Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 20 - Compound Murder (7 page)

“I can find it out easily enough.”

“Then you’ll have to find it out. I can’t give out information like that because of the laws about confidentiality.”

“That’s okay,” Rhodes said. He knew that students talked among themselves. He could ask a few and get the name. If not, Benton probably knew. Or maybe Rhodes could just make a guess. “It was Ike Terrell, wasn’t it.”

Judging from the look on the dean’s face, Rhodes knew that he wouldn’t have to ask anyone else after all.

“I’m not saying you’re right,” the dean told him.

“That’s all right. Dr. Harris said something about having meetings with parents about certain problems. Did you have a meeting with Ike Terrell’s parents about the plagiarism accusations?”

“I didn’t mention any names,” the dean said. “I really can’t discuss things of that nature.”

“You can answer yes or no. That’s not a discussion.”

“Then without mentioning any names, the answer is no. I … the student involved asked me not to get in touch with his parents, and I didn’t. I didn’t see that it was necessary since Dr. Wellington had no proof of his accusations.”

Rhodes thought it over. He decided he didn’t have any more questions for the time being, so he thanked the dean for her help.

“Did you find any grief counselors?” he asked before he left.

“I’m still working on that. It might not be necessary.”

Rhodes didn’t ask why. Benton had already given him the answer to that one.

“If any of the students happen to mention anything helpful, you’ll let me know, I’m sure.”

“I’ll call if I hear anything,” Dean King said. “Some things might have to remain confidential.”

Rhodes thought the college was too concerned about confidentiality and not concerned enough about who had killed Wellington. He thanked the dean again and left her office.

*   *   *

On his way out of the building, Rhodes stopped by the HR office and checked on Wellington’s family connections and address. The HR director was Susan Owens. She’d worked in the public schools before coming to the college. Rhodes had known her for years, and she was happy to cooperate with him. She looked up Wellington’s file on her computer.

“Dr. Wellington lived at the Forest Apartments on Pine Street,” she said. She gave Rhodes the apartment number. “He’s not from Texas. He’s from Arkansas, and his contact information is a brother there. I’ll give you the address.”

She wrote the address on a notepad, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Rhodes. He folded it and put it in the pocket with his reading glasses.

“The college will be notifying him,” she said. “If that’s all right with you.”

Rhodes didn’t mind at all. “Did you know Wellington?” he asked.

“Not well,” Susan said. She wore old-fashioned half-glasses with plastic frames. She pushed them up on her nose. “Just to speak to in the hall.”

“What did you think of him?”

“
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
I learned that in an English class, believe it or not. Part of it was the title of a story we read. Do you know what it means?”

“I think we must have read that same story when I was in school,” Rhodes said. “I don’t remember anything about the story, but I remember the title means that we should say nothing but good about the dead.”

“Very good. I’m impressed with your memory. I believe in that saying, by the way, so I’m going to tell you that Dr. Wellington had very nice posture.”

“A good quality in anybody,” Rhodes said, standing a little straighter.

“Yes,” Susan said. “I think so, too.”

Chapter 6

The radio on Rhodes’s car started to squawk as he opened the door. He got in and grabbed the mic. Hack came on and said there was another emergency.

“You got to get over to Hannah Bigelow’s house,” Hack said. “Quick.”

“What’s happened?”

“Wild hog in the house.”

“Hogs are Alton Boyd’s job.”

Boyd was the county’s animal control officer. He’d dealt with hogs before. Also cows, goats, and lots of dogs and cats. Not to mention an alligator.

“Alton’s out somewhere around Milsby with Duke. There’s a bunch of cows loose on the road, and Alton’s tryin’ to round ’em up while Duke keeps people from havin’ wrecks. Ruth’s down around Thurston, and Buddy’s workin’ a fender bender out east of town. The hog’s up to you.”

Rhodes thought of a television character whose lament was that it was always something. Roseanne Roseannadanna or some odd name like that. The name didn’t matter, though. She was right. In Blacklin County, it was always something. Murder investigations sometimes had to come to a stop because of mundane troubles like hogs in the house. Not that there was anything mundane about a hog in the house.

“I’m on my way,” Rhodes said.

