Free Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) by J M Hayes Page A

empty beer bottle.
    “Uh…lean up against that tree and spread your arms and legs,” Wynn instructed.
    “This tree?” the black man pointed. It wasn’t the one Wynn had in mind but it didn’t matter. He wanted the man’s back to him so he wouldn’t realize Wynn was unarmed. And he wanted the man in a position from which it would be difficult to launch an attack.
    “Fine,” Wynn said.
    The black man walked over to the tree and leaned against it. “I can’t really spread my hands,” he apologized. “The trunk’s not big enough. Will this do?”
    “That’s OK,” Wynn replied, beginning to feel in control again. “Just do the best you can.” Wynn stepped up between the man’s legs, stuck the mouth of the beer bottle in the small of his back, and patted him down. Wynn found nothing more lethal than a wallet and a cell phone. He removed them from the suspect and tossed them behind him. Wynn glanced longingly at the hand cuffs clipped to his belt, but his two-year-old had lost the key a month ago and the manufacturer hadn’t sent replacements yet.
    “Stand up real slow, but keep those feet spread,” Wynn ordered, “and take your belt off.”
    The man did as asked. Wynn fashioned a reasonable substitute for the cuffs out of the belt and lashed the man’s hands behind his back.
    “Who are you?” the deputy asked.
    “Neil Bowen.”
    “What you doing out here, Neil Bowen?”
    “I don’t know exactly,” Bowen replied. “Trying to keep from getting lynched, I suppose.”
    “Now that I believe.” Wynn bent and picked up the wallet and thumbed through a collection of plastic credit cards and photo IDs, all of which confirmed that the individual in custody was one Neil Raymond Bowen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History at Fort Hays State University. That was surprising. It was one thing to expect a transient black man to kill Reverend Simms. Quite another to find that transient probably earned at least four times Wynn’s annual salary. Folks like that seldom wandered around the country bumping off people according to some randomly psychotic pattern. Still, a black professor of history was an unlikely figure to find on foot in Simms neighborhood so shortly after the murder. That left him as a reasonable suspect in Wynn’s mind.
    “Well, Neil,” Wynn asked, “care to tell me why you killed him?” Wynn wanted to see the black man’s face when he answered, watch for clues that he was lying, so Wynn stepped around in front of his prisoner.
    What he saw was surprise. “That’s a beer bottle you’ve been pointing at me,” Neil Bowen said, accusingly.
    Wynn flushed a little but told the black man to just answer the question.
    “I haven’t killed anyone,” Bowen finally said.
    “Then why’d you run.”
    “Because you drove at me like you intended to run me down.” Wynn recalled, that since he’d been sure the stranger must be the murderer, that had been pretty much his intention. He decided not to pursue the point any further.
    “If you didn’t kill him, who did?”
    “Not knowing who was killed puts me at something of a disadvantage in making a guess, officer, especially since I don’t know a soul among your local population.”
    “So then, what were you doing there?”
    “I was looking for help. My car quit on a dirt road a couple of miles north of here. I couldn’t raise anyone with my cellular. I could see that there must be some sort of community here because of the grain elevator and a couple of other buildings, including the spire of what looks like a courthouse, so I hiked across some fields and then started knocking on doors. I hadn’t found anybody home yet when you started chasing me.”
    “A likely story,” Wynn muttered around the uncomfortable suspicion that it just might be true. College professors didn’t make good random serial killers, especially ones who carried the kind of identification that could be checked. A professor would surely be smart enough to avoid