The Tamarack Murders (8 page)

Daisy was asleep on the couch, a blanket spread over her. His watchdog, Clarence, was asleep on a pillow next to her, his head resting on her hip.

Tully tiptoed over to his bedroom, undressed, put on sweat shirt and sweat pants, and went to bed. He wasn't worried about burglars breaking in. His former watchdog was back. He had no idea how or why Clarence had suddenly returned. He had given him to a friend months ago. Well, not exactly a friend, but a person willing to accept Clarence. He guessed that anybody willing to accept Clarence had to be regarded as a friend. And now the miserable little beast was back.

Tully awoke to the racket of a large spoon beating on a metal pan.

“It's almost seven o'clock!” Daisy yelled. “Time a hard-working sheriff should be out of bed!”

Tully groaned, got up, and wandered out to the kitchen in his mismatched sweatshirt and sweatpants. Breakfast was on the table. Huckleberry pancakes and sausage links! He supposed Daisy wasn't a totally evil person. He pulled out a chair and sat down.

She laughed. “You look like something Clarence dragged in.”

“If you're referring to my watchdog, Daisy, that's pretty bad. What's Clarence doing back? I thought I was rid of him for good. For that matter, what brings you out here?”

“What do you suppose, Bo? I was lonely and needed some company. All I found was Clarence sitting in a car with a dreadful old man.”

Tully frowned and shook his head. “Batim Scragg! Daisy, he is so much worse than a dreadful old man. He is possibly the deadliest human being on the planet, if I exclude my father. Did Batim say why he was returning Clarence? I liked to think of them as two peas in a pod.”

“He said Clarence kept chomping his chickens.”

Clarence had climbed up on a chair at the end of the table and was staring at Tully, a questioning look in his eyes.

Tully stared back at him. “Oh, it's all right, Clarence. You can stay. But Daisy owes me big time.”

Clarence's tail began to wag.

Daisy said, “I should think huckleberry pancakes would make us even for my rescuing your cute little dog.”

“Not by a long shot, sweetheart. A down payment does occur to me, however.”

Tully and Daisy's affair had ended months earlier, but neither of them had quite gotten over it. He got up, walked over, and gave her a quick smooch. “That's for the huckleberry pancakes. By the way, where did you find the huckleberries?”

“Your stash in the cellar. I used the ones from the freezer, but I noticed you canned some too. You're quite the handy guy, you know that, Bo? You'd make somebody a good wife.”

“Thanks. I'll have to think about that. Actually, it was Rose who canned the huckleberries.”

“Old as you are, you still have your momma looking after you.”

“Yeah, and for a nosy old broad she does pretty well by me in the way of food.”

Tully sat back down and sampled a pancake. “Hey, not bad, Daisy. You'd make somebody a pretty good wife yourself.”

Daisy laughed. “Yeah, right! You had your chance, Bo, and you blew it.”

“I thought you were the one who blew it?”

“No, it was you.”

“Well, in that case, I'm sorry. By the way, I do have some gossip, if you're interested.”

“I'm alway interested in gossip, Bo! Wait till I get a refill.”

She grabbed the coffee pot off the stove and refilled both their cups. She replaced the coffee pot on the stove, sat back down at the table and folded her hands. “Now tell me! I love gossip.”

Tully told her about seeing Grid's car parked in the widow Danielle Stone's garage.

Daisy responded, appropriately, with a gasped expletive.

Tully said, “Yeah, my word exactly. This adds a whole new dimension to the bank robbery and murder. I wouldn't be surprised if Grid ended up with both the widow and the loot from the bank.”

“It's pretty cold blooded, Bo. You think Gridley Shanks is that cold blooded?”

“I think Grid can be any way he wants to be. The nasty part of this, he has a beautiful wife, absolutely gorgeous, and two young kids that live with a former wife and her husband. The shooting took place on a piece of land he owns. So he knows the terrain out there. He has two so-called hunters on his property who can't tell a herd of deer from a herd of elk. How they figure in, I don't know. I thought I heard an ATV take off on the other side of the ridge after the shooting. I saw a four-wheel-drive ATV at Grid's place. Suppose he has an affair going with Danielle Stone, Vergil's wife. He not only masterminds a robbery and somehow ends up back at her house with the loot, he does away with his competition for Danielle, her desperate husband. How does that sound?”

