Dead Sleeping Shaman (4 page)

“What I said. Lucky wants you to get back there with me and take your patrol car so he can stay in touch.”

“You nuts?” Dolly twisted her mouth and nose in opposite directions. “I’ve got order to keep here in Leetsville. This place is going crazy. They’re telling me they don’t have to believe in man’s law, is what they’re saying.”

That brought an “Amen” from behind her that was picked up and echoed around the crowd and out toward 131.

“There’s jaywalking and littering and parking violations happening all over. Caught one guy with his robe in the air, urinating over behind the gas station. You go. Be Gaylord’s jurisdiction anyway.”

I shook my head. “You know better than that. Lucky wants you there.”

“Hell’s bells and panther tracks,” she swore, then looked around at the circle of believers, drifting away now that Dolly had stopped threatening them. “You better be sure about this,” she hissed at me.

“You think I’d make it up? So I could get a ride in your patrol car with the siren blaring in my ears?”

She made a disgruntled noise, less than pleased that I had inserted myself into her busy day. With one wave at the crowd, she stalked off toward her police car, parked illegally out on the highway. She gave a last “Get back” toward a robed, shiny-headed woman walking in the road.

At the station, Dolly quickly checked in with Lucky Barnard, who said he had called Gaylord. “Medic and an ambulance on the way. Soon as Brent gets his team together, he’ll be out. Wants to see you, Emily. He’ll need a statement.”

Once away from town we didn’t pass another car on any of the roads leading to Deward. The siren screamed anyway, wailing through empty space.

“I still think you could’ve handled this better,” Dolly groused, leaning forward over the wheel, staring out the front window, her eyes going from left to right, watching for deer or any animal that would have had to be deaf not to hear us coming.

“And leave you out of it? Since when? You’d have skinned me alive when you found out.”

“Not this time. Nothing to do with us. I got plenty going on in town. Bunch of nuts. They’re sticking around ’til the twenty-seventh. You believe it? Two weeks more of their crap.” She shook her head. “I’ve got a court date with those Mitchell boys. You watch, Brent’ll try to foist this one off on us. Got enough to …”

“She probably died of natural causes. You’ll see what I mean when we get there. Could be a suicide. I didn’t look close …”

“Good thing. We don’t need civilians pawing around a crime scene.”

“Maybe not a crime scene …”

She was quiet for a while, the siren the only sound, and that was muffled by the closed windows.

“Can you imagine them believing such crap?” she asked.

“Who? What crap?”

“That the world’s going to end.”

I shrugged. “Guess so. If you believe in your preacher …”

“Crazy stuff.” Dolly shook her head. “You heard about those hoofprints he’s predicting?”

“Hoofbeats,” I said. “Can’t hear hoofprints.”

“Whatever.”

We drove on a few miles. Dolly picked up speed. “You should’ve called Gaylord straight away.”

I was tired of this reluctant virgin act. “I don’t have a cell phone.”

“Closer than coming all the way back to Leetsville, where I was busy.” She gave me a stern look. “As you could very well see.”

“It was all I could think to do.”

“You gotta think things out better.”

She made a sharp left turn at the dirt road leading to Deward. The ruts in the road made our voices staccato when we tried to talk.

“What you need is to find yourself a real job. Keep yourself busy. Emily Kincaid, Fuller Brush salesperson. Something like that.”

“They still sell Fuller Brushes?”

“Think so. You could find out.”

“I might have an agent for the book. Think I’ll start another one.”

“Don’t put me in the next one. Bad enough with this dead, dancing thing.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“And don’t just copy somebody else’s book either.”

“I didn’t do that on purpose.”

“Yeah, well. You don’t seem to do a lot of things on purpose. They happen to you.” Her voice shivered over the bumps in the road.

“You mean like Jackson hanging around?”

“Whatever …”

She slowed, turned off the siren, and drove carefully onto the two-track sand trail leading into the long-gone town. There were more ruts than I remembered, having come out so fast. She pulled off the trail and parked where the sand wasn’t deep, in the same place I’d parked before. An ambulance was there, pulled in toward the entrance to the town. No Michigan State Police cars; no white vans. Dolly reached into the back of her patrol car and pulled out a cloth bag and a clipboard. She checked her equipment, got out, and strode off toward where I pointed.

I didn’t want to have to go back to where the woman lay, but I had to. I wished for a whole phalanx of big, strong cops. I wanted deep male voices, and techs working where the body had been. I wanted that woman gone, Deward back to what it was, and those terrible pictures out of my head.

