Off Route: A Mike Dodge Mystery

The second thing I noticed about the man on the bench was his copy of National Geographics Journeys of a Lifetime. It had fallen into the dirt beside the wrought-iron/soy composite seat – the one I’d probably seen him occupying a half dozen times. I assumed he’d obtained it only recently, probably a gift or an Amazon whim – the second half of the volume was flat, clean, unsullied as yet. The first half had been turned and worried and crimped, and I saw the edge of a bookmark peeking from the pages.

The first thing I noted about the man was that his throat had been torn pretty much to shit. The book had escaped the blood spatter in the fall, no doubt as he flailed against death. Sometimes, it actually is more about the destination than the journey.

**

My first bike of note was a 1969 Schwinn Hollywood. The green: Steel frame, two-toned saddle, silver/chrome fenders, none of that ten-speed shit -- two gears and a chain you could walk back on without a frigging toolkit or junior engineering badge. Despite its French derivation, Terre Haute had a famous federal penitentiary and industrial aromas to spare but nothing with the hubris to call itself a mountain.

Neither E.T. nor Breaking Away were a glimmer in Spielberg or Yates’ eyes back then – I had mainly The Beav as a role model (Wiki it up, punks), and besides, it was a free ride, spanking bright and, unlike nearly anything the Dodges of Center Street possessed, untouched beyond the dudes at the Schwinn plant, a couple of Smith’s Department Store flunkies and the manager who conferred it to me with minimal fanfare, and a Terre Haute Star photog likely pressed into odious ad department duty on a Saturday morning. I probably wasn’t that hyped myself about rise-and-shining after a week in the elementary school mineshafts and missing Scooby Doo, but a good chunk of my pre-pubescent life had been spent in some Dr. Seuss/Roald Dahl nightmare in the Smith’s shoe stacks, and I was damned if the bastards didn’t owe me something.

For me, the Hollywood came to represent a certain autonomy worth tortuous shoe shopping: At 12 I pressed the Schwinn into service delivering the morning Star, shivering and flinging in the wee smelly hours before the Terre Haute dawn, proudly (and moronically) disavowing my meager weekly allowance, and, ultimately, underwriting my state university tuition.

The new bikes were Sarah’s notion. A half-century of respective divorced motherhood and sedentary meat and cheese had caught up to us, and one impetuous day after concluding the burial vault was a poor hidey-hole for whatever we didn’t squander in senility and system failure, we popped for a pair of electric-assist cycles. At 50 percent clearance, maybe more a whimper than a pop, with me doing the lion’s share of whimpering.

Senior autonomy is a different groove, but no less invigorating. With an electronic boost to help our sorry asses over hill and dale and redneck-congested intersection, we expanded our exploration range and lunch and shopping options, and discovered The Trails. Millington was crisscrossed with miles of canopied, vegetative, graded, pothole-free corridors I’d previously believed reserved for Fitbit-addicted millennial runners, retired professors who raised heirloom zucchini and read books and shit, sketchy folk who liked to mug or sell pot to millennial runners and literate oldsters, and horny students seeking a coital glade with an element of risk.

What I found – beyond about 50 percent of the above – was a virtual system of wormholes between Chateau Dodge and Hardee’s, Dodge Ranch and Monical’s Pizza, Mike’s Suburban Fringe Hideaway and the Panda Express, well, you get the jist of zero-sum fitness. Today, tragically, Sarah had opened the wormhole exclusively between Villa Dodge, Krogers, and the Walgreens.

After a winter journey to the Keys that had broken my two-year COVID-free streak (DeSantisland and back on peak discount flights -- who’d have figured?) and a dozen unanticipated expenses on our return to the Garden Spot of the West Nile (Virus), we decided to remain staycationers at least until the first rime of frost. Too bad, really, because if there was a great last time to see Earth, it was probably 2023. July went down as the hottest in the recorded history of the planet, and somewhere not too far from where I’d cavorted with dolphins before catching the Cov, a 3,000-year-old coral reef just up and died because some asshole or assholes had turned the Atlantic into a saltwater hot tub.

