Fourth Person No More

By John Gastineau

Can a reporter know too much? Yes, when what he knows and how he knows it jeopardizes the efforts of local authorities to find, try, and convict the persons who shot and killed three children and left their babysitter for dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543942675

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Here’s how you keep secrets. Don’t talk. Don’t write anything down. Live a life so open nobody notices when you don’t talk and you stop writing everything down.

I know it works. I tried it. Trouble is, a guy like me can’t stop talking or writing. Not that long. Some of this, you didn’t read the first time.

The Program says I must be honest. With myself and with others. This time I will be. I didn’t tell everything I knew last time.

You never do. There’s always that nugget, that bit you hang onto, maybe to trade to a source in the future, maybe to jump start the next story, maybe just to hold onto, to know that you have, to turn and admire. But there were things about the Aunt Lotty business I should’ve said, if not to the people who read my material then to somebody.

Like Moze. The kid deputy? He was not quite the hero I might’ve made him out to be.

True, he did go into Aunt Lotty’s double-wide that night with his service weapon drawn, but that was just to buck himself up. He already had a pretty good idea what was in there, and it represented no danger to him. It was just that the dispatcher had told him some and his imagination did the rest.

Yes, Moze did have his gun out when he went in, but he was so shook he barked his knuckles on the doorframe trying to use that stiff-arm technique he’d seen cops use on TV. It’s a wonder he didn’t drop the damned gun. Or shoot himself. Or me.

And when he came out? Maybe ten minutes later? He did not reappear at the door, set his jaw, and march manfully to his squad to call for the investigative forces of five contiguous counties and the state police. No.

Moze clutched the doorframe for a long minute, his face tipped up glistening and gray in the moonlight, sucking air. He towed himself hand over hand down the stair rail and stumbled to an oak in the yard. He put his hands on either side of the trunk, bent at the waist, and blew a double order of French toast and bacon across a new, two-hundred-dollar pair of Tony Lamas. His head still bowed, he moaned, Sweet Jesus.

Call it a prayer for dead children.

Pretty good detail, you might say. Impossible to obtain unless you were there, you could say. As I was, at the beginning, even before the beginning, at the ingestion of the French toast and bacon.

That’s another thing I didn’t say before. I mean, I wasn’t looking for a Pulitzer out of this, and I did have to think about covering for Moze, who technically should not have had a civilian, particularly a civilian reporter, riding around in his squad. But a little recognition from a certain editor wouldn’t have hurt.

Chance said Bob Marley. That is his name: reggae king, Scrooge’s foil, exec ed, as if a paper with a circulation of 4,500 needs a news boss with a title that rich.

Luck, said Marley, dumb luck I had gotten bored reading Anne Tyler late of a Friday, the night before Halloween. And where else would I go for a little bite of something, said Marley, who’s sired two tykes and sometimes talks in the style of the last story he’s read them. Assuming, said Marley, father to us all, assuming, of course, I was still off sauce. Hack’s was the only place outside of a couple of taverns that was open after midnight in Failey, said Marley. Anyone in my position should have gotten the story under those circumstances, said he.

But not everyone would have known to use that foray as a chance to buy breakfast for Amos T. Moze Beard, 21, kid deputy. It was not, at that time at any rate, a well-recorded fact that young Moze took his first break about an hour after coming on or that he usually used it to stoke himself for the rest of his shift. Nor would just anyone know that when they’re young, before old-timers nip them or they get burned by the likes of me, cops actually like to talk about their work with people other than cops. And certainly not everyone would have known what it meant when the radio Moze had propped next to the condiments squawked.

Moze was not, at that moment, conversant. He had his head down, shoveling. But at the radio’s bark, he froze. And in the silence that followed, he quivered, like a dog on point, resonating with what he had just heard.

I couldn’t think what he was waiting on, so I said, Ten-zero. Moze? Did that say ten-zero?

