Dead Poor

by M. K. Coker

  “To get you lot out. Okerlunds and Mareks. Even nothing’s better than that.”

  Whatever she saw in his eyes, in the hands that had fisted again on the table, must’ve spooked her, because she hissed out what sounded like truth. “Damn man finally had something worth something, and a blind eye when a body just wanted some fun. Then he fucked it up, just like always, just like forever. I’m pleased as punch he’s dead. No use, no-account dead weight. Now get out—and don’t come back without a tool belt on.”

  Marek rose to his feet, ready to leave—with nothing—but Karen headed for the table, not the door.

  “You called me before the election and left a message. Said you had dirt on Bunting.”

  For a moment, Marek thought that Nadine simply wouldn’t respond. Finally, though, she tipped her head back with her sneer at full wattage. “And you didn’t have the wit to call me back. You’d have paid good money for the dirt I could’ve dished, ’stead of buying off the election after. I know how it goes. You grease the wheels of those Dahls, and they grease yours. I ain’t telling you nothing.”

  “You don’t have to. You filed a restraining order. That’ll tell me all I need to know.”

  “A restraining... what?” Her sneer faltered. “Oh. That. Just surface. I got more. You pay, you play.”

  Karen’s face was colder than a Dakota winter. “I wouldn’t play you if you were Elton John’s best instrument. You can keep your lies.” Karen turned on her booted heel and marched out, stepping perfectly on the uneven flooring so as not to ruin her exit. A born athlete.

  “Okerlunds lie!” Nancy screamed after her.

  “Yes, they do,” Marek said down to her. “To liars.”

  Her gaze swung back to him. “We had a deal.”

  “No, I asked ‘what if.’ I didn’t seal a deal.” As she gathered breath, he told her, deadly serious, “You try anything to smear Karen or anyone else that belongs to me and mine, and I’ll go straight to Don, and you’ll lose this place.”

  She choked a laugh. “Don won’t give a Marek the time of day.”

  “Maybe not. But all Karen’s got to do is tell Don a concerned citizen’s filed a complaint about a homeless drunk who might well set fire to the whole prairie one night.” Marek let that sink in. “You’ll be gone before the snow flies.”

  Marek didn’t take satisfaction in her reaction—the glazed look of an animal caught in its last bolt-hole. That he’d seen that naked look of fear would never be forgiven, but it wouldn’t be forgotten, either.

  “You have a debt to pay,” Nadine finally sputtered. “You’re family.”

  “I don’t owe you anything. And the only thing I’d ever pay a penny for based on blood, Nadine, is rehab.”

  “Don’t need your pennies. And I’m no drunk.”

  As Marek shut the door of the house behind him, her empty whiskey bottle shattered against it. Let her clean up the mess. Like his mother and uncle, he left the Kubicek homestead with nothing.

  Except pity for Bob Bunting.

  CHAPTER 13

  Karen had to work hard to keep her hand light and her wheels out of the ruts on the way out. When she’d stormed out, Karen had actually been more pissed at her detective than at Nadine. But they both were what they were. Marek, soft. Nadine, a user. “You better not have promised to fix up anything in that godforsaken house.”

  “No,” Marek said shortly.

  “Good. Glad you made that clear.” So maybe she’d been off there, imbibing too much of her father’s bias. Karen relaxed onto the bad but drivable county road. “I hope that place falls down around her ears. Alice Dutton was spot on. A drunk, a manipulator, and a backstabber.” After a few miles of grim silence, she asked, “Do you think she knows anything worth knowing?”

  He shook his head, not in the negative, she decided, but to clear it. “Maybe, maybe not, but whatever she was selling, I wouldn’t buy. You buy once, you never stop. That was Bunting’s mistake.”

  “Yeah, I got that. I have to say, the idea of a young Bob Bunting falling into her clutches just when he’d escaped his mother’s makes me feel a lot more sorry for the man. And that’s a good thing. Makes me want to find his killer. Just wish it was her. She’s poison, through and through. What now?” Her stomach rumbled. “What time is it?”

