Muddy Mouth: A Dog Park Mystery

by Newsome, C. A.

  “Oh.”

  “The partners are all middle-aged ladies. Two are librarians. I don’t remember their names, but I suspect they’re the women who hired you. I think he’s just a front. The ladies might be willing to ransom him, but they don’t really need him. He sure can’t ransom himself. Anyone close to the situation would have picked up on the discrepancies.”

  “Have you told Austin any of this?”

  “I figure they can do their own research. Anyway, I don’t think the ladies would appreciate me letting the cat out of the bag. The Austin police can be the bad guys. I have to live here.”

  3

  Sunday, June 19

  Thanks to recent hip surgery, John Morgan, whose hacker handle was “Trees,” sat in his tree house. He hadn’t climbed the ancient white oak for more than 20 years due to progressive deterioration of his spine and hips that left him disabled. The climbing harness pinched his new hips painfully on the trip up, but it didn’t diminish his exhilaration. I’ll make a sling to sit in for the next run, like window washers use. That should take care of it.

  He unclipped his harness and ascenders, unslung his knapsack, then leaned against the trunk of the elm, his heart still pounding. He wheezed heavily, his breath loud against the backdrop of wind shushing through the leaves and the twittering of birds. Sweat ran into his hair—streaked with gray and grown past his shoulders—and a beard that reached the middle of his chest because he’d been too fatigued to cut it during his convalescence.

  He’d pay for over-exerting himself, but the trip had been worth it. His sky house had taunted him for too long, 30 feet from his front porch and impossible to reach.

  Sunlight dappled two decades of dead leaves littering the weathered, gray floor of his aerie, a sturdy platform eight feet square and 40 feet in the air. His heart rate slowed, his breath evened out, and the pain in his hips faded.

  He stayed where he was for several more minutes with his eyes closed, enjoying the breeze, the dancing bits of sunlight on his face, and the surrounding green. Even with his eyes closed, he could feel the life around him, taste the oxygen rich air. A tear snuck out from under one eyelid. This was home.

  By some miracle, the old broom was still there, lodged between the platform and a pair of overhanging branches. The paint on the handle was peeling and the straw was filthy and fragile, but he was able to shove the accumulated leaves and debris over the side with it.

  His knapsack yielded a yoga mat, a zabuton meditation mat and a zafu cushion. Cuddled in the zabuton was a Buddha statuette, twin of the one on his shrine in the living room. Buddha liked high places, and this treehouse was the highest place for miles around. He lodged the statuette in the crook of two branches, then used bungie cords to strap him in so he would survive high winds. He attached an empty Gatorade bottle below, as a repository for petitions. He draped a string of tiny magnasite skull carvings around the whole to enhance intuition and spiritual connection. Lastly, the knapsack coughed up a jade figure of a seated monkey, his personal animal totem.

  The monkey was last year’s Christmas gift from Bailey. He grinned, anticipating her next visit. Bailey had generous hands, graceful as swans, and they soothed his damaged body and wounded soul with delicate touches like the wings of birds.

  He wondered if he could keep his new flexibility secret from her until November. That’s when she closed her gardening business for the winter. It would be fun to surprise her.

  He’d been mum earlier, when she called about the missing author. Leroy Eberschlag’s digital footprint ended at the Austin Hyatt, if you didn’t count the one phone call. That call came from a pre-paid cell phone currently pinging in Cincinnati. He followed the trail of pings back to Austin, where the phone had been activated the day after Leroy vanished.

  According to the phone, Leroy arrived in Cincinnati several days later. How was the man living? He couldn’t go out in public. Research into his friends uncovered no unusual activity that would suggest they were helping him. It was time for alternative methods.

  This would be an appropriate christening of his treetop shrine. He placed a slip of paper into the Gatorade bottle, a request for the truth about Leroy’s whereabouts. He lowered himself upon the zafu in a semi-kneeling position, with his knees on the zabuton underneath. The lotus position was beyond him, but this he could do.

