“He had to have twelve stitches.” Tom shivered.
Meg felt a frisson of alarm. Jeff had said Rob was all right. “Is he home? I need to talk to him.”
“No, he had some work to do on Dad’s computer.” Tom gestured down the street. “The sheriff’s holding a press conference at the courthouse right about now.”
“So that’s where the journalists went.”
“Rob’s hiding. He says they’ll get bored after a day or two.” Towser woofed. “Okay, boy. Ms. McLean, do you think Mom should have Towser put down?”
“What! Of course not.” The dog might be a nuisance, but he didn’t deserve the death penalty.
Tom patted Towser’s square brown head. “The thing is, she’s afraid she won’t have enough money to stay in the house, and I can’t take him to Portland. No pets in my apartment house. You wouldn’t want to adopt him, would you? He likes you.” A definite wheedle.
“I…no, absolutely not.”
“Rob can’t because his schedule’s too erratic.”
“Mine, too,” Meg lied. If anything, her schedule was going to be too predictable. Inspiration struck. “Your father had a valuable gun collection, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Sell it and use the money to support Towser in style. Your mother can hire a dog walker for him.”
Tommy looked at her, wide-eyed, then laughed aloud. “Yes! That’s brilliant, Meg. Dad would hate it.”
Meg was feeling sententious. “Things work out, Tom. I know you don’t believe that now, but it’s true.” And keep you in the rear of your affection. Towser woofed and gave a small bounce of agreement.
When Tom went on his way, Meg returned to her house and started in on the boxes stacked on the dining room table. She had finished clearing that room out, and was flattening cartons with an eye to baling them, when a knock came at the kitchen door. She glanced at her watch. After ten.
It was Rob, shivering in the risen wind.
“Come in. You look like death,” she said frankly.
“I’ve been told that already.”
“I like the outfit.”
He glanced down at the knee-shot jeans and the T-shirt that peeked out from a mungy gray zippered sweatshirt. “Be grateful it’s not covered with gore.”
Her throat closed. She cleared it. “Would you like a drink?”
“I would like a complete anesthetic.” Wincing, he sat down at the table. “But a finger of Scotch will do. I need to talk to you.”
“Me, too, or vice versa, but first things first.” She got out the Scotch and poured two moderate dollops. “Tom said you were working on the computer.”
“Yes. Thanks for setting the German Bible aside. Hal’s passwords were in it.”
“Heavens, in code like numerology?”
“A straightforward list tucked between the pedigree of a remote cousin and a reminder to send the garnet earrings to Tante Anna.” He rolled a sip of Scotch on his tongue.
“That must have made things easier.”
“It did. I got financial data the 1RS would be happy to have and some interesting phone numbers. Hal’s e-mail was overflowing. He must have corresponded with every paranoid freak in the country. We may even have to interview some of them. And I found out where he went Friday evening.”
Meg leaned forward. “Where?”
“Portland Airport. I accessed his credit card records. He tanked up the SUV at an airport station. I called and talked to the attendant. Unfortunately, Hal was alone at the time or I might have a description of the killer.”
“Somebody flew in and killed him?”
He swallowed Scotch, frowning. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s confusing.” He looked at her. “I ought to fire you.”
Meg had been expecting that. She took a judicious swallow of her own Scotch. “Sorry. Fire me and I sue the county.”
“Meg…”
She met his eyes for a long moment. He looked gaunt and bruised and very tired. “You’re feeling guilty about the poor lady you were talking to when the man shot at you, and you want to take it out on me. No way.”
He lowered his eyes. “I seem to have made myself a target. I’d rather not do that to anyone else. Mrs. Crookshank was bad enough.”
“That’s a great name.”
“She was my fourth-grade teacher.” He traced the rim of his glass. “She’s okay and she forgave me, but we must have been quite a sight.” He described Mrs. Crookshank’s adventure in sufficiently comic terms to provoke a smile, but Meg thought he was forcing the humor.
