A Mammoth Murder

by Bill Crider

  “I already know plenty,” Rhodes said. He was looking through the reports on Ronnie Bolton’s disappearance one more time. “I know he was shot, and I know he was buried. What more do I need?”

  “You need to know who it is,” Lawton pointed out.

  “The dental records will tell us,” Rhodes said, but he was already convinced he didn’t need them. He thought that Hack and Lawton were, too. “Anyway, I’ve sent the remains to the state crime lab. They’ll be careful and thorough.”

  “Well, they better be.” He confirmed Rhodes’s suspicions by adding, “Have you called the Boltons yet?”

  “I had to call them to get access to the dental records. Dr. Lowery will send them to the state lab.”

  Rhodes thought about how Bolton had sounded when they’d talked. He hadn’t been excited about the news. If anything, he’d been subdued, but maybe he was keeping his voice down because he didn’t want his wife to hear.

  “Do you think it’s Ronnie?” he’d said.

  “I can’t be sure,” Rhodes had told him. “We’ll have to wait for the lab to give us a positive ID. My guess is that it’s him, but I don’t think you should mention it to your wife yet.”

  “I won’t. I hope … I don’t know what I hope.”

  Rhodes didn’t know what to say because he couldn’t imagine what Bolton was feeling. For years there had been at least a chance, no matter how slim, that Ronnie was alive—and an even slimmer chance that one day he might somehow return. If the story the bones told turned out the way Rhodes thought it would, then even that slim hope was gone.

  On the other hand, while it would be the end of hope, it would also be the end of uncertainty, and that might be a good thing. Rhodes wasn’t sure, though, whether the two things balanced out. Only Gerald and Edith Bolton would ever know that.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as we’re sure,” Rhodes had said, and Bolton had thanked him before hanging up.

  “You think you’re gonna find some kind of answer in those old reports?” Hack said, breaking into Rhodes’s thoughts.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” Rhodes told him, forgetting about his phone call to Bolton and concentrating on the papers scattered around on his desk. “I might.”

  His eyes wandered to one page in particular, the one that contained a description of the clothing Ronnie Bolton had been wearing on the day he disappeared: a Dallas Cowboys cap, jeans, a blue and silver Cowboys jersey.

  Rhodes read the description again, thinking about the scraps of clothing that remained with the bones that the hogs had turned up. He looked back at the report. Cap, jeans, a blue and silver jersey.

  Then Rhodes knew what he’d been overlooking all along.

  24

  IT WAS THE CAPS.

  Everybody wore caps. Even Claudia and Jan had gotten them for the dig.

  There had been no cap on or near Larry Colley’s body in Big Woods, but Rhodes couldn’t remember ever having seen him without one.

  Louetta had been wearing some kind of cap when Rhodes had last seen her alive. He tried to remember what the words on it had been, and after a second they came to him. CORNELL HURD BAND. The band was a group of ten or eleven musicians from Austin. Rhodes had heard one of their CDs and enjoyed it, which was why he’d remembered the name.

  But there hadn’t been a cap near Louetta’s body when Rhodes had found her, either. There hadn’t even been one in the store. The cap had disappeared.

  And there was nothing that looked like a cap among the scraps of clothing with the bones that had been unearthed on the creek bank.

  Three people, all dead.

  Three caps, all missing.

  It was possible that Rhodes just hadn’t seen the pieces of the cap with Ronnie’s bones—he couldn’t stop thinking of them as Ronnie’s—but the other two were clearly missing.

  Rhodes reminded himself that Larry Colley might not have been wearing a cap when he was killed. The wound in the back of his head wasn’t a clue. Colley had been hit on a spot a bit lower than where a cap would have been, so no trace of the cap would have been embedded in the wound.

  Colley always wore a cap, though, Rhodes told himself. He was sure of it. Colley and Bud both wore the same kind, the long-billed welder’s model.

  So where were the caps?

