Avalanche: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries)

by Patrick F. McManus

  He found them in Pap’s room, sitting in easy chairs, their feet propped on the coffee table. They were smoking cigars, probably Cubans. He said, “Glad to see the two of you hard at work.”

  “It’s tough,” Dave said. “Pap and I been in that hot tub so much we’re turning into prunes. About time you showed up.”

  He told them about his visit with Ben Hoot. Pap said, “I’ve heard about Hoot for years. Every time somebody goes missing up on the West Branch, Hoot gets the blame.”

  “You think he deserves it?” Tully asked.

  “No evidence ever turned up.”

  “I suspect not. Anyway, he gave me a lead that I’m going to follow up on. I have to tell you, this case gets weirder all the time. I talked to Lurch on the phone. He said Susan pinned Horace Baker’s time of death between eleven and midnight Monday. Herb found out that both Horace and Mike had key-man insurance for two million each.”

  “Key-man insurance?” Pap said. “What’s that?”

  Tully told him. “Apparently, the way this works out is that Blanche Wilson would end up with four million dollars.”

  “That’s a pretty fair motive,” Dave said. “You don’t think she killed them, do you?”

  “Not personally.”

  “A hired killer?” Pap said. “That’s always a chancy business for murder. Hit men are generally stupid. They get busted for a different murder and right away they give you up, so they can get a more lenient sentence.”

  Dave said, “Sounds as if you’ve had some experience with hit men, Pap.”

  “Nope. I always figured you want somebody dead you best to do it yourself.”

  “If you’re done plotting murder,” Tully said, “I’ll fill you in on Mike Wilson. Lurch says that according to Susan, Wilson didn’t drown—no water in his stomach or lungs. But the boot tracks from the Pout House to the river were made with Wilson’s boots! How do you figure that?”

  “Somebody else was wearing Wilson’s boots,” Dave said. “Somebody a lot lighter than Wilson. I figured that out from the tracks in the snow. The idea was to make us think Wilson had walked out to the river and drowned.”

  “Wilson’s body was wearing the boots,” Tully said.

  “I don’t care,” Dave said.

  Pap said, “The murderer must have taken the boots off Wilson and wore them down to the river to make us think Wilson had fallen in and drowned. Then he put the boots back on Wilson and threw the body in the river.”

  “Whoever wore the boots from the Pout House to the river had to be picked up by boat,” Tully said. “So we’ve got at least two people involved.”

  Pap blew a cloud of cigar smoke at Tully. “How do you figure Mike got in the river then?”

  “Whoever made the tracks to the river was too small to carry him. As Dave has pointed out, the tracks would have been much deeper if the person was carrying a body.”

  “They had to dump him in upstream of where we found him,” Dave said. “As you pointed out, Bo, bodies don’t float upstream.”

  Tully said, “Sometimes they do. Whoever threw him in the river wasn’t aware the river was backing up. There’s a back eddy by the dock and the person would have known that any body thrown in there would just float around in the eddy. I suspect the body was taken to the middle of the suspension bridge and dropped into the middle of the current.”

  Pap said, “Sounds reasonable. The killer probably didn’t know that Mike had died before he was tossed in the river.”

  Dave said, “You’re probably right, Bo, about him being dropped in from the suspension bridge. It’s way up above the water, and the killer, or killers, probably couldn’t tell the river was backing up. Normally, the body would have washed all the way down to the Blight River and from there on down to the Snake. It probably never would have been found. This way it was washed upstream.”

  “I guess we’ve solved the murder,” Tully said.

  “Yeah,” Pap said. “Except for who did it.”

  “Oh, yeah, there’s that,” Tully said.

  26

  IT WAS DARK BY THE time Janice stopped the dogs outside Cabin Three. Tully went in and came out carrying the small kitchen table.

  “What now?” Janice said.

  Tully went back in and came out carrying a chair. He sat down on the sled and asked Janice to set the table upside-down on his lap.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said.

  “Now put the chair on the table.”

