That Old Scoundrel Death

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes had hardly completed the thought before the driver of the Crown Vic made a hard left turn onto the road that led right through the middle of Thurston. Rhodes had no choice but to follow. They zoomed past a cemetery and then into the town. The road was deserted, as it often was in Thurston, and Rhodes was grateful for that.

  It took them only seconds to get through the town and into the country again, and they hadn’t gone more than a quarter of a mile before the driver of the Crown Vic made another fast left turn, this time onto a graveled county road just to spice things up. While there would be even less traffic, and fewer people along the way, or so Rhodes hoped, the road was a lot more dangerous for anyone driving at high speed, which would include Rhodes and the person he was pursuing.

  Unlike the highway, the county road wasn’t straight. To say that it was curvy was an understatement. It seemed to have a curve every hundred yards, and the driver of the Crown Vic wasn’t afraid to slide around them so fast that she was only a hair from losing control of the car. Too, the road had only one lane, making the possibility of meeting another driver a bit scary at any speed above twenty-five or so, which is what people usually drove on it.

  In spite of that, Rhodes followed right along after the Crown Vic, wishing he’d lingered a bit longer over his burger at Manny and Gale’s grocery and missed out on the excitement of the chase.

  Except that it wasn’t exciting to him. Maybe it would’ve been exciting if he’d been a lot younger, but now it was just nerve-racking. His hands were getting a little sweaty on the steering wheel, and that was something that didn’t happen often.

  After the fifth or sixth curve, the Crown Vic came to a wooden bridge that crossed Sand Creek. Just at that moment, an old pickup came around the curve ahead of the bridge and kept on coming. The driver had probably driven the road hundreds of times and had never encountered a speeding car at the bridge.

  The driver of the Crown Vic wasn’t going to turn aside. Rhodes knew that, and the driver of the pickup wasn’t going to have time to react when he saw what was going on. Rhodes slowed for the inevitable crash.

  He’d misjudged the pickup driver, however. As the robber rumbled across the wooden bridge, the pickup driver came to his senses and whipped his steering wheel to the right just in time to avoid the onrushing car. Unfortunately, there being nowhere else to go, he was steering right down the bank and into the nearly dry creek bed. As Rhodes sped up and crossed the bridge, he saw the pickup driver clutching the wheel, his eyes bugged out, and his mouth open in what must have been a scream. Rhodes hoped he’d be all right, but he was too invested in the chase now to stop and find out.

  He wondered if the robber knew where she was going or if she was trying to get away from him, or if she was just enjoying herself.

  If it was the latter, her enjoyment ended almost immediately. She came to a sharp curve, slid into it too fast, and overcorrected as the car’s tires failed to gain traction. The Crown Vic flipped over three times. It flew over the drainage ditch, smashed through a barbed-wire fence, and stopped upside down in a field of dead grass and weeds.

  Rhodes pulled as far to one side of the road as he could, with his right wheels over the edge and into the ditch. He unbuckled his seat belt, took a deep breath, let it out, and got out of the Charger. He didn’t see anybody moving in the Crown Vic, but he got his pistol from its ankle holster and walked up to the car.

  When he got there, he didn’t smell gasoline, which was good. The car wasn’t in danger of catching on fire. The roof of the car hadn’t caved in, which was also good. Probably reinforced, as in the Interceptor. Grasshoppers jumped and banged against the sides of the car.

  Rhodes bent down and looked into the driver’s window. A young woman hung upside down, suspended by her seat belt. She didn’t seem injured. She grinned at Rhodes.

  “That was fun,” she said with a wicked grin. “Wanna do it again?”

  Chapter 16

  It was an old joke, and Rhodes had heard it before. But even if it was a joke, he didn’t want to do it again. He wanted to get the robber out of the car, and after a bit of a struggle, he got the door open. She said she couldn’t unbuckle the seat belt, so Rhodes stuck his pistol in his waistband, got out his pocketknife, and cut her free. She fell to the roof but was agile enough to twist around and crawl out of the car. Rhodes backed away and let her stand up. Then he cuffed her.

