Read Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith for Free Online

return.
    “Can I walk on the road?”
    “Stop where you are,” Mooney said. “I’ll come to you.”
    I saw the beam of a flashlight making its way towards me. I assumed it was Mooney. I waved my light at him. He stopped about thirty feet away and said, “Walk straight to me.”
    I nearly tripped in a small ditch and came up on the road. It was a little bit gritty and somewhat soft, made of a mixture of soil, sand, clay, and chat.
    “Welcome to hell,” Mooney said. He was wearing an overcoat and gloves and he was shivering. When my flashlight hit his face, he looked as pale as the moon that was coming over the horizon.
    “Do I want to go back there?” I knew perfectly well that I didn’t.
    “Depends on the strength of your stomach. Worst I’ve ever seen.”
    I’d seen dead bodies before, but it was long ago and far away. My experience defending murderers had sometimes required me to examine gruesome photographs, but I knew this would be different. I shrugged my shoulders.
    “We’ve got four shot to pieces,” he said. “Man, woman, and two children. They’re all dead.” His voice had a higher pitch than normal. In the cold darkness, it sounded almost as though it were being piped in over a transistor radio.
    “What can I do?” I said.
    “Just come on back here with me and take a look around. Maybe you’ll spot something we’ve missed.”
    Mooney told me to walk directly behind him. We rounded a slight bend and I could see a man kneeling and gingerly picking up objects from the ground and placing them in an evidence bag. As I got closer I could see that he was picking up shell casings. A lot of shell casings. Another officer with “CSU” on the back of his jacket was pouring liquid plaster into a footprint on the ground. Others were searching the surrounding area with flashlights. A photographer was kneeling over something a few feet away. A light flashed.
    I suddenly noticed two pairs of legs protruding from the ditch onto the road beneath the photographer. One pair of legs was longer than the other and covered with what appeared to be slacks. There were brown shoes on the feet. The shorter pair of legs was bare. The right foot was wearing a black pump. The left foot, like the legs, was bare. I noticed something else: The bottom half of the legs were bent at a grotesque angle.
    I stopped cold.
    Lying across the legs at right angles were the blood-soaked children, both facedown. The smaller child was on top of the longer pair of legs, the larger child on top of the shorter pair. I stared at them, momentarily unable to think.
    “Somebody placed them like that after they were shot,” Mooney was saying. “And there’s something else—you see how the bottoms of the legs are bent? The sonsabitches ran over them when they left. Shot them point-blank and they fell straight back into the ditch. Shot the kids and placed them facedown on top of the parents. Then they ran right over their legs. They’re broken to hell.”
    “Sonsabitches?” I said. “There was more than one?”
    “At least two. Maybe more.”
    “How do you know?”
    “There are footprints all over the place, but it’ll take a while before we can sort it all out. The crime scene guys tell me it looks like they came in one vehicle, a large one, van or truck maybe. They drove down the road a ways and turned around. There are footprints around the tire tracks where the vehicle stopped. They lined them up next to the ditch and executed them.”
    “How’d we find out about it?”
    “Somebody heard gunshots and called it in. Young deputy, only been on the job four weeks, came out here and found them. He’s sitting in a cruiser over there. I tried to talk to him, but he’s too upset right now. He’s just sitting there in a daze.”
    I could smell blood in the air. There was a lot of blood on the children, but I couldn’t quite see the adults. The prurient in me urged me to move closer to the bodies, to take a look at their faces. I