Hanging Falls

by Margaret Mizushima

  Surprise lifted Cole’s brow. “Rompun’s a brand name for xylazine. It’s a powerful sedative and analgesic for horses. I’d say up here beside a game trail would be the last place you’d find a bottle of it.”

  “Robo found it soon after we started following the horseshoe prints.”

  Stella spoke up. “Why would someone use Rompun on their horses or carry it with them up here?”

  Cole frowned. “Good question. I use it for surgeries or to immobilize a horse for a procedure. I don’t dispense it to my clients. It’s nonnarcotic but dangerous to humans.” His gaze met Mattie’s. “It suppresses respiratory function and can result in death to humans.”

  Mattie nodded, recalling what it had been like when she and Robo were dosed with a large-animal tranquilizer in her backyard a few months ago. They’d barely made it through the experience alive.

  “So it would be hard for someone to get ahold of this stuff,” Stella said.

  “Right.” Cole’s eyes narrowed as if he had remembered something.

  “What are you thinking?” Mattie asked.

  “I met a farrier yesterday who said he had access to horse tranquilizers through a friend, although he avoided telling me who.”

  Stella jumped on the words. “What’s his name?”

  “Quinn Randolph. He’s from Hightower and he’s building a clientele here.” Cole’s frown deepened. “He was out at the Vaughn place when I went there this morning, and I know he’d been there before.”

  “Meaning he might have known Luke,” Stella said, her brow knotted as she gazed into the fire. “That’s useful information, Cole. Any other customers of yours who might have the drug?”

  “Like I said, I don’t dispense it to my customers, but I suppose someone could get it through another vet.”

  “How about the Vaughns or the others that live out there?” Stella asked.

  “I’ve only been out there once, but I don’t think they have tranquilizers available, or at least no one said so when Randolph brought it up.”

  “I need to make some phone calls to veterinarians in Willow Springs.” Stella gazed into the fire for a moment before addressing Cole. “Any other way a layperson could get it?”

  Mattie watched Cole’s expression change as he thought about it. She could tell he’d thought of someone else.

  “Rompun requires a prescription from a vet for a layperson to get it. But there was a drug rep in my office this morning that would have access to it and might even carry it with him. He’s new to the area, and he’s about the same age as Randolph. It’s a long shot, and the guy probably has nothing to do with this, but you might see if the two happen to know each other.”

  “What’s the name of the drug rep?”

  “Parker Tate. He works for a company out of Willow Springs, and I’m one of the vets in his territory.” Cole looked at Mattie, his expression sheepish. “He made some off-color comments around Angie and I got a little hot under the collar, so I’m not the one to ask for a character recommendation. Told him not to come back to the clinic again unless he had an appointment with me.”

  Mattie approved of his way of handling the situation and gave Cole a nod.

  “How old is this guy?” Brody asked, his eyebrows pinched in disapproval.

  “I would say early twenties.”

  “We made another find up above Hanging Falls this morning, or I should say Robo did,” Brody said. He went on to describe the shirt and best-friend necklace. “Made us wonder if there’s a girl involved.”

  “A teenage girl,” Mattie said, further refining the thought. “It’s the kind kids share in junior high around here. Luke seems too old to be interested in that sort of thing. Quinn Randolph or Parker Tate too, for that matter.”

  “We know there’s at least one teenage girl that knew Luke,” Stella said. “The Vaughn girl, the one with the dog.”

  Mattie and Cole chimed in together as their eyes met. “Hannah.”

  We would remember the name of the girl with the dog, Mattie thought. “There was also another teenage girl inside the Grayson house, reading a story to one of the younger kids.”

  “We’ll need to go out there first thing in the morning and interview them,” Stella said to Mattie. And then to Brody, “When we get back tonight, let’s search for the farrier and the drug rep online.”

  Brody nodded.

  Stella thought for moment. “I’ll ask our lab to test both of our victims for xylazine, just on the off chance that it was used on either of them.”

