Funeral Hotdish (20 page)

“Sheriff, our attorney can be here in fifteen minutes if you don’t leave us alone. Now, either do this legally, or you’re not going to do this at all. You realize, of course, that if you illegally confiscate this gun and then find something, it wouldn’t be permissible in a court of law. You do know that, right?”

Now she was showing off. Some would applaud her “gotcha moment.” Others would despise it. But Joya didn’t care. This felt good. She was racking up points with her father.

Sheriff Potter threw a dangerous look at Ralph and pointed his finger. “You’re not going to get away with this,” but his legs were doing the real talking as he headed out the door.

Joya slammed it behind him. He never saw that she had to brace herself against the jam so she wouldn’t collapse from her false bravado.

When she turned, her parents stared at her as if they saw a person they didn’t recognize.
This is who I am
, she thought, as she sat down at the table and demanded, “What in the world is going on here?”

“Oh God, thank you, Joya,” her mother finally said as she began to cry.

Joya got up and put her arms around the woman she adored. “Don’t worry, Mom, it’s going to be alright.”

Ralph had to give it up, too. “Yes, thank you. You know, I could have given him my gun because it has nothing to do with this.” He had to underscore the point that he wasn’t a total idiot.

“That wouldn’t have mattered, Dad. He could have done anything with that gun—he could have shot it to make it look like it was the murder weapon. Did you see how gleeful he was when he rushed in here? He was ready to arrest you for murder. Do you understand that? He could have hauled you off in handcuffs and thrown you in jail. That’s just what he wanted to do. A guy like that could easily fudge the evidence to get what he wants. He didn’t have a warrant because he has nothing to get a warrant with. You’ve got to convince a judge that you’ve got real evidence that points to someone in particular. You can’t just go on a Walmart shopping spree.”

Ralph Bonner saw his daughter through new eyes that night. He never thought he’d say this, but the girl was right. And she’d probably just saved his neck.

“So tell me about this silo.”

Ralph had to come clean. He told the story in shorthand, with Maggie jumping in now and then to add a detail. He said the words with his head lowered, like he now realized how foolish it had been.

“We kidnapped him, but we didn’t kill him.” Ralph sounded very certain, hoping it wouldn’t allow any more questions. But Joya needed more.

“Dad, I’m sure you didn’t do it. But are you completely convinced one of the others didn’t? Nobody knew where he was. How would anyone find him? Nobody even knew he was kidnapped, right? Being missing isn’t the same as being kidnapped. For all anyone knew, he’d left town with a buddy or something. I know they’re your best friends, but the three of you were the only ones who knew where he was. And now the sheriff knows it was Earl’s silo and he thinks he’s got you guys.”

“I don’t know what the sheriff knows,” Ralph admitted in defeat.

Joya took over. “I’ll go get those reports so we know what’s going on. And let’s find you an attorney.”

Ralph got up to go to the phone and Joya stopped him in his tracks. “Dad, who are you calling? You can’t be calling Bernard or Earl. That’s exactly what they’d want you to do. Oh God, they might have a wiretap on your line! Dad, don’t say anything on that phone that you don’t want the police to know. And if anyone calls you, play dumb. You have no idea what that son of a bitch is up to. That’s how they caught Sammy. It was the wiretaps.”

Later in bed, she’d fantasize that Sheriff Potter had stormed in on a bluff, betting Ralph didn’t know anything about the necessary warrant, unaware he had a daughter who knew the law, certain he’d call his buddies and spill the beans—everything caught in a wiretap. But then she thought, Naw, the guy’s a two-bit backwoods hack. He’s not smart enough.

How she wished she was right.

Chapter Twenty

Tuesday, January 18, 2000

Government offices were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, so Joya had to wait until Tuesday to get the records. She drove to the beautiful historic courthouse in Wahpeton, where the sheriff’s office and jail occupied the lower level.

“I’m here for a copy of the sheriff’s report on the murder of Darryl Harding and the suicide of Johnny Roth,” she announced to a skinny woman with thin hair and a cardigan sweater.

