No Good Deed

by Lynn Hightower

  ‘Ma’am, when I want an Egg McMuffin I’ll get in the car and drive for it.’

  Sonora saw the smile flick across the CSU technician’s face, but she frowned her down and the woman went back to the clipboard like she was glued to it.

  ‘So you went out to breakfast?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, this one was old and cold. Got it out of the fridge. Single-guy syndrome.’

  Sonora did not believe him, but there was nowhere to go with this. She could ask him if he’d been to Delaney’s place. Get him on record saying no. She checked her watch. Nine a.m. Only 9 a.m. Shaping up to be a terrific kick-ass day.

  ‘Did you go see Donna Delaney last night? Go to her home?’

  He cocked his head to one side. ‘Nope.’

  ‘You won’t mind coming down to the office, giving me a written account of where you were last night?’

  ‘Not at all. But I wasn’t there. You can trust me, Detective. I’ve admitted to an Egg McMuffin. If I was a liar I’d tell you I had bran flakes and a banana.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sonora shifted the ice-cream sandwich up along her temple. The seam of thick white wrapping caught her skin and she winced. ‘Did you even try to get ice?’

  Sam glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. ‘It was the most frozen thing I could find. Sure you don’t want to go to the ER? You could flirt with Gillane some more.’

  ‘Maybe later. What did Helen say exactly?’

  ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’

  ‘One, Sam, and thanks for my morning obscenity. When did Helen call you?’

  ‘She called Crick because she couldn’t get you. You were supposed to meet her first thing, remember? Phone locked in the car with the weapon?’

  ‘How many fingers am I holding up, Sam?’

  ‘Crick took the call while we were following the blood trail of your latest victim. Helen was pretty excited. Said the dog was having a fit over a big pile of manure, and for us to bring a shovel and a pitchfork and get out there. Said there was a pitchfork up against the fence, but she was thinking it might be evidence, so she didn’t want to touch it.’

  ‘My God, Sam, think about it. I’m excited. You’re excited. Helen and the dog are excited. Over manure. What kind of job is this?’

  Sam gave her a look. ‘You really got hit on the head.’ He checked over his shoulder, saw a pickup barreling toward them, pulled out anyway. Sonora hung on to the armrest.

  ‘You sure you never saw the guy before?’ Sam asked.

  ‘What guy? The one in the ski mask?’

  ‘Yeah, the one in the ski mask.’

  ‘How would I know if I ever saw him, he was in a ski mask, that’s the point of ski masks. You don’t see their face. But I have to say it weirded me out to find McCarty in the middle of everything.’

  Sam looked at her. ‘He your number-one suspect?’

  ‘Where’d you get that idea?’

  ‘Well, you did send him downtown.’

  ‘Let’s see, he’s got Joelle’s blood all over his shirt, he’s Johnny-on-the-spot when I run into that maniac in the barn—’

  ‘Johnny-on-the-spot? I haven’t heard that one in years.’

  ‘Plus he’s a veterinarian. Which means he could be our finger-ripper.’

  ‘Finger-ripper. I like that.’

  ‘Are you paying attention at all?’

  ‘Sort of, but I’m mainly looking for Helen’s car.’

  ‘She knows we’re coming?’

  ‘Crick told her to hang on, we’d be right out. Told her you’d been delayed by a small case of dismemberment and a barn brawl.’

  ‘Nothing like the truth.’ She looked out the window. ‘Speaking of which. There’s her pickup.’

  Sam hit the brakes, waited for a battered white Montero to blow past, and pulled the Taurus to the side of the road in front of the Mazda, which was half in and half out of a ditch.

  Sonora opened the car door, looked over her shoulder at Sam. ‘You could have parked so the ditch was on your side.’

  ‘Climb over. The ice cream’s melting. You going to eat it?’

  She handed him the ice-cream sandwich, slid across the front seat of the car and climbed out after him into the two-lane road. ‘Which way from here, Sam?’

  He unwrapped the white paper, took a quick bite of the ice cream which was melty and sagged sideways. He pointed to a small square sign, red on white, a six mounted on a silvery metal stake.

