The Love of a Lawman, The Callister Trilogy, Book 3 (39 page)

Walter Thornton, one of the two doctors in town, served as coroner. John radioed the sheriff's office and instructed Dana to call Dr. Thornton and tell him to come out to the south edge of McRae's place just up from the Snake, off Rocky Ridge Road. He disliked telling Dana they had found a body, but he had no choice.

John looked at the sun. Noon. He hoped the doc didn't get lost.

The Double Deuce Ranch's headquarters was located a few miles on up the mountain, on Sterling Creek. Cattle could be grazing nearby and soon milling through the crime scene. John sent Rooster to the ranch to inform Luke McRae that his fence had been cut and a murder victim had been discovered on his property. And to ask for the use of some shovels.

Within the hour Luke arrived with tools, barbed wire and two hired men and John asked them instead of repairing the cut fence and returning it to its original location to fence off the crime scene to protect it from wandering livestock.

While he waited for the doctor, John asked more questions of the two fishermen. They had come up from Boise to spend the day on the river. They had no boat. They gave permission for John to look inside the Caravan. He did, but found nothing incriminating. He wrote every scrap of information he could think of about the Powell brothers in the spiral notebook, then sent them on their way with instructions to keep themselves available.

He returned to the crime scene and looked around outside the perimeter of pink ribbon. The grave was located several feet from a massive evergreen. Overhead, a canopy of limbs so thick that sunlight barely filtered through made the area dark and eerie and colder than the sunlit pasture leading up to the trees. Thick duff and soil had been disturbed in a ten-foot circle around the grave. John saw nothing he could identify as a clue to the victim's identity or the killer. Finding a footprint would be a miracle. He tied his handkerchief around his nose and mouth and began to work his way in a methodical circle inside the pink ribbon, picking up and saving every item that showed promise, marking and photographing where he found it.

When he had finally worked around to the protruding fingers, fighting off swarming flies, he squatted and looked closer. Though before he took the sheriff's job John had never seen a corpse outside a funeral service or a funeral home, in the past few months he had witnessed two—one, an auto accident victim, and the other an elderly woman who had died in her sleep. He might not be familiar with dead people, but living most of his life on a cattle ranch he had seen any number of dead animals. He had more than the average person's knowledge of the decomposition process. Whoever this poor sucker was, he couldn't have been here more than a few days.

Mae Hamlin had expected to hear from her husband on Thursday, six days ago. "Fuck," John muttered.

He saw no indication the corpse had been dragged to its burial site and he speculated it must have been carried here from somewhere else by someone on foot. Either the killer was a big, strong dude or he'd had help.

Another hour passed before Dr. Thornton arrived, followed by a crew of EMTs in Callister's only ambulance. John and Rooster had snapped pictures and combed every inch of the area around the grave. They turned it over to Dr. Thornton. He examined what he could see, then asked that the body be uncovered.

John, Rooster and Luke McRae tied bandanas around their faces and picked up shovels. They had scarcely turned over soil before a khaki-colored sleeve appeared and John knew, as he had suspected since he first saw the fingers, Frank Hamlin was no longer missing.

When the EMTs were able at last to lift the corpse from the shallow grave, they saw two dark, dirt-encrusted stains on Hamlin's uniform shirt in the middle of his chest. Gunshot wounds.

The group stood staring in brittle silence as Dr. Thornton went about his work. Every man present was acquainted with Hamlin on some level. Rooster, who went to the same church, broke into tears. One of the Double Deuce's hired hands had been childhood friends with Hamlin's son and was too distraught to speak.

With Rooster being the better acquainted with Mrs. Hamlin, John dispatched him to town in the Blazer to bear the message that her husband had been found.

"It'll be dark before long," John said to the remaining men, battling the lump in his own throat. "It's a long shot, but look around for shell casings or bullet fragments in one of these tree trunks." He didn't expect them to find any, but he issued the order to give them something to do, something to distract them from the grisly sight of the decaying body.

John walked around the area snapping more pictures. Close to and nearly behind the tree trunk, a chunk of metal caught his eye. He snapped a picture, then gingerly pulled a heavy steel knife from the duff. Double
Bs
stood out clearly on the hilt.

John's focus zoomed to the night he had locked Paul Rondeau's similar knife in the safe in the sheriff's office storeroom. John hadn't looked at it since. Was it still there?

Or had it somehow made its way out of the safe? Had he just now picked it from beneath the pine needles at the head of Frank Hamlin's grave?

* * *

When Dr. Thornton finished, the EMTs loaded the corpse into the ambulance and headed for St. Alphonsus Hospital in Boise for the autopsy.

John rode back to town with the doctor. "How long before we'll know about the gun?"

"Not long."

The doctor remained quiet, which was okay with John. Like an old silent movie, the events of the past few days streamed behind his eyes, swerved repeatedly back to the hunting knife and the morning he had released Paul Rondeau from jail, charged with nothing more than drinking and disturbing the peace.

Something else had been gnawing at him all day. It came to him as the doctor pulled into the courthouse parking lot and John saw the sheriff's department's white Blazer. Where was the Fish & Game Department vehicle that Hamlin drove? John had seen no trace of it. He had been so shaken by the crime and so preoccupied with the body, he hadn't thought of Hamlin's truck.

He went into his office intent on accomplishing one task. He opened the safe and saw that the knife he had taken from Paul Rondeau was still there, lying on the bottom shelf where he had put it. He hadn't thought it wouldn't be, not really. But he had to check.

He took the knife back to his desk and compared it to the one he had found at the crime scene. They were identical. The possibilities that fact opened were mind-boggling.

John reached his apartment after ten thirty. Izzy had left a voice mail message. He wanted to curl up in her soft arms and let her whispery voice drive away the horror of what he had seen, but it was too late to call her, much less see her.

