by Steve Goble
“Right.”
“OK. Stop the panic calls. Someone will hear you.”
“Right.”
“And don’t freak out if a cop asks you questions.”
“Oh, fuck.”
“Don’t freak out. Don’t. They gotta ask questions. Doesn’t mean they know anything, OK?”
“OK.”
“Believe me?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m serious. We’re good.”
“OK.”
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Thursday, 10:46 a.m.
THE SUN HID behind gray clouds as Shelly and I stood on the bridge that carried the two-lane highway across Black Powder Creek. Lab people wrapped in blue overalls fussed over the guardrail, the asphalt, the naked maple branches, and the roadside gravel. Shelly and I stood in the middle of the road, right on the yellow stripe. Deputies north and south of us were turning traffic away. Across the river to the north and east, the investigators were walking the corn rows and the bank, looking for clues.
Shelly did a slow spin. “Nothing to see from this spot but farmhouses, and those are not close. This would be a fantastic place to toss a body in the river. Dark night, I’m guessing not much traffic?”
“We are off, as they say, the beaten path,” I answered. “Almost all local traffic on this stretch, very few mere passersby. Big highways pass us by completely.”
She thought. Her tongue stuck out just a wee bit, touching her upper lip, and her eyes rolled skyward. “So, she goes to a party, meets up with someone, presumably a guy, leaves with him and ends up in this river.”
“Possibly,” I said. “And whatever happened, she was bound and beaten, maybe tortured, even. Who would torture her? And why?”
I tried to envision it. An empty stretch of road at night, with a nice long straight stretch of highway so you could see headlights from either direction. Very little traffic in the wee hours. Hell, very little traffic in the daytime. Fog tends to cloak the river here at night this time of year, too, providing extra cover. It had been foggy at my place last night, and probably had been so here, too. It had been foggy Saturday night and early Sunday morning, and the same went for Sunday night and Monday morning and every morning since she had vanished.
The only real danger to a killer dumping his victim here would be campers on the bank below, doing some fishing, or perhaps teenagers pulled off the road to do what teenagers do in parked cars in lonesome places. There were dirt paths on both sides of the bridge that people used to drive down to the bank for some fishing or drinking or whatever. But it would have been easy enough for a killer to confirm whether there was anyone around to inconvenience him before dumping his victim. From the bridge, the killer would be able to see any campfires or lanterns, or any vehicles.
Hell, with a little patience, someone could have emptied a truckload of corpses here, without worrying about witnesses.
One of the lab guys spoke through a white face mask. “Lot of people stop on this bridge?”
I sighed. “Well, not a lot. But people fish from this bridge sometimes. I’ve seen bicyclists stop here to take a piss or a photo of the river. I’ve seen tourists stop to take photos of the river, too. And people walk their dogs out this way.”
“Thought so,” the masked man said. “Lots of evidence of foot traffic, human and canine, but mostly old and mostly scuffs. We can get a few shoe prints, but not much else, and nothing definitive. No signs of struggle here, no blood, no tire marks.”
While the lab guy had given that bleak assessment, I had wandered over to the guardrail. I stared down into the murky water. I imagined Megan Beemer’s body going over the rail, into the water, drifting with the current until it got tangled in the branches of a leaning tree. I wished I had brought the rest of my bourbon.
“Shelly, come here.”
She did.
“Look down there.” I pointed at the field to the north, bordering the river. Dark streaks of furrows, in pairs, entwined with one another in the mud, like traces of a snake orgy.
“Four-wheelers?”
“Yes. Kids come here to fish, or to make out, or to camp and drink,” I said. “And four-wheelers hit these fields just for fun as soon as the corn is out of them. Big, wide-open spaces, no one nearby to disturb, and loud, mud-churning ATV machines full of horsepower. It’s the American way.”
“I suppose just about everyone around here has a four-wheeler?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That won’t deter us from gathering tire prints, though.”
