“No, it doesn’t have to look like a weasel, just resemble a weasel in its length. Heavier than a weasel” Viv added.
We got back to the truck and I asked Richard to let me know what the lab found out about this guy’s iPhone. Chris and I headed over to the Oil Lamp to eat lunch. We missed the big rush at noon and made it through the buffet line and sat down to eat and I realized roast beef, rice, and gravy never looked as good.
“So Chris”, I asked between bites of roast beef, “what made you notice the lack of blood under that body?”
“I expected to see it but it wasn’t there. You’d expect a tree falling on someone would cause bleeding, wouldn’t you? I just remembered that from this morning when Brad asked about the blood from the hog you shot. It was all in the field because you didn’t load it up right away”.
“Those are all right on track. It shows an insight I wasn’t aware you had. Or training”. I let that last word out accidentally on purpose. I smeared muscadine jelly on my biscuit like it might be the last one I was ever going to have.
“Something like that” he said between bites.
We spent the rest of the meal wondering what had happened to that man. What caused him to die in the first place? Why bring a body out to a public park? Houston County is not short of fields and woods and a thousand other places to hide a body. We talked about dogs and short-legged, long-bodied mammals.
We talked about the footprints coming in and leaving the scene. Chris asked if I saw the boot prints. “I noticed a pair of boot prints coming to the tree but none coming from the other side and none leaving.” he said.
“But there were a second set of one-way prints that led away from the tree and body. There were no other tracks that matched this one”. He slid his camera to me and I turned it to look at the picture. It was a clear single left shoe print. It looked like a cross-trainer or athletic kind of shoe; the sole had sections that must have run right under each toe and a circle in the center of the heel.
“The boots he had on weren’t his boots,” Chris leaned in closer and lowered his voice, “and there weren’t any boot prints at all on the other side of the tree. The shoe prints I showed you left the tree and went back to the bridge – but there were none of those prints coming to the tree or coming from the other side of the tree.”
“On top of that, the one-way boot prints were much deeper in the mud than the one-way shoe prints. I think that the killer carried him in there, dropped him down, and changed his boots for this guy’s shoes”.
“Killer?” That’s the first time that had been brought up although I really don’t see what else it could have been. Every town has its share of bad news and Perry wasn’t any different but there’s a hardness, something difficult to reconcile with a small town like Perry. The easy pace, the comfort and the people there don’t match up evenly with the cruelty and the evil of murder.
“I believe it has to be, Mark. Why change shoes, why leave a body in the park barely a half mile from the county courthouse, unless as you said, nerves got the better of the person or people who did this.
We spent the next half-hour talking about what we had seen that morning over sweet tea. It was nearly two when a text came in over the phone from Richard Turnbow, the Perry Chief of Police. The message read “What do you make out of this mess? This was on the victim’s iPhone when the lab looked for other Craigslist postings”.
I scrolled through the list of postings and couldn’t take any meaning from them. All were listed under different categories and I read them out loud to Chris:
“In Jewelry, there was ‘Jon boat for sale $125
In Free, there was ‘Fishing pole for sale $225’
In Materials, there was ‘Mag light for sale $303’
In Materials again, there was ‘Mag light for sale REDUCED $310’
In Antiques, there was ‘Anchor for sale $413’
In Motorcycles, there was ‘Mercury outboard for sale $510’
“What a bunch of messed-up prices for fishing equipment”. I looked down again at my phone that listed the Craigslist postings that made no sense. But there was something about them that the dead man related to and that might help us.
“Why would you put REDUCED on a posting then add to the price?” I asked, thinking about the $303 to $310 price change on a mag light.
“Because reduced must not mean reduced in price” Chris answered, taking a bite of banana pudding.
Five
“And these prices are way way off. Either way high or way low”.
