The Crime Scene

            Every crime scene I have been to has this foreboding air about it that you feel the anguish of the victims down to your bones.  Prosecutors know it. As a District Attorney, I still remember the dried, caked on crimson brown blood that covered the car seat.  Combat veterans are familiar with it.  A bomb may obliterate the soldier beyond identifiable body parts, but you feel the loss of life as if there is a spirit that still hangs on there.

            Outside of the beach side village of St. Teresa on the panhandle of Florida you get the same feeling. The beach meanders around Alligator Harbor before it heads west towards the point.  Only the mid day sun stops the continuous breeze that blows off of Dog Island.  At one point on the beach, a stream cuts through the dunes and flows directly into the Gulf.  There are no homes or roads and only the occasional footprint that crosses through there.

            On each side of the stream the sand is covered with fragments of clay pottery.  You bend over and pick up one to see lines of circles and strips that were cut into the soft clay before the bowl was placed into the hardening coals of the fire.   The fragments date back to 200 AD when an Apalachicola Indian village sat on this point. Only two hundred years after the birth of Christ!  A thousand years before Columbus turned his ships west coming out of the harbor.  The village was home to a tribe of nearly a hundred.  A small microcosm of hunters, fishermen, cooks, weavers, mothers and children.

            It was here that a marauding tribe of Creeks descended on the village one sleepy morning, just before sunrise, killing virtually every adult male.  Skulls were bashed in while children screamed in horror. Blood flowed over the sand. The village that had been home to the Apalachicola tribe for generations became silent.  The fragments of pots were scattered across the beach only to sit there for the next 1800 hundred years.

            I sat there on the beach holding the fragment of blackened clay.  The blood had been washed off hundreds of years before, but it remained a crime scene.  Scores of husbands and fathers lost their lives there.  You could still feel it in the air.

            The crime scene is one of the basic elements of the thriller story.  Like primary colors, it is needed to advance the scene. It requires the accuracy or imagination to record the place with such detail that the reader is there, standing in the corner, when the events occur.  Credibility occurs with the level of detail.

            The “mystery” in a mystery often times comes from the clues that the reader discovers in the description of the crime scene. It provides the pieces of puzzle that, in the end, when put together, let it all make sense.

Andy Harp

Author of “A Northern Thunder”

www.andyharp.com