  “If it’s present in both, it would give us a link between the two cases,” Mattie said.

  “And give us a lead on two persons of interest,” Stella said.

  Brody sloshed water on the fire, making it smoke. “Let’s douse this fire and head home. We’ve got a lot more work ahead of us.”

  And a long way to go to get home, Mattie thought, hating the idea of leaving the warmth of the fire. And only a half day to work tomorrow before my family arrives.

  Her family! Her stomach fluttered.

  She and Robo might be finished with the work they needed to do in the high country, but she wanted to help Stella with interviews tomorrow morning. Luke Ferguson was someone’s son and family member, well liked by the people he lived with. She wanted to do her best by him and bring his killer to justice.

  And in the case of Tracy Lee? Well, a part of her felt responsible for his death. He might have been sneaky and a bit of a voyeur, but now she realized he’d been vulnerable, maybe even afraid. Had she called attention to him by bringing him in for interrogation? Were she and her colleagues somehow part of the reason he’d been killed?

  She wouldn’t be able to rest easy until she had some answers.

  * * *

  Halfway down the mountain, Stella connected a call to the sheriff and learned that he and Glenna had followed the trail of two riders until it led back to a wide spot off a dirt road farther east from the main parking lot. There they’d found tire prints in the mud worthy of casting. From the depth and shape of the prints, it looked like a truck and trailer had parked and then turned around to go on down to the highway. Boot prints—flat sole, rounded toe, square heel—and horseshoe impressions had also been taken.

  One valuable piece of evidence became apparent at the truck: both riders wore the same size and shape of boot. That cleared up why the prints at the crime scene had looked like they’d come from only one set of boots. Apparently, if a shoe fit two suspects, they might have their pair of killers.

  Mattie was surprised by how relieved she felt when she learned that the sheriff had arrived safely at the end of the trail. Why had she been so worried about him? After all, the sheriff was an experienced and competent lawman, so there shouldn’t have been any need for concern. And Glenna had been there as backup.

  But the man had been her mentor, someone she could count on, and her world wouldn’t be the same if something removed him from it. Law enforcement was a dangerous profession, and you could never count on a fellow officer’s safety during an investigation.

  Besides, Sheriff McCoy represented the closest thing to a father figure that Mattie had ever known.

  Cole trailered the horses to his home while she took Robo directly to the station. Before they parted, he made her promise that she would call him when she finished work.

  Brody and Stella took their laptops into the briefing room to dig for information on Quinn Randolph and Parker Tate while Mattie fed Robo in the staff office and wrote her reports. When he finished eating, he curled up on his red cushion beside her desk and fell asleep within seconds. After she printed her reports and left them in the outgoing tray, she considered waking him but decided to leave him in the office to sleep.

  She found the others still in the briefing room, comparing notes on what they’d found online. Sheriff McCoy glanced at her when she entered and gave her a smile that made her feel warm and welcome. “Where’s your partner?”

  “Asleep,” she told him as she clo
sed the door behind her. “He’ll track me down if he wakes up and I’m not there.”

  Before she could make it to the table where they all sat, the harsh sound of Robo’s toenails scraping the door echoed through the room.

  “Ha!” Stella said, her eyes on her computer screen. “He has his Spidey sense on even when it looks like he’s asleep. He’s one tricky character to leave behind.”

  Mattie turned to let Robo into the room, using the moment to hide her flushed cheeks. Stella knew only the half of it. Her dog had become increasingly difficult to work around whenever she and Cole wanted to be alone in her bedroom. Even though she considered Robo the most obedient dog she’d ever seen, her bedroom door had gained many new scratches on the outside veneer in the past weeks. Apparently his down-stay wasn’t good enough to go the distance.

  While Cole had been dealing with Angie learning how to share her father, she’d been dealing with Robo. Kids!

  After she opened the door, Robo trotted into the room like a king, giving her a glance as he passed. He went directly to the chair that Mattie usually sat in and waited for her to settle. Then he circled a couple times, lay down to put his head on his paws, and sighed. She figured he would be asleep again soon.

