Obsidian

by Thomas King

  Cole shrugged. “Anybody who read the write-up on the stand next to the car.”

  Okay, Thumps had run out of patience with coincidences. The break-in at the Land Titles building, the pocket watch, and now a missing Mustang painted obsidian. Someone was having a good time at his expense.

  “Licence plate?” said Duke.

  “OBSIDIAN,” said Gorka. “What else?”

  “Okay,” said the sheriff. “Let’s run through it again. From the top.”

  THUMPS AND LEON left the sheriff to the business at hand and wandered over to the transport truck to look at the cars that were stacked up on the ramps.

  Leon settled in next to a maroon Plymouth. “Who wants to go first?”

  “Someone’s screwing with us,” said Thumps.

  “With you,” said Leon. “I’m retired.”

  “It’s as though I hit a tripwire on a land mine. I go back to the coast, and all hell breaks loose.”

  “Are you asking me?” Leon took the silver dollar out of his pocket.

  “You’re not going to solve the case with that?”

  “Nope,” said Leon. “But I figure to keep it handy for when you ask me to do something and I have to make a decision.”

  “I’m not going to ask you to do anything.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  Thumps organized the elements in his head to see if he could make any sense out of the pieces.

  “Three scenarios, so far as I can see,” said Thumps. “One, our serial killer has resurfaced here in Chinook.”

  “After all this time?” Leon shook his head. “Why?”

  “Second, Raymond Oakes has resurfaced here in Chinook.”

  “Again,” said Leon. “Why?”

  “And third,” said Thumps, “someone is playing a sick game.”

  “A break-in, a pocket watch, and a stolen car. That’s some game.”

  “So, we still have nothing.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Leon. “We can’t do much about the break-in or the pocket watch, but a car is an entirely different critter.”

  “Okay.”

  “If the guy who stole the car is the guy who did the break-in and sent the pocket watch, then we can suppose that he’s still in town.”

  “Because why go to all that trouble and then drive away.”

  “So we find the car,” said Leon, “we find our perp.”

  “Harder to hide than a pocket watch.”

  “You know the town,” said Leon. “Where would you hide a car?”

  THE SHERIFF TOOK another twenty minutes with Cole and Gorka. He didn’t look particularly happy as he stomped across the broken ground, his hat pulled down tight on his head.

  “You two solve this thing yet?”

  Thumps waited for Duke to get all the way to the transport truck. “Did Cole have a tracking device on the car?”

  “That would be too easy,” said Duke.

  “Thumps thinks the car is still in town.”

  Duke nodded. “Lots of places to hide a car.”

  Thumps took the watch out of his pocket and let it hang by the chain. “Why steal a car?”

  “You going somewhere with this, Tonto?”

  “I can see the break-in,” said Thumps. “Low risk. The watch is low risk as well.”

  “But the car isn’t,” said Duke.

  “You have to steal the keys, sneak into the barn, drive the car away, and hide it.” Thumps took a deep breath and let it out. “And there’s no guarantee that Cole or Gorka would have mentioned the paint job. So far as they’re concerned, it’s just a stolen ’67 Mustang.”

  “Maybe the car was stolen for two separate reasons,” said Leon.

  “The paint job,” said the sheriff. “So we’d make the connection.”

  Thumps nodded. “And our perp needed a car for something else.”

  “And even if we didn’t tumble to the symbolism of the paint, our perp would still have the car he needs,” said the sheriff. “Win, win.”

  “Pretty weak,” said Leon.

  Thumps walked away from the transport, and then he walked back. “Common denominator in all this is me.”

  “Someone is trying to get at our Thumps,” said Duke. “Get inside his head.”

  “That’s the way I read it,” said Leon.

  “Still could be a prank,” said Duke.

  Thumps nodded. “Could.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Only thing we can do,” said Thumps. “Wait to see what happens next.”

  Leon flipped the silver dollar. “Call it,” he said. “You win, and you and Marshal Dillon get me as a free consultant.”

  “Sure as hell can’t pay you,” said Duke.

