“Yes, I remember. He thinks someone’s offering them farm work. Denise, what happened?”
“A milk truck driver scared some turkey vultures off a body in the ditch on Liberty Hill Road. Deputy Luck just got there. It looks like a homicide. It looks like the victim might have been homeless.”
The jar grew warm and heavy in her hand. She heard the gunshot echoes from her dream.
“Sheriff? Are you there?”
“Let me guess,” she said. “Shot twice with a small-bore rifle, probably a .22.”
The phone went silent for moment.
“And the body’s caked in dirt.”
“What’s going on, Heidi?”
“Am I right?”
“Heidi, what the hell is going on?”
She pulled the jar away and finished into the grass. She raised her face toward the house and saw Grammy Belle staring back at her. The guest room curtain fell closed. She dumped the jar.
“I’m on my way,” she said.
CHAPTER 2
Leroy Fanta, having heard the call on his bedside scanner and beaten the sheriff to the scene, was lighting his first smoke of the day when he saw Heidi Kick’s brown-on-tan Charger crest into the already brutal morning sun on Liberty Hill Road.
At the sight of his favorite sheriff, Fanta felt pride—and then, beneath his ribs, a hot gob of loss.
Come November, it looked as if Heidi Kick would be gone.
He could visualize the headline he would write:
Challenger’s Attacks Take Down First Female Sheriff
Except the Bad Axe Broadcaster did not print news anymore. It no longer needed headlines, nor an editor to write them. After a century in service, the Broadcaster was no longer even a newspaper. It had become the Happy Valley Shopper after Babette Rickreiner had sucked it into her empire, and as of last week, after forty-three years as editor-in-chief, Fanta had become unemployed.
He should turn his scanner off, maybe. But here he was. Sheriff Kick’s new rookie, Deputy Lyndsey Luck, had blocked the road with three orange cones. Fanta hustled in his old-man shamble to move them. His favorite sheriff steered past with a nod and parked behind the milk truck. Then she stayed inside the Charger, talking on her cell phone.
Now fully into his first sweat of another tropical day in the Bad Axe, Fanta energized himself with a pull on his Winston and limped toward Deputy Luck and the milk truck driver where they stood on the bridge over Hink’s Creek. His joints hurt, every goddamn one of them. His fingertips prickled. His pig valve felt sticky as it flapped. His hip locked, and he had to tack left to go straight. He hadn’t seen a dead body in a while, he told himself, other than his own in the mirror. What Babette Rickreiner had done to the Broadcaster had crushed him. He felt like a ghost as he joined the deputy and her witness.
“Where?”
Deputy Luck aimed a stolid nod at the bend in the road across from the milk truck, where the ditch bristled with wild parsnip.
“He? Or she?”
“The deceased is an adult male,” reported the deputy in her just-out-of-school manner. “Caucasian, between twenty and forty years of age.”
“I just seen a glimpse,” the driver jumped in to explain. Fanta looked at an eager kid with a peach-fuzz beard and thirty pounds of extra fat. “I was keeping my eye out for some lost beer. I just picked up milk at Lars Hansen’s, and he told me his wife drove back from town on this road yesterday with the tailgate open. A twelve-pack of Busch Light got slung out the back, and they couldn’t ever find it.”
Light beer, Fanta mused. Though presumed locally to be harmless, light beer figured in an absurdly high percentage of Bad Axe calamities, one way or another. Nothing light about a dozen Miller Lites in the bloodstream, and he knew the sheriff would agree. He looked to see if she was done inside her Charger. Not yet.
“I thought that twelver might have slung out on the corner, and I just barely seen something, so I backed up to look.”
Deputy Luck, brown-eyed and apple-cheeked, stocky and earnest, a Green Bay girl whose go-to expression seemed to be, Oh, cheese, had been toiling with a short pen over a small notebook. “And your zip code?” she asked, continuing her interview of the driver.
