Dead Poor

by M. K. Coker

  Lori’s head went up and back, chin tucked. “What are you talking about? A will? Bunting?”

  Karen pressed hard, not letting her catch up. “Bobby was named for his father, wasn’t he? Bunting. Did he rape you? Is that why you killed him? He threatened you and Bobby, he turned his back, and you did what a mother bear does—you protected your cub. Self-defense.”

  “What? Where the hell do you get this stuff?” Like her son had earlier, she leapt to her feet, a fire rekindled on her drawn face. “I can’t believe this. No, I take that back. I do. Dangling a bit of hope in my face then accusing me of murder? Backstabbers, that’s what you people are, acting all nice and helpful—then wham! My mother was right. Trust nobody. You want to know about me? About Bobby? Ask Marsha Schaeffer.”

  Lori Jansen slammed the door on her way out.

  CHAPTER 36

  That went well. Not.

  But at least Karen had already scheduled a meeting with Marsha over the fate of the evictees, so they would have their answers in... she checked her watch. Five minutes. In the meantime, she sat down in Lori’s chair across from Marek. He had his head in his hands, fingers massaging his scalp, as if his brain hurt.

  “I’m thinking... not guilty,” she told him. “Too shocked, too angry.”

  “I agree.” He looked at her. “But it was a good angle. One we had to spring on her.”

  “Dragging a three-hundred-pound man across the log bridge was always a dicey proposition, even with mother-bear adrenaline. And, yeah, we didn’t know if Mountain Man helped her. But you know what? I’m glad. I mean, I’m not glad that I feel like crap. But I’m glad it’s not her. We don’t have to separate her and Bobby. They may hate us for the rest of their, and our, natural lives, but they’re still a team. Down, but not yet out. Unlike us. Or me, at least. That was my brain fart, that Lori killed Bunting.”

  Marek just shook his head. “We’ve still got Mountain Man and the pocketknife.”

  A sharp knock had Karen pushing back to her feet. Marsha Schaeffer, with her long, curly gray hair and flowing gossamer top over leggings and boots, looked like a flower child gone millennial. An itinerant social services rep based out of Sioux Falls, Marsha was only in the county one day a week, which was more than some rural counties that only got a visit once a month. Stretched thin was stretching it. Nothing left but gossamer of the safety net.

  “Oh, sorry, am I interrupting?” Marsha asked, looking at their long faces.

  “Only in a good way. Marek, do you know Marsha?”

  “Only in passing.” He got to his feet, enveloped the social worker’s long fingers in his thicker mitt of a hand, and shook. “I’ve referred some of my cases to you, I believe. Never heard anything but good.”

  “Ditto. But we all have our failures.” Marsha turned back to Karen. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what you’re going to ask me about, Sheriff, and I’m afraid I will have to disappoint you.”

  Talk about a letdown. “You can’t tell us about Lori and Bobby Jansen?”

  With a jerk of fingers, Marsha gripped Karen’s arm. “What’s happened to them? Are they in trouble?”

  Interesting. Like Lori, the woman was overreacting. Big time. “What did you think I was talking about?”

  Marsha released Karen. “The homeless from the trailer park. Harold Dahl has already talked to me about it. He’s getting pressure from the Lions to move them along.” Then it hit. “Oh, no. Are the Jansens in that group?”

  At Karen’s nod, the social worker sank down into Karen’s vacated chair. “I really want to help them out. Truly. Most of the evictees are on waiting lists for what little is available in Eda County. But I’ve run out of placements, of stopgaps, of—”

  “Baling wire?” Marek suggested.

  “Exactly. We had Section 8 housing in Aleford but lost that to fire. The owners chose not to rebuild. Ted’s was my last bit of baling wire. He knew these people, knew which ones would do whatever they could to pay him back, even if it took months, years in a few cases. He gave second, even third, chances. After that, he’d give them my name, tell them to try to find something in Sioux Falls or Sioux City, find a shelter there to take them, whatever he could. People would apologize to him when they were evicted, say they’d send the money when they could. Several did, that I know of. Ted wasn’t poor. Even with what some would say was a too lenient policy, he made a tidy profit, though you’d never know it to look at him. He never flaunted it like Alan Digges.”

