An Arm and a Leg

by Olive Balla

  Frankie dropped the card into the breast pocket of the borrowed shirt. She sat still, as if unsure what to do next.

  Nick allowed his face to soften. “I know this is hard for you, but time is crucial. Can you tell me where you left your brother’s body?”

  “No. But I can take you there.”

  Pritney’s head shot up from behind the laptop, and she squinted at Frankie. “I thought you were lost.” Her voice oozed a level of sarcasm that surprised Nick but that Frankie seemed not to notice. “If you were lost, how can you remember where you left him?”

  “Our uncle schooled us in woodcraft.” Frankie turned her head toward the female deputy. “I kept track of the location.”

  Pritney cut her eyes sideways at Nick. Her lips pursed at whatever expression she saw registered on his face, and she turned back toward Frankie. “So you spent part of the night cuddling with a hibernating bear?”

  This time Pritney’s tone of voice did register, and Frankie cocked her head at the deputy. “I know that sounds weird, but that’s what happened.”

  Nick looked at his partner. “Actually, there’ve been several bears spotted in residential areas this year. Because of the drought, they’ve come down out of the mountains looking for food. Some have lost their fear of humans and even interacted with them in bizarre ways.”

  Nick’s face heated at the look Pritney shot back at him. And she had a point. For all he knew, Miss O’Neil was lying her ass off, making the story up as she went. He rubbed his hand along the thigh of his right leg, the hard, pea-sized knobs of scar tissue discernible through the fabric of his uniform trousers. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been conned by a female in distress.

  “Okey dokey.” Pritney lowered her head and jabbed her fingers on the laptop’s keyboard, the subsequent clacking loud in the otherwise silent room. Once she’d finished typing, she snapped down the lid and stood.

  Perplexed by his partner’s behavior, Nick studied her face for a couple of seconds. “I’ll take Miss O’Neil in the Rover, you follow in the squad car. I’ll call it in on the way.”

  “You’re the boss.” Pritney grabbed up the laptop, her movement radiating more heat than the glowing potbelly stove.

  ****

  Two hours later, Frankie sat inside Deputy Rollins’ Range Rover a few feet from where she’d buried Tim. The area around the temporary grave had been cordoned off, and several people moved with purpose, fulfilling their roles in the well-oiled machine set up to deal with a suspicious death within the county’s confines.

  Frankie forced the memories of the past several hours into the dark recesses of her mind. She would bring them out into the light when things settled down. She’d go over every detail, relive every second, and allow herself to feel all of it. It would fill her, and she would grieve.

  But not now. Not until she’d done everything she could for her brother. She swallowed the lump that kept creeping up her throat and turned her attention to the activity around Tim’s grave. The county coroner bowed over Tim’s body and performed the preliminary duties required of the Office of Medical Examiner. The buzz and hum of human investigative activities filled the forest and silenced the animals that made their homes there. The rich smell of over-turned forest soil mingled with the scent of moist pine needles wafting in through the deputy’s open window.

  Standing some distance from his vehicle, Nick spoke to a man carrying a silver clipboard. Black hair spilled out from under the deputy’s tan hat. Tall and broad shouldered, he looked like someone who either worked out or did hard physical labor.

  Rollins nodded his head at Clipboard and made his way back to the car. Frankie wondered at the cause of the deputy’s slight limp as he slid into the driver’s seat.

  “We’ve secured this area and the area where you left your Jeep. We’ll also comb the forest around your cabin. If there’s anything there, we’ll find it.”

  “What happens next?” Frankie searched the deputy’s blue-gray eyes for answers to the dozens of questions swirling around in her head.

  “The state crime lab folks from Santa Fe will process the scene, along with your vehicle. That means they’ll take photos and look for anything that might help in the investigation.”

  “What about Tim?”

  “The coroner’s office will transport his body for autopsy. Once the medical examiner has done her job, there’ll be an inquest. After that, the body should be released for burial.”

