“Whole back blown away. A .357 Magnum?”
“Bigger.” Rick shook his head. “Had to have made a loud report.”
“People shooting off guns all the time.” Cynthia bummed a cigarette off her boss. “Even if it isn’t hunting season.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“A few more days and I think the animals would have been able to pull the arms off, and the legs too. At least the body is intact.”
“Let’s hope that’s a help.” He spewed out a stream of soothing blue smoke. “You know, there used to be stills up here. Clear mountain water. Just perfect. Those guys would blow you away pronto. The marijuana growers are more subtle. Here anyway.”
“No still around here—at least, I don’t think so.”
He shook his head. “Not anymore, now that Sugar Hollow is public. Ever drink that stuff?”
“No.”
“I did once. Take your head right off. It’s not called white lightning for nothing.” He glanced over his shoulder at the distant corpse. “Wonder what he got into.”
“Guess we’ll find out.”
“Might take us a while, but you’re right. Whenever there’s a murder I hope it’s an isolated expression of violence and not the start of some, you know . . .”
She knew he meant a serial killer. To date nothing of the kind had ever happened in their area. “I know. Oh, Christ, here come Diana Robb and the crew. If she sees me smoking, I’m going to get Health Lecture 101.” Cynthia quickly smashed out her butt in the soft earth.
“Would it do any good?”
“Oh, sure it would—until I wanted the next cigarette.”
10
A damp wind slid down the mountains. Harry jounced and jostled along on Johnny Pop. The manure spreader turned, flinging out wood shavings and manure. The sun seemed pinned to the top of the mountain, the shadows from the line of oaks lengthened. Sunrise and sunset were Harry’s two favorite times of the day. And today the sweet smell of her red clover filled the air, making the sunset seem richer. Harry kept her fields in alfalfa, red clover, and timothy. She usually produced a very good hay crop from this.
The cat and dog slept in the barn. A full day at the post office wore them out. Tucker heard the noise of a heavy truck crunching down the driveway. She jumped up and awakened Mrs. Murphy.
“Who goes there?” Tucker bounded outside.
Blair Bainbridge’s dually pulled into sight. Blair stopped and hopped out, shaded his eyes with his hand, saw Harry and sprinted out into the field.
“That’s odd,” Tucker said to herself. “He always says hello.”
Mrs. Murphy, yawning in the doorspan, replied to Tucker’s unspoken thought. “Maybe he’s realized he’s in love with Mom.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.” Tucker sat down, stood up, sat down, finally stood up, and trotted toward the tractor.
Mrs. Murphy rolled over on her other side. She wasn’t going anywhere. “See you later, Alice Gator.”
Tucker tore after Blair, caught up with him, then blew past him.
Harry, seeing them both, cut the engine. One couldn’t hear very well with Johnny at full throttle. “Blair. Hi.”
Out of breath, he gasped, “There’s been a murder.”
“Who?” Harry’s eyes enlarged.
“They don’t know.”
“How’d you find out?”
He put one hand against the seat of the tractor. “Accident.”
“Accident or accidentally?” She smiled at herself because she realized that was exactly the kind of question her mother would have asked.
He caught his breath as Tucker circled the tractor. “Accident on 810 at Wyant’s Store. I slowed down and noticed Cynthia Cooper just mad as hell, so I pulled over. It was a kid in an old Trooper, driving it like a car. He went off the side of the road, overcorrected, and then sideswiped Cynthia, who was coming from the opposite direction. I mean, she was steamed. The kid was crying, of course, begging her not to tell his parents.”
“Is she okay?”
He nodded yes. “Kid too. Anyway, I stayed to help, not that there was much to do, but she isn’t the type to get upset. She told me she’d just come out of Sugar Hollow, where a nature group had discovered a dead man. Said it was the grossest mess and she wouldn’t be eating dinner tonight. She described what the man was wearing—Harry, I think it’s the biker.”
Harry jumped down. “What?”
He nodded again. “Heavy black boots, leather vest with symbols and studs—who else fits that description?”
“Blood on the saddlebags!” Tucker yipped.
