Another Man's Ground--A Mystery, page 19
“How do you know? He was too damn far away.” This from another deputy marshal on the team.
There was the sound of some shuffling and then a liberal amount of swearing.
“You brought a camera?” the marshal sputtered with rage. “We’re not out here hunting a goddamn Sasquatch.” More swearing. “Maybe that’s why we didn’t catch him. You’re too busy taking his picture.”
“I always bring a telephoto camera,” the agent drawled. “Camera, gun, and hat. And I’m very good at using all three at the same time.”
There was the briefest of pauses, and then Marshal Number One shouted in surprise. “Hey, put that away. What the hell? You don’t draw on a federal marshal.”
The agent chuckled. “Just makin’ a point, boys. You may know fugitives, but I know these woods. So let’s get on with a little bit more respect, shall we?”
There was a good deal of loud grumbling that didn’t stop until a fourth voice cut through it.
“So, your picture doesn’t match Taylor’s description?” barked the Commando.
“Nope,” said Wayne Pondo, the conservation agent. “Lookit.” There was rustling as everyone crowded closer to the camera’s view screen. “I can enlarge it up to here. That is not a dirty-blond guy with an average build.”
“That’s a skinny, little guy with black hair,” the Commando from Branson PD said.
“Son of a bitch,” growled Marshal Number Two.
“Well,” shouted the clearly still pissed-off Marshal Number One, “does Taylor have an accomplice? That’s got to be it. There’s no other reason for someone to be out here in the middle of God-infested, bug-forsaken nowhere.”
Pondo snickered. On their end of the radio, Sheila did, too. Hank picked up the mic and identified himself before Marshal One went headfirst off the deep end.
“The unknown individual is not working with the suspect,” he said. “The unknown is likely a member of a work crew dispersed last week. He is not a threat.”
Sheila shot him a puzzled look. Then comprehension dawned, and she hooted with laughter. Hank shushed her as Marshal Two started talking.
“‘Dispersed’ a work crew? What, into the woods? What the hell does that—oh, shit. They’re illegals. And they escaped into the woods, didn’t they?”
“Their status has not been confirmed,” Hank said. “And they are not currently wanted by my office.”
Marshal Two sighed. “How many are we talking?”
“Possibly up to ten.”
He was pretty sure the strangled growling sound on the other end was Marshal One trying to keep from losing it completely.
“So…” Marshal One said once he had calmed down enough to form a sentence, “we have a forest full of people, essentially—who might or might not be innocent bystanders, who might or might not be illegals, and who might or might not know where the suspect is. Is that correct?”
When he put it that way, it did not sound that great, Hank had to admit.
CHAPTER
27
He was on his way back to the office when Sheila called. As the nearest deputy not actively searching the woods for Taylor, she had just been dispatched to a trespassing call. Hank was headed in the opposite direction and told her so.
“Yeah, but the RP is Donna Kolpeck.” She paused for effect. “And she said her brother is going after Kinney—and he’s armed.” Another pause. “So I’m thinking trespassing doesn’t quite capture the nature of—”
“I get it, Sheila. I’m on my way.” He hit the lights and siren and aimed the cruiser back north.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled up next to Donna’s Audi in a cloud of dust. When it settled, he could see Vern and his sister walking out from the trees. Followed by a shotgun-toting Sheila. This ought to be good.
He leaned against his cruiser and watched them make the last two hundred yards to the house. Donna was clearly pissed off, stomping along several feet in front of the others. Vern walked along with his head bowed and his hands stuffed in the pockets of his canvas pants. His hatless head was starting to turn pink.
Sheila had Vern’s rifle slung over her shoulder and looked delighted. Out in the fresh air, no paperwork in sight, taking control of a situation. He thought about finding a reason to send her back into the woods for a while. Anything to keep that smile on her face.
Donna reached him first and suggested, quite loudly, that he arrest her brother. Vern started to argue, but fell silent as Sheila and her twelve-gauge drew even with him. Hank felt a little sorry for him. He wouldn’t want to be bookended by those two, either, especially if he’d done—well, whatever the hell it was.
