Dead Poor

by M. K. Coker

  People on the road seemed in no hurry to get to the point. Too bad Marek couldn’t do his job on the road. Maybe he’d get some decent time with his daughter. His girlfriend, such as she was, would probably be good with it—except they would need room for her pottery. Her kiln. Her own space.

  Okay, maybe a rolling life wasn’t in the cards.

  Karen shifted on her feet. “Can you tell us what you saw, Mr. Miles?”

  “Mr. Miles. Hah. That’s my dad. Mr. Button-Down Businessman.” He slicked his hands down his sides. “Yeah, I can tell you. It happens now and again, but it’s always a shock. Almost everyone on the road is friendly. Of course, your Mr. Bunting was a local, not a traveler. But I didn’t know that. I was up late, editing some code for a client. After one o’clock in the morning, I know that.”

  “I thought you were fleeing long hours,” Karen commented, looking faintly amused.

  Akio grinned at Karen. “Only because I played before I worked. And I’m a night owl. Another benefit. My hours don’t have to conform to a time clock. It’s usually quiet at night, and I get a lot done. Unlike cubicle life, when I’m done, I’m done. So I work less for more. No bennies, true, but I can handle that. I finally turned my dad around when I told him I was a classic entrepreneur. Taking risks. I don’t want to be the guy who spends decades being hired, laid off, hired, laid off, then having nothing to show for it at the end of the day. I want to live. And I’ve seen more of this country than most ever will, and I’m just getting started.”

  When Marek cleared his throat, Akio blew out a breath. “Sorry. I hate seeing people taken for a ride in the back of the bus—when they can drive the whole freaking bus. That’s what my blog’s about, plus what I see on the road.” He pulled on his ear. “Your Mr. Bunting? Thing is, the man’s dead, and it just seems... wrong. To talk about him behind his back, so to speak. But okay. I finish off the coding gig, send it off, and I realize how long it’s been since I took a... uh, used the restroom.”

  A popular place the previous night. Then again, why else would you wander out in the middle of the night, unless you were intent on foul play? “You met him there?” Marek asked.

  “Yeah, I’m... doing my business... and he barges in like he owns the place, muttering something about meddlers under his breath, along with a lot of profanity. He’s at half flag at the other urinal before he notices he’s not alone. He’s red-faced, not like he was embarrassed, but more like he’d just blown a gasket over something. And I got to be his target. ‘What are you staring at, you stinking chink?’ he said.”

  All trace of the beaming young man was gone. “You know the rant. Told me to go back home, that I was taking all the good jobs from real Americans, that anything I’d gotten in life, I’d gotten for free.”

  Nothing Marek was learning about Bunting made him any more sympathetic. The man was an ass, fore and aft.

  “What happened then?” Karen asked, her hands fisting on her belt. “Did you kick his butt?”

  Akio sighed. “You don’t engage with those kind of people. No point. I played dumb and mumbled the few Chinese words I learned from my great-grandmother and got the heck out. I went straight back to my van, locked it from the inside, and crashed. And I didn’t wake up until your deputy knocked on my door. When I saw the uniform, I’ll admit I was scared—afraid I’d been reported for something trumped up like drugs, just to mess with me. Deport me, maybe, except I’m fifth-generation American. I’m glad you won the recount, Sheriff Mehaffey, because Bunting’s the sort who’d use the badge for his own agenda.”

  Neither Marek nor Karen could say anything to refute that, because it was true.

  “We appreciate your candor,” Karen finally told him. “I’m sorry you had such an experience. I apologize, not on Bunting’s behalf, because the word ‘sorry’ wasn’t in his vocabulary, but on behalf of my office and my county. If you think of anything else—”

  “Oh, I nearly forgot.” Akio bounded back into the van then came back out holding something that looked like a mechanical mosquito, an insect that any red-blooded Dakotan was all too intimately familiar with. “I don’t know if it’s helpful, as it was before dark yesterday, but I’ve got feed. If you’ve got a hard drive available in your office, I can download it for you.”

