by Ronald Weber
“Well,” Mercy sighed. That was hardly the confession of a jealousy-crazed spouse. So much for the love-killing theory. She’d never liked it anyway. “It’s a big loss for both of you then.”
Mercy stood up behind the desk, waited until Burt rose from his chair. “It’s an awkward time for everyone, but we have to follow the sheriff’s orders, which means the campground won’t reopen until he says so. In the meantime, nothing’s changed for you and Billie as the host couple. Soon enough campers will be arriving. You’ll have your usual duties. Everything will be back to normal.”
It was a pointless thing to say—Rainbow Run would never be back to normal, not as far as she was concerned—but Burt was clearly relieved. His long browned face relaxed.
“All right?” Mercy asked him.
“You bet,” Burt said.
* * *
WHEN CALVIN FINISHED, Willard Stroud leaned back in his chair, looked across the desk, said, “Let me clear up something for you. What you read in the newspapers isn’t the way it is. You read about an armed robbery, fellow needs money to buy drugs, he panics, ends up killing the person he’s robbing. That happens, but it isn’t the typical situation. Most drug killings are disputes about territory. Drug dealers kill other drug dealers.”
“How do you know?” Calvin asked.
“Not from experience,” Stroud admitted. “We don’t get many drug killings up here. What I’m telling you is what I hear at law enforcement meetings.”
“You take their word for it?”
“Dammit, Calvin, that’s not the point. All I’m saying is drugs aren’t behind every killing you run into.”
“I think they’re behind this one.”
“And the evidence is that Charlie Orr smoked marijuana at night on the river way back when? Even if he still did, there’s no indication the tent was entered. No indication it or the body was searched.”
“Goes to show you.”
“Show what?”
“You didn’t look so good.”
Stroud said, “We’re chasing our tails. Let’s leave it that you made your point. We’ll keep in mind your drug killing theory.” Stroud stood up behind the desk. “You’ve been a great help, Calvin. You might earn that reward you and Verlyn are getting up.”
“Naw.”
“You’re too much an insider?”
“Naw.”
“What, then?
“Charlie was a friend.”
15
“GOING OUT,” STROUD announced from his office. “Stretch my legs. Call if anything comes up.”
“Where?” Elsie answered.
“Maybe the bakery. Try there first.”
“Bonnie will be ’round with rolls.”
“Always is,” Stroud said. “But I don’t feel like waiting.”
What he felt like was fresh air, a touch of sun, the smell of pine and river carried on a soft breeze. Or just banter with Bonnie on her own turf rather than his. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock, and already he felt as if he had put in a full day at the city-county building. After Calvin left, Zack Cox had brought in reports from both the Michigan and Vermont state police, then Mercy and Fitzgerald arrived together. Finally, Slocum Byrd phoned with a summary of the findings in his medical report—and the information that Charlie Orr’s body had been released to an undertaker from Big Rapids. But the weariness he was feeling, Stroud realized, wasn’t the result of having been busy that morning. It was that he wasn’t a step closer to solving the case than he had been before.
“No way,” Mercy had said when Stroud told her of Calvin’s theory that marijuana was involved in Charlie’s death. “We’d know, someone would, if he was still using it. He couldn’t keep it secret even if he wanted to. Besides, that was the whole point in the old days, smoking with your friends, everyone getting a little high together.”
“How do you know?” Stroud asked her.
“I just do. Anyway, pot’s a dead end, Stroud. Unfortunately,” Mercy added, “so is Charlie’s wife.”
As far as Mercy could tell from her trip to Big Rapids, Charlie and Theona Orr lived entirely separate lives. The only thing they had in common was that, for a portion of the year at least, they were cooped up together in the same house, if not on its same levels. But there was no suggestion, on Theona’s part, of any anger or bitterness, any sense of resentment—anything, in other words, that might be considered a motive for murder. There was only indifference.
“Besides, she’s a little old lady. She could never find her way to Rainbow Run, let alone handle a shotgun.”
“Another method,” Stroud pointed out, “is having it done.”