Moze brought his head up, looking at the radio, expecting more. He was still a boy then, nearly fresh out of the service, with a blond buzz haircut, a mild case of acne that I suspect drove him nuts, and a pair of dorky black plastic glasses that I knew kept him out of the state police, his less-than-secret ambition.

He looked at me but said nothing. So I said, A ten-zero. That would be a body. A dead human body, would it not, Moze?

His eyes went shifty, like he was trying to figure a way to get out of our booth without me noticing.

And ‘times three’? I said. The dispatch said ‘ten-zero times three.’ That would mean three dead human bodies?

Moze shrugged and glanced over his shoulder, still trying to be casual. There were three other people in the place: Doreen, the slack-jawed waitress, and two truckers, judging by the wallet chains running from their belts to their back pockets and maybe the smelly rigs parked outside.

Perhaps I had been too loud. All of them stared at us. Maybe Moze thought that if he waited we’d all go away, but I’ve been put off by pros.

And ‘Austin 8,’ I said. That would be Austin County unit 8 and that would be you, would it not, Moze? Isn’t that you? They said something about registering your twenty on the land line. I believe they want you to call in on the telephone, the landline, as we call it these days.

I paused, raised my bushy eyebrows and pursed out my full lips. Moze turned to eye the ancient pay phone at the other end of room. Probably it seemed a million miles away because he couldn’t bring himself to get up and go to it in front of the audience. That by itself was enough to make me continue.

"Why would they want that, Moze, do you suppose? Why wouldn’t they want you to use the radio. Or more likely, why wouldn’t they want to use the radio?"

I tried to reach for my wallet, but the booth was what you could call confining.

I’m thinking this is something important, Moze. I’m thinking you’re about to get your feet wet. Figuratively speaking, of course. I’m thinking maybe you ought to call in and find out just what the hell is going on.

I wasn’t the only one who’d been thinking. Hack’s is a long room of buzzing fluorescent lights, knotty-pine paneling, Formica, and chrome. Its ambience is not tempered by what Hack calls the sculpture, stuffed deer butts to which green glass eyes, the size of limes, have been affixed on either side of the tail so they appear to be the faces of hairy aliens. The sculpture hang on the walls at either end of the room. Under the one opposite of where we sat is a counter and behind that a long, narrow, pass-through window into the kitchen.

From where I sat, I watched a thick fist emerge from the kitchen side of the window, rap a black telephone handset twice on the sill, and thrust it straight-arm out into the dining area. I had not heard the phone ring, so I assumed the thick fist dialed.

Moze knew whom it was for. Geez, Clay, he hissed, as though I’d gotten him in trouble, and jumped up to take it.

I was more nonchalant. It does not pay for a man of my build to try to twist too quickly out of a narrow booth. Such a person could get stuck and lose his story, maybe his dignity.

Nor does it serve any useful purpose to display too much emotion around Hack. He thinks it reveals something about your manhood.

Hack is, by day, a town cop, a year short of a pension but still a patrolman. Consequently, I run into him day and night, and almost from the moment I hit town, we have not gotten along.

I thought at first it was because Hack was jealous that my girth rides so much higher and more youthfully over my belt than does his. It could also be that he didn’t appreciate it when I suggested in print early in my tenure that his name derived from his preferred interrogation technique. Considering the bright capillaries crocheted across his cheeks and nose and the foul mint you find on his breath from about noon on, I now think it more likely that it is a matter of one drunk recognizing himself in another.

Hack came from the kitchen to meet me at the cash register with the reptile eyes cops turn on people they think they can bully. I chose to meet his opening gambit with my best smile.

Hack, I said, because I am always cordial. He continued with the dead stare.

I ticked off the courses of my meal and Moze’s meal and asked him how much I owed him.

It’s on the house, he said, still without noticeable change of expression.

Hack, you and I have been through this before, I said, still with that winning smile. Thank you. I appreciate your generosity, but I insist.

