Vickery’s first call was to the Apalachee County Sheriff’s Office. The dispatcher patched him through to the sheriff, whom Vickery briefed on what we’d found. “Do you want your folks to handle this? Your deputy, Sutton, is on his way over here already . . . Right, to get the latest bone the Pettis dog brought back . . . No, sir, we haven’t found that bone. And the tracking collar we’d put on the dog is gone, too . . . Yeah, that is a shame . . . Do you want us to just secure the scene till Sutton gets here?” He nibbled on his cigar as he listened. “Actually, Sheriff, we’ve got a good crime-scene analyst here; a bone expert, too—the forensic anthropologist that looked at those two skulls.” He seemed to take satisfaction in something the sheriff said. “Okay, do y’all want to call the M.E.? And the funeral home? It usually takes a while for the hearse to show up . . . Okay, will do. . . . You know we aren’t trying to step on your toes here, but we’ll be glad to go ahead and start working it. You sure that’s what you want?” He motioned “go” to Angie, who nodded and seemed to shift gears almost instantly, into crime-scene mode—the same intense mode I’d seen when she and I had reconstructed the sofa on which her sister had died, and then again when we’d examined Kate’s body. “All right, Sheriff, we’ll get started. See you soon.”
Vickery’s next call was to his boss, the special agent in charge of FDLE’s Tallahassee region, to bring him up to speed on the murder and the sheriff’s request for forensic assistance. At the same time Angie phoned her boss, the supervisor of the crime lab. As she talked, she took a roll of crime-scene tape from the back of the Suburban and stretched it between two pines at the end of the turnoff from the dirt road into the yard. “I haven’t been inside yet,” she was saying as she came back. “Vickery went in looking for the guy, found him and the dog.” She crouched beside the tire track she’d shown me. “Looks like we have at least one tire impression. I didn’t see any shoe impressions, but I’ll take a closer look. . . . Is there somebody who could assist? . . . Great, send Rodriguez. Thanks.”
Angie started by photographing the cabin itself, then took pictures of the faint tire track from various angles and distances. Next she added a position marker—“1”—and a ruler for scale and took another series of photos of the impression. Then, drawing from bins in the back of the Suburban, she filled the pockets on her cargo pants with more evidence markers, gloves, and paper-bootie shoe covers before heading inside to begin photographing the death scene. During the next ten minutes, I glimpsed occasional flashes of light through the porch screen and the kitchen door, as if a small thunderstorm were occurring inside the cabin. “Okay, Stu,” she called, “I’ve got the basic photos, and I’ve done a quick search. I’m not seeing shell casings so far, and there’s not a lot of blood spatter to speak of.”
“Got a guess about the bullet caliber?”
“Medium,” she said. “Maybe .38.”
“Could be,” he mused. “Or maybe a .45.”
“Looks to me like he was standing by the bed when he was shot, or maybe sitting on it, and he fell backward. Lots of blood pooled in the mattress under him, and more on the floor by the dog. But I’m not sure there’s a lot to work with in terms of spatter or trajectory.”
“Yeah, that’s sorta what I thought,” he said. “Ready for me to come in?”
“Sure, come on. Just don’t touch the kitchen doorknob. Maybe we’ll get lucky there. You haven’t touched the inside knob, have you?”
“Nope. Okay, I’ll come poke around, see if it looks like somebody else has gone through his stuff; see if we can find his next of kin.”
While Angie and Stu worked the interior, I tried to console a disbelieving and distraught Deputy Sutton, who arrived moments after they went inside. “I just talked to him a few hours ago.” Sutton shook his head. “He was joking and laughing. So proud of that dog. Couldn’t wait to show us what Jasper’d gone and found this time.” The young officer appeared close to tears. “I had to work an accident. If I’d come right when he called me, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“I know how you feel,” I said. “I’m the one that suggested we put the tracking collar on the dog.” A question popped into my head. “If somebody killed him to get the tracking collar,” I asked, “how do you reckon they knew about it?”
“Hell, this is Apalachee County,” he said without hesitation. “Everybody knows everybody’s business here.” Angie had said basically the same thing about Cheatham County, Georgia, I remembered—and for that matter, the same was true of rural Tennessee. Suddenly he looked even more stricken than before, if such a thing were possible. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “I was talking about it with one of the other deputies the day y’all put it on.”
“Talking where? At the courthouse? At a coffee shop?”
He flushed. “Talking on the radio. Anybody with a police scanner could’ve heard it.” He now looked more in need of consolation than ever, but I could think of nothing consoling to say about the irresponsibility of broadcasting, quite literally, information about how Pettis was cooperating with an FDLE investigation.