Sign Off

by Patricia McLinn

  It felt good, thinking about who to call to find out what. Less than the standard six degrees of separation got me a “tell him I said to call” for someone who worked in the Wyoming state crime lab. Alas, my friend’s neighbor’s former college roommate was off yanking innocent fish out of an idyllic existence in some lake and unreachable.

  I declined to leave a message with my next target. I might be out of the mainstream, perhaps for good, but I still didn’t want anyone at the FBI lab to know Dex did E.M. Danniher a favor now and then. That was how the nickname Danny started, quickly picked by most of my old friends.

  I had better luck calling the newsroom of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

  “Hey, Danny, you scared any rattlesnakes out there in the Wild West?” Matt Lester greeted me.

  We’d started fresh out of journalism school together, Matt and me. He never shied away from accusing me of going over to the dark side with the move to TV, but we remained friends. I’d stayed with Matt and his wife Bonnie for a few of the last, worst days of my marriage.

  “After a snake like you, what’s another rattler?”

  He made a sound that I supposed he thought was a rattlesnake. Not that I knew if he was right or not. After an exchange of “how are you’s” and quick but honest answers—“Dead tired. This kid will never sleep through the night” from him about their third and “I’m not sure yet” from me—he cut to my chase.

  “Whaddya need, Danny?”

  “There’s a kid from this area named Frank Claustel.” I spelled it. “He’s a freshman at Temple. I want anything you can find out.”

  I told Matt about Frank and Rog Johnson and Foster Redus. I didn’t tell him about Tamantha Burrell and her daddy. Or Mike Paycik and his ambitions.

  After we hung up, I listened to the radio while I thought about old times and dead marriages, until the local news came on, dominated by the finding of Redus’ body. The solitary bit of new information was that Burrell had been released after some eight hours of questioning.

  The second time I called, Dex was back.

  I described what I’d seen of the truck and where it went over. “So, tell me this, Dex, if you wanted to kill somebody, how sure could you be that they’d die when you pushed the truck off the side of a mountain?”

  “It depends.”

  Everything depends to Dex. That’s why prosecutors so seldom ask him to testify, even though he’s tops in the lab.

  “It sounds consistent with a truck being pushed over the edge. But I wouldn’t go any stronger without a lot more facts.”

  “Wouldn’t the truck have been likely to burn, maybe explode?” I asked as I looked out the window over the sink. A shadow detached itself from the garage and ventured toward the tree stump and the newly re-filled bowls. I found myself grinning.

  “You’ve watched too many chase movies, Danny. Not many vehicles burn and fewer explode in crashes. Fireball scenes are special effects.”

  He explained why, with an amount of detail I found reassuring as a driver of our nation’s highways, but not particularly helpful.

  “So,” I interrupted, “if someone pushed that truck off the mountain with Foster Redus in it, they were just lucky he died?”

  “It all—”

  “Depends,” we finished together.

  “Get me more, and maybe I can tell you more,” he said in closing.

  Some time later, Mike’s knock on the back door startled me out of a directionless reverie and into the realization that I’d tumbled directly from bed into a pair of sweats without benefit of shower.

  As I opened the door and looked past him—bowls were empty and no shadow in sight—he held up a paper bag exuding the distinctive aroma of donuts. I stepped back and let him in.

  Chilly air streamed in with him. He wore a denim jacket partly zipped. Summer apparently had taken a detour.

  “I come bearing news and gifts,” he said. “But first, do you have coffee?”

  I pulled a mug from the row at the back of the counter. “Help yourself. Now what news and gifts?”

  He looked around as he poured from the half-full pot while I helped myself to a donut.

  “You know, this is a really ugly house.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s like a wind tunnel. It’s a good thing you weren’t here during the winter.” What did he call what Warren the weatherman had reported all through April? “I would have thought somebody from the network could afford—”

  “I know, I know. Now tell me the news.”

  “They took Redus’ body out last night. The state guys would have preferred to examine it where it was, but the truck’s not stable. They’re hauling the truck up about noon. After they get the right equipment.”

