Three Dog Day

by Lia Farrell

  Detective Fuller was quiet for a few minutes and then said, “What about our other big case—the copper pipe theft investigation?”

  “Did you find Wayne’s contact, Jacko, yet?” When Rob shook his head, Ben said, “I’d like you to go back to finding Jacko, at least until we get the fingerprints and DNA typing back from the lab for our John Doe.” Rob pulled into his parking spot and put the car in park. He opened the door and chilly air rushed in.

  Rob got out of the car, slamming the door and looking over at Ben. “I’ll get going on it, boss.”

  The sheriff was pleasantly surprised to see Dory at her desk. He grinned at her, saying, “Why, Miss Clarkson, nice to see you at work, for a change.” Dory didn’t give him the satisfaction of rising to the bait, but merely gazed skyward.

  “Dr. Estes thinks the man whose body Mae found near the river probably died recently. He must have been thrown in the river near or on Jerrod Clifton’s property, and there was no sign of Clifton. Once we run him down, this one’s going to be a piece of cake. Nice work on finding the rag and the knife by the way. Did you get that BOLO out on Clifton’s vehicle?”

  “Did I get the BOLO out? Did I get the BOLO out? You know better, Sheriff,” Dory frowned.

  “Okay, Miss Touchy, I was just checking. Thanks, Dory.”

  Dr. Estes’ report showed up in Ben’s email inbox about an hour later. It was disappointing. He stated that he’d found no definitive way to ID the victim from the manner of his death or his physical condition. Nor could he give Ben a tighter time frame on the date of death. The date range was listed as between January first and January sixth. The measurements Emma sent him of the knife appeared to match the wounds on their John Doe, but he couldn’t give a definitive answer as to whether it was the murder weapon. Ben clenched his teeth. In most cases, the ME was able to give them a time of death within a few hours. That big time window was going to make this a lot harder. As a start, he’d have Deputy George look up hunting knives and compare them to the photo of the knife Dory found. He went in search of George.

  Surprisingly, George was at his desk. The deputy quickly hit a key on his computer but not before Ben caught a glimpse of the game of solitaire he’d been playing.

  “Damn it, George, I’ve told you before, I won’t have you playing computer games when you’re on the clock. And we have a murder to investigate. Why the hell aren’t you looking for our John Doe?”

  “Sorry, boss,” George said, in a lugubrious tone. “Cam said she’d focus on identifying the victim and I could take care of what I was working on before.”

  “That’s not work, so just cut it out. If it happens again I’m writing you up, understand?” George nodded, a blush staining his freckled cheeks. “I have a job for you,” Ben went on. “See if you can identify the exact model of the knife Dory found. My guess is that it’s a hunting knife. Dr. Estes says the blade that made the wounds on our John Doe was between five and seven inches long and may have been ceramic. That should narrow it down. Once we have the model number, I want you to get information about sales of those knives in the past year. If need be, go to the stores for the information, and if they aren’t cooperative, tell ’em you’re working a murder case.”

  “I’ll get started right now.” George looked down and began assiduously typing on his desktop computer. After making sure George was truly looking up nearby sporting goods stores, Ben went down the hall to see what Cam had found. So far, she told him, she had drawn a blank.

  George knocked on his door about an hour later.

  “The knife Dory found is a Boker six inch. I found two stores that carry that type of hunting knife in the area. They’re required by law to keep information on gun sales, but not on knives. They have a list of names of gun owners in the Rosedale area with addresses. I thought I’d start with a hunting supply store called Meeker’s—it’s out in the township near the Clifton property. I’ll see what they have on Mr. Jerrod Clifton and anybody else who’s a gun owner in that general locale. The store owner said that people who buy hunting rifles often buy knives like this for field-dressing deer.”

  “Good work, George. You and Deputy Gomez can head out there. Grab lunch on the way. Mr. Meeker will be much more accommodating to an attractive female deputy.”

  “I bet,” George smiled but then his mouth drooped and he bit his lip. “My wife won’t be too happy about me having lunch with Deputy Gomez, though.”