  “Look at this,” Stella said, turning her laptop so they could see the screen. “Check out the boot.”

  The screen showed a website for Randolph Farrier Services, upon which a rather narrow-faced guy was pictured wearing leather farrier’s chaps, posed with one boot propped up on a blacksmith’s anvil. There it was in plain sight: a leather boot with a rounded toe, which probably also had a square heel and flat sole, although she couldn’t tell for certain from the angle of the camera.

  “It would be hard for him to deny he has this style of boot.” Mattie clicked on the other website pages but couldn’t find any other shots of the farrier’s footwear.

  “There’s only a head shot of Parker Tate on the pharmaceutical company’s website, so no shot of his boots,” Stella said. “Let me show you.”

  The screen filled with the photos of several company employees, and Stella pointed out the one captioned Parker Tate. He looked to be in his early twenties, his hair gelled into an upsweep in front, his eyes flirting with the camera. Mattie withheld her opinion that the guy looked like he thought a lot of himself.

  “Hmmm …” McCoy mused.

  “Real ladies’ man,” Brody muttered, turning his computer screen toward Mattie and Stella. “Here’s his Facebook page.”

  Party shots filled the photo section. Parker’s involvement with many different female friends was readily apparent, as was his penchant for drinking and bars.

  “The farrier doesn’t do social media,” Brody said, pulling his computer back in front of him. “I’ll see if I can find anything else about him.”

  McCoy excused himself to take care of some business in his office while Brody and Stella focused on their laptop screens, so Mattie decided to update the whiteboard on the Luke Ferguson case. They’d picked up a lot of valuable information during this long day.

  When she mentioned it to Stella, the detective gestured toward the printer. “I’ll print a photo of Tracy Lee too. We need to set up his case.”

  The photo of Luke Ferguson that showed his damaged face had been printed and pinned to the top of the whiteboard. Mattie added the evidence that Robo had uncovered and then began a list of persons of interest, beginning with Quinn Randolph and Parker Tate. As she added the names of the folks at the compound—the term she’d been using in her own mind for the place—and the list grew longer and longer, her heart began to sink. They still had a lot of work to do before her family arrived.

  After she retrieved the printout of the mug shot they’d taken of Tracy Lee when they booked him last night, she pinned it to the second whiteboard. Thankful that they didn’t need to use one of the ghastly, distorted images that his face had morphed into above the noose, she stood back and studied the photo for a minute.

  Thin cheeks, unkempt straggly hair, deep-set dark eyes that looked like burned-out holes—this photo finalized the shift her brain had made to classify Tracy Lee as victim rather than perpetrator. Why hadn’t she seen it before? The eyes she’d seen as furtive had become sunken holes of misery.

  The man had been living a life of bare existence out there in the forest, smoking weed and eating whatever fish he could catch. That and the small stash of junk food he carried with him in his fanny pack. Where was his family? Would anyone care if he was alive or dead?

  “We have to find Tracy Lee’s family,” she murmured.

  “Sheriff McCoy’s working on that now,” Stella said, looking up from her screen. “He’ll take care of notification.”

  Brody sat back in his chair and rolled his neck on his shoulders, making the bones pop. “Let’s wrap it up for the night. My eyes are so blurry I can hardly see the screen. I’ll come in early and pick it up again.”

  His eyes were bloodshot and strained, and Mattie remembered they’d been at this now for two days and two very late nights. She stifled a yawn as she agreed to come in early too.

  “Come in when you want, but we’ll plan on meeting together by seven,” Stella said. “We’ll get out to the place where Luke lived by eight. Maybe we can finish up out there within a couple hours before we move on to Randolph and Tate.”

  “All right.” Mattie bent to rest her hand on Robo’s side, and he awakened slowly as if from deep sleep. His eyes opened and focused gradually before he raised his head to stare into hers. “You want to go, buddy?”

