Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112) (5 page)

“If there’s a homicide, Wade, it’s yours.”

Hug advanced several contrary arguments. Rob dug his heels in. It was all a matter of budget, who would pay, the city or the county. The city had only two experienced officers and two rookies, no detective on the staff, and the chief routinely handed serious cases over either to Rob or to the state patrol. After twenty minutes of argumentation, Hug drove off to consult the sheriff. He had agreed to call in the county Crime Scene Unit.

While Dave and Rob waited for the crew, Dave retraced Margaret McLean’s footsteps of the afternoon. Rob considered objecting, but decided tact was in order. Though Dave was a good ally, he could be a master of obstruction when he was offended.

From the plywood sheet, Dave reported that he could see the hand clearly. He inched back out to the driveway, careful not to contaminate the site further.

It bothered both of them that Ms. McLean hadn’t spotted the hand, but the doors had stood wide for hours after she opened them, and Rob had seen the dog digging away.

“Hand probably wasn’t exposed when she opened up,” Dave said.

“She did notice the smell.”

“I hope so.” Dave made a face. “Let me guess what’s on your mind. You’re going to want me to investigate old Towser’s fecal output.”

“We could make Brands tetter do it.” Gallows humor. The thought of the dog violating the corpse made Rob queasy.

By midnight, with the crime scene lights blazing away and the photographer’s strobe pulsing, the crew had unearthed the body of a man, badly decomposed.

Rob sent Deputy Linda Ramos, the team’s photographer, into the house to tell Ms. McLean the news, and to let her know she could go to bed. That was a judgment call on Rob’s part, but they wouldn’t get around to searching the house before morning anyway.

He would need to take the librarian’s statement, too, and he’d have better questions to ask her when he had some idea of the time-frame. She had bought the house in mid-summer, August, he thought. Exactly when she made the offer might be crucial, and when the sale closed.

Rob had spent a lot of time and grant money training his people. They operated almost like archaeologists, lifting the dirt away, slow and careful, with trowels and even small paintbrushes. They kept good records, triangulated important objects, measured everything. From siftings of the nearby soil, they discovered two finger bones and a button from the cuff of the victim’s shirt, but only a few small flakes of basalt that might have come from the broken petroglyph.

The medical examiner, who had to drive from Vancouver, showed up around one-fifteen, pronounced the man dead, and made a lot of preliminary rumblings as he probed the corpse.

Beneath the fog of medical jargon, Rob read that the victim had probably been dead for some weeks, maybe a couple of months, and that he was either Hispanic or Indian, though that wasn’t a certainty.

“Could be Asian,” the examiner grumbled. “Could be a square-headed Caucasian. Younger than forty, older than twelve. Cause of death probably one of the head wounds.” He made a fist and whacked the back of his own skull by way of illustration. They were standing in the street. “Can’t tell you more at this point, and don’t quote me.”

“Me, quote you?”

The medical examiner grinned. “I’ll do the autopsy for you here, if you’ll spring for a night at the Red Hat.”

“Sorry. No money.”

“Tomorrow, then. Eleven
A.M.
in Vancouver.”

“I’ll send Minetti to observe. Thanks, Doc.” Earl Minetti was Rob’s sergeant, the deputy in charge of the evidence team.

“No problem.” The ME cleared his throat. “The guy’s watch is still running.”

It was, too. Rob verified that, breathing through his mouth as the paramedics bagged the body, placing separate bags on the hands and feet. A battery-operated Swatch sagged from the wrist the animals hadn’t got to. For some reason the watch brought the tragedy home. As the ambulance pulled away and headed west toward Vancouver, the forensics team watched it leave in unbidden silence. Then they went on with their chores.

Rob felt a familiar wave of grief and depression. He supposed he would never understand how anybody could snuff out another human being’s life and then shove the body into a hole like a sack of garbage. Not for the first time he wondered whether he should give up the job and go back to Silicon Valley. Except that option was no longer open.

The victim’s face was in bad shape, and they had found no obvious identification on the body, no wallet with a handy driver’s license, no letters from home, no unpaid bills. Minetti would have the task of doing a thorough examination of the man’s effects—after the autopsy.