Wild hogs covered Blacklin County and Texas like fleas covered a stray dog. They were starting to cover a lot of the whole country, for that matter. Rhodes had seen reports of them from as far north as New York. They tore up pastures, killed calves, ruined crops, and multiplied faster than rabbits. They were beginning to move into urban areas, and Rhodes figured the damage inside a house would be considerable.

The state of Texas had tried all kinds of things to get rid of the hogs, but so far nothing had been truly effective. Rhodes had experienced plenty of problems with them himself, but this was the first time he’d heard of one being inside the Clearview city limits, much less inside someone’s house. He supposed it had been just a matter of time until it happened.

Hannah Bigelow didn’t live far from Rhodes, only about a half mile, but that put her house a half mile closer to the edge of town. Rhodes hoped he wasn’t going to have trouble with hogs in his house or yard. Speedo wouldn’t like that kind of visitor at all. Ivy wouldn’t be too thrilled about it, either. Rhodes would have to see about having the fences strengthened, not that fences stood much of a chance against a determined hog, and if there was anything the wild hogs were, it was determined. And unrelenting.

Rhodes parked in front of the Bigelow house and got out of the car. The house was an old one, built sometime during the 1920s, Rhodes thought. One Bigelow or another had owned it all that time, and they’d managed to keep it in fairly decent shape. Hannah was the last of the Bigelows, though, and she was a Bigelow only by marriage. Her husband, Lawrence, last of the true Bigelows, had been dead for a couple of years.

Hannah was waiting for Rhodes on the concrete porch outside her front door. She was short, a little over five feet tall, but stout. She wore her gray hair pulled back into a tight, neat bun at the back of her head.

“It’s about time you got here,” she said. “If my Lawrence were here, you’d have a little more snap to your service. My Lawrence wouldn’t have tolerated a slow response time like this when there’s an emergency.”

“I’m sorry I took so long,” Rhodes said. “I was working on another case. Where’s the hog?”

“Inside, like I told that Hack Jensen when I called. I’m scared to go in there with it. Do you know how dangerous those wild hogs are?”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure do.”

“Then where’s your rifle? You did bring a rifle, didn’t you? You can’t kill a hog with your bare hands.”

Rhodes heard a crash inside the house.

“That sounded like my china cabinet,” Hannah said. “You’d better get in there and put a stop to things.”

She was right, but Rhodes had to ask a question first. “How did a wild hog get inside your house?”

“You know about Donnie?”

Rhodes said that he knew. Donnie was the Bigelow family dog, or had been. He’d passed away not long after Lawrence.

“Donnie was a good dog, and we trained him to come inside through a doggie door in the back. I never thought a hog could get in through it, though.”

“So the hog’s not very big,” Rhodes said.

“I didn’t say it was big. I said it was tearing up my house. Now are you going in there or not? If my Lawrence were here, you wouldn’t be standing out here talking. You’d be right in there after that hog.”

“I’m going in,” Rhodes said.

“What about your rifle?”

“I wouldn’t want to kill a hog inside your house if I could help it. You’d have blood and hair all over the floor and the walls.”

Hannah looked thoughtful. “That would be bad. It’s bad enough he’s tearing up my house. I can see why you don’t have a gun. You better not come running out and leave him in there, though. My Lawrence wouldn’t stand for it if you didn’t get that hog.”

“I’ll get him,” Rhodes said, hoping he sounded a lot more confident than he actually was. He opened the door and went inside the house. He left the door open, in case he needed to make a quick exit, no matter what Lawrence might have thought about it. His hope, however, was that the hog would be the one making the exit.

The light in the front room was dim even with the door open because the shades, old-fashioned shades like you didn’t see much anymore, were pulled down. In the light that slanted across the room from the doorway, Rhodes could make out a bookcase, a piano, and a writing desk. A small table lay overturned by the piano, and a broken lamp lay on the floor. The breaking lamp, not the china cabinet, had probably been the crash they’d heard.

There was no sign of the hog, but Rhodes heard something snuffling around in another room. A crash came from the back of the house. Not much of a crash, but it was followed by renewed, and louder, snuffling. Rhodes went through a hallway with a chest of drawers and a coat tree and into a kitchen. Light came in through a window over the sink, and Rhodes spotted the rear end of a black hog.

