Another Man's Ground--A Mystery, page 11
A loud snort came from behind them and they turned to see Dunc and Guapo. It was unclear which one had made the noise.
“You two finally have a night off together and you’re in here talking about bodily fluids. Only in this house.” He shook his head and shuffled off toward the stairs and his basement bedroom. Guapo contemplated his retreating back before deciding that the people on the couch had more attention potential. He waddled around and planted himself in front of Maggie. She gave him a pat, but kept her attention on Hank.
“At least we’re talking,” she said.
He concentrated on her feet for a while before finally speaking. “Yeah. I didn’t like that, either. I’m sorry I didn’t let it go. I just…” He shrugged.
Maggie looked at her husband, and her face softened. “I know, babe, I know.” She drew her legs up and snuggled in next to him. He put his arms around her.
“And I’m not going to fire Darcy.”
She drew back and stared at him in surprise. She hadn’t expected his apology to extend to his campaign manager.
“I thought about it, and … you had some good points, and she does work really hard, so…”
There’d be ample time later to tell her about the Tucker radio interview. For now, quiet on the couch was enough.
* * *
Cigarette smoke still hung in the air. Kinney must have passed this way recently. Hank stopped at the edge of the woods and looked back toward the house, sitting low and silent in the clearing. He could guess at the original cabin front—a rough log wall on the left side of the structure sitting on top of a stone foundation—and wondered how many generations ago the Kinney clan had claimed this land in the Ozarks. And what they were doing with it now.
He took a last glance, then turned back to the trees. And froze. Jasper Kinney stood two feet away, unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth and twelve-gauge cradled in his arm. Jesus. Hank hadn’t heard him at all. Nothing. Not a rustle of leaves or snap of a twig. He still made no sound as he stared at Hank. The only noise was the rush of blood in Hank’s ears. He felt a little faint, actually. Thank God he hadn’t stepped back or done something else to show that he’d almost startled out of his skin.
He slowly hooked his left thumb on his belt and relaxed his right arm down by his side, and his gun. A study in nonchalance. Kinney didn’t buy it. He smirked, sending his cigarette dancing along his lips. He stopped it in the middle of his mouth and used the hand not holding the H&R Topper shotgun to reach into his shirt pocket and extract a book of matches. In a quick single-hand motion, he somehow pulled one free and dropped the book back in his pocket. Then he raked the match along his angular, stubbled jawline. It flared to life and Kinney, never taking his eyes from Hank’s face, calmly lit his cigarette.
Jee-zus.
Kinney dropped the still-aflame match in the dirt and ground it into submission. Then he stilled his rail-thin body and gave Hank a look that quite plainly said he’d like to do the same to his county’s duly appointed sheriff.
Hank bit back a sigh. Kinney might have all day, but he didn’t. He’d have to speak first. Hell, he’d already lost the manliness competition, clearly.
“We are still examining your woods where the body was found. Our search warrant has been extended for an additional week. Do you need to see a copy of it?”
Kinney held out his hand. Hank drew the document out of his own shirt pocket and waited while Creosote examined it. He half expected the guy to light it on fire. But he gave it back to Hank and resumed his stance. Hank was forced to walk around him to access the path that led to the crime scene, almost stumbling as he hit a rotten stump.
Pissing contest: Creosote, 2; Worth, 0.
* * *
Descending into hell was almost a welcome diversion. He swung gently as they lowered him into the fissure. Alice had excavated up to what looked like the clavicle on the left side of the skeleton. The right arm and collarbone remained buried, as did a few ribs and most of the skull. Hank settled in and got to work. From above, he could hear Sam and the relief sentry chatting as they examined Bill Ramsdell’s camping equipment. It was apparently good stuff, because both deputies sounded quite envious as they poked through it all. Some fancy kind of camp stove had them especially appreciative.
He’d sent Bill home that morning with orders not to return until night fell. The guy had seemed almost disappointed. Hank was just glad he had a deputy willing to camp out every night until the crime scene was cleared.
