Murderers Creek (Maggie Blackthorne Book 2)

by LaVonne Griffin-Valade

  “Pretty country. Then there’s the name. And now an actual murder’s happened there.”

  “You heard about Sergeant Lake’s homicide?” I asked.

  “Course I did.”

  It had turned overly warm in Shannon’s little house, as if the air had been sucked from the room. Out of the blue, I felt light-headed. I clicked off the recorder and stood. “Be right back.”

  I stumbled to the bathroom and washed my face. Seeing my reflection in the mirror, I looked as bad as I felt. I held the towel to my brow for a long moment, dried my hands and face, and took a deep breath.

  When I reached the living room, Hollis was eyeing Dave Shannon intently. He had turned the recorder back on. Something had happened.

  “Tell Sergeant Blackthorne what you told me.”

  “Robbie hangs out at the Murderers Creek Guard Station.”

  We knew that already. How did Shannon know?

  “He told you this?” I asked.

  “It’s where he likes to go to get high and party sometimes.”

  “Keep going,” Holly pressed.

  “He was really upset one day last week, stormed off. So I went looking for him. Knew I’d find him out there. He goes crazy when he gets loaded. I think that’s why he drives out there. Most of the time nobody’s around.”

  “What day last week was Robbie upset?” I asked.

  “Uh, Thursday.”

  “Sergeant Lake was killed on Thursday of last week. What time did you go out there?”

  “After you took my theft report and the drug dealers’ beater was towed off.”

  “So, you lied to Detective Bach yesterday.”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “He asked you if you left your ranch after I took your theft report last Thursday.”

  “Thought he meant in a car or pickup.”

  Bullshit, he’d told Al he was stuck here. “So you drove your ATV on the highway for a few miles, then turned up Laycock Creek Road, is my guess.”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Trooper Jones and I took a little detour up that way after we left your place yesterday. It probably took you a while to get to the guard station, but it can be done.”

  “Sounds like you’re suspicious I might be the officer’s killer.”

  “Are you?” I couldn’t help asking.

  A slight smile passed his lips. “Robbie was gone, and the guy was dead when I got there. I recognized the knife. It had been in the tackle box Robbie stole. So I threw it in the latrine.”

  We sat in the hot silence. Shannon was sweating, Hollis too. My mouth was dry.

  “Do you have a pitcher and three clean glasses in your kitchen?” I asked Shannon.

  “Think so.”

  “I’ll get us all some water.” I didn’t bother turning off the recorder before waltzing to the kitchen.

  I returned with a pitcher full of water and the glasses. I filled all three and handed Hollis and Shannon theirs.

  “Your fingerprints were on the tackle box, too.”

  Shannon nodded, which surprised me. I’d expected him to deny it.

  “Robbie and I went fishin’.”

  How sweet. “When was that?”

  He looked up at the ceiling, calculating. “Uh, the day before my truck was stole.”

  “Wednesday of last week?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  Just yesterday he told us that he’d taken his ATV out to Desolation Ridge last Wednesday. The faulty memory act was getting old.

  “Where’d you go fishing?” Hollis asked, keeping the conversation going.

  “Murderers Creek. Caught five or six rainbow trout.”

  “Anyplace special?”

  “Around a spot the Forest Service calls Stewart Cabin.”

  Hollis yanked his smartphone out of his pocket and began clicking away. When he found what he was looking for, he sent the phone over to me.

  “Interesting,” I said. “Stewart Cabin is located almost smack dab at the headwaters of Murderers Creek. Where you and Robbie left the tackle box, right?”

  “I had nothing to do with leavin’ it there or the heroin inside.”

  “But Robbie?” I asked.

  “A pastime left over from his years at reform school.”

  “Using or selling?”

  “Both.”

  “And the fishing trip the two of you went on, its only purpose was to leave the bundles there for Cruise and Porter to collect?”

  “Robbie finagled the deal. I just went along for the fishin’,” Shannon assured us.

