Murder One

by Allen Kent

  “Are you related to the Greaves?”

  “Not directly. But connected through an aunt by marriage.” It was my turn to stare through the windshield while she watched to see if I was going to say more. When I didn’t, she said, “I’ll go to Mexico with you.”

  I looked over to see if that meant more than “I’ll go to Mexico with you.” I couldn’t tell.

  “I’m glad. It’ll make the trip a lot more enjoyable.”

  “Separate rooms,” she said, clearing up part of my wondering.

  “Of course.” I grinned over at her. “Same hotel?”

  “I’ll be fine with that. But I’m flying down from Springfield. Taking a few vacation days. As far as the state’s concerned, you’re the official representative on this little outing and going alone.”

  “I’ll make a reservation this afternoon. Let you know what flight I’ll be on from Dallas.”

  “And you can find a hotel,” she said. “Let me know what it is and I’ll book myself. We don’t want it showing up on any receipt.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, and started working out the best way to break the news to the office.

  19

  There are one hundred and seventy-nine miles of unpaved road in the county. Eleven of them wind through a forest of shortleaf pine, oak, and shag-bark hickory along a crestline that for as long as anyone can remember has been called Huckleberry Ridge. Halfway down the ridge into Durbin Holler, named after my mother’s family who settled there a couple of decades before the Civil War, there was once a line of springs that poured out of the hillside just above the bedrock. Most have since dried up, except after a week of downpour when they gush again for a few days as what we call wet-weather springs. Homesteaders built their cabins close to where they could get to one of these sources of good water. As the springs dried up, so did the homesteads. Seven homes still cling to life along the ridge or, I guess I should say, seven semi-inhabited excuses for dwellings. The place I grew up in isn’t one of them.

  I pulled off the main strip of gravel onto an overgrown lane, stopped short of a gate in a broken fence held closed by a loop of barbed wire hung loosely over a hedgeapple post. Joseph sat in silence, taking a measure of the woods beyond the fence, while I pushed the gate open.

  She gave me an inquisitive side-stare as I climbed back into the car. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been down this track in a long time.”

  I nodded. “Probably not,” and eased the cruiser through some blackberry brambles and around a turn in the screen of pines. I stopped, but left the car idling. In front of us, what remained of a weather-beaten clapboard shack peeked at us over a thicket of young cedars that now blocked the drive. The oak shake roof had collapsed at one end, leaving broken rafters sticking up out of the room below like a box of gray kindling. Someone had long ago removed the two front windows, salvaging them for some add-on to a hovel farther along the ridge.

  “You think Verl might be hiding out in there?” Joseph asked with more than a trace of skepticism.

  “No. I just wanted to show you this place. It was home until I left for college.”

  Joseph gazed at what remained of the decaying shanty, her brow knitting in disbelief. “You said your father died when you were young . . .”

  “Ten,” I reminded her.

  “And you and your mother lived here until you were, what? Seventeen? Eighteen?”

  “Just turned eighteen when I left.”

  “And your mother continued to live here alone?”

  “When I left, she moved down the ridge to live with her brother and his family. Packy’s dad.”

  She continued to squint grimly at the skeleton of a house. “I’m sorry,” she murmured finally.

  I looked sharply over at her. “What for? I didn’t stop here for your pity. I actually feel pretty fortunate to have grown up here. I just wanted you to see that I didn’t have to come out of Clayton or Ladue to turn out alright.”

  “I didn’t grow up in Clayton or Ladue,” she said testily.

  “Right. Exaggeration. I meant next to Clayton or Ladue.”

  “Point taken. You turned out alright.” She was quiet for long enough I knew she wasn’t going to let it end there. “And what do you know about Clayton or Ladue, anyway? You can’t have spent much time in Saint Louis.”

