Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (17 page)

“Today, the Reverend Peter Simms of the Buffalo Springs Non-Denominational Community Church was murdered across the street in Veteran’s Memorial Park. A few hours later, his father’s body was discovered in his home. Both corpses had been mutilated in a peculiar and identical way.

“If that wasn’t enough to make this an unusual day for Benteen County, you were attacked by your former husband while he was searching for his daughter at the Sourdough Ranch.

“Then, in a bungled attempt to seize your daughter, he mistakenly kidnapped mine this afternoon. Those events put us well past Minnie Stark’s discretion boundary, and far beyond my tolerance for evasions. Now, do you or your former husband or your daughter have any connection to the Simms family? It’s time to talk, Mrs. Lane. If that crazed husband of yours harms my daughter because you don’t tell me what I need to know to save her, the fact that I’m sworn to uphold the law won’t protect you from me.”

Ellen Lane sighed and sat back in her chair. “That sounded like a threat, Sheriff. But I guess I don’t blame you. I feel pretty much the same way as you. What the law tells me I can do to protect my daughter has very little relationship to what I’m prepared to do.”

“That reminds me. You said you had a 9 mm. Are you carrying it now?”.

She nodded. “Yes. It’s in my purse.”

He reached out and picked up her purse from where she’d deposited it on the desk and pulled the pistol out. “You have a permit to carry a concealed weapon I assume?”.

She didn’t say anything.

“Then you won’t mind if I hold on to it for the time being, until we get this settled. And maybe being without it will refresh your memory. All that stands between your ex-husband and you and your daughter in this county, Mrs. Lane, is me. Sooner or later he’s going to discover he’s made a mistake. Then he’s going to come looking, unless I find him first. You can help me do that.”

She paused and stared out the window at an afternoon that was darker than it should be at this hour. The sheriff wondered if a storm was building up in the west, and whether she was organizing her thoughts or composing fresh lies.

“I used to live here when I was little,” she said. “Ben knows that.”.

“Ben’s your ex-husband, right?” The sheriff was so focused on his daughter’s plight that her revelation hardly registered.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about him. What’s he like? Where’s he from? Do you know why he was sexually abusive to your daughter or what the extent of his deviance might be? Would it include pubescent females like my daughter, for instance? Does he have a history of violence? Give me the stuff I need to know, not his favorite color or his shoe size.” Even as he said it, the sheriff realized that last one might be important too, but not now. After Heather was OK he could go back to being a law enforcement officer instead of a frightened father.

“I know surprisingly little about him, considering that we were married for almost four years. Most of what I thought I knew turned out to be lies. I thought he was Spanish. I thought that was why he had kind of an olive complexion and that dark, curly hair and brown eyes. He spoke it fluently, and he talked about going back to visit the old country, only after he was arrested, it turned out he was just a mix of Mexican and poor white trash.

“The main thing I can tell you about him is that he’s false. He hides behind some kind of mask all the time, picks a role and plays it. I never had a clue until I came home unexpectedly one afternoon and caught him in the act. Up to then, I would have called him a great guy, attentive, sexy, a good provider. Then the mask came off and I found out none of it was real. I’d never seen him violent except when a drunk in a bar gave him a hard time once and he broke the guy’s nose. But from the moment I became aware of what he was doing to our daughter, my life was in danger. He’s tried to kill me before this afternoon.

“I don’t really know if he’s just a pedophile or whether it runs wider than that. We had a very active and, how shall I say this…creative sex life. He wasn’t into sadomasochistic stuff, but he seemed to want to try pretty much anything else. He volunteered to coach the girls’ softball team for our church. I wonder about that now, though even after everything hit the Wichita press, nobody came forward with any other complaints against him. I have suspicions, but there’s such a stigma attached to the person who’s been violated that people keep quiet. I can’t say for sure. I’m sorry. I guess that’s about all I know.”

“You really aren’t helping me,” the sheriff said. “I’ve assumed from the beginning that my daughter may be in mortal danger, regardless of whether he finds out who she really is. Come on, I need something here. There’s got to be a Benteen County connection somewhere.”

