by Ann Charles
Speaking of the ornery bird … Harvey stepped out of the kitchen as Natalie and I made ourselves comfortable on Cooper’s black leather couch. I took one look at Harvey’s skull and crossbones covered suspenders and smirked. “You’ve been living with your nephew too long.”
“I’ve only been here two days.”
I heard an indistinguishable grumble come from Cooper, and then he settled into the chair opposite us. He pulled out his notebook and clicked his pen a couple of times, raising both blond eyebrows at me. “Does that bother?”
“You tell me after I cram it up your nose.”
Harvey stepped between us, blocking my view. “Why’s your stinger already half out this mornin’, girlie?”
“Blame your nephew.” My stomach growled at the smell of bacon grease coming off Harvey’s clothes. “You have any bacon left over?”
“Nope. Coop finished it off when he came back home to wait for you two.”
Thwarted again by the damned detective.
“Scooch your cheeks over.” Harvey wedged his bony ass between Natalie and me. “All righty, Coop, we’re all here coolin’ our saddles. Let ‘er rip.”
Cooper pointed his pen at Natalie. “Tell me again what happened Sunday morning, starting from the time you arrived outside of Uncle Willis’ house.”
Natalie leaned her elbows on her knees and dug in. When she got to the part about the unlocked front door, Cooper stopped her with, “How did you know the door was open? According to the pictures Detective Hawke took, there were no indications the jamb of the door was forced or tampered with.”
That was a suspicious question. “Why would you ask that?” I butted in. “Surely, you don’t think Nat had something to do with this whole mess.”
“Ms. Beals was also the one who noticed the barn doors were no longer chained together, which is what led you three to find the dead body.” Cooper scribbled something on his notepad. “It’s my job to determine a coincidental discovery versus a manipulative redirection.”
“In other words,” Natalie said, “did we really just stumble upon a faceless dead man, or did I sneak out there the day before, kill the guy, and then pretend to accidentally discover him along with Vi and your uncle the next day? Is that about right, Coop?”
“There are several possibilities to consider.” Cooper avoided her stare.
I jutted out my chin. “Nat’s no killer and you know it.”
“I have fantasized about cutting off pieces of one or two of my ex-boyfriends, but never the face. That’s just twisted.”
Harvey grunted. “And choppin’ off a man’s twig and berries isn’t?”
She shrugged. “That depends on how much tequila I’ve downed before picking up the machete.”
I shot Natalie a shut-it glare and then nudged my head toward Cooper, who was busy writing a novel on his notepad.
“She could’ve aided and abetted,” Harvey pointed out.
The bucket mouth let out an ‘oof’ when my elbow connected with his ribs. “Whose side are you on here?”
“How did you know the front door was open?” Cooper returned to his original question, his pen poised above the paper.
Natalie shrugged. “There was a crack showing.”
“Thank you.” Cooper jotted down a few words in his notebook. “Please continue where you left off with Sunday morning’s events.”
Natalie cleared her throat and walked him through what had happened in the house and then out in the barn. All the while, Cooper kept his head down, taking notes.
When Natalie finished, I spoke up, “You know what I wonder?”
“This isn’t your interview, Parker.”
“What do you wonder?” Natalie asked, peeking around the back of Harvey’s head. “Besides who was the better archenemy of Bugs Bunny: Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam?”
“I told you Yosemite Sam was the bigger badass, hands down. His huge hats prove it.”
“Plus his arsenal of cannons,” Harvey agreed.
“I don’t know,” Natalie argued. “I still say those big hats hinted at insecurities due to a short-man complex. Elmer had more self-confidence.”
“Jesus, you three.” Cooper squeezed his forehead. “Can we get back to Sunday’s events?”
“Fine, Detective Party Pooper.” I clasped my hands together. “What I wonder is why there was no blood on the floor in the barn. Shouldn’t there be lots of blood if you cut off a face?”
“There was the dried blood on the rag,” Natalie reminded me.