He gave her the digits. The rookie wrote them down carefully and then double-checked. Fanta experienced another pang for Sheriff Kick. His zip code? Oh, cheese. A month ago, Lyndsey Luck had been the sheriff’s fifth choice to replace David Morales. The Police and Fire Commission had felt jilted when first Olaf Yttri and then Morales—both outstanding chief deputies—had left the Bad Axe for greener pastures. After Morales departed in late June for a police job in Santa Fe, the commission’s solution had been to overrule the sheriff during the hiring process and prioritize inexperience, because the important thing was that the new hire have nowhere better to go. The PFC had then tried to make it up to Heidi Kick by selecting a woman. Hence twenty-two-year-old Lyndsey Luck, still just a girl, honestly, whom Fanta had once seen, in the midst of an arrest, ask a very drunk and potentially violent man to spell “Bob.”
She asked the driver, “How often do you drive this road?”
“Back and forth every day, seven days a week.”
“So, would you say fourteen times per week?”
“Uh… yeah. Yeah! Good call.”
With the young people getting on nicely, Fanta drew on his cigarette and, without moving, drifted away. In his head, apropos the fall election, he composed a fantasy endorsement that boasted of Heidi Kick’s success. In fact, the sheriff had been too busy succeeding at the job to campaign for it, so, as an antidote to Barry Rickreiner’s rude campaign signs and social media jackassery, Fanta’s argument would state facts and reference cases solved, and it would “kick-start” the sheriff’s reluctant defense.
He would remind readers of the runaway girl from Iowa who had been raped and murdered, and disposed of in a freezer. He would reiterate that, thanks to Sheriff Kick, four local men were doing five-to-ten for the rape, and a fifth was doing life for the murder. In the process, a hidden history of sex crimes had been brought to light—and who knew how many future victims had been spared?
The sheriff remained on the phone inside her Charger. As Fanta wondered whether the call was about one of her twin little boys acting out again, he continued dreaming up his case of support. Last spring, amid a local infection of hate, there had been the executions of a beloved retired teacher (Augustus Pfaff: shot, mutilated, burned) and the sheriff’s own brother-in-law (Kenny Kick: shot) at the hands of a local white-power gang leader (Rolf Stang Jr.). Stang Jr. had in turn been fatally half beheaded (competition throwing ax) by Terry James Lord, a racist troll from Oklahoma who had flung acid in the sheriff’s face. Lord had been sentenced to two life terms in federal prison. In Fanta’s fantasy endorsement, he would remind Bad Axers that through all this mayhem, Heidi Kick had never flinched. Rapists and traffickers, kidnappers and racists and killers, all accounted for by a brave and hardworking sheriff, who despite her workload had never missed a high school sporting event, a Red Cross blood drive, a ribbon cutting or festival opening, or even a Lady Lions Club luncheon. These facts would glow convincingly from page seven, as Fanta’s lead editorial:
Bad Axe Safe and Sound Under Steady Leadership of Sheriff Kick
Finally she stepped from her Charger, a striking almost-redhead in her mid-thirties, compact and smart in her uniform and cap, almost always bouncy and smiling but this morning wearing a frown and rigid in her body language. The weeks of record temperatures had taken their toll. Crimes of all kinds were up. And despite emergency welfare visits that had kept the sheriff and her deputies running day and night, the lives of three elderly Bad Axers had been lost to heatstroke. Her opponent had marked each death with an RIP tweet and #kickherout.
While Fanta was lost in his thoughts, Deputy Luck had left the bridge to join her boss in appraising the body. Uncomfortable with silence, the giddy milk truck driver tried to make chitchat.
“How’s it g
oing, man?”
“On the bubble,” Fanta told him.
The kid scratched himself.
“Between Anger and Despair,” Fanta clarified.
“Oh. Yeah. Sure.”
“With daily visits from Denial and Bargaining. Babette thinks she let me go, but I sued for age discrimination. Also, I’m a disabled veteran, so there are ADA and VEVRAA issues. She’s filed for a restraining order, so there are injunctions flying every which way right now.”
“Oh. Right. You’re the newspaper guy.”
“Was.”
“Oh. Right.”
“I was killed in Vietnam,” Fanta elaborated. “I just haven’t died yet.”
“Oh. Sure.”
A few seconds later, the kid tried bravely to reboot. “Well, I guess all the news these days is online anyway. Did you see the one about the dog that ate a golf ball?”
Rather than chew off an innocent head, Fanta schlepped over the bridge and into Sheriff Kick’s line of sight, where he hovered suggestively. Her nod meant that he could keep coming and have a look.
