by John J. Lamb
“And have you talked to Sergei yet? What are you going to do if he says no?”
“Consult with my sock puppet.” I pulled the phone from my pocket, and tossing my cane in first, sat down inside the truck to give my aching leg a rest.
I emitted the tiniest of groans and Ash asked, “How bad does it hurt?”
“I’ll manage. March or die, as they say in the French Foreign Legion.”
It was after noon, so I knew Sergei would already be at the restaurant. I pressed the number and he answered, “Pinckney’s Brick Pit.”
“Good morning, Sergei.”
“Brad, where are you? I just left a message on your home phone and I was about to call your cell. Hold on for a moment.” The background noise of conversation and the jazz trumpet of Freddie Hubbard receded and I knew he’d gone into the back room. “Sheriff Holcombe went into the Sheriff’s Office about ten minutes ago and Trent just arrived. They never come in on Sundays.”
“Trent too, huh? We saw Holcombe earlier. He’s out trying to tidy things up.”
“Did he see you?”
“No, but I think he’s beginning to suspect what we’re up to.”
“Where are you now?”
“On the Henshaw Farm, about four miles upriver from town. We found the truck and identified the dead man. He’s Robert Thayer, the nephew of Elizabeth Ewell. I’ll explain the rest later, but I have to ask a question: You live up in Thermopylae, right?”
“Yes, and I’m almost afraid to ask why you want to know.”
“I need a safe place to temporarily store this truck and the other evidence—someplace the sheriff isn’t going to find right away. If we leave it here, Holcombe will discover it and we’ll lose any chance at recovering trace evidence.”
“Brad, you know I support your goal, but what in the name of merciful God makes you think I’d allow you to conceal a stolen truck and illegally-seized murder evidence on my property, thereby making me an accessory after the fact to homicide?”
“Don’t tell me you’re frightened? Not an old Borzoi, like you.”
“If I knew what that expression meant, I’d be impressed with your knowledge and flattered by your assessment.” There was quiet amusement in Sergei’s voice. “My home is at six-twenty-two Thermopylae Road. It’s on the left side near the end of the paved road. Look for a mailbox painted as a goldfinch and follow the driveway up. There’s a small barn behind the house. You can park the truck there.”
“Thanks, Sergei, and would you do me one more favor? If you see Holcombe or Trent go mobile in a patrol car, would you give me a call at this number?”
“Brad, this may come as a profound shock to you, but I’m running a restaurant, not a surveillance post.” There was a pause and the background noise increased. He’d moved back into the front portion of the restaurant. “Both patrol cars are still at the Sheriff’s Office. I’ll do my best. You be damned careful.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
When I disconnected from the call, Ash said, “Honey, why did you call him a Borzoi? Isn’t that a Russian wolfhound?”
“Yeah, and it was a title of respect in his former vocation.” I reached down and picked up the screwdriver. “Well, I guess we’d better get started.”
“Have you ever actually done this before?” Tina watched carefully as I wedged the screwdriver blade in the ignition key slot as far as I could push it.
“No, but since your average seventh-grade dropout can do it, I figure I can manage.” I used the hammer to pound the blade farther and farther into the ignition system and the plastic sheathing around the steering column began to crack. Dropping the hammer, I gave the screwdriver a clockwise turn and the engine started. Everyone looked kind of surprised, including me.
“Okay, I’m going to head out to the road and I’ll follow you up to Thermopylae,” Tina called as she jogged back to her sheriff’s cruiser.
I gave her a thumb’s up and turned to Ash. “All right, my love, you head home and I’ll be back before you know it.”
Ash handed the knapsack to me and leaned close to give me a long kiss. “Please be careful.”
“Hey, you’re the one that needs to be careful. All I have to do is drive a stolen truck across the county and hope the corrupt sheriff and his steroid-addled son don’t see me. You, on the other hand, have to negotiate with the Ice Queen of teddy bears.”
