I looked across at Wentock.
“And you?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, grinning in his cheerful fashion, I don’t see it that way, Cap’n. Ewiss, here, always was a bit funny on that point. Sometimes I’ve screwed him up to our general way of looking at it; but, in the main, he’s not built on those lines, and I don’t grumble at him any more than he don’t grumble at me. I look at it this way. You, or any man as insults me by tryin’ to buy me, has got to pay for it.”
“Good man, Wentock,” I said. “It takes a deal of different opinions to oil the different kinds of consciences. I’ve a brand of my own, and you’ve a brand of your own, and Mr. Ewiss, there, has his. Anyway, you’re welcome to the cash, Mr. Wentock. As for you, Mr. Ewiss, I see you can’t take yours; so I’ll have it back, and I apologize to you. I think your way is the soundest of the three of us. Now, forgetting all this, let’s drop the serious for a time, and we’ll have our dinner.”
It was over the wine that I explained to Wentock the things I had to explain. Ewiss was out of it, though he listened quietly, with the deepest interest, and a flash of a smile now and again that showed he had a sense of humor.
“You see, Wentock,” I said, “I never meant to bribe either of you, but only to make you think that I did. No man in his senses would risk £6000—to be exact £5997—I glanced at Ewiss and smiled; for I had guessed who was my “wellwisher”—“on a piffly little bribe like a couple of fivers. If I had seriously meant to buy you, I should have offered something nearer your price, say fifty or a hundred pounds. As it was, I wanted merely, by means of my trifling bribes, to make you think I was going to run the stuff through in the way I explained so carefully. In other words, I wished to focus your entire suspicions upon Number 2 bag, thereby insuring that the Number 1 bag, which I left in your hands, should receive only the most casual attention; for you would, naturally, taking my plan at its face value, think only of the second bag, which I assured you I did not want searched. Moreover, it would seem self-evident to you that the Number 1 bag, which I handed entirely over to your care, would never have anything dutiable in it; for, had you acted up to your agreement, there was no apparent reason for supposing that I would ever even handle it again. To insure your subconsciously realizing this, I even told you you could keep it, once it had served me in the matter of the substitution.
“Of course, had you been faithful to our arrangement and substituted the Number 1 bag, to be searched, for the Number 2 bag, which I brought with me, I might have been in a hole. You see, the handle of the Number 1 bag contained the particular, shall we say, trinkets you were anxious to lay hands on.
“But then, I knew, both from the smallness of my bribe and from my reading of your faces, and from the ways of customs officials in general, that you would go for the big ‘cop’ you felt sure you were wise to. It might have meant promotion—oh, and quite a number of desirable things, from your point of view.
“After all, Wentock, even you,” I said quietly and pleasantly, “will now agree that honesty’s the best policy!
“And that concludes all I have to say, practically. I planned it all out, even to the burst of anger and the snatching up of both my bags and walking off in that quite superb indignation, on discovery of your treachery. I did it well, didn’t I?—while you were so pleasingly and wittily inviting yourself to this final little dinner, which I had, even then, planned, like all the rest of it.
“As I said in my note, you would be the gainers for coming tonight. That is so; for you are the richer for a dinner and an explanation, and Mr. Ewiss for an apology. That is all.”
DRAGON BONES, by Jacqueline Seewald
Marshal Kevin Simmons of Expectation, Montana took it upon himself to personally answer Dave Paton’s call on a smoldering July day.
“Someone’s gone and burned down that old shack on my back range, Marshal. And there’s a strange car out there as well. Thinkin’ I’m in terrible danger out here.”
“Now don’t be getting crazy with fear. We’ll investigate.” One of the reasons Kevin Simmons kept his job was because he knew how to reassure people. And Paton appeared to need a whole lot of that.
Simmons was a tall, well-built man who exuded confidence. His Marine Corps training had provided that among other things. Nearly forty and still a bachelor, police work was the most important thing in his life. People trusted him to do a good job and he tried not to let them down.
In the shack’s ashes, the marshal and his deputies made a grisly discovery; they found two human skeletons, side by side, one male, one female. They also located empty gasoline cans, charcoal briquettes and a pistol.
“Get the medical examiner’s office to send an investigator. We’re going to need a complete forensics exam on this,” Simmons said, his expression grim.
Both deputies were locals, young, just out of school, and very excited about the case. Bill Lightfoot, a mixture of Cheyenne, Irish and African American ancestry, had thick glossy black hair and high cheekbones, while Frank Wilkons, a raw-boned cowboy with a fair complexion, had hair the color of butter and blue eyes.
Out in the car, they found burglary tools and a hand-written suicide note signed by one Glen Parker.
“What do you make of this?” Bill asked. He was the more curious of the two deputies.
“First, we’ve got to find out who this Glen Parker is,” Simmons said, rubbing his mustache thoughtfully with his forefinger.
“I got a feeling this Parker character was a felon,” Frank said.
“Looks that way,” the marshal agreed. “We’ll run him through the system and see what comes up.”
The following day, Simmons discovered that Glen Parker did indeed have a criminal record. He spoke with his deputies in his office. “Appears Parker was a thirty-five year old drifter and thief who served time in California.”
