“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.
2
As 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.