The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2) Page 3

  “If you wanna pickle yourself, you oughta just go get a direct IV of preservatives from Carter McWayne,” she scoffed. “Wouldn’t kill you any faster.”

  “We all gotta die of something, Suze,” he teased as he stirred his coffee. “It’s not so bad to die of sweetness, is it?”

  Suzie squared off, hands on her slender hips. She looked like a woman who’d had more than her share of lines from men, and bought none of them.

  “Sugar, you used up every last drop of your sweetness makin’ that little boy of yours,” she scolded. “He’s so cute I don’t know whether to breast-feed him or marry him.”

  The radio ran out of music, and the kitchen again echoed with the voices of Curtis and The Bug. Morgan gritted his teeth.

  “Hey, dude, we got caller number nine on the line,” The Bug chirped. “And you’ll never guess who it is!”

  “No!”

  “Yeah, dude! It’s that kid Grady! Dude’s been caller number nine for, like, a month of Saturdays! How do you do it, man?”

  A shy boy’s voice came over the phone line softly.

  “Just lucky, I guess.”

  “Lucky? Dude, you got nothin’ better to do with your Saturdays than sit around and call the radio station?” The Bug said. “You’re what, thirteen? Haven’t heard of masturbation? Can I say masturbation on the air?”

  “You just did.”

  “Cool.”

  “So, Grady,” Curtis piped up, “If you’re only thirteen, you might need some, like, pointers on what to do with Brenda, your prize for being caller number nine today. I personally know she likes to be licked …”

  “In Yahtzee!” The Bug yelped.

  They cackled salaciously. Dead air was more entertaining than these two boobs, Morgan thought. He was certain Ray Pittman, the laconic and paranoid rancher with a boot fetish who sat beside him, would get higher ratings.

  “Awesome, now I know why my mom makes my dad play Yahtzee,” The Bug said. “Hey, Grady dude, does your mom play Yahtzee? … dude, you there?”

  Grady had hung up.

  The kid’s timing truly was flawless.

  The Bullet newsroom was empty, as it was most Saturday afternoons. Morgan souped his film, emptied the wastepaper baskets, propped open the back door to air out the pressroom, and sat down to contemplate the blinking cursor on his word processor.

  Soon, it would be five years since he left the cop beat at the Chicago Tribune and came back to Winchester, his childhood home, to pursue the elusive dream of running his own newspaper.

  Winchester wasn’t perfect, it was just home. Morgan could overlook the town’s peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies because, to him, they were part of the natural order of things. All the locals — and none of the tourists — knew about the hornet’s nest under the toilet seat at the town park. Ranchers stopped their pickups in the middle of Main Street to shoot the breeze. The gas station on the far edge of town had a live-bait vending machine. The hardware store closed on Sunday. Everybody believed the shopping was better in the next town, but nobody wanted to be seen shopping there. A “formal” occasion merely called for a new pair of jeans. The fluctuation of beef prices was more important than the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

  These were all a part of Morgan’s expectation from life: It goes at its own pace.

  But, in truth, after twenty years of covering big-city crime, he also came home looking for something he’d lost along the way, some reaffirmation that newspapering had a purpose, and that news wasn’t just a summary of the various and sundry ways humans imitated animals.

  His cynicism consumed him after Bridger died. His son was only eight when his own blood poisoned him. Leukemia killed Bridger, much too slowly and painfully for a child, and it killed something inside Morgan, too. So it was easy for him and Claire, to leave Chicago after that, because they were already lost. Maybe even dead.

  Things had started out rough at The Bullet, but he worked hard and slowly proved himself to his readers as fair, plucky and guileless. Now, he’d survived a few hundred weekly deadlines, a couple dozen green reporters always looking for the next biggest paper, and even watched one press burn down. But The Bullet always came out.

  Every week went long. He missed too many family dinners, too many Saturday picnics. Although he’d grown more comfortable as the Bullet editor, the hours seem to have grown longer.

  And now, Colter. He made it all make sense. This six-year-old boy was the key to everything in Morgan’s life. When he was born, Morgan knew what the purpose of his life should be, a bundle of clarity in baby powder and poopy diapers. Some mornings, he would creep into Colter’s room to kiss him goodbye, and he’d smell his second son’s sweet, dreaming breath. It filled him.