Daisy shook her head. “Pretty gruesome. You think this Grid is some kind of homicidal maniac?”

“I have to admit he doesn't seem like one. Maybe the secret to being a successful homicidal maniac is not to seem like one.”

Daisy laughed. “Well, yeah, you go around acting like a homicidal maniac you're not going to last very long.”

“My point exactly,” Tully said.

“Maybe he's one of those weirdos who love to play dice with the devil. It gives him a rush and makes him feel smarter than everybody else.”

Tully finished a huckleberry pancake and forked another onto his plate. “Good point. Maybe he figures I'll take his accomplices down, and he'll have the loot all to himself. I'll go check with the FBI guys and see if they've turned up anything.”

“Angie?”

“No way. Notice I said guys.”

He drove to the bank and parked at the edge of the shopping center's lot. Angie was nowhere to be seen, but two other agents were talking to the bank manager outside the front door. The manager pointed to something out in the parking lot. Tully looked but saw only empty blacktop. Maybe that's where the getaway car had been parked. The FBI could worry about the car and the robbery, he would worry about the man killed on the mountainside. Maybe Vergil was one of the robbers and maybe he wasn't. Maybe the car in the ditch wasn't the getaway car at all but only a car that looked like it. On the other hand, why was Vergil climbing the mountain if he wasn't trying to get away from the getaway car? And if he was the robber, where was the loot? And why was he shot? No doubt to silence him about others involved in the heist. And to take his share of the loot. It all made his head spin.

He walked over to the bank. The manager, Phil Estes, introduced him to the two agents. They shook hands.

“So you're the famous Sheriff Bo Tully of Blight County, Idaho,” the one named Mel Jaspers said. “I expected you to be at least nine feet tall.”

“Usually I am,” Tully said, “but I've been feeling a little short the past few days. You fellas got the bank robbery solved yet?”

Shaun Dugan, white-haired and obviously the older of the two agents, shook his head. “It appears the robbers had some inside information. They pulled the thing off with perfect timing.”

Tully tugged on the corner of his mustache and thought for a moment. Then he said, “The chap gunned down up on Chimney Mountain worked for the bank until a while back. He may be the one who helped with the timing. So far, though, we haven't found a penny of the loot.”

“Good heavens!” the manager said. “You mean Vergil Stone! I can't believe Vergil was involved, but it appears he was.”

Jaspers said, “There's a lot of loot to find. Shaun and I could retire and live in luxury on a Caribbean island, if we'd had the good sense to think of it. Apparently, the robbers made off with a bundle, actually a large garbage bag over half full.”

The bank manager said, “Yeah, they made a big haul. It'll take us several days to figure out exactly how much.”

Tully said, “Wow, if I'd known you had that much cash lying around, Phil . . .”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, Bo. We've never had a robbery before and didn't think much about having one. The reason we had so much cash on hand, loggers like it for pay day. A week later the robbers would have got some, all right, but not the big haul they did.”

Jaspers said, “It's pretty obvious they had inside information.”

“Yeah,” Tully said. “You need inside information for a haul like that. Makes a person think about taking up bank robbery as a sideline.”

“It's a pretty crowded field right now,” Jaspers said. “With the economy down like it is, I doubt you'd find any openings, Bo.”

Tully shook his head. “Just my luck. Alway a day late and a dollar short.”

He told the agents he would see them later and then drove over to the courthouse and parked in the spot reserved for the sheriff. His three-thousand-dollar alligator-skin boots klocked nicely as he went up the stairs. A man who knows his boots notices such things. Boots were the only thing Tully splurged on. Anyone wearing boots that expensive instantly drew respect in Blight County. He had paid for them with money from the sale of one of his watercolors. That was the most he had ever been paid for one of his paintings and he knew, finally, that he could now make a living from his art, modest though it might be. The boots had earned him the respect of the county commissioners, even though they knew he hadn't paid for them with graft. They may have been ignorant of the art world, but they understood graft. The holder of a public office never buys anything that showy and expensive with graft. It would set off alarms all over the place. Commissioners go around with holes in their jackets and the soles flopping on their old shoes. But as all the residents of Blight County knew most of their local politicians were corrupt. But they could be bought cheap. Even a poor person could own at least one. As long as the politicians kept themselves affordable, Blight citizens put up with them. The system worked, and nearly everybody was satisfied. It was the Blight way.

