Dead Point
LaVonne Griffin-Valade
DEAD POINT
Copyright © 2021 by LaVonne Griffin-Valade.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Severn River Publishing
www.SevernRiverPublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-64875-093-9 (Paperback)
For Tom, whose love, humor, wisdom, and abiding kindness have made me more loving, humorous, wise, and kind. I would not be laughing every day, let alone writing, without you.
In memory of my mother.
You paved the way.
Contents
Also By LaVonne Griffin-Valade
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
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Thanks for Reading
Next in Series
Read Murderers Creek
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also By LaVonne Griffin-Valade
Maggie Blackthorne Novels
Dead Point
Murderers Creek
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Prologue
August 27, Two Years Before
The sky was platinum. I could smell the scent of trout and crawdad rising from the river. Barbed wire fencing listed toward the water’s edge. Cottonwoods clambered above a grizzled orchard. I had come here with my mother, Zoey, many times as a child. In the close heat of summer we would pick chokecherries, stash our bucket of burgundy fruit, strip naked, and sit in icy water to wash away the dark stain of bitter juice.
This is your lot if you never leave, Zoey had said of the surrounding alkali ash, the fossil-carved shale, and sage ticks. This is a place to abandon before it abandons you, she had warned, one full of small-minded and weak individuals.
Yet after nearly twenty years, I had moved back to the John Day Valley, to the river, the land and sky, even the people. I could hear Zoey’s deep contralto, scolding, speaking of squandered youth and lost promise, of settling. Even from the afterworld, a mother can question a daughter’s choices. Such as the sidearm strapped to my thigh and the badge pinned over my heart.
I ground the heel of my boot into the sodden clay of the riverbank and crossed my arms. Breathing deeply, I let the earthy oxygen fill every cell, bone, and muscle. I removed my Stetson and stifled a pressing desire to weep. “We could forgive one another, Mama. Forgive Tate, too. And ourselves.”
Hot wind whipped through a coarse stand of juniper, casting its pungent musk over burning water. Sighing in the swelter, I put on my hat and moved up the embankment back toward my police vehicle.
1
Evening, February 20
A carcass hung from the branch of a Ponderosa at the southern edge of Logan Valley. The ball-eyed head lay felled among matted grasses, its jaw cocked open, the veined tongue dangling. A mass of entrails glistened on stone-hard ground. Two men slashed knives, skinning the young doe. A thirty-aught-six rifle sat on the open tailgate of the immense flame-red pickup parked alongside, and a stout Rottweiler paraded at the verge. Late-winter dusk, a lavender haze of earth’s dissipating warmth, circled round. So did the blowflies.
I lowered the binoculars. “Dumb fucks.” The goddamn Nodine twins. I’d known those boys my whole life.
I moved along the forest perimeter toward them, staying within the tree line and stepping warily among rotting pinecones and windblown limbs. At fifty yards, I heard the Nodines talking, tossing scraps of gristle and fat across the forest duff. Back and forth, they shared a small bong.
Dry bramble cracked under my boots, inspiring the Rottweiler to rise and flex. Pace and howl. Bark loudly. I moved the binoculars a few inches from cover, put the makeshift slaughterhouse in my sights. Ears erect, the agitated dog stood on point, searching across the scrub grass. I gauged the animal’s speed and the distance between us, should he take off in a dead run: too fast and too close.
One of the twins aimed the thirty-aught-six my direction. Zeroed in the scope. Shit. Who was the dumb fuck now? No backup plan, and my Oregon State Police vehicle sat off the highway about a mile away. I shivered against the wind, buttoned my peacoat, and checked for cell service. Nada.
“Christ.” I sped briskly toward the men. Joseph, or maybe it was Dan, put down the weapon and held up a hand as if to wave howdy. His brother shouted, opened the driver’s-side door, and signaled the Rottweiler to hop in.
The engine rumbled awake—a Cummins diesel by the sound of it—and the truck backed up under the carcass. The Nodines hastily lowered the half-skinned doe, which swayed heavily and slumped into the pickup bed. They stuffed the heart and liver in a muslin game bag, covered their kill with camouflage tarp, gave the canvas a rudimentary tie-down, and jumped in the cab. A well-practiced maneuver, no doubt.
The Cummins turbo revved, and the twins peeled out in a blast of diesel-charged thunder, racing straight toward me across Logan Valley’s wide swath of dwindling bunchgrass, tule, and juniper. Artifact thieves regularly scavenged and pilfered arrowheads buried in the meadows and rocky grassland. Mule deer trails sliced through, but no graded roads. Still, the high-riding Ram 3500 ripped forward like nothing, spraying mud and basalt and shards of obsidian.
I braced myself, legs held slightly apart, my left hand resting on the holstered Glock. The flame-red gargantua pulled up and idled, towering above me.
