The Truth Seeker

by Dee Henderson

  He blinked. “One of them came to Montana.”

  “Time for a break.”

  “Not yet,” Lisa commented absently, reading the transcript from Grant’s trial.

  Quinn could have predicted that answer. He crossed over to where she sat on the couch and slid the report from her hand. “Yes, now. You said you wanted to see my old rodeo tapes.” It was after 11 P.M. They’d been going through the files ever since they got back from the bluffs, and he knew she still wasn’t feeling that great. She’d been sipping 7-Up all evening.

  “What did Emily find out about where Grant bought his horses?”

  “We just asked the question this afternoon. Give her time to find an answer.”

  “I know something is there.”

  “I think so too. And it can wait a couple hours. Come on.” He pulled her to her feet and directed her toward the living room.

  “So what are we watching?”

  “The high school national rodeo championships.”

  “How’d you do?”

  “Let’s just say Montana sent the Lone Star State home without the trophy they dominated for a decade.”

  “Do I hear a bit of pride in that outcome?”

  “Well deserved. I wore the bruises of victory for weeks.”

  She settled down at one end of the couch. “You fixed popcorn?”

  “Ask nicely, and I might even share.”

  She picked up the bowl. “Ask nicely, and I might give the bowl back,” she replied, eating her first handful.

  He slid in the tape, adjusted the volume, and reached for the remote.

  “So what did you compete in?”

  “Bull riding, calf roping, steer wrestling. I stayed away from goat tying.”

  “Goat tying? They have such a thing?”

  “Yep. They even give Horse of the Year awards.”

  Bull riding was up first. He watched her wince as the first rider appeared, survived six seconds, and was thrown off. Two rodeo clowns worked in tandem to distract the bull while the rider got out of the ring.

  “Quinn. You did this for sport?”

  “You spend a lot of time training before you ride one of these guys. Most injuries come from inexperienced riders making basic mistakes in balance and timing. It’s a sport where errors compound quickly. In my case I simply drew a more experienced bull.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The bulls they use at the high school national championships are the same as the ones in the professional circuit. When you draw a new bull to the circuit, you’ve got a better chance of completing the ride than if you draw one with experience. I had the misfortune of drawing Taggert II. He’d been on the circuit for seven years, seen every move, learned a few of his own.”

  “Please don’t tell me this tape has you getting hurt.”

  “No one gets hurt.”

  She watched, fascinated. “You get points for yourself and your team when you compete?”

  “Yes.”

  Quinn didn’t have to watch the tape to remember the competition. He settled back on the couch, crossed his ankles, reached over and tugged at the popcorn bowl that Lisa shared but didn’t release.

  Love was a bit like a wonderful piece of art. The best pieces were those that grew on him, were interesting for deeper reasons than the surface, became more beautiful the more he looked at them. Lisa was like that.

  She glanced at him for a moment and blushed. “You’re watching me again.”

  “Guilty.” He loved watching her.

  “It’s disconcerting.” She raised her hand to brush down her hair. “It makes me think I’m looking like a dust mop or something.”

  He laughed at the image and reached over to still her hand. “You look just fine. The sun gives you a tan and turns your hair blond.”

  “Streaky flyaway blond is not pretty,” she muttered.

  “It is if I say so.”

  “Flattery only works if it has an element of truth to it.”

  His dog came to join her.

  “Why do I get the feeling I’ve lost my dog?”

  She laughed as she offered Old Blue popcorn. “He knows a better thing when he finds it.”

  He took a handful of the popcorn.

  “What’s this?” she asked, indicating the new event on the tape.

  “Calf roping. The calf breaks into the corral, the rider comes through seconds later. Lasso him, get off your horse, toss him onto his side, loop rope around his feet, then throw up your hands.”

  “Is it hard to do?”

  “Much harder than it looks. Holding flailing legs to get the rope around fast is tough. And getting kicked in the face is more common than you’d expect.”

  “I don’t know that I wanted to know that.”

  They watched the first several riders try their luck.

  He saw the change in her expression, the look of distance appear. She’d just drifted away to thinking about work.

  “Excuse me, Quinn.” She pushed away from him, got to her feet, headed back to the office.

  He thought for a moment about joining her but stayed seated. He knew how fragile ideas were until they crystallized.

  He reached around for the phone. Despite his words to Lisa to be patient, he was anything but. “Marcus, how’s it going?”

  “The same as it was thirty minutes ago.” He partner was not nearly so willing to change the focus from Grant to Christopher. “Give me another couple hours, Quinn. I’ll call as soon as I find anything useful. Hold on. Lincoln just got here.” His partner muffled the phone for a moment. “He’s got news. Let me pass you to him.”

  “Quinn?”

  “Hi, Lincoln.”

  “Does the name McLinton mean anything to you?”

  Quinn’s hand rubbing Old Blue went still. “Yes, it does. They own a ranch to the southeast of here.”

  “Grant bought three horses from a Frank McLinton over the lifetime of the stable.”

  “Can you get me the dates of those sales, or when he might have been out here to see the horses?”

  “Emily’s working on it.”

