Shadow Man

by James D. Doss

  The USDA employee was staring vacantly at the remnants of food on his plate.

  McTeague continued. “From what I have heard, Mr. Wakefield played an important role in the plot to persuade Mr. Trottman to return to where he had left Pansy Blinkoe’s corpse—and remove the denture from her mouth.”

  “Forrest was doing a job for me,” Moon said. “And I was acting in my professional capacity as a licensed investigator working on behalf of Dr. and Mrs. Blinkoe.”

  “I am aware,” McTeague said, “that Mr. Wakefield was acting on your instructions. And as far as I know, what he did probably falls barely within the bounds of legal behavior.”

  To Wakefield’s sensitive ear, this sounded very much like criticism.

  She added: “Though there is an ethical question when someone—particularly a U.S. government employee—misrepresents himself to a member of the legal profession.”

  “He was not misrepresenting,” Moon reminded the lady. “He was acting.”

  “That’s right,” Wakefield said. “I have always wanted to strut and fret my hour on the stage.” Caught up in his part, he thumped the table, raised his voice. “Since when is it unethical for an American citizen to practice his chosen avocation? Whatever happened to liberty and freedom and justice for all?”

  “I am deeply sorry,” McTeague said. “If I had brought a star-spangled banner to breakfast, I would wave it and sing the national anthem—while tap-dancing on the table.”

  All three men would have liked to witness the long-legged lady kicking up a storm, and Scott Parris barely stopped short of saying so when she gave him The Look.

  “I know exactly what you’re thinking, Scott—keep it to yourself.” McTeague turned her gaze on Charlie Moon. “I also know what’s been going on.”

  Moon smiled at his fanciful image of the dancing FBI agent. “Then you’re two or three steps ahead of me.”

  She shook her head at the childish man. “Charlie, Charlie—did you actually think you could mess around with the FBI and not be found out?”

  Moon’s expression suggested that he had certainly hoped so.

  McTeague continued. “I am aware that even before that dismembered arm with Manfred Blinkoe’s watch and ring was found by the fisherman—”

  “Fisherwoman.”

  “Charlie, please do not interrupt me.”

  “Sorry.”

  She looked at the beamed ceiling. “Where was I?”

  Being well fed and full of caffeine, Parris was in a helpful mood. “You were aware that even before that dismembered arm—”

  “Right. Thank you, Scott.” McTeague paused to take a breath, fixed the Ute with a paralyzing stare. “I am aware that even before that dismembered human arm was found by the fisherwoman—and not very long after the Blinkoe houseboat exploded on Moccasin Lake—you knew that Dr. Blinkoe was alive and well.”

  Moon gave her an innocent look. “So?”

  “So?” McTeague banged her fist on the table hard enough to rattle dishes. “So you should have informed the FBI!”

  He thought about it. “That’s a debatable point—I didn’t even inform the chief of police, and he’s my best buddy.”

  “That’s right,” Parris said. “And you don’t hear me whining and griping about—”

  “Shut up, Scott.” She said this without taking her eyes off Moon. “That’s how you knew the dismembered arm wasn’t Dr. Blinkoe’s. And all along, Blinkoe has been feeding you information. That’s how you knew the compact he gave his wife was bugged. That’s how—”

  “Whoa, Nelly.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Excuse me.” Moon’s tone was meant to be calming. “It’s just an old expression. What I really meant was: ‘Excuse me for a dang moment, Special Agent McTeague.’ But seeing as how you’re all in favor of sharing information, why don’t you tell us what you found on the tape in Mrs. Blinkoe’s compact?”

  “There was no tape in the compact, Charlie.” She gave him a pitying look. “You really should make an effort to get up-to-date on the latest technology.”

  “Okay, educate me.”

  “The compact was voice activated, and had over eighty gigabytes of RAM—”

  “Ram means one of two things to me,” Moon said. “Either a he-goat or a Dodge truck.”

  McTeague responded with admirable patience. “It is also an acronym for random access memory.”

  “Sure. Random access memory.” He didn’t bat an eyelash. “That’s the third thing.”

