Dead Dogs and Englishmen (2 page)

“The iceman cometh
…”
I muttered under my breath, meaning the messenger of death, as Deputy Dolly Wakowski, in her rickety squad car, turned in the sloping driveway behind me.

I grabbed for Sorrow's collar and missed. If I'd been a little faster, I told myself, I could have gotten back to my house. I could have escaped down into the crawl space, dragged Sorrow in behind me, slammed the trap door behind us, and hid long enough to avoid her.

Sadly, even hiding wouldn't shake her when she was on my trail. Being rude wouldn't get her off my back. Saying I was busy and had
work to do, or “just don't have the time”—all polite excuses from my Ann Arbor days—didn't penetrate Dolly's head. Like a bloodhound, Dolly stomped straight on whether it was with phone calls, pounding at my door, or pulling in behind me and tooting her horn when I tried to ignore her. I was Dolly's special project, like it or not. She was single-handedly going to see to it that I didn't starve to death in her territory. And she was determined to have a friendly journalist covering her police stories so when it came to filling Chief Lucky Barnard's post as head of Leetsville's police force, she'd be the first in line.

Sorrow, indiscriminate greeter that he was, went bounding back up the drive as her car door opened with the squeal of metal on metal. Dolly stuck her heavy black shoes out toward the gravel then pushed her square body, in summer blues, off the seat to stand, frowning, next to the car, under what should have been a shady maple but was instead a mass of bare sticks. I thought of the
falling tent worm poop she was going to get on her hat and smiled,
then waved.

I was stuck. Dolly didn't drive all the way out from Leetsville, wasting taxpayer's gas, unless she had an urgent and significant reason for doing so. Lately, the urgent and significant reasons always had to do with murder.

She put one pudgy hand squarely on top of Sorrow's head, keeping him away from her. “Told you, gotta get him trained” were her first, squeaky-voiced words. When he sat quietly, tail beating small puffs from the gravel, she folded her arms across her bountiful chest, and muttered, “No such thing as bad dogs, only bad owners.”

“Thanks,” I said ungraciously, giving her my best tight-lipped smile. “And ‘hello' to you too.”

“I got something for you. Tried to call,” she groused, then bent to pull her cop pant legs down over her big shoes. Dark sweat circles stained her blue short-sleeved shirt. “Guess you bought one of those machines that warn you who's calling. Dumb. Especially if it's me, with news you need to hear.”

“Check your paranoia, Dolly. Sorrow and I were out walking.” I sighed, then watched as tent worm pellets fell on her blue hat, bounced a couple of times, and stayed there.

“Thought maybe you was ignoring the phone again. You know, like you do sometimes.”

“When I'm writing,” I said. “Can't write and talk on the phone.”

“Yeah, well, hope it all comes to something—your books. Not that I want you mentioning me in any of them.”

“I'll change your name.”

“To what? Do I get to choose?”

“How about ‘Millicent.' I think it means ‘mouthy' in Latin.”

“What the hell kind of name is that?” Her pale blue, red-rimmed eyes went wide. The left eye wandered off a little, as if it had a mind of its own.

Another poop skittered across her hat. I knew I should tell her to move, or I could just count the drops gently raining down on her.

I shrugged. Maybe I even rolled my eyes. “What have you got for me? I'll call Bill, see if it's anything he …”

“Yeah, sure. Like he don't want a murder.”

I shook my head and worked my feet from under Sorrow's large, warm butt, where he'd decided to plant his body. “If your person is really dead and … well … was murdered, sure I'll go with you.”

“What do you mean ‘if'? Unless she shot herself in the back of the head, dragged her body through high weeds with her hands and feet tied, broke down the locked door to that abandoned house over on Old Farm Road, and laid herself out inside—I'd say it's a safe bet she's dead, and was murdered.”

I'd already had enough of Deputy Dolly Wakowski, who, when she finally glanced up at me, looked worse than I'd ever seen her: eyes sunken with dark half moons beneath them. She blinked hard against the bright light.

“Guys from Grayling still there, doing their thing. I'm the officer in charge but the chief's covering for me. I said I'd be right back. I'll get you in—but no pictures of the body, ya hear?”

I nodded. No pictures of the body.

“Drive your own car,” she ordered. “I don't wanna be stuck having to bring you back.”

I looked longingly toward my tiny studio halfway down the hill. Any ideas of writing shifted to a far back burner.

