Another Man's Ground--A Mystery, page 8
* * *
He didn’t call it until after eight o’clock, when every last ray of sun had retreated behind the western hills. Then they hauled Alice up, and fell silent as Kurt walked her out of the woods, his arm around her middle as she wobbled away on cramped and unsteady legs.
Hank walked over to Bill Ramsdell, who had just finished putting up his tent.
“You sure about this?”
“Oh, yeah,” Bill said. “A night in the woods is no biggie. It’ll give me a chance to test this new tent out before the Jamboree. Plus, I can use the overtime.”
Hank tried not to think about how much that would take out of his budget. Guard duty was expensive. Guard duty—he stopped Ramsdell as the deputy started to walk away.
“Just so we’re clear on everything, Bill. You’re not to leave this scene until you are personally relieved by either me or Deputy Turley. No matter what time it is, or anything else. Got it?”
Ramsdell cocked an eyebrow. “That’s what guard duty is, boss. You don’t leave.”
Hank smiled at his properly trained deputy and walked away. It was the first time he’d appreciated getting looked at like he was an idiot.
CHAPTER
12
He hoped Maggie was in bed. Or had been called into the hospital. He hoped she was somewhere—anywhere—they would be unable to have a conversation right now.
The kitchen table was not one of those places.
“Hi.”
She sat there in the dim glow of the light over the stove, wearing pajamas and her old blue robe with the spit-up stains on the shoulder and the belt chewed on one end by the dog.
He went over to the pantry and rooted around for the bread and peanut butter. The rubber chicken had been an awfully long time ago. He made himself a sandwich and poured a glass of milk. She didn’t move. He took a long drink and a big bite and then finally met her eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
He took another bite.
“I’ll say it again. I’m sorry,” she said.
He took another big bite.
“I’m really tired. I’m going to go to bed.”
She stood. Right in front of the doorway. She shoved her hands in the robe’s pockets and said, “You’re not going to go to sleep. I know you. You’re going to toss and turn and fume. We might as well talk about it now.”
“Talk about what? The state of my campaign? The effect that today will have on it? I’d rather not. I’m going to have nightmares as it is.”
She stiffened her spine in that way she did when she was about to do battle. He did not want to do this tonight. He was tired and worried and embarrassed and resentful and he just wanted to finish his damn sandwich.
And he hated that she knew all of that just by looking at him. Her spine softened and she stepped forward.
“Honey, it’s going to be okay.” Like she was soothing Benny after a scraped knee. “I know it doesn’t look so good right now, but it will be all right. There’s still a way to go before the election. You can do it.”
He couldn’t stop the look that crawled onto his face.
“Oh, yeah. Just like that. Easy. Well, it’s not easy. You can’t just put a Band-Aid on it, Doc. That’s not how it works.… This … this is not an easy thing for me. I’m not the one who knows everybody. I’m not the cute local girl who came back home. I’m the outsider. Now, after today, I’m also the politician asshole who doesn’t care about dead kids.”
“No. No. You’re not. We can fix that. We talked about it, and—”
“We? Who’s ‘we’? You and Darcy? Well, she’s fired.”
Maggie jerked back as if she’d been slapped.
“What? No—you can’t do that. Especially now. She’s going to be the one to help with this.”
“Well, unless she can suddenly rewind time and make it so neither one of you says a word at that lunch, then no, she can’t help.”
Pain flashed across Maggie’s face, but Hank didn’t stop.
“What does she do for me? Make me wear a tie. Make me get a haircut. Screw up today, that’s for sure.”
“If that’s your beef, then you need to fire me. I’m the one who told you to stay put today. And I’m the one who would have made you do all those other things. You need to, to get elected. They were all commonsense changes on the surface, not about who you are.” She took a breath. “Well … except today. That was just a cluster. And I’ll say it again. I’m. Sorry.”
He took a big bite of peanut butter and bread and chomped away while he continued to glare at her. Reasonableness hadn’t worked, so she went back to the Band-Aid approach.
“What about the speech?” she said. “That went over really well. And the campaign signs? Those look great, and they’re going up all over. We couldn’t have done that by ourselves, either. Darcy’s getting volunteers to put them up. People are volunteering for you.” She stopped and her blue eyes bored into him. “You didn’t even know that, did you?”
He did not.
And from the look on her face, he should have. She turned and marched, straight-backed, out of the kitchen and down the hallway. The door to their bedroom closed with the kind of definite click that meant he would not be following her through it. He stared at his befuddled reflection in the microwave door. How the hell had this suddenly become about his failings? He was the one who had been wronged. He was the one with the right to be angry. He stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and stomped off to find a spare pillow for the couch.
* * *
He knew he should. But Lord, he didn’t want to. The smell of must and age rose from the gash in the earth in ever greater intensity as more bones were disturbed. The air was sticky and still up here, and he knew it was worse down below. Alice’s shirt was drenched, as was the old terry-cloth headband she wore to keep the sweat out of her eyes. He didn’t know if it was working. She hadn’t looked up in more than an hour. But the bones kept coming. One at a time, in separate paper bags, sent up in the bright orange five-gallon bucket swinging from the pulley line.
