Murder in the Air

by Bill Crider

  “I hope he shows up,” Lawton said. “Hope he likes orange, too.”

  The county’s jail jumpsuits were a particularly awful shade of orange. Lawton hated them almost as much as the prisoners did. They were the Lester Hamilton of jumpsuits.

  “You find out anything in Mount Industry?” Hack asked Rhodes.

  “Not a thing. Somebody will have to take charge of those chickens, and for now that’s Jared Crockett. If Hamilton left a will, that might change.”

  “A man like Hamilton always leaves a will,” Hack said. “It’ll be on file at the courthouse.”

  “None of my business, though,” Rhodes said.

  “Not yet, you mean.”

  “It was just an accident.”

  “Right,” Hack said.

  “Right,” Lawton said.

  Rhodes figured he might as well join in.

  “Right,” he said.

  8

  Rhodes went home early because he knew he’d have to go out again later when he had a look at Dr. White’s autopsy report on Lester Hamilton.

  Rhodes’s wife, Ivy, was still at work, but when Rhodes went into the house, he was greeted by Yancey, a little Pomeranian, who gave the impression that no dog had ever been so excited to see a human being in the entire existence of dogs and humans. He yipped and yapped and hopped around as if he’d been injected with the blood of the Energizer Bunny.

  Yancey followed along as Rhodes walked on back to the kitchen, where the black cat, Sam, lay in his usual place by the refrigerator. Sam wasn’t nearly as energetic as Yancey. In fact, he was the very model of energy conservation. He opened his yellow eyes and looked at Yancey, who immediately turned and ran off to the bedroom. If Rhodes knew Yancey, he was under the bed, doing an imitation of a quivering dust mop.

  “You ought not to scare the dog,” Rhodes said.

  Sam yawned, showing a pink tongue and fangs that a vampire would have envied.

  Rhodes sneezed. He was allergic to the cat, though Ivy wouldn’t admit it. She said the sneezing was psychosomatic. Little did she know.

  “Come on, Yancey,” Rhodes called.

  He waited a few seconds and saw the Pomeranian poke his head around the doorjamb.

  “It’s safe,” Rhodes said. He went to the door to the little back porch and opened it. “Let’s go outside.”

  Yancey shot across the room and through the door like he’d been scalded. When he reached the enclosed porch, he threw on the brakes and slid across the hardwood floor, coming to a halt only when he hit the door. Luckily, he didn’t hit it hard enough to hurt himself.

  Rhodes looked at Sam. “I guess you’re happy.”

  Sam didn’t even bother to open his eyes, but Rhodes thought he looked smug anyway.

  Rhodes closed the door to the kitchen and opened the screen. Yancey dashed outside, where the much bigger dog, Speedo, waited. Speedo was more or less a border collie. Like Sam and Yancey, he’d become part of the Rhodes household in the course of an investigation Rhodes was pursuing. It seemed as if Rhodes had a knack for accumulating animals, even when, as was the case with Sam, he was allergic to them.

  Rhodes sat on the back step and watched Speedo and Yancey cavort around the yard. Yancey appeared to have no idea that Speedo was about twenty times his size, and he barked and nipped at the larger dog as if they were equals.

  Eventually, Yancey found Speedo’s chew toy, grabbed it, and ran off with it. Speedo went after him to recover it.

  While they worked it out, Rhodes thought about Lester Hamilton. He did some of his best thinking while he sat on the step, or so he told himself, and this was a good day both for sitting and for thinking. The early October air was soft and warm with just a hint of fall as the afternoon wound down. A faint smokey smell from somewhere helped Rhodes forget the stink of Mount Industry.

  Speedo snatched the chew toy from Yancey and sped away with Yancey in close pursuit, yipping all the way, momentarily distracting Rhodes, but then his thoughts turned back to Hamilton, whose death was so convenient for so many people, or would be if the chicken farm shut down. Certainly motive enough for murder, not that Hamilton had been murdered.

  Rhodes thought about William Qualls and Calvin Terrall. Their motives were stronger than those of a lot of others, but even someone like Mitch Garrett had reason to be glad that Hamilton was no longer around.