“And Emily …” Dolly sniffed, glanced up at me, and quickly away. “Maybe later … well … I got something I need to talk about to somebody.”

“Somebody like me?”

“Guess you're my friend.” She thought awhile. “Yeah, like you. But later. Or maybe I'll change my mind …”

“Whatever, Dolly. Give me a minute.” I reached out toward her hat, making her duck. Dolly didn't take her hat off much since she'd shaved her head to join a cult and catch a killer. The hair was still short, like a little boy's, with thin, pink scalp showing through.

“Tent worm shit,” I explained, brushing off the top of her hat.

“You could've said.” She frowned hard, then shuddered, pulling her hat off and striking it against her knee. “Just let me stand here like that …”

“Be right back,” I called over my shoulder as I turned and hurried off toward my house.

I set Sorrow up on the screened-in porch with dog bones and water, which wouldn't keep him busy long—he'd be out the newly repaired screen and running around the lake before I got to the top of the drive. But hope does, after all, spring eternal. Some day he'd be nicely trained. He'd be dependable. He'd be a really good dog. Just not yet.

I stopped to call Bill Corcoran at the paper. I told him I was heading over to where a dead body had been found—so he didn't send another reporter.

“Try to get something to me as soon as you can. Tomorrow's paper, okay?” he said, probably leaning back in his crooked desk chair and running his hand through his thick, uncombed hair the way he did, and then pushing his dark, heavy glasses up with that middle finger he sometimes left leaning against his large nose—as if to emphasize the comment.

I grabbed my camera, notebook, keys, and purse. I was out of there, backing up the drive to where Dolly waited. We took off in a shower of gravel. Me, in my aging yellow Jeep, following behind Dolly's patrol car with a big dent in the trunk and a wobbling back tire.

The house on Old
Farm Road, half-hidden by a tall clump of a long-dead woman's overgrown lilac bushes, was one of those abandoned farmhouses waiting for one last wind storm, one last snow, to finish it, weight it down to broken boards and twisted windows. Michigan State Police cars had nosed in along the road between unmarked cars and a white van—probably the techs from Grayling. Men and women—some in protective suits—stood around in the yard, behind police tape, talking, working, photographing.

I pulled in next to Dolly, got out, and waited beside my Jeep.

The blackened house stood to the front of a once-plowed field. The land was a mass of tall wild grasses stretching over a low rise to where the farmland ended and the forest began. I covered my eyes against the bright sun. In a far corner of the land three birds circled, soared, and circled again, wings barely beating as their heavy black bodies rose and fell. Even I could recognize these kings of the sky. Turkey buzzards. Ugly and clumsy on land but in the air they floated endlessly, circled gracefully, dipping, rising, turning sidewise and turning again. As I watched the birds I thought about Dolly—so graceless in most of her life but utterly at home as a cop, in charge, magnificent in her own Deputy Dolly way. But then I told myself Dolly probably wouldn't appreciate being compared to a turkey buzzard, so kept my observations to myself.

I didn't like abandoned houses. Driving by one, I could smell the mold, and the disrepair. Places where families used to live
brought up questions—the whys of everything. But then I sometimes
don't have a lot to do while I'm out driving and my
imagi
nation runs to the philosophical dark side.

“You comin' or what?” Dolly yelled as she started across the road.

“See the turkey buzzards back there?” I pointed.

She tipped her head. “Yeah? Turkey buzzards. So what?”

“Because of the body inside?”

She kept her head turned away from me, then shrugged. “Who knows? Something out there, I'd say. Dead animal probably. They got theirs. We got ours.”

We ducked under yellow police tape strung along the road frontage, down both sides of the house, and probably across the back too. Crime scene. The officers would be very careful, collecting evidence, recording finds, impressions, names of people at the scene—what each had done, when they arrived and left. Dolly had studied police procedure recently, through an online program,
and was into dotting every I and crossing every T. “So those bastards' lawyers can't trip me up in court,” she'd groused and slapped her log b
ook against her thigh.

She motioned me to hurry as she made her way toward the house. The first thing to hit me inside was just what I'd always imagined about abandoned houses: the overwhelming stink of mold and dust caught in dead, wet heat. And then the unmistakable smell of a rotting body. Enough to make me retch; only I tried never to do things like that in front of cops. Later, when I got back home and washed the stink from my clothes and skin, maybe I'd give my stomach the go-ahead, but for right now I put one hand over my nose and mouth and tried not to breathe too often.

