by Nick Pirog
The Save-More murders.
And the only way he could have known I’d taken an interest is if he was tipped-off about my internet search at the library. They must have a program that alerted them when someone searched specific keywords. And then traced it to my login.
“Leave it alone,” he’d said.
And I would have.
If only he hadn’t told me to.
Chapter Seven
The barn smelled horrific.
“What do you think?” I asked Randall.
Randall Jones didn’t look like he belonged on a farm. He looked like he belonged on a football field. He was wearing a floppy straw hat and had a spongy black beard an inch thick that was three shades darker than his skin. He wore a near-constant grin that revealed a small gap between his two front teeth.
“I think,” he said, his voice as gruff as his beard, “that you have a dead pig in your loft.”
I stared down at Miss Piggy, whose carcass was now bloated and covered in maggots, and said “Yep.”
I initially called Randall—his phone number had been scribbled on the back of my feed store receipt—to help me repair the pigpen. My body was still in too much pain to lug around lumber and wield a hammer.
When he arrived in a beat-up Ford Bronco, I decided that Harold and May’s deceased mother was higher on the priority list than the busted pigpen. The piglets would just have to sleep in bed with me for another day.
Darn.
“We could just roll her off,” I said. “Let her fall to the ground.”
Randall shook his head. “Nope, she’ll explode, then you’re never gonna get rid of that smell.”
“What if we move a bunch of the hay bales underneath us then roll her onto those?”
He mulled this over. “Probably be soft enough to keep her from exploding.”
We spent the next ten minutes moving hay bales to the drop site.
Back up top, Randall asked, “You ready?”
We both took two deep breaths then began pushing the huge pig toward the edge. Three hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight feels like twice that, but luckily Randall was even stronger than his frame indicated.
Miss Piggy fell over the precipice, and I yelled, “Timber!”
We both watched as Miss Piggy dropped into the hay, then, like hitting a trampoline, bounced off the hay bales and fell to the earth.
Where she promptly exploded.
Randall cut his eyes at me, then tilted his head back and let out a riotous laugh. Soon we were both in hysterics.
A minute later, wiping his eyes, Randall said, “I guess that didn’t work after all.”
Randall handed me a pair of purple kitchen gloves and said, “Put these on, you don’t want to get that stink on you.”
Randall had backed his Ford Bronco up to the barn door. A trailer was attached, the bed of the trailer covered in a blue tarp. We spent the next twenty minutes heaving what remained of Miss Piggy into the trailer. My ribs screamed out at me, but, if possible, the stench of the exploded sow took sensory precedence.
Most of what exploded, the entrails and some of her guts, was contained by the bedding of hay on the ground, and we were able to pile this into the trailer as well.
Just as we finished, a plume of dust swirled at the edge of the hill; a truck was driving up the road. The truck bounced over the many ruts, splashed through the ever-present puddle, then parked a few feet from Randall’s Bronco.
There was a glare off the windshield, and I couldn’t make out who was behind the wheel. The door opened, and a woman stepped out.
“Hiya, Wheeler,” Randall said. “I thought that was you.”
Sarah Lanningham was wearing jean shorts, a gray tank top, and a red St. Louis Cardinals hat. For the first time, I realized she was hiding some spectacular curves under her doctor’s coat.
Hubba hubba.
“Hiya, Randall,” she said, walking over to give him a quick hug. “What are you doing here?”
He glanced in the direction of the trailer hitched to his Bronco and said, “Helping get rid of this here sow.”
Sarah leaned over the edge of the trailer, showcasing she’d put in her time on the elliptical, and peered down. “What the hell did you guys do to her?”
I pointed at Randall and said, “He did it.”
Randall opened his mouth and threw up his hands. He didn’t cop to it, and I explained, “We tried to roll her off the loft and onto some hay bales, but it didn’t go as planned.”
Sarah said, “She looks like she got hit by an IED.”
Randall let loose a laugh, and I could tell he was running the clip back over in his head. Just the look on his face started me laughing, and soon we were both giggling like children.
My eyes were watering, but I could see Sarah wasn’t amused. She shook her head and said, “I came to check on the piglets.” She looked around. “Where are they?”
I cocked my head toward the house. “Inside.” Then nodding at Randall, I said, “Randall here was going to help me fix up the pigpen.”
Sarah said, “Oh, well, I can come back some other time.”
“No, no,” Randall interjected. “You two go on. I’ll take care of the pigpen myself.”
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, you’ll just get in the way.”
He was probably right.
The lumber I bought the previous day was still strapped to the top of the Range Rover, and I asked, “You need any help getting the wood down?”
He shook his head and waved for the two of us to leave him be.
I thanked him and started toward the farmhouse.
“Good to see you, Randall,” Sarah said, joining me. “Make sure you get Roscoe in for a checkup here pretty soon.”
Randall promised to do just that.
She turned to me—her honey-colored eyes had taken on a slight amber hue under the red ball cap—and said, “Roscoe is his black lab.”
“That’s a great name,” I said, then added, “Speaking of names, why did he call you Wheeler?”
