by P. L. Gaus
Robertson closed his eyes and drew several deep breaths to steady his mind. Slowly, he lifted his hand to his face, and he felt with the pads of his fingers along the ragged line of sutures that had been used to close his wound. As he felt the alarming length of the wound, which started on his jaw-line below his left ear and arced across his cheek nearly to his lips, the sheriff whispered to Branden, “I got too close to the lion cage, Mike.”
“I know, Bruce. You were lucky.”
“Instinct,” Robertson said grimly.
“I know, Bruce.”
“I saw his face, Mike. First time in my life. I saw the face of the lion tamer.”
“It wasn’t a lion, Bruce,” Branden said. “It was just a man with a lettuce knife.”
Robertson shook his head, and as he lost consciousness, he said, “Face too close to the bars.”
• • •
While Robertson slept, the professor held vigil in a chair beside his bed. Branden tried his wife’s cell number, but Caroline didn’t answer. When he looked up from the phone, Robertson was struggling again to grasp the small plastic glass of water.
Branden rose and held the spoon with a sliver of ice to Robertson’s lips. The sheriff took the ice between his lips and then sank back onto his pillow, asking, “Missy?”
Branden held the glass of ice water ready and said, “Not yet. I can call her.”
“No,” Robertson said. “She has her hands full in the morgue.”
At the door to Robertson’s room, there was a knock. Pat Lance entered carrying a cell phone. She was still in her dusty-rose Amish dress and white apron. She wasn’t wearing her wig or her Kapp. She asked the professor, “Can he talk?” and Branden answered, “Little bits at a time. He whispers.”
Lance came up to the side of Robertson’s bed. Before she said anything, Robertson asked, with his eyes held shut and his mind dreading bad news, “Armbruster? Anything?”
“He’s critical, Sheriff,” Lance answered. “He’s still in surgery.”
Robertson grasped the sleeve of the professor’s shirt. “Mike. How long has it been?”
Branden turned to the wall clock, but Lance answered directly, “One hour and fifty-seven minutes, Sheriff. They’re almost done.”
Robertson turned to Lance and asked, “Is that his phone? He has a blue case like that.”
“Yes, it’s Stan’s phone,” Lance answered. “I’ve been going through it, to see who I should call. He has only two numbers listed I.C.E.”
Robertson closed his eyes again. “He has a sister down in Chillicothe. And his mother is still alive.”
“They’re all listed as just names, Sheriff. There’s no ‘Mom’ or ‘Sis’ like you’d expect.”
Robertson waved Lance out of the room. “Call the I.C.E. numbers, Lance. Gotta be family.”
As Lance left the room, the professor’s phone announced a call. He recognized the strumming tone, and to Robertson he said, “It’s Caroline.” He stood by the bed to take the call.
Robertson pushed himself up on his pillow and waited. Branden listened for a moment and then said, “I’m with Bruce, Caroline. I’m going to put you on speaker phone. OK, say that again.”
Muddled by road noises, Caroline’s voice sounded from the phone. “I’m driving to Akron behind the ambulance. They’re taking Ellie to Akron Children’s Hospital. There’s trouble with her pregnancy.”
Robertson became instantly agitated. He struggled to clear his voice, but he managed only to whisper, “Be OK?”
“What’s that?” Caroline came back.
“Is she going to be OK?” the professor asked for the sheriff.
“I don’t know. But her doctor told Ricky that they have better neonatal facilities at Akron. For preemies, Michael.”
Branden took Caroline’s call off speaker phone, and he retreated to a chair in the corner to talk with her privately. Robertson sank back onto his pillow. His head and arms lay immobile with the heaviness of lead weights. His thoughts seemed to swim against currents of viscous oil. Vaguely, he recognized Pat Lance as she came again into the room. The sheriff waved her up to his bedside.
“I talked to his sister, Sheriff,” Lance reported. “She’s driving up from Chillicothe. His mother will have to fly up from Florida.”
Next, a doctor entered the room. He inspected Robertson’s long arc of sutures and wrote notes on a clipboard at the foot of Robertson’s bed.
