Avalanche: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries) (11 page)

THE SNO-CAT STOPPED AT THE
intersection of the trail and the groomed ski track. Tully tossed down the snowshoes Grady had loaned him.

“You know how to use those contraptions?” the handyman asked.

“I’m an old hand at snowshoeing. You just point out the starter to me and I’ll be off.”

“Yes sir, that’s about what I figured.”

Tully slipped his boots into the harnesses and fastened them. “How far in to Hoot’s cabin you reckon?”

“Don’t know. Never been dumb enough to go there, Sheriff.”

Tully glanced at his watch. “Well, it’s ten-thirty now. How about you meeting me back here at two-thirty?”

“Yes sir, I’ll be here. Hope you are.”

“Me, too.”

Tully plodded past Cabin Three and on up the trail. The woods seemed to close in around him as he advanced. He had never before thought of woods as creepy, but now he did. The dark, ancient trees, many of them gnarled, seemed like something out of a fairy tale, a Grimm’s fairy tale. A raven flew in and landed on a branch a short distance away. It cocked its head and examined him, as if he were some strange, unknown creature. Tully almost expected the bird to speak. Then it flew off silently, except for the flapping of its wings. He wondered if maybe it were flying to Hoot’s place to make a report. He plodded along for an hour, the woods seeming to become darker and denser at each step. Finally, off in the distance, he made out the lines of a cabin. No smoke came from its chimney.

Presently, the dogs, two large, mean-looking creatures, came for him, silent as the raven. They stopped twenty feet away, their muzzles twisted in snarls. Then they began to advance slowly.

A voice came from behind some nearby trees. “Show them your badge, Sheriff. That might put a scare into them.”

Tully reached inside his jacket. “I’ll show them my Colt .45 if they take two more steps.”

“In that case, hold up there a second. Dogs! Back! Porch!”

The dogs seemed to shrink at the command. They backed away, then turned and slunk under the cabin porch.

The voice said. “So what brings you up this way, Bo?”

“You know my name?”

“Yup. I make it my business to know anything that might cause me trouble. I know about Pap, too. If you had been Pap I would have killed you right off. He isn’t a man to fool with.”

“I’m not either, Hoot! And I’ve got some questions for you. Maybe you want to answer them right now?”

“To tell the truth, Bo, I’m freezing out here.”

Ben Hoot stepped out from behind the trees. He was barefooted and wearing only his long underwear. He had a scraggly white beard and long gray hair that streamed down his back. In one hand he held a carbine rifle. He lowered the hammer and then gestured with the rifle toward the cabin. “Come on in. I’ll brew us up a pot of tea.”

“Tea?” Tully said, surprised.

“Yup, tea. What did you expect, Ben Hoot to be uncivilized or something?”

Tully took his hand out of his jacket. “I didn’t expect tea. What are you doing out here in the snow with no clothes on? It’s noon.” He slipped off the snowshoes.

“The dogs heard you coming and woke me. I was up most of the night, taking care of business.”

“I never heard the dogs bark.”

“They don’t bark. I taught them not to. They just growl.”

The dogs muttered beneath them as Tully and Hoot stepped onto the porch.

“How do you teach dogs not to bark?”

“You put your boot up alongside their heads. Works on people too. I understand you’re pretty quick with your fists. Guess that might work fine on people, but not much good on dogs.”

Off to one side of the cabin, Tully noticed an open shed hung with stretchers of animal pelts. Two of the pelts he saw belonged to wolves. He could smell skunk.

The inside of the cabin was surprisingly neat, except the blankets on the single bunk seemed to have been tossed back in the manner of a man leaping out of it in a hurry. Two chairs sat next to a small table. Hoot pulled one out and indicated for Tully to sit in it. He leaned the rifle against the wall, stuffed some shavings and kindling in the stove, and lit the fire.

“How’s trapping?” Tully asked him.

“Pretty good, especially now the other fellows have given it up. I spoke to them about finding other occupations. They seemed to see the sense of it right off. You have to be careful about trapping. You overdo and it takes a long while for the furs to come back. I try to be a low-impact kind of person.”

“Low-impact,” Tully said.

“That’s a term I picked up from a magazine. I’m not an illiterate, like most of the folks around here. A nice lady by the name of Jennifer drives a library van up the West Branch Road once a month. I’m about the only person gives her any business. She comes up here mostly for me, and I appreciate it. I usually take three or four magazines and a couple of Willys.

“Willys?”

