The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  They waited for what seemed an unnecessarily long time as a deputy communicated with someone on the other end by portable radio. Finally he blew a whistle for them to proceed. That the crop would be damaged could not be helped. Men and women stretched across the field, each a few yards from another, moving deliberately, arms extended, hands brushing the ripened pods aside, scanning the ground. Even the owner, his wife and sons, and their migrant workers, chattering in their own private language, joined the search. As Ramsey pushed ahead, his pants brushing the stalks aside made a sibilant sound with each step, like breath being expelled, as if he were treading upon a living being.

  Although it would last less than a day, Ramsey relished the freedom, not freedom with the sense of being unfettered, but the quiet and the vast prospect above, which seemed unlike the one visible from the compound.

  At first he wasn’t sure. The shimmering horizon distorted what appeared to be figures spread across the field, but then heads and torsos began to form, as if rising out of the earth.

  As the two lines came within sight of each other, those with Ramsey glanced at one another, expressions bemused, catching the faintest odor carried by shifting breezes, at first dismissing it as an aberration of the heat, until it grew stronger and could no longer be ignored. His line tightened and closed on itself, approaching the fence, hands covering noses and mouths as the stench became nauseous. They stomped the oats flat, trying to find the source. The one who found her, an older man wearing overalls and a straw hat, shouted and raised his hand. He tied a red bandanna across his face. Dozens crowded around the body. For a careless moment, guards, their weapons lowered, forgot about the inmates. The girl lay naked, her arms and legs splayed, as if she had been tossed over the barbed wire from the access road just a few yards away. Decomposition and the feeding of scavengers led to speculation that she had been killed soon after she went missing. Beetles and maggots swarmed the frail body, a haze of green-backed flies hovering with a low, malevolent hum. Her face was unrecognizable, the skin covering her body drawn tight to the point of splitting and darkened as if sheathed in teal. The time elapsed since she’d disappeared had allowed the oats to right and repair themselves, concealing the body. A thickset woman, in a long, flowered dress with puffed sleeves and wearing a denim bonnet, dropped to her knees, and with hands clasped under her chin began to pray aloud, but no one else made a sound. A female cardinal, its color robbed by gender, squatted on the top strand of the nearby fence, bobbing its tail for balance.

  Neither Ramsey nor anyone else had noticed the black named Webster back away until he was several yards from the group and someone shouted. It was as if they all had been awakened from a trance, requiring a moment to orient themselves. That’s when he began running, his arms and legs flailing like a string puppet, as if he were frolicking rather than trying to escape, which, with the thickness of oats, would have been impossible. Without being ordered to, he stopped and turned, facing his captors. He ripped his prison-blue shirt free and tossed it aside. Bathed by the sun, his sweat-drenched body seemed to glow. He held his arms straight to the sides, smiled, and dropped his head back. For a moment, with only an unblemished sky behind and his upper body seeming to emerge from a blur of gold, he appeared suspended. Then a shotgun exploded. Webster dropped from sight, the moment embedded in Ramsey’s memory. He thought of the Zapruder film, as Kennedy clutched his throat, a crimson spray blooming behind, marking the moment of his death, and of his uncle, who raised him and thankfully had passed on before Ramsey was disgraced, setting a watermelon on a stump for target practice, the pulp and seeds scattering like brain tissue and bits of skull. Everyone rushed to where Webster lay, everyone except Ramsey. He remained beside the girl’s body. It didn’t sicken him to stare at her remains; neither did it fill him with sorrow nor a sense of outrage. Could he remember a time when it might? Or had he evolved antithetically? After so many years, he couldn’t be sure.

  While the others huddled, staring at Webster with train-wreck fascination, Ramsey could have dropped to his knees and crawled away, obscured by the oats. In the confusion he might not have been missed for at least half an hour; by that time he could have been well on his way, and with night coming on, an effective search could not have been launched before morning, but then what? He had nowhere to go, no plan, a short-lived escape for which the consequences would have been severe.