  Marek had never seen one of the contraptions in the flesh—or in metal. “A drone?”

  “Yeah, makes really good footage for my blogs. Had an outstanding sunset last night from the overlook. But I got good shots of the entire park. It’s not all that big, you know? And that’s not a knock. I like these little parks. Makes me feel a bit like I’m on the Corps of Discovery, showing people something they’ve never seen before.”

  Karen lifted an inquiring eyebrow at Marek.

  He didn’t know how the footage could be of help, but he’d learned at least one thing during his years in homicide. “You take what you can, when you can.”

  “All right,” she acceded then turned back to Akio. “Can you transport it to the Sheriff’s Office?”

  “Sure. Reunion, right? I don’t think I’ll have any difficulty keeping my camping spot here.”

  “Aren’t you worried about a killer on the loose?” Karen asked him.

  “No. And not because I killed him. I forgot him as soon as my head hit the pillow. You just have to let that stuff roll off, or it’ll kill you. Anyway, I figure this must be personal. Hassling me was just a cheap shot in the dark. I got a radio feed from a local station with my booster, and it said that Bunting was stuffed in the john.” He looked down at his spare frame. “He probably had a couple times my weight. So I’d guess it was more than one person. Takes a village, you know?”

  The last member of their little village of witnesses sat at a picnic table in front of an old gray Toyota, her hands folded, simply sitting quietly, with the infinite patience of the elderly. They’d seen all and had little left to see but eternity.

  Mary Redbird was a tiny woman with white braided hair, high cheekbones, and black eyes that seemed only a little dimmed. When they approached, she got to her feet and, in doing so, revealed she was hunchbacked. Marek was reminded strongly of the print on his wall at home, one bought and framed by his mother. “The Woodgatherer” by Sioux artist Oscar Howe. Hauling the wood through a blizzard for her family’s fire, hunched with her load against the wind, she was the picture of survival with grace.

  “Please, let’s sit,” Karen said. “It’s been a long day. Even if it’s not noon yet.”

  Though a faint uptick of the mouth told them the woman saw through the ruse, she sank back to the table, and Marek and Karen sat on the other side of her.

  “I am on my way to the Black Hills, to work as a tour guide,” she told them when Karen asked. “I just came from the sugar beet fields in North Dakota.” She must have seen their horror, because she smiled. “I have been doing it for many years now. I can outlast many younger. And the pay is good, about twelve dollars an hour.”

  Not a bad wage but not an easy job, either. “Shouldn’t you be retired by now?”

  “On the reservation? Oh, I could be. My family worries for me. But I am married to the sun, as the saying goes among my people. No husband, no children. And our people once roamed the plains, for food, for sustenance... and for beauty. I looked at how those who were my age were dying, long before their elders had, with so little beauty to make their last days glad. You have not seen poverty until you’ve seen it on the reservation. No jobs, no hope. I was lucky in that I taught school, but eventually, I could not stand to see so many of my children lose their lives to hopelessness, to alcohol. So I chose this life. When I can no longer earn my living at it, I will go back home to die. Until then, I will roam as the sun does.”

  Marek hoped that meant that, in winter, she went south. “What did you see last night, Ms. Redbird?”

  “Nothing. I saw nothing. But I heard. I had my car windows open, as I often do when the flies are gone and the air is cool with the coming winter. It reminds me o
f my childhood, when we still hunted, still maintained the traditions, the links, to a life now gone for good.”

  “What did you hear?” Karen asked, her voice low, almost hushed, as if she and Marek were sitting at an ancient campfire to hear the tales of a village elder.

  “The thrashing of an animal in a snare. I felt for it, deep in my soul.” She put a hand to her stomach, and Marek wondered if the gesture was the equivalent of a hand to the heart in her tribe’s culture. “Because so many of my people, they are in that snare, a death snare, with no way out.”

