“I don’t know, Rob. Puberty, probably. I started picking strawberries summers when I was twelve, and I did a lot of baby-sitting, so I wasn’t around all that much. Hal worked for his dad.”
“Doing what?”
“His father owned the old Phillips gas station downtown. He sold it when Hal was in high school, and they built the new station out on Highway 14. Hal always worked for his dad.”
“Hal wasn’t drafted?”
“No, flat feet.”
“Lucky.” Rob’s father was killed in Vietnam the year Rob turned eight. He supposed he ought to check out the Tichnor brothers’ draft status in that era. Vance had probably had a lucky draw at the lottery. Ethan, who was older, would have had an academic exemption.
Linda had resumed her questions. Rob listened critically. She was good, more empathetic than he was. Being a mother herself, she pursued Hal’s threat to kill Tom. By the time Tammy’s doctor appeared to release her, Linda had established strong motives for both Tammy and young Tom.
Hal had conducted a reign of terror. It was hard not to believe he got what he deserved, which was a rotten way to think about a murder victim in the course of an investigation. If the sheriff insisted on mounting a case against Tammy, somebody from the DA’s office would have to interview her doctor. Rob suspected she had been incapable well before midnight.
They took their leave of Tammy after advising her they’d be seeing her again. She planned to spend the night at the Red Hat. Did he mind keeping Tom and Towser? He said no, wondering what he’d let himself in for. He trusted that Earl would finish with the Brandstetter house soon.
Linda had driven a county car and offered Rob a ride to the courthouse.
“It’s almost lunch time,” he said as they made their way down the long hospital corridor. “Go check on Mickey. I’ll walk. I need to stretch my legs.”
“Okay, I’ll make you a copy of the interview after lunch and write up a statement for Tammy to sign.”
“Good. I ought to tell Tom his mother is free to go. See you later.” He headed downstairs to the cafeteria where he found Tom drooping over bad coffee and an old issue of Willamette Week. The place bustled with care-givers in colorful polyester uniforms and glum relatives of patients. The noise level was high.
Too high for Rob. He gave Tom the good word and left by the side entrance. Outside the air smelled delectably fresh. A light breeze blew from the east. He threaded his way among the back streets and through blocks of old houses that separated the courthouse from the newer hospital.
When he got to Birch Street there wasn’t much traffic. It was Sunday. He walked along the row of elaborate Victorian houses, thinking about questions he needed to ask Ethan and Vance Tichnor and their sister. The wind had picked up. A plastic grocery bag fluttered against someone’s privet hedge.
Carol had said nothing at all about Hal’s death, yet according to Tammy they had been childhood playfellows. Kick the can was quite a bond. Rob had been good at kick the can, being small and sneaky. Most childhood games favored the large and straightforward.
“Rob! Robert Neill!”
He stopped and focused on the elderly woman in a track suit who had stepped through a neat gate in the hedge. He felt a twinge of dismay. “Mrs. Crookshank, how are you?”
She touched his arm with a liver-spotted hand. “Very well, thanks. You’re looking good, Robert. I hear you’ve been busy.”
He made a polite noise of agreement. Mrs. Crookshank had been his fourth-grade teacher, a reasonably sympathetic woman. Because he couldn’t very well tell her to piss off, he asked after her daughter and diverted her from current events. Maxine Crookshank was a San Francisco investment banker, a source of mystery to her mother, so she chatted about her fiftyish child for several minutes and Rob half listened. He had nothing against Maxine.
He heard the truck accelerate behind them and turned. When it lurched toward them on the wrong side of the street, he shoved Mrs. Crookshank through the open gate, wrapped his arms around her, and rolled until he ended up on top of her on the lawn with his ears ringing.
She was saying something indignant.
“What?” Stupid.
“Was that a gunshot?”
“Yes.” Several gunshots.
“Get off, you’re hurting me. Rob, are you all right?”
“Stay down.” He shoved himself up, pulling his gun from the shoulder holster, and staggered to the gate, but the truck had vanished. Doors opened on both sides of the street. Heads poked out.
