by Allen Kent
Eye for an Eye
A Colby Tate Mystery
Book 2
Allen Kent
Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kent. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the cases of brief quotations imbedded in articles or reviews, with attribution shown.
For information address AllenPearce Publishers,
16635 Hickory Drive, Neosho, MO 64850
AllenPearce Publishers © ©
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allen Kent
The Talisman Murder
Kent, Allen
All rights reserved.
ISBN:
ISBN-13: 978-1-7332173-6-1
DEDICATION
To my Southwest Missouri friends whose
stories of Ozark characters added such fun and
interest to this book
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful thanks to my team of readers: my wife Holly, Diane Andris, Juliet Scherer, and Judy Day. You all made this a much better book.
And special thanks to Uvi Poznansky for her cover design.
1
The two ancient women hunched together, gazing intently with filmy silver eyes into the cup between them.
“Ohhh, Edith,” one whispered in a high chirp, gripping her sister’s hand beneath the table. “Do you see it there in the leaves? By the handle?”
Her sister’s face tightened into a wrinkled frown. “I see it, Ethel. I was hoping I wasn’t reading it just right.” Both looked up from the flowered porcelain bowl at the stout, dark-eyed woman who sat across the cloth-draped table beside a teenaged girl whose features were a prettier version of her mother’s. The woman fidgeted nervously. The girl had been relaxing back on her spindle-backed wooden chair with a look of tolerant boredom, but leaned quickly forward.
It had taken twenty minutes to drive to the base of the wooded hill and the path that led to the old women’s cabin, then another ten to climb the quarter mile to their door. The session was approaching its second hour and the girl had been absently running through her mind the list of things she would rather be doing. It was a Saturday. Three of her friends had invited her to a float trip on Mill Creek. A girlfriend wanted to run up to Springfield to shop. Even her unfinished physiology homework seemed a more interesting alternative. But her mother spoke little English and the girl had been trained from childhood to be patient and obedient.
The ceremony had begun with the aged twin sisters preparing tea for four: a dark, loose-leafed Turkish blend that the mother provided after being counseled by a friend that the old women of the woods preferred a tea that reflected the tastes of the supplicant. The sisters steeped and poured it unstrained into the flowered cups, rounder and deeper than the delicate glass tea service the Arab girl was accustomed to. She and her mother had added cubes of sugar. The four women sipped leisurely at the strong, dark drink while the girl explained on behalf of her mother why she wished to have a reading.
“Our family has been away from our home in Ariha—that’s in Syria—for over a year now. We have heard nothing from our family: my grandparents or my mother’s brothers. Mother was told by a woman at the church we go to in Crayton that sometimes you can see what is happening in people’s lives.”
The old women had smiled and nodded in unison, encouraging the mother to sip until less than a teaspoon of liquid remained. They showed her how to carefully tip the few drops of tea out onto a saucer, then positioned the empty cup between them. As mirror images of each other, they gazed down at the dregs.
There had been a long pause before the woman who called herself Ethel spoke her concern. Her silver-white hair had thinned to wispy strands that gave her spotted head the appearance of being surrounded by a drifting halo. A bristly tuft of coarse gray whiskers sprang from the right side of her chin, just as an identical tuft marked the left side of her sister’s wrinkled jaw. The girl sat forward at the alarm in the woman’s voice, her mother leaning with her.
“What do they see?” the older woman asked in Arabic.
Edith answered without needing translation. “We begin our readings at the handle,” she said in a strained whisper. “It is often the message of greatest importance.”
“. . . and?” the girl prompted, her mother looking over at her nervously.
“And there has been a death,” Ethel said solemnly.
The mother gasped and covered her lips with a trembling hand. “Is it family? Can you see who it is?”
The sisters looked at each other for confirmation, shaking their heads in unison. “We cannot see who it is,” Edith said. “But it is someone from your home. Someone close. You will know soon.”
2
The explosion jolted me upright and into a cold sweat. I had been lost in a dream of the PTSD damned, crouching tensely forward as my squad led a sweep through some unidentified desert town. I had interrogated the village elders and learned nothing when a boy beckoned from an alley. “Follow me,” he said in a loud whisper. “There is a house in the next street where Al Qaeda is making bombs. I will show you the house.”
“Why didn’t the village elders tell me?” I called after the boy as he ran ahead through a narrow cross alley with mud walls pressing down on us from both sides.
“The elders are being watched. One of the men with them is always a spy. They are afraid to tell you anything.”
He pointed toward a two-story house of ochre brick, separated from the street by a head-high compound wall, its top laced with broken glass. “There,” he whispered. “You will find them in there. But be quick. If they know you are coming, they will blow up the house.”
The squad split and I followed my squadron leader to the grilled, wrought iron gate that opened into the courtyard. He reached across for the latch and lifted it silently. The explosion that followed jarred me back into a sweat-soaked bed and fully awake.
I twisted to the edge and glanced at the red digits of my bedside clock. 4:15 a.m. Instinctively, I replayed and analyzed the sound. Too full and deep for kids setting off fireworks down at the fishing access to the creek below the house. And it had been followed by the telltale rumble of destruction. Something had exploded with enough force to shake the house like a minor quake.