And Central Illinois into Florida, with the prime benefit of not having to be in Florida. Entering the trail off Campustown was like diving into the pre-Global Boiling Atlantic – the tree-lined conduit was a good 20 degrees cooler, and the sweat began to dissipate as I doled out inane salutations and companionable body language. Louis Armstrong must have taken the wrong psych courses – love was pointedly not what the folks were telepathically communicating, at least not on the Logsplitter Trail. With a few octogenarian and multicultural exceptions, it seemed closer to love’s more carnal cousin, in a second-person colloquial sense. Buff old dude in a wheelchair nearly steamrollered me.

COVID had dinged the foundering social contract between Gen-plussers facing Trump Act 2 and the climactic extinction event and the Supreme Court road show of Handmaid’s Tale, the Boomers they blamed for the whole shooting match, and settled Millennials whose frosty and multidirectional guardedness I’d never quite suss-ed out. I spotted the man on the bench probably about 40 yards up as I traded a nod at a hippo pit and her thirtysomething with stroller for a “Don’t even” death glare. The gray man was in his usual tan khakis, non-descript polo shirt, and those velcro’ed sneakers that would only get you into a Hammer concert these days. He had his usual read open on his lap; I’d never caught a glimpse of the cover.

Sarah pulled over to the scrubby berm to the right of the blacktop to adjust her helmet and grab a sip of her blackberry Hint. I was still getting used to my own helmet – I looked like a mushroom Super Mario might have zapped out of mercy.

“Drink up,” my bride insisted. I sipped obediently and reconnoitered the trail ahead. We mounted up and dodged a fully-costumed would-be Lance Armstrong except with more balls as I heard a commotion of birds ahead. A pair of retouched Bridgerton recappers turned briefly back as we whizzed past, and I swerved to avoid a perpendicular chipmunk. Then, suddenly, I could read the logo on Lance Jr.’s streamlined helmet, and my hand-brake squealed as Sarah informed me I was about to hit the guy I almost hit and I skidded nearly into a burly young guy murmuring into his iPhone in that idiotic Euro cigarette case way I usually associate with folks who’ve binged too much Succession.        

“Fuck, dude!” the near-victim yelped. “No dude, not you fuck. This dude fuck.” He looked at me in my big fungal polycarbon helmet. “I don’t mean fuck you, dude. But, fuck, dude.”

“I think I understand,” I nodded. Then I turned to Lance. “But, dude, kinda what he said.”

The cyclist turned to me, eyes huge, skin gray, and jerked his encased skull toward the off-trail alcove with its Millington Parks Department bench and the NatGeo tour guide and the Velcro AARP kicks and the torn-up throat.

**

With Curtis’ OK, I sent Sarah off with the provolone. It was about noon now, and even under the canopy of poplar and maple, we were dangerously close to melting or at least coagulation stage.

“The birds,” I suggested.

“One of Hitchcock’s best.”

“Something flushed them out of the trees right before me and Grand Prix there came up on him. Like maybe a dude with a machete.”

“More like a hacksaw,” Det. Mead grunted, side-saddle on the Millington Parks golf-cart he’d had to take up here. His Parks Department escort was chatting with the Bridgerton. Burly Dude and Grand Prix were on their phones, explaining they’d be late to whatever. “Serrated edge, lotta force. No signs of trampled vegetation on the hill behind the bench. I don’t see how the killer could come up from the side or for a frontal assault and nobody see anything.”

“I can’t see how it could have happened so quickly. We stopped back there for a water break, and he was reading peacefully. The only people we saw were the Real Housewives of Millington and Grand Prix and the big guy there – Ari.”

“The Real Housewives – Donna and Bev to be procedurally accurate – actually know the victim, who before you devise a witty nickname for him is William Collins, who lives about six blocks down, just off the trail. Wife says he comes here to get away and read about ‘the places he’ll never go.’”

