The Buzzard Table

CHAPTER

10


The turkey vulture has a highly developed sense of smell, a rare ability among birds. In one study…they quickly found (usually within a day) many chicken carcasses placed under the forest canopy, and some of these were even hidden from view with dried leaves.

—The Turkey Vulture Society




Major Dwight Bryant—

Wednesday afternoon (continued)

Dwight had almost forgotten about this dead-end dirt-and-gravel road near where he had grown up and still lived. If asked, he would have said it had probably disappeared under the wheels of bulldozers and cement trucks when G. Hooks Talton bought up most of the land on the south side of Possum Creek and built Grayson Village to spite Kezzie Knott, Deborah’s father.

The incident still brought grins to the faces of those in the know. That a wily old ex-bootlegger with a sixth-grade education had outfoxed a multimillionaire with a full stable of attorneys who hadn’t bothered to read the fine print on the deeds to the farms they thought they were secretly buying up was still good for a laugh over sausage and biscuit breakfasts in any of the gas-and-grub eateries that still survived around Cotton Grove.

He must have zipped past this narrow unpaved road dozens of times since the big NutriGood grocery store opened, but he’d had no cause to turn onto it in years. Back when he was a teenager, this had been a makeout spot for randy teenagers. In fact, now that he was remembering, it was here in the backseat of his first car, an old Mercury, that he and Patty Sue Milledge had both lost their virginity. Patty Sue was a surgical nurse at WakeMed now, married and the mother of teenagers; and although they never mentioned that night again, they always hugged each other whenever their paths crossed at weddings and funerals and class reunions.

He briefly wondered if Deborah had ever parked here after a movie or a ball game; if there were a male equivalent to Patty Sue still in the area.

A single patrol car parked beside the turnoff brought his mind back to the present. He lowered his window to speak to the young officer who held a roll of yellow tape and gestured to the rough track that led through a thick stand of trees.

“Everybody’s down there, Major,” he said. “The crime scene van got here about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Thanks, son. Just make sure we don’t get any sightseers till we’re finished.”

“Yessir!”

Twigs scraped the sides of his truck as he followed the nearly nonexistent lane. As he oriented himself, he soon realized that he was paralleling a berm that separated this end of Grayson Village and its manicured lawns from wiregrass, sandspurs, and the volunteer pines that had sprung up in what used to be a cotton field. The lane sloped down and he knew that he must be approaching Possum Creek, but the young pines were so thick that he was only a few yards away before he finally spotted the county’s crime scene van and a couple of squad cars.

Mayleen Richards came over to meet him as he got out of the truck and zipped up his heavy jacket.

“She’s down there.” The tip of her nose was pink and her breath came in little puffs of steam when she spoke. “We’re just waiting for the ME.”

The bank dropped off sharply into a gully that ran along the creek, and a section of the track was cordoned off.

“That where she went over?” he asked.

“Denning thinks so,” she said. “The leaves and grass look like they were trampled there.”

In past years, before the county began maintaining waste disposal sites, this had evidently been a popular dumping place. A roll of rotten carpeting lay next to a rusty refrigerator and a broken toilet. Other household appliances were strewn along the creek bank. Black plastic garbage bags had long ago been torn open by foraging animals, the disposable diapers, aluminum pie plates, and pizza boxes spilled out and left to decay amid glass bottles and tin cans that were nearly obscured by years of grapevines and dead leaves. The slender body of a woman dressed in a dark blue warm-up suit and running shoes lay at the near edge of the gully, half covered by a filthy mildewed mattress.

“I don’t know how she got found,” Richards said. She thumbed her cell phone to show him pictures of the scene before they disturbed it. “She was totally hidden by that mattress. Who called it in, sir?”

“Faye said it was from an unlisted number. She thought the voice was male and not from around here, but she couldn’t keep him on the line long enough to talk him into IDing himself.”

Richards smiled. If Faye Myers, their gossipy gregarious dispatcher, couldn’t dislodge the name, no one could.

Down below, Denning and his assistant were documenting the scene as best they could without further disturbing the body. As they waited a blue jay flew by and crows called to each other from some trees on the other side of the creek. Despite the recent rain, it had been a fairly dry winter and the creek looked a little lower than in winters past.

A few minutes later, the EMS truck arrived on the heels of the ME, who clambered down into the gully and quickly went through the formality of confirming what they pretty much knew already.

“Pulpy head wound, no signs of rigor, advancing decomposition,” he said. “Last seen around seven o’clock Saturday? Yeah, that could be about right. Underneath that mattress and next to the dirt? Temperatures above freezing every night since then? Yeah, I’d say dead about three days. They’ll open her up over in Chapel Hill, but I doubt they’ll get it any closer than that.”

He climbed back up and stood shaking his head as the deputies below lifted the mattress away from the body. “It’s the Jowett woman, isn’t it? Never met her myself, but my sister lives next door to her parents. They’ve been sick with worry. Gonna be a sad time for them.”

Grabbing hold of a three-foot oak sapling for support, Dwight worked his way down to the dump site and looked into Rebecca Jowett’s chilled white face. Her hair was matted with blood and he could tell that blowflies had found the wound, but everything else looked normal. Odd the way death always relaxed the muscles and wiped away every emotion. No matter how the person died, whether peacefully in bed or in a violent shooting, he had never seen any frowns or grimaces of fear or pain on the faces of the dead, only a smooth disinterested neutrality.

“Finding anything?” he asked Denning.

The deputy shook his head in frustration. “Absolutely nothing, Major.”

He pointed to the edge of the drop-off secured with yellow crime scene tape. “We think she was probably rolled off there and then the mattress pulled over her. Except for the body itself, everything else looks like it’s been here for months.”

“No shoe tracks around the body?”

“Just the tip of one. I took pictures but there’s not enough to go on. No tread mark and some big bird must have landed on top of it. Crow or buzzard probably.”

Both men looked up. Sure enough, three or four of the big birds were drifting on the thermals in wide lazy circles overhead.

“I don’t suppose anyone thought to look for tire tracks before y’all drove over them?”

“Wrong, Major. Mayleen and Ray and I, we stopped to check a couple of times on the way back in. Pine straw’s pretty thick and any tire marks would have been washed away in last night’s rain. You can see our own tracks, though.”

“So whoever found the body and reported it must have walked over.” He turned to Ray McLamb and said, “Do a canvass of the houses there along the back. Maybe it was someone out walking his dog or kids playing. And ask about any activity over this way during the weekend—lights at night, the sound of a vehicle. You know the drill.”

He climbed back up and told the EMS crew that they could transport the body, then noticed that the trail continued along the creek bank. He got in his truck and followed it a few hundred feet. It circled around another thick stand of slash pines before opening up into a half-abandoned pasture. There was that concrete slab Deborah had told him about and there, too, in the distance was the tenant house.

He drove back to the dump, gestured for Mayleen to join him, and called the dispatcher. “Hey, Faye. How ’bout you play me back the call you got on this body.”

After listening closely, he said, “Now play it again for Mayleen,” and handed her his phone.

When she had thanked the dispatcher and ended the call, Dwight said, “Did that sound like a British accent to you?”