River Run

by J. S. James

  RIVER RUN

  A DELIA CHAVEZ MYSTERY

  J. S. James

  For Carole and Julie, always

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I would like to thank Carole for her never-ending patience and forbearance while I escaped to coffee shops to caffeinate and sweat bullets. Yes, writing is a solitary venture, but putting up with a writer can also be a lonely affair. Loads of thanks to my first readers—Mike Munro, Catherine Hendricks, Keri Clark, Judy Dailey, Myrna Daley, Val Bruech, and Bruce Hansen. Thanks to Pamela Goodfellow, who long ago started the ball rolling and taught me to value critique groups as well as four-sentence writing exercises.

  I owe much to the team at Crooked Lane Books and, in particular, Jenny Chen, who saw potential in River Run and gave me a shot. Also, thanks to innovative cover designers Lori Palmer and Andy Ruggirello, and thank God for copy editors like Rachel Keith.

  Special thanks are due to David Downing for his first-cut edits of a behemoth manuscript, to Lourdes Venard for her read-through and insights on issues of cultural sensitivity, to Clark County Sheriff’s Tactical Detective Jared Stevens for his subject matter expertise, to Steven Allen for his military savvy, and to Julie for a couple of no-nonsense but useful edits.

  Lastly, thanks to my agent John Talbot of Talbot Fortune Agency, who saw enough light through the forest of this tome to give me a call and speak words of encouragement, advice, and support.

  1

  OREGON’S WILLAMETTE VALLEY

  FOUR MONTHS BEFORE WATERFOWL HUNTING SEASON

  The stench of decay wafted into the patrol car like an insult. Sheriff’s deputy Delia Chavez fought an urge to roll up the window and hit reverse. The bodies on the porch didn’t factor into the foulness. They were fairly fresh. The odor seeped in off the river, like it always did.

  Too late to back out anyway. Deputy Craig Castner was already poking his boxy jaw into the opening, his forearm planted on her driver’s side windowsill. “Wasted trip, Chavez. Suicide pact kinda deal.”

  She nodded, knowing Cast Iron Castner figured his tough-as-nails act had earned him his nickname, not the super-hard lump between his ears.

  “Evening, Craig. Mind if I stretch my legs?” With a shove that forced Castner to take a step back, she got out and shut the cruiser’s door.

  With his feet set wide in the space between their cars, his thumbs hooked into his utility belt, Castner postured like an oversize turnstile against a background of red, blue and white flashes.

  He’d gotten there first and she was deputy-come-lately, trying to horn in.

  “It’s Friday night, Chavez. Don’t you have a truckload of borracho berry pickers to cuff and stuff?”

  Delia bit her tongue and took in the river-bottom scene. Take his shit. This could be the ticket.

  Both pairs of headlights shone on a rock foundation as high again as the first floor of the two-story wood frame it supported. Three of the four walls were overgrown with blackberry vines. The dilapidated house sat fifty yards from the Little Luckiamute River—not so little at sixty feet, bank to bank. A quarter mile below, it dumped into the much larger Willamette. Somewhere on the opposite shore, the Santiam River did the same. To Delia, this lowland junction of three rivers dredged up the rot of nightmares.

  “Got things sorted out, Chavez.” Every second or two, the strobing lights recast Castner’s glower as either comical or garish. “Waitin’ for Harvey and the ME to show up and confirm.” Harvey Schenkel was senior detective in the Sheriff’s Department.

  Delia nodded, scanning a weed-infested yard full of woodpiles and clutter so rusted it would shame a junk dealer. “We have a bit of a wait, Craig. Charlie’s out of state, and that leaves just Harvey.”

  Charlie Lukovsky was Investigations’ other detective. Running short had become chronic, given a morale-busting, penny-pinching sheriff, a half-staffed patrol unit, and a two-person investigations division saddled with a six-person caseload.

  “I heard.” Castner’s face was stone. “Some old coffin-filler at that Bethel nursing home kicked it from smoke inhalation. So?”

  “So, Harv’s there with FD, ruling out arson and—”

  “And he sends Señorita Bachelor’s of Law Enforcement to make sure I snap on my surgicals and preserve the crime scene.”

