Leaning over the thick stone barrier, he caught sight of the body down below in the water. It made him dizzy to look at it from that angle and height.
“Can you fish it out?” District Attorney Henry Wildenburg asked the cop standing next to him. He had to raise his voice somewhat to be heard over the sound of the rushing water.
The officer shook his head, shrugged his broad shoulders. Squinting into the rising sun, he took a few steps away from the D.A. to get a different view of the corpse.
“Dunno. Maybe. Not gonna be easy.”
The corpse faced down into the water of the river, caught on an immense branch that had lodged itself in the grating of one of the city’s water intake points. It bobbed there with the current, its dark coat ballooned from air caught underneath it, its thin, reedy arms floating to each side of it with strange, almost purposeful movements.
One spindly leg of the body hung in an unnatural way over the small waterfall that poured from the river into the grating slightly below it. Bent at the knee, it moved as if trying to propel its owner further into the intake.
Wildenburg, a handsome fellow of the slick, waspish sort, couldn’t tear his eyes from it. It seemed as if the macabre thing wore a formal tuxedo; he swore he could see its coattails being moved about by the current. Surely that was a trick of the light?
Finally, he looked up at the cop and grimaced. “Come now, Cookie – how hard could it be? Surely you don’t intend to just leave it there?”
The officer frowned, clearly annoyed at the D.A.’s personable use of his nickname.
“You don’ know this city too good, Mr. Wildenburg. We don’ leave a mess like that around. We’re short on men, true, after November, but I’ll get someone down there to haul it up toot sweet.”
Twenty minutes later, Wildenburg, bathed in the glow of the sun that had risen on that fine early April morning, watched as a city truck was backed up to the barrier and the crane attached to its bed was swung out over the intake.
He caught a few words of the cop’s grumbling to the driver over the “new D.A. stickin’ his big nose inta sumthin’ like this,” but chose to ignore it. Instead, he hung over the stone wall again and assessed how they’d get the sodden corpse unstuck and up into their hands.
“Nasty business,” the cop opined, rubbing his hands and glancing at Wildenburg. “Never fun findin’ a body.”
“On that we agree,” returned the D.A. as he narrowed his eyes at the man who’d been chosen to ride a line from the crane down to the water.
He asked the cop who found the corpse. “Guy walkin’ his dog,” came the answer. “Dog went all kinds of nutso as they passed here. Musta smelled it, I figger.”
There was a sour smell that drifted up from it, Wildenburg recognized. A combination of water-logged death and other elements, such as trash from the river, he assumed.
Once almost hip deep in the water and leaning over the body, the city man looked up at the D.A. and the cop and called up to them.
“He’s pretty stuck! Might take me a few minutes to wrench him loose and tie him up! Hope he don’t come all to pieces…”
Wildenburg observed as the man glanced all around the body, doping out its predicament. Reaching out, he took hold of its shoulder and began to turn it around to face him.
“Ai-yi-yi…” he hissed, glomming a good look at the corpse’s face.
“What?” Wildenburg asked the man. No reply came. He called out again. “What is it?”
The city worker stared back up at the D.A. with leaden eyes and shaking his head slowly.
“See for yourself,” he grumbled.
With a line around it, the corpse tore loose from the branch as the crane operator took up the slack and revved the rope drum’s motor to haul it up from the water.
Seconds later, the dripping body hung in the air nearly level with Wildenburg and the cop. It faced away from them, but a cool April breeze caught at it and turned it around to face them.
“Christ!” swore the cop. The D.A. bit down on an ejaculation.
The corpse had no eyes. Both orbs had been neatly and expertly plucked from its hideous, grinning skull.