Ellen Lane nodded. “Me. Like I said, I grew up here. But we moved away when I was twelve. As far as I know, Ben never did anything other than pass through Kansas until he came to Wichita to go to school. He spent most of his life in East Texas before enrolling at Wichita State and convincing me he was my own personal Romeo.”

“You then, do you have any connection to the Simmses?”

“Yes. Does the name Todd mean anything to you Sheriff?”

“Todd? That rings a bell. There was some trouble, wasn’t there? I think that was when I was attending a little one-room schoolhouse, before it closed and I started getting bussed into town. We didn’t hear much about it out in our neck of the plains and Mama wasn’t much of a gossip, she’d suffered too much from the gossip of others, but things like that get talked about for years in a place like Benteen County.”

“Yes, there was some trouble, as you kindly put it. Todd was my father. He was accused of molesting Mr. Simms’ daughter. It didn’t happen, but the Simmses were important people here and my father was just a hired hand, the child of dirt poor farmers from out of state. Nobody believed him.”

“I remember now. He committed suicide, didn’t he?”

“He climbed the silo behind the barn at the Simms’ place. It’s a tall one, probably sixty feet. Then he jumped. He landed on a spring tooth that was propped against the wall. It tore him up pretty bad but it didn’t keep his head from exploding on the concrete sidewalk alongside the barn. I was the one who found him.”

“I’m sorry,” Englishman said. “But that’s a link. That’s what I need, only I’m confused. If your former husband hated you, why would he have anything against the Simms family? You’d almost expect the opposite.”

“I don’t know. He was always fascinated by that story, even though I told him my father was innocent. He’d really get off on arguing Daddy’s defense. The Simms girl was old enough to know what she was doing, he’d say. She was a kind of Lolita, some pre-adolescent sex kitten who lured a simple country boy on. It was absurd because he didn’t pay any attention to the fact that Daddy just didn’t do it. It used to make me angry. I thought he was saying all that because he thought my father was actually guilty. Now I think he was arguing his own defense, putting himself in my father’s place and imagining how he’d try to get out of it.”

“OK,” the sheriff said. “That’s a start. It’s pretty twisted, but it gives me a motive to work with. But I’ve still got to find your husband and my daughter. I’m almost certain he’s right here, in Buffalo Springs, or no more than a few miles out of town. But you tell me he’s never been here before. That means he has to have chosen the place he’s hiding from out of your memory. Think, ma’am. Where were your secret places as a child here, places you may have told him about? If you had done what he’s done, where would you run to hide?”

“There was a place under the bridge on Calf Creek, about a quarter mile from the house. I used to go there to play all the time and…”

“No, too far. I’m sure he’s closer in. Besides, that bridge washed out more than ten years ago. I think there’s only a couple of posts and crossties left.”

“God I don’t know. We weren’t in town much, unless….”

“Unless what?”

“Well, my family was pretty conservative. We didn’t believe in dancing and movies and such, but I used to sneak off and ride my bike to town on Saturday mornings and go to the Strand Theatre for the cartoons and the children’s matinee. I came off without enough money one time and I was so disappointed I couldn’t afford a ticket that I hung around and started exploring. I found a door to an old freight entrance in the back that was sprung. They couldn’t close it tight. After that, that’s how I always got in. I remember I searched around back stage a couple of times. They must have had real plays there in the old days, because there was a dusty old room under the stage with lots of trapdoors and a couple of exits into what might have once been an orchestra pit. And there was an iron rung ladder up the back wall that led to a series of catwalks and all sorts of ropes and pulleys and weights where they maybe hung scenery or lights or curtains. There was a door out onto the roof, too, and I remember going up there sometimes because it was the highest place around except for the grain elevator and the dome here at the courthouse. It was my most special secret place, my safe place. I told Ben about it.”

“Bingo,” the sheriff said. He was almost out of the room when she grabbed his arm.

“Hey, what about my daughter?” she demanded.