“Well, he can’t be the only man in the country with a black leather vest.” She stopped a minute and shrugged. A chill overcame her. “Damn, he about ran me over coming out of Sugar Hollow. Covered from head to toe in leather.”
“Better talk with Cynthia.”
“Did you tell her what you thought?”
“Yeah.” He stared at the huge tractor wheel. “He was a little strange. The wheel of fortune, you know.”
Harry watched the sun vanish. “Someone’s up and someone’s down—or dead.”
“Won’t somebody listen to me? There’s evidence on the motorcycle’s saddlebags!”
“Tucker, hush, I’ll feed you in a minute.”
Dejected, Tucker sat on Blair’s foot. Blair reached down to pet her.
Blair’s lustrous hazel eyes bored into Harry’s. “Do you ever get a feeling about somebody? A real sense of who they are?”
“Sometimes.”
“Despite his appearance and his manner that day, I just felt he was an okay guy.”
“Blair, he can’t have been so okay, or he wouldn’t be dead.”
11
A small crowd gathered at the post office parking lot. Harry, Mrs. Hogendobber, Reverend Jones, Market Shiflett, Aysha, Norman, Ottoline, Kerry, the Marilyn Sanburnes—senior and junior, Blair, Mrs. Murphy, Tucker, and Pewter watched as the sheriff’s men loaded the motorcycle onto a flatbed gooseneck. Hogan Freely, president of the Crozet National Bank, with his wife, Laura, walked over and joined the crowd.
Cynthia supervised.
Reverend Jones spoke for all of them. “Do you know anything, Cynthia?”
As Cynthia replied, Susan Tucker pulled in. “Wait, wait for me.”
“What is this, a town meeting?” Cynthia half joked.
“Kind of.” Susan slammed the door of the new Saab. “Fair’s on call. He can’t make it, but I’ll see that your report gets to Fair and BoomBoom, who has a doctor’s appointment.”
“There’s not much to report. A decayed body, a white male most likely in his early thirties, was found in Sugar Hollow yesterday, late afternoon. We have reason to believe, thanks to Blair’s accurate description, that the body is that of the owner of this motorcycle. We’re running dental checks and we hope to know something soon. That’s it.”
“Are we in danger?” Mim asked the sensible question.
Cynthia folded her arms over her chest. “There’s no way to accurately answer you, Mrs. Sanburne. We suspect foul play, but we don’t know for sure. At this point the department isn’t worried that there’s a killer on the loose, so to speak.”
But there was a killer on the loose. The little gathering felt safe because they didn’t know the victim and therefore falsely believed they couldn’t know the killer.
As Deputy Cooper drove off behind the truck with the motorcycle, the assembled folks squeezed into Market’s for some drinks. The motorcycle had conveniently been removed during lunch hour. The sun beat down on them. An ice-cold drink and air-conditioning were welcome.
The animals scooted between legs.
“Come back here.” Pewter led them to the back shelves containing household detergents. “If we get up here we can see everything.” She jumped onto boxes from the floor to the top shelf. Mrs. Murphy followed her.
“Raw deal,” Tucker grumbled.
“You can go behind the counter. Market’s so busy, he won’t notice.”
“All right.” Tucker, happier now that she could participate in gleaning information from the humans, worked her way back through the legs to the counter.
Susan, a born organizer, addressed the gathering. “Any of us that’ve seen the motorcycle before it was parked at the post office ought to write it down for Sheriff Shaw and Deputy Cooper. Obviously, anyone having contact with the deceased should do likewise.”
“Contact? He barged into Ash Lawn and made such a scene!” Laura blurted out.
“Well, did you tell Deputy Cooper?” Mim inquired.
“No, but I will. I mean, how could I tell her? We just this instant found out—if it really is that same man. Could be someone else.”
Miranda happily watched as people bought her doughnuts, brownies, and tarts—today’s batch of goodies. Each day she baked larger quantities and each day they disappeared. She tore herself away from her own products to say, “Those of you who were up at Ash Lawn can go see Sheriff Shaw tomorrow. It would save him time if you go together.”
“What happened at Ash Lawn?” Herbie Jones asked the obvious.