  Her earnest face turned sharp. “From the grapevine in Sioux Falls, I hear that Michelle Bayton is dumping her boy toy—and that he’s no longer in charge of the trailer park and, in fact, facing charges here in Eda County. Is that true?”

  Karen took pleasure in saying, “When we get around to it, yes, he’ll be facing charges, assuming the state’s attorney goes for it.”

  “With the Baytons baying for his blood? You can take that to the bank.” The social worker’s satisfaction turned thoughtful. “As for the evictees, who is administering Ted’s estate? Maybe I can appeal to their better nature, if they have one.”

  Karen smiled wryly. “Judge Rudibaugh.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s going to be an... interesting... discussion.” Though the social worker looked like a do-gooder pushover, Marsha Schaeffer had a steel-plated backbone. “I’ll talk to him before I leave. Is that all? I need to decide how to approach—”

  “That’s not all.” Karen gave Marsha the Cliffs Notes version of what had just transpired in the room. “What did Lori mean, to ask you?”

  Marsha had both hands pressed against her long face, her mouth open in an O, not unlike that famous painting. “The Scream”? Maybe. Karen wasn’t big on art history. Nikki would know.

  Then Marsha slipped her hands into her hair, roiling it like some witch in a Halloween flick. “Lori Jansen was my first major failure, and my worst by far.”

  “Doesn’t seem like a failure to me,” Marek said.

  Karen nodded. “She’s down, but she’s not out. Yet.”

  “My failure, not hers.” Marsha roiled more strands. “Let me give you the short version, because I’ve got a file an inch thick. Her mother was, shall we say, a bit too fond of chemical enhancements. Dabbled first then went hardcore, and it eventually killed her, but not before she’d hauled Lori all over the county and the state, in a long line of Section 8 placements ending in evictions.”

  Ouch. No wonder Lori was so sensitive about the issue.

  “That was all before I got on board. By then, the state had removed Lori from her mother’s so-called care and placed her with her only remaining relative who’d take her, her seventy-two-year-old grandfather, who farmed a few acres outside of Dutch Corners.”

  A town that hadn’t survived a recent flood. Only the Sub had. Karen would much prefer it the other way around. “He died?” she hazarded.

  “Yes, of a broken heart. After I yanked Lori out after a home visit.” Marsha pulled on her curly hair as if she could tug out the memories that obviously haunted her. “Typical newbie. Thought I knew everything and was saving the world, one kid at a time. Her grandfather didn’t have two nickels to rub together, with an outhouse for plumbing and no running water, just a well. A stove for heating and lots of blankets. Appalling, I thought, with my city upbringing.”

  Karen managed, barely, not to look at Marek. She was describing Janina Marek’s home.

  “And old Bob Jansen didn’t take any more kindly to me than I did to him when I started to make demands about upgrading his home. When he didn’t follow through, I wrote up my report highlighting all the deficiencies. Leaving out the minor fact that he loved his granddaughter and vice versa. I was sure that removing Lori was for the best. She was thirteen. But you’d have thought I’d kidnapped her—and in a very real sense, I had.”

  Karen had heard of Indian children being pulled from their homes due to simple poverty but didn’t realize it had happened to whites in her own county.

  Marsha went on, “
I placed her with a nice foster family in Reunion—but it turned out the brother-in-law from Sioux City who liked to visit on the weekends also liked young girls. He molested her for years without my knowledge, because she had zero trust in me. I lost my rose-colored glasses—and she lost far more. Only when she got pregnant when she was seventeen did it all come spilling out. I did what I could to make it right. The brother-in-law is still in jail, I believe. I arranged for an abortion, but Lori didn’t want it, said she’d finally have a real family. When I asked her what else I could do, she told me that she never wanted to see me again. And while I’ve seen her several times at the trailer park, she hasn’t seen me. I’m invisible to her. Nothing I can do will ever make up for what I did. With the best intentions, of course, but that road leads you know where.”

  To hell. Karen had been there. In the trailer park.

  Marek finally said, “Lori said that Bobby made her what she is.”

  “Maybe he did. I didn’t give her any chance of surviving on her own, but from watching from afar—very far—she did it. Oh, she’s had it hard. And I itched, absolutely itched, to help her, but I not only burned that bridge, I vaporized the creek right along with it.”

