Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (21 page)

“It was a more innocent time,” Doc mused, “or maybe we just didn’t want to believe what our friends and neighbors were capable of.”

“Nobody locked their doors then, but the Simmses sure should have locked up access to their daughter. God, Doc! I can’t believe her parents wouldn’t have been aware that something was going on. They must have had suspicions.”

“Maybe, but nobody did anything about it until she was just starting the sixth grade. That’s when Todd took his dive.”

“You find that there?”

“No, not specifically, but her attendance stopped in mid-September that year and there’s a letter here from her parents explaining that, ‘due to a serious illness, Sarah Ann has been hospitalized and will not return for the current term.’”

“Wow! They shipped her off to the loony bin, huh?”

“Looks that way,” Doc agreed, as he burrowed deeper into the file. “Here’s a letter from the Psychiatric Hospital in Larned asking for her transcripts.”

“Oh, that’s so sad. She never came back home. How long was she there, do you suppose, and what were the circumstances of her release? Gee, Doc, our Ellen Lane might be a pretty scary character.”

“Well, she certainly had problems, but it appears she was released no more than a year later. Here’s a letter from a Miss Mary Ellen Chandler of Wichita requesting those same transcripts. It appears she’d become the child’s legal guardian in the interim.”

“Who’s this Chandler person? How does she come into the picture? Do you suppose the Simmses just didn’t want their daughter back?”

“I don’t know,” Doc said. “The name Chandler rings a bell with me, though. I’m pretty sure that was Mrs. Simms’ maiden name. Perhaps Miss Chandler was the child’s aunt. The fact that she became legal guardian is unusual. At the very least, it indicates the problems that hospitalized Sarah Ann Simms went beyond molestation by a hired man. There must have been issues involving her parents or her family.

“We need more details, Judy. Considering the autopsies I’ve performed today and what I’ve just seen in these records, our Ellen Lane may just make a pretty good suspect, regardless of whether we’ve got some nut who’s kidnapped your daughter. Is the phone system still working here?”

“Yes,” Judy English said. “They don’t shut it off for the summer, but we’ll have to go back up to the administrative offices. The phones in here are all internal lines. To get an outside line, someone’s got to switch you through and there’s no one to do that but you and me, Doc.”

“I want to try the number on this letter, see if it still gets us a Chandler or, if not, if I can manage to get someone at the state hospital to break some confidences. We need to check and see if there’s any word from the sheriff too, and have Mrs. Kraus tell Billy French to keep an eye on the lady whose body he’s guarding.”.

“God yes!” Judy led the way toward the stairs. “Maybe there’s word from Englishman. Let’s get to those phones.”

***

It was lonely in the courthouse with all the action elsewhere and nobody calling in anymore. Mrs. Kraus kept checking her radio to be sure it was not only on, but on the right channel as well. She desperately wanted to go on the air and ask the sheriff what he and Wynn had found over at the Strand or to be sure Billy French’s escort duty was going all right. She couldn’t do that though. Everybody had strict orders from the sheriff to stay off the radio until he called in and cleared them for use again. All he needed was to be sneaking up on the bad guy when one of them read off their call numbers.

Mrs. Kraus wanted a cigarette too. She’d brought a pack along with her when she reported in to help out over the emergency that morning, but even though she couldn’t recall lighting up more than a half-dozen or so, the pack was long gone. The emergency pack she kept in her bottom drawer was now empty too. She would have picked through her butts for a recycle or two, but when Doc Jones put in an appearance she’d had to pitch them and make heavy use of the aerosol deodorant.

Most of the day she’d been too busy to think about a cigarette, even though she’d apparently been going through them regularly enough. Now, she was alone in a quiet office with nothing to do but wait and worry.

The sheriff had made her promise to keep the phone line open in case he, or anyone, needed to communicate with the office without using a radio. That was reasonable, but how long would it take for her to call over to Bertha’s and get somebody to walk a pack across the park, or, considering what had happened out there today, more likely around the park.