  As if someone had pressed an on switch, he scrambled to his feet and headed for the door. Mattie said good-night and followed, removing her cell phone from her pocket as she went. In the staff office, she sent Cole a text saying she was about to leave. Before she could put her phone back into her pocket, it rang in her hand. Cole.

  “You’re still up?” she greeted him.

  “Yeah. Got my chores done with the horses, and everyone else here went to bed. Mrs. Gibbs saved some dinner for us. You want to come eat it with me?”

  She smiled, the phone next to her lips. Since he’d seen the bare expanse of her refrigerator, Cole often lured her to his house with the promise of food. Dinner at home would have been a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “I’d like that. We’ll be there soon.”

  FIFTEEN

  As she loaded Robo into her SUV, flashes of lightning chased across the sky and thunder rolled in an uninterrupted chain like distant artillery fire. A chill breeze carried the scent of rain. She was grateful they’d finished their work in the high country, because another night of rainfall appeared to be in store.

  After driving the mile out of town to the Walkers’ lane, Mattie turned in and followed it to the log house, a two-story with a covered front porch. She parked under the cottonwood tree outside the yard.

  As was customary, Cole had been waiting for her outside with Bruno, his Doberman pinscher. Robo had begun his happy dance in the back compartment as soon as she’d turned down the lane, and now he acted like he was beside himself, jumping back and forth in his compartment, pressing his nose to each window. After ratcheting on the hand brake, she popped open the front door to his cage and let him bail out behind her.

  Robo and Bruno wrestled each other around the yard while she and Cole met halfway on the sidewalk.

  Cole took her in his arms. “Mmm,” he murmured against her hair as he hugged her close. “So happy to see you when there isn’t a dead body involved.”

  She groaned. “I’ll say. It’s been wild, hasn’t it? I can’t believe it sometimes.”

  A breeze had sprung up, causing a chill that made her shiver. Well, that along with the memory of Tracy Lee Brown’s distorted face.

  “Let’s forget about death for a while,” Cole said, tucking her under his arm and guiding her up the sidewalk to the porch steps. “Your family arrives tomorrow. Have you heard from them yet?”

  Mattie took out her cell phone to check her text
messages. “Here’s a text from Julia. Oh my gosh, they’re in Green River, Utah, tonight! About five hours away. She says they’ll try to get on the road by nine in the morning. They’ll be here around two.”

  Cole tightened his arm to draw her closer. “Are you excited?”

  Mattie couldn’t define her exact feelings. “Excited, nervous, scared, you name it.”

  “They’re going to love you.”

  She felt her lips quiver slightly as she smiled. “Julia already says they do.”

  A huge gust of wind hit the side of the house, followed by the splatter of raindrops on the sidewalk. Robo and Bruno came running to the shelter of the porch.

  Cole chuckled as the dogs bounded up the steps. “You’d better get up here, you two. At least they have enough sense to come in out of the rain. Did Robo eat?”

  “I fed him at the station.”

  “Let’s go inside and have our dinner, then. I’m starving. You hungry?”

  She acknowledged that she was, told Robo to heel, and made him settle at her side. Cole grabbed Bruno’s collar, and they led the two straight through the den and into the kitchen, a routine familiar to both dogs and a signal that it was time to abandon their roughhousing.

  Though they tried to be as quiet as they could, Mattie heard a door open and close upstairs as she crossed the threshold into the kitchen. She released Robo from heel position so that he could go drink from Bruno and Belle’s water bowl, as he was wont to do each time he visited, and looked back to the doorway just as Sophie came around the corner.

  The child’s brown curls were tousled, and she was wearing a turquoise set of shorty pajamas that had a tiny rose print on the fabric. She carried a bedraggled toy rabbit that she still cuddled with at night but typically left it in the bedroom during the day.

  Although Mattie had never had a favorite toy—in fact, she’d had very few toys of any kind during her childhood—she figured nine was not too old to use a stuffed rabbit for comfort when needed.