Spider mountain
( Cam Richter - 2 )
P T Deutermann
Spider mountain
P. T. Deutermann
Prologue
They were going to hang him, Janey realized. She could just barely see an old man lying in the back of a battered pickup truck, his arms and chest wrapped in at least fifty pounds of chain coiled from his neck down to his hips. His eyes were wide with terror. A heavily bearded fat man was trying to toss one end of a rope up over the limb of an oak tree, while a second, older man, tall and thin with a ferret-like face, was fashioning an elaborate hangman’s noose on the other end of the rope.
She’d been taking water samples on Crown Lake when she’d heard the truck laboring in the woods and climbed up to the ridge to investigate. Her Park Service Jeep was nearly two miles away around the shoreline, along with her radio. Only now she remembered the senior ranger telling them to keep their radio with them at all times. Too late now, she thought. She squinted into the late afternoon sunlight, trying to decide. There were two of them, and she was alone. Being a probationer, she had no weapon other than a pepper-spray cylinder on her work belt. But she couldn’t just squat down behind these bushes and watch them hang the old man.
The fat man succeeded with the rope and began to pull the slack over the branch. They had parked the pickup so that the bed was just about under the tree. The thin man dropped the tailgate with a bang and hopped up into the bed. The chained man tried to roll away from him, but the thin man casually kicked him in the crotch, doubling him over as much as the chains would allow. The old man’s hands groped to reach his pain, but the chains completely pinned his arms, and all he could do was groan. The thin man slipped the noose over his prisoner’s head and tightened it around his scrawny neck. Then he heaved the old man up onto his feet while the fat man pulled all the slack out of the rope. The prisoner could barely stand, but every time he swayed the rope reminded him that standing was the only option.
“Hey,” she shouted, stepping out from behind the bushes and walking toward them. She had the pepper-spray canister in one hand, while she kept the other hand planted in the small of her back, hoping they’d see her ranger uniform and think she had a gun back there. “What’s going on here? You all stop that.”
The would-be executioners whirled to stare at her.
“You let that man go,” she ordered in what she hoped was her best ranger voice. “This has gone far enough.”
The big man casually dropped the end of the rope. He was wearing blue overall bottoms and a stained green wife-beater T-shirt, which barely covered his enormous belly. His black beard came down to the top of his stomach. His face was round and red, with small, belligerent eyes. He had a greasy-looking black pigtail hanging down the back of his neck.
“I said, let him go,” she ordered. She’d stopped a dozen paces from the pickup truck. The chained man was looking at her as if he’d seen the Second Coming. The thin man stood motionless in the bed of the pickup truck, glaring at her, still holding his prisoner upright.
“Well, hell, little lady,” the fat man said, in an unexpectedly amiable voice. “We just funnin’, ain’t we, Will? Ain’t we just funnin’ here.” He kicked at something in the dirt, bent forward slightly, then put his hands on his massive thighs, a lazy smile spreading across his fat face.
She relaxed her guard for just a second, which is when the fat man reached down, scooped up the rock, and threw it at her. It was a baseball-sized rock, and it hit her right in the solar plexus. She doubled over with a painful whoof and he was on her in a flash, grabbing the hand with the pepper spray and whipping it around behind her back while he twisted her arm. She yelled with the pain and tried to escape, but he had her pinned hard. She could feel the mat of his beard against her neck and smell the sweat on him. He grabbed her other arm, pulling it behind her, and then kicked her feet out from under her, dropping her to the ground on her knees. He pushed her right down onto her face. While she was spitting out pine needles, he pulled both her wrists together behind her and tied them with something, and then he reached under her, undid her belt, and yanked her uniform pants down around her ankles. He stood up and planted one heavy boot on her back.
She tried to move her face, but he put his considerable weight on that one foot and she got the message. She lay still, her left cheek plastered to the ground.
“Looky here, Will,” the fat man said softly. “Ain’t that a pretty sight, though. Drawers like that, wonder why she bothers, hunh?”
The thin man spoke for the first time. “Leave her be and git on that rope,” he said.
The fat man took his foot away and knelt down on one knee beside her. While one meaty hand fondled the back of her panties, the other grasped her hair. “You stay right there, kitten,” he said softly. “‘Cause if’n you so much as twitch, I’ll come back over here and kick your teeth right down your throat. You hearin’ me?”
She didn’t say anything. He jerked her hair. “You hear?
She grunted a yes and he stood up. He kicked the black pepper-spray canister away from her and went to get his end of the rope. She watched him pull tension back into it. She heard a commotion in the truck and turned her head just in time to see the thin man push his prisoner off the tailgate and into the air. They’d left no slack in the rope, so she knew that the victim was not going to die of a mercifully broken neck. She closed her eyes but could not shut out the sounds of the old man grunting and gargling frantically while he kicked the air. The coils of chain clinked in time to his frantic struggles.
After what seemed like forever it stopped and she opened her eyes. The prisoner was dangling under the tree, his legs splayed and motionless a few tantalizing inches above the ground, his bulging eyes and black tongue protruding from a plum red face. The fat man, who had been standing on the end of the rope while their prisoner strangled, stepped back and dropped the body onto the dirt. The thin man jumped down from the bed of the pickup and removed the noose.
