Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112)

by Simonson, Sheila

“Do you have something I could put this in, an envelope or a baggie?”

  The ghost of Feckless Meg, teenaged rebel, rose in her, and she almost denied possessing anything as incriminating as a baggie. He was a cop. Reason triumphed. She yanked open the drawer to the left of the sink and found a self-sealing plastic bag.

  He slipped the shard into it and laid the bag on the counter. “Shall we have a look?”

  “Not if I’m going to be jumped by a Libertarian hound.” She dug in a lower drawer. “Here’s a flashlight. The garage light’s not very bright.”

  He took the big flashlight from her, hefting it as if it were a weapon. “Let’s go.”

  The dog had slunk back. It was huge, beautiful, and terrifying. A strip of sleek hair grew backwards along the ridge of its spine. When the dog saw Neill it crouched in the driveway and woofed. Neill squatted down, eyeball to eyeball, and grabbed it by its collar. “Towser, go homel” He released the collar and gave the beast a swat.

  It loped off with another sweet woof.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Experience.” He shone the light into the interior of the garage. Something scuttled away. “A rat.”

  “Ew.”

  The beam of light shifted, steadied. He didn’t enter the garage.

  “Shall I turn the overhead light off?”

  “I think we have a problem,” he interrupted.

  “We?”

  He turned to her, face serious. “Something is buried there in the center of your garage. Animals have been at it, probably for some time. I’m going to call Dispatch.”

  Meg opened her mouth to protest, shut it, and stared.

  His eyes were grave, frowning. “Did you walk around much in there, touch anything?”

  She pointed. “I walked along that edge to the back door.” She described her actions of the afternoon.

  “Where did you find the petroglyph?”

  “There.” She jabbed a finger toward the center.

  “Pity you picked it up.”

  “I wouldn’t deliberately mess with evidence.” Evidence of what? “You haven’t even gone in to look.”

  “No, and I won’t. It’s city business, not my jurisdiction unless the chief calls on us.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  He sighed. “There are procedures, Ms. McLean.”

  “As I live and breathe.”

  A smile touched his lips. He took a cell phone from his jacket pocket and poked out the emergency number. Coded conversation ensued. Neill seemed to know the dispatcher. A patrol car was on its way.

  They stood looking at each other in the dim light. After a moment he sighed. “Why don’t you go in and wait where it’s warm?”

  Meg felt the nip in the air. She rubbed her arms. “I’ll go in when I know what’s happening.”

  “That could take awhile. I’ll come for the rock fragment when the officer gets here. Will you sign a consent-to-search form? He’ll need it before he goes in.”

  “To search the garage? Sure.”

  He cleared his throat. “He’ll need to search the house, too.”

  Constitutional protests rose in Meg’s throat. “But I just unpacked,” she wailed.

  “I’m sorry.” His smile was rueful. “Very sorry. It’s a cinch to search an empty house. Too bad you didn’t spot the rock before the guys unloaded your truck.”

  “Had I but known,” Meg snarled.

  “Is that a quote?”

  “It’s what all gothic heroines say as they plunge into catastrophe.”

  COMMISSIONER Brandstetter’s dog hung around. Rob saw him bounce behind the patrol car as it drew up with its lights flashing. Towser lifted his leg on the left rear tire, sniffed Rob’s ankles, and gave a soft woof. All along the street, front doors opened and citizens peered out.

  The window of the patrol car slid down. “Hiya, Neill.” Dave Meuler, bald, fifty, and steady. “Teresa said you called.” Teresa Morales was the 911 night dispatcher. “I ain’t getting out of this car with that hound on the loose.”

  “Sit.” When the ridgeback squatted obediently on its haunches, Rob grabbed its collar. He peered down the block. A rectangle of light shone from the house at the end.

  “Commissioner!” he roared, projecting his voice like a ham actor. “Get your butt down here or the dog dies!”

  Dave chuckled. “Bastard’s too damned lazy to take his dog walkies.”

  Rob scratched Towser’s big, square head. The dog licked his free hand. “It’s a matter of principle.”

  “My ass.”