  This ass was getting on my nerves. I rose and pulled up my company-issued handcuffs, brought his arms together behind the chair back, and locked the cuffs. “You’re under arrest for aiding and abetting in a felony drug operation, for starters. And for tampering with evidence in a homicide investigation.”

  “Did you think after all those years I spent studying Robbie, and finally had some kind of bond with the boy, I was going to rat him out?”

  “You’ve been ratting him out for the last forty-five minutes.”

  “Robbie needs help. He’s got some problems. You know, mentally.”

  Robbie wasn’t the only one. “Trooper Jones. Please sit with our prisoner while I step out and call Detective Bach.”

  Al’s phone was busy, so I left a long message. Afterward, I leaned against my Tahoe and let the entire conversation roll around my brain. The sun was blazing through the sky, tracking one more day half gone. I closed my eyes and let the river-and-juniper-scented breeze whip my untethered hair. Holly and I would have to go this alone, without Bach’s wise counsel. Well, without his seasoned presence, anyway.

  I returned to Shannon’s living room and sat back down across from our prisoner.

  “Could my hands be brought in front of me?” he asked. “My arms hurt.”

  I handed Hollis the key, and he unlocked and relocked the handcuffs, which allowed Shannon to place his hands in his lap.

  “Dave,” I began. “Did Robbie murder Sergeant Lake?”

  “You’ll have to ask Robbie that question. I only know I went out to the guard station that day hoping to find him there.”

  “But he left the guard station before you could travel there on your ATV?”

  “Yeah. Well, the ATV’s old and only goes about thirty miles an hour. So it took a while to get there.”

  The man was showing signs of exhaustion.

  “Do you have any straws in your kitchen?” Hollis asked.

  Shannon nodded. “In the drawer left of the sink.”

  Hollis rose and made a quick trip to the kitchen and back. He’d fetched a straw so Shannon could drink his water.

  “Thank you,” Shannon said. After he polished off the water, I offered him a refill. He nodded, and I poured the cool liquid into his glass.

  “Dave, just a few more questions,” I said. “Where did Robbie go when he left Murderers Creek Guard Station the day Sergeant Lake was killed?”

  “What?”

  “You said he left before you got to the guard station. Where did he go?”

  He stared out of the living room window. “I don’t know.”

  “Any guesses?”

  Shannon shook his head.

  “Did you notice anything strange about Sergeant Lake’s body or his clothing?”

  “Honestly, it was a sickening sight, so I didn’t spend much time checking him out. Just tossed the knife in the toilet and left.”

  “All right, we’ll ask Robbie about that when we interview him. In the meantime, I’d like to go back to Janine Harbaugh. She lived for three days after she was attacked and pushed from the fire lookout.”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah. I’d known her for a long time. She was tough. And fortunately, I was able to speak with her a couple of times while she was hospitalized. It turns out that before she was pushed from the lookout, she photographed her attacker walking up the hill toward her. On her cell phone. Remember earli
er I said I found it?”

  “The cell phone?”

  “Yeah, Janine’s cell phone.”

  “Could you tell who it was coming up the hill toward her?”

  “The photos were pretty blurry, but yeah.”

  He kneaded the large bandage again, the handcuffs now making that more difficult.

  “Quick question for you, Dave. What day did you let Robbie borrow your loaner truck?”

  My phone rang. I glanced at the screen. Mark Taylor. For all of his annoying habits, he would never in a million years call me during an interrogation unless it was important.

  I stood. “I need to take this.” I walked outside and answered.

  “Maggie, Doug just brought in Robbie Cole. He’s been arrested for harassing mule deer out in the Murderers Creek area. He was speeding around on an ATV. Anyway, I noticed Robbie’s dad is mentioned on the Dave Shannon section of your murder board and so is Shannon’s ATV.”

  “Good call. Wow, I didn’t think this case could get any weirder. Place the kid in juvenile confinement until I get there to question him.”

  “Will do.”

  “And, Mark? Thanks.”

  “All right, where were we?” I asked on returning to the living room.