  “You didn’t need to do that,” she said.

  “Yes, I did. Now I’m going to pat you down.”

  “That might be fun.”

  “Not if I do it right,” Rhodes said.

  “You have to do it right?”

  “Always,” Rhodes said, and he did.

  He didn’t find a weapon, so he relaxed a bit and asked for her name and identification.

  “My name’s Madison Russell,” she said. “My ID is in my purse in the car.”

  Rhodes looked into the car and saw a leather purse that looked like it had come from Walmart. It lay beneath the steering wheel.

  Rhodes figured he had plenty of probable cause to search the car and the purse, but he asked for Madison’s permission, anyway.

  “Sure, go ahead,” she said as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

  Rhodes told Madison to stay where she was while he retrieved the purse. First he checked for a weapon, but he didn’t find one. He did find a handful of crumpled bills, however, probably the loot from her robbery. He moved them aside and found her wallet. Her driver’s license was in it, and he looked at it. She hadn’t bothered to use an alias when she told him her name, assuming the license wasn’t a forgery.

  Rhodes returned her license to the purse, closed it, and set it on the ground. Then he placed her under arrest for speeding, reckless driving, and fleeing a police officer.

  “I thought we were just having a good time,” Madison said.

  “Maybe you were,” Rhodes said.

  She grinned at him. “We could probably both have fun if you wanted to and if you’d take these handcuffs off me.”

  Rhodes looked at her. She was about twenty-five, with short brown hair and wide brown eyes, a wide mouth and a pug nose that she wrinkled when she grinned.

  “I don’t think so,” Rhodes said. “I have a shirt at home that’s older than you are.”

  Madison continued to grin. “Don’t underestimate your abilities, Sheriff.”

  “I’m not, but I don’t fraternize with prisoners.”

  “That’s a fancy word for it.”

  “I’m a regular thesaurus,” Rhodes said. “Did you have a weapon in the car.”

  Madison laughed. “No. I showed that clerk the handle of a hairbrush.”

  Ferris wouldn’t think that was as funny as she did. Rhodes remembered seeing a hairbrush in the purse, so maybe she was telling the truth. He said, “So you won’t have to worry about a weapons charge. We’d better get going. I need to see about the man you ran off the road.”

  “He got in the way,” Madison said.

  “Right. You go first. I’ll follow you.”

  Madison started to walk toward the Charger. When she got to the flattened fence, she said, “Don’t you want to know why I robbed that place?”

  “Nope,” Rhodes said. “You did it, and that’s what matters.”

  “What if I had starving children, like that guy who stole a loaf of bread in that movie? I can’t remember the name of it. It was in some foreign language. The name, not the movie. It was in English, and Hugh Jackman played the guy.”

  Rhodes couldn’t picture Madison as the mother of starving children, and while he hadn’t seen the movie, he knew what she was talking about. It was something he remembered from a long ago English class. He didn’t remember the man’s name, however, and he didn’t care that Hugh Jackman played him in a movie.

  “Still wouldn’t matter,” Rhodes said.

  “You’re just like that guy who was chasing Hugh Jackman,” Madison said. “He had a funny name, too. He never let up
. It was just a loaf of bread, but he kept after Hugh Jackman for years.”

  “You didn’t take a loaf of bread,” Rhodes said.

  “No, but I didn’t get much money, either.”

  “You got some, though, so let’s get in the car.”

  Madison gave in and walked down into the ditch and out onto the road, with Rhodes behind her. He opened the back door of the Charger and got her into the seat. It was a bit awkward with the car being parked at an angle and her being in handcuffs, but he managed it. When it was done, he got into the driver’s seat, started the car, and made a U-turn. Then he got Hack on the radio and told him to send a wrecker for the car. “It’s upside down.”

  “Those wrecker guys can deal with that. They’re trained professionals. You catch Bonnie Parker?”

  “I did. I’m bringing her in.”

  “No Clyde with her?”

  “No, she was a lone wolf,” Rhodes said and signed off.