“Will Shakespeare. You’re a college man, Bo. I imagine you’ve heard of Willy.”

“I know the name.”

Hoot set a copper teakettle on the stove. “Water will get hot pretty quick. Hope you like Twinings English Breakfast.”

Hoot set a bowl of sugar and a spoon on the table next to Tully. “Got a can of condensed milk, if you take cream.”

“No, this is fine.”

“Good. The can is getting kind of clogged up around the holes. So you want to know if I killed that fellow you pulled out of the river. Nope, I didn’t. I figured the time would come when I might have to do Mike, but I kept putting it off. Getting soft in my old age. And then somebody beat me to it. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.”

“You think somebody killed him?”

“Yeah, Mike Wilson wasn’t the sort of person who would jump in a river. Nor fall in one. I watched you and your helper haul his carcass into your boat.”

“You know who killed him?”

“Nope. Wouldn’t say if I did. The person performed a service to the community, and I wouldn’t want to cause him any inconvenience for his trouble.”

“You’re telling me I made the trip in here for nothing?”

Hoot laughed. “Not for nothing. You’re getting a nice cup of tea.”

He placed four tea bags in a flowered ceramic teapot and filled the pot with boiling water. “I let it steep about three minutes. I usually estimate the time, but you have a watch.”

Tully took off his wristwatch and set it on the table in front of him so he could keep track of the time.

“So you trap skunks?” Tully said.

“You smelled that one, did you? I trap about everything that’s got a decent pelt. You know how to keep a skunk from spraying?”

“That bit of knowledge has somehow escaped me.”

“Good, I can teach you something. You shoot them about an inch up from the bottom of the belly. That paralyses them and they can’t squirt. My aim was a little off on the skunk you smelled. I’m getting old and my eyesight isn’t so good. How’s our time?”

“Getting close.”

Hoot waited another minute and then poured the tea. Tully stirred a heaping spoonful of sugar into his and took a sip. “Perfect,” he said.

“Thanks,” Hoot said. “I don’t get many guests. I think the last one was 1947.”

Tully smiled. “Well, I appreciate your time. You’ve been very generous with it.”

“Good. I will tell you something, though. I noticed you poking around the Wilsons’ cabin the other day, the one they call Number Three. You drew down on me, if I recall correctly. I figured you were looking for something. Not much happens on this mountain I don’t know about, and one night I was out very late, Monday night it was, actually well into Tuesday morning, and I see this fellow on skis. Strange to see someone out skiing in the middle of the night. There’s a hollow old tamarack snag up the mountain a couple hundred yards or so from that cabin. The woodpeckers have been at the snag and pecked a good-sized opening about eight feet up. The fellow slides to a stop on his skis and tosses a package up into that opening. It was wrapped in shiny plastic. I could see the plastic shine in the moonlight. I suspect it was whatever you were looking for.”

“You know what’s in the package?”

“Nope, none of my business.”

“You recognize the man?”

“Wouldn’t say if I did.”

“What time?”

“Don’t know the time. The moon was out and far down in the west.”

Tully drank the last of his tea and put his cup back on the table.

“You may have helped me solve this case,” he said. “Thanks, Hoot.”

“You’re welcome. And, Bo?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t come back.”

GRADY WAS WAITING FOR HIM
in the Sno-Cat. “I see you made it out alive, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t advise your hotel guests to go wandering off down that trail. They might not be so lucky.”

“Yes sir. You saw him then?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Grady. Let’s just say I’m happy to be back.”

“Yes sir.” Grady started up the Sno-Cat and drove them back to the lodge.

Blanche met him at the door. “Good news, Bo.”

“I can use some.”

“The phone company has hooked up a temporary line. You won’t have to go up on the ridge every time you want to make a call.”

“Great!”

“But you’ll have quite a wait. There’s a long line of guests waiting to use the phone and let their families know they’re okay.”

“How long have you lived in Blight County, Blanche?”

She appeared puzzled. “All my life.”

“Then you know there’s the Blight way and no way.”

He walked to the head of the line in Blanche’s office and tapped the caller on the shoulder. “Hang up, partner. I’ve got some urgent police business.”

The man looked up, a snarl starting to curl his lips. The snarl faded. It was the same man Tully had knocked unconscious the evening before.

“Got to go,” he said into the phone. “I’ll call you later.” He hung up.

“How’s the jaw?” Tully asked.

“Sore,” the man said. “But not too bad.”

