AHMM, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Lorrimer winced. “That's tough."

  "And then, I got my final divorce papers, delivered at work, yet.” Shanley rolled his eyes. “My wife left me for a basketball player."

  "Man, I'm sorry."

  "Not a pro, I admit. But he's taller than you and he played in college. How do you think that makes me feel?"

  "Pretty bad, I'll bet."

  "Pretty bad doesn't begin to cover it.” Shanley sighed. “On my way out of the building the elevator stuck. I spent half an hour in there, with the alarm ringing the whole time."

  "Oh, brother."

  "The repairmen finally gave up on trying to get the door open. Instead they dropped a ladder down to me. A rope ladder. The bottom only reached to my shoulders. You ever try to climb one of those things when you can't get a foot on them?"

  "Man,” said Lorrimer, “I can see why you were mad."

  "Yeah. And then I turn the corner and see a big guy, looking like he could take on the world—well, I just lost it. You were the scapegoat."

  "Scapegoat?"

  "You know. Put all the blame on the goat and kill it. Not that I wanted to kill you,” he hastened to add.

  "I get it."

  Shanley shook his head. “I know it sounds stupid. Heck, it was stupid. But while I was hitting you—or trying to—it really felt better. Like I was attacking all my problems at once."

  "Well, it didn't feel that good to me."

  "No.” Shanley sighed. “I'm ashamed of myself."

  "No harm done,” Lorrimer decided. “The fact is, I had a bad day too."

  "Yeah?” Shanley looked up at him. “Stuck in an elevator?"

  "Nope. Look, I'm a salesman.” He patted the sample case. “Mostly gaskets and valves for industry. Sophisticated, high-market stuff."

  "Gotcha."

  "Well, there's a company in this building that's been one of our regular customers. The vice president and head of purchasing, a clown named Wragg, kept me waiting around this city for days on the promise of a big order."

  "Well, that sounds great."

  "It did.” Lorrimer sighed. “He could have put me over my quota for the whole quarter. I rearranged my week around him, dropped appointments so I'd be ready when he could fit me in."

  "And he never did?"

  "Oh, he finally did. He told me to get over here first thing after lunch. Then he left me waiting until after six."

  Shanley was wide eyed. “And?"

  "And it turned out he had a complaint about our last shipment, something he could have taken care of in five minutes on the phone. He made me go through all that just so he could chew me out and tell me he wasn't going to buy from us anymore."

  "Wow,” said Shanley. “What a creep. Was it your fault the order was wrong?"

  "No, and he knew that. But I was the part of the company he could hurt, so he did."

  "That stinks. I'll bet you understand what I meant about wanting to strike out at the world."

  "I suppose I do. But it sure isn't fair to pick on an innocent victim."

  "Absolutely not. I feel rotten about that."

  "Forget it. No bones broken.” Lorrimer thought. “You got any plans for dinner, Stan? Thanks to Wragg I have to spend another night in this town."

  "Why not? I've got nothing waiting at home. My wife ran off with the Detroit Pistons, right? Hey, what is it, Max? You look like you saw a ghost."

  A man had stepped out of the door at the far end of the office building. He turned away in the fading light, talking into a phone and not appearing to notice that anyone else existed.

  Lorrimer pointed. “That's him. Wragg."

  Shanley studied the man walking briskly away. “Just look at the jerk. That suit would cost me a month's pay."

  "At least."

  "And that haircut. How much you figure he paid for that?"

  "Too much."

  "And the attaché case, and that cell phone he's prattling into . . . I'll bet on the hoof he's worth more than my car."

  They could both hear Wragg's end of the cell phone conversation. He was using a loud voice to tell someone that the kids had better be ready for bed before he got home. It sounded less like a request than a threat.

  "What a jerk,” said Shanley.

  "Trust me,” said Lorrimer. “You're seeing his good side."

  Shanley scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I'll bet you feel that if you could just take a swing at him, all your problems would go away."

