Death on the Move

by Bill Crider

  “Maybe they didn’t move out, either,” Ruth said.

  “Let’s hope they did,” Rhodes said. “We’d better check another house or two.”

  The next house over belonged to the Claytons.

  “There must have been a mailbox painter who gave them a special deal,” Ruth said as she steered the car down the winding drive.

  The Claytons had a better location than either the Washburns or Mrs. McGee. Their house backed up right on the water, and there was a sturdy-looking wooden pier running out into the water. The house was built of rough-cut boards and had a much more impressive facade than the others. The drive and front yard were strewn with leaves. Rhodes could tell as soon as he stepped out of the car that the front door was open. It was swung about halfway back into the house.

  “Call Hack,” he said.

  The house was as bare as the other one had been. This refrigerator had had an icemaker, too, and again the end of the copper tubing was neatly crimped.

  “Looks like everybody’s moving out,” Ruth said. She kept looking around. “The only difference in this place and the other one is the smell.”

  Rhodes had noticed the smell, too. “Maybe an animal died under the house,” he said.

  Ruth looked at him. “You think that’s what it is—something dead?”

  Rhodes was sure. It was the kind of odor you never forgot once you had smelled it. “Did we look everywhere in here?”

  “I think so. The closets and everywhere. There was nothing in them.”

  As they stood there, the odor seemed to get stronger. “What about that door over there?” Rhodes said.

  “That looks like a pantry,” Ruth said. “Or maybe that’s where the hot-water heater is.”

  “I guess we’d better check it,” Rhodes said.

  He didn’t want to, but he walked over and put his hand on the knob. The odor seemed stronger than ever, but he told himself that it was just his imagination. He turned the knob and opened the door. If he hadn’t stepped aside, the mummy would have hit him as it fell into the room.

  It wasn’t really a mummy, of course, though Rhodes’s first thought had been of Boris Karloff chasing after Zita Johann. This was even worse—a real human being, or what had once been a human being, completely wrapped up in silver duct tape.

  The duct tape had broken in a few places where the pressure of the gases in the body had been too much for it. That was the source of most of the smell. The color of the viscous fluids on the outside of the tape was too much for Rhodes to take in, and he looked away. He could still hear the plopping sound the mummy had made as it hit the floor. Several strands of the tape had burst at that moment, releasing more of the odor into the room.

  When Rhodes turned back, trying not to breathe too deeply, Ruth Grady was kneeling down examining the body, or what she could see of it. “Hard to tell even if it’s a man or a woman,” she said.

  Rhodes wondered how she could be so calm. He could feel his own heart beating a mile a minute, and he promised himself a session on the exercise bike as soon as he got home. He hadn’t been riding regularly lately, and he was really out of shape. He knew that being out of shape had nothing at all to do with the way he was feeling however.

  “You go call Hack,” he said to Ruth. “Get him to send an ambulance and the JP for this district.”

  Mrs. McGee had been right, he thought. Something bad was going on around there.

  Chapter 3

  Rhodes could remember when there hadn’t been a Clearview Lake.

  He stood on the pier behind the house and looked out over the muddy water. There was a huge bank of dark blue, almost purple clouds building in the north, and he knew that the norther he had been thinking about earlier would be blowing through any time now. Already the wind was kicking up a little, and the water was slapping gently against the pilings of the pier.

  The lake had been built more than thirty years before by damming the river that flowed through the southwestern part of the county. Rhodes supposed it had been a project of the Corps of Engineers, but he didn’t remember for sure. The lake had become a part of the county’s everyday life since then—a place for picnics, fishing, and boating. A few people lived here, but most of them, as Hack had observed, were not residents of the nearby towns. They lived in the city during the week and visited the lake on Saturdays and Sundays, or made it a sort of summer home-away-from-home.

  The locals had become so familiar with the place that they had dropped the first part of the name. To them it was just the lake. Nobody called it anything else, not even after the big county lake had been built by the power companies down below Thurston.