  He is so cute. “Because of the modest bandwidth necessary for recording the human voice, that much digital memory can hold hours and hours of recorded conversation.”

  Moon propped his elbows on the table. “So what was recorded during all those hours and hours?”

  McTeague shrugged. “Oh, some of this, some of that.”

  “Skip the this and that—let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. The brass tacks. The bottom line. What I mean to say is—tell us the good part.”

  Scott Parris nodded his agreement with this sentiment.

  “Very well,” McTeague said. “In a nutshell, we were able to determine that Mrs. Blinkoe’s so-called brother—who was actually her high-school sweetheart—played no significant role in the recent spate of criminal activities.”

  Moon knew as much, and was still aiming for the nitty-gritty, et cetera. “Was the tape turning that night when she thought she’d seen her dead husband at the window, and drove her pickup into town to see the family attorney?”

  Ignoring his stubborn insistence on 1940s technology, McTeague nodded. “Mrs. Blinkoe drove her pickup to Spencer Trottman’s home. He tried to calm her, convince her that whatever or whoever she had seen at her bedroom window, it could not have been her husband. Manfred was most certainly dead. This being so, she was a widow and free to take another husband—someone who would appreciate her, treat her with the kindness and respect she deserved.”

  The Ute had guessed the rest. “Trottman asked Pansy Blinkoe to marry him. And she turned him down flat.” Only a couple of years ago, Charlie Moon’s proposal had been rejected even before he had a chance to utter it.

  “Not only did she refuse,” McTeague said, “she evidently thought it was terribly funny. When Spencer proposed, she laughed at him.”

  Parris shook his head. “Always a serious mistake.”

  “It was her final mistake.” McTeague recalled listening to the horrible curses and shrieks on the compact’s concealed digital recorder. “Trottman slapped her, she fought back, he strangled her on the spot. From a detailed analysis of the sounds for the next eighty-nine minutes, it is apparent that Trottman put Mrs. Blinkoe’s body and purse in her pickup, drove the vehicle to Garcia’s Crossing. He stopped at the abandoned church, placed her body in the Martinez crypt. Because he left the purse with the compact in the crypt with the corpse, we have no recordings after his departure. But it is reasonable to assume that he drove her pickup back to Granite Creek, left it in the motel parking lot—along with her keys. Trottman must have walked back to his home, believed he was safe. But after thinking the thing through, he realized that once the woman was reported missing, the Blinkoe telephone records would be checked—and her late-night telephone call to the family attorney’s residence would be discovered. So he not only reported Mrs. Blinkoe’s absence from her home, he also reported their telephone conversation accurately—and preserved the recording for the authorities. It supported his story about being worried when she didn’t show up, not getting any answers to his repeated calls to the Blinkoe residence—which he made after he returned from Garcia’s Crossing. To make the thing look even better, he drove out to the Blinkoe estate—presumably to determine whether anything was amiss. There’s little doubt that Mr. Trottman broke the window in the back door to make it look as if someone had entered the house before he arrived. Once the setup was ready, he called the police.”

  Parris grimaced at the thought of how he’d been taken in.

 
McTeague paused long enough to examine her elegant hands. I really need a manicure. “And it seems quite likely that the man posing as Pansy Blinkoe’s brother was telling the truth. Sometime that night, he returned to his apartment above the Blinkoe garage, noticed that Pansy’s vehicle was not in its usual spot. He rode his motorcycle into town, drove around until he spotted her pickup parked at the motel—with the key in the ignition. Assuming she was in the motel with another man, Mr. Culpepper got hot under the collar. He hoisted his cycle into the back of the truck, drove it away. And so on.” She turned to Moon. “What made you suspicious of Trottman?”

  Moon stared into his coffee cup. “One day last month, my aunt got a peculiar notion that she knew where Pansy Blinkoe was.” He hesitated. “For one reason or another, she thought the woman was hiding out at Garcia’s Crossing—someplace close to St. Cuthbert’s Catholic Church.”

  Parris, Wakefield, McTeague—all felt a chill.

  It was the woman who asked the question. “But how could she have possibly known…?”