He let me stand there for a minute or more, smiling like I’d just jumped out of the clown car.

You must not think much of yourself if you’re afraid you’re going to be bought for a couple of meals, Hack said.

Well, Hack, appearances count. Besides, I like to stay in practice for when the big bribes come my way.

Not everyone appreciates wry jest at moments of confrontation. The net mask draped over Hack’s face went maroon, and I suspect that if we’d been on the street his hand would’ve moved toward the spring-loaded sap that bulges like a huge butt boil from his right rear pocket.

I was eager to get out of there anyway because it sounded like Moze was trying to wrap up his call. I put a ten on the counter.

Cops don’t pay here, he said and jerked his head back toward Moze.

People in this town take the raising of their young very seriously, and that’s what this was about, of course, winning the hearts and minds of kid deputies.

Sure they do, Hack. It’s a well-known fact among the law-enforcement community that only the coffee here is free. That’s why you don’t see a lot of your brother officers around.

Doreen, I called to the waitress at the other end of the room and pointed to the ten. Part of this is yours.

As a rule, more so than most men, cops are not touchers, probably because in their work they must touch to threaten or coerce. I knew Hack was serious when he put a hand on my forearm as I turned. The index finger he aimed at my nose, short and thick as a tuber, was entirely unnecessary.

The kid’s got work, he said. Leave him alone.

I slowly pirouetted out of his grip, raised both hands against the threat of his finger, and backed away.

Hack, the boy’s on the phone and I’m out the door.

Which is where I wanted to be anyway. Moze had parked his squad around the corner, nose out in the best ready-for-anything position, just as he had been trained. But Moze being Moze, young and gung-ho, had gone a step further.

He figured that if he left the door unlocked he could pull out just that much faster, and who was going to steal anything out of a squad parked out front of a known cop diner? I liked the way the boy thought. It made him vulnerable to finding rotund reporters sitting shotgun, but it saved me from having to roost on the hood.

Naturally, Moze told me to get out as soon as he found me. I said I thought we ought not waste time arguing. He said the county had a policy against civilians riding in squads; something to do with insurance. I said he could just drop me at my office; I’d pick up a car and follow him. Someone, presumably Hack, flicked the restaurant’s exterior lights on and off twice.

Son of a bitch, said Moze, and we were off.

Moze smoldered until we hit the edge of town. He said, You’re going to get me in trouble.

Nope, I said. I’m going to stay out of the way and not be obtrusive, not interfere, and if it comes down to it, I’ll lie and say I hid in your trunk.

Yeah, as if that’d help. Or you’d fit.

He was starting to sound whiney.

Hey, Moze. I waited until he turned to look at me. You may not’ve covered this kind of thing before, but I have. I know how it’s done.

I was calm. I had said it evenly, matter of fact. No need for rancor. The Program says that to be honest you must recognize that you are who you are, and, anyway, in a small town, your history is known. Even a kid deputy would’ve heard that I’d covered cops in Chicago, that I’d once been top-of-the-line. He was too polite to say much after that.

It was what an autumn night in the Midwest should be: clear, hard, and cool as crystal. Frost would not begin to suture up the soil for another week or so, but a deep breath outside would still ice your lungs and sharpen your senses.

A harvest moon a night or two past full defined landmarks beyond the headlights in silver. Ten, fifteen miles into the country, we turned off the pavement onto a gravel road. That took us up onto another gravel road that seemed to be cut into the side of a wooded ridge. I had to check the address later against the map or I don’t know that I could’ve found it again.

Near the top, Moze found the mailbox he was looking for and turned up a gravel drive. He hit the squad’s spotlight as we rolled forward.

The white double-wide had been placed in the center of a clearing in a woods. Flower boxes had been added to the windows and ceramic gnomes and animals had been placed in the yard to make it look permanent.

No lights in the windows. The door stood wide open.

