Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (6 page)

There shouldn’t be anyone in Simms’ house. It wasn’t logical that a murderer would wait around in his victim’s home until the law happened by, but what had been done to the Reverend indicated the killer might not share a view of what was logical with the rest of the world. The sheriff, who normally kept his .38 locked in a drawer in what he considered a commendable effort to avoid acts of blatant machismo, was glad for the deadly phallic symbol’s company as he advanced into the dim interior.

Reverend Simms hadn’t gathered many worldly goods, but someone had thoroughly searched those he had in no apparent hurry. Every drawer, every shelf, every closet, had been emptied. There were piles in all the rooms where the contents had been dumped when they didn’t yield what the searcher was looking for. And, the sheriff guessed, since every room had received the same careful attention, it was possible that what was being sought had not been found.

The sheriff went back out to his truck and retrieved a fingerprint kit. He wasn’t surprised when he found only smudges on the surfaces the intruder would have touched. The effort had a professional feel to it, and a professional would have worn gloves.

The sheriff tipped a bedroom chair upright after he finished his circuit of the house, then collapsed into it. His arms and legs ached, like he’d just run a hard 10 k after spending an hour with his free weights. The tension of following so closely in the footsteps of a killer wasn’t what he was used to. He stared vacantly at the piles of clothing and empty drawers at the foot of the bed. It had been stripped of its sheets. Mattress and box springs leaned against a nearby wall.

What might a faintly pompous little preacher like Simms have that someone would be willing to kill for? And not just kill, but torture and then butcher. Had someone wanted answers? Was the killer sending a message? It didn’t add up. The thoroughness with which Simms’ house had been searched made what had seemed psychotic only moments before suddenly look cold-bloodedly rational and malicious. The sheriff knew that killers sometimes used gratuitous violence as a warning, but Simms seemed an unlikely candidate for involvement with the mob or international terrorists or the drug trade. So what was it? Something small enough to hide yet valuable enough to cancel a human life? The sheriff shook his head. No sense, it made absolutely no sense.

The sheriff wiped the sweat from his eyes. There was a small fan lying on the floor. It had probably been pointed at the bed before being tossed aside by the intruder. The sheriff righted it, made sure it was plugged in, and turned it on. Nothing happened. He thought it might have been damaged in the fall it must have taken. He tried the evaporative cooler in the window and got the same result. The light switch didn’t work either. Strange, the overhead light had been on in the kitchen.

The sheriff returned to the back porch looking for the circuit breakers. They weren’t there, but the power poles were in the alley and the feeder line ran to the southeast corner of the house. The sheriff followed it. He found a rusty metal box under the eaves near the corner with a pair of thirty amp circuits—the old fashioned kind with screw-in fuses. One of them was unscrewed, not just loose, barely hanging from its socket. When the sheriff tightened it, the cooler began blowing muggy air into the adjacent bedroom.

The dusty soil beneath the electrical box contained the scuffed prints of a pair of short flat slippered feet, the sheriff’s boots, and the intricate waffled design of a pair of modern athletic shoes. The trails of boots and slippers paralleled each other from the house. The running shoes led behind some shrubbery near the back fence. There were several clear prints, just below average size feet but hardly average shoes. He’d given Wynn the department’s camera, after documenting the mess inside the Veteran’s Memorial Park restroom, and asked him to drop the film off at the Dillon’s for developing and to pick up a fresh roll on his way here. Presumably, the camera was still in the black and white with his deputy, off chasing who knew what or where.

The sheriff tried the radio and, not surprisingly, got no response from Wynn. He’d seen the tire tracks leading off into Kastleman’s field as he drove up Madison and made a right onto Peach. There hadn’t been a Benteen County Sheriff’s car out in that field then. The sheriff didn’t feel like he had the time to go chasing after his deputy while a murderer was still on the loose. Wynn would turn up sooner or later.