I got out of the car slowly. All I had was Dolly. Like her, I didn’t always get what I wanted.

We cautiously stepped alongside
the sand trail, trying not to disturb the ground. If there had been footprints, I’d probably already obliterated them. The place was creepy; nothing pretty about the deep blue sky, or all those high puffy clouds. I vowed I’d never come here again. My feet dragged like big cement blocks. I didn’t want to get to where she lay. Even more than last time, I didn’t want to see her. I was hoping that when we turned the last bend she’d be gone. Let Dolly and Lieutenant Brent think me crazy. I’d take the blame if she’d come out of some catatonic state, gotten up, dusted off her wild skirt, shaken herself, and gone off the way she’d come.

Dolly, ever the sprinter, hurried ahead then turned to give me one of her exasperated, face-wrinkling looks.

“You coming or what?” she demanded, hands at her hips, the drooping gun belt showing under her heavy cop jacket.

“Coming,” I mumbled as I took the last turn that would bring me to the woman, all her color, and that moveable hat.

The crows were still on guard, cawing when they saw us. Their numbers had grown. Like astonished spectators at an accident, they bowed and flew in and out of the jack pine, stopping to turn their nervous eyes down toward the woman and then toward us.

The turkey buzzard at the top of the tree was gone. I figured crows can sometimes be too much for anybody.

She was there. The big straw hat had fallen off completely and lay beside her, tipped up against her immovable body. Her blue, red-rimmed, eyes stared out across the path, toward the woods. The look on her face would have been benign if it weren’t for the many flies that had gathered, making her features seem to move. Two medics were stepping back from the body.

“That her?” Dolly asked me ingenuously, standing with her feet apart, heavy shoes planted firmly in the sand.

I wanted to say “No, that’s another one,” but didn’t because my stomach was turning again and I knew I had almost nothing left down there to give up.

She looked at me over her shoulder. “Know her?”

I shook my head.

“Me either. Sure dressed funny. Think she’s a gypsy?” She bit her lip and looked hard at the woman. “Probably a suicide, you think?”

“How?”

“Poison. Pills.”

“You see a pill bottle? Poison?”

She shook her head, set her crime scene bag and clipboard down, then whisked her hands off on her pants. “Could be in her pocket. I’m not touching anything.”

Dolly greeted the medics, her hand out. “I’ll be the officer in charge on this one,” she said. “She dead?”

The two guys wore white suits, booties covering their feet, and clear latex gloves on their hands. Hard to tell what they looked like, other than Pillsbury Dough Boys. One nodded. “Dead all right.”

“Anything obvious?”

He shook his head.

Dolly set her bag on the ground, asked the two guys for their names, then wrote them on her clipboard. The men went back toward their ambulance.

“Gotta keep a scene log,” she told me as she held her clipboard out importantly. “You’re on it, too. Anybody who gets near this woman goes into my log.

“And I gotta tape the area.” Dolly busily drew a big roll of yellow police tape from her bag. She handed one end of the tape to me, hollering for me to watch where I walked, then, carefully staying away from the body, she ran the tape around a few of the big trees, making a large square with the dead woman at its center.

“That should do it,” she said, eyeing our work. I said I thought it looked fine, the tape taking in the entire area around the body—to the back, both sides, and way down in front. Dolly pulled out her camera and began to take photos of the scene. Behind her, I slipped my camera from my pocket and took photos of my own. Quickly, before she noticed and yelled at me, I snapped the area, not just where the woman lay, but wider shots—all around her. I knelt and took contrast shots. The sun was directly overhead—not much shadow, but still I thought I saw one place that was different from the rest. Standing, looking down, I couldn’t see what the photo had shown. I would look at it again, after I got home, I told myself.

Voices came from toward the parking area and suddenly the space around us filled with men and women. Dolly introduced me, calling me “the body finder” which, I supposed, described my role there. Lieutenant Jimmy Brent nodded, his bald head beady with sweat from the walk in, his unibrow forming a single dark cloud over deeply suspicious eyes.

“I’ll take a preliminary statement,” he said, getting down to business as he pointed me to a quiet place under tall trees, out of the way of the three techs climbing into their white suits. The M.E., old Doc Stevenson, was there, taking photos, then a video of the body, the area, and then of all who were gathered.

I went with Lieutenant Brent to a quieter place, under tall trees, a soft bed of dried pine needles at our feet.

“Mind saying what you were doing out here?” Brent held a pad of official-looking paper and a pen in his flat hands. His voice fell into the deep tones of the accuser as the wind kicked up and swirled dead needles around our legs.

