Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112)

by Simonson, Sheila

  He made himself a note to have the crew investigate the ground behind the garage for signs of digging—and to interview the neighbors, who must have seen something. Himself included. He racked his memory. Nothing. He needed a time line.

  The old man who had owned the house was a contemporary of Rob’s formidable grandmother. A retired contractor, Emil Stroh-meyer had been reclusive, notable as a fly fisherman. Rob had bought two antique bamboo rods at the estate sale. He wished he could consult his grandmother about Strohmeyer. She had known everything about everybody in Latouche County over the age of fifty.

  By half past four, when it started to rain, the crew had completed a workmanlike survey of the floor of the garage. Their feet in the little booties designed to protect the scene began to churn up mud in the drive, so Rob sent them off to sift through their notes and secure the bagged evidence. He would meet with the team at 8:00 in the courthouse annex, along with as many other deputies as McCormick would authorize, to map out the investigation.

  Meanwhile, he needed a shower. The stench of human corruption is pervasive. He left Dave, now the city’s official liaison, to guard the site for the rest of his shift. Dave sat in his car with the heater on. Yellow crime scene tape gleamed in the rain.

  “WANT a muffin?”

  Rob started. It was not quite seven A.M. He was on his way back from the espresso stand. Hot coffee slopped through the hole in the plastic lid onto his right hand. He was also holding a cup of double-shot espresso in his left. He looked around. The librarian.

  “Morning, Ms. McLean. Dave.”

  Dave Meuler swore and sat up. He’d fallen asleep over the wheel of the patrol car. The window was down and Rob could smell wet wool.

  Rob handed Dave his coffee. He took it with a nod and a sheepish grin.

  Margaret McLean stood at the edge of her yard, peering through the rain. She had thrown a jacket over her head.

  “Muffin?” she repeated.

  “Uh, sure. Dave?”

  Dave shook his head no. Steam from his coffee cup clouded the window in front of him. “I’ll pass. In sixty-three minutes I’m gonna sit myself down to the Hungry Logger breakfast at Mona’s.” He sounded pleased with himself. He had been excused from the eight o’clock briefing. “Thanks.”

  She nodded and turned back to the house, rainwater spraying from her wet jacket.

  “Rob?”

  “Yeah?”

  Dave held up an evidence bag. “Towser.”

  Rob grinned. “Good man. See you later.” He took a companionable sip of coffee, which burned his lip, raised the cup in salute, and walked to the house.

  He had showered, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes from the skin out. He’d even poked Mentholatum up his nose, but he could still smell the odor of death. He’d also tried to think things through without much result. At least he’d made a list of questions.

  The kitchen smelled of baking, a definite improvement over eau de corpse.

  When he was outside his second muffin—bran, moist with raisins—and had drunk his coffee, Ms. McLean laid a stack of printouts beside him on the table.

  “What’s this?”

  “Kokopelli. The flute player.”

  “Kokopelli is Southwestern. This one’s different.”

  Meg digested that. “The fragment I picked up was small for a petroglyph.”

  He sighed. “Yes, I know. That’s what made me think it might be a piece taken from Lauder Point when the artifacts in the park were stolen ten years ago.”

  “You spotted it right away?” Incredulity and disappointment vied on her expressive face.

  “I was the klutz who fumbled that investigation. Believe it, I now know every missing piece in photographic detail. The flute player stone came from a bluff inundated when the Corps of Engineers built Bonneville Dam in the ‘Thirties. They split off the rock face in order to rescue the figures. What you found was a piece from the right-hand side of the basalt slab.”

  “What’s the rest like?”

  “There were two other figures facing him, to the left. They were larger, looked as if they were twins dancing side by side to the music. Twins occur a lot in the rock art of this area, but the musician is unusual. The other two petroglyphs are less distinctive. There’s a version of Tsagiglalal, She Who Watches.”

  “Isn’t that the logo for the Scenic Area?”

  He nodded. “This one has googly eyes, concentric circles rather than spirals. The other stone drawing is an animal figure called Running Elk.”

  “I see.”

  “The Klalo people called your stone The Dancers.” He finished the last morsel of muffin and rose. “I have to go now—a meeting with my deputies in half an hour. Todd Welch will replace Officer Meuler when we’re not here, so don’t be alarmed if a county car shows up. We’ll be back to conduct the search of the house and grounds by ten, if that’s okay.”

  She sighed and nodded.

  “I’ll take your statement then. One question. When she showed you the house, did the real estate agent point out the storage space in the floor of the garage?”

  She blinked. “The what?”

  He explained about the lined cavity.

  “Good God.” She sounded blank. “I didn’t see the sheet of plywood then, either. You say it was a lid?”

  He nodded.

  She frowned as if concentrating on visual memory. “The surface of the garage was raked smooth. It looked as if it had been newly graveled.”

  “Thanks. That helps. I’ll talk to the agent before I call Charlotte Tichnor.”

  “That’s the woman I bought the place from, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Emil Strohmeyer’s heir. He had others but he left her the house because she took care of his medical bills. At least, that’s what people were saying when she put the house on the market.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to run. Thanks for fixing breakfast. Under the circumstances, it was generous-minded of you.”