Faceup in the wild parsnip sprawled a young white man, thirtyish but heading into premature middle age, balding with a fringe of stiff black hair, robustly built yet wizened to hardly more than pale skin and knobby bones, wearing nothing besides saggy vintage underwear and one shin-high rubber boot, dry and cracked.
Lyndsey Luck cataloged facts into her notebook. “Black boot on his left foot. Ranger brand. That underwear looks too big. Tattoos on shoulders, forearms, hands, and neck. I count one, two gunshot wounds to the chest.”
Sheriff Kick corrected her rookie. “That’s his other left foot. And those are exit wounds.”
“Right foot, sorry. And exit wounds.”
“Perfect.”
Fanta studied the two small eruptions of gore: both ragged and mud-crusted, one through the lower right rib cage, the other through the opposite armpit. The rest of the dead man was flaked and clumped with dried dirt and pinkly stippled with what looked like a rash. Fanta noted a decidedly elsewhere look about the scene, as if this trauma had occurred in some faraway place and the victim had been dumped here among alien weeds. Sheriff Kick turned. The editor’s weak heart sped, his pig valve flapping.
“Grape, any idea who this is?”
He kept looking just in case: busted nose, self-inflicted tattoos, his one bare foot with toenails so long that they curled. But Fanta only recognized the boot. Ranger was a brand favored by the local Amish.
“I’m sorry, Sheriff. I’ve never seen him before.”
“Deputy, who is the truck driver?”
“Cody Jacob Wilkinson, age twenty-two, commercial license valid, driving record clean, residence on Ten Hollows Road in Town of Hefty.”
“Did he see anyone else on the road this morning?”
“Negative. But he said a Linda Larsen drove through here last evening and lost a twelve-pack of Busch Light off an open tailgate and couldn’t locate it. Mr. Wilkinson was on the lookout.”
Sheriff Kick found a stick. She squatted on the slope of the ditch and pushed a toxic parsnip stem aside so she could see the body more clearly. As Fanta watched, she seemed to become stuck there, as if too deeply in lost thought or too affected by the death to move.
Meanwhile, Deputy Luck had stewed her way to a conclusion. “It’s possible that someone else located that beer.”
Fanta gravely told her, “Beer vultures.” Then he winked.
“Oh, cheese,” she whispered to herself and looked away.
At last the sheriff stood with a scowl, pushed TALK on her radio handset, and began telling Denise Halverson what she needed to happen. She needed any relevant missing person reports analyzed. She needed a team of deputies to search a mile of Liberty Hill Road in both directions. If there was a shell casing, a scrap of clothing, a left boot, a beer can, anything, she wanted it mapped and taken into evidence. She wanted Vernon County’s K-9 team here on mutual-aid loan ASAP to see if the man had died at the end of any kind of trail.
“I’ll do chain-of-custody with the body to the morgue. Dr. Kleekamp can give us a picture with his face cleaned up. We’ll send it around, maybe somebody will recognize him. Meanwhile, we’ll run his fingerprints through CrimeNet. One way or another, maybe we can get a name and talk to his… his next of kin.”
As the sheriff said next of kin, Fanta heard a slight waver in her voice. He could guess why. The dead man had a mother. Motherhood was hard enough without your boy turning up dead in a ditch.
“Be nice to print his picture in a newspaper,” she growled at Fanta as she passed him, as if to cover up the emotion he had seen.
He picked up the stick she had dropped and went painfully to one knee, feeling his swollen organs squish around, scooting as close to the body as he could without tumbling down the ditch on top of it.
He pushed the parsnip stem aside. On the dead man’s shoulder was a crude tattoo, a faded red heart around one word: MOM.
* * *
When Leroy “Grape” Fanta arrived at the two-story brick building, circa 1908, that had been his daily wheelhouse for forty-three years—204 Second Street, Farmstead, Wisconsin—he could hear his desk phone ringing through the old glass door. But his key wouldn’t work in the lock.
He pulled the key out and studied it.
The phone stopped ringing, then immediately started again.
His key looked fine. But maybe he had bent it somehow. Or maybe there was something in the lock—though not that he could see. The phone stopped and started again. Whoever was calling didn’t want to use the message machine, meaning that he or she represented exactly the kind of old-school Bad Axer who wanted a human being on the other end, who felt cut off by the loss of the weekly Broadcaster, to whom saying, All the news is online anyway, amounted to saying, You don’t count anymore.
