The Totem 1979 (11 page)

He came around to where the screen was leaning against his window, took it off, and crawled through into his room. Now he feared that he would get blood on the carpet and the drapes, leaning swiftly out to put the screen back in and snap it shut. With one hand underneath the other, catching drops of blood, he fumbled at the doorknob to his room and tiptoed down the hall to close the door behind him in the bathroom. When he switched the light on, he was shocked. The hand looked worse than he had thought, the bite deep down to the bone, and wide, and swollen, oozing blood, covered with grit, a mass of ugly, bulging, ragged flesh. He gripped the sink to keep from dropping to his knees. He had never felt a pain like this, made worse by the sight of what was causing it. In the mirror, he saw the sweat on his face, the dirt and blood across his pirate top, his skin as white as the towels that hung by the sink. His pallor really scared him. He was trembling. He couldn’t stop. He turned on the tap to wash his hand, understanding that he’d have to wash the pirate top as well. After reaching down to take it off, he rinsed it, then squeezed it to get the water out. He checked to make sure that all the blood was off, and then he went back to his hand. The more he washed, the more it continued bleeding. But at least the wound was clean now, and he grabbed a rag beneath the sink to bind the wound and keep the blood from dripping. Nothing more to do. He thought about some first-aid cream, but he had bound the wound already, and he didn’t feel like doing that again. Indeed he felt sick, and he was thinking only of his bed. He took the pirate top and shut the lights off, turned the knob and went out down the hall.

“Is that you, Warren? What’s the matter?”

He froze and waited.

“Warren?”

“Nothing, Mother. Going to the bathroom.”

“All right, dear.”

Warren tiptoed into his room, closed the door, and leaned against it, breathing hard, sweating. He bit his lip to ease the pain. He waited, but his mother didn’t come. He hung the pirate top within his closet, limped to the bed, and sat there, taking off his shoes. The mud. He hadn’t thought to wash the mud off, and he’d have to hide his sneakers. Somewhere in his closet. Far in back. He didn’t want to, barely had the strength, and had the feeling that this would never end. He took his pants off, put on his pirate bottoms, and crawled into bed. He wished that he had never gone out. He wished that he had stayed at home and gone to sleep. He tried to sleep. His hand kept throbbing. He stared at the moonlight on his wall.

Chapter Two.

“It was a dog, all right. There isn’t any question.”

“That’s what ripped his face, or that’s what killed him?” Slaughter asked.

“Both. The cause of death was loss of blood from massive wounds around the face and neck.”

Slaughter put his beer can down. “You mean there really is a chance his throat was slit?”

The medical examiner just shook his head. “No, I remembered what you said back in that field. I checked the throat especially. The jugular was ripped, not cut. Oh sure, some nut might still have gone at Clifford with a hand rake, something that would tear, but that would leave a different set of marks than all those bites you saw on him.”

The medical examiner reached for his own beer can, and Slaughter shrugged.

“Okay then,” Slaughter told him. “How about this? The nut rips Clifford’s throat and runs away. A dog finds Clifford and starts chewing. That way all the first marks are obliterated.”

The medical examiner just shook his head again.

“Well, why not?” Slaughter asked.

“All the wounds showed evidence of bleeding.”

“Oh.” And Slaughter leaned back in the chair and studied his beer can. That was final. Only living bodies bleed, so Clifford must have been alive when he was mangled. If some nut had ripped his throat, Clifford might have lived for half a minute longer, but not long enough to bleed from what a dog might later do.

It was half-past two at night, and they were in the medical examiner’s office. Slaughter had stayed near the stockpens, helping Rettig and the new man ask the neighbors if they’d heard some trouble in the night. He had asked about a prowler or a stray dog that was barking. Then he’d met with Rettig and the new man, but they hadn’t learned a thing. The trouble was, the field was too far from the houses. Near the noisy stockpens and the highway over there, a sound from a dog would not have carried very well. Slaughter told his men to write their report and go home but in the morning to search the field.

“What for?”

“I’m not quite sure yet. Do it, though.”