Meanwhile, there was enough to go on. And one further, peculiar discovery—the body lay in a square cavity that looked as if it had been dug many years before the murder.

Rob had hoped to find indisputable evidence that the artifacts from Lau der Point had been stored in the garage. That remained debatable. What was odd was that the body had been crammed into a cavity in the center of the garage floor, the walls of which were lined with railroad ties. The space was shorter and somewhat shallower than a real grave, the ideal cache for stolen loot, but only two more chips from the basalt petroglyph had showed up there.

They examined the heavy plywood sheet for everything from fingerprints and footprints to bloodstains and soil types, and sent samples off to the state lab. At some point in its past, the plywood had been given creosote treatment. It covered the cavity exactly. Nevertheless, dirt and gravel had been shoveled or raked over the victim, and the lid had been left unused, propped against the back door. A rake and a rusty shovel hung from the far wall of the garage. Rob pointed them out, and they were bagged and labeled.

He brooded about the lid. If the perpetrators had put it back in place with dirt spread over it, the body might not have been discovered for months—not until Margaret McLean’s Accord broke through the plywood. Maybe they hadn’t been able to close the lid over the victim’s arm, if rigor had already set in. Without the lid, they would have had to import soil to fill the cavity—from the backyard?

He made himself a note to have the crew investigate the ground behind the garage for signs of digging—and to interview the neighbors, who must have seen something. Himself included. He racked his memory. Nothing. He needed a time line.

The old man who had owned the house was a contemporary of Rob’s formidable grandmother. A retired contractor, Emil Stroh-meyer had been reclusive, notable as a fly fisherman. Rob had bought two antique bamboo rods at the estate sale. He wished he could consult his grandmother about Strohmeyer. She had known everything about everybody in Latouche County over the age of fifty.

By half past four, when it started to rain, the crew had completed a workmanlike survey of the floor of the garage. Their feet in the little booties designed to protect the scene began to churn up mud in the drive, so Rob sent them off to sift through their notes and secure the bagged evidence. He would meet with the team at 8:00 in the courthouse annex, along with as many other deputies as McCormick would authorize, to map out the investigation.

Meanwhile, he needed a shower. The stench of human corruption is pervasive. He left Dave, now the city’s official liaison, to guard the site for the rest of his shift. Dave sat in his car with the heater on. Yellow crime scene tape gleamed in the rain.

“W
ANT
a muffin?”

Rob started. It was not quite seven
A.M.
He was on his way back from the espresso stand. Hot coffee slopped through the hole in the plastic lid onto his right hand. He was also holding a cup of double-shot espresso in his left. He looked around. The librarian.

“Morning, Ms. McLean. Dave.”

Dave Meuler swore and sat up. He’d fallen asleep over the wheel of the patrol car. The window was down and Rob could smell wet wool.

Rob handed Dave his coffee. He took it with a nod and a sheepish grin.

Margaret McLean stood at the edge of her yard, peering through the rain. She had thrown a jacket over her head.

“Muffin?” she repeated.

“Uh, sure. Dave?”

Dave shook his head no. Steam from his coffee cup clouded the window in front of him. “I’ll pass. In sixty-three minutes I’m gonna sit myself down to the Hungry Logger breakfast at Mona’s.” He sounded pleased with himself. He had been excused from the eight o’clock briefing. “Thanks.”

She nodded and turned back to the house, rainwater spraying from her wet jacket.

“Rob?”

“Yeah?”

Dave held up an evidence bag. “Towser.”

Rob grinned. “Good man. See you later.” He took a companionable sip of coffee, which burned his lip, raised the cup in salute, and walked to the house.

He had showered, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes from the skin out. He’d even poked Mentholatum up his nose, but he could still smell the odor of death. He’d also tried to think things through without much result. At least he’d made a list of questions.

The kitchen smelled of baking, a definite improvement over eau de corpse.

When he was outside his second muffin—bran, moist with raisins—and had drunk his coffee, Ms. McLean laid a stack of printouts beside him on the table.

“What’s this?”

“Kokopelli. The flute player.”

“Kokopelli is Southwestern. This one’s different.”