  ‘She said to look for a huge red-brick house, go down the gravel road that says fire gate number six, and follow it back to the barn.’ He took another bite of ice cream.

  Sonora looked across the road. Saw a large red-brick house that looked like it dated from the Civil War. If a brick house could sag, this one did.

  She looked back at the sign. ‘It doesn’t say fire gate.’

  ‘Yeah, but it says six.’

  ‘So fire gate is implied? It’s not on the sign?’

  ‘I’m trying to remember if you were like this before you got hit on the head.’ Sam finished the ice cream in two large bites, rolled the wrapper into a sticky white ball and handed it to Sonora. ‘I’ll get the tools.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  The gravel road was narrow, and looped to the right, leading to the fields behind the red-brick house. Sam and Sonora walked along the fence line, in the sparse grass on the shoulder of the drive, avoiding the muddy water pooled in tire ruts of mud and gray-white gravel dust. Sam carried a pitchfork and a scoop-shaped shovel over his left shoulder. Sonora carried her purse.

  She touched the inside of her lip with her tongue. The tissue was swollen and huge, and she wondered if this was what collagen injections felt like. Too bad the swelling would not spread evenly so she could be sore, but sexy.

  They paid for this in LA.

  She frowned, because for some reason the lay of the land looked familiar. The pasture was pale brown and fading green, black four-plank horse fencing in excellent repair. The house, set back from the road on the right, was built in an L shape, with a porch running down one side and along the back. It had recently been whitewashed. Sonora pictured herself sitting there on a porch swing, drinking a glass of wine.

  Maybe she would get a porch swing. That might be affordable.

  ‘Sam, can you hang a porch swing?’

  ‘I’m a guy, Sonora. If I say I can’t hang a porch swing, I go down two notches on the belt loop of manhood. Your problem is – if you get me to hang a porch swing, will I do it right? Or will—’ He looked over one shoulder. ‘This place look familiar to you?’

  ‘The belt loop of manhood?’ Sonora shook her head, and moved ahead of him. The road completed its curve and straightened. On the left, the fields were fenced into five-acre paddocks, automatic concrete waterers in the center, circled by mud and churned-up sod.

  The morning drear was giving way to patches of sun, and the wind was still at last. Sonora looked around, thinking how beautiful it looked, wishing herself away somewhere in the sun, dreading the short, dark days of winter ahead.

  The road straightened and led to a huge black barn, doors slid open. Cobwebs streamed from wood rafters, pieces of rusty machinery parked every which way.

  Sonora heard a bleat, saw two black-faced sheep and a couple of goats in a pen on her right. One of the sheep had his head sideways under the bottom fence slat, and was chewing at the grass on the other side.

  ‘Helen?’ Sonora shouted.

  She caught a streak of movement from the left – a dog, running toward them. Soft white with thick fur in a ruff around his neck. A Shepherd–Akita mix.

  ‘Tail’s wagging.’ Sam held out a hand and the dog went to him happily. Accepted a head-rub, looked expectantly toward Sonora.

  She scratched his ears. Looked at the tag. ‘Hello, Lincoln.’

  He grinned up at her, tongue sideways, then headed up toward the house.

  ‘Watchdog?’ Sam said.

  ‘He’s watching.’
>
  Sam pointed. ‘Helen said go around the back of the barn, head left along the fence line, couple hundred yards. We’ll see her.’

  ‘She’ll be hard to miss.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say stuff like that in earshot.’

  They headed around the left-hand side of the barn, out of view of the house. The ground was spongy beneath their feet. The barn had small square windows, way high up, dark and impenetrable.

  They rounded the side, both looking to catch sight of Helen. Wood posts, twelve feet high, had been set in the ground behind the barn – skeletal, raw, promising. Someone planning an addition. A mound of freshly dug dirt was humped between the posts, a wheelbarrow tipped against a stack of twelve-foot slats of treated poplar.

  Sonora hesitated at the edge of the barn, looked over her shoulder at Sam. Moved to the open door, took a small step inside. Barns were foreign territory.

  It was cool inside, and dark, sunlight pooling at the edge of the open doors. The dirt floor was uneven, and sprinkled with straw and wood shavings.

