The Winter Widow

by Charlene Weir

  “Egg yolks?” she asked.

  “Gives protection from the shock of freezing and feeds the sperm.”

  Ah yes. We surely wouldn’t want the valuable little devils to go hungry.

  Opening the door, he allowed her to precede him. A secretary looked up with a harried expression as they came in. Guthman, obviously proud of the efficiency and success of his business, showed her around. The pride tempered his irritation as he led her behind the reception area into a large room with the clutter and bustle of any warehouse. Two men were preparing orders for shipment.

  Guthman introduced her to a third man. “Slater, my foreman here.”

  Slater, a thin man with gray hair and a precise manner, briefly explained the procedures. The straws Guthman had mentioned were actually thin metal tubes; they were kept in vacuum tanks of liquid nitrogen with labels that read ANIMAL SEMEN, DO NOT DROP, in large letters and several languages. Each had a code number that identified a specific bull. For shipping, the tanks were packed in crates.

  “Everything running smooth?” Guthman asked.

  Slater nodded. “No more trouble with equipment not where it belongs.” He called a sharp command to one of the workers and sprinted off to supervise something that wasn’t being done to his satisfaction.

  “Good foreman,” Guthman said, “but fussy as an old woman.” He took her to his office, barking at the harried secretary for coffee as they went past.

  A huge world map, dotted with different-colored pins to show where semen was being sent, took up one entire wall of the office. On the opposite wall hung an enlarged photograph, in color, of Fafner standing on a grassy hill, looking virile and gazing into a rosy, profitable future.

  Guthman nodded toward two black leather chairs separated by a small table beneath a window with winter sunlight flowing through. He dropped into a swivel chair behind a heavy oak desk, bare except for in tray, out tray, telephone and pencils. She sank deep into one of the leather chairs and the sunshine spilled over her brown-trousered legs. Guthman seemed to tower over her, and like the bull, seemed virile and powerful.

  He also inspired the same sort of incomprehensible awe; she was half fascinated by him, half repelled. With the semen collection a success, he was riding on the flush of satisfaction. It put him in an expansive mood and should work to her benefit, making him more apt to answer questions. The secretary scurried in with coffee pot, cups, cream and sugar on a tray, deposited it on the desk and scurried out.

  “Why were you angry that Brenner Niemen was at Lucille’s funeral?” she asked.

  A dark, dangerous look came over his face. “Lucille’s dead. My only daughter.”

  “Do you think Brenner had something to do with her death?”

  “Huh. If I thought that, I’d do more than get angry.” Guthman poured coffee, got up to hand her a cup, then reseated himself and picked up the other one. He took a gulp. “He’s a bad one, Brenner. Rotten to the core. Always has been. I told him years ago, I never wanted to lay eyes on him. I meant it then and it still goes. He had no right to be there.”

  Guthman had been furious at Brenner for playing slap-and-tickle games with Lucille, and the anger was still strong all these years later? That kind of long-lasting rancor made her skin crawl.

  “Did you know Lucille was going out late at night?”

  He stared at her. She was already beginning to irritate him—vaguely, like a buzzing fly—and he wouldn’t put up with her long.

  He decided to answer the question and nodded, slowly and deliberately. Again she was reminded of Fafner. “I didn’t like it.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  He picked up a pencil and tapped one end against the desk blotter. “Working. She had a job and she intended to do it.”

  Trying to catch red-handed the culprit dumping drums of toxic waste on Vic’s land?

  “I shouldn’t have let her go.”

  “Monday night? The night she left?”

  “I never should have allowed it.” With the point of the pencil, he gouged small ruts in the blotter. “We had an argument. One of the mares was sick. I went to check on her. She was better. Lucille was leaving when I came back in.” He spoke as though each word had to be forced.

  “I told her she couldn’t go out. With a killer running around, it wasn’t safe. She said I couldn’t give her orders. Huh. Living in my house, I give the orders.” He glowered, took a gulp of coffee and went on in a harsh voice.

  “She shouted all I knew was orders. Blind, couldn’t see what was going on under my nose.” He snapped the pencil in half. “She said that was the way I felt, she wouldn’t live here any more.”

