Another Man's Ground--A Mystery, page 23
Radio Dick had the decency to look sheepish. The producer just shrugged. Hank was pretty sure his head was going to explode if he didn’t get out of there soon. Darcy sized him up and hustled him out without another word.
Once they were in her car, Hank let loose again. It had to have been the law-firm PI. No one else could have found his mother’s mother in an assisted-living facility with unlisted phone numbers. And God knew what the guy said to her—he could have gotten her worried, he might have caused her to—
“Stop.”
He did. He glanced over at her for the first time and saw that she looked as upset as he felt. He leaned his elbow against the car door and ran his hand along his forehead.
“Did I just blow everything?”
Darcy took off her designer glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. “No … yes … I don’t know. You totally flew off the handle, which was exactly what they wanted. And a sheriff who can’t keep his temper is not good.” She put her glasses back on. “And you’d been doing so well. That’s probably why they pulled out the grandma card, though. They couldn’t rile you with anything else.”
They both stared out the windshield for a while. Hank fought the urge to dig out his cell phone and call his grandmother. Instead, he turned to his campaign manager.
“Tell me what to do. I’ll do it. I’m the one who just screwed this up. If there’s any way you can fix it…”
She nodded, the wheels behind those icy blue eyes turning rapidly. “The only big thing we’ve got left before the election is that animal-shelter event. You need to get your family and that dog ready . Wholesome, charming, well behaved. All of you. It’ll be our last shot.”
Hank cringed at the impossibility of a well-behaved Guapo but nodded anyway. “Absolutely.”
She pulled out of the parking lot. “I’ll drop you at your car. Then I’m going to go have a chat with a few people.”
* * *
He walked into the Forsyth Easy Come & Go in desperate need of coffee. And a candy bar. Anything to give him enough energy to finish this day from hell. He filled a Super Easy–sized cup, grabbed a Snickers and a packaged Danish for good measure, and walked to the front.
“Heeeey, Sherf.”
Gursey, a Come & Go purple polo shirt hanging off his gaunt frame, stood behind the counter. Hank could not have been more surprised if it was Johnny Cash himself manning the register.
He said hello. “You, um, you got a job, Gursey? That’s … great. I’m really impressed. I hope that means I won’t be seeing you inside again.”
“No way, Sherf. I don’t need to be stealing no more. Got me an income now.” He smoothed the front of his shirt. “And it’s purple.” He broke into giggles. “Ain’t that the thing?”
Hank handed over a ten-dollar bill and eyed the kid as he made change. Very slowly. While swaying slightly. Hank nodded his thanks and walked out into the pleasantly warm morning, pondering the state of Gursey’s sobriety. Between that and juggling his snacks, he didn’t see the man walking toward the store.
“Excuse me—oh, hi, Sheriff.”
“Hey, Pete. Sorry about that”—Hank gestured back toward the store—“I was…”
Pete Wiggins groaned. He owned this and the three other Come & Go locations in the county.
“He gave you the wrong change, didn’t he?”
“No, it’s right, actually,” Hank said. “But he wasn’t looking altogether…”
“Sober. I know. But I test him. I tested him before I hired him, and I make him pee in a cup every damn morning. And he comes back clean.” Pete shook his head. “I still don’t know that I did the right thing, though, takin’ him on.”
“You that hard up for employees?”
Pete shrugged. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Turnover is brutal. If they’re smart, they find a better job pretty quick. And if they’re stupid, I end up having to fire them. So if I can get ones that aren’t stupid, but maybe don’t have a good enough history to get hired someplace else, it can work out good for both of us.” He tapped his nose. “But that’s why I drug test. Everybody. My pass rates have been really good lately. A lot better than normal. I was starting to think maybe the drug tide was startin’ to turn. But then I get one like Gursey. Maybe acting stoned is just his normal sober state, too, and we all just never knew?”
Hank grinned. “Well, you keeping him here is a lot better for society than him coming back to me.”