Meg digested that. “The fragment I picked up was small for a petroglyph.”

He sighed. “Yes, I know. That’s what made me think it might be a piece taken from Lauder Point when the artifacts in the park were stolen ten years ago.”

“You spotted it right away?” Incredulity and disappointment vied on her expressive face.

“I was the klutz who fumbled that investigation. Believe it, I now know every missing piece in photographic detail. The flute player stone came from a bluff inundated when the Corps of Engineers built Bonneville Dam in the ‘Thirties. They split off the rock face in order to rescue the figures. What you found was a piece from the right-hand side of the basalt slab.”

“What’s the rest like?”

“There were two other figures facing him, to the left. They were larger, looked as if they were twins dancing side by side to the music. Twins occur a lot in the rock art of this area, but the musician is unusual. The other two petroglyphs are less distinctive. There’s a version of Tsagiglalal, She Who Watches.”

“Isn’t that the logo for the Scenic Area?”

He nodded. “This one has googly eyes, concentric circles rather than spirals. The other stone drawing is an animal figure called Running Elk.”

“I see.”

“The Klalo people called your stone The Dancers.” He finished the last morsel of muffin and rose. “I have to go now—a meeting with my deputies in half an hour. Todd Welch will replace Officer Meuler when we’re not here, so don’t be alarmed if a county car shows up. We’ll be back to conduct the search of the house and grounds by ten, if that’s okay.”

She sighed and nodded.

“I’ll take your statement then. One question. When she showed you the house, did the real estate agent point out the storage space in the floor of the garage?”

She blinked. “The what?”

He explained about the lined cavity.

“Good God.” She sounded blank. “I didn’t see the sheet of plywood then, either. You say it was a lid?”

He nodded.

She frowned as if concentrating on visual memory. “The surface of the garage was raked smooth. It looked as if it had been newly graveled.”

“Thanks. That helps. I’ll talk to the agent before I call Charlotte Tichnor.”

“That’s the woman I bought the place from, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Emil Strohmeyer’s heir. He had others but he left her the house because she took care of his medical bills. At least, that’s what people were saying when she put the house on the market.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to run. Thanks for fixing breakfast. Under the circumstances, it was generous-minded of you.”

She murmured something polite.

S
HERIFF
McCormick’s conference room was overheated. Rob’s team, smaller than he liked but adequate, looked sleepy. Minetti wasn’t happy with his projected trip to Vancouver. He didn’t like autopsies, for one thing, and, for another, he was an anxious supervisor. He wanted to be on top of the house search.

Rob said, “I’ll stay with them, Earl.”

Minetti’s eyes dropped and he shrugged. He was ten years younger than Rob, ambitious, something of a hotshot. “Okay. It’s yours, Linda.”

Behind her fashionable wire-rimmed glasses, Linda Ramos’s dark eyes sparkled, but she had the wit not to gloat. There were other egos involved. Minetti usually seconded Thayer Jones, who was experienced but slow. Rob decided to give Thayer the backyard while Linda and Jake Sorenson did the house.

“How long is this going to take, Neill?” The sheriff sounded belligerent, and, under the belligerence, plaintive.

Rob said soothing things about overtime, and noted the relief among team members that they weren’t going to be working another full shift. They had to be as tired as he was after the all-nighter.

“I need to secure the site and make sure the house isn’t part of the crime scene,” Rob concluded with a deliberately vague gesture because he had no idea how long that would take. “Then we’ll stand down until Earl can bring us something definite about the victim. I’ll take Ms. McLean’s statement and do some telephoning. The former owner of the house, the feds, and that new officer the intertribal fisheries people have hired to look into looting.” He would also check the FBI’s NCIC database before he left his office in the courthouse annex, but that went without saying.

Sheriff McCormick slapped his hands on the conference table and rose. “Right. Let’s get on it. And keep your lips zipped. We don’t want a lot of speculation out there in the community. Refer the press to me.”

Rob cleared his throat. “What about Maddie Thomas?”

Mack winced. “Not yet.”

“I want to talk to her.” Madeline Thomas was principal chief of the Klalos, a formidable and articulate woman. She was not a fan of the Latouche County Sheriff’s Department.