  Moon raised his palms. “Don’t ask me.” He waited for a few heartbeats. “Anyway, my aunt was anxious to tell me about it, so she used this little satellite telephone I gave her for a birthday present. She pushed the button programmed to dial my cell phone, but I had it turned off. She didn’t want to leave a message, so she called the Columbine land line. My foreman’s wife answered, told Aunt Daisy I was on my way to Spencer Trottman’s office, and gave her Trottman’s number. But when my aunt called, Trottman didn’t answer. So she decided to ring my cell phone again and leave me a message. Problem is, she pressed the wrong button, ended up leaving the message for Trottman.”

  McTeague asked for clarification. “How did you determine this?”

  Moon appreciated the question. “When I pressed the Redial button on her phone, Trottman’s number came up on the readout—which proves that was the last number she’d called.” He shook his head at the irony of it all. “Imagine the lawyer’s surprise when he checks his messages, and hears Aunt Daisy telling me where to find Pansy Blinkoe—and she’s got it right! He must’ve thought she’d seen him stash the body in the church cemetery. He can’t just sit around and wait until she tells me about it. So he goes out to the res that night with a green coffee can and some smelly kerosene, and sets fire to her home.”

  The FBI agent glared at her image of the dead man’s ghost. “In an attempt to cover up the murder of Pansy Blinkoe, Trottman attempted to murder your aunt.”

  Parris frowned. “But what about the murder of the Chicago woman on the restaurant patio? D’you suppose the shooter was Trottman—aiming at Blinkoe?”

  “The Bureau has ruled that out,” McTeague said. “We have witnesses who place Trottman at a location six hundred miles away when the shot was fired. We haven’t eliminated Trottman as a suspect in the dynamiting of Dr. Blinkoe’s boat, but it seems far more likely that the event was engineered by the Colombian drug cartel.” She aimed her big eyes at the Ute. “Would you like to comment on that possibility?”

  She’s hoping I’ll implicate Blinkoe in that DC-3 hijacking. “I don’t know who set the charge on the houseboat,” Moon executed an elegant side step. “But what the guy with the dynamite didn’t know was that my client had taken my advice, and hired on a couple of tough guys to guard his body. Blinkoe arranged to meet his hired guns a few miles down the lake from his home. These knuckle-draggers brought a vehicle to a designated point on the shore. The idea was to remove their client from his fancy boat, take him to a safe house. It didn’t occur to these guys that somebody might have already tampered with the boat. While Guard A took Dr. Blinkoe ashore, Guard B was still on the craft, waiting with a submachine gun in case somebody attempted to board. Most likely, when the dynamite was touched off, he was expecting a quiet, peaceful night.”

  “So,” Parris said, “it was Guard B’s dismembered arm that was fished out of the lake.”

  Moon nodded, waited for the inevitable question from McTeague.

  “But why was Guard B wearing Blinkoe’s watch and ring?”

  Moon told her. “Soon as they showed up, Blinkoe suggested a friendly game of poker. Guard A was not interested, but Blinkoe and Guard B got right down to business. They only played one hand.”

  “He lost his jewelry and timepiece in a one deal of the cards?” The chief of police chuckled. “Well, I don’t believe it!”

  “Believe it,” Moon said. “Way it happened, Guard B was holding a pair of sevens, and Blinkoe had three queens and a couple of aces.”

  Parris could not follow this. “Excuse me, but in any kind of poker I’ve ever heard of, whether played on earth or any distant planet you may wish to name—a full house will beat a pair of sevens every time. This universal rule is, as they say—according to Mr. Hoyle. Look it up in his little book.”

  Moon admitted that this was the way poker was played.

  “Then how,” McTeague asked, “did Dr. Blinkoe lose his property?”

  The tribal investigator came clean about his disreputable client. “Guard B caught Dr. B. dealing from the bottom of the deck.”

  Parris grimaced. “Ouch!”

  “You may well say so. Being more than a little irked, Guard B jerked the expensive Swiss chronometer off the boat captain’s wrist. And when Dr. Blinkoe hesitated to remove the other ornament from his digit, Guard B produced a wicked-looking blade and threatened to take it finger and all. And no doubt meant it.”