When he got to the briefing room, all the deputies were out on patrol. Only Daisy, Lurch, Herb, and Florence were there, Herb reading his newspaper as usual, Daisy on the phone.

“Why thank you, dear,” she said sweetly. “We always try to be of service in situations like this. You're very welcome, dear.”

She hung up the phone and shouted at Tully. “You volunteered me to do what! Sit all night with the grieving widow of a man who has just been murdered! Are you out of your mind, Bo?” She had inserted a popular expletive randomly throughout the diatribe.

Tully shrugged and walked over to Lurch's corner. “Find any info on Vergil Stone?”

“Yeah, but nothing you don't already know.”

Tully went into his office. Daisy followed him in.

She pointed to his window. “I hope you like the view. One of the janitors about drove us crazy scraping the paint off. The screeching was awful. I still get shivers up my spine.”

“Your screeching probably got on his nerves, too.” Tully spun around in his chair and looked at the lake. For as much as the window paint had irritated him, he hadn't even noticed it was gone. He swung back around and pointed to a chair. Daisy sat. “One of your jobs from now on, Daisy, will be to watch for any boat out on the lake with a man in it holding a rifle.”

“Sure, Bo, no problem. I was just hoping you would come up with an extra chore for me when I wasn't sitting with the widows of murder victims.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You have such a hard job. So maybe you can tell me the name of the weather girl at the TV station?”

“Don't you ever watch the weather on TV, boss?”

“Once in a while, but the weather girl is so cute I don't hear what she's saying.”

“Her name is Wendy Crooks.”

“See if you can get her on the phone for me.”

Daisy frowned at him. “I can't believe you want to talk to a weather girl!”

“I need her to help me solve a murder.”

Daisy laughed. “You really are desperate, Bo.” She went back to her desk and a few minutes later yelled at him. “Wendy on line one, boss!”

Tully picked up. “Wendy, I need you to help me solve a murder. Is there anyway you can check your Doppler thing and tell me the exact time we got a brief snow flurry out on Chimney Rock Mountain, say between six and ten Monday morning?”

“Yeah, we'll still have it, Sheriff. I'll see what I can find and get back to you. If we don't have it here at the station, I'll have it at home. I record all my weather casts so I can evaluate my performance later. I just get better and better, Sheriff.”

“That certainly has been my impression, Wendy.”

“Thanks, Sheriff. I'll get back to you as soon as I find out. That's Chimney Rock Mountain between six and ten a.m. Monday, right?”

“You got it, Wendy.” He hung up.

Lurch stuck his head in the door. “I got five sets of prints off that mess in the blue dishpan. One set is yours, one is Shank's, and three others belong to guys who have all done time for robbery.”

“Great! I thought so!” He took out his pocket notebook and opened it to the pages the waiter had pressed his finger prints on. He handed the open notebook to the Unit. “You can eliminate this guy. He's the waiter. The other two sets belong to two of our bank robbers, if my guess is correct.”

“Great, boss!”

“I'm pleased you appreciate my effort, Lurch. Anything going on here besides our murder and bank robbery?”

“Not much. Oh, one of the deputies arrested Petey again.”

“Petey! I can't believe it! What this time?”

“Another chain saw.”

“A chain saw! Petey doesn't even know how to run a chain saw! Why does he keep stealing them?”

Lurch shook his head. “I don't know. I guess because they're not nailed down. Maybe he figures he can sell it to someone. Luther Hawkins called up and said somebody stole a chain saw out of his garage. Petey lives a couple blocks away. The deputies picked up Hawkins, drove over to Petey's house and found the chain saw on his back porch. So they hauled Petey to jail.”