The sheriff fought mental sluggishness to frame a question. He pushed on Lance’s elbow to start her toward the doctor, and he managed to say only, “Stan?”
Lance asked, “Doctor, can you tell us anything about Stan Armbruster?”
The doctor slid his clipboard back into the bed’s charting slot. “He’s critical,” he said. “They had him in recovery, but his blood pressure dropped, and they’re deciding now if they can go back in, to try again to stop the bleeding.”
Branden appeared beside the doctor at the foot of the sheriff’s bed. “Why wouldn’t they do that, Doctor?”
The doctor shrugged. “They need more of his blood type, Professor. They’ve already used most of what we had on hand. They’re making some calls.”
Immediately, Lance drew her cell phone from the side pocket of her long rose dress. She jabbed her finger at Chief Wilsher’s speed dial, and when Wilsher answered, she said, “Stan needs blood, Dan. He needs it right now, if it’s to do him any good.”
Lance listened to the chief’s short reply, and she switched out of the call. Her eyes turned to the ceiling as if she had been listening to answered prayer. “They’re sending everybody here, Sheriff,” she said, turning back toward Robertson’s bed. “Dan is calling them all. Everybody. Holmes County, Wayne County, everywhere. To donate blood.”
• • •
When Bobby Newell entered the room, Professor Branden was standing again beside the railing of Bruce Robertson’s hospital bed. The sheriff’s eyes were closed, so Newell asked Branden, “Can he talk, Mike? He’s going to want to hear this.”
Branden pushed on Robertson’s shoulder, but the sheriff did not open his eyes. Branden shook the sheriff a little harder, and still Robertson did not respond. Branden laid his hand on Robertson’s chest, and the sheriff was breathing restfully. So Branden pulled Newell away from the bed and said, “I’ll tell him, Bobby, once he wakes up.”
Newell hesitated and roughed up the tuft of black hair over one ear. “I can come back, Mike.”
“He’s going to ask me who was here, Bobby. I should have something for him.”
“OK, it’s Earnest Troyer’s house,” Newell said. “In Sugarcreek. We went in to search it, and we found a cutting table for drugs in his basement. He’s been bagging cocaine, and he’s had a lot of help. We’re working through a list of contacts and messages on his phone. There are going to be a lot of arrests. Maybe a dozen people were involved.”
“He had to have had some help, Bobby. At the Helmuth farm. There had to be at least one accomplice to drive Earnest Troyer off the property.”
“I don’t know, Mike. Maybe Troyer followed Dent there. Maybe he had his own car. But on the drugs, he had plenty of help. Dozens of people, Mike. This is how most of the cocaine in Holmes County was being distributed.”
Branden arched a brow. “He managed the northern terminus, Bobby. All of Molina’s drug shipments eventually went to him.”
“Right,” Newell said. Nervous energy rippled through his muscles.
Branden shook his head and smiled as if he shouldn’t have been surprised. “He delivered more than pizzas, Bobby. He had a ready-made delivery route for drugs.”
“We’ve impounded his car,” Newell said, agreeing. “But we pulled out of his house.”
“Why pull out?” Branden asked.
“I called in the BCI labs. This needs to be handled at the state level.”
&n
bsp; “Did you tell the FBI, too?”
“Yes. I think I had to, Mike. I think we should let the state and the feds handle this investigation. I’m down to one detective, and she’s standing uselessly outside the surgical suites. Looks like she’s been Tased.”
“What about evidence of Howie Dent’s murder?” Branden asked. “You’ll find evidence in Troyer’s house in Sugarcreek.”
“I turned the house over to an FBI forensics team, Mike. We’ll process the scene at the St. James. And we have Troyer’s car. If the FBI finds evidence in Sugarcreek that Troyer killed Dent, then I’m willing to wait to let them tell us that.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Branden said.
“Maybe,” Newell said with a vexed smile. “My question is whether the sheriff is going to think that it’s reasonable, too.”