  John began his meditation with a simple prayer for clear vision, then emptied his mind, focusing instead on sensation. The clean sweat on his brow dried and cooled. A weight grew on one ankle. Metal walls enclosed him, cocoon-like. He heard a low hum and tasted stale air conditioning. His heart grew buoyant, filling the stale box. The box sat in a wasteland that stretched as far as the eye could see. A beautiful woman with gunmetal grey eyes watched.

  John opened his eyes, disappointed. This was one of his more surreal visions. It happened sometimes. His visions always made sense, but there were times when understanding came only in retrospect. He reminded himself that Spirit always sent what he needed and the fault was with him for not interpreting correctly.

  Wherever Leroy was, there was a sense of confinement and isolation, yet the heart was purposeful and at peace. Not a state of mind he would associate with being a victim or a mugger. And the woman, who was she?

  4

  Monday, June 20

  “The phone records say he’s here, but Buddha and the jade monkey say he’s in an air conditioned box in the middle of a wasteland and he’s happy?” Lia turned to look at Bailey, amazed.

  The two women sat on their favorite picnic table, enjoying the cool hours after sunrise before the humidity set in. For now they had the park to themselves. Honey nosed Lia’s hand. She glanced down at the tennis ball she forgot she’d been holding. She lobbed it into the air so it would roll down the hill. Honey loped away, Chewy on her tail.

  “Are you sure Trees isn’t a lunatic?” Lia asked. “How can Leroy be here and somewhere else? What wasteland? How would he get there? And why? The conference is over. Why wouldn’t he just come home?”

  “Trees doesn’t know if his vision was meant to be taken literally or not. There’s plenty of wasteland out west. He could be in the western panhandle. It could be Death Valley. The border to Mexico is hours from Austin. There are places where people cross, if you know where they are. It wouldn’t be hard to fly under the radar, especially if he had money.”

  “But Leroy didn’t have any cash, not that anyone knows about. The ladies kept him on a tight leash so he wouldn’t run off to Vegas and go on a bender. This is impossible.”

  “I wondered about it, too. I did a Tarot card reading about it.” Bailey pulled a slim stack of the oversized cards out of her pocket.

  Lia kept her face carefully neutral. She loved Bailey, but didn’t buy into her New Age mumbo-jumbo. Friendship required that she listen, and be polite.

  “The first card, the one representing the foundation of the situation was The Moon.” Bailey laid a card on the picnic table, between them. In it, two funny-looking dogs howled at the night sky. “This represents deception, illusion, confusion, and things unknown. It means more is going on than we understand.”

  Well, duh.

  “The second card describes the present.” The card she turned over featured a man hanging upside-down from a wood post by one foot, the other leg cocked at the knee. His hands were behind his back, as if bound. She placed it to the left of the first card, at an angle.

  “He certainly looks confined to me.” Better to humor her.

  “This card isn’t about confinement. It means being powerless, needing to surrender to circumstances. Sometimes it’s about sacrifice. It could also mean he’s taking time out to gain a new perspective.”

  “Do you think he’s been kidnapped?”

  “It could just as easily mean he decided to take off and sort his head out.”

  “In the middle of a convention where crowds of adoring fans were waiting to fawn all over him? What kind of spiritual crisis would drive him to l
eave?”

  “I haven’t got it figured out, but the important thing to keep in mind when you draw cards is not only the cards you pull, but the ones that don’t show up.”

  “Like what?”

  “The Devil, which would mean he caved to temptation or addiction or malice; the seven of swords, which says he’s pulling a fast one; ten of swords has all the swords stuck in a body. …”

  “I see your point. What’s next?”

  Bailey placed the third card directly above the first. “This is the advice card.” On it, a young man held up a sword. “It means to seek the truth.”

  Lia didn’t bother to roll her eyes. One card remained in Bailey’s hand.