  Morgan traced his finger around the picture of Colter and Claire on his cluttered desk, but his mind drifted to Laddie Granbouche. He mused on how she had slipped out of history’s grasp again, but caught himself: Again? He smiled and admitted secretly that maybe, yes, he wanted Laddie and Etta to be the same woman. It wasn’t just a good story. To Morgan, it would be the final stroke on a magnificent, almost artistic life. Etta Place, and maybe Laddie Granbouche, had been her own work of art.

  Two greasy little hands covered Morgan’s eyes.

  “Bet you can’t guess me, Daddy,” a little voice said.

  “Hmmm,” Morgan said. “Let me see. It’s somebody who likes salty french fries.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I think it’s somebody who isn’t … wearing any shoes.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And … let’s see … it’s a little boy who just got done with swimming lessons.”

  Colter hugged his father’s neck as Morgan wheeled around to scoop him into his lap. Colter’s swimming trunks and hair were still damp, and Morgan caught the sweet odor of chlorine on his skin, the smell of a thousand summer memories.

  “How do you know?” Colter asked him.

  “Lucky guess.”

  Claire breezed in from the pressroom. She carried a couple of oily Rocket Burger sacks, some napkins and two tall fast-food sodas. Her long, blond hair was tied back under a floppy summer hat, and her bare shoulders had been reddened by the morning sun as she sat at the town pool while Colter earned his guppy badge.

  “The back door was open,” she said. “We thought you might like some lunch. You still eat lunch, don’t you?”

  Morgan cleared a corner of his desk and Claire handed him an oozing Monster Rocket in its oleaginous wrapper. The Rocket Burger drive-in billed it as a half-pound hamburger, but Morgan was certain much of that vaunted poundage had soaked into its paper packaging. And his envelope of greasy fries was already half-empty.

  “Uh-oh, I think a hungry puppy got into my French fries,” Morgan said, feigning surprise.

  “Mommy ate them,” Colter said, pointing a suspiciously salty finger at Claire, who rolled her eyes. At 42, she hadn’t kept her appealing figure by filching French fries. Colter, on the other hand, was a serial filcher. If stealing French fries was a crime, his sunny little face would be on every Post Office wall.

  “Hmmm, what should we do to Mommy for eating all my fries?”

  “Tickle her!”

  Morgan smiled at Claire.

  “Any last requests before we carry out the sentence?”

  “Not the feet.”

  Morgan looked at Colter, who crinkled his little nose and shook his head devilishly. Together, they leapt on Claire, who was laughing too hard to fight them both off.

  “Stop! Can’t we make a plea bargain?” she begged.

  Morgan and Colter stopped.

  “What kind of bargain?”

  “I’ll give each of you a kiss if you stop tickling me.”

  Colter thought hard.

  “A kiss and a hug,” he bartered.

  Morgan waggled his hand, unimpressed with the new offer. He was holding out for something more.

  “Don’t push it, buster,” Claire warned playfully.

  “Oka
y, okay. For a kiss and a hug, you get parole,” he said.

  Claire embraced Colter tightly, and kissed each chubby cheek. Morgan leaned down and kissed his wife’s forehead, smelling suntan oil and her vanilla shampoo.

  He combed his fingers through her thick hair and felt grateful for her. And for Colter.

  Somewhere under the mess of press releases, books, ledger sheets, wedding announcements, phone messages, old pop cans, unpaid bills, letters to the editor, notes, candy wrappers, magazines, clippings, empty sweetener packets and coffee-stained photographs on Morgan’s desk, a phone rang.

  “Bullet. Jeff here.”

  The voice sounded distant and raspy, likely a cell phone.

  “Jeff, this is Shawn Cowper.”

  “Any news on your John Doe?”

  “Nothing yet. We posted him, but couldn’t find any evidence of heart attack, cancers or any other natural death. No major scars, no hidden bullets or blades. We certainly can’t find any mortal wounds … well, other than decapitation.”

  “Oh, that.”

  “He bled out, but not in Laddie’s crypt. He drained dry. That’s to be expected when you pop the top off, even post-mortem. It was a pretty clean cut, maybe a chainsaw. It might be the cause of death, or it might just be the killer’s way of making my job harder than it needs to be.”

