Doctor and the Detective (eBook)

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Humans, people in general, have the common characteristic of being both repulsed and intrigued by ghoulish murders. It’s a contradiction not easily explained. Repulsion is borne from feelings of abhorrence, disgust, revulsion; sometimes fear for oneself and other sensibilities often defying word descriptions. Emotions often cannot be put into words. Feelings of fascination are oppositional. The macabre has been alluring from time immemorial. Gory novels and horror movies abound. Newspapers reap success in the reporting of blood and gore. The more details, the more papers are sold. Blood sells as well as sex. Thus, it was for the people of Blanton, Missouri to reconcile what happened with contradictory feelings.

The body: young, white, female, naked, had been dropped on stinking garbage in the Blanton landfill. The limbs had been cut off and replaced inches from their position in life. The head was missing. It seemed an artful arrangement in its pose apart from the bloody disarticulation, and one that took the killer a few minutes to purposefully achieve to some preconceived plan.

These initial observations were made by Detective Stanton Pulley of the Blanton Police Department upon viewing the mutilated corpse. He stood over the victim both repulsed and fascinated. Detective Pulley had never seen a murdered human before let alone one that had been dismembered. Later, he recalled his first impressions wondering if he had seen or known her in life and concluded that he hadn’t. Still, without a head and naked, identification was impossible by appearance.

The call had come in and directed to his desk by Evelyn Gruen, the dispatcher.

“This one is yours, Stan. Sounds gruesome, really disgusting. Never heard of anything like it here in Blanton. A body all chopped up. No head. Al found it, her. He’s the one drives that big machine at the landfill.”

“When did he find the body? Did he say?”

“A few minutes ago. Said he spotted it along County Road 6 that borders that mountain of trash. Near the edge. Easy to miss he said. Could have covered her right over.”

Detective Pulley had immediately made the short drive to the landfill where the body had been spotted by the driver, Al Oakes, on one of the big front-end loaders that endlessly shifted the garbage from point A to point B. Eventually the county would abandon the landfill as full, cover it over to find another place to dump the trash from the county’s residents. But for now, it was active much to the disappointment of Blanton’s residents, although everybody needed a place to put it, their trash. As with many things, residents preferred the reviled facility be relocated elsewhere. Anywhere but so close to town and by its placement usually upwind. They also groused about the rendering plant not far out of town but the close proximity of the landfill and its location relative to the prevailing wind made it worse in comparison.

Seeing the body, Pulley called the town doctor, a new doctor with a practice and clinic about four months old, and the only doctor in Blanton. Most folks, especially the older ones on Medicare made the drive to Grayson or even farther to St. Louis if their problem was serious. But for colds, flu, scrapes and broken bones, simple stuff you wouldn’t likely die from, Dr. Siobhan Murphy, a certified family physician, sufficed. Sufficed was perhaps an unfair description. The truth was that Dr. Murphy although apparently a skilled physician lacked a winning bedside manner in his opinion. She was blunt and unafraid to voice her opinion of her patients’ lifestyle shortcomings, including his.

Pulley recalled his one visit to her for a cold that seemed unwilling to go away two months before, just as spring was beginning to reveal itself in all its green and flowery splendor. She had lectured him on hand washing and noticing he was a nail biter advised him to keep his hands away from his mouth if he wanted fewer colds but hadn’t given him anything that would ease the lingering symptoms. Pulley thought she hadn’t been nice about it either. The reminder rose to the surface of his memory leaving a sour taste in his mouth or maybe that was too much coffee. Dr. Murphy was a hard one to like he had concluded after one visit, but he also noticed, couldn’t help but notice, that she was uncommonly pretty and stood out among Blanton’s other young women he knew. Being liked was important to Detective Pulley. A person caught more flies with honey than vinegar as the old saying went and he had grumped about her admonishments all the way home.

