Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112)

by Simonson, Sheila

  Meg glanced wildly around. She spotted a rusty bait tin at the water’s edge and ran for it. When she returned to the heaving mass, Tom shouted, “Throw it on him. No bite, Towser. Leave it!”

  Meg sloshed icy water over the animal’s head. Then she ducked in and grabbed for the thrashing woman, who was still screaming.

  “He’ll kill her. Oh, God.” Meg pulled at Carol. The tan coat and the white wool pants showed splotches of scarlet. “Lie still, Carol. You’re bleeding.” Carol thrashed.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” The heavy woman who owned the café puffed across the road. She wore an apron with a wide ruffle over jeans and a T-shirt.

  Tom snapped the leash to Towser’s collar and pulled him off. The wet hound snarled, baring his fangs. Meg saw a long weal on his shoulder muscle. The bullet had hit him.

  Blood spurted from Carol’s thigh. Meg squished at the wound with both hands. Carol moaned.

  “Give me your apron,” Meg shouted at the proprietor of the Tenas Klootchman. “She’s bleeding to death.”

  The woman was no fool. She whipped off her apron and tore off the ties with hamlike hands. “Let me at her. I’ll make a tourniquet. Goddamn dog oughta be put down.”

  “No!” Tom wailed.

  “She shot him,” Meg said grimly. “He saved my life. Can we tie it here? He went for her thigh.”

  Carol’s sobbing subsided into ominous silence. Meg thought she had passed out, and no wonder. There was blood everywhere and it was bright red.

  Between the two of them, Meg and the café owner rigged a tourniquet. Meg thought it was working. At least there were no more spurts. The woman, her nametag said Patsy, was sitting splay-legged on the grass with her fists clenched on the tourniquet tie. Blood smeared her thick forearms.

  “Patsy?”

  “Yeah, call 911.”

  “Right. Tom?”

  “You can’t put Towser down. He was defending himself!”

  “Yes, I know.” Meg dug in her pocket for the keys and handed them to the sobbing boy. “Put him in the car, Tom.”

  “He’s hurt. She shot him.”

  “Yes. I’ll take him to the vet as soon as I can, but we have to get medical help for Carol now. Okay, Tom?”

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve and pulled the dog closer. Towser growled. “Yeah, all right. Shall I bring you the phone?” Meg’s phone was in the car.

  “Please.”

  Patsy touched the unconscious woman’s neck. “She has a pulse.”

  Meg said, “You’re a jewel, Patsy. How do you know? I can never find a pulse, myself.”

  The woman gave a shaky laugh. “I took a course.”

  “Well, it paid off.” Meg yanked off her jacket. “I guess we should keep her as warm as possible.”

  “Yeah. Man, I didn’t need this.”

  “Me either.”

  Their breath hung on the air a moment, then blew away in wisps.

  Tom ran up with the phone. “I’m going back to Towser.”

  “Yes, keep him calm. There’s a first-aid kit in my glove compartment.”

  “Right.” He disappeared as Meg hit 911 with bloody Angers. Her jeans and jacket were drenched with blood.

  It took her awhile to make herself clear to the dispatcher. The phone kept fading in and out, which didn’t help. When Meg was sure both an ambulance and a patrol car were on the way she thumbed the power off.

  “Jesus,” Patsy said. “She confessed to murder?”

  Meg drew a long, shaky breath. “Yes, and I’m pretty sure she was telling the truth.”

  “Who the hell is she?”

  Meg started babbling. By the time Jake Sorenson’s patrol car screamed up with its lights flashing, Patsy Diefenbach knew more than she probably wanted to know about Tichnor history.

  Patsy kept her hands on the tourniquet. Meg shivered beside her and babbled. Snowflakes settled on the grass.

  AT eleven-thirty, the judge signed the search warrant. Meyer raised less of a fuss about the arrest order than Rob expected, and promised to send the paperwork right away. Things were coming together. Dr. Tichnor showed up at the courthouse annex a little past twelve.

  Rob went out to meet him at the booking desk.

