A Reckoning in the Back Country

by Terry Shames

  “We were thinking somebody had to be with him all the time, and we didn’t take into account that Jenks sleeps at night. Lois said he’s a good sleeper. And for a couple of hours every afternoon he watches TV. So that cut the number of hours we’d need to have somebody with him. So we figure we can hire somebody for part of the day and have shifts the rest of the time.”

  She tells me the details of their plan, but I’m barely listening, because her words have triggered something.

  Suddenly she stops. “Why are you grinning at me like that?”

  “Just glad you figured out that you were going about it the wrong way.”

  “Well.” She cocks her head at a proud angle. “If I do say so, when my circle gets together, we manage to come up with solutions.” She claps her hands. “I wanted you to know. I don’t have time to stay.”

  Sometimes you get stuck in a way of thinking. You keep adding A and B and no matter how you twist it, you end up with D. It’s not the D that’s the problem; it’s the A or the B. In this case, like Loretta and the church ladies, I’ve been thinking the wrong way around. I tried to twist circumstances to fit what happened to Lewis Wilkins. Because of the lawsuit against him, I kept working on the assumption that it was Wilkins who was in debt. But suppose it was Bodine who owed Wilkins money? A lot of money. Suppose Bodine paid him off but decided to steal the money back, and ended up killing Wilkins. Looking at it that way makes sense. But just because it makes sense doesn’t make it true. What I need is a clear motive—and proof of exactly what happened.

  The two men who were at the poker game with Bodine and Dooley when the boat changed hands are Lonnie Casper and Roger Olivera. According to Dooley Phillips, Olivera never went to high-stakes games, but Lonnie Casper did. I don’t make an appointment with Casper. I show up at his house around suppertime. He’s an attorney and lives in a grand house in the only exclusive part of Bobtail.

  He’s got a pronounced drawl and prissy, drawn-up mouth like he’s tasted something unpleasant. He takes me into a home office with Oriental rugs and a grand desk piled high with folders. When we are seated, he takes pains to remind me that he’s a defense attorney. Before I approached him, I asked Jenny Sandstone if she had worked with him, and she said he was “competent, but not necessarily someone you’d beg to be on your side.”

  “I know you’re an attorney. You don’t have anything to be worried about. I’m here to ask a couple of questions that will help me with an investigation.”

  With a little judicious pressure, I get him to confirm the fact that the game where Bodine lost the boat wasn’t the last high-stakes game, by a long-shot. And that Bodine had heavy losses in almost every game.

  “I don’t want to talk out of place here,” Casper says, pursing his lips, “but I thought Bodine was awful reckless. I know he’s well-to-do, but he’s going to burn through his wife’s inheritance if he doesn’t hold up on the gambling.”

  I’ve been puzzling over why Wilkins was out on the road to Burton, and I have a hunch. “Where do they hold these high-stakes games?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Then let me suggest something to you, and you can tell me if I’m right. Is it someplace out on the road between Cotton Hill and Burton?”

  He doesn’t answer right away. He’s drumming his fingers on the desk. “It might have been.”

  I take that as a yes. Now I know why Wilkins was out on the road to Burton. If my theory is right, Bodine paid him off, and he was on his way to throw that money into a big game. That’s why he had the money with him. And Bodine knew it.

  “One more thing. Were you supposed to have a game that included Lewis Wilkins the week before Thanksgiving?”

  He snorts. “Yeah. For what it was worth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bodine called and said that a game was set up for Sunday. He said Wilkins was going to be there. Then he called back and told me it was going to be Monday night instead. He said the fella from Houston couldn’t get here until Monday. At the game I was aggravated because Wilkins never showed up. Of course then we found out what happened and . . .” He clears his throat. “I guess we know why.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Dusty whimpers to go with me when I head down to see the cows the next morning, but I’m so wound up that I worry that I won’t keep an eye on him, so I leave him inside. I haven’t put him in his box for a couple of days, but when I do, he jumps right out. Seems impossible that he has grown so much. “You better behave,” I say when I leave. “I’ll be back soon.”

