Sleeping in Eden (2 page)

“How did they find him?”

Alex made his way past Lucas and stood with his forearms on the half wall of the stall in which Jim dangled. He looked like a spectator at a county fair, examining the qualifications of a late entrant. “He didn't show up for work last night. You know he works the late shift at the plant in Fairfield? Well, some guy that splits his hours got ticked that he didn't show and decided to come by and give Jim hell. The barn door was open, swinging in the wind . . .” Alex looked over his shoulder at Lucas. “He
called the city office from his cell phone and took off. Can you believe that? Called the city office, not 911.”

Lucas smiled faintly, aware that in spite of his seemingly gruff disposition, Alex was a teddy bear in disguise. Lucas had it on good authority that his best friend got choked up watching Disney movies with his daughters, and he didn't believe for a second that Alex was as nonchalant about the grisly scene before him as he tried so hard to convey. “You okay?” Lucas asked him, dropping his voice conspiratorially.

“Fine.” Alex shrugged.

“Seems like a bit of a cold thing to say.” Lucas sloped an eyebrow. “There's a dead man hanging a few feet from your nose.”

“I don't see you crying,” Alex huffed.

“Fair enough.” Lucas sighed. They obviously weren't going to have a brotherly heart-to-heart, and since he didn't know what else to say, the clock ticked off a few seconds of awkward silence. Finally Lucas passed a hand over the five o'clock shadow along his jaw and swallowed a groan. “Let's get this over with so that I can go home.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Alex muttered.

Lucas still felt hesitant but joined Alex at the stall. “Was there a suicide note?”

“Not that we've found. There's not much in here and we went through the house already. Couldn't find a thing of value. You know, I think we're going to have to torch the whole place. Jim Sparks lived like an animal. Honestly, you should see the shit he has in there. Garbage piled high . . .”

“Signs of a struggle? You know, unusual scratches, flesh under his fingernails, extra footprints in the barn?”

Alex snorted and indicated the numbered red tags that littered the barn floor like macabre confetti. “You telling me how to do my job, Hudson?”

Lucas held up his hands in defense. “Never. I'm just saying, I think it's pretty obvious it was a suicide.”

“Look, it's my job to treat the entire farm like it's a crime scene right now. This is a homicide until we can prove
otherwise. Do I have to bag the hands for a forensic team? Or are you going to do your job?”

Lucas never got a chance to respond. As if on cue, two cops emerged from the darkened tack room that was half hidden behind a sagging row of whitewashed bee boxes. They held out a camera to Alex. “We took pictures. But only because Kennedy made us,” the younger one said, winking at Lucas. “I think it was a waste of time. Nice to meet you, Dr. Hudson.”

They shook hands, and Lucas smiled even though he could tell Alex was irritated by the cavalier way his cops insisted on handling the situation. Blackhawk was a small town, but Alex took his job very seriously, following the letter of the law with admirable diligence and an almost old-world sense of honor. Well, to a point. It seemed there was sometimes a little wiggle room within the defined code. But it took a veteran to know when to bend and when to stand firm. The two young men who rounded out the police force were nothing but rookies. Kids, really. Two boys who grew up within Blackhawk city limits and knew little more than the character and quirks of the 2,587 people who called their wooded corner of northwest Iowa home. Their world was finely bordered.

Alex's frustration was understandable, but Lucas didn't feel like hearing a speech. Before the police chief had a chance to lay into the uniformed boys, Lucas said: “Let's get this over with. I'm documenting, you guys have to take him down.”

“You might want to take a few moments to investigate the circumstances and, seemingly obvious or not, try to determine cause of death,” Alex prompted with a grunt. “And, of course, you'll want to confirm that he is, in fact, deceased. I can't do that, you know. The coroner has to.”

Lucas felt his shoulders stiffen. “Get me something to stand on,” he said, his words sharp and just a little too hard. He had acted as coroner on only a handful of occasions, and they had all been run-of-the-mill, small-town stuff. An elderly lady who died in her sleep. A middle-aged man who died of a withering cancer in hospice care. Lucas was an
excellent doctor, arguably wasted on the monotony of rural life, but this was unprecedented. Jim had knocked him a bit off his game.

It took awhile to find something that would work for him to stand on. There were no ladders, no boxes that looked even remotely sturdy. All that was available was the same chair that Jim had used, and after a few moments, with a heavy sigh, Alex righted it beneath the body. He held out his hand before it, palm up, and backed away so Lucas could do his job.

The barn seemed to shift as Lucas climbed onto the chair, but he couldn't tell if it was because the rotting piece of furniture was old and feeble or because the reenactment was making his head spin. He paused a few seconds to get his balance, and did everything he could to avoid looking directly at the body before him. Finally, he took a deep breath and turned to face Jim head-on.

With deft fingers, Lucas probed the rigid neck. It was cold and still, smooth-firm like molded plastic. No pulse, no breath, no life. Rigor had already begun to set in. Bending a little, Lucas took Jim's hands in his own and studied the stiff curve of his thick fingers. Nails bitten down to the quick, tobacco stains creating muddy rivers in the whorls of his fingerprints. He was a nail-biter, a smoker, but beyond the obvious, his hands were clean. There were no wounds, no sign of a struggle, in fact, no indicators of anything beyond his bad habits. He wore no wedding ring, no watch on his wrist to mark the bittersweet passage of time.

Lucas sighed. “He's dead,” he confirmed unnecessarily. “No signs of struggle as far as I can tell.”

“Death by asphyxiation?”

“I'm pretty sure his neck is broken,” Lucas said. “But I'm not entirely sure how. He didn't have far to fall, and it takes at least a four-foot drop to break the neck.”

“Maybe he jumped,” Alex guessed, pointing to the high platform of the hayloft about them.

