“I need to wash up first,” I said, scooting to the bathroom, where I washed my hands and dabbed a bit of cool water on my face. I stared at my reflection in the mirror. “All right, Blackthorne. Now’s the time.”
Duncan was standing next to the table when I returned. Joining him, he poured two glasses of Cava, the sparkling liquid glinting in the light of the faux chandelier overhead.
He picked up both glasses and handed one to me. “To us.”
I clinked my glass to his. “I thought we were celebrating tomorrow night.”
“Well, who knows what the hell is going to be happening tomorrow night?”
That had been my thought exactly. “I have some other news.”
“You’re being promoted to super sergeant or whatever the next level is?”
I shook my head playfully. “Have you ever seen the movie Fargo?”
“The Coen brothers’ film with Frances McDormand?”
“Yeah. I’m going to look just like her next winter.”
“Frances McDormand?”
“Well, like the character she plays. Chief of Police Marge Gunderson.”
He gave me the sweetest look I’d ever seen on a grown man’s face. “Pregnant?”
“Yeah.”
Duncan mulled that over carefully. “That must mean you’re pregnant now?”
I placed my glass of Cava on the table, wrapped my arms around his waist, and looked into his jade-green eyes. “Yes.”
He put down his glass, and we held one another.
“I almost can’t believe it,” he said softly, and we rocked slowly together.
“Believe it. One of the first signs was a reaction to strong odors.”
“Like the salmon baking in the oven?”
“Mostly Sherry Linn’s perfume. But now that you mention it, the salmon…”
“Smells a bit fishy. It’s probably too old.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“If not, there’s a lot of salad, and with sesame seeds tossed in.”
“Sounds perfect. I’m starving,” I said.
“I love you, babe. Not because we’re having a kid together, but because of who you are. Beautiful. Strong. Smart.”
“Uh, you forgot witty.”
“You interrupted me before I could add that to the list. Which would also include sexy.”
“Goes without saying.”
I was on a stage somewhere, the spotlight blinding me. Morgan, across from me, had strapped on a Stratocaster. “I didn’t know you played a guitar,” I said. He placed a microphone in my hand. “What?” I called out and pulled myself from a strange dream.
“You were talking in your sleep,” Duncan whispered.
I chuckled hoarsely. “Yeah, I was in a band or something, standing up on stage with Morgan. He had a guitar. Well, not just a guitar. A Stratocaster.”
“I don’t know what to think about you dreaming about an old ex-husband.”
“Here’s the weird part. He handed me a microphone. Like I was supposed to sing.”
Duncan laughed at that. “I’ve heard you try to sing before.”
“My point exactly.”
He slid over next to me. “You be careful out there today, songbird.”
“Always.”
It would be up to Bach, but I was sure we were ready to make a move on one or possibly both of our homicide cases. But that was news I wasn’t about to share with Duncan.
I sat up and planted my feet on the wooden floor. “I might want to buy a small rug to step onto when I get out of bed on cold mornings.”
He took my hand. “Buy whatever you want, babe. When can we get married?”
“Let’s make plans this weekend, okay?”
“Sounds good. Give me a kiss, I’m hanging out here for a while.”
I made it to the office much earlier than usual, but Doug Vaughn had gotten there before me, anxious to report on the soil sample Hollis had plucked from the grill of Dave Shannon’s ATV. Sherry Linn had also arrived before me and was even perkier than usual.
Doug and I walked back to our desks and both noticed my phone’s voicemail signal blinking for attention.
“Do you need to get that before we start?” he asked.
“Nah, let’s hear your assessment.”
“I just want to make sure you understand I’m not an expert here,” he began. “It does match the sample I took from Murderers Creek, so it could’ve definitely come from there. But even an amateur like me can see that based on the volcanic sediments contained in the sample, it could also be from a similar geologic region. Just not Desolation Creek, which you said Mr. Shannon mentioned.”
“How are you so sure?”
“Well, for one thing, the Murderers Creek area in the southwestern portion of the county and the Desolation Creek area in the northeastern portion were formed in different geologic eras.”
“So the soil could’ve come from Murderers Creek and other places in the county, just not Desolation Creek.”
“An expert would be able to narrow it down further, but that’s the best I can do.”
“Thanks, Doug. That’s helpful. If you put in overtime analyzing the sample, be sure to add that to your timesheet.”
He blushed and gave me a quick nod, then commenced opening his computer.
I listened to my voicemail—a message from Harry Bratton, and he’d sent it last night.
“Maggie. The only prints on the goodies you brought me tonight were from that kid, Robert Cole, Jr. ”
Just as I thought. Lyle Davis had said Robbie was rumored to be selling heroin. Using it too, it seemed.
The voicemail indicator continued to flash. I listened and a guy sounding like a fourteen-year-old boy whose voice was changing introduced himself as senior lab tech Brad Gilbert out of the state lab in Bend. He asked me to call back right away, so I clicked off of voicemail and dialed his number.
“Gilbert,” he croaked.
“This is Sergeant Blackthorne from John Day returning your call.”
“Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I spoke to Lieutenant Bach earlier, and he wanted you to hear the lab findings from the source, and right away.”
“Hold just a second, Mr. Gilbert. I need to find a pen that works.”
“No problem.”
I fumbled in my top drawer and brought out a new pen. “Okay, what have you got for me?”
Brad listed off the DNA results, and by the time he was finished, I knew we all but had the bastard who pushed Janine from the lookout tower. I was still in the dark about J.T. Lake’s murderer, but a possible path to the killer might’ve finally opened up.
I attempted to contact Al to discuss how we should approach the lab’s findings and the new information from Harry Bratton, but he was apparently tied up in the other homicide case. I left a message and sat waiting for the next shoe to drop.
“Morning, Maggie, Doug.”
“Good morning, Mark,” I said.
“Have you had a chance to talk to Duncan about supper with Ellie and me?”
“Sorry, Mark. Slipped my mind.”
“Well, there’s a lot going on, I get it.”
“If Sunday works, that might be good,” I offered.
“Well, Sundays…are always a problem.”
I assumed church, or soccer practice, or church and soccer practice.
“You know,” Taylor continued.
I didn’t.
“Family day. Big breakfast. A hike somewhere. Then game night.”
“What kind of games?” Doug asked.
Thus commenced a discussion about games I vaguely knew about or I’d never heard about or the movies they were spun-off into or the movies that they were spin-offs from.
While Taylor and Vaughn rambled on in the background, I remembered I needed to confirm Cecil Burney’s doctor’s visit with the physician in Boise. Which turned out to be a good excuse to interrupt the discussion of games and spin-offs.
“Mark?” I handed him the con
tact information I’d gotten from Burney yesterday. “Sorry to interrupt, but I’m waiting to hear back from Detective Bach, and I’d appreciate you putting in a call to Cecil Burney’s doctor in Boise for me. We need to confirm that he saw Burney on Thursday the thirteenth.”
“I might have to get Boise authorities involved.”
“That’s possible all right,” I said. “Just tell them this is part of our investigation of the murder of an Oregon State Police sergeant.”
Mark nodded. “Yeah, yeah. That should work.”
“Especially because it’s true,” I quipped.
I tried calling Al one more time and then meandered to the front counter to chat with Sherry Linn, at least until Hollis got there. She seemed a bit friskier this morning, or just more willing to forward a forward question.
“All right, Maggie,” she said after some preliminary banter. “Would you please tell me what you learned from the home pregnancy test?”
“You’re assuming I used it.”
“Yes, I am, and what did it tell you?”
“How’d you get so smart about these things?”
She smiled. “Congratulations.”
Hollis opened the door looking as worn out as I’d been last night.
I made a show of checking my watch. “About time.”
“Sorry, Sarge. I fell asleep in the sauna.”
For his benefit, Sherry Linn and I laughed.
“Holly, once you settle in, meet me in the alcove,” I said.
Waiting for Hollis, I began to add the OSP lab findings to the Dave Shannon page. First, the most significant: The skin under Janine Harbaugh’s fingernails, the blood sample from the broken catwalk railing, the bloody rag found in the loaner vehicle Shannon drove, the paper cup from Shannon’s place, and the cell phone (Janine Harbaugh’s) all presented with matching DNA.
“What are we waiting for? Why aren’t we arresting Shannon?” Hollis asked after reading my notes.
“I can’t get Bach to answer his phone,” I said before returning to my train of thought. “Strangely related—or maybe not so strange—as you know, Harry found three sets of prints on the army-green tackle box. First, Cecil Burney’s, presumably because it belonged to him and was likely stolen from his pickup. Second, Robbie Cole’s prints.”
“Robbie Cole’s?”
“He’s in the system because of his time at MacLaren.”
“The kid who you tailed from the guard station yesterday, right?”
“Yeah. I saw him clearly, was almost close enough a couple of times to bump the little shit’s car, get him to drive a little faster. More to my point, I was at the guard station to retrieve a bag of drug paraphernalia a Forest Service worker had collected from the grounds. Turns out, Harry found Robbie Cole’s fingerprints all over the stuff in the bag.”
“So he was coming back to pick up his things?”
“Something like that, I guess.”
“Plus there’s the rumor from Burney’s nephew that Robbie Cole is dealing heroin.”
“That’s interesting too.” I pointed to the earlier notes I’d written on the page. “But even more interesting to me is that yesterday, Harry told me the unidentified third set of prints on the tackle box matched prints on Janine’s phone and the other paper cup you pulled from Shannon’s burn barrel.”
“All right, try reaching the detective again.”
“Let’s wait a bit. In the meantime, don’t you think it’s more than a coincidence that Robbie Cole keeps showing up on the periphery of both murder investigations?”
“How so?”
“Robbie had stashed his stash at Murderers Creek Guard Station. His prints are on the tackle box. His father is also Shannon’s father. That reminds me, I meant to add the brochure to the list.”
“What did the lab say about that?” Hollis asked.
I tapped on the list of DNA matches. “Bob Cole’s DNA proves he’s one of the biological parents of this person, who I’m saying has got to be Dave Shannon.”
