Dead Poor

by M. K. Coker

  The RVer hovering behind Lori stepped forward, his lips tightened. “Threatened to fire her. Heard him loud and clear. Asshole.”

  “I’ll try to make this as quick as possible, Ms. Jansen.”

  “Lori.”

  “All right, Lori.” And taking her statement also meant Karen could delay pulling out the body. “You don’t have to tell me what you saw. I saw it for myself, but can you tell me what time it was when you found the body?”

  “Well, I’m not sure exactly. I mean, it was just after dawn. I always get the johns done first thing before I go off to my next job.”

  Next? How many did this poor woman have? Not that it was unusual for rural Dakotans to have more than one job, usually farming and something to bring in health insurance. That was often a couple’s split, though, and given Lori’s lack of a wedding ring, Karen guessed that Lori had no one. Marek had two jobs, detective and carpenter. She assumed he would continue with the latter considering what the county paid him. Her own was a bottom-feeder salary, and his was a mere pittance compared to that. But the job came with benefits, not all of them monetary. To be honest, she’d expected him to be as antsy as she was on the way back, wondering if he was going in the wrong direction by returning to their hometown. But he’d accepted his daughter’s verdict: Reunion was home now.

  The RVer tapped a watch that sported more knobs than a cockpit dash. “It was seven eleven. I was sitting right here when Lori went in there. Wondered what she was doing going into the men’s side, I admit, until she lifted the bucket with the cleaning supplies. Heard her scream a minute later, and she nearly ran me over when she rushed out.”

  Lori hunched into the blanket. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I am. For everybody.” He glanced at the toilets and swallowed. “That’s one nasty way to end. I don’t know who that man was, but somebody really thought he was... well, crap.” He looked back and held out his hand. “I’m Pat Donahue, by the way. Rover of the forgotten highways and byways of America. Former San Diego firefighter. I’ve been on the road for four years, two months, and five days.”

  “When did you get in?” Karen asked after nearly having her hand crushed. Donahue was exactly the sort of witness she loved.

  “Last night. I was headed for the Palisades near Sioux Falls but decided I’d had enough. I’m always in bed by ten. It was nine-twenty-seven when I pulled into this spot. The campsites down the road were full, and all I needed was a place to park, and I like the peace and quiet.”

  “Did you use the facilities?” Marek asked, startling them all. Karen never figured out how a giant of a man like Marek could disappear into the woodwork—or the air, given the clearing—and be forgotten, but he did.

  Donahue scuffed a shoe on the asphalt and shook his head. “I’ve got a composting toilet in my rig. Most of these old one-holers are crappy, dirty as hell, and stink to...” He caught sight of Lori’s fallen face and cleared his throat. “Oh, sorry... I didn’t mean...”

  “It is crappy,” Lori said. “But I clean it as best I can. They keep saying they’re going to replace it with a new one like they’ve got down at the campground, but—” Her phone vibrated again. “Sorry. I gotta take this.”

  She winced as a man’s voice bellowed out loud enough for Karen to hear, too.

  “You’re fired! Do you hear me? I ain’t takin’ no more excuses. I turned on the radio, and Nails Nelson ain’t talkin’ about no dead body in the park, so you’re just full of it. I don’t hold with bald-face liars.”

  Nails Nelson ran a low-power FM station and was Eda County’s only version of a news reporter. If Lori had been pale before, she now looked whiter than the corpse in the john, and she seemed ready to keel over. Donahue grabbed her shoulders, and Karen snatched up the phone.

  “You’re talking to Sheriff Mehaffey,” she said over the man’s blistering tirade. “I suggest you calm down. Your employee was a witness to a serious crime. She had no choice but to stay on the scene until I arrived. Which I just have.”

  A short pause followed. “Who the hell are you? One of her dead-end friends?”

  Karen gritted her teeth and reminded herself that she couldn’t arrest the man for being an asshole, especially over the phone. “I told you who I am. Karen Okerlund Mehaffey. If you want to verify that I am on the scene of a crime at Grove Park, I suggest you call the Eda County Sheriff’s Office, not Nails Nelson.”

  “Don’t think I won’t.” He hung up.