  “What are you thinking?” Ivy asked, coming out the door behind Rhodes.

  “Lester Hamilton,” Rhodes told her.

  Ivy sat on the step beside him. They watched Speedo and Yancey for a while.

  “Those dogs are crazy,” Ivy said.

  “They’re just dogs.”

  “All dogs are crazy. Why are you thinking about Lester Hamilton, of all people?”

  Rhodes told her.

  “That’s sad,” she said.

  “You’re about the only one who feels that way.”

  “That’s what’s so sad.”

  It was hard to feel sad while the dogs were having such a good time, and Ivy laughed when Speedo ran up and dropped the chew toy at Rhodes’s feet. Rhodes snatched it up before Speedo could grab it again and threw it where Yancey could snap it up and run away with it. Speedo went after him.

  “Are you hungry?” Ivy asked Rhodes.

  “I didn’t have a lot of lunch,” he said, neglecting to mention what he’d eaten. Ivy occasionally lectured him on his poor eating habits and was trying to change them, without any notable success.

  “We’re having vegetarian lasagna for supper,” she said.

  Rhodes had suspected that might be it. She’d made the lasagna a while back and frozen it.

  “That sounds fine,” he said, and he meant it. “I’ve been out to Mount Industry, and I’m not in the mood for chicken. Or even beef.”

  “When do you want to eat?”

  “We might as well eat early. I have to go to Ballinger’s tonight.”

  “To see Hamilton’s autopsy?”

  Rhodes had no desire to watch an autopsy, much less right after he’d eaten. He’d seen more than enough of them.

  “Just to get the results.”

  “All right.” Ivy stood up. “I’ll go heat it up. You can stay out here with your buddies. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  She went inside. Rhodes watched the dogs and thought about Lester Hamilton. After a minute or two, his thoughts drifted to the mysterious Robin Hood.

  So far whoever was going around shooting arrows into the air hadn’t been a danger to anyone, but Mikey Burns had a point about the possibility of worse things happening. Up until now, there hadn’t been any destruction of property unless you counted holes in utility poles. The destruction of Burns’s tire changed that. It was a step in the wrong direction.

  Why hadn’t anyone seen the bowman, or bowperson, if that was a word? He’d been careful to do his work during the night until now, and then he’d gone to a place where concealment was easy. That explained it, Rhodes supposed.

  He’d meant to ask Hack if Ruth had brought in the arrow, but he could go by the jail on his way to Ballinger’s and find out. Not that he expected they’d learn anything from it. It would be just as clean as the others that Robin Hood had used.

  Ivy called Rhodes from inside the house, and he whistled for Yancey. Both dogs came over, and Rhodes roughhoused Speedo for a couple of seconds. Speedo grinned with pleasure, and then Rhodes went inside with Yancey at his heels.

  “Yeah, she brought that arrow in,” Hack said when Rhodes stopped by the jail. “Didn’t do much with it, though. No time, and she’s not gonna find any prints on it anyway. You on your way to Ballinger’s?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You find out anything, you be sure to let us know.”

  “Tomorrow,” Rhodes said.

  Hack didn’t like being out of the loop. “You can’t come by tonight?”

  “Tomorrow’s soon enough.”

  “Okay, if that’s the way you feel.”

  Rho
des didn’t respond to that. “Anything else going on that I need to know about?”

  “Nope.”

  The way he said it made Rhodes think he wouldn’t have been told even if there had been.

  “Good,” Rhodes said. “I like it quiet.”

  He started to leave and had his hand on the doorknob when Hack said, “There might be one little thing.”

  Rhodes turned around.

  “You read the paper yet?”

  Rhodes hadn’t even thought about it. Now he remembered that Jennifer Loam was supposed to have a story about the chicken farm in it.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t even see it.”

  Hack picked up the copy that he had on his desk. “You might want to take a look. That reporter really lays it on the line, and she says there’s more to come.”

  “I’ll read it when I get home,” Rhodes said, turning again to leave.