  “What did she mean, ‘blind’?”

  “Nothing,” he stated flatly. “Nothing goes on here I don’t know about.”

  Well, maybe, Susan thought, but you didn’t know much about daughters. “You thought she hadn’t come back because of the quarrel?”

  “God forgive me,” he muttered in a low rumble, “that’s what I thought. I expected her to get in touch with her mother in a day or two.”

  “What else did Lucille say?”

  “Nothing. She was crying. She ran out and got in her car.” He stared through Susan, unseeing. “And I let her go.”

  The phone rang. He snatched it, barked a hello and listened for several seconds. “Couldn’t be,” he said.

  She picked up a catalogue from the table at her elbow; a slick, glossy, expensive catalogue, warm from sitting in the sunlight and with the same photo of Fafner on the cover as the framed picture on the wall.

  “Your handlers didn’t do it right,” Guthman said.

  She flipped through pages of colored photos of bulls with a one-page biography of each and, in the usual glowing terms of advertisements, the text pointed out the remarkable possibilities of the offspring of these animals. Udder improvement. Oh, dear. Two and a half times the usual quantity of milk.

  “Cows not receptive,” Guthman said.

  She read about tall daughters with fancy rumps and good feet, superior depth of body.

  “Not possible,” Guthman said. “Sperm count high.” He listened, grunted and made some notes. “I’ll check into it,” he said and banged down the receiver. “Don’t know what they’re doing, and then wonder why cows not in calf.”

  Closing the catalogue, she tossed it on the table where sunshine glinted brightly on Fafner’s picture. “Mr. Guthman—”

  He brushed a hand as though shooing the buzzing fly. Damn the interruption. He was back to businessman, mind occupied with whatever the phone call had brought. She’d get nothing further from him now.

  As she drove back to the police department, she thought about Lucille’s quarrel with Guthman. What had she meant when she accused her father of being blind? What was going on under his nose?

  She was still puzzling over it that night when she got into bed at a little after eleven. The phone woke her three hours later, jerking her from a deep sleep. She snatched the receiver. “Hello?”

  “If you want to catch the cattle rustler,” a voice whispered, “go ten miles west of town. Take the farm road off to the right. Down by the creek, across Vic’s land.”

  “Who is this? Sophie?”

  There was a click and then the dial tone.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  REPLACING the receiver, she squinted at the glowing red digits on the clock—1:20—and groped for the lamp switch, then squeezed her eyes shut against the painful stabs of light. Vic’s land? She shivered, remembering that glimpse into ol’ Vic’s savage mind, the threat she’d seen there. You’ll be all alone. Look over your shoulder.

  Come on, she told herself. “I’ll get you for this”? Threats like that didn’t mean anything. For the most part. And Vic hadn’t even said it, she’d only imagined it.

  A trap? “Rush right out here and you’ll catch the cattle rustler.” That’s how Daniel had been killed.

  After a tiny click, the clock showed 1:23. Time marching on, stop dit
hering around. She reached for the phone with a small, agreeable sense of malice at waking Parkhurst in the middle of the night. He answered on the first ring—must have a phone by the bed—and sounded fully alert.

  “Susan,” she said crisply, and told him about the call she’d just received.

  “Who was it?”

  “I’m not sure.” Her mind didn’t hum along at its best when startled from a deep sleep.

  “Did it sound like Otto Guthman?”

  Parkhurst’s mind seemed to work quite sharply even when jolted from sound sleep: The person who had lured Daniel to his death had sounded like Guthman. Maybe Parkhurst hadn’t been asleep.

  The voice could have been male. She thought of Guthman’s odd way of speaking, putting equal emphasis on each word and sounding as though it hurt his throat to speak. “I don’t think so,” she said. “It was a whisper. It could have been anyone. If the call’s legit, we’d better not waste any more time.”

  “I’ll meet you at the crossroad,” Parkhurst said, and hung up.

  As she splashed water on her face, she tried to recapture in her mind the voice on the phone: calm, no indication of breathlessness or sharp rush of adrenaline.

