Three Degrees of Death

by Allen Kent

  I turned through the open gate and up the lane that wound around the side of an oak-covered hill to Fits’ wire teepee. Whoever damaged the place knew exactly where they were going. You generally don’t drive through someone’s gate without a good reason or an invitation, and Fits’ cage-house isn’t visible from the road. In fact, you have to be halfway around the hill before you can even see it. Anyone just wandering about would turn back from nervousness long before it came into view. When it finally did, I could see right away that this was no accidental bit of destruction.

  The whole front of the mesh tent was slashed open like someone had taken an ax or machete to it. Four of the sapling struts that had held the wire were splintered into kindling. The whole cage had toppled forward and would have collapsed completely if it hadn’t hung up on a roof corner of Fits’ shed. Still, the weight had lifted the back of the little building a foot off the ground, leaving it tangled and ready to collapse on anyone who got behind it to try to release the snag.

  A half-dozen squirrels still scampered through the wreckage, not at all tempted by the freedom offered by the gaping holes and appearing more confused than liberated. I pulled up beside what looked like the tunnel into an igloo, where the squirrel charmer had once had an arched entryway. I climbed from the Explorer, leaned across its roof, and gave the little man a shout.

  “Fits? You here?” I was pretty certain from the look of things that he wasn’t. No answer. I ducked through one of the slashed holes in the wire and gave the shed a critical look. It hadn’t tipped far enough that it would tumble forward, so I tested the door to see if I could get a better look inside. It caught the ground at about a ninety-degree angle. A small wooden table had slid down the sloping floor and barred the entrance. Like all of Fits’ creations, this was a sturdy thing. It took a shoulder and boots braced against the packed ground to push it to one side so I could clamber up into the shed.

  I had never been inside Fits’ place but had a pretty clear mental image of what I’d find. So much for stereotypes. Where I had pictured piles of clutter and loose stacks of acorns and sunflower seeds, I found only a low cot, three straight-backed oak chairs that were also pressed haphazardly against the front wall, and a cupboard that had already been leaning against it. A plain counter below the only window in the shack held a mounted, two-burner propane stove and a sink that I guessed drew water from a well somewhere on the property. No oven. No microwave.

  At the same moment I noticed the burners, I caught a faint whiff of the sulphury, rotten-egg warning that signaled a gas leak. The dials on the front of the stovetop were in the up and off position. As the collapsing mesh tent had fallen forward and lifted the building from its pilings, some pipe must have broken loose behind or underneath.

  Backing carefully toward the door, I fingered my cell to off, doubting that some tiny electronic signal could trigger an explosion, but choosing not to be a test case. No propane tank had been in sight as I drove up. With Fits’ obvious inclination for neatness and order, he had probably tucked it away behind the shed, which meant it would be outside the wire cage.

  Back through the tear in the mesh, I skirted one side of the round base until I could see a 500-gallon tank leveled between two hickories on concrete blocks. I found the shut-off valve, stopped the flow of gas, and turned back toward the patrol car to get a call into Darrin at the gas company. It was then I saw the scrawl across the back of the tilting cabin. 3, 18, 20. The bold black numbers were spray painted—fresh and sloppy enough I knew they weren’t the work of Fits Loony. What the hell was this all about? And where was the Squirrel Man?

  5

  We met in the fishbowl for lunch, me with boots propped on one corner of the old oak desk that had survived the transition from bank to sheriff’s office, our two daytime deputies using the outer corners as a lunch counter. We had ordered Reuben sandwiches and curly fries from LeeAnn’s on the square, washed down by our favorite on-duty beverages from the fridge Marti keeps stocked in the outer office.

  Frankie Ritter patrols the north part of the county and is the deputy I worry about as a disaster waiting to happen. He’s a small, weasel-eyed man with a pencil-thin mustache who was on the force before I was elected and seems itching for an excuse to shoot somebody. Grace calls him Rambo and refuses to respond to a call with him if she thinks there is any chance things will become tense.

