The woods were dark and the high, steep sides of the red clay railroad cut pressed in on us like the walls of a prison. The cold wind blew through the pine tops all around us and made them moan like a score of phantom pulp wood trucks whirring over some distant blacktop. The only things of comfort in sight were the broad shoulders and the great bull neck that supported the completely shaved head of Claiborne Police Detective Alfred “Raz” Klutch. A former college football center, he was shaped looked like a fire plug and was twice as tough.
He had a street reputation for being indestructible, and some say he can’t be killed. People called him “Raz” because it’s short for Rasputin. Like the Russian mystic who was murdered by conspirators nearly a century ago, Klutch had survived several attempts on his life, including a poisoning, being shot at close range at least twice, an attempted strangling and a near drowning. Someone had even set him on fire once during a drug raid, and I’ve also been told that he’d been hit in the head once with a claw-toothed hammer. All things considered, he was the sort of fellow you liked having on your side.
Klutch was leading me down the old railroad tracks that led to an abandoned train tunnel in the middle of nowhere. As if he’d heard my thoughts, he stopped, turned and looked me over.
“Let me remind you that I’m only bringing you out here because I know that you can keep your mouth shut,” Klutch said, his voice like gravel.
He shinned his flashlight in my face, and I nodded.
“You were the only photographer I could find on short notice,” he continued. “And counting myself, you’ll be only the third person to come out here tonight. I want to get good pictures first before anyone else comes out here. Once I make that first call, this’ll become a circus, and there’ll be dozens of folks out here tracking everything up.”
Klutch’s phone call an hour ago had come as a surprise. I’d been sitting at my nightshift reporter’s desk banging out a story when he’d called for me to meet him with my camera.
“So who’s the third person?” I asked. “You mentioned a third.”
“The vic,” he said, turning to continue back down the tracks. “He was our department photographer.”
We arrived at the mouth of the tunnel a few minutes later. It was a large masonry structure set down into the railroad cut. The walls of the tunnel appeared to be composed of limestone, and were covered with patches of green algae. The opening was huge, a black mouth of nothing that was every bit of 25 feet from the track bed to the arched roof of the tunnel. Long abandoned, there hadn’t been a train to pass down these tracks in over a hundred years.
Our flashlights did little to pierce the black upon black of the tunnel’s interior. There was a good bit of standing water from recent rains at the mouth of the tunnel and masses of bat guano on the tracks ahead. Despite the disease-infested guano, the smell wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined.
“Here’s the game plan,” Klutch said. “We need to preserve the scene as much as possible. I’ve already been down as far as the body, alone about an hour ago. If at all possible, walk on top of the track. It’s slick, but that’ll help us distinguish what’s ours and what’s not. Understand?”
“Got it.”
I followed him into the tunnel and after about 50 yards it began to bend to the right. We rounded the bend and the faint outline of the tunnel’s opening disappeared from view behind us. In that moment, I saw it, a crumpled mass of clothes, a long khaki overcoat, the remnants of a necktie, slacks and a blood-soaked dress shirt.
Klutch walked right up to the corpse and knelt as best he could, careful not to get guano on his pants.
“You’re not one of those types who’s going to puke all over my crime scene, are you?” he asked.
“I saw worse in Iraq.”
That seemed to satisfy him, and he spent the next three or four minutes giving me an impromptu class on crime scene photography. The job took three or four minutes. Hours from now, after sunrise, scores of folks would be down here, moving the body, collecting more evidence, stomping all over everything. These pictures would be invaluable then.
The dead photographer’s name was Paul Stewart, and he was a damned mess. He’d been attacked by an animal, and his throat looked like it had been ravaged by something with very sharp teeth. His skin was as ashen as newsprint from blood loss.
“What was he doing down here?”
“Not sure,” Klutch said, shining his light farther down the tunnel. “He’d had the night off for a change.”
More tracks led off into the distance, farther into the darkness of the tunnel beyond. “Let’s see where those go,” Klutch said. “He may have dropped his camera, that is, if the killer didn’t make off with it.”
“Killer? You don’t think an animal did this?”
He shook his head. “I doubt it.”
We followed the dead man’s tracks in the guano, and it was hard not to notice that there wasn’t a lot of blood on the ground. We could see where he’d walked on top of the tracks, like us, on his way down the tunnel, but his return back up the tunnel after his injury had been a stumbling, running affair.
Klutch drew his service weapon, a heavy-duty .40-caliber handgun. I could tell from its silhouette that it was much larger than the small, snub-nosed revolver I had stuck in the small of my back.
We walked about 30 more yards around the bend, when Klutch dropped into a crouch. “What the hell!” he yelled. He shielded his face with his left hand, careful not to point the muzzle of his handgun in the wrong direction. “Bats!”
Instinctively, I crouched behind him. There didn’t seem to be many of them, and I could hear their tiny squeaks as they flew past, on their way out of the tunnel to snack on the ample supply of small insects in the surrounding woods. It was obvious that the tunnel was home to many more bats, but most of them probably took wing to hunt as soon as the sun set, hours ago.
“Rabies infested rats with wings,” Klutch mumbled. “Have you ever looked at one up close?”
Before I could answer, the beam of Klutch’s flashlight passed over something ahead. “What’s that, there on the ground?”
“Looks like a bag.”
“It’s a camera bag.”
We approached slowly, and Klutch pulled a pair of white rubber gloves out of nowhere. “Let see what we’ve got,” he said, pulling the gloves over his thick fingers.
The bag was closed, and Klutch flipped the top open with an index finger. He shined his light inside. “Get a picture of this,” he said, motioning me over for a closer look.
The outside of the camera bag was brown and relatively clean considering that it had been left unceremoniously in a large pile of guano. I peer into the bag and saw that it contained a number of unusual items – an old pocket pistol, some ammo, a wooden mallet, two wooden stakes, some Rosary beads, a wooden cross, a Bible, what looked like a folded Monroe County map and a dozen or so glass phials.
“Notice anything missing?” Klutch asked after I took several photos of the bags contents.
“No camera.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And no memory cards either.” He produced a small yellow evidence flag from his coat, poked it in to the guano beside the bag and stood.
Suddenly and without warning, a rustling sound, like that of a wet flag flopping in the wind, came to our ears from the darkness ahead.
“What in the hell was that?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level and calm.
“There’s been someone watching us from the shadows ahead ever since we reached the bag,” Klutch whispered. “We weren’t the ones who kicked up those bats. Kill your flashlight.”
I turned off my flashlight, and he did the same. We stood there for what seemed like a long time, listening, straining our ears in the darkness. The total absence of light was oppressive, and the smell of the omnipresent guano soon became overpowering as my sense of smell began to compensate for my lack of vision.
With my free hand, I reached into the waistband of my pants and freed my revolver. I slid it from under my jacket and eased back the hammer. Despite my best efforts, the distinctive sound of the hammer being drawn back was unmistakable in the darkness.
I could sense Klutch turn in my direction. “Be ready” was all he managed to whisper before all hell broke loose.
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