Blood Mug

By WF Ranew

PI Red Farlow has a meeting with Wickham Art Center board chair in Atlanta, but when he arrives, he finds the chairman slumped over his potter's wheel with a medieval battle dagger protruding from his back.

During the investigation, other victims are discovered in the pottery studio, each meeting the same gruesome end as the chairman. Is the dagger a dramatic flourish of a twisted mind, or a more profound message?

Clues soon reveal a real estate scheme—wealthy Venezuelan investors plan to plow Whickham under and build condos on the site.

Red gets his hands muddy as he throws himself into finding the answers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tirgearr Publishing
• Release date: Feb 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005108090

WF Ranew

W.F. Ranew is a former newspaper reporter, editor, and communication executive. He started his journalism career covering sports, police, and city council meetings at his hometown newspaper, The Quitman Free Press. He also worked as a reporter and editor for several regional dailies: The Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, The Florida Times-Union, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Ranew has written two previous novels: Schoolhouse Man and Candyman’s Sorrow.He lives with his wife in Atlanta and St. Simons Island, Ga.

Book preview

Chapter One

Death preceded me.

That notion drifted into my mind like a ghost when I encountered the unknown, especially in the dark. Perhaps it was my spook, a lurking memory of all the bodies I’d seen.

Or maybe the heat of the August night—barely cooler than the day—had fried my brain like bacon grease crackling in a hot skillet.

Something conjured this foreboding as I walked toward the clay studio of the Wickham Art Center.

I went over to meet Kevin Densmore, businessman and Wickham board chair, to discuss a recent murder at the center. After two weeks, the police had turned up little in leads or suspects. Wickham’s leaders became worried about staff and student safety and the venerable institution’s reputation.

Densmore wanted to hire me, or so I’d been told by a friend on the center’s board. I’m Red Farlow, a private detective.

Down an alley through the darkness, the mansion’s back door light glowed. There, signs indicated the way to the pottery studio. I walked into a dimly lit chamber and looked back to the wheel room. I later learned potters had created mugs, bowls, and jugs on a wheel for thousands of years.

The whole place was a mess, with everything covered in a patina of gray clay. The dust layers reminded me of exploring a dry riverbed in my youth. The clay crumbled under my bare feet, leaving an imprint on the ground and a thin crusty layer on my skin.

I breathed the clay’s essence and looked around the room.

In the main studio, huge containers of glaze solutions had splashed over the floor. A hot plate overheated paraffin, which bubbled onto the table before someone unplugged the appliance. The paraffin pool hardened and suggested an icy pond on a winter’s morning. Bags of clay neatly stacked four feet high lined one wall, and a dozen or so mud-smeared aprons hung on pegs.

I found Densmore bent over his electric pottery wheel. He neither spoke nor looked up.

I thought the man had given up throwing a rather large mug spinning on the wheel. Beside the wheel on a small table was a snake of clay, likely the mug’s handle. Densmore appeared to be staring down at the unfinished piece, perhaps considering improvements to the clay form.

Then reality kicked in. We would not talk that evening or at any other time.

Densmore sat there, quite dead.

His left hand dangled between his legs and his right hand slumped to the side. Muddy water dripped from fingers and formed small puddles around the left foot resting on the cement floor. His right foot stubbornly pressed the foot pedal as the wheel turned. I looked around the device, found the switch, and turned it off to preserve any evidence.

Blood splattered wet clay and dripped into the newly born mug, which collapsed as the wheel made its final turns. Red blotches streaked the object and whirled to blend with the mud. The spinning wheel mixed bodily and earthen substances into a brownish pink color, which lined the hog pan.

I studied a scene conveying ritualistic fervor, with Densmore’s blood like sacrificial wine nearly filling the unholy, unfired mug. A blood mug.

The red wound around his neck indicated someone garroted the man. I had to look close to see that. Obstructing the view was the handle of a battle-size dagger leaning down from his right shoulder. The medieval weapon accounted for the bloody scene.

He hadn’t died immediately from either wound, in my quick, initial assessment. The garrote had not taken, so the killer plunged the dagger. Or perhaps the double blade provided the dramatic effect the deranged person wanted. A message I couldn’t read but in a language that I knew too well—cold-hearted murder.

