Sherry Linn put me on hold, and I listened to the Muzak, some symphony’s wavering cover of “The Girl From Ipanema.”
“Hey, Sarge. How are you doing this morning?”
“I’ll be fine, Holly. Thanks for asking, but that’s not why I’m calling. I suspect those two Oxy slingers from yesterday are about to roar through town on 395 in Dave Shannon’s truck, Oregon plate number 597-BBF. I’m in my Jetta or I’d go after them myself.”
“I’m already out the door.”
I parked in front of Dorie Phillips’s Castle Thrift Store and made my way up the stairs to my studio apartment above her shop and living quarters. I expected Louie to be yowling or at least about to get testy, but he gave me a friendly nudge on the side of my leg and took himself out the open door.
I cleaned up, donned my uniform, and replenished Louie’s food and water. I made sure to show him lots of love before I took off, which he reciprocated and then plunked down on his cat pillow.
“See you later, pal,” I said and checked the refrigerator for anything that might have turned moldy or sour and ran a broom across the linoleum in the kitchenette. Proud of myself for managing all of that in about a minute and a half, I locked up and scrambled back down the stairs to my police vehicle.
About an hour after I sent Hollis chasing after the fugitives, he and I simultaneously arrived at the station. Stepping from his twin OSP Tahoe, I noted he had that rheumy look of the parent of a toddler.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, man, but you look like shit.”
“Thanks. I can always count on you for an honest assessment.”
“Sure, anytime. So, tell me about the Oxy slingers.”
“Disappeared before I could catch up with them. On a whim, I drove north on 395 until it seemed like I was on a wild goose chase instead of a pursuit.”
“Well, we gave it a shot. Let’s put out an APB, see what turns up.”
Sherry Linn placed her desk phone on its receiver as we entered the office. “I was just about to dial your number, Maggie. A woman named Janine Harbaugh claims it’s crucial she speak with you right away.”
“Was she calling from the Aldrich Mountain Fire Lookout?”
“Not sure, but here’s her phone number.” Sherry Linn handed me a note from the pad of the special stationery she’d ordered up, our office contact info printed at the top. Another one of her contributions to our newly constituted façade of professionalism.
Janine Harbaugh and I went back a long time. As a kid, she’d been my sometime babysitter, taught me how to pluck my eyebrows and apply makeup. That may have been the only time I ever did such a thing, except for dabbing on the occasional spot of lipstick. She was now the full-time summer volunteer at the fire lookout.
Janine picked up on the first ring. “Harbaugh.”
“Maggie Blackthorne returning your call.”
“Maggie, I spotted Dave Shannon’s stolen pickup with my fire finder. It’s been moving from point to point in the forest nearby.”
“How’d you know his truck was stolen?”
“I’m a ham operator. Got my radio out here with me. Know about those thieves who stole it too. So far the driver hasn’t pulled over, and so far I’ve been able to track it. Don’t know how long I can keep that up, though. They might head up some byroad or behind a bluff out of range of my finder—or my backup binoculars, for that matter.”
“By any chance, did you notice the F-150 out there yesterday?”
“No, but like I say, unless they’d set something on fire, they coulda been out there but blocked from my view.”
“Okay, Janine. Thanks for calling. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Like yesterday, I traveled west on Highway 26 until I reached Forest Route 21, then headed toward Aldrich Mountain and the Murderers Creek Wildlife Area. I came to the guard station where J.T. Lake’s body was found. It had taken on a forlorn specter, crime scene tape draped in an X over the chained and padlocked door. The entire scene reminded me of the man who had been hacked to death in the backyard of the place.
Continuing on, the climb grew steep, parched mountain brome grass now lined the narrow roadway. I passed an occasional thicket of Ponderosa pine and western larch and meticulously dodged the magpies scavenging the dry earth for small mammals, grassland invertebrates, and carrion.