And the space between the rock wall and the skeleton had slowly grown bigger. Big enough for someone who was not Alice. He knelt at the edge and rolled a rock between his palms. His neck already had a crick in it from sleeping on the couch last night. The hiking boots he had on were really too bulky to allow for easy footing in the small space. He wasn’t as fast at evidence collection as she was. He didn’t really like bugs.
And he was an ass. An ass full of excuses. He stood and called for Alice to come topside. Ramsdell replaced the bucket with the sling contraption, lowered it, and hoisted her up once she settled herself for the ride. Then he turned white when he realized what Hank intended to do.
“You’re going down there?”
Hank would have appreciated him at least attempting to hide his dismay.
“Kurt can help you lower me,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”
“I guess…”
Except that his excuse-heavy ass wouldn’t fit in the sling. After some debate that was entertaining to everyone but him, they all decided that he should stand on it and they would lower him that way.
“Lucky thing you’re wearing those sturdy boots,” Kurt said. “They’ll support your feet on the way down.”
Yeah. Lucky him.
He swung like a drunken pendulum all the way to the bottom and ignored the applause as he plunked gracelessly down in the soft soil. He braced himself on the rock wall while wrestling his feet from the sling. Ramsdell pulled it back up, and the voices above faded as everyone moved away from the edge. Now it was just him. And Little Doe.
The child was on his right side, with his face against the rock and his back to the dirt slope. Hank had no basis for using “he,” but the poor kid had to be called something. There was a very slim chance they might get lucky and know the gender after forensic anthropologists analyzed the pelvis. It was the last bone Alice had excavated—Hank now knelt in the space where it and the legs had been. He settled himself a little more and took a better look around.
Most of the dirt and detritus was fresh and must have come down with either the fleeing pájaro or the initial corpse. That soil was getting lifted out by the bucketful. Then came the harder earth, packed down by who-knew-how-many years of weather and gravity. It was a wonder Alice had even seen the bones in the first place. Only the tips of two ribs had protruded from the ground. Now enough had been cleared away to see that those were the only two that had stayed intact. The rest were a mess, broken and jumbled together in the space that once held a heart.
Hank lowered his head. Kids were so tough. The loss was inversely proportional to their size. And he had no problem admitting it. Kids’ lives were worth more. Worth more grief, worth more effort. He’d never say that in a court of law, of course, but in a fissure twenty feet below ground level with nothing but a skeleton for company, well, how could you not be honest with yourself?
He shook himself out of his rumination and started to work on the rib fragments, tiny and fragile as the bones of a sparrow. Little Doe had been a small one. No older than eight or nine, he was sure of that, even without a forensic analysis. Did he like to run through the woods? Had he fallen? Man, he hoped not. Stuck here for days, starving to death, probably injured, crying for help that never came.
He was going to be as big a mess as Alice if he kept this up. He started reciting the Cardinals roster, and by the time he got to the bullpen, his headache had faded and his breathing was back to normal. He made it through the entire National League and had just finished listing the American League’s designated hitters when his back muscles seized up.
He tottered to his feet with a groan.
“I know. You got to do that more often—stand up, I mean. Otherwise, it’ll kill you.”
A glowing bristle brush was addressing him from above. He blinked away the vertigo and saw Alice peering over the edge, her face in shadow and her spiky gray hair backlit by the sun.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Time for you to quit,” she said. “It’s getting towards sundown, and your light down there is going to go right quick. We can start again tomorrow and trade off shifts.” She stopped and her tone changed. “Uh, that is, if you want to. I didn’t mean to be giving you orders…”
Hank actually laughed, which he didn’t think would have been possible down in this godforsaken crack. “Alice, now that I know exactly what you’ve gone through for the past two days, I’d say you’ve earned the right to order everyone around. Including me. Just, please, no applause as I get lifted out of here.”
He thought he saw a grin flash across her shadowed face before she disappeared from his sight. It was the first smile he’d seen from her since she’d started on the rotting John Doe four days ago. His back felt a little bit better as Bill and Kurt lifted him to the surface.
* * *
He awoke to a two-year-old belly flopping off the arm of the couch and onto his stomach. Not the best way to start a day, unless you were Benny.
“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Up. Up. Up.” Each word was punctuated by laughter and a bounce that did no favors to Hank’s gut. He groaned and grabbed his son just as Guapo scrabbled on board and dug his paws into the parts Benny wasn’t sitting on.
He dumped them both on the floor and sat up with another groan. Benny popped up and trotted off to the kitchen. Guapo decided he was content where he was and started licking Hank’s toes. Well, Hank thought as he stared down at his muttstrosity of a pet, the day can’t get worse than this.
This second night on the couch had been an accident. He’d been waiting for Maggie to get home from the swing shift at the hospital and must have fallen asleep. She obviously hadn’t woken him up. He sighed.
“I’m more in the doghouse than you are,” he said to Guapo, who responded with a belch and a liberal licking of his own underparts. Hank removed his toes from the dog’s reach.