  He pulled his phone from his shirt pocket and looked at it far longer than she would’ve thought necessary. That told her that he was seriously upset—because that was when his dyslexia was at its worst. “Just going four. I suggest we search Bunting’s place.”

  Too early for supper, despite her stomach’s protest. “Okay, I’ll get a warrant. Judge Rudibaugh shouldn’t have a problem with that, given the man’s dead, and I got Alice Dutton’s okay before we left.”

  While Judge Rudy wasn’t quite so easily—or at least as quickly—persuaded as she’d hoped, he did issue the warrant, along with his congratulations. “Justice under Robert Bunting would have been a travesty. While regrettably inexperienced in the field that you have been elected to, you are still a far more welcome addition to the forces of law in our county.”

  Damned with that faint praise, she’d taken the warrant and called in her remaining swing-shift deputy. Two Fingers met them just behind Grove Park in the trailer park. While Ted Jorgenson kept up what he could, it was obvious that within the last year, the place had deteriorated.

  “I didn’t even know Bunting lived out here until I ran the address for the warrant,” Karen told her companions as they picked their way through weedy grass grown too tall and littered with trash. “I’d have guessed something far more ritzy, given his ride.”

  “All he had was his ride,” Two Fingers said. “He’s filed bankruptcy twice. Had another pending and creditors at the door. I don’t know who gave him the loan, but they’ll be repossessing the truck.”

  Karen took it as a plus that her career-wavering deputy was interested enough in the case to do some of his own sleuthing. “Good to know.” She filled him in on their progress as curtains twitched and lights were extinguished. The majority, in fact, were dark. Though, to be fair, at about five o’clock, their residents were likely at work. A few occupants bravely stared out at them, but more were oblivious, mesmerized by the glare of the boob tube.

  Karen checked the address on the warrant again then stopped in front of a rusted once-white trailer with a twisted skirt of corrugated aluminum that looked as though a giant had gnawed on it. “I’d have thought the man had a pension—or pensions—to keep the wolf from the door.”

  Marek finally spoke. “Never lasted long enough to get one.”

  Two Fingers gave him a sidelong glance, as if that was a not-so-subtle dig at the deputy’s undecided plans for the future, but Marek didn’t notice. Her detective had disappeared into himself, into his own world, something he hadn’t done often in the last year. But she’d seen far too much of it when he’d first returned to Reunion after his wife’s death.

  Karen mouthed at Two Fingers, “Bad day.”

  That got the barest of nods. Karen took out the house key that Larson had given her. She pushed open the door with gloved hands and flicked on the lights.

  “What a pig,” Two Fingers said.

  Over every available surface, Bud Lights intermixed with takeout from The Café and empty Spaghetti-O’s cans. She didn’t see anything from Mex-Mix, which didn’t surprise her. He would have seen it as the domain of illegals, no matter the quite-legal, American-born owner. Probably thought he’d be poisoned if he ordered anything there.

  “It’s a wonder Bunting didn’t die of botulism or something worse.” Karen poked through the remains of many days and nights. “I swear, I see things growing. Disgusting. I’d say something about typical bachelor digs, but I’m pretty sure you both have neater homes than I do. So I won’t.”

  When she got no response, she looked up. Marek and Two Fingers had disappeared down the hallway. She heard drawers being pulled open and presumed they’d started on the other rooms. S
he looked through mail on the coffee table. All looked to be bills—utilities, mostly—and plenty were stamped Final Notice.

  She just hoped the electric company didn’t pull the plug while they were in the trailer. When she saw nothing more but mold in the kitchen, she moved into the hallway. Both of her men had avoided the dark, dank bathroom. As their putative boss, she did the same. She passed Two Fingers rifling through a battered desk in a room used as a study.

  “Anything?” she asked Marek as she stepped into the final room, the bedroom, with sudden reluctance. The dead man’s most intimate area was not something she wanted to think about.

  Marek’s answer was a shake of the head. She turned to look around and saw a photograph, the only one in the room, and it was the same photo that resided in Alice Dutton’s drawer.

  A happy baby, a happy woman, all gone down the toilet.

  “You can’t hate a man too much who’ll display that in his bedroom. I’m guessing it’s probably the only photo he had from his childhood.”