“A hired gun? Not Theona. It would have to be somebody else in Big Rapids. Somebody who had it in for Charlie.”
But that wasn’t likely, either. Stroud checked off the information that had come in from the Michigan police: Charlie had no police record, not even minor traffic violations; his work record with the post office was exemplary; and there was no hint of irregularities on the financial side. “Nothing,” Stroud added, “about marijuana use, either.”
“There’s no police record,” Mercy said, “so there wouldn’t be.”
“The point is that nothing about Charlie’s home life, as far as we know about it, indicates a motive for murder.”
“Big Rapids’s a dead end.”
Stroud sighed, patted his shirt pocket, sighed again. “Think you could use another expression?”
“All I’m saying is that Charlie’s killer seems more likely to have come from up here, not down there. Charlie’s past holds no clues.”
“Neither does the Berrys’. ”
Mercy straightened in her chair.
“Just routine. Like I say, nothing there. Only thing that sticks out is after they retired, down in Battle Creek, they sold everything, bought themselves that big fifth-wheeler, took off. They’ve been living on the road ever since.”
“That’s a crime?”
“Just a fact. Tell you the truth, I think I envy them. Taking off, stopping where they want. I might do that when I retire.”
“You might discuss it with Elsie first. And we might solve this murder first.”
“What I had in mind,” Stroud said.
Fitzgerald said, “So we write off the Berrys and anything in Charlie’s background. That leaves the missing camper. Looks like he’s the key.”
“Maybe,” Stroud said. “The Vermont police say his record is as clean as Charlie’s. He lives by himself, out in the country a ways, and is a loner as far as his work goes. Doesn’t employ a secretary or assistant of some sort. Nobody out there has spotted him or his vehicle in several days.”
“I’ve got some more about him,” Fitzgerald said, and went through what he had learned about Proffit from Hoke Harkness, including the fact that he was a published author of novels under a pen name as well as writing a column in Angling World as Will Woodsman.
“Had him figured all along as a writer,” Stroud said when Fitzgerald finished. “From that notebook. But I didn’t know about Will Woodsman. I’ve seen the magazine around, but I never paid attention to the column.”
“Depending on where you stand,” Mercy said, “it can seem pretty extreme.”
“He’s aggressive,” Fitzgerald said. “And unpredictable. A few issues ago he raised holy hell with the Nature Conservancy in Florida. Something about plans for restoring an area of wetland around Kissimmee. The whole thing struck him as overly complicated and elitist. But, as I say, you can’t predict him. At times he’s a way-out elitist himself.”
“Generally speaking,” Mercy said, “I like the column. It’s not the usual hook, line, and sinker stuff. He’s someone with a point of view.”
“All right,” Stroud said. “Proffit writes novels under one name and an outdoor column under another, and the column’s pretty good. But what’s he doing up here, camped at Rainbow Run, making notes about Charlie? Why’d he take off after the murder but leave much of his stuff
behind? Why can’t my men or the state boys locate the vehicle he’s supposedly driving? Or has he ditched it and is roaming about some other way? Tell me that?”
“If we could,” Fitzgerald said, “we might have the case figured out.”
“But we can’t,” Mercy said.
“The questions,” Stroud said, “were rhetorical.”
* * *
“LIKE THIS PAIR?” Bonnie asked, and turned from side to side, giving him a good look. Her earrings this morning were bursts of golden sun the size of half-dollar pieces.
“They’re you,” Stroud said.
“You always say that.”
“It’s always true.”
Their ritual morning exchange out of the way, Bonnie filled Stroud’s mug with coffee, then remained beside his table, one arm angled sharply from a hard hip. “I was coming over with the rolls,” she reminded him.
“I needed a walk. Helps me think.”
Bonnie kept looking down at him, her eyes serious. “About Charlie, huh?”
“The main thing.”
“Slocum Byrd was in earlier. Said they were taking the body down to Big Rapids for burial. That’s awful.”
“He let me know, too. Nice of him.” Then Stroud asked, “Why awful?”
