by L A Dobbs
Jo tapped the eraser end of her pencil on her desk as she thought about the case.
“I hope John can figure out who the victim is pretty quick,” she said.
“Hopefully there will be fingerprints in the system — or his dental work will tell us. Maybe someone will even come in after noticing that one of their friends is missing,” Kevin replied, his eyes still on his computer screen, where he was processing the photos he’d taken at the crime scene.
“Until then, I’ll just work up a list of things we should do. Sam’s already talking to Thorne, so next I guess we need to talk to Jackson. The body was on his land.”
“Ha! Serves you right!” Reese’s voice drifted over the post office boxes from the reception area.
“Serves who right?” Jo asked.
“Dupont. Check this out. It’s a video someone posted on YouTube about an hour ago.” Reese came into the squad room with her laptop in one hand and the bag of doughnuts in the other. She put the bag on Jo’s desk before perching in a chair with the laptop on her knees. She turned the screen to face Kevin and Jo.
Jo came out from behind her desk and sat on the edge of it. Kevin scooted his chair over so they could both look at the screen.
Their mayor, Harley Dupont, stood on the granite steps of the town offices with half a dozen microphones pointed at his face. He was becoming a common, if not revolting, sight on television. This time he was giving a news conference, and Jo was glad it wasn’t one of his incessant commercials. She considered Dupont a pompous ass, and the thought of his re-election made Jo grind her teeth. She suspected Thorne’s money was backing Dupont, who was a likely shoo-in, especially with no one running against him.
“So what? Dupont’s on TV again,” Kevin said.
The news conference must have been about the murder. News sure did travel fast. But the town had been under a magnifying glass since the owls had been discovered, and Dupont liked to keep on top of things. Right now he droned on about how safe the town was and that the recent murder was an isolated case.
“Watch.” Reese pointed to the screen as something flew from off-screen and landed just below Dupont’s lapel.
Splat!
Jo watched as a yellow, gooey blob spread across his chest and dripped down his perfectly tailored charcoal suit coat.
“What was that?” Kevin asked.
“It was an egg.” Jo’s eyes met Kevin’s. “And if we can find out who threw it, we might have our first suspect.”
Chapter Five
Sam pulled up in front of the old brick-faced post office that now served as the police station. It sat in the middle of town, facing a side street that led to Main Street and the town commons. He got out of the Tahoe and opened the passenger door for Lucy, who bounded out toward the granite steps just as his phone chirped in his pocket.
He pulled it out and looked at the display. John Dudley.
“You have something for me already?” Sam asked.
“Yep. The victim was Ray Ingalls. Cause of death, blunt force trauma. Happened about two a.m. The branch we picked up at the scene was the murder weapon. The blood matches.” John rattled off the details in the gruff staccato manner to which Sam had become accustomed.
“That was quick. How did you ID him?”
“Easy. Fingerprints were in the database. Turns out your victim was one of those environmental activists who have been hanging around town. His prints were on file from a previous arrest.”
Sam paused in front of the large double doors, his hand on the knob, Lucy looking up at him expectantly. “Did that arrest have anything to do with violence?”
“Well, that would be your job to find out. I just figure out what kills them,” John said.
Sam turned the knob, and Lucy nosed her way in ahead of him, heading for Reese’s desk and stopping short upon finding it unoccupied. She pivoted and raced to the squad room. Sam followed more slowly. “Right. Let me know what else you find.”
Sam came around the post office boxes into the squad room where Reese, Jo and Kevin huddled in a semicircle staring down at the screen of a laptop that Kevin had in his lap. Jo sat on the edge of her desk, and Lucy had pressed herself to her side, her head ducking under Jo’s hand to demand pets. Jo looked more than happy to oblige.
“There is one more thing,” John said just as Sam was about to hang up.
“What’s that?”
“That goop on his face? Chicken egg.”
“Chicken egg?” As Sam said the words into the phone, Reese, Kevin and Jo all jerked their heads in his direction.