  I gazed off through the trees along the ridgeline. “We’re going to be meeting my uncle Jack in a few minutes. After my dad died, the one luxury Jack permitted himself and my cousins was two or three road trips to Saint Louis to see the Cardinals play. He usually hauled me along. For Jack, it was something like a sacred pilgrimage to worship at the shrine of Busch Stadium.” I grinned back over at her. “And then we’d all go out to Blueberry Hill on the Delmar Loop for a burger. All the way out there we’d listen to Jack sing or tell stories about seeing Chuck Berry there when he was younger. I still remember all the words to Roll Over Beethoven and Johnny B. Goode.”

  “That’s still not Clayton or Ladue,” she argued.

  “Yes. But close enough. We’d cut though there on our way back to the road home so Jack could show us ‘where the other half live.’”

  Joseph sniffed. “You’re starting to sound like you do want a little pity.”

  “No. Just wanted you to see that a kid could grow up in a place like this and still do alright.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder. “That’s why we’re out here looking for Verl? I’m anxious to see how the rest of the neighborhood fared.”

  I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Okay. So maybe there weren’t many of us,” I conceded and threw the SUV into reverse.

  Packy was called Packy because he was the first kid along the ridge to discover that the Sinclair station out on the highway had acquired a used Pac-Man arcade game. Packy had the quick Durbin hands, a knack for seeing the whole screen, and an eye that could drop a squirrel with a .22 at fifty yards. By the time the rest of us figured out where he was running off to by himself after school, he’d become so good at the game the rest of us never could beat the kid. His place was the next stop along the ridge.

  “Aside from having windows and a roof that isn’t caved in, this place looks pretty much the same,” Joseph muttered under her breath, but loud enough she knew I would hear.

  “May be the same windows,” I agreed. “He moved out of his parents’ place about the time Mom left ours.”

  “Does anyone ever bother to paint?”

  I shrugged. “You’ll see that Uncle Jack’s place is painted. But Packy? He’d never paint. Too expensive and a waste of time.”

  “From what you told Becky, it sounds like he has a pretty busy schedule,” Joseph said cynically.

  I couldn’t let that pass. “Now, there’s a big city comment. A waste of time doesn’t mean he’s got a lot of other pressing things to do. Just that he’d rather do something else—or nothing—more than he wants to paint.”

  Joseph sniffed. “You sound like you sympathize with that kind of thinking.”

  “I not only sympathize, I sometimes practice it,” I called back to her, swinging out of the car and heading toward the door.

  No one had been at Packy’s. The door was unlocked. The window in the front living space was pulled up about four inches and a light dusting covered the plank floor. No footprints.

  I took a quick look inside from the doorsill, walked to the back and did the same at the kitchen door, then joined Joseph who was peering through the single side window into the bedroom.

  “There’s practically no furniture in there.” She said it as if this was going to be some great revelation.

  “No more than a single guy needs.”

  “And there’s a wash basin on a side table.”

  “No running water in the house.”

  “Where does he get it?”

  “There’s still live water here, about thirty yards down the hill.”

  “Live water?”

  “Yeah. I mean a spring that still flows.”

&nbs
p; “And the bathroom. . . ?”

  “About twenty feet in the other direction. You want to keep the john away from the spring.”

  “That must be cold as hell in the winter.”

  I grinned over at her. “Here, you don’t go out there to read.”

  Jack Tate heard the grate of tires on gravel and met us on the front porch, a Cardinals’ cap pulled down loosely over his shock of gray hair. He gave Joseph a long, appraising once-over, then turned his attention to his only nephew.

  “Looks like an official visit, Colby, with the trooper lady.”

  “Afraid so, Jack. This is Officer Mara Joseph.” They exchanged nods. “We’re checking to see if Verl’s come out here to hide out with some of his kin.”

  Jack scowled, his eyes hardening. “We heard he might have taken a shot at your lady friend. But why you stopping here, Colby? You know Verl’s not welcome out here. He, or that excuse for a father of his.”

  I nodded and tried to look like I knew that all along. “That’s what I told Officer Joseph. But I also told her you’d know if he was hanging around here anywhere.”

