A Mammoth Murder

by Bill Crider

  “More important,” Claudia said, “now that we’ve got two stories to write, we might become famous.”

  Rhodes thought that their plans for articles might have made them forget about selling their book with a handsome crime-busting sheriff as the hero. In a way it was too bad. The world needed more books like that.

  “Has Bud Turley been here today?” he said.

  “We haven’t seen him,” Claudia said. “Maybe after what happened last night, he’s ashamed to come out in public. I certainly wouldn’t blame him.”

  Rhodes had to grin at that. He couldn’t think of anything that would keep Bud away from something that might bring him a little publicity.

  “I take it that you haven’t had any trouble from that bunch you met at the restaurant,” Rhodes said.

  “Not a bit,” Claudia said. “But we told Tom about it, and he’s a little worried.”

  “Vandalism,” Vance said. “Those fellas might want to get a little revenge for what happened to them, and since they can’t do anything to you, they might decide to do it to us.”

  “I don’t think you’re in any danger,” Rhodes told him.

  “I didn’t mean us, exactly. I meant to the site. They could do plenty of damage here if they wanted to.”

  Rhodes wasn’t too worried about it. He said, “They’ve cleared out of the motel. I’m pretty sure they’re all back home by now, thinking about Bigfoot again. Only a couple of them really even know this dig is here, and Bud won’t tell them. He doesn’t want this place messed up any more than you do.”

  “Well, I hope they don’t decide to come around here and cause problems,” Bob Anderson said, coming over to join Vance and the two women. “My students will never get another chance like this. It’s something they can put on their college applications that nobody else is going to have.”

  “Bud Turley providing educational opportunities for future college students,” Rhodes said. “That’s something I never thought I’d say.”

  “He’s done a lot of people a good turn by making this find,” Vance said. “Whether he intended to or not. And I have to give him credit for bringing that tooth to your office instead of digging this whole place up by himself. He’d have made a mess of it.”

  It wasn’t that Bud was such a good guy, Rhodes thought. If he’d known he’d found nothing more than a mammoth’s tooth, he probably wouldn’t even have bothered with it. It was the thought that the tooth came from Bigfoot that motivated Bud, at least at first. Now he might be interested in the mammoth because it was going to get his name in the papers.

  “We’d better get back to work and finish up while we have the light,” Vance said. “I wish we could keep on with this during the school year.”

  “Maybe you could work something out,” Jan said. “I’m sure I could get down here on weekends, if nothing else.”

  “I know I could,” Claudia said.

  “Maybe I could, too,” Vance said. “Bob, what do you think?”

  “We’d love to do it,” Anderson said. “Or I would. And I’m sure most of the students would, too.”

  Even if they wouldn’t, Rhodes thought, they’d want it on their college applications. He said, “I have to go back to town now. It looks like you have things under control here, but be sure to call if you need anything from my office.”

  Vance said that he would.

  On his way back to town, Rhodes stopped by Bud Turley’s place. He could hear the loud country music playing from the shop in back, so he went that way and found Bud working on a four-wheel ATV

  When Bud saw Rhodes, he wiped his hands and turned down the radio. His neck was purple with bruises, and Rhodes figured it hurt, but he didn’t mention it. Instead he asked him about the ATV.

  “That yours?” he said.

  “Belongs to a friend,” Bud said. His voice was husky. “I’m working on it for next to nothing. It’s kind of like working on a big lawn mower.”

  “How long have you had it here?”

  “It’s been a few days, why?”

  “I was just wondering. Will it run?”

  “It’ll run,” Bud said, “but it runs rough. Just needs tuning up is all. Won’t take me long, now that I’ve got started.”

  Rhodes changed the subject to ask about Larry Colley’s truck.

  “I hadn’t thought about that truck,” Bud said. He was wearing his welder’s cap tonight, and he took it off to wipe the top of his head with the rag he’d used on his hands. “I didn’t know it was gone, and I don’t know where it could be. He took good care of that sucker. It was old, but it still ran good. You think the killer stole it?”