“I guess it’s a chicken egg. We’re not really sure, but what else would it be?” Jo said, removing her hand from the top of Lucy’s head and pointing to the laptop screen.
Lucy trotted over to Reese and did the same head-hand butting routine.
“What?” Sam was confused. How did she know he had just been talking to John about chicken eggs?
Jo leaned forward, shoving her finger toward the laptop. “Right here on this video. Isn’t that what you were talking about?”
Sam stood behind Kevin’s chair as Kevin slid the controls to replay the last part of the video. He was amused to see Mayor Dupont staring at a gooey mess dripping down on his suit coat.
“What’s this?” Sam asked.
“Dupont called a news conference. Trying to do damage control about the murder, I guess.” Kevin shrugged and dropped his hand from the computer to pet Lucy, who had decided to sit beside his chair. “Apparently not everyone in town is a fan of the mayor, and someone egged him.”
“I found it on YouTube,” Reese said.
“Isn’t that what you were talking about when you came in?” Jo asked.
“No. That was John calling about the victim.” Sam told them how the medical examiner had identified the victim, the murder weapon and the goo on his face, and brought them up to speed on his conversations with Thorne and Jackson Pressler.
“We’re trying to figure out who threw the egg; figure that could be a lead,” Jo said.
Kevin fiddled with the controls, sliding the screen in the direction from which the egg had been thrown, but they could only see the hand throwing the egg. “The rest of the person is off camera. All we’ve got is this hand.”
Reese’s pale-blue eyes narrowed, her dark hair slipping over her shoulder as she bent her face close to the screen. “Wait a minute! Zoom in on that.” She pointed at the hand.
Kevin zoomed in on the wrist. There was a dark-green mark the size of a quarter on the inside of the wrist. He zoomed closer, and the mark revealed itself as a primitively drawn tattoo of a turtle.
“It’s not much, but it could help us identify who threw the egg,” Jo said.
“You think that’s related to the murder?” Kevin asked.
“Maybe. Kind of a neat coincidence, I’d say. If nothing else, I bet this egg-thrower is one of the environmentalists, so he or she probably knew our victim.”
“Speaking of which, we need to find out where this guy was staying. I know a lot of them are camping in the mountains. Wilderness types. Might be hard to find them or his site,” Jo said.
“You never know what might be helpful.” Sam slapped Kevin on the shoulder. “Can you enlarge that and print it? I think I know just the person who might be able to help us figure out where our victim was staying and who this egg-thrower is.”
* * *
Kevin zoomed in even further on the turtle tattoo. He pressed a button, and the printer whirred to life.
“Are you going to question these activists?” Kevin wondered if Sam would take Jo or maybe this time he’d ask Kevin to go. Kevin rarely got to go with them when they talked to suspects.
Sam nodded and turned toward the printer.
Kevin scooted his chair back to his desk, pulled one of the special dog treats that he drove all the way to the next town for out of his drawer and slipped it to Lucy.
“Ruthie Draper’s expecting a visit. She has an issue with Bullwinkle,”
Reese said.
Sam grabbed the paper from the printer and turned around, his eyes falling on Kevin. “Kevin, your shift is almost over. You go deal with Ruthie and then head out. Jo and I will try to find out where our victim was staying and who this turtle-tattoo person is. Reese, you see what you can dig up on Ray Ingalls and his associates.”
Sam strode toward the door, snapping his fingers. Lucy looked at Kevin’s drawer longingly then up at Kevin. When another treat didn’t come, she trotted off after Sam.
Jo slid off the corner of her desk and followed Lucy, grabbing her mug and a doughnut out of the bag on her way. Kevin handed the laptop back to Reese. “Guess I better finish up and get out to Ruthie’s.”
Reese took the laptop and started back toward the lobby. “Yep. I’d better get busy.”
Kevin finished uploading the photos he’d taken earlier in the morning. Figures he’d get stuck with all the shit jobs. To be fair, though, Sam couldn’t ask him to come along because his shift was ending.