  “Want to go?”

  “Yeah.”

  He nodded toward the telephone and a fan of notes on the table. “Progress?”

  “Not really. Waiting for answers to some calls. For others I need more grist to feed the mill before any flour comes out.”

  “That’s where I come in.” Mike dug a hand into the donut bag and came up with a golden brown specimen. Smug, he definitely sounded smug. It’s not fair that the man could look that attractive this early and with his mouth full of donut. If the networks knew about this, he’d be co-hosting a morning show in nothing flat. “I’ve got prime grist. What I don’t have is a good mill. Not the kind you’ve got. So I propose a cooperative effort. Your mill, my grist. Share and share alike on the flour.”

  “I haven’t been holding out on you, Paycik,” I hedged.

  “How about your trip to the Circle B and the construction trailer?”

  Good grief, Burrell was right—everyone in Cottonwood County did know about everything. “Just trying to catch up with you, since you know Burrell.”

  “Share and share alike from now on?” he insisted.

  You’d think he didn’t trust me. “Deal.”

  “Good.” He drew down his jacket zipper and pulled out a manila folder. He dropped it on the table. “Preliminary report on Sheriff’s Deputy Redus.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  Mike shrugged and chewed. “There was a plain envelope with my name on it by my door this morning. I was taught not to question gifts. However, the envelope met a terrible accident and burned to a small pile of ashes.”

  In other words, he at least guessed his aunt was responsible, and he was covering her considerable derrière.

  Firmly wiping my mind of any considerations of Paycik’s family loyalty, his looks and his broadcast future, I opened the file and skimmed the contents. It listed the victim’s clothing as a regulation deputy’s uniform. His wallet (with three-hundred and sixty-two dollars) was in the usual pocket. His handgun was holstered and showed no sign of being fired since its last cleaning.

  Then, hedged around by qualifiers, it described the state of the body. I needed a second reading to bring the legalese and medicalese into focus.

  Redus had been bashed on the head with a blunt object. An image clicked into place of Tom Burrell’s arms, muscles taut, tendons straining as he swung the head of an ax through a log.

  “Are you cold, Elizabeth? Want me to heat up the coffee?”

  “What?” Reminding myself an ax didn’t qualify as blunt, I focused on Mike, who had a hand out for my coffee cup.

  “You cold? I’ll put your mug in the microwave.”

  I felt goose bumps on my arms. “No, it’s fine, thanks.” I took another swig to prove it. “Hold on a minute.” I picked up the phone and hit redial. “I got more information, Dex.”

  “That was fast. Thought you were out where the living is easy.”

  “That’s South Carolina from Porgy and Bess, not Wyoming. Now, listen.” I read the information about the truck and injuries. He asked me to repeat one bit, but that was probably my pronunciation.

  “Well,” Dex said, “it’s what I would have told you if you’d asked how I’d make sure someone in a truck I pushed off a mountain wou
ld die, instead of asking how likely it was that pushing him off would kill him.”

  I had a lot of sympathy for any lawyers who’d encountered Dex as a witness. “Okay, Dex. How would you make sure someone would die in a truck you pushed off a mountain?”

  “Kill the guy first. In this case, your basic blow to the head. Left rear quadrant.”

  I tried to picture it. “So, for someone sitting in the driver’s side of a truck . . .”

  “The blow would come from the side and a little behind. Somebody standing outside the open truck door, swinging a baseball bat or—no, the wound was narrower.”

  “How much strength would it take?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary with the right weapon and a good swing. Any adult of sound body, male or female. Any teenager who wasn’t a weakling.”

  As I thanked him, then repeated the information for Mike, I realized the only person Dex had eliminated was Tamantha.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The green tailgate of Foster Redus’ pickup appeared over the edge of the broken-off ground like an action scene in slow-motion reverse. It even had sound effects—the grinding and whirring of the monster-sized tow truck that inched Redus’ pickup upward with the help of stabilizing side-wires.