  “I don’t blame him one iota.” Parris offered this statement with a flinty expression. “There ain’t nothing worse than an orthodontist who cheats at cards.”

  Having once made a similar observation to Dr. Blinkoe, Moon was not inclined to argue the point. Though he considered cattle rustlers and horse thieves pretty much in the same category.

  McTeague posed a question. “This face that Pansy Blinkoe saw in her mirror—was that her husband staring in her bedroom window?”

  Moon shook his head. “According to what I’ve heard, it was not.”

  The FBI agent tried to slip one in on her favorite Indian. “And who is the source of your information?”

  The tribal investigator pretended to be astonished at such an unseemly question. “I will pretend I did not hear that.”

  She started to grind her perfect teeth, barely caught herself before serious damage was done to enamel. “Then I will ask you again, louder this time: How do you come to know all these details—like about Dr. Blinkoe cheating his bodyguard in a poker game?”

  “I am a professional investigator, who has a solemn ethical duty to protect the interests of his client.” He leaned across the table, met her hard gaze. “Drive red-hot splinters under my toenails, McTeague. Gouge out my eyes with a sharp spoon. Make me listen to all the acid rock and hip-hop that’s been recorded for the past umpteen years.” He shook his head. “Still, I will not tell you.”

  “If you don’t, I shall be chagrined. And very disappointed in you.”

  “Well, that’s another matter entirely. My source is my client, of course. Dr. Manfred Wilhelm Blinkoe.”

  “I had assumed as much.”

  “Then there was no need to threaten me with red-hot splinters, eye gouging, and so on.”

  “I did not threaten you—”

  “Now that you’ve put the scare into me, would you like to know where Dr. Blinkoe is hiding out?”

  “Yes. I most certainly would.”

  “Then you’ll have to use threats of serious violence.”

  “Charlie, this has gone about far enough. If you don’t start talking instantly—”

  “Does the FBI intend to charge my client with anything?”

  There was a tense moment while they eyed each other.

  “Barring the discovery of new evidence, not in connection with recent events.”

  “Good. What about that business about the so-called DC-3 hijacking?”

  “That was not ‘so-called,’ as you call it. The aircraft was most definitely hijacked.
And several bags of cash were stolen.”

  “Stolen from who—the government?”

  She wondered where he was going with this. “You are well aware that the money was forcibly taken from employees of a major drug cartel.”

  “Let me get this straight—the FBI has been working overtime just to get some stolen money returned to a bunch of dope pushers?”

  “Well, of course not! Once the funds are recovered and appropriate legal procedures are completed, the cash will be confiscated by the U.S. Treasury.”

  “Oh, then the drug cartel stole the money from the Treasury?”

  “Don’t be silly. You know very well where the money came from.”

  Moon nodded. “I sure do. From U.S. citizens who happen to be addicts.” He grinned at the pretty woman. “So does the U.S. government want to return the cash to the addicts—or spend the money on treatment programs?” He glanced at his county agent. “Or even give it to the Department of Agriculture? No.” He thumped the table to drive is point home. “They want to put it in Fort Knox. Then spend it on no telling what. Foreign aid to the North Koreans, or the Iranians.” He shook his head. “As an official U.S. taxpayer, this does not sound right to me.”

  She fixed him with a triple-strength glare. “Shut up.”

  He did.

  “And listen.”

  He did this too.

  “Charlie—I want you to tell me where Dr. Blinkoe is hiding.”

  The chief of police banged a spoon on his plate. “Excuse me for interrupting.”

  McTeague turned a scowl on Parris. “What?”

  “You just told Charlie to shut up. Now you’re asking him questions. Out in the Wild and Woolly West, this is what we call a conversational contradiction.”

  Sighing, McTeague addressed herself to the Ute. “Charlie, you may feel free to speak.”

  “Okay.”

  “Tell me where I can find Dr. Blinkoe.”

  “Oh, that’s all you wanted to know?”

  “It is not a matter of what I want to know.” She smiled like a happy crocodile. “It’s about what I want you to tell me.”