“Oh, he’s always been like that,” Deputy Orvan said in response to a question from Sam that Hank hadn’t quite heard. “Known him since we were in junior high. Always rather be outdoors than in. His gear’s sure improved, though. I remember a canoeing trip down the Buffalo River in high school where we turned it upside down and used it as a lean-to shelter because we didn’t have a tent.” He chuckled. “We did have beer, though, so nobody much cared.”
That led to a spirited discussion about prime canoeing spots that kept Hank’s mind occupied as his hands carefully uncovered Little Doe’s broken right ribs. By the time he’d finished with those, Sam had gone back to the station and Orvan sounded like he was organizing the supplies Alice had left up top. Hank sat back on his heels and pondered what was left.
The right arm was almost completely covered with soil. The body had probably come to rest with it wedged underneath the torso. The weight and the many years had compacted the earth well. Just above where he’d removed the collarbone, the skull lay at an angle because the cervical vertebrae had settled and come apart. He snapped several photos and then prodded at the bones. They were pretty well trapped in the dirt, so he gently nudged the skull. The ground’s hold was looser there, and the yellowed dome rocked under his fingers. He sighed. He hadn’t wanted to do this yet. But better him than Alice.
He gathered his brushes and leaned forward into a crouch, ignoring his cranky back. The black sockets soon stared back at him, and then the smile emerged. He shifted and began to work around the crown, loosening soil as he slowly freed the rest of the skull from the earth. Finally, he was able to lift it up. The last clump of dirt fell off as he rotated it gently, one hand supporting the jawbone. He turned it further and stopped.
In a way, he was relieved. Little Doe hadn’t died a slow, agonizing death of starvation at the bottom of a fissure. It had been quick. A bullet to the back of the head will do that.
* * *
Before Hank could say anything, Sheila reached across her desk and handed him a list of names in Sam’s handwriting. Five men and one woman of various ages who drove for herbal companies in southern Missouri. Three had notations that they were out of state with their primary trucking jobs when the bark thefts occurred. One was halfway through a six-month stint for domestic violence in a jail two counties over. And one had been in the middle of delivering herbs to his company’s plant in Colorado. The weeklong trip took place right as Vern Miles reported the theft. Sam had scribbled “unlikely” next to that name.
The last man, Forsyth resident Ned Bunning, had only question marks next to his name. Hank frowned.
“Yeah, I know,” Sheila said. “Sam couldn’t find him. His primary employer hasn’t needed him for the past two months, and so has no idea where he is. And the address listed on his DL is a little duplex that Sam says looks lived in, but nobody in the neighborhood has seen him in more than a week. So him and Lloyd Taylor are the two herb drivers without alibis.”
Hank stared at the list. “And we know that Lloyd is alive. We don’t necessarily know that about Mr. Bunning, do we?”
Sheila leaned back in her desk chair and folded her arms.
“And you say I’m the one with a dim view of humanity,” she said. “Here you are accusing some poor guy of stealing bark and getting killed over it.”
“Not accusing. Just theorizing,” he said. “But, yeah, my view of humanity is pretty dim at the moment.” He tossed a clear plastic evidence bag onto her desk.
“It’s a bullet.”
Hank nodded.
She poked at the bag with one long, slender finger, and then looked at him—really looked at him—for the first time that evening.
“You’re all dirty. You—wait. Oh, no. Little Doe?”
He nodded again.
She slowly put her hand over the bag and pressed lightly.
“That poor baby. Where?”
He explained the entry wound in the skull and his fine-tooth combing of the underlying dirt. The bullet hadn’t been far, at least.
“I thought you’d want to be the one to change the designation on the file,” he said.
She picked up the bag. “Yeah. I do.” She raised it up to the fluorescent light. “You’re not a death investigation anymore, kiddo. You’re a homicide. And we’re going to solve you.”
She gave Hank a grim smile and picked up a pen to log the evidence.