“Oh, I don’t think you can have them?” The woman intended it to be a statement, but her voice made it a question.

“Yes, ma’am, they’re public records,” Joya said. “And you should know that, since they did the North Dakota Public Records Test last year. Remember, the one that you guys failed? And a district judge told you to comply with the law in handing out public records. Remember?”

The clerk well remembered that embarrassing “test,” in which North Dakota reporters posed as ordinary citizens to test the availability of public records. And just like in other states—Iowa, Indiana, South Carolina, South Dakota—they found that while most public departments were good about sharing records the public had every right to see, law enforcement departments weren’t. In every state, they found police and sheriff offices made it tough, if not impossible, to get public records. In North Dakota, one reporter had been followed by a sheriff when he left the office in Jamestown. From this very office in Wahpeton, a reporter was interrogated and detained when he tried to get records on a shooting. And that brought national news organizations to North Dakota to help clean things up—including an appearance in front of a district judge who demanded compliance.

Joya had watched this test in her home state with interest, since Arizona wasn’t the easiest place to wrest public records from some law enforcement units, either. She’d thought of suggesting they do a test in Phoenix, but she’d never gotten around to it. That information about North Dakota’s test sure came in handy now.

“Remember,” she repeated, and the clerk looked at her with disdain.

“It will be one dollar a page.” The clerk thought that would stop this nonsense.

“Isn’t that a little pricey for a five-cent Xerox?” Joya asked. “You know, you can’t make copy costs prohibitive.”

“We don’t think a dollar a page is prohibitive,” she answered back, determined to get the upper hand.

“Fine. I’ll pay it. And I’ll wait right here for my copy.”

Joya sat down in a wooden chair against the wall and pulled a book out of her big bag, making it clear she was ready to settle in until she got what she wanted. She’d had the book on her pile for a while. She brought it along from Phoenix, because now seemed like a good time to read about investigating a murder case.

“October 16, 1931, was a bloody Friday night in Phoenix, Arizona,” she read, as she began
The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd.

It took more than an hour for the clerk to come back with a ten-page report. Joya flipped through it, screwing up her nose as she came to the end. “How about the report on the silo?” She looked the woman straight in the eye.

“That report isn’t ready yet,” the woman lied, and Joya called her bluff.

“Sure it is. Your sheriff is running around arresting people because of the silo, so there’s got to be a report. I’ll wait.”

She sat down and reopened the book, picking up at the end of Chapter Three: “The very first thing you notice is that she was cut apart so precisely the coroner was able to stitch her back together.”

When the silo report was finally added—all three pages of it—Joya paid her thirteen-dollar fee and left the office.

“What a bitch,” she heard the clerk say as she walked out the door. Joya beamed.

The sheriff’s report showed that everything they had so far pointed to Johnny Roth as the killer. It was his bootprint on the carpet in Crabapple’s home, his print on the smashed vase. And of course, it was in Crabapple’s barn where they’d found his hanging body.

From the silo, they’d found specks of Crabapple’s blood—and plenty of evidence that someone had tried to clean it up—but no other blood. Okay, that was good, Joya thought.

They knew the silo was owned by Earl Krump. “Krump is a known associate of Ralph Bonner and Bernard Stine, all of whom have approached the sheriff’s office over the last two years to arrest Darryl Harding. Sheriff Potter has heard these three men threaten the life of Darryl Harding and vow revenge against him, claiming he was responsible for the death of Amber Schlener.”

Joya read those words in the police report with her mouth open. The sheriff was a witness to a death threat? That’s why he was ignoring the evidence that Johnny did it? It was absurd. Who goes around telling a sheriff they’re going to kill somebody? But Joya knew that the word of a law enforcement official held great sway, not only with a judge and jury, but with the general public. After all, in Arizona a woman was sitting on death row solely on the word of a police detective that she’d “confessed” to having her son killed—a confession neither recorded, witnessed, nor attested. His word against hers. If a cop’s word alone is enough to get you a death sentence, imagine what happens if an officer says you personally told him you intended to kill somebody! Everyone would accept it as gospel. This wasn’t good.

