I hadn’t heard the siren or Taylor and the EMTs climbing the stairs. The technicians moved in quickly, dressing Holly’s wound, carrying him to the ambulance, setting him up with IVs, and ferrying him to the hospital.
One of the EMTs stayed behind to patch up Ruben Vickers’s upper thigh. The bullet had done little more than graze him, which meant there was no need for hospitalization. The EMT initially green-lighted Vickers for transport to jail, but once he turned hysterical at the sight of his brother’s body lying on the floor under a hastily arranged coverlet, the EMT consulted by phone with a physician in John Day.
Over my objections, the medical director at Blue Mountain Hospital demanded Vickers be brought in for observation and dispatched another ambulance to take him to the hospital. Al seemed disinclined to intervene, so I lobbied to interview Vickers before the second ambulance arrived. The medical director vetoed that too but agreed to at least have a security guard installed in Ruben Vickers’s room.
I found it all frustrating. “In his state, he might have told us all we needed to know to solve these homicides.”
Bach eyed me. “That’s not how this works, Maggie. You know that.”
Hollis had smiled as the EMTs closed the door to the ambulance. He was still alive, and I told myself he would stay that way.
I dreaded delivering the news to Lil. Before making that call, I phoned Dorie and asked her to be on standby to help Lil with the baby. Then I dialed Lillian Two Moons.
When she heard Holly had been shot, she shrieked and burst into tears.
“The ambulance is on the way to the hospital, Lil.” But that was not the kind of calming information she was looking for.
Finally, she asked if he was unconscious.
“He was alert and he asked me to tell you that he loves you and Hank very much.”
“That means he’s frightened, Maggie.”
I struggled for a response. I could have told her that he’d even made a little joke about getting blood on my sergeant stripes, but the less said about blood, the better. Besides, I knew she was right. Hollis was plenty frightened.
“I know this is hard.”
“I’m not sure I could go on without him.”
“He’s very strong, Lil.” Though I wasn’t sure I could go on without him either.
Sam Damon arrived with his hearse to retrieve the body of John Vickers. “What’s happening in our county, Sergeant Blackthorne? All these violent deaths.”
I was in a shitty mood by then. “Too much brutality in the world?”
“Can’t say as I disagree with that,” he said.
Once Sam left, Bach, Taylor, and I met in Larkin’s achingly stark and impersonal living room. One of the bright white walls was now tarnished by blood residue and a bullet hole. Al was oddly silent, relying on me to suggest our next move. I thought about what he had said when we were upstairs attending to Hollis, that he’d made a huge mistake and there’d be a price to pay. I had no idea what had prompted his pessimism.
Remembering the scene from less than an hour ago—John Vickers holding the Glock to Taylor’s temple—I turned my attention to Mark. “How are you holding up?”
“All right, I guess. I’m worried about Hollis. He didn’t look good. And it’s my doing.”
“This was not your fault, Mark. One of us probably should have been guarding those men with you.”
Taylor leaned across the space between us and gave me a tiny, awkward hug.
I cleared my throat. “Detective Bach and I are going to question Larkin in his office. I’d like you to stay with Wayne Smith in the dining room if you’re up to it.”
He glanced at his watch. “Let me give Ellie a quick call, let her know I’ll be late getting home.”
While he stepped outside to phone his wife, I checked my phone for messages, but there was no word yet from Lil or the EMTs about Hollis.
Al had wandered into the kitchen and returned with a pitcher of water and a stack of glasses. He placed the pitcher and glasses on Larkin’s Jetsons-like coffee table along with his duty belt, Taser, and service revolver.
“Maggie, these were officer-involved shootings. Which means I’m to be placed on administrative leave. And you need to put in a call to regional dispatch and report the shootings. They’ll send a detective out to interview everyone and begin an investigation of both.”
Bach appeared curiously relieved to be citing OSP protocols. “I can’t participate in the interviews either.”
“Al, I need your help with this.”
“No, you don’t. You’re a natural. You occasionally talk too much, but you’ll figure all that out with more experience.”
“I don’t particularly want more experience with homicide investigations.”
He began filling the glasses with water. “We’ll talk about that later.”
I sipped some water. “What did you mean when you said you’d made a huge mistake?”
“I didn’t warn Ruben Vickers before firing my weapon.”
I shrugged. “Heat of the moment.”
“No. That’s why we’re trained and why we have directives in place. Many of which I developed, by the way. This is not the Wild West, and we’re a professional law enforcement organization. We live and die by our rules.”
I thought he was being a tad dramatic, but I kept my commentary in check. “It was really just a flesh wound.”
His glare burned through me. “That’s not how we have to look at it. That stunt contributed to Hollis being shot. And John Vickers might have killed Mark.”
“That last was a distinct possibility from the moment he nabbed Taylor’s gun.”
“Just call regional dispatch and report the shootings, all right?”
After I spoke to regional, the three of us gathered back around the living room coffee table.
“A couple of detectives are being dispatched from Ontario,” I said.
Bach nodded. “Makes sense.”
I picked up my glass of water. “First thing tomorrow.”