Another dagger had pierced the right breast of the first victim.

A possible trend noted.

I took my cell from my pants pocket and looked at the screen. No signal. Stepping outside and walking toward the parking area, I got a call through to nine-one-one. By that time, the heat had drenched my shirt.

Reentering the room, I felt sticky in the breeze of the studio fans.

At the death wheel, a wallet lay on the floor near the body. I picked it up and found bills amounting to about four hundred dollars, his driver’s license, and a host of credit cards, all gold or black. Most were black.

I took several photos of the scene.

Kevin Densmore served as CEO and chairman of his family’s Musella Cove Foods canned fruit empire. A big man in a big southern city.

No more, as Kevin Densmore became reduced to splatters of blood and clay on the studio floor.

* * *

The night heat hovered without relief—eighty-eight degrees at ten forty-five when I arrived.

Outside, the wind swatted at oak limbs and brushed my sweat-dotted face. Inside the basement studio, fans blasted from two of the windows opening out at ground level. Lights seemed adequate but cast a gloomy pall over the front room.

While taking the final pictures of the tragic scene, my phone screen caught a shadowy movement. I looked into a dark back chamber adjoining the studio. My phone switched to video as my eyes tried to focus on the blackness through the next room's portal. I heard nothing, but someone lurked there.

I stepped toward the darkness.

Footsteps sounded in the back of the room. I entered but saw nothing. Still, the video captured the faint, mostly dark scene and whatever else the dim available light might reveal to digital recording, or so I figured at the time.

A door creaked open. The sound came from above the room. Reaching inside the doorway, I fumbled around and found a light switch. The room lit dimly from a single bulb dangling near the far door, which stood open. A stone stairway led up in a spiral to the left and down to the right.

I started the trek. At the top, perhaps two stories up, I opened a door into the old mansion's ballroom.

Another door at the opposite end of that large room slammed shut. The air was much cooler there than the outside temperature dictated. I quickly walked across the parquetry, opened the door, and stepped inside another dark chamber. The kitchen from the smell of it.

A crevice of light showed a nearby pantry. Someone had just moved through an exterior French door leading onto a balcony. I saw the figure move along the balustrade through the windows.

I followed cautiously and stepped onto the long, wide balcony. The summer wind whipped my face, and I looked down the wall lit by a streetlamp. The untamed growth of mature shrubs cluttered the area below me. Wickham needed a gardener.

Suddenly, an overhead spotlight went dark. I carefully made my way forward.

Get out of here, a voice said from a place at the far end of the balcony.

I stepped in that direction and into darkness. I stopped along the balustrade and listened for further movement.

Leave now, the voice said. A woman’s?

I walked on slowly, but despite caution, my foot caught on a loose stone, and I tripped, my right shoe sliding across crumbled mortar where several balusters and the railing had fallen away.

I wobbled a moment, my hands and arms waving in a desperate attempt at balance. Then I tumbled down in the darkness and met the fresh scent of leaves against my face. Thorny branches pierced my skin. I sank fast and deep into nature’s prickly bed. Along the way, my body swept out of the bushes and landed hard on a flagstone and grass walkway. My head thudded against slate.

Blackness inside and out overcame me. Somewhere I felt pain. All over, I felt discomfort. My mind blanked. For how long, I couldn’t know.

* * *

Eventually, I opened my eyes for a better look at the figure standing over me. A watery film distorted the image of a woman. Youngish. Blonde hair, maybe. Or perhaps red or brown. I was in no position to discern at the moment. She wore a white smock and had beautiful legs.

No. Not a smock at all, but a long blouse. Correct that. As my eyes focused, the oversized garment seemed to be a faded man's work shirt.

I reached up to her and tried to utter something, but no sound came. So, I mouthed, Help me. She stared down, turned, and left. Moving into darkness, the woman said, They’re coming for you.

I heard a siren off in the distance, down Briarcliff Road. A flash of light caught the right corner of my left eye. A firetruck and ambulance thundered onto the property and up the driveway.

My head rocked back. Blackness and pain again engulfed me.

