Crazy Like a Fox (Lil & Boris #3) (Lil & Boris Mysteries) (8 page)

The F-150 matched the Campbell kid’s description all right. Except for the hole in the driver’s side window. A nearby tree had caught part of the shotgun blast, a few pellets in the bark. The state police crime scene boys were already picking them out.

I got as close as I dared to study the corpse. The critters had been at it, but I could still tell from the size and build that this could have been Shotgun. Wearing old work boots, jeans, a camouflage-print jacket. He was slumped in a way that suggested he’d been facing someone in the passenger seat when the shot took him. The window had broken from, I would bet, the combined force of his head and the shotgun blast. Safety glass isn’t unbreakable, after all. Just safe.

I took a closer look. Not easy to do without trampling something. The cab had lots of little holes that had me wondering.

I walked over to Lieutenant Breeden. We’d faxed or e-mailed every police department in three states with a description of the F-150, the bag the ransom was put in, and the Chevy sedan Tom and Punk had spotted picking up the ransom. We’d had a be-on-lookout, a BOLO, for McElroy, too. It was unsettling to think he’d been that close to home the whole time. When I said as much, Breeden nodded. “Raises some questions.”

That it did. I gave Punk a go-away look, and he stumped off to rejoin Kurt. Breeden sighed, shoulders drooping. “Any chance you can call off your aunt?”

“Is there ice skating in hell yet?”

He sighed again. He’d have been a happier man if he’d broken free of his mother, whose influence Aunt Marge exploited shamelessly to get my way. “Anything you want to know?”

Lots, but I started with, “McElroy own a Chevy Malibu?”

“We’re going over his place right now. Last call I got, the guy had six-seven cars in the yard, under tarps, and another four in this old barn. I’ll fax over the information when we’ve got it.”

I nodded to the truck. “Is it just me or does it look like there might have been two shots fired in there?”

Breeden shrugged one shoulder. “We bagged two shells. We’ll know more later. Anything else?” He glanced downhill, past me, and his blank face got even blanker. “Chief Rucker’s here.”

I shifted Boris’s weight and muttered a nasty word.

“He’s officially in charge, Lil,” said Breeden lamely, “I can’t change that. Neither can you.”

I snarled, mostly to myself. “If you quote that Saint Francis serenity thing, I’ll throw Boris at you.”

“You being here is a courtesy, you know that.”

Which was his way of reminding me I had no official status except as “victim”. Lucky for me, it was pretty clear McElroy had been dead long enough I wasn’t much use as “suspect”.

Not to say this stopped Rucker from bleating like an old sick bull, “What’s she doin’ here?”

God bless Breeden. “Identifying the suspect.”

What remained of the suspect, more like. I retreated to my cruiser before Rucker could huff and puff his way uphill to me, and let Boris slide back into his seat. His fur was on end, his whiskers stiff, his mismatched eyes pitch-black, and he kept opening and closing his mouth. Filtering all the smells, most of them strange, all of them tainted by the dead body in the truck.

Rucker was blustering at Breeden. Punk labored over, his prosthesis skidding in the muck. He spat out a word that even I blinked to hear, then remarked, “Danes ain’t happy. He wants this off his hands.”

I risked a grin. “So does Breeden. Rucker wins.”

Punk stared past me, and down at the creek sixty feet below us. “Gonna be someone he trusted, I bet. Someone he didn’t lock up the guns around.”

I almost shrugged. “You know Rucker’ll pin this on some nonexistent hobo.”

We both looked uphill, where Rucker and Danes were talking. Or Rucker was talking at Danes, who looked like he’d hand over the keys to the kingdom to get Craig McElroy’s murder off his books and onto someone else’s. He’d do what was easiest for him. He didn’t like intrusions into his jurisdiction. Fastest way to get everything back to normal was to let Rucker do whatever he liked. Not a bad man or a bad police chief, just one who saw this as an external matter. There’s a lot of them around.

I got settled behind the wheel. Punk slid into the back, and started cleaning the crud off his prosthesis. We’d gotten back to the main road before he spoke. He startled me. I’d figured he’d gone back to sleep.

“It’s okay, y’know,” he said. “Not sleeping so much. I still get twitchy when I drive past where I wrecked. It’s normal. This early in, you only start worrying if it stops bothering you.”

I did not like being transparent, not even to a deputy. “Watch much Dr. Phil on your days off?” I asked acidly.

I caught a flash of his grin in the rear view mirror. “Nope. Oprah.”

8.

