by J. M. Hayes
It was as bad as he’d expected. Doc was bent over a cadaver with a gaping hole in its chest. The body had no face because its scalp had been peeled forward while Doc used a small circular saw to cut through the top of the skull. The smell of burning bone might have been enough to make the sheriff gag, but he wasn’t capable of smelling much at the moment.
English stood in the door until Doc’s shaggy eyebrows rose as his hang-dog face straightened into Doc’s version of a welcoming smile.
“What happened to you?”
“I think the medical term is, ‘bloody nose,’ but you’re the doctor. I figured I should let you make the diagnosis.”
Doc put the saw down and came around the stainless steel table. “Lot of blood on that handkerchief,” he said, “which seems to be covering a nose. Offhand, I’d say you got it right.” He stopped to remove the surgical gloves he was wearing and replace them with a fresh pair. “Let me see.”
The sheriff uncovered and Doc reached up and wiggled the sheriff’s nose from side to side.
“Ouch! That hurt like hell.”
“It’s not broken,” Doc said. “But you best cover back up until I get something to pack it with and find you some ice. Otherwise, you’re gonna drip all over your shirt. What happened?”
The sheriff reapplied his handkerchief. “You’ve been coroner too long, Doc, if that’s the best bedside manner you can manage.”
“I have been coroner too long,” Doc said. “I’ve been telling myself that all morning, ever since I started doing an autopsy on this dead teen.” He nodded toward a chair near the door. “Sit over there and tilt your head back, then tell me who popped you in the nose.”
The sheriff took the chair. “I’m not really here about my nose,” he said. “I hadn’t heard from you and I thought I’d better see what you can tell me about this kid.”
“All right. But first, the nose. The dead will wait, and you’re not gonna be the most efficient law enforcement officer if you’re running around holding a bloody rag to your face. Who punched you?”
“Our next sheriff, but it’s more like I tried to hit him and he blocked me and I kind of ran into his elbow.”
That interrupted Doc’s normal cool efficiency. “You what? You tried to slug your worthy opponent? That’s not like you, Englishman. What happened?”
“He got a little insulting.”
“Our local war hero is often insulting. But I haven’t heard of you making a habit of trying to punch him out. You been taking those antidepressants I prescribed for you?”
The sheriff hadn’t even filled the prescription. “This time, it wasn’t me he insulted,” the sheriff said. “It was my daughters.”
“Oh,” Doc said, getting that sad look again. “You mean…?”
“He accused them of having abortions,” the sheriff said, “and I kind of lost it.” The tough part was that one of the girls had gotten an abortion. And most folks in Benteen County, except a silent majority of women, had turned solidly pro-life. Not that the sheriff wasn’t. He just thought the question was more complicated than the pro-life, pro-choice arguments made it. And, frankly, he hadn’t thought the decision was up to him. Doc obviously didn’t buy the pro-life arguments. He’d performed that abortion, and many others.
“Too bad it’s not Lieutenant Greer’s nose I’m treating,” Doc said. “If it wasn’t already broken, I might have corrected that myself.”
***
Hailey started growling again when Mad Dog was still a quarter mile from his driveway.
“Hey, what’s this about?” he asked. “We’re just coming home.” Though the truth of it was he felt like a marching band was parading across his grave. If he had a ruff on the back of his neck, his would be standing up as rigid as hers. Something was wrong but he didn’t know what. The place looked fine.
Or it did until he got past where the evergreens blocked the view of his front yard. That’s when he saw it.
Somebody had erected a sign in his yard, right out by the fence near the road. He knew what it was before he got close enough to read it. He’d been seeing them along the highway, off and on, all the way home.
The thing was about six feet high. It was mostly white—white posts, white background. All white but for the black and red of the lettering and the figure. The figure was a child, just its outline except for ears, all in black with no detail. No indication whether it was a girl or a boy, either, though it was supposed to be naked. From the proportions, the kid would be about six, but that wasn’t what it represented. And that wasn’t what you concentrated on, since the child on the sign had been dissected—head, arms, legs, all amputated and bleeding. Just spurts of blood around the pieces and the sexless trunk, and quite a puddle underneath. “My Mom Chose Abortion,” that’s what these signs usually said.