“We have a whole mess of questions around this case today and it isn’t even two o’clock yet,” I continued,” How did the victim die? Where did he die? Who brought him to Rozar Park? What kind of dog is short and long and has webbed feet? What do all these postings on Craigslist mean? Can we find out anything about these shoe prints? That’s whole lot of unknowns”.
We left the Oil Lamp and headed back to the truck. We drove over to the Police Chief’s office and found Richard at his desk looking over his notes.
“The victim’s name was Tim Cooper. He lived at a Centerville address and I am heading that way in just a minute if you want to go. Any ideas on that Craigslist stuff?”
“Not a clue,” I answered, “it must mean something to somebody.”
“It has to be a code,” Chris added, “because it very consistently doesn’t make sense to us. It can’t be a random set of postings because Mr. Cooper had visited those specific posts and he kept them to be sure – one of them was printed out and in his shirt pocket”.
“Oh yeah,” Richard looked up, “how did you know about the note in his pocket?”
“Because the bottom corner of it was torn away about the size of a dime and stuck to the part of the tree limb on the body right below his shirt pocket”.
“How in the world did you see that?”
“Because I was looking for it. His shirt pocket was worn at the top of the pocket where it meets the shirt – an indication that he kept a pen in his pocket very regularly. If a man keeps a pen that regularly then he uses that pocket and if he does, he might use it for more than just his pen. A notepad, receipts, or folded Craigslist postings that he needs to remember. A man like that keeps up with things and that means he was careful and thorough and a man who is careful and thorough does not walk along a lake at night without a flashlight. Nor does he keep random high-priced craigslist postings that have no meaning”.
“Geez!” Richard hollered and flapped his arms,” a flashlight! Or actually, no flashlight. Calhoun you see more things when you don’t see things than I could looking right at them. What you say about that posting makes good sense to me. Why keep anything unless it was important or at least something he was interested in”.
“Have you been able to track down the author of the postings that were found in his phone? Presumably they were all made by the same person as a way to communicate something”. Chris kept rolling.
“It turns out that each posting was linked to a separate email address. According to the IT guys at Craigslist, they can track down the ISP of each author but that will take some time. They do know that very few people clicked on the link to send an email about what was being sold”.
“I can believe it,” I decided to add something to the conversation, “all the prices were ridiculous. Either so ridiculous high or so ridiculous low that you knew it couldn’t be true”. And there sat my two cents.
Chris took my two cents and didn’t leave any change. “Making prices that are unbelievable would keep people from emailing the address with questions. The postings have a specific meaning that is helped by keeping the email communication down. They absolutely must give some type of message to someone”.
We headed out to the chief’s car and we followed him up Houston Lake Road toward Centerville. The phone rang and I saw that it was Viv.
“What did you find
out?” I asked.
“You might be looking for a bush dog” Viv said excitedly.
“What do you mean a bushy dog? You can tell a dog is bushy from paw prints?”
“No, a bush dog. Speothos venaticus. A small red-colored dog from South America that has short legs and actually really looks a lot like a weasel. They are mostly wild dogs but some have been domesticated mostly in and around Brazil and I don’t know of anyone in middle Georgia or the rest of Georgia who owns one. I’ll email you a picture”.
I told Chris what Viv had said and a few minutes later a picture came over my smartphone. This was the weirdest dog-looking weasel or weasel-looking dog I had ever seen. The face was just like a weasel and the body was like a bigger, hairier, more muscular wiener dog. The face of the dog was an orange that faded to dark red then black as it went toward the tail, which was a stubby thing.
“That’s good news” Chris said.
“How’s that”? I asked.
“That is a dog that someone would remember.”
We pulled up to Mr. Cooper’s house off Thomson Road. Richard and I led the way with Chris behind us as we walked cautiously up to the front door. There was no way of knowing all there was behind Mr. Cooper’s death so being careful was the way to go. The front door was unlocked and we went in the house.
There wasn’t anything unusual inside the house and we made our way into the back yard. There were a couple pecan trees and the grass looked like it