Murder in the Air

by Bill Crider

Rhodes almost got out the door before the phone rang.

  “Better hang on,” Hack said.

  Rhodes stopped, and Hack answered the phone. After he’d talked for a second, he turned to Rhodes.

  “It’s Robin Hood again.”

  Rhodes went back to his chair and sat down.

  5

  The person called Robin Hood hadn’t struck in more than a week, and Rhodes had been hoping that he (or she, nobody knew for sure) had given up his hobby, or left the county. The second option would have been the better one from Rhodes’s point of view. Neither of those things had happened, it seemed, and now Robin Hood was back in action.

  This particular Robin Hood didn’t steal from the rich and give to the poor. He didn’t steal from anyone, for that matter, but he did use a bow and arrow. Jennifer Loam had used the name of Robin Hood in her newspaper story about the goings-on, and it had stuck.

  No one had a good idea what the rogue bowman, or bowperson, looked like. Up until now, he’d worked at night, and it was a surprise to Rhodes that he’d done something during the daylight hours.

  So far, the bowman’s activities had been harmless but annoying. He’d put arrows into wooden fences, utility poles, and advertising signs. The arrows always had a message attached, usually a political comment of some kind.

  One of the arrows had even carried a message that said, “Reelect Sheriff Dan Rhodes.” Hard to argue with that one, Rhodes thought, but Mikey Burns had objected loudly to the one that said, “Commissioner Burns is a lazy lout.”

  “What did Robin Hood do this time?” Rhodes asked after Hack had hung up the phone.

  “He shot an arrow into the air,” Hack said.

  Rhodes wasn’t in any mood for the runaround. He said, “Just tell me.”

  Hack gave in. Almost. “He shot an arrow into somebody’s car tire.”

  “Somebody’s. Now who would that somebody be?”

  Hack grinned. “It would be the commissioner’s.”

  “Which commissioner?”

  “Mikey Burns.”

  “Uh-oh,” Rhodes said.

  On his return trip to the commissioner’s office, Rhodes went through the downtown area, or what had been the downtown years before. There wasn’t much of it left. Many of the buildings were deserted. Some had collapsed and been razed. The only real sign of life on any given day was around what Rhodes referred to as the Lawj Mahal, a new building so white that it almost shone. Randy Lawless, an attorney with whom Rhodes had often had dealings, owned the building and used it as his office and base of operations. The building, along with its paved parking lot, occupied the spot where a number of stores had once stood. It took up an entire block of the old downtown.

  As Rhodes drove by, he thought about Lawless. It was a cinch that Lawless was Hamilton’s lawyer. A man with Hamilton’s money would want the best, and in Blacklin County, Lawless was the best. Rhodes hoped that Hamilton’s death wouldn’t lead to any complications that would involve Lawless, that is, not if Rhodes was involved, too.

  Rhodes’s Charger was the only car moving on the streets. He passed an empty building that had once held a department store. The windows were dusty, and one of them was cracked.

  Clearview was still lively in some places, but not downtown. All the activity now was out on the highway around the big Walmart store. A new motel stood nearby, and a couple of small strip centers had located not far away, along with a big grocery store. The area on the highway wasn’t anything like the downtown Rhodes remembered from his childhood, but it was proof that Clearview was still alive and well.

  Rhodes parked in front of the precinct barn where Mikey Burns had his office and went inside. Mrs. Wilkie was at her desk, and Rhodes noticed that she was wearing new glasses, the rimless glasses of the kind popularized by a recent vice-presidential candidate.

  “Mr. Burns is a little upset,” she said.

  “I heard he was a lot upset.”

  “That’s probably more like. You may go on in.”

  Rhodes went through the door into Burns’s office. The commissioner sat in his leather chair, looking out the window. He didn’t turn around when Rhodes came in.

  “You wanted to talk to me,” Rhodes said.

  “That’s right,” Burns said. He still didn’t turn. “I want this Robin Hood stopped. Now.”

