Bone Dry (Blanco County Mysteries) (16 page)
Read Bone Dry (Blanco County Mysteries) Online
Authors: Ben Rehder
Vinnie thought it over. T.J. was pretty smart, and he was probably right. But Vinnie had to convince him otherwise because of Slaton’s corpse. “Yeah, but all it would take is one goddamn witness to say he saw you in your boat last night, or saw me drivin’ the Porsche into the park. Then we’d be screwed, man, totally screwed. And what about fingerprints? If some kids stole it and dumped it, the cops would expect to find prints. No, we gotta make sure they don’t find it. It’s the only way to cover our asses for sure.”
“Yeah, I guess....”
“Listen to me, T.J. Don’t even think about callin’ it in. You don’t want to go to fuckin’ jail, do you?”
“Hell no!”
“Then just give me a little time, goddammit. I’ll think of something.”
Thursday morning, Marlin was on patrol when he heard Wylie Smith calling for him over the radio. The deputy wanted to meet “to talk a few things over.” Fifteen minutes later, Marlin was waiting in the empty parking lot of a dance hall called the River Palace when Wylie wheeled up beside him, his driver’s door next to Marlin’s.
The first thing Marlin noticed was that Wylie had a black eye.
Marlin gave him a nod and Wylie, without a greeting, said, “D’you hear about the mess from last night?”
“No, what’s up?”
“Got a call from a man named Red O’Brien, said he worked for this old guy Emmett Slaton. Cutting down cedar. Anyway, so him and this other guy, Billy Don Craddock, stop by Slaton’s house last night and find blood all over the front porch.” Wylie gave Marlin a serious look, like,
Welcome to the big city, boy.
“Slaton’s truck’s gone, nobody’s home. The front door was unlocked, so O’Brien walks right into the house—all over my goddamn crime scene—and dials nine-one-one. What a dick.”
“And?” Marlin wondered why the deputy was telling him all this. It wasn’t like they were buddies.
Wylie shook his head. “More blood inside. All over the bed, inside the goddamn bathroom sink, on the carpet, a trail leading right out the front door. And by the time we get there, these two backward assholes have been tromping all over the place. They had plenty of their own wild theories about what had happened, too, like they were gonna solve the whole damn thing for me. I could barely shut this guy Red up. I swear, if being a redneck was against the law, those guys would get a life sentence.”
Marlin knew Wylie was expecting a smile on that line, but he didn’t give him one. The deputy was awfully talkative all of a sudden—with sort of a
We’re in this thing together
attitude.
“Anyway, Slaton’s nowhere in sight,” Wylie continued, “so I seal the house off and get to work. But other than the blood, I can’t find shit. No forced entry, no signs of struggle. I was up all night and didn’t get anywhere. The old man just vanished. The only thing: Curtis was on patrol last night and spotted Slaton’s truck in the Save-Mart parking lot, locked up tight. More blood in there, too, but nothing else to go on.”
Marlin had gotten to know Emmett Slaton over the years and had chalked him up as one of the good guys. Ornery old coot, but likable. And, of course, Marlin knew Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock well. Two of the worst poachers Marlin had ever come across:
Worst
—meaning not only did the two rednecks poach whenever they got a chance, but they were also exceedingly bad at it. No wits about them whatsoever. “Sounds like you’ve got your hands full,” Marlin said. It was obvious Wylie had a request to make, and Marlin wasn’t going to be the one to extend the olive branch.
“Yeah, which brings me around to this other thing—Bert Gammel from Tuesday.” Wylie bit his lip and stared out his windshield for a moment. “I talked to all the other hunters on the lease, and they all come across legit, except Jack Corey. Went out to his place first thing yesterday morning. Right off the bat he was giving me lip, telling me all kinds of stories but not really saying anything at all, you know? Guy’s got an anger-management problem, too.”
Marlin pointed at his own eye. “That where you got the shiner?”
Wylie nodded and spit on the ground beneath his window. “I started poking around a little too close to home and the son of a bitch took a jab at me. I’ll tell you what, he won’t be doing that again.”
Marlin raised his eyebrows, giving a quizzical look.
Wylie said, “He’s in lockup right now. I was wondering whether you could stop by, have a nice little chat with him. I’ve been thinking: Maybe it’s true, he’ll open up a little more to a local boy like you.”
Local boy.
Damn
, Marlin thought,
Wylie’s an offensive jerk even when he’s trying to call a truce
. Marlin let it slide. “What’s Corey told you so far?”
“Not much. He hunted Monday evening, just like the logbooks say. Didn’t shoot, didn’t see anybody else. Heard some shots at about the same time the foreman said. Thought one of them—the one around sundown—came from Gammel’s direction. But man, when I asked him about his run-ins with Gammel, he sure got tight-lipped fast. Said something like, ‘I didn’t do nothin’. You ain’t makin’ me the fall guy.’
“He didn’t ask for a lawyer?”
Wylie absently drummed on the steering wheel and stared into the horizon. “Well, now, he mighta said he should probably get a lawyer, but he never specifically asked for one, no.”
Marlin thought:
Great. You’ve muddied up the waters and now you want me to clean it up.
Marlin had known Jack Corey since grade school, and they had been on the football team together in high school. Corey was a large, quiet guy, a plumber by trade. As far as Marlin could recall, Corey had never gotten on the wrong side of the law, outside of a few speeding tickets. Just a big guy who liked to drink beer on Saturday night and hunt deer on Sunday.
Marlin remembered something. “After I left, did y’all have any luck finding the slug?”