Pete laughed ruefully. “Lot better for society, maybe, but probably not so good for my business. I better go make sure he hasn’t fallen asleep on the Lotto tickets.”
CHAPTER
32
Hank wasn’t even halfway through his iced raspberry Danish when Sheila burst into his office. He cringed.
“What? You don’t even know what I’m going to say yet.” She frowned at him.
“Oh. You weren’t going to comment on my radio interview?”
Now the hands went on the hips. “You think I got time to sit around listening to the damn radio?”
“That was not what I was implying,” he said, slapping his food down on his desk. “I screwed it up royally, and I expected you to call me on it.”
Her hands fell to her sides. “Oh. Well … really? You did that bad?” She paused and then made a chopping motion with her hand. “I can’t think about that now. I’ve got to keep thinking like I’ve got a job. Like I’ll keep having a job.”
The last words were said almost to herself. Hank looked at her and thought, for the thousandth time, how up a creek she’d be if Tucker became sheriff. More than he himself would be, really. He pushed away the Danish.
“So, what’s up?”
She sank into one of the chairs across from Hank’s desk and crossed her legs with an exaggerated nonchalance.
“I got the Rotten Doe preliminary DNA results.”
“Really?” Door number one, or door number two? Please don’t let it be door number three, the one that doesn’t match either of our theories, he thought.
“It’s Jackson Taylor. Or rather, it’s someone with the same mother as our boy Lloyd.” She gave a wry smile. “So I suppose it could be Boone, but I’m going to stick with it being the one that Lloyd hasn’t seen in the longest while. Plus, Boone’s the one who physically matches the guy they’re tracking through the woods.”
“That means Ned Bunning goes back to a voluntarily missing adult,” Hank said. “And lets us narrow our focus on that investigation, at least.”
Sheila nodded. “So why was Jackson Taylor filled with buckshot?”
Hank shook his head in exasperation, just as Sam walked in lugging his omnipresent stack of files.
“So, it’s Jackson? Awesome.” He sank into the chair next to Sheila’s as they both stared at him. “Oh, uh, you know what I mean. Awesome that we have an ID.”
He smacked his stack. “And a lot better than I’m doing. I’ve put aside the ones that don’t fit the time frame of roughly thirty to fifty years ago. Then I went through all the rest again. And this one just—well, listen to this.”
He opened the top file, and Hank saw it was the one for the 1985 city of Branson case where the family had been suspected in their six-year-old son’s disappearance. Sam unfolded a page of his handwritten notes and started reading.
He’d tried to contact the parents, whose last known address was up in the northern Missouri city of Kirksville, but found that the whole family was dead. He finally tracked down one very elderly aunt of the boy’s mother who lived in Michigan. She was able to tell him how and when she’d heard about them all passing away—the father of a heart attack, the mother in a car accident, the sister by suicide, and Tommy from pneumonia complications.
He raised his head from his notes. From the puzzled looks on his bosses’ faces, they weren’t quite following.
“That’s what she said,” Sam continued. “But she’s super old, so I double-checked.” And according to the death certificates, both parents and the sister had died just how the aunt said. As had Thomas William Havich, age nine. Three years after he disappeared in Branson.
Hearing nothing, he looked up from his notes. Hank and Sheila were staring at him openmouthed. He pulled out a copy of Tommy’s death certificate and slid it across Hank’s desk.
“Not what we expected, obviously,” Sam said. “So I called up there. Tommy was, according to his local medical records, a pretty sickly kid. Out of school a lot, tons of doctors’ appointments, that kind of thing. And they just sent me a picture.” He took out his phone and pulled up a photo of a gravestone. THOMAS WILLIAM HAVICH, JAN. 18, 1979–NOV. 2, 1988.
“They’re going to need you to do some paperwork and officially ask for an exhumation to do a DNA test to make sure it’s him, but they didn’t see a problem with it, considering,” Sam said. He carefully refolded his notes and then looked at his rapt audience with a satisfied gleam in his eye.