“Now get out of here. You’re getting dirt on my desk.”
He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath until then. He let it out in a relieved gust as he left the room, basking in her surliness. Maybe that meant things were back to normal.
CHAPTER
16
He’d fallen asleep with the heating pad on his back, and as the smoke alarm jolted him awake, he thought for a split second it had caught fire. It hadn’t, and he bolted out of bed and ran down the hall toward the yelling in the kitchen. The skillet on the stove was shooting flames, and a Scotsman in a bathrobe was struggling with an upside-down fire extinguisher.
Hank spun around, saw the open package of bacon on the floor, ripped one of Maggie’s decorative copper lids off the wall, and slammed it down on the burning pan. Then he grabbed the container of salt on the shelf above the range and dumped it on the grease that had spilled out onto the stove. The last of the flames immediately disappeared. He turned off the gas burner and backed away. Then he looked for his kids, whose screams and the dog’s howls he could barely hear over the horrible peal of the alarm. He reached for it and jabbed the button, but the smoke was too thick to allow it to turn off. The sound was like a cleaver in his brain.
He yanked the fire extinguisher out of Dunc’s hands, hefted it, and smashed it hard and fast into the circular case. Silence.
He lowered the extinguisher and turned to the kitchen table, where Duncan now stood with the kids, Guapo cowering at their feet. Benny was crying and clutching the bottle of syrup. Maribel looked close to hyperventilating. When Hank reached for her, she bolted out of the room, sobbing as she ran down the hall.
He scooped up Benny and turned to his father-in-law.
“What. The. Hell?”
Dunc collapsed into a chair, his robe askew and his thin gray hair sticking out in every direction. “Sweet Lord above. I couldn’t get the damn thing to work. It jammed…”
Hank bit back a growl. “Good thing,” he snapped. “You smother a grease fire. An extinguisher is the last resort. It could have blown the flames all over the place.”
Dunc seemed to crumple even more. “Oh. I didn’t know that.”
He apparently didn’t know how to cook bacon, either, without turning it into an inferno. Hank shot a glance at the stove to make sure the fire was still out and set Benny down.
“You think you can get him some Cheerios without setting anything else on fire? I need to go check on Maribel.”
Dunc looked like he’d just taken a punch. He nodded and reached for Benny, gently stroking his grandson’s sandy brown hair. “Come on, big guy. Everything’s going to be okay,” Hank heard him whisper as he left the kitchen.
He followed the sobs back to Maribel’s room. She was huddled in a corner with her favorite stuffed animal. He knelt down next to her and patted the purple rabbit on the head.
“Honey? Everything’s fine. The fire is out. It’s not going to hurt you.”
She drew away and squeezed herself into an even tighter ball. He spent five minutes coaxing her out, until she finally climbed onto his lap and buried her head in his shoulder. He was puzzled. She was usually able to shake things off pretty well. It was unlike her to be upset for more than a few minutes over anything. Even her fourth-birthday party, where Benny had demolished her My Little Pony cake in the split-second no one was watching—she’d raged for about the amount of time it took to haul Benny to his room for a time-out. Then she’d been off and playing with her friends again.
Granted, that calamity hadn’t involved the possibility of the house going up in flames, Hank told himself. He wished Maggie weren’t at work. She was better at the comforting thing than he was. He rocked his girl until she got her breath back and then he pulled her away so she could see his face.
“Sweetheart? It’s okay. I know it was scary, but nobody got hurt. It was an accident. Grandpop didn’t mean to do it. And it won’t happen ag—” He stopped as she let out a wail that sounded almost as loud as the smoke alarm had. He bent forward and looked her directly in the eye. “All right. Enough. What is going on?”
She clamped her lips together and the noise mercifully stopped. Her teary brown eyes widened as she looked at him.
“I … I did it. It’s my fault. I wanted…” She trailed off. Hank waited and tried to put on his impassive suspect-interview face, but found it a good deal harder to do when the suspect was clutching a lavender bunny.