“What’d you do, Vern?” he said.
Sheila unslung the rifle and handed it to Hank.
“It’s a longer story than standing out here can support,” she said breezily. “How about we go inside and settle down, and Vern can tell it proper.”
She waved the siblings ahead of her and gave Hank a wink. He grinned. This was shaping up to be better than good. They filed in through the narrow entryway and the two gun racks and the faded wallpaper and into the living room. Donna turned toward the kitchen but Sheila gently guided her to a seat, saying there’d be time for sweet tea in a bit. Then she casually leaned against the wall by the door, propped her shotgun up next to her, and gestured toward Vern.
He sighed and ran his hand over his sunburned head.
“I thought he was on my land. So I went out there.”
Donna snorted. “Yeah. Yelling and screaming and waving your rifle.”
Vern shot her a dirty look. “Doesn’t mean you needed to call the cops. You always overreact and—”
“Me?” She was on her feet now. “Me, overreact? What do you call what you did? You damn—”
“Oookay.” Hank, who was still holding Vern’s rifle, stepped forward from his own place against the wall. “We’re going to let Vern talk here, and then it’ll be your turn, Donna.”
She slowly sank back into the chair, her back straight and eyes blazing. Vern turned his own chair away from her and toward Hank. He did not appear eager to open his mouth again.
“Who did you think was on your land?” Hank prompted.
Donna snorted again. Sheila caught her eye and shook her head. Donna pressed her lips together and fell silent.
“Jasper Kinney, of course,” Vern said.
“And how would you know if he was on your property that far out in the woods?”
Well, he’d installed some motion-detector things, Vern explained. After the, ahem, activity that had gone on recently. And one of them went off. Right at the creek. So he went out to see what was going on. With his rifle, just like his daddy had always told him to do.
And Kinney had been out there, just as he’d thought. In the creek. So he’d stood at the edge of the water and demanded to know what the bastard was doing. Kinney had refused to say.
Which surprised exactly nobody.
“Is the creek your property? Or his?” Hank asked.
Vern fidgeted slightly and finally shrugged. The creek had always been considered the borderline between the properties, so if you were standing in the middle of it, well then, he wasn’t exactly sure. So he’d stood on his side of things and yelled at Kinney some more. The bastard had waded out of the water onto his own side and gotten his shotgun from where it was leaning against a tree. At that point, he might have accused Kinney of stealing his slippery elm bark.
“That finally got him riled up,” Vern said. “He turned around and fired that damn Topper in the air and told me I didn’t know a goddamn thing about these woods. That I should sell the place and take the worthless Mileses out of Branson County for good.”
He stiffened his spine. “Hell, no.”
Hank folded his arms across his chest. “Then what’d you do, Vern?”
Vern stared at his shoes. “I might have fired my gun, too.”
Donna rolled her eyes. Clearly, her restraint was about depleted. Hank turned to her.
“Kinney’s been saying that for years. Since before we were born. That’s nothing new,” she said.
“Oh, yeah, like you’re so concerned with family pride and history. Up in your fancy house in St. Louis.”
“Hey, who came down to take care of Dad when he was sick? Not you, you selfish jerk. You were ‘too busy.’ You left everything to me. Dumped it all in my lap.”
“I offered,” Vern yelled. “You just blew me off. Said I’d just muck it up. You—”
Hank decided it was time to step in, before it became necessary to arrest Donna for assault. He held up his hands and shut them both down.
“That’s enough. Vern—quiet. Donna, your turn.”
She straightened in her chair and clasped her hands in her lap. She had waited in fright until the officer arrived—she pointed at Sheila—and they both went after Vern.
At that, Sheila cocked an eyebrow and aimed it at Donna, which meant she was calling bullshit. Hank scowled at Donna. The woman looked over at Sheila and sighed.
