Nightwalkers cr-4

by P. T. Deutermann

  In addition to the D's, their Major Crimes boss, Captain Hildegard Hapsburg, was in attendance. She was built like the proverbial fat lady of the opera, lacking only the winged helmet. She viewed us outsiders with deep suspicion. I wondered idly what would happen if she showed up in a German customs hall with that last name.

  I was still thinking about the night before when Tony had first arrived. He'd given me a couple of speculative looks, but I pretended not to notice. In the world of boys and girls and the games they play, Tony is a player. I didn't doubt for a moment that he knew something had happened. If he only knew.

  "Dearly beloved," the sheriff began. "We are gathered here in the presence of edible doughnuts to figure out how to save Lieutenant Richter's butt from being shot off by a person or persons currently unknown. Lieutenant, how's about you start off with a five-minute summary of what's happened so far, up to the point where we got involved."

  It took ten, but the sheriff was indulgent, seeing as I didn't make anyone look at slides. The detectives were a mixed bag. The two older white guys, maybe five, six years from hanging it up, listened dispassionately, their faces displaying the permanent skepticism that comes from a few decades of listening to people lie to them. The third detective, an attractive black woman in her late twenties, was taking notes and listening very carefully. When I said I was finished, she raised a hand and asked a question, which is when I realized that her notepad contained a whole list of questions. Captain Hapsburg was also taking notes, but so far she hadn't said anything at all.

  "This guy said you killed his wife," she said. "Have you killed any women or anyone's wife in your career or afterward?"

  "One," I said. I then explained what had happened up on Spider Mountain, when one of the Creigh women had pointed and fired a. 357 at me. She was, however, not anyone's wife, nor would she ever be.

  "So it's possible that he doesn't mean that literally?"

  "Explain, please."

  "It's possible that he means you destroyed his wife in some other way. Like putting her in prison for a life sentence."

  We hadn't thought of that. As I'd told Carol, I'd had Horace trying to build something on that under the assumption that it involved a dead woman. The detective had a good point.

  "Yes, that's possible," I said. "Or she committed suicide because I put him away for a long jolt. Horace Stackpole here's been digging along those lines in the records down in Manceford County."

  "You were head of the Manceford County MCAT, right?" she asked. "So it was a team effort to take the assholes off the street. Any individual make a big deal about that being personal?"

  "I've been searching for just that, Detective," Horace said. "In theory, that should narrow the search field considerably, but sometimes the boss is the guy they focus on."

  "Plus," I said, "we're looking for someone other than just your average B and E guy or corner pusher. He's killed two people so far, mostly for becoming loose ends."

  "What was your MOS in the Corps?" one of the other detectives asked.

  "Sniper."

  "Any possibles there?"

  "None living," I said. The detectives smiled at that.

  "You seem to attract a lot of trouble, Mr. Richter," Captain Hapsburg said. "Why should we be helping you here?"

  She had a strong accent, and the "here" came out more like "hier." The sheriff intervened.

  "Because we're working a homicide, Hildy," he said. "You know, like murder? Helping Lieutenant Richter is incidental to catching a bad guy."

  The lady detective had several more questions, but none that produced any sort of clarifying moments. Captain Hildy went back to taking notes, but clearly she still disapproved of the entire proceeding.

  "Okay," Sheriff Walker said. "Here's my plan. We're gonna work the victim in the shooting out at Glory's End. Pull the string on her and everyone she knew, the bikers, the meth world, her dog-training thing, like that. With any luck someone will say, hey, yes, I remember a guy she trained for who bought two dogs and here's his license plate number."

  Chuckles all around. As if.

  "Sergeant Stackpole, sounds like you still have a reliable pipe into Manceford County. Keep at it. I can call Sheriff Baggett if you ever need some top cover."

  "We're good," Horace said.

  "Mr. Richter, I'd appreciate it if you would spend as much time as possible at the plantation, with whatever support your guys can give you. I'd like to develop how this guy got there and got away, and whether or not he has a base of operations out there on Glory's End somewhere."