  “So what’s the last one?”

  “It’s the probable outcome. I don’t like it.” The card Bailey placed on the right featured a tower struck by lightning and two people falling out.

  “I can see why. Good thing we don’t have any towers around here.”

  “It can refer to any kind of catastrophe, or just a sudden event that destroys your foundations. It goes back to the Moon.” Bailey pointed a graceful finger at the first card. “The first card says we don’t know what’s really going on. The last says the truth will come out, it will change everything, and it won’t be gentle.”

  Lia tried to be diplomatic. “That’s good, Bailey, but how does it help us? It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.”

  Bailey pulled a card out of her other pocket. “I pulled one extra card, for our next step.

  The card featured three women dancing and toasting each other with goblets.

  “What does that mean?”

  “The two main meanings are celebration and sisterhood.”

  “So we’re supposed to party?”

  “I’m still meditating on this one. I think we need to keep our eyes open. Something is hinky.”

  “What’s kinky?” Steve asked as he and Terry approached their table. Steve’s dog, Penny, jumped up on the picnic table and slashed her exuberant tongue across Lia’s face. Lia urged her down.

  “Enough, Penny.” She gave Bailey a look. She wasn’t sure what to tell Steve and Terry, if anything. Bailey shrugged.

  “Your brain,” Lia and Bailey said, simultaneously.

  Steve roared.

  “What’s the news on Eberschlag, Lia?” he asked. “You’re in a prime position to pick up gossip while you work on the float.”

  “There’s nothing. Nobody knows what to think.”

  “I say it’s a publicity stunt. I imagine all the press hasn’t hurt his sales any. He’s got a book coming out soon.” Terry took out his phone and hunted up the Lucas Cross Amazon page on the browser. “Savage Gun ranks in the top 100 Kindle books. That’s pre-orders.”

  “If he’s dead, he’s not going to care how many books he sells,” Steve said. “Didn’t they find blood at the scene?”

  “Traces smeared on the wall, like someone wiped it up in a hurry,” Lia said. “It tested positive for human blood. It will take weeks for the DNA to come back, if they had enough to test.”

  “Can’t Peter find out about that?” Bailey asked.

  “He says the Austin police are being closed-mouth. Brent told him being their Cincinnati liaison is like being told to go sit in the corner. So far they haven’t asked him to do anything.”

  “No ransom demand?” Steve asked.

  “Not that anyone knows of,” Lia said. “It’s possible Leroy’s parents are in contact with kidnappers and aren’t telling the police.”

  “Has Leroy made enough on his books to attract kidnappers?” Bailey asked.

  Lia shrugged. “There were bigger names at the conference. Why go after Leroy when they had two New York Times best selling authors on the panel he missed?”

  “He was drunk when he disappeared. That would make him an easier target,” Steve said.

  “Bah,” Terry said. “It’s a stunt, and it’s working.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lia said. “Didn’t you see that clip of his mother on the news? She was hysterical. I can’t imagine letting my family think I’d been abducted.”

  “Verisimilitude,” Terry said.

  “Cold-hearted,” Steve said.

  “If that’s what it is, she’ll never forgive him,” Bailey said.

  District Five’s station house outgrew the quarters assigned to it well before the turn of the millennium. More than a hundred police officers made do with space designed for a squad a third its current size. The building was attractive on the outside, and the parking lot was adequate—especially with the spillover lot across Ludlow at a now-defunct gas station. For patrol officers it was a minor irritation that lasted as long as roll call in a room that was standing room only.

  The detectives suffered like economy passengers on an overseas flight. The District Five bullpen was a long, narrow room with a dozen desks jammed end to end around the perimeter, leaving a narrow space down the middle to navigate. It was a matter of courtesy that no one wore fragrance on the job, and Mexican food was strictly forbidden.

