by Kris Lackey
Also in his box was a post from the regional Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Ada, copied to all enforcement offices connected to the Tate case. According to BIA property records, the house Majesty Tate rented, though it sat in the center of forty acres of old tribal allotment land, was not, in fact, on tribal land. When it was built, the lending bank would not issue a mortgage if it remained on tribal land, out of the bank’s reach. Maytubby stared at the blue screen.
Chapter 17
Jill Milton strained some tortellini from her soup and held the spoon out to Maytubby. “Yes?”
He bit them off the spoon. “Yes.”
She was wearing a periwinkle cotton camp shirt very well. Mozart’s second horn concerto was playing softly in Gjorgjo’s on Ada’s Main Street. A votive flickered through their glasses of old-vine red. Maytubby wore a khaki twill oxford shirt—a little faded but pressed to an edge. He raised his glass. “To square one,” he said. They clinked glasses. “These mussels really are good.”
“Yessir.”
“And your grantspersonship?”
“Matched only by my keen evasion skills. The capitol facade was shedding chunks of masonry like that.” She pointed to the half loaf of bread on the table. “I put my laptop on my head.”
“Harrowing.”
“Oh, it got much worse at the summit. The forces of green split peas clashed with the forces of yellow split peas. The pinto contingent struck them both. No party wanted to settle for a round third of the half ton budgeted in that line.”
“I didn’t know that bean varieties awakened such passions.”
“That’s because you live in an ivory tower. You’re out of touch with the real world.”
She bumped his knee under the table and gave him a fine smile. He wanted to be with her forever.
“So that little reservation you had about Love being a major thug—it was justified,” she said, starting on her soup.
He stared at her until she tapped on the table. “Earth to Bill.”
“What?” He cradled her elbow with his sunburnt hand.
“You weren’t sure Love killed Majesty Tate.”
He cleared his throat. “I was hoping I was wrong. Now that an Indian is no longer a suspect, the case would go to the feds. I learned from the BIA today that Tate’s house is not on allotment land, even though the forty acres around it are tribal. So the case goes to local and state. OSBI will be the main player.
“But you’ll still be involved.”
“As much as the state wants me to be. Hannah and I know the most about it.” Mozart’s bouncy third movement ended. Pans clanked back in the kitchen.
“Have you been reimagining the murder while you were chasing Love?”
“I’ve wondered how all these shadowy players fit into the guy’s life. Now would be a good time to find out.”
“So you think one of them is the culprit.”
“Well, yeah.” He wagged his head. “I’ve done all this work.”
“You’re counting out a rogue?”
“The chances of a rogue killing Majesty Tate with a knife exactly like Austin Love’s are slim, I would say.”
“Unless that person is not a rogue but you’re discounting him because you haven’t run into him yet.”
“True.”
“But that’s too discouraging to think about.”
“Way.”
“You think when Love learns he’s no longer a suspect, he’ll help you?”
“Not by telling me anything. If he hadn’t resisted, he’d be blasting around those county roads, trying to find the guy who tried to frame him. Doing my work for me.”
“Wouldn’t you run the risk of losing him?”
“I have a vast network of informants.”
“Yeah? Name one.”
“You see that guy over my left shoulder, sitting at the bar?”
“The blond one with the mullet and the Hawaiian shirt?”
Maytubby raised one brow and nodded gravely.
“So who does he snitch on: hair stylists and Parrotheads?”
“Nutritionists. You see how he sticks to you, and you don’t notice him?”
“Yeah, I see.” She drank a little wine and set her glass down. “Who will the state send down?”
“My guess is, Dan Scrooby.” Maytubby twirled a tortellini in his red sauce and ate it.
“Where have I heard that name?”
A middle-aged couple entered the restaurant, a gust of hot wind in their wake. The votives flickered.
“It’s the English village the Pilgrims left. The Scrooby separatists.”
“Oh, yeah. I think I forget it because I want it to be someplace with a fancier name.”
