Free Bad Country: A Novel by CB McKenzie Page B

six-year-old child’s obituary was longer than many of those marking the deaths of octogenarians, most of the copy detailing the girl’s many wins, places and finishes in Little Miss beauty pageants. No mention was made of her only sibling, her brother Samuel, as a survivor of hers.
    Rodeo closed the small notebook and stuck it in his shirt pocket, turned his attention to the teenager’s books. Though the rest of the room seemed well-tossed by the police, the books seemed undisturbed but by gravity. The shelves were made of splintered pallet wood and were not even held in the dry wall by expansion screw sets but only with nails scarcely sufficient to hold the pressure of the paperbacks resting on them. Many nail heads were bent and pounded into the walls in obvious frustration. The thin metal brackets were sagging from the wall under the weight of words.
    Each shelf had a theme. Science fiction, fantasy, true crime, government conspiracies, alien visitation, zombies, vampires and werewolves, satanic cults, Vietnam, guns, serial killers, Harry Potter, Stephen King and Poetry. There were six books on the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, so Rodeo studied these with some care. All had the pages containing the well-known diagrams of the Book Depository on Dealey Plaza dog-eared. A number of these diagrams of the ballistics report also had notes scribbled on them, distances from shooter to target and ballistics information. In a margin of one was drawn a Smiley Face and written beside it “not a hard shot!” In another book, on the most famous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald, CE-133A, a halo was penciled in above Oswald’s head, and near Oswald’s mail-order rifle was penciled “Carcano 6.5 millimeters, ask RR about getting one for our ‘job.’”
    There were also two books detailing the lives, the pursuit and eventual capture of the Washington, D.C. “Beltway” serial sniper killers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.
    Rodeo quickly flipped through the rest of the books and then replaced them one by one. He found only a single scrap of paper, in a book of Alexander Long poetry, a homemade business card that had R OSE R ITE.COM embossed on the front and handwritten on the back a local telephone number and the Kettle . No wallet, keys or personal items but several framed photos were on the battered chest of drawers. One photo was of little Farrah, not in one of her competitive Little Miss costumes, but simply smiling in a candid shot looking like a plain little Mexican-American girl with natural brown pigtails and brown eyes. There was a blurry shot of an Anglo girl with pink hair as she was leaving a chain restaurant. Samuel had also taped to the bureau mirror several of his own cropped school pictures. Though the photos represented several different school years, Samuel consistently had acne spots on his face and long greasy hair, a downy fuzz on his upper lip, and was a very ordinary-looking mixed-race kid except for his eyes, which were as luminous as his grandmother’s had been.
    Also taped to the mirror was a photo of a group of Goth kids standing in line outside the Rialto Theater including the girl with pink hair again. Another snapshot had been taken in front of El Charro Café of a similar bunch of tattooed and pierced kids but in cheap prom gear. They stood beside a 1980’s-era Buick sedan with a spoiler bolted unevenly on the trunk lid and “Stretch Limo” soaped on the side panels of the LeSabre.
    Beside this photo was one Samuel had apparently taken of himself, as his skinny arm was partly in the picture as he held the camera in front of his face. Rodeo placed the location of this image as the nearby sweat lodge, which was within a mile or so of Katherine Rocha’s house. The men’s lodge was partly visible as a dome of rags with a low, shadowed entrance. Smoke rose behind the young man, partly obscuring Black Mountain in the near distance. A dark figure also drifted in the background