“What about this one?” the fat man asked, walking over to where the probationer lay in the dirt. “This is damn prime.”
“Business before pleasure,” weasel-face said. “He’p me get his ass in the lake.”
But the big man had other ideas. She could almost feel him staring hungrily at her exposed limbs. “Shit, Will, I ain’t a’goin’ nowheres,” he said. “Right now, I’m gonna tear me off a piece’a this right here.”
“Goddammit, Lee, Grinny’ll kick your ass, you mess with-”
“Don’t hafta know, now, does she,” Lee said, his voice thickening. He straddled her lower legs and knelt down. When she felt his weight, she tried to lunge forward like a fish in the grass. He smacked her solidly on the back of her head, momentarily stunning her. When she felt him tugging at his overalls she tried again to wiggle out from under him. She felt that big paw coming down again and this time she saw stars and then nothing.
1
The uniformed park ranger looked up from his newspaper. “You’re Lieutenant Richter,” he said with a frown.
“That’s right,” I said. “Except for the lieutenant part. I’m not with the sheriff’s office anymore.”
The ranger gave me a stony look, as if this news somehow made my appearance there worse. “I’ll tell her you’re here,” he said curtly. He got up from behind the visitors’ information counter and walked over to an office door. He paused before opening it. “You’re not exactly welcome up here, you know,” he said.
I just waited. The ranger gave me another hard look. I debated quailing in the presence of such ferocity, but yawned instead. He then went into the office, shutting the door behind him. Truth be told, I hadn’t exactly expected a marching band and festive bunting
upon my first visit to the Thirty Mile ranger station since the cat dancers case. But that had been two years ago, and I’d almost managed to bury those events in my moving-on box. Almost.
The station hadn’t changed a bit. The unfriendly park ranger was a new face, so whatever he knew about it he’d been told by others. They’d been furious then because I’d put Mary Ellen Goode in grave danger. Apparently they weren’t over it. Nothing I could do about that. She had called me, not the other way around.
Then she was standing there. Still remarkably pretty, although there were some dark circles under those blue eyes and a tinge of gray in her hair. Her smile seemed a bit forced.
“Thanks for coming,” she said. “Let’s go back to my office.”
I followed her down a short hall. She’s thinner, I thought. The sign on her door read M.E. GOODE, PH.D., PARK ECOLOGIST.
“How’s the arm?” she asked as we went into her office.
“Better,” I said. “I can hold it on the steering wheel for almost an hour now. How’re things in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park these days?”
She sat down behind a cluttered desk. “Comparatively quiet,” she said with a rueful smile. “Until six weeks ago.”
I eased myself into a wooden chair and massaged my upper arm. What was left of it. “I’ve missed seeing you,” I said, and meant it.
She looked down at her desk for a moment before answering. “I’m sorry about going radio-silent,” she said finally. “I-it’s been-very difficult.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve not been well.”
I leaned forward. “Hey? That wasn’t an accusation. Just an observation. I have missed seeing you. Now, tell me: Am I going to get out of this station alive?”
She smiled. “Don’t mind them,” she said. “You made them look bad. They’ll get over it.”
“And how about you-are you getting over it?”
“Are you really a private investigator now?” she asked, sidestepping my question.
“After a fashion. I left the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office after-well, after that incident at White Eye’s cabin.” I saw her flinch when I mentioned White Eye. I guess I had my answer. “I couldn’t very well stay on in law enforcement once I refused to testify. So now I do investigative work for the district court system in Triboro. When I want to.”
She gave me an appraising look. “Sheriff Baggett explained that to me,” she said. “Why you wouldn’t testify. I don’t believe I’ve ever thanked you for that.”
I shrugged and immediately regretted it. There were some things my left arm could do, but lifting suddenly wasn’t one of them. “Well, it was my butt, too,” I said. “Until we know we have them all, both of us would have been dreaming about crosshairs for the rest of our lives.”
“Dreaming of crosshairs,” she said softly. “That’s very well put. And are they working it?”
“I think so,” I said, rubbing my arm again. “But of course I’m on the outside now, so I don’t really know.”
“And how about you-are you working it?”
It was my turn to smile. “Oh, yes,” I said. I’d formed a one-man-band consulting company when I left the sheriff’s office, offering myself to handle investigative projects for various court offices. The Major Criminal Apprehension Team, or MCAT, leaderless after I left, had been disbanded, and the team members reassigned within the major crimes division. I’d offered moonlighting jobs to three of my ex-teammates, who all knew the real reasons behind my refusal to testify in the cat dancers case. Together we were quietly assembling a database of candidates for the as yet unapprehended cat dancers.
She nodded, not quite looking at me. She seemed distracted, I thought. Remembering the cave and those big cats hunting them in the dark? My mother had been on antidepressant meds after my father died. She’d been like this. Wistful. Quick to drift. “You called?” I prompted.
She pulled herself together. “Yes, I did. Did you read about the Park Service probationer who was beaten and raped up here in the park? About six weeks ago?”
“Sorry, no,” I said.
