Drowning Barbie Read online

  “Right, we need to formalize the irrational. Got it. We have a plane to catch in three hours.”

  “Okay, eat and pack without passing GO and collecting…rice in your cuffs. You have to make good on your end of the deal too.”

  “My end? What’s that?”

  “No more Charlie Garland and your old CIA buddies. No more international shoot-outs, bombs, conspiracies, or missed meals.”

  “Right, no more Charlie et al. Just local murders, mayhem, parking tickets, and breaking up underage keggers in the woods. Done. Now, eat your breakfast and pull that towel up or your eggs will be cold before you get back to them.”

  “You are such a romantic, Ike.”

  Chapter Two

  Ike Schwartz, Picketsville’s sheriff, missed the old days when his town was only a dot on the map set back from the interstate and not on anyone’s list of “must see” destinations in the Shenandoah Valley. Sadly, those days were gone and he blamed the university for it. When Callend University had been merely Callend College, a women’s institution more nearly resembling a late nineteenth-century ladies’ finishing school, the town slept peacefully in a cultural backwash. But then, Dr. Ruth Harris had been appointed its president and yanked it into the twenty-first century. Through skillful mergers, fund-raising, and recruiting of top level faculty and students, Callend was transformed from a stereotypical way station to the altar for Southern belles to a full-scale university, training young men and women in the skills needed to manage the future. Picketsville became a place to visit after an obligatory stop at Luray Caverns and Lexington, to experience back-to-back the campuses of Washington and Lee and VMI, and before traveling further south to Hollins University or east to Sweet Briar and Randolph colleges.

  That Ruth Harris was, in the words of Essie Sutherlin, Ike’s “main squeeze,” did not alter Ike’s conviction that the university was the source of his tsuris.

  “Your what?” Essie asked.

  “It means pain in the ass but with frustration, if you follow.”

  “It’s one of them Jew words, ain’t it?”

  “Yiddish.”

  “Thought so. So when are you and the lady going to get married and end the ‘sore ass’ we all is being put through from waiting on you two to do something?”

  “Essie, you should concentrate on dispatching and leave my private life alone.”

  “Ike, you’re the sheriff of a small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business. You ain’t got a private life. So, when are you going to do the deed?”

  “Working on it, and why is that a problem for you? Answer the phone.”

  “It ain’t rung.” At that moment the phone bank lit up and several rang at once. “How do you do that? I swear you know when the thing is going to ring and who’s on the other end almost every time. Okay, which line do I answer first?”

  “Six is trouble. I’m guessing four is your husband, Billy, and three is not important. Pick up six.”

  Essie answered the line he suggested, shook her head, and said, “You’re right. It’s Andy Lieux and he says his old dog found a body in the woods. Hey, didn’t we already have one of them this year?”

  “That was two years ago, and as we don’t have a public trash dump or a surfeit of dumpsters, the woods is where the bodies always go. Where in the woods is this body?”

  Essie returned to the phone. “Where you at, Andy?” She scribbled on a tear sheet and handed it to Ike.

  “Now, pick up line four and find out where Billy is and send him to the scene and then call the medical examiner, the evidence techs, and get them all headed out there too.”

  “Don’t you want to know who’s on two?”

  “No…yes, I think I probably do.” Ike picked up the phone, punched the blinking red button numbered two. “Yes?”

  “That you, Ike?”

  “It’s me. What can I do for you, Pop?”

  “Well, me and Miss Dolly want you and your lady to come out to the farm for dinner this Sunday if you can.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask. It’s still summer, but believe it or not, with vacations and academic planning, it’s a busy time for Ruth.”

  “Yeah, well you ask her and let me know. Oh, and there’s this other thing.”

  “Other thing? What other thing would that be?”

  “Well, maybe it’s nothin’ but I could’a swore someone spent the night in the old hay barn down by the road earlier in the week.”

  “And you’re telling me now? Why?”

