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“They have any other kids?”
“No,” I said.
“Too bad. Do they know yet?”
“They’re in Lafayette today. The sheriff hasn’t been able to reach them,” I said.
She turned and looked at me. Her face was lumpy, her blond hair thick on her shoulders. She chewed her gum methodically, a question in her eyes.
“We have to inform them?” she said.
“It looks like it,” I replied.
“On this kind, I’d like to have the perp there and let the family put one in his ear.”
“Bad thoughts, Helen.”
“I’ll feel as guilty about it as I can,” she said.
Two deputies and the black man who had called in the “shots fired” and the teenage boy who had been the driver of the four-wheeler were waiting for us outside the crime scene tape that was wound around the grove of gum trees. The boy was sitting on the ground, in an unplanned lotus position, staring dejectedly into space. Through the back window of the cruiser I saw an ambulance crossing the wooden bridge over the coulee.
Helen parked the cruiser and we walked into the lee of the trees. The sun was low in the west, pink from the dust drifting across the sky. I could smell a salty stench, like a dead animal, in the coulee.
“Where is she?” I asked a deputy.
He took a cigarette out of his mouth and stepped on it. “The other side of the blackberry bushes,” he said.
“Pick up the butt, please, and don’t light another one,” I said.
Helen and I stooped under the yellow tape and walked to the center of the grove. A gray cloud of insects swarmed above a broken depression in the weeds. Helen looked down at the body and blew out her breath.
“Two wounds. One in the chest, the other in the side. Probably a shotgun,” she said. Her eyes automatically began to search the ground for an ejected shell.
I squatted down next to the body. The girl’s wrists had been pulled over her head and tied with a child’s jump rope around the base of a tree trunk. Her skin was gray from massive loss of blood. Her eyes were still open and seemed to be focused on a solitary wildflower three feet away. A pair of panties hung around one of her ankles.
I stood up and felt my knees pop. For just a moment the trees in the clearing seemed to go in and out of focus.
“You all right?” Helen asked.
“They put one of her socks in her mouth,” I said.
Helen’s eyes moved over my face. “Let’s talk to the boy,” she said.
His skin was filmed with dust and lines of sweat had run out of his hair and dried on his face. His T-shirt was grimed with dirt and looked as though it had been tied in knots before he had put it on. When he looked up at us, his eyes were heated with resentment.
“There were two black guys?” I said.
“Yes. I mean yes, sir,” he replied.
“Only two?”
“That’s all I saw.”
“You say they had ski masks on? One of them wore gloves?”
“That’s what I said,” he replied.
Even in the shade it was hot. I blotted the sweat off my forehead with my sleeve.