  She could only hope that he wouldn’t think to call Nails Nelson directly with the scoop. Karen held out the phone for Lori. “Is your boss always that hot under the collar?”

  Lori took the phone gingerly, as if it were a grenade. “He hates working the counter at the gas station. Makes him crazy. I think he hates people, period. Can I go now? I need that job real bad.”

  “Better if you get another one,” Donahue said. “No cause to treat you that way.”

  Marek saved the woman from having to come up with something to say to that, as it was clear that she couldn’t comprehend the concept of just getting another. “Notice anything odd or out of place, other than the body, Lori?”

  “I don’t think so... wait, I didn’t see the toilet rolls. I always put out three. But that happens sometimes. Not from people using the toilet so much, as taking the rolls.”

  Because it was public property, people considered the rolls free game, forget that it left your neighbors with their butts hanging in the wind.

  Marek adjusted the string of the mask around his neck so it didn’t dig in. “Have you ever met Bob Bunting before?”

  Lori looked at her feet and shook her head.

  But before Karen could press, Donahue said, “Like Baby Bunting?”

  “You knew him?”

  “Hardly. Never been here before—came from the Black Hills most recently. Just thought of the lullaby my mother used to sing to me. ‘Bye, baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting. Gone to get a rabbit skin, to wrap the baby Bunting in.’”

  Karen refused to be distracted from her prey. “You knew him,” she said to Lori. “Bunting.”

  “No, I... that is... are you saying that’s him?” Shock rounded her face. “In the john?”

  “Yes.”

  If she knew him, she didn’t appear to have recognized him. Not too surprising, given the low light and his distorted features.

  Lori’s phone vibrated again. “I gotta go. I don’t got enough hours as it is.”

  “Wait. How can I get ahold of you?”

  Lori hesitated. “You can get me on my cell.” And she spouted off her number, shed the blanket, thanked Donahue, and rushed down the worn path. For the first time, Karen wondered why Lori hadn’t driven up. Then again, the park wasn’t all that big, and Lori hadn’t expected to be delayed by finding a body.

  Or had she?

  Turning, Karen looked at Marek. One of the perks of office was surely that she got to call the shots. Even if, technically, Marek worked for the county commissioners, to forestall charges of nepotism in the line of command.

  She smiled winningly up at him. “You’re our designated dump-ster diver.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The last time Marek had come to Grove Park, as a senior in high school, it had been with his terminally ill mother. He wished, for her sake, that it had been her last stop. Dying weeks later in a dim windowless room in a Sioux Falls hospital, despite Marek’s pleas to the staff to let him move his mother into one with natural light, had been a brutal introduction into the intransigence of bureaucracies.

  That morning long ago in the park, Janina Marek Okerlund been so impossibly light as Marek had carried her to the overlook, where spring had sprung with delicate green fronds on the trees and scented the air with wild plums, in a bittersweet reminder that life went on. Her hometown of Valeska—a town of hardscrabble Czechs with few opportunities for a woman of her education and ambitions—was just a smudge on the endless horizon that spread out below.

  Her fingers h
ad twitched in his, as if for one of the cigarettes that she’d given up too late, as cancer ate at her lungs, at her every breath.

  She’d told him, “It was right here in Grove Park that I really believed I could be whatever I chose to be. I was just a kid then. I’d never been to any park, ever. People like us Mareks, poor as dirt and living on the largesse of grudging family, didn’t go to parks. It didn’t even occur to us. Life wasn’t for frivolity. Mom worked her fingers into gnarled stumps to keep us fed and clothed—when she could keep Dad from drinking her seamstress earnings down the drain.”

  Though Marek had known about his mother’s rough childhood, she’d rarely talked about it when he was growing up. He’d learned more from his father, Sheriff Leif Okerlund, who in his official capacity had occasionally yanked the much younger Janina and her brother, Jim, out of the family home, away from their father’s heavy hand. Janina had grown up idolizing the sheriff and had eventually married him after his first wife died, which had caused unending friction between Leif and his eldest son, Arne, who was Karen’s father.