  Rhodes wondered if he could be dealing with a serial killer, the kind who took souvenirs from his victims. It hardly seemed likely that a serial-killer could be roaming loose in Blacklin County, especially one who killed only three people, one long ago and two hardly a day apart. Serial killers weren’t supposed to work like that. Then again, serial killers weren’t exactly operating along the lines of anything resembling so-called normal behavior.

  “You’re lookin’ mighty serious,” Hack said, interrupting Rhodes’s train of thought for the second time. “You must be onto somethin’.”

  “Maybe I am,” Rhodes said, “but if that’s so, I’m not sure what it is.”

  “You could ask me and Lawton about it. We might not be hotshot professional lawmen like you, but we’re both pretty smart fellas.”

  “Did you ever see Larry Colley without a cap on?” Rhodes said.

  “Now what kind of a question is that? It’s not much of a challenge.”

  “It might be for somebody with a memory like yours,” Lawton said. “Why don’t you tell him the answer, if you think you know what it is.”

  “I know what it is, all right, which is more than I can say for you. You’re about as likely to know as a one-eyed alley cat.”

  “Why don’t you both tell me at once,” Rhodes said. “On three. One. Two …”

  “Yes,” both men said almost together.

  “Dang cheater,” Lawton said to Hack. “You’re supposed to wait till he says three.”

  “Yeah? What about you, I didn’t hear you waitin’. Who’s the cheater?”

  “I don’t know who the cheater is,” Rhodes said, “but I do know who the sheriff is. And he’s going to arrest both of you for disturbing the peace if you don’t behave yourselves.”

  “I’m behavin’,” Hack said. “He’s the cheater.”

  “Never mind,” Rhodes said before they could get started again. “Here’s another question for you. And no cheating. What kind of car does Mary Jo Colley drive?”

  That quieted them down because, as it turned out, neither one of them knew the answer.

  “Who cares, anyway?” Lawton wanted to know.

  “I do.”

  “Why?” Hack said.

  “I have a curious nature,” Rhodes said.

  The truth was that while Rhodes hadn’t considered Mary Jo a suspect, he was now having his doubts. The incident at the library could have been her attempt to throw suspicion on Karen Sandstrom in order to avoid being suspected herself.

  Would Mary Jo collect the caps of her victims? She didn’t wear a cap. She wore a western hat, or she did at work. Rhodes couldn’t imagine why she’d take caps from murder victims. Of course, he couldn’t imagine why anyone else would, either.

  Rhodes picked up his phone and called Sam Blevins. When Sam came on the line, Rhodes asked about Mary Jo’s car.

  “An old Ford, I think. Don’t know what year. Gray. They all look alike to me these days. Far as I know it could be a Chevrolet or even a Buick. Why?”

  “I was just wondering,” Rhodes said.

  He thanked Sam for his help, such as it was, and hung up. It seemed safe enough to disregard Mary Jo as a suspect. Louetta wouldn’t have paid much attention to her car, and if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered with a vehicle so nondescript.

  The Sandstroms were still in the mix, though. It was time to start checking up on where they were the day Larry Colley was killed.

  Lanny, the Quickie Lube employee Rhodes had talked to, turned out to be Lanny Langstrom, and he wasn’t too happy to see Rhodes show up at his door late that afternoon. He was still wearing his jumpsuit, but he didn’t have on his cap. His dark hair was plastered down on h
is head. Rhodes could hear a TV set playing somewhere inside the house.

  “My wife’s fixing supper,” Lanny said, coming out onto the porch and closing the door behind him. “I’d just as soon talk out here if it’s all right with you.”

  It was fine with Rhodes. He told Lanny that he wanted to ask a question about his employer.

  “I don’t know if you’re supposed to tell stuff about someone you work for,” Lanny said, looking doubtful. “I think you’re supposed to keep it confidential.”

  “That’s lawyers and doctors,” Rhodes said, wondering where Lanny had picked up that nugget of misinformation. “They have confidential relationships with their patients and clients. Everybody else is allowed to talk.”

  “Well, you’re the sheriff,” Lanny said, rubbing the side of his head just above his right ear. “I guess you’d know about stuff like that. Unless you were trying to trick me.”