  Tears stung Frankie’s eyes. She swiped them away with the back of her hand.

  “It’s never easy losing someone you love, especially like this. I’ve asked you some hard questions, and I’ll have to ask more. I just want you to know I mean no disrespect.”

  Rollins left the car and returned to the gravesite. He and Clipboard talked for a bit before he pulled his ringing phone from a small scabbard attached to his belt and spoke into it. As he listened, he turned toward Frankie, a strange look on his face. He nodded a couple of times, murmured something, and broke the connection.

  The unexpectedly comforting sound of the stream made its way through the open driver’s window, bringing to Frankie’s mind the melody of an old hymn from her childhood. The few words she could remember floated to the surface of her memory: something about angels walking by the bright, shining river of death. Not something that would be sung in a modern church, these lyrics had been wrung from someone’s soul before the discovery of medicines made it easy to relegate death to the never-going-to-happen-to-me-or-mine sphere. She hummed the haunting melody.

  The deputy’s return to the Rover yanked her back to the present. He stooped over and peered at her through the window, a strained look on his face. “You’re sure it was only you and your brother in your Jeep?”

  “Yes.” Frankie felt her face register surprise. “Why?”

  “And neither of you returned fire at the other men?”

  A chill ran up Frankie’s spine. “No. Neither of us brought a weapon. What’s going on?”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to come back to the station with me, Miss O’Neil. I just got a call from the officers who secured the area around your cabin. They’ve found a man’s body a few feet from the back door. Can you tell me about that?”

  “I don’t… Maybe one of the men who killed my brother turned on the other and shot him.”

  Rollins’ lips thinned. “Footprints in the muddy driveway at your cabin indicate two people stepped out of a vehicle, wandered around a bit, and then got back in. Because of the rain there’s no way to know exactly when those prints were made. But what we do know is someone shot a man just outside your cabin and left him there to bleed to death.”

  ****

  Frankie spent several hours at the police station in Raton answering questions about Tim’s shooting. Again and again she went over the sequence of events. The questioning officer’s voice grew more and more strident each time she denied any knowledge of the dead man found near the cabin. His eyes bored holes into hers as he studied her every facial expression, every muscle twitch and eye blink. The tone of his voice never softened, even after another officer came into the room to tell him the dead man had been identified as a hunter from Idaho who’d been reported missing by relatives in Taos the day before Tim’s death. That, along with the Coroner’s preliminary report, indicated the man had been suffering from exposure several hours before Frankie and her brother left Albuquerque. His death was looking more and more like a hunting accident. Someone made a call to the pet boarding establishment, which supported Frankie’s claim regarding the timeline.

  “Interview terminated at fifteen hundred hours,” the questioner said. Eyes narrowed to slits, he ordered Frankie not to leave the state. Insinuating that she was being allowed to go home only because no weapon or other evidence against her had been found, he held the door open. His body positioned so that she had to turn sideways to avoid rubbing against him, his eyes followed her through the door. She fled into the hall, where
deputy Rollins stood from a chair where he’d apparently been waiting.

  “Do you have a way home?”

  Frankie shook her head. “No.” She had no way home, no one waiting, and no living family. Other than her old nanny Alma, not one living person loved or even cared what happened to her. The lyrics of a golden oldie scraped across her memory like nails on a blackboard, something about one being the loneliest of all numbers.

  “I have to go to Albuquerque for training tomorrow,” the deputy was saying. “But I was thinking of going in this afternoon to visit friends. I’ll take you home, if you like.”

  “Thanks.” Frankie wanted to scream into his face to go eat pig balls and die—he and his suspicious police friends. She wanted to yell that she’d rather hitch a ride with the first friendly trucker who stopped. But exhaustion and a continuing sense of unreality held her back. She just wanted to go home, even if it meant riding with the enemy and sleeping on the floor of her empty house.