“Assignment.”

“That it?”

“Why else?” I knew the police didn’t care for nuance—like “I was feeling good and wanted to be left alone” or “I was thinking about writing another book …”

He raised that eyebrow at me, the look like a shade going up, but under the shade were those eyes. He wrote on his pad of paper.

“Magazine?”

I shook my head. “
Northern Statesman
.”

“On … what … ?”

“You know. Ghost towns. For an October issue.”

“And she … ,” he nodded to where the woman lay, “was here when you got here? You thought she was sleeping, I guess.”

I nodded but added nothing, recalling all cop shows where people lawyered up in the face of tough questioning.

“When’d you realize she was dead? I mean, except for the flies …”

I shrugged and dug my toe in, scraping a hole in the needles with my way-off-white sneaker.

“I moved her foot and she didn’t respond. Then a fly walked down her cheek.”

“You touch the body or anything? I mean other than the shoe?”

I shook my head.

“If we find your fingerprints, that’s the reason.”

“Why else?” I demanded, getting angry. “Look, I’ve got to call the story into the paper. My editor will want something ASAP.”

“Check with Dolly. I’ll keep her informed. Or call me at the police post.” The response was grudging. I figured I’d get as much help from him as I had on past stories. The guy was nothing if not tight lipped.

He asked a few more questions and said he wanted me in Gaylord for a follow-up as soon as I could arrange it. I went back to stand away from all of them and watch.

“Since I’m the O.I.C.,” Dolly said to Brent as he ambled back to stand beside her, “I’m keeping records. I already took the photos … stuff like that. You doing a baseline measurement?”

Brent nodded, then asked one of the officers to get the tape measure from his car.

“Good thing I’ve been studying crime scene management online,” Dolly was going on to anybody who would listen. “No damned defense lawyer is gonna catch me out this time if I have to testify.”

“Good job, Officer,” Brent actually smiled, then ran a hand over his head, coughed a little, and went off with another man to establish the baseline—setting a hundred-foot tape measure from tree to tree: point A to point B to point C, with the woman’s body the central focus. From there they took more measurements and recorded them on a drawing of the site—always with the body and its orientation at the center.

I supposed I should be going. I wasn’t needed and was actually ignored as the men and women went about their jobs, but it was fascinating to watch how quickly the body wasn’t as important as the investigation. Everything was done meticulously. Dolly surprised me, going about recording people at the site, taking her photos, and making notes as to what everyone was doing or finding. Evidently she’d learned a lot since the last couple of bodies we’d found.

The M.E., having finished his work, stepped out of the grid the officers had set up and joined Dolly and Brent, heads down, glancing at the woman, and then at the ground. When their huddle was over, he motioned for the medics to come take the body, packed his bag, and walked off.

I turned away as the dead woman was gone over, hands bagged, then lifted so her head fell back. A thin, white rope around her neck could be seen. I gagged, but not so loud anyone noticed. The body was wrapped and zipped, set on a stretcher—ready for the pathologist. As they wheeled her past me, Dolly must have noticed my face had gone green. She came to where I huddled in on myself and put her hand at my back, patting me awkwardly. “You ok?” she asked, bending her head to mine.

I nodded even though a lonely Special K flake did gymnastics in my stomach.

Dolly leaned closer. “Strangled. Rope. Guess you were right to begin with. Sure is dead. And you know what else? Another thing you were onto before me? I think it’s ours: me and Lucky, and you, of course.”

She hesitated when I pulled away and gave her my version of a “you’ve-got-to-be-kidding” look. “I mean, I might know somebody who’s hunting for her. We got a missing person called in early today. And it’s all about Leetsville. We’ll have to take this one on, Emily. It’s ours—if it’s who I think it is.”

“I don’t want a body,” I moaned as the sturdy little woman moved back, bottom lip determinedly up over her top lip, police hat sitting pertly atop wet-looking, semi-blond hair. Dolly ready for action.

“Doesn’t matter what you want,” she growled. “We never get what we want, Emily. You, of all people, should know that by now. Didn’t sell a book yet, did ya? Didn’t get your ex-husband back. Don’t have a job. We get what we’re given. That’s all. We got to handle whatever that is.”

After that little philosophical diatribe, I protested no more. All I wanted was to return to my quiet little house on my quiet little beaver-ridden lake, and be left alone. Again I didn’t get what I wanted. I had to wait for Dolly to finish and take me back to town to get my car.