Mad Dog felt a fire in his gut. He was Cheyenne. He was absolutely opposed to abortion. Life began at the moment of conception. That was a canon of Cheyenne world view. But that didn’t mean he wanted someone putting one of these grotesque pieces of trash in his yard. If he found out who….
And then he was close enough to read this sign and realize it was a little different than most. He stopped his Mini Cooper in the drive and got out, though not before Hailey used his lap as a springboard to exit first. She trotted to the sign, hackles raised, sniffing it and the grass nearby.
Whoever had put it up was long gone. If anyone were still here, Hailey wouldn’t be running around memorizing scents. She’d be sinking her teeth in someone’s ass. And Mad Dog wouldn’t be calling her off.
He went to the thing and applied a boot. When that didn’t work, he tried a shoulder. He had to back off and get a run at it before wood cracked and a four-by-four splintered. The sign twisted and broke free of the other post as he continued applying pressure. Even after it was lying on the ground, invisible to anyone but him, he didn’t feel satisfied.
“Hailey,” he said. “Let’s go get an ax and some gasoline and matches.” He wouldn’t feel clean until this thing was converted to ash. Not even then. The idea that someone would put one of these disgusting things in his yard, that was bad enough. But this one had been personalized. Turned, it seemed, into the lowest sort of mudslinging he’d ever seen in a Benteen County campaign. This sign said, “Sheriff English’s Daughters Chose Abortion.”
***
Mrs. Kraus still hadn’t managed to check all the messages on the sheriff’s office answering machine. The phones had been that busy since she came in, precisely at eight because the county budget could only afford to pay her an eight-hour day, five days a week—absolutely no overtime. Even so, her paychecks were two months behind.
All the messages she’d gotten to had been questions about Wynn’s accident with the school bus and the Dodge that had gone off the road. There could still be something important on there, but every time she tried to check, the phone rang again.
“Sheriff’s office,” Mrs. Kraus rasped in a voice as smooth as barbed wire.
“I just wanted to call and extend my sympathy to all of you over there about poor Wynn-Some.”
It took Mrs. Kraus a minute to place the voice. “Is that you, Agnes Wagner?”
Agnes hadn’t spoken to Mrs. Kraus for three years. Not since the county-backed scheme to build a wind farm went down in flames. The plan had turned out to be a scam and it cost Agnes Wagner all of her small investment. Nearly every resident lost money on the deal. Mrs. Kraus, too. Even some misappropriated county funds had disappeared. That boondoggle had been the responsibility of the former Benteen County Board of Supervisors, all of them recalled and replaced now, not the sheriff’s office. In fact, Sheriff English had uncovered the plot and saved most of the county’s money. That hadn’t kept Agnes Wagner from blaming everyone who worked at the courthouse, probably even the janitor.
“Why, yes dear, it’s me,” Mrs. Wagner said. “I just wanted to tell you all I’m praying for you and….”
Here it came.
“W
ell, dear. I was wondering if any of those poor children on the bus died, and if you could tell me who they were?”
“So you can call their parents and offer your sympathy to them as well?” Mrs. Kraus was pretty sure it was more so Agnes could call her friends and scoop them with the latest gossip. There was a reason Mrs. Kraus hadn’t felt hurt at being cut off by Agnes these last three years.
“Of course, dear.”
And Mrs. Kraus hated being called dear, at least by someone who didn’t mean it.
“Well, dear,” Mrs. Kraus began, on the verge of telling Agnes to stuff her sympathy where the sun didn’t shine. The other line rang, interrupting her. And, offering what she thought was an even better exit. “The list of dead and dying, it’s so long, and there goes the other phone. I know you wouldn’t want to keep me from departmental business.”
“I could hold,” Agnes said.
“No, I couldn’t ask you to do that,” Mrs. Kraus said. “But thanks for your kind thoughts.”