“No, ma’am. And”—I pointed toward the trailer park—“Buzz has a couple of four-wheelers right up there.”
Shelly talked to the lab guys while I pondered the terrain. Our prick guitar player could have brought the girl to Mifflin County, killed her, and dropped her body off this bridge. He had a motorcycle, though, and carrying a dead girl on a motorcycle isn’t the easiest trick in the world. And if Rick was right, the girl had been dumped here while Van Heusen was in jail. Not even the Professor could kill girls while he was behind bars. I’d spent most of last night convincing myself of that.
Our rock band of local esteem, Soul Scraped, had been at that Columbus party, and they practiced just two miles from here. They could have driven ATVs from the trailer park straight across the empty field, without ever even going on the road. They could easily have carried the girl here and dumped her in the river under the shroud of fog and night.
Football stud Jeff Cotton had been at that party, too. I stared across the river. Brian Cotton’s barn-turned-fortress was maybe three miles from here, up on Breakneck Hill and just off of Big Black Dog Road. They had four-wheelers up there, too. Jeff could have come down from that hill on an ATV, crossed Big Black Dog Road, and crossed the field to this spot. He also could have driven here in a truck, for that matter, and dumped her from the bridge.
Or someone else could have driven here from Columbus and dumped her.
Every damned farm in Mifflin County had one or two four-wheelers. We would examine tire prints, scan the ground down there for blood or hair or semen, and maybe at some point we’d match someone with a motive or opportunity to a tire print that we found in the mud by Black Powder Creek.
And maybe the fucker would resist arrest or put up a fight, and I’d get to break a damned jaw or shoot him in the head.
“Whoa, you OK?” Shelly punched me softly on the bicep.
“Yeah, why?”
“Your jaws were clamped pretty tight there, buddy. And you are making fists.”
“Just something I do when I am thinking hard.”
“OK,” she said quietly. “Let’s go talk to our kids and see if they remember a few things now better than they did before.”
“Yep. Follow me to Tuck’s—we’ll leave a vehicle there and go check out the kids together. Figure out our approach that way. Sound good?”
“OK. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Thursday, 12:30 p.m.
WE DID NOT make it to Tuck’s.
“All units in area, possible OD, Jodyville Market. Repeat, possible OD, Jodyville Market.”
Goddamned heroin. That shit was killing people all over Ohio. “Dee Two reporting, I am close. On my way.” Trumpower’s voice blared right after mine. “Unit Three, en route.”
He was coming at the market from a different direction, but our roads converged on the town and he was so close I heard his siren fire up in the distance. I gunned my engine, and soon zipped past the trailer park. I looked for the Soul Scraped guys, and listened, too, but detected no sign of them.
I did hear Trumpower’s siren power down, though. I rounded the corner and saw him. He had beaten me to the market.
I screeched the truck to a stop across the street from the store. Deputy Trumpower was already kneeling by someone prone on the sidewalk. I opened a tool chest in my truck bed. “Need more Narcan, Irwin?”
“Always
do,” he yelled. “Just used my last dose.”
I grabbed my own supply. “Two doses here.” We tended to run out of the stuff as fast as we could get it, as people all around us overdosed on pain pills or heroin. I ran across the road as Shelly parked behind my truck. “Shelly, got Narcan?”
She nodded and headed toward her trunk. In the distance, I heard an ambulance’s sad wail. I hoped we could keep the person alive long enough for an ambulance to do us any good.
I knelt next to Trumpower, who was staring at his watch while checking the victim’s pulse. I did not recognize the dark-haired teen boy lying on the sidewalk, but I recognized the blue lips, blue nails, and shallow breathing. I’d seen those symptoms way too many times. I pulled apart the eyelids of his left eye, and his pupil looked like a period at the end of a sentence. A death sentence.
The breaths came shallow, and labored, but they came. “Time for another dose, Irwin?”
“Yeah, been three minutes.” The training said to wait three to five minutes, but it is hard to wait five minutes with someone dying in front of you. I ripped open a packet and handed the nasal injector to Trumpower. He bent toward the boy’s nose.