  Leaving the nightstand for Marek, she went to the closet. Bunting had a number of duty shirts in progressively larger sizes, a slideshow in fabric of his career, starting with Eda County, to the South Dakota Highway Patrol, then crisscrossing the state in county jobs, going over the border into Nebraska once, back to the patrol, Iowa twice, then back to the patrol and... she stopped. That one didn’t fit. The patrol duty shirt was for a slimmer man, and the insignia was quite dated behind its plastic covering.

  And the surname on the tag? Not Bunting but Johnson.

  Could it be? She could think of only one possible reason that Bunting would keep a duty shirt of his hated stepfather, Ed Johnson. Back in the day, Bunting could have worn that shirt, as he’d been much slimmer when he’d worked for her father. All sympathy for Baby Bunting disappeared in instant revulsion. “Marek.”

  She had to say it twice before he looked up from his perusal of a box of condoms. If she was right, Bunting hadn’t been so conscientious in the past. Over two decades in the past. She raised the shirt and watched her detective’s eyes narrow, pop wide, then narrow again. Like her, he hadn’t forgotten. “Don’t tell Two Fingers,” she told him.

  “Don’t tell me what?” her deputy asked from the doorway.

  Karen closed her eyes and cursed her big mouth. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned, still holding up the duty shirt on its hanger. She waited a long beat. When she opened her eyes again, her deputy’s face, with its classic high cheekbones, looked hollow. Scooped out from the inside.

  Dropping the papers in his hand onto the floor, he slowly came in, reached out, and brought the front tails up into the light. Old stains stood out like black marks on the light fabric. The kind of stains one would expect from a violent rape. But why keep it? A trophy? If her own stomach churned, she couldn’t imagine what she’d just stirred up in her deputy’s gut.

  Surprisingly, Marek spoke first. “Johnson’s a common surname.”

  Two Fingers’s head snapped up, and Marek fell silent. A common name, yes. It was the surname, after all, of Karen’s daughter. But if you coupled Johnson with the South Dakota Highway Patrol and the stains, the story became an age-old one of power over right.

  Karen let out a breath. Whatever she’d expected to find here, it wasn’t this. Different case. Personal case. About as personal as it got. And as cold. “Deputy, it’s your call. I can turn this over to the FBI in Sioux Falls. You could take a DNA test...” He dropped the shirttails as if burned, and the black holes of his eyes swallowed her words.

  Surprisingly, he said, “I already took a DNA test. To see if the tribal council might change their ruling if I tested over fifty percent Native. It was forty-seven percent.”

  And that number would have been comfortably close to a hundred if his mother had made the choice of her son’s father. “We’ll have Dr. White send a sample from Bunting over to the FBI, if that’s what you want. Your decision. You’ll want to talk to your mother.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Two Fingers just stood there. Karen thought she understood the dilemma. Justice or privacy. Probably even more than that. Was it better to have an unknown rapist father or a known one? Just how long had Bunting been playing the good guy when he was, in all likelihood, the worst of the worst? It certainly put a different spin on their current investigation. Had a victim—or a victim’s brother, father, or son—killed Bunting?

  “Your mother probably wasn’t his only victim,” Marek said flatly. “Never are for that type.”

  The words seemed to shake Two Fingers out of his stasis. “The last reported with that MO.”

  The familiar give and take of facts, speculation, of detective work, seemed to have been the right approach. Keeping her tone brisk, Karen asked, “And what MO was that?”

  “Pull over a single female driver in the middle of the night, plant drugs on her, then spread-eagle her over the hood, rape from behind. Let her go with the warning if she reports, no one will believe her. That she’ll go down for years on the drug charge.” His rage, as dark and deep as his eyes, surfaced for a moment before he controlled it. “Kept his hat low and shined his light in their eyes. My mother was the only one who saw the name tag.”

  Karen could barely get the words out. So much for emotionless. “How many victims?”

  “Three that reported. DCI did the initial investigation. Checked the active duty roster. No Johnson on duty. Thirteen on the roster. Interviewed by phone, all denied knowledge, all came up with alibis from significant others. No further investigation. Nothing done with the rape kits. Deemed pointless. One of the women was a drunk, one was a stripper, and the other...”