The front end of the hog was inside a plastic trash can in which the hog was rooting around for food. The hog snuffled and snorted and kicked back its trotters as it tried to get a better grip on the slick vinyl floor and push itself deeper into the trash can. It had no idea that Rhodes was anywhere around. All it cared about was whatever it had found in the trash.

“My Lawrence would get that critter right now,” Hannah said at Rhodes’s back, and Rhodes didn’t jump more than a foot. He turned to look at her.

“What are you doing in here?”

“I thought you might need some help. Sure didn’t hear you doing anything about that hog. Next thing you know it’ll have the refrigerator open.”

The hog was still busy in the trash can and either didn’t hear them or didn’t care that they were there.

“I don’t need any help,” Rhodes said. “You go on back outside. Your Lawrence wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“You got that right. He always took care of me. Now that he’s gone, I have to rely on the officers of the law, and from what I’ve seen so far, there’s not much to ’em.”

“We do the best we can,” Rhodes said. “You go on back to the porch, and I’ll see what I can do about this hog.”

“You sure you don’t need my help?”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, if you say so.”

Hannah left by way of the hall, and Rhodes turned back to the hog. The bristles on the hog’s back end didn’t seem nearly as coarse as they should have, and the animal lacked the overpowering smell of the wild variety. Rhodes thought that what he had here was an impostor, someone’s pet potbellied piglet that had escaped its home and decided to see what the rest of the big wide world had to offer.

That was good news, since it meant that Rhodes wouldn’t have to kill it, not that he had anything to kill it with, and he wouldn’t have to worry about being ripped to shreds by its tusks. In fact, he very much doubted that the hog had any tusks at all.

The bad news was that he still had to do something about it. The pig might be tame, it might even be housebroken, but that didn’t mean it would be easy to handle. Rhodes wished he hadn’t asked Hannah to leave. He wished Alton Boyd were there to help him. He wished he had the telephone number of the hog’s owner. For that matter, he wished he knew who the owner was, but the wishes weren’t doing him any good. He was going to have to do something, and do it before the pig decided to come out of the trash.

He wondered if Hannah had really gone back outside.

“Hannah?” he said.

“I knew you needed some help,” she said from the hall, and she came back into the kitchen.

“Do you have any duct tape?” Rhodes asked.

“Of course I do. My Lawrence always said you could fix anything with duct tape. Duct tape and WD-40. He always had to have those two things in the house. What he couldn’t fix with one of them—”

Rhodes held up a hand. “Could you bring the duct tape in here? Fast?”

“It’s in there.” Hannah pointed to a cabinet drawer. “Right in there. My Lawrence said to keep it handy because you never know when you’ll need it, so that’s what I do.”

The pig lunged forward, pushing the trash can a foot or more. There must have been something really tasty down in the bottom. Rhodes didn’t think the pig would hear him, so he stepped around him and opened the cabinet drawer. Sure enough, a roll of silver duct tape lay right in front. Rhodes took the tape and went back to Hannah. While she watched, he stripped a long length of tape off the roll and tore it free. It wasn’t a quiet process, but the pig wasn’t bothered.

As Rhodes handed the length of tape to Hannah, the pig began to back out of the trash can. Rhodes tossed the roll of tape in the general direction of the stainless steel kitchen sink. It landed with a clang, and Rhodes grabbed hold of the pig’s back legs.

The pig reacted instantly, squirming and squealing. Rhodes kept his grip, forced the legs together, and upended the pig into the plastic can while bringing the can into a standing position. The pig snorted and kicked with its front feet, but without much effect since they were restrained inside the can. It tried to kick with its back feet. Rhodes held tight. The pig writhed. Rhodes pushed down and kept it in the can.

Hannah stood by calmly with the tape, watching.

“Wrap the legs!” Rhodes said. The struggling pig was dragging him away from her. “Wrap the legs!”

“Oh,” Hannah said.

She stepped over, and Rhodes tried to hold himself away from the legs so she could pass the tape around them. After she’d made a couple of rounds, Rhodes squeezed the legs closer together. Hannah made three more rounds. It wasn’t easy, as the pig never gave up. Its exertions carried Rhodes to the right and to the left, and he slid around the kitchen, with Hannah calmly following along and continuing to wrap the legs.