Deputy Baxter was taking statements from the handful of people gathered at the scene. “Ought to just let him die,” one man said.
That voice came from behind me. I stood and whirled. A chubby fellow of thirty or so with curly blond hair mashed beneath a John Deere cap stared back at me. “How much does that medicine cost me in taxes, just so this fucker can keep partying?”
Deputy Baxter saw my face and turned away, with a glance at me that said “you don’t want this on my body cam, do you?”
I was precisely in the mood to not take this guy’s shit. Before he could say another word, I had him against the market’s big plate glass window. His head did not crack the glass, but not for lack of effort on my part.
“Ow! Let me go, cop! Jesus Christ!”
I strongly considered busting John Deere boy’s lip. “I let you go, you keep right on going, you got me? You go and go and go until I don’t see your sorry ass anymore, and you hope I never see it again. Got it?”
“Jesus!”
I slapped him. “We don’t just let people die, you got me?” I shoved a bit harder, and my eyes were less than an inch from his. He looked like he was about to piss his pants. “You make me sick. Get the fuck out of here.”
I spun him away from the window, and shoved. He fell on his ass, rolled as fast as he could onto his knees, and got up. Then he ran. Sort of. The John Deere cap got left behind.
People around me were holding up their phones, probably live-streaming my infraction to the world. I wondered whose side Twitter would take, the fuckhead’s or mine.
Someone grabbed my arm. I figured it was Shelly, but when I turned, I saw Tuck.
“What the fuck, Ed?” He tried to say it quietly, but his voice was strained. Shelly stood behind Tuck, scowling at me. The ambulance rolled up just then, its wail making further talk impossible. The siren shut down, and the paramedics sprang from the vehicle and took over the medical chores.
We all stood around, taking turns staring at each other and watching the medics try to pull off another miracle. As they carted the victim away, one of them punched Irwin on the arm. “I think this one is gonna live—this time, anyway. Good job, Trump.”
“Don’t fucking call me that anymore,” Irwin said. “It’s Irwin, OK?”
The paramedic rolled his eyes.
We regrouped and decided Trumpower and Baxter could grab the witness statements so Shelly and I could get back to the murder investigation. Shelly looked as though she could not wait to speak to me in private, and Tuck glared at me from the crowd. The discussion among the bystanders seemed to have turned to whether I should be arrested, fired, or given a medal.
I headed toward my truck, but Tuck was on my heels.
“Ed, what is wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit!” He ran ahead and blocked my truck door. “The other day I watched you corral two guys fighting, one had a fucking knife, and you were all calm and zen and shit. In control. Dispassionate, you said. And now I just watched you try to shove an unarmed bystander through a goddamned window!”
“I’ll shove harder next time, OK?”
Tuck shook his head. “Jesus, Ed.”
“Yeah, Jesus, Ed.” That was Shelly, behind me. “What the hell was that? You trying to lose your job? Get sued?”
I inhaled sharply and closed my eyes. “This is not a banner day, OK? I got a bit carried away.”
“I’ll say,” Shelly said, while Tuck nodded.
“Half an hour.” I turned to look at Shelly. “Give me half an hour, I’ll collect myself, and we’ll meet at Tuck’s. Then, we will go see the band. OK?”
She stared at me, hard, and I thought for a moment she might slap me.
“Half an hour, then I will give you a chance to explain to me why I should not ask your sheriff for another partner.”
“OK.”
She returned to her Mazda. I turned toward my truck. Tuck was already walking toward his bar, shaking his head.
Scott Baxter trotted toward me. “Half the witnesses think you are full of shit, Ed, and half think you let that fucker off too easy.”
“Sounds about right,” I muttered.
“I’m between a rock and a mean pig, Ed.”
I didn’t try to figure out what Bax meant. “Huh?”
“I gotta report what I saw.”
“Oh. Sure. I know. Do the right thing, Bax. It’s your job, right?”