Moze said the dispatcher had told him to go to this home, secure it, and report what he found. The homeowner, a Lotty Nusbaumer, had appeared at the door of a neighbor, who had called the sheriff’s department. The neighbor said Miss Nusbaumer was bloody from head to foot and hysterical, talking nonsense about babies and robbers.

There were no babies, not even baby cops. When he was done being sick, Moze straightened up, spat, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He considered the trailer for a moment, then me. A notable transformation had occurred. Moze had grown reptile eyes.

He told me in a voice that he had wired down tight that he knew he couldn’t watch me and do what he had to do. He said he was going to call it in, the phone did not work, and he’d have to use the radio. That would mean every cop in range and anyone with a scanner would be here in a little bit, so I had maybe five minutes to see whatever it was I thought I just had to see.

I was not to touch, I sure as hell was not to take, and I’d better watch where I stepped. Then he wanted me the fuck out. And no, he did not give a good goddamn if I had to walk.

I took it as a compliment to my experience and his trust that he did not feel it necessary to tell me that anything he had said was off the record.

The button on the door knob was not set in the locked position, and there was no sign that the door had been pried. The door opened into the kitchen and an adjoining dining area, not really a room. To the right of that, separated by a counter, was the living room. The only light there was pewter and dim, seeping through a streaked picture window from the security light and the moon outside.

Even so, bodies capture the eye. Three.

My face felt hot, tight; I must’ve been holding my breath. I looked away and exhaled. To cope during the crisis moments, the Program says the drunk must pause and size up. Disappointment more than anger, annoyance more than revulsion. I had entertained some previously unrealized hope of leaving this kind of thing behind in Chicago.

Dill was my editor there, the one who cut me loose. She did that, she said, not so much because I was a drunk as because I was no longer useful to her as a reporter.

I had become a High Beam, she said. I shined my moments against the wall of history or space, rather than the brick of my existence. Nothing could be new to me if always I examined it in terms of whether it had happened to somebody else in some other time or some other place. High Beams robbed themselves of the capacity for wonder, Dill said, and curiosity without wonder was cynicism and waste.

Like most editors, Dill was a head case. But putting that and her fondness for metaphor aside, maybe so. I am not unfeeling, but this was work. People get murdered. When they do, I can do nothing for them, so I do what I do. I breath through my mouth and look at details.

At first glance, the bodies looked like stick-figure code, arms thrown over each other and legs akimbo. Seeing the pattern required a closer look.

They were lined up close together on the floor perpendicular to a plaid couch and situated like pan pipes, according to height. A long, low coffee table was turned to one side, apparently pivoted away from its normal position in front of the couch to make room. There was a gap between the three and the table, a space wide enough for another body. At the top of that space, lying at the foot of the couch as though tossed there, was a sodden, stringy mound of something that looked like the head of a wet mop.

They were not babies, but certainly they were not adults or even teenagers. From the patterns and shapes of the clothing, it looked like two boys and a girl, but in that light and at that moment, I could not say for sure.

An elliptical shadow radiated out around the bodies across a light-colored carpet, but as I looked closer I realized that it was darker than the other shadows and that the light outside could not have drawn it. Darker still were the shadows above the shoulders of each body.

I took one cautious step forward and leaned in closer to see. The children had been put on the floor face down. The backs of their heads were gone, and one or two black, ragged holes had been chewed in the clothes on each of their backs.

The face of the one in the center was turned slightly. In the middle of that dark halo, light gleamed off the milky white of a half-closed eye.

I reared back. It was close, humid, in there, and I had breathed through my nose. A sweetish, raspy smell, blood and meat over gunpowder, that made me shudder, clear my throat, and think about scotch.

Turns out, I had not lied to Moze. I had seen the aftermath of assassination before, in a couple of South Side crack houses after bad dope deals and in a hooch a couple of lifetimes before that after Phoenix crept through.

Never children, though. Never children. Sweet Jesus, indeed.

