The Love of a Lawman, The Callister Trilogy, Book 3

by Jeffrey, Anna

  When he had finally worked around to the protruding fingers, fighting off swarming flies, he squatted and looked closer. Though before he took the sheriff's job John had never seen a corpse outside a funeral service or a funeral home, in the past few months he had witnessed two—one, an auto accident victim, and the other an elderly woman who had died in her sleep. He might not be familiar with dead people, but living most of his life on a cattle ranch he had seen any number of dead animals. He had more than the average person's knowledge of the decomposition process. Whoever this poor sucker was, he couldn't have been here more than a few days.

  Mae Hamlin had expected to hear from her husband on Thursday, six days ago. "Fuck," John muttered.

  He saw no indication the corpse had been dragged to its burial site and he speculated it must have been carried here from somewhere else by someone on foot. Either the killer was a big, strong dude or he'd had help.

  Another hour passed before Dr. Thornton arrived, followed by a crew of EMTs in Callister's only ambulance. John and Rooster had snapped pictures and combed every inch of the area around the grave. They turned it over to Dr. Thornton. He examined what he could see, then asked that the body be uncovered.

  John, Rooster and Luke McRae tied bandanas around their faces and picked up shovels. They had scarcely turned over soil before a khaki-colored sleeve appeared and John knew, as he had suspected since he first saw the fingers, Frank Hamlin was no longer missing.

  When the EMTs were able at last to lift the corpse from the shallow grave, they saw two dark, dirt-encrusted stains on Hamlin's uniform shirt in the middle of his chest. Gunshot wounds.

  The group stood staring in brittle silence as Dr. Thornton went about his work. Every man present was acquainted with Hamlin on some level. Rooster, who went to the same church, broke into tears. One of the Double Deuce's hired hands had been childhood friends with Hamlin's son and was too distraught to speak.

  With Rooster being the better acquainted with Mrs. Hamlin, John dispatched him to town in the Blazer to bear the message that her husband had been found.

  "It'll be dark before long," John said to the remaining men, battling the lump in his own throat. "It's a long shot, but look around for shell casings or bullet fragments in one of these tree trunks." He didn't expect them to find any, but he issued the order to give them something to do, something to distract them from the grisly sight of the decaying body.

  John walked around the area snapping more pictures. Close to and nearly behind the tree trunk, a chunk of metal caught his eye. He snapped a picture, then gingerly pulled a heavy steel knife from the duff. Double Bs stood out clearly on the hilt.

  John's focus zoomed to the night he had locked Paul Rondeau's similar knife in the safe in the sheriff's office storeroom. John hadn't looked at it since. Was it still there?

  Or had it somehow made its way out of the safe? Had he just now picked it from beneath the pine needles at the head of Frank Hamlin's grave?

  * * *

  When Dr. Thornton finished, the EMTs loaded the corpse into the ambulance and headed for St. Alphonsus Hospital in Boise for the autopsy.

  John rode back to town with the doctor. "How long before we'll know about the gun?"

  "Not long."

  The doctor remained quiet, which was okay with John. Like an old silent movie, the events of the past few days streamed behind his eyes, swerved repeatedly back to the hunting knife and the morning he had released Paul Rondeau from jail, charged with nothing more than drinking and disturbing the peace.

  Something else had been gnawing at him all day. It came to him as the doctor pulled into the courthouse parking lot and John saw the sheriff's department's white Blazer. Where was the Fish & Game Department vehicle that Hamlin drove? John had seen no trace of it. He had been so shaken by the crime and so preoccupied with the body, he hadn't thought of Hamlin's truck.

  He went into his office intent on accomplishing one task. He opened the safe and saw that the knife he had taken from Paul Rondeau was still there, lying on the bottom shelf where he had put it. He hadn't thought it wouldn't be, not really. But he had to check.

  He took the knife back to his desk and compared it to the one he had found at the crime scene. They were identical. The possibilities that fact opened were mind-boggling.