“Has he gone out yet?” Dunc stood in the kitchen doorway with a cup of coffee in one hand and Benny’s sippy cup in the other.
Hank shook his head. The two men stared at each other. Guapo started to whine.
“You’re the one who brought him home from the pound,” Hank said.
Dunc scowled at him, then whistled for Guapo. “No walk yet, you varmint. Go out back.”
They disappeared into the kitchen as Maribel and Maggie came down the hallway from the bedrooms. One of them gave him a hug and skipped off to breakfast. The other crossed her arms and sighed.
“Good morning,” Hank said brightly. Then his voice returned to normal. “Look, I didn’t mean to sleep out here again. I was waiting up for you and…”
She sat down next to him. “I know. Your case reports were spread all over. I stacked them over there. Didn’t want you to roll over on them.”
“Thanks.”
They sat there, side by side, for a bit, Hank staring at the floor and Maggie at the ceiling. Finally, Maggie began to speak. Hank laid his hand on her leg.
“No. I should go first. I should have known that people were volunteering for me. I should have been up on that. I wasn’t. I should have been paying attention to Darcy. But you have to admit, when I did listen to her, it didn’t work out so well.”
Maggie gritted her teeth. “Yes, and I’ve apologized for that. And she will, too.”
“Then why hasn’t she?”
“I guess that’s my fault, too,” Maggie said. “I told her to give you a few days.”
He grunted. “And that gives you more time to try to convince me not to fire her.”
Her jaw was still clenched. “Yeah, Mr. Cynical, that was just what I was thinking. You know me—playing every angle.”
“That … that’s not what I meant.” He raked his hand through his hair. “I don’t know what I mean. I don’t know what I’m going to do. This election is … is … I just want to do my job.”
Maggie put her hand over his. “Maybe,” she said carefully, “it might be good to think of it—of the campaigning—as part of your job. Not as something separate. Not as something that’s keeping you from your job.” He started to speak, and she raised her hand to stop him. “I know, I know. It is keeping you from the bodies in the woods. I get that. But I mean psychologically. If you accept that campaigning is a part of this job—and you need to do it to be good at your job—that might make it easier.”
She dropped her hand back onto his. He looked at it and sighed. It was his “I’m tired and I want this conversation to be over” sigh. She, as usual, ignored it.
“Well, how about this?” she said.“You meld the two together. That might get you to the right place mentally.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You put this away, just for a day.” She waved toward the stack of missing-children reports on the coffee table. “That poor kid’s been down there for years. One more day isn’t going to hurt that case any. You put that aside, and you get going on who tipped off Tucker.”
Hank, for the first time during the conversation, looked at his wife full-on.
“Somebody is working against you,” she said. “You need to know who it is. Use those investigative talents of yours and figure it out.”
He glared at her. “What do you think I’ve been doing?”
“Not that. Have you gone through duty logs? Have you narrowed down exactly who knew and when? Have you charted out all of the possibilities?”
“You’re the one who makes charts,” he snapped.
“Yes,” she said, so calmly that it made him even more irritated, “and you’re the one who doesn’t confront things when they have the potential to be upsetting.”
“What are you talking—I investigate murders, for chrissakes. What’s more upsetting than that?”
She put her other hand over his. “That stuff isn’t personally upsetting. Not like finding out someone you trust is sabotaging your campaign against Tucker.”
He tried to take his hand away, but she wouldn’t let him. He wanted to protest, but he couldn’t think of anything to say that would undercut her argument. Instead he started to pout, which she took as a win, releasing his hand and kissing him on the cheek before going in to breakfast. Damn woman.
CHAPTER
13
“I was starting to think you thought it was me.”
Sheila settled into the seat in front of his desk and took a sip from her fresh cup of coffee. As part of their well-established tradition, she had not brought him one.
“What? Why on earth would you think that? You’re the only one I’m sure didn’t do it.”
She gave him a small, resigned smile. He cringed.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “I … I just … I trust you. That’s all I meant.”
Her smile didn’t change. “I know. You trust me, because I’m the only one with less options than you if you lose. You at least could find another job in southern Missouri.”
He wanted to argue, to say it wasn’t true and she wouldn’t be stuck here on permanent graveyard shift at the jail if Tucker won. But she would, and they both knew it. And Hank, not for the first time, wondered what it was really like, being the first African American deputy in the county. And one of the first female deputies as well.
She sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him, though. Instead, she sat there and sipped her coffee and waited for him to speak. He wished he knew what to say.
“I … you … you have been invaluable to me since my first day at this job. I think we make a good team and I … I hope you feel the same way.” He stopped. Anything else he could say would probably come out the wrong way again.
But Sheila wasn’t going to take pity on him. She sat there calmly, holding her chipped Branson Mountain 2011 Fun Days mug with both hands, and didn’t say a word.
“So … um … would you mind—only if you want to—could you help me with the time line for contacts when Little Doe was found? If you don’t want to, that’s okay. It’s totally up to you.” He was doing his best not to look desperate, but had a feeling he wasn’t succeeding.
