“You got some crime scene gloves in this trunk?” I asked Starnes.
“In that red tool kit there. Whataya got?” she said.
“Not me. Sam. Brought us an empty bottle.”
Starnes expression was one of incredulity.
“And this is important why?” she said.
“Sam’s my best kept secret. This bottle is important to your investigation, I can promise you that.”
“Where’d he find it?” Starnes asked.
Sam took off down the creek as soon as her question was posed. He traveled in the direction the white truck was likely heading when it went off the side and into the water. At least the tire tracks would suggest that strongly. I trotted along behind him; Starnes was running next to me. He stopped about two hundred yards from where the vehicle had gone into the creek. He walked around what appeared to be some kind of makeshift fire pit. There was a sleeping bag, a pair of old boots, empty tin cans which had housed some pork and beans, and several more empty bottles of Old South Whiskey. Someone had attempted to have a party. Pork and beans and whiskey – not on my list of party favors.
“And this is important because?” Starnes said.
“Ask the dog. Don’t ask me. One crisp bark means yes, two crisp barks indicate no,” I said for clarification.
“You jest,” she said. Skepticism reigned supreme.
“Not even a hint of humor.”
“You know I’m a scientist, don’t you?” Starnes said.
“Yeah, and I know you called me and told me to bring the dog.”
She sighed.
“Sam, is this stuff here important to my crime scene?” Starnes asked as if not expecting a reply.
Sam barked once.
Chapter Nine
Two days later the white truck was removed from the Break Rock Fork area and hauled to Madison. Since the village had barely enough space for Starnes’ office and county jail, the acting sheriff had to search for a place to house and inspect the evidence. She found an empty building that had been used as an automobile dealership downtown Madison. The spacious structure afforded her ample room needed to thoroughly examine the truck, take it apart, and then put it back together. Deputy Benjamin Bevel happened to be the nephew of the former owner of the dealership as well as the current owner of the building. Ben called his uncle just to be sure all was okay for the acting sheriff to utilize the facility. Sounded political to me, but I’m a foreigner in McAdams County and not used to the ways and means of the locals. Ben gave Starnes a thumb’s up and my persnickety crime scene friend was in business.
It took another three days to get the lab results back after Starnes had finished taking the truck apart and reassembling it. As might be expected, there were multiple sets of prints on the truck, several of which were either smudged or unidentifiable with the databases available to Starnes. Five sets came back that matched existing records. Abel Gosnell owned the truck and his prints were clearly evident. Adam Gosnell and his son, Cain, had some discernible prints on various parts of the truck. Again, no surprises there. Mina Beth Cody’s prints from the truck were a match to prints in her file.
Abel’s prints were matched to his military service record. He had served during the second Gulf War. Adam’s prints came from his Korean War record where he had served with distinction for almost five years. Cain’s prints were from his jacket with the police in Asheville as well as the local law enforcement of McAdams County. Cain had notable disagreements with the law over drunk and disorderly convictions, excessive speeding, and domestic violence. The one surprise was Mina Beth’s prints. She was in the system because she had been charged with killing her step-mother. Charged with second degree murder and was acquitted. My, my.
I was sitting in Starnes’ tiny office when she came in after lunch.
“Finished with the truck?” I said.
“Yeah. Just checking everything again.”
“Find any blood?” I said.
“A little, but not enough to make me think the truck is the actual crime scene.”
“Unless you have a better plan, I suggest we return to Break Rock Fork and widen our search area.”
“It’s at the top of my to-do list. I want the three of us to go back where we found the truck and walk down the river.”
“You mean the creek?”
“Whatever. The water out there. I have a hunch that we’ll find the body somewhere in the river… ah … the creek. It’s all water to me. Let’s just find that body.”
“Let’s take the Jeep. You can ride and think while I entertain you with stimulating conversation.”
“Be still my heart,” Starnes said with little emotion.
Forty minutes later, we arrived at the spot beside the creek where we believed the white truck to have entered the water. It was mid-afternoon and strangely warm for an early November day. There had been no rain in the county for over a week and the drought conditions were actually helping our investigation. Despite the merciful weather, our investigation of the missing Abel Gosnell was getting nowhere.
As far as Starnes and I could ascertain, the last rain must have come a few days before Gosnell disappeared. We were basing that on the fact that we had some well defined tire tracks imprinted in the ground near the creek. The ground must have been soft enough at the time the white truck went airborne to leave behind our tiny lead.
I parked the Jeep near the tracks, but not so close as to raise the ire of Starnes.
Sam headed out at a rapid pace after he had listened to our conversation en route about following the course of the water in search of the body. Starnes and I followed fifty yards behind him as we began our pursuit. His nose allowed him to move at a faster pace than our eyes permitted us to scan the water in search of any possible remains. It wasn’t long before Sam was out of sight due to the twist and turns of the road and the water. Our two legs were no match for his four fast ones.