Wylie grimaced. “No, but not for lack of trying. Damn place is so wooded, it could have ricocheted or fragmented and ended up just about anywhere. From what Lester says, Corey hunts with a thirty-thirty. So I estimated the trajectory based on the drop of that big ol’ heavy bullet and we scoured the area for about two hours. Even went fifty yards further out than my calculations gave me. Nothing. But talk about your needle in a haystack. It’s damn near impossible to find a slug in these kinds of situations. Give me a shoot-out in a building any day, then I’ll find your slug for ya.”
Marlin nodded. A lot was riding on that bullet, and they both knew it. Wylie slipped his cruiser back into DRIVE. “So, if you could talk to Corey this morning, uh, I would appreciate it.”
Marlin noticed that Wylie wouldn’t meet his eyes and seemed almost embarrassed to ask this small favor.
“I’m not expecting you to get a full confession out of him or anything,” Wylie continued. “Just talk to him, see if you can get him to loosen up a little. Otherwise, that boy’s setting himself up as the prime suspect.”
“Did you mention the evidence from the scene?”
“I didn’t get specific yet, because I’m trying to get a warrant to search his truck and his house.” “How’s that going?”
“I wrote it up last night and left it for Judge Hilton, but it could go either way. It’s all circumstantial, I know, but everything points toward Corey. If I can come up with something on the search, then I’ll go for a blood sample. Get some DNA evidence that will nail him good.”
“Unless he’s innocent.”
“What’s that?”
“Unless he’s innocent.”
“Well, yeah,” Wylie said. “Of course.”
On the way to the jail, Marlin stopped at a convenience store and made a quick purchase. Three minutes later, he was checking in with the jailer, leaving his .357 revolver at the desk.
Marlin went into the visitation room, sat at the small, scarred pine table, and waited. Five minutes later, the door leading to the cells opened and Jack Corey walked in, wearing blue jailhouse clothes. His left arm was in a cast.
“Come on in, Jack,” Marlin said. “Grab a chair.”
Corey mumbled a greeting and took a seat. The man looked awful. Dark bags under his eyes. Greasy, unwashed hair. A couple of days’ worth of beard.
After Corey got settled, Marlin asked, “You doing all right, Jack? What happened to your arm?”
Corey eyed him skeptically. “You didn’t hear?”
Marlin shook his head.
“That asshole Wylie nailed me with his nightstick. Fractured my wrist.”
“Before or after you popped him in the eye?”
“After,” Corey admitted grudgingly, staring at the floor. “He deserved it though.”
“You wanna tell me what happened?”
Corey raised his left arm and set it down on the table with a loud
plonk.
“He was all over me, telling me how he knew what I did and I was gonna end up in Huntsville. Kept describin’ how the needle would feel going into my arm, tryin’ to rattle me. But he wouldn’t listen to a goddamn word I had to say.” Corey lifted his head and met Marlin’s eyes. “John, I had nothin’ to do with Gammel gettin’ shot. I swear to God. Man, you’ve known me for, what, nearly forty years? You know I wouldn’t do somethin’ like that, right?”
Marlin took a deep breath and leaned forward. “Jack, I have to say, it doesn’t sound like something you’d do. And if you’re not involved, all I can tell you is to sit tight and wait, because we’ve found some things that should help us clear this up. But Jack, if something
did
happen between you and Bert Gammel, that same evidence is going to tell Wylie the complete story. There won’t be any getting out of it, because science doesn’t lie.”
Marlin noticed that Corey was still steadily meeting his gaze, a good sign.
“What I’m saying, Jack, is that if something pissed you off enough to lose your head, to do something stupid, now’s the time to come clean and tell us. You know how the prosecutor is. He’s willing to take a plea when a guy owns up to what he did. On the other hand, when a guy clams up and the deputies have to follow the case all the way to the end, for a crime like this…well, things can get kind of rough.”
Corey shook his head. “John, I’m tellin’ ya—you can give me one of those lie-detector tests or whatever, but all it will ever show is that I didn’t do it. I don’t give a damn what Wylie says or what he believes, he’s got the wrong guy. And there ain’t no way I’m gonna confess to something I didn’t do.”
Marlin’s intuition, honed from dealing with hundreds of poachers over the years, told him Corey was telling the truth. Of course, Marlin remembered all too well the times he had been fooled by a good lie.
“Tell me a little bit about your problems with Gammel, the arguments you had at the deer lease.” As he spoke, Marlin pulled an item out of his hip pocket. It was the pouch of Red Man chewing tobacco he had purchased earlier at the store.
“Aw, man, it wasn’t nothin’, really. He shot spikes all the time and threw ’em in the ditch. I thought it was a goddamn waste, and almost called you a couple of times.”
Marlin opened the package and stuffed a small amount of tobacco in his jaw.
“The only time it was really a problem,” Corey said, “was this one time we got into an argument and he took a swing at me. But all the guys were there and can tell you it was his fault, not mine. Even Lester showed up and can tell you what happened.”
Marlin laid the tobacco pouch on the table and noticed Corey eyeing it.
“How come you won’t let Wylie search your house and truck?”
Corey looked confused. “Hell, he can search all he wants. He never asked.”
Marlin was stunned. “He didn’t ask permission?”
“No, but I woulda told him to go right ahead. I ain’t got nothin’ to hide.”
Marlin figured Wylie probably had been afraid to show his hand, to let Corey know a search was coming.
“Well, I’ll let him know you said it was okay, then,” Marlin said. He paused and looked around the drab room. “Not exactly the Hyatt, is it? They treating you all right?”
Corey shrugged. “Yeah, no problem. But I need to get back to work. I’m self-employed, and when I don’t work, I don’t get paid.”