* * *

This was some way to start a new case. I discovered the body of my prospective client and failed to apprehend his killer or a witness. The more painfully tricky part came when I tripped into darkness, fell over bushes, and busted my ass.

I pondered this while reclined in a Piedmont Hospital ER cubicle. I felt numb, and for a good reason; heavy doses of painkillers worked through my ravaged body.

My lovely wife, Leigh Wallace, stood by my ER bed, as she had done after a bad guy shot me not so long ago. His name was Halbert Dixon, who damaged me far beyond the gunshot and in ways I tried to forget.

Sweet man, she said. That’s what Leigh called me in the most loving voice one can imagine. She did love me. I most assuredly loved her.

I tried to pull her onto the bed, but my immobilized arm caught on the rail. Pain electrified my body until I eased the arm down.

Mr. Farlow, you need to rest, a young nurse said as her diminutive but commanding presence filled the room. You’re due for surgery later this afternoon. On your, ah, upper leg.

What happened? Oh, I know what happened. What I mean is, what exactly are my painful backside injuries? I asked.

The nurse mumbled something about contusions and piercing wood matter. Guess I got stabbed by a branch of one of the bushes.

The doctor came in and told me the bushes saved my life. Yet I suffered several severe puncture wounds from splintered holly branches.

A twenty-foot fall for a man of your age could kill you, the doctor said. I estimated the doctor to be about thirty years old; she was pretty but overly somber. She’d pulled her long, black hair and tied it with a black ribbon. Her oversized tortoise-shell glasses veiled the beauty of likely a sexy woman. The doc hid it all very well, too, in her bedside manner.

A fall like that could kill anyone, I retorted. The nurse laughed. The doctor did not.

You have a piece of green wood stuck in your hip, the medical woman told me.

Lucky it missed my asshole, I said.

Nobody laughed.

I’m glad you have a sense of wit about all of this, the nurse said. It will help.

The doctor examined my arm cast and turned me up slightly onto my right side to observe something else. Electric ripples tingled with the pain. She asked if I was dizzy and then left. On her way out, the MD told me surgery would, in all likelihood, take care of the stick-up-the-ass issue.

Three hours later, they rolled me into the OR.

Chapter Two

Rufus B. Hound Dog Donohue, an insomniac, knew he had to sleep sometime. It was midnight. Moving toward the shower, the photog heard a homicide alert on his police radio monitor.

Instincts kicked in. He put on a clean shirt, khaki pants, and photo vest, filled with digital memory cards, an assortment of batteries, and two lenses—an 85mm and a 24mm Leitz wide angle. Dog slung a bag containing three Leica digital camera bodies and other lenses over his shoulder on the way down the steps. The bag’s equipment boasted a net value in the thousands of dollars.

I met Hound Dog years ago at another overnight crime scene. Standing over a woman whose body was hamburgered by multiple shotgun blasts, I saw the camera flash. I noticed him standing there and pressing his motor drive. Flash. Whir. Flash. Whir. Flash. Whir.

Shall I pose with the body? I asked. Gallows humor at my worst.

Would you please? he asked.

Hell, no, I said. This is ugly enough already.

After introducing himself, Dog kept taking pictures while circling the body and perimeter. He was not supposed to be inside the tape, but I later learned Hound Dog Donohue could go just about anywhere as long as he left any evidence undisturbed. From his ballet around the tragic stage, the man moved as a practiced veteran of crime scenes.

Several hours after I fell on Sunday, Dog visited me at Piedmont and told me what transpired earlier that morning after he arrived at the center, shot his photos, and went over to the newspaper.

After hearing the initial call, Rufus got into his truck, turned to the police radio channel, and listened for the address. The dispatcher called out a code indicating a suspicious death at the Wickham Art Center. Rufus lived in the upstairs apartment of an old house on Tenth Street, a few blocks from the center.

He cranked his truck, backed out of the drive, and sped to the crime scene.

He was wide awake, despite the long day previous and insomnia two nights running. His heart raced.

* * *

Rufus Donohue made his living as an ambulance-chasing street photographer who monitored police radios for breaking stories. Freelance assignments mostly came from the newspaper where he used to work, the Atlanta Herald-Record. His was a dying breed, but one hanging on by the public’s insatiable addiction to breaking news.