“I kind of wanted to punch the guy myself,” he said, staring at the road. “But we ain’t supposed to do that. He’s got a right to express an opinion and all, right?”
“Yeah. Get your statements, Bax. File your report. Be honest. And it’s all over the goddamned internet by now anyway. Just write the truth. Don’t worry about me, OK?”
“OK.”
I got in the truck, and wished to hell there was bourbon in the glove box.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thursday, 1:35 p.m.
I STOPPED THE truck in the middle of a gravel road few people even knew about. I tried not to think about the partial bottle of whiskey back home on my picnic table, not very far away at all.
I closed my eyes, sought to control my breathing, tried to let the tension flow out of me, first from my clenched jaws, then from my knotted brow, then from my neck, from my arms, all the way down. I had a job to do. Someone had murdered Megan Beemer. My job was to discover who had done it.
I imagined finding the son of a bitch and shooting him dead.
I shook my head, popped a Doc Watson CD into the player, and started the truck.
As I turned onto a real road and headed to Tuck’s, I tried to let Doc’s perfect guitar work calm my mind.
It didn’t.
The phone buzzed. It was Deputy Gavin.
“Ed, that Bannon guy is a grower. Had about five grand worth of pot all bundled up for sale. He’s in a cell now. We’ll need you to actually do that report.”
It took me a moment to remember the guy who had showed up at the drunk hooker’s trailer after she’d aimed a gun at my face. You’d think something like that would stick in your mind, but my mind was not exactly at peak performance.
“Fuck. OK. Yeah. Sorry. Lots going on. How about the woman?”
“Docs say she was very drunk, that’s about it, based on early results. They kept her at the hospital, but they are probably going to release her in a few days. Your actual report, if you write it, might weigh into their decision. You planning to charge her?”
I closed my eyes tight. I did not want to deal with this. “No. She was defending herself from expected harm.”
“She was drunk and aimed a gun at a cop.”
“Give her a stern warning. She mentioned suicide, though. Tell them that. It’ll be in my report. I’ll get it done soon.”
“Ed, I thin
k—”
He was still talking when I ended the call.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Thursday, 4 p.m.
SHELLY STARED AT me. I had just spent a lot of time trying to explain the Marston case to her, and what it had done to me. We were in a dark corner booth at Tuck’s, and she was trying to decide whether to kick me off the case.
“OK,” she said, after a long pause. “That was horrible. I can see how that would stick with you.”
“Yeah.”
“But you have to be in control.” She wasn’t as cute when she scowled. “I mean it, Ed. What I saw today outside the store, that can’t happen again.”
“I know.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.” I took a sip of coffee but maintained eye contact. I did not want to get shoved off of this case.
“I can find someone else to show me around, but …”
“But?”
“This is personal to you, Ed. I get that. You want to see it through. I get that. It means you are motivated, and so you are not just going to blow my case off, and I can appreciate that. I’ve had cops in other jurisdictions blow me off. So, two things.”
“Name them.”
“No more punchy.”
“Got it.”
“And I am in charge. It is my case. You are the help, not the boss.”
“Got it.”
Shelly took a long, slow drink of java, then set her mug down with some authority. “I am taking a chance, cowboy. Fuck it up, and I will make you regret it.”
“Understood.”
“Sheriff’s probably going to take the decision out of my hands and suspend your ass anyway when he sees the reports from the heroin rescue. Or, you know, the internet.”
“Yep.”
“So I might as well get some work out of you anyway, while I still can.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Don’t fuck up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Thursday, 5:35 p.m.
“THERE’S BUZZ.” SHELLY pointed toward our skinny rock star, strolling on long legs across the trailer park gravel and gently rocking his shoulders and head from side to side. He looked like a scarecrow in the wind. The only touches of color on him were his pale face and the yellow scarf that kept his long hair from falling into that face. Everything else was black. There was no point in yelling at him, because he had earbuds in. Those were black, too.