“Allegedly,” Peterson agreed. “Johanssen will call it the heat of passion—you wait and see.” He waved the folder at me. “Thanks, Doc. Keep me posted. I’m headed down to Town Park for Huck Finn Day. You coming?”
I shook my head. “No thanks, Tom. I’ve got work to do. I’ll give you a call if I turn up anything else of interest.”
I went back to the papers on my desk. There wouldn’t be anything else. I already knew the whole story. All of it, every last word and, God help me, every last feeling.
*********
Pete Wilson loved Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher Day, if he could be said to love anything at all. He was drawn to the fact that Telluride had the decency to kick off its summer festival season with a program just for kids…well, sort of. There were a couple of other events that came first in the schedule, and the town felt compelled to make it Huck and Becky instead of Huck and Tom. But there was a parade — there was always a parade — then costume day in Town Park with a fishing contest. It was fun to see the ones in torn pants and checkered shirts, barefoot, with painted-on freckles, plying the pond. Almost none of the girls wore old-fashioned dresses, and most of the kids confined their “costume” to a straw hat. Still, it was a day just for them and he liked it. Too much of the town was all about adults, even when people intoned with great solemnity that it was “for the children.”
He cast a glance up at the sky, which was clouded over and starting to spit rain, as he walked down to the park. The parade was over, and the town was making its way toward the green-space. He passed a poster in a shop window advertising the event and wondered again why it was Huck Finn and not Tom Sawyer who got top billing. After all, Tom and Becky were the best of friends, and Huck Finn starred in a book that no one in Telluride would read out of political correctness.
He smiled to himself. Fitting in with the crowd, at least on the surface, was a small price to pay to escape Chicago and the crime beat. Nothing much ever happened here, Houston’s murder being the exception that proved the rule. He would be glad when the horde of reporters that had invaded as soon as Houston was murdered finally left. They were thinning some already. They figured out that Marla Kincaid wasn’t going to do anything spectacular as long as her lawyer had her under wraps, and the trial was a long time away. Even so, a few of them were still camped so determinedly around the hotel in Mountain Village that the poor girl was held a virtual captive, especially after that fiasco on the street yesterday when she tried to go out for a walk and was swarmed by the press.
Wilson shook his head, banishing his reflexive grin at the thought with a grimace. That was the difference between real reporters and these scriveners of fluff that covered the celebrity circuit. A real reporter would have known the best way to get a story on Marla was to leave her alone, lull her into a false sense of security. The way these idiots acted, she’d gone to ground like a frightened fox, and she could stay holed up there longer than they could mill around on the sidewalk, assuming she didn’t get cabin fever again. And assuming that another one of those idiots didn’t get himself arrested by posing as a maintenance man and crashing into Marla’s room.
A green SUV with a red-headed driver crawled past him on the street, easing its way out of town. The last time Pete Wilson had seen that particular vehicle and that particular driver was during Marla Kincaid’s ill-fated walkabout. The driver rescued her from the pack of reporters and whisked her off, presumably back to the safety of Mountain Village, and, curious, he’d loitered around long enough to see the young man heading back to the hotel twice more that evening. Wilson put two and two together and wondered what the medical examiner would think if she knew that her son was cavorting with a sweet young thing who was charged with murder?
The town pond was already lined with kids trying their hand at fishing. Once in a while, one of them would shriek with delight and pull up one of the small fish that resided in the dark waters. The adults in charge would duly make a fuss, measure the catch, and gently return the traumatized fish to the pond to risk capture again. He stood for a while, watching, then took a few photos and interviewed a few of the participants for the next edition of the paper.
It was a good turnout, but the park was far from full and most of the people were concentrated by the pond and the refreshment concession run by the Elks. A couple played Frisbee in the field that would become an ice rink in the winter months, and three girls in matching pink tee-shirts raced their mountain bikes around them, deftly dodging both the people and the flying plastic disc with shrieks of delight. Wilson’s eyes followed them a fraction of a second, thinking how the drizzle had dampened their thin tee-shirts to show just how well they were beginning to fill them out.