  The loft was full of hay on the right side, empty on the left. Pitchforks, shovels, rakes were hung on the walls. The right-hand side had stalls, with red-mesh metal doors.

  ‘Sam,’ Sonora said. ‘Better get in here.’

  He set the fork and shovel against the barn door, came close enough to her that his hand brushed her back. Whistled, low and tuneless.

  In the aisleway, next to a rusting manure spreader and a small yellow-and-rust John Deere tractor, was a teal-green pickup.

  Sam moved to the back of the truck. ‘I’ll be damned. Double tires – Dually.’

  Sonora looked into the front. The floors were muddy, a wealth of forensic detail. ‘Keys in the ignition. Seems real strange.’

  ‘No, farmers do that all the time.’

  ‘Leave keys in the truck?’

  ‘Sure.’ Sam pulled his head out of the cab, moved along the side. ‘Set up for a goose-neck horse trailer,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Connects to the thing here in the truck bed, instead of a ball hitch on the bumper. Carries some serious weight.’

  ‘What you think he did with the horse trailer, Sam?’

  ‘What you think he did with the horse?’

  Sonora did not like to imagine such things. They went through the barn and out the back, blinking in the light. Sonora saw movement, caught sight of Helen leaning against the fence line where it turned to wire mesh, diamond shapes framed by dark black posts. She waved an arm at Sonora. Bella sat at her feet, planted in front of a composted manure pile that rose over Helen’s head.

  Sonora looked across the field, at the way the land sloped and dipped to the right. There would be a pond just over that hill, and a little knot of trees and brush.

  ‘Sam. This is the Kidgwick Place, isn’t it, Halcyon Farm?

  He stopped, took the pitchfork and shovel off his shoulder. ‘That’s what it is. I thought it looked familiar. I never got out here, but I saw the crime scene photos.’

  ‘You, me and everyone else in the country.’

  Sam nodded. The crime scene photos had been leaked to the press. One of the secretaries had been fired – taking the fall for someone whose name was whispered, but never said out loud.

  ‘That was what, seven, eight years ago?’

  ‘Somewhere around there. It was right before I went with Homicide. You work that case?’

  Sam grimaced. ‘We all worked that case. There’s a pond over the hill, that’s where they found the boy, half in and half out of the water. Ben Randolph. Sixteen years old, killed by his buddies for a 1973 Chevy Impala he bought used and rusty with money he saved bagging groceries all summer.’

  ‘He was killed by his buddies.’

  ‘Two so-called friends, got him here to pick up Tammy Kidgwick, daughter of the house. Her parents were gone for the day – church retreat. The boys bashed his head in and when that didn’t do the trick, one stood on his back while the other stepped on his neck and held him under water till he drowned.’

  Sonora remembered the crime scene photos. The back of the house. The pond. A shot of the boy, face down in the mud, then another with him rolled on to his back, skin purplish-white, lips blue, body stiff with rigor. They’d torn his back pocket when they’d taken his wallet and keys – Andy Rivett and Malcolm Sweetwater. Andy one year older than Ben, Malcolm eight months younger. Running with the crowd that attended classes sporadically, smoked pot, but stayed out of major trouble until they went straight to brutal murder along an unpredictable path that their peers, parents, teachers and psychologists studied in detail, looking in vain for the warning signs of homicidal tendencies.

  No one had a theory any more sophisticated than shit happens.

  The boy, friendly and trusting, had not had too many friends. It was a scenario that brought chills to any parent with children heading for the teen years.

  ‘Sweetwater got out, shock probation,’ Sam said.

  ‘He was the younger one.’

  ‘Yeah, but a real sociopath. I hear they’re looking for him in Houston and North Carolina.’

  ‘What about the other two?’

  ‘Andy Rivett is still in jail, and will be for another twenty years. They measured his IQ around eighty-five or six.’

  ‘The girl was cleared, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Not completely. Bristol was working Juvie then, and he was pretty hard on her, but she cooperated and swore she didn’t know what was in the works. She just didn’t stop it. Died in a car accident two years after it happened. There was some suspicion of vehicular suicide, but the insurance company paid up.’

