Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (7 page)

“I’m coming right out, Judy. Stay there. You see Sam and Minnie, keep them there till I come.”

“Englishman. Go suck an egg!” Judy put the phone back on the wall. Mrs. Lane was looking at her with wide, curious eyes. “Obscene phone call,” Judy explained, just as it started ringing again.

“How interesting,” Mrs. Lane said with obvious curiosity. The phone kept chiming but Judy didn’t pick it up even when it passed the fourth ring. Neither did Mrs. Lane. The two stood and watched each other and the phone until it stopped at the count of twenty-two.

***

With mares chewing oats and mothers chewing fat, the two Heathers dug out the rags and the Neat’s Foot Oil and began cleaning their tack.

“How do you like it here?” Heather English asked. The Starks had a couple of guest houses on the place where they put up buyers or rented space to horsey types with enough money to indulge an urge to improve their riding skills. Sam Stark could ride anything with four legs and make it like it and Minnie was an accomplished instructor of almost every equestrian form. Scores of medals and cups decorated her trophy room, including one Olympic gold.

“It’s OK.” Heather Lane caught the look of surprise her namesake showed at her lack of enthusiasm. “I mean, the horses and the riding are great. Minnie’s terrific. It’s just…well, you can only ride so many hours a day. Then…this is a nice place, a great pool and they’ve got a dish so you can watch all the TV you want, but what’s the fun of doing all that with nobody but your mom?”

“Right.” Judy’s daughter could understand that. “There’s just the two of you then? No brothers or sisters? Your dad didn’t come?”

“I don’t have a dad!” Heather Lane exclaimed with surprising passion. Then, more calmly. “My folks are divorced and I was an only child.”

“Me too, on both counts.”

“Oh, I thought…well, the way you talked about your dad….”

“He and Mom have been divorced for eternities. But he only lives a couple of miles away on what used to be Grandma Sadie’s farm. I still see him all the time.”

“What’s he like?”

The question was asked with a kind of wistful intensity that made Heather English stop and consider how to answer it. He was just Dad. She’d never tried to define him before.

“He’s OK. I mean, he’s not a dweeb or anything, but sometimes he seems real surprised I’m not still a baby. He tries to listen, though, but you know how adults are. They never quite get it.”

“He sounds…normal, you know. I wish my dad was like that.

“What is he like?”

“He’s a monster. Mom’s been protecting me from him as long as I can remember.”

“A monster?”

“Yeah, a child molester. I was the child. Mom had him put in jail for it but he got out recently. He appealed and they overturned the original sentence. Now he’s trying to fight Mom for custody. Can you imagine?”

Heather English could not, and the thunderstruck expression on her face was an eloquent answer. “You mean he….” She couldn’t bring herself to even euphemize the word she’d tested her father with before dawn that morning.

Moments before, Heather Lane had seemed the younger of the two. Suddenly she was much older.

“I don’t remember it. I mean, it was ages ago, back when I was an infant. I wasn’t even two when she divorced him and the trial was just after that.

“I can’t actually remember him doing it. In fact, I don’t really remember him at all. I guess I was too little. But the doctors Mom took me to said he did it and Mom says she caught him at it and I’m not a virgin and haven’t been since forever.”

“God! I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. That’s OK. I’m used to it.” Heather Lane’s face softened again. “But it must be neat to have a dad who’s normal.”

“Listen, Mom’s promised to drive me into Hutchinson this afternoon so we can hit the mall, go to a movie, and get some supper. If you’d like to come…well, I can persuade my mom if you can persuade yours.”

“Oh God, I haven’t been in a mall since like the dark ages,” Heather Lane said, her face flushing with genuine excitement.

Neither mother proved hard to convince. By the time they left, Judy had completely forgotten the sheriff’s orders, a fact that would have surprised no one who knew either of them.

***

The blade sliced through flesh with so little resistance it was like opening the wound with a zipper—easier even. Of course, this flesh was far beyond the ability to resist and Doc Jones kept his scalpels honed razor sharp.