He didn’t regret the call to her office exactly, about the body. He had no choice really. Dr. Murphy acquired the title and job of medical examiner in that part of the county with her extensive education in pathology– and she was close. Why she had chosen to hang out her shingle as a family physician in Blanton was anybody’s guess. Blanton was a dying town. It was perplexing to Detective Pulley given her extensive credentials displayed in her office glimpsed but not studied during his single visit. Family physicians had residencies and he imagined that pathologists did too. Two residencies would mean years more in school unless perhaps they could be completed simultaneously like prison sentences served consecutively. But he really didn’t know. He wondered if his feelings resulted from her obvious young age or his initial displeasure with her attitude that prejudiced him toward her. The bottom line was Dr. Murphy was the one to call.

Her receptionist, Jasmine Land, a local farm girl who knew nothing about medicine but was young and handsome in the way big boned girls could be and personable where Murphy wasn’t, transferred the call saying into the receiver in a needlessly hushed voice since the adjacent waiting room was empty, “It’s a Detective Pulley from the police department.”

“Did he sound like he has a cold?”

“I don’t think so, but I haven’t spoken to him since I started here, so I really can’t tell.”

“You know him, then?”

“Most everybody knows everybody in Blanton.”

“Put him through.”

“Dr. Murphy,” Pulley began.

“Just a minute, detective,” she interrupted. Pulley could hear unintelligible sounds over the phone but no voices.

“All right, I’m back, detective. What’s up? You still in a panic about that cold? Colds go away. I told you. Or did you catch another one? What’s it been? A couple of months?”

“Ah, no, no and yes. About two months. I’m calling because I need you to come to the town landfill off of County Road 6. Not to the main entrance on Carl Street.”

“I know where it is. Why?”

“A body was found with the arms and legs dismembered and placed near their original position in life…more or less. The head is missing. The body is positioned kind of like a dancer or something.” Pulley thought his description succinct and professional.

“A dancer? Male or female?”

“Female. Adult woman but young I think although without the head that might be conjecture. The skin is discolored but looks young and firm. I mean not wrinkly.”

“Okay. I’m on my way as soon as I can get George Furney and Ruth Reddleton the hell out of my office and him to quit drinking.”

Pulley was thinking town drunks were a cliché but George Furney fit the description. Nothing short of death would get the old man to give up the bottle. Drinking up his Social Security check was about all George had to look forward to every month. When the money ran out, he had to dry out. It was Widow Reddleton, a neighbor who saw to it that Furney didn’t starve between checks. Everybody has some kind of mission in life and hers was saving Furney from himself. Furney had no interest in Widow Reddleton but tolerated her meatloaf, beef stew and peach cobbler that had won first prize at the county fair the year before.

After Furney’s wife Mabel had died he fell in love with the bottle. Widow Reddleton held out hope that Furney would expand his love affair to her but few in town thought he would.

Dr. Murphy arrived at the landfill fifteen minutes later. Blanton was a small town and the landfill was an odiferous neighbor, situated too close as time had passed and it had grown in size but since there had been an emptying of the town’s once flourishing population in recent decades, fewer people existed to complain. In truth, Howard Thompson’s big hog farm contributed far more to the fetid air than the landfill. But Thompson’s business was profitable and sometimes downwind. Not much profit existed for the paltry collection of merchants that remained. Some blamed the Walmart for the decline but it was a love-hate relationship since everyone shopped at Walmart including the remaining merchants.

Murphy parked and walked to Pulley after spotting his standing form silhouetted against a mountain of trash.

“Dr. Murphy. Thanks for coming. This is one for the books in Blanton.” Pulley pushed his fedora back, squaring broad shoulders and placing two big former farm kid freckled hands on his hips beneath the jacket of his suit. Nobody wore hats anymore but Pulley had grown up with a cap on his head and the fedora suited him. Besides, it covered the red hair he hated along with the pasty, freckled white skin he inherited from his Scottish mother. He had to stay out of the sun and the hat helped. He’d considered dying it, his hair, but that was too much work and everyone in town would know and probably giggle behind his back. Red it was and red it would remain although his mother always called it cinnamon-colored not red to ease his self-consciousness.

Murphy...