Chapter 13
Once Ash departed in the boat, I followed Tina’s car through the cornfield. We passed the old barn and shortly thereafter I saw what I assumed was the new barn—not that you could have told the difference between the two ramshackle buildings on a moonless night. On the opposite side of the lane was the Henshaw’s three-storied Queen Anne Victorian-style house and I slowed down for just a second to look at it. I was stunned.
From the sorry state of the barns, I’d naturally assumed the home would be in similar condition, so I wasn’t prepared to drive past a life-size Thomas Kinkade print. The house featured one large turret, a broad wrap-around porch, flowerboxes beneath the ground floor windows, and was painted a sunny yellow with periwinkle trim. A white picket fence circumscribed the grassy front yard, lush and colorful flowerbeds surrounded the house and lined the walkways, and two gnarled old apple trees stood in the front yard. Up on the porch, a tawny tiger-striped cat lay sunning itself on the railing while Claire sat on a white wicker chair and practiced combat loading her shotgun. She waved and I waved back.
The driveway dead-ended at Wallace Road and Tina pulled over to allow me to take the lead. I made a left turn and followed the road for about a mile over the low rolling hills to where it intersects with U.S. Route 340. I had to wait until traffic cleared and then turned north. Route 340 has at least two other names that I’m aware of—the South Eastside Highway and the Stonewall Jack-son Highway . . . big shock, that last one. The two-lane highway runs along the base of the Blue Ridge foothills, parallel to the Shenandoah River, bordered mostly by farmland and the occasional home. Overhead and to the east, I could see the black forms of buzzards coasting gracefully on the thermal currents above the hills.
There was a fairly large amount of other vehicle traffic on the road, which was a good thing because it reduced the possibility of the Chevy being spotted. Still, I was apprehensive when I stopped for the red light at the intersection with Coggins Spring Road. If Holcombe or his son somehow learned that we’d found Thayer’s truck, or about our other activities, this was the route they’d take to get to the Henshaw Farm. However, the cross traffic passed by without incident and the light turned green.
As I drove, I noticed that the obvious gunshot pock-marks in the windshield didn’t draw so much as a curious glance from other motorists. There were two reasons for this: First, hunting is a very popular form of recreation here, and it isn’t uncommon for a sportsman to imbibe a little too much Peppermint Schnapps then mistake a motor vehicle for a deer. This isn’t a good thing, but it’s still much better than mistaking your hunting buddy for a deer, which also happens on a fairly regular basis, courtesy of the German firewater. Second, the local folks have this old-fashioned concept about minding their own business and it’s one I find quite refreshing. It wasn’t until I’d been away from the city for a few months that I began to appreciate how oppressively Orwellian the atmosphere can be—everybody watching everyone else intently for fear of becoming a victim. But, leaving the Massanutten Sheriff’s Office out of the equation, crime is still relatively rare here and that means people don’t have to behave like gazelles on the savannah in constant alert mode for lions.
Arriving in the small town of Elkton, I turned east on Highway 33 and headed up the four-lane road toward Swift Run Gap, one of the pathways over the Blue Ridge Mountains. As I drove, I pondered my next move. From their expressions of surprise, Tina and Sergei both thought it was enormously significant that Holcombe and Trent were at work on a Sunday. There were several reasons why they might be breaking the commandment about keeping the Sabbath hol
y, but the one that made the most sense to me was that they were preparing to implement a damage-control plan, which meant time was of the essence. That, in turn, suggested they at least suspected I was pursuing my own investigation and it was vital they act before I found anything too damning.
It was apparent to me that Holcombe’s original plan was to bury Thayer as a John Doe and hope that nobody noticed. But if he believed that plan was no longer feasible, he’d be forced to make an official death notification to Elizabeth Ewell and sell her some fraudulent tale about how Thayer accidentally drowned. However, if I was correct, it also meant that I’d have to interview Miss Ewell and her live-in nurse before Holcombe got there. Unfortunately, that might also cause me to miss the appointment with Cleland—not that I didn’t think Ash could handle herself in the encounter with the CEO.