  Rhodes said he didn’t know. “How about your Bigfoot friends? Did they all get out of town all right?”

  “Friends, my foot.” Bud touched his neck with the tips of his fingers. “You saw what that damn Charlie did to me last night.”

  As Rhodes remembered the incident, Bud had been the aggressor, but if Bud wanted to remember it differently, Rhodes didn’t mind.

  “I just want to be sure he and the others got out of town,” Rhodes said. “I don’t want them causing any trouble out there at the mammoth dig.”

  “You think they might?” Bud seemed genuinely concerned. “That woman reporter talked to me about it today. She even took my picture. There’s gonna be a big story about it in the paper in a day or so.”

  “Those women I told you about last night want to interview you, too. You’ll be a celebrity, Bud. That is, you will if nothing happens to the dig.”

  “Nothing will happen. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll call Jeff and Charlie and give them the word. You can count on me, Sheriff.”

  Rhodes said that he hoped so. As he drove away, he was thinking about ATVs. Whoever had clobbered Rhodes at Colley’s trailer had been riding on one, and both Johnson and Bud had access to one. Rhodes wondered if Buck Sandstrom did. It was likely, since nearly everyone who lived outside the city limits owned one, and a lot of the people in town did, too.

  Rhodes wondered if all the trails to the killer had grown cold already, but he didn’t think so. If he kept worrying at the things he’d heard and the things he’d seen, something would point him in the right direction.

  Something always did.

  The next day Rhodes was up early and out in the yard with Speedo and Yancey when Ivy called him to the door. She’d been dressing for work and had her robe and house shoes on.

  “It’s Hack,” she said, handing Rhodes the phone. “He sounds happy.”

  Ivy knew as well as Rhodes that nothing made Hack happier than an emergency call.

  Rhodes took the phone just as Yancey sank his sharp little teeth into the bottom of his pants leg and started to shake his head from side to side. Rhodes bent over and took hold of Yancey’s jaws. Yancey didn’t want to let go. He growled, but a growl from Yancey wasn’t exactly intimidating. Rhodes persuaded him to let go. Then he told Hack to go ahead.

  “You need to get out to the mammoth dig soon as you can,” Hack said.

  Typically, he didn’t say why.

  “Why?” Rhodes said after a short pause.

  “Looks like they got big trouble out there,” Hack said. Ivy had been right. Hack sounded delighted. “The whole dang place has been torn up. Somebody’s vandalized it.”

  23

  RHODES DROVE TO THE SITE OF THE DIG. VANCE AND BOB ANDERSON were there, but the students hadn’t arrived yet. Rhodes figured they were in class and wouldn’t come out until that afternoon. Claudia and Jan weren’t there, either. Maybe they weren’t early risers.

  Hack hadn’t been exaggerating much when he’d said that the place had been torn up. Chunks of earth were rooted up everywhere. Some of the little red flags were still in place, but others had been trampled into the ground. One of the canopy ropes was broken.

  “I guess those Bigfoot hunters that Claudia and Jan told us about didn’t get the message,” Anderson said. “They must’ve decided to come out here and see how much damage they c
ould do, just to get back at you.”

  Rhodes had considered calling in a bulletin on Jeff and Charlie as soon as he’d gotten the call from Hack, but he’d thought it might be a good idea to wait and have a look at things first. Now he was glad he’d made that decision.

  “I don’t think those Bigfoot hunters did this,” Rhodes said. He pointed toward the trees. “Look all along the creek bank back that way.”

  Anderson and Vance turned to look in the direction Rhodes had pointed.

  “See how the bank’s torn up?” Rhodes said. “It looks to me like the feral hogs have been out here during the night, having themselves a little fun. They’re the ones to blame, not the Bigfoot boys.”

  “I think you’re right,” Vance said. “I should have known. They skipped a stretch before they got here to the dig, though. That’s what threw me off.”

  “How messed up are things?” Rhodes asked.