  As sheriff, Rhodes worked for both the county and the city of Clearview. His major employer was the county, but the town of Clearview, which didn’t have its own police force, contracted with the county for law enforcement. In some ways, it wasn’t a good situation. Rhodes answered to the county commissioners and to the Clearview city council, usually in the person of the mayor, and every council member, every commissioner, and the mayor thought he was Rhodes’s boss. In a way that was true, but Burns really didn’t have the right to direct Rhodes’s investigations. Not that Rhodes planned to mention it.

  “We’ve been after him for a while,” Rhodes said. “Nobody ever sees him.”

  The truth was that Robin Hood hadn’t appeared to be much of a threat, and while the investigation was ongoing, it wasn’t a priority. Rhodes didn’t plan to mention that, either.

  Burns spun his chair around and leaned forward onto his desk. He didn’t ask Rhodes to sit down.

  “You have evidence,” he said. “Why don’t you use it?”

  “You mean the arrows?”

  “Damn right I mean the arrows, and the notes, too. Get some fingerprints. Catch that bastard.”

  Burns was worked up more than a flat tire should have warranted.

  “We haven’t been able to get any fingerprints,” Rhodes said.

  “Why not?”

  Rhodes knew what Burns was thinking. Like most of the population of Clearview, Burns probably watched one of the CSI shows, or all of them, and believed that law enforcement forensics in Blacklin County matched those on television. They didn’t. Rhodes would have been willing to bet that even the forensic techniques in New York City didn’t match those on television.

  “Robin Hood must be wearing gloves,” Rhodes said. “Even if we could get fingerprints, we’d have to find a match.”

  “What about that thing the Feds have? I can’t remember the initials.”

  “That would be the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System,” Rhodes said. “IAFIS. Sure, we could use that, but if the prints aren’t in the system, they wouldn’t help even if we had them.”

  “Bow hunters have to be licensed.”

  The key word there was “have.” The law required a bow hunter to have a license, but that didn’t mean everybody with a bow was a hunter, and not all the hunters bothered with a license.

  “We’ve checked out all the hunters with licenses,” Rhodes said. “They’re all alibied.”

  Burns stood up. “Maybe there’s some fingerprints this time. Come on.”

  Rhodes followed Burns out the back door of the office, thinking that it might be handy for a commissioner to have a back door now and then. He could leave without his secretary even knowing he was gone.

  Burns led Rhodes past a couple of road graders and county trucks to where his car was parked. The precinct barn was on a main road but at the outskirts of town. The side on which Burns parked was partially concealed from the road by trees. A couple of other cars were parked beside Burns’s, a bright red Pontiac Solstice convertible.

  Now Rhodes knew why Burns was so upset. The convertible was Burns’s midlife toy. The commissioner usually drove an old pickup.

  Robin Hood couldn’t use the excuse that he was aiming for someone else’s car. Nobody else in the county had a car like that one.

  “Truck’s in the shop,” Burns said, before Rhodes could ask. “I never drive the Solstice to work. I wish I hadn’t today. I should’ve walked.”

  The little two-seater sagged to one side, and Rhodes saw the arrow sticking out of the left rear tire. It looked like the other arrows Robin Hood had used, with red and black fletching. Though Rhodes h
adn’t mentioned it to Burns, the arrows weren’t likely to be a clue. They had medium-weight aluminum shafts and broad-head tips. Both shafts and tips were popular brands, easy to obtain at sporting goods stores. If you didn’t want to buy them in Clearview, you could drive to Houston or Dallas. You could even order them on the Internet. They were next to impossible to trace.

  “I came out to go to lunch and saw it like that,” Burns said. “It almost made me cry.”

  Rhodes was reminded that he’d missed lunch. Again. It was an all too common occurrence when he was on the job.

  “I haven’t touched the arrow,” Burns said. “I know better than that.”

  TV again. Rhodes didn’t think there would be any fingerprints, but it was good that Burns was being careful.

  “It might be hard to get the arrow out of the tire,” Rhodes said.

  “Cut it out. It doesn’t matter. The tire’s ruined.”

