The Cherokee also yielded no clues. The forensics team found no evidence of blood or forced entry. The area near it showed no sign of disturbance or digging. They found fresh tire tracks, but they were too faint to reveal tread marks or other useful information. In a couple of spots where the road had a soft surface, tracks appeared to have been brushed out.
"Sorta like in old western movies,” observed Garcia. “Where somebody uses a piece of sagebrush or tree limb to brush out their trail."
"The only person who would have a reason,” said Rands, “would be the killer."
"But why move the body and leave the vehicle? It makes no sense. We're not going to be fooled by the body being found at one place when the vehicle's still at the other."
Rands returned to Sawyerville for another chat with Larry Hughes before Hughes left for home. It was almost five o'clock.
"These were in his pocket?” Hughes asked when shown the plastic bag with the three arrowheads. “Why would he have points in his pocket?"
"I'm wondering the same thing. If he found them elsewhere, why carry them around with him? If he found them on the federal land, he should've left them there. If he found them on Larson's ranch, he should've notified Larson before he took them."
"So you're saying he was a either a looter of federally protected relics or a thief?"
Rands shook his head. “He may've been carrying them with him, so I can't say that. But it looks suspicious."
"It sure does. But how would any of that get him shot?"
"I don't know that any of it would. It's just that the single oddity we've found so far is Indian relics in his possession, probably illegally. Unlawful acts tend to lead to other unlawful acts. . . . Tell me, Larry, if you discovered your archaeologist looting relics from the Metolius National Forest, what would you do?"
"Report him so that he could be arrested. But, Vern, I don't think it's about points. Nobody kills over points, even to avoid arrest, let alone to stop somebody from picking them up off the ground. Not even Indians seeking to protect their heritage or crazy environmentalists. How about the possibility that there's a marijuana patch out there somewhere? We stumbled on a patch near there a couple of years ago."
"I remember it,” Rands said, but we've found no evidence of that thus far."
* * * *
That evening at home, while he ate dinner and later while he watched TV, Rands continued to think about the arrowheads. An adult man wouldn't carry arrowheads around with him, Rands reasoned, so Otis had found them that day. It didn't mean they had led to his murder. But if Rands could discover where Otis had found them, he might get a better idea of where he'd died. He needed to talk to an arrowhead collector.
Next morning, he dropped in at the Paiute County Historical Museum, where five days a week out-of-town visitors strolled through the old brick two-story building, formerly a bank, to view yellowing photographs and knickknacks from the nineteenth century. The museum manager, Charlie Adams, was just the man to know who in the county collected arrowheads. He mentioned Pete Garrison.
Garrison was a tall, lean, white-haired retired logger who lived in a small house at the west edge of town. He appeared reluctant to talk until the sheriff assured him that he wasn't hunting for relic looters, only the killer of Otis. Then, sitting in the small living room with. Garrison and his wife looking on, he displayed the plastic bag of three arrowheads.
A smile crossed Garrison's face. “I can tell you one thing right off the bat,” he said. “These points ain't from around here."
"You're sure?"
"Sure I'm sure. Look at them. One's creamy white, the other two are colored sorta milky brown. All are in perfect condition. Points in central Oregon are black, made of obsidian. Also, they're rarely in perfect condition. Almost always you find them broken."
"Why broken?"
"Because—like I said—they're made of obsidian. That's just brittle volcanic glass, easy to chip or break. Indians made few perfect ones—they tended to break so easily that they threw away more than they made—and when they shot the arrows from their bows, the points usually broke when they hit rocks or bone or trees or just the hard ground. These points are from somewhere else. They mightn't have even been made by Indians. Many people make their own, either for target shooting or to sell."
Garrison told him about people who made Indian-style points as a hobby. Many in central Oregon used obsidian, but in other parts of the country other materials. The hobbyists used stones to knock pieces of obsidian into the desired shape, like the Indians had done, but some of the people selling for profit used more refined tools, including machines.
