by Lakota Grace
Cooper Davis’s murder investigation had blown wide open. I called his office and left a cryptic message for him to call me.
CHAPTER 21
THORN MALONE awoke on day two of her Vision Quest with body-jolting quavers. The stove fire had gone out sometime in the night and even the sheep’s fleece had not kept her warm. She’d awoken twice to stoke the fire, but then fell prey to exhaustion and let it go out.
She pushed the cover aside and lifted to a sitting position. Every muscle was sore. She grabbed her jacket and stuck her feet into her shoes.
A drip, drip, drip in one corner of the hogan nudged at her consciousness. It must be raining outside. She’d heard distant thunder the night before, muffled by the thick log walls. She reconsidered her intention to walk out at first light. Maybe she’d wait, just a little, to see if the storm let up.
The hogan was frigid, pushing Thorn to action. Opening the door of the stove, she built a nest of twigs and branches. Her fingers were shaking so much that she dropped the match, and it flamed out. Holding the next match with two hands she tossed it into the pile of torn paper and shreds of bark, blowing on it to catch. She added tiny morsels, feeding the embers. Then, she cautiously shoved in larger branches. When they burst into a strong flame, she added the last of her kindling, and then the logs from the pile Ben had left.
She closed the door of the stove and held her hands against the heating metal. As the hogan warmed, she thought bleakly about Jill Rustaine’s death and its aftermath. Ben meant well, but this crazy idea of a Vision Quest couldn’t extract her from the mess she was in.
This trip was a temporary solution to an awful problem, one that even her dad with his numerous connections couldn’t fix. What was wrong with her? Why had she fought with Jill Rustaine?
The door crashed open, and Thorn jumped. Hard-driven rain blew through the opening as she rushed to close and brace it. The sharp drops attacked her arms like needles of ice. Thorn pulled on her jacket, put up the hood and opened the door again. Squeezing her eyes shut against the rain, she lifted logs blindly and tossed them through the hogan door. Then she grabbed the ax and threw it in, too.
And she had to pee. Forget about the stupid latrine. She dashed around the hogan to the leeward side and squatted. The hard raindrops hit her naked skin, sending another jolt of ice through her body. Then she squished through the mud and running water and dived through the front door. She slammed it behind her and huddled in front of the stove, crying.
Through the small window next to the door, the sky turned white as rain shifted to sleet, hard and biting. The meadow disappeared in a swirling fog filled with ghostly, dark shapes. Thorn could no longer see the pinyon tree she sat under yesterday. Winter had arrived. Her thoughts of trekking out to the main road vanished. No way was she venturing out in this weather. Ben could just come get her.
She rubbed her numb fingers together trying to get feeling into them. Her shoes were drenched. The Adidas she wore were practical for hiking, but their material easily soaked up the wet, turning her toes into blocks of ice. She pulled the fleece tight around her shoulders and dug in her pack for her last pair of dry socks.
And she was starving. In stocking feet, she searched through the hogan, inch by inch. Surely there was something else here to eat. From the shelf, she retrieved the old box of oatmeal, one corner chewed by mice. Inside was a half-cup of moldy oats. Putting her finger over the damaged box corner so she wouldn’t lose them, Thorn walked across the room and dumped them into the pot she’d made the chocolate water in. She added water and put the pot on the single burner of the stove and chunked two more pieces of wood into the fire.
The flames darted up, and she adjusted the damper to allow the fire less air. Soon the water was boiling, and she stirred it with a long stick. The meager oat flakes didn’t turn the water thick. Maybe there were too few of them. Thorn was too hungry to wait. She took the pot off the stove, set it on the table and waited impatiently for it to cool enough to eat.
But she needed water to drink, too. She searched around the hogan for another container and found a dented bowl under a scrap of tarp. Squaring her shoulders, she put the tarp on her head and raced out of the hogan.
