Zero at the Bone (16 page)

Sharb rested his pen on the notebook and ran a hand over his jaw, making a rasping noise. “We’ll look into that as soon as the banks open in the morning. You have any theories about it you might want to share with me?”

Katherine shook her head. “What’s happened, Lieutenant?” Sensing it was going to be unpleasant, she pulled her head in a little tighter to her shoulders, to get ready. She noticed that her hunger had vanished.

Sharb kept his hand cupping his jaw, partly covering his mouth as he spoke. “Mr. Travis Hammond was found four hours ago on his ranch in Kingsland by some deer hunters—legitimate ones, it’s archery season, and they’re licensed for it. He was impaled on the antler of a dead buck. Both him and the buck had been dead for many hours, probably since early morning. The hunters are being treated for shock. I’ve just come from there and I can’t say I blame them.” He shook his head. “Ugly scene.”

He rubbed hard at the reddened lower rim of one eye as he looked at Katherine. “What do you think of that? Another animal gone berserk. Maybe it’s the beginning of a general uprising, huh, where they’re going to revolt and take over the world. What do you think?”

Katherine felt very cold. All that time she had been calling him, angry and demanding, the old man had been lying dead. She folded her arms around herself and saw behind her eyelids the frail old attorney making an impassioned plea for her not to judge so harshly the mistakes that others made when they were young. “He certainly wasn’t killed by a deer,” she thought. She was surprised when Sharb answered because she didn’t know she’d spoken it aloud.

“No more than your father was killed by a tiger. I want a word-by-word description of your conversation with him yesterday. Everything. If he said it looked like rain, I want to hear about it.”

Katherine repeated everything she could remember about the interview. Then she added, “He seemed very nervous, worried, anxious, but I don’t know what he’s usually like.”

“Well, I should think he would be nervous after getting that note.”

“Note?”

“Just like the one your father had in his hip pocket when he was murdered.”

Katherine sat forward in her chair, her heart racing. “What note?”

“A warning note. It said”—he closed his eyes and recited—“‘Lester, Put your house in order. Justice is nigh. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Pointman.’”

“And Mr. Hammond had a note like that, too?”

He gave a nod. “Came in the mail about a week ago. His secretary, the little granddaughter, saw it when she opened the mail. She said he was indeed very nervous the last week. He may have destroyed the note because we haven’t been able to find it.”

He started to lean back in the chair, but discovered it was so deep, he couldn’t do it and keep his feet on the floor, so he perched uncomfortably back on the edge. “Now, Miss Driscoll, if you got a note like that, wouldn’t you go to the police with it?”

Katherine didn’t answer. She was thinking of her father’s asking her to come soon and wondering if the note had had anything to do with his haste.

Sharb prodded. “Unless you were up to something, huh? Is that what you’re thinking?”

“Was there a date on the note?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“I was wondering if the note had anything to do with my father writing me to come to Austin. He stressed urgency.” Again she was astonished that she had spoken aloud. Something about Sharb got her talking. Whatever technique he was using seemed to be working.

Sharb, for the first time, smiled at her, showing tiny, crowded teeth. “I was wondering that, too. And you know what else? I’m wondering if your coming has something to do with these events. After all, you arrive to see Lester Renfro, he’s just been killed. You have a meeting with Travis Hammond, you call him on the phone, and he’s killed. Is this just a coincidence? Are you bad luck—some sort of catalyst?”

Katherine instantly saw an image of herself arriving in town yesterday, brimming with anger and bitterness, so wrapped up in her own concerns she couldn’t see past her nose. In spite of all her efforts to stop them, tears filled her eyes and spilled out. “I’m wondering, too,” she said.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t do that. I didn’t mean to—just don’t do that.” He jumped to his feet and stood looking down at her. He pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket, looked at it and stuffed it back in quickly.

Katherine didn’t know what was happening to her. She never used to cry, hadn’t cried for years, and here she was dissolving into tears at any provocation. In front of strangers. She used the back of her hand to wipe her face.

He held a palm up to her. “Now, okay. Don’t be so sensitive. I really didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I meant I wonder why this is happening now, if your coming could have anything to do with it. But please don’t do that.”