  “One more little thing,” Hack said.

  Rhodes sighed and turned around. “What?”

  “Deputy Grady says she might get you a witness on that tire shootin’. She says there’s bound to’ve been somebody around there, and she’ll do some askin’ tomorrow.”

  “Good idea,” Rhodes said. “I hope she finds somebody.”

  “She’s good,” Hack said. “If there’s a witness, she’ll find him.”

  “We’ll see,” Rhodes said.

  Ballinger’s Funeral Home had once been a private mansion, or what passed for one in Clearview. Now it served the dead instead of the living.

  Ballinger had his private office in the back of the building in a little brick house that had been the servants’ quarters long ago.

  Rhodes had called from his home to let Ballinger know he was coming, so he went inside the office without knocking. Ballinger sat behind his desk, which as usual was littered with old paperback books, Ballinger’s preferred reading material. He bought them at garage sales for a nickel or a dime. Sometimes for a quarter if it was one he really wanted.

  “Good to see you, Sheriff,” Ballinger said. “Have a seat. Did you talk to Mikey Burns today?”

  What with everything else that had happened, Rhodes had forgotten Burns’s mention of Ballinger as a source of knowledge about terrorism in Blacklin County.

  “I talked to him,” Rhodes said, sitting on the couch that faced the desk. “He mentioned something about a book you’d read.”

  “That’s right.” Ballinger pulled a book out of a small pile to his right. “This one.”

  He held it up so Rhodes could see the cover. The title was The Coyote Connection, and the illustration depicted a young man with black hair and long sideburns. In one hand he held a knife. A woman in a low-cut dress reclined in his other arm. Rhodes supposed he was protecting her. The author’s name was Nick Carter.

  “I can’t find any really old books anymore,” Ballinger said, “so I’ve started reading these Nick Carter books. There must be hundreds of them. This one’s set in Texas. It was published in 1981, and do you know what it’s about?”

  “Terrorism?” Rhodes asked, taking a wild guess.

  “That’s right, and it’s scary stuff. Take a look at the back cover.”

  He tossed the book to Rhodes, who caught it and turned it over. According to material on the back cover, the book was about Middle Eastern terrorists slipping into the United States along with Mexican nationals coming across the Texas border from Mexico at Matamoros and Brownsville.

  “It could happen just the same way right now,” Ballinger said. “Nothing’s changed. The terrorists could come over from somewhere like Cuba, cross the border at Brownsville with some smuggler, and work their way to Washington.”

  “It says here that the goal of the terrorists is assassination.”

  “Right. They’d go to the Capitol and kill all the congressmen they could,” Ballinger went on. “That’s the plan in the book, I mean. Probably they’d avoid the big main highways and maybe even come through a little county like this one. Are you ready for something like that?”

  “From the looks of things,” Rhodes said, turning the book around so he could see the front again, “I don’t have to be ready. Nick Carter would take care of them.”

  “He’s not real,” Ballinger said, “and neither is that supersecret agency he’s supposed to be working for. His methods aren’t exactly the kind of thing the current administration would approve of, either. You’re real. You’re what stands between us and the terrorists.”

  “If they ever get across the border, that is.”

  “They could do it.” Ballinger put the book back on his pile of similar books. “Which is why we need that M-16.”

  Rhodes held the book so that Ballinger could see the cover.

  “Nick Carter just has a knife,” Rhodes said

  “And a Luger and a gas bomb, but like I told you, he’s not real. We need real protection.”

  “If we can get any Homeland Security money, I’d rather use it to get some other equipment. Something a little more practical. More computers, video for all the county cars, that kind of thing.”

  “You can’t shoot terrorists with computers,” Ballinger said.

  “Maybe we’d use arrows.”

  Ballinger got the reference. “Robin Hood up to mischief again, huh?”

  “He’s more the kind of thing we have to deal with around here than any terrorists,” Rhodes said, and he told Ballinger about Burns’s tire.

  “Mikey loves that little red car,” Ballinger said. “I’ll bet that flat tire got him plenty upset.”