E
veryone was happy to let Vernon Rucker have the case. Danes got to keep the potential embarrassment of an open homicide on someone else’s shoulders. Breeden got to tell his mother truthfully that it was out of his hands, which didn’t do much to get her off his back, but did remove Aunt Marge. Rucker got to crow about his big case. Even Aunt Marge voiced approval, since it meant I wouldn’t be getting myself into more “trouble”, as she calls it. The only people not happy were the personnel of the Sheriff’s Department of Crazy, Virginia. And we didn’t get a vote.

I don’t drink. Being raised by Aunt Marge, a dietitian and borderline health nut, does that to you. You also don’t smoke, take recreational drugs, trust traditional medicine and pharmaceutical companies, eat anything processed or anything ending in –os, unless it’s avocados. I reckon I’ll live to be 113, or die at 50 from sheer lack of pre-embalming. But I do have my vices. Chocolate is the biggest one.

So when we decided to drown our sorrows, we did it at Old Mill, in a booth in the back . There is no tavern in Crazy. When you can buy cold beer at the grocery store and drink it on the way home, bars are superfluous. But Seth understands people need to drink somewhere besides their cars and homes, so he’ll keep Old Mill open till about eleven at night. After eight, you’re out of luck if you want hot food, but he keeps vats of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream handy, and there’s always plenty of “nibbles”, as he calls them. Pretzel nuggets, chips and salsa, mixed nuts. Good beer food to go with the three beer brands Seth had on offer. He had a few low-end wines, too, but no hard liquor. Kept the church ladies happy that way.

Across the table from me, Tom nursed a bottle of Sam Adams, as preferable to Coors or Budweiser. Punk stared at a ginger ale. I poked at a hot fudge sundae made with chocolate ice cream. Next to me on the bench, Boris popped his head up over the edge of the table and lapped at a small saucer of heavy cream.

I sighed. “Sucks.”

Punk said, “Yeah.”

Tom grunted.

Boris slurped.

I reached out and poked a pretzel nugget. It skittered toward Boris, who batted it enthusiastically off the table, and vanished onto the floor to pursue it.

Punk drank the ginger ale. He looked like a man reconsidering temperance.

Tom finished his beer. He did not look like a man who’d ever consider temperance.

I poked at the ice cream some more.

If there’s anything more glum than unhappy cops trying to drink away their troubles, I don’t want to know what it is.

I ate some of my ice cream. I’d be running extra miles out of guilt this week, but then, who cared if I got a little soft here and there? Only man in my life had four feet and a tail. And, it so happened, a pretzel nugget in his teeth as he jumped back up beside me. He deposited it on my lap and merowled for praise. I told him he was wonderful, and he settled in to worry at the pretzel nugget like a dog with a bone.

Tom reached out and grabbed a handful of mixed nuts, and started to sort them out, meticulously, by type. Cashews, peanuts, hazelnuts, macadamia nuts, pecans. Then he lined up some pretzel nuggets, so he had five of each.

“That’s the most…” Punk started, and stopped. We watched Tom in fascination. This was a guy who, at work, barely remembered to stack papers in To-Do and Done piles. Yet here he sat, all obsessive-compulsively weird on the snacks.

Tom stopped long enough to drink half his second beer. Then he said, out of nowhere, “Tanya wants to get married.”

I choked, and came close to having ice cream go up my nose. My mind was definitely no longer on my problems. “Did she go down on one knee and all?”

Tom shot me a dirty look, and a dirtier one at Punk for laughing. “It ain’t funny! I don’t wanna get married. Not yet. She keeps talking about why waste time.” Tom shuddered. “I know life’s short, that’s why I wanna
take
my damn time!”

It wasn’t nice to laugh, but I did. “Sorry,” I said, and Boris’s tail twitched hard, twice. Punk pointed at it, and laughed harder, sputtering something about my cat ratting me out.

“Look, tell her you can’t think about it while you’re acting sheriff,” I advised, glaring at Boris and his tattle-tail. “Too much stress or something.”

Tom lit up. Poor sucker. “Will she buy that?”

I went for honesty. Damn cat didn’t give me much choice. “No. But she’ll back off and play the martyr card. It’ll give you a week or two.”

“Or,” said Punk, not too helpfully, “she’ll dump you.”

Tom sulked. “Y’all are supposed to be my best friends, not my big fat pains in the ass. I got enough of them already.”

That set us off again. I have no idea why. I’d just decided it was time to go home on a happy note when my cell phone rang. It wasn’t even my shift. Then I realized it was Punk’s cell phone. He
was
on shift. At least, technically.