  He guessed Mary Redbird came from the Crow Creek or the Pine Ridge reservation, the poorest areas in South Dakota, and possibly the entire country.

  Karen looked disappointed. “And that’s it?”

  “No, I heard a hunter’s step, stepping lightly in the woods.” She gestured in the direction away from the overlook, to the other side of the hill. Her campsite was the closest to that side. “And I knew that the suffering would not last, and I lay back down. I felt... comforted... to hear a hunter again in the woods. It is a blessing of the old, when young and old merge, and I slept again with the abandon of a child, until your deputy woke me.”

  “I hope he didn’t startle you,” Karen said, probably thinking that the hatchet-faced man in a uniform might well do more than startle a woman like Mary Redbird.

  “Oh, no. All I could see, at first, was light around him, and I thought, perhaps the time has come, and I go to my people sooner, rather than later. But then he spoke, and I knew he was not of my people, and I woke fully. And so I have waited to speak to you. They know, in the Hills, that I will come, and they will accept my word, that I was delayed. It is better there, now, when they let us have some small part again of our sacred lands.”

  When they should have had the whole.

  CHAPTER 8

  Surveying the media outlets at the barricade, Karen wished to God she had a drone that could bring her uniform to her. She had her official jacket with her, but it was a warm, sunny fall day, and she was already wearing a sweatshirt. The combination would look ridiculous. She didn’t need a mirror to know that, and she wouldn’t want to look at herself in the mirror anyway. Business casual didn’t stretch to encompass her current getup. But she’d already been seen, so she had no choice but to suck it up.

  Cameras panned as she got out of the vintage Corvette, making her wish for that piece of crap known as the Sub, her official and even more vintage Chevy Suburban. That was the one thing she absolutely, positively had been looking forward to handing off to Bunting.

  Schooling her face, something she hadn’t needed to do as a dispatcher, took a huge effort of will. The press was, she told herself, not her enemy, though it had certainly felt like it of late.

  Walrus and Kurt were doing a good job of keeping the ramparts from being breached. Though truth to tell, the Dakota press was generally a pretty easygoing lot, unless the nationals swooped in for the kill. Then they could get downright vicious, as Nails had.

  Right now, though, she saw nobody farther afield than Sioux Falls and Sioux City. The tale of two cities, two states—South Dakota and Iowa—led to two channels for every network.

  A grizzled veteran from Sioux Falls allowed all the rest to shout out their questions, waiting as Karen did, for the eye of the storm. How could she possibly answer questions when they were all talking at once? Sometimes she wondered about their IQ.

  When the hubbub finally died down, the veteran asked, “Sheriff Mehaffey, you won a recount late last night to the victim of what sources are telling us is a homicide. Robert Leonard Bunting Jr. Why are you on the scene and not a suspect in his death?”

  She felt Marek’s silent presence behind her. He had her back. “Along with Detective Okerlund, I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when Mr. Bunting was killed. I was about to sign on with APD there when I got the call. Detective Okerlund also has a standing offer with APD. As for why I’m here, DCI was first on scene. Though I offered to step back from the investigation, they declined to take the lead.”

  “What about your deputies?” a blond bombshell of a man from a Sioux City station asked. “Won’t you have to investigate your own men?”

  She took Larson’s lead on that. “Killing Bunting after the recount? That’s monumentally stupid. And I don’t keep stupid on my roster. Besides, my men had leads on other jobs. None of them needed his death to advance their careers. Or in one case, retire.”

  “Didn’t you win with Bunting’s death?” he pressed.

  “No, I won by seven votes in the recount. I may not have liked his election tactics—and I’m sure you’ll recall his win was courtesy of a killer—but I didn’t rejoice.”

  And that, she realized, was the honest-to-God truth. Perhaps some of that leaked out onto her face, because that angle was mercifully dropped. At least for the moment.

  “Are you going to close the park?” another reporter asked.

  Karen hadn’t even thought that far ahead. “Not at this time.”