I was still lost in thought when Tina frantically flashed her car’s headlights at me, yanking me from my reverie. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw a police cruiser coming up fast in the passing lane. The patrol car’s blue emergency lights weren’t on, but the cop was obviously in a hurry. I considered making a run for it, but knew that would be a lethally stupid thing to do. There was no way in the world I could outrun the cop car and police pursuits have a disturbing propensity to end with someone—usually the person being chased—in the intensive care unit or the county morgue. So instead, I got ready to pull over and hoped that if it was Trent, he’d brushed his teeth before going on duty today. I thought I could endure a physical beating, but the prospect of being immersed in his toxic-waste dump quality breath while being transported to jail in the stuffy backseat of a patrol car was just plain terrifying.
Then the car rocketed past and I saw it was a U.S. Park Service unit on the way back up to Shenandoah National Park. The female ranger was gulping down what looked like a Burger King Double Whopper and didn’t give the Chevy so much as a second glance. I remembered to breathe and looked in the rearview mirror. Tina mimed mopping her brow.
Just before entering the park, I turned right on Thermopylae Road. For a few moments, I was plunged into cool greenish shadows as the sun disappeared behind a dense canopy of intertwined tree branches. The two-lane highway cut a serpentine course around the west base of a low hill, and when the trees cleared, I could see I’d entered a cleft between the mountains approximately a third of a mile wide. A sign said the road dead-ended in five miles.
I followed the meandering road up the valley, passing through pastureland that was dotted with cattle and cylindrically shaped hay bales sheathed in white plastic. Tidy homes were scattered along the way, some built from brick and others of modular construction. The two-lane asphalt road gave way to a one-lane unmarked road and that in turn became a narrow macadamized lane that began to ascend the south end of the valley. Fields gave way to forest and I began to worry because my odometer indicated I’d gone 5.3 miles and I wasn’t seeing any more houses.
I passed a small pond and the road made a hairpin and upward turn to the right. At last I saw the goldfinch mailbox and knew that if Ash ever saw it she’d want one for our house. I turned onto the gravel driveway and saw Sergei’s home about seventy-five yards farther up the hill, nearly hidden by the trees. It was a sturdy log cabin resting on a foundation of stacked and cemented flagstones, with a green metal roof and a stone chimney on the far side. There was a little porch and on it a single wooden rocking chair, which accentuated the palpable sense of loneliness exuded by the isolated house.
Evergreens and tall maples surrounded the cabin and the front yard was carpeted with a dense layer of brown pine needles. Suspended from the lower tree branches and hanging from about a dozen black wrought-iron shepherd’s crooks was the biggest collection of bird feeders I’d ever seen short of the aviary at the San Francisco Zoo. As I drove past the house, a cloud of sparrows, finches, and chickadees rose from the ground and sought shelter in the nearby trees.
The small wooden barn was behind the house. I pulled inside the building, turned the truck’s engine off, and decided to make a quick search of the interior before leaving. Opening the glove box, I found the vehicle registration paperwork, a couple of Lotto South tickets, a yellow receipt from an oil-changing place in Culpeper dated back in August, some Taco Bell hot sauce packets, and a three-quarters-full bottle of toasted hazelnut-scented moisturizing lotion. The last item was as out of place as a furrier at an animal rights convention. I’ve rummaged through crooks’ motor vehicles for a quarter-century and never once found nice-smelling skin care products. You didn’t need the investigative acumen of a talking Pomeranian to deduce that the lotion probably belonged to Thayer’s girlfriend.
After that, I quickly checked under and behind the seats, but found nothing of evidentiary value. Then I took the expended cartridges and fingerprint cards and put them inside the glove box. It was as safe a place as any for the evidence. Tina sounded her horn for me to hurry and, grabbing my cane and the knapsack, I shut the truck’s door and left the barn.
Tina yelled out the car window, “Holcombe just put out a BOL on the truck and Trent went in service a second ago!”