Dan, at the wheel, rolled down his window and spat a wad of chew. “Trooper Blackthorne. Need a lift?”
“Shut off the engine and step out of your vehicle.” I nodded toward the bed of the pickup. “I’m confiscating the venison and issuing a citation for unlawful taking of deer.”
“I don’t think so, Maggie.”
I snapped open the holster and drew out my pistol, but the red truck was already roaring back toward the highway. In its outsized side-view mirror, I glimpsed a rampage of dust, my flailing hair, and the frantic riffle of Stetson brim.
I was a good shot and could’ve fired the weapon, blown out a tire, rendered that fancy new pickup immobile. It might have done the trick, put a halt to their getaway. Yet it was also conceivable I’d puncture the auxiliary tank, trigger a fuel explosion, and kill both men. One slaughtered deer wasn’t worth risking fatal injury, not even to those sorry-assed individuals.
I holstered the Glock and sprinted back to the highway where I’d left my dented OSP Chevy Tahoe parked on the shoulder of the road. It sat unscathed. No flattened tires, no broken w
indows or headlights, and the one cracked taillight had been that way for a while.
But I had no clue which direction the Nodines had headed.
“Bastards,” I whispered, as if half expecting them to be waiting for me to catch up.
The twins had always been wild and imperfect replicas of one another. Like my second ex-husband, they grew to be devious men and a torment. Neither ever married. Both served time for dealing meth and bouncing checks, on top of a bunch of dimwit petty shit. The Ram 3500 was a sign of sudden income—a good run in Winnemucca, an illicit deal with some badass, or worse.
On the way back to John Day, I radioed the station hoping Hollis wasn’t at home with Lillian Two Moons, his very pregnant wife.
“Evening, Sarge,” Hollis said in that voice somewhere between Barry White and Johnny Cash.
“I’m out of mobile comp range. Run a plate for me.” In a moment of lucidity back there, the Nodines hauling ass out of Logan Valley, I had memorized the number.
“I’m all ears, Maggie.”
Senior Trooper Hollis Jones was a good cop. Smart, reliable, unflappable. Back during police academy, we’d been OSP recruits and outcasts together. His transfer to my unit last year was a boon to my sanity, even if he didn’t necessarily see it as a stellar career move at the time. He appreciated my sense of humor and tolerated my cynical streak, which definitely couldn’t be said of the humorless, by-the-book types typical to the organization. Plus he gave me good-natured shit for already making sergeant.
“Ram heavy-duty truck, 2017 model, registered to a Frank Sylvester in Burns,” he said, coming back online.
“A couple of local poachers drove off in the thing before I could issue a citation. Twins. Daniel and Joseph Nodine. Spelled N-O-D-I-N-E. State corrections grads. See if you can pull up addresses. And notify regional dispatch. Also, call Henry Tom at Burns Paiute Police. They killed a mule deer out in Logan Valley, a good deal of which is under the tribe’s jurisdiction.”
“Oh, I know Henry. He’s my brother-in-law.”
“Lillian’s brother?”
“Well, her half brother.”
“God, Holly, you got any other secrets I don’t know about?”
“Sure, plenty.”
“You’ll have to fill me in next time I’m bored. See you in twenty.”
The poacher tip line call from a Mr. Anonymous had come in late in the day. Taylor, the fish and wildlife officer in our unit, usually handled those reports, but he was out on vacation, and Hollis had gone with Lillian to a doctor’s appointment. We were also down one trooper due to budget cuts, so I’d listened to the recording and headed out to investigate.
Winding back down Canyon Mountain on Highway 395, I reminded myself to listen again to the tip line message. I might just recognize Mr. Anonymous’s voice, although my hunch took him to be from elsewhere. A man who didn’t agree with killing game out of hunting season, but a different sort of scofflaw, maybe someone digging nearby for arrowheads without an antiquities permit, or looking for a way around the federal land agreement with the Paiutes. A dude with his own moral threshold to abide by, I’d wager.
I parked in front of our police station, a squat, airless modular equipped with an evidence locker, some battered office furniture, and four late-model computers. A faded American flag guarded the entrance.
Hollis looked up from his computer. “I ran the Nodines through DMV. The only locals with that surname are Lynn Nodine here in town and Farley Nodine over in Mount Vernon.”
“Their mother and their old man. Nothing on either brother in surrounding counties?”
“Nothing in the entire state. LEDS lists them as address unknown.”
“What the hell?”
“They’re off the ex-con reporting grid, I guess. I’ll do some more sleuthing. Run them through the western states databank.”
Hollis was the best there ever was at fact-checking. Any nugget buried deep inside some cyber cave, he could dig it up.