“Yeah, but that wasn’t necessarily the dead guy’s blood.”
“You think the killer might have cut himself while slicing off the face?”
“Maybe, as ironic as that would be.” I looked at Cooper, who was watching me with unhappy eyebrows. “Did you find any drops or smears of blood in the barn?”
His lips tightened. “That’s police business.”
I didn’t let that stop me. I leaned forward, addressing my couch mates. “Did either of you notice dried blood on the dead guy’s clothes or in the safe?”
Both shook their heads.
I turned back to Cooper. “When you cut the face off someone who is already dead, there’d be no heartbeat to pump out blood, right?”
“I’m here to ask the questions, not you.”
“Why my barn?” Harvey tugged on his suspenders. “Why my safe?”
Why his grandpappy’s gun? I chewed my lower lip, wondering how one thing led to the next.
“Did you find blood anywhere else on Harvey’s property?” I asked Cooper, not expecting an answer.
He didn’t disappoint. “That’s none of your business, Parker.” He shook his pen at me. “And don’t you go out there sniffing around either.”
“Or what? Let me guess, you’ll arrest me.”
“If you’re lucky.” Cooper aimed his pen at his uncle. “Your turn. Make sure you include anything that seemed off to you on Sunday morning.”
“Ol’ Red was off his feed at breakfast.”
“I meant anything having to do with the body at the ranch.”
“That does have to do with the body. Ol’ Red is the one who found it in the barn. I’m guessin’ he sniffed out the raw meat lickety split because he hates that dog food you picked up for him. Can’t say I blame him, either.” Harvey snorted. “It’s full of too much healthy shit.”
“If Red’s going to live in my house and do his business on my yard, he needs to eat dog food, not table scraps.”
“Red fancies people food.”
“He ate one of my motorcycle boots.”
“That’s ‘cause he likes ya.”
Harvey echoed my daughter’s reasoning for a chicken egg winding up in my boot. Personally, I didn’t think Red had a preference when it came to boots. The last one I’d seen him chewing had belonged to someone long dead who’d left part of his foot behind.
“Red needs to be deputized if you ask me,” I said, poking at Cooper since he kept throwing that police business hogwash at us. “He could team up with you and really make headlines. I can already see the tagline for your billboard out on Interstate 90.” I looked up, pretending I was reading a billboard. “The Deadwood Duo: Digging Up Crime One Crook at a Time.”
That lip curl was back. “Nobody asked you, Parker.”
Natalie joined in the fun. “Oh, oh, I got one. How about: Deadwood Duo is the name, sniffing out felons is their game.”
When Cooper’s glare shifted to her, Natalie thumbed in my direction. “She started it.”
Cooper returned to his uncle. “There were some scratches on one of the barn doors, bigger than the last time. Did you forget to clean the bait out of your illegal traps again?”
Harvey looked up, pretending to inspect the ceiling. “Hmmm, looks like ya popped a nail in yer drywall there.”
“Don’t mess with me old man. Besides the rag with blood and the disorder of contents under your bathroom sink, did you notice if there were any other differences at all?”
<
br /> Harvey stroked his beard for a handful of seconds. “Nah, nothing that caught my eye.”
“When was the last time you’d been in your bedroom?”
“When you and I stopped by the house a few days ago.”
Cooper nodded, making a note of something. “Why was your safe unlocked?”
“I told you before; I leave it unlocked because I can’t remember the combination.”
“But the locking mechanism still works?”
“As far as I know. I haven’t locked it in a few years.”
I pondered what Cooper was getting at for a head scratch or two, and then it clicked. “You’re trying to figure out why the killer didn’t lock the safe, aren’t you?”
“You think he was planning on coming back?” Natalie picked up on my line of thought.
“Maybe,” he said.
The fact that Cooper answered with something other than his usual “police business” mantra added to my concern about this possibility. My worried brow probably matched Harvey’s. “If that’s the case, how is he going to feel when the body is gone?”