  “Can you confirm reports that Bunting’s body was found dumped in a toilet at the overlook?”

  Since Nails probably had that out on the airwaves by now, she confirmed. “We do not, however, have an official cause of death from the medical examiner in Sioux Falls. Word is, the autopsy will happen tomorrow morning.”

  In the fast-paced world of media, that was years away. The questions went downhill after that, since she could answer none of them without compromising the investigation. She’d started to step back when the veteran reporter asked, “What does it feel like to be the only elected female sheriff in South Dakota?”

  Off balance, she answered without thought. “It feels scary.” When that got a startled pause, she clarified, mentally kicking herself. “Scary to know that the people I serve have put their trust, sometimes even their lives, in my hands and that of my men. It’s a heavy responsibility. I don’t take it lightly. Anyone who does, doesn’t really get this job.”

  “Like Bunting?” As if talking of feelings had opened the floodgates, the bombshell said, “You didn’t like him.”

  She gritted her teeth. “Whether I liked him or not has no bearing on the job.”

  “We had a complaint from a couple who were detained for hours, waiting for you to show up.” Another reporter had muscled in with a grating gotcha tone. “Do you really believe that Bunting was killed by a visitor to the park?”

  Karen felt her fingers tighten, wanting to strangle the Class A assholes from Florida. Behind her, Marek cleared his throat, a rare occurrence of him wanting to speak on camera. Perhaps he knew just how close she was to saying something she’d later regret. She hadn’t eaten a bite since sometime the previous day, and that was making her lightheaded. Not a good time to be spouting sound bites. She moved aside.

  Marek introduced himself then said calmly, in that laconic way of Dakotans who weren’t her, “Recall, we have a potential killer on the loose, and keeping the campers together, with our deputies, protected them. And in a case like this, you can’t make any assumptions about what, or who, might be important. People may not even know what they know until we interview them. And we have just finished. We have now released the campers with our apologies for the delay. Any complaints should be directed toward the Eda County commissioners and will be promptly addressed.”

  It seemed ludicrous, said like that. Marek’s deep, almost subsonic voice seemed to have lulled the press into a trancelike state, as they didn’t try to stop Karen and Marek from leaving.

  With the press in her rearview mirror, Karen said, “That was boneheaded.”

  He frowned at her. “What did I say?”

  “Not you, me. Scary. Talk about a poor choice of words.”

  “Oh.” He rubbed at his knee. “It is scary. If you don’t get that, you’ve no business in the job.”

  “But guys don’t say that on air. And for me, as the lone female sheriff in this state, to say it was just idiotic. Makes people think I can’t handle the
scary stuff. I can pretty much guarantee that’s what they’ll run with, not anything else either of us said, or even Bunting’s death.”

  “After you burned them last month, getting an apology in print from no less than a Pulitzer-prize-winning Twin Cities reporter?” He shook his head. “No, I think they’ll give you the whole sound bite.”

  “Maybe... but only after they lead with something like ‘Lone Female Sheriff Afraid of the Job.’ Maybe with a Halloween theme and little ghosties. But enough about my fat mouth. What about the investigation? What’s next?” She glanced down at her frayed jeans. “That is, after we stop to change cars and clothes.”

  Marek blinked as if such mundane matters had been far from his mind, even though his knees were practically under his chin in the bucket seats of the Corvette. “We need to go to Aleford to talk to the aunt. She may know what was going on in his personal life.”

  Josephine had let them know that Bunting’s next of kin and only known blood relative was his mother’s sister.

  “And to see the ex-wife,” Karen reminded him. “Last address Josephine found for Nadine Early was there. Speaking of our long-suffering secretary, maybe we’d better stop at the office before she has time to type up her resignation letter.”

  He frowned, as well he might, since Josephine typed up his dictations. His dyslexia had been a sticking point when he’d first been hired, and Josephine had ridden to the rescue by offering to type up his verbal reports. “At her speed? If she was set on it, it’s been done since yesterday.”