A Killing Secret

by Robert E. Dunn

  I relaxed my hand. Then I let the rest of me unwind a bit. “Yeah. He was that.”

  “Clare said you wanted to talk about…” Lawson worked his mouth a little as he tried to find the words he wanted. “Illegal activities. He said it wasn’t about me, though. That true?” He sipped his whiskey.

  “I’m not promising. I don’t know who it’s about.”

  “You tell me what and I’ll tell you if I want to talk.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “Some trees were taken from land owned by Hosea Fisher.”

  Lawson nodded and sipped. I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing or considering. “When?” he asked, setting the glass on the bar.

  “Today.”

  The big man’s broad shoulders relaxed. He took another sip of whiskey. When he lowered the glass this time, Lawson was looking at me and smiling. “I’ll talk.”

  “I know an alibi grin when I see it.”

  “I was in Springfield last night and all day today.”

  “Not alone, I guess.”

  “I was in the hospital watching my daddy die. Last night. Doctors saw me. Nurses. One real pretty one. Till a couple hours ago I was making arrangements and lettin’ the pretty one help me feel better about things.”

  “You don’t sound exactly broken up,” I said.

  “He wasn’t much of a daddy.” He took another drink.

  I was struck by how much I didn’t want a taste of whiskey. Usually it was a struggle. I’d found the one person I didn’t want to drink with.

  “What’s a two-thousand-dollar tree?” I asked.

  “Around here, probably walnut. It’ll be one grown in amongst other trees in a woods. Field trees get damage. Cattle mess with the bark or you hit it with a tractor. The damage shows in the wood, dark spots or burls. You want a mature tree with no low limbs.”

  “Why?”

  “Limbs make knots or tracks in the grain. You want it clear for about twelve feet. Fifteen is better. You take a tree like that to the mill and cut it down thin.”

  “Grade A veneer?”

  “Yep.”

  “And there’s an illegal traffic in trees like that?”

  “You know anything of value there ain’t an illegal traffic in?”

  “Seems like a lot of work.”

  “I look like someone afraid of work?” He took the last swallow of his drink and set the glass down loudly. “Not that I’m admittin’ anything. But I can cut a big tree down, top it, and have the log ready to go in half an hour. Less if I bring help to get it on the trailer. Any way you cut it, that’s good money.”

  “Just to let you know, I’m a cop. Not a reporter. Saying that you admit nothing while admitting a crime is no protection.”

  “I talk ignorant, but I ain’t. I admit what I already been convicted of.” Lawson gave me a hard, one-eyed appraisal. “Still, I take comfort in knowing I’m not the lumberman you’re lookin’ for.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “You know a lot of people who do this sort of thing?”

  He looked away and appeared to consider his empty glass.

  “Okay. Let me put it this way.” I waited for him to turn back, then asked, “You know anyone who would kill for this sort of thing?”

  The brow over E’s milky eye twitched and his good eye focused sharper. “People who do this sort of thing, do it so they don’t have to work hard. Most folks I know loggin’ like that, live by hunting and fishing. They barter for most everything else they want.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means they want things easy. Nothin’ easy about killing a man for his lumber.”

  “A girl’s dead.”

  E straightened his back and reached for his glass but didn’t lift it. “I didn’t know. I thought we were just talking about trees and cash.” He tapped the side of the glass with a meaty finger. “What girl?”

  “Her name was Rose Sharon.”

  “That singer girl?” He reached over and tapped the girl’s face in the photo of Rose and Billy. “The one gettin’ all comfy with the sheriff?”

  I nodded.

  Lawson raised his glass and sucked the remaining ice into his mouth and crunched it loudly between his teeth. “Then I’d imagine you got some problems headed your way.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He put the glass down with a hard thump and pushed it away. Reaching in front of me he swept the two photos up and laid them out between us. “That’s your dead girl.” He pointed. “That’s your boss.” He moved his finger to the other picture and thrust it under the unknown sergeant’s face. “There’s your lumberman. A genuine asshole. But he’s her brother and his buddy.”

  Lawson stood.

  I kept my gaze fixed on the photos. Without looking at him, I could still feel the presence of the big man. His cologne lingered with the stink of his revelation. “Thanks for your help,” I said.

  “Keep your thanks,” he answered, walking away. “Just remember you owe me one.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, finally raising my head.

  Lawson was gone.

  Clare cleared the glass and wiped the bar without looking at me. “E’s a horse trader,” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He trades. Favors. Information. Even actual horses sometimes.”

  “Why did you call him?”

  “You wanted to know about tree poaching.”

  “He’s the only guy you know?”

  “E’s the only man to ask. There’s not a tree, horse, or heifer that gets stolen between Springfield and Harrison, Arkansas that E Lawson doesn’t have a finger on or take a cut of.”

  “And I owe him a favor?”

  Clare shrugged.

  Chapter 5

  I left Moonshines and went to HQ. Billy wasn’t there and he wasn’t picking up his phone. Billy wasn’t the kind to ignore the job, so I had to assume it was me he was ignoring.