“Mighty perturbed, I’m guessin’.”
“Was there evidence of foul play?” I asked Cooper.
“Isn’t a missing face foul enough?” Natalie grimaced.
“I mean like stab marks or a dent in his skull.”
“Or gunplay,” Harvey prompted.
I shot him a what-the-hell glance. I thought we were keeping our lips buttoned about guns of any kind.
“What makes you think there might have been gunplay?” Of course Cooper latched onto that like a badger.
“How did he die?” I threw at Cooper, trying to shift the focus off any thoughts about the shotgun now stuffed under the front seat of Harvey’s pickup.
“That’s also police business.”
“What was the time of death? Can you at least tell us that?”
“Are you worried about your alibi, Parker?”
I wrinkled my lip at the boneheaded detective in reply.
“Did he have any tattoos?” Natalie asked.
“I’m not at liberty to disclose that at this time.”
Did that mean Yes? If so, did the dead guy happen to have a tattoo of a goat head turning into a pig? Like the one on the nut job demon lover who’d tried to kill me? The same tattoo Doc had “seen” on some tooth-pulling, burlap bag-wearing murderers while he was playing medium with Prudence the ghost?
Thinking about Prudence and her killers made me curious about something else. “Did he have all of his teeth?”
Cooper’s squint reappeared. “Why would you ask that?”
I skirted the truth. “I was curious if the killer had removed the ability to identify the victim based on dental records.” What I really wondered was if the guy still had all four canine teeth, and I had a feeling Cooper knew that.
“Right. Next you’re going to try to convince me that the tooth fairy is real.”
Well, I wouldn’t call Prudence a fairy—more of a tooth trophy hunter.
Before I could reply, he switched gears. “Your turn, Parker. Go through Sunday’s events, starting with pulling into my uncle’s drive.”
I grimaced. Here came the rubber glove treatment. I just hoped he’d use lubricant this time.
Without preamble, I started through my version of the story again, skipping the shotgun part the same as Natalie and Harvey had done. I ended with when Cooper and Hawke had pulled up and started bossing everyone around.
“We didn’t boss you around. Giving orders at a crime scene is our job. Top priority is securing the area and evidence.”
“You were a little bossy,” Natalie seconded.
“You were barkin’ orders like your Aunt Gertrude at the Thanksgivin’ table.”
Cooper glared at us in turn, his frown lines deepening into ravines and then canyons.
Harvey looked away, scratching his neck.
Natalie cracked her knuckles one at a time.
I twiddled my thumbs, glancing at the clock on Cooper’s dining room wall, wondering what Doc was up to right at that moment.
All was quiet on the front line as we waited for a yell of “Incoming!”
Cooper snapped his notebook closed. “There’s only one problem I see with all three of your stories about that morning.” He paused, probably for effect. Oh man, did they teach him that in Interrogation 101? I tried not to roll my eyes as he tucked the little book into his coat pocket, building up to his interview summation.
“Spit it out, boy. The longer you chew on it, the worse it tastes.”
Cooper clicked his stupid pen. “Nobody’s talking about how my great grandfather’s sawed-off shotgun played into Sunday’s events.”
My heart leapt from my chest and raced out the front door. It was all I could do to hold a straight face and not turn to gape at Harvey and Natalie.
Damn Harvey for taking the shotgun from the scene of the crime. I highly doubted Cooper was going to buy that I had nothing to do with removing evidence this time.
“That ol’ gun?” Harvey asked. “What does that have to do with this mess?”
“We found the tin tag on the floor inside the safe with the dead man.”
The what? What was a tin tag? Was that some part on an old gun?
“But we can’t find the shotgun anywhere.”
“You sure ‘bout that?” Harvey’s face gave away nothing. I needed him to show me how he did that in the face of the terror of being locked up in that urine-stinking jail cell.
“I searched your usual hiding spots.” Cooper clicked the pen again.
