It must have impressed the dispatcher, because she said, “Somebody will be right there, ma’am, but stay on the phone with me, okay?”
I knew she wanted to keep me talking until a deputy arrived in case I was reporting a crime I’d committed myself. Also, the investigating officer would want to know how I’d come upon the body, and the dispatcher didn’t want me to leave the scene.
I said, “I won’t disconnect, but I’m going to put the phone down because I need to calm the dog.”
Before she could tell me what she thought about that, I laid the phone on the ground so I could use both hands on Mame. I not only wanted to calm her, I wanted to get us both back to the street. Keeping her collar in one hand, I stroked her head with the other and talked softly to her.
“Good girl, Mame, good girl. You’re a very good girl, and everything’s okay.”
That’s what we all want to hear, that we’re good and that everything’s okay.
I kept repeating it, and she gradually stopped snarling and decided not to bite me. But when I turned her around to pick her up, her eyes were full of reproach. I had hurt her feelings and she wasn’t going to forgive me easily. I didn’t blame her. I
never
hit an animal, any more than I would hit a child, and I despise people who do. No matter how people may try to justify it, any time a large person uses physical punishment on a small vulnerable body, it’s despicable abuse.
But here the first time I’d caught Mame with a corpse’s
finger in her mouth, I’d smacked her nose. Both of us were going to have to readjust our opinions of me.
I picked up the phone and carried Mame to the street, stepping out of the thicket just as a green-and-white patrol car cruised toward us. I told the dispatcher the deputy had arrived and turned off the phone. The patrol car pulled to a stop and the driver got out. When I saw who it was, I took a deep breath. Deputy Jesse Morgan recognized me at about the same time. I imagine he had to suck up a bit of air too. The last time we’d met had been over another dead body, in circumstances no less peculiar than this one.
He was crisp and neat in his dark green shorts and shirt, his waist bulging with all the paraphernalia of a law-enforcement officer, his muscular legs covering the ground in a confident stride. Only the diamond stud in one earlobe indicated that he had a life apart from keeping Siesta Key safe.
He nodded to me with that impassive face that all law-enforcement officers cultivate.
“Miz Hemingway.”
I nodded back. “Deputy Morgan.”
“You called about a body?”
“The dog smelled it and ran over and started digging. She had a hand pulled out before I knew what it was.” I pointed toward the thick trees and underbrush. “The body is under that big oak.”
He stepped into the thicket, walking as if he wasn’t at all concerned about poisonous snakes or spiders or fire ants. I could see his dark green back through the branches, saw him stop and stand a moment with his hands on his hips, saw him kneel for a few seconds, and then stand and turn to walk back to me, talking on his phone as he came. When he stepped onto the street, his face was unreadable. I wasn’t surprised. Only once or twice in our acquaintance had I caught him in a smile.
“What time did you find it?”
“Not more than ten minutes ago.”
“You called as soon as you saw it?”
“I had to fight the dog first. She wouldn’t let go of the finger. If it has tooth marks, they’re from Mame.”
His mouth turned down a bit. “She chewed on the finger?”
“I wouldn’t say she chewed on it exactly, more like clamped her teeth down and held on.”
He looked hard at Mame, who returned his look with an imperious tilt of her nose. It took a lot more than a uniformed deputy to intimidate Mame.
He said, “I used to have a dachshund. They’re stubborn little guys.”
“That’s just it; she doesn’t know she’s little.”
He didn’t slip up and smile, but his eyes warmed a bit and he nodded. Another car drew up, and Deputy Morgan walked over to meet Sergeant Woodrow Owens. Mame squirmed in my arms and I put her down. Like a little guided missile, she headed straight back toward the thicket. I had the leash this time, so I pulled her back and glared at her, feeling like an embarrassed parent whose child is showing unflattering traits in public.
A
s he passed by with Deputy Morgan to go look at the body, Sergeant Owens flapped his hand at me. A tall, lanky African-American with droopy basset-hound eyes and a slow drawl that sounds like he just swallowed a mouthful of warm buttered grits, Sergeant Owens is the man who once looked me in the eye and told me I was too fucked up to continue as a law-enforcement officer. He understood why and was sympathetic, but he couldn’t have a deputy who was liable to go apeshit every now and then. I don’t hold it against him. I’d have done the same thing in his position.
I sat down on one of the cypress logs edging the lane and trapped Mame between my knees. In a few minutes Sergeant Owens came out and squatted beside me.
“You okay, Dixie?”
“Yeah, I’m good.”
“Haven’t seen you since that other business.”
I nodded. “That other business” had been a few months back when I had gone in a house to feed a cat and found a murdered man in the kitchen. I had ended up nearly getting killed myself, but in an odd way it had been good for me. I had thrown off a sick sense of victimhood and done what I needed to do to defend myself. I’d also stopped being afraid that I might be truly crazy. Now I was pretty sure I wasn’t much more neurotic than the average person.
I said, “I left shoe tracks by the body, and there are probably some dog hairs there too.”