  “You had asked Mr. Shannon what day he’d let Robbie Cole use the loaner vehicle,” Hollis reminded me.

  “Monday or Tuesday. I can’t remember which,” Shannon said.

  “Try harder,” I said.

  “All right, let’s say Tuesday.”

  Bingo. “Janine took the photos on Monday. And they’re of you, Dave,” I said.

  “That can’t be. I was wrong, Robbie had the loaner on Monday.”

  “Janine was attacked on Tuesday,” I lied.

  “All right, he borrowed the loaner on Tuesday.”

  “What time?”

  “In the morning. Yeah, like ten thirty.”

  “Janine was air-lifted to Bend about that time on Tuesday morning. She had already spent Monday night in John Day at the Blue Mountain Hospital.”

  “All right, now I remember. Robbie borrowed the loaner on Monday,” Shannon said.

  “I don’t believe you. I don’t believe Robbie borrowed your loaner at all.”

  “Maggie, there’s some mistake.”

  “But I’ll take part of the blame for Janine Harbaugh’s death.” I held up his sticky note referencing her and the lookout. “After all, I called you and let you know she had spotted Cruise and Porter driving your stolen vehicle all over Aldrich Mountain last Friday. If she could spot your truck using her fire finder and a powerful pair of binoculars, you thought she might’ve seen you out there on your ATV, driving toward Murderers Creek Guard Station the day before that.”

  Shannon bolted up and charged toward me. Hollis stood, wrapped his brawny arms around the man, and forced him back into the seat of his chair, where he bawled like a child.

  29

  Afternoon, August 21

  Gauging by the way Dave Shannon cradled his head in his cuffed hands, he had cried himself to a state of despair. He no longer wept, but his breathing was ragged and his bandaged face was inflamed. I checked the bathroom for tissues, and finding none, tore off several squares of toilet paper. I ran a clean washrag under warm water and offered it and the TP to him.

  “Thanks,” he whispered. He blew his nose and placed the warm washrag over the bandages. “I want you to know, I didn’t go out there to kill that lady.”

  “We’re listening,” I replied.

  “I kept thinking about what you said, Maggie, that she could see stuff from far off, and I just wanted to know if she’d ever seen anybody ridin’ an ATV out there. She said of course she had. I asked when, and she said, all the time. Out to the headwaters of Murderers Creek, I asked. She told me she’d need to check her map and went over to that thing with some kind of scope on it.”

  “The fire finder.”

  “That was it, I guess. So, then I made the mistake of thinking she was trying to help me out, and I walked to one of those big windows and looked out over everything.”

  He paused, exhaled.

  “Then what happened, Dave?” Hollis quietly asked.

  “She pulled out the smallest handgun I’ve ever seen and told me to get out.”

  We had gone through her belongings at the lookout searching for a firearm but found nothing to indicate she owned such a weapon.

  Shannon went on. “Before she could fire it, I knocked it out of her hand. Pushed her across the room and into the door. I just wanted to know who’d taken it.”

  He was breathing heavily.

  “Who had taken what?” I asked.

  “The tackle box. I’d convinced myself the truck thieves hadn’t found it after all. And then I convinced myself the lookout lady probably saw who took it. Thought I could scare her into telling me if I had to so Robbie and I could sell those drugs ourselves, get the money we had coming to us, and more.”

  This guy really was something else. “Where had the heroin come from?”

  “It was passed to Robbie from one of his reform school buddies. Never met the guy, though. Robbie called the meet-up with his buddy and our fishing trip to the headwaters ‘mule runs.’”

  “Why would Robbie bring you in on this deal?”

  Shannon shrugged. “He needed my help. More like he needed my ATV so he could take the stuff out to the headwaters of Murderers Creek in the first place.”

  “Dave,” Hollis began. “I don’t understand why the tackle box was left in such a remote location.”

  “That’s where the reform school buddy told him to take it, I guess.”

  “Why did Cruise and Porter stop at your sheep ranch the morning they stole your truck?”

