Strike Dog (13 page)

Service didn't ask what this meant. “What's this about a cake?”

“Why we're here,” Eddie Waco said. “Elray hardly went ta the privy without Cake Culkin skulkin' nearby.”

“Culkin was an enemy?”

“More like a partner, though he don't wear a badge. Elray sent 'im off to jail a long time back and looked after his kin while he was away. Cake come out and they bin fast friends ever since. I'm thinkin' that whatever happened to Elray, Cake will know something.”

“The wife already knew,” Service said.

“Word moves fast in these hills,” the Missouri game warden said. “The old man knew too, and I'm thinkin' hit was Cake brung word.”

“Jimsonweed Christian?” Service asked.

Waco smiled. “Not a true believer,” he said.

“There's a radio here?” Service asked.

Eddie Waco said, “Yup, but you don't need to be a talkin' at thet FBI woman. Word is she's in hospital down ta Wes Plains an' all drugged up.”

“What happens now?” Service asked.

“We red up for supper,” Eddie Waco said. “Then we eat, but don't be eatin' big on account we gon' be eatin' a whole heap till we git done here.”

Red up?
The local dialect and terms had Service befuddled, and suddenly he thought he knew what it was like to be a troll wandering into a village in the black spruce swamps of the Upper Peninsula for the first time. The people here, he decided, were a lot like Yoopers, and he found the thought comforting.

Service and Waco got a couple of sleeping bags out of the room in the house where the dead conservation agent kept his gear cache, took them out in the field, made a fire ring of stones, took wood from a pile near the house, kindled a fire, and settled into their bags to catch some sleep. Kids from the house brought them biscuits and ham and some kind of beans in runny red gravy.

Service was physically tired and sore, but couldn't sleep. Whenever the breeze let up, mosquitoes dropped on him en masse. He paid no attention to them. It seemed to him that people continuously filtered in and out of the house, most of them carrying food and other things the family might need. Two carpenters set up sawhorses just off the porch and hammered and sawed all night, making a simple coffin of white oak planks.

There were no stars and not much light from the house. Service could smell more rain in the air and wondered how long until it moved in. Sometimes the wind seemed to pick up, but then it would die away, which told him they were on the edge of a front rather than in the bull's-eye. If it stiffened and held, he knew the rain would quickly ride in on it.

His own cases back home sometimes had taken odd twists, but this was in a class of its own. How could somebody have been killing game wardens for so many years with impunity? As far as he was concerned, a bulletin should be sent immediately to all state fish and game agencies, wardens doubled up on patrols for safety, and all of them alerted to what was going on. But this had not happened, and probably wouldn't. One thing was certain: When he got back to Michigan he would make damn sure that Chief O'Driscoll heard what he had to say, even if he had to go over the chief's head to Governor Timms. Hell,
she
was the one who'd put him into this damn mess.

In his short time as a detective, he had learned that making a case required intense and continual attention to detail—and some luck. The greater the focus on details, the more likely you'd catch a break. So far he'd seen little in Tatie Monica's approach to create confidence. She was like an inexperienced angler in a major hatch, frantically chasing from fish to fish rather than focusing on one until it was caught, or stopped rising. Jumping around created movement, not direction, and movement for its own sake was not progress. He was beginning to have serious doubts about the special agent's abilities to manage this case. Or maybe it was inexperience and he just ­couldn't see. But it seemed to him that the team should have remained in Wisconsin at the kill site to investigate it, rather than running down to Missouri to start all over. Something in the sequence and priorities just didn't set right.

The number of visitors seemed to increase well before sunrise. Eddie Waco led Service into the woods and downhill to a spring where they stripped off their shirts, rinsed with freezing spring water, and used their fingers to straighten their hair. They spent some time trying to knock the dust and dirt off their clothes and boots in order to achieve some semblance of presentability.

Cotton Spargo met them with a pot of coffee and two cups.

“Elray had a dream?” Eddie Waco asked.