Katherine looked up at him with wet eyes. It was surprising to see the effect her tears had on him. He didn’t seem to be a man who would be bothered, but since it had caught his attention, she might as well get something out of it. She lowered her eyes and sniffed. “Please tell me the other things, about my father’s … murder. You feel certain it was murder.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. It was.” He held up a stubby forefinger. “Number one is the note. Someone—this pointman—has been threatening him.” He raised his middle finger. “Number two is the wire. You know that the glass in the window was reinforced with wire. The window could have been broken from outside by a tiger, but the wire is another matter. It was cut absolutely clean. My man in the lab tells me even a tiger from Hell couldn’t do that. Only a very sharp pair of wire-cutters.”

He held up three fingers now and shook them for emphasis. “Number three is the traces of rotten meat on the inside of the door and on the threshold. This one I’m real proud of ’cause not many of my colleagues would’ve been thorough enough to analyze the back of the door. Now McElroy and Dieterlen tell me the tigers are always fed in their cages. The food comes from the kitchen, they cart it in through the main door. It never goes into that little room. It would just never be there, so it wasn’t the remains of zoo food. And four…” He looked up at her shyly, as if reluctant to tell her what four was, but then continued. “Four is that on your father’s skin and clothes, even in his hair and eyebrows, we found traces of rotten meat, the same as on the door—beef, they think.”

Katherine had never listened so intently in her life. She found she was actually leaning forward and turning one ear toward him.

He stopped his recital, but continued to hold the four fingers aloft. Katherine heard the heavy sound of her own breathing as she began to spin the story in her head.

“Now,” he said, “can you make something of all that? Assume it was murder, just to humor me, and tell me how it could be done. You’re an animal trainer. Must know something about animals, I suppose. Give me a scenario.”

She nodded slowly and spoke as if in a trance. “The murderer picks a day when the cats had been fasting and are really hungry,” she began.

“Good, good!” He smiled at her. “Go on.”

“He or she somehow gets in early without being seen or stays all night. That wouldn’t be hard for an employee, I think. He brings a piece of rotten meat to excite the tiger. He … rubs it on the door to keep the tiger right there. He brings wire-cutters.” She paused, visualizing the tiger house, the tiny concrete room.

“Let’s see. When my father gets there at six-fifteen, he … oh, hits him on the head or chokes him, or, if he’s very strong, breaks his neck. Then, oh God, then he rubs the meat all over him and pushes him out into the exhibit. He breaks the window, using I don’t know what, something heavy, but some of the wire won’t give way. He’s anticipated that, though, and he has his wire-cutters.”

Sharb looked at her, nodding, his black eyes shining. “Just the way I see it.” Then he lifted his notebook a few inches and slapped it sharply against his knee. “But why go to all that trouble? Why not just knock him off?”

“Well, in my father’s case, he almost pulled it off, getting everyone to think the tiger did it.”

“Yeah. But this deer thing—who would believe a man was gored by a deer? C’mon. Why go to all the trouble to make it look that way? Think about it: the nut’d have to go out, shoot the deer—it was shot with an arrow—then shoot the lawyer, looks like he was arrow-shot, too, right in the chest, then drag the deer to the lawyer or the lawyer to the deer, and then hoist the lawyer up onto the antler and stick one of the prongs, whatever you call them—I’m no hunter—into the wound of the arrow. Looks like that’s what he did. Jesus.”

Katherine was silent, absorbing it. Then she said, “You seem certain the same killer did both these.”

He lifted his open palms and rolled his eyes up. “Hell, yes. Aren’t you? Travis Hammond’s granddaughter can’t duplicate the threat note exactly, but when we showed her the one from Lester Renfro’s pocket, she confirmed that the handwriting, the paper, and the sentiments were almost exactly the same on the one that came in the mail addressed to Hammond. Sure, the same man did these murders.

“And you know something, Miss Driscoll? He’s a real evil son of a bitch. I know it. I have a foolproof technique for detecting them. You know how I do it? The hair on the back of my fingers stands straight up. Here. Look at that.” He held out the back of his stubby hand for Katherine to examine. The thick black hairs on his fingers were standing erect.