  Leon caught the coin and peeked under his hand. “Damn,” he said. “You are one lucky son of a buck.”

  “He like this all the time?” said Hockney.

  “No,” said Thumps. “Sometimes he can get really annoying.”

  Twenty-Two

  Hockney went right to the table by the filing cabinets and touched the side of the old percolator. “Ready to go.”

  “Never turn down coffee,” said Leon.

  Thumps felt somewhat aggrieved that Duke had started making drinkable coffee. After years of drinking the glop that had come out of the sheriff’s coffee pot, it didn’t seem fair that Leon should miss that minor rite of passage.

  “Sheriff’s coffee,” said Thumps, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “Not what it used to be.”

  “Sarcasm is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” said Duke.

  “Patriotism,” corrected Thumps. “‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’”

  “Here,” said the sheriff. “Make sure you keep it charged.”

  “I don’t need a cellphone.”

  “It’s not yours,” said Duke. “It belongs to the city.”

  “I don’t want the city’s cellphone.”

  “You have to carry one when you’re acting sheriff,” said Duke. “You might as well practise.”

  Leon grinned. “You’re going to be acting sheriff?”

  “Temporary,” said Thumps.

  Leon turned to Duke. “Vacation?”

  “Something like that,” said Duke. “You want cream or sugar?”

  “Just black,” said Leon.

  “Good,” said Hockney, “’cause we don’t have cream or sugar.”

  What Thumps wanted was to go home and crawl into bed. He wasn’t particularly tired, but since he had arrived back in Chinook, he hadn’t had much time to himself. It would be pleasant to lock the door, crawl under the covers, and just lie there in the dark. He didn’t think it was depression. It was more the exhaustion that comes with being alive.

  “Damn,” said Leon. “Now that’s coffee.”

  “Hear Lorraine had a boy.” Hockney pulled the tin of cookies out of his drawer and set them on the desk. “But they can’t agree on a name.”

  “My sister has one of those baby-name books,” said Leon. “Must have close to a thousand names in the damn thing.”

  “Word is that Lorraine wants a name that’s imposing.”

  “Imposing?”

  “You know,” said Duke, “something with at least three syllables.”

  “Edward,” said Leon.

  “Only two syllables.”

  “Percival,” said Leon. “He was some kind of knight.”

  “According to Dora Manning, whose niece works at the hospital, Lorraine is considering Orlando, Leander, and Jeremiah.”

  “Lotta name for a baby to be dragging around,” said Leon.

  “While Big Fish,” said Duke, “wants something that people will remember. Memphis, Yancey, Ishmael.”

  “Ishmael?”

  “Right now, Big Fish is calling the baby Little Fish, and according to Dora’s niece, that isn’t going over so well.”

  Thumps tried to imagine in what universe Big Fish thought he would win an argument with Lorraine.

  “A
nd all this before they even decide on whether the boy is going to have Lorraine’s last name or Big Fish’s or if they’re going to do that hyphenated thing that turns the kid into a zip code.”

  Big Fish would be better off just to agree with whatever Lorraine wanted, amass as many air miles as he could in the process, and live to lose another day.

  Duke yawned and closed his eyes. “So, what do you want to do?”

  “About Big Fish?”

  “Big Fish is on his own,” said the sheriff. “Man fool enough to take on Lorraine Chubby is beyond help. What do you want to do about our little mystery?”

  “How about we start over,” said Leon. “Put the whole thing together piece by piece.”

  “You make it sound like a puzzle,” said Duke.

  “It is,” said Leon.

  “Sure,” said Duke. “Except we don’t even know if we have all the pieces.”

  “So we work with the pieces we have,” said Leon.

  “Be my guest,” said the sheriff. “I’ll sit back and referee.”

  “Late summer on the coast,” said Leon. “Tourist season is almost over. Then suddenly, we’re up to our necks in bodies.”

  Hockney held up a hand. “Bodies with a piece of obsidian in their mouths.”

  “That’s right,” said Leon.