“Said he done dreamt of this white light which he thought was the Lord Himself, but the Devil come out of it and grinned at him. Bothered the boy,” Spargo said. “Would me too. Elray ain't been sharp since Sister Rosa went over to the Lord.”

Cotton Spargo nodded politely, and stopped talking. Service followed Waco into the wood line.

They had heard the whine of a helicopter's turbines while they were at the spring, and by the time they got back to the house, the body had been carried inside and the chopper was sitting in the field, its rotors wobbling like a vulture's flight feathers in the variable breeze.

Waco introduced Oregon County sheriff Doug Hakes, who wore a chocolate-brown and blue-gray uniform shirt and a sweat-stained brown baseball cap. “Any trouble with the feds?” Waco asked.

“Snakebit fed's not able to make a fuss, and the young 'un's feelin' so much pressure he seems a bit tongue-tied,” the sheriff said.

“What about Bonaparte?” Service asked.

The sheriff took off his hat and stroked his brush cut. “One which come out by whirlybird afore the storm? He's long gone.”

Service wanted to ask where and when, but bit his tongue.

“They's fixin' ta clean Elray up,” the sheriff said, leading them into the house. A young man came out of a room looking green and spewed vomit as he dashed for the outside.

Eddie Waco offered Service a small container of Vicks, and Service dabbed a little under each nostril.

“No call for thet,” the sheriff growled. “He was 'frigerated and we brung him home in ice.” He pushed open a door and held out his hand for them.

The room was white and stark. Service saw nail holes in the walls and knew that the room had been cleared. There was a table in the center. The dead man was unclothed, stretched out on his back, his skin gray. Damp white cloths lay on his hands. There were quarters where his eyes should have been. Service flinched at a
whump,
marking an explosion not that far from the house.

“Dirt up this way's thinner'n Maggie's drawers,” Eddie Waco explained. “Hardpan and rock right up to a man's boot soles. Dynamite's quicker'n shovels.”

Service understood. During the winter in the U.P., bodies were kept in storehouses until spring when the ground frost melted and holes could be dug for graves. What had to be done for and with the dead was not something most people gave much thought to until it was staring them in the face. Once he had arrested a poaching crew out of Champion. They used a body-storage facility to stash their take over winter. Standing among boxes of frozen human corpses and hanging deer carcasses, the lead poacher had looked at him and said, “Hell, dese folks don't mind, eh?”

Service studied the body. Elray Spargo looked even larger all spread out on his back than he had looked in the refrigerated tent on the Eleven Point River. Spargo had long red-gray hair, a thick neck, and broad shoulders. His beard had the texture of steel wool. His hands had protruding knuckles, and long thick fingers. What clothes had the man been wearing? More importantly, had Spargo intended to fish the night he'd been killed? There had been no mention of that so far. If fishing wasn't involved, did this mean another shift in pattern, another mistake, or had he misunderstood the pattern?

Service made a twisting motion with his hand, and Eddie Waco said to one of the men washing the body, “You don't mind, you fellers want ta help me roll ole Elray over on his belly?”

They did as they were asked. It was obvious they had handled bodies before.

The lungs had been removed, or put back into the body. The wounds that remained were horrific, and had been crudely stitched with what looked like coarse, braided black fishing line. Service was certain Tatie Monica and the FBI would go ballistic when they found out they no longer had the body.
Why did the killer remove the victims' eyes?
His mind kept going back to this and he wasn't sure why.

The law officers helped the men roll Elray Spargo onto his back again and went outside. Service lit a cigarette, Waco put a pinch in his cheek, and Doug Hakes took a cigar stump out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth without lighting it.

Thunder was buzzing intermittently to the southwest.

“Should hold off,” the sheriff said, looking up. “What you make a' all this?” he added, glancing at Waco.

“Ain't no ord'nary man could git the edge on Elray.”

“You hear anythin'?” the sheriff asked.

“You?” Eddie Waco answered, countering the question with a question, the sign of an experienced cop. Service hadn't known Waco long, but he was comfortable with him, and though Waco played the hick, and was a bit stingy with words, he seemed to have a sharp mind and a reason for the things he did.