  So Bobby was not Bunting’s son. And he’d been named for his grandfather. And Karen and Marek had, even if unintentionally, pressed all of Lori Jansen’s hot buttons in exactly the wrong way. No wonder she’d tried to hide that Bobby was her son. The wonder was that Lori felt she’d had to do the right thing at the overlook, losing her job in the process. Just how much more damage had they done?

  Karen suspected that she and Marek were now on the Jansens’ shit list. Instant invisibility. And in the Dakotas, a mantra of “trust nobody” was a very poor way to survive.

  “Looks like we’ve all got a hand in landing her there,” Karen finally said. “I always wondered how you can do your job, day after day. How do you keep going? Just not care?”

  “If I didn’t care, I’d give it up. But I no longer expect. I cajole, I reward, I do what I can. But mostly? If I have the resources—which in the case of the evictees, looks like I don’t, unless I can twist the judge’s arm—then I can make a real difference. That’s rewarding. To give a break to people who go through bad luck and, yes, sometimes poor choices—and boy, have I made some of those—to get back on their feet. And teaching people the basics of how to navigate the work world, the kind of things we learned by osmosis. Dress a certain way for an interview. How to avoid diploma mills, payday loans, predatory lending.”

  Marsha lowered her hands, leaving her hair disheveled. “But some of my clients? They don’t change. The cycle just rolls around, generation after short generation. If you expect people to change, you’ll just get frustrated. So I do what I can and let it go. Maybe one thing I did, or said, will turn one of them around. That’s the only thing that still surprises me, who makes it and who doesn’t, because it’s often not who you’d guess.”

  Larson had said something similar. “Like the Jansens,” Karen said. “If it helps, before we pissed Lori off, she said she’s got a distant cousin to stay with, after Lions Park.”

  “Ah. That’s good. I know that cousin. Pam Jansen. I’ve helped her get some job training so she could work on the computers at the new recycling center, though Lori doesn’t know that.”

  Marek said, his eyes on her face, “It’s not just her you’ve helped, is it? You’ve arranged for other jobs, other situations, for Lori. In Sioux Falls. Here. With Ted.”

  Marsha Schaeffer flushed right up to her curly hair. “All right, yes. Guilty as charged. If Lori ever knew, she’d quit, she’d leave. Anything I had a hand in, she’d reject just on principle. It’s been my penance, looking after them in what little ways I can. Don’t ever tell her.”

  “We won’t have a chance, most likely. Talk about burned bridges.” Karen rolled her shoulders. “Though someone will have to tell Lori that her son is inheriting the trailer park. At least, in trust. I don’t know the details yet. We did tell her, but she didn’t believe us.”

  The dawning hope mirrored Lori’s. “You’re serious?”

  “It looks like it. Judge Rudibaugh is still deciphering the will. Ted’s handwriting is atrocious. We do know that a trustee is involved.”

  “Lori? Oh.” Marsha looked uncertain. “Well, that would be... awkward. I mean, for me. I have a number of clients in the trailer park. Or did. I hope she wouldn’t kick them out, just on my account. It’s all such a muddle. One bad choice, and... it ripples out for years. I yanked her out, so she can yank my people out, to hurt me, and in the process, hurt others.”

  Karen thought about that. “She’s angry. She’s hurt. But... I don’t think she’s heartless. She may mouth the hard line when it comes to those who aren’t working as hard as she is, but when it comes down to it, I don’t think she’d turn out the Doris and Zoe Harknesses of the world.”

  Those names got, as Karen had expected, a knowing nod. For all their dysfunction, Doris and Zoe were tight. She’d seen it in their byplay, for all it sounded more like bickering. What happened to Zoe after Doris was gone would be another story.

  “If you can get the judge to let the evictees back in the trailer park before he hands over the reins, that might be a more achievable goal,” Karen told the social worker. “Face-saving is easier when it’s someone else’s decision.”

  Marsha rose to her feet, a militant light in her do-gooder eyes. “Then I’ll see it done.” And she marched out.

  Unfortunately, Karen and Marek were once again left with nothing to do... but wait.