“Causes a prickly feeling when I get into something like this.” He looked down at his notebook for the first time, flipped the page and read for a minute, moving his lips slightly. “Let me ask you something else. What is the connection between your father and Travis Hammond? I know Hammond drew up your father’s will and was handling his estate, but what else do you know about their relationship?”

“Nothing but what I’ve already told you. Mr. Hammond was the attorney for the Driscolls. He told me yesterday that he met my father when he married my mother, but he didn’t really get to know him well until they worked together a few years ago on the committee for planning the new Phase Two cat exhibits.”

“But if he’s been receiving money for twenty-nine years, he was lying. There must be more to it,” Sharb said.

Katherine nodded. “Yes. There must have been.”

“We’ll get on that right away. You can count on it.”

“Oh,” Katherine said, “this probably doesn’t have anything to do with it, but my mother always felt very friendly toward Travis Hammond, really the only person in Austin she felt that way about. She kept in touch with him, until she got sick a few years ago.”

Sharb nodded.

“Really I think my uncle, Cooper Driscoll, might know more about the relationship between Mr. Hammond and my father.”

“Yeah. I plan to ask him about it when I finish with you. He had two calls on Hammond’s answering machine, too. Big stick at the zoo, Cooper Driscoll, big stick all over town, huh? Though I hear he’s had some financial setbacks of a major kind.”

“So I hear. I just met him tonight for the first time. Well, the first time since I was five.”

“Izzat right? Why’s that?”

“There was a—well, I don’t know what you’d call it—a rift, I guess, in the family when my mother and I moved away, not just a rift with my father, but with her family, too. And we just never saw any of them again after that.”

“Yeah. But why not?”

“Oh, the usual. I’m sure you see it all the time. My parents got divorced. My mother felt alienated and rejected by her family.” Katherine squirmed in her chair. This was not something she liked talking about. And anyway, it was irrelevant.

“Yeah,” Sharb persisted, “I’ve seen some real humdingers of … what do you call it? Rifts. But usually people get back together eventually with their families, their parents and brothers and sisters. But not your family. So what happened?”

Katherine felt suddenly pressured, and warm. It was stuffy with the door closed. “Well, I’m not sure. There was a fight.” She lowered her eyelids and remembered:
I woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night. There was screaming and running. I was shivering, terrified of … something.
“My mother and I left my father,” she said.
My mother, hysterical, weeping, grabbed me by the arm, dragged me out of the house, into the car.
“It was pretty awful, even thinking about it now. Everyone was mad at everyone.”
I ran back to say good-bye. The dog, the dog I had loved and who had loved me in return, sprawled on the bedroom floor, eyes and mouth wide open.
“I don’t know exactly what it was about. I was only five and I just don’t remember.”

Katherine lifted her lids. “It can’t matter now.” That was more than she’d said about that time to anyone, ever.

When the phone on the table next to Sharb’s chair began to shrill, they both stared at it until it stopped. Then Sophie came thudding down the hall and knocked on the door. “Phone for you, Lieutenant Sharb,” she called, breathless, through the door.

“I got it,” he said, picking it up. “Sharb here.” He listened and said, “Good. A half hour more here. I need to talk to Mr. Driscoll, then I’ll need to pick up from Miss Katherine Driscoll some canceled checks we need to look into tomorrow, at a bank in Belton. Then I’ll be in. Okey dokey?”

He put down the phone and looked at Katherine. “Travis Hammond was killed with an arrow for sure. He’d gone out early to hunt, wanted to take advantage of the season, his wife said. Avid hunter. This will come out in the press tomorrow, Miss Driscoll. So will the new information about your father’s death. You should prepare for the publicity. What are your plans?”

“I’m going to stay in Austin awhile, get things settled. And I start working at the zoo tomorrow,” she said.

His mouth gaped open for a moment. “Why?”

“I need the money. You know about my financial problems in Boerne, and all my father left me was a couple of Lean Cuisines in the freezer, so I asked Sam McElroy for a job.”

He began snapping his pen furiously for a minute. Then he said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

He stuck his arm out toward her and turned it over so she was looking down on the back of his hand. The hairs between the knuckles still stood erect and, in spite of herself, she felt the prickle on her own hairless fingers.