“So you rolled across the lawn in your fourth-grade teacher’s embrace? That’s funny, all right, but you must have one hell of a headache.” She tapped her skull. On his, a shaven strip showed ugly black stitches.
“It’s just sore. I bet you think I was shot.”
“You weren’t?”
He touched his head. “I ripped my scalp open on one of those underground lawn sprinklers they used to install in the nineteen-fifties. You know, the kind with the round metal cap that sticks up into the lawn and makes the mower clank. Bled all over the place.”
Startled, she met his eyes. They both laughed. “Oh, dear, I’m sure your head hurts, but it is a little anticlimactic, isn’t it?”
“Anticlimactic is good.”
“And Mrs. Crookshank is all right?”
He grimaced. “She’s grateful. I saved her life, or so she thinks. She told me my father would be proud of me.”
“Would he?”
“How would I know?” His brows snapped together. “How the hell would she know? He’s been dead since nineteen sixty-eight and she never met him.” He took a hasty sip of Scotch. “Sorry. It always burns me when people do that phony channeling act.”
“Did she do it to you in the fourth grade?”
He was silent.
Meg swallowed whisky. “How old were you when your father died?”
“Eight. He was killed during the Tet Offensive. February. My mother and I were living here with my grandparents. I don’t remember the rest of the third grade. We moved up to the cabin on Tyee Lake when school let out, and my mother started drinking. I guess she didn’t know how to be a widow.” There was no sarcasm in the last comment, just sadness.
“It must have been terribly hard for her.”
“I can see that now. Then I was angry, angry and scared. I didn’t know what to do.”
Meg shivered.
“By the time I got to the fourth grade, I was a walking ball of fury. I kept picking fights with kids who were bigger than I was, which was practically everybody in my class. I was a trial to Old Lady Crookshank.”
“And you dislike her—”
He interrupted. “I don’t dislike her, Meg. She tried to be sympathetic and failed. Anybody would have. When I see her, though…”
“It throws you back into that state of mind?”
He sighed. “That’s it, and I can’t avoid her. She was a friend of my grandmother’s.”
“I’m sorry,” Meg said softly. “Your mother died, too?”
“One of her drinking buddies drove off the River Road in a sleet storm almost exactly a year after Dad died. They were both killed.” He shivered and took a gulp of Scotch. “Jesus, I have not had a good day. I ought to go.”
“Well, at least you didn’t apologize.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Tell me about your father. Do you remember him?”
He rubbed his shoulder and took a sip of whisky. “He was a nice guy, funny, a Chicago Irishman with red hair and freckles. The name was originally O’Neill. By the time he volunteered for a tour in the combat zone, he was a staff sergeant. He told my mother it would be safe but boring. He’d spend his time at brigade headquarters in Saigon typing forms in triplicate.”
“And it would have been safe enough, I suppose, if headquarters hadn’t come under rocket attack?”
He glanced up from his drink. “You know about that? Most people don’t.”
&
nbsp; “I read a little about it. He volunteered? He must have been career military.”
“A lifer,” he agreed. He rubbed the side of his face, winced, and dropped the hand. “My mother met him in Tacoma when he was stationed at Fort Lewis. Grandma sent her to Pacific Lutheran, which is a good, quiet liberal arts college. I guess Gran was hoping Mom would settle down, but she was a party girl and probably rebelling against all those books.”
“It was the beginning of that era of rebellion.”
“Not at PLU,” he retorted. “They, my grandparents, kept expecting her to do well in school and she never did. She was their only child. She eloped with Dad, and I came along seven or eight months later. He was almost thirty and she was nineteen.”
Meg was thinking about her father, who had been in his thirties when she was born. “Did you get along with him?”
“Sure. We enjoyed each other.” He took a thoughtful sip. “He could see I was going to be small for my age. I guess he showed up at some first-grade fiesta and spotted that I was the runt. So he started teaching me judo.”
“Wow,” Meg said feebly. Judo sounded like a recipe for disaster to her. “He taught you to fight?”
“No, he taught me how not to get picked on.”