  As far as Rhodes could remember there had never been any trouble at the lake. The county cars made it part of their regular patrol, but there had never been any reason to pay it special attention. After thirty years, people could get a little lax, but it was too late to worry about that now. He walked back toward the Clayton house, the sound of his heels hollow on the boards of the pier.

  Dr. White had come, along with the ambulance crew and the JP. Rhodes was glad that Hack had thought to notify the doctor. Ruth hadn’t specified the problem over the radio, but Hack had known what the trouble was from her request for an ambulance and justice of the peace. Those two things almost always added up to a death of one kind or another.

  Dr. White hadn’t liked the scene. Peeling the tape off the body was going to be a truly messy job, and there wasn’t going to be any possibility of identification from physical features. Rhodes didn’t particularly want to think about what the person under the tape looked like.

  He stepped onto the lake shore. Most of the work in the house had been done, the measurements made, the time and circumstances recorded. Ruth Grady was taking a last look around in case they had missed anything the first time, though Rhodes didn’t think that likely.

  Now came the hard part. Checking out the other houses in the area to see how many of them had been burgled, notifying the owners, and trying to figure out just who the body was—or had been.

  There was no county morgue. Dr. White did his work at Ballinger’s and that was where Rhodes found him.

  “The body was that of a well-nourished white female, about thirty-five years of age,” Dr. White said.

  Rhodes had noticed that in the last few years, Dr. White had begun to talk like an autopsy report.

  “Any clothing? Any identification? Anything at all to tell us who she was?” Rhodes asked.

  “Nothing. She was completely nude.” The old doctor shook his head. “I tell you, Sheriff, I never saw anything like it. When I peeled the tape back, her skin . . . Never mind. Let’s just say that I won’t be able to talk to you about any identifying marks.”

  Rhodes could imagine what the body must have looked like. “That’s all right,” he said.

  “I didn’t really look for them,” Dr. White said. “After the first few rounds of tape peeling, well, I didn’t peel anymore. I just cut through it as if it were the skin.”

  “How did she die? Any idea?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s the easy part. She was shot. I have the bullet for you. It looks like a .38.”

  They were sitting in Ballinger’s office, surrounded by books with titles like Scream Bloody Murder, The Killer Inside Me, and Some of Your Blood. It was an appropriate place, Rhodes thought, but he wondered just how many people Ballinger allowed in there. There were a lot of folks in Clearview who might not have understood their funeral director’s reading habits.

  “One shot?” Rhodes said.

  “In the right temple. Massive trauma to the brain. She must have died instantly.”

  “And then someone wrapped her in duct tape and put her in a closet.”

  “Not exactly,” Dr. White told him. “At least I would say not.”

  “What, then?”

  “From the way that blood had pooled in her buttocks and legs, I would say that she had been lying in a reclining position for quite some time before being pla
ced in the closet. At least if your impression is correct.”

  “What impression?”

  “That the body was standing in the closet and fell forward as you opened the door.”

  “That’s the way it happened, all right. How long would you say that she’s been dead?”

  “A difficult question,” Dr. White said, “and one that brings up another question. Why the tape?”

  “I’d been wondering about that,” Rhodes said.

  “I can only speculate, of course,” Dr. White said.

  “I’ll settle for that.”

  “All right. I can’t really give a very good estimate of the time of death. The main problem is the tape. Did you happen to notice how tightly it was wrapped around the body?”

  “I noticed,” Rhodes said.

  “It might have been done that way to slow down decomposition,” Dr. White said. “No air could get to the body, or at least certainly not as much air as if the body had been exposed completely. The tape may also have slowed down the usual bacteria.”

  “So what’s your best guess?”

  “I prefer to call it an estimate,” Dr. White said.

  “Estimate, then.”

  “It’s been unusually warm lately, the body was inside. I’d say three weeks. Approximately.”

