by Bill Hopkins
Chapter 3
Last Sunday Morning, continued
Mrs. Bolzoni clumped around the kitchen, muttering about frogs, rust, and her bowels.
Rosswell tramped outside where he dallied, observing the fog thin as the sun rose higher in the sky.
A big guy with square shoulders and bulging eyes strolled up. "Judge, how about going fishing with us?"
All Roswell knew was his first name. Theodore. A second, smaller man sporting a buzz cut and a diamond in his right earlobe-Philbert-followed Theodore. Each wore a black braid necklace with a small golden star hanging from it. Did the matching necklaces have some special significance for them? Were they gay? And if they were gay, did the necklaces mean they were going steady?
The two men, guests who hailed from St. Louis, had passed Mrs. Bolzoni in the hallway when they came out. They fell to packing fishing gear into the back of a Ford Ranger.
Philbert elaborated on the invitation. "What more could you want than to fish and drink beer with two charming assholes like us?"
"Where are you going?" Rosswell walked over to the pickup and assumed the rural conversation stance-hanging his arms over the bed of the truck, leaning forward at a slight angle. It was a pose familiar to him since childhood. Men who talked outside gravitated to pickup trucks.
"The Mighty Mississippi." Theodore directed his eyes toward the river. "I can smell it from here." A big sniff and a deep intake of breath proved to Rosswell that the guy did indeed smell the river. A this-side-of-rancid odor, reminiscent of meat about to spoil.
"We've got hundred pound test line." Philbert rattled around in the bed of the truck until he found a spool of the bright yellow line, which he handed to Rosswell. It felt slick and glowed. "Best stuff on the market."
"Holy crap. Plan on catching a whale?"
Theodore shook his head. "Catfish."
"What do you use for bait?"
"Take a peek." Theodore opened a Styrofoam cooler. Inside was a mass of dark red guts. "Take a smell."
The odor was the same as the meat processing plant Rosswell had once toured. "Beef liver. Stinks."
Philbert dug around in a tackle box for a few seconds until he drew out a huge treble hook. "That's why they call it stink bait." He motioned Rosswell to take a gander. "And here's what we stick it on. Once they bite on this baby, they can't get off till we drag them to shore." The three-pronged fishhook gleamed in the sunlight.
Rosswell's curiosity grew. "What do you do with a hundred pound catfish?"
Philbert nodded when Theodore said, "We take a picture of it. And then throw it back."
"You don't have a fish fry?"
Philbert pinched his nose closed. "You'd never want to eat a fish that's lived in the Mississippi River. Too nasty."
Rosswell winced, thinking of the woman who'd gone into the water.
Theodore said, "We saw the sheriff out here earlier and tried to get him to go with us. I wonder about that guy."
Philbert punched his thumb against his chest. "Me, too."
"The sheriff? Why?"
Philbert fingered the treble hook. "I think he gets a little rough sometimes."
Theodore said, "Don't start with that shit."
Philbert said, "You said you wondered about him."
Rosswell pushed it. "How's the sheriff a little rough sometimes?"
Theodore coughed. "We spotted him wrestling a woman into the back of his patrol car. Looked like he might've slapped her on the arm."
"Slapped her? On the arm?" Philbert sounded disgusted. "Hell, he punched her in the face is what he did."
Rosswell said, "What was she doing?"
Both men shrugged.
Rosswell persisted. "Was she hitting him? Was she armed?"
"I couldn't tell," Theodore said.
"Could've been resisting arrest," Philbert said. "She looked pregnant to me. That's sure bad if he's tuning up on a woman who's pregnant."
Theodore said, "She didn't look pregnant. Maybe a little chubby but not pregnant."
"There wasn't fat anywhere except her belly. I could tell because she had on some kind of night gown."
Theodore blew a raspberry. "How about that little barista at Starbucks you're always hitting on? She's skinny except for her belly hanging out. And she's not pregnant. Unless she's been pregnant for two years."
"I'm not hitting on her," Philbert said. "She's the only woman who knows how I like my Mochaccino."
Rosswell asked, "When exactly did you see the sheriff doing this?"
Philbert rubbed the unshaved stubble on his chin. "About two months ago."
Theodore said, "It was more like three months ago. It was right after that audit we did for Harrison, the shoe guy." He switched his attention to Rosswell. "We like to come down here as often as we can to relax."
Philbert said, "It's Harriman and he sells sporting equipment."
Theodore snapped his fingers, the pop loud enough to scare birds. "Yeah, that was the guy."
Rosswell said, "You're auditors?"
"CPAs," Theodore said. "We do private audits. Or government audits. We don't care where the money comes from."
