See Also Deadline

by Larry D. Sweazy

  CHAPTER 36

  The house was dark inside and out. The porch light was off, as well as the security light mounted on the single-car garage at the side of the house. Only the streetlight offered a view of the Oddsdatters’ neat little house.

  Bare-limbed shadows danced across the brick exterior; spindly arms reached out of the darkness, touching nothing. Tall, snow-covered bushes sat at each corner, perfectly shaped in the fall to serve as Christmas trees.

  The house was a two-story brick affair with the gable end facing the street. The place was modest, not a rich man’s palace by any means, a perfect example of the Franco-Germanic architecture that was common in town. Henrik Oddsdatter maintained a dental clientele made up of humble, hardworking people. Anything fancy would have put people off. Darlys, everyone thought, was Henrik’s pride and joy, but even she drove a Plymouth, not a Cadillac or a Lincoln Continental.

  Guy turned off the engine, and the inside of the police car went dark. “I think you should stay here,” he said, looking at me with a determined look on his chiseled, Gary Cooper face.

  I forced a smile. “I’ve been stuck inside a vehicle for more hours today than I can count. I’ll stay behind you. I’ll only come to help if you call, if you find Darlys or Tina, if that’s all right with you?” I wasn’t going to overstep my boundaries again.

  The police radio hissed with static, drawing Guy’s attention. He picked up the mic and said he was, “10-23,” which I knew was police talk for “Arrived at the Scene.” George answered back with a tepid “10-4.”

  Guy set the mic back down and looked at me again. He reached over and gently touched my gloved hand with his. I didn’t pull away.

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you, Marjorie. I couldn’t live with myself if you got hurt because of being with me,” he said.

  Guy’s tone and the seriousness in his eyes forced me to believe him. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, either, Guy. That’s why I think you should let me go with you. You might not have an hour to wait for Duke.”

  “Okay, you’re probably right. I know you can handle yourself.” He didn’t pull his hand away; he let his touch linger. His deep blue eyes softened, changed in a way that made me uncomfortable. I looked away, then reached for the door handle, breaking contact. I couldn’t breathe, and I didn’t like how I felt, how the atmosphere inside the car had changed. For a brief second, I was somewhere sultry, tropical. A surprise in the darkness of a snowy night.

  Cold air rushed against my face as I stepped outside, washing away anything but the reality of our presence at the Oddsdatters’.

  I waited for Guy to get out of the Scout, then followed him up to the front door. He had his weapon out, a Police-Special .38 caliber, and I carried the .22, with a round set in the chamber. The safety was off. I only had one shot.

  Guy peered into the triangle window, then tried to open the door. I was surprised that he didn’t knock on the door and present the warrant to Henrik—if he was home. Guy motioned for me to follow him as he made his way to the side of the house. He edged along the cold brick like a burglar might, shuffling through half a foot of virgin snow all the way to the garage, trying not to be seen. I followed in his tracks and came to a stop next to him. He grabbed a flashlight off his belt with his free hand, then shined the familiar beam inside the garage window.

  “What kind of car does Darlys drive?” Guy whispered.

  “A red Plymouth Fury.”

  “There’s a black Pontiac in there. Now I know what to look for if we have to leave.”

  A black car. I guess the make might have been a Pontiac. I didn’t say anything, but I would when the time was right, if I had to remind Guy that I thought I’d seen Tina in the back of a black car driving down Villard Street.

  Guy turned off the flashlight, then headed to the back door, which was a couple of healthy steps from the garage. He stepped up on the stoop, opened the screen door, and knocked as loud as he could. “Doctor Oddsdatter, this is the sheriff. If you’re home, please come to the door.” Then he knocked again, cocked his ear, and listened for a sound of any kind.

  I couldn’t hear anything, didn’t see a light come on. A dog barked a few houses down, and my attention was drawn away from Guy for a second. I wished Shep was with me, keeping a lookout.

  Guy knocked again, even louder this time. He waited a second, then knocked again.

  Nothing.

  Without any warning, Guy reached for the doorknob. The door opened at the first turn. He wore a quizzical look on his face. “Everybody’s locking their doors these days,” he said in a soft voice.

