by Allen Kent
Brenda retreated toward the door. “Why would anyone want to murder old Nettie?” she murmured. “The woman has nothing and wouldn’t harm a fly.”
I ushered Brenda back onto the porch and pulled the door partially shut behind me. “Nothing but what you see around you. If what I hear is right, she owns about 300 acres of timberland behind here along the creek.”
Brenda lowered the neck of her dress and smoothed it back into place, glancing about. “But isn’t this all part of what’s supposed to be flooded by the water project? Become part of the new reservoir?”
“Yup. Part of the eminent domain land. Nettie’s been raising hell about it. But she hasn’t been able to slow anything down. I can’t see any reason someone would want her out of the way when her complaining hasn’t had any effect.” I pulled open the passenger side of the patrol car and waved Brenda in. “We need to get back up on the ridge road where I can call Springfield.”
“She’s been pretty upset,” the woman murmured as she slid into the seat. “But who would want to kill Nettie Suskey?”
2
A guy as new to the job as I am wants to sound calm and confident when making a pronouncement at a crime scene in front of someone who’s likely to talk about it. At the same time, it made me nervous as hell to think someone had murdered a harmless old woman in my county. Though I’d been on the job less than a year, I’d already had two occasions to use my gloves on a body: a girl not even out of high school who didn’t feel like she needed to heed the “don’t text and drive” warnings, and a guy I’d gone to school with who, to no one’s surprise, blew himself up overcooking a batch of meth. But Nettie was one of those “I don’t think she has an enemy in the world” kind of people who bothered no one. She drove her old open-sided jeep into the Methodist church every Sunday and again on Wednesday nights for the women’s group, and didn’t seem to have enough in her old trailer to attract anyone’s attention. It was a shot of adrenalin to finally have a legitimate murder case, but I wasn’t at all thrilled by what it said about the spot I’d decided was the right place to settle down .
After taking Brenda back up to her car, I’d called the coroner and state police and waited until both arrived. Our local coroner is Chase Backman who runs the funeral home, assisted living center, and ambulance service: what the locals jokingly call “full-service dying.” But Chase is an honest man, and people are happy to trust their declining years to his care. Plus, I haven’t seen others clambering to take business from him. Chase knows when a job requires more than his forensic skills, which are limited mainly to taking a rough stab at time of death. When he and the state trooper arrived, we photographed the body from every angle, and he had Nettie taken right up to the morgue in Springfield.
The patrolman who showed up within minutes of Chase was Dave Johansson, another guy as honest as the day is long, but not an investigator.
“You look around much more inside?” he asked after we’d finished with the body.
“No. Just enough to know someone killed Nettie and ransacked the place. I didn’t want to do any more poking about until I had a little more forensic experience with me.”
He glanced about the living room. “Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be me. But someone was either looking for something to steal or wanted us to think so. You didn’t look in the other rooms?”
“Waiting for you.” I led him down a short hall to the right into a bedroom. There wasn’t much to check in there either, but all of it was scattered about like a twister had been through the room. The double-bed mattress was thrown off its metal frame, the clothes from the single dresser strewn haphazardly across the floor. An upholstered, roll-armed chair was upside down, its cross-braced springs visible and the cushion thrown against one wall. Clothes in a small closet with a bi-fold door still hung on the rod, but pushed to one side. The few boxes from a narrow shelf above were upended beneath them.
“For being out here where no one could hear and it’s unlikely anyone would come by, this search looks kind of frantic,” Johansson said. He did a quick walk-through of the rest of the trailer with me, suggested we secure the place until he could get a specialist on the scene, and called in the request to his regional headquarters. I found Grace back in the office when I called, asked her to bring out a Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza from the Woodshed with a thermos of coffee, and told her I’d be camping out overnight. She had the “on-call.” Then I planted the squad car at the end of the path to Nettie’s steps and waited for dinner.