  Tichnor’s khaki pants held a crease and his boots shone. He sported a tailored hunting jacket. At least he hadn’t come in a three-piece Italian silk suit. “I’m late. I stopped by the Red Hat. Carol’s not there.”

  “I think she’s gone out to the lake. I have a car looking for her.” Rob had sent Jake Sorenson out to search for Carol’s car—and for Todd. Rob didn’t mention the missing deputy. No point causing confusion.

  Tichnor’s face reflected his anxiety. “I’m afraid for my sister.”

  “Then we need to get going. Is Vance armed?”

  “He’s a gun nut.”

  “I know he has a collection, but I thought it was still in Lake Oswego.”

  The doctor’s tension eased a little. “I hope so. He’s probably got some kind of handgun in his van, though.”

  Along with two cell phones he wasn’t answering.

  Rob ushered Tichnor into his office. “Make yourself comfortable. I’m getting things organized.” He explained briefly about Madeline Thomas.

  “She’s out there on my land?”

  “Yes. Watching Vance, according to her husband. Jack is going to show us where she is.”

  “Good. We’ll need a guide.” Tichnor ducked his head and his ears went red as if he were embarrassed. “I’ve been to the lake, but I haven’t walked around that area since I was in my twenties.”

  “You bought the land sight unseen?” What it was to have money to burn.

  “I bought it for the trees, and because Uncle Pete wanted me to. My wife thought I was crazy to invest in land here. She wants to buy a place in Cabo San Lucas. I hate Cabo.”

  The office phone rang. “Neill.”

  Reese said, “Judge Meyer sent the warrant and the arrest order by messenger.”

  “All right. Has Earl come back?”

  “Eating lunch in his office. Thayer, too.”

  Rob glanced at his watch. “Tell them all to assemble in the briefing room. Fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Any word from Matt Akers?”

  “I was getting to that. He just called. His crew left the site ten minutes ago.”

  “Did he say anything about Todd Welch?”

  “Todd?”

  Rob explained Todd’s masquerade.

  Reese gave an exasperated cluck. “I’ll call Akers again.”

  “Right. Do that. We’ll need body armor for the troops, including me, Dr. Tichnor, and Jack Redfern. Oh, and a bullhorn.”

  Reese squawked.

  Rob overrode the objection. “Yeah, I could use the P.A. system in the car, if I could take a car in the back way, but I can’t. Get me a bullhorn, just in case.”

  They discussed weapons. AR15s for the deputies at the gate. Rob didn’t like the thought of a shoot-out, but if Vance tried to make a break for it, they’d need to stop him. If, God forbid, Vance had taken Todd hostage, someone might have to shoot Vance. Thayer was a sniper.

  And if I don’t get the team into place soon, Rob thought, the sucker may drive off with the loot and Todd’s dead body in the back of the Windstar.

  “Jack Redfern just showed up,” Reese said.

  “Good, send him in.”

  Later, on the long drive to the lake, Rob considered the odd coming-together of personalities. On the face of it, Dr. Tichnor and Jack Redfern had nothing in common, but both of them were mild-mannered, humane men who wanted a nonviolent resolution. They got along.

  Rob was driving a county car for the first time in a while. The engine ran a little rough. The other cars had gone ahead and were already in place. He thought the deputies understood the game plan.

  He had Tichnor beside him. Jack slewed sideways in the back seat, as if riding in the back of a police car didn’t suit his dignity. He had probab
ly had rides in the backseats of other patrol cars in connection with gill-netting, so sticking him there along with the Kevlar armor wasn’t tactful. Rob needed to talk to Tichnor, though.

  “Tell me about Vance.”

  “He’s not stupid.”

  “I know.” They were passing the Hunters’ Roost Campground. Rob glimpsed yellow crime scene tape fluttering in the distance.

  “Vance is impulsive and, your word, obsessed.”

  “Why the Lauder Point artifacts? I don’t understand that at all.”

  “That was Grandpa.” Tichnor sounded miserable. “He took us to Celilo Falls before The Dalles Dam went in. Then he showed us the artifacts from the drowned sites near Bonneville. He took us out to Lauder Point Park right after the little museum opened.”