Eighty-six separate wounds. Doc had counted them carefully, after washing off what had recently been Peter Simms, and marked them on his autopsy chart. Eighty-six, and not one of them a puncture wound. All of them incisions, slashes. From the lack of tearing and abrasions and the similarity to the surgical Y-shaped cut with which Doc began his autopsy, it appeared they had been made with an instrument as carefully honed as his scalpel. Probably a razor blade, he thought, though modern blades were thin and fragile and might be easily broken in a fight. An old fashioned straight edge razor was more likely to have held up to the heavy use required of this weapon, though it could just as easily have been a pocket knife or even a scalpel.

That was what had always fascinated Doc about forensics. It was about half science and half art, from what he could tell. The dead didn’t give up their secrets easily. There was a similarity between the autopsy process and an ancient oracle cutting open a goat or a chicken and reading the future (or, in this case, the past) by examining its entrails. Determining cause and time of death was as much a matter of interpreting what he found as what he didn’t.

Peter Simms didn’t smoke and didn’t drink excessively. That left him with healthy pink lungs and a smooth and unremarkable liver. He ate too well and didn’t exercise so Doc wasn’t surprised to discover, beneath a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, that the Reverend had been a good candidate for angioplasty or a bypass not many years down the road.

The Reverend hadn’t eaten that morning, but there were some internal surprises. Doc found the amputated genitalia stuffed deep into Peter Simms’ throat. It had caused a blockage of the trachea and some damage to the larynx, but Doc was pretty certain Peter Simms hadn’t lived long enough to feel that particular indignity. There was some blood in the lungs though, and a bit of bloody froth in the bronchial tubes.

The autopsy revealed little else beyond the sustained savagery that Peter Simms encountered in Veteran’s Memorial Park sometime before dawn. Aside from the location of the genitals and the possibility that the Reverend might have suffocated on his own blood, Doc noted only two other unusual features on his report. Doc wasn’t sure which of them surprised him most.

He had assumed the murderer took Simms’ scalp as a trophy. That was why scalps were taken in the old days, or for the bounty sometimes paid by those who considered Indians to be vermin, fit only for extermination. Doc had felt confident that souvenir would prove to be valuable evidence, something Peter Simms’ killer would have kept and hidden. When the sheriff found it, the scalp would be the final confirmation to put someone behind bars. He’d been wrong about that. He found the square flap of scalp inserted firmly inside the Reverend’s rectum, though this indignity, too, was apparently post-mortem.

The other surprise was that the conservative, evangelical, self-righteous Peter Simms had a tattoo on his derriere. Quite near to where his scalp had been left, there was a small, colorful, intricately rendered cartoon figure. Doc was sure Walt Disney wouldn’t have approved of this anatomically correct, though exaggerated, version of his favorite mouse.

***

Wynn was in a lot worse shape than the black man. After about a hundred yards, he’d slowed to a brisk walk, reasoning that he could keep a better eye on the creek bank at that pace and that he should approach the abandoned farm with at least a little caution. He was almost there, watching both, when he discovered that one of the crew-cut sheep wasn’t a ewe. He heard the hooves and started to turn just in time to get butted—literally—and somersault through the dry buffalo grass. Wynn found himself on hands and knees, only a few feet from where a big ram with a punk hairstyle was getting ready to show off for his harem again. Wynn took advantage of his stance, converting it into a sprinter’s start. He hurdled the electric fence with a burst of speed and agility that might have earned him a starting spot on the Buffalo Springs High track team if he’d exhibited it a decade earlier. Sheep aren’t bright creatures, but electric fences have a way of imprinting themselves on even the dimmest reasoning. The ram stopped a few feet behind the wire and began trotting back and forth, as if inviting Wynn to a rematch. Far behind him, among the thin patches of grass, a pair of items reflected the hot sun. Wynn checked his belt. His radio was missing. His hands were empty too. Before encountering the sheep, one of them had held his .357 magnum. The big ram eyed him and stalked the edge of the pasture staying between Wynn and the tools of his trade. Wynn began to realize this was taking on all the earmarks of another “lose some.”