  Sonora glanced back up at the house. The porch had been painted in the last four weeks. Everything else looked worn, neglected, like the farm had been in stasis for several years. Now there was paint and a barn addition.

  New owner, she wondered, or the healing power of time? It would be nice to see someone on the recovery end.

  She took a look toward the pond, thinking they’d end up dragging or draining it. She followed Sam, felt soothed by his voice as he greeted Helen, talked to the dog. There was something comforting about the rhythms of his speech – maybe it was the Southern thing.

  She thought of Joelle’s fine young face, round and unformed. Tried not to think.

  Chapter Twenty

  There were cows close to the diamond-mesh fence, attending to cow business, grazing. One lifted its head, looked in their direction. Sonora wondered if the cow had seen the killer. Cows as witness.

  The compost pile had been there a while, clumps of manure mixed with straw bedding. It was inoffensive, smelling faintly of horse and ammonia, grass and weeds growing over the top, as if to convey respectability. A pitchfork lay on one side, tines face down.

  Bella sat near the edge of the pile, paws smeared with dirt, toenails crusty, tongue hanging from the side of her mouth. Her muzzle was flecked with white foam, her chest streaked with drool and dirt.

  Helen murmured ‘Good girl, good girl’, patted the dog’s head. She smoothed a palm over the droopy, fur-wrinkled cheeks, looked sideways at Sam and Sonora. ‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think we maybe found your girl.’

  ‘You called CSU?’ Sonora took the shovel from Sam.

  Helen shook her head. ‘What if I’m wrong, and after that fiasco last night? Makes the dog look bad. Then some jerk calls an ambulance and sends me home and I look bad. This time, if I’m wrong, me and Bella going to keep on looking, and I don’t want interference.’

  ‘Teal-green pickup in the barn,’ Sonora said, inclining her head. ‘Your credibility’s intact.’

  ‘Yeah, I took a quick look. No trailer attached. You think it’s the one?’

  ‘It’s a Dually. Fits the description.’

  Sam squeezed Sonora’s shoulder. Handed her the pitchfork and kept the shovel. ‘Go at it easy, Sonora, small clumps of dirt in thin layers. Helen, get me that blue plastic tarp over there, will you
? Put the dirt there, Sonora.’

  ‘This be the spot, I take it?’ She pointed to the left-hand side of the mound. Raw compost with no vegetation in a four-by-three hump, dirt darker than the rest, newly crumbled, unsettled, aromatic.

  ‘Yeah.’ He pointed. ‘You work that end, I’ll take this.’

  Sonora had never used a pitchfork before, except a red plastic one she’d had with a Hallowe’en costume when she was five. As she remembered, she’d chased her brother from one end of the house to the other, till her mother had taken the pitchfork away.

  She took a quick look at the sky. More rain today?

  Enough had fallen the night before to make the manure heavy and hard to move. She poked it carefully. Underneath the top layer, packed tight by the rain, the manure crumbled like fine ash.

  ‘Composted,’ Sam said, wiping a hand across his forehead.

  ‘Nature at work.’

  ‘Don’t you get it? If the stuff we’re digging is composted right here at the top, then we’re dealing with stuff that came from deep in the center of the pile. As in recently dug up.’

  ‘Then say recently dug up, don’t get complicated.’

  Sonora adjusted the pitchfork in her hands. The wooden handle was smooth, annoyingly loose in the rusting metal joint that held it to the black crusty tines. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Sam handle the shovel like he’d been born with one in his hands, moving half-scoops of dirt on to the tarp at a rate that made her own efforts look pitiful.

  She glanced back at the house. Still no one. Maybe they were at work. Did they have a regular schedule of leaving the farm every day? Had the killer known he was safe here?

  If so, that would most likely make him a local boy.

  Sam stopped shoveling, went to his knees and reached into the dirt.

  Sonora leaned on the wood handle of the pitchfork. Took a quick look at her palms, hot and pink, with gritty lines of sweat. She was raising blisters. ‘Something, Sam?’

  ‘Rock, maybe.’

  Sam scooped dirt with the palms of his hands, brushed a clod of manure and straw to one side. Squinted. Looked over his shoulder at Sonora.