  “Well, it’s like this. I don’t usually pay that no mind. I worry it might burn down, you know, if they was to light a fire in there. I been meaning to tear the thing down so burning wouldn’t bother me much either, but I’d hate to see somebody get hurt. Anyway, I was down to the barn this morning and they left some stuff behind.”

  “They probably got spooked and ran without picking up.”

  “Yeah, maybe, but this stuff looks like it ain’t been used for a dozen years. Old stuff.”

  “Okay, listen, I have to go. I’ll talk to Ruth and see if we can make it Sunday. I have a crime scene to check out. I’ll look at your barn on my way. Probably some people dumping their trash the way they do.”

  ***

  Deputy Billy Sutherlin had the yellow crime-scene tape strung between five or six trees and had isolated roughly a third of an acre when Ike arrived.

  “Over there, Ike.” He pointed to the pile of freshly turned earth in the center of his scene.

  “What do we know, Billy?”

  “So far, nothing. The dog dug up part of an arm before Andy pulled him off. We ain’t touched nothing since. The ETs ought to be here pretty quick. They called maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Did you get Andy’s statement?”

  “Yeah. Got that wrote down in my book and sent him packing because his dog was like to go crazy trying to get at the body.”

  “Okay. Get some help out here. I want to sweep this area for anything that looks like it doesn’t belong. And I mean anything.”

  Chapter Three

  While deputies shuffled through the accumulation of leaves and fallen branches in their search for anything that might prove useful, Ike set the evidence technicians and the medical examiner, who’d arrived with them, to work exhuming the body. As he watched, a face, then a torso, and finally an entire body of a middle-aged woman came to light. She had on faded and torn jeans, a blood-stained t-shirt with a slogan silk-screened on it that he couldn’t read, and a bandanna that had probably bound her going-to-gray and cheaply dyed hair. Crusted blood filled a too-deep depression on the side of her head. Her feet were bare and very dirty. Lying close—but buried in the dirt and evidently tossed in as an afterthought—was a pair of lime green flip-flops.

  “Probable death by blunt force trauma. I won’t know the TOD until I get her on a table and start poking around, but she’s been here awhile, Sheriff. So, how was your vacation?”

  “Do all medical examiners have your level of sangfroid or are you a special case, Tom? You have a positive knack for blending the awful with the mundane. I need an ID on this lady ASAP and the vacation was…exceptional, I would say.”

  “Exceptional? That begs a question.”

  “Judging from her face, I think we have a meth head here. Sunken cheeks…that’s a meth face for sure.”

  The ME glanced at the dead woman’s face and nodded, then signaled for the ETs to lift the corpse over to a black body bag. As they did so, one slipped and her foot slid into the shallow grave.

  “Careful there, Anderson,” the ME snapped. Ike glanced into the now-empty grave site and saw what appeared to be clothing of some sort.

  “Pull that coat or whatever it is out. There may be some useful information in it, on it, or about it. What question is being begged, Tom?”

  The ETs zipp
ed the bag shut over the dead woman and returned to the shallow pit. The tech who’d slipped reached in and lifted the cloth away. It tore.

  “Cripes, this coat is rotten and…Jesus, there’s another one.”

  As she lifted the cloth scraps away, the skeletal remains of a second body came into view.

  “I hope you don’t have an early tee time, Tom. It appears you just got yourself another job.”

  The ME bent and brushed aside some of the cloth and dirt. He called for the ETs to bring brushes and they set to work uncovering the second body.

  “I’ll tell you here and now, these are two separate cases, Sheriff. This one was planted here at least ten years ago. If they’re connected at all it would be because the killer had a thing about this particular burying spot for his victims, but what are the odds? Or, I suppose, our latest murderer could have been plain lazy. If he’d dug a proper grave, he’d have found this guy and moved over a few feet.”

  “Or maybe he was absentminded and, after a decade, forgot where he planted his first victim.”

  “This would be a case of the snail serial killer—slow but deadly.”