“Good.” The man went out and Tully kicked the door shut behind him. He dialed the department. Daisy answered.

“Bo! How are you?”

“Just the ordinary. I think somebody tried to kill me and Pap. Or rather tried to kill me. They would have got Pap as a bonus.”

“You watch out for yourself, Bo. I don’t want you killed!”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, little things like that keep me sharp. How’s everything there?”

“It’s a madhouse! I can’t wait till you get back.”

“They finally got the phone hooked up,” he told her. “I suppose it will be a couple days more before they have the road cleared enough for us to drive out. Is Lurch around?”

“Yeah. Hold on a sec!” She yelled in his ear, “Byron! Bo’s on line one!”

Got to do more work on phone protocol, Tully thought.

Lurch came on. “Boss, I haven’t slept in three days! There’s no way I’m flying a helicopter back up there!”

“Only if I need you up here, Lurch. But right now I don’t. Did you find out from Susan the time of death for Horace Baker?”

“Between eleven and midnight Monday. And I was right about the gun, too. A .22 caliber.”

“How about the striations?”

“Good. We find the gun, boss, we can match it to the slug.”

“Probably not much chance of that. Whoever did the killing probably deep-sixed the weapon but I may have a lead. Now, how about Mike Wilson?”

“He didn’t drown. Susan says the cause of death was blunt-force trauma. She says he was hit with something on the back of the head, but it didn’t break the skin. He died before he got in the river. She estimates that it took him at least an hour to die. No sign of water in either his stomach or lungs.”

“So he was murdered.”

“Looks that way. Dead men usually don’t jump in rivers by themselves.”

“How about the boots then?”

“They match the tracks in the snow.”

Tully tugged on his mustache. “He could have hit his head on the rocks when he fell in the river.”

“Susan says no. She says if he hit his head on those rocks, he would still have been alive when he went in the river. There would have been water in his stomach and lungs, because he would still have been breathing. And there’s no sign of the kinds of gouges rocks usually make. Besides, the blow on the back of the head couldn’t have been made by rocks.”

“Any other injuries?”

“Yeah, his nose was broken.”

“What? Like in a fight sometime?”

“No, it’s freshly broken. Susan said she suspects he landed facedown when he was hit. That’s what broke his nose.”

“It’s all very clear to me now, Lurch. Someone hit him on the head hard enough to kill him, but then he walked from the Pout House to the river but died before he hit the water.”

“That’s the way I see it.”

“Yeah, I bet you do. Any idea of the time Wilson died?”

“Susan said because of the cold, it’s too hard to tell. Hey, Herb is trying to take the phone away from me. I’ll talk to you later, boss.”

The undersheriff came on. “Hi, Bo.”

“So what’s up, Herb?”

“Just to let you know I haven’t been sitting around here reading the paper all day. I did a little investigating.”

“I told you, Herb, I don’t want you doing any thinking on your own. So what did you find out?”

“As you know, Bo, anytime there’s a murder you start looking for a motive. Usually, it’s a family member who done it, right?”

“Right.”

“For the insurance, right?”

Tully sighed. “Right”

“As you also probably know, Horace didn’t have any family. His secretary, Irene Pooley, is about as close as he had to a relation or even a friend. Well, me and my insurance agent, Rob Collins, we started looking into the insurance situation. Turns out Horace had key-man insurance for two million dollars.”

“What’s key-man insurance?”

“I didn’t know either. Rob says when there’s somebody a company thinks is essential to its operation, they take out key-man insurance on him or her, to cover the loss if the person dies or something.”

“And the beneficiary was?”

“The company—meaning Mike Wilson!”

“But if Wilson was murdered, too?” Tully said.

“He also had two million in key-man insurance on him, with the company as the beneficiary!”

“That’s four million dollars! What happens to it if both of the insured turn up dead?”

“It goes into the company and the stockholders get it.”

“You got a list of the stockholders?”

“There’s only one.”

“And that is?”

“Blanche Wilson.”

“Wow! Okay, you done good, Herb. Maybe I’ll let you do some more thinking on your own.”

Herb grunted. “To tell the truth, Bo, it gave me an awful headache.”

“It tends to do that. Put Lurch back on, would you, Herb?”

Lurch came on. “Yeah, boss.”

“You got anything on the list of people I gave you?”

“Haven’t had a chance.”

“Okay. When you get to it, add the name Ben Hoot.”

“Ben Hoot. You got it, boss. You want me to do this list legal or illegal?”

“Whatever it takes.”