Water was pouring off the roof, and she collected it directly into the bowl before it hit the contaminated barrel. When it was two-thirds full, and she was totally soaked, she dashed for the hogan. She stripped out of her outer clothes and propped her jeans on the chair near the stove to dry. Then she redressed in her last pair of jeans and T-shirt.
By now the oatmeal was cool, and she swallowed the lumpy, watery mix. Yuck! No sugar, no maple syrup. But it was food. Her belly churned. No! She wouldn’t upchuck. She just couldn’t. But her stomach had other ideas, and she rushed into the sleet once more, retching uncontrollably.
Shaking, she ran back to the cabin and slammed the door. She attempted to soothe herself. The old oats had gone rancid, moldy, spoiled. Upchucking was the body’s way of protecting itself. She tried to ignore the tiny voice inside that complained, I’m hungry!
At least it was warm inside the hogan, and Thorn lay on the cot. The next minute, she arose, restless. She paced the cabin’s rough sixteen foot interior. Then she turned and walked the short length again. The close walls were a prison in the dim light and darkening storm clouds.
The sleet steadied into a drifting snow, sifting out of the heavens, damping the sounds outside. Gouts of wind rattled the front door, battling to get in. The drip in the corner sounded, a steady metronome beat.
Thorn thought back to the fight that had caused her withdrawal from school. She’d been so scared when that girl threatened with a knife. But the niggling thought behind the fear was how she had taunted the girl, provoking her to anger. Maybe she could have handled it differently. Her dad would have, she knew.
Thorn put another log in the stove. At least she had water, and she was warm. That was something. She tried to ignore the fear at the back of her heart. What if Ben didn’t return? Nobody else knew she was here. No one would search until summer, if then, when her dead body would be gone, only bones left. She touched her cheekbones, wondering how they would appear, fleshless.
High on a shelf was an old notebook and a stubby pencil. Thorn climbed onto a rickety chair and retrieved them. They’d been there a long time, the pages settled into a crinkled dusty brown. It was a sketchbook, and in it, Thorn discovered Ben’s world, done in hues of colored pencil, still vibrant after years of neglect.
Here were the far-ranging mesas and the sheep. She turned one page to discover a quick sketch of a mother with a newborn lamb. Even an exact drawing of the pinyon pine that she’d sat underneath, with a stylized rainbow arching overhead.
On the next page was a skilled rendition of an old woman, her face shaded a deep mahogany, a brilliant Navajo rug curved around her shoulders. Ben’s grandmother? He’d talked of her, how she had encouraged his artwork, his love of the natural world.
Turning to a blank page, Thorn hefted the pencil, wishing for profound words to celebrate her Vision Quest, but none came. Mainly she was hungry. Did that count? She scribbled of what Shepherd would make for Thanksgiving Dinner.
Her dad was a great cook and promised to teach her someday. He’d fix his special green applesauce. She wrote that on the page. Then the words spilled out. Turkey. Pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Homemade mashed potatoes with giblet gravy. Bread and butter pickles. Rolls warm from the oven. Candied yams with marshmallow topping. Her fingers stopped as a big tear stained the page. Who was she kidding? Thanksgiving might not come for her this year.
Thorn lay on the cot unable to sleep. The fire radiated from the stove and from the corner came the steady drip of the roof leak. The day turned into a dim twilight, and the small windows rattled against the wind. The storm was not yet finished with her.
She hadn’t prayed since she was a little girl, but the words came back to her, “Now I lay me down to sleep…”
Thorn sent a short though
t skyward: Take care of me. Take care of my dad.
She pulled the smelly sheepskin tight about her shoulders and settled uneasily into the camp bed, trying to ignore her hunger.
CHAPTER 22
The next morning, COOPER DAVIS poured an extra scoop of cat litter into the box to mask the smell and, at the wide-eyed stare from Sarge, ladled a helping of gourmet duck cat food onto the plate. He petted the cat’s head awkwardly and was rewarded with a nip as the cat ignored his offering and chose the dry chow it had scorned the day before.
Maybe he should try the venison cat food again? He’d do that tomorrow. He yanked opened the curtains so sunlight would form a warm puddle for the cat to nap in.
