Dead Point (Maggie Blackthorne Book 1)

by LaVonne Griffin-Valade

  “Hon, you might want to watch your language,” Seth said.

  Despite that bit of patronizing, his affection for Jess was obvious.

  “It’s not a problem,” I said. “I sometimes use profanity myself. May I hold Sophia for a sec?”

  Jess handed the sleeping baby to me. She had the same pale skin and dark hair as her mother. And me, for that matter.

  Reticent, the woman took the child back from me. “Everything’s okay, right?”

  “If you’re asking whether everything is all right with your little girl, I’d say she’s just about perfect.”

  Jess smiled.

  “Thank you both for your time,” I said to the couple.

  After I finished the apple and energy bar I’d brought for lunch, I rummaged around the office for snack crackers, apparently having abandoned this morning’s resolve to adopt healthier eating habits. The Ritz box was empty, and the Triscuits were too stale even for me. Hungry, I thought about the pizza in my refrigerator at home, left over from Duncan’s visit the night before last. And then I thought hungrily about the man himself, an indulgence abruptly interrupted by Taylor’s noisy entrance through the front door of our trooper station.

  He usually went home for his meal breaks, often arriving back at the office smelling of garlic or onions or some exotic extract his wife, Ellie, had learned to make through the online extension service. Today, I detected the scent of chocolate nougat and caramel. It made me wish I had a Snickers bar stashed somewhere.

  “Mark, before you take off your jacket, we’re taking a little trip. I want to find Trudeau’s missing cattle.”

  “Where’re we headed?” He handed me my peacoat.

  I slipped the coat on and grabbed my pack. “Izee Road.”

  “Out near Murderers Creek, then.”

  “Yeah. He was apparently pasturing them on BLM property.”

  Taylor locked the station door, and we climbed in my Chevy Tahoe.

  “Wouldn’t Trudeau have pastured them at his ranch?” he said.

  I shook my head. “Big T’s in quite a state of disrepair these days. Pasture’s gone to pot, along with all the outbuildings.”

  We pulled out of the parking lot, gravel sounding a metallic ping.

  “He was down to about thirty or so head of cattle, right?” Taylor asked.

  “That’s right. All steers,” I answered.

  “How does anybody get a grazing permit for so few livestock?”

  “He’d probably had the permit for years, originally for a much larger herd. My guess is he was selling them off a few at a time.”

  We drove south on 395 past Canyon Mountain until we reached Bear Valley and the Silvies River drainage system, stretching over a massive plain on the backside of the Aldrich range.

  Eight miles or so north of Seneca, I cut west on Izee Road. Not far from Big T, we passed the ranch where I had worked as the cook’s helper. The summer I turned fifteen, I spent my mornings mastering the art of sourdough biscuits and my evenings watching the sun set, the rosy alpine glow spreading across the mountains and streaming through broad stands of Ponderosa.

  Off to the north, Dead Point—a needle-like basalt batholith—loomed above the high desert, an eerily apt reminder of the three murders that had occurred a relatively short distance away.

  At milepost thirty, a loading chute had been built into the fencing next to a gate. There were no cattle to be seen, and the property beyond the fence was thick with juniper. From there, the land sloped sharply up a shale escarpment.

  I shut off the engine and retrieved my binoculars. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Outside, Taylor zipped up his jacket and pulled on the damn Pendleton earmuffs he always talked to me about ad nauseam.

  “Dang, Maggie. It’s freezing.”

  I reached across the front seats to the glove compartment, lifted out a gray wool scarf and my Thinsulate gloves, and bundled up. I climbed over the gate, and Taylor followed suit.

  Traipsing uphill over slippery terrain, I wondered why the acreage was labeled grassland cattle forage. Seemed more suitable for bighorn sheep and wild horses—that is, until we reached the summit. We’d hiked up a small ridge that looked over a creek-basin pasture of native bluebunch wheatgrass and Idaho fescue where a small herd of Black Angus grazed.