“Okay. She told me to stay here, but I followed after her anyway,” Donna said. “Which … was actually good, right? Because I knew where he’d gone.”
She snuck a glance at Sheila, who clearly intimidated her, then took a deep breath and continued. They heard a good deal of yelling as they approached the creek, and then a gunshot. Officer Turley started running and made it there pretty quickly. They’d gotten to the creek right as Kinney said something and Vern fired his rifle. Officer Turley ordered them both to put their guns down. Vern lowered his but didn’t drop it. Kinney laughed at her and disappeared into the trees on his side of the creek.
Then Officer Turley took Vern’s rifle, which should just be tossed in the trash as far as she was concerned, Donna said, and they all walked back up to the house. “And now, here we are.”
Yes, indeed. Here they all were. Stewing in a room that was stale and stuffy and full of hot air. Might as well use it.
“I want to know more about the feud between your family and the Kinneys.”
They both stiffened at that, like cats that had seen a dog but not yet decided whether it was a threat. Vern decided it wasn’t.
“We bought this land from Kinney’s granddad, after World War I. They sold it. It was their choice. And they’ve been assholes about it ever since.”
Donna nodded. It was thirty acres, and no, they didn’t know why the elder Kinney had sold it. But soon after, he’d died and his son, Jasper Kinney’s father, had come into the homestead. And he wasn’t happy that a third of it had fallen into the hands of the Miles family. They’d hated each other ever since.
“Is that why Jasper said you didn’t know the woods?” Hank asked.
“Yeah. We haven’t been here a hundred and fifty years, so of course, I can’t know the woods.” His tone made clear what he thought of that line of logic.
Hank thought a moment.
“Is your land the only parcel that the Kinneys sold off?”
Vern thought so, but Donna hesitated.
“I remember Daddy saying once that the Old Kinney had sold some other land, before he sold this to our great-grandfather,” she said. “He needed the money. I remember something about gambling, but I don’t know whether that was about the Old Kinney or someone else, to be honest.”
“So what does Jasper Kinney do with the land that’s still in his family’s possession?” Hank said.
“Guards it like it’s a damn fortress,” Vern said.
That was not very informative, and since these were the first two people Hank had come across who actually wanted to talk about the Kinneys, he was not going to leave it at that. Had Jasper ever farmed it, logged it, mined it—anything? They both shook their heads. He’d never done anything with it. He’d made his living as the manager of a tractor dealership until about five years ago, when he retired.
Hank turned to Vern. “And why do you think Jasper’s the one who stole your bark?”
Vern started to fidget and then hem and haw. “I guess I don’t really have a—”
“Just to screw with us.”
They all swung toward Donna. “And look. It’s worked. Vern’s a mess. Which is just what Kinney wants.” She shrugged. “I have no doubt he did it. But we need to just let it go. You need to let it go,” she told her brother.
They were back to giving each other dirty looks, and that was how Hank and Sheila left them twenty minutes later. They walked out into air much cooler than what was inside and strolled over to Sheila’s cruiser, which was parked farther away from the house and closer to the woods. Hank leaned against the hood as she secured her shotgun in its spot between the front seat backs and the partition that separated the backseats.
“What do you think? About Kinney being the thief?” he said.
She slammed the car door and looked back at the house, where a thick green curtain moved in one of the tall windows. She rotated so she faced away before she started talking. And laughing.
“That man has no sense when he gets mad. Because anybody who goes waving a gun at Jasper Kinney like that and expects to walk away in one piece is a damn fool.”
“So you saved a life today.”
She gave him a wicked grin and pointed at the lettering under the sheriff badge on her squad car door. “‘Working for your safety and security,’” she drawled.
“But honestly,” she continued in her normal voice, “I don’t know. I don’t know if Kinney would have bothered to shoot him. He obviously enjoys messing with him. If he shot Vern, who would he have left to hassle like that?”