Taylor turned to Al. “What’s going on?”
“I’m technically on administrative leave.”
“Oh, right. Officer-involved shootings.”
“And Maggie’s officially in charge of our murder investigations.”
Which meant I didn’t need Bach’s permission to interview Ruben Vickers tonight in his hospital room. Something I planned to do right after I checked in on Hollis, no matter what the damn medical director or anyone else had in mind.
“Instead of Larkin, I’m starting the interviews with Smith. What’s left to search upstairs, Al?”
“Hollis and I hit up the bedrooms and bathrooms, but there’s a small storage room still to go.”
“I know you’re technically on administrative leave, but I can’t have you standing watch without even your Taser while I take turns interviewing Smith and Larkin. It makes more sense for Mark to do that. Would there be some breach of protocol if you finished our search of the house?”
Bach wrestled with that for about half a minute. “Since this is Larkin’s residence and we’ve already gone through the double-wides the Vickers men occupied, I think I can find a rationale for that and document it to everyone’s satisfaction.”
God, I thought, this dude must be a pain in the ass to live with.
23
Evening, March 1
We hastily searched Asa Larkin’s small office and then proceeded to the dining room. The scene there was surreal. A bruised and anxious Larkin waited quietly at the table alongside Wayne Smith, who gave the impression of a contrite and possibly hungry guy caught up in someone else’s shit. Neither of them were innocents, though—of that I was sure.
Taylor removed Larkin’s handcuffs and sat across from him, stun gun at the ready. I checked for word on Holly, and finding none, I slipped my cuffs from Smith and clipped them back on my duty belt. Then Al and I escorted him to Asa’s office.
I set up and clicked on the Tascam voice recorder, then stated my name and r
ank, along with his name and today’s date. “Out of curiosity, why didn’t you hightail it out of here when you saw our police vehicles parked down the road?
“Well, ma’am, y’all have been out here to visit with Mr. Larkin several times, so I didn’t really think much about it.” Smith spoke with a true Southern accent, not the countrified affect spoken by a lot of eastern Oregonians. “Besides, I wouldn’t just drive off and leave my things in the double-wide.”
“Like your gun and this?” I pointed to his file box now sitting atop a bookshelf.
“Asa bought the Beretta, so I wouldn’t call it mine. There’s nothing but personal papers in the file box. I can show you, if it’s okay to get the key out of my pocket.”
I nodded, then rose, retrieved the file box, and placed it on the desk. In the meantime, Detective Bach stepped out to search the storage room upstairs.
Smith handed me the small key, and I inserted it into the lock. Inside I found more photos of the two young women in the picture he kept on his refrigerator. Along with some old letters, bills, his birth certificate and passport, and several personal documents having nothing remotely to do with our murder cases.
“About Mr. Larkin. How is it he hired you?”
“I met him at our church in Lake Oswego, right before I got excommunicated.”
“For?”
“They accused me of stealing from the children’s charity. I tried to tell them it wasn’t me, but they threatened to call the police if I didn’t leave the church premises immediately.” In the stuffy, overheated room, Smith had begun to sweat profusely. “But I suspicioned who the thief really was. Turned out I was right.”
“The thief was your current employer, correct?”
“Soon to be my former employer.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, ma’am, he spent last night in jail, and you’re back out here today. Seems like something serious is going on. Serious enough to put him at odds with John and Ruben this past week.”
“Over what?”
“I couldn’t figure that out.”
Smith’s alert that his boss was a thief wasn’t exactly news, but I was curious about Larkin’s row with the Vickers men. Just this morning, Brady had also mentioned some friction between them.
I moved on. “What do you know about Dan and Joseph Nodine?”
“They were supposed to steal market-ready steers and hand them off to John and Ruben. The Nodines said they could do it on a regular basis, but then they didn’t come through even once. That pissed them off.”
“Pissed off the Vickers men, is that what you mean?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How do you know all of this? Were you part of this arrangement with the Nodines?”
“Only after I overheard John and Ruben talking about it. We were supposed to split the money three ways. After paying off the twins.”
“Why didn’t the Nodines come through?”
“Don’t know. I was plenty relieved, though. I dreaded getting messed up in cattle theft.”
“Why did you, then?”
“You gotta believe me. The Vickers brothers are dangerous men, or were, in John’s case. When I told them I knew what they were up to, they threatened me.”
“So you’re telling me you were coerced into joining the Vickers’ gang?”
“Well, yeah.”
This idiot could justify anything, and he was starting to irritate me. “Why on earth should I believe a single word you say?”
“John and Ruben were as angry as I’d ever seen them, John especially. They were going after the Nodines, planned to mess them up pretty good.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
He shrugged. “Afraid I’d get fingered along with the Vickers boys, I guess. But at least I let Dan and Joe know.”
“Go on.”
“I’d figured out where they parked their camper. So, the morning of the day they were killed, I drove to the campground to warn them. Met up with them just as they were about to leave in their jeep, told ’em John and Ruben were mad as hell and out for blood.”
In the phone call that sent me out to the wigwam burner, Joseph had said they’d been warned.