Fanta grumbled around the block toward the alley where the back door was. Lord love a duck, it was hot. Seven A.M. in Wisconsin, and it felt like high noon on Hill 937 in South Vietnam. He rounded the corner, saw that the bank sign read ninety-five degrees, and he snorted. That was only weather. As he had been pointing out in the Broadcaster just two weeks ago, climate was another story: this had become the hottest summer ever, breaking last summer’s record, which had broken the record from the summer before. Cumulatively, the relentless thermal load had settled into the bricks and the concrete and the asphalt, had sunk into the fields and the forests and the spring creeks, and either Fanta was mistaken, or he was seeing rapid changes. Lately, different birds hunted different insects in the Bad Axe, different parasitic vines twined the tree trunks, a bigger and bolder mustelid hunted a more prolific mouse population in his woodpile. Unless Fanta was mistaken, and he was not, he had seen a nutria—sleek Gulf Coast rodent, big as a beaver—ransacking the bank of the Bad Axe River. And the gypsy moths, their incessantly chewing caterpillars the vanguard of an invading horde, shrouding trees everywhere with their sticky gray tents, ominous and funereal… and, goddamn it, Fanta’s key didn’t work in the back door either.
He noticed that the knob and lock were shiny. They were different. They were new.
He labored back to the front door.
Same.
Babette Rickreiner had changed the locks on him, still with his personals inside, his whiskey and cigarettes, music cassette tapes, pictures of his late wife, a hundred years of Bad Axe history in his filing cabinets.
And the phone kept ringing.
Streaming sweat and cursing everything Rickreiner—“Happy Valley Shopper, my flat ass”—“Barry Rickreiner for Sheriff over my road-killed body”—Fanta jaywalked across Main Street to Farmstead Home and Agricultural Supply, where he shoved himself through the door. His weary pig-valve heart felt strange, unusually thumpy. Was it the heat, or the dead body, or the wounded look on the face of his favorite sheriff? Was it his Agent Orange exposure, or the carditis inflicted by the Lyme spirochetes upon his heart muscle? It was hard to say exactly which specific pains
afflicted Fanta as he wallowed up to the agricultural desk. Perhaps all of them. His vision tunneled. His veins throbbed. His joints bucked and squealed like train couplings.
“What can I do you for, Grape?”
His short-term memory had been dissolving under stress. He had to think for a moment.
“One crowbar, please,” he wheezed eventually at his old pal Ron Bellweather.
“The biggest, nastiest crowbar you can sell me.”
CHAPTER 3
A blue body bag lay zipped on the examining table. The latest Bad Axe County coroner, the multitalented Dr. Blaine Kleekamp, both the sheriff’s family medicine doc and a wildlife veterinarian, shut off the water and turned from the sink, snapping on rubber gloves.
“How’s your little boy?”
Her stomach seemed to flop—which one?—and she glanced away.
School had been out for exactly 64 days—yes, she was counting—and Opie had been gone at Rainbow Kids Camp for the last 23 of those days—and the precise divisor for either of those numerators was the number of times, either 17 or 12, that Taylor had been in a time-out since. In any case, the outcome of the calculation equaled parental worry. Or could it be possible, she thought just now, that the correct numerator was the 117 days since Barry Rickreiner had filed the paperwork to run for Bad Axe County Sheriff, when the first KICK HER OUT and BARRY HER signs had appeared? Was that when Taylor’s troubles had begun?
From the basement window of Strangspleen Funeral Home, the county’s make-do morgue, she watched the tires of the ambulance retreat, leaving her a view of the backside of Farmers’ Direct-Buy, the original of Babette Rickreiner’s franchise properties, inherited from her late husband. In the Rickreiner tradition of predatory enterprise, Farmers’ Direct-Buy dangled a lose-lose deal by which sinking farmers could acquire suicidal levels of debt while spending borrowed money elsewhere and defunding the local economy. The sight of BARRY HER’s cash source made the sheriff remember that Dr. Kleekamp had declared himself a Heidi Kick supporter. Since Oppo claimed to work for the county, Oppo could be Kleekamp, she thought. She might trust him if he was.
Bad Moon Rising Page 2