She strolled over to the window and peered across the square. Bertha’s was drawing a good supper crowd. Surely one of them would be willing to….

The thought stopped half formed. There was a tall figure out there, almost hidden in the underbrush back beneath the elms. She leaned forward and squinted, as if subtracting a couple of inches and contorting her face would make him any more recognizable. As she watched, he turned and came back out into the sunlight where he stopped again and seemed to look back her way. It was Mad Dog, and he had something long and slender and blade-shaped in one hand. Lordy Pete, she thought. Is that a knife? With the thought, her doubts about the sheriff’s oddball brother came flooding back. He had been out there in that park before dawn, about the time the Reverend Simms was being sliced off this mortal coil. Mad Dog had been known to experiment with mushrooms and cactus buttons. Lord knew what kind of psychotic flashbacks he might be having from his hippie days.

Mad Dog seemed to be staring straight at her. She thought about backing away from the window a little, but decided cowering from Mad Dog was the last thing she wanted to do. Then he opened his mouth and screamed and she found herself stumbling back across to her desk and digging for her Glock. She stood there, breathing heavily for a minute wondering if she should try to hide or just march down to the front steps and pop Mad Dog as he came across the street to murder her. Finally, she compromised by peeking out the front window. Mad Dog was climbing in his Saab and backing out into the street, paying not the least attention to her or the courthouse, or the expensive new Volvo with the out-of-state plates that should have had the right of way and nearly had to lock up its brakes to keep from rear ending him.

Mad Dog headed down the block toward Bertha’s. The woman driving the Volvo turned a familiar face toward the courthouse and studied it with dark, intense eyes, then continued along the street in Mad Dog’s wake.

Now what the hell was Mrs. Ellen Lane doing back in Buffalo Springs without her daughter or, more important, her bodyguard, Billy French? Mrs. Kraus didn’t get time to give it much consideration. That was the moment when the phone began to ring and the radio, using a poor imitation of the sheriff’s voice, insistently crackled her call number. Glock in hand, Mrs. Kraus hurried to answer both.

***

“Go ahead, get the phone,” the sheriff told Mrs. Kraus. “It might be important.”

He stood on the Corner of Poplar and Jackson, just south of the Strand. There was no one in sight and no indication which way the maniac might have gone with his daughter. Wynn was waiting with the truck, or better be. His future as a Benteen County Deputy was in doubt, first, for warning the kidnapper that the sheriff was in the theater by forcing the door when he’d been told to stay put and stay quiet, and second, for getting stuck in the door again and failing to cover the outside of the building when the sheriff asked him. It wasn’t likely Wynn could have stopped the man, but he might at least have seen him descend and followed him.

The sheriff didn’t feel like playing the numbers game they normally used to code their calls. Heather’s kidnapper wasn’t listening and if others were, maybe they’d seen something that could help.

“Billy,” he asked the radio, “you receiving me?”

Something staticky and incomprehensible crackled in his ear. It was probably Billy French. Englishman fiddled with his squelch control, boosted his volume, and repeated his question, suggesting Billy try some adjustments too. All he got was more interference.

“This is Sheriff English,” he told the radio. “Anybody else on this channel?” He was hoping some of his deputies had come back into the county and gotten the word they were needed, or just turned on their radios out of curiosity about what was happening on an otherwise dull Sunday night.

Nothing but static. The sheriff turned and retreated toward the alley. He wanted to be sure Wynn was still there and not getting into further trouble, and he wanted to start driving streets, looking for hints or witnesses, anything to point him toward his daughter and her captor.

“Five hundred to five-oh-one,” Mrs. Kraus’ voice croaked through increasing static.

“Go ahead, Mrs. Kraus.”

“That was the KBI,” Mrs. Kraus said, sounding more worked up over talking to the illustrious Kansas Bureau of Investigation than the sheriff would have expected. “They called, wanting us to do a notification of next of kin. They…. Oh, damn, there’s the telephone again.”