  “It did,” Rhodes said.

  He didn’t mention the note, which had upset Burns even more.

  “You think you’ll catch who did it?” Ballinger said.

  “We’re working on it. If we catch him, we wouldn’t want to use an M-16 on him.”

  “I guess not. Tear him up too bad. You don’t want to use it unless you got terrorists in your sights.” Ballinger shifted in his chair. “You want to see that autopsy report on Lester Hamilton?”

  “That’s what I came for.”

  “Here it is,” Ballinger said, getting it out of a drawer.

  Rhodes got up and handed the book back to Ballinger, taking the report from him in exchange.

  “You won’t like it,” Ballinger said.

  “I was afraid of that,” Rhodes said, and he started to read.

  Dr. White’s conclusion was that Lester Hamilton had died by drowning. Rhodes had expected that. What he hadn’t expected was the discovery that the marks on Hamilton’s right wrist weren’t made by a catfish.

  That wasn’t true. He’d expected it. He just hadn’t wanted to admit it. He’d spent most of the day denying it, but there it was, right there in the report.

  In layman’s terms, what Dr. White said was that the marks weren’t consistent with the bite of a catfish, or any other kind of fish for that matter. They’d been made, he suspected, by a rope. He’d found no trace of fibers, so he couldn’t prove his suspicions, but he was certain that there was no catfish involved. That pretty much settled it, Rhodes thought.

  Even though there wasn’t any proof of it, Lester Hamilton had been murdered.

  9

  “Murdered?” Ivy asked. “isn’t that pretty much just an assumption?”

  “It’s more than that,” Rhodes said. “Somebody got a rope around Hamilton’s wrist and held him under the water.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, that’s the problem. There was nobody else there, and it didn’t look like anybody else had been there.”

  Rhodes and Ivy sat at the kitchen table with the Clearview Herald between them. Rhodes hadn’t looked at Jennifer Loam’s article yet. Sam lay by the refrigerator, and Yancey was nowhere to be seen. Cowering under the bed, most likely.

  “What about Hal Gillis? Didn’t you say he was there?”

  “He was, but it’s hard to think of him as somebody who’d kill Hamilton.”

  “Has anybody you’ve ever arrested for m
urder looked like a killer?”

  “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “So you’d better look at Hal Gillis pretty closely.”

  “You have something against him?”

  “No, but he was there and nobody else was. I’d think that would make him a prime suspect.”

  “I thought I was the professional lawman in this family.”

  “You are. It just seems logical to suspect Hal.”

  “I’ll put him on my list,” Rhodes said, and then he sneezed.

  “I dusted in here a couple of days ago,” Ivy said.

  “It’s not dust.” Rhodes looked at Sam, who was looking back, his rest disturbed by the sneeze. “It’s the cat.”

  “You aren’t allergic to Sam, and I wish you’d quit pretending that you are.”

  Rhodes sneezed again. “Right.” He pulled the paper to his side of the table. “I need to read Jennifer Loam’s article about the chicken farm.”

  “I read it,” Ivy said. “Lester Hamilton would be rolling over in his grave if he had one.”

  Rhodes thought about Hamilton’s current autopsied state and said, “I don’t think he’ll be moving much.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  Rhodes grinned. Then he sneezed.

  “Go ahead and read the article,” Ivy said. “I’m going to shower and go to bed.”

  When he’d finished reading Jennifer Loam’s story, Rhodes laid the paper on the table. Hack and Ivy hadn’t been kidding. The article was a powerful indictment of factory farming. Loam said that Hamilton had managed to make such great profits because he’d shifted a lot of his costs to the taxpayers, and that he’d done great harm to the environment. She said that while the chicken farm generated as much pollution as many regulated industries, it was exempt from antipollution laws because it was considered “agriculture.”

  All in all, it was an article that William Qualls must have loved, and it gave Rhodes at least one bit of new information. Somehow, Loam had found material that proved the incinerators used to burn the carcasses of dead chickens were inadequate. The incinerators were too small, and often the second stage of burning was skipped. Qualls had suspected something along the same lines.