  Until a few days ago this was exactly the news he had hoped to hear. Now it just raised more questions. It put Grant back at the top of the list. “Any word on Christopher?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Thanks for this. Call whenever you hear anything else.”

  “I will,” Lincoln reassured.

  Grant had come to Montana.

  Quinn hung up the phone and went to find Lisa.

  “Lisa.”

  She held up one finger, motioning for a moment of time. He crossed over to join her and see what she was studying that was causing the frown.

  The excavation of Rita’s grave.

  She finally shook her head slightly and looked up at him. “What?”

  “Grant has been to Montana. Emily found out that he bought three horses from Frank McLinton, the owner of a ranch southeast of here.”

  “When?”

  “She’s still getting dates.”

  Lisa leaned back against the couch, thinking about it. “Grant was out here to buy horses. That fits.” She looked up at him. “How did he get the horses back to Chicago? He wouldn’t have flown them back, so did McLinton deliver them or what?”

  “Great question. Do you have the phone number of the stable manager? The Scotsman?”

  “Samuel Barberry. It would be in Lincoln’s notes.”

  Quinn found it and picked up the phone. It was late, something he would apologize for, but he needed the answer. It took a few minutes to describe what he needed to know.

  “Normally I’d take one of the horse trailers from here and go pick up the new horse,” Mr. Barberry explained. “Or if it was a horse coming from a distance, a couple of the stable hands would fly out, rent a horse trailer, and drive the animal back.”

  “Do you remember the horses Grant bought from Frank McLinton?”

  “Sure. A nice chestnut and two bays. Greg and Danny fle
w out and brought two of them back, Chris went out to pick up the other.”

  “Christopher Hampton?”

  “His brother Walter helped him drive it back. They’ve got distant family out that way.”

  “Do you remember when that was?”

  “1980, ’81? Somewhere around then.”

  “I appreciate the help, Mr. Barberry.”

  “Anytime.”

  Quinn hung up the phone.

  “What?”

  He looked over at Lisa and took a seat on the chair across from her. “One of the horses was driven back to Chicago by Christopher and Walter Hampton.”

  Her surprise at the news matched his. “Both brothers?”

  “Two drivers, they must have driven straight through to Chicago. And the time is right. Grant bought the horse in either 1980 or ’81.”

  “Amy disappeared in 1980.”

  He nodded. “Grant and Christopher were both here. Chicago did come to Amy.”

  She started tapping her pen on the table, and Quinn waited. “That tells us more than I thought we would find.” She reached for one of the photographs on the table from the excavation of Rita’s grave and held it out to him. “What do you see?”

  It was a photograph taken looking down into the grave site. The skeleton beginning to appear was lying face down, the dirt had been brushed away so that Rita’s arms and hands were uncovered. He looked back at Lisa. “What?”

  “It matches what they were doing during the calf roping.”

  He looked back at the picture, stunned.

  “It’s a calf roping loop. Look at her hands. The tape first figure-eights around the wrists, then goes around the palms fast and then loops between the hands.”

  The silver reflection of the duct tape suddenly became the focus of what he was seeing. “Rita was killed by someone who knew how to calf rope.”

  “It’s bigger than that. Someone who roped like that probably killed Rita, Marla, Vera, and Heather.”

  “Christopher.”

  She rubbed her arms. “I think so. And if that’s true, it suggests Amy is buried somewhere around here, bound in a similar fashion,” she whispered.

  He absorbed that.

  Lisa got to her feet and came over, closing her hands around his. “We need to go back to Chicago.”

  He slowly nodded. It meant Christopher had probably shot his father.

  “Quinn? We’ll find out the truth.”

  Twenty-three

  “Christopher did it.”

  “Convince me,” Marcus said quietly.

  Lisa scowled at her brother. She was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open, and he wanted to sit and review what she and Quinn had spent the day proving.

  “Lizzy, I trust your conclusions. I just want to see how you reached them. You and Quinn are both very close to this.”

  She pushed back her chair and got up to walk over to the whiteboard. Marcus was right. And if she’d missed something in this list . . . it mattered. She’d already helped convict Grant Danford of a crime she was now arguing he did not do.

  “The Plymouth clinched it.”

  “What? It was found?”

  She nodded. “Lincoln found it this morning at a junkyard, crushed. Christopher had hauled it in. He said he’d hit a tree. It got him fifty dollars. He was the one following Quinn. As soon as we had that, the other threads started falling into place.”

  Marcus absorbed that, then nodded. “Go on.”

  She wiped the whiteboard clear to draw the circles she now knew by heart. “It’s the number of links that point to Christopher, rather than any one piece.”

  She started with Montana. “It wasn’t just Rita and Amy who were horse-crazy. So was Christopher. Quinn was the one who pointed out that to ride in the city, it takes money, access, and time. Christopher started to work for Grant Danford at the stable so he would have the ability to ride. Christopher met Rita Beck and Amy Ireland when they were at the stables taking pictures of the horses. Amy returned to Montana. A year later, Christopher went out to Montana to drive back a horse for Grant. During the time he was there, Amy disappeared and Quinn’s dad was shot.”

  She started the list for Chicago. “Rita Beck. Christopher knew her. His testimony puts himself at the scene when she disappeared. He had access to where she was buried.

