Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (8 page)

She was out of the office when the short, swarthy man with the gymnast’s build came in, knocked at the open door and called out “Hello,” and “Is anybody home?” The only reply he got was the angry pulse of the phone demanding to be put back on its cradle and the sheriff’s muffled voice interrupted by occasional bursts of static as he tried to raise Mrs. Kraus on the radio that occupied the center of her desk.

“I don’t know if you can hear me,” the sheriff finally told the stranger after repeating “Five-oh-one to five hundred” several times. “I tried to call but the line was busy. I’m in my truck and headed out of town. Simms’ last phone call was to Sourdough Ranch and that’s where I’m going. I’ll phone from there, but if something comes up and you can’t reach me on the radio, call ahead and leave a message or maybe get one of the neighbors to take it over and meet me there.”

“Thank you,” the man with the Mediterranean features replied in the direction of the radio. “All that time going through the house gets me nothing. I come in here and I don’t even have to ask. Yes, thank you very much indeed.”

“Did you copy that?” the sheriff’s voice inquired. There was no longer anyone in his office to hear.

***

“Assume the position,” Wynn commanded.

“What position?” The black man seemed genuinely confused. At least he’d frozen when the deputy ordered him to do so and had yet to notice, or if he had, to mention, that what was aimed at him was an empty beer bottle.

“Uh…lean up against that tree and spread your arms and legs,” Wynn instructed.

“This tree?” the black man pointed. It wasn’t the one Wynn had in mind but it didn’t matter. He wanted the man’s back to him so he wouldn’t realize Wynn was unarmed. And he wanted the man in a position from which it would be difficult to launch an attack.

“Fine,” Wynn said.

The black man walked over to the tree and leaned against it. “I can’t really spread my hands,” he apologized. “The trunk’s not big enough. Will this do?”

“That’s OK,” Wynn replied, beginning to feel in control again. “Just do the best you can.” Wynn stepped up between the man’s legs, stuck the mouth of the beer bottle in the small of his back, and patted him down. Wynn found nothing more lethal than a wallet and a cell phone. He removed them from the suspect and tossed them behind him. Wynn glanced longingly at the hand cuffs clipped to his belt, but his two-year-old had lost the key a month ago and the manufacturer hadn’t sent replacements yet.

“Stand up real slow, but keep those feet spread,” Wynn ordered, “and take your belt off.”

The man did as asked. Wynn fashioned a reasonable substitute for the cuffs out of the belt and lashed the man’s hands behind his back.

“Who are you?” the deputy asked.

“Neil Bowen.”

“What you doing out here, Neil Bowen?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Bowen replied. “Trying to keep from getting lynched, I suppose.”

“Now that I believe.” Wynn bent and picked up the wallet and thumbed through a collection of plastic credit cards and photo IDs, all of which confirmed that the individual in custody was one Neil Raymond Bowen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University. That was surprising. It was one thing to expect a transient black man to kill Reverend Simms. Quite another to find that transient probably earned at least four times Wynn’s annual salary. Folks like that seldom wandered around the country bumping off people according to some randomly psychotic pattern. Still, a black professor of history was an unlikely figure to find on foot in Simms neighborhood so shortly after the murder. That left him as a reasonable suspect in Wynn’s mind.

“Well, Neil,” Wynn asked, “care to tell me why you killed him?” Wynn wanted to see the black man’s face when he answered, watch for clues that he was lying, so Wynn stepped around in front of his prisoner.

What he saw was surprise. “That’s a beer bottle you’ve been pointing at me,” Neil Bowen said, accusingly.

Wynn flushed a little but told the black man to just answer the question.

“I haven’t killed anyone,” Bowen finally said.

“Then why’d you run.”

“Because you drove at me like you intended to run me down.” Wynn recalled, that since he’d been sure the stranger must be the murderer, that had been pretty much his intention. He decided not to pursue the point any further.

“If you didn’t kill him, who did?”