He usually got to a crime scene or fire before anyone else. Some have accused him—never proven, mind—of starting trouble to generate a good picture. Shooting spot news photos made up his main occupation.

He provided video to TV stations as his main channel of income now that newspapers had descended into deep circulation and budget declines, not to mention a dent in their influence of late. But his passion and professional pride revolved around a photo, any photo, on the front page of the Herald-Record.

To say Hound Dog had a nose for news would cast his instincts into a bucket of hackneyed phrases. He could hear an ambulance or police siren five miles away and, in a couple of minutes, headed in the first responders’ direction.

He shared his talent with only one other newsperson, his best friend, Gin Beau Pembroke, a police reporter for the paper. No one else came up to Hound Dog's standards.

He did not bother calling Gin Beau as the hour crept into early morning. They’d catch up later at the newspaper’s city desk.

* * *

During his hospital visit with me, the photojournalist said he arrived at Wickham in time to make a couple of shots of the pottery studio, which police had cordoned in yellow crime tape. Dog knew the detectives and officers there. Many in the police department thought him a vulture for his work. But most cops welcomed him to their crime scenes and the chance to land in a newspaper picture. Dog garnered police respect over many years and inside miles of yellow tape.

After shooting photos and talking with the officers and detectives, Hound Dog walked back to his truck and checked his digital images. He emailed several to the photo and city editors before driving downtown to the paper.

The death of a prominent CEO ranked as hot news, and Dog wanted to share a part in the breaking story with his photos and his information about the murder.

* * *

Hound Dog stepped off the third-floor elevator into the Herald-Record's downtown Atlanta newsroom. Few people were around, and silence blanketed the large room, absent the unusual computer keyboard clatter and rumble of numerous conversations. But an editor and reporter had appeared early Sunday morning when they heard about Densmore’s death.

In Atlanta, as elsewhere, dead celebrities got noticed.

Rufus took a few steps toward the city desk, across a floor cluttered with Sunday proof papers from the newsroom bustle the evening before and past the pungent tarred- bottom of coffee urns left on all night.

He met the weekend editor's glare, Lincoln Links Darling. Links and Rufus never got friendly, despite the photog’s award-winning pictures for the paper.

What the hell are you peddling so early in the morning? Links greeted him.

Rufus, well aware of Links' feeling about an outsider scooping the Herald-Record's reporters and photo staff, spoke with caution and always kept the conversation courteous.

Just came from a murder over at the Wickham Art Center, he said. Thought you all might want to take a look.

Darling buried his head into his computer screen and grumbled something to himself Rufus did not make out. Finally, the editor spoke to Hound Dog. Yeah, big shot gets offed, and here I am at four-thirty a.m. on Sunday morning. Fun times, this business.

He was head of the fruit company, wasn’t he? Rufus said. The photographer already knew that, but he needed to kowtow a bit.

Yeah, that’s him, Links said and turned to a reporter sitting three desks over. Hey, Hank, come over here. OK, Dog. What ya got on this slaying?

Henry Strange, the morning cop shop reporter, looked like a rabbit caught in headlights. A young reporter fresh out of J school, he’d only been at the Herald-Record a few months.

Rufus saved the newbie’s bacon. It just happened a few hours ago, Links, he said. Look, here are some photos from the scene.

Rufus moved his camera to show the editor. Hank walked over to see for himself.

Links studied the photos as Rufus slowly scrolled through images of the murder scene on the expensive camera’s screen.

Go back three or four, Links said and pointed to one frame. OK, there. What are those things?

That’s inside the pottery studio, in the wheel room. Where potters throw clay, Rufus told the editor.

Can you email me the ones of that room, the cop cars out front, and the one of the body going into the meat wagon?

Already have. These and several others should be in your inbox right now. Check to see before I leave, Rufus said.

Links grumbled something else and sat down at his computer screen, sprinkling the keyboard with rapid typing. The photos popped up in his email file.