“Burgess Meredith.”

“You know,” Curtis responded, “They’re doing marvelous things with Pop Culture Tourette’s these days.”

“Burgess Meredith on the Twilight Zone. The bank teller who just wants to read his books. The book we found next to the bench describes the top destinations on Earth to see, and it looks like he rations it out each day on the bench. He’s not even halfway through. You still got the book, right? Can I show you something?”

“It sounds like you already know the thing cover to cover.” There was judgment.

“Can I show you something?”

Curtis gloved up, I think more out smugness, and pulled the guide from a plastic evidence sleeve. He handed me a second pair of gloves, I chalked it off my taxes, and flipped to the bookmark. It was at the end of the fourth of nine chapters, ‘On Foot,’ detailing the treasures to be found in South Africa’s highest mountain range, The Drakensberg, including barking rock baboons, always a treat. The fifth chapter, “In Search of Culture” had been perused through the ‘Top 10 Vanishing Places,’ including the Glades, the Amazon, and the Great Barrier Reef, which had gotten a bleach job courtesy of climate change. Maybe about halfway through, I assumed, Collins had read his last. The only sign of handling past the Doom Tour was a crimped corner at the end of the chapter.

“He folded back the corner of each chapter, probably to gauge the time he had left in his little trailside sojourn,” I suggested. “With a bookmark to keep his place ‘til his next getaway.”

“Wife actually coaxed him into getting out, even just on the trail,” Curtis noted. “Nearly died a few years back – West Nile, back in 2015. He worked for the county -- lawyer managed to get Collins a small shut-up settlement, argued he was exposed to an unnecessary mosquito risk, county negligence, yada yada. But the wife – ought to be here by now – says he was a wreck even before COVID, only started leaving the house a few months back. This is what you wanted to show me?”

I held up a finger. “Let’s go back. I spotted this right after the murder. Right about the middle of Chapter Three, ‘By Rail.’” In the upper left edge of the right page, was a single reddish-brown streak terminating in a partial print. “Guess is, it’s Collins’.”

“The deceased succumbed to carotid complications from a paper cut.”

“One bloody fingerprint. Just one. How often you see that? Wouldn’t you expect to see more stains?,” I countered, turning the book over and tilting it until the light glancing through the canopy reflected off the matte cover. “You can see where the back cover’s been cleaned – where the lamination’s duller. Collins probably missed the internal stain– it’s on the right page, blotted onto the left, and when he resumed reading, he began on the next page. So the book got bloody – not too bloody, and whatever happened apparently made Collins run home. Maybe a mugging attempt, some pissed-off meth head. Or maybe William Collins committed his own act of violence.” I glanced across the path. “Hey, Ari?”

The bulky young man was now scribbling in a small notebook with an Audubon sketch on the cover. Ari looked up and hustled over.

“Ari here is a birder,” I told Curtis. “Ornithologist?”

“Birder’s cool,” the big guy murmured in a deceptively high timbre.

“Detective Mead, Ari. Ari’s from Champaign. Why do you grace us today, Ari?”

Ari turned to Curtis, who regarded him as some odd species crapping on his car roof. “How much you know about migratory patterns?”

“Illuminate me.”

“Well, you know we’re going through some pretty radical climactic shifts, right?”

“Heard tell.”

“Well, it’s really effed up a lot of avian migratory patterns. The black-chinned hummingbird for one — the usual range is west of the Mississippi, up from the Gulf through Texas into the Northwest, Canada. Breeding range, of course… Oh, sorry. Thing is, there’ve been a few sightings in Illinois, one a couple weeks back right around here. I’d give my right nut to get one on my life list.” Curtis perked. “Shit, man, it’s birder jargon — these hardcore guys, they’ll quit their jobs to finish their year, run all over the place. Me, I got my mom to take care of, so something like this comes along…”

“What is this?” Curtis asked me, bluntly.