  "Maybe so. I—” Lorrimer's eyes widened. “What are you saying?"

  "You know what I'm saying.” The little man pounded a fist into his open palm. “I'll bet the petty cash in his wallet would buy us both a steak dinner. We won't be able to use his credit cards but at least he'll have the hassle of replacing them. What do you say?"

  Lorrimer blinked. “We can't do that. He'd know it was me."

  "You saw the way he ignored us. Besides, it's dark, and we'll hit him from behind. By the time he recovers his senses we'll be blocks away."

  He looked down the street. Wragg was the only person in sight. The vice president slapped his cell phone shut with a flourish. What an arrogant jerk.

  "Make up your mind,” Shanley urged. “He'll be out of sight in a minute."

  "Oh, hell,” said Lorrimer. He put his sample case down in a doorway and shook out his muscles. “Why not?"

  "All right!” Shanley grinned. “You go high. I'll go low."

  Copyright © 2010 Robert Lopresti

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Department: SOLUTION TO THE MYSTERIOUS CIPHER

  He knew only that they had fought for him and that now, through some unfathomable code of their own, had turned on him again.—Evan Hunter

  From “To Break the Wall” (Discovery Magazine, 1953)

  breakthwl mnopqsuvxyzcdfgij

  ABCDEFGHI JKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Fiction: POINTS by David Braly

  * * * *

  Robyn Hyzy

  * * * *

  "You didn't disturb anything?” asked the sheriff.

  "Nothing,” said Howard Larson. “I almost touched him, you know, to see if he was hurt or whatever, but then I saw he had to be dead. So I didn't touch him, and called you."

  The body was of a dark-complected man in his mid or late thirties, medium height and build, brown hair, clean shaven, with unremarkable facial features. He wore casual outdoor clothes: a lightweight olive green jacket over a green chamois shirt, tan chinos, and a good pair of hiking boots. The front and sides of the jacket were soaked in dried blood.

  They were on the rutted dirt road that ran from Larson's house through his ranch to the state highway between Mitchell and Sawyerville in the forested foothills of the Metolius Mountains. The ranch, nestled between the national forest and the rural subdivision on Scissors Prairie, bordered the state highway for three miles, with most of the land along the highway covered with second-growth pine and hemlock. The body was four feet off the private road, about three hundred feet from the highway junction. A few cows grazed amid the nearby trees.

  "Do you know him?” asked the sheriff.

  "Archaeologist for the Forest Service. Came to the house a few days ago to warn me he'd be poking around in the area between the dry creek and Scissors Prairie."

  "For what reason?"

  "The developer of the Scissors Prairie subdivision wants to expand it in this direction. We're in talks now. But his development plan will have to pass muster with all the federal and state agencies. Because it'll have an impact on the adjoining national forest, and because he'll be buying or trading for Forest Service land that's intermixed with mine, the plan has to first be approved by the Forest Service. They've no concern about the second-growth trees, but they want assurance that the federal land has no archaeological significance."

  "Why would Steve Calloway want to expand his development during this economy?"

  "He's buying land, not building houses on it. The hou
ses might not be built for many years. But he's preparing for better times. And I need to sell some of my ranch or lose it all to the bank. This is his chance to buy cheap."

  "You haven't seen this archaeologist since he came to your house?"

  "No. And I can't figure out why he's over this far from the area Calloway intends to buy. And where's his vehicle? As I recall, he drove a Jeep Cherokee. But it ain't here. It makes no sense."

  "What was his name?"

  "He told me,” said Larson, “but I don't remember."

  Even from the road Sheriff Vernon Rands saw what appeared to be a bullet hole in the chest of the archaeologist's jacket. He turned to look at the three deputies who'd followed him out from Sawyerville. Juan Garcia, his stocky undersheriff, was one.

  "Juan,” he said, “you take charge here. Secure the area, take all the necessary photos, and so forth. I'll call the crime lab in Bend and have them send over some forensics people to assist us."

  "Are you leaving?"