  "Right," I said. "Detective Sergeant Bell here is our electronics wizard. He's going to wire the house for video. If you're amenable, he'll get together with your people and arrange secure comms for us. Now that we're all retired and working private, we have access to some fairly spiffy toys in that department."

  "Absolutely," he said, "and we'll give you the code for our jungle drum system, and also the secret smoke signals."

  Ooops, I thought, there I go, stepping on toes again, but the sheriff was smiling. I decided to stop talking before I got in any deeper.

  The meeting broke up, the detectives talking to my guys, the sheriff and I discussing possibilities out at Glory's End, and the shepherds sitting now at the end of the table, unashamedly pointing the two remaining doughnuts on the plate.

  "How are you and the Lee ladies getting on?" Sheriff Walker asked.

  I almost blinked when he asked that. I was still digesting the unexpected meeting with Valeria the night before. I told him we were doing fine, so far. He asked if he needed to drop by and explain what all the ruckus had been about across the road. I told him that I'd done that, and that their reaction had been to encourage me to shoot the bastard the first chance I got.

  "Yeah," he said. "That's sounds like Hester, anyway. I would never go creeping around that house at night. She reputedly can shoot the ear off a squirrel at a hundred yards."

  I asked him about his Major Crimes boss.

  "Hildy?" he said. "She's okay, most of the time. She disapproves of civilians, and I think she wouldn't be entirely averse to bringing back elements of the secret police to our business. You should see her do an interview."

  "I think she doesn't like me."

  "Hildy doesn't like anybody," he said. "Even me. She was here when I got here, and she has the admin situation in her own personal vise. That's valuable, but it makes us all somewhat dependent."

  "You let her go operational?"

  "Not if I can help it," he said with a laugh. "She's good people, just a little bit too serious most of the time."

  I wanted to ask him how he knew about Hester's ability with a rifle, but at that moment a deputy came in and told the sheriff that the homicide victim's husband was out front.

  "Husband?" the sheriff asked.

  "Says he is," the deputy replied. "There's five of 'em. Bikers. Said they rode up from Charlotte. Uglier'n stumps, every one of 'em."

  "Bikers," mumbled the sheriff. "I hate bikers."

  "Except when they give me shit while they're on their bikes and I'm in a cruiser," Tony said. "Then I can give them a physics lesson. That can be real fun."

  "These here aren't posers, you know, lawyers and doctors?" the deputy said. "Front desk told the 'husband' he could stay; sent the rest outside to keep their hogs company. They started up with him, and he had to send for Willard."

  "Willard?" I asked.

  "Willard is our uppity manager," the sheriff said. "Okay, I'll go talk to this guy. Deputy Smithy here will take you out the back way. Make sure my D's have all your numbers, and we'll get up with you as soon as we have something."

  I thanked him for all his help and said we'd be over at Glory's End for the rest of the day. As we left, he noticed that the mutts were still pointing the doughnuts.

  "Oh, for God's sake," he said and tipped the plate in their direction. Two audible snaps and then they joined the parade to the back door. The sheriff was now a designated softie, a
nd they would always remember that.

  As we went down the hall, we passed, or rather stepped aside for, a huge, round-faced, glary-eyed black man in a straining khaki uniform. He was six something tall, the same wide, and he had to lean slightly back as he walked so as to counterbalance his sumo-sized paunch. His fingers were curled in a grab-it-and-hurt-it posture, and his arms hung out at his sides like two Smithfield hams. He walked like a Hollywood robot, one leg followed by the other, and the walls literally shook as he went by. Even the shepherds were cowed.

  "Willard?" I muttered as we headed for the back door.

  "Willard," the deputy said. "Specializes in anger management."

  Uppity manager, I thought. Got it.

  I thought about Carol as we drove back to Glory's End, followed by a fleeting image of Valeria, excuse me all to hell, Ms. Valeria of the moonlight, as we drove past the entrance to Laurel Grove and headed up the driveway to my new home. I had to force myself not to look up that long drive just before we turned in. I did glance in my rearview mirror and saw Tony grinning. I tried to ignore him. Where was Willard when I needed him?