“Like Barking.”
“Like Shitterton. What’s he like?”
“Sighs a lot. Puckers up before he exhales. You know, exasperated. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly.”
“Sounds like he found the perfect job.”
“Actually, he did. He would be depressed if he couldn’t feel aggrieved.”
“Would you like another detective better?”
“He’s okay.”
“That’s what you said about Katz.”
“I have to guard against becoming terminally aggrieved.”
“Mm-hm.”
He drained the carafe into her glass. She swirled the wine around and watched it slowly rappel down the sides.
“Has Sol Stoddard returned to frighten the children with his family values?”
“No. I read in the Tulsa World he’s going to formally announce his candidacy for governor of Oklahoma next week.”
“Still curious if it was his Lexus Hannah saw parked at Boggy Depot beside the notorious Cobalt. She thought the two guys were hooking up.”
“That would make for a lively campaign revelation.” “Yes, it would. I need a pretext to search it.”
The temperature was still over a hundred as they walked the few blocks to the McSwain Theater, newly restored by the Chickasaw Nation, to watch Pearl, a nation-funded film about Pearl Carter, a very young Chickasaw pilot in the 1920s.
“We’ll see what they did without us,” Maytubby said as they entered the cold lobby.
They both had been asked to audition as extras, and both were told the same thing when they were not cast: “Your face is too striking. You’ll distract the audience.” They believed it and didn’t believe it, each for different reasons.
The film had been out a while, but they hadn’t seen it. As they left the theater, Maytubby said, “Films about child prodigies always make me feel not quite up to snuff.”
“You’re a pilot.”
“I wasn’t a twelve-year-old pilot—or a teenage barnstormer.”
“You should be worrying about the famous aviator Wiley Post. His eye patch was hot.”
“Hotter than my barbed-wire fence scar?”
“A thousand times.”
“You think there are any after-hours eye patch stores in Ada?”
Chapter 18
Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation Agent Dan Scrooby sat in one of the plastic booths at the Ada Travel Center. He was wearing khaki pants, a navy polo shirt with the OSBI star embroidered on the chest, and a Heckler & Koch P30 in a Texas cross-draw belt holster. He stared at a laptop screen as he ate a sausage biscuit from the buffet. Behind him, a skinny young man in a Chickasaw Nation security guard uniform stood at the door between the travel shop and its casino. When a casino patron entered or left, the trills and bings promising good fortune, along with a cloud of tobacco smoke, wafted into the shop.
Maytubby slid into the booth and faced Scrooby, who did not look up from the screen when he said “Bill.” He exhaled loudly and shook his head. “Where do they get these people?”
“Dan. Where do who get what peop
le?”
Scrooby scowled at the screen and jabbed a finger at it. “These people.”
“Oh, yeah. You’re right. They are an epic pain in the ass.”
“You got that right.” Scrooby slapped down the screen of his laptop and pushed it aside. His face shone with sweat. “So, looks like your ex-con meth cooker was set up. I tried to talk to him this morning. You know where that got me. Perp’s likely Anglo, wouldn’t you say?”
“Chances are. That’s why you’re here.”
Scrooby lifted a clipboard from the booth seat—police media were still migrating from the old ways—laid it on the table, and started flipping through completed forms and printed e-mail exchanges. He stopped near the bottom. “This car burning—it speak to you?”
“Yeah. It says if the arsonist was stupid, he didn’t bring enough accelerant, and if the arsonist was cunning, he brought just enough.”
“To preserve evidence incriminating …?”
“The owner, maybe.”
Scrooby flipped a couple of pages on the clipboard. “The nonpreacher preacher Woodley, who is a nonresident in the residence listed on his registration.”
“And he could have done it himself.”
At this, the agent finally looked up. “To incriminate himself?”
“I’m not sure he is himself.”
Scrooby nodded as he took a shark bite out of his sausage biscuit. “If this guy is not a preacher, doesn’t live where he says he does, and owns the car Love used to elude pursuit for a crime he didn’t commit, what’s he doing around here?”