I’ve told you what you need to know to understand why Rocky and Frankie weren’t chosen as Chief Deputy. And our two night guys work nights because they want to. Larry Newby’s a retired security guy from Jack Henry and Associates and is about as reliable as an old Swiss clock. But he likes to be home during the day. He finishes his shift at 4:00 a.m., sleeps until just after noon, then works in his garden or woodshop until he comes on duty at 8:00. If I tried to change his hours, he’d be gone in a heartbeat.
Bobby Lule roams the county between midnight and when we open the office at 8:00. He’s the other Latino on the force, one of those ex-marines I was telling you about. A solitary guy whose personal version of PTSD inclines him to want to be alone. But when trouble raises its ugly head early in the morning, Bobby’s not shy about taking it on and calling for help when he needs it. The county’s in good hands at night.
But that pretty well left Grace as my choice for Chief Deputy—that, or I hired someone new. Just after I got elected, I stopped in on Jerry at Family Market who probably has a better sense for what’s happening around the county than anyone in town. He’s usually behind the meat counter slicing and wrapping the porkchops that bring people in from as far west as the Oklahoma line. He’ll throw out a bright “Good morning! And what’s new in your world?” and keeps working while people tell him everything that’s been on their minds. He’s sort of like our father-confessor, hairdresser, and best buddy all rolled into one. And he keeps things pretty much to himself, so no one’s ever able to come back at him with an “I didn’t expect you to be spreading that about.” For some reason, Jerry decided to take the new sheriff under his well-informed wing and started by recommending Grace.
“You won’t find a better Deputy Sheriff,” he told me while slicing a couple of pounds of sharp cheddar for a brats-and-burgers open house we were planning to welcome me into office. “The Torres family’s well-respected by everyone. Grace speaks both Spanish and English as first languages, and she’s smart as a whip. Nothing escapes that girl.”
“Almost too pretty,” I suggested.
Jerry looked up from his cheese slicer with a sharp enough glare to remind me what a dumb thing that was to say. He didn’t stop with just the look. “Better keep that comment to yourself. We don’t get quite as PC around here as lots of places. But if Grace got wind that she’d been passed over because you thought her too pretty for the job, you’d never hear the end of it. Until next election. Then you’d be gone.”
“I was just meaning that I worry people might not take her as seriously as they need to,” I fumbled. “Some smartass who thinks he’s being pulled over by Jennifer Lopez and wants to impress her with what a macho sonofabitch he is.”
Jerry chuckled. “It would only happen once. I guarantee you, this isn’t the kind of grace Reverend Latimer’s doling out. You haven’t been back in town long enough to have seen our Grace in action.”
I had my chance two days later. Cille Hubbard, who’d been living by herself on a three-acre spread about a mile east of town, had been moved into assisted living by her kids. The next week, true to a grapevine that sweeps our county in a way that would make Facebook green with envy, someone broke into the empty house and ransacked it, taking everything Cille’s daughters hadn’t moved with her. One of the girls stopped by to mow the lawn and make sure the power had been turned off and called in the robbery. It was my first visit to a scene with Grace Torres.
“Don’t mow the lawn,” Grace told th
e daughter as we completed our walk-through. She answered the woman’s surprised look with, “They left that big flat-screen on the wall in the living room and the riding mower that’s chained to the tree out back. That means they didn’t have bolt cutters and enough room in whatever they were driving to take the TV. I’m guessing they’ll watch the place for a day to see if the break-in’s been discovered. When they think it hasn’t, they’ll be back with a pickup and something to cut that mower loose.”
The daughter looked dubiously at the heavy zero-turn mower. “There was no key here for it. It would be hard to lift into a truck.”
Grace sniffed, glancing down at the key the woman now held. “Look at how basic that thing is. And there are about a dozen stock keys for those mowers. If this is the bunch that’s been hitting places like this around the county, they have what they need to start it or can hotwire the thing. Don’t mow the lawn. I’ll hang out here the next couple of nights.”