I could have left then. I had enough to launch the story, and Moze was outside yelling what was taking so long. But I had not seen all.

With a pen, I tried the light switch, but it did not work, and I was careful to return it to its original position. Dark spots peppered the paneling in the living room up to shoulder height. I thought at first they were bullet or pellet holes, but I resisted the temptation to put my finger to one when it looked moist. It made me stop and consider again the spots and streaks on the picture window above the couch. They were, I realized, on the inside, not out.

On the table in the dining area were two glasses of milk, two partially eaten apples, a coffee cup, scissors, paste, and pieces of construction paper. Even in the faint light, I could make out the outlines of a witch’s pointed hat and a pumpkin.

A siren was approaching, but there was an orange glow behind me, so I looked. To the left of the door, a hall ran the length of the double-wide past a bedroom and a bathroom to a bigger bedroom at the end.

The bedrooms were black. In the bathroom, though, a flashlight capped by an orange jack-o-lantern face had been left on. It was standing on end on the toilet tank aimed toward the ceiling. In the bowl, someone had left the core of a red apple and what looked like a .22 rifle. The barrel was bent, hooked up into the trap. The water was yellow. It was time to go.

I was making notes on the pad as I emerged. It’s a tricky business walking and writing at the same time, especially in the dark. After years in this business, I have mastered it, but it takes all my concentration, so when I looked up, I thought I had lost touch with reality.

There was Moze, like some squat wood gnome, stringing yellow ribbon from tree to tree around the perimeter of the yard—police tape to keep out gawkers.

As he hugged a sapling to wrap tape, Moze looked nervously from me to the sound of the siren. He was nearly frantic when he said, God damn it, Clay. Leave.

Clearly, it was a plea, so I did.

Going far was hardly an option. A person of my build may travel gracefully and with good humor, but on foot, not lightly or far.

There was the fact, too, that I did not want to. A drunk is, by definition, self-indulgent, and a fat drunk is the worst. Moze was naive to think I was going to walk away from this one. Or any other one, for that matter.

I sauntered out past the police line and down the drive to the road about thirty yards or so, checked over my shoulder that Moze was as distracted as I knew he would be, and ducked into the woods. With my back against a tree, I could see both approaches, the drive, and a corner of the trailer up to the door. It was a little cold, but this was the way I liked it. No chitchat with sources, no interference or influence with the way things would go. Just see without being seen. Pure observation.

When I was a kid, I kept my marbles in a milk bottle. To play, I’d turn the bottle over. At first, you’d get only one or two out before they jammed. You’d have to shake the bottle, maybe stick a finger up its neck, to make more come out. But once they started to flow, momentum would carry them out in a stream. That is how the authorities arrived. Call Moze the first marble.

A state police trooper was next, arriving in fury, all siren and lights. Troopers drive big, white, bulbous Chevies that taper to each end. A hundred yards down the road from my vantage point, he threw the screaming dumpling into a power slide and blocked the road.

I could not see the trooper, but I assumed he got out of the squad because for ten minutes I listened to his radio squawk. Lots of air traffic and no procedure, the voices talking over each other.

To my right, a set of headlights crunched gravel as it rolled up slowly forward. The car stopped well short of the drive.

In one movement, a tall, athletically built trooper unwound himself like a cat from behind the wheel to pivot and stand with one foot in the door of his squad. I had to duck when he used his spot to sweep the area 180 degrees around the front of the squad.

When he was done, he placed himself between the car’s headlights and, silhouetted, he began walking forward. A flashlight beam bounced from one side of the road to the other in time to measured and methodical steps.

At the drive, he whipped the beam up at the trailer. When the beam landed on Moze’s squad, he said, Shit.

The trooper continued to walk and look for tracks on the road. The other trooper met him coming from the other direction.

Anything? The driver of the screaming dumpling turned out to be she. Even after a professional lifetime of dealing with cops, I admit to having difficulty immediately entertaining the possibility.