“He might have known Love was seeing Tate. He might have bought the lookalike knife. He might have killed Tate. No prints, but you’ve got the DNA from her nails. Might match some hair or something left in the Cobalt. Red hair isn’t hard to spot. That Cobalt has a Louisiana dealer sticker on it. The CODIS DNA match was an Arkansas murder. Arkansas is between here and there. The Arkansas murder weapon was a Winchester thirty-thirty rifle. Common deer gun. Killer at least fifty yards away—basically a sniper. Victim was in a property dispute with a powerful real estate broker.”
“We can do the hair. You’re saying maybe hired gun? But why would this guy go to all this trouble when he could kill Tate the same way and disappear?”
“Maybe he didn’t want to establish a pattern. Maybe he was making things interesting. Maybe the other case also had a fall guy but with different habits.”
“Who hired him to kill Tate?”
“I don’t know. The only thing I have now is that Deputy Hannah Bond, in Johnston, saw Woodley park next to a white Lexus, no tag ID, in a dark corner of Boggy Depot. Woodley got in the Lexus. Hannah left because she thought they were just hooking up. My girlfriend knows that Solomon Stoddard drives a new white Lexus ES.”
Scrooby exhaled in almost a whistle. “I think I saw the presidential limousine parked in the Wayne cemetery yesterday.” He looked at the ceiling. “Besides …” He scooted his laptop toward himself, pushing the clipboard aside. He typed a few dozen characters and swiveled the computer around so Maytubby could view Stoddard’s record in every crime database up to the National Crime Information Center. Maytubby toured the sites. At one, he memorized Stoddard’s plate: 43X-3827. He turned the computer around.
“Not even a parking ticket. Wife’s a stone fox, too.” Scrooby snapped the laptop shut for emphasis. “Sol gets in, he’s promised law enforcement more officers and big raises.”
“You have most of the facts,” Maytubby said. “How can I help you?”
“I’m closer to the city. Let me see if I can find out what Tate was doing up there.”
“I’ll look into that Arkansas case and try to find Woodley.”
Scrooby had already opened his laptop. He nodded but didn’t look up. Before Maytubby had reached the exit, he heard Scrooby sigh.
Chapter 19
By concealing her patrol car more cunningly and lowering her tolerance slightly, Hannah Bond managed a good morning’s take in only two hours. As her last citation drove slowly away, she followed the car on State 7 and then turned north into Bromide. She followed Main Street out of town (and out of Johnston County), watching for a jeep track that the Web map said should be splitting off to her left. It soon appeared, and she took it.
Her book of moving violations wouldn’t be worth the pain and suffering if she whacked a muffler, so she drove gingerly up into the scrubby woods spreading several miles behind the house where Majesty Tate was murdered. Veils of white dust rose on thermals above the quarries to the west. Because evidence was plentiful on the south side of the hill, she and Maytubby had ignored the woods behind the house, on the north side.
Though the blue grama grass between the ruts had gone dormant in the drought, it was almost as tall as the roadside grass and didn’t appear to be broken. Bond kept moving so her exhaust pipes wouldn’t sit long enough to kindle a prairie fire. When the track crossed a barren dry wash, she turned off the cruiser and walked it. She found only a couple of truck treads where the track crossed the wash—so old they were set in mud. To the east, nothing in the sand but coon and deer prints, snake waves. A buzzard’s shadow flicked across the rocks.
About a hundred yards west of the road, she found herself looking down at two sets of dirt bike tracks, a little smudged by wind. Near the grass line, the tracks were a little sharper. She took a calendar card from her pocket and laid the ruler side across the tread print, photographed them with her phone. Both front and back tires were four inches wide. Bond knew they were from one bike—the front with spiked tread blocks and the rear with widely spaced paddle-shaped tread blocks. And she knew that these treads were for riding in sand.