The sheriff kept going and she stayed with him. As they passed the next office, he pushed the door open. Heather Lane and Doc were playing a complicated form of double solitaire on the floor.

“Hi Mom,” Heather Lane said. “Come look at the neat game Dr. Jones is teaching me.”

***

“Look,” Dr. Bowen said, “it’s not my place to trivialize anyone’s religious beliefs and you’ve been very kind to me, offered me some important assistance at an awkward moment. Still, I have to say I don’t think you understand Cheyenne religion that well.”

Mad Dog reached up and turned on the Saab’s air conditioning, adjusting the flow so that his guest would receive its maximum benefits. Those benefits would be limited. Mad Dog had a theory that the Swedes, however remarkable their engineering, did not understand efficient air conditioning because they were conditioned to Swedish air. When a hot summer day in Stockholm might just push ninety, you built your system accordingly. You were not prepared to produce the cooling needed in Saudi Arabia, the Sahara, Death Valley, or Benteen County, Kansas. On a day like today, all Mad Dog’s Saab would do was blow air that was slightly cooler than what might come through an open window.

Mad Dog nodded and put the Saab in reverse, backing out of the parking spot he’d taken behind the courthouse and avoiding the new line of posts that guarded a row of bedraggled rose bushes. “You’re probably right, Professor. I haven’t been doing serious research very long. What I know is just what I got from a little reading. Tell me where I’ve gone wrong.”

Wynn had finally returned a few minutes before. He’d had the professor’s car towed over to the Texaco where it had been filled with gas and where it was currently on a battery charger. It should be ready to go by the time Professor Bowen called for it. Wynn would have given him a ride to pick it up, but he was without wheels himself. The tow truck had already departed on its second excursion of the day, retrieving the Benteen County patrol car. The sheriff was interviewing Mrs. Lane and Wynn thought he needed to stay where he’d be available for whatever his boss might require. Frankly, Neil Bowen was just not that comfortable in the presence of a deputy who, he felt, had been willing to kill him for being black and in the wrong neighborhood. He’d been pleased to accept Mad Dog’s offer of a ride to his car.

“It’s not that simple, Mad Dog. Surely you wouldn’t expect me to explain all the intricacies of Christianity in the course of a short drive. I assure you, while Cheyenne culture was at a more primitive level technologically than that of Western Civilization when the two met, the religious philosophy of these plains nomads was no less sophisticated. And then, of course, there’s the problem that I’m not an expert. As an historian whose interest focuses on matters that occurred in the same era and locale, I’ve given myself a basic grounding in the subject, of course, but I’d hardly feel competent to explain it in the sort of minutiae that your situation would seem to dictate.”

“So you’re saying I couldn’t have summoned a
havsevama’-tasooma,
an evil spirit?”

Dr. Bowen was not accustomed to dealing in absolutes. History was filled with them, names, dates, places and the like, but he was not the sort of historian who limited himself to such concepts. For him, history was a grand and constantly evolving process that could only be described in the abstract. Mad Dog seemed to want his knowledge dispensed vending machine fashion. Put your money in and push the button and get what you want. Neil Bowen preferred the magic of ideas, conjuring up notions for his students like Legos that they could assemble as they saw fit. Mad Dog wanted the final product ready made.

“No, I’m not saying any such thing,” Professor Bowen said. “Anything, of course, is possible, especially within the framework of the world view that you’re discussing. Let me attempt to generalize, and perhaps offer a little advice, Mad Dog. But please don’t accept what I tell you as gospel, especially not Cheyenne gospel. I am not part of that culture, nor am I even a worthy student of it.” He paused.

“However, I can offer an informed opinion.” Dr. Bowen cleared his throat and straightened his collar as he always did just before beginning a lecture. “First—and bear with me a moment because I’m sure I’ll restate some of what you already know, and do it in a very simplistic way—let me outline the world view of which we speak. And excuse me, I’m going to use the English terminology, for instance Cheyenne rather than
Tsistsistas
, because I don’t speak
Tsistsistas
and neither do you and while we may use the same
Tsistsistas
term, it may translate in a different way to each of us.