  I brought up the binoculars and recognized the Big T brand, a capital T superimposed on a larger capital B. I counted thirty-three animals, six more than Jess Bennett had hauled in her livestock truck, and all carrying the Big T brand.

  “Trudeau’s cattle all right, but I count more steers than I expected to find.” I passed the field glasses to Taylor. “Double-check, will you?”

  He aimed them in a slow swath across the pasture. “Thirty-three?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How many were expecting to find?”

  “Twenty-seven,” I said.

  “How’d the extra steers get here?”

  And then I understood. Dan and Joseph had brought the six animals back to where they’d stolen them. Just like they said they would.

  Taylor stood awkwardly on the loading chute gate. “I’m pretty sure you’re right, Maggie. The Nodines returned the steers they stole from Trudeau. But why didn’t the truck driver or Trudeau realize the six missing steers were up there in the pasture?”

  “The twins were late and Trudeau and the woman headed out before they arrived?”

  “Guess that makes sense.” He hopped off the gate and dragged a burlap bag out from under the loading chute. “McKay Feed and Tack? Didn’t they recently have a theft?”

  I put my hands on my hips. “Yeah, but one of the stolen cattle prods was found in the Ram 3500 the Nodines were driving. The other one was in their old camper.”

  Taylor opened the burlap bag. “Wasn’t other stuff missing? As in, two forty-pound salt licks. And one, no, two fence cutters?”

  I peered inside. “Goddamn, Mark. Good work.”

  “Nothing but luck. The sack was camouflaged in the shadows underneath the chute. I could’ve easily missed it.”

  “Well, I missed it completely.”

  “You think it was the Nodines who took all that stuff from the Feed and Tack?”

  “Seems like it. Probably left the burlap bag here when they brought back the steers.”

  He nodded and loaded it in the back of the Tahoe. We took off over the worn macadam. Bordered on either side by scrubby lodgepole pine and dry sagebrush, the surface of Izee Road was a mix of riven asphalt and chesil underlay. Like the land was reclaiming the old ranch route bit by bit.

  Again in the distance, I saw the Aldrich range and the Palouse-like hillocks of soft gold transforming to deep green in the slow release of winter’s icy paralysis. Despite the strange beauty and tranquility, all the little jaunts to backcountry were taking time away from attending to the list of questions still needing answers. For one, Kat McKay. She was due another visit so we could talk about that semiautomatic pistol of hers.

  The drive back to town was quiet, even after I clicked on local news and weather. There wasn’t much new to report on either front until the voice of Sheriff Dirk Rhinehart broke through the otherwise mundane broadcast. In a statement delivered from the steps of the courthouse, he warned the citizenry of Grant County that the Oregon State Police had yet to apprehend the killer or killers of the Nodine brothers and Guy Trudeau.

  The sheriff went on to assure the populace that he, the officers on his force, and the contingent of five dozen volunteer deputies were prepared to form a search party to hunt down whoever had murdered the three men, should it come to that.

  Taylor sighed. “He’s not kidding either, is he?”

  “Afraid not.” I shut off the radio. “Don’t know how you can take a search party out looking for a killer if you don’t know who the killer is.”

  I plugged in my iPod and put on Emmylou Harris.

  “Got any Taylor Swift?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “I like
to tell people she was named after me.”

  I pointedly turned up the volume, silencing the man until we parked at our police station. He hauled the burlap bag to the evidence locker while I checked messages at my desk.

  I’d received a statewide update on the murder investigation down in Paisley and a short voicemail from J. T. Lake asking me to contact him first thing tomorrow morning. His tone had lost some of its incivility. I wondered if someone had given him the word to back off during the homicide investigations. Nah. Would never happen.

  “You want me to contact Duncan McKay? Let him know we found the rest of the stuff from his store,” Taylor offered.

  “I was just going to do that,” I fibbed.

  He moved off to his desk.

  “On second thought, go ahead and make the call. I actually need to go talk to someone else.” Kat McKay. A conversation I wanted to have without the distraction of flirting with Duncan beforehand.