  The road began to twist along the river.

  “My grandfather took me to Lauder Point, too. It didn’t make me want to steal what was there.” As a child, Rob had not been history-minded. Rockets and space probes had interested him more than arrowheads, but he didn’t want to say that with Jack in the car.

  Tichnor said, “Grandpa collected arrowheads. When we got home from the park, he showed them to us, all laid out on velvet. I remember Vance cut his finger on a piece of obsidian.”

  “Okay, so he admired his grandfather’s collection.”

  “Grandpa gave it to him. It was his first collection.”

  “I see.” His first, and acquired without effort.

  Dr. Tichnor was saying, “Vance did a study project for seventh-grade history, using the arrowheads. He had a real interest. At one point, he wanted to be an anthropologist.”

  “Did the family discourage him?”

  “No. Dad probably pointed out that anthropologists don’t make a lot of money, but that wasn’t really an issue. If Vance had become a professor at some college, my mother would have been delighted, even if he made peanuts. She would have given him an allowance. It wasn’t money.”

  “So what was it?” Girls? Booze?

  Tichnor ruminated. “Vance’s grades weren’t wonderful. He’d pick something up, then drop it. Changed his major three times. He wound up with a degree in business, but he didn’t work at it.”

  “That doesn’t sound obsessive.”

  “You’re right.” He eased his seat belt. “The thing is, he knew his grades would never be top of the class or even more than adequate, whatever he studied. He would have had trouble getting admitted to a rigorous graduate program, and he wouldn’t have settled for second-rate.”

  “Not even for the pleasure of studying something he enjoyed?”

  “No. Maybe that’s a family failing, Lieutenant. I was hung up on grades myself as an undergraduate.”

  In all likelihood, Vance had looked at his brilliant brother’s academic achievements and despaired. Rob said, “But you studied something that continued to interest you?”

  “‘The fascination of what’s difficult.’” Tichnor’s hand gripped his seat belt as Rob passed a car. “I should have been a jazz pianist.”

  “No lie?”

  Tichnor gave a short, self-conscious laugh. “We’re straying from the subject at hand.”

  “I appreciate your candor, however.”

  “I’m trying to figure Vance out. It was probably my mother’s netsuke that triggered him off. She’d been collecting them for years. She traveled to Japan a couple of times, took classes at the Henry Art Gallery, paid outrageous prices to dealers. After my father died, she spent a lot of time and money setting up a secure place to show them off.”

  Rob glanced at him.

  His mouth set in a thin line. “She kept on about how important the collection was, and by implication how important she was for having the taste and gumption to preserve a part of the past. It wasn’t her past, God knows. I once said why netsuke, why not whiskey decanters, Mother?”

  Rob smiled. “And?”

  “I thought she was going to disinherit me,” Dr. Tichnor said ruefully. “She didn’t talk to me for several years. I had to send messages through Carol.”

  “That’s extreme.”

  “Mother is extreme. Vance is like her in a lot of ways, though he’s more affable, at least on the surface. Both of them have a streak of ruthlessness.” Tichnor fell silent, probably considering just how ruthless his brother could be.

  Rob flashed his lights and passed a county maintenance truck. “Vance’s wife seems unimpressed by his collector persona.”

  “Moira’s not very bright about people.”

  Another silence. They were into the glacial till. Huge boulders thrust from among the trees. The creek twisted around others and the road twisted with it.

  Tichnor said, “Vance’s first wife, Isabel, shared his enthusiasms and humanized them. I liked her, but it was probably a mistake for them not to have children. For their marriage, I mean, not for the children.”

  Rob was glad he’d said that.

  “Even though the divorce was Vance’s idea, it turned out to be a trauma for him. It made Isabel bitter, and I don’t blame her. She got their collection of Southwest Indian pottery in the settlement.”

  Indian pottery. “I presume they acquired the pots through dealers?”

  “The pots weren’t antique,” Tichnor said, “and I’m sure they paid a fair price. Isabel liked several artists—Zuni, I think—and she and Vance even commissioned vases. She taught him about the culture and the techniques. They used to enjoy making buying trips to New Mexico in the winter.” He fell silent.