“Then what was the chair for? More likely he just really wanted to get the job done. He threw himself with some serious force.”

Alex seemed to consider something for a moment, but apparently it was too implausible to imagine that foul play was involved. “Let's just get him down,” Alex said. “I think our best bet is to have two men on the ground to hold his body. I'll cut the rope.” He produced a bone-handled hunting knife, originally ivory-colored but now stained tea brown and anything but police issue. “Let's do it.”

Lucas and Alex switched places, and the police chief began the slow process of sawing through the thick woven rope.

Progress was slow, and made even more tedious by the utter silence that amplified the dull scratching of the knife. Each piece of rope that spun off the homemade noose made a soft snick that seemed like an echo of the sound Jim's neck must have made when it broke. Lucas saw each pop as a snapshot of Jim's sad life: his beat-up, mustard-yellow Chevy truck, the stray mutt that followed him around for a few weeks until it was mangled by a car, the bottles of Black Velvet that he bought on the first Monday of every month. The imaginary scrapbook was so sad, so rife with loneliness, that for an aching moment, Lucas's arms longed to encircle Jenna. The specters that haunted the shadowed barn drew his attention like a magnet, but Lucas gave his head a hard shake and focused his attention on Alex so that he didn't have to wrestle unseen demons.

Alex was completely engulfed in the task before him as he adjusted his weight on the chair in order to get at the rope with his other hand. His movement on the worthless piece of furniture tossed the balance to one of the shorter back legs and the flimsy chair began a teetering roll on three legs. Lucas hopped off the stall gate and made a lunge to steady Alex, but he was too far away and past the point of rescue. In an instant, Alex counterbalanced, grabbed for Jim's body, stopped himself in horror, and went flying backward off the chair. As he hit the ground with a nauseating thud, the three men maneuvered
around the now swinging body of Jim Sparks and crouched down to offer help that was too late.

Alex was grimacing and clutching his right elbow, but he assured everyone he was fine, punctuated with a few choice words and “Get the hell away from me.”

“Come on, Alex,” Lucas coaxed, “let me take a quick look at you. Did you hit your head?”

But Alex was already getting up. “I'm fine. It's just that piece of—” He shrugged off their steadying hands and swung back to kick the toppled-over chair. As his foot made contact with the seat, a sharp crack split the air and was almost immediately joined by Alex's yelp. The chair hadn't moved.

Lucas joined Alex and bent down to see what had held the piece of furniture so tightly in place. “Foot okay?” He asked quietly.

“Shut up.”

“Yup.”

The chair was sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. The back left leg had dug a deep gash in the hard-packed earthen floor of the barn and was now securely rooted in between the dirt and what looked like a thick tree branch.

“Looks like you've got quite a bit of leverage,” one of the young officers quipped from over their shoulders.

Alex didn't respond to the jab, but leaned in closer to the foot of the chair and carefully dusted dry earth off the branch.

“So there're roots underneath the barn. Big deal.” The other rookie cop turned away and proved himself gutsy enough to grab Jim's body and stop its dancelike sway.

“I don't think it's a tree branch,” Alex mumbled. “Too far away from anything growing nearby.”

“Sounds ominous,” Lucas quipped.

“Mysteries R Us.” Alex waved him closer. “Take a look at this.”

Lucas crawled down on his hands and knees and studied the object. It was barely peeking out of the ground, a hint of grimy hardness in a parallel line with earth. Only a couple of inches were exposed, but Lucas could tell that it extended far beyond
eyesight and deep underground. Dirt worn as smooth as cement banked both sides—if the chair hadn't disturbed its hard-packed grave, the incongruity beneath the barn floor might have never surfaced at all.

Reaching out a tentative hand, Lucas brushed the dirt away with his fingertips, revealing a grayish white surface that was comparatively smooth despite tiny pockmarks that dug minuscule basins across the exterior. He clawed at the dust with his nails until they began to split, then he turned to Alex with a sigh.

“The knife?”

Alex handed it over without a single cynical comment.

Lucas scratched and dug, prying chunks of earth away with each vicious slash. Within minutes, he could tentatively wrap his fingers around it. He pulled gently. It didn't give an inch. Pulling harder produced the same effect: nothing.

“What do you think it is?” Alex cut in.

In the corner of his mind, a shadowy thought was beginning to materialize in smoky, elusive wisps. Lucas brushed more dust away, touched the object again, and realized with a paralyzing jolt that the doctor in him had always known what it was. His subconscious perceived it even when his mind refused to believe. “Oh, God.” Lucas whispered it—a prayer, an invocation, a heartfelt, aching plea—because he knew . . . he knew what lay beneath the feet of the community's infamous outcast.

“Lucas, come on, don't get all melodramatic.”

It was through a fog that Lucas managed to mumble, “I think we're looking at Angela Sparks.”

A tangible quiet descended on the barn. Disbelief, thick and poisonous, choked each man as they stared at what they now knew to be a bone. A human bone. Moments trudged by before Alex found his voice. “I thought Jenna was helping her get out of town.”

“Me, too.”

Jenna Hudson was deep water. Mysterious, flowing, dark. She had stormed into Lucas's life late in his residency and had affixed herself indelibly, ineradicably in his mind before she ever made it to his heart. Jenna, with her baggy jeans, piled hair, bare feet. She wore her own skin as if it was an afterthought, something that she had just tossed on as she swept out the door. She claimed him without meaning to, without really seeming to care if he was hers. But he was, and from the first moment, she knew it.

Jenna was all eyes. Blue so bottomless it was navy, almost black. And it was those eyes, in the face framed by curls that appeared to flow out of everything that was her, shadowy enough to be coal, that demanded all of Lucas. He had never been in love before, and he never bothered to question if he even knew what love truly was. He simply married her.