  “It could be worse. They didn’t really dig up anything. Mostly they just messed up our markers. Some of them we can get back in about the right place. Maybe most of them.”

  “Not all, though,” Anderson said.

  “No,” Vance agreed. “Not all. But enough. I took a few pictures of the layout before we left yesterday, and that’ll be a big help. If we’d been farther along, it might have been worse, but this can be fixed. I was afraid when we first got here that somebody had dug up the tusk and stolen it. That would’ve been a real setback. But it didn’t happen.” He looked back toward the trees again. “I’m sorry we called you out here, Sheriff. It was just a wild goose chase.”

  “That’s all right,” Rhodes said. “I’ve been on a lot of those.”

  Back at the jail Rhodes had to deal with the usual routine things. No matter how important a single case might seem, there were always other calls coming in.

  A fisherman at the lake had been backing his boat into the water and had kept on going. He was all right, but his truck was underwater. Rhodes had the man call a wrecker for that one.

  There was a complaint that during the night some young women had been driving around town mooning other drivers.

  “Nobody ever moons me,” Hack said when he mentioned the complaint to Rhodes.

  “You’re too old,” Lawton said. “Nobody’s gonna moon an old geezer like you.”

  “You’re not any spring chicken yourself,” Hack told him. “I’d say you were just as much of a geezer as I am.”

  “Maybe so, but I’m not the one whinin’ because young women don’t ever moon him.”

  “I wasn’t whinin’ . I was just sayin’ that it never happened to me.”

  “Sounded like whinin’ to me.”

  “Well, it wasn’t.”

  Rhodes stopped the argument by asking about another report he had. Someone was dumping trash illegally on one of the county roads.

  “Same place they’ve been dumpin’ it for weeks,” Hack said. “You want me to tell Buddy to stake the place out?”

  Rhodes told him that he didn’t think so. “Buddy will catch them sooner or later. He doesn’t like people who dump trash on the roads.”

  “Nobody does,” Hack said. “But that ain’t ever stopped ‘em from doin’ it.”

  The rest of the day went pretty much like that—lots of petty complaints, all of which could be handled by the deputies or left alone, and all accompanied by expert commentary from Hack and Lawton, who had opinions on everything. The problem was that all the complaints had to be dealt with, and many of them required a decision by Rhodes. They kept him busy, and they kept him from being able to devote all his attention to the murders.

  It was the middle of the afternoon before things slowed down enough for Rhodes to get out the reports on the disappearance of Ronnie Bolton and start reading through them again. He couldn’t help thinking that if he just read over the reports enough times, whatever he’d overlooked would jump out at him.

  It didn’t. He was flipping through the pages for the third or fourth time that day when the phone rang yet again and Hack answered. Rhodes could tell from his tone that he was getting excited only a few seconds into the call.

  “I’ll get the sheriff right out there,” Hack said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Those last words were the ones that bothered Rhodes. They never meant anything good.

  Hack hung up the phone and turned to Rhodes. There was a smile on his face, another sure sign of trouble. “You need to get back out to the mammoth dig. They’ve found something.”

  Rhodes hoped Hack was going to tell him it was a tusk. Or maybe some Clovis points that would prove that the mammoth had died at the hands of ancient hunters. The news, however, wasn’t that good, not that Rhodes had expected it to be.

  “What have they found?” Rhodes said.

  “More bones.”

  There was nothing surprising in that, so Rhodes just waited. He knew there was more to come, and eventually Hack would get it told.

  “Human bones,” Hack said.

  “From mammoth hunters?”

  “No,” Hack said. “They’re not that old. Tom Vance says they’re not very old at all.”

  Rhodes stood up.

  “I’m on the way,” he said.

  When Rhodes arrived at the mammoth dig, the canopy was stretched out, and the little flags were all back in place, at least as far as Rhodes could tell, but nobody was there. Vance, Anderson, the students, Claudia, and Jan were all fifty or sixty yards away in the direction of the trees. They stood in front of three tall native pecan trees and looked down at something on the ground as they talked together.