  Alvaro had herded Cagen and Needham Bender from the Independence, KWMT’s cameraman Jenks, Mike and me behind crime scene tape that kept us backed up against the mountain. But the road was narrow, so we could see almost everything, right down to the chrome wheels, broken spotlight on the cab roof and scratches in the stylized flame racing stripes. As long as the state crime lab guys didn’t whisper to Alvaro, who was taking notes, we could hear, too.

  The bed of the pickup, they described as empty. In my notebook I itemized the contents of the cab as they read them off:

  —A handgun in a special holder under the driver’s seat.

  —A second handgun in the glove compartment.

  —Handgun and rifle ammunition, shotgun shells.

  —Various maps, an owners’ manual and maintenance schedule.

  —Four boxes of super-ribbed condoms.

  —A scattering of keys broken loose from their ring.

  —One interior gun rack, partially detached, apparently during the trip down the mountain.

  No one said it, but for all the looks exchanged, it might as well have been shouted: There was a gun rack and ammunition, but no rifle or shotgun.

  —The hinged, metal box used for forms, citations and reports.

  —One carbon copy of a Cottonwood County Sheriff’s Department arrest report.

  The state guy put that in a plastic sleeve, which Alvaro picked up. The paper looked as if it had been previously crumpled in a fist. He kept his back to us, but his shoulders seemed to tense, and the back of his neck reddened. I had a hunch whose arrest report it was.

  Something else nibbled at the edge of my mind, but I couldn’t entice it to the forefront.

  When the lab guys started buckling down to the painstaking jobs of checking for fingerprints, fibers and other trace evidence, I said, “Let’s go” to Mike.

  “How about if we talk to each of the suspects,” he suggested when we were in his four-wheel drive. “See how they’re reacting.”

  I agreed, because I figured it wouldn’t pay to irk the driver on these roads. Besides, it would be interesting to see whom he considered suspects.

  * * * *

  “I thought we’d start with the official version,” Mike said as he pulled his four-wheel drive into a spot behind the courthouse after a quick stop at the Dairy Queen. We ate inside this time, and I didn’t spill.

  “No one’s going to get away with the murder of one of my deputies,” the sheriff declared as soon as we were ushered in. “No, sir. Not going to happen. Bob Widcuff personally guarantees it.”

  “So, it was officially murder? Redus’ truck didn’t go off the cliff by accident?” Mike asked. That was a nice touch, since we weren’t supposed to know about Redus’ head.

  Widcuff’s cheeks puffed out. “Well, now, let’s not get hasty. That’s not an official statement. No, this is just between us, some honest, caring folks talking about the tragic death of one of our fine law enforcement officers.”

  “But you didn’t call in the state guys right off. Why not?” Mike said.

  Oh, yeah, I could see who was No. 1 on Paycik’s suspect list.

  “Redus always talked about getting out, going someplace bigger. Maybe he’d finally backed his words with action. We had to consider that,” Widcuff said defensively. “But I pushed for a fuller investigation earlier. Thing is, there’re a lot of factors that go into a decision like that and a lot of people who get involved. Sometimes my hands are tied.”

  I took that to mean someone else had been giving him orders. That was in keeping with the general opinion of the sheriff. The question remained, if Widcuff was a puppet, who was pulling the strings?

  “In the end it didn’t matter,” he said with heavy self-satisfaction, “because we had the right man, right from the get-go. You know who worked Three-Day Pass Road last season?”

  “Who?” I obliged.

  “Tom Burrell’s company.” He nodded for emphasis. “Another company took over this year, but he probably thought he’d be back supervising this year, and he could make sure the body wasn’t ever found.”

  I didn’t see how without inexplicably dropping several tons of material over the edge of the highway to cover up the truck permanently.

  “That’s another thing,” Widcuff went on. “The crime scene was six miles from Burrell’s house as the crow flies. Could have tailed him easy.”