Cooper slipped into the office early, before the rest of the staff arrived, carrying a tall cup of coffee from Starbucks. He sorted through his messages. One from that family liaison officer, Peg Quincy. He set the message aside. He’d call her later.
The sheriff’s office was silent, the hubbub of telephone calls and inter-desk chitchat absent. Still, there was an ambient spirit in the room of unwashed bodies, people under stress, and black-humor jokes that covered the tenseness of murder investigations. Cooper savored these quiet moments before the day officially arrived. It would soon enough.
Cooper knew that this break-in period was a trial run. He had been hired, under a temporary edict to replace an aging detective who had retired unexpectedly at the end of summer. If he didn’t make the grade, he’d be dismissed as casually as he’d been taken on.
This Arizona assignment, so far from what he knew as home, had presented the ideal way to get away from personal problems that were tearing him apart. Even now, he had a letter tucked in his briefcase from Gen’s lawyer, demanding his tax records back ten years. How the hell did Cooper know where they were? In a box he hadn’t unpacked yet and wasn’t likely to, in the near future. Let her find her own damn returns.
His daydreaming cost him valuable minutes, and when he looked up, other people were entering the squad room. Grabbing his coffee in one hand and the Rustaine murder book in the other, he headed to the conference room where he could spread out before someone else snagged the space.
He hung an “occupied” sign on the the door and walked to the table where he dumped the book. He slung his long frame into a conference chair but was blinded by light coming in the window. Cursing under his breath, he rose to adjust the blinds. He sat once more, only to be interrupted by a knock.
“What!”
A junior clerk poked her head around the corner.
“They said you might be in here. This came in the mail for you this morning. I opened the envelope. I hope that was okay.” She offered him a stack of financial bank statements. “And I did the research you asked me to do, investigating Jil-Clair Industries. It’s there, too.”
He grabbed the papers out of her hand.
She jerked back.
“That all?” he barked.
She backed toward the door, a scared expression on her face.
Damn! Geneva had that same expression the last time he saw her.
“I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “Got a headache.”
“It might be the altitude,” she said, pushing a pair of black-rimmed glasses back on her nose. “My grandfather gets that when he comes to visit.”
Hey, he wasn’t that old. But she disappeared before he could respond.
Cooper took a gulp of the coffee that went down his throat the wrong way, and he coughed his way to sanity. He spread the financials out on the flat surface. There weren't many of them.
He looked at the return address. Malcolm Vander, CFO, Jil-Clair Industries. He’d expected Harriet Weaver would collect the information, but perhaps not. She might only handle personnel records. And those hadn’t arrived, either. He made a mental note to check with her. Details, the bane of any detective’s life, and yet, the way cases were solved.
He shuffled the documents Vander had sent into date order. More than a few were copied upside down; others were blurred as though the paper had been shifted as the scanner moved across it. He’d encountered this before. Sloppy copies signaled that the person doing the copying either didn’t care what they were doing, or did and wanted to deliberately obscure information. It was Cooper’s job to figure out which.
Five years of profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets spread before him. He picked the most recent set to review. Nothing jumped out. The balance sheet balanced. The profit-and-loss showed a modest profit and lots of expenses for leases, office furniture rental, and employees’ salaries.
When he flipped to the back of the report to review the detail sheets, there was nothing there. What Vander had sent was a composite top sheet for the statements. The minimum that was required for compliance, which eliminated the juicy detail schedules where the good information often resided.
Still, as Cooper compared this year’s documents with those from earlier years, they showed a nice steady progression from break-even income increasing gradually to small profits, leading to this year’s pending Initial Public Offering. Jill Rustaine had stood to become a very wealthy woman, according to the balance sheets, when the IPO went through.
On the other hand, his suspicious cop mind suggested there could be two sets of books: one for potential investors and another that showed the real state of the company. Cooper remembered the empty parking lot and rooms filled with unoccupied desks. Could go either way.