  “Maybe Henrik doesn’t have anything to be afraid of.”

  “I’m going in. You stay here. If anything happens, you go back to the Scout and radio George and tell him you need help ASAP.”

  I watched Guy edge inside the house uninvited. He turned on the kitchen light, announced himself again, and walked out of sight, making plenty of noise as he went, hoping, I was sure, that Darlys and Henrik were sound sleepers, up in their bedroom, completely unware of what was going on. I hoped so, too.

  After Guy searched the entire house and found nothing out of place, we drove straight to Henrik’s office, which sat a block off Villard in a sixty-year-old building that had originally belonged to a deed and title company. Henrik’s dental practice was on the second floor. All of the floors were marble, the ceilings tin, and the walls paneled in burled walnut. The office was old luxury made modern with a waiting room, a television, and the latest, most comfortable chairs and most up-to-date equipment.

  Guy parked across the street from the front entrance with an ear turned to the police radio. There was no sign of Darlys’s red Fury.

  Duke radioed that he was on his way.

  “We’re going to wait until he gets here,” Guy said.

  “What if I’m wrong? What if Henrik and Darlys are in Arizona?”

  “That would be a good thing, right?” Guy said.

  “Yes, of course, but then you wouldn’t be any closer to figuring out who killed Nils or where Tina is.”

  “I’m not going to give up until I solve this crime, Marjorie. I don’t care how long the investigation takes, or if the whole town gives up on me. I don’t care. This happened on my watch. I’ve known these people most all of my adult life. None of us should live in fear of losing our child or find a good man like Nils Jacobsen dead like we did. I’m sorry you’re here at all, Marjorie. I wish you were home asleep like the rest of the town.” He looked over at me, stared me in the eyes, and said, “How did you figure this all out? I know you read the reports, but I’m not sure I would have been able to put all of that together.”

  “I don’t know, parsing information is what I do, I guess. I’m an indexer. I organize ideas and words so they make sense to readers, to strangers. But everything has to make sense to me first, I guess.”

  “I’m sure glad you got a brain in that pretty head of yours.”

  I blushed and looked out the window. There was nothing I could say to that. I felt relieved, assured. There was nowhere else I would have rather been. But I didn’t say that. I couldn’t.

  A pair of headlights cut through the darkness and headed toward us. Duke Parsons pulled up alongside Guy’s Scout, leaned over, and rolled down his window. Guy followed suit.

  Duke craned his neck and looked at me with surprise and disdain all rolled into one. “What’s she doing here?” he snapped.

  Guy looked at me, then back to Duke. “We wouldn’t be here if Marjorie hadn’t figured this out.”

  “Great, another wild goose chase,” Duke said.

  “Deputy, if you don’t mind showing some manners and respect, Mrs. Trumaine is here because she brought me some information that I asked her to retrieve. We both feel there’s a good possibility that our suspect is holed up somewhere close.”

  “You have a suspect now? Since when?” I could see Duke roll his eyes even in the darkness. I wasn’t the least bit surprised b
y his reaction to my presence.

  “I do have a suspect, and we’re going to go search Doctor Oddsdatter’s office.”

  I sat there with my mouth shut. I was staying out of this.

  “Can’t this wait? Doctor Oddsdatter, really, Guy?” Duke said.

  “No, this can’t wait,” Guy said. “I don’t have time to explain all of my reasons to you.”

  “Well, she’s not going with us,” Duke said.

  Guy looked toward me with stern eyes and squared his shoulders. “Yes, she is. I’m not leaving her out here by herself.”

  The office door was locked. There was no way in other than to break the door glass that bore Henrik’s name and announced his profession as a dentist.

  “The janitor’s closet’s in the basement,” Duke said. “The key to the office is in there.”

  “We’ll all go. Marjorie, you stay between us.”

  Only the light from the exit signs lit our way. Duke led, and Guy followed, but in the darkness I could still read anger brewing on Duke’s neck, just under his skin. He had never liked me, and I was certain, from this point forward, that he would hate me.