  While I feed the cows, I think about how my original thinking led me astray. Because Wilkins was mauled to death by dogs, and there were rumors of dogfighting in the area, it seemed reasonable to think that he was killed over dogfighting debts. The clues have told a different tale.

  Now I’m convinced that Bodine killed Wilkins. The trick will be tying him to the murder, but I intend to do just that. I’ll double down on forensic details. I’ll dig into Bodine’s financial status. If necessary, I’ll call in a team to process the shed where we found the cane corsos. And I’ll make sure the medical examiner goes over Wilkins’s clothing, if they haven’t already done so. Bodine was desperate, and desperate people make mistakes.

  Maria is supposed to be on duty this afternoon, but I ask her to come in early. I want to hash out the details with her regarding what went on yesterday. I’ve begun to depend on her good instincts.

  While I wait for her, I dig out the notes Maria took on the phone call she made about the place where Cal and Pete kept the stolen dogs, and find the phone number.

  “You talked to my deputy recently about a shed on your daddy’s property where some dogs were kept?”

  He sighs. “Yes. What now? Seems like my daddy had a few problems I wasn’t aware of.”

  “Did your daddy play poker?”

  Silence stretches out. “No. But my Uncle Lonnie did.”

  “Would that be Lonnie Casper?”

  “Yes. He’s my daddy’s brother-in-law.” I might have figured.

  Maria comes in, carrying a package. “Got you a present. Or rather I guess it’s for Dusty.”

  I tear it open and find a collar and a leash. “This is too big for him.”

  “It won’t be for long. Look how fast he’s growing. And before long he’s going to be getting into everything. Until you have him trained, you need to keep him on a leash.”

  For a couple of minutes we watch Dusty explore and gnaw on whatever comes into his range. The leg of the metal desk doesn’t appeal to him, but the wooden chair next to my desk is to his taste. I scoop him up and take him into the jail so he’ll stay out of trouble. When he immediately starts yipping, I bring him back and put the collar on him. At its smallest, it’s still too big, but when I put the leash on, he’s so busy tugging it that he doesn’t realize he could duck out of it.

  I tell her I went to see Lonnie Casper last night. “I think I have an idea how Bodine got Wilkins on the road between Burton and Cotton Hill that night.”

  “How did you figure it out?”

  “Something Casper told me. He said Bodine told him there was supposed to be a game Sunday night and it was changed to Monday, but I bet Wilkins still showed up out there on Sunday. At first I thought maybe Bodine had just neglected to call Wilkins and tell him about that change. Then it occurred to me that maybe Bodine set up the whole thing. He needed Wilkins to be alone so there would be no potential witnesses.”

  “I don’t quite follow you.”

  “I’m thinking that Bodine called everybody but Wilkins and told them the game had to be changed to Monday. Bodine had his stepson and his friend Pete follow Wilkins Sunday night, abduct him from his SUV, and take him to wherever Bodine was waiting with the dogs.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why Wilkins had the money with him.”

  “Remember the passport?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wilkins was greedy. I think the only reason he was still i
n town was because of that game. He thought he might win one more big pot, and then he planned to disappear.”

  Maria groans. “Of course! That makes total sense. And if Wilkins hadn’t been so greedy, he would have been long gone.” She sits back up. “Why did Bodine come up with such a horrible way to kill Wilkins?”

  “The dogs were handy. It’s possible he didn’t intend to kill Wilkins, just scare him.”

  “Your reasoning sounds good, but it’s all circumstantial. It’s going to be hard to get the district attorney to authorize an arrest.”

  “You got any suggestions?” I ask.

  “It wouldn’t hurt to talk to Bodine, see what shakes out.”

  “Not without a plan.”

  She gives me a rare wicked smile. “Surely we can think of something.”

