Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (3 page)

Mad Dog let himself glance around at the street. He was surprised that the blurring swirl of spots didn’t remain in the center of his vision. When he looked away from the restroom his sight was clear. Whatever the phenomenon, it was located in space and time and not just in the inner workings of his mind behind his nearly coal black eyes.

The adjacent street was abandoned. There was a collection of cars down at Bertha’s, but no faces peered his way through her front window. Mad Dog decided to examine the phenomenon more closely and perhaps relieve himself of the coffee behind the structure or in some of the park’s thicker bushes.

The humming was louder as he approached the building. The spots grew clearer. A pungent odor became increasingly noticeable as he drew near. The spots, he was surprised to discover, were flies, a swarm of them so thick as to explain the hum and the apparent distortion of the atmosphere in the door to the restroom. He’d seen swarms like that around dead things, usually ones that were well past ripe, but the smell that steadily grew more offensive wasn’t decay. There was a coppery tinge to it with fecal overtones. The door to the facility was still padlocked, but lock and chain hung from the hasp, dangling where they’d been pried free of their attachment to the wall. Fresh scars on the surface gave evidence of the force used to separate them.

Mad Dog took a deep breath of relatively fresh air, swiped wildly at the flies, and stepped to the door, pushing it further open to see what was interesting the flies. What he discovered made him address a deity other than the ones he’d been concerned with contacting. He lurched away from the restroom and fell to one knee, vomiting cupcakes onto the dry grass. His stomach continued to heave long after it was empty.

What remained of the Reverend Simms, lying face down in the abandoned toilet, took no offense at Mad Dog’s reaction. The flies didn’t complain either. They were delighted to have an option.

***

Doc Jones had the sad, sagging face of a bloodhound. His big ears stood out from the side of his nearly bald head and his jowls drooped so heavily that they pulled down the corners of his mouth in the perpetual frown of disapproval he brought to any occasion that required his presence.

The sheriff met him at the door to his ten-year-old Buick station wagon, which sometimes doubled as hearse or ambulance, as the doctor parked beside the even older Benteen County Sheriff’s black and white. The patrol car’s light bar broadcast an invitation to anyone who hadn’t yet joined the throng milling about the edge of Veteran’s Memorial Park. Its driver, Deputy Wynn, known to friends and enemies as “Wynn some, lose some,” was the only person in full uniform. He was making an effort at crowd control, keeping people back from the restroom by providing grisly descriptions of what was still lying there to those who would listen. Most citizens would, and were.

“This for real, Sheriff?” Doc waved at the crowd as he pulled his house-call bag out of the vehicle. “You really got a homicide here?”

“That, or the most determined suicide I ever heard of.”

“Be damned,” the doctor muttered as the sheriff led him toward the facility. “Been coroner in Benteen County seventeen years and this is my first homicide. Thought I was going to have to retire before I got one.”

“Guess you lucked out, Doc.”

“Don’t get sarcastic on me. I’m not glad somebody got themselves murdered. I’m just interested in the challenge. Want to see if I’m up to finding a cause of death, narrowing down the time, giving you the clues you need to bag the killer. It’ll be a hell of a lot more interesting than flu or VD or hemorrhoids, or sewing up some drunk who picked wrong from among the several roads he was seeing as he drove home. Where is it?”

The sheriff pointed at the door, still ajar and filled with flies.

“Who puked in the weeds?” Doc advanced as eagerly as a teenager shopping for his first car.

“Mad Dog. Mine’s over behind those trees.”

“Yours? Sheriff, I’m surprised at you. You’ve pulled more than one kid out of a hot rod that needed kingpins instead of twin carbs.” He paused before the door. “Mad Dog didn’t do this.” The way he said it made it about half statement and half question.

“Don’t think so,” the sheriff said. “He found the body and came and got me after he stopped heaving his guts out. But he was here before dawn, probably about the time this happened. I haven’t ruled anybody out yet. Hell, I’m not even sure who’s in there.”

“Good,” Doc Jones stated. “The mystery is what makes this challenging. Not much fun in just corroborating a confession. You or Mad Dog touch anything?”

“Just the door…at least me. Unless Mad Dog did it, I don’t think he touched anything else either.”

