'Will you be late?'
'I—I don't know, Viv. Don't wait up for me.'
She had smiled at him. 'All right, Monty. Just be careful in dealing with the desperadoes.'
It was a standing joke between them. Logandale had the lowest crime rate in the entire state. The college was known as a haven for eggheads, not raucous and reveling frat boys. The town itself was just under four thousand population, with a full-time police force of only four men and one woman. The sheriffs department had a substation in Logandale, with one deputy living in town.
Monty had spent ten years on the NYPD, going on disability retirement at the age of thirty-two after taking a shotgun blast in his legs. He walked with a slight limp that became more pronounced as he grew tired. Unable to put police work out of his mind, and not trained for any other type of work, Monty had answered an ad in a police magazine, driven up to Logandale for an interview, and was hired on the spot. That was three years ago. There had been no major crime in the small town during that time. A few break-ins, some petty theft, a fist fight or two on the weekends. Several domestic situations involving husbands beating the shit out of wives, and one domestic situation of a wife beating the shit out of her husband. No rapes, no armed robberies, no shootings, no knivings, no embezzlements—that came to the attention of the police force—no nothing.
It was boring. But the job paid surprisingly well. But a Boy Scout troop could have handled the job. Up to this point. All that was about to change.
Monty gripped the steering wheel and sighed heavily, trying to shake off the feelings of impending doom. Monty was of average height, average weight, average build; everything about Monty Draper was average, which was the reason he had spent nearly all his time doing undercover and stake-out work for the NYPD. One watch commander had commented that Monty Draper could get lost in a crowd of two.
Logandale, set off the beaten path, with no major highways or interstates running near it, was, putting it simply, a nice place to live. The town was surrounded by dairies, farms, and a sometimes colony of kooky writers and nutsy artists just a few miles out of town. When the colony was in residence—during the summer months—the townspeople viewed them with scarcely concealed amusement. But the writers and artists never caused anyone any trouble.
The man who owned the land where the colony was located was the Writer-In-Residence at Nelson College, Noah Crisp. Noah had inherited an obscene amount of money from his mother and father; had published many books, but had never had a best-seller. As a matter of fact, since most of his books were so off-the-wall, so to speak, Noah paid for their publication. But since he was the nearest thing Logandale had to a celebrity, he became sort of an instructor at the college. The board felt that Noah's babblings really weren't harmful, since no one in control of their faculties would pay any attention to them anyway. His classes were usually titled under something like: The Transcendental Aspects of Creating Salable Fiction. Or, The Haruspextic Pitfalls of Writing.
Classes any serious student of writing should take. Surely.
Noah was fifty, a bit on the pudgy side, and wore a beret, of the type featured in the Village back in the early and mid-fifties, and usually wore a painter's smock over jeans and cowboy boots. To say Noah was a bit eccentric would be putting it kindly. Many townspeople just called him a fucking nut and let it go at that.
As Monty drove the streets of the quiet little town, he recalled the visit by Noah, just a few weeks past. The man had not been his usual flaky self, not speaking in his usual pompous and/or condescending manner.
Monty had waved the small man to a seat.
Seated, Noah blurted, 'Chief, are you a religious man?'
The question had caught Monty off balance. He had not expected that. Monty shook his head. 'Not really. I was raised in the Catholic church, but I broke away from it years ago. While I was still in high school.'
Noah nodded his head in understanding. 'I, too, was raised in the church. But I haven't attended in years. Personal reasons. Chief, something very—strange is occurring in this town. I use that adverb in lieu of bizarre.'
Monty elected not to tell Noah that strange was an adjective, not an adverb. He thought.
Monty waited.
'My dog disappeared, Chief.'
Monty looked at the man.
'But I found him—yesterday.'
'I'm … glad, Noah. Do you consider your dog's disappearance bizarre?'
'What! Oh, no. Of course not. But I do consider it quite bizarre when the animal was tortured to death. Wouldn't you?'
'You want to go into more detail?'
Noah laid half a dozen Polaroid prints on the chiefs desk. Monty looked at them and felt like vomiting. The little dog had been hideously tortured, then patches of the animal had been skinned. Strange markings were cut into the skin. Alive, the thought came to Monty. The little animal was alive while this … depravity was done. Monty lifted his eyes from the pictures of pain.
'Where did you find the animal, Noah?'
'About a mile from my home. Down a dirt road.'
'What prompted you to look there?'
'Because I had looked everywhere else. Really. Victor, that's my dog's name—was his name, had a habit of running off quite often. But I always knew where to look for him. But this time, no Victor. So I began a systematic search for him. This spot,' he said pointing to the prints, 'was the last area in the quantum. I was—I became quite ill when I found him.'
'That's understandable.' Monty looked at the prints. Something was disturbingly familiar about the scene. But he couldn't pin it down.
'You look perplexed, Chief,' Noah said.
