by Alex Grecian
“Here.” Rudy reached into his pocket and pulled out a small rubber coin purse. He squeezed it open and poked around inside until he found six quarters. He fished them out and showed them to the girl in the palm of his hand.
“I only have a dollar,” the girl said.
“That’s okay. Take them all.”
“I don’t think—”
“Honestly,” Rudy said, “they’re heavy. My pants are gonna fall down with those in there.”
She wrinkled her nose at him, but he smiled to show her it was a joke. “Go ahead,” he said.
At last she reached out and scooped the quarters out of his palm, replaced them with the dollar bill. It was moist with her sweat. He disguised his revulsion with another friendly smile. Just a nice old man waiting for some pizza. He watched her scamper away toward the machines and then stepped up to the counter and waited to be helped. He eventually paid for the buffet, and found a table as far as he could from the man in the sharkskin suit. The stranger was watching him over the top of his magazine, like someone out of an old spy movie, and Rudy wished he would just go away.
Rudy ate two pieces of sausage pizza, wiped his hands with a paper napkin, and stood up. He left the girl’s sweaty dollar bill as a tip and moved toward the front door, managing to get there just as the girl finished playing Ms. Pac-Man. She stepped back from the machine and almost bumped into him.
He chuckled. “Done with the games?”
“Last quarter.”
“Oh, that’s a shame.”
She shrugged yet again. He wanted to pry her mouth open and pull her tongue out. If she wasn’t going to use it, why have it at all?
But instead he opened his eyes wide and snapped his fingers. “You know what? I think I might have more quarters in my bus.” He was careful not to call it a van. Kids these days were taught to be suspicious of strangers.
“Bus?” Sure enough, she craned her neck to see out the big windows at the front of the Pizza Hut. The green-and-red van was visible from a distance no matter where it was parked, and he could see the subtle change in her expression. How could something that looked like a holiday on wheels be threatening? She looked back up at him. “I don’t know, mister.”
He had her that easily. The promise of some nonexistent quarters. It was nearly always that easy, though, and his triumph didn’t show on his face. He was sure it didn’t.
“Come with me.”
He didn’t look back, just swung the door open and walked out onto the chilly blacktop. He could hear her behind him. He motioned to Donnie and the side door slid wide, revealing its dark interior. Rudy leaned in and grabbed a tool that was sitting ready beside the center console.
“You know,” he said, turning to look at her, “I’m not sure exactly where they . . .”
The girl was running away across the parking lot, and in her place was the stranger in the sharkskin suit, the New Yorker rolled up under his arm, an umbrella held loose in his left hand. He was much taller than Rudy was, and broader across the shoulders. The stranger reached into his jacket with his free right hand, and Rudy could see that there was a shoulder holster there under his left arm.
“Am I right in thinking you’re Rudolph Bormann?”
Rudy hadn’t heard that name in more than sixty years and it didn’t immediately register, but an alarm went off somewhere in the recesses of his lizard brain. He jabbed out with his Taser, not thinking, not planning, not at all careful, the way he was usually so careful. But the Taser was there in his hand, ready for the little girl who had now disappeared completely, having enjoyed the benefit of Rudy’s quarters and not having paid him back in any way; it was there and he used it. An instinct.
The stranger stumbled back, his eyes wide, and dropped his umbrella with a clatter. Rudy hit him again. The third time the man went down in a quivering mass on the blacktop, the New Yorker flapping its reluctant way across the field behind the van.
Rudy looked back and forth between the highway and the big front window of the Pizza Hut, but no one came running, there was no outcry. The driver’s-side door creaked open, and Donnie came running around the front.
“Oh, shit,” he said softly, as if to himself.
“Help me,” Rudy said.
Donnie started to open the passenger-side door.
“No,” Rudy said. “Help me put him in the van.”
“Oh, shit,” Donnie said again.