  Rhodes walked along the bank to where everyone was. Jan saw him first.

  “You need to have a look at this, Sheriff,” she said. “Toby’s the one who found it.”

  A girl from Anderson’s class gave Rhodes a shaky smile. “I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I was just walking along down here to, well …”

  Her voice trailed off, and Rhodes looked along the bank at a thick stand of what his father had always called privy cane. Rhodes thought it might be some kind of bamboo. At one time, people had grown it around their outhouses to hide them. These days, when there weren’t a lot of outhouses, a stand of it could provide a place to have a little privacy for bodily functions if you were caught short out in the country.

  “I think the hogs rooted it up,” Vance said. “It must have been buried in the bank at one time.”

  Rhodes didn’t have to ask what it was. He could see the bones sticking out of the earth. He was surprised the hogs hadn’t made more of a mess of them, but the hogs hadn’t really been feeding. They’d been more interested in just rooting up the earth and moving along than in more serious matters.

  The bones looked small. Remnants of cloth clung to some of them.

  “We haven’t touched anything,” Vance said.

  “Good,” Rhodes said. “This is a crime scene now. You can all go back to your own excavation, but I might want some expert help later.”

  “Who is it?” Claudia said. “Do you know?”

  “Maybe,” Rhodes said, thinking of Ronnie Bolton.

  After Rhodes had looked over the site, he called on Vance for the expert help. Vance carefully unearthed the rest of the bones, and it didn’t take an expert to see that they had once belonged to a boy of about Ronnie Bolton’s size. Rhodes could see the rib cage, and one of the bones had a large chunk missing. It might have been broken off by a bullet.

  Ronnie’s dental records would be easy to get, but Rhodes was already convinced from what he’d seen that the bones were Ronnie’s remains and that he’d been shot. Soon after that, he’d been buried at the foot of the three pecan trees, which had been a little smaller then.

  Rhodes looked up toward the road. A row of bushes and high weeds grew all along it. From the road it would be hard to see anyone down where Rhodes stood, and it had probably been much the same when Ronnie had been buried.

  Not that many years ago, Ronnie Bolton had been having a good tim
e at his family reunion. He’d wandered off with his cousin, the way boys will, and someone had killed him. Rhodes had never really expected that Ronnie would be found alive, but now that he was seeing what he believed to be solid evidence of the boy’s death, he felt a little hollow inside. It was bad enough when someone as old as Louetta Kennedy was deprived of the remaining days of her life, but it seemed even sadder and more unfair when the victim was someone as young as Ronnie Bolton had been.

  Rhodes tried to shake off the feeling. It wouldn’t do him any good. He looked around at the burial site. He didn’t expect to find any clues, not after the years that had passed, and he didn’t. He went back to the county car and radioed Hack.

  “You got an ID yet?” Hack asked when Rhodes told him the situation.

  “No,” Rhodes said. “Just a guess.”

  Hack had the same guess. “Ronnie Bolton.”

  “Maybe.” Rhodes wanted to be sure he hadn’t missed anything. “Get hold of Ruth and send her out here to work the crime scene.”

  “Ten-four,” Hack said.

  “I think we have three stories to write now,” Jan said when Rhodes went back down to the dig.

  “Maybe they’re all connected,” Rhodes said. He didn’t mention Ronnie Bolton or his disappearance. “Sometimes things we think are over with aren’t finished after all.”

  Jan said, “Larry Colley was killed in the woods over there, and the body of somebody else was found right here. So we have a kind of connection already. Propinquity.”

  It was a college-professor word, but Rhodes thought he knew what she meant.

  “You could start with that,” he said. “And see where it leads you.”

  “The question,” Claudia said, “is where does it lead you?”

  Rhodes said he wished he knew.

  “See,” Hack said. “This is when you need CSI: Blacklin County. Those CSI fellas could tell you plenty just from examinin’ those bones.”