  “You really going to see about that guy at the bridge?” Madison asked from behind the mesh screen that separated them.

  “I am. It’s all part of the job. You should hope that he’s doing all right.”

  Madison wasn’t concerned about the man she’d almost crashed into. “That bank’s not very steep. He’ll be fine.”

  Rhodes wasn’t so sure, but when they got to the bridge, he saw the man standing at the top of the bank and talking on a cell phone. Rhodes parked the Charger and got out. The man put his cell phone in a pocket, and Rhodes asked, “You all right?”

  “As all right as I can be, considering what just happened to me. I hope you caught up to that crazy driver.”

  “I did,” Rhodes said. “She wrecked her car, and she’s under arrest in the backseat of mine.”

  “Good,” the man said. He wore a sweat-stained baseball cap with a checkerboard logo, a khaki shirt, and blue jeans. “I hope she’s insured.”

  Rhodes laughed. “I wouldn’t count on it. Have you called a wrecker?”

  “Just got off the phone with one. I’m Ellis Holmes, by the way. I know who you are.” He looked down the bank at his pickup that was nosed into the creek bottom. “I sure wish I’d been able to get off the road into a ditch instead of into a creek. Guess it can’t be helped now, though.”

  Rhodes looked at the pickup. “Doesn’t look like there’s much damage.”

  “We’ll see,” Ellis said. “I have insurance, though, so I’m not too worried about that even if that woman isn’t insured. I’m just worried about being without my truck. I’ll have to rent something.”

  “Good luck,” Rhodes said. “If you’re okay, I’ll go on to town with my prisoner.”

  “I’m fine,” Ellis said. “You go on ahead. The sooner you get that crazy driver behind bars, the better I’ll like it.”

  “So will I,” Rhodes told him.

  * * *

  Almost as soon as they got Madison booked and printed, Seepy Benton came in. He’d spent the morning talking to Roger Prentiss and looking into Lawrence Gates’s computer.

  “Roger didn’t really know much more to tell me that would be helpful,” Seepy said. “He couldn’t figure out why Lawrence was so interested in the schoolhouse controversy, but that’s what’s taken up all his time recently.”

  “We know that,” Rhodes said. “He lied to me about why he was doing it. He told me that his grandmother went to school there.”

  “He was hiding something, then,” Seepy said.

  “He likely was,” Rhodes said, “but what was he hiding? Did anything you saw on the computer give you any clues?”

  Seepy looked a little embarrassed. “I checked it out to see if he had any social media accounts under other names. I didn’t find any. He didn’t have any under his own name, either, naturally.”

  Rhodes didn’t think that was much of an answer. “Did that tell you anything?”

  “No,” Seepy said.

  “So what else did you look for?”

  “I looked through all his files. He had a lot on the Thurston school. He’d copied a lot of newspaper articles from various newspaper archives. I looked at all the articles, and they didn’t give me any information that we don’t have. We already knew that some famous people went to school there, and that was no surprise. There was a lot of military material, too. If you wanted to know about wars, especially twentieth-century wars, Lawrence would’ve been the one to ask. He had things on all of them, from World War One to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had more on those last two and Vietnam than anything.”

  “Still doesn’t tell us much,” Rhodes said. “Was there anything else?”

  Seepy looked at the floor then back up at Rhodes. “I didn’t really look at all the files.”

  “Why not?”

  “Some of them are encrypted.”

  “Encrypted?”

  “Converted into code so only the person who knows the key can read them.”

  “You could break the code,” Rhodes said.

  “That’s right,” Seepy said. “Eventually I can. Any code can be broken. It just takes time, and there’s some software that can help. I’ll get into those files. Don’t worry.”

  “I’ll try not to,” Rhodes said. “If Lawrence went to that much trouble, he had something to hide.”

  “It wasn’t much trouble for him to encrypt the files,” Seepy said. “It’s easy enough to do. You’re right about him having something to hide, though. He wouldn’t have encrypted them otherwise.”

  “You’ll break the code, though.”