The sheriff jotted a reminder to himself in his notebook. These prints were sufficiently clear that he should be able to identify the brand from the sole pattern, as well as the size of the wearer. Who that might be, or what their presence meant, were still mysteries. Did they belong to the killer? If so, why not slice and dice Simms in his house or his yard? Why trail him to the park and deposit his remains in an abandoned restroom? And why hadn’t Simms felt threatened when he realized someone was fooling with his fuse box—or had the Reverend realized that at all? If he’d known, he should have called the deputy who was on duty last night and gotten someone to come check it out. That hadn’t happened, maybe because Simms was involved in something he didn’t want known. But even if the sheriff could convince himself to accept that absurd sounding proposition, why had Simms obligingly wandered out into the night to his fatal encounter in the park.

A slight movement in the far corner of the back yard caught the sheriff’s attention. There was an open-topped fifty-five-gallon drum standing back there with just a hint of smoke rising into the improbably motionless Kansas air. Buffalo Springs didn’t offer garbage removal. People either hauled their trash to the dump or burned it in containers like this in their back yards, then trusted the nearly constant wind to carry their pollutants a state or two away. It didn’t seem likely that Peter Simms would have been burning trash before he walked off to the park to get murdered.

The Reverend Simms hadn’t been good about watering his yard. There were plenty of weeds and some clumps of grass, but there were also dusty patches of bare soil that showed a trail of those waffled footprints going to and from the trash barrel. The sheriff avoided stepping on them as he examined the contents of the drum. The contents were, not surprisingly, ashes. It appeared that stacks of paper had been recently burned, or, perhaps not papers, but something smaller and regular, say three-by-five cards, or maybe not cards, maybe photos. The sheriff bent and peered intently into the container. Just the hint of an image seemed to stare back at him from the top of the pile. It looked like a figure, someone small, perhaps a child. He couldn’t quite make it out. It was covered with a dusting of more ash. He bent and blew on it softly. It dissolved into fine soot that rose on a wisp of smoke and danced, unrecognizable and unrecoverable, in the steamy air. What had it been? Were they pictures? Had the searcher found and burned them, and if so why? Was this what someone had been looking for, what Peter Simms died for.

Too many questions, too few answers. The sheriff found himself wishing he was better qualified for his job. Some real police experience from somewhere would be awfully nice to fall back on about now. A decade as Benteen County Sheriff didn’t qualify. No one in county history had been murdered before. What he knew about homicide investigation came from movies, TV, and novels. His qualifications for the job consisted of a brief military career that sent him home from Vietnam with a bronze star and a purple heart, just enough popularity with the voters, and the revelation that the preceding sheriff had been collecting cash payoffs instead of issuing traffic tickets at a speed trap on the highway over near Cottonwood Corners.

The sheriff decided to take one last look at the house, letting himself consider Simms as someone cunning and desperate, not just zealously intolerant. He went back through each room, looking for a perfect hiding place and finding nothing that hadn’t received previous attention.

He stopped in the kitchen on the way out, picking up the phone to check in with Mrs. Kraus. There was a notebook and a pencil hanging from a string beside it. The sheriff thumbed through to be sure all the pages were present and there were names and numbers inside—people who would need to be informed.

The phone was one of the models that chirped at you instead of ringing the way a lot of Benteen County phones still did. Among its neat row of push buttons was one bearing the label
redial
. Why not, the sheriff thought. He punched it and heard a staccato of tones flash into an electronic abyss. There was a long moment of stillness and then a phone, somewhere, began to ring.

“Hello,” a familiar voice said. At first he thought he must be wrong, but he knew her voice. It was his ex-wife.

“Judy,” the sheriff demanded, “where are you?”

***

The two Heathers were currying a pair of big mares, one a chestnut Morgan and one a dappled roan and white Saddlebred. In the shadow of the barn the girls looked astonishingly alike, a fact their mothers were remarking on when the phone began to ring.

