A Necessary Death

by Sheila Connolly

  Cover

  A Necessary Death

  With working conditions deteriorating and tempers wearing thin, construction supervisor Mason is having enough trouble completing the massive building project on time and on budget—the last thing he needs is a dead body. Sure, on a job as big as this one accidents happen, but this death was no accident.

  Hoping to clear up the murder quickly, Mason begins to search the site and question the construction crew who have set up camp nearby. But with few clues and fewer suspects, he’ll have to turn to an unlikely source for the solution—and an explanation that’s as old as the project he’s given his life too.

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Sheila Connolly

  Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs

  ISBN: 978-1-940846-72-9

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  Contents

  A Necessary Death

  The Relatively Dead Series

  Books by Sheila Connolly

  About the Author

  A Necessary Death

  “Are we going to be ready on time?” I asked the burly foreman of the work crew.

  He waved a leathery hand at me, and I noticed he was missing a finger. “Sure, no problem. Just a few finishing touches. A little cleanup here and there. Make sure the paths are clear. That kind of thing.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed him. This building project had been going on for years. There had been mishaps, but that was true for any construction site, wasn’t it? But this had to be finished this week: the date for the opening ceremonies had been set years earlier, and there was no way we could change that.

  “The scaffolding will be coming down?”

  “We know our jobs,” the guy said. He didn’t appear to think very highly of me.

  But I had my own job to do. “You do know this is important?” I persisted.

  The guy, who must have weighed about twice what I did, gave me a weary look. “Yeah, sure. Like you guys haven’t been reminding me every other day. I know it’s important. Got it.”

  “There were delays.” I wasn’t sure whose fault they were, but I couldn’t afford any more, not this late in the game.

  Now the guy looked annoyed. “Yeah, sure there were. Damn suppliers didn’t deliver on time, or sent the wrong stuff, or cut it to the wrong size. You know how long it takes to reorder the kind of supplies we need? And then things got lost. Or hung up at the port. And then there was that month when it rained every day. You can’t move heavy loads of building materials through a foot of mud. Not my fault.”

  I summoned up what patience I had left. “I didn’t say it was. But when we laid this out”—long before my time on this job—“we tried to allow for problems like that. I know you can’t control the weather.”

  This was a big construction project. I’d been young when I’d signed on as, well, I’d have to say the on-site supervisor for my employer. My bosses were the ones who had laid out the plans and drawn up the specs, and then they’d contracted out the construction. The beefy guy in front of me wasn’t the first construction foreman on the job. He wasn’t even the third. But by and large he’d proved competent. At least he’d kept his crew fully manned, which wasn’t easy. He probably expected a bonus if it was done on time.

  The construction crew made a pretty tight community. They had their own housing near the site, and they often shared meals—it was easier to cook for a lot of people all at once, and it saved fuel. Some of the men had families with them, and kids had been born there, kids old enough to run around now. But women and children were under strict orders to stay away from the construction, where they’d just be in the way.

  A lot of people were glad that things were close to wrapping up. The crew’s village had grown over the years, but now nobody wanted to invest any more time and money in building additional homes or improving sanitation, a sore point, especially after a recent wave of illness had swept through the place. Nobody had died, but it had left a lot of the people who had come down with whatever it was weak and sore—and less able to work. The supply systems that brought food and other necessities to the village were beginning to break down, and nobody wanted to clean the rats out of the storage sheds, not if they knew they were leaving soon. There’d been a couple of years of bad crops locally. At least there was water available, although sometimes the supply was kind of muddy. All in all, tempers were wearing thin: it was time to finish this project.

  And it was up to me to make sure that happened on time. If I could.

  I started to add a comment to the foreman when we were interrupted by a youngish man I didn’t recognize. “Sir?” he said anxiously, tugging on the foreman’s sleeve.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?” the foreman snapped, swatting the boy’s hand away.

  “Sorry, sir. But this is important.”

  “It’d better be,” the man growled. “What?”

  “Sir, uh, we’ve found a man dead.”

  The foreman released a string of colorful curses, a good few of which I’d never heard. “Where?” he spat. “In the workers’ village?”

  “No, sir,” the younger man said. “In one of the ditches around the edge of the site.”

  “Show me,” he demanded. The young man turned and scurried away, with the foreman close behind him. I wavered where I stood. Deaths happened around any construction site, some from natural causes, others from falls, or from being crushed under a shifting pile of materials. From the anxiety the young messenger had shown, and the location of the body, I was going to guess this was not a natural death. Maybe not even an accidental one. Which meant I had some responsibility to see that this unfortunate event did not interfere with the timely completion of the project. The dedication ceremony loomed; people were coming long distances to take part, and they couldn’t be turned away at this late date.

