by Tami Hoag
“You want to call a lawyer?”
He didn’t raise his head, but lifted his gaze from his scab to the fat-ass deputy sitting across the table from him. Ellstrom. They had crossed paths once or twice since he’d hit town. Carney had little respect for lawmen in general and less for Boyd Ellstrom. He twisted his sharp-featured face into a snide look that had come naturally to him since birth and gave a hacking little bark of a laugh. “Why should I?”
Ellstrom glanced up from the yellow pad he was scribbling on and scowled. “’Cause your dick’s in a wringer, shithead.”
Carney combed a hand over his greased-back dark red hair, arrogant and unconcerned, gaze still locked on Ellstrom’s jowly face, dark eyes twinkling with secret amusement. “I don’t think so.”
Naw, the way Carney saw it, he was sitting pretty. He cackled to himself as Ellstrom tossed down his pen, heaved his bulk up out of his chair, and walked away.
“Fuck!” Carney choked and waved a hand in front of his face. “Jesus, Ellstrom! Did something crawl up inside you and die?”
Ellstrom shot him a glare. “Shut up, asshole.”
The door to the interrogation room swung open and Carney glanced up as Jantzen walked in, looking ready to kick some butt. He was the one lawman in this hick town Carney made a point to steer clear of. The BCA guy came in behind him, rumpled and bleary-eyed, his hair standing up in a rooster tail at the back of his head. Jantzen gave an order to one of the deputies who had run Carney in—Spencer—and the deputy left the room. Kaufman and Ellstrom stayed, Ellstrom standing back along the wall directly across from him, a frown cutting a deep horseshoe above his double chin, his gaze mean and dark as Carney sneered at him.
“Do you want a lawyer present?” Jantzen asked quietly, sliding into the chair at the head of the table, directly to Carney’s right.
Carney shifted a little in his seat. There was something about the way Jantzen stared at a person that gave you the creeps. It wasn’t that he had a lot to worry about, Carney assured himself. He figured he was holding all the cards. He sniffed and tipped his head to a cocky angle. “You charging me with something?”
Yeager smiled at him. “Naw, this is what we call a ‘non-custodial’ interview, Carney. Just want to ask you some questions, is all. See if you can help us out.”
Ellstrom gave a derisive snort. Carney shrugged his bony shoulders, grinning back at the BCA agent, showing off an alarming array of crooked teeth. “Ask me anything you want,” he said magnanimously.
“Hey, that’s the spirit!” Yeager laughed.
Dane sat stone-faced. He’d be damned if he was going to play pals with this little lowlife. At twenty-two Fox had an adult record of petty offenses sprinkled with a serious charge or two that he’d never been nailed for, including assault and possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. God only knew what kind of juvenile record he might have amassed. The sheriff’s office up in St. Louis County had no doubt been glad to see the last of him.
For a long moment Dane simply stared at him, cataloging every aspect of him—the furtive dark eyes, the thin, bony face, the grimy brown plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off to reveal arms that were nothing but bone and knots of sinew. Carney Fox was the kind of slimy little rodent that slinked through life, always on the brink of trouble, always slipping out of the noose at the last second. The way Dane saw it, justice would be served all the way around if he was guilty. He stared at the little rat and willed him to be guilty.
“I hear you went out to Still Waters Wednesday,” he said at last.
Carney jerked up his pointy chin, a truculent gleam in his eye. “Says who?”
“You left the Red Rooster at four-twenty. Said you were going to Still Waters on business.”
“Did anybody see me there?” The question was a challenge. Carney folded his arms over his chest and laughed as he watched Jantzen’s face darken. That answered his one big question—whether or not the Stuart woman had seen anything besides Jarvis’s big dead carcass.
“Were you there?”
Carney pulled a face and shrugged.
Dane rested his hands, palms down, fingers splayed, on the tabletop. His voice softened to a deadly pitch. “Do you know anything about the Jarvis murder?”
Carney let his gaze wander across the other faces in the room—Yeager, Kaufman, Ellstrom. He let the anticipation build.
“You didn’t get along with Jarvis, did you, Carney?” Yeager said.
Yeager was the only one in the room still looking cool and friendly. Kaufman was back in the corner, cracking his knuckles. Ellstrom hulked by the door, scowling, red creeping up the sides of his face as he rubbed a hand against his belly. And Jantzen sat there, still as a statue, staring at him with those spooky blue eyes like some kind of a wolf. A shiver wiggled down Carney’s back. He hunched his shoulders defensively.
“He was an asshole.”
“Aside from having that in common,” Dane said dryly, “you didn’t get along with him. He wouldn’t hire you on a couple months back. You made a big scene about it.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Lots of witnesses there.”
“So?” Carney challenged. “So I didn’t get the job. Big fuckin’ deal. I got other prospects.”
“Right. Like spending the rest of your worthless life rotting in prison.”
Carney sniffed. “You got nothing on me, Jantzen.”
Dane leaned toward his suspect, never blinking, until only a scant six inches of stale air and Carney’s rancid breath separated them. “Well, I don’t like you, Carney,” he said silkily. “So you’re off to a bad start right there.”
