“Good.”
“Male, female, or did you not look?”
“The dead body is inside a closed room, and the smell’s pretty ripe. I didn’t get a good look. However, by the decomp, I would say the person died at least several days ago.”
“Well, we’ve had a lot of warm weather here,” he said. “Give me the address again, so I can confirm the ownership. And who did you say was living there before?”
Caleb filled in the detective on all the details, as much as he could, and said, “Laysha’s sitting on the back deck. We’ve got her dogs here with us.”
“Well, stay where you are,” he said. “I’m about thirty minutes away.”
“Will do.” Caleb hung up and quickly called Badger and updated him.
“Seriously?” Badger said. “A dead body in the empty house?”
“Yeah. I had to pass over as much of the information as I had to the cops, but they’re on their way now.”
“Oh, they’ll be looking for all kinds of information at this point,” Badger said. “Give them anything you can of course,” he added. “We need to solve this, and let’s not have it derail our search for the dog.”
“I guess the question is, could it be connected?”
“No way to know for sure yet, but we have to assume that there must be some connection just because it’s the same property.”
“Sure, but it’s been a long time since the dog was here.”
“Yes, it has, at least as far as we know, and the couple supposedly moved out shortly afterward. What we don’t have is necessarily the truth on any of this.”
“Good point,” Caleb said. “I hear the sirens. I’ll talk to you with an update later.” And he hung up. As he turned, Laysha stood there, pointing at the front. “I know. The cops are here,” he said. “Let’s go talk to them.”
He noted that she had leashed all three dogs, and, as they walked out to the front, two cops stood there, discussing what was going on, and then a third vehicle pulled in. Out of that one stepped Ansel Lowery. Caleb walked over and shook his hand.
The detective smiled. “Well, it’s good to see you two. Nice to know that all’s well in your corner of the world, but, jeez, it’d be nice if you didn’t keep calling me for the wrong reasons.”
“It’s been a long time since we’ve called you,” Laysha protested. “And this is a particularly ugly reason for calling you,” she admitted. “The decomp’s like seriously bad.”
Chapter 4
Laysha stayed outside and watched while the cops went inside with Caleb. He seemed to fully adapt to the presence of a dead body. And maybe that was his military experience, but, for her, that smell was shocking and then to see—which she didn’t even really see anything—just a crumpled pile of clothing and something like … looked almost yellow and green and putrid. She sighed when Caleb finally came out.
He walked toward her, wrapped her in his arms, and said, “Sorry you had to see that.”
“I don’t even know what I did see,” she said, “but it was pretty nasty.”
“Yep. Anything like that is,” he said with a nod.
“I gather you’ve seen things like that before?”
“I have,” he said, “not that it ever gets any easier.”
“I can’t imagine,” she said.
“No, it’s definitely not preferable.”
At that, she turned to see Detective Ansel coming toward them.
“So you want to tell me what’s your side of the story?”
She sighed and quickly gave him the version of what happened as she knew it.
“Well, it certainly matches up with his. Unfortunately I don’t have anything here to go on, but we’ll have to run down who it is and how they got here,” he said. “We’ve got your contact information, so we’ll be in touch.”
Caleb said, “I still need to look for the dog.”
“Well, I don’t want you back in the house,” he said, “and we haven’t searched the grounds yet.”
“Do you mind, while we still have an hour of daylight, if we take a walk around the property?”
He frowned.
Caleb rushed to say, “If we see anything, obviously we’ll let you know.”
“Right,” he said. “Fine, go take a look.” He stopped, then added, “Actually, why don’t I come with you?” And they walked around to the back of the house and headed toward the fence line.
“It hasn’t been mowed in a while,” Caleb said.
“I’m not sure it was ever really that well taken care of,” Ansel said. “If you look closely, no grass clippings are here at all. Everything’s gone to seed.”
“Another good point,” Caleb admitted. “So what we have is a dead body that may or may not be related to the people who were here. It’s been an empty house for a couple months, so it could have been anybody’s dumping site.”
“How did they know about that pantry though?” she asked.
“Unless they came in, took a look, and just wanted a room to lock up the body in,” he said, looking at her.
She nodded. “Still a little disturbing to think that somebody would carry around a dead body, dump them, and leave them.”
“They have to leave them somewhere, and if it’s an empty house …” Ansel said.
“But surely the body would be found faster than just taking them out and deep-sixing them,” she said.
“Maybe, but it’s also quite possible that somebody preferred the dumping to the digging.” Ansel shrugged.
“I’m thinking there might be more than one dead, and that’s a little disturbing,” she murmured.
“I didn’t mean that so much, but it’s another angle,” Ansel said. “I can tell you it looks like a shot to the back of the head.”
“Ah.” At that, Caleb nodded. “So execution.”
“It’s possible, particularly given how close to the border we are.”
“I don’t like the sound of that at all,” Laysha said.
Caleb reached out and grabbed her hand, tugging her a little closer. She went willingly enough.
“It was pretty unpleasant to look at,” Ansel said. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said, “but it still sucks.”
“It does, indeed.”
They did a quick trip around the property and didn’t see anything obvious. As they stopped at the far corner and looked back at the house, she turned to Caleb. “Any idea on the dog?”
He shook his head. “I’ll come back in the morning,” he said, “and see if I can track it from the house.”
“I still don’t understand how you can do that,” she muttered.
Detective Lowery looked at him. “You got some experience tracking?”
“I do,” he said, “but a lot of weather has transpired since then,” he said. “So chances of finding anything are pretty close to nil.”