"You might wanna talk to Keith Fredericks,” Garrison said. “He used to be a big collector of points. And he also used to be a friend of Carl Randolph, who owned the Larson ranch before Larson. I'm sure, him being both an enthusiastic collector and a friend of Randolph's, he searched for points on that ranch."
"Is it a good place to find arrowheads?"
Garrison smiled. “Points aren't naturally occurring, sheriff. You find them wherever the Indians left them."
Outside, Rands thumbed through the small Dex telephone directory he kept in his Bronco until he found Fredericks's address, which turned out to be only three blocks from Rands's own office.
"I never thought a sheriff would question me in a murder investigation,” said Fredericks, sounding pleased. He was a small man, gray haired, with a weathered face and George Will glasses. “Even if it isn't about any direct involvement."
"I'm not sure it was murder.” Rands sat across the kitchen table from Fredericks in the the widower's small house. Fredericks had been doing the Bend Bulletin's crossword puzzle when Rands arrived. “It may've been an accident, though it seems unlikely."
"Well, Pete told you the true gen. Carl gave Stan Williams and me permission to search for points on that ranch when he owned it. This was back before Larson bought it from Bowers, who bought it from Carl. We searched the most likely spots, but never found anything. This would've been back forty or more years ago."
"The most likely spots? Mr. Garrison told me that arrowheads are found only where the Indians left them. He said they weren't ‘naturally occurring.’”
Fredericks chuckled. “Well, yes, that's true, but some spots are more likely than others. You look at the topography, try to imagine where Indians might've camped or hunted. That's where you'd most likely find them."
"Such as along a deer trail."
"Exactly.” Suddenly he laughed. “You know, it's funny you mentioning a deer trail. I'd forgotten all about it, but that scoundrel tried to hoax us."
"Carl Randolph?"
"Yep. Told me about it a few years after he'd sold the ranch. Said he'd salted an area along a deer trail for us."
"Salted? I don't quite understand. You mean he spread salt on—?"
"No, no, no. I mean salted! You know, like you salt a mine. Put pieces of gold in it so somebody will think it's a good mine when it isn't. Carl did the same thing, basically. He dropped a whole bunch of points along a deer trail, thinking we'd find them and get all excited and start bragging all over the place. Then he'd tell what he'd done. Only trouble was, he planted them in the wrong place. But in any case, that would have nothing to do with the dead archaeologist."
"Probably not. But on the other hand, he had arrowheads in his possession and you say you and your friend never found any. Tell me the details."
Fredericks thought it over for a moment, searching his memory. Finally he said: “Carl told me that he'd ordered several dozen points from a mail order outfit in one of those western historical magazines you used to see on the newsstands all the time. You remember, magazines like True West, Old West, Real West, and so forth. They used to carry ads for points and other Indian relics in a classified ad section in their back pages. The points supposedly were ‘collected along the banks of the Rio Grande,’ or some such thing. Maybe so. Or maybe some fellow cut them on a lapidary machine, tossed them on th
e ground by the river, then picked them up again a minute later. I don't know. But you could buy them, always in mint condition, for very little money. Maybe ten cents apiece or something. I've seen them because some friends used to buy them. They weren't like our points around here."
"Because they were in perfect condition,” guessed Rands. “And made of material other than obsidian."
Fredericks looked surprised. “That's right. Different colors and none broken or misshaped. Top quality if Indians really did make them."
"And what did Mr. Randolph do with them?"
"Spread the whole bunch of them along a very wide deer trail on his ranch just north of Scissors Prairie, where we'd be sure to find them. What he didn't know was that we'd already searched that trail by the time he went out there to spread the points around. That'd been the first place we searched. We never went back. Poor Carl was out about thirty dollars for those points. I don't know what that'd be in modern money. He told me all about it a few years later. He was too embarrassed by the failure to tell me earlier. I guess the points are still out there."