Carney swallowed hard, his bravado a little shaky now. Damn those spooky eyes. He held still as long as he could stand it, then scraped his chair back and stood up. “Go fuck yourself, Jantzen,” he sneered, digging a cigarette out of the pack of Marlboros tucked into his shirt pocket.
“Why should I when you’re doing such a good job of it for me?” Dane said, rising slowly from his chair.
He took a casual step toward Fox, looking relaxed, lazy. Carney held his ground, eyes wary, like a skittish horse. Faster than the kid could blink, Dane’s hand snaked out. He snatched the cigarette from Carney’s lip and hurled it aside, then charged, backing Fox up so fast he stumbled and smacked the back of his head against the wall.
“I want a straight answer, you little piece of shit,” Dane snarled, towering over him, looking ready to tear out his throat. “Are you listening to me, Carney? It’s third down and you’re so deep in your own end you’re about to get the goal post up your ass. Punt, Carney. Were you out there?”
His back against the cold hard plaster wall, his courage beating a hasty retreat, Carney blurted out the tried and true line that had saved his butt more than once. “I got an alibi! I was with a friend.”
Dane’s eyes narrowed as anger bubbled in his gut like hot acid. An alibi. Swell. Now he would have to ferret out some other shitheel and go through this all over again. “Not that I believe you have any,” he growled, “but does this friend have a name?”
“Stuart. Trace Stuart.”
Chapter Twelve
DANE STEPPED OUT OF THE COURTHOUSE AND squinted against the late afternoon sun. It was a beautiful day. All things considered, he would rather have been in his hayfield mowing alfalfa, or down at the creek dipping a pole into the water. But neither of those things was in the cards. As he put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses, a trio of reporters rushed up to him, pens poised.
“Sheriff, is it true a suspect has been questioned and released?”
“No arrests have been made,” he said flatly, and continued on his way. They started to tag after him, but he turned slowly and lifted his sunglasses. “I don’t have anything more to say,” he murmured.
As Dane saw it, one of the few good things about reporters was that they were quick studies. In the two days since the murder they had learned very quickly when to test him and when to back off. They backed off.
He
took the path that cut catercorner across Keillor Park, trying to work off some of his tension with long, purposeful strides. Several members of the Lion’s Club were working on the band shell, draping red-white-and-blue bunting and fumbling around with sound equipment and power cords, preparing for the Miss Horse and Buggy Days pageant.
A pair of Amish children watched from a buggy that had been tied to the hitching post at the end of the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, towheads poking around the side of the buggy, eyes bright with curiosity, mouths ringed with the telltale red of cherry Popsicles. They looked amazed by the preparations being made for a festival that celebrated their presence in Tyler County. A festival that would bring money to Still Creek and nothing but more hassles for the Amish.
There were members of their sect who benefited from tourism. Those who sold handcrafted goods through the town’s shops, the young carpenters who had been signed on to work on the interior of the Still Waters resort to add a touch of “authenticity,” the more liberal of the group who allowed tours of their homes and farms. But for the most part the tourism they had attracted was nothing more than trouble for them.
Dane made it a policy to keep channels open between his office and the Amish community. Despite the fact that they almost never called on him, they were his responsibility as much as anyone else in Tyler County. They were also his neighbors, and several were friends. He was well aware of the problems tourism had brought them. The interruptions of their private lives by outsiders who saw them as curiosities, who photographed them and stared at them and mocked them as if they were devoid of intelligence or human feeling just because they chose a simpler life. Then there were the tensions among their ranks as young people abandoned the Ordnung, the old church standards, and defected from the Unserem Weg, the Amish way of life; lured by shiny new cars and the promise of money and leisure time.
To the Amish, Horse and Buggy Days was a bad joke, an irony. But Dane supposed it was really just a part of the system of checks and balances that kept the two cultures living in harmony. The Amish had come to Still Creek from Ohio in the mid-seventies when the price of land had been high and the price of crops low. Farmers had been going broke. Cash rich, the Amish had bought up farms left and right, prospering in their isolationism while the rural communities around them slowly died from the economic crunch of the agriculture crisis. Then men like Jarrold Jarvis and Bidy Masters had grabbed on to the idea of tourism, and the scales had balanced.
“Dane! Dane Jantzen!”
Dane turned and winced inwardly as Charlie Wilder and Bidy Masters bore down on him, scowls on their faces and newspapers in hand.
“Have you seen this?” Bidy demanded, shaking the paper in front of him like a rattle. “It’s a disgrace! It’s an outrage!”
Charlie unfolded his issue and held it up for Dane to see. The banner headline read Local Entrepreneur Murdered: Still Waters Churning. The news was certainly no surprise. Dane suspected it was the source that had the backs of the town council up. It was the special edition of the Clarion.
“It’s bad enough having this all over the city papers,” Bidy complained, his vulture face pulled into the lines of extreme displeasure usually associated with an acid stomach. “But do we have to put up with it in our own town?”