It was early in the season. A few weeks and no matter what was going on, Town Park would be packed and the campground full of vacationers and festival-goers, the backbone of Telluride’s summer economy. Wilson found he was enjoying the last few days of relative calm before Telluride’s summer-long storm of visitors. He turned his attention from the girls on the bikes as one of the Elks took a microphone.
“Time to line up for the costume contest!” he said in theatrical tones. He smiled and waved a hand to the double handful of children who had actually turned up in tattered pants or the other accoutrements of Mark Twain’s long-ago Mississippi. A ragged line was beginning to shape itself when a sound, sharp and hard, rang out and reverberated in the tiny box canyon. People looked around in surprise. But Pete Wilson knew a gunshot when he heard it. And then he heard another.
A woman screamed. Wilson looked around to see the stocky brunette who had been playing Frisbee, frozen in place, shrieking and pointing. The man she had been playing Frisbee with lay crumpled about a hundred feet away, the Frisbee on the ground just ahead of him.
The crowd stood as frozen as the woman for a long moment, then exploded. Mothers swept up their children. The Elks herded those nearest into the warming hut and bathrooms. People ran in any direction, running into each other with shouts and deprecations, shoving each other aside and jostling the smallest children to the ground. One father huddled with his toddler, pressing the child against the stones of the barbecue pit and shielding him with his body as he looked desperately around at the crowd roaring past him. They ran in every direction except toward the man on the ground. The woman who had been with him—his wife, girlfriend, mate of the day?—still stood screaming, motionless as a statue.
Pete Wilson had the sense to shoulder his camera and fight the exodus to get the first photo of the young man lying dead on the ground before he pulled out his cell and called 911. Some habits never die.
CHAPTER FIVE
JUNE 8, AFTERNOON
The sirens — an unfamiliar sound in Telluride — made me look out my window. The street was uncharacteristically empty. I saw a knot of people huddled in the porch of the bakery across the way. They were cramped, close together, pushed within the confines of the doorway, almost as though they were trying to escape a cold winter wind. Then almost as though they had received some mysterious signal, they darted back inside.
When a tall, muscular, gray-haired man passed, walking casually with hands in pockets and head thrust back to the day, one of them darted out and called, motioning him in. I saw him stop, stiffen, look around hurriedly, and dash inside with the others. I let the shade drop back and turned back to my desk, a familiar sense of unease making me too restless to sit and accomplish anything. I paced the long rectangle of my office for ten minutes by the clock before the call came that explained it all. It was Tom Patterson.
“Need you down here in Town Park,” he said without preamble. “There’s been a shooting.”
Technically, a shooting in Town Park would have been the marshall’s problem but, by common arrangement, the Sheriff’s Office handled all homicides in the county. It saved on resources. I continued to pace, thankful for the headset that Ben had insisted I have, if for no other reason than he was tired of explaining to others about his Luddite
mother and her unreasonable distrust of technology.
“When?”
“Fifteen minutes — give or take — ago.”
“Who did it?”
“Damn it, Doc, I don’t know. I just have a dead body and a panic on my hands and I need you down here to help me make sense out of it.”
Tom’s words were sharp. It was unlike him to lose his temper. I’ve always thought that that phrase about blood running cold was hyperbole, but I found out otherwise.
“Tom,” I said cautiously, “is the scene secure?” Cop and Medical Examiner code for ‘is it safe to come out’? Suddenly the empty streets made sense. A shooting in broad daylight in the middle of Town Park. I heard a sigh.
“Doc, I don’t know,” he repeated. “I think so. There were a couple of shots. A man was killed. All hell broke loose at the Huck Finn Day party. All I can say is that Pete Wilson has been here taking photographs and trying to interview the man’s girlfriend, and nobody’s shot him yet.” There was a pause. “Though I might consider busting a cap on the son of a bitch myself.” Another pause. “You know I wouldn’t call you out if I didn’t think it was safe. This looks like—feels like—a single, deliberate hit. Get down here. I need your help.”
