by Ann Yost
Not unlike Jake.
In any case, Cam Outlaw was not exactly the Deliverance type. If he had had a falling out with his partner, he’d have sought a legal remedy.
Could it have been an accident? Jake tried to create a plausible picture. Could somebody, desperate to put food on his family’s table, have been hunting small prey near the casino site? But what about the anonymous tip?
His years as an L.A. detective had taught him the danger of trying to bend the facts to fit a preferred interpretation. He’d learned the same lesson from his short marriage. At least in crime the motives were usually straightforward.
It almost always boiled down to greed.
Jake got to his feet and paced the length of the crime scene. The body formed the third point of an equilateral triangle along with Packer’s car, a smoke-gray Jag and the construction trailer. The symmetry caught his eye. It was almost as if the killer had staged a presentation. If so, why? He blinked. The body was on county land but the reservation border was only about twenty feet away. Had the killer wanted to keep the investigation out of tribal hands?
Jake considered the victim. He’d met Packer a few times. The guy had been short but powerfully built, ruddy-faced, with the cockiness of a born salesman. Tonight his expensive pinstriped suit was waterlogged and muddy, his body was crumpled like a downed helium balloon, and what Jake could see of his face looked waxy in the spill of light from the flashlight.
There was nothing lifelike about the man on the ground. Whatever had made Nate Packer human was long gone leaving behind only a rotting rind, like the white flesh of a watermelon.
Death was, after all, the great leveler.
Jake knelt next to the body and searched the dead man’s pockets and found a slim, calfskin wallet that included a dozen credit cards but no cash. He slid his fingers into a hidden pocket and found a foil-covered packet. A condom. That seemed odd. Jake knew Packer had recently married the delectable Paula, a trophy wife if ever there was one. Why the need for a wallet condom? Maybe he was a former boy scout and always liked to be prepared.
Or, maybe, he’d been caught messing around with someone else’s woman.
Perhaps the arrow had come from Cupid’s quiver, after all.
The rain started up again. Jake turned up the collar of his lightweight jacket but not before the cold drops slid down the inside of his shirt. Homer had taken photos of the footprints in the mud but they had to wait for the medical examiner and the forensic team from State headquarters in Augusta before they could get out of the weather.
Homer Winslow, short, skinny and twenty years Jake’s senior, crossed the open field, the site of the proposed casino.
“Jag’s clean as a whistle.”
Jake nodded. Tomorrow would be soon enough to go through the construction trailer. As soon as the boys from Augusta arrived, they’d rope off the area, examine the body and remove it. Then Jake would have the unenviable task of driving to Bangor to alert the next of kin. And to collect alibis.
He nodded at the arrow stuck in the damp bark of one of the few trees left on the casino site.
“Got an evidence bag?”
The answer was, of course, “yes”. The deputy had never sought the county’s top law enforcement job. He’d refused even the temporary post after Sheriff Poxey’s death last year, luckily for Jake, who’d answered the “help wanted” ad in Law Officer’s Magazine. Nevertheless, Homer took his job seriously. He was diligent and always prepared. It was unlikely any fingerprints would have survived the rain but Homer wore plastic gloves to extract the arrow from the tree trunk.
Jake shone his light on the weapon. He didn’t know a helluva lot about arrows but he realized the arrowhead on this specimen was abnormally long and narrow, like the head of a cobra. The fletchings at the base were red, yellow, and orange. Was that significant? Probably, to its owner. Arrows were as individual as golf clubs, which made this an important clue.
Jake stood with his back to the battering rain and hunched his shoulders. After a few moments, Homer spoke.
“Got to be one of them Indians.”
“It’s possible.”
“The perp used a bow and arrow.” Homer had a tendency to state the obvious.
“There are lots of crack archers in the world.”
“This ain’t the world. It’s Eden County.”
The man had a point. Eden, with its population of 2,800 was the county seat. If there were any world-class archers in their jurisdiction someone would know. Uncannily, Homer answered the unspoken question.
