9 More Killer Thrillers

by Russell Blake

  When he arrived, the two lawmen searched the pickup, finding a baggie of marijuana in the glove box, as well as a floor littered with empty beer cans, fast food wrappers, cigarette butts, and other trash. The bed of the truck was just as messy. Among the trash and tools that littered the back, Dolan found a small piece of hammered copper that looked suspiciously like a part of an oversize bird’s tail feather. He held it up to the sheriff and said, “I think we’ve found what’s left of Thomas the Turkey.”

  Chapter 17

  “Do you think Chandler really could have come here to recover some of the money from his robberies?” Chad asked.

  “Well, we know that the $48,000 taken in the North Platte robbery, where that farmer shot him, was never found,” Parks said. “If he really was involved in all of the robberies he was suspected in, we’re talking somewhere in the neighborhood of $650,000 altogether. And not one penny was ever recovered. It had to go somewhere.”

  “I don’t know,” Weber told him. “It still comes down to the same thing. If you’re going to hide money from a robbery, why Big Lake? There must be a million places easier than here to get to. But if he really did stash some money around here, I seriously doubt it’s buried in somebody’s back yard. And that entrenching tool is all we have to even begin that line of conjecture. I think it’s all overactive imaginations running wild.”

  “Just a bunch of guys sitting at a bar dreaming up crazy schemes,” Buz said. “But, one good thing came out of it. Those two losers back in the cells admitted they stole that damn turkey and cut him up and sold it for scrap. At least we can close out that case.”

  “Who are they?” Robyn asked. “They didn’t look familiar to me.”

  “Barry Gifford and Corey Dengler,” Buz told her. “They’re cousins. And the two of them together come up about fifteen minutes shy of retarded. And that was before they started doing drugs when they were kids and fried whatever brain cells they may have had to start with.”

  “Shame, too,” Dolan said. “Walt and Clarice Dengler are damn fine people. Six kids and every one of them turned out good except for Corey. I put a lot of it on Barry, though. He was a problem even as a little kid. Wendy had him in her third grade class, and even then the stories she’d come home and tell me; he’d steal from the other kids in the class, pick on the smaller ones, break things on purpose. She said she spent more time trying to control him than the rest of the class put together. And Corey seemed to just follow his lead all the way, even back then.”

  “Okay, before this meeting breaks up, I want whoever is on duty to drive through that neighborhood every so often to see if we have any other idiots out there with shovels,” Weber said.

  “Anything else I’m missing?”

  “What about the hippies?” Archer asked.

  “So far we haven’t had much trouble from them,” Weber said. “The woman we picked up at the pharmacy’s name was Suzette Megler. She slept it off at the hospital, I cited her for shoplifting and she’s back out at the meadow. We’ve had a few calls for vagrants, but mostly those were just folks passing through town headed for the meadow. Like I said, we’re going to have to look the other way if we see some minor pot use, because if we didn’t, we’d be overwhelmed. A lot of folks are worried they’ll cause problems, but Chad and I were out there this morning and everybody seemed pretty mellow. Let’s keep it that way.”

  “I suspect if we do have a major problem, it will be some of our local good ol’ boys hassling the hippies, not the other way around,” Chad said.

  “What about Wyatt Earp?” Buz asked.

  Tommy said, “I stopped by his place to check on him this morning and he still seems pretty down. All he did was ask if I had heard anything else about Mr. Wilson. The rest of the time he just sat there staring off into space.”

  “Wilson’s going to live,” Weber said. “As for Wyatt, I’ll swing by and look in on him again before I go home. I can relate to what he’s going through. I know a lady over in Springerville that I’m going to have him talk to. We’ll give him a few days to get himself back together before he comes back on duty.”

  “It’s funny, him always acting like he was such a hotshot and all that, and then he totally loses it when he actually does have to shoot somebody,” Buz said. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t envy what he’s going through, but it’s just kind of ironic.”

  “It’s never an easy thing to deal with,” Weber said. “We all carry guns and we all know it could happen to any of us at any time, and we’d be in the same place Wyatt is. And trust me, it’s not a place any of us ever wants to be. Having to shoot somebody is about the worst experience a cop can have.”

  On that sober note, the weekly staff meeting ended, but before Weber could escape his desk, Mary Caitlin cornered him.

  “Don’t even think of it, Jimmy! You’re not leaving this office until you return these telephone calls,” she said, thrusting a handful of message slips at him.

  “Mary, isn’t part of your job description dealing with a lot of the little stuff so I don’t have to?” Weber asked her.

  “Yes it is, and I do filter out ninety percent of them,” she replied. “I only give you the ones that require your personal attention.”

  Weber sorted through the messages, throwing two from the mayor in the wastebasket without reading them. “Okay, I can live with the Forest Service needing an update on things out at the meadow, and this one from Judge Ryman about any charges against Anthony Wilson, and this one here from Detective Timpkins up in Colorado. But why do I have to call Flossie Fuller to hear all about the hookers that came to town with the hippies? That woman sees hookers under every bush!”

  “Every bush? Was that a Freudian slip?” Parks asked.