Just after 1:00 a.m. that night, the radio beside my bed blared, “Bobby or Larry? One of you close to the Hubbard place? I’ve got company and could use some backup.”
I was there fifteen minutes later, pulling into the Hubbard drive right in front of Larry Newby. We both bailed from our cruisers behind sheltering doors, weapons drawn.
“Got things under control,” Grace called from the house. “Come on in.”
The pair that were sprawled face-down on the living room carpet, wrists cuffed, were classic meth heads: bone-thin as worm-ravaged mongrels, rheumy-eyed with pupils the size of dimes, and teeth that looked like they’d been through a brush fire. I couldn’t tell if their squirming and twitching was drug-induced or because one’s nose had been flattened across his face like a piece of roadkill. The other was trying to keep weight off a dislocated shoulder. A crimson stain continued to spread beneath the smashed face. The man with the shoulder was more concerned about other injuries.
“She smashed my nuts,” he gurgled though a mouthful of snot. “I know one of ‘em’s ruptured. I’m gonna sue the shit out of all of you.”
Grace nodded toward an eight-inch blade a few inches from the man’s hip. “Better get a photo of that. It’ll have his prints all over it. He was dumb enough to pull it when I confronted the sonofabitch.”
Officer Newby was wrestling the perp with the smashed face to his feet. “And what happened to this piece of work?”
“Look underneath him there. He was out back cutting the mower loose. He was stupid enough to pull that thing and charge through from the kitchen when he heard his buddy here go down.” A rubber-gripped, .38 caliber Smith and Wesson lay beneath him on the caramel shag, a few inches from the widening red stain. Grace held up her arm to display the blood-splattered elbow of her uniform shirt. “Ran into this,” she said.
No one complained when Grace was named Deputy Sheriff. To some folks around town, she’s simply known as Amazing Grace. To me, she’s proven a dozen times since that she was the right pretty face for the job.
I’d backed the Explorer out of sight behind a birch clump and was kicked back, listening to a Grisham audiobook on my phone when I heard her coming down the hill with the pizza. She seemed to know where I’d be hiding and turned in beside me, her driver’s window a few feet from mine.
“Medium Canadian bacon and pineapple—and I assumed you’d want a large diet Coke with that. Right?” The pizza box slid through the window, followed by a 44-ounce styrofoam cup and a fistful of napkins.
I chuckled at the size of the drink. “This should help keep me awake. Have you had dinner? I can probably manage about two-thirds of this pizza, so you may as well help me with the other third.”
Grace held up her own 32-ounce drink. “I was hoping you might ask and had them put jalapenos on half of it. You can pick them off if you decide you want two-thirds. Hang on. I’ll pull the car out of the way.” A moment later, she slid into the passenger seat and reached back for a slice of the pie I’d deposited behind me.
Though I’d given permission and chose to myself, Grace refused to wear jeans with her uniform shirt. Part of it, I guessed was that she knew it helped her look “official” if she had on the full uniform. But it was also because she looked so damn good in the official pants. Leaning over the seat stretched the whole outfit even tighter over a frame that already displayed it like a photo shoot. I told myself every day that there was something fundamentally unprofessional about feeling your insides stir every time your chief deputy reached for a binder on a top shelf. But they did, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.
“Marti gave me the basics when I got back from court,” she said, cupping the pizza slice to keep the peppers and pineapple off her lap. “I knew you’d have your hands full, so didn’t call. But what have you been thinking?”
I’d found one of her jalapenos on my wedge and was desperately slurping coke in an effort to keep from looking like I couldn’t handle my peppers. I let the fizz bubble away some of the burn, checked over the rest of my slice for any other green flecks, and set my cup in the holder between the seats.
“The place is a mess. All torn up to look like a robbery. But you know as well as I do that Nettie didn’t have anything. I can’t see anyone killing her just to steal from an old, dirt-poor woman.”
Grace nodded, chewing on a pepper-riddled slice with a relish I knew was mainly for my benefit. “The timing can’t be coincidental. The settlements are starting to be negotiated for the land in the flood zone. Had Nettie been given an offer?”
