The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller

by Jack Lynch

  And then we were rising above it. The river bed climbed toward the shore. The water still tugged at my knees. I gripped the rope awkwardly and pulled like a doryman as I slogged toward the high ground. That's when the rope broke.

  We pitched backward into deep water, Tuffy with a whoop and his arms flailing, me with a nose full of river water. We couldn't hang onto each other and went over the falls with a lot of yelling and cursing. I banged a leg sharply against a rock below the falls before being swept on downstream. Tuffy was ahead of me, thrashing with both arms. I tried to get to my feet but couldn't. The water wasn't deep enough here to be over my head but it moved with a strong flow. I hit my head on something and probably would have passed out if the freezing water hadn't already put my nervous system into semi-shock. Thirty yards or so farther we came to a narrow sandbar in midstream. Tuffy managed to scuttle with his good leg close enough to it to brake himself. I followed and paused there just long enough to spit water and take a couple of breaths. From the bar to the far shore was a comparatively easy journey. Not too far and not too deep. I wish I'd seen that before I tried the rope trick up above. I didn't bother with the piggyback business, but just scooped the boy up and waded on across. We rested by the bank, squeezing out our clothes and gathering strength. I figured the kid had a dozen or so smart remarks to make, but he kindly kept them to himself.

  "What happened back there?" was all he said.

  "I honestly don't know. The rope gave out. It shouldn't have."

  The boy shuddered. I shared the sentiment, got him up on my back again and started away from the river. A half hour later we broke into a cleared hillside that overlooked the highway. Tuffy grunted when he saw it. I was too close to ending it and too dead tired to respond. I just plunged on down with the boy swaying on my back. A couple of autos came around the lower curve and climbed away from us, but we weren't at an angle where they'd be apt to see us. When we reached the road I let the boy down gently and stood there, hands on my hips, blowing like an old horse. I felt exactly like an old horse.

  "I hope somebody stops," said Tuffy.

  "The first car will stop," I assured him.

  It was another six or seven minutes before another auto came around the curve below us. I stepped out into the middle of the road and flagged it to a stop. Inside were an elderly couple who didn't like the bedraggled looks of us. I told them my story and asked for a lift. They were frightened and didn't want to help.

  "How do I know it isn't just a trick to get my car?" asked the old gentleman through a narrow crack above the window. "And I see you got a gun on your hip there too."

  Another auto pulled up and stopped behind us. I turned. It was a county sheriff's car. I stepped back.

  "It's okay. The deputy will help."

  The first car took off with a lurch and a great belch of exhaust.

  "What's going on?" demanded the lanky man climbing out of the patrol car. He wasn't in uniform, but wore trail clothes and boots.

  "Hear about the plane crash?" I asked.

  "Yeah. Got called in. I'm on my way up to River Run Campground now to join the search."

  So we'd dropped below the campground. No wonder I felt like something left behind on the battlefield. "I've got one of the survivors over here," I told him, indicating the boy.

  "I'll be God damned," said the deputy. "Where did you come from?"

  I sighed and looped a hand toward the mountain. "Way up there."

  "I'm Deputy Morris," he told me, reaching inside to turn on the flasher atop his patrol car. "You're not from around here."

  "No, but I was helping in the search. The boy has a broken ankle and a wrenched knee. He could use a lift to Barracks Cove."

  "We'll get help faster taking him up to the campground. There are 'copters in the area that can pick him up and take him to the hospital in Willits. You mean to say you carried him down?"

  "I sure did. And he grew some on the way." We went over and lugged Tuffy to the patrol car. "Maybe you could get on the radio. Get word to the search parties. The boy's dad is pinned in the wreckage and needs help. It's about five miles north of where everybody's looking. Maybe one of the helicopters can ferry a party over there."

  After we settled Tuffy in the rear of the car, Morris got in and tried to radio, but we were in a pocket where his signal wouldn't carry. I got in on the passenger side and we drove on up the highway to where the deputy could relay a message.