  “I’m not trying to trick you. It’s just a simple, straightforward question.”

  “OK. Go ahead and ask me.”

  “When I was at the Quickie Lube the other day, you said Buck Sandstrom was there all the time. Is that strictly true?”

  “What do you mean by ‘strictly’?”

  “I mean is he there all the time.”

  “Well, everybody has to have lunch,” Lanny said.

  Not everybody, Rhodes thought, remembering that he hadn’t, but he nodded his agreement.

  “So he’s not there all the time,” Lanny said. “He takes a break from about noon till one, or that’s what he always says. ‘I’ll be back at one.’ He gets back early, though. Sometimes I wonder if he thinks we’d screw things up if he left us for very long.”

  “He never takes a long lunch hour?”

  “Shoot, no. He’s all over us, down there in the pit, checking up on the office worker, making sure we do the whole checklist instead of just part of it, and telling us what we can do to …”

  Lanny’s voice trailed off before he admitted that Buck was engaged in helping sell the customers an air filter or set of wiper blades, but Rhodes wasn’t interested in that. If Lanny was telling the truth, and Rhodes didn’t doubt him, then Buck wouldn’t have had the time to kill Larry Colley or Louetta Kennedy.

  Just to be sure, Rhodes said, “What about this week in particular? Any late lunches, any time off?”

  Lanny rubbed his head again, as if doing so helped him to think. “Like I said, he’s always there, checking on us. This week, every week. Not that he stays late or comes early. He’s always right on time. Opens up on the dot, closes on the dot. He says a man should be at home with his family as soon as the whistle blows.”

  Lanny looked over his shoulder at the door, a sure sign that he was hoping Rhodes would go away and let him be with his family.

  “Not that we have a whistle,” Lanny said. “But you know what I mean.”

  Rhodes said that he knew and thanked him for the information.

  “You’re not gonna mention to Buck that I talked to you, are you?” Lanny said. “I mean, you’re like a lawyer and a doctor, right? You have to keep stuff confidential.”

  “I won’t tell anybody,” Rhodes said. “You can trust me on that.”

  Lanny stood on the porch watching as Rhodes went to the county car. It was a shame, Rhodes thought, that some people didn’t trust their local sheriff.

  Rhodes didn’t bother to check up on Karen Sandstrom. She was too frail to have killed Colley and Louetta. She could have done it with a pistol, but not by brute force.

  As Rhodes drove home, he thought that he was narrowing down his list of suspects pretty well.

  In fact, there was now only one name left on it.

  Bud Turley.

  25

  “YOU DON’T REALLY THINK BUD WOULD KILL HIS BEST FRIEND, do you?” Ivy said.

  She and Rhodes were sitting in the kitchen, eating their low-fat meal, veggie enchiladas, which Rhodes had to admit weren’t bad. They were spicy, and the mushrooms inside the rolled corn tortillas were almost as good as meat. The other vegetables—zucchini, spinach, black beans—were also tasty and filling.

  Of course, a platter of cheese enchiladas at the Jolly Tamale, Rhodes’s favorite Mexican restaurant—which was, for that matter, the only Mexican restaurant in Clearview—would have been a little more satisfying, but Rhodes didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention that.

  “Bud’s the one it comes down to,” Rhodes said. “I’m still trying to figure out the motive and everything else, but Bud is definitely the number-one suspect.”

  Rhodes wondered what Lanny would think if he knew that the sheriff was discussing suspects with his wife. Lanny would probably think Rhodes was betraying confidential information and should be kicked out of office.

  Ivy wasn’t buying Rhodes’s idea. She said, “I just don’t think a man would kill his best friend. There’s an article in the paper today about how Bud found the mammoth, and it mentions all the years that he and Larry Colley palled around together. Bud sounds awfully upset that his friend’s dead.”

  Rhodes hadn’t seen the paper, but he was sure that Jennifer Loam had done her usual excellent job of reporting. He wondered if Claudia and Jan had gotten any pointers from her. He also wondered if Claudia and Jan were doing any writing of their own, or if they were just working at the mammoth dig. Maybe he should have asked them if they had any new theories about Larry’s death. He could use the help.