“They haven’t gone out yet, as far as I know. And Jerry keeps pretty close track of this kind of thing. The assessments were finished two months ago, but we’d have heard if someone had been made an offer.”
“Pretty valuable land.”
“Yeah. Maybe the best tract in the flood zone.”
“Who stands to benefit if Nettie’s out of the way?”
I took a bite of the side of my slice I knew had been farthest from the peppers.
“I got a feeling,” I said, looking past Grace in the waning light at the shadowy shell of the trailer, “that figuring that out is going to be one helluva lot harder than either of us can imagine.”
3
The sound of tires struggling to grip the steep downhill into the valley pulled me from a dream in which I was arguing with an Iraqi tribal leader about why we needed to conduct a house-to-house search of his village. I was losing and welcomed being dragged back into consciousness by the unmarked Chevy Tahoe. I stretched upright, slapped my cheeks a few times to give them a little color, and swung out of the car like I’d been staring intently at Nettie’s screen door all night. The SUV pulled up opposite me, pointed the other way with the driver hidden. The investigator that stepped out couldn’t have looked less like State Trooper Dave Johansson. She wasn’t much taller than the top of the Tahoe, with short brown hair, dark almond eyes, and an oval face that I’d rate on the pretty side of cute. She grinned across at me like she knew I was sizing her up.
“So the chief drew the night watch,” she said, staying where she was and letting me do the walking.
“I was out here. And my deputy was in court all day. She needed a good night’s sleep.”
“She was in early. I called on my way down to see where I should meet you.”
“Yeah. She’s a bit compulsive that way. But she must have given you good directions. This isn’t an easy place to find. Nettie used a post office box and had no address for your GPS.” I rounded the end of the Explorer and had a look at the rest of the state investigator. Trim jeans. A light blue, long-sleeved shirt under a tan jacket with the state patrol emblem on the pocket. I’m six-three with shoes on, and she came about to my shoulder. I extended a hand.
“Colby Tate. Most people call me Tate.”
Her grasp was surprisingly firm and confident. “I gathered that from your deputy. I’m officer Joseph. Mara Joseph. I’ve been asked to help with your investigation. You can call me whatever you like.”
�
�Mara,” I said, swept back a lifetime to a small church not more than ten miles from where we stood. “The name taken by Naomi when she returned to Bethlehem.”
“Well, well! A sheriff who knows his Tanakh.”
I smiled enough to let her know it was a friendly correction and said, “Old Testament to the people down here. You don’t grow up in these hills without being schooled in the scripture. But Tanakh and Mara Joseph? I’d guess you were schooled in Torah and Talmud.”
Mara Joseph cocked her head to one side. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a first conversation when I arrived at a crime scene that was quite like this. But, yes. You’re right. My family’s Jewish.”
My smile tightened into an embarrassed grin. “Sorry, Officer Joseph. You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve always been something of a language nut, and I couldn’t help myself. Mara’s a pretty name. As I recall, it means ‘bitter’ in Hebrew.”
Her head stayed slightly cocked and her brow furrowed over those captivating dark eyes. “I heard you were a Marine interpreter in Iraq. Then did a stint with the State Department in the same kind of role somewhere in the Middle East. Not what I would have expected of a rural sheriff in this part of the state. Did your interpreting include Hebrew?”
“I’m really not at all fluent in Hebrew. Better Arabic and Farsi. But I remembered Mara from my Bible study as a kid.”
She raised an amused brow. “Mara also means ‘comes from the sea.’ Some days I fit one definition. Some days, the other. When I’m on a murder investigation, I lean toward bitter.”
“Well, Tate’s a Norse name that means ‘cheerful.’ So if we’re going to work this together, on your bitter days, maybe I can carry us.”
Her smile relaxed. “Okay, Tate. And while we’re in the ‘learning each other’s names’ stage, what does Colby mean?”