I struggled with Deputy Powell as he flung me to the ground and handcuffed me. Yet in spite of that, he had easily handled me without any hint that it was a struggle. I was sweating, and my heart was pounding. He wasn’t even breathing hard. He leaned in close to my ear and calmly spoke.
“Mister, for your own protection, I am detaining you.” He continued calmly and forcefully. “What I think happened today is this. You were out here hiking. You found a guy lying on the ground. You thought he was dead. He wasn’t. He got up, walked over that ridge to his vehicle, and drove away. No body, no crime, unless we include you not calling for medical help for someone who was probably seriously injured. Or if we include you calling in a false report of a corpse. And even if there was a body, you messed with my crime scene.” He stopped to let that sink into my clearly dense skull.
He then continued, as if comforting a village idiot. “Here is also what I think. If you are, as you say, an ex-cop, you probably miss the action, so you let your active imagination run away with you. It is a hot day, and you look dirty and tired from hiking. It was easy to let it all influence your thinking. So what we are going to do is this. We are going into town and have a chat, just you, me, and the Sheriff. Got that?”
He remained remarkably calm, and I might go so far as to say even eloquent, considering the circumstances. But he was right. I did miss the action of being a cop. Finding the corpse had started my juices flowing. It was a corpse, no doubt about it. But I decided to stop trying to convince him of anything. The time had come to just be compliant.
“Yes,” I grunted with what little breath I could muster considering how his bulk had squeezed most of the air out of my lungs.
“Because you claim to be an ex-cop, I am giving you more courtesy than I would normally.”
Courtesy? Flinging me to the ground with your knee digging into my spine? But maybe this was courtesy. I wasn’t really physically hurt. He was big enough that if he wanted to be discourteous, I would be a mangled pile of body parts, vulture food. And I had also turned away from him. To him, it probably looked like I was running away. I am the village idiot.
Yet I still wanted to be believed. After all, there were other facts I could point out, like the putrid odor, the flies, the vulture, the boot prints that did not match the corpse’s footwear, the man with the gun on the ridge. But they were observations that I could not show. I had no pictures. So they were not facts. To him, they would not exist. Based on the meager rock-solid pieces of evidence, the pictures in my cell phone, and with the absence of the body, his scenario was probably more believable to everyone else in Montana.
He grasped both of my arms between the elbows and shoulders, and in one easy movement pulled me vertical. He frisked me, pulling my wallet, keys, and cell phone from my pockets. These were dumped in my backpack. Then securely grasping the chain link of the handcuffs, he pushed me ahead of him and toward the ATV.