  “No teeth, no face, no marks, no telltale wounds …”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Two things,” Dr. Cowper said. “John Doe had a crown of thorns tattooed on his upper arm. It’s still there.”

  “And the other thing?”

  “He was crucified.”

  “No shit?” Out of the corner of his eye, Morgan saw his six-year-old son cover his mouth in surprise, and Claire gave him the evil eye.

  “Found gashes in his palms and feet. Probably railroad spikes or tent stakes. Lots of tearing from his weight hanging against them.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yes, exactly like Jesus.”

  “No, I didn’t mean …”

  “Just a quick question: Any missing-persons cases around here from the last few years?”

  “I don’t know of any. None accidental, anyway.”

  Dr. Cowper exhaled over the phone. Or maybe it was a passing truck. Morgan couldn’t tell. Cell phone service in this part of Wyoming was poor, but only when it wasn’t awful.

  “The sheriff is checking the computer for Montana, South Dakota and surrounding counties. There’s a slim chance somebody somewhere is missing this fella. But the sheriff seems sure our guy isn’t local.”

  “How about a story in the paper? Maybe somebody will come forward with something.”

  “Good idea. Officially, you’ll want to get all this from the sheriff, but we’re looking for information about an adult white male, thirty to sixty years old, medium build, 150 to 180 pounds …”

  “Height?”

  “Shorter now.”

  The two men needn’t have snickered to know they were both jaded, but they did.

  “Sorry,” Cowper said. “Make that five-foot-seven to five-foot-nine … give or take a head.”

  “Jesus, Doc,” Morgan said, smiling. “How long do you think he’s been dead?”

  “At least a year,” Dr. Cowper said. “The mummification stumps me. If the body is exposed, the climate must be very dry and shielded from bugs and animals. If he was killed in summer in Wyoming, the dry heat would have mummified him pretty fast, but there’d be lots of bugs. So, he died in spring or fall maybe, when the bugs aren’t around. I just don’t know. I can’t be sure without more sophisticated tests.”

  Morgan knew DNA was useless without comparative tissues from known descendants or the corpse himself before he was a corpse.

  “So is it unlikely you’ll ID this guy?”

  “It’ll be tough, but not impossible … if we get lucky. I might be able to bring up some fingerprint fragments, but who knows? If he was ever fingerprinted, we might find a match, but then again, we might not. We’ll certainly take some tissue samples to test any future possibilities, but right now, he’s still John Doe.”

  “Any foreign substance in his system?”

  “Off the record? Toxicology is iffy on old remains. We’ll look for drugs and poisons in the skin and body hair. We can spot some toxins that stay in the body, like arsenic, but I’m not holding my breath. My gut tells me this wasn’t a pleasantly poisonous death. There are deep ligature marks on his ankles, and his lower leg bones were all smashed. From the look of it, I’d guess he was hog-tied upside down at some point. But we found something else.”

  “What?”

  The cell phone crackled with electric fuzz.

  “Damn phone. Anyway … we found some greasy dirt under his fingernails. His hands were big and tough, too. It might mean nothing, or it might help us place this guy someplace before he died. More tests, I’m afraid.”

  Dr. Cowper sounded less intrigued, more frustrated at the moment, but Morgan sensed he was on the scent.

  “Well, look on the bright side, Doc, at least you know it isn’t Laddie Granbouche. So … one corpse down, a few million to go.”

  “That’s why I’m calling, Jeff. You might be able to help.”

  That’s a new one, Morgan thought, somebody asking a newspaperman for help in a death investigation. Most cops and prosecutors preferred to keep their secrets in the family. It was neater and cleaner that way. Reporters always mucked things up. What the public didn’t know about cops’ foul-ups wouldn’t hurt.

  “Sure, anything,” Morgan said. “But you’ve got McWayne and Goldsmith. That better than Jack Klugman and … well, I don’t know. Who else could you possibly need?”

  “Not who, Jeff. What. I’d like to borrow your darkroom to develop some film we shot this morning. There are a couple things I want to look at, things we missed on video.”

  “Something important?”