“Oh. I guess that would be a problem for a little boy. I was small, too, and I stayed that way.” She smiled at him. “Unlike you. For girls, being small can be an asset, the Gidget syndrome. Did your father teach you when to fight and when not to?”
“He was strong on avoiding fights, used humor to defuse tension. He didn’t teach me that. I observed it.”
“You admired him, didn’t you? I wish I could feel that way about my father. Not that he was Hal Brandstetter. I feel so sorry for Tommy.”
“Me, too. I had a great dad and I was damned angry when he died, but I think I would have been all right if my mother had known which way was up. Fortunately, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents that last year of her life. They were terribly grieved when she died, but they made the effort to help me deal with it. We had a bumpy road for a couple of years, though, and fourth grade was the worst.”
“If Hazel Guthrie had feet of clay, don’t tell me.”
“She kept me busy.” He rubbed his arm again and rotated the shoulder. “She could be a bit overwhelming, but I didn’t rebel against her until high school. Gran was great on board games— Scrabble and things like that. And she fed me science fiction, so I learned to like books. She also gave me my first computer.”
“Let me guess. Radio Shack?”
“A TRS80 Model I. Great machine. I made it sit up and bark.”
“Was your grandfather into computers, too?”
He gave a reminiscent grin. “Lord, no, he even distrusted electronic calculators.”
“What did he use at the drugstore, an abacus?”
“Cash register. The kind with a bell.”
“I remember those.”
He sipped Scotch, raising the glass in a half salute. “Grandpa was quiet, a birder and a fly fisherman, and he used to take me canoeing on the lake. The best thing he did for me in that period, though, was to enroll me in the karate school. He was no fighter himself, but something had to be done about my temper. He knew I would associate martial arts with my father and work at it. I did, too. I never tried for a black belt, but I liked the discipline right from the first, the calmness, being in the moment.”
Meg made a mental note to read up on karate. The fashion these days was for tae kwan do and tai chi, but karate had a long and honorable history. She liked the idea of a small boy being taught to contain his belligerence in a ceremonial and effective way.
For a while they sat silent, thinking separate thoughts, then Rob finished his drink and shoved the chair back. “Thanks. I’d better take myself off before KATU-TV decides we’re trysting in the kitchen.”
Not a bad idea, trysting. Meg stood up. “Wait. I have a report for you.”
“Already?”
“I’m fast and cheap. “ Lordy, like an airport whore, Meg thought. Keep you in the rear of your affection. She ran from the room, returning in better order with a printout of her notes. “Here. I also had a couple of ideas.”
He groaned theatrically.
“Oh, shut up. What about Charlotte Tichnor as the collector, the mastermind? She has the profile of an obsessive.”
“Kind of long-distance.”
“Say she uses her children to do the work.”
“It’s a thought.”
She eyed him suspiciously but his face was grave. “The thing is, Brandstetter wasn’t the collector, though he may have been the thief. He wasn’t interested in any kind of art, and he had no sympathy for anyone else’s culture.”
“I agree. A person of taste and refinement, that’s the kind of suspect I need. Carol?”
Meg shook her head and repeated Carol’s offhand remark about Indian junk. “She was too looped to con me. She’s intense enough about needlework, but I don’t think she’d kill for an antimacassar. And if she wouldn’t kill for needlework, she certainly wouldn’t kill for rock art.”
“What about her brother?”
“Vance?” She visualized the high-colored face, the confident swagger. “I don’t know. He has a glittering surface.”
“Maybe surface is all there is.”
She frowned. “Maybe. He’s one of those people who are always onstage. I had no sense of what he was really thinking or what his interests are other than making money and showing off.”
“He collects guns and cars.”
Meg made a face. “What’s the doctor like?”
Rob described Ethan Tichnor’s indignation over the felled trees on his brother’s property.
“So he has intensity? Carol said he was boring.”
“Boredom is in the mind of the beholder or something. I thought she was boring, not that I’ve seen much of her. She was role-playing, too, when I talked with her here and in the official interview.”