  Duke nodded. “Were they all killed the same way?”

  “Bludgeoned,” said Leon. “The killer used pieces of driftwood and rocks, anything that he could find at hand.”

  “Up close,” said Duke.

  “And smart,” said Leon. “He doesn’t have to bring a weapon with him or take it away.”

  “Were you able to arrange the victims in order of killing?”

  “No,” said Thumps. “By the time we found all the bodies, there was no way to establish the timeline.”

  Leon looked at Duke. “In most cases, we knew they were dead before their families knew they were missing.”

  “So they weren’t all discovered right away?”

  “Best we can figure,” said Leon, “is that they were killed over two days, three at the most.”

  “The bodies were left in the dunes and the seagrass. Above the high-tide mark,” said Thumps. “A lot of people walk the beach, but they stay near the water. Nobody much goes into the deep sand.”

  “Ballsy,” said Duke. “Each trip to the beach would expose him.”

  “Sure,” said Leon, “but the chances he’d be noticed were slim.”

  “Still, you put out queries?”

  “We did,” said Leon. “Ads in the local and state papers. Television. The internet.”

  “And you got nothing?”

  “Worse,” said Leon. “One guy swore that he had seen his next-door neighbour at the beach with an axe.”

  “Let me guess,” said Duke. “A neighbour with whom he had a beef.”

  “Lawsuit,” said Leon. “Then there was the mother of two who fingered a secretary in her husband’s office. Said she was walking on the beach when she saw the secretary come out of the seagrass with blood on her hoodie.”

  “And?”

  “We checked. The secretary was in Mexico on vacation at the time of the killings.”

  “Nothing like a serial killer to bring out the best in people.” Duke ambled over to the coffee pot. “So, no leads. No timeline. The wild card is Raymond Oakes, and you guys didn’t know about him until a couple of weeks back.”

  “All correct,” said Leon. “But Thumps had an interesting idea.”

  “He gets one of those every so often,” said Duke.

  “Once we knew about Oakes, we went back to the evidence and tested the obsidian that was found in the mouths of the victims.”

  Duke poured himself a cup of coffee and let the steam flow over his face. “Because if Oakes had killed Tripp and her daughter, and a serial killer had murdered the other people, then the obsidian would be different.”

  “That was the thinking,” said Leon.

  “And?”

  “Inconclusive.”

  “Which brings us to Nina Maslow and her research,” said Thumps. “Maslow dug up Oakes, and she did a rough profile of the serial killer.”

  “Let me guess,” said Duke. “They don’t match.”

  “Not even close,” said Thumps. “Maslow believed that the Obsidian killer was well educated, wealthy, and extremely intelligent. She was sure that Northern California wasn’t his first.”

  “Whereas Raymond Oakes didn’t even graduate from high school,” said Leon. “He was in jail before he was twenty and barely out when the killings took place.”

  “Okay,” said Duke. “Let’s back it up a bit. Maslow would have been able to do a full background check on Oakes, but she had no way of doing a reliable profile on a ghost. Our serial killer could have been a woman for all Maslow knew.”

  “Possible,” said Leon. “But not likely.”

  “And profiling isn’t a hard science,” said the sheriff. “Mostly, it’s a good guess.”

  Thumps took the two files out of his bag and handed them to Duke. “You remember John Douglas and Robert Ressler?”

  “Names ring a bell.”

  “FBI agents,” said Thumps. “In the late ’70s, they looked at thirty-six serial killers to try to figure out what made them tick.”

  “Split them up into organized and disorganized,” said Leon.

  “Not much of a profile,” said Duke.

  “Disorganized criminals were generally young, drunk or high, or mentally ill. They were sloppy, left all sorts of trace evidence lying around.”

  “And generally got caught,” said Leon.

  “Whereas organized criminals were smarter,” said Duke. “That’s pretty much common sense.”

  “Douglas and Ressler’s general premise was that behaviour reflects personality.”

  “Now there’s a T-shirt,” said Duke. “‘Behaviour Reflects Personality.’”