Then he’d looked at the setting sun and known he couldn’t put it off much longer: he would have to go see Clifford’s widow. In Detroit, he’d on occasion had to tell someone that a wife or child or husband had been killed, but he’d never known the people he was telling. By contrast, here those he told were always people he knew, and some days it was worse than being the chief of police was worth.

Like today. To see his friend Doc Markle dead beside that mangled steer. To hear about his friend’s wife so distraught that she was in the hospital (Slaughter planned to visit her as well). And then to go out and explain to Clifford’s wife what had happened. It was bad enough to have to say that Clifford had been killed. But not to know why he’d been killed or how, that made Slaughter feel inept and worthless. He had held Clifford’s widow, let her keep on crying, and helped her sit down on the sofa. He had brought her coffee, waited until her son arrived from the other side of town, and finally decided that he’d earned the right to leave. He told her that he’d let her know when she could have the body, that he’d pass on any news the minute he received it. Then he’d said good-bye and went outside and nearly lost his balance on the porch.

By then the sun was gone, and he was looking at the stars, the rising moon, thinking that he ought to go see Mrs. Markle, but he couldn’t make himself. The scene with Clifford’s widow had been just too much. The only thing Slaughter wanted was to get away from this, to get inside his car and roll the windows down and drive. To his place out in the country where he fed and watered both his horses-he’d forgotten when he last had ridden them-and then because the things he’d seen today had ruined any appetite he might have had, he put off supper, driving back to town.

He parked, lights off, in the shadows by the stockpens, looking toward the field in case he saw some movement. But there wasn’t anything, and after all, he couldn’t spend the night like this, so he drove to the station. The lights were on along the hall. The night man was on duty by the two-way radio. Tall and thin. An Adam’s apple that bobbed whenever he spoke. “Hi, Chief. I wondered who was out there.”

“Much doing?”

“Quiet.”

“For a change today.”

Slaughter walked toward his glassed-in section of the office. He sat and thought a moment, looking at the night sheet he had read in the morning. He tapped a pencil on his desk and reached to open the phone book. First, the hospital. Mrs. Markle? She’s asleep now, resting better. Thank you. Then a number in the valley. Sam Bodine. But no one answered. Then the state police.

“It’s Slaughter here. I wondered if you’d check on someone for me. Sam Bodine… . That’s right. He’s got a ranch on Route 43, twenty miles north of town. I wonder if you’d look in on him for me… . No, there’s nothing wrong, at least not that I know of. But I went out there today, and no one was around. It seemed like they had left in quite a hurry. I phoned later this afternoon and then again just now, but both times no one answered, and I thought if you had a man out that way, he could maybe have a look… . Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Slaughter hung up and again tapped his pencil on his desk.

Too much in one day, he thought. Fifteen minutes later, the night man told him that the medical examiner was on the line.

Slaughter picked up the phone. “So how’d you know I was working?”

“Well, I called your house, and no one answered. Where else would you be? You mean you’ve got a lady friend shacked up that I don’t know about?”

“You would have wakened me at this hour?”

“Why not? All the rest of us are working. Actually I knew you’d be waiting, and I phoned this number first. You care to visit?”

“You’re finished?”

‘Just this minute.”

“On my way.”

“Hey, hold it. Don’t forget-“

“I have it in my trunk.”

Slaughter stood and left the office. “I’ll be at the medical examiner’s,” he told the night man. He was moving down the hall. What he’d put inside his trunk were two six-packs of Coors that he’d picked up at a convenience store as he was heading toward the office. It was now a ritual with them. Whenever Slaughter made the medical examiner work late, he always dropped in at the hospital and offered beer and talked with him a while. The gesture was a small one but appreciated, and besides, the chance to talk, to get to know the people whom he worked with, that was part of Slaughter’s reason for his move out here. In fact, he’d even started looking forward to their chats, as if a corpse were not the reason for their late-night conversations. Not this time, however. No, not this time.