  After leaving the liquor store, Dewey felt like celebrating, one hand resting atop the steering wheel, the other wrapped around the neck of a bottle of low-grade alcohol. He sang along tunelessly to a cassette playing “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma,” his voice switching from normal to an annoying falsetto as Shelly West alternated verses with David Frizzell. But then, another sound. He flicked the volume down. A rod knocking, like a morning-after headache. He pumped the brakes up and pulled into a 7-Eleven. He got out and lifted the hood. He uncapped a gallon jug of recycled forty-weight and filled a dented tin can that he then carried to the front. Acrid smoke spewed into his face when he spilled some on the exhaust manifold. He lowered the hood but then raised it again when it failed to latch and slammed it shut with both hands. A jagged chunk of Bondo fell off.

  After crossing back into the state, a colonnade of grain elevators, which had stood empty for years, flashed momentarily in the sweep of passing light, but then no other structures, no lights ahead, behind, or to the sides, nothing but 30 miles of untamed forests between him and Carson Springs. A foraging possum waddling across the road turned to face the truck, its eyes glowing red when caught in the beams.

  “Roadkill!” Dewey laughed and swerved to crush it beneath the left front tire, but as he did, the right side dropped onto the shoulder. He jerked the wheel to the left, tipping the truck. It rolled down an embankment, jettisoning metal and glass, until it came to rest on its roof in a muddy swale, steam hissing from under the hood. Dewey lay broken and bloodied on the shoulder where he died, but not quickly. Sometime later, after the lights of the crumpled truck had gone dead and the radiator expelled itself, an eighteen-wheeler, its cab glowing yellow, sped past. The driver glanced at the road, not realizing he was lost, and then at a swindle sheet spread across the steering wheel. The book bag had tumbled from the bed of Dewey’s truck and come to rest beside the road’s segmented center. The tractor’s front tandems ripped it apart, shredded paper swirling upward in their wake like confused butterflies.

  Robert Earl had seen it in others, tradition dictating their lives, growing old in family albums that would someday be put aside and forgotten; at times, when alone, their gaze fixed at some middle distance, wondering if there might have been more. And he had tried it himself, a marriage that led to divorce, his wife married to another. Two boys he’d never wanted, calling another man father. But he thought of it, the way destiny had wound its way through his life, as just the way things were, random, one event following another capriciously, without pattern. The secret, he concluded, was to expect nothing and accept the inevitable. He paid what the court had deemed fair, and for that he got to spend two weekends a month with his boys. He’d rather have not seen them at all, just in passing, maybe, but it would have been unseemly and injurious to his image. Although they were grown and gone, for years he tolerated the four days by watching them fight and buying whatever they wanted. He thought of it as penance.

  By the time the cruiser, its lights off, pulled in between the willow and the disabled Oldsmobile, it was almost dark; the trailer windows glowed. He had been elected to eight two-year terms as sheriff, so it was something he’d done many times: telling parents that their son or daughter had been crushed beyond recognition in a grinding head-on collision, or a wife that her husband had dropped dead of a coronary while counting his change at Fred’s, or apportioning anguish and relief in an emergency room, reading from a list following a fatal school bus crash. It had nothing to do with him, and he ordered his life so it wouldn’t.

  Two deputies accompanied him, one driving, the other in
the back seat, not for support for what some might consider a trying moment of responsibility, but more a demonstration of authority. Once, after leaving the washroom at Sonic and zipping his pants as he walked along the hallway leading to the serving line, he heard someone yell, “All your fuckin’ cash, man.” He stopped and pulled his .357 Magnum from its holster to shoulder level, the barrel pointed at the ceiling. He could see the robber’s back reflected in the front window. He then stepped clear of the dividing wall and leveled the pistol, which was only inches from the temple of the robber, who held a Glock on the frightened cashier.

  “Drop it,” Robert Earl said, but pulled the trigger before the man had time to respond.