  “He’s likely to pull out that Glock 10 he carries and start spraying the room before we can get things calmed down,” she once complained. So far, Frankie has been more interested in having the cannon strapped at his side than actually using the thing. He’s a man in constant motion, fidgeting against the doorframe during most of our morning meetings or bouncing a foot against the floor and nervously craning his neck to pop stiff vertebrae if he has to sit. He had taken a small bite of his sandwich and now leaned forward with elbows on the corner of the desk, watching me like a birddog on point.

  Rocky D’Amico balanced the energy on that side of the desk by lounging back in his chair with his Reuben clenched in both hands, his fleshy face the picture of unconcerned contentment. He’s about six years from retirement. My goal is to get him there without the extra sixty pounds the man carries crushing his heart while he’s out on patrol.

  Rocky manages the evidence room and serves as jail commander when we have an occasional guest in one of the bank’s back rooms we use as cells. Three or four times a day as the spirit moves him, he makes a quick loop through the farms and small housing projects that fall just outside the city limits. We try to keep him within a five-minute run of the health clinic, should he need sudden resuscitation. Grace patrols the rest of the county during the day. I’m left with trying to coordinate the four of us and our two night-officers, cover calls the others can’t get to, and deal with the politics of small-town Middle America.

  This lunch meeting fell under ‘coordination’ with blinds up so Marti didn’t feel completely excluded as she handled the phones. While I watched through the glass wall, Grace hurried into the outer office, looked quickly our way to see if everyone else had gathered, and turned toward the fishbowl without a word to Marti. Not a sign of good news.

  “Okay. Let’s hear what you have,” I said when she reached her traditional corner chair but chose to remain standing. “What were you able to learn about the kids?”

  The chief deputy looked at the Styrofoam box holding her sandwich and the bottle of peach-flavored green tea that sat on the end table beside her chair but left them where they sat.

  Her line of a mouth was so tight I could see that she was fighting a trembling lip.

  “My mother’s frantic,” she said. “And when I talked to Erin on the phone just before I came in—it’s about six-thirty in the evening over there now—I could hardly understand the woman. You were right, Tate. I should have called Donna. Erin’s a basket case. But Donna took the other students and bus on to their next stop—whatever that island is. Erin stayed in Inverness until they figure out what’s happened.”

  She paused and darted a glance in Marti’s direction through the glass wall, then back to me. “I talked to the Haddads. As you can imagine, Yusef is spitting nails. They think you should go over there.”

  I’d pulled my feet off the desk. Until I saw her come into the building, I’d expected her brother and the Haddad girl to have shown up by now, confessing that they’d gone farther into the city than they’d planned or lost track of time. But six hours? Way too long, even if they’d gotten lost. Some good soul would have given them a ride back to the hotel or steered them to a police station.

  Miriam’s a shy kid and might have been too timid to ask a stranger for help. But Grace’s brother Danny has never met a stranger. Once he realized they were lost and were going to be late, he’d have called, then gone into the nearest shop and asked for directions.

  “I saw Yusef at the high school,” I told the team. “He said the same thing. But as critical as this is right now, I can’t just take off and go to Sc
otland. Couldn’t afford it myself, and the department shouldn’t be paying for it.”

  “You went to Mexico on the Suskey case,” Grace retorted. Ritter and D’Amico followed the conversation like two spectators at Wimbledon. Marti had stopped typing and watched intently from her desk.

  “Completely different situation,” I said defensively. “That was our case. This one belongs to the Scottish authorities.”

  Grace glared from her standing position beside the still untouched lunch. “But these are our kids. My brother, for one. It can’t cost much more to go to Scotland than to go to Mexico. And Yusef said he and his brothers will pay for the trip if you go.” Frankie and Rocky’s heads swung back in my direction.