  She put the chair on the table. “I know,” she said, “we’re going to have a private supper out here, just us two.”

  “Afraid not,” Tully said. “Mush us along, sweetheart. We’re headed for an old snag about two hundred yards up the groomed track.”

  “You’ve been up there before?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “Mush!” Janice yelled. The sled took off in a spray of tails.

  Minutes later, he yelled, “I think this is it!” He pointed up at a towering gray snag. He could make out the hole Ben Hoot had told him about. Janice stopped the sled and the dogs flopped down, their breaths rising like tiny clouds of fog in the moonlight.

  He had Janice lift the table and chair off of him, then pushed up from the sled, grunting as he did so. It occurred to him at that moment that maybe he was getting too old to be riding dogsleds around in the dark. He set the table next to the snag, and stood the chair next to the table. He stepped on the chair and then on to the table.

  “Very clever,” Janice said.

  “Thanks.” He pulled on a white-cloth glove. “I hope a martin hasn’t made its home up there.” He stood on tiptoe and reached up, feeling around in the hole. His fingers touched the package. He pulled it out and looked at it.

  “Find what you expected?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Good. I’m getting that creepy feeling, like maybe we’re being watched.”

  Janice walked up and pulled the lead dog around to turn the sled back down the mountain. Tully sat down on the sled and Janice loaded the table and chair back on top of him.

  “I suspect we are,” he said.

  “Mush!”

  27

  THAT NIGHT TULLY LAY IN bed listening to the night sounds through an open window. The wind had come up and was blowing snow off the roof. He hoped Pap and Dave had done what he told them. This wind would cover up the tracks on the bridge even more. No doubt the West Branch Road was drifting shut, as if the avalanche weren’t enough. Maybe this was the start of a blizzard. As a kid he had always looked forward to blizzards. The school superintendent would shut down all the schools, because it was too dangerous for the kids to be out. From the safety standpoint, it was the sensible thing to do. Also, it gave Tully and his friends the opportunity to spend their blizzard days out sledding. He no longer looked forward to blizzards. Something has gone wrong with a man’s life, when he stops looking forward to blizzards.

  The wind let up. An owl in a nearby tree let out a brief whoo, possibly in appreciation of some relief from the wind. Coyotes then commenced their wild laughing and giggling. Tully wondered what poor creature they had found to torment. Then a long wavering howl came down off the mountain. The coyotes instantly clammed up and were not heard from again that night. They were probably home packing their bags for a long trip out of the region. Tully wondered about the wolf. Was it part of the pack that had been decimating the elk and deer herds? For most of his life, there had been no wolves in Idaho. Then the feds, the Fish and Wildlife Service, decided to introduce them: “Wolves, here’s Idaho.” The wolves prospered. Tully did not like wolves, hadn’t liked them since reading Little Red Riding Hood as a youngster. He had been pleased to see the two wolf pelts hanging in Ben Hoot’s shed. He could have arrested Hoot right then on the illegal act of killing a wolf. Hoot also had known it was illegal, but both he and Tully had been too polite to mention it. Tully for one didn’t relish even the possibility of getting dead over a couple of wolf pelts. In a way, he en
vied Hoot his lonely life. Here was a man who pretty much made up his own rules and laws and probably never violated any of them. You could probably count the number of his rules and laws on the fingers of one hand. Tully didn’t want even to speculate what those rules and laws might be. Still, there was something strangely civilized about Hoot. Tully thought maybe he himself would go down to the Blight County Library when he got back and take out a couple of Willys. Well, maybe only one. If he became too civilized, it would definitely interfere with his job.