“This disheveled man, this dirty biker, pushed open the front door after we were closed—” Laura started to say.
“He wasn’t that disheveled,” Blair interrupted.
“Well, he certainly wasn’t well groomed,” Laura protested.
“Jeez.” Market brought his hand to his face. “If you can’t agree on how he looked, I can’t wait to hear the rest of it.”
“I was in the back, so I can’t add anything.” Aysha bought a lemon curd tart. She couldn’t resist despite her mother’s glowering gaze.
Harry added to the picture. “Blair and I were in the living room. We didn’t see him come in but we heard him. He wasn’t rude, really, but he was, uh, intense.”
“Intense? He was cracked.” Kerry put her hands on her hips. Kerry was a bit of an overreactor. She’d only come in from the slave quarters to catch the tail end of the incident. “He wouldn’t leave, and Marilyn, who was in charge that day—”
“I asked him to leave,” Little Marilyn chimed in. “He wouldn’t go. He said he wanted Marin—”
“Malibu,” Harry interrupted.
“Yes, that was it. He wanted this Malibu and he claimed she was at Ash Lawn. Well, of course she wasn’t. But he was so insistent.”
“Who’s Malibu?”
“An old girlfriend,” Blair told them.
“That doesn’t tell us who she is.” Mim, as commanding as ever, hit the nail on the head.
Ottoline sarcastically said, “With a name like Malibu, I suggest we look for someone in a tube top, high heels, short shorts, and with voluminous hair—bleached, of course.”
12
The sheriff’s office, drab but functional, suited Rick Shaw. He disliked ostentation. His desk was usually neat since he spent most of his time in his squad car. He disliked desk work as much as he disliked ostentation. Mostly he hated being stuck inside.
Today files cluttered his desk, cigarette butts overflowed in the large, deep ashtray and the phone rang off the hook. He’d been interviewed by the local television station, the local newspaper, and the big one from Richmond. Those duties he performed as a necessity. He wasn’t a sheriff who loved seeing his face on the eleven o’clock news. Sometimes he’d make Cynthia juggle the interviews.
The coroner worked late into the night taking tissue samples.
No driver’s license or identifying papers were found on the body. Cynthia knew the plates were registered to Michael Huckstep. But was the body that of Michael Huckstep? They could assume it was, but until they had a positive ID, they wouldn’t know for certain. After all, someone could have killed Huckstep and posed as him.
Rick asked for a list of missing persons as well as stolen motorcycles to be made available to him. They were. Nothing on either California list matched the abandoned Harley or the dead man.
Cynthia scraped into the office. He held up his hand for her to wait. He dispensed with his phone call as soon as he could.
“Mim,” he said.
Cynthia emptied the ashtray into the wastebasket. “She wants to be the first to know.” She replaced the ashtray. “We went over the bike. Nothing there. No prints. Whoever drove it to the post office wore gloves.”
“Bikers usually wear gloves.”
“Wonder what he was doing in Sugar Hollow?”
Rick held up his hands as he twirled around in his swivel chair. “Sightseeing?” He twirled in the opposite direction, then stopped. “Makes me dizzy.”
“If it weren’t for drugs, we’d be out of work,” she joked. “I bet he went in there to make a deal. Sugar Hollow is pretty but not exactly a tourist attraction. He was in there with someone who knows the county—I betcha.”
She silently reached over, slipping a cigarette out of his pack, lit it, and spoke. “We searched his motel room. Blair said the biker told him he was staying at the Best Western. The manager, the night manager, and the maids haven’t seen Mike Huckstep, the name under which he registered, in days. They don’t pay much attention to people coming and going, I guess. No one agrees when they last saw him, but he seemed to be respectful and quiet when he checked in—and he paid in advance for a week.”
“Anything in the room?”
“Three T-shirts and a clean pair of jeans. Not another thing. Not a notepad, a pencil, not even socks and underwear. No paperbacks or magazines. Nada.”
“I’ve been reading over the transcripts of your questioning of the Ash Lawn staff as well as Harry and Blair. You know”—he tipped back in his chair and swung his feet onto the folders on the desktop—“this doesn’t compute.”