“She’s a born tool, you know. Her mother uses her. I suspect her husband did. Why not the perpetrator?”
Rob yawned. “Ouch. Face hurts when I do that. You said you had ideas, plural.”
“Oh. Well, about Edward Redfern. You’ve been assuming he was onto the thieves, that he tailed Brandstetter here.”
“Yes.”
“What if he was pursuing the collector instead? What if he thought he was safe and Brandstetter surprised him?”
His eyes widened. After a moment, he said, “You may have something. I need to think about what that would mean.” He tapped the printout. “Thanks, again. Good night, Meg. I’ll fire you if things heat up again around here, but you do good work.” He cocked his head. “And your ideas aren’t half-bad either.”
She decided to make a clean breast of things. “Uh, speaking of ideas, I sort of goofed. I asked Dennis Wheeler for his set of keys.”
He went still, frowning.
She scrabbled in the junk drawer, found the keychain with its Day-Glo tab, and handed it over. “I’m sorry. That was stupid.”
“Did you try it? The back door key.”
“No.”
“Let’s see if it works.”
It didn’t.
Rob took the keys and the printout with him, and Meg went back inside. She almost wished he had reproached her.
DAVE Meuler did good interviews. Chief Hug had let him come back on duty. Rob decided to borrow him and asked Dave to interview all the residents living on Old Cedar Street and in the three houses behind Brandstetter’s, looking for witnesses to the killing. Some of the interviews would duplicate Thayer’s hasty survey of Sunday afternoon. It was hard to believe there weren’t eyewitnesses to the shooting, but what bothered Rob most, on reflection, was all the noise.
Two shots fired from a .357 must have made a loud report. True, people in the area were used to hearing gunfire in October. It was hunting season. But not in town and not in the small hours of the morning. There had been the sound o
f the killer’s vehicle, too, coming and going, doors closing, voices maybe, and the dog.
Rob couldn’t imagine Towser snoozing through a commotion like the shots that had killed his master. The dog didn’t yap. His voice was low-pitched, but it could reach a considerable volume. Tammy had been unconscious and Mrs. Iverson was deaf, but the wind surfers should not have been insensible, and they had been at home by that time.
“Shall I start with the Brownings?” Dave flicked lint from his navy blue uniform sleeve.
“Listen, Dave, I’m not trying to horn in, but I’m going to see if I can catch Kayla Graves.”
“Hot stuff,” Dave said appreciatively. Kayla had quite a reputation.
Rob clucked his tongue. “Come with me. Those kids are more likely to have noticed something than the Brownings.”
“Okay. Which of us is the Good Cop?”
Rob had to laugh. “You. I look like a villain.”
“Wait till the bruise turns green. You’ll look like Algae Man.”
The red Mustang was missing. Kayla was on night duty at the nursing home. She usually had breakfast/dinner at Mona’s after she came off her shift, but she was due back at any moment, or so Tiffany said.
It was Tiffany’s day off. She blinked at them sleepily when they rang, and led them toward the kitchen. She wore boxer shorts and a T-shirt that extolled her favorite sport. Her Lhasa Apso sniffed at the two of them without much curiosity when they stepped into the hall, then stumped off. It was a fat, somnolent creature.
“Um, coffee?” Tiffany offered.
Rob declined. Dave accepted instant colored water and dosed it with sugar and creamer. They sat at a sticky-looking table.
Tiffany punctuated her account of her roommates’ whereabouts with yawns. Lisa had breakfasted early and left to receive a shipment of new boards at the shop.
While they set up the recorder and Dave recited the time, date, and persons present, Tiffany drank half her coffee. It seemed to revive her. “It’s about Old Brandstetter, right? Somebody did the world a favor.” She yawned again. She had perfect teeth.
Dave said, “The killing happened between midnight and five Saturday morning.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Bad luck. We partied until eleven on Friday. Kevin and I went to bed then. I don’t know about the others for sure, but they probably hung it up around then, too. We were all going out on the river early Saturday. Except Kayla. She doesn’t surf after the end of September.”
Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112) Page 17