  Ben put his hand over his mouth to hide his amusement. Mrs. Phelps would be giving George a lot of credit if she thought he could ever get close to, let alone seduce, the lovely Cameron Gomez.

  “Tell the Missus I ordered you to go to lunch with Deputy Gomez. In fact, I might make Cam your new partner,” Ben said, lips twitching. “If your wife has an issue, she can take it up with me.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  “And when you and Cam are done with that, swing by the Clifton property and see if Jerrod’s back yet. Put a citation on his door ordering him to appear at the office. It’s mostly farms in that area, but talk to the nearest neighbors on both sides to see if they saw any unusual activity around Clifton’s place since the first of the year.”

  Detective Fuller appeared in Ben’s doorway a few minutes later. “I tracked down Jacko Jones. His girlfriend answered the phone at his apartment.” Rob had a piece of paper in his hand. He glanced down at it, then back at his boss. “Delightful woman. She said, and I quote, ‘That sorry piece of shit hasn’t been home in three days. Check the worst bar in town and he’ll be under it.’ I guess that means Bar-None.” Rob apparently knew the local bars well. Bar-None was a watering hole for the serious imbiber.

  “You can take this one by yourself, Rob. But if you go in uniform, that place will empty right out. Just go home first and put on some old clothes before you head over there.”

  “Yeah, probably need something I can burn afterward. I’ll let you know what I find.” He gave Ben a quick salute, turned on his heel and was gone.

  Rob called back several hours later. He had tracked down Jacko and persuaded him to drink some coffee. Once he had sobered up, Jacko admitted to being aware of a copper theft ring operating in the vicinity of Rosedale.

  “He offered to give me details about some people he thinks are involved, but he wanted money and for us not to look too closely into whatever role he ‘might’ have had in the operation. What do you think, boss?”

  “Okay,” Ben said, “money’s probably the only way to get the information out of him. But try to limit the damages, will you? And tell him I’ll let him go this time. He’s probably not smart enough to run an operation like large-scale copper theft. But maybe he can help us nail some of the lower echelon and they can point us to the ringleaders.”

  “All right. I’ll see how much of a discount I can get on the price of Jacko’s information.”

  Chapter Nine

  January 9th

  Detective Wayne Nichols

  After successfully closing the Tom Ferris murder case at the end of the previous summer, Wayne Nichols, chief detective in the Rosedale Sheriff’s Office, had asked Sheriff Ben Bradley for a leave of absence. Ben said he needed time to consider Wayne’s request. In most cases, a leave was granted only for illness or injury in the line of duty. Wayne had been grazed by a bullet during the Ferris case, but since then had made a complete recovery.

  When Ben asked why he wanted the leave, Wayne told the sheriff—and John Granger, the police chief from Mont Blanc—that he needed the leave to pursue a “fugitive from justice.” It was a partial truth; his foster mother, Jocelyn, had killed her husband Aarne, and to Wayne’s knowledge she had never turned herself in for the crime. He intended to bring her to justice, he told them. In fact, there was a lot more to the story, for he had never dealt with his remorse over leaving Jocelyn behind when he fled.

  It wasn’t going to be easy—what he knew he had to do. After decades of keeping his past deeply buried, he had finally told his girlfriend, Lucy Ingram, an
ER physician, about his early life in foster care with an abusive family. He admitted to running away from the place at seventeen, afraid he might one day attack, or even kill, the foster father who violently abused his foster mother. His little brother, Kurt, had begged him not to go. Wayne had promised him that he would return one day.

  “I went back there three years after I first left,” he told Lucy, seeing in his mind’s eye the dingy ranch house on the gravel road, the only childhood home he could remember. He and Lucy were in bed at her house. Lucy wore a soft T-shirt and was sitting up, her arms around her knees, her long brown hair reaching her shoulders. Wayne lay beside her, naked except for a St. Anthony’s medal on a chain around his neck. He touched the medal from time to time as he told her the story. Since recovering from the gunshot wound he received at the end of the summer, he had been working out, eating right and trying to improve his health. His hair was more salt than pepper and his body had many scars, but his belly was flat now and he felt better than he had in years.