Hollis nodded in agreement. “Back to your question about Robbie Cole being on the periphery of both murder investigations. Do you think Shannon might’ve reached out to Robbie, brother to brother?”
“I do. I also think Shannon was trying to get his father to pick up on the fact that he was living nearby.”
“So he goes to the Ford showroom looking for a job?”
“Yep.”
“Bob seems kind of clueless to me.”
“That pretty much sums up the man, I’d say.”
27
Morning, August 21
Bach was on the phone, fraught and on edge. He was reliably calm and dispassionate in most situations, including last year when he relieved himself of command after a gun battle with two of Asa Larkin’s henchmen. Always the strictest adherent to protocol, the detective had wounded one badass without forewarning the guy. That was all it took for Al to remove his service revolver and put me in charge of interrogating the suspected killers and closing out our homicide investigation.
But that was then and this was now.
“The situation here is confused and tense, and I don’t know if I can rely on officers to follow even the most basic procedures. Don’t let this get out, but a trooper has been wounded. And there are a lot more of them than there are of us. Backup is on the way, but I can’t leave at this point.”
“I saw the bulletin this morning, but I didn’t realize it was an armed standoff with a small militia. And this has something to do with the guy who was killed more than a week ago?”
“Yes. It wasn’t clear what prompted the initial incident until late last night when a group of angry ranchers and others gathered to protest the loss of some grazing land, which has turned out to be a previously unknown archeological heritage site.”
“The victim from a week ago was involved somehow?”
“He was one of the archeologists who pressed the case with the Bureau of Land Management to end grazing rights.”
“How large is the heritage site?”
“Twenty-five acres or so.”
“That’s it? All this over twenty-five acres?”
“The protesters claim this is just the beginning, that the government will eventually shut down the whole national forest to grazing. The matter’s been roiling for a while. And now sympathizers are arriving from all over the West and elsewhere to join the group.”
While Al continued describing the situation, I looked online for word of an armed standoff near La Grande. There were a terse few paragraphs, but the uprising appeared to actually be closer to Baker City. A photo of a makeshift compound—tents, trucks affixed with campers, large motor homes, small camp trailers, and other vehicles gathered together on a grassy patch of land—accompanied the piece.
“Are you all right, Al?”
“I’ll have to be. I’m the highest-ranking officer here, at least until Captain Howard arrives this afternoon with more troopers and the FBI.”
“I found a brief story about it, but it sounds like the standoff is taking place near the Elkhorn Mountains, not too far from Baker City.”
“You’re right, Maggie, but the victim lived in La Grande, and that’s also where his body was found.”
“I’m reminded of the takeover of Malheur Wildlife Refuge in next-door Harney County in 2016. Similar issues, similar response from supporters. The group’s leaders were on their way to John Day to meet with our illustrious sheriff when they were captured.”
“Did you live there at the time?”
“Moved here the summer after. Mostly, the local dust had settled by then.”
“So, about your homicide cases.” Al sounded more like himself now. “Corporal Macintyre can’t spare another detective right now, and even if he could, I would ask him to send that person over here so I can close out the Lake and Harbaugh killings with you. But that’s not to be, and it’s precisely why I had the lab technician call you this morning.”
“I did wonder why I got the wo
rd directly from the lab.”
“Tell me what should happen next,” he said.
“Arrest John Robert Davidson, alias Dave Shannon, on suspicion of murder.”
“I would start with a search warrant. That’ll put him on edge, and you have plenty of probable cause to convince a judge to sign a search warrant. Plus perpetrators don’t usually expect that and are sometimes thrown off-kilter by it. As you experienced in our last case together.”
“All right, though I think our judge would sign anything I wanted him to.”
“Besides his house, property, and vehicles, make sure your search warrant covers any computers and cell phones, too. As for the rest, your instincts will guide you.”
“And Hollis will be there.”
“Good instincts and Hollis. You don’t need much more than that.”
Thanks to the assistance of the City of Boise Police, Taylor had already confirmed what Cecil Burney and his nephew had claimed about their whereabouts on August thirteenth. So, after explaining the verbiage I wanted included, I tapped Mark for the task of training Sherry Linn on how to fill out a search warrant. In the meantime, Hollis and I went back over the collective wisdom scribbled on the murder board, made sure all of our pack supplies were in order, and loaded up our electronics and weapons.
“Maggie?” Sherry Linn stood at the entrance to the alcove. “Mark and I are going to the courthouse to submit the search warrant to the judge for a signature. But I wanted to mention I heard on the radio earlier that Janine Harbaugh had passed away yesterday.”
“Yes, that’s right, I’m afraid. I apologize for not letting you know that earlier.” I’d also forgotten to mention it to Duncan last night, and he’d known Janine pretty well. That’s how deep I’d learned to bury grief when I put my mind to it.
“I just wanted to make sure you knew.”
“Did the newscaster make it sound like an accident?”
“No. It was a pretty straightforward report. And short.”
“Good.”
She handed me the search warrant. “Would you check this over, make sure I put in all the details you asked for.”
Murderers Creek (Maggie Blackthorne Book 2) Page 25