  “Sure, right after I check the fish and wildlife log.”

  On the way to question Kat about that automatic pistol, I’d barely made it to the high school at the border between John Day and Canyon City when Asa Larkin’s black Prius passed me on the left. Doing so in a no-passing zone was an infraction, not to mention idiotic given the car had sped up and swerved wildly around my State Police vehicle. I flashed my lights and sounded my non-emergency siren, signaling the driver to move to the shoulder.

  Brady Wakefield—Larkin’s son—was at the wheel, and Rain McKay-Ferlinghetti was his single passenger. The Wakefield boy rolled down his window.

  “License and registration, please,” I said. “Did you know it’s a violation to pass when the lane lines are solid? Plus you were speeding in a school zone.”

  Brady shrugged, removed his license from his hip pocket and the registration from the sun visor.

  After the numbers came up clean from DMV, I wrote out a citation and watched both dark-haired young men through my windshield.

  Brady’s window slid down as I walked back to the Prius.

  I handed him the registration, his license, and the ticket. “I’ve cited you today for the two traffic offenses. Your court date is on the bottom of the form there.”

  He pressed the automatic window button in his door panel and began closing the window.

  I knocked on the glass. “Hold on. I’m not finished.”

  Brady jerked his head and eyeballed me maliciously. “Fuck off, lady!”

  I opened the driver’s-side door. “Unlock the rear cargo hatch and step out of the vehicle.”

  He hit the hatch lever and moved out of the Prius.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper, ma’am. It’s just, my dad will be pissed I got a ticket.”

  I’d noted the birthdate on his driver’s license. He’d just turned nineteen.

  “You mouth off to a police officer again and your dad might have to bail you out of the local hoosegow.”

  “For what?” Rain stood next to the passenger door. “What would you arrest him for?”

  “Do you know what I might find in the rear cargo area?” I asked him.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then you’re better off minding your own business. Get back inside the vehicle.”

  As I moved to the open cargo hatch, Brady following behind, a dozen or more black-and-white magpies lifted from the juniper-infested hillside and swept overhead, shrieking in Corvidae furore.

  The cargo area was empty. Well, of course. Brady was smart enough to hide his contraband, booze or otherwise. I rolled back the protective mat and popped open the lower storage compartment. I found a set of tire chains and a folded tarp. Under the tarp lay two seven-round magazines loaded with nine-millimeter cartridges and a Kel-Tec PF-9 automatic pistol, same model handgun used to kill the Nodine twins.

  Maybe I was finally getting somewhere.

  14

  Afternoon, February 26

  After Brady Wakefield denied knowing about the gun in the back of the Prius, I took possession of the key fob and his phone. Visibly shaken, he agreed to wait quietly in the backseat of my Tahoe. I’d convinced him that was how he could avoid being placed there in handcuffs.

  I called Hollis at home, and he joined me within minutes, arriving just before Duncan drove up. The Prius, the two Tahoes, and the Feed and Tack delivery truck were parked end-to-end facing south on the shoulder of Three Flags Highway, directly in front of the high school.

  Duncan met up with us, his buckaroo’s limp more pronounced this afternoon. “Maggie. Hollis. What’s the situation with Rain?”

  The boy had called his uncle the moment he saw Brady slide into my police rig.

  “I’ll need to talk with him,” I said.

  “What about? Over the phone, he told me it was Brady who was in trouble.”

  “Other than a couple of traffic citations, no one’s in trouble until I say so.”

  Rain had moved from the Prius to the front seat of the delivery truck. “Come with me,” Duncan said.

  He opened the driver’s-side door. “Sergeant Blackthorne needs to talk to you before we can go. And that means you need to answer her questions, do you understand?”

  The boy nodded, and I slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door.

  “I saw your picture in the Blue Mountain Eagle. The one from the basketball game.”

  Rain ignored my comment. “When do you read me my rights?”

  I ignored his drama. “Where were you and Brady going in such a hurry?”