I paused in my course around the rug, closing my eyes against the rising fear, taking a long breath in and letting it out slowly before I replied.
“I’ll be right down. But just me. I’m not sending any of my crew.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
The two words held a world of relief, and then the line went dead. I reconsidered my commitment to go alone, dialing Quick and grateful to hear his voice.
“Jaz here.”
It was one of his two standard phone-answering phrases. The other was “Morgue,” in appropriately melancholy, drawn out tones. I occasionally countered with my own “Ma’s mule barn, Ma speaking,” but this wasn’t the time for levity.
“There’s been a shooting in Town Park. Care to come along with me?”
Quick wasn’t a forensic technologist, but his battlefield experience and common sense made him an invaluable colleague. I had a feeling Patterson might welcome him as well.
Quick let out a low curse, another of his trademarks.
“Where the hell they think this is? The Bronx?” I could hear him opening a cabinet. “I’ll get the kit. You get that camera of yours. I’ll be ready in five minutes.”
I met Quick in the lobby of the center. By now, the word of the shooting had spread all over town, and my own staff had taken refuge in the interior of the building, away from the massive front windows. They were listening to the local radio station, which had interrupted its usual eclectic music format to provide running commentary on the shooting. The volunteer deejay alternated between reading a single statement from the town marshall—Patterson still had his hands full—and taking calls from people who had been at the park when the shooting happened. If you believed them, the shooter(s) was (were) a lone (pair of) tall (short) black (white)(Indian) men (women) who were by the stage (soccer field) (Bear Creek trail) and were last seen driving (running) away from the scene in the company of a brown (black) Lab (mutt).
So much for eyewitnesses. What their sight confused, their ears did not. Every caller I had heard as I pulled out my camera and tape recorder and checked batteries and memory cards was confident. There had been two shots in rapid succession. Not one. Two.
It took us only a minute or two to walk the few blocks to the edge of Town Park where a deputy ushered us to the scene. A nondescript man of middle age, expanding paunch and thinning hair plugged with recent transplants lay on his side. A bright yellow Frisbee was on the ground a few feet away.
“Fill me in,” I said to Tom as I pulled on my gloves.
“He was tossing the disc with his girlfriend over there in the field. She overthrew and he went after it. She says she heard a sound and he just fell.”
“One sound?” I asked, remembering the callers.
“So she says. Why?”
“Everyone who’s calling in to the radio station says two.”
“They’re right.” Pete Wilson had materialized at my elbow. Tom Patterson’s face became a thundercloud. “There were two shots. Close together, but two.”
I turned to face the reporter. “Did you see him fall?”
Pete Wilson shrugged, the noncommittal gesture without concern for the dead man. “No. I heard the shots, then heard the banshee screaming. He was already down. Hard to tell where they came from, even, everything echoes so bad.”
I turned back to Patterson. “I need room to examine the body. Get him out of here.” Wilson wasn’t the only one who had a cold heart.
Patterson brightened considerably and took Wilson none too gently by the elbow.
Quick and I knelt by the body to take our first good look at the dead man. He had dropped where he stood, face down on the grass; there was only a pool of blood beneath him, no trail in the surrounding ground. That was unusual. Hollywood notwithstanding, most people move around a bit even with a fatal gunshot wound unless it’s one to the head, like the one that killed Houston. Even with a shot to the heart, it takes a few seconds to lose enough blood to lose consciousness. Dropping someone in his tracks generally takes a combination of a good shot and a round with a lot of stopping power.
I was surprised when I finally flipped the man over, after photographing him from every possible angle, to find a pair of tiny holes in the front of his shirt. I scowled and pointed them out to Quick.
“What do you think of this?” I asked.
