Known Dead_ A Novel - Donald Harstad [101]
To take our minds off the driving, we sort of speculated as to who it might be, with the bets running on its being the man who was with Gabe when he left the Stritch farm. The one with the white tee shirt. Or it could have been one of the Stritch family friends who had been in the woods when the whole thing went down. It was going to be interesting to see.
We also talked a little about who the hell had called. Purest speculation, for sure. The upshot of the whole thing was that we had absolutely no idea.
The other topic was related; what Harry had meant when he said ‘‘cut him down.’’ I thought it meant that he was hanged, and that also raised the possibility of a suicide. People had claimed ‘‘credit’’ for suicides before, just to try to impress somebody. It was possible that remorse or despair had overcome one of the participants. Being hanged also raised the specter of a possible ‘‘legal’’ execution within a group. That’s what I thought it was going to be. All interspersed with things like ‘‘Uh, I wouldn’t pass here, George, you’re gonna want to turn right in just a few seconds anyway . . .’’ and ‘‘There are only two lanes of traffic on the bridge, George, you might want to shut everything down until we get across the Mississippi here, because the other cars have nowhere to go . . .’’
The directions got us to a farm lane, with tall grass and weeds growing down the middle. The old ruts were about a foot deep, but very narrow and close together. Even George could keep only one set of tires in a rut at a time. Long lane, with grasshoppers jumping onto the hood and windshield as we bumped and rolled toward the gray wood barn with a collapsed roof. We stopped behind an ambulance, and got out. There were three cars in front of us, one belonging to the sheriff himself. A small cluster of people were standing around the foundation of what appeared by its size to have been a house many years ago. Harry waved.
‘‘Come on over here, Houseman. You’re gonna love this one.’’
We waded through the knee-high grass, which seemed to be hosting about a million grasshoppers. It was hot, very hot, and extremely humid. We got to the group, and I looked down into the old basement. There, standing propped against what had been an interior limestone wall, was a large timber, about ten feet long, with a very large stone bracing its foot. Stuck to it was a body. Naked. Male. There was a sign dangling around the neck, with the word RAT in capital letters, and something I couldn’t make out underneath. There was what appeared to be a railroad spike protruding about three inches out of the chest of the corpse, apparently having been driven through the rib cage and into the old timber. It looked like that was all that was holding the body on the plank. The face was deep waxy purple, and either very contorted or just really well worked over. The tongue was swollen, bluish, and protruding, so I guessed he’d been strangled before being nailed up. A little closer look at the neck confirmed that. The ligature mark was even with the ear line, back to front. You could have encircled his neck at the ligature point with one hand. Easily. Probably a wide band or rope. If it had been sharp, the neck would have been severed.
‘‘Shit, Harry . . .’’
He grinned. ‘‘Not one of your everyday corpses, is it? You know him?’’
‘‘No,’’ I said. ‘‘I don’t.’’
I was balancing myself with one hand on some old slats, as I moved out on the six-inch-wide top of the old masonry wall, toward the body. ‘‘Mind