Doc smiled, straightening out the crescent of his mouth. He slipped through the curtain of flies, then came right back out again, several shades paler. “Jesus Christ!” he said, imploring the same deity addressed earlier by Reverend Simms, then by Mad Dog. Doc Jones did manage to avoid losing his breakfast, however. The arrival of a premature baby had kept him from eating it. Doc braced himself against the door frame, mouth hanging open, inviting flies.

The sheriff refrained from making a wisecrack. What lay in there in a pool of congealing blood and excrement remained too vivid in his mind. “Any idea who he is?”.

“Shit, all that cutting, I’m not even sure it’s a he yet.” Jones shook his head and swatted at the flies, regaining self-control. “You want to take some pictures of the crime scene, get it done. I’m going to take the deceased’s temperature and check for rigor. Maybe look for lividity too, though with all that blood loss I may not find much, Then we’ll move the corpse over to Klausen’s funeral parlor. I need some place cool that doesn’t smell like an abattoir where I can work on cleaning this cadaver up and figure out who or what it was.”

The sheriff hadn’t gotten over the shock enough to think about pictures and he certainly didn’t want any. He wouldn’t need them to remember, and he didn’t want to look again. But Doc Jones was right. If anyone was charged, if this went to trial, there would have to be pictures.

“Could it be Peter Simms? I hear he didn’t show for church this morning. I can’t think of anything much short of this that would keep him from delivering a sermon.”

Doc waved at the flies again. “I don’t know. Body’s about the right size but it’s so mutilated and covered with dried blood…. Course, in a place like Buffalo Springs, it seems pretty likely if you’ve got a spare corpse and a missing person, they’re going to turn out to be one and the same. Go get your camera. Soon as we finish I’m going to need help getting it into a body bag and over to Klausen’s.”

“OK.”.

“Get a shovel or a dust pan or something too,” Doc shouted at the sheriff’s back. “Damned if I want to pick up all those entrails by hand.”

***

The sheriff paced back and forth across the antique white octagonal tiles that covered the floor of the mortician’s lab in the back of Klausen’s Funeral Home. He was trying just to listen to what Doc was saying and ignore the wet, sucking noises that resulted whenever Doc probed at the ruin that had once been human. The sheriff had a notebook and a pencil to take down any pertinent facts Doc might mention. There was a dark mark in one corner of the exposed page where he’d started to write something, only to break the lead because of the force with which he’d tried to write it. He thought about excusing himself to look for a pencil sharpener, but there was a ball point in his pocket. Doc had brought in a little portable cassette recorder and the sheriff didn’t think he’d ever forget one second of this day anyway. Besides, once he got out of the back room at Klausen’s, it would be hard to get him back in except as a customer.

“It’s Peter Simms all right,” Doc was saying, sponging the last of the dried blood off the corpse’s face. “Funny, he’s been mutilated so much, but the killer hardly touched his face at all. Kind of like he didn’t want us to have a problem making an identification.”

“You got a cause of death yet, Doc?”

Jones laughed, a sound with just a touch of hysteria to it. “Take your pick,” he said, stepping away from the stainless steel tray and waving at the bloody remains with its contrastingly pale, cherubic features. “Off hand, I’d say he bled out—cardiac arrest as a result of loss of blood. There’s any number of these wounds that would have killed him eventually. I mean, Jesus, he’s had half his fingers cut off, his guts split open and spilled all over the place, his nuts hacked off, and slashes made all over his body—most of those minor, really, though some of them go clean to the bone—and he’s been scalped. If the Reverend was lucky, the killer got to a major artery real quick and he was dead before the worst of this happened. Or he had a heart attack and died of fright. But he could have survived quite awhile, through most of this, and my guess is whoever did it would have wanted him to be as aware as possible, else why bother. I’ll be able to tell you better after I open him up.”

The sheriff wanted to look away, but he couldn’t. Simms’ face was as peaceful as might be expected after the mortician was through. He was even smiling, a knowing smile that seemed to indicate he’d recognized the joke after all and was enjoying the discomfort of those who had yet to fathom it.

“
Risus sardonicus
,” Doc explained. “Death’s grin. Some of the facial muscles contract during rigor mortis. It’s a natural phenomena but I can never help thinking they’re laughing at me.