  “Is there a note?”

  “Come on,” Burns said.

  He walked over to the car and knelt down by the flat tire. Rhodes knelt beside him and saw the paper tied to the arrow with two pieces of monofilament fishing line. Both the line and the paper were common and easy to obtain if they were the same kind that Robin Hood had used previously.

  Rhodes took out his pocketknife and slipped it under the monofilament at one end of the paper. He cut the line and removed the paper. Holding it by the edges, he unrolled it.

  Burns stood up, and Rhodes rose as well.

  “What does it say?” Burns asked.

  Rhodes read the note. “What do you get when you cross a rooster with a razor?”

  “A riddle?” Burns asked. “Are you joking?”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Is the answer on there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “A chicken Schick,” Rhodes said. “Or a county commissioner.” Rhodes didn’t smile when he read it, and Burns didn’t laugh.

  “Is that a clue?” Burns asked. “Or is it just a nasty joke?”

  “Could be both,” Rhodes said.

  It might be even more than Burns thought it was, and Rhodes didn’t like the implications. Hamilton’s farm was in Burns’s precinct, and Burns had received the bulk of the complaints about it, not that there was anything he could do. Since one of the earlier messages had also criticized Burns, Rhodes wondered if Robin Hood might be one of the Mount Industry residents. He also wondered if the arrow and the message had any connection to Hamilton’s death, which was beginning to seem more suspicious than ever.

  “Is it going to help you catch Robin Hood?” Burns asked.

  Rhodes didn’t think so, but he said, “You never can tell.”

  Burns looked at his little car. “You’d better catch him, and catch him quick. First it was telephone poles, and now it’s cars. Next it might be people.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Rhodes said.

  Rhodes left the precinct barn without removing the arrow from the tire. He called Hack and asked who was on patrol duty nearby.

  “Buddy,” Hack said. “You need him?”

  Rhodes told Hack to have Buddy remove the tire and take it to the jail.

  “We’ll let Ruth get the arrow out and go over it for prints,” Rhodes said, though he didn’t think it would do any good.

  “Was there a note?”

  “I have it bagged and tagged.”

  “What’d it say?”

  Rhodes told him. Hack thought it was funny.

  “And it’s about chickens,” Hack said. “You think it has anything to do with Hamilton?”

  Rhodes wasn’t ready to commit himself. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “It’s really too bad you don’t have anybody runnin’ against you,” Hack said. “You’re a perfect politician.”

  “That’s not a compliment.”

  “I guess not, but I didn’t mean it ugly.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to Mount Industry to let the people who work for Hamilton know the situation. Don’t mention the note to anybody.”

  “By ‘anybody,’ you mean that reporter,” Hack said.

  “I mean anybody,” Rhodes said, “and that would include Jennifer Loam.”

  “Can I tell Lawton?”

  “If you think he can keep his mouth shut.”

  “You don’t have to worry about him. Nobody can get anything out of Lawton.”

  That was the truth, Rhodes thought, not unless they had a month or two to spare for questioning.

  “Go ahead and tell him,” he said.

  6

  Mount Industry just about didn’t exist anymore. Rhodes couldn’t remember when it ever had. Oh, at one time there had been a little more to the place than there was now, a church or two, a little grocery store, and a school. The churches and the school were gone now. The store was still there, but it didn’t carry a full line of groceries, hardly anything more than cold drinks, bread, candy, and chips. The owner kept it open because he wanted to have something to do. There was a cemetery near where the church had stood, and enough houses were around to give the idea of a community, but that was all.

  Rhodes drove past the cemetery and saw flowers, probably artificial, on some of the graves. He rounded a couple of curves and saw the chicken farm at the top of a low hill.

  An expensive iron fence ran along the side of the road, and Rhodes wondered what it was for. It certainly wasn’t needed to keep in the chickens. They never left the buildings they were kept in, never saw the light of day until they were hauled off to be processed.

  The smell when Rhodes got out of the car was real and tangible, like worms crawling up his nostrils as he walked to the red metal building that served as the headquarters of Hamilton Farms.