  “Or,” Ike said, ignoring the ME’s bad joke, “he wanted this dead guy found because the two people are related somehow.”

  “A much more sensible possibility, to be sure, but would you like to calculate the odds on that?”

  “Nope. I need your report as soon as, etcetera. I’m thinking this second stiff won’t be so easy to ID. Can you think of anybody who’s been missing for ten years or so?”

  The ME lit what appeared to be a very rotten corncob pipe. “I’ve been on this job in this state less than six months. You’re kidding, right?”

  “I wish.” Ike turned and called out to his deputy. “Billy, anything?”

  “I don’t know, Ike. We have this bunch of flowers left on the grave. I don’t reckon they’ll tell us much, though.”

  “I got something,” Charley Picket called out. “There’s a piece of oak branch over here and I’m pretty sure there’s traces of blood and hair on it.”

  “Bag it and give it to the ETs. Good work, Charley.”

  For years Charley Picket had been the only African American deputy on the force. His job, before Ike’s election, was to patrol what was euphemistically referred to in the bad old days as the colored section of town. Times had changed and Charley, like Dilsey Gibson, had endured. He now enjoyed the privileges granted to a deputy with senior tenure and, more importantly, patrolled wherever he was needed.

  Ike lingered at the crime scene until he felt sure everything that needed doing had been done. He drove away from town toward the countryside. His father and his stepmother, Miss Dolly, lived on the family farm several miles from Picketsville. Abe Schwartz did not farm. No one in the line of Schwartzes who traced their immediate ancestry back to East Prussia and an earlier century, had ever farmed. Abe’s forbearers arrived in the United States from Europe in advance of the then-current pogrom. They joined the thousands who had left their “mother country” in the mid to late nineteenth century. The Schwartzes settled in Richmond, Virginia. Several generations of tailors-turned-haberdashers ended when Abe took up politics. At one time or another he’d held most offices in the state government except governor. During his career span, the thought of a Southern Jewish governor had been unthinkable. Times and demographics had changed, but not in time to benefit Abe. That didn’t mean he didn’t still harbor hopes for his son. Ike, he felt, wasted his talents as a small-town sheriff and said so—often.

  Abe’s barn sat twenty feet back from the road. It had been built as a hay barn and its double doors faced the road. Tractors, or teams of horses in the old days, could pull the wagons filled with hay more easily along the road. Before the advent of automobiles and time-sensitive lifestyles, that arrangement made perfect sense. The barn had been empty for years. People rushing by would not know that, but kids forced by their parents to put their X-Boxes on pause and go outside, discovered it and, during daylight, it became a place for relatively innocent mischief. At night it appealed to a different sort of activity and prompted the expression, made by hormonally imbalanced teenaged boys, accompanied with sniggers and orthodontically augmented leers: “She’s got straw on her back.”

  Ike pulled off to the shoulder and stepped out. He breathed in the humid air and the scent of newly mown hay and honeysuckle. Abe rented his fields to a local horse breeder. The arrangement kept the scenery picturesque, saved the breeder significant money in feed bills, and Abe the trouble of maintaining his property. Definitely a win-win.

  The barn doors were ajar. Ike wrenched one open and stepped in. Abe was correct: Someone had dumped an armful of things onto the floor. The sheriff poked at it with the remains of a pitchfork and wondered idly how the thing had lasted so long. Something like a pitchfork, even one with a bent and broken tine, would normally have disappeared years ago. The clothing sat in an untidy pile to one side of the barn floor. It did seem to be mostly baby apparel, worn Oshkosh by Gosh pajamas, a raggedy stuffed animal—things like that. Ike did not know much about babies or their clothing needs, but the condition and the general appearance suggested they were from another decade at least.

  Further sifting revealed papers, some handwritten and some typed, and yellowing photographs. Someone had dumped trash, but why in this place? Why not dump it on the roadside like every other litterbug? Or, if they were fastidious, there were dumpsters aplenty in the area. And why wait ten, fifteen, twenty years to do the dumping? He stared at the scattered materials for several minutes, then turned and left.