“Outside of the Indians there’s only one guy around here who could shoot a bull’s eye into a man’s heart,” he said, slowly. Homer might be a rural sheriff’s deputy but he knew the power of a dramatic pause. “He was on the national team when he was a kid. Don’t know if he’s kept up with it.”
Jake told himself to be patient. After all, he owed the man for accepting a younger boss, a city cop from L.A. And everybody deserved the occasional moment of drama. He waited.
“I think it was the Junior National team.”
Who was it?
“Uh-huh.”
“He usta hang around the rez, too. Cause of that girl.”
Jake was getting a bad feeling about this. He ground his back teeth and kept his mouth shut.
“His daddy didn’t like it none, either. Mavis, that’s the wife, Mavis always thought Dr. Outlaw busted them up when Cam was away at college. Still, he’s a good boy. I can’t believe he’d shoot down a man in cold blood.”
A cold finger of dread worked its way down Jake’s spine and his stomach roiled.
“Cameron Outlaw?”
“He was a natural. Coulda made it to the Olympics, some folks said.”
Cameron Outlaw, who was Packer’s partner in the casino venture. Cameron Outlaw, Eden’s golden boy, a widower and single dad, like himself.
Cameron Outlaw, Lucy’s brother.
Well, hell.
Blackbird’s tribal cop appeared at the eleventh hour, some thirty minutes behind the boys from Augusta. Davey Tall Tree, big, moon-faced and slow as molasses in January wore his usual pleasant but vague expression. He reminded Jake of a recently awakened Pillsbury Doughboy, rumpled and sleepy-eyed.
“Sheriff,” he said. “What’s happened here?”
Jake shook the officer’s extended hand and explained what he knew so far.
“Man was shot with a bow and arrow you say?”
Jake showed him the bagged arrow. “Do you recognize this?”
Davey’s dark eyes widened in his pudgy face. “Yeah. It’s from the museum.”
Jake knew the museum of Penobscot memorabilia was located in an annex tacked onto the back of Cully’s Trading Post, a general store-slash-souvenir shop that was, in turn, connected to the tribe’s community center which included Davey’s office. Did that mean the perp was a reservation resident? Jake knew better than to jump to that conclusion.
“Who had access to it?”
The heavy shoulders lifted and fell. “Everybody. Museum’s not locked when the Trading Post is open.”
“If the arrow was on display it must be unusual.”
Davey bobbed his head. “We say it’s a war arrow from the last of the battles with white settlers.”
“You say it’s a war arrow?”
Davey’s smile was self-deprecating. “Most of the 1800s were peaceful for us. It’s unlikely this arrow’s over two hundred years old. Most probably it was used for hunting fifty years ago but ‘war arrow’ sounds, you know, cooler.”
Jake contemplated Davey’s words. Had the killer chosen the fake war arrow because of its designation? Or was this an effort to cast suspicion on the tribe?
The tribal chief, Jake knew, spent most of his time jawing with a group of old men at the community center.
“Seen anyone unusual around the trading post lately?”
Davey closed his eyes and cocked his head. “Mr. Packer and Mr. Outlaw and some men from the county w
ere out the other day.”
Mr. Outlaw. Jake ignored the ripple of unease. “You have any idea when this arrow went missing?”
Davey shrugged. “I’ll check with Cully. You know how it is. When you’re around stuff all the time you don’t really notice it.”
Jake would ask Cully, too. And he’d ask everybody else who’d been to the Trading Post in the past week.
“Did you see Packer on the rez earlier tonight?”
Davey’s response was slow but Jake didn’t read anything into that. He’d observed the tendency to hesitate in many of the Penobscots. He figured it was cultural, a sign of respect, the same as the habit of pausing outside a dwelling to give the inhabitant time to adjust to the prospect of a visit.
“Mr. Packer was at the Tribal council meeting with his lawyer and Mr. Outlaw. It got out around nine.”
Jake’s lips tightened into a straight line. He’d talk with Packer’s family first but he couldn’t eliminate Cam’s name from the “A” list.