  “No place special. That’s just how he drives everywhere.”

  It was remarkable how much he resembled his father, Arlan, and not just because of the thick hair. With those fierce eyes, wiry frame, and the same Ferlinghetti remove, Rain was a gene copy of his dad.

  “You boys were out cruising the gut?”

  “No, driving to my mom’s house.”

  “Do you know why Brady is sitting in the backseat of my police vehicle?”

  Rain paused and bit his lip. “You found something in the back of his car?”

  My blank stare, again purposeful.

  “Alcohol is my guess,” he said.

  “I’d be issuing both of you a Minor in Possession charge if that were the case.”

  “Then I’ve got no idea what you found.”

  “You’re free to leave with your uncle. First I need to ask you about something. You were with your mother when she was caught target shooting in Murderers Creek Wildlife Area?”

  “Yeah. But I never shot anything.”

  “Really?” A boy learning to shoot was practically a requirement in Grant County.

  “I don’t like guns. I think the target practice was an afterthought or something. Driving out to Murderers Creek was Kat’s idea of a mother-son outing.”

  It was never a good sign when a kid started referring to a parent by their first name.

  “An afterthought?”

  “Kat’s never been a gun person either. I don’t get why she decided to buy a pistol.”

  A question I was eager to have an answer to myself.

  I rejoined Hollis and Duncan. “I got what I needed from Rain.”

  “Did he behave himself?” Duncan asked.

  “Yes. He’s free to go. But before you take off, did Mark Taylor contact you?”

  Duncan shook his head.

  “We found the other items taken from your store. I think the salt lick and the fence cutters were pilfered at the same time as the cattle prods. And probably by the Nodines,” I said.

  “They would’ve had to break into my place, then, and I’ve had no break-ins that I know of. I banned them from the Feed and Tack more than a week ago.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Duncan rearranged his cap over his thick swath of hair. “They’d been swiping little stuff for a long time. Packs of gum, a can of chewing tobacco, some pin screws, a hacksaw blade. I did stop them at the door and made sure they handed over the hacksaw blade. But they came back a week later and tried
to palm an expensive bottle of pinkeye spray. Mostly I’d ignored the other puny thefts, but this time I saw the truck they were driving. That massive red gas hog. I decided they could probably afford to pay for whatever they needed. Anyway, I told them they weren’t welcome in my place anymore.”

  I wished he had shared this news with me earlier. “You should’ve called the town police and had them arrested.”

  An expression new to me darkened his face. Was he embarrassed? Irritated?

  “I already told you what I think of our police. But given what happened after I kicked the Nodines out of my store, I should’ve called you guys. And I probably should’ve wondered why they needed pinkeye spray, but I didn’t.”

  It was all I could do to refrain from offering Duncan some affectionate sign of reassurance. But I needed to hold myself in check standing in public view.

  “The pinkeye spray, that’s for cattle, right?” I asked.

  “Most all livestock.”

  “If you could pinpoint when they tried to steal a bottle of it, that might help us.”

  “Saturday the sixteenth. We were in the middle of a big sale.”

  “Thanks, Duncan. We should get going,” I said.

  “Me too. I left Frankie in charge of the store.” He extended a large, warm hand, first to me, then Hollis. “Be seeing you.”

  “Sorry about calling you back to work today, Holly. I know you wanted some time at home.”

  “Once you mentioned the Kel-Tec 9, there was no question about staying home. Just glad I was there long enough to take care of Hank so Lil could sleep in.” He pointed toward the backseat of my Tahoe. “What are we doing about Larkin’s kid?”

  “He said he didn’t know the weapon was there, and I’m pretty convinced he didn’t. His cocky façade went south as soon as he saw the gun in the storage compartment. And when I asked to see his conceal carry permit, he about lost his shit.”

  “It probably belongs to his father, don’t you think?”

  “That’s a question we’ll have an answer to soon. Apparently one of Larkin’s men is driving him into town to pick up his Prius. He’s meeting the boy and us at the station.”