“I’ll tell the crime techs. I’ve called Lieutenant Guidry. I imagine he’ll want to talk to you.”
“Guidry will be handling this?”
I didn’t like how my voice went up an octave when I said that or how my heart did an annoying little tap dance. Guidry had been the homicide detective on the case where I’d found the murdered man in the cat’s house, and there had been times when I’d hated him with a fine and pure venom—mostly because he had usually been right and also because he had forced me to move out of the dark web I’d spun round myself. I was much stronger now, and I had to admit that Guidry had a lot to do with why. Even so, I wasn’t ready for any kind of relationship with a man, and it irked me that my body didn’t seem to know that.
I said, “I need to take the dog home.”
Sergeant Owens stood and reached to give me a hand up. Keeping Mame’s leash short, I dusted off my cargo shorts and pointed toward her house. “It’s just down the road there. I won’t be long.”
“Take your time. We’ll be here awhile.”
I knew what he meant. Nothing is rushed at a crime scene. Crime technicians would walk shoulder to shoulder around the area looking for anything a killer might have dropped. They would photograph the mound and the protruding hand. They would photograph my tracks and Mame’s. They would look for any other tracks, for fibers, for hair, for anything that might point to the identity of the person or persons who had covered a dead body with soil and duff. They would take several measurements of the exact location of the body from the base of the tree and from other markers. Only then would they uncover the corpse.
As I carried Mame home, she looked over my shoulder toward the brambly woods as if I’d deprived her of the most fun she’d had in a dog’s age. We met two unmarked cars, with a van from the Crime Scene Investigation Unit close behind. They pulled close to the cypress logs along the edge of the street, but they still blocked the single-car lane. Secret Cove residents were going to be pissed.
At Mame’s house, I carried her straight to the bathroom and scrubbed my hands several times with antiseptic soap. Then I gave Mame a bath, wrapped her in a big beach towel, and brushed her teeth with poultry-flavored toothpaste. Every time I thought of that dead finger in her mouth, I said “Bleh!” and went over her molars again. For good measure, I gave her a Greenie to make her breath sweet again. I was a little tempted to chew one myself.
While she chewed on her Greenie, I took her out to the lanai to brush her dry in the early sunshine. I talked to her while I pulled my brush through her ear fringes and down her trousers and inside her forearms, telling her how beautiful she was and what a good girl she was, but my mind kept straying to what was happening at the crime scene. Mame seemed preoccupied too, chewing her Greenie with her eyes half closed as if my voice was background music to the images in her head.
When she was all dry and gleaming, I put her on the floor and pulled some hair from the grooming brush to put into a plastic bag. In the kitchen, I got out a twenty-pound bag of organic senior kibble and measured a half cup into her bowl—all a miniature dachshund needs for good health and a shiny coat. I added a Jubilee Wafer to keep her joints supple and gave her fresh water in a clean bowl. Mame wagged her tail and followed me to the front door to let me know we were friends again.
At the front door, I took her face in both hands and kissed the tip of her nose.
“I’ll be back tonight, okay?”
Mame swallowed the last of her Greenie and licked my hands with a chlorophyll-green tongue. People say dogs live only in the moment, that they don’t have memories of the past. I don’t believe that for one second. I was sure Mame remembered everything that had happened, but I didn’t mention it. Some things are best left unsaid.
I walked down the street to the crime scene, where more cars edged the lane and yellow crime-scene tape had been
stretched around the trees. A deputy from Community Policing stood beside the crime-scene tape.
I said, “I’m Dixie Hemingway. I was with the dog that found the body this morning. I brought some of the dog’s hair for the techs.”
She took the plastic bag and looked at the silky russet hairs inside.
“Irish setter?”
“Long-haired dachshund.”
“I’ll give it to them.”
“Is Lieutenant Guidry here?”
She tilted her head toward a group of people standing behind an ambulance. “He’s over there.”
“I imagine he’ll want to get a statement from me.”
She nodded and strode to the clump of officers. They all turned and looked at me, and then they parted and Lieutenant Guidry stepped through the gap.
Gosh.
Nobody should look that good, especially not somebody in law enforcement. Most law-enforcement men look like they’ve gained twenty pounds since they bought their last suit, but since they don’t have the time or money to buy new clothes every time they gain weight, they just keep cramming their expanding guts into old pants and letting their jacket sleeves strain at the armpits. Half of them wear Thom McAn shoes and black socks that haven’t faded the same way, so one is darker than the other.
Not Guidry. Some Italian designer kept him supplied with the kind of easy free-hanging jackets and pants that only the very rich can afford. The kind of things that wrinkle because they’re made of natural breathable fibers from countries where people live in yurts or alpaca tents. Poor people get stuck with complicated clothes made of crap left over from oil refining, synthetic stuff you can wad up and run a truck over and it won’t wrinkle. He wore leather sandals and no socks, and anybody looking at the leather could tell it was the best damn leather money could buy. Guidry was either independently wealthy and just working as a homicide
detective for kicks, or some rich woman dressed him.