  Hurriedly, she brushed her teeth, yanked a comb through her hair, then dressed in black corduroy pants and black sweater. Had it sounded like Vic? She wasn’t sure; whispers were anonymous.

  Pulling a dark gray jacket from a hanger, she shrugged into it and tried to figure why she’d thought the caller had been Sophie. Maybe something in the cadence. She started to leave, then grabbed a muffler and a watch cap of Daniel’s and shoved them in her pockets as she trotted down the stairs.

  * * *

  THE night, cold but at least above freezing, was clear, the black sky aglitter with stars. The huge, pale, fake-looking moon hanging just over the hills on the horizon cast long shadows behind them. She stumbled on the rough, uneven ground as they slogged their way across the pasture. Vic’s land. A chill settled in her spine. He could shoot them, tumble their bodies in some isolated spot and no one would ever know.

  A sense of unreality gripped her, of forever walking across an alien landscape of small hills under an endless sky, waiting to be shot in the back.

  Parkhurst went down a slope and up the next and she stuck right beside him, slipping a little on the way up. The slightly warmer temperature left patches of mud. He put a foot on one strand of barbed wire and held up the others, allowing her to climb through.

  “The nearest point of the creek,” he said in a low voice, “is a quarter-mile that way, just beyond the trees. Sound carries.”

  She clenched her teeth and muttered, “I was aware of that.”

  They crossed another field, and when they reached the cottonwood trees he halted. It was darker under the trees, and moonlight filtered through bare limbs to throw a crisscross of shadows over his face. She heard the splash and trickle of water.

  He raised his head, listening, and she caught a glimpse of white teeth as the intent look of a hunter closed over his face. Since he was more familiar with the terrain, she let him lead; he slipped from tree to tree like a commando. She tried to follow with the same quick silence and worried about tripping or scraping a boot heel against a tree root. The sound of running water grew louder, and far ahead, she saw the flicker of firelight.

  Putting a hand on his arm, she whispered, “Can you circle around, come in from the other side?”

  He nodded and was gone. She waited to give him time to work his way around, tried to control her breathing, to hear over the sounds of the creek. She could hear her own heartbeat. Daniel had been killed after receiving a phone call telling him where he could find a cattle rustler. Tree limbs swayed, constantly changing the patterns of shadows. Her feet got cold.

  She began to move cautiously toward the firelight. Would she find Daniel’s killer at the end of the line? Accomplish her goal within the five days the mayor had grudgingly given her? She stopped behind a tree trunk, then eased forward again. Dead leaves and small branches were underfoot. Don’t step on a twig; the snap would sound like a gunshot. Was Vic waiting for them at the end of this dark trek? He hadn’t shot them when they were crossing the empty fields. Was he waiting at the edge of the creek with his rifle raised?

  Maybe she shouldn’t have called Parkhurst; this was her private vendetta. Her heart banged against her ribs. Maybe the killer was just a few yards ahead, the bastard who shot Daniel. Her senses seemed overly sharp. She was acutely aware of the acrid smell of wood smoke, the snap and crackle of the fire, the shadows moving like live things through the trees.

  I’ll get him, Daniel. She crept closer. Where was Parkhurst? By now, he should have had time to get in position on the other side of the fire. He couldn’t have been shot; she’d have heard the sound. His throat slit with one silent slash? Captured, with the rifle pointed at his head?

  Carefully, slowly, she kept moving, then froze behind a tree. Her breath caught; hair rose on the back of her neck as she stared at a nightmare vision.

  On the creek bank, the fire danced. A large bulk with steam rising from it hung from a tree limb. A man, huge and menacing, slashed out with a long knife that glinted with each stroke. Eerie, evil shadows capered around the darkness like spectators at some satanic ritual.

  On the ground, a slick black pool of blood glistened. The fire shimmered and fluttered, throwing wavering light over the grisly relics of carnage; severed cow head, hooves and scattered entrails. Above it all hung that big cold moon. She leaned against the tree, feeling sick.

  Directly across from her, on the other side of the fire, Parkhurst stepped into view. “Nice night for slaughter,” he said.

