A Living Grave

by Robert E. Dunn

  I got it. I nodded.

  “People forget sometimes, they think we live in the modern age. This part of the world just kind of wears its civilization like a Sunday suit. Once church is over it comes off easy. Last thing we need is a reason for them to take off the suit and go looking for their own answers.”

  Despite the folksy delivery, the threat was real. The Ozarks had a long history of citizen justice.

  “I’m going to need to talk to the parents,” I told him.

  “I know.” He sighed as he said it. “Make it tomorrow. Let me talk to them again first—ease them into it.”

  “Sheriff, that’s—”

  “I know. It’s not the way to do things. But it’s the way I want it done this time.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I have plenty to occupy me.”

  I left his office fuming a little. The sheriff was no professional, but he knew enough to understand this probably had more to do with either family or people known to the family than it did to any stranger. Even a stranger that was a booze-running biker.

  Failing an interview with the parents, the next best thing was to talk to close contacts. Kids the age of Angela were in many ways more deeply connected to friends than to their family. That was where I wanted to start. I wasn’t going to ignore the other issue, either. I had asked Clare to come in and look at some booking photos. The biker was our only lead so far and I wanted a name to go along with it. I asked the desk to set that up for me and I headed out to the Briscoe address. I had a feeling there would be some kids hanging around.

  * * *

  The windows were down on the departmental SUV I had taken. At lake level the air was relatively cool. I liked the feel as it kicked my hair. Leaving Forsyth, the roads snaked under green cover following ancient animal and Indian trails. Sunlight shooting through the gaps in leaves stuttered across my windshield. Both temperature and elevation rose as I moved away from Lake Taneycomo.

  The roads in the county were my thinking spaces. They were just right for splitting my concentration. One part of my mind drove, watching the road and controlling my hands and feet, and by extension the vehicle. Another deeper part of my brain was freed to gnaw over problems like a dog working an old bone. I didn’t even need a specific problem. Sometimes you let the mind free and it takes you to places you never planned.

  I had just started to relax into my own thoughts when the cell phone rang. So much for mental freedom. It wasn’t Darlene. Everyone from the sheriff’s department had the same ring tone and it wasn’t playing. I took a quick look at the number, then set the cell down and let it ring. Five-seven-one area code, that’s Quantico, Virginia. You say Quantico and most people have the same first thought: FBI. That wasn’t who I thought of. Quantico is also the home of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigative Division Headquarters. It would be Major John Reach calling and being ignored again. I didn’t know what he wanted. The one message I had listened to said only that he wanted to speak with me. I didn’t want to speak with him. The call went to voice mail and I tried to get my mind free again.

  Freedom wouldn’t come. I knew I had fallen blindly into one of those cases that had no good ending. It would end. There would be a time that it was no longer at the forefront of anyone’s mind but the parents of the dead child. But it would pass without grace. The best that could be hoped for would be a clean-lined, official stamp of finality. Answers and consequences. Not that either would really matter. This girl’s death would be a landmark in the lives of an innocent family. Like a strip mine sunk into the private landscape of their life, it would exist as a huge, horrendous wound that would never heal. People like to talk about closure. They especially like to say it to cops. They need closure. They want closure. There would be no closing the pit for these people. For the moment I was glad the sheriff would be talking with the parents. It was a brave and honest thing for him to deliver the news himself. He deserved respect.

  That’s what the drive does for me, perspective. I had gotten on the road thinking only of how Sheriff Benson had slowed me down and gotten in my way. I need a lot more perspective in my life.

  I wasn’t going to get it on that drive, it seemed. At the same time, the cell rang again and I came around a bend to see a man fire up a loud pipe Harley and tear ass away from an older crew-cab pickup on the side of the road. That wasn’t so alarming, but the body lying in front of the truck was.

  The phone call was the same one I had ignored before, and it was easy to ignore again. I crossed over the highway and parked facing traffic in the same dirt cutout as the pickup truck. Before leaving the SUV I called in the location and requested an ambulance. I also asked for a BOLO—be on the lookout—for the Harley and the biker. I didn’t see the patch on his vest, but that’s the nice thing about club bikers. Even if you don’t see the colors their look is like a uniform. If he stays on the road we’ll get him.

  When I stepped from my vehicle the man on the ground grunted a hard, achy-sounding breath into the dirt. He followed with a series of hacking coughs coming up from deep in his chest. Once the coughing passed, his hands scrabbled out in the dirt, rocks, and trash looking for a place to land before pushing his body up. His shaved head was smeared with blood running from a wound in his scalp. It was ugly and there was no telling if he had any damage to his neck.

  “I don’t think you should try getting up just yet, sir,” I told him.

  He ignored me long enough to push up onto his hands and knees. His head remained dangling from his shoulders like it weighed just too much to lift. Then he spit a bloody glob into the dirt.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked, still without looking up.

  I told him and he nodded his head in a vague waggle. “Nice boots,” he said. “Lady cop?”

  “I’m a cop.”

  He laughed a little, but it turned into coughing. He looked like he was fighting to control that as well as to keep his head still. When it passed, he asked, “That mean you’re not a lady?”