  It took Harold Brandstetter five minutes to walk the short distance. He was about Rob’s height, five-ten, but he had to weigh close to three hundred pounds. Rob thought the man’s knees were going. He wore sneakers, sweat pants, a T-shirt that said god, guns, and guts, and a red brocade robe that looked like something from a 1940s movie about high society. He toed out as he walked.

  Rob said, “Evening.”

  “You got a fucking nerve threatening to shoot my dog.” The voice was high and harsh like a buzz saw.

  “Just describing natural consequences,” Rob drawled. “Dave’s armed. I hear his mother was bitten by a Doberman.”

  Brandstetter snorted. “What’s going on here anyway?” His bright little eyes darted back and forth, taking everything in. He was sweating.

  “Ms. McLean reported property damage—kids messing around in her garage, I guess. Dave will check it out when your dog’s elsewhere.”

  Brandstetter’s eyes narrowed. “McLean? That’s the new librarian, right?” He had voted against giving her a contract. He voted no a lot.

  “Right.” Rob released Towser’s collar. The dog bounced four feet straight up, placed his front paws on his master’s shoulders, and licked Brandstetter’s face.”Down, goddammit,” Brandstetter shouted, staggering back. “Sit!”

  Towser sat with the air of one expecting a kibble.

  Rob steadied the other man, then let his hand drop. “Put him in the house, Hal.”

  After a moment the commissioner shrugged. “C’mon, dog. Heel.” He strutted off toward the streetlight where two or three of the curious had gathered. The dog trailed behind.

  When they were out of earshot, Rob said quietly, “Remember the Lauder Point case?” Shortly after he joined the department, he had been assigned to investigate the theft of Native American artifacts from Lauder Point County Park.

  Dave opened the door and slid out. He arched his back, as if he’d been sitting in the car for several hours, and rubbed the side of his neck. “Sure, I remember. Tribal council sued the county.”

  Rob described the damaged petroglyph.

  “Part of the loot?”

  “Maybe.”

  Dave whistled. “And you think they stored the things next to your grandma’s house?” It was Rob’s house, and had been for more than two years, but everybody would go on thinking of it as Hazel Guthrie’s house. He watched Dave meditate. “Lauder Point? After all this time?”

  “Yeah.” Lauder Point, ten years before, had been Rob’s first big case. He had not covered himself with glory. “I’ll have egg on my face. Again.”

  “If that’s what the whatchacallit drawing is.”

  “Right. Uh, there’s something else buried in that garage. It stinks.”

  Dave had taken a step along the drive. He froze. “Somebody’s picnic debris?”

  “Could be. Or a dead cat.” Neither wanted to say it might be a human corpse. Rob cleared his throat. “Let’s do it by the book. Got a consent-to-search form?”

  Dave turned back to the car. “Right. I’ll call in while you’re getting the signature. D’you want your forensics crew? The chief’ll throw a fit if he has to use ‘em. He’s over budget.” In criminal cases, the city of Klalo contracted control and evaluation of physical evidence to the county.

  Rob smiled. “I just spent two good hours arm-wrestling the sheriff over my budget.”

  “Election coming up.” Dave rummaged in the gl
ove box.

  No kidding. Sheriff McCormick was a competent manager, and he backed his men up when the occasion called for it. Come election time, though, he always talked fiscal accountability, and he talked a good ballgame. Canceling overtime two weeks before Hallowe’en was counterproductive, though, or so Rob had argued. The sheriff had finally agreed. He would look without joy on an expensive investigation—as this would be if the rock shard turned out to be part of the Lauder Point loot. So much the better, then, if the chief of police picked up part of the tab.

  Rob talked the situation over with Dave and remembered to ask him for a small evidence bag. By 10:30 most of the gawkers had gone back inside their warm houses. Margaret McLean took her time coming when Rob got around to knocking on her kitchen door. She looked rumpled and exasperated.

  She sat at the kitchen table and read the form while he transferred the broken petroglyph to the evidence bag, which was paper. Organic matter was apt to rot if it was stored in plastic. The brown blotch on the surface of the petroglyph could be dirt but looked like dried blood. Rob labeled the bag and dated it, then tore a sheet from the small notebook he always carried and wrote out a receipt.