  Too late for either, she figured, but said nothing. With six years in grade, she was still Castner’s junior deputy. He often accused her of using her education to jump seniority. In truth, she did lean on her degree. Otherwise, why had she sweated blood to earn the damned thing?

  Detective next, sheriff not far down the road.

  Castner backswept his arm toward the dark forms at the middle of a sloped porch. “Look, it’s open-and-shut. Way those two oldies are slumped in their lawn chairs? Way the guns dropped? The woman looks like death warmed over. Her man prob’ly couldn’t stand to outlive her.” He flattened his hands across his heart. “‘Life’s over for us, sweetie. How’s about we go out with a bang? Ready? On three,’ ka-pow, ka-pow.” He rehooked his thumbs on his belt.

  “Maybe so, Craig. How about we go over what else you’ve found?”

  Except for a grunt, Delia got no response. She reached in through her open window, pulled out a flashlight, rubber gloves, and shoe covers, and toggled the cruiser’s high beams. With part of her protective wear snapped on, she brushed past Castner’s elbow gates and made it to the front bumper before he tugged at her arm.

  “Hey now, woman. You hold up. This is a goddamned waste of time.”

  Delia turned and burned a stare into Castner’s hand, then his face. “I guess you haven’t heard. Harvey specifically requested that I do a preliminary. Either we walk through the scene together or you wait here. Your choice.”

  Castner backed off, his eyes drops of lead. “Yeah? We’ll see about that.”

  She stepped toward the wreck that the pair on the porch had called home. Behind her, the door to Castner’s patrol unit opened and slammed shut. He was sure to be on the horn to Sheriff Gus Grice.

  After all, Castner was Grice’s nephew.

  Confident Harvey had already run interference, Delia slipped on the shoe covers and eased her way up a dozen sagging porch steps. Too high for headlight beams to do any good.

  The bodies were slouched in opposing lawn chairs as Castner had described, the male in bib overalls, undershirt, and a weathered fedora, the female in a faded housedress, one slipper halfway off her left foot. Had there been loving gazes, any sign of them was long gone. The pair had been dead for a day or more, judging by the sallow, waxen skin.

  A deer rifle lay at the man’s feet and a large-bore pump shotgun beside the woman’s chair. Delia’s Maglite lit up a puddle of sticky-dry blood beneath the dead man’s torso. Gun-cleaning materials and loose .30-06 cartridges lay on a bench next to his chair. Beneath the ever-present river stink, the warm night held a lingering odor of butchery.

  The man appeared near seventy, had a face like cracked leather and a tennis ball–size hole in his chest. A cascade of blood, now dry, saturated the lower portion of his bib. A dark-ocher pool had hardened on the porch floor, more than she’d have expected from a gunshot wound. Delia put her light on his face, and her body tensed. His corpse wore a look she’d seen too often. Run-ins with hard men were common in Delia’s line of work, but even in death, this guy pushed a primal button. Like she’d seen him. Someone like him.

  The quiver of familiarity passed. She shifted her light to the woman and sucked in air—not at the dark flower around the heart-level hole, but at the impact of long-standing damage. Careful not to touch the body, she teased back tendrils of gray and exposed a recently bruised forehead. The woman’s face spoke less of old age than ongoing abuse—the sunken, beseeching eyes, the discolored skin, t
he buildup of calcium deposits on both cheekbones. The scarring from repeated damage and healing. And the silent scream that echoed within the cavity of her dead mouth.

  Delia flicked the beam back on the man, down to his gnarled hands. Clublike. Each knuckle aping the rounded end of a ball peen hammer.

  Her free hand found the butt of her holstered weapon. Her left shoulder twitched as if a demon had dug in, whispered in her ear. Pull it. Shoot the bastard again. Years of practice breaking up domestic squabbles hadn’t dulled her loathing of abuse as blood sport. She fingered the Smith & Wesson’s release strap—officially her backup weapon, in practice her sidearm of choice—and flicked a glance toward the idling patrol cars. Castner glared back from behind his dash lights. She let out held breath and forced her hand down to her side.

  Castner’s premise—two old, fast-failing fogies deciding they couldn’t live without each other—had dissolved faster than a sand castle in a tidal wave.