  “Shut up! You’re a pig,” Mary told him, then turned back to Weber. “And the reason you have to call her back is because the woman’s crazy as a bedbug and I don’t want to deal with her. You don’t pay me enough for that.”

  “Hippies are into all of that free love stuff,” Parks said, “They got no need to pay for it, and no money either.”

  “Shut up, Parks,” Weber told him as he reluctantly reached for the telephone.

  ***

  After reporting to Gregory Page that the Enlightened Love Movement had not burned down the forest up to that point in time; telling Judge Ryman that he and the Town’s attorney, Bob Bennett, were holding off on deciding whether or not to file assault charges against Wilson until after he was released from the hospital; and assuring Flossie Fuller that he would launch an immediate investigation into her allegations about prostitutes working the hippie encampment, Weber called Detective Timpkins back.

  “I talked to one of the local highway patrolmen who works this area, and he told me that the night Jerry Lee Chandler escaped from custody, he came across Richard Moynahan sleeping in his car in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station a few miles south of town. He knew Richard and his family and since he was off by himself and not bothering anybody, he didn’t hassle him. I’m thinking that may have been where Chandler found him.”

  “Could be,” Weber agreed. “A quick question. We found an entrenching tool in the trunk of Moynahan’s car and I’ve got some local barflies who are convinced that Chandler brought it to town to dig up buried loot from his bank robberies. Is there any reason your guy would have something like that in his car?”

  “Do you mean one of those folding shovels like you can get in Army surplus stores? Yeah, Richard had one. I’ve seen it myself a couple of times when we towed and inventoried his car after he was arrested for his penny ante stuff. Remember when I said he lived out of his car a lot of the time? When he did, he used it to dig holes to take a dump in, and then covered them back up.”

  “An environmentally friendly loser,” Weber said. “Who’d have thought?”

  “Well, after all, Sheriff, this is Colorado,” Timpkins told him. “We do have a certain respect for Mother Earth around here. Even our losers.”

  We
ber chuckled, and Timpkins continued, “I dug up one other thing I think you’ll find interesting. I’ve been trying to trace Richard’s movements from this end to see if there could be any possible connection between him and Chandler, and I’m convinced that it was just fate that allowed them to cross paths and Chandler took advantage of the opportunity. However, in the process of all of that, I traced Richard’s cell phone records.”

  “I don’t remember seeing a cell phone among his stuff or in the car,” Weber said.

  “Well, I don’t know about that. But Richard had a cell phone. His mother paid for it and insisted he have it for emergencies. I guess in the hope that someday he would straighten up and call home. Anyway, the records show that in the hours after our highway patrolman saw Richard at that gas station, two calls were placed from it to another cell phone. The number comes back to one of those throwaway prepaid phones that you can buy at convenience stores and truck stops. It was purchased in Texas five years ago, and according to the records, only three hours of the total prepaid twenty hours were ever used, and that was years ago. But when you make a call on a cell phone, it pings off the nearest cell tower. When whoever made those calls to that number from Richard’s phone, it pinged from a cell tower right there in Big Lake.”

  Weber almost dropped the telephone. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what it says here,” Timpkins told him. “Both calls lasted less than a minute, which could mean they were very quick calls, that the person hung up on whoever called, or that all the caller got was a recorded message.”

  Weber asked for the phone number, and for the name it was registered to. Timpkins gave him the number, but said back before the days of Homeland Security, no identification was required to purchase one of the prepaid phones, so nothing was on file.

  After ending his call with Detective Timpkins, Weber called the telephone number he had given him and got a recorded mechanical voice telling him his party was unavailable. Weber left his number and a request to call him back.

  Larry Parks was at his desk in the small cubbyhole of an office that served him.

  “You know more about all of this high tech stuff than I do,” Weber said, handing him the slip of paper with the cell phone number on it. “Is there a way to trace this number?”

  Parks studied the number for a minute, then picked up his phone and called it, getting the same recording Weber had.

  “Whose number is this?”

  Weber told him what he had learned from Detective Timpkins, and Parks shook his head. “If it were a newer, more expensive phone with GPS technology built in, we could probably get to within a hundred feet of it. But I doubt the one we’re talking about will have that. And if we were in a real city, with lots of cell towers, we could triangulate the signal off three different towers and get pretty close. But here in Dogpatch you’ve got just the one tower until the other ones go up, so I think we’re stuck.”

  Weber shook his head in frustration. “Damn it, I knew there was a reason Chandler showed up here. It just didn’t make sense he’d wander into town like he did. Now we need to figure out who he was coming to see and why.”

  Parks sat back in his chair and studied the phone number reflectively. “Who knows, Jimmy? Maybe he had a girlfriend who moved up here. You have a lot of new folks who have come to town in the last few years. Or maybe somebody from his old gang. Hell, maybe he really did have some money hidden around here somewhere!”

  “I knew it,” Weber said again.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Parks said, picking up his telephone again. “Since Chandler was a Federal fugitive, let me call the prison up in Colorado and see if they can tell us about any phone calls he might have made, or any visitors.”