  The station was still a madhouse. There were news vans from every station in a two-hundred-mile radius filling the parking lot and street around the building. The inside was like an ant farm, all activity and little meaning.

  I refused to be sucked into the chaos. At my desk I ignored all the flashing phone lines and worked the computer long enough to get a little information on Levi Sharon. Rose’s older brother was an E-5 sergeant. He had been arrested for logging trees on army land while a drill instructor at Fort Leonard Wood. No jail time, but he’d been given a dishonorable discharge. A little more digging showed he had been with the Third Infantry Division in Iraq at the same time I was there as an MP. Billy had been a medic in the Third.

  As I worked the official databases, I checked some unofficial sources. The first link to show after typing Rose Sharon into the search engine took me to a picture of her body in the snow. Along with the photo were speculations about the killing. All of them foolish. The most lurid were in large type, and all suggested a sexual element to the murder. Things only got worse from there. A respected local reporter, Riley Yates, posted a story that connected Sheriff Billy Blevins to Rose Sharon. It quoted Sissy Fisher. Riley had written a clear, restrained presentation of facts. But there was no escaping the riptide under the logic. The suggestion that Billy had been romantically involved with the dead girl was obvious.

  Despite the late hour, Doreen was still on the job. I went to see her.

  “Where’s Billy?” I asked.

  “He’s not here, and the phone calls from reporters are only getting ruder. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “He’s been calling in. He said he’s working but won’t say on what.”

  “Call him,” I said, trying to sound as decisive and sure as possible. “Tell him I said to authorize overtime and add as many deputies as
we can call up. Tell him we need more crowd control at the crime scene and someone outside the HQ. And tell him I’m calling in extra help.”

  “Extra help?”

  “Chuck.”

  Doreen nodded and punched the speed dial for Billy. I use my cell to call my friend, and the previous boss, Charles Benson.

  “Sounds like you have troubles over there,” the former sheriff said as soon as the phone connected.

  “We do,” I said. “Wanna help?”

  “Already on it.”

  “What?” My surprise was doubled when I watched the main door open and the man I was on the phone with walk through. “How?”

  Chuck grinned and shook snow from his shoulders as he put his old flip phone away. “The look on your face makes me wonder if I might be a ghost. I hope I didn’t pass and no one told me.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “The sheriff called me and asked me to take a job.”

  “A job? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m the new assistant sheriff.”

  Doreen stood, then dashed around her desk with open arms. “Welcome home.” They hugged each other tightly.

  “You don’t look near as happy,” Chuck said, grinning over Doreen’s shoulder at me.

  “I don’t know what I am.”

  “Don’t try to tell me it was a job you wanted.” He disentangled himself from Doreen, then said to her, “I’ll be settin’ up in the sheriff’s office. Send me all the media calls. How are we on the duty roster?”

  Doreen quick-stepped to her desk, repeating the orders I had given just a moment before.

  Chuck looked back at me. “That’s a good start. You gonna stay here and work the phones or do you have other things to do?”

  Chuck walked back to his old office and I followed. “What do you know about what’s going on?”

  “That girl was murdered. The news got wind. Here I am.”

  “You know what I’m talking about. Billy. Rose Sharon.”

  Chuck went straight in and sat behind his old desk. He ignored the hat rack by the door and placed his hat, crown up, beside the blotter. “What about them?”

  “Where is Billy?”

  “Don’t you figure if he wanted you to know, he would have told you?”

  That hit me like a slap. “What did he say?”

  “He said he had some things to do.” Two lines of the desk phone flashed. Chuck looked from it to me and picked up the handset. “He said you had plenty to do yourself.”

  “Are we working on the same things?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Why isn’t he talking to me?”

  “The two of you have a difficult relationship at the best of times.”

  “Is that you talking or him?” I asked.

  My old friend shrugged. It was an exaggerated gesture that for some reason made him look even older than he was. It reminded me there were reasons he’d wanted to retire.

  “Trust issues,” he said. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “Billy doesn’t trust me?”

  “It isn’t that he doesn’t trust you. It’s that he knows you don’t trust anyone.”

  “But—”

  “There come times in relationships when trust is all you have and is everything you need.” Before I could say anything else, he punched a button on the phone and said, “Taney County Sheriff’s Office, Assistant Sheriff Benson speaking.”

  I knew when I was dismissed.

  With Chuck helping to smooth things over at HQ, I felt free to follow my thoughts. The problem with that was my thinking was along two different paths. I tried to concentrate on the murder that set everything in motion. But my head kept getting hijacked by more personal concerns. I realized that both sets of thoughts were on the same track. They were leading me straight to Billy’s place. The sheriff’s office is in Forsyth. Between getting through the news vehicles and the falling snow, it took most of an hour to get to the town of Hollister where he lived.