  She edged deeper onto the porch, spraying light over layered seediness. What was that word movie critics liked to toss around when they’d seen it all before? Cliché? The ambience here even beat out that Tobacco Road flick she’d wasted an evening on. Now there was a deputy Castner could relate to.

  A screen door hung from a single hinge, the sill worn to a deep groove. Her light traveled over a clapboard outer wall gone without paint so long its weathered wood reflected an eerie, silver gray.

  About to step in, she backed up and re-aimed her flashlight along the front wall, down into a narrow space between encroaching brambles and stone foundation. Something bladelike glinted back. She crouched at the side of the porch for a closer look.

  Blade was right. It was the longest piece of cutlery she’d seen outside a meat market. A home-fashioned boning knife, slightly curved and slender. Below the handle, the first three inches gleamed. The remaining nine were coated in dark maroon.

  Delia returned to the body of the old man. Using a pen point, she unhooked one side of his overall bib and folded it back. Next, she pried up the blood-starched hem of his shirt and exposed a horizontal gash—the main source of the blood puddle. She saw the guy yanking out the blade, flinging it off behind him, then staring in shock at the gusher he’d unplugged.

  Good for her.

  Method evident and motive congealed, Delia pressed on.

  She played the beam down the front hallway and stepped past an open gun cabinet ringed with spilled shotgun shells, then through a doorway to her right. No blood spatters, no telltale drops suggesting the stabbing or shooting had happened anywhere but the porch. The inner walls were steeped in outside dankness. She flicked the kitchen’s light switch and got nothing. She flash-lit a wooden table, scarred and burnt under hard use. Beside a lantern, a lined tablet and Bic pen rested at one end. The closest chair lay upended.

  Delia swept the room, over cupboards painted institution green, across Formica countertops, gouged and ripped, yet neat and uncluttered. Her beam traced along a row of drawers, all closed except one. That drawer stuck out at an awkward jaunt, its collection of knives awry. Castner must not have even glanced in there.

  She scanned the linoleum floor, worn thin by foot traffic. Spilled kitchen matches littered a pathway ending at a potbelly woodstove with a nickel-plated base, its door ajar. She stepped closer and bent low over one clawed foot where the circle of light haloed a dried stain smaller than the tip of her pinkie. The spot was dark maroon, like the puddle under the old man.

  She wedged the Maglite into the stove. The door swung open with a rusty screech that jangled her nerves.

  Delia bent forward. A crumpled page, the same yellow as the tablet, lay atop the stove’s dead ashes. She withdrew the paper by a corner, teased it open with her pen, and read by flashlight. The message appeared hurried, but written by a delicate hand.

  Robbie,

  Stay away. Willard made me write the postcard he sent you. That devil means to get even for what happened to Je—

  Graceful loops flattened into a scrawled line as if the page had been yanked from beneath the pen point. Delia swallowed on a dry throat and straightened up.

  Backtracking toward the front of the house, she mentally assembled the events of a last-straw scenario: Devil Man catches Battered Woman writing covertly to someone she knows. Battered Woman’s warning attempt is thwarted. She blows her cork, latches onto the first handle available in the drawer, and skewers Devil Man in the gut. Devil Man makes it to a lawn chair, tosses the knife, and loads the rifle he’s been cleaning. Committed to finishing what she started, Battered Woman grabs up a new weapon from the hall gun cabinet, loads, and pursues.

  Back on the porch, Delia aligned herself directly behind the dead woman, her light trained on the body she assumed was Willard’s. Facial crags remained deeply shadowed as if carved into granite.

  Maybe they touch off at the same time, maybe not, but Devil Man’s heart-shot drops Battered Woman into her chair.

  At any rate, years of suffering were over. End of story.

  Then why did it feel like chapter one?

  “Told you it was a damned waste of time.” Silhouetted in headlight glare, Castner stood below the porch, his arms locked across a data-entry keypad.

  Delia came down the steps. Halting on the last, she faced him at eye level. “You sure did, Craig.” She nodded back over her shoulder, toward the porch. “Got IDs on the victims?”

  “Now, what d’you think?”

  The grip-strengthening ball, always in her coat pocket, got a hefty squeeze. She cocked her head and waited.