  The marble floors echoed all around us. There were no other sounds as we descended into the building’s basement. The basement wasn’t like the cellar under my house, full of spiders and unseen creatures, but was made of cement bricks, with walls, storage rooms, and hallways shooting off in every direction. Guy used his flashlight to light our way to the janitor’s closet, aiming the beam at the floor so we wouldn’t announce our presence to anyone.

  There were no sounds to be heard in the basement other than a constant drip of water coming from an unseen faucet somewhere close. The basement smelled musty, old, with an undercurrent of decay to the odor.

  Duke led us to the janitor’s closet. He grabbed the doorknob and shouldered his way inside as quietly as he could. I had no idea how he knew where the closet was or how to open the door, but he did. He quickly returned with a key in his hand.

  As Duke handed the key to Guy, I thought I heard a sound, a whimper. Duke froze. The keys dangled a few inches from Guy’s hand, who looked toward the sound, toward the whimper. I was sure I had heard a whimper.

  CHAPTER 37

  Guy flipped the flashlight off. He stood there and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. The whimper seemed distant, coming from somewhere at the end of the hall we stood in. The sound could have been anything in that old building—a rat, a joist creaking under the weight of the snow on the roof, anything.

  Guy motioned for us to follow him. All three of us edged along the wall, our individual weapons at the ready. I didn’t like where I was, what I was doing, and I was starting to rethink my decision to come along when I heard the sound again. Someone was crying.

  Nothing could have stopped me, then. If Darlys or Tina were hurt, I’d be the first one to help.

  The cry echoed down the hall and was quickly followed by a muffled voice, a male voice. Angry, intent on admonishing or quieting whoever was crying. Then silence.

  I could feel Duke’s hot breath on the back of my neck. Guy was nothing more than a silhouette leading the way. I was inches from him.

  We finally arrived at the end of the hallway, which, to my surprise, turned left and went deeper into the bowels of the building. A sliver of dim light reached out from under a door about thirty feet down the hall.

  Guy stopped and mouthed, “Stay here.”

  I didn’t argue or ask him to repeat himself. I knew what he meant, and why: You’re in danger. Let us do our job.

  No words were needed for Duke to understand, either. He pushed past and rubbed against me to let me know he was there. The move was done in a bullying kind of way, to show who had power and who didn’t. He smelled of sweat and discomfort, like he hadn’t had a bath after three days of baling hay. I plastered myself against the wall and kept my eyes on the moving shadows. My breath was caught in my lungs. I really didn’t like that man at all.

  Guy and Duke took up their positions on each side of the door. The light didn’t flicker or move as it would if there were someone moving inside the room.

  Then the whimper came again. The sound reminded me of a first-year doe that I’d hit with the truck driving back from town. The cry of its pain had been too much to bear. I’d had no choice but to put the poor thing out of its misery. There was still hope for a rescue here.

  The whimper was followed by the voice. Even from where I stood, I recognized Henrik Oddsdatter’s voice. So did Guy.

  He didn’t hesitate to pound on the door with his fist. “This is the sheriff, Doctor Oddsdatter. There’s no way out. If you come out peaceably, I’m sure we can talk this over.” Guy was demanding, firm, but not threatening.

  A female scream came right behind Guy’s words. I couldn’t tell if the scream had come from a grown woman or a girl. Then the sound vanished. Like someone had put a hand over someone else’s mouth.

  Seconds seemed long and strained. Finally, Henrik said, “This is a family matter, sheriff. You need to go on about your business.”

  “I have a warrant.”

  “This is a family matter,” Henrik said again. The light vanished, and darkness overtook the hallway. Any detail I could see on Guy or Duke’s face disappeared.

  I heard rustling inside the room, followed by a groan or a moan, I couldn’t tell which.

  Guy flipped on his flashlight and motioned for Duke to go low. He was going in high. Then Guy looked to me and mouthed words I knew all too well. Stay put.

  Without any warning or further requests, Guy set the flashlight on the cold floor, then stood up and kicked in the door. “Everybody put your hands up! Everybody put your hands up!”