  Ike kept a variety of things in the trunk of his cruiser—a pump shot gun with a shortened stock and barrel, a Kevlar vest, a crime scene kit, and a change of clothing. In a separate box he stored tools ranging from a five-pound maul to a set of lock picks (entering a building in the pursuit of evidence as opposed to making an arrest often required different approaches), flashlights, and padlocks. He grabbed one of the latter and a spool of crime-scene tape. He shoved the barn doors closed, threw the rusty hasp over, and locked them shut. He reconsidered stringing the tape. Yellow tape without some sort of supervision of this remote building would be an invitation to the curious to break and enter.

  He would send someone out in the morning to collect the stuff—if he could. Right now they had enough to do with two fresh murder investigations. The paperwork alone would take hours.

  He felt good. He was back at work.

  Chapter Four

  Except at work when they had no choice, Ike and Ruth had made a decision to avoid people in general. Socializing prompted questions. Questions about their vacation in Maine, for example. Questions about their brief stay in “Sin City.” Questions from family—that would be Ruth’s mother, Eden Saint Clare, and Abe and Dolly Schwartz. Questions about future plans—specifically marital. So, for the last three days, they had been eating their meals at either Ruth’s house or Ike’s apartment. On the weekend they planned to retreat to Ike’s A-frame in the mountains. Buried in maples and laurel, they were guaranteed a modicum of privacy. Tonight, however, they risked a public meal at Frank’s Restaurant and Grill. Frank stayed in business as a restaurateur chiefly because in a down economy, no major chain wanted to risk the start-up costs involved in opening a competitive location. That had to change soon. Rumors of a Denny’s had been circulating for months. The fact that a Denny’s would be considered a better choice as a place to dine than Frank’s tells you everything you needed to know about Frank’s culinary skill.

  Thus, Ike and Ruth felt moderately safe at Frank’s because, aside from the roast beef, Frank served truly mediocre food. Chances were slim that anyone they knew would eat there on a Tuesday night. Ike picked a roll out of the bread basket and searched for butter.

  “We have a problem,” he said and waved to their waiter.

  “Just one?” Ruth asked. “From where I’m sitting
we have…well, I have multitudinous problems. If I had a really good option, I’d be out of here in a New York minute.”

  The waiter arrived and Ike asked for butter. The server stared at the table for a moment hoping, Ike supposed, to find the missing butter hiding under the napery. He nodded and left.

  “You say that every summer and fall, Ruth. New faculty and new students on their way in, old faculty and students who can’t behave, on their way out, and the paperwork attached to all of the above sits like the Himalayas on your desk. Yes, I know and you know it will all smooth out by Halloween, and then you’ll be fine. The problem we have at the moment is about us and how we announce to the world we’re getting married when, in fact, we already are.”

  Ruth pushed back from the table and sighed. “You’d think Frank could at least have a restaurant that smelled good. A restaurant should be filled with the aromas of fresh bread, roasting meat, garlic, something. This place smells like Pine-Sol.”

  “Are you sure you want to sniff at Frank’s cooking?”

  “Frank should put an onion or two in the oven. I had a friend who did that. She couldn’t cook a lick—ordered catering brought in when she had a party, but the house smelled like she’d done it all herself.”

  “You think Frank ships this dreck in from outside?”

  “This? Don’t be silly.”

  “Maybe we should drop in on the Reverend Blake Fisher and see if he’d oblige us by putting on a show wedding.”

  “Do you think he would?”

  “Who would…Frank and the onion or…?”

  “Fisher and the ceremony, of course.”

  “I have no idea. My experience with any sort of clergy, and Blake Fisher in particular, is limited to solving a felony murder and a theft involving the contents of his safe. But, why wouldn’t he? He likes you, Ruth. Didn’t you almost offer him a faculty position? I bet he would if he thought you might start attending on Sundays.”