  "I'm going to the Forest Service office. They'll know why this man was here. Also his name. I don't want to go through his pockets until the forensics people finish."

  The Metolius National Forest main office was just off the highway one mile east of Sawyerville in a long, windowy, unpainted wooden building. Rands drove onto the large blacktop parking lot that fronted it fifteen minutes before noon, hoping that forest supervisor Larry Hughes hadn't yet left for lunch. He knew him only slightly, their departments cooperating in cases of trespass, vandalism, poaching, animal abuse, theft, and marijuana cultivation, but Rands didn't know him well enough to have an opinion of him. He always suspected that people with advanced university degrees and posh federal or state jobs looked down on him. He was a rural county sheriff with only two years of community college who had won his job in a close election. Little surprise that when the frowning sheriff did form an opinion of such men, it was usually negative.

  Supervisor Hughes was still in.

  Lean and fortysomething like Rands, in other respects Hughes was his opposite. He was light complected while the sheriff was dark, bald while the sheriff still had a full head of moderately long black hair, clear eyed while the sheriff wore orange-tinted aviator-style glasses over his ever-suspicious eyes, and loud-voiced while Rands habitually spoke in a quiet, gravelly tone that carried his rural accent into a listener's ear with all the audio pleasure of a fingernail being drawn across a blackboard. Even Hughes's office—sunny, open, with windows where there weren't maps—contrasted with the sheriff's dark, cramped office.

  "Dead!” said Hughes when Rands told him. They were seated facing each other across Hughes's desk. “How'd it happen?"

  "We're not sure yet. I've phoned the state police substation crime lab in Bend for a forensics team. They're hurrying over by helicopter and then a deputy will drive them out to the Larson ranch. I think he may've been shot."

  "But you're not sure?"

  "No. I didn't wanna touch the body before the experts examine it. But it did look like he had a bullet hole in him. Can't be certain. Might be a preexisting hole in his jacket that got covered with his blood, making it look like a bullet hole when it isn't. . . . Who is he? We don't even know his name."

  "Phil Otis.” Hughes shook his head. “He's only been here a few months. He came over from Portland to replace our previous archaeologist, who was promoted to a job in Colorado. Phil wasn't the best archaeologist in the world—I think he barely got through the university—but he was energetic. So far as I know, he had no enemies."

  "Why he would be on Larson's road?"

  "No idea. He should have been examining the land between the dry creek and the prairie. That's a good mile from there."

  "Know where his vehicle is?"

  "It should be with him."

  "Precisely where in that area was he supposed to be working today?"

  "Phil knew what he needed to do and how to do it, so I just let him do his own thing in his own way. He did the work on time, so I had no reason to oversee him too tightly. All I can tell you, Vern, is that he should have been between the dry creek and the prairie, which is an area that covers several square miles. I can't tell you where between. Some quarter sections belong to Larson, some to us."

  A few more minutes of conversation drew from Hughes the address of Otis and the information that he was divorced, with no family living in Paiute County.

  Rands took a deputy with him to secure the Otis house, located in a modest neighborhood a couple of blocks from downtown. It was a yellow house with a metal roof, a large picture window overlooking a small yard and a quiet street. No vehicle was parked in the attached garage.

  Using a skeleton key, Rands went inside. Everything looked normal, nothing tossed or busted like in a burglary or fight, and most everything looked unremarkable. The oddities were in the linen closet: two large cardboard boxes filled with Indian relics, which, except for three dozen black arrowheads and a couple of black spearheads, were individually wrapped in old pages from the weekday Portland Oregonian. If the relics were imitation or reproduction, they were legal. If they were genuine and removed from government land, they were illegal, prohibited from private ownership by the Federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. Rands was no expert, but they looked genuine to him, and he knew that the government's own archaeologists were among the worst violators of that particular law. He removed the boxes.

  "What do you think?” he asked the deputy, Clyde Hendrickson. “Genuine or fake?"

  Hendrickson closely examined a tomahawk, a bone knife, and a small drum, its stretched leather hard and cracked.