“Looks like a .22 to me,” he said, running a brown, gloved finger around the edges of one of the holes in the blood-soaked shirt. “Don’t make a lot of sense to me. Something that small don’t usually kill a man right away.”
I straightened up, standing with my feet on either side of the man’s own feet and looked around. Fixing my sights on the Frisbee, I stood motionless for a minute, my hand drifting involuntarily to my chest, touching the same spot where the gunshot wounds were on the unfortunate corpse. I looked down at Quick, still kneeling at the man’s side. “Can you stick a probe in that to get me an angle of the shot?” I asked.
“Sure thing.”
It wouldn’t be perfect, but of where the shooter —no doubt long gone by now — might have been. I watched as Quick slid two thin, steel rods into the holes left by the bullets. Tom Patterson had taken his place next to me by that time, and as soon as the probes settled, we both stood still and silent, imagining the trajectory and looking out at the park for a likely spot. He saw it before I did—the cluster of trees at the top of the sledding hill. Straight, uninterrupted line of sight, sufficient height to account for the downward drift the probes were indicating, and enough cover from any angle, even the hiking trail above that with the park being crowded, no one would have seen anything at all.
“Get up to the top of that hill and see what you can find,” Patterson barked to one of the deputies. The man loped off, motioning to one of the others to come along.
Quick straightened and reflexively brushed his hands off on his jeans, leaving a small smear of blood. I frowned at him and he gave me an apologetic look.
“I’ll change them as soon as I get back with the wagon and a body bag. And,” he cast a look at the deputies who were just cresting the hill, “I’ll bring a metal detector. I expect those boys can use it.”
He was off before Patterson could thank him, and we both watched him for a moment before turning to look at the body at our feet again. Tom finally broke the silence.
“This is no damn good,” he finally said. “No damn good at all.”
I was inclined to agree.
**********
Isa finished filling the yellow bucket with warm water and closed the tap. The smell of the cleaner reminded her of the tall pines that she could see through the windows. She wasn’t supposed to use ordinary cleaner, only some expensive liquid the woman who lived here called green even though it ha
d no color at all. It didn’t work, either. Isa smiled and nodded whenever the woman fussed at her for using something different from the grocery store, then did as she pleased. Clean was better than not clean, so she was using the real cleaner, the brown, not green, kind. She liked the scent, it worked, and with the man dead and the woman arrested, there was no one to fuss at her today.
The woman always called her Eva, because she could never remember Isa’s name and out of spite, Isa never used hers, though she remembered it because it was so pretty. Marla. It was always Marla who fussed at her though she knew it was the man, Mitch, whose idea it always was to complain. He was a lot like Pelirojo, always using someone else to do the things he wanted done but did not want to take the blame for. Like fussing at Isa for the cleaner. And making her stay late that night to clean. At least she was not here when the murder happened. She hunched her shoulders, trying to shield herself from the effects of all that violence, but it didn’t work. She shuddered in spite of herself and whispered a quick prayer to La Guadalupana.
She worked methodically through the empty house, ending in the big bedroom. It was filthy, with broken glass on the floor and walls marked by the things the woman had thrown around. It was all made worse by some sort of fine, black powder scattered over the surfaces of the furniture and the gold statue of the man with no face. It was as much a mess as the kitchen had been on the night the man was killed, the night it had taken her until ten just to finish cleaning. She had been almost to the house in Montrose when the tiny phone in her bag rang, and the police called her back.
The last time she had seen the room, the police were there, and the dead man, and his woman, who had thrust a paper at her and told her to call the number and tell the woman who answered she had been arrested. The woman policeman was angry and yelled at both of them and tore the paper out of Isa’s hand, but not before she had memorized the number. Isa was good with numbers, and she was good at doing the little things that got her work and kept it for her. Like calling the number later that evening from one of the downstairs bathrooms, making sure her voice was soft enough not to be heard through the door by the woman policeman who went with her and passing the message on.
Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1) Page 7