  Behind the headquarters, the long chicken houses covered the land, each of them almost as long as two football fields. Their silver metal roofs spakled in the sun. The canvas curtains along the sides were rolled up so the insides of the buildings could get a little sunlight, but the openings also made the smell worse than if the curtains had been closed. Rhodes heard the raucous noise of thousands of chickens. The stink clogged his nose, and he coughed.

  As Rhodes approached the headquarters, he saw a pickup parked behind the building with a flat-bottomed aluminum boat in the bed. A chicken sat on the end of the boat, and Rhodes wondered if it had escaped from one of the farm buildings. More power to it if that was the case.

  The headquarters door opened and a man came outside. It was Jared Crockett, Hamilton’s supervisor, a rangy man who wore jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat. He looked more like a wrangler about to go off on a cattle roundup than a man in charge of chickens. He’d been known to claim that he was related to Davy Crockett, and Rhodes was surprised he didn’t wear a coonskin cap.

  No one knew where Crockett had come from or what his qualifications for running a chicken farm were. Hamilton had hired him from somewhere, and he’d showed up and taken charge of the operation. He lived in the old oak-shaded farmhouse that the original owners of the property had built sometime in the 1930s. It had been restored to something like respectability, and it was even air-conditioned. Rhodes didn’t think that would help with the odor. He wondered how Crockett liked living there.

  “Thought I saw you drive up, Sheriff,” Crockett said as he walked to greet Rhodes. He had a big nose, a wide mouth, and small, hard eyes. “You here on business or pleasure?”

  Crockett smiled, showing big white teeth. It was as if he couldn’t smell a thing. All Rhodes could figure was that he must have gotten used to the stink.

  “Business,” Rhodes said, his throat constricted. He’d been there a couple of times before, and Crockett knew he wouldn’t have come for the fun of it. “Can we go inside?”

  “Sure thing.” Crockett made a broad gesture. “Come on ahead.”

  Rhodes walked in front of him and went into the metal building. He’d hoped the smell there wouldn’t be as bad as it had been outside, but he couldn’t t
ell much difference.

  The office was furnished with a gray metal desk, a matching file cabinet, and a couple of gray metal folding chairs. Hamilton hadn’t gone in much for extravagance or comfort.

  A photo of Hamilton and the current governor hung on the wall behind the desk. The governor had his arm across Hamilton’s shoulders.

  “Take a seat, Sheriff,” Crockett said, and instead of going behind the desk, he sat in one of the folding chairs.

  Rhodes took the other chair and said, “I have some bad news for you, Crockett.”

  “Let me guess. Another complaint about the way this place smells. I tell you, Sheriff, I just don’t get it. People just like to complain, I guess. I don’t smell a thing.”

  Either Crockett was an expert liar or he had something seriously wrong with his smeller.

  “This isn’t about the smell,” Rhodes said. “It’s about Lester Hamilton.”

  “What’s that rascal gotten himself into now? I haven’t seen him for a couple of days, and we need to be making arrangements for a shipment.”

  “You’ll have to take care of that yourself,” Rhodes said. “Lester’s dead.”

  Crockett slumped and rubbed a hand across his face. “You sure about that?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “What was it? Car wreck?”

  “He drowned.”

  “Damn.” Crockett paused and looked off, as if he might be thinking about his deceased boss. “Was he out noodling again? I’ve told him over and over how dangerous that is.”

  “It looks like that’s what he was doing.” Rhodes explained the circumstances. “He should’ve listened to you.”

  “He sure should’ve. What’s happened is a damn shame, and not just because he’s dead. I need to know what’ll happen to my job. I can handle this place myself for a while, but I like to know who I’m working for and who’s paying my salary. I can’t work for nothing.”

  “You wouldn’t just walk away, would you?” Rhodes asked, knowing that a lot of people in the county would hope the answer was yes.

  “Not for a while. Too many other people working here that have to be taken care of. This is a big shock, Sheriff.”