No, he said. There’s a mountie there already.

Not a county mountie, she said sarcastically.

She directed her flashlight beam up into the woods and again I ducked. Then she aimed the beam across the road. It fell on a wire fence and behind that a field of what looked to be bean stubble.

Hey, what do you think?

On the cool night, I could hear a mile. She sounded edgy, eager.

There was a long pause.

Maybe we ought to wait, he said. For the eyes and the techs.

Yeah. But she didn’t sound happy about it. Want to go check out the stiffs?

Is this your first time?

Yeah, she said, a little defensively.

I thought he was going to tell her she didn’t want to see the bodies, but this was a different generation.

You don’t do anything at one of these until somebody tells you to, he said.

A horn blast interrupted their conversation. Behind the man’s squad, a van had appeared. From it jumped techs, another form of worker bee, two men and a woman in dark jumpsuits and nylon jackets with ISP written on the back in reflective letters.

One began photographing the scene, slicing the darkness with a strobe and the curt whine of a motor drive. The second turned on floods and followed the first with a video camera. The third got in the squad and pulled it forward to a point past the drive. Then, he brought the van up.

As he did so, the sheriff arrived. Woodrow Modine drives an unmarked Chrysler. If it weren’t for the five or six antennae that bristle off the trunk and back window, the two-tone brown paint job, and the red lenses where the bright headlights should be, you might not know his ride was a police car.

He pulled it up to the drive and got out to stand impassively in his open door. He chose not to turn off the red flashers. It played hell with the photos and video. All three techs spun and started to shout back at him, but they cut it off abruptly when they saw who it was.

I was tempted to go talk to Wood when I remembered the dilemma it would put Moze in. It was just as well because Detective Sgt. McConegal of the state police’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation appeared out of the darkness behind Wood. McConegal is the district’s head eye. I for BCI, I for investigator, I for irascible. Sgt. McConegal and I have, upon occasion, debated finer points of the public’s right to know.

Well, Woody, McConegal said. He was fulsome as if they hadn’t seen each other in years.

Your crew, Wood tilted his head toward the techs, have forgotten their manners.

The two men stood for a time looking at each other. Wood is on the outer envelope of middle age. He is not very tall, he is nearly bald, and his face is rounded and lumpy, as though carved from a potato. It’s a benign face that makes it easy to ignore the broad, muscular chest, flat belly, and thick wrists that come with it. McConegal is the opposite, mid-thirties, tall, thin, sharp-featured. Wood wore his trademark chocolate-brown, polyester jumpsuit and cowboy boots. McConegal had on a tie and sport coat.

Woody, McConegal said finally, you know I got to hear it.

One of the techs had raised a flood lamp on a pole secured to a bracket on the back of the van. She trained it on the driveway, but it spilled over, washing out the shadows in the faces of both men. Wood closed his eyes and sighed.

Woodrow, shit. There’re three getting cold. Tell him and be done with it.

Potter Crandall, the Austin County prosecuting attorney, stepped into the pool of light. He wore a baby-blue, porkpie hat and a rumpled, tan, trench coat open over a brown suit without tie. His glasses, as usual, had slipped and caught on the flare of his pug nose. He was sixty-two years old, more often than not rheumy-eyed and gruff, and, outside of the courtroom, entirely profane. Like Wood, his appearance was deceptive. First-time adversaries frequently mistake him for a rube.

The state police have the most money of any police agency in the state. As a result, they have the best training, the best equipment, and the best pay. As a result of that, they usually employ the smartest and most highly motivated cops. But the home-rule statute prohibits them from intervening in an investigation without an invitation from local officials.

Pride might have made him reluctant, but Wood knew he was just postponing the inevitable. He pulled himself up to attention.

Sgt. McConegal, he said, the people of Austin County would appreciate the assistance of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in this matter.

The Bureau? said McConegal. Is that all you want? How about the rest of the agency?