Newell turned to leave, but his phone rang. He stopped in the room to take the call. He said, “Hello,” and listened for several moments. Then he said, “Mike, I have to take this out in the hall. You’ll never believe who it is.”
• • •
As Newell left, Pat Lance returned with Armbruster’s phone. On the display, she had found a picture of herself, taken by Armbruster when she was in the Mast home, wearing the dusty-rose dress that Fannie and Irma had made for her. Lance showed the photo to Branden and said, “Stan took this. I didn’t know.”
Branden looked at the phone and said, “That looks like it was taken at the Mast farmhouse.”
“It was,” Lance said with a smile so confused and crooked that it turned only one corner of her lips. “And there’s more, Professor. He’s taken other photos of me on the job.”
Lance selected a second photo from the phone’s light box, and she showed it to the professor. It was a picture of Lance working at a computer, while she and Armbruster had been searching the Budget newspaper for evidence of Fannie Helmuth’s movements.
With puzzled chagrin, Lance asked the professor, “Has he been talking about me?”
To delay the obligation to answer, the professor gave a reluctant smile. But from his bed, the sheriff answered readily, “He likes you, Lance.” Then as he struggled to rise up on his pillow, the sheriff added, “I can’t believe you didn’t know that.”
Pat Lance stared back at the sheriff as if he had surrendered to insanity. She looked again at the photo on Armbruster’s phone, and she switched it off. Her face flushed with pink heat, and she spun around and hurried out of the room.
Robertson watched her disappear through the door. To Branden, he said, “I can’t believe she didn’t know.”
“Apparently she didn’t,” Branden said.
Robertson shook his head and reached out for his glass of ice water. He managed without help to get a chip of ice with the plastic spoon and slip it into his mouth. As he set the glass on the tray over his bed, the sheriff said, “Armbruster has to make it, Mike. He just has to. If he doesn’t, I don’t think Lance can handle it.”
Then the sheriff said, “It was my father, Mike. All these years. In all those dreams.”
“Who was your father?”
“I should have known, Mike,” the sheriff said. His voice trailed into a whisper as sleep pressed in upon him. “But I never recognized him. Until tonight. In that stairwell, with Earnest Troyer coming at me in the dark.”
Leaning in over the bed rail, Branden asked the sheriff, “Recognized who?”
“The lion tamer, Mike,” Robertson said as his eyes closed. “In my childhood nightmares. My father is the lion tamer. Taunting me to step close to the bars.”
34
Friday, August 19
10:55 P.M.
FANNIE’S CELL phone rang just as she and Reuben were crossing the Denison–Ashtabula Road on State Route 87 in northeast Ohio. In the hours since Fannie had emerged from the hotel outside Middlefield, they had been pacing slowly east in their buggy. The buggy was loaded heavily with provisions stacked in the rear cargo bay. Fannie had sat all day beside Reuben on the sprung seat of the buggy.
Reuben had managed the reins and the horse since leaving Middlefield. He had been careful to keep the rig well to the right side of the pavement. There had been light traffic on the roads, but it had been dark for several hours, and Reuben had anxiously been watching for a suitable place to turn off for the night. The journey had been made harder by a vaporous drizzle that had overtaken them from the west as soon as they had crossed into Trumbull County.
As her phone began to ring, Fannie checked the display and said to Reuben, “It’s Jodie, again.”
Reuben gave the reins a slap, but he offered no comment.
Fannie answered Jodie’s call. “Hi, Jodie, we’re still out on the road.”
“I’m worried, Fannie,” Jodie said. “I’m anxious. I don’t have much time, now.”
“We’ll meet you, Jodie. Early tomorrow morning. You’ll have enough time to get back to Akron with your money.”
On the buggy seat next to Fannie, Reuben said, “Whatever you think is best, Fannie. Tell her we have to stop for the night, but we’ll see her tomorrow morning.”
The rain came harder, and Reuben steered the horse into the little roadside town of Gustavus Center. He found a white-sided town hall on the right, and he pulled into its broad circular drive. To Fannie, he whispered, “We’ll park here for the night. It’s too dangerous to stay out on the road in this much rain.”