  She murmured something polite.

  SHERIFF McCormick’s conference room was overheated. Rob’s team, smaller than he liked but adequate, looked sleepy. Minetti wasn’t happy with his projected trip to Vancouver. He didn’t like autopsies, for one thing, and, for another, he was an anxious supervisor. He wanted to be on top of the house search.

  Rob said, “I’ll stay with them, Earl.”

  Minetti’s eyes dropped and he shrugged. He was ten years younger than Rob, ambitious, something of a hotshot. “Okay. It’s yours, Linda.”

  Behind her fashionable wire-rimmed glasses, Linda Ramos’s dark eyes sparkled, but she had the wit not to gloat. There were other egos involved. Minetti usually seconded Thayer Jones, who was experienced but slow. Rob decided to give Thayer the backyard while Linda and Jake Sorenson did the house.

  “How long is this going to take, Neill?” The sheriff sounded belligerent, and, under the belligerence, plaintive.

  Rob said soothing things about overtime, and noted the relief among team members that they weren’t going to be working another full shift. They had to be as tired as he was after the all-nighter.

  “I need to secure the site and make sure the house isn’t part of the crime scene,” Rob concluded with a deliberately vague gesture because he had no idea how long that would take. “Then we’ll stand down until Earl can bring us something definite about the victim. I’ll take Ms. McLean’s statement and do some telephoning. The former owner of the house, the feds, and that new officer the intertribal fisheries people have hired to look into looting.” He would also check the FBI’s NCIC database before he left his office in the courthouse annex, but that went without saying.

  Sheriff McCormick slapped his hands on the conference table and rose. “Right. Let’s get on it. And keep your lips zipped. We don’t want a lot of speculation out there in the community. Refer the press to me.”

  Rob cleared his throat. “What about Maddie Thomas?”

  Mack winced. “Not yet.”

  “I want to talk to
her.” Madeline Thomas was principal chief of the Klalos, a formidable and articulate woman. She was not a fan of the Latouche County Sheriff’s Department.

  “Let’s wait until we have more definite information. You aren’t sure there’s a link with Lauder Point yet.”

  Rob was sure, but he didn’t insist. He would have to talk to Maddie eventually, but maybe Mack was right to wait. No reason to stir the chief up sooner than he had to.

  “MESSY process, “ Margaret McLean muttered, scrubbing her hands under the kitchen faucet. Linda had fingerprinted her first thing. “For purposes of elimination, right?” No flies on Ms. McLean.

  Linda grinned and stowed her gear. Jake Sorenson was finishing a cup of coffee.

  Good coffee, Rob reflected, sipping his. What it was to have a cooperative suspect. He cleared his throat ostentatiously and fingered the tape recorder, though it didn’t need adjusting.

  The librarian dried her hands and sat opposite him with an air of resignation. “Okay. Have at me. I suppose I’m the prime suspect.”

  “As a matter of fact, you’re down near the bottom of the list.” He sent Linda and Jake off to inspect the house, both of them grinning.

  “They’re not going to read my data files, are they?”

  “Nope.”

  A small smile warmed her face. “Good. Jake should know my computer just got here. He carried it in.”

  Jake had been instructed to point out everything he and Todd had brought into the house for the record. Rob didn’t say that. He turned the tape player on, gave his name and the date, and asked her to identify herself.

  “Margaret McLean, spinster of this parish.”

  Rob frowned. Some people had to make jokes. Defense mechanism.

  “Sorry.” She didn’t look remorseful. “I’m Margaret McLean, 404 Old Cedar Street. I own the house.”

  “When did you buy it?”

  “I put earnest money down July 25th. The deal closed August 13th. I flew up and signed all the tax documents on the 15th.”

  “Fast.”

  “I thought so. I paid cash, used a certified check.” She named a Wells Fargo branch in Santa Monica.

  Cash. With no mortgage involved—and no bank inspectors to nose around—the process would have gone faster than usual. “Did you return to Klalo at any time after you signed the papers?”

  “No, and I was only in town for about an hour on the fifteenth.” Her face darkened. “I had to take a day off work to sign.”

  “You received the keys at that time?”

  “Yes, but not the key to the garage. I picked it up yesterday. Apparently they forgot to give it to me.”

  “That’s the key to the padlock on the garage’s front doors. What about the back door?”

  She shrugged. “No key to that.”

  “There is no key, or you don’t know where it is?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Neither lock had showed signs of being forced. The real estate agent had some explaining to do.

  She had pulled her capacious purse to her lap and was rooting in it. “Aha!” She brandished a small manila envelope. “If you want to document my drive north, I have receipts from a significant number of service stations between here and Los Angeles. The van was a gas hog.”

  “I’ll take your word. So you decided to buy the house, paid the earnest money, and left here the 25th of July?”

  “I flew out of Portland Airport July 26th at six-thirty in the morning and didn’t return until I came to sign the papers. I flew back to LAX immediately because I was moving my daughter to Stanford early. She’s a freshman and attended a science orientation. She wanted to look for a part-time job, too.”

  “Big transition.”

  “For Lucy and for me.” She had a fetching smile, expressive of untrammeled delight.