“That sounds like a bit of a pickle,” I said, wanting to save Harvey from having to outright lie to his nephew or worse, admit the truth. Tampering with evidence was going to look bad on my ever-growing record.
“It’s a pickle all right.” Cooper threw his pen, like a gauntlet, onto the coffee table between us. “Especially since we found evidence of rock salt in a wall of the barn.”
Chapter Five
Meanwhile, back in the land of the non-living …
After announcing that detail about the rock salt in the barn wall, Cooper nailed each of us in turn with those steely eyes of his, settling finally on me.
We were dead meat.
Detective Cooper had his teeth sunk in, and I highly doubted he’d let go until one of us whimpered.
Harvey’s stupid family shotgun was going to land us in a chain gang cleaning up litter in the median of Interstate 90.
I felt a wheeze of fear trying to crawl its way up from my lungs. I opened my mouth, searching for something to say that would send the detective back into his dog house where his usual chew toys waited for him.
Before I could get a word out, Natalie let out a hair-raising screech.
I nearly jumped into Harvey’s lap in surprise.
All three of us gaped at her.
She pointed at the floor. “Spider.”
Spider? I looked down at her feet, then hit her with a wrinkly brow. First of all, there was no eight-legged beastie to be seen. Second, I’d known Natalie almost my whole life and had never seen even a peep of arachnophobia from her before, not even when she’d found a nest of Daddy-longlegs in the basement of my parents’ house during a sleepover back in seventh grade. Hell, she’d practically petted the creepy crawlies that night.
I was about to ask her what in hell was wrong with her when she narrowed her eyes at me.
Oh! She was saving our bacon. Her distraction now had Cooper searching the floor around her feet for the phantom spider. Thanks to Natalie’s quick thinking, Cooper’s interrogation was momentarily knocked off track. I needed to make my escape before he could get it back on the rails.
I shot to my feet. “If we’re done here, Detective, I need to get to work. I have paperwork and a boss waiting.”
Cooper glared up at me. “We’re not done, Parker.”
“Great! I’ll look forward to hearing from you again as this case gets more exciting
.” Or not. Besides, what could be more exciting than a skinless face?
On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t have asked that question since I really didn’t want to find out the answer.
Without giving Cooper the opportunity to bid me further adieu, or to block my path with some police “Red-Rover” maneuver, I bee-lined for the door.
Natalie raced out after me. “Wait for me, crazy!”
I keyed the pickup to life as Natalie was climbing into the cab and barely gave the old truck a chance to catch its breath before stomping on the gas. I wanted to get the hell out of Dodge before Cooper decided to throw us in the think-tank on some trumped up charges based on his suspicions alone.
A glance in the rearview mirror as we sped away found Cooper standing on the front porch watching us leave, his arms crossed. I lowered my head a fraction, half-expecting him to whip out his gun and shoot out the back window of our getaway truck.
“We’re up shit creek,” Natalie said after we made it to the bottom of the hill and turned right toward Deadwood. “It’s only a matter of time before one of us cracks.”
I thought of that piss-reeking, pubic-hair sprinkled urinal in the jail cell down at the Deadwood Police Station and grimaced. “It’s not going to be me.”
“Ha!” Her tone was full of disbelief.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You almost spilled your guts back there. If I hadn’t played Little Miss Muffet to distract him, you’d have upchucked the truth.”
“No way.”
“Yes way. Your eyes got all big and round like they do when you’re freaking out.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“Oh, they definitely did. You’ve never been very good at keeping secrets what with your twitchy nose and scaredy-cat eyes.” She looked at her hands. “Well, except for that doozy about Doc, but I was too blind with a stupid crush to notice your usual cues then.”
My cheeks warmed. I wished I could crawl down by the gas pedal until this awkward moment blew out the window. I thought about blurting out that Cooper had the hots for her to make her feel better about the whole Doc and me affair, but it would only feed that insecure part of her psyche that this sabbatical from men was supposed to starve to death.