I switched on the lamp and was wrestling on my jeans when my cell erupted with the opening bars of the theme song from “The Great Escape.” Not a call from someone in the department. That would have been “The Magnificent Seven.” In Crayton, people have pretty well learned to bypass 911 and call straight to my phone. The local cell prefix, plus aces and eights. 1188. In a poor attempt at humor by our locally owned phone company, the numbers had been assigned to both me and the sheriff’s office, just with different prefixes.
I cleared my throat and tried to answer as if I’d been waiting up for the call. “Sheriff Tate.”
“Tate, this is Lonnie Heiskell.” He was shouting into his phone. “I’m working as night watchman over here at the creek water project. Somebody just blew the thing up.”
“Easy, Lonnie,” I said. “You’re yelling so loud I can hardly understand you. Someone blew what up?”
“The dam,” he bellowed into my ear. “Someone blew up the damn dam.”
Lonnie’s family moved to Crayton when we were both in the ninth grade. My clearest boyhood memory of him was of his offer to barter a week’s lunch money if I’d let him copy my algebra test answers. I’d agreed, slipped him my paper five minutes before the end of the period, and pocketed two-fifty. Mrs. Swisher called us both into her classroom after school the next day, sat us on opposite sides of her desk, and gave us new tests—different questions. I
’d done okay. Lonnie missed them all. We both went home with a note that led to my butt getting chewed by my mother and Uncle Jack taking a belt to me. That was the last time I thought it smart to sell information. Lonnie didn’t look any the worse for wear when I saw him the next morning. He was basically a good kid. Just bone lazy. Never could hold a job for long. Right now, he sounded wound pretty tight.
“Are you okay, Lonnie? Anybody injured?”
“No. The guard shack’s up on the hill above the creek. But I had some rocks fall on the roof, and one come damn close to near killin’ me. Another busted out the window of my pickup. I’m okay. But it scared the shit out of me.”
“Sit tight, Lonnie. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Have you called the company people?”
“No. I called you first thing. It just happened.”
“Yeah. I heard it,” I told him and grabbed for my uniform shirt. My Sig and holster hung on a wooden peg beside the bedroom door and were buckled on before I reached the mudroom and my boots.
As I drove the three miles to the dam site, I radioed Bobby Lule. Bobby’s our deputy who roams the county between midnight and when we open the office at 8 a.m. He’s also an ex-Marine, a solitary guy whose personal manifestation of PTSD inclines him to want to be alone. But when trouble raises its ugly head in the dark hours of early morning, Bobby’s not shy about facing it down and calling for help when he needs it. When I reached him, he said he’d been at Casey’s having a cup of coffee with Darren Sykes, the night patrol officer for the Crayton police, but had heard the explosion and was headed east.
“I thought I’d hear from you,” he said through the radio. “I couldn’t pinpoint the sound and didn’t see no light in the sky. Thought maybe a meth lab had blown up. But I figured you’d get a call and could tell me where I needed to be.”
“The new dam site,” I told him. “Lonnie Heiskell called and said someone blew up the dirt work that’s been done.”
“What the hell was Lonnie doing out there?”
“They’ve hired him as night watchman.”
“Hmm,” Bobby grunted. “Good job for him, ‘long as nothing happens. I’m about five minutes away.”
“About the same for me. I’ll meet you at the gate.”
Bobby’s headlights were right behind me when I pulled up to the guard shack that protected a sixteen-foot rolling gate in a chain link fence that disappeared off into the dark in both directions. Chunks of rock littered the scraped lot outside the fence as if it had rained boulders.
I’d swung by the site within a day of Mid-Missouri Water first putting up the fence. There wasn’t much to see from the gate and no real reason to get official and try to talk my way down into the hollow to see how construction was coming along. The plan was to back up Mill Creek, the stream that runs below my place, creating a 1500-acre lake to replace a city water supply that depended on two wells that either needed to go deeper or be replaced. The whole process has created one of the messiest public rows since I came back to Crayton three years ago.
As far upstream as I am, it won’t do much more than widen the creek and improve fishing. But for the folks who own bottomland in Blackjack Holler, it means losing property through eminent domain that’s been in families for generations. Tempers have been running at a low boil for nearly a year now. Even town folk who aren’t losing property aren’t thrilled that some of their neighbors are having theirs taken away and can’t do anything about it. Lots of this land, including the patch up along Huckleberry Ridge where I grew up, isn’t much more than limestone bedrock covered by enough clay to support hardwood forest and a little pasture grass. Good for raising cattle, but not much more than that. But it was homesteaded by hardy, independent folk five generations back. Those who’ve come after them are just as stubborn and don’t take kindly to being told someone can just up and buy their land without their say. And the river bottom along Blackjack Holler is some of the best in the county.
Lonnie was standing beside my Explorer before I could push the door open.
“Thanks for getting here so fast, Tate,” he stammered, stumbling backward as I forced him out of the way and climbed from the patrol car. Bobby Lule joined us. I led them both toward the sliding gate that had been pushed halfway open.