  “Marla Sherrall. She was buried in the same way as Rita. Again, Christopher has put himself at the scene. He’s driving the Plymouth, following us, he’s the one leaving the notes about the murder, telling me to go away. He’s nervous because we’re investigating Rita and Amy and finding out we’re investigating Marla is enough to push him into trying to stop me. He’s running scared now as he feels the noose tightening.”

  “Why kill Marla?”

  “Why he chose her? We don’t know. It’s the MO of the killing that makes them connected. But with Vera—the type of duct tape positively linked Vera and Heather. And we’ve placed Christopher knowing Vera. She worked for his uncle before she retired, knew his aunt. If she knew about the gambling—well we know Christopher had been trying to cover up that fact from his uncle.”

  “Martha Treemont?”

  “A similar burial to the other victims, but we don’t have a direct connection to Christopher. We’re hoping to find it in the Nakomi Nurseries’ records, that he worked a job near where she disappeared.”

  “Christopher burned down your house.”

  She nodded, hating him for that. “We think so. It’s the fact Egan’s house burned down. I don’t think that was an accident,” she said quietly. “We didn’t find it, but he may have gotten away with murder. Egan didn’t have to be the one who dropped the cigar. The only other person besides Christopher who might benefit from Egan’s death is Walter—and that doesn’t type. Walter wouldn’t have risked a fire that near the nursery when a turn of the wind in the wrong direction would have sent the flames racing through the nursery grounds. The nursery is his life.”

  “Agreed. But Walter had to have known or at least suspected something about his brother. Lizzy, he gave Christopher an alibi for the day your house burned down.”

  “He’s protecting the nursery, trying to be big brother. Christopher is named as a passive owner. If Christopher is proven to be the arsonist, the insurance company will come after him for the damages, and thus go after the nursery.”

  Marcus looked from her to Quinn.

  “It’s Christopher,” Quinn stated. “And I want him.”

  Marcus nodded. “I’ll get the search warrant.”

  “Christopher’s home, vehicles, and the nursery grounds,” Quinn added. “Jack thinks he can match the fuel oil if we can find him a sample of where it came from.”

  Twenty-four

  The nursery grounds were busy on Saturday afternoon. Customer cars filled all the parking slots in front of the two long greenhouses; drivers were now parking in the grass on both sides of the road.

  Quinn pushed open the nursery office door and felt a wave of slightly cooler air rush out to meet him. The front room with its open service counter, large scheduling board, and time clock was noisy with phones ringing and a fax machine active, but it was empty of customers at the moment. “Walter.”

  “Back again?” He tore off the fax, scanned it, and passed it to the office manager. “Write up the work order for this and check the inventory. I’ll figure out which crews to assign later.” Terri nodded, cast a curious glance at them, and turned toward the back office.

  Walter picked up his gloves and walked around the counter. “What can I do for you?” He sounded willing to help but also looked ready to leave.

  “We’ve got a problem.”

  Walter looked out the window, saw the squad cars pulling in, and stiffened. “Okay . . . ”

  “We’re going to have to talk with your brother. Do you happen to know where we can find him?”

  “I wish I knew. He was supposed to be working on a job at the new First Union Bank in Naperville, but he never showed. I h
ad to send another site manager, putting the job three hours behind schedule. Why?” He groaned. “He’s been gambling again, hasn’t he? I knew it. What kind of trouble has he gotten into this time?”

  “We’d like your permission to look around the nursery grounds while we wait on a warrant to his home.”

  Walter looked stunned. “What do you think he did?” He looked from one of them to the other, but they didn’t answer him. “Listen, Christopher’s got some problems, not the least of which is his temper, but he’s an okay guy.” He took a deep breath. “I own the house he’s been staying in. The only thing Christopher has is a passive interest in the nursery business. As far as I’m concerned, you can look anywhere you like. I’m sure this can get resolved without going as far as a warrant.”

  Quinn looked at Marcus, got a slight nod. “I appreciate it. And I hope it can be resolved with a few questions. You’ll be here for the next couple hours?”

  “Here or up at the toolshed. I’ve been working on the sod baler.”

  “There’s going to be an officer staying here at the office. Please don’t move any records.”

  “Of course not.”

  “We’ll be in touch.”

  Walter’s business and home were landscaped and carefully maintained for a beautiful image. The house where Christopher was staying was the exact opposite. The yard needed mowing; weeds were growing in the cracks of the walkway from the driveway to the house.

  A motorcycle was being taken apart in the front yard, a few feet off the driveway.

  Despite Walter’s offer, they had waited for the warrant to search the nursery grounds and Christopher’s home before coming over. Quinn found the front door unlocked, knocked, and received no answer. He opened the door and stepped inside. Dumped in the hallway were two hockey sticks, a bike helmet, and a set of golf clubs. There was the faint odor of bacon grease in the air.

  “Christopher? Police.”

  Quinn walked through the silent house.

  Christopher needed a housekeeper. The place hadn’t been dusted in months. The kitchen would take a few hours to clean; the dishes were piled in the sink and the counters were littered with coffee grounds and spots of jelly.