Once Hank and Sheila regained their powers of speech, they all spent the next fifteen minutes puzzling about where the hell little Tommy Havich had gone when he disappeared and what kind of people would not bother to let the police know that he’d been found. Or did it mean that someone else was in the Kirksville grave and Tommy was the one who’d been in that crevice in the woods all along?
It took a few moments for Sam and Sheila to realize that Hank had fallen silent. He was staring at that old water spot in the ceiling and drumming his fingers on the desk. The splotch went in and out of focus as he pondered. Death, government, poor record keeping, deep roots.
He whirled toward his desktop and started pounding on the keyboard. Sam started to speak and then hesitated. He turned to Sheila, who shrugged and shifted in her seat to get a better view of the computer screen. Hank clicked furiously from page to page, finding what he’d expected. Until he didn’t.
He smacked the mouse to close the Internet browser and rose to his feet.
“I gotta go to Springfield.”
They both stared at him.
“What?” Sheila almost yelled. “You got the marshals wanting a briefing, and this exhumation to authorize, and Ted’s wife called, and…”
He knew that. And he knew he should stay. He was the boss, and all those tasks were what came with it. And he also knew that, in his heart, he was an investigator. This was his case and he wanted—needed—to do his own legwork. He looked at his staff with their what-the-hell expressions. And sat back down.
He took a deep breath and tore through his desk for a blank sheet of paper. He scrawled on it and handed it to Sam.
“It’s not online. You’ve got to go up there and find it. Don’t let them stonewall you.”
Sam looked at the paper and then back at Hank, confused.
“Just go,” Hank said. It killed him to say it, and it killed him to sit there and watch Sam hustle out the door. Then he turned to Sheila, who looked like she wanted to kill him, and not metaphorically.
“You think you can just go gallivanting off whenever a lightning bolt strikes?”
“I’m still here, aren’t I?”
They glared at each other. Finally, Sheila sighed and started to look just the slightest bit sympathetic. “This job still fits you like a too-tight pair of shoes. You can walk in ’em, but it isn’t pretty.”
He gave her a weak grin. “I’m trying. I promise you, I’m trying.”
She stood. “You’re going to need to keep on trying, real hard, because now we get to go see the marshals.”
“Go see them? I thought they were coming here.”
“Oh, no. They’ve ‘requested’ we go out there. Something about sharing the misery.”
Hank snorted. He wasn’t sure who was more miserable at the moment, him or the guys in the woods.
* * *
It turned out to be the guys in the woods. The marshals were bug-bitten, sunburned, citified messes. Even the Branson PD Commando looked tired and sore. Hank handed out cold water and protein bars, and listened to their plan to penetrate the knob to the west that they were now ninety percent sure was Boone Taylor’s hiding place. Hank hoped the immigrants had made themselves scarce.
Wayne Pondo was the only one who didn’t look like he wanted to pack it in. He was resting easily off to the side, sitting on a log and doodling in the dirt with a stick. Hank left Sheila to hash out the group’s radio communications and walked over. Wayne looked up from his drawing.
“Shouldn’t you be out campaigning or something?”
“I was this morning. Didn’t go too well.”
Wayne shook his head. “That jackass Tucker can’t win. It’d be back to croneyville in that department. Plus, he’s an idiot.”
Hank chuckled. “I appreciate that … I think. But you can’t help—you don’t even live in this county.”
“Nope. I can’t vote for you. I did put in a word with my ma, though. She lives down in Hollister.”
“Now, I definitely appreciate that.”
Hank sat down on the log and looked at the conservation agent’s artwork. Wayne smoothed it away with a shrug. It was what he did when he was trying to think through something, he said. But he wasn’t having any luck. Something was bothering the heck out of him, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Some particular in this whole business was off, but every time he came close to putting his finger on it, it flitted away.
Hank knew that feeling. They both stared at the smoothed ground for a minute. Then Wayne got up to join the group, which was arming itself.
“You look like you want to come,” he said.