The room we walked into wasn't large, maybe nine feet by twelve feet. Smashed beer cans, old rags, and yellowed fast food bags testified to who had been using the place lately. Peeling, blue flowered wallpaper hung in streamers from the walls. The ceiling, having fallen some time ago, exposed narrow wooden slats overhead. Piles of old plaster lay strewn across the bare, wide-plank floor. In the middle of one of the piles of fallen plaster lay the curled body of a woman. She was dark-skinned—maybe Hispanic or Indian, and lay on left her side, facing away from us, knees drawn up. She wore white shorts, streaked in places with dirt and grass stains. If her hands had been tucked beneath her chin she could have been sleeping except for her yellow cotton shirt, stained dark red with dried blood.

Half of her face had been blown away. Gunshot. I walked around the body, as close as the cops would let me get. Her hands had been pulled behind her and tied with something that looked like jute roping. Her legs were tied at the ankles with that same coarse rope. I took her to be in her forties. Dark hair—what was left of it—that looked to be neatly cut. Her nails were trimmed and painted a soft pink. The sandals on her feet were fairly new, though the heels were scuffed and worn equally, as if she'd been dragged in them. An execution-style murder.

I'd seen plenty of dead bodies while on the Ann Arbor newspaper, but it never got any easier. Just the faces—always ugly in death, eyes staring off beyond everyone, involved elsewhere. I tucked my emotions down inside me and looked at what I could see of her face. A skewed blood trail, like a trail of tears, made its way down her cheek. Another trail led from the door to the body. Even I could tell she hadn't been killed where she lay. No blood spatter on the walls, nor on the floor around her. No tissue. No pool of blood beneath the body. The crooked blood trail down her face meant she'd been leaning or sitting up when she was shot. A killing you might expect in Chicago or Detroit but not your average murder in the quiet countryside of Northern Michigan. Up here people got shot in the heat of an angry fight over a snow blower, or a man strangled his wife when she bad-mouthed his sainted mother, or meth buddies hallucinated and had an old-fashioned shoot-out. From time to time we had hunters shooting each other. Nobody got shot in the back of the head like this woman, their bodies weren't tied up, and most were left where they died.

This old house was obviously only the killer's crypt of choice, not the scene of the murder.

I stood behind Dolly and made my notes. Woman in her forties. Slight build. Not enough blood under that half of head to have been killed here. No tissue in the blood that was there. No spatter up the wall beside her. No spatter across the floor.

She was dressed neatly, despite the bloody stains. A gold cross hung around her neck.

“Emily Kincaid.” Detective Brent, from the Michigan State Police post in Gaylord, pulled his single, dark eyebrow tighter over his nose as he turned, saw me, and called my name. He left his place beside the body. “I understand why Officer Wakowski wants to include you. You've been a help to us in the past. But stay out of the way as much as you can …” He waved a large hand at me, motioning me back from the body.

“Anything on who it is? Why the body was brought here?” I got my questions out as fast as I could.

“You noticed she didn't die here.”

I nodded.

Brent gave a deep sigh. “Anyway, nothing on her. No ID. Sure not from around here. Looks Hispanic, or maybe Indian, or even Arab. Can't tell. Only thing is that gold cross around her neck. You see that? Wasn't robbery. Clothes in good order, far as I can see. Unless the M.E. finds something we aren't seeing, I'd say it wasn't rape. But we'll wait on that one.

“That gold cross might help,” Brent went on. “I'll send your paper a picture—if we don't ID her right away. You could run it. Otherwise, until we get something more, just go with the usual.”

We'd worked together a few times now. There was a grudging respect for me on his side, and a careful wariness on mine. He would shut me out of a story if he had to, when he didn't want something in the
Northern Statesman.
And I wasn't above running with something he wanted to sit on. He had his job and I had mine. We both knew that and liked each other in spite of it.