I took the first graded track again bearing west. Road 2150 wound through the Murderers Creek Wildlife Area, which was spread out over more than fifty thousand acres in at least half a dozen parcels separated by BLM and Forest Service land, as well as privately owned property.
Under the day’s sky of jacinth and amber light, the forest thinned and opened up to a view of the entire Aldrich range and further west, the Ochoco Mountains.
On a little further, I shifted into four-wheel drive and took the fork to the fire lookout, dust fanning out from under and behind my rig. It was slow going until I crested a large knoll and cut through a small valley, blood-red Herefords ranging on either side of the road. I crossed over a cattle guard where the buckled macadam began to wind and rise up another sheer incline, eventually ending at a parking lot twenty feet below the tall wooden lookout.
I hiked up the hill and climbed the thirty or so steps and past Janine’s living quarters to the observation deck at the top. Through the open doorway she called for me to enter the space, which was glassed in on all four sides.
She was manipulating what I knew to be the fire finder, a circular ring attached to a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree map and mounted on a table in the center of the observation deck. The finder’s eyepiece was directly across from a brass sight.
“I can spot smoke from pretty far off with the fire finder. And to home in on the general location of the flames, I rely on these giant topographical maps.” Janine pointed to the maps tacked above the bank of viewing windows.
I nodded, recognizing for the first time how fire watch requires more than sitting on top of a mountain and staring out at the view.
She continued, “But I sometimes have to also use my Sunagor binoculars. Those babies are powerful. And because of the up-and-down nature of mountainous terrain, they come in handy. Anyway, name something you want to check out through the finder.”
“Oh, how about locating Cummings Creek for me.”
Janine found the creek on her map, rotated the finder’s brass sight to that spot on the map, and looked through the eyepiece. “Here, take a look.”
I tried it. “I’m not seeing much.”
“Try adjusting the eyepiece. It’s a little hard to get used to, but it’s pretty powerful once you get the hang of it.”
I did as she suggested. “Wow. That’s amazing. It’s like I’m right there.”
“Now let me direct you to them car thieves.”
She rotated the contraption again, and I looked through the eyepiece. I didn’t immediately locate Dave Shannon’s caribou-colored truck, but eventually I was sure I saw those idiots speeding our way.
“Do you need the Sunagors?”
“Nah. They’re close enough to view through the finder.”
Stop-start, stop-start, they appeared to be looking for something. And when it seemed they found it, I checked the map at the base of the fire finder. They’d turned up an unimproved course that branched off of FR 2150 not far from the lookout.
“Got ’em,” I said. “Thanks, Janine. That’s a big help.”
“Anytime, Maggie. I ain’t a fan of car thieves.”
I could have told her that Anna Jo Porter and Vincent Cruise, Jr., were capable of much worse than auto theft. Instead, I gave her a swift little hug and shuttled back to my parked vehicle.
I motored to the forest route the Oxy slingers had taken—number 2170, read its rickety signboard. It was hardly more than a narrow dirt fairway, and I was soon following their tracks past a gate securing a private hunting area and its No Trespassing sign. About a mile further on, the access road ended, opening up to a logged-over meadow.
The signs of the truck’s presence continued on. The outlaw couple had dodged stumps and snags and the occasional large boulder marking a path through the rugged terrain. I did the same, taking care to avoid the obstacles Cruise and Porter had maneuvered around as well as any tricky spots where the remains of late-season snowmelt left the scrub-covered ground slick with a deep layer of pooled mud.
I made it to the far side of the meadow just as the course shifted to a mix of rock and clay, making the fugitives’ trail harder to follow. I idled my Tahoe. Up ahead, an alkali scarp sloped off sharply into a ravine. The earth had been newly disturbed by tire tread, and it looked as though the F-150 had spun out. I put the SUV in low gear, ticked forward slowly, stopped a prudent distance from the embankment, and set the brake.
I got out and edged toward the precipice, crawling on my hands and knees. Dave Shannon’s new truck lay at the bottom of a sixty-foot canyon.
“Goddamnit.”