  He got up and took a sleeping pill. He didn’t like sleeping pills, but sometimes one of them actually put him to sleep for a while. Waiting for the pill to work, he began to ponder his murder case. Obviously, Blanche Wilson was a central figure. She was the one who would profit from the murders of Horace Baker and Mike Wilson. It was becoming clear that she wasn’t the least bit upset over the demise of her husband. Maybe Blanche was also behind the attempt to kill him and Pap with the avalanche. He knew the avalanche had been deliberately triggered with dynamite, and Blanche was the only person he had told about the approximate time he would be driving up the West Branch Road. She could have hired two hit persons, one to kill her husband this side of the avalanche and another one to kill Horace Baker on the other side, knock both of them off simultaneously. If that was the case, whoever killed Mike Wilson would still be on the lodge side, trapped there by the avalanche like everyone else. There were about forty guests to choose from. He could rule out the frat boys and Marcus Tripp, much as he hated to. He could take Lindsay off his list, too. He ruled out Janice, who already had more money and dogs than she knew what to do with. DeWayne, the bartender, was still at the top of his list, if for no other reason than he was a Scragg. That left about thirty guests, among whom was the gentleman he had flattened the evening before.

  The wolf howled again. Tully didn’t hear it. He had drifted off to sleep.

  28

  TULLY ATE BREAKFAST WITH PAP and Dave. The old man and the “Indian” had also heard the coyotes and the wolf. Dave said he liked the idea of wolves out in the wilderness, because that was what wilderness was. Pap said he liked the idea of wolves, too, but didn’t care much for their reality. “They’re wiping out the elk and deer.”

  Dave said, “How come elk and deer and wolves survived together for many thousands of years without any messing around by humankind?” Pap said it was because back then deer and elk knew how to climb trees. “Maybe there were humans too but the wolves ate them.”

  Tully said, “Would you two stop? We’re supposed to be solving a couple of murders here.” He explained his theory about two hit men, one in Blight and one trapped with them at the lodge.

  Pap shook his head. “You really think Blanche is dumb enough to hire not one but two hit men? I don’t think so. I told you, murder-for-hire guys give you up in the blink of an eye.”

  Dave said, “I don’t know. Most people aren’t as familiar with murder as you are, Pap. The parties involved might see it as a good deal. You give each of the killers ten grand and you pocket the rest of four million.”

  “These guys may be real pros,” Tully said. “If one of them is up here at the lodge, he may look like any of the other guests. He probably knows how to fit in, to become part of the crowd.”

  “He’s probably a single,” Pap said. “We could get a list of the guests and pick out the single guys. If I was going to murder someone, I certainly wouldn’t want my wife along, particularly my wife, no offense to your mother, Bo.”

  “None taken.”

  “I’ll talk to Blanche and have her get me a list. It should be easy enough to pick out the singles.”

  Dave said, “Yeah, but if the hit man was a real pro, wouldn’t he bring a woman along just as part of his cover? She wouldn’t even have to know what he was up to.”

  Tully said, “Stop complicating things, Dave. I want to get out of this place sometime soon.”

  After breakfast Tully stopped by the lodge office. Blanche was nowhere to be seen, but Lois was seated at a desk working on a stack of papers. She told Tully she didn’t think there would be a problem with the list of guests, but she would have to ask Blanche first. “Jobs aren’t all that easy to find in these parts,” she said. “By the way, aren’t you supposed to have a warrant when you go after things like private lists?”

  “A what?” Tully said.

  Lois laughed. “I forgot, it’s the Blight way. Okay, I’ll get you the list, one way or another.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Say, I need to use your phone, Lois.”

  “Help yourself, Sheriff.”

  “My point is, I need you out of the office, with the door closed.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’ll go get myself a cup of coffee.”

  “Good idea. Get me one too, if you don’t mind.”

  “You got it, Sheriff.” She left.

  Tully called the National Guard headquarters and asked the pilot to pick up a package. “I’ll be there in an hour,” Ron Stolz said.

  Then he called his own office. Daisy answered.

  “Good news, Bo!” she said. “The highway department says they’ll have the West Branch Road cleared by Sunday.”

  “Daisy, good news would be if they had it cleared right now. I’m even starting to miss you.”

  “Really, Bo?”

  “Yeah, really. Now put Lurch on, will you?”

  “Byron!” she yelled in his ear. “Bo wants you on line one.”