Officer Omar Winston, also from Gaylord—a little guy I had trouble liking—stood beside Brent with his hands crossed over his pants zipper, feet wide apart, his shaven head settled down into thick shoulders, like a turtle. Omar Winston rarely smiled. And rarely was he more than minimally polite. He kept his almost lidless round eyes firmly on the world around him, ready to take on any and all miscreants and reporters—whichever gave him the most trouble. Dolly said she thought he was a good guy, but then Dolly stood up for all cops, at all times, and in all places. I'd had a couple of run-ins with Winston and they hadn't been pleasant. He was an unattractive man with a snarly face and a sycophantic way with officers ranked above him. If he'd shuffled along instead of marching, if he'd been just a little more self effacing, he'd have made a perfect Barkis, a character from
David Copperfield.
Ahhh but,
Barkis is willing.
Yes,
Barkis is willing.
Though I liked Dickens's Barkis, this one annoyed me.

“Anybody check out those turkey buzzards in the back?” I asked, to a round of startled and incredulous cop faces.

“What the hell, Miss Kincaid, we've got our hands full right here.” This from little Omar Winston. I noticed his left cheek was ticking away. That was what I liked best about the guy, that I made him nervous.

“I just thought … they're back there. Could be something …”

Brent turned from talking in low tones with the coroner. He sighed. “Dolly, maybe you and Emily should go take a look. They were out there when we got here. Nothing like checking—be on the safe side. Let Emily get a couple of pictures of the house. But keep her out of the way of the investigating officers, all right?” He turned to me. “No disrespect, Emily. Just, you know, don't want some lawyer saying we let you foul up the crime scene when this comes to court.”

I nodded. I knew the drill.

Dolly looked at me, her face bunched with distaste. She wasn't happy being sent off to check on birds, but she was a good soldier, did as she was told, dragging me out of the house and around to the back where those birds still circled.

In the yard, as I leaned against a broken clothes pole half-fallen in the weeds, I asked Dolly if Lieutenant Brent was leaving her in charge and if I should call her for updates.

Her eyes brightened for the first time though there seemed to be something missing there. She toed an ancient pile of rags on the ground. “Yup. We got our reciprocal agreement on cases like this. Though sometimes you wouldn't know it, the way those state boys throw their weight around. Chief Barnard says to make sure we hold on to this one. We'll get forensics through them, but that's about all.” Her little face drew in with distaste. “They know who's got near a 100 percent solve rate on murders over here. I'm not pushing it in their faces, mind you. But it's out there. I'm doin' a damned good job.” She hesitated, then added a grudging, “With a little of your help.”

I smiled.

“I think you've got everything we got, so far.” She pushed off. “Give me a call later. I'll let you know if we get anything on the victim. Could be some migrant grudge playing out here. She looks Mexican. Maybe somebody's girlfriend. You know, a jealous fight. Something like that. But then … we don't know. Wouldn't be a bad idea to visit a few of the orchards and farms that employ Mexican workers. But don't put anything about that in your story.” She snapped her head up, realizing she was thinking out loud. “I'll let you know what you can print.”

She took one big sniff and went back to business, striding off over the overgrown farm field toward the woods.

The birds were still there, graceful shadows against a silvery sky. I put my head down and made my way behind Dolly through tall weeds that caught at my ankles. She was kind of pissed at me for making her leave the real scene of the crime, but even though I was new to this wild northern world, I knew that circling buzzards spelled something dead. If she wasn't interested, I was. And I was willing to be laughed at later if we came on a dead possum.

Dolly stopped just ahead of me. “Hey,” she yelled, then bent over, pointing toward a path in the grass. She traced a straight line through the weeds, out to where we were walking.

“Drag trail,” she said. “Watch where you walk. Either somebody dragged the body to the house this way, or there's another body out there. Stay behind me, you hear?”

I moved over, avoiding the straight path of broken weeds leading toward where we were heading. Something had been pulled along, all right, and not too long ago. The weeds were still flattened, but rebounding slowly. Eventually they'd be standing straight with only a hint of what had happened here.

When we got close, the buzzards paid us little attention. They were into what they fought over, there on the ground. The ugly, red wattled things with skinny necks and dull eyes flew at each other, sprang into the air, then settled ahead of us in the tall grass. One of the birds glared forward, as if fixated by something. Another leaped back atop a thing lying too still to be living. The bird took a long moment to pull himself away from what he'd found, giving way grudgingly, only as we got almost to where he stood.

A dog lay among flattened grasses, a pale furred dog—probably a pit bull, I thought, from the configuration of the snout and thick body, and from the pink-rimmed eye I could see, one pink-rimmed, oozing eye the buzzard had been pecking.