“Who reported the local hummingbird sighting?” I inquired, hastily.

Ari shrugged. “Goes by RatiteKing. Which is kinda weird, since the only North Americans ratites — big flightless birds -- have been extinct for, well, I’m no paleontologist—”

“What we need from you, Detective,” I blurted. “Is to search the thicket right behind and around the bench. We’re looking for a body, possibly bodies.”

Curtis had learned over time to trust my deductive genius, or simply hoped to avert a stroke. He yelled to the Parks guy, who jumped and reluctantly left the Bridgerton Appreciation Society.

It didn’t take long for the ‘ranger’ (?) to locate the mangled, partially skeletonized, probably nibbled-on remains. Three small corpses, enough plumage still remaining for me to look to Ari.

“Well, obviously, those ain’t hummingbirds,” the birder said with a mingled tinge of regret and relief. “But, dudes…” He reached for his bird log, then glanced up guiltily. “Sorry…”

**

He was on his deck next morning, almost as if waiting for us. Dan Arden, though I’d only known him as the angry old wheelchair guy on the trail.

Sarah and her ex had actually used Arden Rodent Control before the founder had retired to travel the globe, scoring birdies on the course and the bush. RatiteKing — a bitter double pun for the flightless former exterminator — was legend in Ari’s community for his country and species lists, until a Jeep drove his rented motor scooter off a Hawaiian trail.

The rest of the story came into focus as I surveyed his deep backyard. Raw soil mingled with wood pulp was compacted where a presumably huge tree had been, and a smaller, surviving maple had been amputated to a nearly vertical totem, exposed cambium ragged and twisted like WIlliam Collins’ throat. Up a steep incline, I could spot the bench where the agoraphobic Mitty had died.

“Our guys almost immediately IDed the blood in the victim’s book as avian, not human,” Curtis began. “Mr. Dodge here has some campus connections, and we expect to confirm species within a day or two.”

Arden fixed us both with a sorrowful but icy stare. “I can ID species now, show you my photos and log entry on the real — live — thing. Fucker just massacred them, senselessly. Viciously. I saw him just batter at them with that book he always brought with him, but I couldn’t do anything. I screamed at him to stop, but he just kept going…”

“Collins probably had PTSD — he’d nearly died from West Nile,” I explained, like that would help. “His wife finally cajoled him out of the house, and the only place he felt safe was on that trail bench. But he was still basically surrounded by bugs, possibly even the mosquitoes that had ruined his life. And birds. Mosquitoes are the carriers, of course, but the dead birds signal the virus is live. Like now — few dead crows around here have tested positive.

“So while he vicariously traveled the world, Collins was probably also on tenterhooks, watching for any sign of ‘dangerous’ wildlife. Then a virtual flock of colorful, strange swallows on their new migratory route lights right in front of him, on the bench, dangerously close. Collins starts to bat them away with the only weapon he had, kills one or two, then the panic and suppressed anger takes over.”

“I recovered two of them,” Arden interrupted harshly, sloshing his ice tea as he gestured toward the maimed maple. “Buried them out there. After, you know, they were my life. I have a whole book just on the habitat I built back here, but after that, just couldn’t be a party to luring those poor creatures into a human environment any more.

“When I got out on the trail the other day and saw that…man…sitting on the same bench where he’d savaged those beautiful creatures, I knew I had one more job. Took me a few to get home, but it was still out, and he was still there. I got a pretty good swing — one of the few things I still got.”

Curtis spotted the telescoping pole saw by the fenceline. Arden had wiped the saw blade, but only half-heartedly. It was 94 at 10 a.m., but I felt something cold and utterly black squirm in my gut.

“Why there was no disturbance in the thicket,” Curtis said with clinical necessity. “You must have some powerful upper body strength. Why didn’t you at least hide it or get rid of it? Jesus, dude, you ripped the man’s throat wide open!”

“I guess,” the former ornithologist, former killer smiled vibrantly, “I’m only human.”