  He cleared his throat.

  The smile faded. “I can probably document where I was throughout August, lots of receipts.”

  He said, “It won’t be necessary, Ms. McLean. You were working after that?”

  “During and after.” She gave the name and address of the library she had worked at, and the name and a telephone number of a colleague. She had been deputy head of a consortium of public libraries, much larger than the Latouche County Regional Library.

  He wondered why she had chosen to move to a rural system. “Do you have connections in Latouche County?”

  She looked blank.

  “Friends, relatives…”

  “Just Hazel Guthrie.”

  “What?” He gaped.

  “She’s my hero. I think she died a couple of years ago but she was a legendary librarian. She worked out a procedure for dealing with attempts at censorship from community groups. It’s a national model.”

  When he didn’t speak, she leaned forward, eyes sparkling. “What’s wonderful about it is that it’s nonconfrontational. It keeps the books on the shelves, but it gives people who have grievances a way to express their feelings, too, and even to become part of the selection process. She also computerized the library, both catalogue and circulation, years ahead of everybody else, and before that she made interlibrary loans available to ordinary patrons, not just university professors. I could go on.” In her enthusiasm she jiggled the purse and it began to slide off her lap. She grabbed it and swung it up on the table. “Don’t tell me you never heard of her.”

  “Paused at eleven-eighteen.” He shut the machine off and smiled at her. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Hazel Guthrie was my grandmother.”

  Margaret McLean blushed charmingly for a forty-something woman.

  “I live in her house.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re fixing it up. I hope you don’t mean to sell it. It should be a national shrine.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” He spoke drily but he was moved. His grandmother had died at eighty-seven, about fifteen years before her time, as far as Rob was concerned. He still missed her intelligence and humor. His grandparents had raised him after his mother’s death the year he turned ten.

  Hazel Guthrie had not been a demonstrative woman, but he had never been in doubt of her affection. After a few years of post-adolescent revolt, he hadn’t doubted his affection for her, either. They had drawn closer in the last ten years of her life, when he came back to Klalo.

  He fiddled with the recorder, then turned it on. “Resuming at eleven-twenty.” He took Ms. McLean through her arrival in Klalo, her retrieval of the garage key, and her discovery of the rock drawing, with attention to the state of the garage floor and the position of the plywood lid.

  “The victim’s hand was partially exposed when I saw the open doors,” he added. “Weren’t you aware of it earlier?”

  She shuddered. “No. I thought moles had been digging, or rats, but I didn’t know why. There was a bad smell, like a dead animal. My God, how awful.” Tears came to her eyes, and she blinked hard. “I thought there might be a dead cat, something like that.” She sniffed and dug in her purse for a tissue. “Sorry.”

  He waited for her to compose herself. “Okay, thanks, Ms. McLean. Interview ended.” He glanced at the kitchen clock and added the time.

  She blew her nose. “You’re very formal.”

  “I was being official. Thanks, Meg.” He rose and stretched. “And thanks for the coffee.”

  “That’s it?”

  “For the time being.” He slipped the recorder into his jacket pocket and gestured toward the living room where Linda and Jake were moving around audibly. “They’ll be at it awhile yet, and Deputy Jones is checking out the backyard.” He explained why.

  “I guess that makes sense.” She sighed. “This is going to be a nightmare, isn’t it? And to think I just wanted to settle in peacefully and get acquainted before I start work. ‘The best-laid plans…’”

  He dipped into memory. “‘Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are, it might have been.’”

  She laughed and he found himself laughing, too. “Gran and I used to do th
at, cap each other’s clichés.”

  “The last bastion against Alzheimer’s.”

  “That, at least, was a problem she never had.”

  She said ruefully, “I was thinking of my own descent into oblivion.”

  MAY I speak to Charlotte Tichnor?” Rob identified himself, leaned back in the chair, and wriggled his stiff shoulders. He was phoning from home so he’d be handy if something turned up in the search next door.

  The woman at the Seattle end of the line said, “She’s at Harrison Hot Springs for the rest of the week. This is her daughter, Carol Tichnor. Are you calling about my grandfather’s house?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The house is our only connection with Latouche County these days. We sold it in August.”

  The royal we irritated Rob. “Your mother sold it, certainly.”

  “She’s out of town,” she repeated.

  “I talked to the realtor who handled the sale. She told me someone borrowed the key to the garage after Ms. McLean’s offer was accepted.” Rob took a sip of cold coffee and his stomach roiled. He supposed he should eat lunch, though the idea wasn’t appealing.

  “That was before the sale closed. We thought some family things might be left in there, so I asked the office to mail us the key. I dropped by, but the garage was empty, so I gave the key back.”

  “There should have been two keys, padlock in front, regular lock in back.”

  She hesitated. “Just one key.”

  “Did you mail it back?” He fiddled with his ballpoint, clicking the nib in and out.

  “I put it into an envelope and slipped it through the agency mail slot on my way out of town.”

  He jotted a note, probably illegible. “I see. Did you enter the garage?”

  “No, I just stuck my head in the back.”

  Meg had said the key didn’t work in that door. Rob noted the discrepancy. “When was that?”