  Deputy Rollins pushed a music CD into the player in his vehicle as Frankie buckled up. Music from the seventies and eighties poured into the otherwise dead airspace. Rollins tried several times to open up polite conversation, but Frankie didn’t respond. Instead, she sat with her body pressed up against the passenger door, her spine so rigid she quickly worked up a headache.

  In some circles her behavior would have been considered impolite. In others it could be defined as dripping with attitude. Either of those was fine by her. Her little brother had been shot before her eyes, and she’d basically been accused of murdering a man she didn’t even know for some reason she couldn’t fathom. So yeah, she was feeling pretty pushed out of shape right about then.

  The officer who interrogated her, although he’d called it an interview, had left no doubt as to what he thought of her story. He and his protect-and-serve buddies would undoubtedly be expending lots of energy in digging up evidence against her, trying to find some connection between her and the dead hunter. So, securing an attorney would probably be a wise move. But taking into account the state of her finances, she wondered at her chances of finding one willing to work for homemade strawberry or raspberry jam.

  Like harbingers of things to come, words about staying alive floated from the CD player and into the charged air. Frankie swallowed hard against what felt like giant hands kneading and twisting her stomach.

  Chapter Five

  Larry’s stomach tightened as he dialed Bellamy’s number. A body would think that after a couple of years working for the old guy Larry could at least talk to him on the phone without feeling the need to hurl his beans. Maybe his innards were trying to tell him something his head hadn’t quite figured out.

  Bellamy picked up after the second ring. “Ah, Larry. You have good news, yes?”

  “Mel and me rifled through O’Neil’s place. We didn’t find anything there, so we went on over to the sister’s house. She’s got the place locked up tighter’n a drum. Besides an alarm, there’s deadbolts on the front and back doors. We figured you wouldn’t want us to risk breaking in and being seen.”

  “What about Tim’s car? Were you able to manage a look at that?”

  “We didn’t see anything inside O’Neil’s car.” Larry added a silent screw you at the sarcasm in his boss’s voice. “We were about to pop the trunk when some old blister came out of the house next door and yelled what were we doing, so we took off. We could go back later tonight when everyone’s in bed.”

  “We’ll chat about that later. We received an interesting call this morning from our songbird. It seems O’Neil is dead.”

  Larry’s stomach lurched at the thought that Bellamy knew he’d withheld important information. He gulped then cleared his throat. “That’s good, right? At least now he can’t make trouble.”

  “That’s all you have to say for yourself? What other details did you leave out of your report?”

  “I didn’t know O’Neil was dead, I figured he was just hurt. But him being dead takes care of our problem, right?”

  “That remains to be seen. The Colfax County Sheriff has issued an all-points bulletin for two men in a green pickup, along with a press release asking for any witnesses. It seems another man was shot as well, a hunter whose timing and choice of hunting grounds turned out to be a terminal mistake.”

  Larry swallowed hard, the sound embarrassingly audible. “What’ll me and Mel do?”

  “We will give you instructions, and you will follow them to the letter. Mel has hidden the pickup at the farm. We’ll get it repainted when things have died down a bit. You take the old Camaro we keep in the barn. Drive it into town, get it serviced and fill it up. Mel will drive it.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Is that ancient Mercedes you stole from your ex-boss still running?”

  “Yeah, it runs good. I mostly just drive it around town.”

  “Are your tags up to date?”

  “Yessir, I’ve been real careful about that ever since you fixed the title and all.”

  “Excellent. We wouldn’t want you to attract the attention of the local gendarme.”

  “The what?”

  “The law.” Bellamy snorted into the phone. Like the airbrakes on an eighteen wheeler, the puff of air blasted into Larry’s ear. “How have you managed to survive this long with such a miniscule brain?”