Donnie got the man under his arms and Rudy stooped and lifted his legs. Even with Donnie’s help, it wasn’t easy. Rudy’s knees hurt, and the stranger weighed a good deal more than the little girl would have. They had to rest the man on the lip of the doorway until Rudy could catch his breath. Then he bent and pushed up, folding the stranger’s legs up against his chest while Donnie scrambled backward and rolled him onto his side so Rudy could close the door.
When it was done, Rudy leaned against the van and waited, panting and watching.
A hawk flew overhead and screeched, banked toward something unseeable in the field, and disappeared in the grass. Rudy watched it and felt his pulse at his wrist, counted, calmed himself.
“We should go,” Donnie said. Rudy had already forgotten the boy was there. Sometimes he wondered if his mind was beginning to go.
“I want to know who he is,” Rudy said.
He climbed back in the van, crawled over to the stranger, and felt his pulse. It was slower than Rudy’s, but steady. The man wasn’t going to wake up soon. Still, Rudy used one of the chains bolted to the floor of the van and secured the man’s body. Then he went through the man’s suit pockets and found a car key.
Donnie started the van and sat behind the wheel, bouncing in place, anxious to get going. Rudy ignored him. He stood in the parking lot and pointed the big plastic end of the key at the rental car with Texas plates. It beeped and unlocked for him. Inside, the car was clean and smelled new. Nothing behind the visor or in the glove box. But there was a wallet in the console, and Rudy took it with him back to the van, sat in the passenger seat, and removed the contents, spreading them out on his lap, while Donnie started the van and drove back to the highway and away from WaKeeney.
According to the man’s driver’s license, his name was Ransom Roan. A small stack of five business cards identified Ransom as “chief investigator” for something called the Noah Roan Foundation. Rudy had never heard of it. A family business? Had Ransom Roan followed Rudy from the church or was he at the Pizza Hut by coincidence?
Rudy had a lot of questions for his new friend Ransom. He shoved the contents of the wallet back inside and put it away in the glove box, then reached back and used the Taser again on Ransom’s limp body. Then once more for good measure. He didn’t want Ransom to wake up before Rudy was ready for him.
He felt as if he had woken up from a long nap, and there was a familiar tingle in his fingertips. He whistled tunelessly as Donnie drove, and anyone who saw him would have said he looked much younger than his ninety-four years.
CHAPTER NINE
1
Skottie had become increasingly frustrated with Lieutenant Johnson. He insisted on following protocol and wouldn’t sign off on her involvement in the tractor fire investigation. With the threat of a lawsuit hanging over the department, he said he needed to be able to show that everything had been handled properly and aboveboard. Skottie had not been the first to arrive at the scene of the fire, she had not been the officer in charge, and she had left before the coroner showed up, so the lieutenant had elected to keep her on the sidelines.
After putting Maddy to bed, Skottie had called Trooper Ryan Kufahl. When he’d picked up, his voice sounded thick with sleep.
“This is Skottie. Did I wake you?”
“Hmm. No,” Ryan said. “Actually, yeah, I guess you did. Fell asleep in front of the TV again.”
“Sorry,” Skottie said.
“No,
it’s still early. I’m gonna have a hell of a time getting to sleep later.”
“Listen, I won’t keep you. I was just wondering if you could fill me in a little on that burn victim you found.”
“Wish I could,” Ryan said. “I was supposed to go along and witness the autopsy, but I caught a three-car pileup that took me past the end of my shift.”
“They delayed the autopsy?”
“Right,” Ryan said. “Supposed to go in first thing tomorrow so I can view it and sign off.”
“Who was handling it? Was it Iversen or one of his assistants?”