  While Marek had cradled his mother against him as they sat at the overlook that day, she’d continued speaking when air settled into her damaged lungs. “Your father brought us up here, me and Jim, after our dad was taken to prison that first time. He said, ‘Don’t make his name your destiny. Make the name your own. You’ll find people along the way who’ll help you. Do well in school or in an honest trade, and the sky’s the limit.’ And we both looked out, at all that sky, and we believed, even though life had told us not to. Choices. I made mine that day, to make Sheriff Leif Okerlund proud.”

  And for the most part, she had. That she’d taken a long time to accept that her only son was flawed in the one area she held supreme—the life of the mind—had been one of the few bones of contention between his parents. But perhaps the yin and yang, the push of his mother’s expectations and the pull of his father’s compassion, had made him what he was today.

  “Marek?”

  He blinked himself back to the present, at Karen’s half-amused, half-desperate expression, and looked down at his feet. “I’m not going down there in these boots.” The battered Blunnies he’d bought in Australia in his twenties had carried him through many, many hard years. His late wife had even had them resoled for him as a birthday gift. That the short leather boots with elastic-gore sides weren’t the norm for the Dakotas was just his little bid to stand apart—other than his height.

  “You need some shitkickers,” Karen mused.

  Marek smiled faintly. Shitkickers in Australia were people who did menial work. In South Dakota, they were heavy boots... or the farmers who wore them. All of the above would work. And did. But he didn’t want to work, not when it came to shit.

  “I still have a job offer on ice in Albuquerque,” he reminded her.

  Her fjord-blue eyes narrowed. “Thin ice.”

  “How ’bout some Wellies?” Donahue interrupted from behind them, holding a pair of heavy-duty rubber boots, probably cadged from his firefighting career.

  Marek looked at the man’s feet and relaxed. “Too small for me.”

  “Prove it,” Karen countered.

  Feeling like O. J. Simpson presented with the infamous glove, Marek toed off his Blunnies and couldn’t get his feet even halfway down Donahue’s boots. So, with vast reluctance, the rest took turns trying them on.

  “Sorta like Cinderella and the glass slipper,” Donahue said with a grin as he watched the proceedings from behind the crime scene tape. “Glad I’m out of the running.”

  When the perfect fit was found, Marek slapped the winner on the back. “Congrats. You get to go to the ball.”

  Larson glared down at the black boots that fit him as if molded onto his legs.

  With a flourish, Karen bowed. “May I have this dance?”

  “Only if you lead. Otherwise, shove it.”

  When she just laughed, he stomped toward the toilets, looking like the Michelin Man with puffs of white suit bulging between tie-downs so no crap got in.

  It was soon obvious that none of them was going to come out of the deal smelling like roses, though, after Larson lifted the large plywood hinged cover. The crime scene below, such as it was, was a killer.

  Larson balked at the sticking point until Karen needled him. “Your scene, Larson. We amateurs wouldn’t want to disturb it.”

  With a litany of curses, Larson allowed Marek to lower him down into the slime. He sank to his shoulders, just as Bunting had.

  “Look for a weapon,” Karen suggested.

  “Crap hasn’t gone to my head.” He gave her a basilisk stare that shut her up. But after rooting around, he shook his head. “Nothing here but shit and the body.”

  That left them with the difficulty of removing a three-hundred-pound deadweight in tight quarters. In the end, it took heavy ropes, the firefighter’s ingenuity, and all of Marek’s strength to raise the heavy body. Then the rest of them had to muscle the body onto a tarp outside.

  A blanket to wrap the Baby Bunting in.

  Gingerly, Larson retrieved a phone and a pair of keys from Bunting’s pockets. The first, he placed in an evidence bag to take back to DCI, the second, he separated. The house key, he handed to Karen. The car key, he handed to the tow truck operator who’d come to take the SUV to Sioux Falls for processing.

  Looking like a doctor who’d strayed into a mud-wrestling contest on a feedlot, Larson pointed to Jessica then to Bunting’s mouth. “Bag that fecal material.” Maybe it made him feel that he got some of his own back as his trainee gagged. Sitting as far away as she could, she scooped up Bunting’s last meal into an evidence bag.