  “Grace, I know how serious this is and don’t want to play it down. But it’s not our jurisdiction. I’d just be a civilian over there getting in the way. They don’t need us, and we’ve got our hands full here. I stopped at Fits’ place, and he’s gone. Someone really tore it up. Ripped big holes in the wire and pulled the shed off its blocks. If I hadn’t turned off the gas, the place could easily have blown up. We need to start an all-out search for him and will need all-hands-on-deck.”

  “We’re going to sit here and do nothing?”

  “We’re not going to do nothing. I thought the kids would be back by now. Since they aren’t, as soon as we’re through here, I’m going to call Special Agent Rosario. He’ll want to know Miriam is missing so he can check things out from that end.” Warren Rosario was the agent from the FBI’s counterterrorism division who had helped with the Haddad resettlement and when Yusef’s old enemies had come after the families in Crayton.

  “What should I tell Mother—and Yusef?”

  Eyes shifted back to me.

  “That we’re doing all we can from here. In fact, I’ll go see the Haddads after I call Rosario. But now, any thoughts about what might have happened to Fits?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence, then, “Did you check the old cabin next to the cage house?” The question came from Frankie who accompanied it with a jerk of his neck that sent a nerve-jangling pop across the room. He jolted to his feet and propped himself nervously against the door frame.

  The looks from Grace and Rocky should have answered for me, but I try to be patient with Frankie. Though he has a habit of asking obvious questions, they don’t always have obvious answers.

  “Yes. I looked all through the other cabin. Half of it is full of bags of seeds and acorns. The other half he uses as a workshop for his bows. Whoever tore up the cage left all of that alone.”

  Rocky hunched forward over his ample stomach, sandwich still clutched to his chest, looking like one of Fits’ squirrels with a nut. “Does anything indicate what this was all about? What might have happened to him?”

  “Aside from the damage, which was pretty major, the only thing that seemed out of order were some numbers scrawled across the back of his shed. Looked like a spray can. Big black numbers.” I pulled the pad from my shirt pocket. “3, 18, 20. Mean anything to anyone?”

  Grace continued to glare, making it clear we hadn’t settled the lost kids’ situation to her satisfaction. Frankie’s head shake increased enough to signal a ‘no.’ D’Amico took a gulp of Diet Coke, chewed thoughtfully, then asked, “This is July, right? That’s month seven. Is this some message about something that happened in March? Anybody know what Fits was up to in March?”

  Frankie’s head continued its even shake. “No one ever really knows what Fits is up to. You don’t see him at all until he comes out to take a bow to someone or make a trip to Jerry’s to pick up some stuff with one of them squirrels in his pocket.”

  “Maybe we should see if anyone remembers him being out and about on March 18 through 20,” D’Amico suggested. “What days were those? And—“

  “Tate, you need to go talk to Yusef soon,” Grace interrupted. “They need to know if we’re going to help with this Scotland mess in some way other than just call the FBI, then sit here and worry about it. He’s mad as hell. Mother’s beside herself. Tate, two of our kids are missing—and one’s my brother.”

  I slumped back in the chair. “Alright. I’ll see if Yusef will actually pay to send someone,” I agreed, looking in Marti’s direction as she hung up a call and hurried toward the fishbowl with such purpose I had to wonder if Granny Durbin’s bad news was going to come in fours. She swung the door open with enough force that Frankie had to scramble to the side to stay on his feet.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Tate, but that was Officer Joseph on the phone. Apparently, Verl found a Springfield attorney who would take his case. She and the Patrol were notified just now that they have been named in a wrongful death suit.” Marti cast Grace a quick, apologetic glance. “And so have you and the county, Sheriff. You’ll probably be notified this afternoon or tomorrow. But for now, you need to be available.”

  The steel in Grace’s lower lip began to melt into a quiver. I stood from the desk with D’Amico rising uncertainly with me. “You two get out and start contacting everyone you can think of who might have seen Fits,” I told the two men. “Rocky, you start with Jerry at the store. Frankie, see who’s bought bows in the last few months. Grace, stay here for a few minutes. Let’s see what we can figure out about Miriam and your brother.”