  John reached his apartment after ten thirty. Izzy had left a voice mail message. He wanted to curl up in her soft arms and let her whispery voice drive away the horror of what he had seen, but it was too late to call her, much less see her.

  His heart, having been in race mode all day, felt like a dead weight in his chest. It pounded like a bass drum. He had never felt more lost. He fell into bed exhausted, but lay awake, too keyed up to drop off.

  The last time he had seen Frank Hamlin haunted him. They'd had breakfast together months ago in Betty's Road Kill and Frank had been bragging and brandishing pictures of his new grandson.

  At eleven, the phone rang. Anticipating news, he answered in his official voice.

  "John?"

  Julie? His thoughts flew to his kids and his heart flip-flopped. "Yeah, what's up?"

  "Did I wake you?"

  "That's okay. Something wrong?"

  "I'm, uh, in Boise. You couldn't come down here, could you?"

  John frowned. "When?"

  "Now. I've got a flight booked at six back to L.A.... John, I need you to take the kids."

  That statement brought John to a sitting position. "What? Where the hell are you?"

  "I said I'm in Boise. I can't keep them, John. They're causing trouble between Carson and me. He doesn't want them. I want to leave them with you."

  John stood up. "Where are you?" he asked again.

  "I'm at this big truck stop on the Ontario side of the freeway. Can you come?"

  John knew the one, near the Oregon state line. He grabbed his jeans. "You know it'll take me three hours to get there."

  "This place is open all night. Just hurry, okay?"

  John dressed in minutes. He put a pot of coffee on to brew while he pulled on his boots and combed his hair. If anything had happened to those kids, he would never forgive Julie and that overeducated sonofabitch she had married.

  He filled a thermal cup with hot coffee, grabbed his jacket and hat and headed for Boise. He shaved twenty minutes off the three-hour trip. By the time he saw the truck stop, two dozen scenarios involving his kids and Julie's husband—none of them pretty—had played out in his head.

  He hadn't seen his ex-wife since she moved the kids to California more than a year ago, but he recognized her sitting in a booth working a crossword puzzle. Emotion swept through him when he saw both his boys asleep—Trey on the seat opposite her and Cody with his head on her lap. John crossed the room and scooted in beside Trey, jostling him to make room. The ten-year-old mumbled, but didn't awaken, which kept John from crushing him in a hug. Julie rolled her crossword puzzle book into a tube and stuffed it into her purse.

  She was a pretty woman who had always had her share of vanity. In the artificially cheery restaurant lighting, she looked worse than he had ever seen her. Her long brown hair was pulled back in a collapsed ponytail, loose strands hanging. Against her pale face, her dark eyes looked swollen and red, with smudges of black makeup beneath them.

  "Jesus Christ, Julie, you look like hell. What's going on?"

  "Thanks a lot. You don't look great either."

  The exchange was nothing more than an extension of the animosity that had existed between them for years now.

  "I've brought you the kids," she said, "so that should make you happy."

  "I'm glad to take 'em, but I still want to know why."

  A weary-looking waitress came with a coffee carafe and filled a mug for John. He blew on the surface of the hot liquid, then sipped, waiting for another charge of caffeine.

  "I didn't know what else to do. Carson doesn't want to raise another man's children. If he could have adopted them, perhaps it would have been different—"


  "What kind of a damn nut is he?" John shot her a squint-eyed look as a new concern flew at him. "Has he mistreated 'em?"

  She frowned. "No, no, no. Nothing like that. You always think the worst."

  "Well, I don't get it. One day he wants to adopt them and the next he's kicking them out of his house?"

  "John, please, let's don't argue." Her eyes grew shiny with tears. "I'm under a lot of pressure. I've brought them to you. They're yours as much as they're mine. They wanted to be with you anyway. Trey and Carson have been getting on each other's nerves really bad. Carson doesn't appreciate a nine-year-old's opinions."