Bill studied Parker’s mug shots. “Mean-looking cus. What are those tattoos on his arms?”
Frank narrowed his sky bright eyes. “Dragons, I think.”
“Or lizards maybe,” Bill said.
“What about the woman with Parker?” Frank asked. “We got anything on her?”
“In his note, Parker identified the female with him as his girlfriend who’d decided to die with him. Said she was Lori Crawford of Aspen, Colorado. So far, no further info.”
“Just got something back about her,” Bill said, dark eyes intense. He held up a fax. “A week ago, police and firemen put out an arson fire at a ski lodge. Inside they found the bodies of the owners, a man and wife. They’d been tied to chairs and shot to death. It being summer, the building was empty except for the two of them. Aspen law enforcement thinks the place had been ransacked for valuables. Want to guess the names of the owners?”
“Wouldn’t be Crawford?” the Marshal said.
“Right as red rain.”
“So it looks like Parker murdered and robbed his girlfriend’s parents,” the marshal said.
“I wonder if the body we found was really Parker.” Frank knifed his hand through his thick shock of yellow hair. “I mean he was already wanted for murder, couldn’t he have killed someone else and made it seem as though he committed suicide? Why else would he burn down the shack unless he wanted to make identification difficult?”
“You got a good point there,” Marshal Simmons agreed. “There’s only one way to know for sure.” He phoned the medical examiner’s office.
“We got a little problem,” John Robinson, the county ME told him. “An inexperienced investigator gathered up the burned bones, along with a lizard skeleton also lying in the ashes, and well, he jumbled them all together in a body bag.”
The marshal felt his blood pressure rising. “We photographed those skeletons before your man took the bones. We did our job right. Why couldn’t you do the same?” Nothing infuriated him worse than incompetence. He felt like cursing but kept a tight rein on his temper.
“Now listen here, I think we can do something about this,” th
e ME said in a placating voice. “There’s a forensic anthropologist, Dr. Sarah Whitney, who helps criminal justice agencies, She’s with the university. I’ll personally bring the bag of bones over to her.”
“All right,” Simmons agreed, but he didn’t hold out much hope of solving the case after a major mistake like this one. Still, it seemed worth a try.
* * * *
The marshal had almost forgotten about the Parker matter. Then several months later something happened to bring it to mind again. Simmons received information from the Colorado police. In investigating the deaths of the Crawfords, they’d discovered that Parker had tried to pawn expensive jewelry in Denver. He had claimed the jewels belonged to his deceased wife. The pawnbroker was suspicious, thought the man was lying and reported it to the police. Parker had been dating the Crawford girl and according to the employee of the ski lodge who’d been the one to find their bodies, the parents had quarreled bitterly with Parker. The Crawford girl had not been seen by anyone since the murder of her parents. There was a good chance he’d kidnapped her. A warrant for Parker’s arrest had been issued.
Simmons decided it was time to take action. He got into his car and began to drive. Expectation, located in Southwest Montana not far from Butte, had once thrived, but with the decline of the local mines, it became little more than a small, dusty town. Simmons loved calling it home, just as he loved riding or driving through the big sky country with its shining mountains and wide open spaces.
He planned a visit to the university to find out just what the anthropologist was doing with the sack of bones. He was not intimidated by university people; he’d gotten his degree in Missoula before he entered the Marine Corps as an officer and considered himself reasonably well-educated.
* * * *
The first thing he noticed when he met the doctor was how petite she was, a slim, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties with a bright smile and warm as toast brown eyes.
“It’s been the world’s biggest, macabre jigsaw puzzle,” she told him. “That bag contained around 10,000 burned bone fragments, lizard and human. Since they were all broken up, it‘s been difficult to tell which ones belong to man, woman or reptile. But my students and I have pieced together key portions of the skeletons. We took x-rays of the reconstructed bones. I compared them with medical and dental x-rays taken of Parker and Ms. Crawford when they were alive. I was able to make some progress.”
Simmons was encouraged. The doc sounded as if she knew what she was doing. The marshal sat on the edge of his chair. “What did you come up with?”
“I’m fairly certain the skeletons are Parker and Crawford.”
“Any way to be absolutely certain?” He turned his most charming smile on her.
“My students and I can continue gluing together additional bone fragments. Then I’ll invite you and the medical examiner to come to my office for a formal display of evidence.”
“You just go ahead and do that, Ma’am,” he said. “We’ll be available.”
* * * *
Good to her word, six months later, thanks to her efforts, Marshal Simmons was able to formally issue death certificates for Parker and Crawford. Only one small hitch: Colorado officials refused to believe it.
“If this don’t beat all!” Simmons rubbed his bristling mustache in annoyance.
“What’s wrong?” Bill asked.
“They’re keeping Parker on the FBI most wanted list.”
The marshal decided to go back to see Dr. Whitney. “I don’t like having our work here questioned, Sarah.” By this time, they were on a first-name basis.
“We can be very scientific in forensics proof.”
“Enough to satisfy doubting Federal law enforcement in Washington D.C.?”
