Cassie cut into the baseball steak. It was delicious.
“Turned out it was a drug thing,” he said. “The woman OD’d and the husband apparently stuffed her in the trunk because he was high on meth and didn’t know what else to do with her. Then he offed himself in a hayfield.”
Cassie must have looked skeptical because Verplank said, “I know what you’re thinking. But we had agents from the South Dakota and Montana divisions of criminal investigation here and they both came to the same conclusion.
“Before that,” Verplank said, “The last outright murder was in 1992. Guy shot right out there on Main Street. But that’s about it. We don’t have many violent deaths but what we do have I’d call end-of-the-trail deaths.”
“Meaning what?” she asked. She knew she shouldn’t be enjoying the steak as much as she was given the subject matter being discussed. But she did.
“If you look at Ekalaka on the map it’s about as isolated as you can get,” he said. “We didn’t even have a paved highway to here from Baker until recently. This place is absolutely not on the way to anywhere—you don’t pass through. If you find yourself in Ekalaka you are coming here for a reason, as you no doubt learned today.”
She nodded.
“So we’re literally the end of the road. An enterprising bad guy or a meth head like the South Dakotan might figure it’s a good place to hide out or dump a body. Two years ago a rancher found a couple of mutilated bodies in his irrigation ditch. The FBI showed up and concluded they were gangbangers from either Fargo or Minneapolis. Somebody killed them and drove their bodies here thinking no one would ever find them and connect them to anywhere. That’s what I mean.”
“Gotcha. So do you think this boy’s body was dumped here?”
Verplank concentrated on eating the last few ounces of his meat, then swabbed French fries through the juice on his plate and popped them into his mouth.
“Between you and me,” he said. “I do not.”
When she arched her eyebrows he said, “I’m waiting to find out what the DCI concludes from their autopsy and investigation. They’ve got the body at the state lab in Missoula and they haven’t sent me any results yet. So I’m keeping my theory to myself for now and only sharing it with you. I don’t want to assume a homicide like I did with those South Dakota tweakers and turn out to be wrong again.
“I’ve got an election coming up,” he said as explanation.
“Okay, it’s just between us,” Cassie said. “And we’ll start from the premise that what you think is simply a theory at this point.”
The sheriff leaned back so the waitress could clear his plate. Cassie did the same.
When she was gone, Verplank said, “It was easily the creepiest thing I’ve seen since I’ve been the sheriff here. I still think about it.”
Cassie reached inside her purse for her notebook. “Can you describe what you found?”
“Not here,” he said after he looked over both shoulders to see if any locals were eavesdropping. “Let’s go to my office.”
“I’ll get the check,” she said.
“Not in a million years. My county, my treat.”
*
AT THE CARTER COUNTY Justice Center, Cassie followed the sheriff through the back door into his small office. An inside window looked out over three small cubicles and a lone deputy seated at a desk. The deputy looked up and saw them and waved hello.
Verplank signaled back to the deputy and gestured to Cassie to take the hardback chair positioned in front of his desk. He sat down heavily and opened a file drawer behind him and placed a folder on the desk.
Before he opened it he said, “Some of these photos are pretty graphic. Are you okay looking at them?”
“I’m okay,” she said. But she wasn’t sure. She’d met Raheem several times when he was with Kyle. He was brash but polite to her and she always thought he was overplaying the role of a fish out of water; a cool street kid stuck in rural North Dakota even though he had been in Grimstad most of his life.
It was one thing to look at deceased bodies of strangers. It was quite another to possibly see the dead body of someone she knew and liked.
The sheriff opened the file and slid a full-color eight-by-ten to her.
She glanced at it and gulped.
The shot was taken from about ten feet away so she could see the entire body. He was naked except for partially pulled-down boxers. The body was chest-down and sprawled crosswise across three rows of a freshly plowed field. The victim’s skin was the same color as the clumpy dirt it lay in. The soles of his feet were pinkish.
There were several deep red abrasions near the shoulder blades and another on the small of his back. The victim’s limbs were long and well muscled.
There was no head.
“That’s what the scene looked like when I arrived,” the sheriff said. “The photo was taken by me on my cell phone as I walked from the state highway out into the field. Obviously there was nothing obvious there to identify the victim. No wallet, no clothes, no tattoos. No teeth to check dental records.”
She tapped on the photo. “Any idea why his underwear is pulled down?”
“First thing I thought, too,” he said. “But I think we can discount sexual abuse. Those shorts got pulled down from falling forward into the dirt. The fabric was caught by the ground itself. It’s hard to see that from the angle you’re looking at.”
She breathed a sigh of relief.
“Who reported it?” she asked. Her voice was husky and unsure.
“The school bus driver. She said she was on the way into town from picking up rural kids and she saw a bunch of crows perched on something in the field about fifty yards from the road. The ranch is owned by the Wilson family. The driver’s name is Jean Spires and she knew that crows sitting there all together meant something was dead. She called in to say there was a dead Indian or a migrant in the hay meadow.”
“An Indian?”
Verplank expelled a long puff of air from his nose. “We don’t see many other dark-skinned citizens around here. The reservation is west of here. She assumed.”
“Those wounds on his back?”
“The crows. Meaning birds and not Crow Indians.”
She nodded.
He slid a few more photos to her of the field itself. The soil was dry and chalky and made up of small clods of dirt. In one photo bare footprints could be seen clearly. In the other were boot prints just as obvious.
“Those are mine,” the sheriff said. “The only footprints in that field besides those of the victim.”
It took her a moment to understand the point he was making.
Then: “So the victim ran across the field from the road without anyone chasing him?”
“That’s what it looks like. He wasn’t dumped there. I measured the distance between his footprints and you’ll notice the balls of his feet made deeper impressions than the heels. He ran there.”