“Not knowing who was killed puts me at something of a disadvantage in making a guess, officer, especially since I don’t know a soul among your local population.”

“So then, what were you doing there?”

“I was looking for help. My car quit on a dirt road a couple of miles north of here. I couldn’t raise anyone with my cellular. I could see that there must be some sort of community here because of the grain elevator and a couple of other buildings, including the spire of what looks like a courthouse, so I hiked across some fields and then started knocking on doors. I hadn’t found anybody home yet when you started chasing me.”

“A likely story,” Wynn muttered around the uncomfortable suspicion that it just might be true. College professors didn’t make good random serial killers, especially ones who carried the kind of identification that could be checked. A professor would surely be smart enough to avoid being found in front of his victim’s home. Wynn clung desperately to the hope that a professor might be so clever that he would do something apparently stupid just to confuse investigators like himself.

“Well, Dr. Bowen, I got one dead body and one stranger on the street where he lived, so I hope you’ll pardon me if I keep your hands secured till we get you back to the jail and I can check up on you. Either way, we’re going to take a little walk, down the drive and across the road where I can borrow a phone to report in.”.

“You can use my cell phone if you’d like.”

“Not much point,” Wynn said, though he proceeded to do exactly that. The phone told him it had an adequate charge, but no cell was available. “These things almost never work here. Benteen County’s supposed to be overlapped by two cells, but the sheriff thinks maybe we’re underlapped instead. Not enough folks out here for the phone companies to worry over.

“Now turn around and follow the drive. We got that walk to take.” Wynn hoped somebody would be home at the next farm. Otherwise they were going to have to walk down to the highway and over the bridge and all the way back to Buffalo Springs.

***

Old Man Simms’ place was only about six miles south of town. It didn’t take Mad Dog long to get there. He guided his Saab Turbo through the gap in the evergreens. With the turn, he slipped from a landscape that resembled a solar anvil into a shaded forest of maturing hardwoods that almost hid the two-story frame house in their midst. Not so many years back, this yard would have been immaculately manicured, watered to a lush green on which you could practice putting. Green it still was, lush too, but grasses were being replaced by weeds and though someone had seen that the lawn got enough water to support the trees, no one had bothered to mow for about a month. That, Mad Dog recalled, was when Simms fired his last hired hand.

The Simms’ place had never fit into the Kansas landscape, but now, untended, it had exchanged an elegant feel for an eerie one. In the sudden half-light of the yard, Mad Dog almost expected to hear a Rod Serling voice-over explaining that he had just stepped into the Twilight Zone.

The drive circled the house and Mad Dog parked his wolf in Swede’s clothing under a massive maple that must have been planted when the house was built. A tire swing hung from one of its branches. The youngest Simms would have stopped using it about three decades ago.

The yard was unnaturally still. Normally by this time of day a steady south wind would have moaned through the leafy canopy. Not today, and no birds either. Probably too hot for them, he thought, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, then drying it on his Levis. He still had the Speedos on underneath, but he’d donned a shirt and pants and boots before leaving Buffalo Springs. Bad enough to tell a man his son had been butchered without making a mockery of the scene by doing it bald and next to nude.

Mad Dog decided even the bald might be a bit much. He reached into the car for his weathered green and yellow John Deere cap, set it at a jaunty angle—he couldn’t set a cap any other way—and climbed the porch to the front door.

He knocked and the door swung slightly open. Mad Dog found it surprising that the door wasn’t latched, but not that it was unlocked. Most people in Benteen County still didn’t lock their homes. Violence intruded into their lives through their TV screens, not their front doors.