But was the reason he never got in on the bigger investigations because he was a part-timer, or was it because Sam and Jo were working on something on the side that they didn’t want him to know about? And why was Sam hesitating on hiring someone new? Was it because he couldn’t find the right person, or was it because Sam didn’t want another cop around to see what he was up to?
Maybe Kevin’s mysterious contact had been right about Sam and Jo all along.
When the uploads finished, Kevin grabbed the keys to his Isuzu from the middle desk drawer. He’d take his own car up to Ruthie Draper’s. No sense in driving the Crown Vic if he was going off duty right after.
At least one thing was looking up. Without Tyler, Kevin got to drive the Crown Vic instead of his own car a lot more. When Tyler was around he usually drove it, while Sam and Jo usually took the Tahoe. Kevin had had to drive his personal car.
Kevin glanced at the empty desk in the corner that had been Tyler’s. Why hadn’t there been any progress in the investigation of his death? Kevin was sure there was something more to it than a random killing, because his mysterious contact had asked questions specifically about the case.
Thoughts of his contact made him uneasy. Just what did the person want? At first Kevin had thought it was some sort of secret Internal Affairs department. He’d felt proud to be asked, but a little suspicious of the secrecy.
The contact insisted he couldn’t tell anyone, implying that there was some sort of nefarious activity going on in the department and they needed his help to ferret out the source. He felt good to be working for the good guys, but if that were the case, were Sam and Jo the bad guys?
Kevin said good-bye to Reese and headed out to the side parking lot, clicking his fob and listening to the chirp of his car as it unlocked. The harsh August sun had been beating on the car all day, and the interior was hot enough to bake a quiche.
He blasted the air conditioning, lowered the windows and pulled the visor down to keep the sun from shining through the windshield into his eyes. A tiny piece of paper fluttered out onto his lap.
Despite the heat in the car, Kevin’s blood froze. He recognized the message, a cryptic code from his contact. But how had they gotten into the car? The doors were locked.
Kevin didn’t know much about the contact. He always met with a different guy — someone he’d never seen before and never saw again. He got the impression the people he met were just messengers and someone big was behind them. Someone who had the capability of getting into a locked car and then re-locking it without the key, and who wasn’t afraid to do that in the middle of the day in the police station parking lot.
Whoever it was — possibly the FBI, Kevin hoped — was not to be messed with, and this proved it. The message was not only a note to alert him to a meeting, it also sent another kind of message. One that told him they could get to him even in places where he thought they couldn’t.
Did the FBI stick messages in people’s locked cars and pay the excessive amounts of money that Kevin had been given to perform these tasks? Something in the dark recesses of Kevin’s mind made him wonder if he had been a little too eager to accept these missions. And a little too naive. Then again, if Sam, Jo and Tyler were up to something illegal, shouldn’t he do his part and get the information that would prove it?
On the other hand, if they weren’t — and so far Kevin hadn’t seen any concrete evidence that they were — just what, exactly, was his contact using the information he passed along for?
He stared down at the message. It looked like gibberish, but Kevin knew what it meant. He had to meet the contact behind Lago — an upscale restaurant downtown — at 4:30 p.m. The Dumpster behind the restaurant was their usual meeting place. It was perfect, because it was at the end of an alley and further secluded by a fenced area.
No one except the kitchen staff went there, and because Kevin’s cousin, who worked in the kitchen, was usually the one that went out to the Dumpster, the chances that anyone would see them was nil. Besides, the meetings lasted only long enough for the contact to pass a note and money. If anyone saw Kevin coming or going, he had the perfect excuse. He was visiting his cousin. He’d even had to use that excuse once when Jo had seen him.