  “Honest, I don’t know what I don’t know, Jeff. I simply want to take another look at some little details that didn’t seem significant when we thought we were just copping a quick peep at Laddie.”

  “No problem. Anytime.”

  “Good. I’ll send one of my tech guys right over. And thanks, Jeff. I owe you one.”

  At dusk, while the forensic team’s photographer developed his film in The Bullet’s darkroom, Morgan surfed the Internet for morsels of information about Etta Place and her outlaw lore. He found hundreds of articles about the Wild Bunch, but his interest was most piqued by a 1901 honeymoon photograph of Etta and Sundance taken by a New York photographer who later sent a copy to the Pinkerton Agency.

  In it, she and Sundance wore sober, even melancholy expressions, although both were elegantly dressed. The frock-coated Sundance carried a top hat and shiny black shoes, every bit the wealthy Wyoming cattle buyer he pretended to be. Etta wore a high-collared dress, tight at her slim waist. Her dark hair was swept up on her head in a Gibson Girl style, the way a stylish, nineteenth-century woman of means might wear it, but one rebellious strand slipped down her neck, a subtle, sensual clue to her less civilized nature.

  One more thing caught Morgan’s eye. He magnified the electronic image for a closer look.

  Over her left breast, Etta had pinned a man’s pocketwatch. Its fob chain disappeared in a graceful loop beneath her decorative ruffle.

  Had it been a wedding gift from her outlaw groom, a bauble snatched from a startled train passenger or a petrified bank clerk? Or had he bought it for her at Tiffany’s, a fresh, never-possessed object for the love of his life?

  Or was it something more, a memory saved from a past that would be utterly forgotten in her distant future? Could she have known that time would erase almost every detail from her portrait and leave only the mystery?

  Maybe she had. At the very moment the photographer’s flashpowder flared, maybe she knew. Time was her hiding place, her refuge.

  Morgan saved the image. The ghost of Etta Place ha
d begun to haunt him, too.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Apple-wood smoke wafted over their Sunday afternoon barbecue. Jeff Morgan spiced his low fire with green, finger-thick sticks pruned from the orchard in spring, letting their sweet smoke embrace his thick steaks.

  Dr. Shawn Cowper sipped unsweetened tea and absorbed the friendly June sun while Morgan cooked. The secret garden behind the Morgans’ magnificent house at Mount Eden was in full bloom, with bees busily floating on the still, warm air. Still, Morgan knew, if not for a special guest, he’d likely be down at the newspaper, working.

  “I can’t get over the quiet,” Cowper said as Morgan tenderly checked his three juicy, fawn-colored steaks. The fire hissed as he lifted them slightly and beads of fat dripped through the grill.

  “The man who owned this house was a dear friend,” Morgan said. “He edited The Bullet and made me want to be a newspaperman when I was a kid. This whole place, the garden and the trees all around, was sort of a personal shrine that was built for his mother and a retreat at the same time. I come here for perspective.”

  Claire brought a bowl of fresh strawberries and cream from the house, setting them on the garden bench between her and Cowper. Colter tagged along, distracted by an earthworm among the peach iris.

  “Just picked these a few minutes ago,” she said.

  Cowper smiled and chose a fat, ripe one. As he sunk his teeth into it, its juice trickled down his lip and chin.

  “Oh my,” he said, cupping his hand beneath his face.

  “All that April rain,” Claire said, giggling like a little girl as she unconsciously dabbed the juice away with a napkin, just like the mother of a small boy. When she caught her husband’s eye, she quickly handed the napkin to the handsome young scientist and turned to look for Colter among the sunny flowers, hiding her blush.

  “Colter, baby,” she called softly as she tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear, “come sit on Momma’s lap.”

  Morgan knew Claire was understimulated by Winchester. She’d grown up among the neatly trimmed lawns and shaded lanes of Winnetka, Illinois, the middle daughter of a corporate-accountant father and an artist mother. She had attended a private prep school and held degrees in art and history from Millikin University, a prominent liberal arts college in Decatur where she graduated magna cum laude. Morgan met her at the Chicago Tribune when he was a stripling cop-beat reporter and she was a newsroom librarian. She had loved the choices Chicago laid before her. Had the great city not come to represent Bridger’s death place, she’d have stayed forever.