The coroner’s brief examination of the body in situ elicited the information that he’d been dead a couple of hours. It was now nearly midnight. Packer must have stepped out of the Tribal Council meeting and met his death within thirty to sixty minutes. The odds were his killer had attended the meeting, too.
“What happened at the meeting?”
Davey hesitated and, again, Jake held onto his patience.
“It went pretty smooth, but afterwards there was an argument.”
“Between Tribal elders and Packer?”
“No. Between Packer and Outlaw.”
A pit formed in Jake’s stomach. He frowned. “They argued in front of you?”
“No. Outside. Afterwards. We, that is the tribal elders, asked Mr. Packer for a list of his subcontractors. There’d been rumors the Jersey mob was involved and we wanted to make sure we weren’t getting gangsters up here. The names sounded all right to me but Mr. Outlaw looked kinda surprised and I heard them talking about it outside by the cars. Mr. Packer didn’t take him serious. He laughed and said they had to get the stuff from somewhere. Then Mr. Outlaw kinda lost his temper. He told Mr. Packer he wasn’t gonna do business with a crook. It got pretty loud.”
Jake ignored the ice forming in his gut. “Did you see either of them leave?”
“Yep. Packer spun out of here in his Jag and Outlaw left awhile later in his Mercedes.”
“Awhile? Ten minutes? Fifteen minutes?”
“’Bout that. Somewhere’s around nine fifteen, I’d guess.”
So Cameron Outlaw needed a rock-solid alibi for the hour after the Tribal Council meeting. Jake hoped he had it. He wondered if he should roust him now and decided not. The guy had a kid. He wasn’t going anywhere. Morning would be soon enough.
Morning, when Lucy Outlaw would be out of his house and out of his life, for good.
The prospect should have made him happier.
****
By nine a.m. Lucy was climbing into her ten-year-old navy blue Jeep Explorer. Jake had returned to the house around three a.m. but he had not poked his head out of his room this morning, not even to see the kids off to school. He was probably trying to avoid her, Lucy thought, sourly.
It helped to be offended. It was better than dealing with the cavern of emptiness under her heart.
The gearshift tended to stick in moist weather and she had to shove it hard. So that was that. Not that it was a surprise. Except for those few surreal moments last night, Jake had never pretended to have an interest in her. Everyone in town knew he was hunting for a stepmom for his kids. Everyone in town knew that Lucy was too young and flaky to be a parent. Besides, she had definite career ambitions. A future with Jake, well, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway.
She blinked hard as her tires kicked up rivulets of water on either side of the street. The sky had cleared and the temperature dropped. Spring weather in western Maine was so wacky that while April showers could turn into May flowers, they, just as easily, could turn into a raging nor’easter.
Lucy swallowed around the lump in her throat. This morning, she was supremely uninterested in the weather.
She parked next to the carriage house behind the big, fieldstone Outlaw family home on Walnut Street. Lucy had recently moved out of her pink-and-white bedroom in the main house and into the loft apartment in the outbuilding above the veterinary clinic owned and run by Lucy’s brother, Baz, and his new wife, Hallie. Regret tugged at Lucy’s heart. Hallie Scott Outlaw was everything Lucy was not: mature, maternal, organized, and the kindest person Lucy had ever met. Jake had wanted to marry her before Baz swept into town and staked a prior claim.
As much as Lucy had loved getting to know Baz, and as perfect as he and his wife were together, sometimes Lucy wished he hadn’t come back. Hallie would be married to Jake now and she, Lucy, would never have had the addicting experience of living in the Langley household.
She dragged herself up the outside staircase to her apartment, dropped her suitcase, and dialed Ed Stiles over at the Eden Excelsior.
It was time to get a real job.
“Talk about timing.” Ed Stiles, red-headed, portly and very fond of putting his feet up on the desk, had been a friend of her father’s. “As it happens I’ve just gotten an opening. Tammy Winslow quit last week after she made the junior varsity soccer team.”
Lucy had no intention of becoming Ed’s girl Friday but she figured she’d tell him that after he hired her.
“Great. When can I start?”