  They closed the restaurant for half a day to clean shards of skull and bloody tissue from the fry baskets, the condiment bins, and the walls.

  He and two deputies attended the funeral, standing to the side, shoulder to shoulder, hats in place, as the dead man’s brothers comforted their mother. He and his men were not there as a matter of respect, or to express regret for having done what had to be done, or to solicit some expression of forgiveness or at least understanding, but as a warning, much as he and his men in the 1st Cavalry had done in Vietnam by tucking death cards in the mouths of fallen Vietcong.

  The door to the trailer opened as they climbed from the cruiser and placed ten-gallon hats atop their heads, leveling the brims. The woman stood, hands on hips, as a silhouette, the light behind seeming to bend away and around her so that she appeared as a stick figure, slight in stature but intimidating and anonymous.

  “You found her,” the woman said in a flat, hollow voice. It was not a question.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Robert Earl said just as dispassionately. “I’m afraid so.”

  She stepped back into the light and, by casually opening her hand away from her side, invited them in. On a coffee table with a glass insert, an open coloring book with crayons scattered across the top.

  After they sat, backs rigid, on the end of their bunks nearest the aisle for the eleven o’clock count, and the lights were turned off, the snoring and the stench of near-naked bodies sweating in the still, humid air began. Ramsey lay on his stomach, chin resting on his laced fingers. He would not fall asleep easily, and when he did, he was still vigilant, with an edgy awareness, like some exposed animal, in peril, always seeking but never finding shelter. He watched the field, a gentle cross breeze caressing his face. Although he could not see the men still searching for clues, flashing lights sweeping in ocher waves across a shelf of fog sliding unevenly like silt low above the field said that some remained. He thought of Webster, not of the moment when his head exploded, but of the moment, the timelessness of it, between the decision to leave and the end, which had not really been an ending at all. Most would say it had been an act of desperation, which if reflected upon rationally would never have been attempted, and, after a cursory investigation, which would exonerate the guard who had fired, that was how it would most likely be reported, as an aborted escape, but Ramsey alone knew he had succeeded, that, like a translucent cicada husk clinging to a winter-stripped limb, Webster had left nothing behind to kill.

  Ramsey had seen him on the compound but noticed nothing to distinguish him from hundreds of others, most, like Ramsey, with little hope of ever being released, and if they were, of use to no one, danglers, feeding along the edges. But Webster had not been just another jailhouse punk. He had had vision and, when he had smiled and offered himself sacrificially, had imparted to Ramsey the gift of clarity.

  Without reference he had no sense of time, but it must have been close to midnight before the flashing lights surrendered the night; a razor-thin sliver of grinning moon hovered, its edges feathered by mist, as the great, silent field began repairing itself.

  CHARLES TODD

  Trafalgar

  FROM The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

  Mumford, Cambridgeshire, 1920

  The old dog died at two o’clock, thrown unceremoniously out of his warm bed by the fire and onto the cold January ground.

  And it was this fact that troubled Rutledge as he delved deeper into the mystery of Sir John Middleton’s death.

  It was the housekeeper-cum-cook, gone to the village for onions for Sir John’s dinner, who found the old dog lying by the wall under the study window. Mrs. Gravely, stooping to touch the graying head, said, “Oh, my dear!” aloud—for the old dog had been company in the house for her as well—and went inside to deliver the sad news.

  Opening the door into the study as she was pulling her wool scarf from her head, she said anxiously, “Sir John, as I was coming in, I found—”

  Breaking off, she cried out in horror, ran to the body on the floor at the side of the Georgian desk, and bent to take one hand in her own as she knelt stiffly to stare into the bloody mask that was her employer’s face.

  Her first thought was that he’d fallen and struck the edge of the desk, she told Rutledge afterward. “I feared he’d got up from his chair to look for Simba, and took a dizzy turn. He had them sometimes, you know.”

  The doctor had already confirmed this, and Rutledge nodded encouragingly, because he trusted Mrs. Gravely’s honesty. He hadn’t been particularly impressed by the doctor’s manner.