Dane pulled off his sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He needed this like he needed a kick in the balls. “Murder is news, Bidy. The Clarion is a newspaper.”
“Our newspaper,” Bidy said bitterly. “Now we’ve got some foreigner coming in, printing stuff like this.”
Charlie gave one of his little icebreaker chuckles, but his smile was so forced it looked as if it might crack his round face. “It casts a bad light on Still Creek, Dane. The chamber of commerce mails this paper out as part of the tourism package. Thank God we read the thing before Ida Mae went ahead and sent them. Think of the effect this could have on Horse and Buggy Days! We’ve already been getting calls—people expressing concerns about coming down from the Cities.”
“You’ll have to take your complaints to the publisher, boys,” Dane said on a sigh. “Freedom of the press is guaranteed by the Constitution. As long as she’s printing the truth, it’s out of my hands.”
It might have been out of his hands, but it was on the tongues of nearly everyone in the Coffee Cup. Dane caught snatches of criticism and complaint as he strode through the diner looking for Amy. A sense of betrayal colored the comments. It was one thing for the bigger papers to report bad news, it was quite something else for their own beloved newsless little Clarion to splash murder and mayhem across its front page. The Clarion was supposed to talk about all things good and small-town—local 4-H clubs preparing for the county fair, the town council breaking ground for the new library, fire prevention week, Horse and Buggy Days.
Dane dismissed the topic from his mind as he slid into a booth across from his daughter. God knew, he had enough on his mind without worrying about the Clarion, and he meant to forget all of it while he snatched a few minutes for himself.
Amy gave him a smile that rivaled the sun’s brilliance and a little of the weariness that was dragging him down lifted away. She had selected a booth at the back of the restaurant and sat with her back to the wall and her canvas sneakers on the seat, the latest issue of Glamour splayed across her knees. Her long hair was pulled over one shoulder and secured in a fashionably loose ponytail with a scrap of ecru lace that matched her cotton off-the-shoulder summer sweater. The sun had already teased out the freckles on her upturned nose, he thought, then reminded himself that she was seldom without sun, living in California.
“Hi, stranger,” she said, wiggling her fingers at him. “How’s it going?”
“Hi, peanut.” He reached across the table and gave her hand a squeeze, frowning a little as he caught sight of the bright orange polish on her fingernails. “Things are getting pretty bad when you have to make an appointment to see your old man, huh?”
“I know you’re busy,” she said, sympathy plain on her face and in her voice. “It’s okay.”
Dane’s frown darkened. “It’s not okay.”
He got precious little time with her as it was. She would be with him for three weeks before heading back to L.A. and Tricia and Stepdaddy. Three crummy weeks. The idea galled him. She was his daughter, his baby, as much a part of him as she was of Tricia, yet time for him was doled out in miserly snatches because her mother was ambitious and wanted something “better” than he could provide.
Three weeks. Hell, the way this case was going, he might not get to sleep for three weeks, let alone get to spend time with his daughter. He studied her now, as if he were trying to memorize her features, and his eyes narrowed.
“Is your hair turning red?”
Amy grinned and fluffed at it with orange-tipped fingers. “God, Dad, I thought you’d never notice! Mom let me get highlights for my birthday. Don’t you love it?”
Dane bit down on the word no, taking a more diplomatic tack. “Aren’t you a little young to be coloring your hair?”
“Daddy . . .” She slanted him that look that declared him hopelessly uncool. They were going to have it out about this age business before too long, but she couldn’t bring herself to start the argument now. He seemed too tired and frustrated—and that stirred not only compassion in her, but caution as well. His fuse would most likely be burning short.
Phyllis Jaffrey swooped in on the booth in her soundless shoes and shoved a plate under Dane’s nose.
“What’s this?” he asked, eyeing the cheeseburger suspiciously.
Phyllis ignored him while she set a tall glass in front of Amy. “Here’s your Coke, sweetheart,” she said, a smile in her gravelly voice. She gave Amy’s shoulder a squeeze with one bony little hand. “It’s the real thing. You’re too young and skinny to be drinking that diet stuff.” She slid Dane a wry sideways look. “It’s a bacon cheeseburger with the works, Sherlock. You look like you could use a good dose of fat and cholesterol. On the house.”<
br />
Dane managed a grin for the woman who had been feeding him cheeseburgers since he’d been captain of the junior varsity football team. “Officers accepting favors and gratuities is against the law, Phyllis.”
Phyllis sniffed as she hugged her empty tray across her middle. “I don’t do gratuities, Sheriff. I do cheeseburgers.”
“Amen.”
He groaned with heartfelt appreciation as he sank his teeth into the burger. It was no fast-food travesty, but a solid quarter pound of lean, home-grown beef on a bun that had been baked fresh that morning. His stomach growled impatiently for it as he chewed. Breakfast had been five cups of black coffee and half a bottle of Tylenol. He hadn’t had any time—or appetite—for lunch. His little chats with Carney Fox and Trace Stuart had occupied most of the afternoon and had left him with a bad taste in his mouth.