  The words in the letter she had written just a few weeks ago came back to him. He wanted to ask what had happened to all the great stuff in Southern California, but what would be the point? "Don't talk to me about pressure. I've got this murder that cropped up—"

  "Murder? In Callister?" A silly grin crossed her mouth. "That's too ironic. What do you know about solving a murder?"

  "Not as much as I'll know next week. I've got to get back. Did you bring suitcases or something?"

  "Outside. I've got a rental car."

  "Then let's get on with it."

  He roused Trey, who was too sleepy to say much of a hello, then picked Cody up from his mother's lap. Carrying Cody and leading a groggy Trey by the hand, he followed Julie out to the parking lot.

  Her good-bye to their sons was short and weepy. The boys were too sleepy to notice. He stood by, trying to piece together what had gone wrong between her and his kids. A conversation needed to take place about the future, but not tonight.

  The sky was turning from deep blue to steely gray when he reached Callister's city limits for the second time in a twelve-hour span. Knowing his parents would be up, he called them. His dad answered the phone. "I've got my kids with me," John told him. "I can't explain why and I don't want to make a big production of it right now, but I need you and Mom to look after them. Can you come to town and pick them up. I'm sure you've heard about Frank Hamlin."

  Twenty-four hours had passed. Everybody in Idaho had probably heard about Frank.

  "Who do you suspect?" his dad asked, his speech revved up with excitement.

  "I can't talk about it. It's under investigation."

  "You don't have to worry. We'll take care of those kids."

  John helped his sons shower and get dressed in clothing he took from their suitcases. Why had Julie dragged them away from their home with nothing more than two small suitcases? She must have left in a hurry.

  "Mom's gonna ship our clothes," Trey said in explanation. "We're not going back," he added defiantly. "Mom's husband's a jerk."

  John stared at him, stumped for a reply. The sudden change in his and his kids' lives refused to mesh with everything else going on in his mind.

  He had nothing but a loaf of bread in his kitchen, so he made toast for their breakfast. It wasn't adequate, but his mom and dad would prepare a feast for them. Before they finished eating, his parents' truck pulled to a stop outside.

  As he walked his sons to the truck, Cody looked up at him with big brown eyes. "You want us, don't you, Dad?"

  "Of course I do." John felt like crying. It was only five a.m., the day hadn't even started and he was already faced with one more crisis he didn't know how to handle.

  Chapter 26

  Like a truckload of rocks, the onerous responsibility that had fallen to him settled on John's shoulders in the shower. What faced him now was no rodeo, where the stakes were nothing more than a fat cash prize and a fancy belt buckle. A good, honest man had lost his life. What could be the reason, other than pure evil?

  John's past, his present and his future formed a pyramid in his mind and atop it sat justice. Everything of value in his life—including the woman he loved—rode on how he handled events in the coming days. He couldn't even let himself be distracted by celebrating the reunion with his children.

  The heavy hunting knife with two Bs engraved on the hilt loomed in his mind. He had to know, besides the one in the safe and the one he had found at Hamlin's grave, how many others this recluse Buck Brown had crafted.

  Phone service didn't exist in isolated mountain pockets, so of course the knife maker had no phone. That would be too easy. John had no choice but to make a personal visit. Rooster had given him directions to where Brown lived on Cabin Creek.

  The phone warbled as he shaved. When he picked up, Isabelle was on the line. A clear memory from the morning John had released her brother from jail fixed itself as firmly as a granite boulder in his mind. "Are you okay? I've been worried. I heard about the game warden."

  "I'm okay, which is more than I can say for poor old Frank."

  "It's so awful. I don't think I ever met him."

  "Nice guy. You'd already left Callister by the time he came to town."

  "Do you have any idea who's responsible?"

  "Not yet, but I expect to know more today."

  "I'll be thinking of you. Is there anything I can do?"

  "I don't think so. I'll be in touch as soon as I can."

  "I love you, John."

  "I love you, too, Isabelle." Emotion swelled in his chest. He wanted to tell her about his boys, but he didn't have time.