  "Looks authentic to me,” he said. “Either that or a remarkable imitation. And I don't know why anyone would bother to make a cracked and ruined imitation."

  "Let's put these boxes in our evidence room until we can find an expert to examine this stuff. I've got a suspicion that the late Mr. Otis may've been looting protected relics."

  An hour later Rands drove the seventeen miles back to Larson's road. There he found the forensics team already finishing its work. The local coroner's van stood by, waiting to remove the body to the crime lab in Bend. Rands parked his Bronco at the edge of the road a hundred feet from the activity and then walked.

  Garcia, seeing him coming, walked out to meet him.

  "Nadia just found the archaeologist's vehicle,” he reported. “It's parked near a deer trail that runs along the boundary between the ranch and the subdivision."

  "Let's go have a look.” Rands turned back toward his Bronco. “What did the forensics people discover?"

  "Shot in the chest. Probably early or mid morning. Appears to be a pistol round, but they'll need to examine it with their equipment to be sure. No blood found on the ground, so they think he was killed elsewhere and dumped here. They found his wallet cards and some money still on him, so robbery doesn't appear to be the motive."

  "This would be a long way to come out to mug somebody."

  "They made an unusual discovery while going through his pockets. Three points."

  "Points?"

  "Arrowheads. Removing points from where he found them would be legal if they were on private property and he'd received Larson's permission. But I asked Larson. He said he didn't know anything about them and to the best of his knowledge there are very few on his ranch."

  While they were climbing into the Bronco and getting it turned around Rands told him about the Indian relics they'd discovered in the Otis house.

  "Do you suspect that Howard Larson killed this guy to keep it quiet about Indian relics on his ranch?” asked Garcia. “That Larson feared it would stop his deal with Calloway because the Forest Service would block it?"

  "No. The relics we found were wrapped in old pages from the weekday Oregonian. Since that newspaper is no longer delivered outside the immediate Portland area, clearly he'd found or bought them earlier, while living on the wet side of the state. And even if he found the pocketed arrowheads on this ranch, it would
n't stop the sale. Arrowheads by themselves aren't significant. You find them everywhere. It would take something big, maybe the ruins of a prehistoric settlement, or something odd that would change the archaeological or cultural map, to stop a real estate development."

  Otis's Cherokee was parked in a glade just off the deer trail in the shade of tall pines. Deputy Nadia Wilcox had parked her Bronco on the trail beside it to wait for them, touching nothing.

  Rands, too, touched nothing. He did examine the Cherokee visually, noting a lack of blood inside it or churned up ground around it. He doubted that the murder had happened inside the vehicle, also doubted that it had been used to transport the body. A thick layer of brown pine needles and other debris covered the trail, preventing footprint impressions. The Cherokee was invisible from the trail; whoever parked it had to turn off onto the glade that was parallel to the trail. Possibly the killer drove it there to hide it. Or perhaps Otis had parked it there to be in the shade of the trees while he worked.

  "I'll have the forensics people look at the vehicle,” said Rands, “but I don't think this was the crime scene."

  Rands and Garcia drove back to where Otis had been found. The body already had been loaded into the coroner's van for the trip to Bend. Rands took the three arrowheads from the forensics officer in charge, who surrendered the evidence reluctantly even after the sheriff told him he needed it for the immediate investigation. Rands asked him to examine the Cherokee.

  Rands held the plastic bag of arrowheads out to Garcia, and asked: “Something look a bit strange about these?"

  Garcia took them, turned the bag over and over in his hands, studying the points closely.

  "Pretty well made,” he said at last. “I've never seen a white point or brown points before."

  "Maybe that's what seemed odd to me. I've only seen black arrowheads. But I guess they come in all colors.” Rands took back the bag and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “Let's see if we can find where Otis was working,” he said.

  During the next hour Rands and his deputies searched the area. They began where the body was found and slowly spread out, looking for disturbed ground or evidence of digging. They found nothing.