  He handed it to her. “Okay to do the search?”

  “Do they have to go through the house tonight?”

  “It’s a little pedantic to search the house at all,” Rob said, “but the courts like us to be thorough.”

  A search of the house was probably pointless as well as pedantic, but he didn’t say that. When Old Strohmeyer died, the place had been cleaned and repainted. However, if a crime had been committed afterwards, whatever the crime might be… Rob’s mind chased the thought.

  It had to be afterwards, he decided. Before the house came on the market, the garage had been cluttered with so much junk the old man had parked his truck out on the drive.

  It bothered Rob that he hadn’t noticed anything suspicious in the weeks since the house sold, but he hadn’t. He’d racked his memory. Living next door to the crime scene was going to be embarrassing.

  Ms. McLean expressed her feelings about the search in some detail, but her heart wasn’t into venting. She yawned. “Could you do my bedroom first? Then I can go to bed while your crew paws through the rest of the house.”

  That seemed reasonable. “I’ll see what I can do to hurry them up, but it’ll be a couple of hours at least.” Longer, if the dead cat turned out to be a dead man. He didn’t say that. No need to alarm her.

  She groaned, but she signed the form. “I’ll be in the living room taking things out of boxes.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  Another groan.

  “You could read a book.”

  She looked at him. Her eyes—hazel and expressive—had a speculative gleam. “My computer’s up. I think I’ll go online and look up petroglyphs. There’s a site on rock art, and one on the Columbia Gorge Scenic Area.”

  “Check out Lauder Point Park,” he said wryly and regretted the indiscretion.

  Her eyes narrowed. “State park or county?”

  “County,” he admitted. “There’s a website for tourists.” He’d helped design it. It needed updating.

  “Do you want printouts?”

  “Anything specific to the area in the last two or three months. Otherwise I think I’m current.”

  “Okay.” The idea of an Internet search energized her. “There’s fresh coffee on the counter. Mugs in the cupboard.” She whisked from the room, a trim woman of about his own age, short, with her brown hair cropped so it curled around her face. She reminded him of his grandmother, but he didn’t think he’d share that thought with her. Smiling, he went out to talk to Dave and await the evidence team.

  There wasn’t much occasion to smile after that. Dave shone his flashlight on the disturbed area of the floor and agreed with Rob that they were seeing a human hand, or rather, the remains of a badly decomposed hand with much of the flesh and some bones missing. An edge of filthy cloth, the cuff of the shirt, blended with dirt and other debris. The hand was barely visible from the drive.

  Dave called Wade Hug, the chief of police, who showed up within fifteen minutes looking like a bear rousted from hibernation. Rob explained what he thought they had. When the chief heard about the possible Lauder Point context, he cheered up and offered to transfer jurisdiction on the spot.

  “If there’s a homicide, Wade, it’s yours.”

  Hug advanced several contrary arguments. Rob dug his heels in. It was all a matter of budget, who would pay, the city or the county. The city had only two experienced officers and two rookies, no detective on the staff, and the chief routinely handed serious cases over either to Rob or to the state patrol. After twenty minutes of argumentation, Hug drove off to consult the sheriff. He had agreed to call in the county Crime Scene Unit.

  While Dave and Rob waited for the crew, Dave retraced Margaret McLean’s footsteps of the afternoon. Rob considered objecting, but decided tact was in order. Though Dave was a good ally, he could be a master of obstruction when he was offended.

  From the plywood sheet, Dave reported that he could see the hand clearly. He inched back out to the driveway, careful not to contaminate the site further.

  It bothered both of them that Ms. McLean hadn’t spotted the hand, but the doors had stood wide for hours after she opened them, and Rob had seen the dog digging away.

  “Hand probably wasn’t exposed when she opened up,” Dave said.

  “She did notice the smell.”

  “I hope so.” Dave made a face. “Let me guess what’s on your mind. You’re going to want me to investigate old Towser’s fecal output.”

  “We could make Brands tetter do it.” Gallows humor. The thought of the dog violating the corpse made Rob queasy.