Not that I cared. Neither he nor his clothes were any of my business, and I never wasted a second thinking about him.
Truly.
Guidry is olive-skinned, probably late thirties or early forties—old enough to have acquired permanent parentheses around his mouth and fine white laugh lines fanning at the corners of his eyes. His hair is dark with a sprinkling of silver at the sides, close-cropped to show a shapely skull and nice ears. He has gray eyes, a beaky nose, and even white teeth. I didn’t know anything about his personal life, or care, but he had mentioned once that he’d been married in the past and didn’t have any children. Okay, he didn’t mention it until I asked a leading question. I don’t know why I asked. I didn’t really care one way or the other.
Today he wore an oatmeal linen jacket with the sleeves pushed up his tanned forearms. His pants were linen too, brown and nicely wrinkled, and his knit shirt was a dark salmon pink. I absolutely hate it when a man looks better than I do. As he approached I was acutely conscious of my rumpled khaki shorts and of my bralessness. My sleeveless T was black knit. You couldn’t see through it, but men have a kind of X-ray vision that always alerts them when a woman isn’t wearing a bra.
We shook hands, formal as if we were meeting for the first time. Neither of us mentioned what had happened the last time we were together. I don’t know why he didn’t mention it, but I had almost got killed then, so it wasn’t something I wanted to talk about.
He said, “I understand your dog found the body.”
“She’s not my dog, but I’m taking care of her. She must have smelled it from the street, and she ran to it and tried to dig it up. She bit on a finger.”
He didn’t look surprised. Dogs can smell dead bodies from a long way away, and they’re always drawn to them. That’s why rescue teams use cadaver dogs to find dead bodies trapped under wreckage.
“Break the skin?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
Dead bodies don’t bleed and I hadn’t looked that closely.
I said, “I gave the crime techs some hair from the dog for comparison.”
“You didn’t see or hear anything in the area before you found the body?”
“Not a thing.”
“Any cars, people?”
“There was one car earlier, but it was somebody who lives here.”
“Name?”
“Conrad Ferrelli. At least it was his car. I didn’t actually see the driver.”
He seemed surprised. “You know Conrad Ferrelli?”
“I’ve taken care of their dog several times.”
His gray eyes were watching me. “Something bothering you?”
“The car was going awfully fast.”
“Wait here.”
He stooped under the crime-scene tape and went over to talk to the Medical Examiner. The crime-scene technicians joined them, and from time to time they all glanced at me. I shifted from foot to foot, thinking uneasily of Conrad Ferrelli’s speeding car.
Guidry came back to me. “They’re ready to uncover the body. Come see if you know who it is.”
I followed him to the tree where the techs were kneeling beside the body, gently brushing soil away from the head. The techs blocked my view of the face, and as I waited I looked toward a rustling in the surrounding greenery. Conrad Ferrelli’s Doberman pinscher stood beside a tree trunk, a thin shaft of light sharply defining the rust markings on his muzzle and throat. His dark eyes looked puzzled and wary.
I said. “Oh, no.”
The Medical Examiner looked up. “Ms. Hemingway?”
I pointed toward Reggie. “That dog belongs to the Ferrellis.”
I squatted on the ground and stretched my hand toward Reggie. Behind me, I heard Guidry say, “Everybody stay where you are and be quiet.”
I could see Reggie clearly now. He wore a pale dangling necktie—probably one of Conrad’s—but he didn’t have a collar or a leash.
I said, “Reggie hi, boy, that’s a good boy, good Reggie, come here, Reggie, come on, Reggie.”
He raised his ears but he didn’t move. I crooned to him some more, while the people behind me stayed silent and still as statues. I stretched my hand toward him, palm up, and sent him mental images of my hand holding kibble, of my hand stroking his head, of my hand patting him with love. I’ve always done that with animals, and I’m convinced they get the pictures exactly the way I send them. I can’t prove it, and lots of people think it’s a nutty idea, but as long as animals respond to it, I’ll keep doing it.
Reggie lowered to his front elbows, a look on his face that I could only describe as ashamed. Still hunkered low, I slid my feet in his direction, moving in tiny increments while I crooned sweet phrases to him and sent him mental messages of our happy connection. Somebody shouted in the street, and I sensed Guidry leaving the tree to go shush the people beyond the crime-scene tape.
It seemed to take hours, but it was probably no more than a couple of minutes until I got close enough to get a firm grip on the necktie.
“Good boy, Reggie. That’s a very good boy. Sweet Reggie, you’re a good, good boy.”
I carefully moved my hands over his body, feeling for broken bones or swelling, watching his face for signs of pain. He didn’t seem hurt in any way, but I could feel fine tremors under his skin. When I sensed that he was calm enough to follow me, I led him around the group of forensics people to the Community Policing Officer. Then I went back to look at the dead body. So far as I was concerned, it had already been identified.