Morgue
There’s nothing certain in a man’s life but this:
That he must lose it.
-Agamemnon, Aeschylus
Deceased white
male. Apparently middle-aged. Found naked behind a bar and grill in Carlson,
Arizona.
Carlson is a
tourist berg located in the central-east portion of the state. It is the seat
of Mogollon county. You reach it by leaving the I-17 where it intersects State Road
88. Then you head East for about half an hour. Detective Ryan Dalton had passed
through it before but had never worked a case there.
Home to
rednecks, a few large ranches and some farms that produced corn during summer and
pumpkins for the region’s autumn festivities, Carlson also received a lot of
tourism business. Various Indian ruins, along with river experiences, drew
people to the area. The casino was regularly voted as the best in Arizona.
Dalton wasn’t
summoned from Phoenix to these hinterlands, though, just to see a body. The
dead man had been found with a wooden shaft, presumably the instrument of his
mortality, protruding from his chest. The detective still wasn’t exactly sure
why this had merited state intervention but the CID for Carlson PD had asked for
help and Dalton’s boss in Phoenix had sent him on his way.
There were
other oddities about the case. For example, a series of gunshots had been heard
outside the establishment that night. Immediately after, a few patrons had
rushed out to the alleyway behind the bar and discovered the body. The man had
not been shot nor had any rounds, shells or other evidence of gunfire been
found.
Also, the
man had clearly been dead for some time.
He drove up
in the rain. It was July and monsoon weather had come to make the Arizona
summer slightly less unbearable. In Phoenix, where Dalton lived, the hard
rainfall that he remembered from his youth at this time of year hardly ever
seemed to fall anymore. Desert civilization had created a heat island out of
concrete and steel that seemed to part the rain-heavy clouds and send them elsewhere.
The rain that
day did not fall so hard that it obscured the captivating transition which the
terrain underwent as Dalton drove up out of the Valley of the Sun and into the mountains.
Saguaro
cactus littered the landscape beside the interstate as it left Phoenix. Ascending
northward, mesquite and creosote gradually replaced the cactus. In Carlson, the
mesquite had just begun to give way to small evergreen varieties of tree. Had
he continued on to Flagstaff in the North or Payson in the East, tall juniper
and ponderosa pines would have come to dominate the forested countryside.
Arriving in town,
the detective took in the sprawl of the place. He knew from perusing Google
Earth the night before that he could not see everything. From the vantage of
his car, it looked smaller than it was. However, he knew that settlements and
subdivisions reached out into any corner of the valley that promised shade if
not water. There were numerous tendrils of civilization that creeped down along
creeks and brooks.
The downtown
area itself was a handful of buildings at a crossroads that included a
supermarket, a drug store and two banks as well as a medley of restaurants and
other establishments. The town had a hospital, a nursing home, a public library
and a variety of government buildings as well but they were scattered all over,
down one dusty lane or another.
Over the
whole settlement, the Carlson Casino loomed from atop the highest hill.
Reservation land was primarily to the north and west, in mostly arid landscapes
among jutting, desert buttes. A few branches of the reservation extended into
town. The casino was just on the edge of Native territory.
When Dalton
pulled into the parking lot of the local jail, the rain had subsided temporarily.
He stepped out of the car, inhaled the powerful smell of the rain and the
surrounding creosote bushes. They were their own particular shade of green and they
glistened in the sun’s rays that peeked through openings between the rapidly
changing cloud formations in the sky.
The jail sat
separate from the rest of the town, closer to the interstate and south of SR 88.
It did not look like a jail. None of them do anymore. It appeared to be an
office building like any other in a small town. As if it might provide meeting
spaces for town halls and school functions. Dalton assumed that the police
vehicles were kept around the back and that prisoners were brought in that way
as well.
He met the
medical examiner just inside, after he passed through the metal detectors and
retrieved his weapon, ID and other accoutrements. A heavy-set man, probably in
his 60s and dressed in clean scrubs, approached Dalton as he composed himself
after passing through the security checkpoint.
“Ned
Springer,” he said, introducing himself as he shook Dalton’s hand. He asked
what the detective thought of the weather, the landscape and so on as they
navigated the hallways of the Mogollon County justice system.
In the
morgue, when he started to remove the body from the cabinet, Springer opened
the drawer slowly and stated, “There’s something that I want you to see that I
haven’t told anybody about.”