  “It was getting dark by the time I found the place. Jocelyn’s husband Aarne’s truck was parked in the yard. I opened the screen door and called my foster mother’s name. She screamed. She didn’t recognize me in the dark.”

  Emotions wracked him—the guilt he felt about leaving his foster mother with no protection from her abusive husband and the sorrow that swamped him when Jocelyn told him his little brother Kurt was dead.

  “Where do you think Jocelyn could be now, Wayne?” Lucy asked him, a frown creasing her forehead.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never heard from her again.”

  “How old would she be?” Lucy asked, her voice low and gentle.

  “I think she would be in her mid-seventies, if she’s even still alive,” Wayne said. His tone was bleak.

  “Didn’t you ever try to find her?”

  “No. For a long time, I just pushed the whole thing down deep inside. Years would pass without me ever thinking about it, but the Tom Ferris case made me realize something.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “I have unfinished business with Jocelyn Outinen. Both Aarne and my little brother, Kurt, are dead. I hate to think of Kurt in an unmarked grave.”

  “That’s why you asked for the leave of absence, I assume,” Lucy said.

  “Yes, but the sheriff and Captain John Granger both have to approve the leave. Granger lost a detective in Mont Blanc to retirement in the fall, so I was filling in there. I raised the issue again with Sheriff Bradley recently. He said he would look into it. Whenever I wasn’t busy on an active case, Ben said I could use the office and resources available to the police to try to find my foster mother. I haven’t had much progress so far. I’m meeting tomorrow with Mark Schneider, Captain Paula’s computer whiz kid. I’m hoping together we can locate her.”

  “If anyone can, it’s you,” Lucy said. She lay down and put her arm across Wayne’s chest. He was stirred by her scent and closeness, wanting to share every second of the searing night he unearthed his brother’s body, buried in sand toward the back of their property, but there were still things he couldn’t talk about.

  He flashed back, standing in the dark, putting an arm around his foster mother, feeling her violent quivering.

  “I stabbed him like the pig he was,” Jocelyn said. Her breathing was noisy; she was baring her teeth like an enraged animal.

  Wayne and Jocelyn walked out to the driveway and opened the door to Aarne’s pickup. His body fell out on the gravel. Wayne tried to get Jocelyn to go to the authorities, saying her sentence would be short since she’d killed Aarne in self-defense, but he couldn’t convince her.

  Now, almost forty years later, he was unable to escape the past any longer. He had to locate Jocelyn, ask for her forgiveness, give his brother a final resting place, and pay for his own crime. Against every rule of police procedure, the gun used to kill his little brother was hidden in Wayne’s apartment. He had never turned in the evidence or reported the murders, afraid that the gun would lead the police to charge Jocelyn with his foster brother’s killing.

  While waiting for his leave to be approved, Wayne had continued to perform his regular duties at the office. However, whenever he was caught up, he used personal contacts, letters and databases both civilian and criminal in what so far had proved a fruitless search for Jocelyn Outinen.

  Because Jocelyn was his foster mother, he began by investigating whether she received a subsidy from the Department of Children’s Services for support of her foster children. Their records showed that the payments had stopped decades ago. There was only a single note in the file. It read “Family moved. No forwarding address.”

  He had searched extensively for Jocelyn’s social security number. She was Native American, had probably been born at home and many Indians did not have social security numbers. Confusion existed over names, ages, and family relationships because of the intricate sociological structure of Native American tribes. Proof-of-age problems were so intractable that special tolerance was provided for most Indian claims. Despite his efforts, he found nothing.

  Wayne moved on to the National Missing and Unidentified Person’s System. Called NamUS, it was a huge database maintained by the U.S. Department of Justice. To his surprise, someone had reported Jocelyn missing a few months after Aarne’s murder. After contacting the Justice system, he learned two reports had come in with an address in Hannahville, a Potawatomi reservation town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Wayne knew Jocelyn Outinen was a member of the Potawatomi tribe. He could still recall some words from that lovely language.

  “Wayne, can you stay over tonight?” Lucy’s voice called him back to the present.