  Castner’s eyes wavered. He tilted the keypad forward. Lips moving, he read silently off the display, then hugged the cranky device to his chest, like a pat hand. “Postman called it in. One Willard Lester Gatlin. The other’s Rose Gatlin. Lived like hillbillies in this river-bottom skunk hole. Annie’s trace pulled up a string of poaching convictions on the old man.”

  Annie Cox’s official title was communications and dispatch officer. Unofficially, she covered the sheriff’s butt and kept the place afloat. Polk County Sheriff’s was not the tightest ship in Oregon’s law enforcement armada.

  Delia acknowledged his cooperation with a nod. “How about a Robbie? Maybe Robert?”

  Castner’s eyes narrowed. Chin jutting, he sighted down his nose. “You find somethin’?”

  Delia said nothing. Let him wait.

  The muscles in Castner’s jaw bunched as he checked his precious database. “Missing-person report filed twelve years back. A son named Jesse Gatlin drowned in the Willamette. Nothing on anybody named Robert.” The keypad disappeared behind Castner’s back. “Your turn. What’ve you got?”

  A fresh set of headlights approached the house. A mud-caked Ford F-350 four-by-four rolled to a stop and a lanky frame unfolded from it. Harvey. Allowing detectives to use personal vehicles was one of the Sheriff’s budget slashing notions. So far, the specialized insurance offset any savings.

  “Craig, you got here ahead of me. You go first.”

  Delia prowled the property and waited Castner out. If he hadn’t been such a stink-flinger, she might’ve stopped him from making an ass of himself in front of Harvey.

  The yard between the back of the house and the river was littered with everything from discarded animal bones to a single-wheeled deer-toting cart and overturned boats, all choked by weeds. Her light picked out an old outboard motor the color of sea kelp with cursive lettering in faded gold that spelled out Elgin. Her upper arms goose-bumped. She blinked at the déjà vu sensation, there and gone in a flash. Unsettled, she faced away from the mess.

  Lowland woods defined three sides of the open ground that sloped toward the river. An ancient weeping willow dominated the fourth, dangling its umbrella far out over the slow-moving current. Her light kicked back diamondlike sparkles between the tree roots. With each step toward the river, the disquiet crept higher, almost to her throat.

  It’s only water.

  Thirty feet back was plenty. From behind
, sounds of a radio dispatch drifted on the night air. Thankful for the Maglite, she narrowed the beam to its farthest reach.

  The glitter at the base of the tree turned out to be broken bottle glass, the bark above so chipped and pitted with bullet holes she was amazed the willow had survived.

  Farther up, her light picked out a band of discoloration where the trunk went from mud gray to nut brown. Its significance hit with a coldness that traced its finger along her spine. The last flood had climbed several feet above her head. No wonder the house sat on a built-up foundation. Images of angry currents surrounding her on that porch, swirling over its top step to rise above her ankles, drove that chill deep inside. Down to the ends of her toes.

  Whoo-whoop.

  Castner, signaling his exit.

  Harvey called to her from the porch. She was up. This was her ticket.

  Delia made to move but felt glued in place, slow to tear her eyes from that telling watermark or tamp down the feeling that her fate was at the whim of a river.

  2

  WILLAMETTE VALLEY:

  FOUR WEEKS BEFORE WATERFOWL HUNTING SEASON

  The boy’s alive. It was a good shoot. The boy’s alive. It was a good shoot.

  Sheriff’s deputy Delia Chavez typically put no stock in chants or mantras, but this one calmed her as she waited to find out how badly she’d screwed up. It kept her pacing the bus-size RV’s aisle instead of kicking the shit out of every miserable piece of furniture in the place. Instead of kicking herself for letting her temper off its leash.

  More than two hours had passed since the shooting. The medical examiner was gone and Camacho’s body had been removed from this moss-covered wreck marooned out behind the oldest watering hole in Independence, Oregon. The other deps were gone, too—one returning the abducted boy to his mother.

  Mostly unmolested. Mostly uninjured. After Delia had hugged his shakes away, told him he was okay. Hoped she wasn’t blowing smoke.

  Even the hard-core Sunday morning drinkers and card players had faded back inside the tavern’s rear door. Only she and Detective Harvey Schenkel, who doubled as IA officer for the Polk County Sheriff’s Department, were left inside the pigsty on cinder blocks, her in the living area, him working his way forward from the bedroom.