He shook his own head to clear it. Dumb bastard. He shoved the gun back in place and reached into his jacket pocket for his cell phone. He couldn’t focus, but he punched 911 anyway and got Jane.
As his tinny voice relayed information about the shots and the truck to the dispatcher, he made his way back to Mrs. Crookshank. A green Datsun pickup, he said. Small. Older. Dirty. Washington plates, something starting with BE, driving erratically.
His former teacher still sprawled on the lawn. She stared up at him. The frame of her glasses had bent and the glasses hung from her left ear.
He knelt beside her and lifted the glasses off gently. “Are you all right?”
“No, I don’t know. My back. You’re bleeding, Robert.”
“I am?”
The phone squawked.
“All over your face.”
He touched his forehead and his hand came away red. “No shit.”
Jane said, “What’s going on?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. Cut my head, I guess.”
“That’s a four-twenty-two? Shall I send an ambulance? Rob?”
He collected his wits. “Yes, they need to check out Mrs. Crookshank. I had to shove her down and she says her back hurts.”
“But you’re okay?”
“Jesus, Jane, I don’t know. I think so. Send the paramedics and a patrol car. And tell them to find the fucking pickup.” He signed off, thrust the phone into his pocket, and sat on the damp grass beside the elderly woman.
“You shouldn’t use bad language.” Her mouth quivered.
He smiled at her. “I know. I’m sorry.”
HAROLD Brandstetter had had a tight focus—or a narrow mind—so his books were a disappointment to one who had cut her teeth on the Library of Congress Subject Heading Index.
Meg noticed the German-language Bible right away. It was an anomaly among the ranks of military histories, right-wing rants, conspiracy theories, pop biographies of political hacks, and how-to books on wilderness survival and bomb building. The fiction, all paperback, consisted of paranoid thrillers of the Tom Clancy ilk.
Hal had claimed to be a Libertarian, but Meg saw no evidence that he had studied John Stuart Mill or any of the classic theorists of small government. Or even Ayn Rand. Of course, that didn’t mean much. He’d probably looked at the more recent proponents. Meg had met a born-again Christian who had never read St. Matthew.
Hal did have an assortment of handbooks that dealt with evaluation and pricing of antiques, including coins, guns, and cars, and one or two university press paperbacks on Indian artifacts. None of the books except the Bible had intrinsic value. Whatever his preoccupations, Harold Brandstetter had not been a book collector. But he had been a gun collector, predictably, with stacks of gun magazines, and he had been interested in the idea of collecting.
Meg flipped through the Bible, no easy task wearing latex gloves, and noted a number of lists and yellowed clippings. Most of them had been stuffed between the opening pages and were worth a closer look. She set the tome with its dark gothic type aside, with a Post-it that said “Important.”
When she was satisfied with her book categories, which didn’t take long, she began sorting printouts onto the bare surface of the dining room table. She could hear noises from the office and the master bedroom down the hall. Earl Minetti and Jeff Fong were completing the forensic work.
Although Meg had seen Minetti directing the Crime Scene crew in her garage, and he must have seen her
, he had introduced himself to her with some formality. He also introduced a slim young Chinese American who wore sweats beneath the protective coverall. Fong had round metal-rimmed glasses. He smiled at her. Minetti was less welcoming but minded his manners.
They had left her almost at once and gone off about their own business. A vacuum cleaner whirred and stopped. Every once in awhile, a cell phone would ring and she would hear a low male voice. Otherwise the house was silent. It smelled of dog and could have done with a good dusting.
Meg took a little tour. The decor was retro without being fashionable, as if the Brandstetters had inherited the furnishings and never changed them. A depressing oil painting of a sherbet pink mountain hung in the living room. The sofa was brown plush with a matching armchair. A huge white leather recliner, not of the period, sat in front of the big-screen television with VCR and DVD players docked beneath it. She saw no evidence of interest in music, no CDs or tapes. The carpet was beige shag avec dog hair.