  What kind of messed up pleasure did Bellamy get out of making fun of Larry’s lack of education? Just because he’d dropped out of school didn’t mean he didn’t know stuff. He wanted to remind his boss that several of the ideas used to streamline the operations at Bellamy’s chicken farm had been his. And that the farm’s website design had been all Larry’s doing. He wanted to yell that into his boss’s ear, but thought better of it. Far be it from him to deprive Bellamy of one of his favorite pastimes. Besides, he made it a practice never to buck anyone who could handle sharp instruments the way the old man did.

  And then, of course, there was Bellamy’s collection.

  One of the first things the boss had done after hiring Larry and Mel was to take them to his basement and show them his pride and joy. He’d laughed and said there were people who’d give an arm and a leg to own the things he’d spent the past twenty years accumulating.

  A feeling washed over Larry—a feeling his ma used to say meant a goose was walking over his grave. He clamped his jaws together so tight his neck started to ache.

  “You will watch the sister,” Bellamy was saying. “She is not to see you or suspect she is being followed. It is within the realm of possibility that she might yet find the items O’Neil took.”

  “What should I do if she does turn something up?”

  “In that event you are to notify us immediately. Oh, and make sure Mel doesn’t pull any more stupid stunts. If something suspicious happens to the sister, the law will investigate everyone associated with both of them. We don’t want to have to deal with that kind of heat.”

  Beads of perspiration popped out on Larry’s forehead and upper lip and an all too familiar feeling started up a hum along his nerves—the same feeling that made him leave Amarillo without even packing up his belongings. He hadn’t understood the reason for it at the time, but later he’d learned he escaped only minutes ahead of his ex-boss’s two shooters. And now here was that feeling again.

  Bellamy smacked his hand on his desk, the sound loud in Larry’s ear. “Well? Moan. Grunt. Make some sound to indicate you understand.”

  “Yessir, I got it.”

  “And another thing, find out if O’Neil rented a freezer locker, or any storage unit with electricity, for that matter. If he did, we only have about one month before the owner is legally allowed to break into it and auction off the contents. At that point, the proverbial poo will hit the fan. And you know what that means.”

  “Yessir.” It meant every man for himself.

  Chapter Six

  Tim’s body was released for burial the next week. The funeral was held in the church where Frankie served as music direc
tor and organist. Her boss, Pastor Dan, offered a lovely eulogy, and her choir sang an exquisite anthem to the filled-to-capacity gathering. Although heartbroken, it comforted her to see how many people her brother’s life had touched.

  Once home from the cemetery, Frankie pulled a recorded pipe organ concert out of her collection and slid it into the player. She walked to the new leather sofa in her living room, kicked off her black patent leather heels and sat, her legs drawn up underneath her. With her head rested on the back of the sofa, she closed her eyes and allowed the majestic sound of Widor’s “Toccata” to pour over her as the dammed up grief for her brother broke loose.

  She had just picked up a pile of soggy tissues and headed toward a waste basket when the sound of an all-too-familiar, disembodied voice made her hand freeze in midair.

  Please help me…

  Frankie cocked her head to one side, listening.

  Please…

  The tissues slid from Frankie’s suddenly-numb fingers. She braced herself against the wall to keep her knees from buckling. “Stop it. Go away,” she said to the empty room.

  Please help me. Don’t let her…

  “I said go away.” Frankie’s voice rose to near-screech level, so distorted she barely recognized it as her own.

  Like a goldfish dropped onto the floor, she opened her mouth wide, sucking great gulps of air into her lungs. She stumbled to a table in the entryway next to the front door, grabbed up her purse and pulled her phone from the leather holster attached to the side of the bag. Barely able to control her trembling fingers, she punched a pre-set speed-dial. The phone was picked up at the other end after two rings.

  “The offices of Doctors Angela and Peter Demaris, Raynell Lavender speaking. How may I help you?”

  “This is Frankie O’Neil. I have an appointment with Doctor Angela Demaris next week, but I was wondering if you could work me in sooner…maybe sometime tomorrow?”