  If you judged by the outside of Bodine’s house, you’d think he didn’t have a trace of money problems. The house is grand, and in the same part of Bobtail where Lonnie Casper lives. His place is on a slight ridge in the gated community. Trees hide most of the homes from the road, so until you reach the gate, you don’t even know it’s there.

  We get in with our badges. I tell the man at the gate not to give any advance warning. We don’t expect to get Bodine to confess. This first trip is to get him worried, and surprise is part of the plan.

  A sleek woman wearing a jogging suit and with her long red hair pulled back in a ponytail answers the door.

  “Mrs. Bodine?”

  “Yes. How did you get by the guard at the gate? They should have called.” Her attitude reminds me of her son Cal’s.

  “I wouldn’t know.” I introduce myself and Maria. “Is your husband home? We’d like to have a word with him.”

  She lifts an eyebrow, and I swear she’s wondering why riffraff like us would have any business with her husband. “Wait here.” She leaves us standing in the foyer.

  “Low-class,” Maria mutters when she’s out of earshot.

  I give her a look. Now is not the time for her to get on the high horse that she keeps handy.

  “Hello, Craddock. I’m surprised to see you here.”

  Bodine advances with his hand held out. He’s wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and there’s sawdust on his sleeves. I introduce him to Maria.

  “Couple of things have come up I’d like to ask you about,” I say.

  “That sounds serious. Why don’t we go in the family room? I’m all dirty and my wife would kill me if I track up the living room.” He leads us down the hall to an expansive room off the kitchen. “Can I get you all something to drink?”

  “No thank you, we’re fine. Does your stepson happen to be around?”

  “Calvin? He doesn’t live here. And I don’t see a lot of him. Why?”

  “After we have our chat, I’m going to have a talk with him, too.”

  Bodine licks his lower lip. “Well sure. I don’t know whether he’ll be home. Here, sit down.”

  He points us to comfortable armchairs that probably cost more than all my living room furniture put together. I prefer to spend my money on art rather than on showy furniture. I sneak a peek at what’s on these walls, and I recognize an indifferent eye for art when I see it. These paintings would be right at home in a cheap office.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you,” I say.

  “Really? What happened? Is something wrong at the warehouse?”

  “You know Lewis Wilkins was set on by dogs.”

  “Terrible.”

  “That poor woman, having to see her husband like that,” Maria chimes in.

  He frowns at her. “I’m sure it was an awful thing,” he says.

  “As it happens, we know what dogs were responsible,” I say.

  “Well, that’s good.” His wary eyes don’t agree.

  “The thing is, it was an unusual kind of dog.”

  “Unusual how?”

  “It was a dog that’s known to be vicious, and is frequently used as a trained guard dog.”

  “Guard dog?” His face has paled.

  “The thing is, we found the dogs.”

  “You what?” For the first time, he seems truly alarmed. He practically screeched the question.

  I’m surprised at his reaction. Maria and I exchange glances, and she is as puzzled as I am. Suddenly I know where I made my mistake. If he sicced those dogs on Wilkins and then killed them, he wouldn’t have left them out in that shed. He would have made sure they were taken away and never found. So why didn’t he?

  “We found their bodies, anyway. Somebody had killed them. We also found out where the dogs came from.”

  Bodine clears his throat. “All right. I’m still not sure where this is leading.”

  He has recovered his composure, but I’m trying to figure out what surprised him. “You see, the dogs were fitted with a chip that has the name and address of the owner.”

  “Oh.” He’s clutching the arms of his chair.

  “I did a little poking around, and it turns out that the original owner couldn’t handle the dogs, so he sold them to a security firm. And it turns out that the security firm leased the dogs to your father-in-law, Chuck Flynn.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. You mean it was those guard dogs from the warehouse that killed poor Wilkins?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  He produces a big sigh. “That’s terrible. I have to say, I feel responsible.”

  “Really? Why is that?”

  “A couple of weeks back, someone left a gate open and those dogs got loose, and we never found them. They must have made their way through the backwoods to that area where Wilkins lived, and then attacked him.” This is completely different from what he said the first time we talked about the dogs.