“Couldn’t he be buried up here?”
“He has a wife in Big Rapids.”
“Yeah, but friends here.”
Stroud nodded, and Bonnie moved off with a swishing sound of her uniform to freshen the coffee of other customers in the bakery. There was a newspaper on the table, and Stroud slid it in front of himself, hoping to give the impression he was reading in the event one of the customers decided to strike up a conversation. That was the risk he ran stopping at the bakery, encountering a voter who thought he knew more about policing Tamarack County than the sheriff did. In the case of Charlie Orr’s murder, Stroud thought bitterly, the voter might be right.
Bonnie Pym had brought Slocum Byrd to mind, and Stroud tried to concentrate on what the medical examiner had told him on the phone. The only thing new was that Slocum had narrowed the time of death down to between midnight and three o’clock in the morning. Charlie had definitely died, died instantly, of two .16 gauge shotgun shells fired from the same gun, fired from outside the tent, and striking him in the head and upper torso. Slocum thought it certain that, at the moment of the shooting, Charlie had been stretched out on the cot, reading, the tent illuminated from inside by the neon lantern. The shots, in Slocum’s view, hadn’t been fired at random into the tent. The killer had stood only a step or two beyond the tent wall, aimed deliberately downward at the reclining form.
“Like shooting fish in a barrel, Willard,” Slocum had said, the image inexact—and tasteless—but telling nonetheless. The killer had intended to kill. But knowing that didn’t clarify the more important question: Was it Charlie Orr he had meant to kill or just somebody in a tent?
Stroud was thinking about that when his attention strayed to the newspaper in front of him, the weekly issue of the Call. Dominating the front page was Gus Thayer’s account of the killing. Despite himself, Stroud scanned the columns of type, looking for errors. Surprisingly, Gus had most things right. And one thing Stroud didn’t have at all.
Gus had managed to locate in Montana the owner of the log home on the mainstream that had been broken into around the time of Charlie’s death. The owner, staying at a ranch through July and August and fishing private water on the Ruby River, told Gus he kept shotguns for upland bird hunting in the fall, the only period in which he was regularly in residence in his home on the Borchard. The owner couldn’t be exact about the number of shotguns he owned, so he could say nothing definite about the missing gun until he arrived at the home in the fall. Even then he might not be able to recall for certain.
Stroud pushed the newspaper aside. When he got back to the office, he would ask Zack Cox if he had read Gus’s story. Then he would ask him how the hell it was the Call had located the owner of the log home before a deputy sheriff of Tamarack County had. Maybe, he would add, Gus Thayer ought to be appointed a deputy sheriff.
Giving Zack grief would make him feel better, Stroud knew, but it wouldn’t advance the case. Until he returned in the fall, the owner of the shotguns was another dead end. Even if he was compelled to come back to Michigan now—and maybe, Stroud conducting a murder investigation, he could be—there was no way of tying in the missing gun, assuming the owner identified it as a .1 gauge, with the gun that killed Charlie. The gun had to be found before that could be done.
Gus Thayer, of course, wasn’t inclined to wait for the evidence. The Call story assumed a link between the shotgun taken in the break-in and the gun used to kill Charlie—and more, a link between the hell raising by young people from Ossning that had taken place in the past at Rainbow Run and the killing. Mercy Virdon, of the DNR field office, was quoted to the effect that the campground was regularly patrolled now, but the unavoidable conclusion of the story was that Charlie Orr’s murder had been a thrill killing by young hoodlums looting private homes along the river and running amok in public campgrounds.
The further conclusion, there in the Call between the lines, the sheriff’s office and the DNR equally incompetent, was that citizens of the county had ample reason to feel uneasy in their beds.
* * *
“BAKERY SUBSCRIBES TO this rag?” Stroud asked when Bonnie returned with a pot of coffee. He jabbed a finger toward the newspaper he had pushed to the side of the table. “Or some litterbug just leave it?”
“Got your goat, huh?”
“You ought to get some decent papers in here.”