She gave him a one-hundred watt smile that dazzled him.
“I believe so. Come with me.”
He followed her into her laboratory.
“Superimposing two video images by blending x-rays from two cameras, we’re able to reconstruct skeletal pieces over a medical x-ray of the bone taken when a person was alive and see how they match.” Dr. Whitney displayed a chiropractor’s x-ray of Parker’s first right rib, then over it, superimposed an image of the man’s right rib, taken from the burned shack. “Ossification, notches, areas of density all match. Now let’s check out the girl.”
Lori Crawford‘s dental x-rays matched the female jawbone taken from the shack. Sarah also found a white dot on Parker’s jaw which analysis confirmed to be lead.
“To use your police vernacular, he ate his gun.”
“What about the girl?”
“Shot through the heart,” she said.
“Well, I guess if the FBI wants to arrest Parker, we’ll tell them to come to your office.”
“That’s right. I’ll take Parker off my shelf and turn him in,” she said with a toothsome grin.
“Much obliged,” he said.
“You should be. We even put together the reptile bones for you and discovered it was a bearded dragon. They’re pretty popular as pets around here though I can’t understand why.”
“Bearded dragons are desert reptiles so they survive well, plus they’re outgoing, friendly little critters.”
“If you say so.” She gave him a dubious look.
“I’ll say so again over a steak dinner. I owe you at least that much.”
She blinded him with that killer Miss America smile. Well, at least something good had come out of this investigation, he conceded.
* * * *
Simmons should have been able to close the case, but something still didn’t sit right. Experience told him there was more to the crime. That whole business of finding a bearded dragon’s skeleton with the other remains kept bothering him. It somehow didn’t sit right. A fleeting memory nagged at him. Marshal Simmons did some further investigating, asking questions of the local people. Two days later, he’d come full circle.
“Mind if I come in?”
Dave Paton’s eyes opened wide but he stepped aside and let the Marshal enter the small ranch house. “Some reason you’re here today, Marshal?”
“Well, Dave, I got to thinking how strange it was that this criminal chose to commit suicide in your field in your shack.
“I mean it isn’t on the main road. How would a stranger even know it was here? Didn’t sit right. So I did some more checking. Some of the older folks remember your family. You had a younger brother name of Greg Paton, didn’t you? He was a real hell raiser. Got into some trouble and left for parts unknown as I recall.”
When the rancher didn’t reply, the marshal gave him a hard look. “I seem to remember something else about your brother. Didn’t he have a strange nickname? What was it people called him? Dragon? Now why was that, I wonder?”
The rancher shook his head.
“He had a tattoo on his arm of a dragon, didn’t he? Had the work done locally. And didn’t he keep some bearded dragons as pets?”
“He could have.” Paton ripped at a dirty thumb nail.
“Mighty odd coincidence that Glen Parker had the same initials as your brother, isn’t it?”
“It is at that,” Paton agreed. Simmons observed a nervous tic in Paton’s left eye.
“You killed him, didn’t you, Dave?”
“Me? Why would I do that?” Paton’s eyes were fixed on the floor. “Man who came here was a stranger.”
“One who just happened to bring a bearded dragon into the cabin with him? My guess is your brother came back here desperate for help. He had the girl’s body in the trunk of the car and wanted to bury her on your property. We had forensics check out the trunk and found blood and hair residue. He’d brought you nothing but misery and shame and you were furious. So you got the drop on him likely with his own gun, forced him to write the suicide note, then pushed the pistol into his mouth and shot him. Afterwards, you burned the shack thinking to hide any possible evidence.”
“I told you, it wasn’t my brother who come here.”
The marshal eyed Paton with a hard stare.
“We got forensic proof, Dave. It’ll go easier on you if you confess. I’ll work to get you a deal.”
Paton let out a deep sigh. “He didn’t believe I’d really kill him. Took him by surprise. But I had enough of him and his evil ways.” Paton’s eyes met his for the first time.
“That’s a burden of guilt you’ll have to carry around with you for the rest of your life I reckon.”
Paton scratched his beard thoughtfully. “I done the world a kindness ridding it of him. There’s only one thing I feel guilty about—barbecuing that lizard. Unlike my so-called kin, it didn’t deserve to die. And that’s a fact.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Multiple award-winning author Jacqueline Seewald has taught creative, expository and technical writing at the university level as well as high school English. She also worked as an academic librarian and an educational media specialist. Eleven of her books of fiction have been published. Her short stories, poems, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in hundreds of diverse publications. Her Kim Reynolds mystery series includes: The Inferno Collection, The Drowning Pool, and newest release The Truth Sleuth.
THE GOLDEN SLIPPER, by Anna Katherine Green
“She’s here! I thought she would be. She’s one of the three young ladies you see in the right-hand box near the proscenium.”
The gentleman thus addressed—a man of middle age and a member of the most exclusive clubs—turned his opera glass toward the spot designated, and in some astonishment retorted:
“She? Why those are the Misses Pratt and—”
The Mystery Megapack: 25 Modern and Classic Mystery Stories Page 12