Mrs. Kraus punched a button, hanging up on Agnes Wagner and connecting herself to the line that was ringing. “Sheriff’s office,” she said.
“Vote for Greer,” someone said, then laughed before the line went dead or she could tell him off.
Politics always seemed to bring out the worst in folks, but this election was beyond anything she’d seen before. How had the opposition found someone as self-righteous and vicious as Lieutenant Greer, then persuaded so many folks to buy into his Old-Testament, unforgiving brand of Christianity? It was exactly contrary to the version she’d been brought up on, where turning the other cheek was the preferred option. What was wrong with Kansas? And, more particularly, Benteen County? The evangelical crusade against infidels and Democrats seemed to have found its ultimate level of insanity here.
She took advantage of the momentary silence to play another message from the department’s answering machine.
“This is Mr. Juhnke over at Buffalo Springs High,” a nasal voice said. “Sheriff, I thought you should know. That school bus your deputy ran into, it wasn’t checked out to anybody. Whoever was using it didn’t have authorization.”
***
“Young Caucasian male,” Doc said. “Maybe fourteen or fifteen. He wasn’t carrying any documents, but most of his clothes were made in Latin America.”
The sheriff tried to concentrate on what Doc was saying instead of the person he was saying it about—a wrecked, partially autopsied body lying on a stainless steel slab a few feet away. At least the sheriff’s nose wasn’t leaking anymore. Doc had stuffed it with cotton and given him one of those artificial ice packs.
No matter how many years English had spent on this job, he’d never learned to handle the way sudden violence turned living, breathing humans into empty containers like this one.
“Anything in his pockets?” The sheriff’s voice sounded like a cartoon character’s with all that cotton jammed in his nostrils. It might have been funny in other circumstances.
Doc shook his head. “I went through everything and did an external examination before I started cutting. Truth is, I’m not likely to be able to help you much. I can tell you what he ate last and how long ago, but you already know when and how he died. Acute blunt-force trauma. Kid must have been trussed up and thrown in the back of that vehicle. He wasn’t belted in, so when the car rolled he was thrown out a window. Then the car crushed him, but he was probably dead already.”
“Trussed?” That took the sheriff by surprise. He hadn’t noticed any bindings at the scene. Of course he hadn’t spent much time on the kid once he knew the boy was beyond help. There’d been so many other victims.
“You probably wouldn’t have noticed that, would you? I found a little piece of sliced plastic embedded in one of his wrists. Part of one of those disposable plastic pull-tight strips they use for handcuffs these days. Marks on his ankles make it look like he was bound hand and foot. The plastic probably got cut off him when he went through the window, or just tore free as he tumbled across that field.”
“You’re saying this kid was being abducted? Held against his will?”
“Looks that way,” Doc said. “Guess I should have let you know that sooner, huh?”
The sheriff started to tell him so, then stopped himself. If he’d known at the scene, maybe he could have concentrated more on questioning the driver of the Dodge. But Doc hadn’t known at the scene, either, and both of them had been too busy trying to keep Wynn and the kids from the bus alive until the emergency vehicles arrived. He hadn’t had time for an interrogation. Now, with the driver transported to a hospital in Hutchinson, and with the sheriff working this investigation single-handed, knowing before this moment wouldn’t have helped him one bit.
“The driver was belted in up front where he had air bags. Still, he did things to his knee that’ll remind him of last night for the rest of his life. When I found the plastic, I called the hospital in Hutchinson. The driver’s still in surgery. They said he wasn’t likely to wake up for HPD to question him before mid-afternoon. I did ask them to call back and let me know when he starts recovery. That was the guy who asked for Pastor Goodfellow, wasn’t it? You find Goodfellow? He know anything about this?”
The sheriff was glad he hadn’t chewed Doc out. The emergency medical techs who transported the driver had known he was under arrest and in need of questioning. By the time Doc found the plastic, there was nothing more to do from Benteen County. Just call the cops in Hutch and make sure they questioned the man as soon as he came out from under anesthetic.