  “Besides,” Ivy said, “how does all this fit in with Ronnie Bolton?”

  Rhodes had told her about the discovery at the mammoth dig, and she’d hit on another point he hadn’t quite worked out.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Yet. But I will.”

  “You think there’s a connection?”

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  Ivy got up from the table and started clearing away the dishes. Rhodes finished up his enchiladas, along with what was left of his pinto beans and Mexican rice, two more low-fat foods that he liked just fine, especially with salsa on them.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of any connection,” Ivy said.

  She set two slices of red-meated seedless watermelon on the table in big plates. Rhodes liked watermelon, but he had an odd habit, one that he’d picked up as a kid. He liked to put salt on it, something that Ivy couldn’t understand.

  “It’s the combination of sweet and sour,” he said as he sprinkled on the salt. “It makes the watermelon even better.”

  Ivy shook her head. “If you say so.”

  Rhodes hadn’t told her about the missing caps, but he thought he’d wait until he finished eating.

  When he’d scraped the watermelon right down to the rind, Rhodes pushed back his chair and told her his theory about the caps.

  “That’s pretty shaky if you ask me,” Ivy said when he’d laid it out for her. “Anything could have happened to Louetta’s cap. What if somebody came by the store and just took it?”

  “Why would anybody do that?”

  “I don’t know, but it could have happened. And you don’t even know for sure that Larry was wearing a cap. Besides which, you don’t know for sure that Ronnie’s cap isn’t buried there near where his bones were found.”

  “You might as well go ahead and say they aren’t his bones,” Rhodes told her.

  “I wouldn’t say that. I believe they are.”

  “And I believe the rest of it.”

  Ivy got up and put the watermelon rinds in the trash and the plates in the sink.

  “Then you must be right,” she said. “After all, you’re the sheriff.”

  “You better believe it,” Rhodes said.

  The next morning Rhodes thought he had the answers that had been eluding him.

  Sometimes it worked like that. He’d go to sleep with a problem on his mind, and during the night his unconscious mind would work it all out.

  Not that he trusted his unconscious mind to be a hundred percent reliable. He preferred logic to the mysterious workings of
the brain during sleep. After all, if his dreams were anything to judge by, his unconscious mind was a real piece of work.

  While he ate his shredded wheat—with low-fat milk, naturally—Rhodes read the article about the mammoth dig in the Clearview Herald, but he couldn’t really concentrate on it. He was too busy thinking about the connections he’d made while he was asleep.

  Ivy came in with Yancey trailing along behind her. He never yipped at her, not the way he did at Rhodes, something that Rhodes had never quite figured out.

  As soon as he saw Rhodes, Yancey pranced over to the table and started to bounce around Rhodes’s chair. He was quiet for a while, but soon the yapping began.

  “He wants to go out,” Ivy said.

  “I know,” Rhodes said. He spooned in a rectangle of shredded wheat. “I’ll take him in a little while.”

  “Don’t forget to change the water in Speedo’s bowl.”

  “I won’t.

  “And feed him.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “And be careful today.”

  “I’ll do that, too.”

  Ivy went away to get dressed, and Rhodes finished the shredded wheat, washed out his bowl, and put the bowl in the dishwasher. Yancey was at his heels the whole time, but he’d stopped barking.

  He started up the instant Rhodes opened the door, however, and he bounded out to find Speedo, who was waiting for him. The two of them charged around the yard for a while, with Yancey displaying complete unconcern for the fact that Speedo, a border collie, was several times his own size. Rhodes was certain that Yancey didn’t even know that Speedo was bigger, or, if he knew it, he didn’t believe it.

  While the dogs romped, Rhodes sat down on the step of his little back porch and went through the events that he now believed would lead him to the answer to the question of who had killed Larry Colley.

  If it went back to Ronnie Bolton, as Rhodes believed it did, then Bud had also killed Ronnie. Just why was something Rhodes’s unconscious mind had neglected to tell him. It would have helped to have a motive. Maybe that would come later.