  "Don't worry, son," Morris told Tuffy. "They'll find your pa in no time, now."

  I stretched back and closed my eyes.

  "That must have been some hike, mister."

  "It was. The name's Bragg."

  We rode in silence for a moment. "If you don't mind my asking, Bragg, how come you're armed?"

  "I'm a private cop from San Francisco. I was working on a case when I got drafted into the search party. Figured I could signal with it if I found anything. Only by the time I came on the boy I was too far from the other searchers."

  Tuffy sat up in back. "You're a private eye?"

  I groaned inwardly. "I guess some people still call it that."

  "Huh," said the boy. "Maybe Dad should have hired you and saved us all a lot of trouble."

  "How do you mean?"

  "The reason my dad and me were flying down here was to look for Uncle Bob. He's a detective down in Southern California. We were going to spend the weekend trying to find him."

  My eyes opened and I stared at the roof of the patrol car.

  "Uncle Bob disappeared a couple weeks ago. The last we heard from him, he was in a place called Barracks Cove."

  I sat up straight and turned in the seat. "Tell me about your Uncle Bob, Tuffy."

  THIRTEEN

  Detective Robert Dempsey, according to Tuffy, had spent more than ten years in the Los Angeles Police Department, winning citations, earning promotions and growing an ulcer. He had left, finally, to take a job as chief of detectives in Rey Platte, a wealthy retirement town inland from Santa Barbara, where the pace was slower and the work was easier on a cop's stomach. Tuffy's dad had celebrated a birthday on the Friday before Jerry Lind dropped out of sight, and his brother the cop had phoned him greetings that evening from Barracks Cove. During the conversation, Bob Dempsey had said that he was in Northern California on a special investigation. They learned later that Dempsey had phoned his wife in Rey Platte that same evening. It was the last anybody had heard from him.

  In subsequent queries to the Rey Platte police, Tuffy's father, Steven Dempsey, learned that whatever it was his brother had been doing in Barracks Cove, it apparently wasn't connected with current duties in Rey Platte. He was on leave, and had made arrangements to be gone for as long as a month. The department wasn't worried about him particularly, but his wife was. And by now his brother was worried too. Worried enough to fly down from Seattle to look for him.

  I doubted that there would have been an army of out-of-town police marching through Barracks Cove on a given day, so I had to assume that Dempsey was the cop Allison had told me about. The one that Jerry Lind, for whatever cockeyed reason, had been on the trail of. I wondered how Jerry Lind would have known where Dempsey was. I also had to wonder, with an unpleasant feeling, what might have happened to a pussycat like Jerry Lind if a veteran police detective like Dempsey had disappeared in the same area.

  By the time we reached the campground I was not only sore and exhausted, but worried as hell. I made some telephone calls from the ranger station there. I learned that Mendocino airport, closer to Barracks Cove, was fogged in again. I also learned an intrastate airline made a daily stop at the field in Willits, but not on Sundays, so I phoned down to San Francisco and made arrangements to be picked up in Willits by an outfit calling itself Golden Gate Sky Charter that would fly you anywhere twenty-four hours a day so long as your credit was good. They were based at San Francisco International and I'd used them before. They knew my credit was good, so by the time I'd driven from the campground over to Willits, t
here was a charter plane waiting for me. They were a reliable outfit, but I grumped a lot over their prices. When we landed at Rey Platte I told the pilot to wait for me. He gave me a slow, rich smile. They charge a lot more than a waiting taxicab does.

  After I explained my business the local police gave me the home telephone number of their chief. I called him and he agreed to meet me back at his office at eight o'clock that evening. It just gave me time to get a sandwich and beer at a downtown lunch counter. It occurred to me that for a man on an expense account I hadn't been eating all that well the past couple of days.

  The Rey Platte police chief was named Charles Porter. In his office at a little past eight he gave the appearance of a man captured by his desk. He was slow moving, slow talking and overweight, losing his hair and increasing his chins. He sat in a squeaky chair and didn't rise when I was ushered in, but he did lean across the desk to offer his hand.