“I wanted to turn on the knob. By myself. Grandpop … he said I couldn’t. That he needed to clean something up.” More tears. “I did it anyway. I … I wanted to hear the clicks. I … I’m sorry.” She buried her face in his T-shirt.
Well.
He took a long breath and thought about what to do. What was the appropriate discipline when your five-year-old started a grease fire that ruined at least one skillet, a copper lid, a smoke detector—okay, technically he was the one who’d smashed that—and a whole lot of bacon? He sighed and patted Hoppy on the head again. It did not make him feel better, but it seemed to help Maribel. She gave him a cautious smile and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.
He tried to remember what Maggie had said about that parenting book she was reading. He probably should have paid more attention.
“Um, okay.” Something about taking responsibility. “You know what you did was wrong, right?”
She nodded.
“And what do you think you should do now?”
Her little face scrunched up in thought.
“I should help fix it,” she finally said. “I can sweep the stuff that fell on the floor.” She looked at him hesitantly and he nodded encouragement. “And help wash the dishes that got burnt. Oh—and say sorry to Grandpop.”
Hank nodded again and lifted her up off his lap. He needed to go say sorry to Grandpop, too.
* * *
It took an hour to clean up the stove. With Dunc’s endorsement, he had Maribel “wash” the skillet, even though they both knew it was now unusable and would have to be trashed once she wasn’t looking. Then they took a look at Maggie’s ornamental lid, which had acquired several not-so-decorative scorch marks on the inside. Neither one of them had any idea how to clean it. So they hung it back on the wall.
The dropped package of bacon had disappeared. As had the dog. Hank left Dunc to solve the mystery of which piece of furniture the damn mutt was hiding under with his prize, and went to work.
He was almost there when his cell rang. The caller ID said Padre.
“Hi, Father Tony.”
“There is a problem, my friend.”
“Javier?” His pájaro?
No, no, the priest said. Javier was fine. Luckily, he had still been in bed when the visitors arrived this morning. So they had not seen him. “They” were two Branson County commissioners. And one of them had been quite impolite.
“Let me guess. He was named Fizzel,” Hank said.
Oh, yes, said Father Tony. Edrick Fizzel had been there. He had wanted to know if the church was sheltering illegal aliens. He had replied that in God’s eyes, no one was an alien. This had caused Mr. Fizzel to turn an interesting shade of red. Almost magenta. Father Tony had been a little concerned, but it soon became evident that his coloring was not the result of a physical ailment. Father Tony had an opinion about whether it was indicative of a moral one, but he was going to refrain from commenting further on his suspicion.
Hank grinned and steered the conversation back on topic. The commissioners had come to him, Tony said, because they had heard about a large group of illegals found in the northern part of the county.
“What? Did they think you have them there with you?” Hank asked.
“I think they do not know what they think, so they came to see the first Spanish speaker they could find,” Tony said.
They did stop short of accusing Tony of harboring fugitives. They did not use such restraint when they brought up Hank, however. They said they did not trust local law enforcement to handle the problem. Tony had asked them why, and Mr. Fizzel had launched into an unkind litany of Hank’s perceived failings. He had considered correcting the commissioner on several points, but decided that it would be more helpful to let the man go on so that he could find out exactly what kind of dirt he was shoveling. The stuff Tony listed off sounded a lot like the crap Tucker had ranted about in that radio interview.
“Why does he dislike you so much, my friend? Was he not one of those who appointed you sheriff in the first place?”
Oh, yes, Hank said, he sure was. But then Hank had tangled with Henry Gallagher and found out that the commissioner had a mutually beneficial relationship with the county’s leading businessman. Gallagher paid Fizzel’s son a small fortune for a job as a routine clerical worker. In return, Fizzel looked out for the interests of Gallagher Enterprises with the devoted zeal of a yappy terrier. And he had yapped plenty during the Bryson murder case last February, interfering with Hank’s investigation as it zeroed in on his benefactor.