  The man spun, knife raised.

  Parkhurst thumbed on a flashlight.

  Floyd Kimmell, mouth open, stood spotlighted beside the hanging carcass. His red hair looked the color of blood; a sheen of sweat covered his face.

  “Drop the knife.”

  Floyd lowered his arm, knife blade pointed up for attack, and took a threatening step.

  “Now!”

  He waggled the knife and began to circle around Parkhurst. Parkhurst moved only enough to keep the other man blinded by the flashlight. Floyd raised an elbow to shield his eyes and kept circling, moving nearer.

  She stepped out from the tree with her gun gripped in both hands and shouted, “Floyd!”

  He turned. Parkhurst closed in, made a chop at Floyd’s arm, and the knife fell.

  “Doggone it,” Floyd said. “How’d you find me?”

  Parkhurst’s teeth flashed in a grin.

  * * *

  SINCE they were outside city limits, the sheriff’s department held jurisdiction and Susan contacted Sheriff Holmes. Within thirty minutes, he arrived with two deputies, loaded Floyd Kimmell in a patrol car and carted him away. The deputies stayed behind to collect the bloody evidence, a job she was happy to let someone else handle. Parkhurst stayed with them; she trailed after the sheriff to the Frederick County jail.

  Under the harsh glare of fluorescent ceiling lights in the interrogation room, she sat next to Sheriff Holmes in a straight-backed chair on one side of a wooden table scratched with initials and scarred with myriad rings from coffee mugs. Technically, it was the sheriff’s arrest and he would do the questioning; out of courtesy she was permitted to sit in.

  Floyd, his jeans and black sweatshirt reeking of wood smoke and slaughter, slumped in a chair on the other side of the table with one arm hooked over the back and shot her an aggrieved look. With his bushy red hair, muttonchop whiskers and reddish-brown eyes, he resembled a bungling fox.

  She stared at him. Are you the one? Did you shoot Daniel?

  “Well, Floyd,” Holmes said with a soft-spoken, unhurried manner, “you seem to have gotten yourself in a heap of trouble.”

  The sheriff, with his close-cut gray hair and lined face, didn’t look at all like Daniel, but that unhurried manner reminded her of him. Floyd glowered, pulled his hands from the tabl
e, let them drop in his lap and cracked his knuckles.

  Holmes scraped his chair back a little, took a pipe from the pocket of his blue uniform jacket and began tamping in tobacco. “Just how many steers have you slaughtered?”

  Floyd shrugged. “Don’t know, I lost count.”

  The sheriff, pipe stem clamped between his teeth, struck a match and held it above the bowl; his sleepy-lidded eyes watched Floyd over the flame. He shook out the match and puffed on the pipe, producing clouds of gray smoke. “What did you do with the beef?”

  Floyd let his gaze roam over the pale green walls as though he might find inspiration in the dirty smudges. “I sold it.”

  Holmes nodded encouragingly.

  “I’d get a phone call, that’s all. And I’d slaughter the beef and meet a guy somewhere and turn it over and he’d give me the money.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “There was no need for names.”

  “Who is he?” Susan asked, impatient with the sheriff’s slow way of handling things.

  Floyd slid a glance at her, then back to Holmes. “Don’t know who he is,” he said peevishly.

  Holmes gave her a bland look that said, Back off. I know what I’m doing.

  Get on with it then, she thought. He puffed on the pipe and eyed Floyd through the smoke, which combined with the stench of wood smoke and the too-warm temperature of the room, made her slightly queasy.

  “Well now, maybe you could tell me how this whole thing got started.”

  Floyd shifted in the chair like a schoolboy and cracked his knuckles. The sheriff’s thin, lined face held the concern of a parent waiting for a delinquent child to own up. Tell me everything, his attitude indicated, and I’ll help you all I can.

  “I was asked, is all. Guy from Kansas City asked if I was interested in making some money.”

  “Who?” Susan asked.

  Floyd cracked his knuckles.

  “Stupid, Floyd,” she said. “You’re being stupid. The whole setup was stupid, and whoever’s paying you must be even stupider than you are.”