  “I won’t hold you to it,” Rhodes said. He thanked Dr. White and went back to the jail.

  Ruth Grady had finished getting in touch with the owners of most of the houses. She and Rhodes found five others that had been entered and stripped of everything that could be carried away. They also talked to the homeowners who lived there. None of them had noticed anything out of the ordinary, and none of them had seen the U-Truck-’Em van.

  “This is really something,” Hack said after Rhodes filled them in on Dr. White’s report. He had forgotten his earlier irritation. “Looked just like a mummy, huh?”

  “That’s right,” Rhodes said. “What about the Claytons, Ruth?”

  “They’re the only ones I haven’t been able to contact,” she said. “All the others will be here this afternoon or tomorrow to check on their property. It’s going to be really crowded around here.”

  Rhodes wasn’t looking forward to that. “We’ve got to get to the Claytons. The corpse was in their house.”

  “I’ll keep trying,” she said. “It’s not easy to find people on the weekends. I’m surprised that none of them were down here at the lake.”

  “Not the right kind of weather,” Hack said. “I bet they all wish they’d been coming up every week to check on their houses, though.”

  “You know who’s going to get the blame for that,” Rhodes said.

  Hack smiled. “That’s why they pay you a big salary,” he said.

  “Sure it is. And there’s something else we have to worry about.” He told them about the robbery of the corpse at the funeral home.

  “Now who would do a thing like that?” Hack said.

  “Exactly what I’d like to know,” Rhodes said. “You heard any gossip about Skelly or Ballinger being in financial trouble?”

  “Now surely you don’t think one of those old boys would rob corpses.”

  “No, I don’t. But I don’t know who else would, either.”

  Lawton came in through the doorway leading to the cell area. “Who else would do what?” he said.

  He had a smooth, round face, and Rhodes had always thought he resembled the comedian Lou Costello. In fact, Rhodes thought that Hack resembled Bud Abbott and that when Hack and Lawton got together vaudeville lived again. He was never sure that their routines were practiced, but he often suspected they were.

  “We were talkin’ about what happened over at the funeral home,” Hack said, then explained to Lawton, more or less straightforwardly, what had occurred.

  “Wouldn’t neither of those two fellas do a thing like that,” Lawton said.

  Ruth Grady hung up the phone. “I still can’t contact anyone,” she said. “Do you want me to get in touch with the police department?”

  “Good idea,” Rhodes told her. “Have them notify Clayton and ask them to have him get in touch with us.”

  She turned back to the phone. Rhodes could hear her dialing.

  “They got people cleaning up over there at Ballinger’s,” Lawton said. “You talk to them?”

  Rhodes had to admit he hadn’t. He wondered why Ballinger hadn’t thought of that himself, instead of suggesting Skelly. “I’ll get on it,” he said.

  “You’d think a man in a high-payin’ job like his would’ve thought of that,” Lawton said to Hack.

  Hack was feeling generous. “It would’ve come to him, but he’s got bigger things on his mind.”

  Rhodes knew Hack was willing to excuse him, then let him off the hook so easily because no one had told Lawton about the dead woman in the cabin. Neither Hack nor Lawton liked to be the last to find out anything that happened around the office, and each one delighted in getting ahead of the other. Now Hack would feel one up on Lawton for days, or until something else happened that Lawton found out about first.

  While Hack told his story with relish, Rhodes turned back to Ruth Grady.

  “They’re going to notify Clayton,” she said. “I talked to an Officer Ferguson. She said she’d take care of it. I didn’t know those Dallas police were so nice.”

  “Is she going to tell him about the body?”

  “She’ll leave that to us. She thinks she might know this Ted Clayton, though, and she’s going to check on him for us, see if he has a record or something.”

  “If we had us one of them computers, we could do that for ourselves,” Hack said. He had been agitating for a computer for several months. “We could just plug into the state and local networks and get all that information lickety-split.”