OK, this is all I need, Links said. Go sit down with Hank and give him some of the details we can use for captions. While Hound Dog had not called his friend, Gin Beau, who might be asleep, Links did not hesitate. The editor loved rousing reporters in the middle of the night. After arriving at four that morning, he immediately dialed Gin Beau’s cell number and put him on the Densmore killing.

By five-thirty, Gin Beau was at police headquarters talking to detectives.

Hank worked the phones to get local reaction from the business community, trying to catch those who knew Densmore before they got off to church or a golf or tennis date.

Rufus quietly breathed a sigh of relief as he and Hank wound their way around tightly packed desks, all stacked high with newspapers and press releases. He recognized Gin Beau's rubbish heap. Wedged between stacks of old papers and a row of dictionaries and news style reference books was a dusty poster of a Bob Dylan concert at Chastain Park. The date was May 7, no year. The poster promised an opening act by Merle Haggard and his band, the Strangers.

I was just calling to track down what the radio chatter was, Hank said. This is a big one.

Rufus nodded as he rolled over a chair from an adjoining cubicle.

The photographer quoted from his head. Mostly, what the cops told him covered the basics, with few details on what happened to Kevin Densmore other than signs indicating murder.

The reporter’s fingers raced over his laptop keyboard as Rufus dictated notes to him.

What time did you get there? Hank asked.

I guess around twelve-thirty this morning, Rufus replied. "Cops had been there around a half-hour or so at that point.

Who found the body?

Oh, that’s a good story, Rufus said. A private eye named Red Farlow. But they took him to the hospital before I arrived.

What, was he attacked by the killer or something?

No, no. No one knows what happened to Red, except he fell at the building, Rufus said. Before that, he found the body and called the police.

Hank stopped typing a moment and looked at Rufus. So, you know this guy? This PI?

Red Farlow? Of course, Rufus said. He’s a national treasure. We met a few years ago at a crime scene when he was with the GBI. Matter of fact, it was a murder.

Rufus said no more as he did not want to give Hank too many details about how we knew each other.

That suited me.

* * *

It was about twelve years ago, more or less, a few years shy of my retirement from law enforcement. I lived and worked in south Georgia at that point, but the bureau director brought me back to Atlanta to work on homicides, by then my specialty.

We got a call from Atlanta’s police chief to join him at the scene of a particularly heinous crime. The daughter of a friend of a city council member had been viciously attacked in her Buckhead home and shot several times with a twelve-gauge shotgun, at close range.

Bloody. Messy. With a nasty tinge of evil vengeance.

I arrived at the scene around eight in the morning, with Atlanta cop cars in abundance and crime scene techs working hard.

The chief greeted me and walked me over to where the young woman’s bloody remains sprawled across a patio of marble tile.

Blood trickled in rivulets across the stones to the right of the body.

Who is she, Chief? I asked.

Marianne Demosthenes, he said. Rather, she was. The victim was a socialite. She inherited the estate from her father, a New York deli owner who moved the family to Atlanta after selling out up there. Large Greek community here, you know. He did pretty well, as you can see from the surroundings. His other businesses were shipping and a high-end steak house called Demo’s over on Peachtree at Lenox Road.

Oh, yeah, that Demosthenes?

Indeed, she was.

Any idea what happened?

The chief paused and tugged my left elbow to indicate we ought to continue our discussion elsewhere. We stepped to the end of the patio to a spot devoid of crime scene activity.

Red, this is a sensitive situation, he said. This woman had been known to hang around with some unsavory characters. Known drug dealers. Her latest dalliance was with the leader of a bike gang called the Lead Poison.

Yeah, heard of them, I said. Death by lead poisoning usually means a bullet in the head. The gang’s mark.

The chief nodded with a grimace.

Anyway, we’re starting with them. Don’t know much more than that, except a councilman is close to the family. So, we have some pressure to move quickly on this thing.

All I could do was listen at that point. Political expediency played the devil’s role in law enforcement and often hindered investigations. Politicians rarely helped solve crimes.

I looked at the worn face and wrinkles of Chief Walt Pearson.

When are you going to retire, Walt? I asked.

A soon as the one who did this gets the electric chair.

That could take years, I said.

I’ll retire on his death sentence, he said. That’s good enough for me.

The State of Georgia still electrocuted killers and rapists with some