  They said good-bye and John glanced at the clock. He had been awake twenty-four hours and more than a day's work awaited him. He felt like a zombie, but he didn't feel tired.

  Before he left for Cabin Creek, he had one more call to make. From the beginning of John's tenure as the sheriff of Callister County, he had been adopted as a quasi protégé by the sheriff of a neighboring county. Walt Cassidy had spent a lifetime in a law enforcement career that spanned three states. He had been everything from a big-city homicide detective to a chief of police in a small town. "I like you," he had told John. "You've got guts and you show promise."

  At the time John had laughed and replied, "Don't get to liking me too much because I'm strictly temporary."

  Most of the time John muddled through legal procedure on his own, having discovered that much of it was plain old horse sense. This morning he didn't want to make a procedural mistake that could cost a conviction. He wasn't too proud to call for help from a man more experienced than he.

  Cassidy told him he had already heard about Hamlin and would leave at once for Callister, which gave John time to go to Cabin Creek and come back before the older sheriff arrived.

  The trip to Buck Brown's was a half-hour ordeal up a rugged road. John had never met Brown and hadn't heard of his artistry until Rooster told him. Indeed, the scraggly-bearded craftsman was what the deputy had said. A recluse. An old hippie. A throwback to the seventies.

  When John showed him the pictures of the knife he had found at the gravesite, Brown said he had made only two like it, confirmed that a few weeks earlier he had sold them to Paul Rondeau and Merle Keeton at a bargain price.

  John's stomach dropped to his boots and his heartbeat took off on a wild tangent. "Do you put your initials on every knife you make?" John asked him.

  "Ever' one. I do it in a way nobody can copy. I'm an artist."

  Creeping down the mountain from Brown's shack, visions of knives and incredible coincidences swirled in John's mind. Paul Rondeau and Merle Keeton owned twin knives. Now John had both in his possession. What were the odds of that?

  While he knew the location of the knives, he didn't know where to find either owner. They could be anywhere.

  Both Rondeau and Keeton had a long history of run-ins with the Fish & Game Department, most of the incidents with Frank Hamlin. Both men, over the years, had paid fines at various times for poaching big game, fishing out of season and illegal trapping and were, even now, at risk of permanently losing their licenses to hunt, fish and trap in Idaho.

  Frank Hamlin must have weighed around one-ninety. John believed his body had been carried to its grave. It would have taken two men.

  When John reached his office, Cassidy was waiting for him. The old lawman had to hav
e driven a hundred miles an hour to reach Callister so soon. They wasted no time going to the crime scene.

  The Fish & Game pickup truck had been on John's mind at various times all night. He and Cassidy had no luck locating it. After several hours of searching and questioning, they stood on the big concrete boat landing and wondered if the green Ford rested at the bottom of Hells Canyon Reservoir, a hundred feet down.

  "Looks like I'm gonna have to call in a diver," John said.

  "Looks like," Cassidy agreed.

  At the grave, they searched for more clues, picking up and labeling items John and Dr. Thornton had overlooked the day before. John showed Cassidy where he had found the knife and related the encounter with Paul weeks back and the morning's meeting with Buck Brown.

  "Then there's your suspects," Cassidy said.

  "It's not that simple. I've got this conflict of interest." John didn't say so, but that was what really weighed on his mind. Determining the suspects had been easy.

  "Like what?" The older lawman gave him a look, his laser-blue eyes almost hidden in a squint.

  "I don't know Rondeau real well these days, but I went to school with him. We're the same age. Keeton's a little older. I've got something going on with Paul's sister. The fact is, we're kinda serious."

  "In a small town, when it comes to a crime committed by the locals, you'll usually have a conflict of interest, John." Cassidy walked to the edge of the trees and looked out over the sunlit landscape. A quarter mile away they could see the Snake River shining like a silver ribbon. He smoothed his hand over his thick mustache. "You can't let a woman, or anything, come between you and the badge. If you do, you won't like yourself and it'll be a mark against you for the rest of your life."