“You got somebody pretty pissed off, didn’t you,” I murmured to whoever wore those clothes. My voice sounded odd in the dismembered room.
If there’d been anything to find in this ruined house, the dog’s killers already had it. In my days with the public defender’s office, I used to see this kind of destruction with depressing frequency.
Most likely the invaders had been hunting for more drugs. Or they felt the drug dealers had done them out of something. The addicts I’d known would have traded their mother’s wedding ring for a single hit and then come back to shoot up the place so they could retrieve their jewelry. I’d represented one woman who killed her own son when he couldn’t get back the ring he’d traded for a rock of crack.
I climbed down the steep stairs and found the door that led to the basement. I walked partway down the stairs, but a spider the size of my hand scuttling from my flashlight kept me from descending all the way. I shone my flash around but didn’t see signs of blood or battle.
I left through the front door so that I wouldn’t have to wade through the kitchen again. The door had a series of dead bolts, as unnecessary an investment as the security camera over the padlocked gate. Whoever had been here before me had shot them out.
Before retreating through the gap in the fence, I found a board in the high weeds and used it to poke through the open pit. It held so many empty bottles that I didn’t want to climb down in it, but as far as I could tell, no one was hidden among them.
I took a few pictures with my camera phone and headed for the exit. I was just skirting the fence, heading to the road, when I heard a faint whimpering from the collapsed shed. I pushed my way through weeds and rubble and pulled apart the siding. Another Rottweiler lay there. When it saw me, it feebly thumped its stub of a tail.
I bent slowly. It made no effort to attack me as I cautiously felt its body. A female, painfully thin, but uninjured as far as I could tell. She’d gotten tangled in a mass of old ropes and fence wires. She’d fled into the shed when her partner was murdered, I was guessing, then panicked and worked herself deep into the makeshift net. I slowly pried the wires away from her chest and legs.
When I moved away and squatted, hand held out, she got to her feet to follow me, but collapsed again after a few steps. I went back to my car for my water bottle and a rope. I poured a little water over her head, cupped my hand so she could drink, tied the rope around her neck. Once she was rehydrated, she let me lead her slowly along the fence to the road. Out in the daylight, I could see the cuts from where the wires had dug into her, but also welts in her dirty black fur. Some vermin had beaten her, and more than once.
When we reached my car, she wouldn’t get in. I tried to lift her, but she growled at me, bracing her weak legs in the weeds along the verge, straining against the rope to get out into the road. I dropped the rope and watched as she staggered across the gravel. At the cornfield, she sniffed among the stalks until she found what she was looking for. She headed into the corn, but was so weak that she kept falling over.
“How about if you stay here and let me find what you’re looking for?” I said to her.
She looked at me skeptically, not believing a city woman could find her way through a field, but unable to go any farther herself. I couldn’t tie her to the corn—she’d pull that over. I finally ordered her to stay. Whether she’d been trained or just was too weak to go on, she collapsed where she was and watched as I headed into the field.
The stalks were higher than my head, but they were brown and dry and didn’t provide any shield from the sun. All around me insects zinged and stung. Prairie dogs and a snake slipped away at my approach.
The plants were set about a yard apart, the rows appearing the same no matter which direction I looked. It would have been easy to get lost, except I was following a trail of broken stalks toward the spot where the crows continued to circle.
The body was splayed across the corn like a snow angel. Crows were thick around the shoulders and hands and they turned on me with ferocious cries.
2
DOG-TIRED
YOUR FRIEND WASN’T THERE, but I did find one of her fellow communards. Or drug dealers, as we call them on the South Side.” I was in Lotty Herschel’s living room, leaning back in her Barcelona chair, watching the colors change in the glass of brandy she’d given me.
“Oh, Vic, no.” Lotty’s face crumpled in distress. “I hoped—I thought—I wanted to believe she was making a change in her life.”
It was past nine and Lotty was almost as tired as I was, but neither of us had wanted to wait until morning to talk.