Ellis didn’t look at Oakes. He smiled broadly at his fellow cops and brandished a pudgy yellow envelope with the word EVIDENCE stamped over both sides.
“I ASKED WHAT YOU GOT THERE?” Oakes screeched. He sounded like a terrified child.
Nautilus high-fived Ellis, as if he had a major crime-breaking find in the envelope instead of his own handkerchief. The men walked to the car, laughing as though every wish they’d ever made had just been granted in triplicate.
Come on, come on … Nautilus thought.
“I didn’t have any fucking choice,” Oakes whined to their backs, defeat in his voice. “Bobby Lee said I had to do it.”
Tanner’s body went straight to the state morgue in Frankfort. Cherry arranged to have the body put atop the post-mortem list, going from transport to autopsy. We ate a light breakfast to give the transport a head start, then drove the ninety minutes to Frankfort, the state capital. McCoy returned to the scene to see if he could make any further reconstructions using his woodsman’s knowledge.
“It’s unreal,” Cherry said as we zoomed down the ramp from I-64 to Frankfort, “the perp carried Tanner’s body almost a half-mile. He went down steps, up and down the trail, pulled it to the top of the arch. Oh yeah, he was also carrying a big coil of rope. You know the kind of strength that would take?”
I shook my head in disbelief. I was fit and relatively strong and would have crapped out halfway down the trail. If it was one person, he was built like Mike Tyson in his prime.
The attending pathologist was a man named Vernon Krogan, late fifties, close-cropped gray hair, wide blue eyes incapable of surprise. I knew Doc Krogan, his species anyway, closing in on retirement after a lifetime disassembling bodies, many of them victims of hideous and violent crimes. He’d performed the autopsy as if tearing down a carburetor, not interested in philosophical aspects of the device – carburetors have neither philosophy nor theology – but only in such things as carbon accumulation and surface pitting.
The autopsy complete, the body was covered by a drape. Cherry and I stood to the side of the table as Krogan pulled off his mask. The room smelled of death and disinfectant and I’d smell it for days. I used to think the smell was on my clothes, my skin, but realized it had gotten trapped in my head.
“The corpse had been slit open,” Krogan said, removing his mask. “I’d figure a gutting knife, like hunters use on deer. Hang them upside down, slit the belly, let the innards fall out.”
Cherry grimaced. “Tanner’s guts were gone?”
“A crude job, intestines slashed out, cut top and bottom. A lung had been left behind. But mostly everything got yanked out.”
Cherry was having trouble grasping the news. “Tanner was emptied out and sewed back up?” she said. “That’s what you’re saying?”
Krogan pulled off his paper lab gown and jammed it into a receptacle. “Sewed is an imprecise term. Someone punched holes in the opened flaps of flesh, lashed the pieces closed with black boot laces.”
“Why sew him back up?” Cherry asked.
“To keep the stuffing from falling out, of course.”
“Stuffing?” Cherry said.
Krogan paused. “Oh … No one told you? Several of my colleagues came back to take a look.”
“Told us what? Look at what?”
“The emptied abdominal area was packed with a brown substance before being stitched closed.”
“What kind of substance?”
Krogan snapped off his gloves and dropped them in the receptacle. “We’re doing tests, but everything points to horse manure.”
“Tanner was packed with horseshit?” Cherry said, eyes wide.
Krogan regarded Cherry with a look combining curiosity and amusement.
“So far you’ve sent us a man with a soldering iron in his lower bowel, a drowned woman dressed like a hooker, a man crushed by a snack van, and a corpse packed with horsepoop. What do you have going on over there in Woslee County, Detective Cherry? Sure seems like a corker.”
“Tanner was full of shit,” Cherry said when we were pulling away from of Frankfort’s city limits and roaring on to Highway 64, heading east to Woslee. “Nothing real academic in that symbol.”
“Hard to ignore,” I acknowledged. “It also suggests Tanner was purposefully poisoned. But how did the stew get on his stove?”
Cherry thought in silence for eight miles, until we pulled on to the Mountain Parkway. “I got it!” she yelled, smacking the steering wheel with her palm. “Remember the three by five card I found, Bless you Brother for your constant inspiration?”
“The card in his kitchen,” I nodded, remembering the seemingly inconsequential find.
“I expect half of what Zeke Tanner ate came from his flock. Folks lacking money to drop in the collection plate make it up with food or services. All the killer needed to do was cook up a tasty-looking bowl of death, leave it on Tanner’s front steps when he was out, the note as the clincher. It would have happened all the time, totally normal, except this time Tanner sat down to his last meal.”
I mulled over Cherry’s words. “Something’s bothering me,” I said. “Tanner was poisoned by our killer, right?”
She nodded. “He used the geocache site to crow to the world. Or whoever was looking.”
“But the killer jammed a tool inside John Doe, presumably waiting to enjoy the show from hell. He knelt a foot from Burton’s head and slowly cranked down the snack truck. He stood a dozen feet from Tandee Powers as he bobbed her under water with the rope and pulley …”
It took a couple seconds, but Cherry got it. “There was no personal involvement with Tanner,” she said. “The killer wasn’t in on his victim’s final breath.”
“Something went wrong with the killer’s plans,” I said. “The guy on the bush-hog showing up, maybe. Tanner was sick or hallucinating and got freaked out by the guy, went amok with the gun. How far is it to Tanner’s church?”
“Twenty minutes,” Cherry said, now thinking parallel to me. “I’ll have McCoy meet us there. This is his kind of thing.”
Lee McCoy was parked near Tanner’s shattered church when we arrived. The ranger listened quietly as Cherry confirmed that Tanner appeared not a random bit of mayhem as initially thought, but our fourth serial victim.
“Horse manure?” McCoy said. “Doesn’t that say …”
I nodded. “Brother Tanner was full of shit. Someone wasn’t buying Tanner’s status as a holy man, Lee.”
“We thought Brother Tanner was nuts,” Cherry said. “We didn’t know the problem was part of the bigger picture. Thing is, in all the other cases, the killer was in on the death.”
McCoy had a fast mind. “You’re thinking someone was watching?” he asked.
I nodded. “Nearby and waiting for the mushrooms to take effect, perhaps. Hoping to step in and do nasty, up-close things to the poisoned man, stuff like he did to Burton and Powers. Actions with a personal symbolism.”
Cherry jumped in. “Best-laid plans gone awry.”
McCoy jogged to the fence line behind Tanner’s house trailer and studied angles of sight, peering into pines and hemlocks