  “Hey, boss!” Karen looked out the door to see Walrus with her landline in his hand. “You’ve got a call.”

  Hope springs eternal. “From Larson?”

  “No, The Seasons.”

  Karen got to her feet and tugged Marek to his, barely able to keep her balance. She’d been off balance most of this investigation, so nothing new there. “Put it on speakerphone.”

  CHAPTER 37

  From seasons such as these.

  Marek sat down on his desk, thinking that Shakespeare had a line for anything and everything under the sun. Or Adam did. But he didn’t think Karen, or The Seasons, would appreciate the reference. Then again, perhaps they would. He had met the FBI agents out of the Sioux Falls resident office: Wintersgill, a New Englander who walked with a limp, and Dakota native Sommervold. Male and female respectively. Their coloring—red hair, gray eyes; blonde hair, green eyes—covered all the seasons, hence their nickname.

  What did they have for them this time, a fall guy or another fail?

  Marek was getting tired of failure, all around. The case, the people. Times had been hard in the past in the Dakotas, but he didn’t think that people had blamed those who were hit hardest as much as they did now. Or maybe they had. Blame games were always popular. And if it made you feel superior, smug in your good choices—or good luck—then all the better.

  “Go ahead, Agent Sommervold.” Karen settled on her own desk. “Detective Okerlund and Deputy Russell are here, too.”

  “Greetings,” the FBI agent said. “Agent Wintersgill is on my end, as well. I’m sorry you weren’t able to nab your Mountain Man this afternoon, Sheriff. I wish we could have provided backup for you, but it was a no-go on the weather front.”

  Glancing out, Marek saw that it had finally stopped raining, although a phalanx of trolling thunderclouds readied for another assault.

  “It is what it is,” Karen replied and got a sound of assent from the other Dakotan. “But since you’re calling me, I’m guessing you’ve got something for us on the DNA?”

  Wintersgill’s clipped tones came over the airwaves. “We were able to pull down a priority on your duty shirt. All Native American rape cases have been flagged for immediate processing.”

  Several years ago, the national press had dinged the FBI for neglecting cases that involved the rape of Native American women by white men. Marek was glad that Two Fingers wasn’t on shift yet. As it was, W
alrus stoked his windsocks and eyed the exits, but Karen shook her head at him. “We’re listening.”

  “Good news and bad news,” Sommervold said. “Which do you want first?”

  “Bad,” Karen said as Walrus said, “Good.”

  “Detective Okerlund?” Wintersgill’s wry, dry voice. “You’re the tiebreaker.”

  He’d put up with more than enough bad news. “Good.”

  “Your deputy’s blood type isn’t compatible with Bunting’s,” Wintersgill informed them. “We got that from Dr. White just now. We can follow up with DNA but it’s not a priority.”

  Walrus let out a whoosh. “Wonderful news. That would’ve sucked.”

  Marek picked his way through what Wintersgill hadn’t said. “But the DNA on the duty shirt did belong to the rapist, to Two Fingers’s father. Is that what you’re trying not to say?”

  “Very well put, Detective. Yes.” Sommervold had taken over, seamlessly, like any longstanding partner did. “We weren’t sure we’d get DNA off the duty shirt, to be honest, but the lab pulled it off. Multiple sources of DNA, but only one male profile. The others, seven in number, were are all female and, we presume, all his victims. We got hits on the three known victims of the patrol rapist. Since Two Fingers gave us the results of his own DNA test, we were able to make a match there as well. The lab says there is no doubt that Two Fingers is the product of two profiles, the male profile and your deputy’s mother.”

  More careful wording. This time, Karen picked it up. “You know who this rapist is?”

  “Yes, he was in the system, but not CODIS, which is why we didn’t get a hit initially. Came from a state system that’s still got a backlog. Your man was convicted of rape seventeen years ago in Idaho. He died in prison in a fight with an inmate he’d once put away. Karma, I’d say.”

  Marek and Karen exchanged a long look.

  “Let me guess,” Karen said. “Ed Johnson?”

  After another pause, Sommervold returned the volley. “Sheriff, if you keep stealing our thunder, we don’t get the payoff. Yes. Bunting’s onetime stepfather.”