  Lights were on and a car was in the drive, but the sheriff’s official vehicle was missing. The car was a newer Dodge but it had been down some tough roads. Its sides were frozen with slush and mud. There was a deep crumple on the left front fender. In the wrinkled metal around the wheel well were brown weeds and packed snow. Someone had run into a ditch, and probably that night. The hot metal of the engine was still ticking as it cooled.

  Standing beside the car, I watched the windows of the house for any movement. There was no reason to delay or spy other than my fear of finding out things I didn’t want to know. I took a deep breath of frigid air and went for the door.

  I didn’t knock. I had a key, but the door was unlocked. When I pushed it open a blast of heat rolled out, almost wilting me. The wood stove against the living room wall was radiating enough heat for three houses the same size. It was bigger than necessary, and Billy never built the fire that high.

  As I moved into the room I reached for and loosened the seating of my service weapon. “Billy?” I called, even though I was sure he wasn’t there. “Hello?”

  The house was a ranch. The front door opened to the main living room that spilled to the kitchen on the far end. The main room was clear, but I had to pass the hallway to the bedrooms before I could come around the far wall that divided the living room from the dining room and kitchen.

  The hall was dark.

  Before I glanced around the corner I pulled my weapon and said in my command voice, “Sheriff’s Department. Who’s there?”

  I darted my head forward for a quick glance down the gloomy hallway. It was clear. I stepped forward, facing into the hall with a wide stance and my pistol raised. “Sheriff’s Department,” I announced again.

  Nothing.

  I didn’t linger. But I didn’t want to go down that hall without clearing the front rooms first. I turned back into the entry and stepped toward the dining room.

  That was when I was struck from behind.

  Something broad and rough and hard hit the back of my head. It wasn’t forceful enough to put me down or out. Not by itself. But it bounced me forward and I struck the wall with my temple. As stars and pulsing purple-red tunneled my vision, I realized that someone had waited behind the wall, then circled around through the kitchen to come up behind me.

  I still had my weapon and might have been able to right myself and bring it around if that someone had not slammed me in the kidney. My knees buckled. All the words I wanted to say froze in my throat.

  Then a foot hit my back and pushed.

  I fell forward onto my hands. My hand still gripped my weapon but it seemed a million miles away and too heavy to lift. The club struck my back again, low and close to the spine. With an odd sense of satisfaction I recognized that it was a piece of firewood. Then I was on the floor.

  I don’t think I ever quite went out. But the searing pain locked my body. My mouth was a silent rictus. Whoever had ambushed me took the gun from my limp grip. Once I was disarmed, they put their hands under my arms and dragged me back into the blazing hot living room.

  “I remember you,” a man’s voice said as I was dropped.

  I reached with trembling and uncoordinated fingers for the baton on my belt. My head was spinning. My gut was roiling. The real fight was to remain in the present. My mind was close to retreating into the dirt and hot wind of Iraq. I could feel the grit of sand in my teeth and on the bloody wounds that tracked my body. Over the years since I had been raped and left for dead by two of my superior officers, that time and place had been a terrible refuge. As if I could hide from new pain in the violence and terror of old pain.

  Just like every moment of every day when I struggled to reject my desire to be drunk, I rejected the need to hide in my deepest moment of fear. I came back to the hot room and the man standing over me. But my baton
was gone.

  I was lying facedown. The man was straddling me at the waist. My reaction was to fight.

  As soon as I started to flail my arms and try to roll my body over, the man dropped. He knelt, settling his ass on my back. His knees pinned my arms.

  “Settle down,” he said. “I ain’t gonna hurt you no more if I don’t have to.”

  “You’ve already assaulted a cop,” I managed to say. “Don’t make it worse.”

  “Believe me. Things can’t get much worse.”

  Then I asked the one question that was clear in my swirling brain. “Why is it so hot?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you have it so hot in here?”

  I could feel his confusion communicated through the lessening tension in his body on mine. He shifted and I imagined it was a shrug.

  “I was cold,” he said. “I crashed my car getting here. It took a long, cold hour to get it out. And I didn’t have no coat.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You don’t know?” He laughed. It was a high, tittering giggle. “I thought you were here looking for me.”

  “I was looking for Sheriff Billy Blevins.”

  “And he’s out looking for me.” He laughed again. “Looks like we got a big old daisy chain, don’t it?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  Tension came back into his body. It was different. Surprise, not anger. Not violence. “I don’t want to kill you.”

  “If you don’t kill me, I’ll ask Billy your name.”

  He was quiet and still for several seconds. I was grateful for his thinking. My mind was clearing.

  “Levi,” he said finally.

  “Rose’s brother.”

  I felt movement again. I interpreted it as a nod. I tried turning my head to see if I could get a look at Levi Sharon. It didn’t work. If I turned to the right, my hair fell in my face. When I turned to the left, the raw, rising lump on my temple was on the rough carpet. So I stared at the fire behind the stove’s glass.

  “Why is Billy looking for you?” I asked.

  “I gotta do what I gotta do.”