  Duke’s flashlight clicked on, and I could see that he was kneeling at the edge of the door, his .38 Police Special aimed inside, exactly like Guy’s.

  Henrik didn’t obey. I heard a loud explosion, a gunshot in a small room, a bright flash of orange, then a thud, and a yell from Duke as he tumbled backward. His gun fell from his grip and spun out of the light, into the darkness, out of reach. Bright red blood sprayed from his shoulder, and he crumpled to the floor on his side, eyes wide open, hurt, stunned, but not mortally wounded.

  Henrik must have seen what I saw. He fired again, hitting Duke below the first wound.

  Guy pulled back. I think he was uncertain where to shoot, afraid he might hit Darlys or Tina if they were close by. I didn’t blame him for not taking a shot.

  “Looks like we have a problem, sheriff,” Henrik said. “If your deputy moves a muscle, I’ll shoot again. Only this time, I won’t be so kind. I can see his head clearly. Now, you need to drop your weapon, stand back, and let us leave. Then we can all pretend this never happened. You can tell everyone that this was a routine check and a vagrant shot your deputy. I am in Arizona.”

  Guy was still as a statue. “I can’t let you do that, Doctor Oddsdatter,” he said.

  “You have no choice. You have Deputy Parsons’s life in your hands.”

  Guy looked down at Duke. The deputy’s eyes were wide with fear and pain. Blood pooled on the floor.

  “Then you’ll have two murders to answer for,” Guy said.

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know that you killed Nils Jacobsen. You wouldn’t be doing this if you weren’t guilty.”

  “Guilty is an ugly word. We couldn’t reach an agreement, much like we can’t here. We’re at an impasse,” Henrik said. “I couldn’t let him bring that boy here. Not now, not ever.”

  “You ambushed him.”

  “Put your weapon down, sheriff. I am not asking again.”

  “I can’t do that.” I could tell Guy was searching the darkness for a place to shoot, but he wasn’t confident.

  Henrik was as good as his word. Only he didn’t shoot Duke, he shot Guy, hitting him in the forearm and sending the .38 flying into the air. I heard the steel bounce off the cement floor. Guy was smart enough to jump out of the way, leaping a
way into the darkness, out of Henrik’s sight, but Duke was still at risk. The next shot would surely be at Duke’s head.

  I couldn’t breathe, and my whole body was numb. I blinked and tried to regulate my breathing. I had to do something; I couldn’t stand there one more second.

  “Hold steady, Marjorie. Aim for the heart. That poor coyote’s got distemper. Shoot to kill. Don’t make the creature suffer.” Hank’s voice had come to calm me, to direct me. My father had taught me how to handle a rifle when I was a ten-year-old girl. I was the son he never had. I’d had no choice but to learn how to shoot on the farm. Reasons to fire a weapon didn’t come along very often, but when they came I had to be ready. Hank had made sure I put into practice what I knew. We both took life and death seriously. There was no place for a soft heart on a farm like ours.

  Henrik didn’t know I was there. He would either shoot Duke, or he would go looking for Guy. I was betting on the latter.

  I aimed Hank’s Revelation .22 midway up the door. I breathed in, exhaled, put my finger on the trigger, and sighted the scope, which had come attached to the rifle when Hank’s father bought the gun at the Western Auto store in 1935. I had to imagine that I was on the farm, stopping a rabid animal from doing any more harm.

  The flashlight was still on the floor. I saw Henrik’s shadow first.

  “Never point a gun at anyone unless you mean to kill them,” my father said, early on. I had both of them at my shoulder, urging me on.

  I had no choice. Henrik had killed Nils. He would kill Duke and Guy to get away. He would kill Darlys and Tina to silence them.

  And then he stepped into the doorway and stopped.

  “Breathe in, pull the trigger back. Exhale, and release.”

  I fired the .22 directly at Henrik’s heart. I couldn’t miss. A small caliber rifle like the Revelation was difficult to kill a man with.

  I hit my target right on.

  Henrik took a step back with an odd look on his face. He turned to me, surprised at my presence. He pressed one hand against his chest, a pistol dangling from his other hand.