“Think Cake was around?” Hakes asked.

“Have to see,” Eddie Waco said, noncommittally.

At 10 a.m. people began to queue to view the body and pay their respects.

Hakes wandered off to talk to a plain woman in a navy blue frock. “Okay to ask questions yet?” Service asked.

“Not yet,” Waco answered.

Service heard a lot of crying and wailing and caterwauling inside, but when people came out, they seemed composed and joined in normal conversations with others.

During the night sawhorses, doors, and planks had been used to make temporary tables outside the house. Around noon people began filtering to the tables and standing behind their chairs until Fiannula Spargo came out of the house with her eight children, all of them dressed in black. A small veil of black lace hung over her face. After the family was seated, the others sat down.

Platters of food were served: hams, turkeys, roasts, tubs of mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, string beans and black-eyed peas, huge pans of corn bread, endless pots of black coffee, and sweating pitchers of iced tea.

Eddie Waco snatched a cob of corn and began gnawing. Between bites he said, “This here's a real offmagandy. Local crop won't be in for two month. Somebody done toted this in from outside.” Waco ate the corn without salt, pepper, or butter, shoveling ears into his mouth like logs on a conveyor belt. Because of his false teeth Service couldn't eat corn without cutting it off the cob, so he contented himself with other things, like the corn bread, which had onions and green peppers in it, and more than a dash of sugar to sweeten it.

People laughed and talked and gently scolded their kids like it was a church social. Service saw a man take two heaping plates, walk out to the wood line, and come back empty-handed a short while later. He nudged Eddie Waco, who said, “I seen,” as he attacked another ear of corn.

After the meal was finished and table cleared, Service watched a sleek black horse pull a small trailer with rubber tires across the field toward the house. The horse was tall and wore a headdress of gaudy, tall, black plumes, which undulated as it moved. The air remained close and heavy. The open coffin was carried out by six men and slid onto the trailer. Elray Spargo was beginning to ripen. Service touched his upper lip and Waco gave him another dollop of Vicks.

The dead man's wife and children walked directly behind the horse-drawn trailer. Cotton Spargo and other relatives followed the widow. The rest of the mourners filed along behind. The shoes of two hundred people raised dust, leaving an opaque cloud hanging in the humid air. Thunder continued to rattle softly in the southwest like someone shaking cookie crumbs off a baking pan.

The grave had been blown out of a more or less flat spot by some boulders and several spiky white oak trees. The widow and her children gathered around as the coffin was placed on short logs beside the gaping hole. The six men worked ropes under the casket and stepped back.

The minister who stepped forward had a withered arm, and the twisted countenance of a demented chipmunk, but the crowd responded almost immediately, and in no time the preacher was slapping the sides of the casket and railing against sin and evil and demanding everyone live a righteous, God-fearing life.

Service tuned him out. The sermon, if that's what it was, went on interminably, but didn't dull the responsiveness of the mourners.

Cotton Spargo spoke. “Y'all know Elray done his duty twinny-four years. He done loved Fiannula and his kids and all his kin. Police respected him, lawbreakers a'feared him. Anybody needed help, Elray was there. All y'all know how he was. Couldn't bear to see people in bad times. . . . Bin a heap a' Spargos called home ta the Lord, but this time Lord—and preacher, I apologize for a-sayin' this—hit's too dadgum soon. I cain't explain God's ways, and neither can you'n, so we just accept and keep on livin', but I tell all y'all this . . .” He gulped, paused, and sobbed. “I loved that big ole boy a' mine, an' I'm gon' miss 'im ever day.”

Grady Service choked up, remembering two boxes of ashes sitting in his cabin.

The crowd, led by the children, sang, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The young voices touched something inside Grady Service. He kept thinking about Walter, the son he had known nothing about until a year ago. At seventeen, Walter had left California alone to find his biological father. The boy had courage and determination beyond words. Service thought,
My life is out of order. Fathers should go before their kids.