  ***

  Two hours later, Parks reported that the records at the prison were a dead end. Except for a few calls to his court-appointed attorney and three visits from the same attorney in his first year of incarceration, Chandler had neither made nor received any telephone calls nor had any visitors during his time at the prison. The only mail he ever received was from the same attorney, and there was no record of him ever mailing out a letter. His former cellmate and other prisoners said he had kept to himself and never talked about his personal life or mentioned any family or friends outside the prison’s walls.

  A frustrated Weber left the office just after five, knowing that finding any motivation for Jerry Lee Chandler’s appearance in Big Lake was still somewhere just out of his reach. He had instructed Chad Summers and Tommy Frost to help Mary Caitlin prepare a brief, informal biography of everyone they could who lived in the neighborhood where Chandler had been killed, hoping to find some connection to Chandler or any place where the dead man had lived or committed his crimes. “Let’s keep this very low key,” Weber said. “The last thing we need is Chet Wingate getting word that we’re treading on the privacy of law-abiding citizens. This stays between the four of us, okay?”

  ***

  Weber found Wyatt Trask sitting in the same place on the couch where he had left him the last time, lost in thought.

  “How you doing, big guy?” Weber asked him.

  “Is he…?”

  Weber quickly shook his head. “Anthony Wilson is okay, Wyatt. He’s going to live. At least until his arteries finally close up and his heart gives out on him.”

  The deputy breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank God. Every time the phone rings or somebody comes by, I know it’s to tell me he didn’t make it.”

  “Wyatt, I know what you’re going through. I’ve been there myself. But you have to let it go. It was a righteous shooting, and you saved Frank Harrelson and Julie Smith from being shot. You’re a hero, man. You did good!”

  “I’m no hero,” Wyatt said, breaking down into tears. “I keep thinking there had to be a better way than shooting that old man!”

  “No, there wasn’t,” Weber told him. “If you hadn’t shot him, I was going to. It was the only way.”

  “I keep asking myself if there was any other way. Some way it didn’t have to happen.”

  “Wyatt, look at me.”

  The deputy turned his face to Weber, but it wasn’t the face of the squared away, gung ho deputy he had been days before. He needed a shave and his sunken eyes were red-rimmed and haunted.

  “Wyatt, you didn’t choose to shoot that man. Anthony Wilson made that decision himself. He decided it when he picked up that old Colt and came down to the Thriftway. He decided it when he didn’t drop the gun when I told him to. He decided it when he cocked that hammer back and pointed it. At every step of the way, he could have stopped it from happening, and he didn’t.”

  “But he was just a fat old man!”

  “And fat old men can kill you just as quick as strong young men can. Steve Rafferty was still a couple of months away from his eighteenth birthday when I shot him. Technically, he was still a child. But that child had already killed and mutilated one man, and ran a car off the road with three people in it, including his own sister and her baby. Then he shot Buz Carelton, and shot at me and the other deputies. It doesn’t matter how old somebody is, it only takes a few pounds of pressure to pull a trigger.”

  “How do you live with it, Sheriff? When do you stop replaying it over and over again in your mind?”

  “You live with it one day at a time,” Weber told him, recalling his own anguish and sleepless nights. “You keep busy, you try to push it away when it starts to come back, and eventually you learn to cope with it. But I won’t lie to you, Wyatt. It never goes away. You just learn to live with it.”

  He fished Molly’s business card out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Wyatt.

  “This is a lady named Molly Bateson. She’s a shrink, and I’ve been seeing her since my shooting. She’s good and she’s helped me a lot. Call and make an appointment to see her. The Town will cover the cost.”

  “Sheriff, I know I’ve come across pretty strong in the past and stepped on some toes with my attitude. I really believed I
was the man. But now I know the truth. I was just a loudmouthed idiot.”

  “You came on a little strong,” Weber acknowledged. “But, Wyatt, there’s one thing you need to know. There’s not a deputy in the department who doesn’t care for you and who isn’t hurting for what you’re going through. As terrible as it feels right now, maybe this will make you a better lawman. You’ve experienced something few cops ever have to, and that every one of them hopes they never have to. You can use this to do an even better job out there on patrol. And you can help other deputies if they’re ever put in the same position you were.”

  Wyatt nodded his head and turned to stare off into space again. Weber knew that what he had told the young deputy was the truth. But he also knew that at that point in time, Wyatt didn’t believe it. Just as Weber himself had not believed it when Pete Caitlin, who had shot three men during his own long career as a lawman, had told him the same things.

  Chapter 18

  The telephone woke Weber early Wednesday morning, and when he answered it, the dispatcher told him that there was a fire at the site where the second cell tower was going to be erected. The sheriff dressed hurriedly and sped out of his driveway, the Explorer’s siren screaming. He was a half-mile away when he spotted the thick, oily, black smoke billowing into the air.

  He eased his vehicle onto the shoulder of the road behind Buz Carelton’s truck, walked past it to a fire truck and followed the canvas-wrapped fire hose up a freshly graded rough trail. Fifty feet up the trail he could feel the heat, and he climbed a short rise to see a crew of firemen spraying water onto the charred hulk that had been Dutch Schmidt’s bulldozer. Other firemen were busy throwing dirt on small fires that had spread in the brush around the main blaze.