Fannie held her phone in her lap while she considered her decision. The rain increased its thudding spatter on the canvas roof of the buggy. A lone car passed by them on the road. With a resigned sigh, Fannie said, “We have to meet her, Reuben.”
Taking up her phone again, Fannie switched it from mute and said, “We’re near the Pennsylvania border, Jodie. Reuben wants to stop now, because the rain is getting worse.”
“I can be there by morning,” Jodie said. “Maybe by eight.”
Fannie whispered to Reuben, “Do you still think we should do this?”
Grimly, Reuben nodded a yes.
“OK, Jodie,” Fannie said into her phone. “We’ll meet you at eight tomorrow morning. On the Vernon Center Bridge. It’s on Route 88, crossing the Pymatuning River into Pennsylvania.”
35
Saturday, August 20
2:25 A.M.
IT WAS pain that dragged Sheriff Robertson out of sleep early Saturday morning. It was pain in his jaw, pain in his cheek, and pain along the entire length of his wound. There was pain when he swallowed, and there was pain at the core, the kind of deep pain that arises from wounded bone. With his eyes closed against the challenge of enduring it, he fumbled for the call button that would summon a nurse.
His wife, Missy, had been waiting beside his bed. She grasped his hand and helped him push the button. When her husband opened his eyes, she leaned in close and kissed his forehead. She held his hand and laced her fingers into his. With her other hand, she brushed her fingertips across the bristly top of his hair.
The sheriff’s eyes closed and then reopened. “Missy,” he said, looking at the ceiling to ride the pain. He wanted to pull her close to him, but he lacked the strength. His eyes closed again, and he dozed.
When the nurse arrived, Missy requested more pain medication for her husband. The nurse took up the sheriff’s chart and inspected his medications log. “Another hour,” she said. “We need to wait another hour.”
When the sheriff next opened his eyes, it was only ten minutes later, and Missy was still holding his hand. He turned his head slowly to her and asked, “Nurse?”
“She was just here, Bruce. She’ll be back as soon as she can.”
Robertson drew a labored breath. “Rough,” he said. “I hate hospitals.”
“I do, too,” Missy said. “But thank God for them.”
“No doubt,” the sheriff answered. “Anything about Stan?”
“He’s in recove
ry, Bruce, but they’re not very hopeful.”
“Blood?”
“They have enough, Bruce. They’re waiting to see if he can stabilize.”
“Wake him up,” Robertson growled. “Tell him to fight.”
“You need to let his doctors manage this, Bruce.”
Robertson appeared to sink into his pillow as if something there was pulling him into a nightmare. He seemed to retreat from a threatening vision. He rolled his head to the left and to the right, and he sounded like he was quoting Scripture when he recited, “Steadfast devotion to duty.”
“That sounds like your father talking, Bruce,” Missy said. “That’s something he would have said.”
“Heard it all my life,” the sheriff answered. His eyes were open now. He was awake again with the pain. “I heard it every day, Missy. ‘A man’s honor derives from his relentless and steadfast devotion to duty. It derives from his steadfast devotion to justice.’”
“Father or not, that’s all you, Bruce,” Missy whispered in his ear. “That’s you, Bruce, through and through.”
“Well, I got it from my father. Right along with my worst nightmare.”
“The lion cage,” Missy said.
Slowly, the sheriff’s chin tipped with a painful nod. He winced against the pain.
“It’s just a dream, Bruce. A stupid childhood dream.”
Robertson opened his eyes and turned them to his wife. “Have I been wrong all my life, Missy? To insist on wearing duty like armor? Because I’ll tell you, it requires the kind of self-assurance that I don’t think I have anymore.”
“Devotion to duty is not just your armor, Bruce. It’s your core.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe that’s gotta change.”
Missy pulled the sheriff’s hand farther into hers. She leaned in close to his ear. “You could do a few things differently,” she said. “But if you start doubting yourself, you’ll lose it all. Your entire department leans on you. They do it because they trust you.”