  Just for the hell of it, I'd left Horace back at the sheriff's office, ostensibly to visit with his old friend, and perhaps get us some information on the suddenly bereft "husband." We were in an anomalous position with the local gendarmerie. As retired cops, there would be a certain amount of professional courtesy. On the other hand, we were technically outsiders in a homicide that had happened on Sheriff Walker's patch. I didn't have to tell my guys how to behave, but we were operating on split objectives. Walker and his crew had themselves a homicide. This guy had said he was going to kill me. Their efforts would not necessarily prevent my problem from happening, so I certainly wasn't going to sit around and wait for the long but legally shackled arm of the law to do its thing, sympathetic as it might be.

  Horace showed up a little later and told us about the husband and his supporters. Apparently, the grieving spouse's main interest had been in getting his dead wife's monthly Social Security check transferred into his name, and for that he needed a death certificate. The sheriff had informed him that the certificate would give "pending investigation" as a cause of death but that that was not sufficient for the Social Security Administration. This led to a display of anger management issues, at which point the sheriff had Willard escort the deeply bereaved biker out of the office without his feet ever touching the ground. Horace said it was quite a scene, especially when Willard deposited the biker on his hog, lifted the rear tire and rider off the ground, swung it around so that the bike pointed in the away direction, and then pushed the bike forward. One of the would-be desperadoes had given Willard yet more static, which inspired the big guy to plant his legs astride the guy's front wheels and turn the handles 180 degrees, which did amazing things to control wires. Everyone concerned apparently got the message. They eventually departed in good if really noisy order.

  The sheriff had asked Horace an interesting question as he was leaving: If the dead woman was the dog handler, where were the Dobermans? That question had been on my mind, too. They'd attacked Tony in the springhouse, then disappeared right around the time I shot up the barns and my stalker shot down his associate. Had the dogs gone with him? Or had they fled when their trainer had been killed? In which case, were they now somewhere out there on Glory's End, looking for something to eat?

  Pardee and Tony set up the private cell net for us on the front porch of the house, and then Pardee swept the house for bugs. He didn't find any. I asked Pardee and Horace to go back to Triboro, Pardee to get that surveillance gear for the house, and Horace to see if he could get a line on the bikers from Charlotte. One of them, maybe even the devastated husband, might know who had hired our late Doberman trainer. Horace asked if he should do that or casually mention it to his buddy in the Rockwell County office. Horace was thinking straighter than I was. He then asked what our plans were.

  "Tony and I are going to start looking for coal," I said and then explained what I meant.

  "Suppose you guys find him?" Pardee said.

  I made that whistling sound from the spaghetti western. They all grinned, but I knew that had been a valid question. Assuming he didn't get me first, I needed to decide if I was going to hand him over to the cops or take care of business.

  They left for Triboro. Tony and I went into town for something to eat and then up to Danville to get us some ground transportation. An hour later, the golf cart dealer followed us down the drive at Glory's End with a Club Car model 1200 XRT utility vehicle on a trailer. It was a four-wheel-drive number, complete with canopy, Plexiglas windshield, camo paint job, headlights, two rear-facing seats in the back in place of a dump box, and two outlets for charging cell phones or other equipment. It weighed about a thousand pounds and had a noisy gasoline engine and seriously knobby tires. I would have preferred all that with an electric drive motor, but only the smaller golf carts had electrics. One option would have to be special-ordered, and that was a couple of heavy square nylon netting panels that went on both sides of the cab, which would keep occupants in during rough-and-tumble off-road going. I wanted them to keep attacking dogs from being able to jump into the cab long enough for us to get our weapons out.