Another bit of bad news was that the silo had yielded one possibly fabulous clue: a spent twelve-gauge shotgun shell. It had rolled into a crack in the cement floor, and whoever had cleaned up the place had overlooked it. Joya instantly saw the problem. If they could tie this shell to one of the shotguns owned by her father or his friends, they’d be in real trouble. That’s why the sheriff had tried to bluff her dad into giving up his shotgun on the spot. She bet that he’d tried a similar tactic with the other two, and hoped they were smart enough not to comply.

If, on the other hand, the shell was from Johnny’s gun, that would be the end of this.

She prayed it was Johnny’s.

***

Joya Bonner was used to a coroner’s office that occupied a two-story building in the heart of one of the nation’s largest cities—a first floor with refrigerated rooms that could hold dozens of bodies, which it sometimes was called to do, and three “operating theaters” on the second floor for multiple autopsies at a time.

So what passed for a coroner’s office in Wahpeton, North Dakota, seemed amateurish. Two rooms. Not a refrigerator in sight. One room was the office. The other was the autopsy room. One steel table to hold a body. No communication system to record the report—just a tape recorder on a nearby shelf. No viewing room for visitors to monitor the autopsy. Here, if you wanted to observe, you sat on a chair in the corner of the small room as the body was cut apart inches away.

Joya walked into the office and smiled at the plump woman who was eating lunch from a Tupperware bowl.

“Oh, sorry.” Wiping her mouth, she set the bowl aside. “We’ve got a lot of work to do today so we’re staying in for lunch.”

“Well, it looks good,” Joya offered, smiling her friendliest smile. “Leftovers?”

“Yeah, meatloaf.”

“Oh, I love meatloaf. Nobody makes it like my mom. You’re making me hungry!”

The two women laughed and Joya always loved it when there was a connection.

“How can I help you?” the woman asked.

“I’d like a copy of the autopsy report on Darryl Harding,” she said. “The boy from Northville?”

“Oh sure, I know who you mean. We don’t have a lot of murders, you know, and this one was so yucky. That poor kid. Somebody just blew him away. Can you believe it? That kind of thing doesn’t happen around here.”

“I know. I grew up in Northville and the whole town is in shock. You wouldn’t think North Dakota would have to worry about stuff like this.”

“You sure wouldn’t.” The clerk reached over and pulled a file from her “in” basket. “Do you want a copy?”

“Yes, please.”

The woman got up and took the file to a Xerox machine in the corner, copying the six pages as she continued her testimony about the value of living in North Dakota. “You know, my husband wanted us to move to Odessa, Texas, because they’ve found new oil down there and he says it’s going to mean lots of easy money. But I said, Petie, I’m not moving! I don’t know what Texas is like, but I bet it’s not as nice as North Dakota and I don’t want our kids to grow up somewhere that isn’t safe. That’s what I told him. And he finally agreed, and we stayed here. That will be a dollar-fifty—we charge twenty-five cents a page.”

Joya stifled a laugh and handed over the money. “I thank you so much, and now I’m going to go out and find myself some lunch, and then call my mom and tell her I want meat loaf for dinner!”

Both women were giggling as Joya left the office.

She sat in her dad’s car and gobbled up the report.

Darryl Harding was killed by a single shotgun blast to his chest, the killer so close, the steel B-B’s hardly fanned out. The shooter was standing over the body when the trigger was pulled, probably holding the gun at the hip, rather than on the shoulder, according to the angle of the pellets. The wound was contaminated with plant material that was not identified.

The body’s wrists were raw, as though he’d been chained. His clothes still held remnants of straw and wheat shaft, suggesting he was in a grain silo.

The stomach was clear, signaling he hadn’t eaten in a day or so.

The body was moved after death, as much as a day after, according to postmortem lividity.

Joya closed her eyes, imaging how devastating this information could be in a news conference that went to the worst possible scenario—the kind she was used to hearing from her own sheriff back in Phoenix.