“Out for blood and armed. How’s that not a recipe for murder? Or at least worth a call to the authorities?”
“I thought if the Nodines got word ahead of time, they’d hightail it, and everything would blow over.”
“And no one would learn you were in on their cattle-rustling scheme, right?”
“Yeah. That too.”
“Did you know where they stowed your boss’s Ram 3500?”
The man was momentarily speechless. “Is that what happened to that hog? I thought Asa took it back to the dealership or something.”
“So you had no idea the Nodines were in possession of it?”
“No, ma’am. But I guess that’s how they were going to steal cattle, right? So they must’ve stole Asa’s livestock trailer, too.”
“Mr. Smith, did the Vickers brothers kill the Nodines?”
“I sure think so, but in all honesty, I don’t know. But I do know for a fact they killed that Mr. Trudeau.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I was there. I saw it happen. That’s how I knew they might kill me too.”
“Start from the beginning.”
“John and Ruben figured out that Asa had somehow got ahold of a painting by some famous artist, one of those old-fashioned Western painters. Anyway, they thought the painting was worth a lot of money and knew it was stored upstairs.” He pointed awkwardly toward the ceiling.
He continued. “When Asa didn’t go through with buying Mr. Trudeau’s steers, they come up with the bright idea of trading the painting for the beef cattle. They called the old guy and set up a meeting somewhere south of Seneca, gave him the painting, and he told them where they could find his steers.”
Driving out here last Saturday, I’d passed Guy Trudeau whipsawing his Gran Torino all over the highway heading north toward the turnoff to Big T. That was the day before Holly and I found his body.
“How were they going to haul all those animals?” I asked.
He shrugged and smiled. “Don’t know, but before they had a chance to work all of that out, John figured out the painting could be worth millions. So then he was itching to get it back.”
“Again, how did you know all of this?”
“I didn’t know anything about trading the painting for cattle until I drove them to Mr. Trudeau’s house last Sunday. That’s when they told me.”
No doubt Smith was expecting a cut of the proceeds, but that was a road I could travel down later.
“Tell me about Mr. Trudeau’s murder.”
“We took my Pathfinder into John Day for groceries. They noticed Trudeau’s clunker at that hamburger joint by the high school. John had me park there and wait. Then we followed him out to his place.”
“And then what?”
Smith swallowed. “I sat in the car for a while. Finally I decided to take a walk. But I heard the old coot screaming, went to the kitchen window, and saw they had him strung up.”
He breathed deeply. “Honestly, I don’t think they went out there to kill him. But they did and without coming away with any painting.”
I stood and moved to the other side of the desk. “Wayne Smith. You’re under arrest for withholding evidence in three homicide cases. Accessory to murder, with possible murder and theft charges pending. Stand up.”
“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” he said as I pulled his arms behind him and handcuffed his wrists.
I reached across and turned off the recorder. “You’ve got that right. You’re about as sorry an individual as I ever met.”
Al was waiting for me in Larkin’s living room.
I checked the time. “Five thirty. Still no word on Hollis.”
“Waiting’s always the hardest part. For now, though, I think you’ll want to see what I found upstairs.
”
I followed him to the storage room. Against one wall stood a row of tall file cabinets. Bach opened one of the drawers and drew out a thick legal file. “Mostly old documents from Larkin’s law practice in Lake Oswego. But open the bottom drawer of that far cabinet.”
I crouched down, pulled the drawer open, and lifted out a heavy cardboard box. A mailing label affixed to the box read “Mr. Frank Sylvester, Little Juniper Road, Wagontire, OR 97758.”
“What’s inside?”
“A Frederic Remington sculpture. I googled it on my laptop, and it’s worth about five grand.”
“Have you got an extra pair of gloves?”
He reached in a pocket of his outer carrier and pulled out two latex gloves. I put them on, opened the box, and brought out the sculpture affixed in bubble wrap. I spotted Remington’s signature and the notation indicating it was number two of one hundred bronze castings.
“If you lift up the bubble wrap gently, it comes right off,” Al said.
I removed the wrap and placed the sculpture on top of the file cabinet: a cowpoke on the ground wrestling for control of a bucking horse. It was nearly two feet tall, and as I turned it slowly around, each new angle presented a new way to see the piece.
“Do you know the title of the sculpture, Al?”
“The Wicked Pony.”
“It’s time for a conversation with Larkin. Are you sure you don’t want to sit in?”
He shook his head.
“Would you like to know what I learned from Wayne Smith?”
He said nothing, so I spelled it out.
“His story’s especially compelling because Trudeau’s cause of death hasn’t been announced to the public. Smith knew he’d been strangled.” I carefully wrapped the sculpture back in its bubble cocoon and placed it in its box.
Al couldn’t hold in a question any longer. “Any thoughts about whether or not Smith participated in the killing?”
“He comes off as devious, scheming. But prone to murder? I’m not sure.”
Bach nodded. “I’ll collect Asa Larkin for you.”
“That’s another thing, Larkin was pretty nervous when I returned Smith to the dining room already in handcuffs.”
Dead Point (Maggie Blackthorne Book 1) Page 30