  “For a map with detailed instructions explaining how to get to the headwaters.”

  “I don’t understand,” Hollis said. “Why would they have taken off without the map and instructions?”

  “Don’t know. They lit out in my truck before I got back outside.”

  “There was an Oregon atlas in their Toyota. With the Grant County pages bookmarked and Murderers Creek highlighted in yellow,” I put in. “Maybe they intended to grab it before they took off.”

  “Nah. Robbie said they found the atlas too confusing. They couldn’t follow it or find what they were looking for. Seems my truck was more valuable to them, I guess.”

  “I’m also curious why they were told to go to your place and not Robbie’s?” Hollis asked.

  “He thought one of his neighbors might notice if those two stopped by his house. Anyway, when they got here, they waited outside, and I went to get the map and instructions out of my file box. While I was gone, they drove off in my truck. Like I told Maggie that day, I’d left it unlocked and with the keys in the ignition.”

  “Did you talk to them at all?” I asked him.

  “They weren’t excited about driving into the wilderness to find the headwaters of some creek. I explained that we’d stashed the heroin inside a tackle box at a signpost marking the place. Dumb shits didn’t even know what a tackle box was.”

  A guy who leaves his vehicle unlocked and parked next to the highway with the keys in the ignition had a lot of nerve calling those two dumb shits, in my estimation.

  “That’s why they took your pickup, then. They might not have been very bright, but they figured out the old Toyota they were driving probably wouldn’t make it to any headwaters,” I said. “What about payment? When was that supposed to happen?”

  “Robbie said they were supposed to replace the heroin with ten thousand in cash, half for his buddy, the other half for us.”

  I glanced at Hollis. “I was there when their bodies and your wrecked vehicle were pulled out of a ravine. Neither had much cash on them, and none was stashed in the Ford F-150 or found in the vicinity of where it crashed.”

  “Are you saying they had no money? They planned to fuck us over? We’d get nothin’ and they’d have a shitload of smack to shoot up,
sell, whatever?”

  So this puke was referencing its street name now?

  “That’s right. And that you killed Janine Harbaugh for no reason.”

  “You gotta believe me, Maggie, it was an accident. I just wanted her to tell me where the tackle box was. Tell me who’d found it.”

  “How would she have known?”

  “I thought she could’ve seen who’d taken it through that finder.”

  “There’s a reason it’s called a fire finder. She could spot smoke from a great distance and, using the map attached to the finder and her binoculars, identify the approximate location of a blaze. But she could only view vehicles as they got much closer to the lookout, and then only if they weren’t obscured by the terrain.”

  “So she couldn’t have seen us drive out to the Stewart Cabin area or spotted Robbie on the ATV hauling the tackle box to the headwaters?”

  “Not only that, she couldn’t have glimpsed you driving your ATV to the guard station the day Sergeant Lake was killed. Isn’t that really why you went out to talk to her?”

  He paused. “Yeah. I didn’t want anyone to suspect me of killing the cop. But I never got around to asking her that question before she pulled out the gun.”

  “Well, you do understand that what you’ve just told us adds first-degree assault and first-degree murder in the death of Janine Harbaugh to your tally of charges.”

  The man kept his emotions in check when I presented him with that information.

  “What happened to her gun?” I asked.

  “Same as her phone, I tossed it.”

  “Is your rig unlocked?” Hollis asked. “I haven’t searched it yet, but you’re welcome to tell me if Ms. Harbaugh’s gun is stowed inside before I go do that.”

  Shannon stared straight ahead. “I think I’m done talking to you two.”

  “Just in case it’s locked, the keys to the truck are on his dresser in the bedroom,” I said. “But first, stand up, Mr. Shannon. Trooper Jones is going to search your person again.”

  After Shannon was patted down once more, Hollis retrieved the truck keys and moved outside. In the silence, I considered Janine’s gutsy move pulling out a gun, which prompted me to remember the ghost gun from the wrecked F-150. I had automatically assumed it belonged to Cruise and Porter.