  Jack looked critically again at my partner, as if trying to decide how much family talk she should be privy to.

  “He hasn’t been nowhere out here in months,” he said finally. “Charlie and me was over at Lloyd’s place just this mornin’, helpin’ him pull a calf that needed to be turned. Lloyd hadn’t seen him since the start of the summer and was damn certain he’d know he better not show his face along the ridge.”

  “I figured as much. But had to check. How’s Shirley? And how’s Charlie getting on?” Charlie had come back from his stint in the Marines with a heavy dose of PTSD, brought on by being the only one in his gun truck to survive an IED blast. He’d been virtually untouched, and it was eating away at him. Some days he was his old self. A devil-may-care screw-off who figured the world didn’t owe him a thing, and he didn’t owe it anything in return. Other days, he was so tortured I thought he’d have been better off to be taken with the rest of his squad.

  “He has his days,” Jack said grimly. “He’s still over with Lloyd. He’d get some help from seein’ more of you.”

  Jack was right and I knew it. When Charlie was in bad shape, I was about the only old friend left around who had any idea what he’d been through. But I didn’t like to relive it either and too often left Charlie to face his demons on his own.

  “I’ll do better,” I promised Jack and believed I would. “Well, we’ll be getting on. Hug Shirley for me and tell Charlie I’ll be calling him about fishing. Call me if you hear anything about Verl.”

  Jack nodded in such a way that I could tell he wasn’t sure I’d be calling Charlie. We walked back to the patrol car.

  “You believe him?” Joseph asked.

  “Completely. He wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “Things seemed a little strained.”

  “If you hadn’t been along and I was here just as family, it would have been completely different.”

  “Tough being sheriff when you know everybody.”

  “And are related to half of everybody. But the good thing about it is, as long as you do the job right, they tell you things just the way they are.”

  We turned the Explorer in the drive and headed back up toward the road.

  “So, what’s this pulling a calf?” Joseph wanted to know.

  “It was coming breach. They had to reach in and turn it.”

  Joseph cringed. “Is this something you could do?”

  “I’ve helped with it. Jack’s the pro. He’s as good with cattle as any of the vets around.”

  “And Charlie? What’s up with Charlie?”

  I told her about the IED blast.

  “Damn,” she murmured. “I can only imagine . . .”

  “No,” I assured her. “You really can’t.”

  20

  We stopped at LeeAnn’s on the way back to the office to get a quick lunch: a Reuben for me and a club for Joseph. It gave her a chance to see small-town law enforcement up close and personal. Our table was midway down the wall between the door and the register. Coming or going, everyone in the café passed us. Most stopped.

  “How’s it going, Tate?” was the standard greeting, with a hand extended toward me and a sidelong glance and nod at a patrol officer who didn’t look like any they’d seen before. “Getting any breaks on Nettie’s case?”

  “Making progress,” I’d say, and they’d say, “Terrible thing” or “I hope you get the sonofabitch.”

  Joseph leaned over between supporters and whispered, “It must be nice. Knowing everyone and having them rooting for you.”

  “Most of the time,” I agreed. “But everybody in here already knows you were shot at, that we have people going through the Greaves place this morning, and that you and I have been visiting the folks out on Huckleberry Ridge. Sometimes a little more secrecy would be nice.”

  “How do they find out so quickly?”

  I grinned across at her. “Information’s the coin of the realm in a town like this. Jerry rules supreme because he knows almost everything. Knowing something before someone else does and letting them know it—that makes for a satisfying day. Someone headed into town along the ridge road saw us parked at Uncle Jack’s, knew I was with the state patrol woman, and stopped at the market or by the bank. Think of it as hitting “Post” on your Facebook page.”

  A wiry kid who smelled of ground oats and molasses stopped and looked Joseph over more directly than the older set had been willing to do. “How’s it going, Tate? Did you turn up anything out at Verl’s place?”

  “Just on our way to the office to find out,” I said. “We don’t have any reason right now to think the Greaves were involved.”