Hank smiled sadly. “I do. But I’m an administrator now, which means I don’t get to do anything. I just get to talk about it.”
One of the marshals hollered that they were leaving. Wayne stood and gave Hank a penetrating once-over.
“I don’t know,” Wayne drawled. “I got a feeling that you might figure out how to get around that.”
He handed Hank the stick and walked over to the hunting party, slinging his rifle over his shoulder as he went. There’d be no camera today. The group of men moved off into the woods, leaving Hank, Sheila, and one young Branson PD radio operator the only ones in the clearing.
A half hour later, Hank’s cell phone rang.
“It’s those little purple flowers. And now they’re all gone.”
Hank was thoroughly confused as to why he should give a damn. “Were you planning to gather a bouquet, Wayne?”
“No, wiseass,” Wayne crackled through the tenuous phone connection. It wasn’t just the flowers. The plants. The whole plants were gone. Roots and all. He realized that what rankled him was he’d never seen purple ones before, only white. Goldenseal only came with white flowers. So what the hell was the purple stuff—some kind of damn subspecies maybe?—and why had someone come out to the middle of nowhere in the past couple of days and harvested it all? Wayne’s irritation was clear even through the static.
Hank stopped in mid-step, his foot hanging in the air inches above the packed dirt. He brought it down slowly as everything sank in.
“Wayne, you have to find me a plant. A purple one. The whole plant. They can’t all be gone.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t see a single damn one. And now I’m getting yelled at. I got to get back to it. We can talk about this later.”
Hank barely heard him over the blood pounding in his ears. He whirled toward his cruiser. “No, Wayne. This is just as important. You have to get me a plant.”
He ended the call and wrenched open the car door. Sheila stared over at him in surprise.
“I have to go back to Forsyth.”
The look she gave him would have burned through the patrol car had it still been there. But Hank was gone, reversing in a cloud of dust as the pounding in his ears got louder and louder.
CHAPTER
33
He roared down Highway 160 through Forsyth, blew past the sheriff’s department, and turned into the Easy Come & Go with a skid. He slammed the cruiser into park and stormed into the air-conditioned building. Gursey’s greeting died on his lips as Hank reached across the counter and grabbed his shirt.
“What’re you using, and where’re you getting it?”
Gursey’s eyes bugged and his feet scrabbled against the tile as Hank’s grip threatened to drag him over the counter.
“I ain’t on no drugs,” he gasped. “He tests me.”
“And what are you on so you can pass the test?”
The question took a split second longer to process than it should have. Gursey’s eyes got even bigger and he groaned. “Now I’m going to get fired again.”
Hank didn’t give a rat’s ass about Gursey at the moment. He walked around the counter, still holding the kid’s shirt, and sat him down on the stool next to the cash register.
“Who are you buying it from, and for how much?”
Gursey scratched his patchy goatee. It was expensive, sho’ enough, but since he was able to be working, it was mostly doable. He had some money left from before his last stretch in jail, and he’d paid a hundred for a baggie of the powder, which was two or three doses. You mixed a teaspoon of it with water the night before you knew you’d be tested. And the effect lasted two or three days so, you know, that cut down on the expense-ness somewhat. And after he got paid here at his job, he’d have enough money left over for pot, his favorite cough medicine, and occasionally some oxy.
He nodded matter-of-factly at Hank and fell silent.
“Damn it, Gursey, why don’t you just quit the drugs?”
Gursey looked at him like he was an idiot, which he was. He stared at the pockmarked tile floor for a moment and pondered the futility of it. Where, he asked slowly, did Gursey get it?
Gursey got it from his buddy Sven. And Sven had gotten it from Axel, who knew a guy up in Nixa whose cousin—
Hank held up his hand, and Gursey stuttered to a stop.
“Who is the supplier?”
“I don’t know, man. Some dude.”
He reached for Gursey’s polo shirt again, and the kid started waving his arms as if a yellowjacket were about to land. “I swear, man, I don’t know. I go to Svenie.”