Waiting for the icons to populate on my computer, I glanced at the reminder note I’d stuck next to the screen: baby shower March 2nd, Holly’s place. “How’s Lillian feeling?”
“She’s having Braxton Hicks.”
“Braxton Hicks? Is that your kid’s name or something?”
“No, but I’ll be sure to add it to the list,” Hollis cracked wise. “Not sure why they’re called Braxton Hicks, but it means practice contractions. Lil’s have gotten a little stronger.”
“Time to get your tail home, Holly.”
“I’m taking off soon. First I wanted to tell you the rest of it. Frank Sylvester also owns a long-haul trucking outfit. With the same Burns address the poachers’ rig is registered at.”
“Burns is your turf. You ever heard of the guy?” By habit, I stood and paced the perimeter of our huddle of desks.
“Not him or his company.”
“Any wants and warrants?”
“Nope. No stolen vehicle report. Nothing.” He logged off and locked his desk drawer. “I’ll be at home if you need me for anything else tonight.”
“Thanks. Got it under control.”
“Always, Sarge.” He fetched his red plaid jacket from the coat hook by the door. “Say, Maggie. Lil’s feeling a little nervous about the baby coming and all. I thought you could give her a call, maybe drop by.”
“I’m probably the last person in the world to give advice about that kind of thing.”
“Lil just needs to talk to another woman. She doesn’t have sisters. Or close pals, really. And her mama’d just say, ‘Leave that Black son of a bitch and come home where you belong.’ So, I’d appreciate you reaching out, just for a conversation. No medical exam necessary, I promise.”
On occasion I forgot about the bullshit Hollis and Lil had to put up with, between redneck racists and the bigotry of their own families.
“Your wife’s the best, Holly. Not sure what she sees in you, but I’d be happy to talk to her.”
He smiled and nodded. “Thanks, Sarge.”
Lack of doula expertise aside, I could understand how Lillian might be lonely and anxious. In her place, I’d be scared to death. And I was willing to do just about anything for the two of them.
Shortly after eight o’clock, Duncan McKay cracked open the office door, his solid frame filling a good share of available space on the public side of the service counter. I hadn’t seen much of the man since he quit bull riding and came off the rodeo circuit. He’d moved back to John Day six or seven months ago to run the family’s combination feed store and tack shop. Also came home without that barrel racer he’d been married to. And with a busted kneecap, I’d heard.
Duncan had a serious air about him, combined with considerable shagginess around the edges. I’d also heard he was a bit on the grouchy side, but he managed a half smile, reminding me of the boy I’d known growing up.
“I need to file a police report, Maggie.”
He removed his McKay Feed and Tack cap. It was probably tough being surrounded all day by the accoutrement of buckaroo life. Or he might have decided that’s just how it was now. Better than winding up gored by a cranky bull, I supposed.
He quietly cleared his throat. “I had some stuff stolen from my business.”
“Shouldn’t you be reporting that to the locals?”
Duncan snorted derisively. “Nobody home at the sheriff’s office or the town police station tonight.”
I got his drift, seeing as how all the bars in town were open until at least midnight. Between the unemployed drunks and the working-stiff drunks, somebody should’ve been at the ready with a key to a holding tank or jail cell.
“Okay, then. I’ll take your information.” I opened a new report form. “When did the theft occur?”
“Not sure. Within the last week, I think.” He raked an immense hand through his thick hank of sandy hair tinged with gray. I’d nearly forgotten about the brilliant copper color that had once been his calling card. Big Red McKay.
“Any
sign of forced entry?”
“Not that I could tell.”
“Got a tally of missing items?”
He produced a folded sheet of paper from his coat pocket, placed it on the counter. His clear green eyes looked straight into mine.
“Two forty-pound salt licks. A pair of fence cutters. Two pricey rechargeable cattle prods. Also, a carton of packaged jerky from my storeroom,” he said slowly and slid the paper toward me.
The list, neatly printed in small, elegant script, detailed product specifications, brand names, and retail prices. In all, some thief made off with about a thousand dollars in merchandise. Probably less than Duncan’s deductible.
“What made you suspect any goods were stolen?”
“Customer came in today to buy one of the Hot Shot DRX rechargeable cattle prods. My inventory tracking software listed four in stock. There were only two. I got a special deal from the wholesaler. No other outfit this side of the state carries this particular model. Not that it means much to most people, but they’re supposedly the best. The safest.”
“Might you be out more inventory?”
Duncan gave out a tired-man sigh, rolled his shoulders forward, rolled them backward, and shoved his massive hands into the front pockets of his Levi’s. “I spent about three hours this evening scan-counting product, but I could have missed something, I suppose. I’ll double-check and let you know, but I might not get to it until Sunday when we’re closed.”
Dead Point (Maggie Blackthorne Book 1) Page 1
