Chapter 76

After a while, Dr. George came over and stood with Rawle, outside the thickening circle of evidence tags.
Now that the bodies were covered over, Rawle’s nausea seemed to have calmed down a little. For a while there, confronted so graphically with death, he felt a like he was dying too. Like his spirit was being sucked down along with his friends.
“How ya making out,” Dr. George said, sounding slightly less cheerful than usual. “I’m so sorry. I know this one is close to home.”
Rawle could barely look him in the face.
The problem was, Rawle needed Dr. George to talk, but Dr. George simply was not allowed to do so. He was not allowed to discuss evidence with the press in any stage of a police investigation. No exceptions.
At the same time, this was a man who was on Jack’s ball hockey team. Rawle and Dr. George’s toddlers were in the same daycare. When Dr. George lost the last election, Rawle was among the first people to shake his hand and tell him what a cocksucker his adversary was.
Rawle turned on his heels and looked at the medical examiner coldly in the eye, putting as much don’t fuck with me George in his voice as Jack himself might’ve done in a similar situation. “George. I need to know exactly what happened here.”
His voice was rich with emotion and mucous.
The medical examiner scratched the stubble on his unshaven, good-looking face, torn between his professional duty and the reality of living in a small community. The need to not turn away a friend in need. The urge to tell in any small town, especially about an event like murder, was very compelling.
“I’ve done a very quick examination… You know I can’t discuss my impressions,” Dr. George whispered. “I can’t be sourced. I’m sorry. I can’t interfere with the investigation by releasing any details, no matter what.”
He said all this very earnestly, but Rawle sensed that he was just getting the technical stuff out of the way, before spilling his gut.
“I know, George,” Rawle whispered, sympathetically. “You have to let me worry about that. That’s my job. I won’t burn you. Is that what you think of me? I just have to know what happened, for Christ’s sake. This is Jack! Just tell me. Anything you can tell me. Even just what’s patently obvious, so I know I’m not fuckin’ going crazy- that I’m actually seeing this shit with my own eyes, because I don’t believe it, George. I don’t fucking believe it. Just tell me what you see?”
“I know. I know,” he said, sounding tired. “No sourcing. OK? I’ll tell you what I believe is pretty obvious and you can see for yourself. There’s massive internal and external injuries. There’s severe trauma on most of the surface area of both. Lots of blood loss, as you can see.”
“Unbelievable though… Is that a lot of blood? Or is it just the snow that makes it look like that?”
“It’s a lot of blood,” Dr. George answered, keeping his voice very quiet. “Extensive broken bones, with both. Cause of death, my educated guess is trauma arrest. Organ failure or blood loss leading to cardiac arrest. With Jack certainly, brain trauma, increase in intracranial pressure.”
Rawle interrupted him with a hiss.
“They were beaten to death with a baseball bat?”
Dr. George scratched his forehead nervously and looked to see what cops were within earshot. Cst. Keith was, but he didn’t count.
“I would say beaten with a piece of wood. Like, from the forest. And likely several different pieces of wood, several different thicknesses of tree branch. Know what I mean? Probably beaten where they found the dog and placed immediately in the trunk and driven to this spot, presumably to delay authorities finding them. But I’m purely guessing. That would give the murderer a chance to get away, right? I don’t know.”
Rawle made some mental notes.
Could one person drag them both back to the Jimmy? One and a half kilometres?! Two killers? Killer grabbed whatever he could find. Sticks. Not planned maybe?
Dr. George was saying someone, or a group of people, came up to Jack and Tee in the forest and clubbed them with tree branches until they were dead, and the dog too.
“What about the big rocks then?” Rawle demanded. “Did he use rocks too?”
Kyle was scribbling everything Dr. George said in his tiny flip-notebook.
“Sticks and rocks… I’m sorry. Those boulders were actually found across their chests… Um-“ Dr. George pointed at the two large rocks sitting along the edge of the ditch. The Tombstones.
“What?”
Dr. George lowered his voice even more. “The two rocks were set on Jack and Tamara. One rock on Jack and one rock on Tamara.”
“Why?” Rawle whispered, hysterically, but he was already imagining an answer: To hold them down, to pin them down so they couldn’t move while the killer buried them in snow.
“He pinned them down,” Rawle murmered. “They were still alive, so he pinned them down.”
Dr. George nodded and turned away.
Rawle pictured his friends as the huge rocks were lowered onto their chests. Trying to wriggle free, trying to breathe, while the killer covered them snow. Until all the light was gone.
His eyes began to water.
It must have felt so hopeless.
How could somebody do something so evil?
Dr. George pointed into the ditch at some rocks exposed by the strong eroding power of mountain meltwater.
“He must have got the boulders from there. Anyways, the forensic ID people will learn that, in the autopsies. They got priority case spots cleared for tonight. They’ll be able to tell what caused what. That won’t be me conducting those, not on a homicide. The RCMP has somebody in Halifax. What I’ve told you, is basically what happened as far as I can tell. I can also suggest to you that its likely Jack and Mrs. Lee were rendered unconscious during the assault. Ah, and that they probably passed away from that state.” He looked at Rawle with enormous sympathy. “I think they didn’t suffer as much as you might think, Rawle…. I know its pretty shitty comfort....”
Kyle Verryn was scribbling madly to catch up.
“No, G… I appreciate it,” Rawle said. He really did. Maybe they really were knocked unconscious. Maybe they didn’t suffer. But he didn’t believe that.
He knew that even if they were unconscious, deep down they were tortured by the violence of their deaths. Their souls were stolen from the earth, through violence and terror. He could feel their pain and shock in the air, like a buzzing insect.
“Are you feeling OK?” Dr. George said.
“Just shock,” Rawle mumbled, staring dazily at his feet. “Tension and shock… Anything else you can tell me?”
Dr. George shook his head. Rawle’s own pen and notebook were out, but he hadn’t written a single thing.
When Dr. George walked away, he scribbled down the only thing he could think of: “Sticks and Stones.”