“We get the Free Press.”
“I was thinking out of state,” Stroud said. “Maybe Chicago.”
“You want more coffee?” Bonnie asked.
Stroud shook his head. “Better be getting back.”
“Maybe, long day ahead, you should have some.” Bonnie waited beside the table. When Stroud gave her a look, she said, “Elsie called. Someone’s waiting to see you.”
“She say who?”
“Just someone.”
Stroud sighed, got up to leave.
“The reason I said about coffee,” Bonnie said, “is something else. A deputy saw a vehicle pull into the city-county building parking area. He told Elsie to tell you. The vehicle’s got a Vermont license plate. The guy you’re hunting for, huh?”
Stroud was nearly out the bakery door when he turned, came back to Bonnie. “How’d you know about that?”
“The old fellow who runs the campground out there. He was in.”
“Burt Berry?”
“Said a camper, all the way from Vermont, was missing. Said he was the one probably killed Charlie.” Bonnie glanced down at the newspaper on the table. “Only thing Gus Thayer doesn’t know, huh?”
16
THE MAN ROSE from a chair, extended his hand. “Alec Proffit.”
Stroud ignored the hand. “Get Zack down to the interrogation room,” he instructed Elsie. Then he glanced at Proffit. “Follow me.”
In the windowless, gray-walled room, waiting for Zack Cox, Stroud inspected the man. Big, tanned, with thick brown hair that could use cutting, wearing khaki trousers and a wrinkled blue fishing shirt with a Royal Coachman stitched above the pocket. His eyes, Stroud noticed, nearly matched the color of the shirt—eyes in a strong-featured face that gave off no suggestion of alarm. On the contrary, Alec Proffit appeared wholly at ease. He didn’t look like a man who had just turned himself in for murder.
When Zack arrived, Stroud said, “I’d like this conversation recorded. All right with you?”
“Certainly,” Proffit said.
Stroud nodded to Zack to start the machine. “Why don’t you tell us why you’re here. How’d that be for a start?”
“I understood you were looking for me.”
“How’d you know that?”
“I didn’t. Not exactly. But I knew you had reason to be.” Proffit
leaned forward, braced his elbows on the metal table separating him from Stroud, looked with level gaze into Stroud’s eyes. “We could save ourselves time, sheriff.”
“Fine,” Stroud said.
“I didn’t kill Charlie Orr. But I know who did.”
Stroud shot a glance at Zack, beside him at the table. Zack was looking back at Alec Proffit with a fixed stare. Stroud satisfied himself that the machine in front of Zack was running. He hoped to hell it was also recording. He had resisted getting a new digital outfit, deciding an old Panasonic cassette recorder was just fine for Tamarack County. Too late for second thoughts now.
He tried to keep his voice flat, off-hand. “We’d like to hear about that.”
“I don’t mean I have a name. I know the types who had reason to kill him.”
“Oh?” Stroud said.
“Poachers, for one.” Lines tightened around Proffit’s mouth. “They run wild on the South Branch of the Borchard.”
“Poachers,” Stroud repeated.
Proffit leaned back in his chair. “I’ve got to tell you how I know that. I write a column for an outdoor magazine called Angling World.”
“You’re Will Woodsman.”
“I expected you’d done some checking by now. Charlie Orr was a regular reader of the column. I know that because he wrote me a letter—early part of the summer—about the poaching situation on the South Branch. He didn’t know me, just knew the column, and thought I might be interested. I was. Charlie said that poaching was the main reason for a decline in the river’s population of big fish, but the poaching wasn’t taken seriously enough by the DNR. It was always put at the bottom of a list of factors causing the decline. He believed it belonged at the top. Now you have to understand that I get letters all the time from readers. Often they’re complaints about something in a column, but occasionally they give me ideas for a piece. Charlie’s did. I’d never thought bait fishing on flies-only water accounted for as much fish-kill as he was arguing. It accounted for some—that was obvious—but it never came in for much mention in studies of fishery decline. So I decided to look into it, see if it might be worth a column.”