  He replied with regret, “No, I’d better get up and go.”

  “Too bad. I don’t have a shift until eleven tomorrow,” she said. Her eyes were teasing, sparkling with amusement.

  He smiled down at her and ruffled her hair. “I’ve got that meeting in Nashville early.” Moonlight shone through a crack in the bedroom drapes. Seeing the swell of her breasts under the sheets, he pulled the blanket down gently and touched his lips to hers. She placed her arms around his neck as she softly kissed him back.

  It was cold the morning of January ninth on Wayne’s drive to the Nashville police headquarters. An icy rain was falling and mist lay on the fields between Rosedale and the big city. Winter had already begun in the Middle South and Wayne felt the pressure of time passing. The older he got, the quicker the days seemed to fly by. He checked his cellphone and found a text from Ben, one that he hadn’t seen yesterday. The sheriff had called him on his way to the scene to tell Wayne about Mae finding a body in the Little Harpeth River, an apparent drowning. This text said John Doe died from stab wounds. A murder.

  “Damn it,” Wayne said aloud, thinking he should just withdraw his request for a leave, now that the sheriff’s office would be investigating another murder.

  Mark Schneider was waiting for him at the entrance to the Nashville police post. He was a skinny, nerdy looking youngster with spiky black hair and black-rimmed glasses. He reminded Wayne of a punk version of Clark Kent, only without the muscles. Three silver studs stuck out of his left ear, and as he turned to lead Detective Nichols down to his work area, Wayne saw a dragon’s head tattoo rising up on the back of Mark’s neck from under his T-shirt.

  “I finally got something for you,” Mark said over his shoulder as he ran down the stairs. Wayne’s breathing quickened. At last, something was going to break.

  They entered Mark’s lair, stuffed with computer equipment. It was in the basement of the building. The cellar of the police post had been built at great public expense because Tennessee’s thin layer of topsoil lay only inches above enormous granite and sandstone deposits that went down hundreds of feet. The result was a basement that was cool and soundproof, a perfect environment for the many humming, whirring computers that required protection from heat and humidity.

  “Come in and sit here,” Mark said, quickly moving a stack of printo
uts to the floor.

  Wayne drummed his fingers on the computer desk. He was anxious to hear any news Mark might have. “What did you find?” he asked, bypassing the polite greetings that usually grease the social wheels in the south.

  “Hang on, where did I put it?” Mark asked himself as he scrounged through piles of paper. “Right, got it. You found Jocelyn’s marriage license and gave it to me a while ago. Using that, the State of Michigan Native American database and a skip tracing site, I linked her married name up to the name she’s serving time under. Her name now is Joci Kemerovo. She’s Potawatomi.”

  “So, she’s alive then,” Wayne said, exhaling in relief. “And she’s in prison?”

  “Serving time in Michigan. Murder in the second degree, but she got life. Here’s the file.”

  Wayne grabbed it like a drowning man seizing a life preserver. He clapped the kid on his shoulder. “Good work. Where did you say she was incarcerated?”

  “Huron Valley. It’s in Ypsilanti, Michigan. There’s a note in the file saying that they suspected her of murdering her son, Kurt, but his murder was ultimately listed as killed by a person or persons unknown.”

  Wayne shook his head, troubled. Jocelyn had not killed his little brother. Her husband Aarne had done it. But he finally had a starting point. “Thank you, Mark.”

  “NBT,” Mark said. At Wayne’s confused expression he translated, saying, “No Big Thing.” He grinned at the detective’s reaction.

  By the time Wayne walked out to his truck to return to Rosedale, a sense of hope was beginning to creep back in. His foster mother, Jocelyn Outinen, whose maiden or tribal name was Joci Kemerovo, had turned herself in to the authorities after killing her husband. He wondered how long she lived with guilt before she went to the white man’s law. Most killings on Indian land were considered reservation business and were dealt with by the tribal councils or tribal police. But Aarne Outinen was white and had not been killed on the rez. Killing a white man was white man’s business. If Jocelyn had gone to the tribal elders to confess, they would have taken her to the police.