The pickup appeared to have rolled several times. There were no signs of movement in or around the vehicle. And without adequate equipment, no damned way could I make it down there on my own.
After radioing local dispatch and requesting a rescue crew and two ambulances, I rang Hollis with an update.
“That’s not very far from the Murderers Creek Guard Station. Might those two have had something to do with the killing of Jeremy Lake?” he asked.
“All I know is they’re probably not in any kind of shape to be interrogated at present.”
“And why in hell were they driving around out there?”
“I’ve got no clue, Holly. And the atlas they left in their Toyota didn’t tell me much.”
“Same here. I haven’t turned up anything more instructive than yesterday’s bulletin.”
“Keep digging, oh tenacious one.”
“I’m on it.”
“I’m meeting the rescue-recovery team and ambulances back at the main road. I’ll check in with you sometime after that.”
There was something off about the whole Vincent Cruise-Anna Jo Porter cluster fuck. And now they were no doubt lying dead at the bottom of an Aldrich Mountain gorge.
The rescue crew consisted of Whitey Kern and his heavy-duty wrecker, Sheriff Dirk Rhinehart and five burly deputies, and a few specially trained members of the John Day Volunteer Fire Department. I guided the contingent of rescuers and the two ambulances to the ravine’s edge and helped Whitey stabilize his wrecker as everyone else but Sheriff Rhinehart and the ambulance EMTs began slowly rappelling down to the crumpled truck.
“Don’t look good for the folks inside that pickup, Maggie,” Whitey whispered.
“I’d say not.”
“How’d you find ’em, anyway?”
“I spotted them from Aldrich Lookout.”
“How’d you know to come out here to look for ’em?”
It wasn’t like Whitey to dig for details. In his line of work he’d seen it all and then some. But he rarely asked about particulars beyond where to tow what.
His face reddened. “I should be minding my own dang business.”
It was nearly two o’clock and hot as hell when the recovery team was finally able to wrench the bodies out of the mangled F-150 and raise them from the canyon floor using the pulley system they had rigged together. An hour or so before, a deputy had radioed up to Sheriff Rhinehart to report that both victims were dead, which prompted the EMTs to take their leave and for me to contact Sam Damon.
“Sergeant Blackthorne,” Sam had said, surprised to hear from me a second day in a row. “These kinds of tragedies often come in threes in Grant County.”
If anyone had known about that, it would have been Sam, the only mortician in the county.
A short while after the EMTs had taken off, I went to meet Sam at the main road. By the time I led him to the meadow, the cadavers, placed in stretchers, lay waiting for his care. Whitey Kern had also managed to drag the remains of the F-150 up from the bottom of the ravine and load it onto his outsized wrecker.
Sam asked everyone to participate in a moment of silence. This was a ritual he had skipped yesterday but made up for today with an extra-long oration and prayer for those who’d met with an untimely demise, particularly those souls who arrived at death through some kind of violence or catastrophe—his solemn commemoration of the murdered and the maimed.
Once he’d sounded the amen, Sam and I loaded the bodies in the back of his hearse, while the sheriff and his deputies stood in a circle with the volunteer firefighters, chatting and drinking cold drinks fetched from their coolers.
Before heading back to town, I joined the male gathering. “Thank you for your work here today,” I said.
“What were those two doing out here?” Sheriff Rhinehart asked.
“We don’t know yet. You probably saw the bulletin yesterday, Sheriff.”
“Them’s the two wanted for drug crimes?” he asked.
I nodded.
“If I’d known that, I would’ve let my boys here have the day off.”
It was a well-known fact the sheriff was an asshole, and by their chuckles, it appeared the deputies and some members of the Volunteer Fire Department crew were too. Or Rhinehart was just trying to vex me. But I wasn’t about to let him or any of the other men think I gave two shits about what the sheriff said or did, as long as he didn’t get in my way or break the law.
I extended my hand, and out of male habit, he reached over and took it.