“Anybody home?” Mad Dog called. The last time he’d been through this door was more than thirty-five years ago in hot pursuit of Janie Jorgenson, easily the pick of the Buffalo Springs High School cheerleaders. It was only hours after they’d won the state championship and he’d carried the ball for over 170 yards and intercepted a pass in the closing seconds to preserve the victory. Old Man Simms hadn’t been old then. Simms and his wife had been among the team’s most ardent boosters because their oldest boy, the Reverend’s brother, Tommy, had been a big and mean-for-his-age sophomore lineman. This magnificent yard and home had been a natural place for a celebration. It had been a memorable night for Mad Dog. Janie had intercepted the first of his passes as he drove her home afterward, but then she’d let him fumble under her blouse and skirt and they’d soon achieved an even grander prize.

It wasn’t Janie’s trim little bottom, beckoning from within bright panties under a short skirt—scarlet under gold—he followed through the door this time, just a memory. Mad Dog wondered briefly what had become of Janie, and if she ever thought of him and their season of trial and Eros.

It was cooler in the house than outside, but not by much. And quiet, though you couldn’t have heard a pin drop because of the plush pearl-grey carpet that lined the foyer.

“Mr. Simms?”

Still no answer. Mad Dog knew he should leave, go back to the Maddox farm his mother had made sure he inherited and call Mrs. Kraus or Englishman to report his failure from there, but something drew him.

There was a living room to the right of the foyer and a dining room to the left. At the rear there was a closet, a hall, and a stairway to the second floor. Old Man Simms was sprawled near the top of the stairs, his eyes watching Mad Dog’s progress. Actually, his line of sight was slightly lower, almost straight down the steps, as if he were wondering how he could descend from up there. He certainly wasn’t going to do it himself, not with his neck at that unnatural angle and the life gone out of him. He’d been dead for a while. Mad Dog could tell because the spot where the patch of scalp had been removed was dried and crusted. But for that you might have thought he’d simply slipped and fallen. Mad Dog’s second corpse of the day had been more gently handled than the first. It didn’t matter much, though. Mad Dog felt himself go wobbly in the knees and found himself sitting on the carpet, not quite knowing how he got there. A phone stood on a table nearby. Mad Dog reached out, picked it up, and punched in his brother’s number at the Sheriff’s Office.

***

Sunday was usually Bertha’s biggest day. Under normal circumstances she outdrew the Buffalo Springs Non-Denominational Church. On a day when the only competition were the Methodists down on Jackson and the Lutherans out on Poplar, or the Buffalo Burger Drive Inn over where the highways intersected across from the Texaco, she had been swamped. By mid-afternoon, virtually every rumor had poured through Bertha’s doors, been swapped across her formica tables, passed along the sweep of her counter, and washed up against the booths by the back wall. Most of the tale tellers had long ago given up and gone home when the stranger walked in and ordered a glass of iced tea. Bertha swiped the counter in front of him with a rag that smelled strongly of disinfectant but left a suspicious grey film behind. She was aggressive with it, challenging almost, as if she were waving a weapon under his nose.

It was impossible to tell if the glass she served his tea in was clean because it was sweating almost as much as he was after his walk from the courthouse. He took a chance and sipped it and smiled at her when it tasted like tea and not the stuff on the rag.

Bertha and her four remaining customers kept wary eyes on him while he drank, eyes that shifted innocently away whenever he looked in their direction, then flashed back at the first opportunity. Everyone was keenly aware that no arrest had been made yet. Peter Simms’ murderer still roamed free. Strangers, who might normally be greeted with enthusiasm at least equal to the money they might be willing to spend in the county were, today, treated as if they might momentarily don a hockey mask and begin pulling the starter rope on a bloody chain saw.

The compact man with the international face finished his tea and Bertha came cautiously back down the counter. “More?” she inquired.

“No thanks,” he answered. “But there is something you might be able to help me with.”.

Bertha raised her eyebrows and kept her hand near the bin with the steak knives.

“Can you tell me how to find the Sourdough Ranch?”

“Lookin’ to buy a horse?” a farmer at a table by the front window asked.

“No, trying to find someone.”

Eyebrows raised again. Bertha’s, not having fully returned to a normal position after the first query, threatened to merge with her hairline.