  Rob waited. The road kinked and straightened.

  “I’ve been brooding about it. I suspect Vance began to think about the Lauder Point artifacts in the aftermath of the divorce, when he was picking up the pieces.”

  “How so?” Rob wheeled the car through a long S-bend.

  “He would have realized that without Isabel he couldn’t trust his own artistic judgment. A lot of their friends sided with Isabel. Most of their social life had centered on those people. Their real social life, I mean, as opposed to the people Vance cultivated as part of his business.”

  Rob wondered whether Vance classified Phyllis Holton as a real friend or a business friend. “He lost his friends and had trouble replacing them. I think I see what’s coming. He needed to impress people, and the means to do it were gone.”

  “He must have decided to acquire someone else’s collection,” Tichnor said simply. “It’s a logical alternative.”

  Jack made a rude noise.

  Tichnor twisted against the seat belt. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’m just trying to understand my brother’s mentality. I don’t think that way.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. Rob thought he sounded skeptical, but Jack was a peaceful man and didn’t push it.

  “How does Carol come into the story?” Rob overtook a kid driving a purple low-rider.

  “I don’t know.” The doctor sighed. “She was such a pretty girl, a natural blonde with a fashionable figure. Fashionable in that era didn’t mean straight up and down. She was perky, too. My friends were crazy for Carol. Being her big brother gave me a lot of prestige.”

  “In high school?”

  “Yes. We attended different colleges.”

  “Vance, too?”

  “He liked California, so he enrolled at UC Santa Barbara.”

  “Surf and turf,” said Rob, who had accumulated enough courses for a degree at Cal Poly without planning to.

  “Carol started at Mills, then transferred to Santa Barbara when Vance entered as a freshman. I never understood that. They were close but not joined at the hip, as my granddaughter would say. After Stanford, I went on to med school at the U Dub. Carol married an insurance executive who collected blondes.”

  “Collected,” Rob mused. Funny how the word came up. Carol went out of her way to be collectible, in his opinion. “What was her major?”

  “Art history.”

  Rob frowned. “And she runs an antiques shop that specializes in needlework?”

  �
�That was a late-blooming interest. Post-divorce. In college, she was mainly interested in having a good time. Vance joined in. They thumb-tripped together through Europe one summer.” He made a gulping sound as Rob passed two sight-seers in slow-moving cars.

  Rob tried to imagine Carol hitchhiking.

  “I sound censorious. Carol once accused me of being jealous, but I had a pretty good time myself. I didn’t begrudge them their pot parties and rock concerts. Mother was scandalized, though, and she didn’t hesitate to enforce her feelings.”

  “What do you mean enforce?”

  “She had the power of the purse.”

  “Money.”

  “Yes, partly. Money and disapproval. She set Vance up in business, and she helped Carol sort through the wreckage when the executive dumped her. She now makes Carol a very generous allowance.” He tugged at the seat belt. “Mother expects them to be suitably grateful.”

  “You said Vance never grew up. Sounds as if Carol has problems along those lines, too.”

  “I suppose she does. But Vance has an edge of aggression. He schemes. Nowadays, he uses Carol to keep in good with Mother. And for other things.”

  “What things?”

  “They cover for each other. Always have.”

  That was vague and Rob meant to pursue it, but the radio crackled. He answered. The dispatcher patched Earl through.

  “Uh, we have a situation here.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There’s a bunch of Indians from Two Falls hanging around the entrance, ten maybe. One of them has a drum, and a couple of them are carrying signs. We’re keeping them off the property, and they’re not doing anything much yet, but I don’t like it.”

  Rob swore under his breath. “Are they blocking the highway?”

  “No, and we won’t let them block the access road either.”

  “What about Tichnor?”

  “No movement. His van’s still in front of the house.”

  “Press?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay. Keep things quiet.” He considered telling Earl to warn the Klalo assembly that Vance was dangerous, but that might just step up the danger if they were armed.

  “Right.”

  “I’ll be with you—” he checked the time “—in twenty-two minutes.”