Another Man's Ground--A Mystery, page 24
Hank counted to ten. Then he inquired as to Svenie’s particulars. And Axel’s. And the cousin’s. He’d always hated this about drug investigations. They were all such good friends that they’d crash together for the night, and they knew how everybody liked their joints rolled or their heroin ingested—but ask for a last name, and no one knew a damn thing.
It took Gursey five long minutes to remember that Sven worked a bit up Highway 160 at the motor lodge. It took him no time at all to remember he had none of the powder left.
“I don’t believe you,” Hank growled.
His arms started windmilling again. “No, man, seriously. I’m suppose to meet up with Svenie tonight to get more. I couldn’t get a lot last time. He said ever’body’s low on it, man.”
Which made sense, because if Hank was right, harvesting of the raw materials had only just started up again. That didn’t mean he believed Gursey, though. And he wasn’t going to until he had a chance to search his residence. And right now, he didn’t have the time. He hollered for Pete Wiggins, who came running out the office in the back like the place had caught fire.
“Take him,” Hank pointed, “and walk him down to the jail. Just go in the front and tell them I said to put him in his normal cell. I’ll do the booking paperwork later.”
Gursey’s shoulders slumped. Pete’s shoulders did, too. “Can I at least get him out of my polo shirt, first, Sheriff? I reeeeally don’t want a mug shot with Easy Come & Go in it.”
Fair point. Hank nodded and turned to leave. He paused at the door.
“Hey, what’s this stuff called? On the street?”
Gursey, one arm already out of his shirt, looked at him.
“Purple Pass.” He hoisted that lopsided grin. “Some of us call it PP for short.”
“Of course you do.”
* * *
Two hours, one stoned Svenie, and three construction workers later, Hank was finally getting somewhere. One user led to another, until he got to the last man, a framer working on a new housing development in Hollister, who had been using Purple Pass for several months. He’d failed testing twice and had been about to be cut loose.
“And, dude, my boss ain’t cool. He woulda told everyone from here to Springfield about it, and I couldn’t a gotten hired anyplace,” the man said, once Hank convinced him that talking discreetly by the water truck was a whole lot better than getting hauled off the jobsite in handcuffs.
So he and a few of the boys had gone to drown their sorrows. At a bar. Out in the woods. Where a man said he could solve the problem. And for fifty bucks, a one-dose baggie of the stuff was his. A discounted sample, as it were.
“It worked, oh, yeah. So I went back for more. He called it Purple Pass, and said he’d be obliged if I let my friends know.”
And there you had it. It had spread like wildfire on the Kansas prairie, letting all sorts of stoned and high folks keep ringing up candy bars or hammering nails or driving delivery trucks down crowded roads. All the possibilities made Hank’s head hurt.
And now, the guy named Ray said, he heard tell that office workers were catching on. Those assholes could afford to pay more, so that was driving the price even higher, which was awesome. Until …
“Until what?” Hank said slowly.
Ray shrugged. “Until the other source started up. They started flooding the market. People could get it for cheaper from them. Totally tanked my business. I talked to my guy, and he said he’d pass it on to the grower. Maybe think about lowering our prices.”
“Who was this other source?”
“Some jerk-offs up in the north part of the county. I don’t know names, but there were a couple of them goin’ around, taking my business. Like a gang or a family or somethin’.”
Hank started to feel a little giddy.
“And did you tell that to your distributor?”
He shrugged again. “Yeah.”
“And then what’d your distributor do about it?”
“Nothin’. Cuz then it all stopped. There was no more of it, nowhere. From anybody.”
“But now there is?” Hank said, remembering Gursey’s scheduled rendezvous with Stoned Svenie.
Ray started to respond, but stopped, the rusty wheels in his head obviously trying to turn. “Uh … I don’t know. What you’re talking about. I ain’t heard anything.
“So, if that’s all … I better get back to it.” Ray took a tentative step back toward the skeletal condos. The expression on Hank’s face stopped him.
“Let’s take a look in your truck, shall we?”
Ray was not cut out for the sterner realities—like police interrogation—of a true distribution business. His face fell and his shoulders slumped. He halfheartedly pointed toward an old GMC parked off by a stand of trees. Hank gave an “after you” wave, and they walked over. Ray climbed into the truck bed and unlocked the steel toolbox installed up against the back of the cab.
He pulled out two gallon-sized zip bags and gave them to Hank. One was full of smaller baggies, stuffed and ready for sale. The other held loose powder, maybe a pound’s worth. Or should one measure ground-up Ozark herbs in kilos? He supposed so.
There were one hundred doses in the divided bag, Ray told him, again reluctantly. The loose stuff probably would amount to almost that many, but he hadn’t had a chance to divvy that up yet. Buyers usually bought two baggies, at a hundred bucks a pop. If they looked like they could pay more, he charged them two hundred. But after the shortage, who knows, Ray said almost tearfully.
“They mighta bought three or four and paid twice as much,” he sniffed.
“And how much of that goes back to your guy?” Hank asked.
“Ninety percent,” he said. “I keep the rest.”