  6

  Some of you are familiar with Grace Torres. But if you are new to the county and our little squad of officers, it might be helpful to know why these three particular bits of bad news—Fits’ disappearance, the lawsuit against me and Mara Joseph, and two kids missing in Scotland—were making things especially tense around the office.

  Grace’s father is an old school Latino whose idea of an appropriate life for his oldest daughter was high school, marriage, and a houseful of children. Grace agreed with him on the high school bit and made the most of it. Serious student, active with a student newspaper that was in constant trouble with the school administration because it thought it was supposed to stir up controversy, and the lead striker on a volleyball team that won its region two years in a row. I remember one memorable sports headline in the Daily that touted that Crayton had been “Saved by Grace.” She’s a tall, slender woman with jet-black hair that she usually wears in a single braid or ponytail thrust through the back of her departmental ballcap.

  To say Grace is pretty is like calling Selma Hayek “cute.” The woman is downright beautiful. She was a year behind me in school, and during my junior and senior years, half the crowd at volleyball games was made up of guys like me who had just come to drool over that gorgeous face and cheer every time that long body stretched up to make a kill.

  Grace couldn’t have cared less. She didn’t date, worked in the family bakery when she wasn’t at practice or involved with the paper, and defied her father by accepting a scholarship into the law enforcement program at Missouri Southern. Why law enforcement? I asked her that when I first joined the department. She said, “I love Crayton and want to live here. I didn’t want to be a teacher or a nurse, so what else is a woman supposed to do to make a decent living in a town like this?”

  When I suggested becoming a lawyer or an accountant, she just sniffed. “And sit in an office all day? Please. You went to college. Then joined the Marines and, after that, were an interpreter for the government in those Middle East places. And you think I should sit all day at some desk job on the square?”

  She did end up with a desk on the square, but with a job she threw herself into with so much energy and fearlessness that she was known around Crayton as Amazing Grace. She remained unattached until after I returned to town, then started seeing a good-for-nothing hothead named Sal Becerra. One of the not-so-minor complications in our relationship was that I ended up shooting Sal when he tried to break into Marti’s house where Grace was hiding after Sal gave her a good beating.

  A second complication, also of the more significant variety, was that I still found myself sitting in the fishbowl gazing out at that face and selfishly wishing she didn’t work f
or me. You see, I firmly believe you should never get involved with a subordinate, even when she looks like Grace.

  Complication three—maybe complications come in threes as well as bad news—is that I’ve had an off-and-on relationship with State Patrol Officer Mara Joseph, one that Grace and Marti openly hold in disfavor. So there you have it. Amazing Grace desperately feeling like she needs to do something to find her brother, my becoming caught up in a wrongful death lawsuit that involves Mara Joseph, and a guy missing who everyone in town likes, but no one knows very well. The ‘fishbowl’ was feeling more and more like the real thing—with me swimming in circles and everyone staring through the sides wondering, “When the hell is he going to get things straightened out?”

  “Obviously, I can’t go to Scotland,” I told Grace when we were alone in the office. “Maybe the Haddads will pay for it, but I’m sure I can’t leave the country until this thing involving LJ’s death is settled. Even if the county and I hadn’t been named as co-defendants, I’m Joseph’s only eyewitness and pretty well need to be here.”

  “We wouldn’t want to let Mara Joseph down, would we?” Grace said testily.

  “Grace, that’s not fair. I was there. Right? What I say about the shooting could make all the difference for the county, the patrol, and Joseph.”

  “So we just do nothing about Danny and Miriam?”

  We had both remained standing in front of my desk. It was one of those moments when I was stumbling all over myself inside trying to figure out how to come across as understanding and compassionate, but firm—with maybe a hint of “I think you’re pretty amazing, Grace.” Mainly I had to make it clear that this was one of those times I had to stay around town.

  “Why don’t you go?” I blurted. It came out before I really took the time to think about all the new complications surrounding the suggestion.

  She looked dumbfounded. “What? I…I couldn’t go by myself.”