“Greer and I had our little misunderstanding before I got to Goodfellow, so we didn’t talk much. The pastor claimed he knew nothing about the guy or the Dodge or the kid.”
Doc leaned against the counter where his autopsy tools were laid out. The bone shears gleamed. “Goodfellow speaks Spanish. He evangelizes among the new Latin majority down in Garden City and some of the other meat-packing communities where English has become a second language. You’ll probably find most Hispanics in this part of the state know our pastor.”
The sheriff pulled his notebook out and checked. He’d forgotten the driver had appeared to be Hispanic, though it was in his notes that way. The man hadn’t been carrying any identification and there’d been no tags on the Dodge.
“Remember?” Doc said. “Goodfellow tried services in Spanish here. Didn’t work because our Latinos don’t speak Spanish anymore.”
That was because Buffalo Spring’s last economic boom had been more than fifty years ago. People had been leaving the county ever since, not migrating to it.
The sheriff’s cell rang. It was Mrs. Kraus. She told him about the school bus, as well as her opinion of the low-lifes who’d been tying up her phone since she got in.
“Just what I need,” the sheriff said, “another mystery to solve.”
He was feeling overwhelmed. Aside from Wynn, who was in an ICU in Wichita, the county’s financial crisis had left him with only two other deputies. One of those was on indefinite leave in Winfield, trying to persuade his aging parents to trade the house they kept accidentally setting fire to for a place in a retirement community. The other, a wanna-be chef, was home heaving his guts out after one of his recipes failed. Mrs. Kraus had said that deputy wouldn’t be in until his fever broke and he could get more than ten feet from the nearest toilet.
“Things are getting complicated, Doc. That school bus had no business being out there. Now I’ve got that to look into, as well as this kid.” He glanced at the crushed and carved body on the stainless steel table. “Can you tell me anything else about him that might help? I don’t have much to go on.”
“Well, there is one thing,” Doc said. He bit a lip for a moment as if searching for a way to put it. “Took me awhile to realize it,” he said, “’cause he’s so banged up and all, but this boy’s real unusual.”
“How’s that?”
“He was perfect. Other than what the accident did to him, and being tied up, this kid didn’
t have any blemishes. No cavities, no fillings, no missing teeth. You’d expect some old wounds, but I haven’t even found a scar on him, to say nothing of birth marks or other defects. I mean, it’s weird. He doesn’t even have a pimple.”
***
When Mad Dog looked around, Hailey wasn’t there. She’d been sniffing the grass moments ago, just a few feet away. Had she caught a scent and decided to follow it?
He called her name, not that she usually came when wanted. She was mostly wolf, not dog. She didn’t do obedience. When he needed her, that was something else. When he needed her, she was always there.
He left the Mini in the drive and headed for the house. Maybe she was thirsty. Maybe she’d gone to the galvanized steel tub he kept filled for her by the back door.
As Mad Dog passed the lilac bushes in front of the house, a splash of color caught his eye. Red, on his front door. There wasn’t supposed to be any red on his front door. Paint, he thought at first. Then he got closer and realized it wasn’t exactly red and it sure wasn’t paint. It was more the rust shade that blood turns when it dries. And it had been applied to his door to spell one word—“Pagan.”
Mad Dog was starting to get seriously angry. The sign in his front yard, that was bad enough. But somebody had painted their intolerance on his door in blood, and left behind the paint brush. One of the squirrels that lived in the big trees that dotted his yard had been gut shot, its tail dipped into the death wound to paint the message.
This was almost like killing a pet. The squirrels in his yard were half-tame. Hailey delighted in chasing them, and they delighted in teasing her from just out of reach. It seemed to be a game both sides had agreed to play without the normal consequences. Hailey might cut them off from a tree they were headed for, but she always let them get away. And when they stayed too close to the ground to stop and brag about their escape she showed them how high a wolf could jump, but she always managed to avoid snapping her powerful jaws on one. Even when they threw sticks or hedge apples at her.