  Lurch picked up. “Hi, boss.”

  “I’m sending you a package by helicopter, Lurch. Get out to the National Guard base and pick it up. Should be there in about two hours.”

  “What’s in the package?”

  “I was getting to that. Actually, the package is now in a shoe box I found. The object in the shoe box is in a Ziploc bag like they put leftovers and stuff in. Be careful when you take the bag out of the shoe box because I want you to check it for prints.”

  “Okay. So what’s the object in the bag?”

  “I was getting to that, too. It’s a gun in a holster. Check both the gun and the holster for prints and if you find some, see if you can get a match on the bullet that killed Baker. Check the clip and cartridges for prints, too.”

  “Got it, boss. What kind of gun?”

  “Lurch, would you let me tell this! I’m pretty sure it’s a Colt Woodsman.”

  “That’s a .22 caliber. The cartridges are pretty small but I might get a partial print off one of them. You think it could be the gun used on Horace Baker?”

  “Could be but I don’t see how.”

  “If it’s the gun used on Baker, why wouldn’t the killer deep-six it?”

  “If the killer happens to be a gun lover, and the gun happens to be an original Colt Woodsman, as I think it is, he probably couldn’t bear to deep-six it. I actually don’t think it was used on Baker, because how would it get back here?”

  “Geez, boss, I don’t know. Why ask me?”

  “It was a rhetorical question, Lurch. I’ll call you about five, to see what you find out.”

  “Daisy wants to talk to you.”

  Daisy came on. “More good news, Bo. One of the deputies caught Clarence!”

  “Caught him! He was supposed to shoot him! Where’s Clarence now?”

  “We have him in a cell. Stubb Speizer is furious, because I had him moved into a cell with Lister Scragg. We couldn’t leave them in the same cell, because Stubb would get bitten.”

  Tully ran his fingers back through his hair. “Did you think about calling the pound?”

  “The pound would put him down, you know that, Bo. He’s such a cute little dog.”

  “Daisy, one way or another, you make sure Clarence is off the premises by the time I get back. By ‘premises,’ I mean the earth!”

  “But he is so cute, boss.”

  Cute, thought Tully. Cute is what keeps most of the pets in the country alive. If they all looked like maggots they would be fish bait.

  29

/>   TULLY TRAMPED OUT THROUGH THE snow to the helicopter. He handed the shoe box to a National Guard airman and waved at Ron Stolz, the pilot. Ron waved back and then lifted off.

  Tully crossed the road and walked down to the dock on the river. Whoever made the tracks from the Pout House to the river had to be picked up by boat. As far as he knew, the inflatable jet boat was the only boat anywhere on the river. But Grady would probably know if the inflatable had been moved. It would be a simple matter to launch another jet boat somewhere else on the river. In any case, at least two persons had to be involved in the death of Mike Wilson: the person who made the tracks and the person who drove the boat to pick up the first person. Tully had somehow managed the jet outboard well enough to survive several horrific sets of rapids. He had no intention of doing it again in his entire life and could scarcely believe that he and Lurch had made it back alive. Whoever drove a boat up here must have been incredibly skilled or incredibly stupid.

  He climbed up to the suspension bridge, which was covered with packed snow. It appeared that several dozen people had walked back and forth across the bridge in the last day, wiping out any previous set of tracks. The middle of the bridge was a good thirty feet above the water, with the strongest part of the current passing directly below. If the river had started to back up this far by the time the body was dropped in, it was doubtful the person doing the dropping would have been aware of it. He headed back across the bridge.

  He stopped by the office on his way into the lodge. Lois said she had checked with Blanche. Tully could have the list. “I ran off a copy for you.” She handed it to him.

  “Wow, that’s service,” he said. He thanked her and headed through the lounge to the dining room. Lindsay was seated on one of the sofas, her crutches beside her. “Bo, it’s about time you showed up. I’ve been waiting for you ever since the helicopter took off. I thought maybe you hopped aboard it.”