In the dining room, a dim color print of dead birds and a shotgun hung over the sideboard. The table and chairs looked as if they hadn’t been used in years. Perhaps they hadn’t. The chrome-legged breakfast table in the kitchen showed signs of heavy use. She gathered that the Brandstetters did not entertain.
There were no family pictures in sight, but dozens of photographs showed Hal’s truculent red face next to one politician or another. These photo ops had been carefully framed, then hung without much sense of spacing, too low or too high, in the hall, the dining room, and the living room.
The housekeeping was just good enough not to be slatternly. Tammy Brandstetter must have vacuumed and dusted once a month, and at a guess, cleaned out the clutter once a week. She had left no mark of personality on the public rooms of the house. Nothing showed her interests apart from the dog, a large exception in every sense.
Towser was a presence: dog scent, dog hair, a well-chewed rawhide toy on the living room carpet, scratch marks on the doors, dog dishes in the sink. Meg wondered if Hal had been afraid of Towser, and if so, why he had tolerated the ridgeback. Perhaps Hal had been afraid to be afraid.
She was sorting the printouts by subject matter and website, a no-brainer, so she let her mind wander as her hands worked. If, as seemed probable, Hal had been in on the Lauder Point theft, he had not stolen the artifacts because he found them interesting for their own sake. Neither he nor his wife collected art. But somebody did.
What kind of person collected things? Until she inherited the Brentwood house, Meg had never had the means to acquire a collection, and she doubted that she had the temperament, either. She would not have collected books—too much like work.
She enjoyed reading, and she knew enough to admire a well-designed, well-bound volume, but book collectors’ obsession wasn’t reading. She had known collectors with mint-crisp first editions who bought cheap paperback versions of their treasures if they wanted to read them.
To amass a true book collection you needed reasons other than love of the written word. Some book collectors were motivated by greed. If they were shrewd and knowledgeable, they could make good money on first editions of writers like Stephen King. Others wanted to impress. On her one trip abroad, Meg had visited the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, a dazzling personal collection of medieval manuscripts. It said a lot about Beatty’s taste and expertise as well as his wealth. Impressive.
Some collectors were scholars who wanted to lay their hands on everything ever published about Dutch sailing vessels or Civil War weapons, or whatever. Some were antiquarians with no interest in anything published after a given date. Some were just accumulators. They liked books, and the books piled up, but they never culled them. Meg was fond of accumulators, but she wouldn’t have wanted to live with the book dust at home and at work. A by-product of decaying glue and paper, it is obnoxious enough to be classified as an allergen.
She was sorting with a will. Halfway through, she came across a bibliography, a thick printout of sources that dealt with the looting of archaeological sites. It focused on the impact of looting on scholarship and on the victimized cultures. One of the articles listed was called “Killing the Past,” a crisp summary of the consequences.
Meg had not only visited the Beatty collection in Dublin, on the same trip she had also made a pilgrimage to the British Museum. At that time, the book collection was still housed in the huge museum in Great Russell Street. She had viewed the Lindisfarne Gospel and the Gutenberg Bible with suitable awe. Then, with an hour to kill, she had strolled through the wing housing the Elgin Marbles.
Early in the nineteenth century, Lord Elgin had sailed to Athens, hired local workmen, and crated up all the Periclean sculpture he could find on the Acropolis. He had sailed back to London with his booty, and the swag had later been given to the British Museum. It remained a bone of contention between the British and the Greeks.
True, the works he appropriated had been lying unvalued in the dirt when Elgin removed them. True, air pollution in present-day Athens was so appalling, the acids would probably destroy the art. Equally true, the works were Greek, not English, part of the heritage of Greece, and they belonged in Athens, the city that had offered them as a tribute to the goddess of wisdom. Both sides made other points, but that was the gist of the argument.
A mostly neutral observer, Meg had found the well-conceived display of the Elgin Marbles disorienting. In London, their meaning changed. The sculptures became not a tribute to Athena but the trophies of a nineteenth-century aristocrat. A Scot, as Lord Byron had pointed out in his scathing satire on the subject, not an Englishman. They were, however, displayed in London, not in Edinburgh.