As Dalton
expected, the body was ghostly pale. It had the look of all dead bodies except
for the wooden shaft sticking out of its chest.
When he had
encountered his first corpse in the line of work, a real corpse and not a
carefully prepared cadaver in a coffin at a funeral home, Dalton had learned
something about death that he never forgot. Confronted with mortality, he
realized that dead bodies look very different. They do not simply appear like
living people that are not moving. In a dead person, all nerve and muscle
function has ceased. Tissues lose their tension, give way to gravity. The face
changes as the jaw slackens and the mouth hangs open awkwardly.
This body
was no different. It was a lump of muscle and other tissues. The man himself
had leaked out with his blood and dissipated forever.
“What’s so
special?” the detective asked.
“Look here.”
Springer brought two fingers to within an inch of the wooden shaft. He moved
them along its length, glancing back and forth from the evidence to Dalton. The
detective saw that there were small black letters and symbols carved into the
wood. There were no words that he recognized. The symbols looked vaguely
familiar.
Dalton
looked at Springer, furrowed his brows.
“I didn’t
know what to say, either.” The medical examiner smiled. “I also didn’t let word
get around. The presumption at the scene was that it was part of a fencepost or
something. We’ve got plenty of them handy around here. The marks are small and close
to the wound. I suppose the other half of the sentence is inside this guy’s
chest. I don’t think that any of the uniforms on scene noticed. So far, it
hasn’t been mentioned in any report. I’ve refrained from writing anything about
it so far. I will have to eventually, though, but I wanted to get someone like
you up here first before anyone starts talking.”
“But what are
they?” Dalton queried. “Do you recognize the words? Is this some sort of gang
scrawl?”
“Oh, no!” Springer
exclaimed, smiling again. “That’s the thing. There aren’t any gangs up here.
We’ve got Mexicans, but this isn’t Mexican, or Spanish anyway. No, I’m pretty
sure that this is Latin. You Catholic?”
“A bad one.”
Dalton grinned. “But they didn’t teach Latin in Sunday school when I was a kid.
Different generation.”
“Me
neither.” Springer said, smiling back. “Parents raised me Lutheran. Now I watch
sports on Sunday. No, but I do recognize these symbols from my Sunday school
memories.” He was bent close to the body again, pointing to the carvings.
“That’s the Greek alpha and omega. Jesus says it in the book of Revelation. I
am the alpha and the omega.”
“So is this
Greek?”
“No.” Springer
shook his head vigorously. “The Greek alphabet doesn’t look like ours. I am
pretty sure that these other words are Latin and this is probably some kind of
Catholic thing. Like maybe it came from a Catholic property.”
“And how did
it end up in the middle of this guy’s chest?” Dalton asked rhetorically.
“That’s why
I called you guys.” The medical examiner expelled a forced laugh.
The
detective took a photo of the wooden post, making sure to capture the letters
and symbols carved into it. He badly wanted to ignore the marks on the wood. Without
them, he already had some plausible explanations. The stab wound was obviously
the cause of death and likely the result of a fight. The nudity was not hard to
explain, especially if toxicology showed the presence of drugs or alcohol in
the tissues. The gunshots heard prior to discovery may have had nothing to do
with the case. There were a lot of gun owners in a town like Carlson and there
may have been another story entirely behind a separate discharge of firearms.
It was also
possible, at this point, that a lot of the story was in error. The bystanders
who found the corpse had come out of a bar, after all, and may not have given
good reports of what had actually happened. Allowed to focus on just the body, Dalton
could possibly have been back home by the next day. He wondered if there was
some way that he could toss this back to PD by morning and get some fishing done
before heading back to Phoenix.
But the
marks were there. And the medical examiner would put them in his report.
“Is there
anything else about this body that I should know? Any other marks or wounds?” Dalton
asked.
“No.” The
other man shook his head. “That was it. I haven’t done the full autopsy yet.
When you leave, I’ll get started and take a look inside. I’ve already taken
samples for all the lab work. We don’t get a lot of suspicious deaths out here
so it’s at the top of my list. Today’s Friday. I should have a complete report
ready for you on Monday, but toxicology and some of the other lab work might
take longer.”
Dalton told
the man to keep him informed.
“Is there a
Catholic church in town?”
Springer
nodded. “Yeah. Holy Spirit, I think it’s called.” He didn’t know the street
number but gave Dalton a general idea using cross streets.