This had never been a particularly prosperous farm. The drought of the late eighties had driven it from ailing to terminal, along with the finances of the family who eventually lost it to the bank, and themselves to another chance somewhere in the sunbelt where it didn’t matter if wheat here yielded less than twenty bushels an acre at under $3.50 a bushel. The place had been abandoned as a home for only a few years, but spare dollars had been required for payments or repairing machinery—nothing left for a weather-beaten house and outbuildings—and the place looked as though it had been without human companionship for decades.

There were a few osage orange trees in the yard, survivors despite the drought because they were a hardy plant and their root systems were close enough to benefit from the groundwater generated by the creek. Wynn used them as camouflage as he zigzagged his way toward the first of the outbuildings. He didn’t really expect to find the murderer here, but with his .357 sunning itself in the pasture, he wouldn’t take any chances. The first building had probably been a chicken coop. Wynn ducked inside, looking for a loose two-by-four he could take with him to revisit the ram. The place looked dilapidated enough, but Wynn was unable to budge any of the boards he tried to wrench free. The only weapon he found was an empty beer bottle beside a comfortable looking pile of straw and a used condom. Wynn resolved to check the place again some night. He wasn’t prompted by a deep sense of outraged morality. He just thought it would be fun to scare a couple of kids and maybe cop a peek at a naked prom queen.

Unable to find anything better, he took the bottle. Not much of a weapon, not even enough to get him back into the pasture, but having something in his hand made him feel a bit more confident. It was just as well since the black man was trotting across the farm yard toward him as he exited the hen house. Wynn grabbed the bottle in both hands and extended it, sighting over its label and squaring his body in a perfect shooter’s stance.

“Freeze!” he shouted.

***

“What did Englishman want?” Mad Dog asked, leaning against the door frame of the Sheriff’s Office.

“Where Wynn is. Where French is. If Doc had anything for him yet.”

“And?”

Mrs. Kraus couldn’t decide whether Mad Dog looked more or less grotesque with the paint washed off. He’d spent the last twenty minutes in the restroom across the hall. From the way his skin glowed, as if it had been lightly abraded rather than gently scrubbed, she suspected he’d discovered the hard way, just as she once had, that the body paint didn’t come off as easily as advertised. Mad Dog stood there in his black Speedos, his near nakedness emphasized by his shaved head. He was an uncommonly powerful figure for a man his age.

“I didn’t kill him,” Mad Dog said in response to her silent stare.

She leaned back in her chair, pulling the top drawer of her desk open as she did so, exposing the handle of the Glock to her view if not his. “Never thought you did,” she said, reassuringly. She smiled, showing off her teeth. A few were still of organic origin.

“And?” he tried again.

“And nothing,” she said. “‘Wynn some’ is lost, drove himself off into Kastleman’s field west of town and ain’t been seen since. French ain’t home yet and nobody can find him. No other deputies in the county just now. Me and your brother’s the only law enforcement anybody can reach. And Doc hasn’t called.”

“Englishman find somebody to tell Old Man Simms about his boy yet?”

“My guess would be that’s one reason he’s looking for a spare deputy. He’s following up some lead he picked up over at the Reverend’s or he’d probably go himself. I’d call, but the old man’s pretty frail and that seems a heartless way to learn a relative’s gone, even if neither had much use for the other.” Besides, the sheriff had told her not to call when she’d suggested it. If the shock of the call didn’t kill him, Old Man Simms was the kind to sue over a near miss.

“You know,” Mad Dog mused. “I feel responsible.” Mrs. Kraus let her fingers slide into the drawer. “Maybe I’ll go out and tell him. That way, if a deputy does show up, Englishman can use him for something more important. Englishman calls again, let him know where I’ve gone.”

“I’ll do that,” Mrs. Kraus agreed. She kept her hand near the butt of the gun until she heard Mad Dog’s aging Saab start up. When his car was no longer audible she took the phone off the hook and went to visit the restroom herself.