“How ’bout last week?”
“How about today?”
“Come on over.”
Forty minutes later Lucy entered the square, stand-alone building on Third Street, a block from Main, and across from the Pink Poodle hair salon that housed the Excelsior’s offices.
Ed swung his feet down from his desk and pushed his bulk to his feet.
“Welcome aboard,” he said, around the stogie in his mouth. “Let me show you around. This is the newsroom.” He swept out an arm intended to include a pair of battered desks topped with computers that looked to be nearly as old as Lucy, a hotplate and coffee pot, stacks of bundled newspapers, some reporters’ notebooks and pencils. “And that’s the head.”
Lucy peered into a tiny dark cubicle.
“Your tasks include cleaning the toilet and coffeepot, compiling high school sports scores, checking the three funeral homes in the county, typing up the copy sent in by Esther Wheelhouse over at St. Barnabas, PTA notes from Fran Sietsma and notices from Gladys Semple at the Volunteer Fire Department Auxiliary.”
“That’s it?”
He grinned at her. “Not hardly. You’ll be writing all the headlines and laying out pages, too. Oh, and you’ll be covering the county board meetings at the Town Hall on alternate Mondays, the school board every fourth Tuesday and the Planning Commission every third Thursday.”
“Fine,” she said. “What about breaking news? You know, like the body out at the casino site?”
“You already know about that? J.C., girl,” he said, using his own shorthand for cursing, “you are well connected.” He squinted at her. “That why you wanted this job?”
“How often does a fledgling reporter get to cover a corpse?”
The truth was, she hadn’t thought about covering the sheriff’s department until that minute.
“I need the experience, though, since my long-term plan is to become a war correspondent.”
“You study journalism at the university?”
“Some.” She’d also studied Russian literature, opera appreciation, classical Latin and the Indian subcontinent among other interesting and varied subjects that had, unfortunately, not prepared her for employment.
“You think you can handle a murder investigation?”
She sucked in a breath. So it was murder.
“Absolutely,” she told him.
He gave her a sideways look. His eyes were small, round, and dark brown. Like chocolate M&Ms. “Langley won’t like it.”
Lucy swallowed a groan. That was the trouble with small towns. Everyone knew Jake’s opinion of her.
“I’ll do a good job. I promise.”
Ed nodded, slowly. “I believe you will. But, Lucy, I want you to stay out of trouble.”
She refused to be offended. This was too important. This was her chance. She had a sudden brainstorm.
“Do you mind if I try to peddle a feature on this to the Hartford Courier?
“Not so long’s I get my page one story first every week.”
“Thanks.”
When Ed cocked his head to one side he reminded Lucy of a plump, fluffy pigeon.
“A war correspondent, huh?”
While he poured them each a cup of coffee from the ancient, battered percolator, she told him about her plan to win a Pulitzer Prize covering war in the Middle East.
He leaned back in the cracked leather chair behind his big, wooden desk and parked his crossed ankles on top of it while she occupied the smaller metal desk that was so old it had a pull-out drawer for a typewriter.
“What’s more newsworthy than war? I mean, its got everything; life, death, heroism and sacrifice, danger and drama. Definitely worth writing about.”
The editor picked up a paperclip and unbent it. Lucy noticed a small pile of similarly tortured wire bits on a corner of his desk, sort of a paper-clip graveyard. She held back a smile while he considered his response.
“There’s plenty of drama in a small town, girl. The human condition is inherently dramatic. We have our share of love and hate, life and death. It’s just from a different perspective. An ant’s eye view, if you will. Big canvas versus small canvas. Each has its points.”
A small town wouldn’t work in the long run, Lucy thought. She had too much to prove.
“What made you decide to go with small canvas?”
He barked a laugh. “I was in a war, Luce. Vietnam. I’d never willingly go back to that kind of hell.”
“But you’ve got to admit it’s hard to win a Pulitzer covering the Library budget and the Homecoming Day parade.”
Ed had picked up another hapless paperclip. He paused before unbending it. “That what you’re after? Awards?”