  "So you're the one who found Bob Dempsey's nephew."

  It surprised me. "That's right, Chief, but how did you know?"

  "A while after you called, I had a phone call from Chief Morgan in Barracks Cove. He said you might be on your way down and asked me to help you any way I could. He said he hadn't been able to give you much assistance so far, but that you were the hero of the day up there. How's Bob's brother?"

  "Still alive anyhow. The last I heard they'd put him on a helicopter and were flying him to a hospital."

  "That's something. Now, what can I do for you?"

  "I've been hired to find a young insurance investigator from San Francisco who disappeared a couple of weeks ago. I trailed him to Barracks Cove and spoke to a woman there who knew him and had seen him after he left San Francisco. She said he'd been trying to find an out-of-town police officer in the area. Then, this afternoon while I was up on the mountain, the woman was checking motels in the Barracks Cove area for me, trying to find where the missing insurance investigator, a man named Lind, might have stayed.

  "I talked to her again just before catching a plane down here. She didn't learn where Lind had stayed, but she did find out he'd stopped by several of those same motels asking if they had a record of this out-of-town cop. By then I'd learned that Dempsey was missing, so I telephoned some of these motels myself, and the manager of one of them has in-laws named Dempsey, so he remembered the name. And it was the name of the officer Lind had been asking about."

  "So you figure that your man's disappearance is linked to Dempsey?"

  "That's right. I take it that you and Dempsey's wife still haven't heard from him?"

  "That's true. But I've tried to tell Coral, that's his wife, that it's too early yet to start worrying about him. I expect Bob to surface in time."

  "What makes you so sure?"

  "Because he's the best man at his work I've ever run into, here or anywhere else. He's big and hard and smart. He's an able detective. He's worked on some big cases. Both here and in Los Angeles. But he has his own way of doing things. After events get to a certain stage he likes to operate with a degree of secrecy. I guess it was a hard-won lesson from having to contend with departmental leaks early in his career. And I think another reason is that he's a politically ambitious man."

  "Did the two of you ever talk about that?"

  "No, but the last time he telephoned Coral, I guess it was the call from Barracks Cove, he told her things were going well enough so's he'd end up the next sheriff of the county."

  "What could he have been working on that was that big?"

  "I'm just not sure, and I've been giving it some thought too. Of course it could be something from his days with the LAPD, but if he's got eyes to be sheriff around here, I don't know how something from back then could help him much. There was one thing of the past to come up recently, but Bob didn't seem all that excited about it at the time."

  "I'd like to hear about it."

  "Well, about five years ago we had a rather spectacular bank robbery just down the street. At the Rey Platte Union Bank. We never knew if it was planned or if the robbers—there were three of them—just hit it lucky that day. Anyway, they struck around eleven in the morning, just as the Corrigan Security armored car was delivering a big cash shipment from Santa Barbara. Back then we had an electronics firm right here in town that had started out thirty-five years ago as a fix-it shop. Mathews was the man who started it. One of his boys went away to the war in Europe and worked on radar equipment. When he came home he went back to school and the next thing you knew old Mathews and the boy were in the electronics business. They got a lot of government contracts and things.

  "Well, sir, they did prosper. Had to move around town two or three times, expanding. Finally, about three years ago, they put up a new plant ten miles south of here. The point of all this is that at the time of the bank robbery, old Mathews, to the consternation of his accounting department, still paid all the folks who worked for him in cash, in pay envelopes. Said it had always given him a thrill to get a pay envelope when he was a boy, and he thought his help deserved the same.

  "He finally changed his thinking when the fellows who held up the bank got not only the bank's cash but the Mathews payroll from the armored car as well. Nearly half a million dollars.