  Only a crow could follow that six-mile route. For the rest of us it was slow-going, twisting, climbing roads. It seemed more reasonable that Redus’ killer was someone he’d arranged to meet. Someone who’d driven up separately, and then used his or her vehicle to push Redus’ over the edge.

  That didn’t rule out Burrell, since he had no one to confirm he’d been home all night.

  “Yup, finding the body will make this a piece of cake, but we were building a case against Burrell all along. Methodical investigating, that’s what it takes. Putting each piece of evidence together. Not missing a thing.”

  “So the files Redus kept didn’t have anything that pointed to Tom Burrell?” I asked.

  “Nah. There wasn’t anything about him in—wait a minute, what do you know about those files?”

  “Just that they must not have helped your case against Burrell. Otherwise you wouldn’t have burned them, would you?”

  “Of course not,” he reassured me. Then he saw the cliff at the end of the road I’d led him down and stood on the brakes. “I didn’t burn no files. Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No? The man you had do the burning probably remembers. Probably kept the memo, too.”

  “I didn’t write a memo. I just told him to . . .” His triumph evaporated as he felt the ground start to give under his foot—the foot he didn’t have in his mouth. “You don’t know anything, Ms. Bigshot Reporter.” His smirk was downright nasty. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here—”

  “Why, Sheriff Widcuff, I don’t know what you mean.” I stopped just short of batting my eyelashes. “I just thought we were talking about this tragedy.”

  He didn’t thaw completely.

  He was vain, and I suspected that his vanity chafed at the restrictions placed on him. Whether those restrictions were simply the vagaries of politics and political alliances or something even less benign, he wasn’t going to tell us. He was vain, but not entirely stupid.

  “Yes, it is a tragedy, A terrible tragedy,” he said. Then, in case we didn’t get his drift, he added, “A terrible, terrible tragedy.”

  “It is,” I agreed. “And it’s tragically ironic that the one file Deputy Redus apparently had loose in his truck at the time of his death was the one on that poor young boy—now, what was his name?”

  “Rog Johnson,” th
e sheriff supplied. He shook his head wisely. “Situation like that boy’s suicide—that cuts up a law enforcement officer something fierce.”

  Mike tried a couple more questions, but the sheriff had settled firmly behind his “tragic” bunker and was not going to be lured out again.

  “So you got confirmation of what Richard said about Widcuff ordering Redus’ files burned,” Mike said as we walked out.

  “We still couldn’t use it in a story. The sheriff would deny it, and we don’t have him on tape. But we got an indication that the loose file found in Redus’ truck was the one on Rog Johnson—though not whether it’s the official one or the one Alvaro saw. We also got interesting hints that our sheriff is not the captain of his own fate.”

  “Yeah, I caught that.” Mike looked at me over the roof of his four-wheel drive. “You did that very well.” It didn’t sound entirely complimentary.

  * * * *

  Mike’s next stop was the county high school.

  When I raised my eyebrows, he turned off the engine, unhooked his seat belt and stretched in a thoroughly satisfied way. “Since you got Widcuff to admit that loose file in Redus’ truck was a copy of the one on Rog Johnson’s arrest, this seemed the next logical stop.”

  “Your logic escapes me, Paycik.”

  He grinned, but it wasn’t nearly as attractive as usual. Smugness is not a charming expression. “I found out something interesting yesterday.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That shot-putter, Brent Hanley, is Myrna Johnson’s nephew. So Rog was his cousin. Rog was older, but Brent was bigger and tougher. The way I hear it, he was protective of his cousin.”

  “The last time I talked with young Brent he tried to bean me with a shot put, remember? I’d just as soon keep my brain matter, if it’s all the same to you.”

  He opened his door. “I’ll talk to him alone, then.”

  I got out of the car.

  He didn’t grin, but he sure wanted to. “Don’t worry. They’re in classes, and he won’t be carrying a put. Probably.”

  “How reassuring.”

  As we crossed the threshold of the angular brick and glass building erected when oil was a hot commodity, a bell went off. In an instant we were caught in a maelstrom of rushing young bodies.