Free Carcass Trade by Noreen Ayres Page A

marked the property of a builder wanting to put up a castle for himself, newsworthy because various interest groups were saying no way.
    I lowered my windows and felt the warm air rush in, and enjoyed a moment of spring. Over the acres of dried grasses, blackbirds twitted and flitted. The sky was knit with faint curtains of contrails left by jets out of El Toro Marine Base. A peaceful day. A tranquil day. I thought how when a baby reaches for you, he grabs you with all four limbs.
    Joe walked with me to where the corpse lay on hardpack twenty feet away from a campground trash barrel. A coroner’s assistant standing by a stretcher kept bringing the V of his elbow to his face to breathe through the fabric of his shirt. For every ten degrees of ambient temperature, the chemical reaction causing decomposition doubles. It had been hot the last two days. The heavy, repulsive smell reached me.
    Joe pulled a Hav-A-Tampa out of his pocket and gave it to me. I peeled off the wrapper, and he leaned near with a colored lighter and lit me. I took a couple of puffs off the small cigar, then bit into a shred of leaf, and went forward with my camera. “Where’s Homicide?” I asked.
    â€œNo soft shoes but you guys,” the deputy standing near Joe said. His voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been yelling in a bar all night.
    â€œHe’ll be here, but late,” Joe said. “Frank Rubio. His girl’s been in an accident on the freeway.”
    â€œBummer. Is she hurt?”
    â€œJust mad because she can’t get to her job, is what he said.”
    Camera in hand, I focused on the body and snapped off two shots. I moved in close and knelt over Mr. Doe as he lay on his side, the left arm a fat plank of faded tattoos extending from his sleeveless shirt. Near the shoulder was a fierce eagle carrying a submachine gun in his talons; below that, a dripping heart wrapped in blue barbed wire. The dead man’s eyes were blackened and puffed like a toad’s. His nose, lips, teeth, and chin were covered with a dark issue that carried down to the dirt. “He was killed here,” I said, pointing downward. “Blood was still flowing.”
    Joe said, “Look in his eyes.”
    He motioned in the direction of his evidence kit where I could get some gloves, and I left my camera with Joe and returned to the corpse. With my thumb I pried open one spongy eyelid. My breath was held, and the silence as I peered into that brown, dead orb was like none other. There was a ringing in my head and a whiteness at the edges of my vision as though the void between the man and me was seen and heard in a high pitch through thick Plexiglas.
    I stood up immediately, and Joe said, “Are you all right? You look a little green.”
    â€œIt’s hot. I was rushing. Maybe it’s the cigar.”
    â€œWhat’d you see?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œLook again.”
    Joe knelt with me. As the other eyelid went up under my thumb, I noted the dark pink spots on the cornea. “Petechial hemorrhaging,” I said, referring to a condition caused by the increase in blood pressure because of compression of the airway. “He suffocated. Maybe strangled.”
    I didn’t see a ligature, and no fingernail wounds appeared on the neck, the victim’s attempt to be rid of a rope or whatever instrument of death he would have had to fight. But there couldn’t be, for his arms had been bound behind him with silver duct tape. The tape had loosened and gone wavy in the heat, so that the swollen-eyed man looked as though he was about to break free from a nap anytime. One leg was at the wrong angle. I said, “Looks like they broke a kneecap.”
    â€œHe must have been a very bad boy,” the deputy said in his loosely strung voice. His rusty, freckly arms at my eye level were a farm of golden hair. He squatted then, too, and told me he thought the creeps had kicked the body around some by the