  “Anyway,” said Thumps, “that’s what Maslow did. She looked at the crime itself and then began working her way back to the criminal. What triggered the crime? Who were the victims? How were they killed? What happened to the bodies? Was there any post-offence behaviour?”

  “You mean such as writing letters to the press or phoning investigators?”

  “Right,” said Leon. “Evidently, that happens a lot. Nothing like a little publicity to float a serial killer’s boat.”

  “But in the case of the Obsidian Murders,” said Thumps, “the killer made no attempt to insert himself into the investigation.”

  “Okay,” said Duke, “I get that Maslow figured the guy for organized. Killing ten people takes some planning, but there’s no way she would have known what triggered the killings. And, as I remember, there didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to how he chose his victims.”

  “True,” said Leon. “The victims ranged in age from twenty-two to seventy-one, men, women, and one child. Some were local. Some were tourists passing through. The only constant was that their bodies were arranged in the sand and each victim had a piece of obsidian in their mouth.”

  “I get the organized and smart part,” said Duke. “Guy commits multiple murders and gets away without leaving a trace. But how did Maslow come to the conclusion that the guy was well educated and wealthy?”

  Thumps could feel his shoulder tightening. “Maslow saw the obsidian as a clue. A number of cultures, such as the Olmecs and the Aztecs, would put stones in the mouths of the dead. Jade, pearls, obsidian. That kind of symbolism wouldn’t be common knowledge.”

  “Our perp could have looked that up on the internet,” said Duke. “Wouldn’t have to go to university to play Aztec.”

  “No,” said Thumps, “he wouldn’t.”

  “And he could just have a thing for obsidian.”

  “He could,” said Leon.

  “Which brings us to the wealthy part.” Duke leaned back in the chair and rested his hands on his stomach. “Impress me.”

  “I think Maslow wa
s guessing,” said Thumps.

  “No shit,” said Duke.

  “None of the victims were robbed. Nothing was taken. Credit cards, jewellery, cash. One of the victims, a lawyer out of San Francisco, had a forty-thousand-dollar watch on his wrist.”

  Duke snorted. “What idiot takes a forty-thousand-dollar watch to the beach?”

  “Better question,” said Leon, “is what idiot kills the guy wearing it and leaves the watch?”

  “You know,” said Duke, “I can’t tell an expensive watch from a cheap watch.”

  “Another of the victims had $2,000 cash in his pocket,” said Leon.

  “Thin,” said Duke. “Very thin.”

  “Hell,” said Leon, “thin is all we’ve got.”

  “So, what about this Raymond Oakes?”

  “Oakes doesn’t fit the profile,” said Thumps, “and Maslow couldn’t see him leaving an expensive watch and that much cash behind.”

  “But she thought he could have killed Anna Tripp and her daughter.”

  “Yeah,” said Leon. “Maslow thought that was a possibility.”

  Duke sighed. “So we’ve either got a brainy, rich serial killer spreading joy wherever he goes, or we have a serial killer and a homicidal spouse. Is that about it?”

  Leon nodded. “I think that covers it.”

  The sheriff stood up and stretched. “You want more coffee?”

  “Sure,” said Leon.

  Duke brought the coffee pot over. “Today, it’s a Brazilian blend with black cherry overtones and hints of tobacco.”

  “Perfect.”

  “But what I don’t get,” said Duke, “is the time delay. When you went back to the coast to poke around, did you find anything new?”

  Thumps pushed his cup forward. “Just Raymond Oakes.”

  “While here in Chinook, we get a break-in at the county morgue, where someone leaves a piece of obsidian on the autopsy table,” said Duke. “You get a pocket watch in the mail that supposedly belonged to Oakes. And someone steals a car that is painted black.”

  “Obsidian black,” said Leon. “And don’t forget the movie folks.”

  Duke shook his head. “What kind of people go around making films out of someone’s misery?”

  “Like you said,” said Leon, “it could be a bad joke.”

  Duke put the pot on his desk. “We even know what this Oakes character looks like?”