  “It means I’m a cop and it’s all that matters in this situation.”

  Once again he spit out the blood pooling in his mouth. There wasn’t as much this time. “Only reason I ask was, the footwear didn’t seem to match the voice. You’re Hurricane, aren’t you?”

  “My name is Detective Katrina Williams.”

  “Hurricane,” he said bluntly. “I’ve heard of you. I don’t suppose you got them?”

  “The guy got away on his bike but I got a call out. We’ll find him. EMTs are on their way too. You just relax.”

  “Guy?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said guy. There was only one?”

  “That’s all I saw.”

  “Me too, but it felt like a whole herd.”

  “Herd?”

  This time when he laughed he put a little more head into it. Before he spoke again he spit out another mouthful of blood. “Collective noun,” he said. “You know how a group of crows is a murder. A flock of ravens isn’t a flock. It’s an unkindness. Then there’s a shrewdness of apes. When I was lying here I decided that I had been kicked to pieces by a herd of bastards.”

  “Well, aren’t you the interesting one?”

  “I know,” he said and I could hear the smile in his voice now. “Why would anyone want to give me a beatdown? I’m just a harmless, interesting guy.” He lifted his head and looked up at me for the first time. As soon as he did he winced at the pain and started coughing again.

  “Take it slow and easy,” I cautioned.

  In answer he nodded, grimacing with the effort. Even with the pained look it was a nice face. Under the blood was a square jaw that managed to be masculine without getting into lantern shaped. His eyes were a rich hazel-brown that could have been chosen from a color chart to match perfectly with his sun-darkened skin. There was one incongruity. His head was bald and it looked like a recent development. The scalp was still paler than the rest of him and made him look maybe a bit older than I thought he was. If I
had met him someplace else I would have looked twice and thought three times. Even here, on the side of the road, with blood running down his cheek and his lip swelling, I liked what I saw. Or maybe it was just that I would like any man that took an ass-kicking and got up laughing instead of whining and cursing.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  While looking up at me he ran his tongue around his mouth, probably looking for missing or broken teeth. A couple of times he winced when he found something, the sources of the blood he spit out one more time. The look on his face was the down-but-not-out of a fighter, a crooked smile that broke into a bent grin as he offered up his hand to me.

  I took it and helped him up.

  “I’m Nelson Solomon,” he said.

  “Like the painter?”

  The grin that had shaped his lips made its way to his eyes and then it was a genuine smile. “Exactly like the painter,” he told me. For a moment he stood there holding onto my hand and steadying himself. When he was confident enough in his footing he let go and waved me over toward the barbed-wire fence and the pasture beyond. “Give me a hand with the rest of my stuff?”

  “I really don’t think you should be climbing fences or tramping through fields right now, Mr. Solomon.”

  He waved my concern off. “I was never unconscious, just took a few shots and got the wind knocked out of me.” Before I could say anything more he went for the fence and ducked through the sagging, rusted strands of tetanus waiting to happen.

  “You mind telling me what happened here?” I asked as he came up on the other side. In his hand was a stained rag and a couple of tubes that looked like toothpaste.

  “I was over there.” He pointed off to a tree line. “There’s a good view of the lake and I was painting.” As he talked, he walked, picking up more tubes and adding brushes. The tubes were paint.

  I had thought he was kidding after I said his name was like the painter. I didn’t know much about art, but his was all over the place—posters, coffee-table books, calendars. He was a merchandising gold mine. I couldn’t afford even a decent print and couldn’t imagine the cost of one of the originals. I had heard there was a place selling them down on the Branson Landing, a shopping development for tourists. Other than loitering teens, locals don’t spend much time there.

  While I was thinking, he kept gathering. Working his way down a trail trampled in the grass, he pulled up a box with legs on it. When he set it upright it was a little fold-up easel and compartment for supplies. After dumping everything else he had picked up inside, he collapsed the whole thing and held it up by a handle. He was grinning even bigger than before, pointing to a stain on one corner.

  “I got him with this,” he called out. “See? Blood.”

  “So he attacked you?”

  Walking back along the trail, he nodded at me as he kept an eye out for any other pieces of his kit. “He was just trying to scare me, probably.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked. “Did you know him?”

  “Nope,” he answered, still smiling. This time, though, his eyes didn’t quite look at mine.

  “So why’d he come mess with you?”

  “I don’t know. Some people are just general, all-around assholes.” That time he was looking at me, but there was something more than the conversation at hand in his gaze. He looked like a man having a good time. He added, “You know?” And then he looked from my face down my body. He wasn’t rude or trying to be obvious about it; just a little more honest than I was used to.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

  Nelson Solomon, the famous painter, looked back at me then. He pursed his lips and looked like a schoolboy caught checking out the new teacher. I thought I should keep things on track, so I said, “Things don’t usually happen that way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People, even asshole bikers, don’t usually start in with random strangers. Especially not when they have to get off their bike, climb a fence, and cross a field to do it. Must have been some reason.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like art?”

  “Do all your critics work so hard to make their point?”