Dr. Lyle Iversen was the coroner and forensic examiner for the twenty-third district, which covered four Kansas counties that butted up against one another in a sideways L shape. In his spare time, he acted as assistant coroner for the other districts in western Kansas, as well as parts of Colorado and Nebraska. He was based out of a mortuary near Hays in Victoria, but he kept his Dopp kit ready because most of his time was spent on the road or in the air, traveling to small towns to analyze crime scenes and sign death certificates. He had a Cessna gassed and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Skottie hadn’t met him, but she had heard stories about the adventurous doctor. If he was somewhere away at the fringes of his territory, one of his two assistants would have responded to Ryan Kufahl’s call.
“It was the man himself,” Ryan said. “But I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him. Like I say, I had that accident I had to respond to, so I left the doctor to his business and never made it back up there.”
“Did he identify the body?”
“I don’t know, Skottie.” Ryan sounded annoyed. “What’s this about, anyway?”
“Yeah, sorry. I was thinking this might tie into something else I’m working on.”
“Working on? Like what?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Skottie said. “Kind of an off-hours thing. Do me a favor and don’t mention this to the lieutenant? That we talked about this?”
“Sure, I guess,” Ryan said. “But if there’s something I should know about, you’ll clue me in, right?”
“Of course. Sorry I woke you up.”
“No problem. I should probably eat something anyway. I’m surprised you can’t hear my stomach grumbling.”
Skottie ended the call and paced around the room while she considered her options. She could call Dr. Iversen and ask him the same questions she’d asked Ryan Kufahl, but she didn’t know whether Iversen was strictly by-the-book. She hadn’t caught the call, so he might be as reluctant as the lieutenant to give out any information. Kufahl and Lieutenant Johnson were the only people he was officially obligated to talk to about the case. On the other hand, Skottie now knew where the body had been taken.
She decided it might be best to cut out the middleman and take a look at the evidence herself.
2
Three men sat in a car across the street from the house, two of them in the front seat, one in the back. When they saw Skottie come out and get into her car, the man in the back seat leaned forward and flicked the ear of the man behind the wheel.
“We should follow her,” he said.
“Why would we do that?” Theoretically the man in the back seat was in charge, but the driver was used to making decisions.
“I don’t . . .” The man in the back seat slumped back down with a sigh. “I guess, like, maybe we don’t even have to go in the house?”
“She’s probably armed right now. I don’t wanna get shot, do you?”
Skottie’s car roared past them to the end of the street, and the three men got a glimpse of her face as she passed, but her eyes were focused on the road ahead and she didn’t look to either side. She paused at the stop sign, turned left, and was out of sight.
The man in the passenger seat chimed in. “She probably keeps her gun under her pillow. We’re gonna get shot no matter what.”
“No,” the driver said. “She won’t do anything with her kid and the old lady around, right? That’s when she’s gonna be most vulnerable and scared. So we wait, we go in, and we leave. Safe and easy.”
Neither of the other two spoke, and the driver relaxed. It was just like he said. Safe and easy, in and out. As soon as they delivered their message, they could go home.
3
Nine miles from Hays was tiny Victoria, Kansas, named for Queen Victoria by Scottish and English settlers in the late nineteenth century. There was nothing on Main Street to indicate that its history had been preserved. It resembled every other small town in the area, with agricultural co-ops and John Deere suppliers, small construction companies and dusty mercantiles. Hudson Brothers Mortuary was sandwiched between a bank and an insurance agency. The digital readout on the bank’s sign informed Skottie that it was past eleven o’clock and the temperature was thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. She pulled up in front of the mortuary’s white brick building and turned off the engine. A half-track was parked in the wide alley across from the mortuary, and a stray calico with one ear stopped to scowl at Skottie’s car before trotting casually away. Despite the mist that still clung to the ground, Skottie saw fingers of lightning reaching down to touch the horizon. The moon’s diffuse glow lent an eerie cast to the empty street, and Skottie half expected to hear boot heels clicking toward her across the pavement or a distant wolf’s howl. She got out and went to the door, situated well back from the street under a wide arch. She pressed a buzzer on the wall and waited, stamping her feet against the cold. After a very long time, she heard footsteps on the other side of the door and a latch was thrown. The door opened inward, and a stout man in an ill-fitting blue uniform peered out at her.
