I got out, releasing Peppy from her leash. The dog tore off into the night, after who knows what creature: I hoped not a skunk. I shone my flash over the ground and the outbuildings—two barns, some sheds.

If Emerald Ferring and August Veriden had come to see Doris McKinnon, they must have turned back and driven on. This was a complete dead end.

Peppy had raced back from her hunting adventure but had started nosing around the house, snuffling at the foundation. She disappeared again, this time at the back of the house. I called to her, but she started barking and whining.

“Come!” I said in my sharpest voice.

She came partway toward me, her eyes glittering in my flashlight, but barked and whined again and turned back to the house. I followed her, my legs stiff, the tingling on my neck moving down my spine.

The back door was shut but not locked. Peppy can smell ten thousand, or maybe it’s ten million, times better than I do, but when I pushed the door open, even my inferior nose picked up what she had noticed from across the field—the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh, the metallic odor of blood.

20
The Short-Tempered Arm of the Law

“If the house was dark when you got there, why did you go in? You have some kind of message that the owner had been killed?”

We were in the Douglas County sheriff’s office. The questioning was sort of informal, but when we left the McKinnon farm, squad cars had flanked my Mustang fore and aft. While we rode, I’d called my lawyer in Chicago to see if he knew someone in Lawrence or one of the nearby bigger cities.

“My dog,” I said now. “She smelled death and was so insistent that I went in to see what was troubling her.”

In Cook County the sheriff shows up at a crime scene only if it’s an important photo op, so I’d been surprised when the Douglas County sheriff arrived at the farm in person. He also headed the interrogation back at the Judicial and Law Enforcement Center in town. In a jurisdiction without a lot of violent crime, maybe he wanted the excitement of a murder investigation.

I’d called 911 from Doris McKinnon’s back porch—I’d retreated there as soon as I saw the body. Her body, I guessed, but it was impossible to tell the race or sex with the bloating and the destruction. It looked as though her head had been battered, but even that was hard to be sure of.

“Are you cause or effect, Warshawski?” That had been Sergeant Everard, who picked up the call from the emergency dispatcher. “In sixteen hours you’ve been Joanie-on-the-spot for four women in crisis and we don’t usually have even one murder in the county each year.”