Crown of Serpents (34 page)

“Thanks Chief.”

“Listen,” Bailey continued, lowering his voice. “Tommy Junior specifically mentioned last week that his pop’s business shut down because all their customers started going to the Indian-owned gas stations for tax-free sales. His whole family has hated the Indian tribes for years. Blames the state for not enforcing the laws. So, watch your ass Rae. I mean it. There’s a number of people out here that do very, very stupid things out of unfounded fear and resentment.”

Rae stood up and grabbed her coffee. “I hear ya Chief. Thanks for the tip. I’ll go see if Senior’s still out there. You take care.”

“Alright now, you have a good one.”

Rae re-entered the meeting hall and gave a quick look around. She couldn’t help but miss the man fitting the chief’s description. He sat in the corner. She put on her friendly smile and walked over.

“Good morning. Tom Owens Senior?”

The man’s beady little eyes, barely visible behind overstuffed cheeks, looked Rae up and down. He set his fork down and spoke through a mouthful of pancakes. “Who’s asking?”

“I’m investigator Hart with the State Police.” She then paused to judge his reaction. He turned his eyes slightly downward and chewed his pancakes with a wet smacking sound. Definitely hiding something, she concluded. “I’m just wondering where your son Tommy is. I need to ask him a few questions.” She then observed his dark blue coat sleeve ripped at the elbow. The fabric seemed to match the patch taken from the swamp. Her heart jumped.

“Bout what?” asked Senior, belching defiantly.

Rae leaned down and came face to face with the grotesque man. She held his gaze. “About the arson and attempted murder of Ed McMann. That’s what?”

“You think my boy did that?” he asked loudly, spitting a little piece of food across the table.

Rae stood back up and crossed her arms. She noticed a hush fell over the meeting hall. “Tell me something Tom, how did you rip your coat sleeve?”

“Shoveling shit on the farm. It’s what I do for a living now that the fucking Indians put me out of business. Here, you wanna smell?” He stood up and extended his arm in provocation.

Rae didn’t bite. She just stood there and stared angrily at him.

“How dare you accuse my son. I’m done with this shit.” Senior slammed his chair aside and immediately made for the side exit door.

Rae realized she came on too strong — again. She pursued Tom outside to his vehicle and observed him entering a beat up, blue Chevy pick up truck. He drove passed her, leaned out his window, and shouted for her to leave his son alone. She wrote his plate number down and watched him speed off north on 96A. She jumped into her unmarked sedan and followed.

Allowing him plenty of distance during the tail, Rae placed a call to the E-911 dispatch for a background record check on both Tom Senior and Junior. A minute later, to her detriment, she found out both the father and son had clean records. She smacked the steering wheel. The torn coat and the hearsay anti-Indian rhetoric would be flimsy evidence anyway, she realized. Nothing a judge would base a search warrant of their house on.

Rae’s cell phone rang on her seat. She pulled over to take the call, letting Tom Senior disappear down the road.

“State Police. Hart.”

“Miss Hart? This is Alan Payton, the West Highland Terrier breeder over in Varick—”

“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I think that son of a bitch who killed my dog in that arson was trying to take another one last night.”

“Is that right?”

“Yep, they got all riled up early this morning, barking and howling,” said Payton. “I thought maybe they just saw some deer or something. All were accounted for so we went back to bed.”

“Uh huh,” pondered Rae.

“But then after feeding this morning, my wife noticed blood on Horatio’s muzzle. He’s the pack leader. He did not have any cuts on him so we started looking around out in the run.”

“And?”

“And well my Horatio got the better of that bastard. Bit the tip of his finger off! I’ve got it sitting under the water bowl. Didn’t want to move it or anything. I also found a flashlight too. Left it alone as well.”

“Mr. Payton, I’ll be right over,” Rae said, realizing Tom Owens Senior could be ruled out. He had all of his fingers back at the pancake breakfast. “I’m going to call ahead for some deputies to secure the scene. You did good.”

“Thank you ma’am. See ya in a bit.”

In front of Alan Payton’s house Rae noticed a black Seneca County sheriff’s deputy patrol car had already responded. She recognized the patrol car’s ID number as that of the rookie and vet combo. Putting on the latex, she met the owner, who took her around back where the young rookie sheriff was standing in the dog run. She nodded to the thin mustached, small-framed deputy who stood next to an overturned stainless steel dog bowl. A short black flashlight, its beam long since faded, sat nearby.