“One of ours. New rangers are assigned to an experienced ranger as a mentor when they start their probationary year. Janey Howard was assigned to me. She’d been here almost three months. The chief sent her to one of the backcountry lakes to take water samples. She didn’t come back that afternoon. Once it got dark and we couldn’t raise her on the radio, we launched a search.”
“The local cops join in?”
“Absolutely. Park Service. Carrigan County deputies. Volunteer firefighters from Marionburg. But we concentrated on where she was supposed to have gone. Found her vehicle there, so that’s where we looked. Some hikers found her two days later, wandering down one of the trails, about ten miles from the lake. Wearing nothing but an old blanket. Barefoot. Dehydrated. Beat up. Among other things.”
“Did she get herself loose or did they dump her?”
“No one knows. She doesn’t know. She remembers nothing, which is probably a good thing. She’s home, over in Cherokee County, in Murphy. Her parents are being-very protective.”
“They mad at the Park Service?”
“ ‘We trusted you to take care of her,’” she recited. “ ‘She was supposed to be a park ranger, not a rape victim. Walking tours, nature hikes with the tourists, butterfly lectures, sweet bunny rabbits, bird watching. See Bambi run. That kind of thing. Instead you people sent her off into the deep woods and some twisted bastard got her. What was she doing out there all alone?’”
“Her job, perhaps?” I said.
Mary Ellen sighed. “It is a beautiful park. And we do all of those nice things. But you and I know that evil can get loose in the backcountry from time to time.”
“Do we ever,” I murmured.
She shot me a sideways look. “And,” she continued, “Janey was working very close to Injun country.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Meaning?”
“Meaning that she was working up on the edge of Robbins County.”
“Ah.” I’d heard of Robbins County back when I’d been with the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office. The Great Smokies Park extended into both Tennessee and North Carolina. Robbins County enveloped the southeastern boundary of the park on the Carolina side. It was a place where the hill people lived remote and were determined to keep themselves that way. It was also rumored to be the mother lode for methamphetamine in western North Carolina. The Robbins County Sheriff’s Office was also reputed to be a really interesting organization. Their official motto was “Taking care of business.” I’d heard they’d painted that right on the patrol cars.
“Yes,” she said. “Our local sheriff, Bill Hayes, apparently has to ask permission to operate in Robbins County. They were not exactly forthcoming.”
“The Park Service is federal-you don’t have to ask permission.”
“Yes we do, outside of the park. Anyway, we got her back, but that’s all we got. Which is why I called you.”
I leaned back in my chair. “The Park Service has sworn officers. And I would have guessed they’d get the Bureau into it, especially if you guys suspected criminal collusion from local law.”
She hesitated. “It’s complicated,” she said. “It seems our regional director is scared of starting some kind of feud with local mountain people. Send the FBI in and stir up a hornet’s nest of hillbilly outlaws who would then come into the park for recreation involving the tourists. We’re not staffed to cope with that kind of mess. The visitor count is down already because of what happened to Janey Howard.”
“And the visitor count is important?” I asked.
“It determines the budget, among other things. Especially if it goes down because of bad publicity.”
“Does it have a bearing on other things-such as promotions, seniority, performance evaluations?”
She nodded. “What can I say: We’re a federal bureaucracy. Anyway, I thought perhaps you might have some ideas on how we can find out who did this.”
“What’s Sheriff Hayes doing?”
“The Carrigan County people got nowhere in Robbins County, whose sheriff maintains it didn’t happen on his patch. And, of course, if it didn’t happen in Robbins County, then it probably happened in the park.”
“Either way, technically not Hayes’s problem, either.”
“Not his jurisdiction,” she corrected. “He’s mad as hell about it, and they did more than they had to. It’s just-”
“Right,” I said. “Some cases are just no-win for anybody. So you guys want to hire me? Is that it?”
She put a hand to her mouth in surprise. “Us? The Park Service? Oh, no, we can’t do that. I mean-”
I grinned at her. “I know that. I was just teasing. Besides, my name isn’t exactly enshrined in a place of honor here. I thought I was going to have to call for the dogs, the way that ranger was looking at me.”
“You’ve brought them along?”
“Don’t go anywhere without them,” I said. I saw the alarm flicker in her eyes again and mentally kicked myself. “Why don’t we have dinner,” I said. “We can talk about it some more. I may have some ideas for you.”
She appeared to think about it. “I don’t know if that would be such a good idea,” she said finally. “Marionburg is a very small town. And, well-“ She stopped.
And my being here has resurfaced some very bad memories, I thought. Which she was not, apparently, able to expunge. No wonder the rangers were still mad at me. Before the cat dancers case she had been the brightest object at the station.
“Well,” I said, getting up. “I’m assuming there’s still only the one decent place to eat in Marionburg. I’ll be there around eight if you change your mind. Otherwise, I’ll check around a little and then give you a call. Okay?”
She nodded quickly. Too quickly, I thought. I sensed that she wanted me out of there, and that now would be nice. Plus, she was probably embarrassed. I’d driven almost four hours from Triboro, and now she was probably thinking that her call had been a mistake. “Thank you,” she said in a small voice, again not quite looking at me. “And I’m sorry for being such a drag.”
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