We were a couple steps from the porch, and she stopped. “Most people around here still call me that. It’s my middle name.”
“You don’t seem to like it.”
“I don’t.”
“Then why go by it?”
“It wasn’t by choice. In first grade, my class was fifteen kids, eight girls, and three of us were named Sarah. Sarah Graves, Sara Whitfield, and me. My teacher just started calling me by my middle name the first week, and everyone has called me Wheeler ever since.”
“Where did Wheeler come from?”
She sighed. “It’s my mom’s maiden name. It comes from the old English days when your last name was what you did for work.”
“Like Blacksmith?”
She nodded.
“So what did a Wheeler do?”
“Um,” she said, giving me a sideways glance. “They made wheels.”
I forced a laugh. “Right.”
First chunky.
Now dumb.
I was tempted to tell her I once got a B- on an algebra test in high school, but I didn’t want to add bragger to that list.
I said, “My middle name is Dergen.”
“Dergen?” She stifled a laugh.
“What?”
“You don’t know?”
I shook my head.
“That’s what we call cow shit out here.” She laughed and said, “That cow just took a big old dergen.”
“Oh, man.”
“Yeah, I’d keep that to yourself if I were you.”
We moved up the porch and toward the front door. It was still technically on its hinges, but it was hanging by a thread.
Wheeler asked, “Was the front door like this when you got here?”
I told her about how after I fell out of the tree I grabbed the tire iron from my car and went The Shining on the door.
She found this amusing.
“How’s your body feeling these d
ays?” she asked.
“A little better. Thanks again for those Hydrocodone, those really helped.”
She shrugged.
“Except they were Tylenol.”
“Like I’m gonna give some strange guy off the street prescription drugs.”
“Yeah, that was probably smart of you.”
We entered the house, and I called out, “Harold! May! We have a visitor.”
There was a pitter-pattering, and the two little piglets came barreling around the corner. Both Wheeler and I crouched down and let the piglets attack us.
“Oh, thank you for the kisses,” Wheeler said, picking up May. She sniffed, looked at me suspiciously, then asked, “Why do they smell so good?”
I shrugged.
“You gave them baths, didn’t you?”
“I plead the Fifth.”
She picked up Harold and said, “You must be Harold.”
Harold wiggled his little tail and oinked.
We headed into the dining room, and she gave each of the piglets a quick exam. When she finished, she said, “Well, I half expected to come here and find two little dead piglets, but it appears you have done a pretty good job so far.”
“Is that a backhanded compliment?”
She shrugged, then asked, “What time did they last eat?”
“It’s been a few hours.”
We made our way to the fridge, and I filled two bottles with formula. I fed May and she fed Harold.
As May suckled away on the bottle, I couldn’t help stealing glances at Wheeler. The care with which she held Harold. The look in her eyes as he sucked on the bottle. There was so much love there. I wondered if she had the same love for every animal she treated. How big was her reserve? And what happened when she couldn’t fix one of them?
It must take its toll.
I thought back to my days as a homicide detective. One of the first rules is: don’t get attached. To the victim, to the victim’s family, or to the investigation itself. You let yourself get attached, and it will slowly chip away at you. You won’t make it three years.
I only made it two.
That’s because I couldn’t draw a line in the sand. I couldn’t see the body of a seventeen-year-old girl and not imagine it was my kid sister lying there.
When you’re a homicide detective, you’re on rotation, and when your number is called, there’s no “Thanks, but this one isn’t for me. I’ll grab the next one.”
After I cracked, after I was let go from the Seattle Police Department, I started taking on cases with the FBI. But with the Feds, it was different, I could pick and choose the cases I investigated. And that’s why I loved the cold cases. It was easier to hold on to your emotions when you were dealing with a crime that happened five, ten, twenty years earlier.
At least, most of the time.
“The yellow tulips,” I said, glancing up. “Are you the one who put them at the memorial?”
Wheeler raised her eyes, but didn’t answer.
“I know your dad was one of the people killed.”
She set Harold down, rinsed the bottle in the sink, then turned back to me. “Yes,” she said flatly.
I set May down and she scampered out of the kitchen to wherever her brother had absconded to. Then I opened the fridge and grabbed two beers. I twisted off the tops, then handed one to Wheeler. She took a sip in silence, then followed me out front. I pondered chancing the two rocking chairs, but they both had a bad case of osteoporosis, and I feared they would collapse under our weight.
I nodded at the chairs and said, “I ordered those from the Old Dilapidated Farmhouse store. They are strictly decorative.”
I could tell she was still thinking about her dad, and she didn’t laugh.
We plopped down on the front steps, a foot apart. A huge beetle, easily an inch long, rumbled past, stopping for a quick moment to glance up at Wheeler.
Even the bugs were impressed.
The big beetle made a U-turn, probably headed back to tell all his buddies about the hot chick on the porch steps, when he banged into my foot. Then he started climbing up it. I shook out my foot, but he held on tight. I leapt from the porch and swatted him off with my hand.
