“I’d like very much to know, Doctor.”
“I think the man, his ID says Donnie Barber, killed the deer illegally yesterday, the day before the season started—I know that’s when it died. That arrow’s consistent with the rest of his archery equipment. He was butchering it in a hurry. I haven’t done the antigens on that blood on his hands, but it’s deer blood. He was just going to take what deer hunters call the backstrap, and he started a sloppy job, this short ragged cut here. Then he got a big surprise, like this arrow through his head. Same color, but a different kind of arrow. No notch in the butt. Do you recognize it?”
“It looks like a crossbow quarrel,” Starling said.
“A second person, maybe the one with the crossbow, finished dressing the deer, doing a much better job, and then, by God, he did the man too. Look how precisely the hide is reflected here, how decisive the incisions are. Nothing spoiled or wasted. Michael DeBakey couldn’t do it better. There’s no sign of any kind of sexual interference with either of them. They were simply butchered for meat.”
Starling touched her lips with her knuckle. For a second the pathologist thought she was kissing an amulet.
“Dr. Hollingsworth, were the livers missing?”
A beat of time before he replied, peering at her over his glasses. “The deer’s liver is missing. Mr. Barber’s liver apparently wasn’t up to standard. It was partly excised and examined, there’s an incision just along the portal vein. His liver is cirrhotic and discolored. It remains in the body, would you like to see?”
“No, thank you. What about the thymus?”
“The sweetbreads, yes, missing in both cases. Agent Starling, nobody’s said the name yet, have they?”
“No,” Starling said. “Not yet.”
A puff from the air lock and a lean, weathered man in a tweed sports jacket and khaki pants stood in the doorway.
“Sheriff, how’s Carleton?” Hollingsworth said. “Agent Starling, this is Sheriff Dumas. The sheriff’s brother is upstairs in cardiac ICU.”
“He’s holding his own. They say he’s stable, he’s ‘guarded,’ whatever that means,” the sheriff said. He called outside, “Come on in here, Wilburn.”
The sheriff shook Starling’s hand and introduced the other man. “This is Officer Wilburn Moody, he’s a game warden.”
“Sheriff. If you want to stay close to your brother we could go back upstairs,” Starling said.
Sheriff Dumas shook his head. “They won’t let me in to see him again for another hour and a half No offense, Miss, but I called for Jack Crawford. Is he coming?”
“He’s stuck in court—he was on the stand when your call came. I expect we’ll hear from him very shortly. We really appreciate you calling us so fast.”
“Old Crawford taught my National Police Academy Class at Quantico umpteen years ago. Damndest fellow. If he sent you, you must know what you’re doing—want to go ahead?”
“Please, Sheriff.”
The sheriff took a notebook out of his coat pocket. “The individual here with the arrow through his head is Donnie Leo Barber, WM thirty-two, resides in a trailer at Trail’s End Park at Cameron. No employment I can find. General discharge with prejudice from the Air Force four years ago. He’s got an airframe and power plant ticket from the FAA. Sometime airplane mechanic.
Paid a misdemeanor fine for discharging a firearm in the city limits, paid a fine for criminal trespass last hunting season. Pled guilty to poaching deer in Summit County, when was that, Wilburn?”
“Two seasons ago, he just got his license back. He’s known to the department. He don’t bother to track nothing after he shoots it. If it don’t fall, just wait on another’n … one time—”
“Tell what you found today, Wilburn.”
“Well, I was coming along on county road forty-seven, about a mile west of the bridge there around seven o’clock this morning when Old Man Peckman flagged me down. He was breathing hard and holding his chest. All he could do was open and shut his mouth and point off in the woods there. I went maybe, oh, not more than a hunderd and fifty yards in the thick woods and there was this Barber here sprawled up against a tree with a arrow through his head and that deer there with a arrow in it. They was stiff from yesterday at least.”
“Yesterday morning early, I’d say, cool as it was,” Dr. Hollingsworth said.
“Now the season just opened this morning,” the game warden said. “This Donnie Barber had a climbing tree stand with him that he hadn’t set up yet. Looked like he went out there yesterday to get ready for today, or else he went to poach. I don’t know why else he’d take his bow, if he was just setting up the stand. Here come this nice deer and he just couldn’t help himself. —I’ve saw people do this a lots. This kinda behavior’s got common as pig tracks. And then this other ’un come up on him while he was butchering. I couldn’t tell nothing from the tracks, a rain come down out there so hard, the bottom just fell out right then—”
“That’s why we took a couple of pictures and pulled out the bodies,” Sheriff Dumas said. “Old Man Peckman owns the woods. This Donnie had on him a legitimate two-day lease to hunt starting today, with Peckman’s signature on it. Peckman always sold one lease a year, and he advertised it and had it farmed out with some brokers. Donnie also had a letter in his back pocket saying Congratulations you have won a deer lease. The papers are wet, Miss Starling. Nothing against our fellows, but I’m wondering if you ought to do the fingerprinting at your lab. The arrows too, the whole thing was wet when we got there. We tried not to touch them.”
“You want to take these arrows with you, Agent Starling? How would you like me to take ’em out?” Dr. Hollingsworth asked.
“If you’d hold them with retractors and saw them in two at the skin line on the feather side and push the rest through, I’ll wire them to my board with some twist ties,” Starling said, opening her case.
“I don’t think he was in a fight, but do you want fingernail scrapings?”