I’m cutting her off. This stops today! Officer Shelley’s telling herself as she’s knocking on Ms. Vandywagg’s door.
When Loraine from dispatch radioed in that Ms. Vandywagg was in distress again, Shelley’s first question was, “Can somebody else respond?”
“Why ruin a good thing?” Detective Pitts Dugan chortled. “Ms. Vandywagg’s become your specialty. None of the rest of lugs would know how to handle her. Haha.”
“She’s asking for you, Shelley,” Loraine said. “Says it’s a crisis. Wouldn’t say anything else.”
The woman found headless in her bed at the Sunnyside Suites, is a crisis. Shelley has perps left to question, a few pros to check on, a homeless encampment left to toss. She has a murder weapon to find. Oh, and she has yet to locate the woman’s head.
But Shelly 10-4’d Loraine, taking the Vandywagg call. Ms. Vandywagg’s condo abuts the greenbelt where the hobos hang out—something the WASPy residents never cease reminding them of. After shutting things down with Ms. Vandywagg, Shelley can patrol the camp for leads.
This fucking city! It’s the 6th homicide of the year for Unionville, Washington’s 6th largest city. One silver lining is that the press has stopped caring. Shelley thinks about the likely murder weapon. Probably a bread knife. Serrated. Dull. Given the lacerations on the neckline and the fact that just such a one is missing from the woman’s kitchen set.
At Ms. Vandywagg’s door, Shelley knocks again. Though she hopes Ricky’s outside, one hand goes to her pouch of doggy treats, the other goes to her expandable baton.
Ricky is Ms. Vandywagg’s big brown chow. Each time Shelley has come over, the dog snarls and froths from his bearish snout and when he barks, the sound echoes through his barrel chest while his auburn-colored mane goes into a full head bang.
Yet there’s silence.
The door flings open to reveal Ms. Vandywagg in her yellow track suit and the full paint job: eyelashes dripping with mascara, sea green eyelid makeup, and blush bullseyes on her cheeks.
“Hope you didn’t get all dolled up on my account.”
“Oh, Officer! Thank God you’re here!”
“What is it this time?” Shelley asks, resting her hands on the collar of her vest so she can keep one ear on the radio.
“It’s Ricky. He’s lost! You’ve got to help me!” Vandywagg gesticulates toward the backyard. No Ricky. “That son of a bitch!”
“Ricky is kind of a son of a bitch.”
“The gardener! He left the back gate open!”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Vandywagg. It’s been a long night. And a long day. And I only have ten minutes.”
Help me, Shelley. Help me. That’s how it’s been for the last month since Shelley responded to Ms. Vandywagg’s call about the dog, which had got its head stuck in a hole in the backyard fence. Shelley widened the hole with her knife and the mutt went free, but not before Ms. Vandywagg told her every sordid detail of her life: dead husband, kids in other states that never call, and never visit, dwindling retirement funds. Shelley’s replies started genuine and quickly downgraded to perfunctory. Yet every week since, there’s been a Ms.-Vandywagg-call. She’d fallen looking for the remote. Her air conditioner wasn’t working. She saw a black man walking around in the parking lot. And now, back to Ricky.
“Oh, Shelley. This is a crisis! He’s never gotten out before! He doesn’t know his way back! And with all these hoodlums running around…”
With Ms. Vandywagg in tow squawking about how terrible and insensitive her neighbors are, and about how smelly and near the homeless are, Shelley strides out back and through the open gate. There, she sees nothing surprising. Three piles of lawn shavings discarded by the gardener. Smoke from the half-hearted fires of the bums on the other side of the hump of trees looming in front of them. And, in the middle distance, Ricky, prancing through the sword ferns, carrying something in his black jaws roughly the shape and volume of a cantaloupe, a human head.
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