I may have screamed.
Wheeler laughed
I said, “He was attacking me.”
“I could see that.”
Once I composed myself, I said, “I heard the bugs were big in the Midwest, but it’s still a shock.”
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” she said with a light shake of her head. “Wait till the middle of July.”
“What happens in July?”
“You ever see Jurassic Park?”
“Sure.”
“You know the scene with the pterodactyls.”
I laughed. “That bad?”
She took a swig and nodded.
I matched her swig, then asked, “So did you ever leave this place?”
“I went to undergrad at the University of Missouri, then vet school out east.”
“Where out east?”
“Cornell.”
“Ah, Delaware.”
“Upstate New York, actually.”
“Right.”
“How ‘bout you?”
“I went to the University of Washington for a few years.”
“Didn’t finish?”
“It wasn’t for me.”
“So what did you do?”
“I went to the police academy.”
She sat forward a couple inches. “You were a cop?”
“I was a beat cop for a few years, then a homicide detective in some capacity or another for almost a decade.”
She cocked her head down at my leg and said, “Is that how you got shot?”
“That happened up in Maine, when I was working a case later on.”
“Maine? How did you end up there?”
“I was a second-year homicide detective in Seattle when my parents died. My kid sister was just finishing high school and got a scholarship to Temple so I moved to Philly with her.”
“Geez, I’m sorry.” She paused, then asked, “What happened to your parents?”
I recounted how my parents were flying back from a Rolling Stones concert in my father’s company jet when the plane crashed into the Sierra Nevadas.
“Where is your sister now?”
“France. She got married last year. Now they’re trying to start a family.”
“Uncle Thomas.”
I hadn’t given this much thought, and the idea made me smile. “Yep.”
“Anyhow, she’s a badass painter.” I bragged about Lacy for a few minutes, then segued into Lacy’s MS diagnosis and how we ultimately ended up in Maine. I touched briefly on the case that led to my being shot, but it wasn’t one of my favorite topics to dwell on and I shifted things in her direction. I asked, “How old were you when your dad was killed?”
She deflated slightly at the mention of her father. “Twenty-eight.”
“And that was four years ago?”
She nodded.
“So you’re thirty-two?”
“Yes, math wizard, I’m thirty-two.”
I grinned then asked, “What about your mom?”
“My parents got divorced when I was twelve. My mom moved to North Dakota and got remarried. I have two stepbrothers up there.”
“You ever go visit?”
“Every couple years. The town they live in is even smaller than here.”
The soft pounding of a hammer caused me to glance up. Randall’s wicker hat bobbed above the tall grass in the distance.
I turned back to Wheeler and said, “When I first got here, I was surprised at the size of Tarrin.”
“Smaller than you thought?”
“Bigger.”
“Really?”
“I mean, you guys have a Sonic.”
“Yeah, that was a big day,” she said smiling. She glanced down between her feet, and I could see the memory loading. Her head lifted, one of her dimples
winking. “Half the town camped out in their cars the night before it opened. They actually ran out of hamburgers, and people had to wait an hour for someone from the Sonic two towns over to bring more meat.”
“So you got your burger?”
“You kidding me?” she scoffed. “Chili dog all the way. Three of them.”
I smiled.
My kind of girl.
She tilted her beer, which was empty, and said, “You want another one?”
“Sure.”
I made to push myself up, but she said, “I got it.”
She sprang up and was back twenty seconds later with two cold ones.
I twisted the top off the beer then pointed the mouth of the bottle at her red ball cap. “You a big Cardinals fan?”
“You have to be around here.”
“You go to any games?”
“Usually a couple. Haven’t gotten out there yet, but it’s early in the season.”
“How they doing?”
“Couple games back of the Cubs,” she said. “You follow baseball?”
“Not really, but my grandpa loved the Cardinals.” I pointed to the rocking chairs on the porch and said, “He would tell stories about his entire family huddled around a little transistor radio listening to their games.”
For a moment, I felt myself travel back to the 1940s. The paint on the farmhouse a brilliant white. The rocking chairs pristine. Harold in one of the chairs with one of his little sisters on his lap. The sound of the announcer’s voice crackling over the radio.
“Thomas?”
I broke from my reverie “What?”
Wheeler said, “I asked if you and your grandpa were close.”
“We were, but I only knew him for a couple years.”
“How did you only know him a couple years?”
I’d only told a few people the story. I’m not sure if it was the 1.2 beers I drank, Wheeler’s beckoning glance, or the flashback I just had, but the story came spilling out of me.
“Two Thanksgivings ago, I moved back to Seattle. I hadn’t been back in eight years, but my parents still owned a house on the cliffs overlooking Puget Sound. One day, the phone rang and it was this old man. He asked for someone by name—I think he asked for someone named Bobby—and I told him he had the wrong number. I don’t know what would have happened if I hung up the phone that day, but thankfully, I didn’t. I ended up talking to him for twenty minutes, mostly just listening to him ramble on about the nursing home he was living in. Then he asked me to bring him some stuff.”