Kevin shifted in his seat uneasily. Not for the first time he wondered if he was doing the right thing. Now that Tyler was gone and he’d been putting in some extra hours, he’d gotten new insight into Sam and Jo, and as far as he could tell they weren’t doing anything nefarious. But they had been a little secretive, and they hadn’t let him in on their investigation into Tyler’s death that he knew they were doing on the side. He guessed there wasn’t any harm in continuing. He only passed along little tidbits about some of the cases they were working. He’d wait to see what the contact wanted him to do. So far they’d only asked him to keep his eyes and ears open. To pass on bits of information about cases that seemed unimportant to Kevin. And to look for a few things in Tyler’s belongings, one of those things he still had in his own possession as a sort of insurance policy in case things went wrong.
Kevin ripped the message into tiny pieces and put a few in the trash bag he kept in his car, stuffing the others in his pocket to throw away at a different location later. Even though no one else could decipher it, one could never be too careful. He started up the Isuzu and drove off toward Ruthie Draper’s, a feeling of trepidation squeezing his chest.
Chapter Six
Jo balanced her doughnut on top of her half-full coffee mug in her left hand and opened the door of the Tahoe with her right. Lucy jumped into the passenger seat and settled in.
Jo looked at the dog and jerked her head toward the back seat. “In back.”
The sun slanting through the windshield highlighted the gold flecks in Lucy’s eyes as they flicked hopefully from Jo to Sam. She didn’t budge from the seat.
“Come on.” Sam went around to the back and opened the tailgate. Lucy reluctantly jumped from the passenger seat and then into the back of the Tahoe.
Jo settled into the passenger seat and took a bite of the doughnut, a blob of jelly dropping onto her T-shirt as Sam came around to the driver’s seat. He started the engine, glanced over and handed her a napkin.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Jo asked as she set her mug on the dashboard and swiped at the jelly blob, awkwardly trying to dab at her shirt while holding the doughnut.
Sam smiled that easygoing friendly smile that she recognized from working so many cases together. The smile highlighted his strong jaw and the lines that crinkled out from the corners of his hazel eyes. He wore a black T-shirt, the uniform they all usually wore in the summer, except instead of a jelly stain his showed a broad chest and thick biceps that proved he was still in pretty good shape even though he was pushing forty.
Jo’s stomach did a little flip, and she felt the comfort of their close relationship returning. It felt like old times. Maybe she’d been imagining the gap she’d thought had grown between them these past few months.
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“Yep,” Sam said. “We should talk to Jesse.”
That had been exactly what Jo was thinking. Jesse Cowly was a small-time drug dealer and amateur thief that Sam had been grooming as an informant. He’d caught Jesse with pot but hadn’t prosecuted him, opting to get on his good side so he could glean information for more important crimes.
It had worked in their favor. Jesse now seemed fairly happy to talk to them whenever they came asking. The added benefit was that because Jesse ran in the fringes of the seedy underground of town, he knew a lot going on that Sam and Jo wouldn’t otherwise be privy to. And because he hung around in the bars — especially Holy Spirits, where the environmentalists had made their quasi-headquarters — Jesse probably knew about the victim and his friends.
Jesse wasn’t a bad guy. He was in his early twenties and liked to party. And to pay for his parties, he liked to dabble in stolen goods. Nothing too large, car radios, speakers. Nothing wrong with that as far as Jo was concerned. She didn’t mind giving him a break on the minor charges because she felt deep down that Jesse was the type who would never turn into a real bad guy. He was more the type who liked to skirt the edges of the law. The type who made a great informant.
Jo settled back in her seat. She figured this was as good a time as any to bring up the new hire and Tyler’s investigation. She stole a sideways glance at Sam.
“So nothing’s come up about Tyler, huh?” She finished off the doughnut, ignored Lucy’s whine for the last bite, and wiped the sugar off her fingers with the napkin.
Sam shook his head. “Nope. Were your contacts ever able to figure out where those deposits came from?”
Jo frowned. After Tyler’s death, a large sum of money had been deposited into his bank account. Tyler’s mother had assumed it was a payment from the police force. Of course, she might have made that assumption because Sam had told her there was a fallen officers fund. There was no such fund. Sam had taken it upon himself to cut Tyler’s mother a check from his own retirement savings. But the twenty-thousand-dollar deposit wasn’t part of that.