  It would be quite a coincidence for the dogs to make the fifteen-mile trip and end up in the woods behind Lewis Wilkins’s house. “That’s one explanation, except for one or two little issues. Tell me, exactly when did the dogs go missing?”

  “I don’t remember the date.”

  “Did you report them missing?”

  “No, I figured they were long gone.”

  “That’s a problem. You know, they’re registered as lethal weapons, and according to the contract they were supposed to be kept under your control all the time.”

  A tic has developed under Bodine’s left eye. “You trying to tell me the law would make a big deal out of that?”

  “Yes, they would.”

  “Unless you have reason to believe the dogs were stolen,” Maria says in her most innocent voice. “Then you’re off the hook.”

  “Maria, I’m not sure that’s true,” I say. “If he had reported them stolen, then of course he’d be off the hook, but he didn’t.”

  Bodine is chewing his lower lip. He sees a lifeline. “I didn’t report it, but I think I told somebody that I thought they might be stolen. I’m pretty sure I told my assistant manager that. He’d remember it. And he should have been the one to report it. And I’ll bet whoever stole them, shot them.”

  He doesn’t seem to have noticed that he changed his story to fit what he thinks we want to hear. “Okay, then Monday if you don’t mind I’ll come in and talk to him.”

  Maria looks startled and Bodine is relieved.

  When we get to the squad car, Maria explodes. “What is wrong with you? Why did you let him get off so easy?”

  “Now hold on. Two things. You noticed how surprised he was that we found the dogs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think about it. If you had sicced a couple of dogs on somebody and they killed him, and then you killed the dogs, would you leave the dogs’ carcasses lying around to lead back to you?”

  “No, I guess I wouldn’t.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.” I tell her what I suspect Bodine did instead.

  She nods. “What’s the other thing?”

  “When he went along with your suggestion that somebody stole the dogs, he said the thief must have shot them. Only I didn’t tell him how the d
ogs were killed.”

  “Why didn’t we arrest him then?”

  “We could make the case that he killed the dogs, but we still don’t have a case that he set them on Wilkins.”

  It’s a quiet afternoon at the Bobtail Police Department. The duty officer is fine with me taking a look at the pickup that got hauled in a couple of nights ago when its owner was brought in. We go over to the yard where it was towed.

  “Lazy kid said he was going to come in this morning to pay the fines,” the owner of the yard says. “But I haven’t seen him yet.”

  “Makes our job easier,” I say.

  Maria and I realized that the boys used Pete’s pickup to steal the other dogs, and we speculated that because they were being paid by Bodine, they used Cal’s pickup to do the job of transporting the guard dogs. We peer into the bed of Cal’s pickup, and the evidence is right there.

  “There’s no question there were dogs in here,” Maria says. There’s dried mud all over the bed. “Look at the claw marks.”

  “Won’t be hard to match,” I say. “Big claws, big dogs. And there’s dog hair.”

  “Could be a different dog,” she says. But we know it’s not.

  We get a careful impression of the claw marks and samples of the hair and take the evidence over to the vet’s office. On my request, Doc England has kept the dogs in cold storage. He compares the hair and claws. “Same.”

  “You sure?”

  He shrugs. “Only DNA testing can make a positive ID, but it’s the same type of hair, same color, same texture. And you can’t miss those claws. Unless there are other cane corsos around here, which I seriously doubt, these are the same dogs.”

  Now the only decision Maria and I have to make is whether to tackle Jerry Bodine or his son. “The son is a lot more likely to screw up,” I say.

  Maria is sitting next to me in the squad car. She turns to me, her eyes narrowed. “Sic ’em.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Cal Madigan turns out to be hard to find. He doesn’t answer his cell phone, and the house he lives in, a place in the suburbs that I suspect Jerry pays for, is deserted. In a neighborhood with small, neatly kept houses, his is the one with the overgrown yard.