Whatever was said took the smile right out of him. He threw a ten onto the table, and nudged Tom to get out of the way. “Gotta go,” he said. “Lil, you’ll want to come, too.”

Tom failed to look impressive. “Why not me?”

“You’re drunk,” I said before Punk could try tact. I shrugged on my coat and grabbed Boris. “What’s going on?”

Punk shook his head, and waited until we were outside to tell me. “You ain’t going to like this,” he said, “but that was my buddy Fowler, with the county. Rucker just arrested Jack Littlepage for kidnapping.”

***^***

I’ve known for years that Vernon Rucker’s mind is small and closed, but somehow simultaneously wide-open to bizarre leaps of illogic. Seeing my cousin Jack Littlepage behind bars in Rucker’s holding cell, however, was enough to make me decide Rucker wasn’t crazy. He was insane. Certifiably in need of round-the-clock care someplace remote and quiet like Sunrise, which is a tiny little facility in the southern part of our county, so exclusive not even most locals know about it.

I walked into the county police building trembling. Part of it was the sugar high, some of it was indignation, and a lot of it was sheer outrage. I had one blood family member with whom I am on any terms, let alone good terms, and Rucker decides
this
is the person who kidnapped me? I don’t know if I looked as furious as I felt, but none of the county boys risked even a tiny smirk in my direction when I came through those doors. They scattered like roaches when the lights come on.

“Have you lost that peanut you call a mind?” I demanded, and dropped Boris onto Rucker’s desk. He huffed and hissed. Boris, I mean. Rucker just gawped. “Jack wasn’t even in the country!”

“He could’ve arranged it all before he left.”

“And why the hell would Jack Littlepage need to go kidnapping anyone for money?” I screeched. Boris hunkered and growled. I wasn’t sure at whom. “He’s got enough money to buy and sell this whole county five times over!”

Rucker recovered some composure. I wasn’t about to credit him with spine, though he did get to his feet and lean over his desk to yell back at me. “Could be he wanted to take a chunk outta the Ellers!”

Fair enough, not that I admitted it. “Could be you’re a damn fool! You know they just build buildings at each other!”

“They both want Grenville!”

I took a deep breath. Grenville was a hunk of real estate just outside of Crazy which belonged to whichever of the Colliers were going to be left with legal standing after all their feuding and wrangling. That would take a few more years at least, what with suits and counter-suits. Both my cousin Jack and my Eller uncle had wanted it. Though it wasn’t in the style of the Eller-Littlepage feud to get irritated by a setback that small. When a feud’s gone on for 200 years, it’s a safe bet both sides are plenty patient.

All of which Rucker would know. Whether or not it had sunk in through all the fat was another story.

I decided to throw facts out the window. The Rucker approach. “So you see Jack Littlepage driving home and figure you can do what? Close the case by making an accusation without a damn shred of evidence? Do you know what his lawyers are going to
do
to you?”

“He has motive,” said Rucker stubbornly, and very loudly. His breath smelled like pork rinds. Even Boris’s cat-food breath was better than that. “Everybody knows about the Ellers and Littlepages!”

Behind me I heard Punk say quietly, “Oh hell.”

My yell would’ve drowned out a jackhammer. “
That’s my point, you idiot! Everybody knows the Ellers got money!
”

Red-faced, finger shaking under my nose, Rucker bellowed, “
Don’t you mouth off to me, girly!
”

The next thing I saw wasn’t Rucker’s hollering face. It was Punk catching an armful of angry Boris, who was leaping straight at Rucker for no better reason than he wanted all the shouting to stop. Punk swore, no surprise with Boris’s claws sinking in, and that got me calmed down. I reached out and pried Boris loose with a completely undignified croon. He clung to me, teeth still bared, and I left Rucker’s office to stomp over to the holding cell.

Jack jumped to his feet. “Lil!”

He’d have hugged me if the bars weren’t in the way. “You okay?” I asked, and peeled Boris off me. He slunk through the bars, sniffing at Jack’s trousers.

Jack shrugged. Obviously Rucker didn’t have the same effect on him that he did on me. “My lawyer’s already on the way down from the Charlottesville office, and Harry Rucker’s been called. I’m sure I’ll be home by midnight.” He smiled the way the rich and privileged do, which has a lot to do with years of orthodontists, and favored Rucker with the Littlepage glare. His had more sneer in it than mine. “I’m glad you’re okay. I did call to check.”