I gripped onto his calloused paw and gave a muscular shake. “It was nice seeing you, Dirk.”
After a long hour back in the office, I hit send on the report recounting my endeavor to apprehend Vincent Cruise, Jr., and Anna Jo Porter, their subsequent calamitous demise, and the efforts to retrieve their remains, as well as those of the Ford F-150 they’d stolen from Dave Shannon.
Speaking of, I called Dave and let him know the thieves had totaled his vehicle.
“Thanks for letting me know. Can I ask where they crashed?”
“Sure. Janine Harbaugh spotted your F-150 from the fire lookout on Aldrich Mountain. She’d heard about the theft over her ham radio and contacted me.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. They weren’t terribly far from the lookout tower when they took a side road and ended up pitching down a canyon.”
“What were they looking for?”
“I have no idea. By the way, Whitey Kern’s taking your rig to the State Police lab in Bend tomorrow. Is there anything you need out of it before he does that?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. I’m curious, though, how bad were the thieves hurt?”
“I’m afraid they’re both deceased.”
“Huh. Guess that’s what happens when you go joyriding off a mountainside.”
I couldn’t tell whether that comment from Dave was a pragmatic assessment or a malicious retort.
I’d spent much of the past couple of days out in the vicinity of Murderers Creek, and I’d begun feeling a bit homesick for our small office. So I was pleased to hear Sherry Linn at the front counter chitchatting with Mark Taylor and Doug Vaughn. I was even happy to see our unit’s two game wardens.
Red-faced, Vaughn turned to greet me as I moved from my desk to the front counter. “Afternoon, Sergeant Blackthorne.”
“Hey, Doug. Call me Maggie. We’re pretty informal around here.”
“Sure, okay,” he said. Vaughn had been stationed in Salem before taking this gig. A lot more stodgy and regimental in the capital city, at least that was my experience working there at the beginning of my police career.
“Maggie,” Sherry Linn inserted, indicating the plastic chair in our makeshift waiting area, “Mr. Kern would like to speak with you.”
I hadn’t noticed Whitey, sitting mouselike in the corner of our so-called foyer.
“Whitey,” I said. “Come on back.”
He followed, greasy cap in one hand, a large paper bag from Chester’s Market in the other, and sat in the chair beside my desk. “I
found some things,” he said.
“Okay.”
“After I got back with my wrecker this afternoon, I decided to load the Volvo from yesterday alongside Dave Shannon’s busted-up truck. That way I’d be ready in the morning to head to Bend.”
Whitey sucked in a bit of stuffy air and continued. “Thing was, I had to move the F-150 over a tad bit to make room for the Volvo. But when I wrenched it up, a few things fell out. Mostly warped metal. Except for these.”
He handed me the bag. “I made sure to wear clean gloves when I picked ’em up and put ’em in the paper sack.”
“That was smart, Whitey.” I opened the paper bag and peered inside. “Thanks for bringing these in. I’d appreciate you not mentioning what you found to anyone.”
“You know I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that.”
“I was pretty sure of it.”
He rose and made his way to the front door, tipping his cap to Sherry Linn on the way out. When I was certain he was gone, I put on gloves, reached into the bag, and lifted out the contents. My hands shook slightly as I laid everything on my desk.
I removed the gloves and dialed Detective Bach.
“Maggie?” he said above the din of road noise.
“Al, I’ve got some news. Jeremy Lake’s missing belt buckle and hat just turned up. Also, his ear and a small ghost gun.”
6
Evening, August 14
“Lordy, a ghost gun?” Al asked. “Those things are sold online as a kit so people can put together their own unserialized, unregistered firearm. How have we managed to allow such weapons to exist? And legally.”
“Well, as Hollis likes to quip, welcome to America?”
“Supposedly for those self-reliant individuals who thrive on building their own guns free of the watchful eye of the government.”
“Probably not the type to take up woodworking.”
Murderers Creek (Maggie Blackthorne Book 2) Page 5