“You don’t look so good, Sheriff. You’ve got what you need from me for now. Why not go start solving this. I don’t need you here anymore. God knows, I sure wouldn’t stay for the rest of this if I didn’t have to.” He reached down and picked up a pair of bone shears and worked their gleaming jaws to demonstrate. “Soon as I get cause and narrow down time, I’ll let you know. Go on, get.”

“Thanks Doc,” the sheriff was more relieved than he cared to admit. “You sure you don’t need help.”

“None you can provide. Besides, I just got my wish. I think this might be proof of that ancient Chinese curse. ‘May you get what you wish for.’ Well, what the Reverend here got was worse. Go grill your brother or track down a killer. I’ve got a chest to crack.”

The sheriff went.

***

The Benteen County Courthouse occupied most of the block at the west end of the square, just across the street from the park. It was a red-brick, two-storied structure with attic rooms, a central tower above its sloped roof, a plethora of chimneys, and metal gingerbread along its eves. It was a handsome building, a reminder of thousands of courthouses built just before the end of the nineteenth century and, for the most part since, replaced by structures less pleasant to the eye, less evocative of justice than expedience, but easier to heat and cool and maintain.

The sheriff swung his truck carefully into the parking lot behind the building. Actually, it was more a vacant lot than a parking lot and its exact boundaries remained a matter of dispute with Lanny York who lived next door. Lanny continually mounted an advance of fresh rose bushes that departmental deputies and other county employees as regularly ran over with their vehicles or the county’s only black and white. The bill for replacing those roses currently totaled $384.59, not including interest, but the county board of commissioners had denied the claim on the basis of the location of York’s property line and the entire matter was moving ponderously trialward. The sheriff, concerned both with the narrow margin by which he’d last been elected and what rose thorns could do to his new truck’s paint, carefully avoided York’s latest thrust into no man’s land and parked in the corner of the lot farthest from any other vehicles. He locked the doors, though it had been three months since even a purse left in an open vehicle had gone missing in the county. He climbed the steps to the courthouse’s back door and let himself in.

The “ground floor” was almost six feet above the surrounding prairie, not much of a pedestal upon which to set county law and government, but in land this flat, any elevation tended to be noticed. He threaded his way past vacant offices and out into the main foyer where a massive staircase led up to the courtrooms, only one of which remained presentable enough for use. His office was across the hall where frumpy, ageless Mrs. Kraus sat at the reception desk in front of a wall so covered with trails of moisture through decades of dust that, at first glance, it looked to be a contour map of someplace with more rugged topography than Benteen County.

“Where’s Wynn?” the sheriff asked.

“Don’t know,” Mrs. Kraus growled. Her voice tested the limits to which whiskey and heavy smoking could carry human tones. She was supposed to have been pretty once, a hot number who sent Mr. Kraus, exhausted but satiated, to an early grave. “Wynn can’t seem to remember how to work his radio. Ain’t heard from him since you sent him over to Reverend Simms’ place to look around.”

The sheriff walked over to her desk and picked up the handset out of its charger. Half a dozen rechargeable walkie-talkies were all the county could afford for its deputies. Since the county was so flat, they could occasionally make themselves heard for twenty, thirty miles, but if you wanted to contact a deputy over in Crawford or Cottonwood Corners, both within Benteen’s borders, you picked up a phone.

“Five-oh-one to five-one-one” The sheriff said to the radio. The radio lay in his hand and didn’t reply. “Five-oh-one to five-one-one,” he repeated.

“Told you,” Mrs. Kraus rasped. “I even tried calling the Reverend’s house a few minutes ago. No answer. Can’t raise anybody else either. Billy French’s wife says he had to go over to help his sister jump start her car so the family can drive back to his place for Sunday dinner. She’s gonna have him call soon as he gets back. He’s the only deputy you got’s supposed to be on call today. Hank and John took Hank’s boat over to Cheney Reservoir. Said they were going fishing, but most likely seeing which of them can drink the most beer or pick up anything remotely resembling a girl. Neither one’s due back till their shift starts tomorrow night. And Burke’s on vacation. I’m your only employee who’s both findable and willing to come in on a day off.”