The rookie nodded a greeting. “Investigator, I’ve secured the evidence just as you requested,” he smiled, pointing to the bowl and flashlight.

“Thanks deputy,” acknowledged Rae, noticing some unusual discoloration on the grass near his feet. “Just do me a favor and don’t move. I think there’s blood evidence near your shoe.”

The deputy looked down, realizing he had potentially compromised key evidence on the crime scene. Angered and embarrassed, he apologized to Rae.

Emphasizing the point, she asked where his partner Wyzinski was, knowing full well the vet wouldn’t have sent a rookie alone out on an important scene like this.

“Wyz called in sick with a bad case of the flu. Couldn’t get his big butt out of bed.” He smiled nervously.

“Heard there’s a strain going around,” agreed Rae. She picked up the dog bowl and inspected the fingertip. At first glance she noticed white discoloration, due to the death of the skin cells, but upon closer examination she realized the fingertip was wrapped in latex. The Cranberry Marsh arsonist also used latex — remnants of which were found burned at the scene. The tip seemed to be the first segment of the middle or even ring finger. It was just the pad of the finger behind the nail, but gave her enough of a fingerprint for the crime lab to hopefully make a match. She left it alone and placed the bowl back over for protection.

“Tell you what,” she suggested to the rookie. “How about you ease back slowly, get to your patrol car and start making some calls for me? Call doctor’s offices and hospitals, see if anyone came in with a finger injury as of last night.”

“Yes ma’am,” replied the deputy, looking down as he backed away from the run.

“And get Mr. Payton’s statement too,” she ordered.

“Sure.”

“And one more thing,” added Rae. The rookie stopped and looked up. “Have a patrol sent to Mark’s Pizzeria. See if the deliveryman, Tommy Owens Junior, is working. Find out if he lost a fingertip.”

“Will do.”

“If he did, arrest his ass.”

Rae then placed a call on her cell phone to activate the crime scene van. She slowly and methodically searched the dog run, finding more blood on the grass trailing away. She tracked the blood across the owner’s side yard over to the shoulder of the road where the blood ended at a set of wide truck tire tracks in the mud.

Same time. Three Bears Courthouses. Ovid, Seneca County, N.Y.

On the day she intended to initiate the downfall of her boss, Anne Stanton left her Kingston home at six in the morning to begin her road trip west into central New York. She had convinced Alex Nero the night before that advance research and scouting on terrain features in the Kendaia area would better substantiate the cave location before they began their primary ground search, rather than waste time by going at the search willy-nilly, as she put it. She agreed to meet him later in the day for his big real estate announcement over at the Seneca Army Depot. There she would present any findings she had come across. In the meantime, Nero would be coordinating the manpower and equipment needed for the search and for the spelunking expedition sure to follow — all the while waiting for Rousseau and his team to recover the last of the Boyd journal clues. Nero told her he would send her a text message with the final cave directions once the code had been deciphered in its entirety.

Arriving just south of the Depot in Ovid, a sleepy rural village once the original county seat before being moved north to Waterloo, Stanton drove up to the village’s main tourist attraction. On a small knoll sat three red brick, white-framed buildings built in similar architectural style, but varying dramatically in overall size. The largest building was on the left, the next one in the middle a bit smaller, while the tiniest sat on the right. Named the Three Bears Courthouses these buildings took on various functions and housed many organizations over the years. Today, the smallest courthouse housed a local Veterans of Foreign War branch, the middle courthouse a Rotary International and Lions Club, and the largest structure — freshly renovated — hosted the Seneca County Historical Society, which had just moved from Seneca Falls.

With briefcase in hand, a faded New York Yankees baseball cap over blonde upturned hair, Stanton quickly ascended the main steps of the Papa Bear courthouse and entered the historical society. The president of the organization, an overly zealous man in his late thirties, introduced himself as Danny Wood. He led her up to the private research room on the second floor.

Already laid out on an old cherry table was a copy of the post-Revolutionary War Military Tract land map for the Finger Lakes region. This was land confiscated by the Continental Congress and given to the veterans of the war for their service in hopes they might settle the lands once owned by the Iroquois Confederacy. Many vets had taken the opportunity to resettle, but most simply sold their awarded lands to farmers or prospectors.