  "It gave me a fit too," the chief recalled somberly. "The bulk of the payroll money was in hundred dollar bills, the serial numbers in sequence and recorded by the Corrigan Security firm and the bank in Santa Barbara. But except for right after the robbery, we never heard of any of those recorded bills turning up, until just about three weeks ago when one of them surfaced at a bank up north, in Santa Rosa. It was kind of a fluke that anyone there even bothered to check it against the lists. But somebody did and we were notified. Seems it came from some doctor in the town of Willits."

  I whistled softly. "It's beginning to sound good."

  "Well, granted it's the sort of thing that would make Bob Dempsey's ears stand up, but I didn't think too much of it myself."

  "Why not?"

  "I called Santa Rosa. Asked about the condition of the bill. They told me it had been put to some use. But those bills were mint fresh when they left town here."

  "It could have been purposely made to look more used than it was."

  "Maybe, but all things considered, I doubt it. I also called the doctor in Willits, a man name of Nelson. He said he got the bill from some hippie character as part of what he charged for an abortion he performed. It was a young girl who had something wrong inside her, so's a full-term pregnancy would have killed her. Least that's what the doc said. The only address he got from either the girl or the hippie fellow was a post office box number the girl had in Barracks Cove. I phoned there too, and learned the girl has given up the box and didn't leave a forwarding address. I figure her hippie boyfriend was one of the rich ones. Plays in a band or deals in dope or something. I've seen 'em around here, looking like they was just run over by a truck, but carrying enough cash to buy the both of us."

  "Did Dempsey show any interest in all this when the bill turned up?"

  "He did somewhat, sure. He asked if I wanted him to go up to Willits, to see if he could learn anything more from the doctor. I told him no, that I didn't think it would be productive. I had the impression then that he agreed with me."

  "How long after that did he ask to take a leave?"

  "Almost a week."

  "Was anybody hurt in the bank robbery?"

  "One of the Corrigan guards was shot, not seriously."

  "Could a private insurance company have had an interest in any of this?"

  "I don't remember. But the Corrigan people must have had some kind of coverage. Let's look."

  He got up and crossed to a file cabinet, searched through it some, then brought out a thick packet. He sat back at his desk and began paging through documents. "Yeah, there it is. The Corrigan outfit recovered some of the loss from Coast West Insurance Co."

  "The man I'm looking for works for Coast West."

  Chief Porter let me go through the f
ile, jotting information. The three suspects in the case all were from Santa Barbara—Paul Chase, Randolph Hayes and Timothy Rowen. The three had been in their middle twenties at the time of the robbery. They had worn masks, but in the exchange of gunfire and fight with the Corrigan guards, the masks were torn loose from the men later identified as Chase and Hayes. Those two, and Rowen, had lived together in Santa Barbara. They all three disappeared after the robbery.

  Paul Chase's brother, Wesley, was the only individual who had served time in connection with the case. They found some of the stolen money in his apartment, but they never proved he took part in the robbery itself. He spent eighteen months at a state prison.

  "Have you kept track of this Wesley Chase?"

  "We did for a while. He served his time then went back to Santa Barbara until his parole expired, then he dropped out of sight like the others. Can't say's I blame him. A lot of people were interested in him, what with all that money still missing."

  "Do you think he knew where his brother and the others had gone to?"

  "I couldn't say. Never met the man myself. Dempsey questioned him over in Santa Barbara. Anything else you need?"

  I riffled through the rest of the file. "I'd like a copy of the wanted flier on the three missing men. And a photo of the brother who served time, if you have one."

  "Don't have it here, but I can get one and mail it to you."

  "And I'd appreciate a photo of Dempsey, and maybe a telephone call from you to his wife, to introduce me. I want to stop by and see her this evening if I can."

  The chief gave me a copy of the wanted poster on the bank robbers. None of the three had ever been arrested before, so the photos on the poster were informal. They were smiling, good-looking boys. One was in an Army uniform. It said all three were Vietnam veterans. The department mug shot of Dempsey that Chief Porter gave me showed a man with a hawk nose and a strong chin. He looked tough.