  Was an Indian. On, as Karen recalled, reservation land. “And that’s when the FBI took it over?” They had jurisdiction along with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  “Yes, but they didn’t touch the case until a few years ago. They got a lot of bad press, national press, over all the unsolveds on the reservations. So they ran all three of the rape kits. No hits.”

  “Was Bunting in the patrol way back then?” Marek asked.

  Karen didn’t need to think. She knew exactly when he’d left her father’s employ. She hadn’t wanted to face him again after the riot act he’d read her as she’d idled in the ditch with an open beer can in her car—and though he hadn’t known it, a baby in her belly. That lecture had made her decide to give up that child instead of telling her parents and risking her father’s job during a difficult election. “Yes, he was. He quit my dad’s roster by leaving a note stuck under the windshield wiper of his squad. I knew the man was an ass. I never guessed he was much worse. I realize you have to ask your—”

  “No. I don’t need to. She’s always wanted him found.” And with that, he seemed to settle. “We need to get that to the FBI.”

  She held it out. “Then take it. I’ll call and tell them to expect it.”

  He frowned, not taking it. “But with Bork out...”

  “Marek and I will handle any calls. I need to talk to Adam anyway when he comes on shift at midnight.” When Two Fingers didn’t move, she glared. “You think we can’t handle it?”

  He saw right through the move, but it got him moving—with the duty shirt.

  “So much for feeling sorry for Bunting.” Karen turned her back on the bouncing baby boy and scooped up the papers on the floor. “Nadine was too good for him.”

  Marek didn’t answer. He’d disappeared again into himself, but this time, she suspected that was because he was thinking hard about the case, not about the emotional minefield of Two Fingers’s father or his own checkered ancestry.

  “We might as well head home for supper then meet back up to talk to Mindy Bullard. See if she can ID the bruiser and his knockout relation.” When Marek’s shoulders braced, Karen sighed. He’d had a hard day already. Facing the wife of the man who’d nearly killed his child might break his back. “I can talk to Mindy myself. No need for you to go.”

  He shook his head. “If I star
t avoiding people related to people we arrest, I’ll soon be out of a job.”

  “Isn’t that the truth.” After one last look around, Karen locked the door of the trailer and turned to see a slim blond man in his early thirties walking gingerly over the muck toward her.

  “About time you got here. Guess when you get around to it, you really get to it fast, seeing this is Bunting’s unit.” The man started right up the stairs. “No need to lock it. I’ll have it cleaned out before the night’s done. I’ve got a crew who’ll do it for me for a reduction in rent. I assume you’ve finished with the rest already?”

  Marek kept walking down the steps so that Mr. Slick, for who else could it be with his natty suit and tie, had to stumble back or be flattened. “Hey, watch it. You blind as well as dumb?”

  “Just dumb, I guess,” Marek said, stopping on the last step, an unmovable barrier.

  “Go get the tape for the door,” Karen told him.

  Mr. Slick frowned up at her. “Tape? What tape? Did Bunting break the door?”

  Marek moved, and Mr. Slick scrambled back, stumbling into a mudhole. He lost his cool enough to stick out his middle finger at Marek’s back. “Is that the best you can get? At least Bunting would have hired someone with a few brain cells to go with that brawn.”

  Karen let him think so. “Is that why you supported Bunting to the bitter end, staying for the recount, Mr....?”

  “Digges. Alan Digges.” He didn’t try to deny he’d been there. “I supported Bunting because, unlike some I could name, he promised to get things done. I called your office numerous times this past week and got the runaround.”

  Uneasily, Karen thought of Biester, who’d said much the same.

  Sensing the upper hand, Digges smirked. “I’ve got tenants lined up, money in hand, waiting for those trailers. All you’ve got to do is show up with the eviction notice, and we’ll do the work. But since you’re here now, we’ll let bygones be bygones. I expect you’ll see lots of me in the future. That’s how you make a profit.” Like Nadine Early, he rubbed thumb and fingers together in a money gesture. “Churn, baby, churn.”