Judy was leaning her athletic frame against a wall, a contrast in her auburn ponytail, cotton shirt, denims, and boots to the tall, dark, intense and equally athletic woman beside her whose idea of casual dress—color coordinated exercise-wear by an athletic shoe manufacturer—seemed inappropriately formal in a place where the scents of straw and manure and urine blended to smell like all horse stables. The aroma was either aromatic or noxious, depending on your fondness for horses.

“We get it after the fourth ring,” Judy explained. “If there’s somebody up in the main house they’ll pick it up before that. If not, we take a message.”

The dark woman nodded. Judy wasn’t the first person to explain the phone rules to her. She looked around nervously, as if searching for something to write on. Judy exchanged wide, calm-eyed stares with the sorrel in the stall across from the phone, then picked up after the fourth ring, surprise knitting her smooth brow as her “hello” was answered by her ex-husband.

Judy was no fan of the Reverend Simms’ brand of Christianity. She normally took Heather over to Crawford on Sunday mornings where an Episcopalian service could be found. It was a long drive, but everything in Benteen County was a long drive. It was more or less on the way to Sam and Minnie Stark’s Sourdough Ranch, the location of some of the best horseflesh in Kansas, where she’d made arrangements for her Heather to learn a skill that most girls, at some time in their lives, fantasize about more than sex.

The horses were a handsome pair, made more so by the girls’ attentions. They stood patiently, knowing their day’s work was done and the girls would soon lead them to their stalls for a reward of oats.

“How’d you get your name?” Heather Lane asked Heather English.

The latter blushed. She’d always thought the combination a bit much. “I don’t know about the Heather. I think Mom must have read it somewhere and wanted to name me something unusual. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, about the same time lots of mothers seem to have come up with the same idea. And English, I’m not real sure about either. My Grandma Sadie had lots of husbands during her life, only a couple she actually bothered to marry. My grandfather is supposed to have been a British soldier who was briefly assigned to a weather research station just over the county line. Nobody is real clear on whether that was his name or Grandma just didn’t know, and when it came time to write something down on Dad’s birth certificate, chose his nationality. Whatever, or whoever, by then he was long gone.”.

“Wow! She sounds neat.”

“She died before I was born but Dad says she was something else. Before her time. She should have been a hippie, he says, cause she would have made a good one.”

“Gee! She was pre-hippie. I thought they had hippies like forever.”

***

“W hat the hell do you mean, where am I?” Judy countered.

“You called me, remember?”

“There’s been a…” the sheriff paused, considered, and decided, for the time being, to minimize, “…crime. I’m at the scene. It’s possible the last place called from here could be significant. The phone’s got one of those automatic redialers and I punched the button. I don’t know where I’ve called. Are you home?”

“A crime?” Judy watched Mrs. Lane’s eyes widen at the words.

“Please, Judy, just tell me where you are.”

“Where do you think I am? Where are your daughter and I virtually every Sunday at this time?”

“That’s what I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

“OK, OK,” Judy sighed, her boundless patience once again pushed to extremes by her clueless former mate. “Sourdough Ranch.”

“Aren’t the Stark’s basically atheists?”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Is it a crime to be an atheist in Benteen County now? Actually, Minnie told me they were Druids. At solstices and equinoxes they perform bizarre rituals involving kinky sex out in the back pasture.”

“Yesterday was the solstice.”

“Oh Jesus, Englishman, lighten up. I was kidding. You know, a joke.”

Judy always called him “Englishman” too. The nickname had originated with his mother, who loved the works of Noel Coward. Once she had a Mad Dog she had to have an Englishman as well. He still put up with it from Mad Dog and from Judy. Other folks had been persuaded just to call him Sheriff.

He looked around the ruins of the kitchen. “Whoever did this wasn’t joking,” the sheriff observed. “Why would Peter Simms call the Starks?”

“How should I know. Sam thinks he’s what they call light in the loafers and Minnie just thinks he’s a flake. I can’t imagine them having anything to say to him, or vice versa, but you’ll have to ask them and they don’t seem to be around right now. And what’s that got to do with your crime, anyhow?”