Lowering the camera, he comes up beside me. “A half dozen or so from different angles.”

That gives me the go-ahead to move the body. “Help me roll him over,” I say.

Squatting next to me, Glock places his hands on the dead man’s left hip. I put my hands on his left shoulder. “Go,” I say and in tandem we roll him onto his back.

A cup or so of blood spills from his mouth when his head lolls. Glock and I move quickly back to avoid getting biohazard on our clothes. Plank’s face goes beyond macabre beneath the stark light. I see several broken teeth. Gray-black powder burns around his lips. Nostrils filled with coagulated blood. Jaw broken, mouth hanging open. A tongue shredded by a bullet.

Livor mortis has set in; the right side of his face is dark purple. Lividity occurs when the heart stops and blood, no longer being pumped, settles to the lowest part of the body. The bruise-like discoloration begins as early as half an hour after death and becomes more pronounced with time. It’s my first clue with regard to his time of death.

“Looks like he’s been dead at least an hour,” I say.

“If people knew what bullets did to their fuckin’ faces, we’d have a hell of a lot less suicides,” Glock comments.

The bullet wound appears to be self-inflicted. It entered via his mouth and exited out the back of his head, shattering his skull and taking a good bit of brain with it. Some might think it an apt end for a man who’d just murdered his family in cold blood.

“If he put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger,” Glock begins, “wouldn’t the concussion send him backward? Wouldn’t he land face-up?”

“Usually, that’s the case,” I say. “But if he was leaning forward. Clutching the weapon. Head down.” I ward off a chill the image conjures. “There may not have been enough momentum.”

“Hell of way to go.”

“Why would an Amish man have speaker wire?” I’m mostly thinking aloud. “He probably doesn’t own a stereo or TV. He didn’t even use a milking machine or generator for his dairy operation.”

“Hard to figure.” Glock shrugs. “Maybe he got it on sale somewhere or someone gave it to him. Uses it because it’s strong.”

“He has baling twine in the barn. Why not use that?”

“What are you getting at, Chief?”

I’m not sure how to express the thoughts running through my head without sounding prejudiced. But experience has taught me to listen to my instincts. Right now that little voice in my head is telling me this scene may not be what it looks like.

“I can’t see an Amish man doing this,” I say after a moment.

“The Amish are human, too,” he says. “They have tempers. Limits. They snap.”