  “Eventually,” Seepy said. “You can count on it.”

  “You know I will,” Rhodes said.

  * * *

  After Seepy left, Rhodes called Roger and told him that he wouldn’t be by but would talk to him later. Then he went to his office in the courthouse. It was a place where usually nobody would bother him, and he needed some time to think. Jennifer Loam had tracked him down there a time or two, but even if she did it again, which Rhodes didn’t expect, he’d be away from Hack and Lawton and wouldn’t have to worry about them telling him some endless story about some armadillo assaulting a man.

  There were no trials going on that day, so the courthouse was quiet, its hallways almost empty. Although Rhodes could hear people talking in the county offices he passed, he got to his office without being seen. There’d been a time when he’d have stopped by the Dr Pepper machine in the basement, but the new one no longer dispensed the drink in glass bottles, and that took all the pleasure out of buying one. Rhodes could get a can or a plastic bottle just about anywhere, but he wouldn’t do that, either, unless he could get one made with real sugar. The good news was that he also wouldn’t be buying the orange snack crackers that he liked because they just weren’t as good without a Dr Pepper. So he’d avoid a few more calories.

  He went straight to his office, slipped inside, and shut the door. When the door was closed, he looked around. The place was as tidy as ever, which it should’ve been since he hardly ever used it and since the courthouse cleaning crew took good care of it. The chair and desk were much nicer than those in the jail, although Rhodes didn’t care about things like that. He was interested in comfort, and the chair was comfortable enough. He sat in it and took a few minutes to organize his thoughts about the interviews he’d had that morning.

  It was likely that the people he’d talked to had believed they were giving nothing away, but as was often the case, they’d told Rhodes more than they thought they had, especially the Falkners. It was Leslie who’d given away the most. He’d told Rhodes that he and Faye knew nothing about the firecrackers at the Hunley house, but Rhodes hadn’t mentioned firecrackers at all. Con Hunley might’ve called Leslie to complain, but he hadn’t mentioned doing it. So Rhodes figured there was just one way Leslie could’ve known about them, and that was that he and Faye were guilty of throwing them.

  Of course that meant that they’d both been out of the house, although they said they hadn’t, and while the Hunleys had sai
d the firecracker incident occurred about three in the morning, Leslie and Faye could’ve been out much earlier. One or both of them could even have gone to the schoolhouse to meet Lawrence.

  Rhodes would talk to them again, if only to make sure they didn’t pull any more pranks on the Hunleys, but also to find out about any other lies they’d told.

  The Reeses were only a slightly different story. Charlie had tried to get Arlene to lie for him, but she’d told about his leaving the house for a horseback ride, and then Charlie had pointed out that if he hadn’t been in the house, maybe she hadn’t been, either. So Rhodes had two more suspects in Lawrence’s death.

  Manny hadn’t seen Charlie riding his horse through town, but there was no reason Charlie had to have passed by the store, and he might not even have ridden the horse if he’d gone to the school. His big red truck would have been all too easy to spot, however, so if he’d taken a vehicle, that probably hadn’t been the one. He might even have walked to the school.

  And then there was Kenny, who’d lied about him and Noble being in Thurston. Kenny was the only one Rhodes knew who had any kind of motive to kill Lawrence, so that put him right atop the suspect list.

  Rhodes had plenty of suspects now, and a lot to sort through, but before he could get any further, someone knocked on the door.

  Rhodes knew who it had to be. Jennifer Loam had tracked him down yet again. He considered not opening the door, but he knew how persistent she was. If he didn’t let her in, she’d stand out in the hallway all day and keep right on knocking. He got up and did what he had to do.

  “You’re hiding out again,” Jennifer said when he opened the door.

  “Hack ratted me out, didn’t he,” Rhodes said.

  “I never reveal my sources or my informants,” Jennifer said. “Are you going to invite me in?”

  “Sure,” Rhodes said. What else could he do? “Come on in and have a seat.”

  Jennifer swept past him and sat in a leather-covered chair near his desk. Rhodes went back to his own chair and resumed his seat.