And other employees could be potential murderers if a real set of books evidenced secret off-the-record operations. Cooper sighed, not wanting to go there this morning. Tracking obscure leads down rabbit holes of offshore bank accounts and tax dodges was stuff for the experts.
He wondered who would manage the company, now that Jill was out of the picture. Rustaine’s attorney would know if she had a will in place. Time to call him. Cooper dug out the phone number that Malcolm had given him.
After talking to several gatekeepers, the estate attorney came on the phone.
“They told me you would be calling. Normally I’d discuss this in person, but I understand Phoenix is a long way from Flagstaff.”
“Right,” Cooper grunted.
“I’ve got the papers right here. Disposition of property: a small trust set up for one Ralph Marks, in care of his mother. A relative, she said. A ten-share distribution of company stock to one Harriet Weaver. I assume that’s an employee of the company? The remainder flows over into a charitable trust for the preservation of raptors and birds of prey. Interesting. I wonder what made her think of that? And that’s the balance of it, Detective. I hope that helps a little.”
“Thanks. Send me a copy,” Cooper said. He gave the attorney his address and hung up.
So, not much money changing hands, unless you counted the hawks and eagles. Cooper shoved the financials aside and picked up the other stack of papers the clerk had researched for him, a collection of newspaper articles concerning Jill Rustaine and her company.
Cooper thumbed through the clippings. One showed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the opening of Jil-Clair Industries facilities. He squinted at the picture: Jill Rustaine was the attractive woman with dark hair snipping the banner using an outsized pair of scissors. Next to her was the Mayor of Sedona, Cooper presumed. And on the other side, in a prominent place of importance, was Malcolm Vander with a fake camera-ready smile.
And where was Harriet Weaver? Cooper placed his fingernail on each person in the group, searching for her. He finally located her almost out of the frame, a worried expression on her face, her gaze fixed on Jill Rustaine, not the camera. No one in the picture that looked like the sister, either. A story in that, Cooper bet.
He shuffled through the rest of the clips. Jill at a symphony fundraiser, Jill giving a speech for the Chamber of Commerce mixer, Jill accepting an award from a women’s business owner’s organization. The clippings were standard PR media releases designed for a person establishing herself in a new community. But nothin
g of her past. Each article began, “Jill Rustaine, president of Jil-Clair Industries,” which told Cooper absolutely nothing.
He stacked the papers for further review and opened the murder book. Statements from the hikers in West Fork Canyon. No one had noticed unusual events. You’d think theywould have heard something, surely. But then he remembered the sound-muffling walls and the rush of water at the bottom of the canyon.
He saw his own handwritten notes about Thorn Malone. “Suspect was apprehended at the scene and questioned. In returning to the patrol car for transport, suspect escaped. Re-apprehended and placed in custody at Anasazi County detention awaiting further questioning.”
Absent in his notes was mention of the fact that he hadn’t put her in handcuffs, and that’s why she escaped. How was the kid going to navigate the creek with her hands behind her, for heaven’s sake? And no further notes about how she got away yet again from the Yavapai authorities because they couldn’t reach him, or the fact that he agreed to wait three days while she went on this crazy Vision Quest. What had he been thinking?
Cooper paged past the report. He’d complete his portion of the murder book soon. Everybody got behind when a homicide investigation occurred. Standard, par for the course. He’d finish his summary notes as soon as he could question the girl properly. No point in scribbling random speculation. He’d include the pertinent facts. That’s what solved a murder.
The next page was a brief report from one Peg Quincy, Family Liaison Officer, about a visit to Jill Rustaine’s sister. Said that she lived on the Marks’ Pecan Farm. Cooper flipped open his laptop, signed in to the department's Wi-Fi and did a search for the location in Camp Verde.
The quickest way was down I-17, but the program showed an alternate route through Oak Creek Canyon. That went right by the West Fork Park. Maybe he could save time and visit the scene of the crime again as well. It might jog his memory although he doubted he’d forgotten a single detail. But it could bring out one or two facts that he overlooked.