His heart, having been in race mode all day, felt like a dead weight in his chest. It pounded like a bass drum. He had never felt more lost. He fell into bed exhausted, but lay awake, too keyed up to drop off.

The last time he had seen Frank Hamlin haunted him. They'd had breakfast together months ago in Betty's Road Kill and Frank had been bragging and brandishing pictures of his new grandson.

At eleven, the phone rang. Anticipating news, he answered in his official voice.

"John?"

Julie?
His thoughts flew to his kids and his heart flip-flopped. "Yeah, what's up?"

"Did I wake you?"

"That's okay. Something wrong?"

"I'm, uh, in Boise. You couldn't come down here, could you?"

John frowned. "When?"

"Now. I've got a flight booked at six back to L.A.... John, I need you to take the kids."

That statement brought John to a sitting position. "What? Where the hell are you?"

"I said I'm in Boise. I can't keep them, John. They're causing trouble between Carson and me. He doesn't want them. I want to leave them with you."

John stood up. "Where are you?" he asked again.

"I'm at this big truck stop on the Ontario side of the freeway. Can you come?"

John knew the one, near the Oregon state line. He grabbed his jeans. "You know it'll take me three hours to get there."

"This place is open all night. Just hurry, okay?"

John dressed in minutes. He put a pot of coffee on to brew while he pulled on his boots and combed his hair. If anything had happened to those kids, he would never forgive Julie and that overeducated sonofabitch she had married.

He filled a thermal cup with hot coffee, grabbed his jacket and hat and headed for Boise. He shaved twenty minutes off the three-hour trip. By the time he saw the truck stop, two dozen scenarios involving his kids and Julie's husband—none of them pretty—had played out in his head.

He hadn't seen his ex-wife since she moved the kids to California more than a year ago, but he recognized her sitting in a booth working a crossword puzzle. Emotion swept through him when he saw both his boys asleep—Trey on the seat opposite her and Cody with his head on her lap. John crossed the room and scooted in beside Trey, jostling him to make room. The ten-year-old mumbled, but didn't awaken, which kept John from crushing him in a hug. Julie rolled her crossword puzzle book into a tube and stuffed it into her purse.

She was a pretty woman who had always had her share of vanity. In the artificially cheery restaurant lighting, she looked worse than he had ever seen her. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a collapsed ponytail, loose strands hanging. Against her pale face, her dark eyes looked swollen and red, with smudges of black makeup beneath them.

"Jesus Christ, Julie, you look like hell. What's going on?"

"Thanks a lot. You don't look great either."

The exchange was nothing more than an extension of the animosity that had existed between them for years now.

"I've brought you the kids," she said, "so that should make you happy."

"I'm glad to take 'em, but I still want to know why."

A weary-looking waitress came with a coffee carafe and filled a mug for John. He blew on the surface of the hot liquid, then sipped, waiting for another charge of caffeine.

"I didn't know what else to do. Carson doesn't want to raise another man's children. If he could have adopted them, perhaps it would have been different—"

"What kind of a damn nut is he?" John shot her a squint-eyed look as a new concern flew at him. "Has he mistreated 'em?"

She frowned. "No, no, no. Nothing like that. You always think the worst."

"Well, I don't get it. One day he wants to adopt them and the next he's kicking them out of his house?"

"John, please, let's don't argue." Her eyes grew shiny with tears. "I'm under a lot of pressure. I've brought them to you. They're yours as much as they're mine. They wanted to be with you anyway. Trey and Carson have been getting on each other's nerves really bad. Carson doesn't appreciate a nine-year-old's opinions."

The words in the letter she had written just a few weeks ago came back to him. He wanted to ask what had happened to all the great stuff in Southern California, but what would be the point? "Don't talk to me about pressure. I've got this murder that cropped up—"

"Murder? In Callister?" A silly grin crossed her mouth. "That's too ironic. What do
you
know about solving a murder?"

"Not as much as I'll know next week. I've got to get back. Did you bring suitcases or something?"

"Outside. I've got a rental car."

"Then let's get on with it."

He roused Trey, who was too sleepy to say much of a hello, then picked Cody up from his mother's lap. Carrying Cody and leading a groggy Trey by the hand, he followed Julie out to the parking lot.

Her good-bye to their sons was short and weepy. The boys were too sleepy to notice. He stood by, trying to piece together what had gone wrong between her and his kids. A conversation needed to take place about the future, but not tonight.

The sky was turning from deep blue to steely gray when he reached Callister's city limits for the second time in a twelve-hour span. Knowing his parents would be up, he called them. His dad answered the phone. "I've got my kids with me," John told him. "I can't explain why and I don't want to make a big production of it right now, but I need you and Mom to look after them. Can you come to town and pick them up. I'm sure you've heard about Frank Hamlin."

Twenty-four hours had passed. Everybody in Idaho had probably heard about Frank.

"Who do you suspect?" his dad asked, his speech revved up with excitement.

"I can't talk about it. It's under investigation."

"You don't have to worry. We'll take care of those kids."

John helped his sons shower and get dressed in clothing he took from their suitcases. Why had Julie dragged them away from their home with nothing more than two small suitcases? She must have left in a hurry.

"Mom's gonna ship our clothes," Trey said in explanation. "We're not going back," he added defiantly. "Mom's husband's a jerk."

John stared at him, stumped for a reply. The sudden change in his and his kids' lives refused to mesh with everything else going on in his mind.

He had nothing but a loaf of bread in his kitchen, so he made toast for their breakfast. It wasn't adequate, but his mom and dad would prepare a feast for them. Before they finished eating, his parents' truck pulled to a stop outside.