Rosswell steered the conversation back to his main concern. "Was the woman blonde?"
"Could be," said Philbert.
"No," Theodore said. "More of a redhead."
Rosswell asked, "Strawberry blonde?"
Theodore said, "Yeah, could've been strawberry blonde."
"Tall?"
Philbert appeared to be measuring Rosswell's height. "A little taller than you maybe. We weren't that close."
Rosswell said, "Do you know exactly where this was?"
Theodore pointed north. "There's a big house up there. It's on the river."
"Some kind of home for folks who aren't right," Philbert added.
Rosswell said, "Do you know what happened to the woman?"
Theodore spoke in a stage whisper, "We don't know. But she does."
He hooked a thumb toward the house. "She's the biggest damn gossip I've ever run into."
"Mrs. Bolzoni?"
"Yeah," said Philbert. "We came back about a month or so after we saw that and Mrs. Bolzoni told us the sheriff had dragged a woman out of a house and carried her off to Number Four."
"Judge, what's Number Four?"
"It's what they called the psychiatric hospital before they changed the name."
Philbert said, "Why are you so interested in somebody the sheriff carted off to a loony bin?"
Rosswell explained about Tina's disappearance. He finished with, "Sounds like it might've been Tina."
A math problem arose. Rosswell encountered several pregnant women when he'd served as a medic in the military. Some showed early and some didn't. Tina could've been anywhere from two to four or five months pregnant when she disappeared. In the Middle East, Rosswell had helped care for a woman who vowed that she was five months pregnant, yet all Rosswell noted was a thickening of her waist. The woman was well nourished, slender, muscular, and strong. Tina's pregnancy was her first child, she worked out, and had great muscle tone. She could've been well along when she disappeared and perhaps hadn't started showing. How far along was she when she told Rosswell? He didn't know.
Theodore said, "You think Sheriff Gustave Fribeau kidnapped your girlfriend?"
"No way. But whoever kidnapped her could've reported her as being out of control or disturbing the peace or something and called Gustave."
"I don't think we have sheriffs kidnapping women in Missouri," Philbert said. "Judge, hope you find her."
"What's the new name for Number Four?" Theodore asked.
Roswell said, "State Sanitarium Number Four is now called Eastern Ozarks Mental Health Center."
Philbert tapped Theodore on the shoulder. "That's the place we're auditing."
Rosswell canned the tour of gift shops and instead spent the day fishing with Theodore and Philbert until it was suppertime. The three of them cleaned up and headed for the dining room.
Mrs. Bolzoni pulled Rosswell aside. "You must reserve the supper."
A lapse of memory plus a good time fishing had pushed the requirement that he make reservations for the evening meal from his mind, thus threatening his presence at what he knew would be a fantastic repast. "Give me this one chance and I'll never break the rules again." Rosswell had fallen for that ploy a time or two. Now he hoped Mrs. Bolzoni would show him mercy. "I promise."
"I must make the little change," Mrs. Bolzoni groused, then stood aside to allow Rosswell to sit with the rest of the guests.
Caesar salad loaded down with Parmesan, cheese stuffed shells, crusty rye bread with plenty of garlic dipping oil, and, for dessert, tiramisu trifle, whipped up with strong coffee, chocolate, mascarpone cheese, sponge cake fingers, almonds, and, usually, amaretto liqueur.
When Theodore and Philbert bit into the dessert, each gave Mrs. Bolzoni a head tilt.
"Stop with the question you want to ask. I ran out of the amaretto," said Mrs. Bolzoni.
Rosswell took the hint and dug into the dessert, now assured by Mrs. Bolzoni that it didn't contain any alcohol. After the third bite, he stopped to question himself if she had truly run out of amaretto or if someone had told her that he was an alcoholic. The fact wasn't secret, so he wouldn't have been surprised that she knew.
After completing his meal, he returned to his room to enter a lengthy report of the day's happenings into his journal. Tina's eyes were green, the same as the cover of the journal. Besides information on her disappearance, it contained photos printed from the Internet of missing young women who resembled Tina. Rosswell was no statistician, but he'd found that a number of such women were concentrated in a radius about three hundred miles around Sainte Gen. At the minimum, that would include parts of Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Such a concentration was, at best, odd. At worst, there was an effort on the part of somebody to gather the women into the area.
Maybe the women were outliers, oddities whose presence in the number of women missing in the general population indicated mere inconsistencies and nothing else.
Around ten o'clock, he set the writing aside, scrolled down the contacts on his cell phone, and clicked on one. After three rings, his call was answered.
"Rosswell? Is that you?"
"It is. Listen, tomorrow I'm scanning and emailing you my entire file on Tina. Then we need to talk."