“Wait,” Starnes said after we had walked in silence for a good while. “You see that over there?” she pointed toward an object which the water had swept against a fallen tree branch in the creek. “I think it’s a shoe.”
“I think one can expect to find shoes in this water,” I said. “People dump everything imaginable along with things unimaginable in bodies of water.”
“I want that shoe,” she said.
“You want me to call Sam to retrieve it?”
“I do not. Sam is on his own trail. I’ll get the shoe. You wait here and stay dry,” Starnes said as she headed down the side of the creek bank and waded into the water without removing her boots this time. Carefree and purposeful.
She waded across the narrow channel and retrieved the shoe that had been lodged in a tree fall from on the other side of the small waterway. I called it a tree since it was a large branch a good ten inches in diameter. It was large enough to be a tree all by itself. She sloshed her way back across to my side and up the bank. She handed me her treasure as if she had found King Tut’s crown.
“Don’t fondle that. I’ll get a bag from the trunk… oh, damn, we’re in your car,” she said.
“I have bags,” I said.
“Really? Since when does a private detective carry evidence bags?”
“I didn’t say I had evidence bags. I said I have bags.”
“What type of bag?” she asked.
“Plastic bags.”
“Like from the supermarkets?”
“You got it,” I said.
“In the Jeep?” she said.
“Where else?”
“You could have brought one with you,” Starnes said with absolutely no humor in her voice or twinkle in her eyes. I should have anticipated our finding more clues. Silly me.
“I’ll head back and retrieve the Jeep taking the shoe with me. I will secure your evidence and bring the Jeep closer to us. You go on and try to find Sam.”
She moved on ahead without answering. I walked back the opposite direction holding the wet shoe so as not to destro
y any potential trace evidence. I learned that word from Starnes and her laboratory work in Norfolk. It’s that small minutiae of stuff that supposedly entraps the careless suspect and makes the judicial system work more effectively by putting the right people behind bars when it is discovered and documented properly. But what do I really know of such things? I occasionally watch crime dramas on television or read about such stuff in Baldacci. All I knew was that Starnes had found a man’s shoe stuck in a large tree branch in the creek a few hundred yards downstream from where a white truck had crashed.
Still, it was more than we had at the beginning of our investigation. I’m used to the little by little routine of stumbling along frantically searching for things to add up. I’m the one who plods along desperately seeking clues, leads, and people to interview en route hopefully to stumbling upon some glimmer of truth. My job is to aggravate people into confessing or doing something dubious that exposes their guilt or my keen suspicions. Keen is sometimes defined as luck. Dumb luck, if truth be told.
I dropped the shoe into the bag that had the name Super Store Gargantuan, tied the two handles together, and left it in the back of the Jeep. Not exactly what Wineski would call securing the evidence, but it was the best I could do at the moment. Twenty minutes later I caught up with Starnes standing along the dirt road next to Sam. They were studying something in the creek.
Chapter Ten
I am always fascinated by the power of water to forge its way through rock, dirt, sand, and whatever other obstacle might stand in its way. It may take several hundred million years to get where it is headed, but its tenacity pays off. It also has the capacity to widen its borders for seemingly no apparent reason other than it wants to. It can go along pencil thin for miles and miles, and then decide to increase its width. Water is powerfully relentless with only the motive to get where it is going.
Starnes and Sam were standing at just such a place in the small creek that fed the French Broad River. Out of nowhere, it seemed to me, the creek widened some fifty or sixty feet and right in the middle of the now larger stream was an island of rock large enough to split the creek into two channels. On the rock island were several notable tree-falls. Notable because there were no trees growing on this particular island. No doubt the relentless water had unceremoniously discarded the downed trees on this barren landscape to rest and rot. Goes to motive.
In the branches of one of the larger tree-falls lying still as death on the rock island in the middle of stream was the decaying corpse of someone I presumed to be Abel Gosnell. Since we were not looking for anyone else, it was an easy conclusion. Still …
“Probably our guy,” I said as I approached Starnes.
“The dog found him.”
“Way to go, Sam,” I said and patted him on the head.
“I would have missed him completely,” she said.
“Naw, you would have seen that,” I tried to be encouraging.
“Don’t think so. The decaying is blending in all too well in that downed tree. If I was using binoculars from here, then maybe I would have ascertained enough to know I was looking at a decaying human carcass. I doubt if a human eye could have made it out from this distance.”
“Rosey could have,” I said.
“That man you have with you from time to time?”
“Yeah, that man. Dead-eye Rosey Washington. Marksman extraordinaire. You’re a fair shot as well, I’m told.”
“Don’t let the tales get ahead of the facts. I can shoot squirrels, rabbits, and anything larger that moves on the land. But when I do that, I know what I am looking for. That carcass out there is not something I normally have in my sights. Remember, we were looking for a missing man, not necessarily a decaying corpse.”
“You knew it had to be a fifty-fifty proposition – alive or dead,” I said.