  By midnight, with the crime scene lights blazing away and the photographer’s strobe pulsing, the crew had unearthed the body of a man, badly decomposed.

  Rob sent Deputy Linda Ramos, the team’s photographer, into the house to tell Ms. McLean the news, and to let her know she could go to bed. That was a judgment call on Rob’s part, but they wouldn’t get around to searching the house before morning anyway.

  He would need to take the librarian’s statement, too, and he’d have better questions to ask her when he had some idea of the time-frame. She had bought the house in mid-summer, August, he thought. Exactly when she made the offer might be crucial, and when the sale closed.

  Rob had spent a lot of time and grant money training his people. They operated almost like archaeologists, lifting the dirt away, slow and careful, with trowels and even small paintbrushes. They kept good records, triangulated important objects, measured everything. From siftings of the nearby soil, they discovered two finger bones and a button from the cuff of the victim’s shirt, but only a few small flakes of basalt that might have come from the broken petroglyph.

  The medical examiner, who had to drive from Vancouver, showed up around one-fifteen, pronounced the man dead, and made a lot of preliminary rumblings as he probed the corpse.

  Beneath the fog of medical jargon, Rob read that the victim had probably been dead for some weeks, maybe a couple of months, and that he was either Hispanic or Indian, though that wasn’t a certainty.

  “Could be Asian,” the examiner grumbled. “Could be a square-headed Caucasian. Younger than forty, older than twelve. Cause of death probably one of the head wounds.” He made a fist and whacked the back of his own skull by way of illustration. They were standing in the street. “Can’t tell you more at this point, and don’t quote me.”

  “Me, quote you?”

  The medical examiner grinned. “I’ll do the autopsy for you here, if you’ll spring for a night at the Red Hat.”

  “Sorry. No money.”

  “Tomorrow, then. Eleven A.M. in Vancouver.”

  “I’ll send Minetti to observe. Thanks, Doc.” Earl Minetti was Rob’s sergeant, the deputy in charge of the evidence team.

  “No problem.” The ME cleare
d his throat. “The guy’s watch is still running.”

  It was, too. Rob verified that, breathing through his mouth as the paramedics bagged the body, placing separate bags on the hands and feet. A battery-operated Swatch sagged from the wrist the animals hadn’t got to. For some reason the watch brought the tragedy home. As the ambulance pulled away and headed west toward Vancouver, the forensics team watched it leave in unbidden silence. Then they went on with their chores.

  Rob felt a familiar wave of grief and depression. He supposed he would never understand how anybody could snuff out another human being’s life and then shove the body into a hole like a sack of garbage. Not for the first time he wondered whether he should give up the job and go back to Silicon Valley. Except that option was no longer open.

  The victim’s face was in bad shape, and they had found no obvious identification on the body, no wallet with a handy driver’s license, no letters from home, no unpaid bills. Minetti would have the task of doing a thorough examination of the man’s effects—after the autopsy.

  Meanwhile, there was enough to go on. And one further, peculiar discovery—the body lay in a square cavity that looked as if it had been dug many years before the murder.

  Rob had hoped to find indisputable evidence that the artifacts from Lau der Point had been stored in the garage. That remained debatable. What was odd was that the body had been crammed into a cavity in the center of the garage floor, the walls of which were lined with railroad ties. The space was shorter and somewhat shallower than a real grave, the ideal cache for stolen loot, but only two more chips from the basalt petroglyph had showed up there.

  They examined the heavy plywood sheet for everything from fingerprints and footprints to bloodstains and soil types, and sent samples off to the state lab. At some point in its past, the plywood had been given creosote treatment. It covered the cavity exactly. Nevertheless, dirt and gravel had been shoveled or raked over the victim, and the lid had been left unused, propped against the back door. A rake and a rusty shovel hung from the far wall of the garage. Rob pointed them out, and they were bagged and labeled.

  He brooded about the lid. If the perpetrators had put it back in place with dirt spread over it, the body might not have been discovered for months—not until Margaret McLean’s Accord broke through the plywood. Maybe they hadn’t been able to close the lid over the victim’s arm, if rigor had already set in. Without the lid, they would have had to import soil to fill the cavity—from the backyard?