She brushed a speck off her otherwise immaculate uniform. “So, I think Kinney might have done it, if he’d thought of it. Just to piss off Vern. But it’s more likely it was the Taylor boys’ operation. Plus, Jasper’s got stripped trees of his own. And if there’s one thing I don’t think that man would do, it’s destroy his own property.”
Hank agreed. He inclined his head slightly toward the Miles farmhouse. “What do you think? Have we stood here long enough to get him worried? Worried enough that he’ll think twice before doing something stupid again?”
They both laughed, careful not to let the watching Miles siblings see.
“Now,” Hank said, “how about we keep the fun going and go talk to Jasper Kinney?”
* * *
Kinney did not answer his door. The brown-paneled house sat silent. The Confederate flag had been taken down. Hank knocked again. Nothing. They walked back to their squad cars.
“I got one more place to look,” he said. “Follow me.”
Fifteen minutes later they pulled into the gravel lot of the Redbone. It was later in the day this time, and the sun painted the shingle roof with orange glow instead of pounding it with white heat. There were many more vehicles, most of them pickups, parked along the front. The workday must be finished.
Hank didn’t realize he was instinctively checking that his gun was ready in his holster until he saw Sheila doing the same as they walked up to the door. He opened it and she stepped inside with him right behind her. Then they walked up to the bar, the silence and the stares spreading behind them like a boat wake.
Creosote sat at the hickory plank just right of center. He was the one patron who had not turned around at their entrance. Hank took the empty barstool to his left and Sheila sat down immediately to his right. Hank looked down the bar toward barman Willie Boyd, who did not look pleased that they’d added themselves to his customer base. He stood for a moment, considering. Whatever decision he was weighing must have come out in their favor, because he finally started to very slowly walk their way. He stopped directly in front of Kinney.
“What’ll you have?”
Sheila passed an admiring palm over the wood of the bar and then folded her hands in front of her. “Whiskey. Dickel No. 12.”
Well, damn. He couldn’t very well order a Budweiser now. He asked for a bourbon and didn’t move until the bartender set it in front of him. He took it and casually turned around, leaning back against the bar. He wanted to see what the clientele thought of his temerity.
It was as if he’d spit on the altar at church. Men averted their eyes. They stared at the floor or at the ceiling and fidgeted uncomfortably. A few of the younger ones gaped at him in open disbelief. And then two older guys at a table near the dance floor got up and headed for the door. And every last customer followed them out.
The door clicked shut after the last of them. Hank turned back around. Willie retreated to the other end of the bar. And Kinney calmly took a sip of his drink, which looked like a pretty decent bourbon. Better than what he’d been served, Hank thought as he settled against the bar.
“So, that dead guy in your ravine was killed by a shotgun,” Hank said.
Kinney said nothing. Sheila twirled the whiskey in her glass and nonchalantly shifted closer to Kinney. That made him finally turn his head. Toward Hank.
“Lots of folks got shotguns.”
Hank nodded. “Yep. ‘Lots of folks’ don’t have access to your property, though. But you do. So do your sons.”
Kinney scowled. Hank took a drink and idly glanced around the empty bar. He knew that neither of Kinney’s older sons had been anywhere near the area in the past six months. One was career military stationed in Okinawa, Japan, with his wife and three kids. And the other was working as a hunting guide in Montana and hadn’t been off the resort’s land since January. The third son, of course, was in prison for killing his wife.
“So I got people looking into them, ’cause of course, anyone with access to your land is suspect.”
The ropy muscles in Creosote’s lean arm tightened and the knuckles wrapped around his glass whitened. Good. Hank wanted to force the man to talk to him.
“Jeff’s in the Air Force, you moron. He ain’t been in the country in a year. And Jed is hunting goddamn bear and buffalo in Montana. They’re not your suspects.”
“Well, I guess that just leaves you,” said Hank, still relaxed and easy against the bar.
Creosote chuckled and said he couldn’t possibly patrol the boundaries of sixty acres of land. So yeah, his woods could have been used as a dumping ground.