  “Except them cuttin’ Nettie’s timber,” the kid said. “Well anyway, I hope you catch the sonofabitch done this to her.”

  Joseph arched her brows and leaned forward, following him with her eyes as he left the café. “Interesting smell,” she whispered. “I couldn’t place it.”

  “Randy works the dock at the feed store,” I explained. “Loads bags of stock feed all day.”

  “Hmm,” she murmured. “I kind of like it.”

  Grace and two state officers had a folding table set up against one wall of the office, covered by an arsenal more impressive than we had in our munitions cabinet. Three semi-automatic rifles, five shotguns of various gauges, an assortment of handguns, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. No Marlin. But as we entered, Grace held up a lever-action rifle with a gloved hand.

  “You got here just in time. We found a Winchester model 94. I was about to go fire a test round and send the cartridge back with the state people to check against the one you found.”

  “Let them take the rifle,” I suggested. “I’d just as soon they have custody during the test-firing, and they can do the printing at the same time. But I doubt that’s the weapon.”

  She nodded. “Yup. No scope. And that was a pretty good shot from the road. I’m guessing Verl used his Marlin. He reclaimed it on the way out.” She waved an arm over the table. “But they had quite a collection in there without it.”

  I walked to the table to look over the weapons. “I’m surprised you could find anything in there. Were there other boobytraps?”

  A state policeman whose nametag said Corporal Doniphan was pulling copies off the printer and handed me the top sheet. “Here’s a preliminary report. There was one guarding the back entrance as well. Rigged just like the front. They had a simple hook that could be attached across the passageways they’d created. We believe they unfastened them when in the house. They probably hooked them both up when they went out to meet you two coming down the hill. And the weapons? The only organized place in the whole building was a six-foot gun cabinet in the back part of the building. There were a couple of beds back there with junk piled right up against them on two sides. This cabinet was right beside the back door where they could get to it in a hurry.”

&
nbsp; Joseph glanced over the sheet, turning it over to find the back blank. “You don’t say much about what was in all those piles. You couldn’t have had time this morning to sort through all that junk.”

  Doniphan straightened and shifted his gun belt, looking to Grace and his partner for support. “We were tasked with checking the place out for boobytraps. We brought the weapons in because we identified the place as a crime scene and because of the shot from the ridge. I don’t think there was any expectation that we’d go through all that junk. Just from a pretty thorough walk-through, it looked to us like those guys collected anything and everything someone else had thrown away. There were TV sets, old vacuums, plastic yard ornaments, bicycle parts. You name it. What was it you were wanting us to look for?”

  “He’s right,” Grace cut in, taking a step toward the patrolman as if he might need to fend off a charge. “The place was full of crap. It smelled like dead mice and sweaty sheets and, without some specific reason, there wasn’t anything to be gained by hauling all that stuff outside. There wasn’t room in there to just shift it around.”

  Joseph looked at the chief deputy thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “I guess you’re right. If the place is secured, we can always go back.” The two women stood and looked at each other without expression for long enough that I figured I’d better intervene.

  “What did you learn about the bruises on the kids and from Maria Hernandez?”

  Grace kept her eyes on Joseph for another few seconds, then turned and walked to her desk. “As usual, Maria withdrew her complaint when I showed up. I told her again that we could help her find a shelter if she ever needed a safe place to stay. She didn’t look convinced. I checked the kids over and thought the school was right to be concerned. We brought social services in and took them by the clinic to be checked. The case worker stayed with them and is going to follow up.”

  I saw my opening. “Good work. And while I’m thinking of it, you’re going to need to take care of things here for a few days. I’m taking a quick trip down to Mexico on Sunday to see if I can trace some of that evidence I talked to you about.” Grace immediately shot a glance back at Joseph. I pulled the reservation copy from my jacket pocket and handed it to Marti. “Can you run a reimbursement request through for me? I’ve booked a flight to Mazatlán from Northwest Arkansas and will be back Tuesday afternoon.”