"Better take another one just to be safe," Alan said. "Get the bodies, too. I'm not going to have those guys saying we broke the chain of evidence. Be damned if I will." He was aware that his voice sounded a shade querulous, but there was nothing he could do about it.
Norris took another Polaroid, documenting Alan's position outside the circle of evidence and the way the bodies were lying at the foot of the stop-sign. Then Alan leaned cautiously forward again and placed his fingers against the bloodstained neck of the woman lying on top.
There was no pulse, of course, but after a second the pressure of his fingers caused her head to fall away from the signpost and turn sideways. Alan recognized Nettle at once, and it was Polly he thought of.
Oh jesus, he thought dolefully. Then he went through the motions of feeling for Wilma's pulse, even though there was a meatcleaver buried in her skull. Her cheeks and forehead were printed with small dots of blood. They looked like heathen tattoos.
Alan got up and returned to where his men were standing on the other side of the tapes. He couldn't seem to stop thinking of Polly, and he knew that was wrong. He had to get her off his mind or he was going to bitch this up for sure. He wondered if any of the gawkers had ID'd Nettle already. if so, Polly would surely hear before he could call her. He hoped desperately that she wouldn't come down to see for herself.
You can't worry about that now, he admonished himself You've got a double murder on your hands, from the look.
"Get out your book," he told Norris. "You're club secretary."
It Jesus, Alan, you know how lousy my spelling is."
"Just write."
Norris gave the Polaroid to Clut and got his notebook out of his back pocket. A pad of Traffic Warnings with his name rubberstamped at the bottom of each sheet fell out with it. Norris bent, picked the pad up off the sidewalk, and stuffed it absently into his pocket again.
I want you to note that the head of the woman on top, designated Victim 1, was resting against the post of the stop-sign. I inadvertently pushed it off, checking for pulse."
How easy it is to slip into Police Speak, Alan thought, where cars become "vehicles" and crooks become "perpetrators" and dead townspeople become "designated victims." Police Speak, the wonderful sliding glass barrier.
He turned to Clut and told him to photograph this second configuration of the bodies, feeling extremely grateful that he'd had Norris document the original position before he touched the women.
Clut took the picture.
Alan turned back to Norris. "I want you to further note that when the head of Victim 1 moved, I was able to identify her as Netitia Cobb."
Seaton whistled. "You mean it's Nettle.@"
"Yes. That's what I mean."
Norris wrote the information down on his pad. Then he asked, "What do we do now, Alan?"
"Wait for CID's Investigation Unit and try to look alive when they get here," Alan said.
The CID arrived less than three minutes later in two cars, followed by Ray Van Allen in his cranky old Subaru Brat. Five minutes later a State Police ID team arrived in a blue station wagon. All the members of the State Police team then lit cigars. Alan had known they would do this. The bodies were fresh and they were outdoors, but the ritual of the cigars was immutable.
The unpleasant work known in Police Speak as "securing the scene" began. It went on until after dark. Alan had worked with Henry
Payton, head of the Oxford Barracks (and thus in nominal charge of this case and the CID guys working it), on several other occasions. He had never seen the slightest hint of imagination in Henry. The man was a plodder, but a thorough, conscientious plodder.
It was because Henry had been assigned that Alan had felt safe to creep off for a bit and call Polly.
When he returned, the hands of the victims were being secured in gallon-sized Ziploc Baggies. Wilma jerzyck had lost one of her shoes, and her stockinged foot was accorded the same treatment.
The ID team moved in and took close to three hundred photos.
More State Police had arrived by then. Some held back the crowd, which was trying to draw closer again, and others shunted the arriving TV people down to the Municipal Building. A police artist did a quick sketch on a Crime-Scene Grid.
At last the bodies themselves were taken care of-except, that was, for one final matter. Payton gave Alan a pair of disposable surgical gloves and a Ziploc Baggie. "The cleaver or the knife?"
"I'll take the cleaver," Alan said. It would be the messier of the two implements, still clotted with Wilma jerzyck's brains, but he didn't want to touch Nettle. He had liked her.
With the murder weapons removed, tagged, bagged, and on their way to Augusta, the two CID teams moved in and began to search the area around the bodies, which still lay in their terminal embrace with the blood pooled between them now hardening to a substance like enamel.
When Ray Van Allen was finally allowed to load them into the Medical Assistance van, the scene was lit with police cruiser high beams and the orderlies first had to peel Wilma and Nettle apart.