  Peter’s desk sat at the far end, away from the steady foot traffic near the door. Brent sat around the corner from Peter, having charmed a retiring detective into willing the desk to him in such a way that those who were next in seniority just snorted and let Brent have it.

  “Hey Dourson, I heard you were passed over for CID,” Hodgkins razzed as he exited the bullpen, followed by his permanent shadow, Jarvis. “You shouldn’t let your girlfriend solve your cases for you. Looks bad to the brass.”

  “I see you’re still here,” Peter said. “Haven’t figured out how to cheat on the I.Q. Test yet?”

  Hodgkins shot him the finger and swaggered by.

  “When are you going to do something about Hodgkins and his sidekick?” Brent asked as they entered the narrow warren shared by the detectives and headed for their desks. At the moment, the room was uncharacteristically empty.

  “You think I should?” Peter asked.

  “After they set Brainard on Lia, I was sure you were going to take them down. They’ve more than earned it.”

  “True, but the problem with guys like Heckle and Jeckle is, if you retaliate, no one can tell which one of you is the bigger ass.”

  “So you’re doing nothing?” Brent sat back in his chair, arms folded, and stared at Peter in disbelief.

  “Oh, ye of little faith. One of the first things they teach in martial arts is to use your opponent’s momentum and body weight against him.”

  “And?”

  “When hunting, one waits for the doe to step into the clearing. Timing, Grasshopper, is everything.”

  Brent shook his head. “So what did Lia say when you told her you were offered a spot in the new homicide division?” Brent asked.

  “I didn’t tell her and I’m not going to. I already turned it down.”

  “Brother, say it isn’t so. That’s a high profile gig with a substantial pay increase. Why would you give it up?”

  “High profile, high pressure and lousy hours. I’d be working out of Downtown and going all over the city. Here, I’m away from the politics, I’m close to home, and I only have to acquaint myself with the local losers. I can maintain regular hours and have a personal life.”

  “Why aren’t you telling Lia?”

  “She’ll think I gave up a good career move for her, and she’ll feel pressured.”

  “Didn’t you? Give it up for her?” Brent asked.

  “Not exactly. I’m not that ambitious. If we weren’t together, I might have taken the slot because I didn’t have anything better to do. And the way I understand it, we’ll still work cases. We just won’t be the guys taking all the heat.”

  “Smart thinking. And since you’re stuck here, you can join me. I got a hot one.”

  “Oh, really?” Peter asked.

  “A precursor of life under the new system. Eighty-three year old woman has called three times this week. She says the neighbor’s teen-aged son is be
aming weird noises into her house in the middle of the night to make her crazy.”

  “Can’t you just tell her that’s impossible?”

  “Won’t stop her from calling again tomorrow. I promised the desk I’d take a look.”

  “Five gets you ten it’s tinnitus,” Peter said.

  “You tell her that. See what she says.”

  “Maybe we can blame it on her dental work.”

  “First we have to look all over her place for the invisible speakers where these sounds are coming in,” Brent said.

  “How does she know it’s the neighbor’s kid? Why isn’t it aliens?”

  “The young man in question lit fire to a sack of dog doo on her porch when he was eight. Who else would it be?”

  “Well, that explains it. Looks like we’ve got a career criminal to take down.”

  Sarah looked dubiously at the tether hanging from Lia’s belt while she held the door to SCOOP Manor open. “Cecilie’s out and it’s just us today. You’re really going to work with Chewy tied to your side?”

  “It’s an experiment. Chewy won’t focus on me and heel properly. I figure this way, he’ll have to.”

  “That’s drastic, isn’t it?”

  “Desperate times, desperate measures. He’s got to be ready for the parade.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Cats are so much easier.”

  Lia looked at the row of giant litter boxes to clean and the dozens of milling cats to feed and medicate. “Uh huh, that’s why I’m here. Because cats are so easy.”

  Sarah snorted. “Cats are very easy. That’s why it’s so easy to wind up with too many of them.”