That was a pretty high cut, Hank mused, turning the bags over in his hands. Had Ray ever thought about keeping more back for himself?
“Hell, no.” Ray shook his head emphatically. “Those dudes out there—I don’t know who the grower is, but he’s gotta be out there somewhere. And you don’t mess with them people. That’s why I ain’t telling you where I get it. You can’t say I told you anything.” He was practically shaking with fear.“I didn’t give up no names.”
Hank longed to take him in, throw him in a cell for a bit, make him sweat. But on what charges? Carting around a bunch of pulverized plant root? It technically wasn’t even something he had solid grounds to confiscate, except that it was material evidence in a homicide investigation.
But, as he walked away with his bags of Purple Pass, he knew where to go next. Ray hadn’t dropped any names, but he’d dropped enough.
CHAPTER
34
He called and invited Sheila for a drink. That stopped her grumbling at his sudden departure from the manhunt command center. She met him on the side of the road just out of view of the Redbone with a caught-canary smile on her face.
“We can prove it’s Kinney?”
“Almost,” Hank said. “We’re just one degree of separation away. This is where the construction worker got hooked up with the powder.”
Her grin flattened into a puzzled line.
“Oh. There are some things I should tell you before we go in there,” he said.
He briefed her on his line of inquiry, which put the smile back on her face and her department-issue shotgun in her hands.
“I’m going around the back. We think he’s the only one in there, but…”
He did love the way her mind worked.
He crunched across the gravel parking lot and closed his eyes for a moment before opening the door and stepping into the dark bar. He stepped to the right until he had solid wall behind him, his hand on his gun.
Behind the bar, the barman turned around. He had a clipboard in his hands and looked to be taking inventory. He set it down and put his palms flat on his granddaddy’s stretch of wood.
“You don’t listen very well, do you?”
“Nope.” Hank slid the bolt on the door closed, and only then walked into the room. “See, I got a problem.… Well, I got a bunch of problems, but only one of them pertains to why I’m here right now. Your bar has apparently been used as a distribution center for a substance that helps people break the law.”
The bearded face was impassive.
“Who’s supplying you with the stuff?”
Nothing.
Dust motes floated through the stale air. Hank took another step forward. The beard finally moved.
“Unless you got an actual crime to talk about, you need to leave my bar.”
Another step closer.
“Oh, good. Then we will have a conversation. Because there is a crime. There’s a Taylor brother shot dead and dumped in the woods. That’s murder, which I think we can agree is against the law.”
Willie straightened and took his hands off the bar. “You identified that body you found in the woods?”
Hank nodded.
“And that’s who it is?”
He nodded again. The barman smoothed the papers on his clipboard as he thought about that. “Can’t say as I’m sorry to hear it. The Taylors are a plague on this county.”
The two men stared at each other for a while.
“What would he have been doing around here to make someone want him dead?”
“No idea.”
“Really? I’ll bet if you thought a bit, you could come up with something. Because, how the law works—if you participated in the action that led to the murder, you’re on the hook, too.”
The barman ran his hand along the varnished wood. The beard seemed to tremble a little, but he stayed silent. Hank walked forward until he was only a few feet from the bar. “You handed out some powder. Powder that, by itself, isn’t even illegal. Do you really want to go down for murder? You tell me who’s making the stuff and giving it to you, and you won’t. You can keep polishing that hickory slab of yours for as many years as you want. Or you can go to prison.”
Willie Boyd glared at him and then pivoted and headed for the back door. He pushed it open, and light flooded into the dim bar. The men’s eyes adjusted to find a relaxed, perfectly coiffed deputy and her Remington twelve-gauge blocking the way out. Willie stopped short and let out a long, slow breath.
Say it, say it, say it, Hank thought. Say it, so I can go arrest the bastard.
It took four more minutes of warring with himself for Willie to crack. He turned to face Hank.
“It was Jasper. He came to me, said I probably had some customers who could use what he had. And that it would make us a fair amount of money. And that it wasn’t illegal. He said he’d do it himself, except that he didn’t come into contact with that many folk, now that he was retired and all.”
“And how many people do you distribute to?”
There were about two dozen. Willie wrote down as much of their names as he knew. Ray was the second one on the list.
“And what’s your cut?” Hank asked.
“Five percent of what I take in.”
And with Ray and his ilk taking another ten, that left Jasper with a whopping eighty-five percent. He’d been taking in millions. Sheila shook her head in amazement.
“And how much have you personally made so far?”
“About eighty grand.”
A pretty big payday for a guy who ran a backwoods watering hole.
Willie Boyd didn’t know where Jasper got it, or how he made it. And yeah, the supply had dried up after that deputy got shot and all those cops started flooding into the woods. He hadn’t connected the two until now. People had not been happy about it. They’d come in, demanding their usual weekly amount, saying their customers were up shit creek if they didn’t get it. He’d passed that all on to Jasper. Just yesterday, he’d finally gotten a new supply. It was already gone. His distributors had practically been lined up out the door to get it.
“What about earlier? Were you getting undercut by anybody?”
The barman shrugged. He’d heard a few rumblings from his distributors, about other people starting to show up with their own supply of powder and selling it for cheaper.