  “I’ve been talking to the commissioners,” Rhodes said. “If the budget can stand it, we may get a computer this year.”

  “About time,” Hack said.

  Lawton wasn’t saying anything. He was sulking. After a few seconds he turned and went back into the cell area. “Gotta sweep up,” he said over his shoulder as he slunk out.

  Rhodes left Ruth Grady to deal with the property owners who would be coming in later in the day. He wanted to drive back out to the lake and look for signs of the rental van. It just might be that it was someone local and the van was parked right there in some garage or driveway. Ruth had already tried to check with the rental company. She was informed that the company had gone out of business six months before and all the vans sold at auction. The auction firm would forward a list of the buyers. There’d been a lot of them.

  “Won’t take long,” Hack had said. “They’ll prob’ly just punch it up on their computer and print it right out.”

  Rhodes wondered just when Hack had learned so much about computers, and if Hack knew as much about computers as he seemed to think he did. Rhodes also hoped that when and if the commissioners came through with the money he wouldn’t have to be the one who learned to use it. He wasn’t sure he could, in spite of Hack’s assurances that even little kids did it all the time. Still, it would be a real convenience if it worked out.

  The wind was blowing hard now, and the temperature had dropped by at least twenty degrees. It would be down below freezing by nightfall. Rhodes drove around the shore of the lake, across the dam, and down among the houses that looked so deserted in the bare trees. The wind swirled the dead leaves in the road and scraped them across the windshield. Rhodes could see why the houses had appeared to be easy pickings to the burglars. They could come in the middle of the day and no one would notice. Still, he suspected that most of their work had been done at night. He had checked the patrol schedule, and the county cars went through every night, but only once—twice on Saturdays. Park the van behind the house and it would never be spotted. Park it in front and it might have been, but only might.

  This driving around was getting him nowhere, so he pulled in at Mrs. McGee’s. She was no longer sitting on t
he porch, which came as no surprise. In the mild temperature of the morning she had been wrapped up as if preparing for an expedition to the Arctic.

  Rhodes stopped the car and got out. The raw wind whipped through his pants legs as if the material were fishnet, and gusted a piece of grit into his eye. He climbed up on the porch, turned his back to the wind, and rubbed until his eye teared up and washed out the tiny particle. He knocked on the door. When Mrs. McGee answered, he was greeted by a blast of heat that felt as if he had just opened the door of an oven.

  “Come in, Sheriff,” Mrs. McGee said. “Don’t stand there and let all the heat out.”

  He stepped inside. The room was small and neat, the hardwood floor polished to a high gloss and the area rugs placed precisely in the right places. Rhodes wondered if a floor like that wasn’t dangerous for an old woman, but he didn’t say anything about it. Mrs. McGee, despite the heat in the room, was still dressed as she had been while sitting outside, the knit cap still pulled down on her brow.

  “Come have a seat,” she said. “No need to stand up.”

  There were a couple of old-fashioned rocking chairs pulled close to a Dearborn heater, which had been turned up about as high as it would go. The wooden arm of the chair Rhodes sat in was hot to the touch. He moved the chair back a bit and turned so that his legs would not get scorched. Mrs. McGee, on the other hand, drew herself closer.

  “When you get old, your blood thins out,” she said. “It gets harder to take the cold every year.”

  “I’ve heard that,” Rhodes said, and he had. He wasn’t quite sure that he believed it, though.

  “You didn’t come here to talk about an old woman’s thin blood, I guess,” she said. “Is it about those burglaries?”

  “Yes,” Rhodes said. He told her about the body in the Clayton house.

  “Land alive,” she said. “The world is gettin’ to be a terrible place these days.”

  Rhodes agreed. “I just wanted to let you know that we’ll be stepping up the patrols through this area. I don’t think you have anything to worry about, since they’ve obviously been avoiding houses where people are living, but I thought you ought to know about the dead woman.”