  Rutledge had been in Cambridge on Yard business, to identify a man brought in by the local constabulary. McDaniel was one of the finest forgers in the country, and it had appeared that the drunken Irishman, taken up after a brawl in a pub on the outskirts of town, was the man the police had been searching for since before the Great War. He fitted the meager description sent round to every police station in the country. In the event, he was not their man—red hair and ugly scar on the side of the face notwithstanding. But Rutledge had a feeling that the McDaniel they wanted had slipped away in the aftermath of the brawl. The incarcerated man had rambled on about the cousin who would sort out the police quick enough, if he were there. When the police arrived at the lodgings that their man in custody had shared with his cousin, there was no one else there—and no sign that anyone else had ever been there. The case had gone cold, and Rutledge was preparing to return to the Yard when the chief constable came looking for him.

  “Sir John Middleton was murdered in his own home,” Rutledge was told. “I want his killer, and I’ve asked the Yard to take over the inquiry. You’re to go there now, and I’ll put it right with the chief superintendent. The sooner someone takes charge, the better.”

  And it was clear enough that the chief constable knew what he was about. For the local constable, a man named Forrest, was nervously pacing the kitchen when Rutledge got there, and the inspector who had been sent for from Cambridge had already been recalled. The body still lay where it had been found, pending Rutledge’s arrival, and according to Forrest, no one had been interviewed.

  Thanking him, Rutledge went into the study to look at the scene.

  Middleton lay by the corner of his desk, one arm outstretched as if pleading for help.

  “He was struck twice,” a voice said behind him, and Rutledge turned to find a thin, bespectacled man standing in the doorway. “Dr. Taylor,” he went on. “I was told to wait in the parlor until you got here. The first blow was from behind, to the back of the head, knocking Sir John down but not killing him. A second blow to the face at the bridge of his nose finished him. I don’t know that he saw the first coming. He most certainly saw the second.”

  “The weapon?”

  Taylor shrugged. “Hard to say until I can examine him more closely. Nothing obvious, at any rate.”

  “Has anything been taken?” Rutledge asked, turning to look at the room. It had not been ransacked. But a thief, knowing what he was after, would not have needed to search. There were framed photographs on the walls, an assortment of weapons—from an Australian boomerang to a Zulu cowhide shield—were arrayed between them, and every available surface seemed to hold souvenirs from Sir John’s long career in the army. A Kaiser Wilhelm helmet stood on the littl
e table under the windows, the wooden propeller from a German aircraft was displayed across the tops of the bookshelves, and a half-dozen brass shell casings, most of them examples of trench art, were lined up on a cabinet that held more books.

  “You must ask Mrs. Gravely that question. The housekeeper. She’s been with him for a good many years. I went through the house, a cursory look after examining the body, to be certain there was no one hiding in another room. I saw nothing to indicate robbery.”

  “Any idea when he was killed?”

  “We can pinpoint the time fairly well from other evidence. When Mrs. Gravely left to go into Mumford, he was alive and well, because she went to the study to ask if there were any letters she could take to the post for him. She was gone by her own account no more than three quarters of an hour, and found him lying as you see him when she returned. At a guess, I’d say he died between two and two-thirty.”

  Rutledge nodded. “Thank you, Doctor. I’ll speak to her in a moment.”

  It was dismissal, and the doctor clearly wished to remain. But Rutledge stood where he was, waiting, and finally the man turned on his heel and left the room. He didn’t precisely slam the door in his wake, but it closed with a decidedly loud snap.

  Rutledge went to the window and looked out. It was then that he saw the dog lying against the wall, only its feet and tail visible from that angle. Opening the window and bringing in the cold, damp winter air, he leaned out. There was no doubt the animal was dead.

  He left the study and went out to kneel by the dog, which did not appear to have been harmed in the attack on Sir John. Death seemed to be due to natural causes and old age, judging from the graying muzzle.

  Hamish said, “There’s been no one to bury him.”