  “Interesting dental implant,” Donohue observed, finding yet another euphemism for the crap stuck in Bunting’s no-longer pearly whites. “Looks like it was done on purpose.”

  Despite what they’d all just been through, Marek’s stomach churned, and his mind did the same as he finally caught up. “You’re thinking the killer used his own... excrement?”

  “Hey, no cause of death determined yet,” Karen said, having learned her lesson well from Larson not to make assumptions. “He might’ve died over a Big Whopper then got stuffed in there later.”

  Larson gave her a sour look as he threw his heavily stained protective suit into the nearby dumpster. “Got a good look. Homicide.”

  Silence descended on the clearing. Even the birds held their songs.

  Larson dragged off each glove slowly, deliberately.

  “Well?” Karen demanded. “Don’t be a... turd.”

  Not until he’d disposed of the gloves and washed his hands at the water pump did the DCI agent finally look up again, grey eyes bleak. “Stabbed in the back.”

  CHAPTER 4

  While Karen had seen some creative carvers in her short time in office, they’d all done their damage face-to-face. The idea of attacking a man from behind was deeply disturbing, even when it came to Baby Bunting. Who would kill in such a way? An enemy, no doubt. But it wasn’t unheard of even for a so-called friend to turn treacherous. She stripped off her slimy gloves much more quickly than Larson had. “Et tu, Brute?”

  The agent gave her an arch look that told her he wasn’t going to forgive her anytime soon for her own treachery in making him go down into the slime. “Facts, my business,” Larson told her. “Motive, yours.”

  Still in his protective suit, Marek looked like the Abominable Snowman with a toothache, waiting his turn for an extraction. “Single blow?”

  “Looked to be,” Larson hedged. “Autopsy to determine.”

  Without something to dry her hands on after washing under the pump, Karen flicked beads of water from her fingers onto the concrete. The wet spots evaporated in the sunlight. She wished she could remove the case as easily. Bunting was proving to be as much trouble dead as alive.

  When she saw Jessica shifting from side to side like a kid trying not to pee, Karen moved aside. “You need to go? You can use the women’s. Or take it in
the woods—or the campground.”

  “I’m good. Just want to get this crap off me. Never been to a scene as bad as this. I thought dumpsters were the worst. All that stinking garbage. But this, it takes the cake.” She blanched in mid-peel, her suit at her midriff. “I don’t think I’ll want to eat or do anything else until I’ve taken a proper shower.”

  “I’m with you there, sister.” Karen began to pace the short sidewalk. “A single blow. What does that tell us? That it’s a man? Have to be pretty strong, I’d think, to get through that bulk.”

  Marek shook his head. “All depends on the angle, the sharpness of the knife, the depth of the wound. Doesn’t always take that much, so long as you hit the right spot.”

  “Lucky break or—” Her Adam-12 ringtone interrupted her. As a former dispatcher, she’d thought it appropriate, but maybe the time had come to change it. Along with her phone number, she wished, as she looked at the caller’s name.

  “Nails,” Marek deduced, no doubt from the way she’d involuntarily extended her arm. She’d rather be holding a rattlesnake than her phone.

  Larson looked up from stowing evidence bags. “Better take it.”

  She made a face but complied. “Mr. Nelson, to what do I owe the honor of your call?”

  The low-power FM radio operator was Eda County’s only claim to a news channel. YRUN, his ironic call name for a legless Vietnam vet, operated out of the top floor of the converted Carnegie library, where Nails lived and rarely left. She’d saved his life once, but his thanks had been to stab her in the back. He’d pushed her to reveal her biological daughter’s identity on the air, nearly igniting Marek’s notoriously slow-burn temper. Her loss to Bunting, at least initially, had largely been Nails’s doing, no matter how much the bigwig news reporter from the Twin Cities had contributed.

  Well, that and a killer who’d masterfully manipulated both of them.

  “Knock off the sarcasm, Sheriff. I apologized. On air. And given how many times I ran that broadcast, that means I apologized over and over again. Congrats on the recount, by the way. And I mean that, swear to God, and said so in this morning’s broadcast. You’re the best man... woman... for the job. Bunting was a bad egg. But he didn’t deserve to get stuffed into a john.”