“We’re closed,” he said. His hair was thin and greasy, and he had three chins stacked neatly atop the huge knot of his navy necktie.
Skottie flashed him her badge. “Yeah, sorry. I’m following up on a case, and it can’t wait till morning.”
“We’re closed tomorrow, too,” the watchman said. “Thanksgiving, don’t you know?”
“Well, that’s just it,” Skottie said. “If I wait two whole days, this case is gonna go cold.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Speaking of cold . . .”
The watchman blinked his eyes and stared out at the street, as if he might be able to see the temperature. He hopped back on his heels and opened the door wider. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Weather’s been freaky, ain’t it?”
“Supposed to rain again later,” Skottie said. She squeezed past him into the stuffy vestibule.
“Snow and fog and rain. We’re getting the whole shebang this week, huh?”
“Welcome to Kansas.”
The watchman squinted at her. “Don’t gotta welcome me. I been here near on forty-five years. My whole damn life.”
“It was just a joke.”
His brow furrowed with effort. “Huh. Anyway, never saw weather like this, I’ll tell you that.”
He turned his back to her and waddled away through the dim vestibule. Skottie followed him into a small waiting area decked out with wooden chairs and ancient wood paneling. There was a tiny desk in one corner of the room that evidently served as a guard station. An empty Styrofoam cup of coffee was tipped over perilously close to the edge of the desk, and there was a tattered paperback laying facedown, open to a point roughly halfway through.
“We only got one body right now,” the watchman said. “Waiting for a viewing on Saturday. That what you’re after?”
“Actually, I’m wondering about the case Dr. Iversen’s working on.”
“Iversen? Oh, that ain’t part of the mortuary, per se. They got their own area in the back. I don’t go in there. It’s where they do the autopsies and stuff.”
“Exactly,” Skottie said. She decided since she was here under false pretenses, she might as well go for the big lie. “I was the trooper who found the body today. I need to get some info
rmation for my file. Trying to get the paperwork squared away so I can enjoy the holiday.”
The watchman led the way down a narrow hall, turning on lights as he went. “Got a big turkey?”
“And all the trimmings,” Skottie said. She had seen the turkey in the basement refrigerator, but had no idea what else Emmaline was planning for the holiday feast. She felt a sudden flash of gratitude and sympathy for her mother, who had welcomed Skottie and Maddy into her home, fed them and cared for them. Then she boxed up these feelings and put them away for later.
“Well, this is the lab back here. I can unlock it for you, but then I really oughta get back to my post.” He drew himself up taller as he mentioned his responsibility, and Skottie wondered whether he had anyone at home, up late prepping a turkey and potatoes, or whether he was looking forward to a TV dinner and a six-pack in front of the football game.
“I’ll let you know when I’m done in there so you can lock it back up,” she said.
The watchman nodded. He unlocked a thick wooden door, then lumbered away, back to his lonely vigil.
Skottie could smell all the familiar hospital chemicals. She brushed her hand against the inside wall of the room until she found a light switch and flicked it. Overhead lamps blinked to life, revealing a long room, bright white and sterile. Support beams divided the room into sections, and two stainless steel tables had been situated between the beams with easy access on each side of them so there was plenty of empty floor space. Dr. Iversen would be able to move around freely as he worked without bumping into anything. Counters lined two of the walls, with cabinets above and below painted candy-green, deep metal sinks with arched faucets, and soaps and towels and squirt bottles of varying colors. A bulletin board was hung over an old-fashioned wall phone with a long cord. Two desks with iMacs were positioned near the back of the room, and the wall to Skottie’s left as she entered the room was dominated by a huge refrigerated cabinet with eight heavy doors fronting storage bays designed to keep corpses fresh. There were paper cards in slots on three of the eight doors, indicating those cabinets currently held bodies.