Stanton smiled, already perusing the map. It would be very helpful. She was about to compliment the president for being so prepared for her visit when her cell phone vibrated in her pant’s pocket. A quick glance at the display announced the expected text message from Nero.

It was the deciphered Freemason cave directions.

She read the code: CAVE LOCATION. FOLLOW BROOK EAST FROM APPLETOWN. STAY ON SOUTH BANK PAST ORCHARDS. AND CORNFIELDS TO BURIAL GROUNDS. DESCEND TO BROOK AND SEE OAK. MARKER TREE FACE LOOKS AT ENTRANCE. ON OPPOSITE SIDE HALFWAY UP SLOPE.

Huh? Marker tree face? What does that mean, she wondered.

At the bottom of the text message was another sentence:
you are in this too deep, your life now depends on the success of your research
.

After slipping her phone back in her pocket and donning white cotton handling gloves over shaking hands, she leaned close to the map, nose almost touching. She searched the east side of Seneca Lake. “This is an amazing replica Mr. Wood,” she noted to the society president, in a voice veiling her fear of Nero.

With a lisp in his western New York whine, the man replied, “Oh my God, call me Danny. I’m so glad you like it. It’s an honor to work with the Haudenosaunee Collection. Mr. Nero is a big fan of mine.”

Stanton thought, if only he knew. She smiled weakly and put on her eyeglasses.

“I tried to get as much material as possible ready for you after your call yesterday,” continued the talkative Danny. “And there’s more. Just wait!” With a double clap of his hands, he skipped off into the library room.

Stanton turned back to the map and in Military Tract Lot 66 she found Kendaia Creek. She then opened her briefcase and removed a notepad and pencil, but her eyes wandered to a manila envelope containing a mini-cassette tape recording and a topo map of the Ashokan Reservoir. In just an hour’s time she would turn the package over to the authorities to play her final ace in the hole. She wanted Alex Nero to die in prison where he belonged.

Danny bounded back into the research room. He carefully placed on the table beside her an oversized, scuffed and stained thick black leather bound book with threads hanging from its linen cover. “You won’t believe what I have here,” he announced with oozing enthusiasm. “It’s a rare, limited edition, one of only ten surviving history books of Seneca County. It covers the years 1786 to 1876, complete with illustration plates and personal accounts of the early settlers.” He drew a breath.

Stanton whistled softly.

“And I already bookmarked for you several excerpts on the early Indians, the Sullivan’s Trail, and the village of Kendaia. So, feel free to dig right in. I’ll be downstairs putting some Chamomile tea on. Would you care for some?”

“Certainly Danny and thank you so much for your hard work already. You’re very thorough. Oh and by the way, I just love your shirt.”

Danny blushed, thanked Stanton, and told her he’d be back in a jiffy with their tea. With a pirouette he was off.

Stanton shook her head with a smile, but then delved into the large volume and hit the first bookmark Danny had noted. It was a skewed history on the birth of the Iroquois Confederacy, obviously written from a white man’s perspective. The next bookmark gave a short overview of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign and how it broke the backs of the Iroquois when they aligned with the British. Nothing she didn’t already know. And then Kendaia popped up, also referred to as Appletown. A mere sentence described how it was destroyed in 1779, but that some old apple trees had gone untouched. Finally she hit a bookmarked reference on an excerpt called the
Trophy of Indian War
, listed on page 143 of the book.

The following paragraph she read caused a chill to creep up her spine.

Let the record show that in the year 1801 settler Wilhem Van Vleet, in the northern part of his Lot 79 bordering Lot 73, found a souvenir of Sullivan’s invasion in a large oak tree felled at the rear of his farmhouse plot. The tree measured about three feet in diameter and straddled the brook flowing west to Appletown on the lake. In the crotch about eight feet up, thoroughly embedded in the growths of the tree, a horseshoe of very fine workmanship was discovered. Upon strict examination, a Freemason symbol was found engraved along with a date marked Sept. 5th, 1779, that fateful day 22 years hence when Sullivan’s soldiers torched the Indian village once standing near Van Vleet’s acreage. Wilhelm kept the horseshoe on his fireplace mantle as a Trophy of the Indian War. In 1845, after he passed away, his son J.W. Van Vleet donated the souvenir to the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York.