“Yeah, I knew that. But still, we don’t see that many dead bodies decaying like that in the city. I would have missed it. Give the dog some credit,” she said and rubbed Sam’s back.
I had never seen Starnes show any affection toward Sam in the few years I had known her. She simply was not that kind of person. A whole new page was being writ upon the life of the little girl from the Blue Ridge Mountains of McAdams County, North Carolina.
“He bark and tell you that it was out there?” I said.
“No. He told me to get my butt over here and see what he had found. Of course he barked. How else would he communicate with me?”
“Your sarcasm is noted; however, you need to know that Sam is not a typical canine. He communicates quite adequately with his eyes and other body language. You’d be surprised how we dialogue at times.”
“I am a scientist. I’ve already told you that. I simply remind you that I do not subscribe to any of that dog whisperer crap or whatever you call it for communicating with animals. I admit that his barks do seem to indicate something, but aside from that, forget it. I will not be taken in by your intuitive, diminutive and dubious logic.”
“Shall I take my dog and go home?” I said trying to feign offense.
“Not on your life. I need you now more than ever. The dog, too.”
“Diminutive and dubious?”
“I’ve been working on my communication skills.”
“So I can tell.”
Of course the body Sam spotted lodged in the tree limbs on that island in the creek was that of Abel Gosnell. It had been close to two weeks now from the time Gosnell had been reported missing until Sam found him in the fallen oak. We were in the Medical Examiner’s office in Asheville. Actually, I was in the office, Starnes was back with the coroner studying the remains of Abel Gosnell up close, and Sam was in the Jeep in the parking lot waiting on us.
Starnes Carver entered the office, stood staring at the floor in front of her for several seconds, and then abruptly turned to face me.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Finished?”
“Hardly. But we have something to work with. It’ll take a few days for a final report with the lab work and all. In the meantime, let’s go back to McAdams County.”
“Talk with more people?”
“Yeah. Stories to check out,” Starnes said as we pulled out of the parking lot.
“Cause of death?”
“Preliminary findings are a gunshot wound to the right temple.”
“That would do it. Any bullet fragments?” I asked.
“Nothing at present we can work with. Size of the hole in the skull suggests a handgun that was fired at a medium range distance of, say, three to five feet.”
“Any estimate as to how long Gosnell’s been dead?” I said.
“Rough estimate, but the coroner and I concur that Abel had left this world before he was reported missing – our best guess.”
“Based on …?”
“Decaying remains and some bugs.”
“You can stop with that. I’ll leave those gory details to the likes of you scientists. Suffice to say, he’s been dead at least two weeks.”
“Yeah.”
“So, where to first?”
“The lady that takes care of Daddy needs to get off early today, so we need to head back to the house to look after him. We’ll start first thing tomorrow with some interviews,” Starnes said.
It was after four when we arrived at our living quarters in the remote reaches of the Piney Ridge section of the county. Despite the roughness of the terrain, this area of McAdams County was a bustling community compared to the seclusion of Spillcorn where the Gosnells live. We would be heading up there again tomorrow, I was certain. It seemed the logical point of repetition in our conversations with key people. Starnes was getting the handle on investigative redundancies.
The small Reliant that the caretaker drove was not parked in its usual spot when we pulled up to the house. The house was empty. Oprah was interviewing someone on the television. A search for a note from the caretaker turned up nothing. Starnes made a call to the dispatcher. No one had called regarding
her father.
Starnes made a call to the caretaker on her cell. No answer there either. Starnes took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and stared at nothing in particular through the front window.
I went back outside and noticed that Sam was sniffing around the yard as if he discovered a scent.
“We need to find Mr. Carver, Sam,” I said.
He stopped his sniffing of the yard, looked up at me as if to say what do you think I am doing, and then continued to sniff around the grounds. After a few minutes, he headed up the steep mountain behind the Carver home.
“I think Sam’s onto something. He’s headed up the back mountain,” I called to Starnes who was still inside the house.
“Does he know who we’re looking for?” she said, no doubt for clarification.
“Yeah, I told him.”
“All the technology in the world at our fingertips and we’re asking a dog to help us,” she said to no one in particular. I figured it was directed at me since Sam had already scaled the high hill behind the house.
“You think he’s found a trail?” she asked as we walked around to the back.
“I do. Maybe your father stepped out of the house for a late afternoon stroll up the mountain.”
“He’s not supposed to do that,” Starnes said.
“You do everything you’re supposed to do?”
She didn’t answer as we trotted up the slope with some considerable effort. Sam was a good hundred yards ahead. When we reached the crest of the hill, Sam was standing next to Spud Carver who was sitting on a rock near the gravesite of his recently departed spouse. Sam was sitting next to him offering as much sympathy and quietness as a dog with sensitivity could offer.
“Daddy, I was worried about you. Didn’t know where you got to,” Starnes said as we approached him.
When Blood Cries: A Clancy Evans Mystery (Clancy Evans PI Book 6) Page 5