“Did you mention this to Jasper?” Hank asked.
“I can’t recall.”
“Do I need to go over the whole accessory-to-murder thing again?” Hank said.
Sheila raised her shotgun just the slightest fraction of an inch. Willie closed his eyes. His beard seemed to have a lot more gray in it than it did ten minutes before.
“Yes. Yes, I told him. I didn’t know who it was,” Willie said. “I told him that, too.”
“You mention any theories that any of your guys might have had? Any rumors they’d heard about who the other source was?”
Willie swallowed hard. His face had lost all color. Sheila took a step closer.
“Well?”
He shook his head.
“Does that mean you’re not going to answer the question?” she said.
Willie looked at the shotgun in her hands and stayed silent. Now Hank moved closer.
“And what did Jasper say?”
A long pause. “He said he’d take care of ’em.”
Hank let out a long breath and gave Sheila a nod. They walked out the back door, leaving a pale, woebegone man slumped against the wall. Hank didn’t envy the hit his reputation would take among his patrons once they found out he’d said all that to the cops. Sheila, however, had a spring in her step as they walked back to their cars.
“Means, opportunity—and finally, motive.” She did a little celebratory shuffle in the gravel.
Hank chuckled and waited while she stowed her shotgun in the cruiser. “We need to get Jasper fast, before he realizes we’re on to him, and before he can sell any more of this Purple Pass stuff.”
She patted at her hair. “And we need to get every cop we can find to come with us. I’ll start working on that.”
It was true, but Hank couldn’t tell if it was also a criticism. He thought about Ted still in the hospital, and that now-familiar ache settled into his gut again. He looked at Sheila and nodded. He couldn’t manage anything else.
* * *
Sheila called in favors from as far north as Springfield and rounded up a dozen officers from various jurisdictions that still had a few folks to spare after already loaning personnel for the Boone Taylor manhunt. Everyone was supposed to meet at the main office in Forsyth at 6:00 A.M. the next day in full tactical gear. Excellent. Hank and Sheila grinned at each other as they turned out their office light and headed for the parking lot. And then Hank’s cell phone rang.
He answered it and slowed to a halt as he listened. Sheila stopped as she saw the look on his face. He hung up and turned to her.
“We’re not done yet. There are a few questions the Miles siblings need to answer.”
They climbed into a cruiser, and Hank sped through the falling darkness down roads he had come to know too well in the past month. They pulled up to the farmhouse. Both the Audi SUV and battered truck were parked out front. Good. He rapped sharply on the door.
Before the footsteps inside reached the door, Sheila turned to him.
“Is this a notification, or an interrogation?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
The door swung open. Donna Kolpeck gave a surprised smile and showed them into the living room. She hollered for her brother, who came in from the kitchen wiping barbecue sauce from his hands.
“This is nice of you, Sheriff,” she said, “but we kind of figured that our slippery elms weren’t too much of a priority right now, with the manhunt going on and all.”
“That’s not why we’re here, ma’am,” Hank said.
They sat on opposite ends of the stiff, high-backed sofa and stared at him questioningly. Sheila stood in the corner.
“We need to talk about Charlie.”
They looked like he’d just asked them to solve a quadratic equation. Why on earth would you want us to do that?
“How did he die?”
Donna squinted in puzzlement. “He had cancer. I think we told you that.”
Hank nodded. He just needed a few more details.
It had been cancer of the bones—that’s what their parents had told them. He spent a lot of time up at the hospital in Springfield, and that was where he had died. He was seven. He had been cremated. The family had continued to celebrate his birthday every year, because it seemed to make their mother happy.
They both trailed off and stared at him some more. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
“Well, you see, there’s no death certificate. For Charlie. Not up in Springfield, not in this county, even. And there’s no record at any hospital up there of a Charles Miles ever being treated. For anything. Especially cancer.”
He watched them both very carefully. Vern stared at him blankly.
“What are you trying to say?” Donna said, her face flushed. “That Charlie isn’t dead?”
“No,” Hank said. “What I’m saying is that he didn’t die the way everyone has always said. And that is of concern to us as law enforcement, because we have a dead child in the woods not far from here.”
Donna went from a pink flush to an ashen pallor. Vern took a second longer to make the connection. Then his jaw dropped.
“You think that’s Charlie, out in the woods?” He flung his arm up in the direction of Kinney’s property. “You think that he, what, fell in that ravine and died?”
Hank saw the grim line of Sheila’s lips out of the corner of his eye. They had never publicly released the cause of death, or that a bullet had been found with the skeleton.
“Our parents took him up to the hospital,” Donna said. “They went back and forth for weeks—months. He didn’t wander off into the woods…”
“Did you ever see him again—after your parents said they took him up to the hospital?” Hank asked.
There was a beat of silence, and then Donna drew in a deep, horrified breath. “No,” she whispered.
Vern dropped his head into his hands. “They said it would be too painful for us. That they didn’t want us to see Charlie like that.”
Hank gave them a moment. Then he reached into the inside pocket of his windbreaker.
“We’re going to need DNA samples from both of you. To determine if it is indeed Charlie that we found out there.”