  It took only a minute or two to reach the long depression in the ground where the man lay. A few other people had gathered, but the construction site was so large that most people probably hadn’t noticed anything odd. The foreman was looking down at the man, shaking his head, still muttering curses. The unhappy messenger was hiding behind a pair of men standing a cautious distance away. I studied the . . . I balked at calling it a body, so I spent a moment or two watching the man in the ditch for any sign of a breath. Nothing. The man was crumpled awkwardly, and there was blood on his clothing, although I couldn’t see where it was coming from. All right, he was dead. No
t too recently: the blood was no longer flowing, and it had darkened. No sign of any other injuries. When he had breathed his last, he had been a stocky, strong-looking man, probably in his thirties. His clothing was shabby but well-tended, and not dirty enough to have belonged to someone hauling construction materials around.

  “Who is he?” the foreman bellowed.

  The few people around the body looked at each other and shrugged. “Don’t know,” one man volunteered. “Not one of ours.”

  I wasn’t surprised by that. In the next few days, leading up to the dedication, there would be more and more strangers straggling in. It wasn’t practical to fence the site—it was simply too big, and besides, any labor expended had to go toward finishing construction. The man could have arrived and decided to check out the site, rather than waiting for the formal opening.

  “Who found him?” the foreman demanded of the small group standing around.

  One of the men shuffling from foot to foot at the edge of the ditch said, “That’d be me. I’d just come on my shift and I noticed a coupla birds flyin’ in and out of the ditch, so I stopped to look. That’s when I seen him.”

  “Musta been dumped before first light,” the foreman said, almost to himself. I had to agree. Anybody with a body slung over his shoulder or dragging behind him would have been noticed in all this open space, if he’d crossed by full daylight.

  “So he’s a stranger. Where are the guests being housed?” I asked. I had been staying at an inn in the nearest town, but I had trouble imagining the town absorbing the flood of people we expected, and I was grateful to have a room. I had no doubt I’d be sharing it soon.

  The foreman shrugged. “Wherever they can find space. In town. In other towns. In a tent if they thought to bring one. On the ground if they didn’t. Not my problem. I’m in charge of the construction, period.”

  Once again he was right: he wasn’t supposed to be managing visitor lodging. But maybe indirectly, I was. I was supposed to see that things went smoothly. I was now looking at a definite impediment to that, in the form of a corpse. And now several people were looking at me as though they expected me to come up with a plan, something I definitely did not have. But I did want to get the man out of the ditch and out of sight before more curious people showed up and work was further disrupted.

  “Well, we can’t just leave him lying there,” I said firmly. No one disagreed. “Anybody got an idea where we can put him?”

  “Bury him. Or toss him in the river,” someone in among the watchers suggested.

  I’ll admit I was tempted. But it didn’t seem right, not without knowing who the man was, or why he had died or been dumped—in this particular spot. “Take him to the big shed. But wrap him up in something first, and go straight there. Don’t stop to chat with anybody. In fact, don’t talk about this at all—if there’s anything to be told, I’ll do it. Okay, somebody here find a blanket or something.”

  I hoped I sounded more confident than I felt. I was pretty sure the village was full up, and nobody would volunteer to give up their precious space to house a dead man, even if it was only for a short while. The storage shed was less than perfect for storing a body—I shuddered at the thought of those rats—but I didn’t think we’d need to use it for long. Frankly, I was stalling for time: I didn’t believe the bleeding man had stumbled across the field in the dark on his own and fallen into the ditch to die. So someone had carried him and dumped him there, knowing he would be found. The problem was, it would have been easy enough to get rid of him, so why leave him out in the open? Maybe it was an accident—or maybe it was a warning, and there might be worse to come. Were there people who wanted to see this project fail? Who wanted to create a scandal? I wanted to know how he had died. For that I needed to look at the body—and I was glad I hadn’t eaten much breakfast. At least he hadn’t been dead long.

  One of the men trotted back to the makeshift village and returned a couple of minutes later with a voluminous woolen cloak. It would do to conceal the man. “Can you wrap him up and take him to the shed, before too many other people see him?” I asked.

  “I will,” the man said, and jumped into the ditch. He wrapped the body up like a sausage and slung him over his shoulder as if he weighed little, then set off for the village. As he went I looked for other people, but it was still early in the day: the workers would already be here on the site, and those who weren’t needed were probably still asleep. Still, I wouldn’t have much time before the news spread through the workers’ village, so I had to move fast.