"Do you remember which trail it was?"
"Sure. The wide one. You could drive a car on it. Only one wide one like that up there. Carl wasn't gonna do any hiking to pull his joke! Laziest rancher you ever saw."
"Still alive?"
"Died years ago."
Rands hurried to his office and called in every available deputy, six in all. He also phoned the Sawyerville City Police chief and asked to borrow his canine officer and police dog.
"We're going to the deer trail near where Otis's Cherokee was found,” he told them. “I believe Otis was killed on that trail, either accidentally or on purpose, and then his body moved. We need to find the exact spot. The killer may have swept over the ground with a bush, but it's impossible that he covered up every footprint or blood splatter. We're going to find something."
What they found, after three and a half hours of searching in the summer heat, was a yellow pencil. Marcia, the canine officer, found it while the police dog was sniffing around unproductively. She called Rands over, and he noticed at once the smooth condition of the soil and the odd arrangement of dead pine needles and other debris. Obviously the ground had been swept. He also noticed that the pencil was in excellent condition, showing no signs of age or weathering. It had been dropped recently.
"I think,” he said, “we've found the crime scene."
He had all the deputies search the area. They found no other clues, but they did find two dozen arrowheads, none obsidian, none broken.
Rands went to his Bronco and pulled out the big detailed map of the county that he and every deputy kept in their jockey-box. He unfolded it on the ground, knelt down, and studied the area above Scissors Prairie. He found their location, and noted the property lines. They were, he realized, on the Larson ranch, four hundred feet north of the Scissors Prairie subdivision. They were, in short, on part of the land Larson needed to sell in order to save his ranch.
Early the following morning Rands, Garcia, and three other deputies, along with the city's canine officer and police dog, arrived at the big two-story nineteenth-century house where Howard Larson lived. It sat behind a row of cottonwoods, next to an earthen parking area for Larson's car, pickup, and flatbed truck. A red barn was visible behind the house, and forest beyond that.
When the rancher came out onto his porch, Rands told him, “Mr. Larson, I've a search warrant for this ranch and every building and vehicle on it."
"Looking for what?"
"The pistol you used to murder Phil Otis and any other evidence of the crime."
Larson swallowed. “Why on earth would you suspect me? If I'd killed somebody, I wouldn't have left the body on my own road."
"You would've left it there if moving it from the trail where he was killed was safer than the risk of being seen carrying him over the highway. And since you probably couldn't quickly find Otis's vehicle parked in the glade, I'm guessing you used whatever vehicle you were driving on the deer trail when you stumbled across him and he mentioned those arrowheads he'd found."
"That's your guess, huh?"
"It is."
"You're welcome to search, sheriff. But you're not gonna find anything."
A confidence had entered Larson's voice. It bothered Rands. Perhaps the rancher had destroyed all the evidence. Of course, he couldn't destroy the pistol, but he owned hundreds of acres of land where he could've buried it. Never could they search the whole ranch. The best they could hope for about the pistol was to find fresh-turned dirt where it'd been buried. But it was the discovery of one of two other items Rands was counting on.
One was whatever Larson had used to wrap the body in. He'd used something. He would never have placed the bleeding corpse on the bed of his pickup or truck or inside his car.
The other item was arrowheads. Even non-collectors couldn't toss away what they believed to be a genuine Indian arrowhead. Rands thought Otis may have shown Larson the arrowheads before Larson killed him. They, indeed, were likely the motive. Arrowheads other than those in Otis's pocket, and, Rands suspected, Larson would have removed those, too, had he known of their presence. Otis probably had been stealing those three arrowheads and so had said nothing about them, but instead had shown Larson some others that he'd found.
The search yielded two pistols, but both were .22 caliber, and the crime lab had notified Rands that the round which killed Otis had been fired from a .38-caliber gun. The search yielded no bloodstained blankets, trash bags, or other body-wrapping material. They did discover blood stains in the back of the pickup truck, but Larson appeared unfazed.