  Tony and I set out in our new chariot just after three, headed to the eastern ridge where the coal mine tunnel was supposed to be. I had the shepherds running ahead because I wanted them to be able to hear. Our own hearing was clobbered by the noisy engine, which put us at a tactical disadvantage. On the other hand, we could really cover the ground compared to being on foot. Tony drove while I watched the farm road ahead and what the shepherds were doing. If they stopped, we stopped. We went down that dirt road that went east-west across the center of the property, crossed the creek, climbed the ridge, and stopped in the gap overlooking the next valley. The brickworks were off to our left down by the river. With the engine off, we could hear a truck going by on the two-lane to our right, but it was out of sight behind the trees fronting the cropland.

  The ridge lifted steeply about a hundred feet above the farm road on either side and then ran due north toward the river, dropping down to the bottomlands only at the far end. It was covered in trees and some good-sized rock outcroppings. The sun was behind us, headed for sundown in about three hours, so the eastern slopes of the ridge were already in shadow. The shepherds had gone on down the road but returned when they realized we'd stopped. Frick spotted the two seats in the back and hopped in; Kitty followed suit. No more running down the dusty trail for them-they were going to ride with the gentry. The doughnuts were taking their toll.

  Tony had brought along Pardee's collage of aerial photographs. He looked up at the boulders and seams of granite hanging above us. "Great place for an ambush," he said. "So where's this coal mine?"

  "Don't know, but I'm guessing the entrance overlooks this set of crop fields in front of us. Sheriff Walker wasn't too clear about the where, or even if the story was true."

  "There's this one area, maybe two-thirds of the way to the river, which might be a tailings pile. Hard to tell with all these trees."

  We drove down to the bottom of the hill, turned left on the dirt path that led down toward the river and the brickworks, and began to scan the hillside on our left. To our right were crop fields, overgrown with tall weeds and grass. The highest point of the ridge was above where the central road came through. From there it descended toward the river, devolving into wooded bluffs. While Tony drove I tried to match the aerials with the terrain, but it all looked pretty much the same. Then, about a quarter mile from the river, I saw what looked like a spur path leading off to the left and up the hill. It was more like two ruts in the dirt than a road, but I noticed that it was covered in large gravel.

  Tony took the vehicle off the path and pointed it upward into the trees. We got maybe fifty yards and had to stop because of all the new-growth scrub trees in the way. The two ruts were still visible, and they led into those trees. We shut the
vehicle down and took stock. Tony got out and scuffed the ground. The shepherds jumped out and began sniffing around.

  "Something must have been up here," he said. "This gravel is two, maybe three inches deep, and hard-packed."

  Frick suddenly stiffened and looked up the hill. Kitty stopped her examination of the ground and also looked.

  "Down!" I ordered, and Tony hit the deck, rolling swiftly behind the vehicle, where I was already unlimbering my SIG. The dogs kept looking up into the trees, and I expected gunfire in the next few seconds.

  Nothing happened. The sounds of the country intruded, birds, insects, a couple of crows raising hell about something in the distance, a jet flying high overhead, the ticking sound of the engine as it cooled in the late afternoon air.

  "What ya got?" I asked the dogs. Frick looked back at me but then resumed her scan of the hillside. Somewhat to my surprise, Kitty moved slowly to her left, away from Frick, and then began to creep up the hill. As she got about thirty feet up the hill, two black shapes came out of the trees above us.

  The Dobermans.

  This time, however, they weren't attacking. They were coming down the hill in a submissive posture, not quite slinking but displaying zero aggression. I heard Tony rack his weapon. I told him to wait, that something had changed. Frick went forward, hackles up, but Kitty did not seem alarmed. That confirmed to me that something had indeed changed.

  The Dobermans came on down to the vehicle, with the shepherds closing in from both sides. They got to about ten feet from us and then sat down, ears back, heads down, their sleek bodies actually trembling. When they stopped, my dogs stopped.

  I stood up and came out from behind the vehicle. "Watch the tree line above us," I told Tony.

  I approached the Dobermans, who wouldn't look at me. They were a pair of males, beautifully conditioned, with cruelly cropped ears and shiny black coats. They were still wearing their collars. One of them was slightly larger than the other, and I spoke to him.