“I don’t care about the KBI just now,” Englishman said. “Check the phone and see if it’s something important. If it isn’t, get rid of them. I need you to call the Sourdough for me.”

“But the next of kin was for Tommy Simms, Peter’s brother, the old man’s first born son. They just identified him. He was all cut up and scalped and…. Aw, hell, hang on a minute and let me get the phone.”

“He was what?” the sheriff demanded, but there was no reply. Mrs. Kraus was dealing with the phone, but it didn’t take her long to get back on the radio.

“Sheriff, it’s Billy. He’s lost Mrs. Lane and her daughter.”

There was a strict code with which the federal government regulated the use of its airwaves. The sheriff’s reply was a violation of that code and the Fourth Commandment.

***

“OK,” Mrs. Kraus said, her voice crackling from the radio like a slab of bacon tossed into a hot skillet. “I got the damn phone off the hook for a couple of minutes ‘cause, even if it’s the kidnapper calling to tell me where he is, I got things you need to know and I need to tell them without interruption so I don’t forget nothing.”

“Go ahead,” the sheriff said. He and Wynn were cruising the deserted streets of Buffalo Springs, looking for any sign of the perpetrator and his victim, or any living soul who might have been a witness. They were also looking for hiding places or avenues of escape, and coming up equally empty.

“All right. First, the KBI wouldn’t give me much detail, even when I told them what we were working on down here, but they say Tommy Simms was back overseeing some machine shop repairs in Crawford on Saturday morning. Told the mechanics he had a lunch date, though not who with. Said he might be gone awhile. He was. Didn’t come back at all. His body was discovered stuffed into a toilet in a rest stop up on the interstate about four this morning. They wouldn’t give me any details, but they said what they had sounded similar to what was done to the Reverend Simms, and they did confirm that Tommy had been scalped. They would have come down to do the next of kin themselves but their investigators are holing up in Crawford because severe storm warnings have been issued for most of this part of the state. You looked at the horizon lately, Sheriff?”

Just what they needed, a thunderstorm to complicate search efforts, probably make the radios useless because of interference while it was around and maybe knock out power or phone lines and scatter the streets with the occasional downed tree or utility pole.

“No,” the sheriff admitted. “I’m in the old downtown and the grain elevator’s in the way. I thought the radio was picking up a lot of interference though.”

“One of the KBI fellows says there’s a line of monstrous thunderstorms coming our way. They’ve issued warnings for heavy rain, high wind, hail, and maybe some tornados. Should get here in about an hour, possibly less.”

He had noticed that it was getting dark unnaturally early, though he hadn’t given the matter much thought. There was too much else on his mind.

“Second, or third maybe, after the weather report,” Mrs. Kraus continued. “French got Mrs. Lane and her daughter to Sourdough Ranch, only Mrs. Lane wouldn’t get out of the car. Said she thought she saw somebody hanging around one of the stables and was pretty sure it was her ex. Frenchy went to see. Says he conducted a pretty thorough search and even saw somebody. That somebody ran and it took him awhile to discover it was only that kid Cody who works as a hand out there. When he finally got back to the yard, Mrs. Lane and her daughter and their car were gone. Says he thought about giving chase, only her dust was already settled and he couldn’t use the radio until he got your all clear and didn’t know when he’d be able to advise us she was on the loose unless he stayed right there and called in.”

So much for the questions the sheriff wanted to ask. Ellen Lane’s ex had made it pretty clear his wife would know how to find him, only now she wasn’t available. One more avenue to recovering his daughter was closed. The Sheriff went through a string of creative expletives, but not into the radio.

“You copy that, Sheriff?” Mrs. Kraus inquired.

“Yeah, I got it.” he replied, more calmly, rounding the corner at Poplar and Van Buren and noticing, to his surprise, that Mad Dog’s Saab was parked in a space in front of the Buffalo Springs Antique Mall, temporarily closed—almost a year now—for remodeling. It had been the five and dime when they were boys and downtown Buffalo Springs was still a going economic concern.