“You mean their testimony?”
“No, no, that’s fine. I mean the murder. It leads nowhere. Maybe it was a busted deal and the killer took his revenge and the money. There was no money in the pockets of the dead man’s jeans.”
“Could be . . .” Her voice trailed off, then strengthened again. “But you don’t believe it was a busted drug deal, do you?”
“You’ve been around me too long. You and my wife see right through me.” He put his hands behind his head. “No, Coop, I don’t believe it. Murder offends me. I can’t stand the thought of anyone getting away with it. The rules for getting along in this world are very simple. Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal—seems reasonable to me. Oh, sure, there are times when I could brain my wife and vice versa—but I don’t and she doesn’t. I count to ten, sometimes I count to twenty. If I can act with a little restraint I figure others can too.”
“Yes, but I think murder has to do with something deeper. Something infantile. Underneath it all a killer is saying ‘I want my way.’ Simple as that. They don’t, they can’t, even conceive that other people have legitimate needs that might be different and in conflict with their own. It’s all me, me, me. Oh, they might dress it up and look mature, concerned, or whatever, but underneath they’re infants in a violent, quivering rage.”
Rick ran his hands over his receding hairline. “You been reading psychology books on me, Coop?”
“Nah.”
The phone rang. Outside Rick’s office an officer picked it up, then called out, “Cynthia, Motor Vehicles in California. Want to take it in Rick’s office?”
“Sure.” She reached over and punched a button. “Deputy Cooper here.” She paused, listening. “I’d appreciate that.” She gave the station’s fax number. “Thank you very much.” She hung up the phone. “Mike Huckstep. They’re faxing his registration papers and driver’s license to us. At least we’ll have a physical description.”
He grunted. “Who in the hell is Mike Huckstep?”
13
Valet parking set the tone for Mim’s party. On the invitations she had written that it was a western theme party, complete with square dancing and barbecue. The valet parkers, Susan Tucker’s son, Danny, and his high school friends, were dressed in plaid shirts with pointed yokes, jeans, and cowboy boots.
>
Mim sported beautiful ostrich cowboy boots the color of peanut brittle. Her white leather jeans had been custom made for her, fitting like a glove. She wore a white shirt with a turquoise yoke. Her scarf was Hermès and her Stetson was a 20X beaver. The hat alone must have cost more than $300, since most cowboy hats are only 2X or 4X at most, X being the grade of beaver. The hat, of course, was pure white.
Her husband had donned an old pair of jeans, well-worn boots, and a nicely pressed Wrangler brushpopper shirt. His belt buckle hinted at the family pocketbook. It was a large, beautifully worked silver oval with gold initials in the center.
All of Crozet attended the hoedown, as it was billed.
Harry borrowed a deerskin shirt with fringe on the yoke, front and back, as well as long fringe on the sleeves. She wore her one pair of Tony Lama boots that Susan had given her for her birthday three years ago. Blair looked like a younger, more handsome Marlboro man, right down to the chaps. Fair fried when he beheld his competition. Not that Fair was bad-looking, he wasn’t, but somehow he could never quite synchronize his clothes. Cowboy attire suited his tall frame though, so he looked better than usual.
Mrs. Hogendobber, dangling loads of costume jewelry, swayed in a big red skirt and a Mexican blouse. Her blue cowboy hat hung on her back, the little silken thread like a necklace setting off her throat.
Reverend Jones dug out an old cavalry uniform. He wouldn’t tell anyone where he found it. He could have ridden in from 1880.
The music, the food, the ever-flowing liquor, put the group in a wonderful mood.
Kerry McCray arrived early and alone. She said her date, the singer from the Light Opera series, would join them after his show at Ash Lawn. This didn’t prevent her from sashaying over to Norman Cramer while Aysha jumped around the dance floor with another partner.
“Norman.”
He turned at the sound of the familiar and once-beloved voice. “Kerry.”
“Let me ask you something.”
“Sure.” His tone was hesitant.
“Are you happy?”
A long, long pause followed. He locked his long-lashed blue eyes into hers. “There are days when I think I am and there are days when I think I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life. What about you?”
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