And the moral of the story? Was Lord Elgin a looter? Were the modern equivalents of Lord Elgin, the great museums and galleries, looters, too? They spent unimaginable wealth on pots, masks, temple friezes, rock art. And low-life scum like Hal Brandstetter often brought them the goods.
And what about the archaeologists themselves, the scholars who studied pots and masks and rock drawings in situ? It seemed to Meg that, just by looking at the artifacts, they focused the minds of collectors and thieves on what they studied, so they became part of the mentality without wanting to.
Meg browsed through the titles listed in the bibliography on looting. She had a lot of experience with bibliographies, and this one was a winner—well organized, deep, clearly annotated, a pleasure to behold. Apparently, Hal had thought so, too. He had highlighted the articles that dealt with collectors of Native American artifacts.
Meg was getting a headache. She backed off a couple of steps and stared at the heaps of sorted paper. Collectors. What about them? Her Aunt Margaret, the one who left her the house, had collected thimbles. It was hard to imagine anyone killing in the course of thimble-theft.
“Time out for lunch?” Earl Minetti stood in the hall and eyed her work. “I want to lock up.”
“Good idea. Do you like chili?”
“Uh, sure.”
“I made a big pot overnight. It should be fairly tasty by this time, and the two of you are welcome to join me.” Meg was still into therapeutic cookery. “Three of you,” she added. “Jake’s out in the garage, isn’t he?”
Minetti nodded. He looked wary, as if he wondered why she was being so generous.
No such thing as a free lunch? Meg led the way to her kitchen. She would feed them there where it was comfortable. The dining table was heaped with boxes.
Jake made himself at home while the other two had a look at the ground floor of the house and Meg dished up.
“Hey, Meg, you’re a cop,” he said, grinning.
She smiled back. “Not really. I’m a consulting expert. Sounds more expensive.”
He laughed. “Something I can do?”
“Put out the silverware and glasses.” She cut bread, glad she’d had the wit to thaw another loaf that morning.
He fumbled in her flatware drawer and came up with the right cutlery.
“How’s Todd?”
He made a face. “Torn in two. His mom and Maddie Thomas keep calling him, wanting to know what’s happening, and he can’t tell them. Not that there’s anything to tell. I wish they’d lay off.” He plunked down knives and big spoons all around. Who needed forks?
“The young man who was killed—”
“Todd’s cousin, Eddy. Todd’s sick about that. I guess I would be, too. I hope we stick it to the bastard who killed him.” He rummaged in the cupboard, found glasses, and set one at each place.
“You don’t think it was Brandstetter?”
He eyed her with the same wariness she had seen in Minetti, and for that matter, in Rob Neill.
“Never mind, Jake. I have my own ideas, but they’re just ideas. You guys will sort it out eventually. Why don’t you go round up the other two?” She started ladling chili into the big soup bowls she had bought when Lucy started bringing home boyfriends.
The chili passed muster if the silence that fell as the men ate was an indication. Meg thought it tasted okay, though she probably should have chopped another poblano into it. It was chili definitely con came. Somewhere she had a nice recipe for vegetarian chili. To a man, the deputies drank milk. Meg was not a great drinker of milk herself and had been nipping at a half gallon since her first shopping expedition. Gone in one fell gulp.
A cell phone rang. Minetti wiped his trim little mustache with a paper napkin and said, “Minetti, yeah. At Ms. McLean’s eating lunch. What?”
Meg wagged the ladle at Jeff. “More?”
He held out his bowl. “I haven’t tasted chili that good since I left California. The folks up here don’t have a clue.”
“My God, they did what?”
Everybody looked at Minetti. He had turned pale. “Right away, Jane. Ten-four.” He set the phone down. “Somebody in a green pickup just shot Rob Neill.”
Men shouted. The ladle clattered in the tureen. Meg couldn’t get her breath.
At last she heard Minetti saying, “The ambulance is on its way. Jeff, you keep on with the house. Jake, we need the patrol car. We’re looking for an older Datsun pickup with Washington plates. Green, she said.”
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