“What sort of BOL?”
“Grand theft auto.”
“I wonder why Sergei didn’t call.”
“He probably tried but you couldn’t receive the call up here. Get in and let’s get out of here.”
I opened the back door. “I think it’d be best if I lay down on the backseat for the ride home.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Not if it prevents Sergeant Testosterone from seeing me.” I shut the door and tried to make myself comfortable on the seat, which smelled almost as bad as Trent’s breath. As Tina began to back the cruiser up, another unpleasant thought occurred to me. “What about the park ranger unit we saw on the way up here? Are they on the same radio frequency as the SO?”
Tina turned the car around and began to fly down Thermopylae Road. She glanced into the backseat to answer, which made me wish she were watching the winding road. “No, but our dispatcher will call them with the BOL information, so there’s the chance that Kristine—that’s the ranger who passed us—will remember seeing the Chevy and call it in.”
“Let’s just hope she was more interested in her lunch than the stolen truck she drove by. Tell me about the radio call. Did Holcombe make any mention of the pickup being connected with Thayer?”
“No, only that it was stolen.”
“Makes sense. If he linked the missing truck with Thayer too soon, Liz Ewell would probably begin asking uncomfortable questions, and she impresses me as the sort of person with statehouse-level clout and who isn’t afraid to use it. The last thing Holcombe wants is the State Police looking into this.”
“You’ve lost me.” Tina suddenly inhaled and jerked the steering wheel to the left to bring the car back onto the road.
“You’re going to lose us both if you don’t pay attention to the road.”
“Sorry.”
I sat up a little so that Tina wouldn’t have to keep glancing into the back seat. “Holcombe knows the truck isn’t where he and Trent left it there by the river. Maybe somebody tipped him off or he went looking when he didn’t find the expended cartridges. However he found out, they’re scared. They don’t know if the truck’s been actually stolen or if we found it and they can’t go to Liz Ewell and ask her if she’s seen it because she’s never reported her nephew missing.”
“Oh. And the only way Holcombe could know Thayer was missing was if he had something to do with it.” Tina kept her eyes on the road and I began to relax.
“Exactly, but the ironic thing is that she probably does know he’s missing. Yesterday—which seems like a hell of a long time ago—I was talking with the auctioneer’s gofer. He told me he went over to the Ewell house when Thayer FTA’d with the Mourning Bear.”
“FTA’d?”
“Failed To Appear. He told Ewell’s live-in nurse what happened, so the Land Baroness of Massanutten County must know by now.”
“So, why hasn’t he been reported missing?”
“People as powerful as Liz Ewell are seldom stupid. She has to know that Thayer was a crook. Maybe it’s part of the family gene pool. Anyway, we can presume she’s well enough connected to also know about the felony arrest warrant.”
Tina nodded. “And she was hoping to find him and get the Mourning Bear back without involving the law.”
“Which brings us to what happened to the bear? Did—”
Trent’s voice blurted from the police radio. “Mike Two to Mike Seven, what’s your location?”
“God, that’s me.” Tina picked up the microphone. “Mike Seven to Mike Two, I’m on Thermopylae Road at Powell Gap Road.”
“Rendezvous ASAP at that old abandoned gas station on thirty-three just east of Elkton.”
“Ten-four, on my way.” Tina slipped the microphone back into its holder and glanced back to give me a mildly panicked look. “What do we do now?”
“For starters, don’t panic. Isn’t that the old stone gas station right there next to the highway?”
“Yes.”
“Then it doesn’t impress me as the sort of place he’d tell you to meet if he knew I was with you.”
“You’re right. He’d want to meet someplace where there were no witnesses.”
“So go ahead and make the rendezvous.”
“But you can’t stay there in the backseat.”
“I know, so we have two options: You can either drop me off here and come back later to get me or we can pretend I’m a teenager trying to slip into a drive-in movie without paying.”
“You mean ride in the trunk?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve done it in my law enforcement career.”