Slaughter got there in five minutes. In a town this size, there wasn’t any place he couldn’t get to quickly. He parked in back beside the spaces for the doctors and went in through the Emergency ward. The hospital was small by big-city standards: two stories made of brick and glass with wings off to the right and left, and one wing down the middle. But though small, it served the town quite well, and thinking of the nightmares of Detroit, Slaughter was grateful that he seldom saw a bleeding, groaning patient who’d been brought in from a knife fight or a shooting. He walked along the corridor and reached the section marked pathology where, without knocking, he turned the office doorknob, and the medical examiner was in there, sitting, waiting.

As they sipped their beer, Slaughter shifted in his chair to face the darkness beyond the open window where a dog began to bark. A frenzied howl came shortly afterward, then some sounds that Slaughter couldn’t identify. He listened, strangely fascinated, at the same time apprehensive.

“You know,” he said and turned and paused because he saw that the medical examiner was looking toward the window too and evidently concentrating on the sounds out there. “You know,” he said again. “Since we saw Clifford in that hollow in that field, I kept remembering the night sheet that I read this morning. There’s a mention about Clifford being missing. Something bothered me about it. I went back tonight and read it through once more. A couple lines above where Clifford’s missing, there’s a note about a dog that howled all night, another note about a prowler.”

“So?”

“Both complaints were from that neighborhood.”

The medical examiner glanced from the window, looking at him.

“Not quite near the field, but close enough.” Slaughter squinted. “How drunk was he anyhow?”

The medical examiner just shrugged, not even checking through the papers before him. “Point-two-eight percent, and he’d been drinking like that several years. His liver looked like suet.”

“Could he walk, though?”

“I see what you mean. Did someone drag him to that field, or did he walk? I found no evidence of a struggle. It could be you’ll find something different in the field. I did find some bruises on his right forearm that are compatible with his position in that hollow. Also bruises on his shoulder.”

“So?”

“Well, think about it. All those bruises were fresh, so fresh in fact that he incurred them just before he died.”

“Not after? Someone kicking at him once he’d died?”

“No, bruises are just localized internal bleeding. If you strike a corpse, you’ll cause some damage, but not bruises in the sense we mean them. Only living bodies bleed, hence only living bodies can develop bruises. Now a bruise will take a little time before it starts to color. Half an hour as an average…”

Slaughter stared at him. “You mean he landed in that hollow at least half an hour before he was attacked?”

‘That’s right. But bear in mind the words I used. I said the bruises were compatible with his position in that hollow. Could be he received them earlier some other place. But it’s my educated guess that they’re from where he fell down in that hollow. Now it’s possible that someone pushed him. If so, I don’t know what point there would have been, because the cause of death was dog bites at least half an hour later.”

“What time?”

‘Three o’clock. Three-thirty at the latest.”

“Yeah, the people at the bar said Clifford left a little after two when they closed. Fifteen minutes walk up to that field. Half an hour or so beyond that. Yeah, it brings him pretty close to three o’clock.”

“You’re understanding then?”

“I’m getting it. There wasn’t any other person, as the untouched wallet more or less suggested. He came lurching from that bar and stumbled up the street. He had to piss, he tried a shortcut, or maybe he was just confused. We’ll never know exactly why he tried that field. But halfway through, he passed out from the booze. That’s how he got the bruises. Then he slept a little, and at last the dog came on him.”

“That’s the way I reconstruct it.”

“But how many?”

“What?”

“How many dogs? One? Or several?”

“Oh. Just one.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“You know how the language goes. My educated guess.”

“Sure, but on what basis?”

“Well, the teeth marks were all uniform. But let’s assume for argument that we’ve got two dogs with the same sized teeth. Their enzymes would be different, though.”

“Their what?”

“Their enzymes. Their saliva. Hell, the crud inside their mouths. A dog can’t plant its teeth in something and not leave saliva. All the enzymes in those wounds were uniform. They came from just one dog.”

“Not a coyote, or a wolf?” Slaughter asked.

“No, the teeth were too big for a coyote’s. Yes, all right, a wolf, I’ll give you that. A wolf would be a possibility. No more than that, however. No one’s seen a wolf down here in twenty years. It’s hardly worth considering.”