  I’d accomplished one thing: the body had been removed and stowed safely out of sight of prying eyes. Now what? I turned back to the foreman. “You need to get back to work. If anybody asks what was going on here, give them some phony answer. I don’t want anybody getting too curious until I know what’s what.”

  “You’re the boss,” he said, showing curiously little interest in the dead man. He turned to yell at the bystanders, “You lot, back to where you’re supposed to be, and keep your mouths shut.” They drifted off slowly, some toward the work site, others back toward the village.

  The only one who remained was the young man who had first brought us the news, and now that I looked at him more closely, I saw he was more a boy than a man. Since the foreman hadn’t shooed him away, I approached him. “Shouldn’t you be working too?” I asked.

  “No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I should be, but I’m not strong enough yet, since I was sick. Mostly I carry messages, or help clean up, after the heavy work is done.”

  “Was it you who found the man?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Not the other man?”

  “No, sir. I went and told him, and he came over to look, and then he said I should go find you, so I did.”

  One lie told already. Would there be more? “Is it true that nobody knew the man?”

  The boy shrugged. “Maybe. But I think I saw him at the village, yesterday.”

  “Was there anyone in the village who would have any reason to hurt the man?”

  The boy shook his head, then said, “I don’t know.”

  Maybe he knew, maybe he didn’t, but I’d guess he didn’t want to betray his friends and workers to me, who he didn’t know or trust. I decided not to press too hard, not yet.

  “Well, then, I need to go look at the dead man and see how he died. Want to help?”

  “I guess,” the boy said without enthusiasm. Maybe he’d already seen too much death and he wasn’t excited by the idea of examining a body.

  “Good—I can use an assistant. Come on, and you can show me where the man put the body.”

  We strolled across the open field toward the village. It looked like it had grown like a weed, kind of sprawling and irregular. The buildings had been cobbled together with whatever scraps of wood were available, and it looked like a strong wind would blow any or all of them down easily. But I knew they wouldn’t be needed much longer.

  We passed through most of the village, walking slowly enough not to attract attention, or so I hoped, until I realized that I as a stranger would draw curious stares anyway. There were few people around, only a couple of women and small children. I spotted one old man sitting on a slab of tree stump outside one of the small huts. Despite his age, his eyes were sharp. We nodded at each other as the boy and I passed by, and I could feel him watching until we were out of his sight. “Who’s he?” I asked, once we were far enough away.

  “He used to be a worker here, but then he smashed up his leg and can’t work. But he brought his sons onto the crew, and they look out for him.”

  “So he’s been working at this site for a long time?” I asked. The boy nodded. I made a mental note to talk to the old man; he might have noticed something out of the ordinary if he’d been sitting there long this morning. “Let’s take a look at the dead man. Take me to him.”

  The storage shed was located at the far edge of the village. I pushed my way through the rickety door, held closed by a loop o
f rope, and stood in the doorway waiting for the rats to scurry away. There was little light inside, except for what trickled through the gaps in the boards. The body had been dumped on the ground, and a couple of brave rats had already sampled some of his exposed skin. I shuddered. I looked around for something to raise the body so I could look more closely without kneeling in the dust, but found nothing but half-full bags of grain. I knelt.

  The boy hovered behind me, unsure of his role. Was he anxious to get away, or did he want to stay. “Hey, boy, you want to help?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “What do I do?” He came around and knelt on the other side of the body, his eyes on my face.

  “Help me get his clothes off, first.”

  That didn’t take much effort: the man was wearing a vest, which came off easily. Under that he had on a collarless shirt that pulled over his head. so I raised the body while the boy peeled that off. Then we laid him back down. I drew the line at removing the rest of his clothes—there was no sign of blood on the lower parts of his body, although his shirt had been stiff with it. The question was, what had drawn all that blood? A slash that had bled heavily? Or one or more wounds that went deeper than the skin?

  I felt his skull: no signs of a blow, and the skin beneath his hair was intact. No signs of wounds on the front of him. “Let’s turn him over,” I told my young assistant, and he didn’t hesitate. As soon as we had rolled the dead man over onto his face, the source of the blood became clear: several puncture wounds in his back, spaced irregularly. As the blood had dried, the wounds had shriveled. I couldn’t tell what kind of weapon had made the wounds, but it didn’t really matter, anyway. The man had been murdered, struck from behind, more than once. There were no wounds on his hands or arms, so he hadn’t had a chance to defend himself. No weapon had been found with the body in the ditch, so whoever had done this had taken the weapon with him. But if this man had bled to death, it was not where he had been found—there would have been much more blood there. So he’d been killed somewhere else and dumped in the ditch. Why?