"Do your blood tests,” Larson said confidently. “You'll see it's from deer and ducks. And, I'll add, shot in season."
But then they found an old Mason jar half full of arrowheads. Most were broken and black. But five on top of the pile were other colors and in perfect shape.
Larson waited out the search at his kitchen table. Rands walked in with the jar, opened it, and, in front of him, used tweezers to carefully pull out the five arrowheads—and only those five—that were not made of obsidian.
"Did he show these to you?” asked Rands. “Or did you pick them up off the nearby ground after you killed him?"
"I don't know what you're talking about.” But clearly Larson was bothered that Rands knew exactly which arrowheads to select. “Those are just some old points I've found on this place over the years and a few I picked up elsewhere when I was a kid."
"These colored ones aren't. They came from the deer trail where Phil Otis died. Nowhere else. And we found another couple dozen of them yesterday at the same place."
"Did you?” And then Larson realized what Rands had told him. “You've discovered where he died?"
"Yes. You brushed away the footprints and your vehicle tracks, but we found a pencil there. Probably his, maybe yours, but either way it pinpointed the location. All the arrowheads we found there confirmed it was the location we were looking for."
Larson appeared to be about to voice another denial, but he didn't. Instead, after a moment, he seemed to shrink in upon himself, become smaller, deflate. Then he nodded.
"It was an impulse,” he said. “I had a pistol with me and when that cocky young bastard told me he was gonna prevent approval of the Forest Service permit, I just got so angry I shot him. I was stunned when I realized what I'd done. But, of course, there was nothing I could do after I'd done it. Well, nothing except try to cover up the killing."
"So you moved him away from the trail so nobody else would find the arrowheads and try to stop your sale?"
Larson nodded. “You got everything right, sheriff. I used an old tent stored in the back of my pickup to wrap him up, and later burned it. Drove the body to the road because I didn't dare go out onto the highway and risk being seen. Brushed over the trail. Should've gotten rid of the points, but . . . well, I didn't think about them being specific to that one little area. I should've guessed it from wh
at he told me."
"What'd he tell you?"
"That he'd never seen points like those before, so they must have cultural and historical significance. That's how he'd stop the development."
Rands remembered Hughes's comment about Otis not being the world's best archaeologist. He wondered how long it would've been before Otis realized that the arrowheads had been planted. Perhaps he would never have realized it, perhaps some other archaeologist would've had to tell him later.
He read Larson his Miranda rights, then asked, “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘salting the mine'?"
Copyright © 2010 David Braly
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Mystery Classic: SLEEPING DOG: SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY WALTER SATTERTHWAIT by Ross Macdonald
Ross Macdonald
"I counted the number of rooms I had lived in during my first sixteen years,” he once wrote, “and got a total of fifty."
As a son, he was born in California in 1915 but lived most of his childhood in Canada. He was abandoned by his father, John Macdonald Millar, at the age of three, and raised partly by his sickly Christian Scientist mother, Annie, and partly by other relatives, including his Mennonite grandparents. In high school he drank and fought, smoked and stole and gambled until he straightened himself out and went to work for a year on a ranch. When his father died in 1932, the insurance policy, still made out to his wife, provided her with enough money to buy an annuity that paid for their son's college. Three years later, when he was twenty, she died of a brain tumor. He spent the next year traveling throughout Europe, bicycling by himself across Nazi Germany. At the University of Michigan, he studied under W.H. Auden and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Samuel Coleridge.
As a husband, he often argued with his wife, Margaret. Sometimes they merely screamed and shouted; sometimes they threw things at one another. Over the years, occasionally, they could not live together, but they could never live apart. By shaping and editing her work, he helped her become a published mystery writer before he became one himself. With the money from a movie sale, she bought their first California house in Santa Barbara, the town in which they remained for most of their adult life. Collectively, in forty-five years together, editing and helping each other, they wrote fifty-three books.
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