Larry, Christ. Crandall jammed his hands in the pockets of his trench coat and looked away, embarrassed.

Right, McConegal said. He pointed a finger at Crandall. You heard it. He aimed the finger back over his shoulder at the tech adjusting the flood. Riley, you heard it?

Yes, sir, said Riley, the tech.

Crandall pulled a cigar from inside his suit coat and absently began to peel away the wrapper as he looked over his glasses from Wood to McConegal.

Larry, he said, in exactly five seconds, I’m going to put fire to this stogie and ruin your goddamned crime scene. Why don’t you fucking proceed.

They trudged up the drive side by side, Crandall in between. A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived, followed by Poteet, an undertaker who also served as coroner, driving his hearse. Only in small towns does one find such economies of function.

The gawkers were stealthier. Like apparitions, shadowy in the dim light, they began to appear, in twos and threes, along the fence in the bean field across the road from the drive.

They looked to be mostly neighbors who were drawn to the commotion by the lights, the sirens, or the telephone and who came across the fields by foot when they found the roads blocked. There were women and men of a variety of ages; a few held sleepy children. Most wore the denim, boots, and billboard caps advertising seed, feed, or fertilizer that identified them as farmers, but there were others in camo or sweats and a few in nightclothes wrapped in blankets.

These people were not urban gawkers. They craned their necks and whispered among themselves, but their interest was not the bald, buck-naked sort that embarrasses and angers young cops and firefighters. Nor did these folks exhibit the familiarity and cynicism that reduces the grisliest scene to mere street theater. They did not shout at the cops, they did not rag the techs, and they did not contend with each other to see who could tell the most morbid joke. Instead, they stood quietly and respectfully, so much so that the cops did not notice them at first.

The flood of cops continued unabated. From the state, there were blue troopers in uniform and eyes in plain clothes. From the county, six more brown deputies appeared, the entire department, and two or three off-duty town cops.

I counted twenty-seven in all milling around, waiting for someone to put them to work. It made me antsy. Sooner or later, someone would tell them to spread out at arm’s length and search the woods around the trailer. I couldn’t imagine that one rotund reporter would fall through the sieve.

Little Sheba saved me. Tall and loose-limbed, she burst out of the shadows down the road into the pool drawn by the flood lights. She had thrown a car coat over her harem outfit. Her eyes were so wide they pulled the black almonds she’d penciled around them into circles. She trotted two or three steps, then slowed, fought the urge, trotted again. The gait made a belt of coins at her waist jingle like a tambourine.

When Little Sheba turned up the drive, the woman trooper called, Hey, no, you, wait. Three other cops closed ranks across the drive like a picket fence and blocked her.

An entourage followed. Akmed, the eunuch, a short guy in a white T-shirt, gold vest, and blue harem pants, walked out of the dark after Sheba. Unlike her, he walked at a steady pace, but he resolutely held his eyes on the ground until one of the troopers put a hand on the guy’s arm, drew him to a stop, and gently removed a cardboard and tinfoil scimitar from his belt. The guy looked up then, blinked, and smiled shyly at the trooper, who began talking to him quietly.

The clowns, one man, one woman, each clutched in the other’s arms, came behind Akmed. Earlier in the evening, they had probably worn neon wigs and black derbies. Those were gone by the time they arrived, and their red, rubber noses hung from strings around their necks. Only huge, grotesquely incongruent, red-and-white smiles remained painted across their lower faces.

They stopped at the first cop they came to and said something anxiously. The cop took the woman gently by the elbow and escorted them up the drive.

While the cops and the gawkers focused their attention on Little Sheba and the entourage, I picked my way through the woods toward the road. Wood had emerged from the trailer and was walking down the drive toward them. Behind him, troopers were starting to bring out the bodies.

It only took one trooper on each end of a black body bag they were so light. Troopers tend to be young and strong, and these guys did not