  “Sometimes it feels like it,” he said, smiling again.

  “Could this have been his property?”

  “No,” Nelson said, and it was the first time he sounded absolutely certain. “Bank owns it.”

  “Did the bank give you permission to be here?” I asked as I put a foot on the center strand of wire and pulled up on the top strand.

  Just before ducking through he nodded again. Once back on the road side of the fence he said, “I’m a good customer.”

  I didn’t doubt that.

  “So, you don’t know what the guy wanted?”

  “He wanted to kick my ass and he mostly did.” He said that with a self-deprecating smile that, if I’m honest with myself, I enjoyed. Then he added, “I think he wanted me to be scared a little bit too.” That was the truest thing he’d said to me about the fight.

  “But you didn’t just leave and call the sheriff’s department?”

  “I’ve had enough scares in my life.”

  That’s when I looked at his eyes and saw the kind of resolve that can make a cop’s life both easier and more difficult. You want to root for the good people who stand up for themselves, but at the same time you see the consequences of that every day.

  “You decided you just had to fight him, then?”

  That grin again.

  “There was no fight. Mostly it was just me getting beat up. I was already finished up and packed, but I learned a long time ago, if you let the bastards take, they never stop. He started pushing me around when I told him to kiss my ass. Then he took hold of my painting and said he was keeping it, and I was leaving. That’s when I swung the field kit at him.”

  I looked again out to the trees he had pointed to earlier. “Out there?” I asked. “Then how did all the mess get strewn around up here?”

  I looked away and watched the big cube-shaped ambulance pull up behind my SUV.

  “No,” he said. “That was where he left me on the ground. There, where everything spilled out, was where I caught up to him.”

  “And I found you here because . . .”

  “I caught up to him again at his bike. He must have gotten a good one in to my ribs, because I went down. Then the kicking started. That’s why I thought maybe there were more of them. It felt like I was being trampled.”

  One of the EMT’s, an older man named Lawrence trotted up to me at the fence with his big kit.

  “What’s up, Hurricane?” he asked.

  I pointed over to Solomon.

  “I don’t need an ambulance,” he said, waving both hands in front of himself.

  “Go with Lawrence,” I told him. “If nothing else, he’ll wipe some of that blood off your face.”

  Solomon hit me with a look that said something there were no words for, but women always recognize. The surprising thing about it was that I didn’t mind. Then the look blossomed into that grin again. “Pretty delicate for a hurricane, aren’t you?” he asked and it wasn’t just teasing, it was flirting. Real flirting, not just banter. It had been a long time, but not so long that I completely missed it.

  I smiled. I couldn’t help it; the expression took over my face so quickly I was unprepared. Then I touched the scar beside my eye and let the smile fall off my face before I said, “Believe me, Mr. Solomon, delicate is not one of my stronger qualities.”

  Who knows what thoughts that put into his head, but he was smiling like he had just caught me naked and liked what he saw, before hefting the painting kit into the bed of his truck. Something happened then and Solomon fell against the truck, coughing deeply. When he turned back around there was fresh blood spattered his lips and on the back of his hand. None of it killed the gleam in his eyes.

  As he let Lawrence take him to the back of the ambulance I heard Solomon say, “I think she likes me, don’t you?” Lawrence
laughed and muttered something I couldn’t hear, but Solomon laughed until he was coughing again. I went through the fence to see what was in the trees, but I’ll admit I was smiling.

  It was an amazing view, but not what I had expected. From what I had seen of the guy’s paintings, Solomon painted landscapes that were more natural than nature. He was famous for capturing scenes of light and shadow crafted by sun and mountains. Like Ansel Adams in color. I had never seen one that had man-made features in it. The view from the tree-lined bluff showed the lake with part of the town of Forsyth and the serpentine asphalt wending through canyons of cut-away stone. In the faces of the rock cuts were still the precise vertical lines put there by steam drills two generations ago. Over everything were dancing shades of green, billions upon billions of leaves topping a million trees.

  Somehow I didn’t think the biker was possessive of his favorite view. Still, the only thing that seemed even remotely odd about the scene to me was a single wisp of white smoke curling up from the trees below.

  Backtracking the trail, I stopped to pick up a rolled-up, half-empty tube of paint from the field grass. Cobalt green. When I looked up I saw the light bar on the ambulance flash. It whooped once and U-turned into the road going the way it had come. The driver kept the light bar spinning. Solomon was being taken to the hospital.

  Damn it.

  I was kicking myself for being caught up in the man’s charm. He must have been hurt more than he seemed and I should have made sure he stayed down until help got there. For a moment I stood in the middle of the empty field. Inside my gut there was a weird twinge, like a small slip in a tight knot.

  How bad was he? And how much was my fault?

  It was just for a moment, though. You can’t last long as any kind of cop dwelling on the things that you have no control over and anything past is completely out of your control. I could best help Mr. Solomon by catching the guy who gave him the beating. And just maybe finding out the truth behind it.

  Once my feet started moving again a deputy’s car pulled up with his lights on. I let him call a tow truck for Solomon’s vehicle and wait for it.