If Sheriff Potter were the publicity hog that Sheriff Arpaio was, he’d have already called a news conference to decry that this poor boy was chained up and starved to death before being blown away by a Rambo with a shotgun. How soon before some reporter came calling for this very report and reached the same conclusions?

She didn’t have all day to get the help they needed.

Joya next stopped at the office of the attorney who’d been recommended by a friend in Phoenix. He wasn’t a seasoned criminal defense attorney, but then, Wahpeton didn’t have any. Violent crime wasn’t a profitable specialty around here, since there was so little. For that, Fargo attorneys were needed. Around here, the money in lawyering came from the civil cases—more leases and rental disputes than kidnapping and murder.

But Dolan Lowe came recommended with enough experience to know the ropes. Besides, her Phoenix friend said, this guy hated Sheriff Potter.

Joya laid a twenty-dollar bill on the desk and said, “Let’s call that a down payment on a retainer so my father is officially a client, and I’m his representative.”

Lowe saw what their mutual friend in Phoenix had meant when he said, “Don’t bullshit this woman. She’s smart, and she knows the law.”

Under the attorney-client privilege standard, she filled him in on what had happened in Northville, stressing that while her dad and his buddies had kidnapped the kid to get him to talk, she was completely convinced none of them had killed him. She handed over the police and autopsy reports she’d gathered that morning and suggested he make her a copy and he keep the originals, and she noted the points in the reports that worried her.

“The sheriff thinks he’s got them because they kidnapped the kid,” she told the attorney, sounding anxious.

“So what evidence does he have that they kidnapped him?” the lawyer asked. Joya laid out the facts as she saw them.

“That’s not evidence. That’s circumstance.” Lowe was glad he was smarter than a journalist. “So what if it’s Earl’s silo? Ownership doesn’t mean anything in this case. It doesn’t mean Earl had anything to do with a kidnapping. I don’t see that they found a lock. Did they find a lock on the door?”

Joya noticed for the first time that the police report said nothing about a lock.

“Well, if there had been a lock, they sure would have mentioned it, because they could have traced that back,” Lowe stressed. “Found out who purchased the lock. Found out who had the key or the combination. And that would limit access. But if they didn’t mention a lock on the door, there probably wasn’t one and that makes ownership even less important. Anybody could have had access to that silo. Anybody could have kidnapped that kid and put him there. There’s nothing to tie it to your dad or his friends. Unless they’ve admitted they kidnapped him. They haven’t, have they?”

“Oh, no,” Joya assured.

“Fine. Let’s keep it that way.”

Joya gave a great sigh of relief. She’d totally missed the lock. She’d put too much strength in Earl’s ownership. She’d accepted that they’d have to answer for the kidnapping, and now she could see there was nothing that proved her dad had kidnapped anybody.

“The only thing they found in that silo was a shotgun shell, and if they can’t tie it to your dad, they’ve got absolutely nothing,” Lowe concluded.

Joya already knew that, and it scared her. “I know, that would be so bad.” She relayed how the sheriff already had come for her dad’s shotgun, but she’d stopped him.

“Good work,” the attorney said with real admiration. “But you know it’s almost impossible to trace a shotgun shell, don’t you?”

Joya perked up. “Really?” She hadn’t known, but then, guns weren’t her strong suit. She didn’t like them, didn’t own one, and since she’d left home, hadn’t shot one, although her dad had made sure all his children were gun savvy.

But in all the lessons Ralph Bonner gave his children, he never discussed the traceability of a shotgun shell. Attorney Lowe now gave her a CliffsNotes version.

“Shotgun shells are anonymous. They’re not like bullets that get marked up as they go through a barrel of a rifle or a gun. You can trace bullets to a specific weapon. It’s very hard to tie a particular shell to a specific shotgun. Plus we have no evidence that the shell they found has anything to do with this murder. Maybe it had been there a long time. Having a shotgun shell in the same place as a shotgun murder doesn’t mean much. Especially not on a farm in North Dakota.”