“So, Lonnie. Tell us what happened.”
He pressed so close as we walked that I found myself veering away. He reminded me of an old birddog I’d once had who was so frightened by gunshots I kept tripping over him when my friends were out squirrel hunting within earshot of our place.
“I was just sitting in the shed there, watching a video I’d loaded onto my laptop—the company don’t mind me doing that—when there was this huge explosion. The shed’s just sitting on skids, and I thought it was going to tip over. Rocked it up off the skids and half turned it. Then dirt and rocks started raining down. One came right through the roof. About a hundred-pounder, I’d say. Missed me by maybe a foot and smashed the hell out of my computer. Damn near killed me.” He pointed at a ragged hole in the shingled roof of the guardhouse. “And another took out my windshield.” A white Dodge Ram sat beside the shed with a few mosaic patches of glass clinging to the edges of the window frame.
“You been down there?” Bobby asked, forcing the gate open another six feet.
“Yeah. But I called you first, Tate. Then called Mr. Spangler who owns the construction company. He’s up in Springfield so won’t get down here for at least another hour. Then I walked on down to see what I could see. I only had my flashlight, and it’s pitch dark down there. But what they’d got done on the dam is pretty much blowed apart.”
I inched away from the clinging security man. “How much did they have done, Lonnie?”
“Not a lot, really. They’d diverted the creek through a concrete culvert that they can close up when the dam’s done and had started moving dirt. Maybe four or five feet on top of the culvert. But I don’t think it’s even a third done.”
The guard shack and fence were on the ridge above the construction site, with a gravel road that descended into the narrow valley on the downstream side of the dam. Another patch of ground had been cleared inside the fence and held an assortment of graders, dozers, and dump trucks. A dirt film covered the equipment, with one truck and dozer marred by deep craters in their yellow hoods. We swept the road with three lights as we moved down toward the creek, the rubble thickening as we got closer to the dam.
The explosion had thrown up a chest-high berm along the creek bed and we clambered up onto it, gazing down into what was now a half-acre pond. There was no sign of the concrete bypass.
“Damn,” Bobby muttered, flashing his light around the edges of the crater. “Haven’t seen nothing like this since I-raq. This was quite an explosion.”
I ran my own beam along the far bank, then into the broken trees around us. “And pretty well centered on the dam,” I added. “I was thinking on the way over here that some storage shed must have been storing dynamite and blown up. But this was set off right in the middle of the dam. No accident.”
“Nobody came by me, and the gate was closed all night,” Lonnie insisted defensively, pressing back against my elbow.
“You unlocked the gate when you came down?”
“Yeah. It was chained and padlocked. I had the key in the shed and had to unlock it.”
“We’ll check the fence when it gets light to see if it’s been cut,” I told him. “But as I remember, this fence doesn’t surround the site. Just stretched along the road for about a quarter mile in each direction.”
Lonnie nodded in the dark. “Yeah. It’s mainly to keep people from trying to steal stuff like gas or mess with the equipment. You could come in around it pretty easy—or come down through the trees on the other side of the creek.”
“You didn’t hear anything down here?”
“No.” He frowned down into the crater. “But I probably wouldn’t. You don’t hear much in the shack. And I was watching one of them Fast and Furious movies. Li
ke I told you, they don’t mind me watching that stuff while I’m on the job. I’m just there to keep people from trying to break in through the gate at night.”
I turned upstream along the edge of the berm. “Let’s have a quick look around for anything obvious,” I said to Bobby. “Then wait for daylight and Mr. Spangler to get here. We don’t want to tramp around too much in the dark, and he’ll be able to give us a lot better idea of what we’re seeing when it gets light.” Bobby grunted his agreement and headed along the berm in the other direction. Lonnie Heiskell remained planted where we left him, not sure whose side to cling to. I’d looped around to where the stream poured into the newly created pool and started back toward Lonnie when Bobby called from the downstream side.
“Tate. Better get over here.”
“You found something?”
“Yes, Sir. We’ve got ourselves a body.”
3
My thought as I scrambled along the edge of the crater toward Bobby’s light was that whoever had blown up the dam had damn well blown himself up with it. Bobby had moved downstream and into the brush along the creek bed, much of it shredded and flattened by rock shrapnel from the blast. Bobby’s shout had jarred Lonnie into motion and he joined me below the crater, pressed uncomfortably close to one elbow. As I neared, I could tell this wasn’t a body that had met its untimely end during the night.
“I smelled something as I got down this way,” Bobby called as I approached. “Followed my nose and found this. Almost didn’t see it up there.” He flashed his light up into a white oak that had been sturdy enough to withstand the blast.
The body was draped over a thick branch, face-down, about ten feet above the ground. As it had tumbled through the upper limbs, some of the man’s clothing had been ripped away, leaving the stomach and chest up to the shoulders exposed. With three flashlights shining up at the corpse, it was clear the man had been dead a few days. The clothing that remained was caked in dirt, and there were early signs of decomposition.