On the margins of the wash, where the tracks came and went, she could find grass stems broken by the bike, but she couldn’t follow the trail more than a few feet. Back in the cruiser, she crept back into the thatch of dusty oak and red cedar as she climbed toward the crest. On her laptop, she watched her progress, satellites in black space guiding her toward the crooked hall-and-parlor house.
The track ended shy of the hilltop, not far from a small clearing where there was a spring. The spring did not have a name on the map. Bond could see a camouflaged deer stand twenty yards off the road. That explained the track, which followed no fences and led to no house or petroleum well. The last of the manifold deer seasons, from black powder to crossbow, had ended six months ago. It was unlikely that out-of-season hunters would use an established camp so near a town. Besides, those hunters would be in pickups or on four-wheelers.
Bond walked shrinking circles around the camp and into the clearing but saw no more bike tracks. She climbed the ladder into the stand, found nothing there but a few empty Evan Williams pints and two 30.06 shell casings. The hall-and-parlor house was no more than a half mile downhill from the camp. Though the grade was gentle, Bond switchbacked, checking cattle trails for prints, looking for places a slipping bike tire might have scuffed. She flushed a roadrunner, and the rustle sent her hand to her pistol grip. The bird sped off in its ducking-chicken-pedaling-a-bicycle way.
By the time the crooked roof appeared through a crosshatch of oak limbs, Bond had spent the margin the speed trap had bought her. And she was more than a half mile from her cruiser. She wrung the sweat from her baseball cap and drank from her canteen. Then she walked fast around the yard and behind the house, searching for bike tracks. The only prints anywhere near the house, except for hers and Tate’s and Maytubby’s, had been the Survivor boots that Love wore. Three minutes and nothing. She gauged the area where someone could stand and see everything going on in the house through the double rear windows, and then she walked it, back and forth, turning over leaves and twigs and downed branches. She felt a little surge of anger at Love’s exoneration—at the real killer’s invisibility. It was hard for her to retrain her imagination.
The sunlight caught a little flash. She saw
a small disk of creased foil that trailed a paper scrap marked with a pastel green T. She photographed it. From her utility belt, she took a latex glove and a baggie, then picked up the swatch of Tums wrapper and sealed it away. The wrapper hadn’t seen the weather of six months, but then again, this was Oklahoma—it might have blown here from Saskatchewan. Not ten feet up the hill, she found a Survivor boot print pointing toward the house. A little depression next to it looked like a knee print. She laid the ruler across both and photographed them.
Then she covered ground swiftly with her Paul Bunyan stride. Inside fifteen minutes, she was passing an Amish buggy on Bromide Road. The dispatcher in Tish was mercifully silent. Parking where Maytubby had found the knife, she walked up the road toward the front side of the house. Even through the polarized aviator sunglasses, the dust was dazzling.
Before she was halfway to the crooked house, she saw, between many other tire prints, the narrow checkered prints of dirt bike tires. She laid her ruler across one and photographed it. She had no time to go further, and she was low on water.
Rounding the last bend, she saw the sheriff’s cruiser parked in front of hers. Sheriff Benny Magaw was leaning into the rearview mirror, combing his few wisps of dyed hair. He rolled the window down and smiled at her.
“Deputy.”
“Sheriff.”
“Catch a lot of speeders on this stretch, do you?”
She waited.
“Love is in jail, Hannah. OSBI’ll do a good job. I need you doing the county’s work.”
Bond nodded and touched her hat brim with two fingers, turned toward her cruiser.
“Taxpayers don’t want to pay twice for the same service,” Magaw said to her back.
She frowned as she pulled around the sheriff’s cruiser. Then, instead of making a bootleg turn to head back toward Bromide, she drove around the bend, toward the crooked house. Magaw would not know whether to follow her or wait for her. She smiled. Just beyond the bend, she slewed into the bar ditch, made a tight U-turn, and kicked back down the road. Magaw was just rounding the bend when she blew past him. His cruiser disappeared behind a veil of dust.