The Huckleberry Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (4 page)

“Bo!” the driver said. “What the devil you doing out here?”

Tully climbed up on the running board. “Pete, I was trying to pick some huckleberries,” he said, “but before I could get to it, I found three young guys out there in the brush, all of them shot in the back of the head.”

Pete gasped out an obscenity. “What’s the world coming to, Bo? Even way up here in the mountains you got folks getting themselves murdered!”

“As to what the world is coming to, I wish I knew, but I don’t. Have you heard any shots the last few days?”

“Can’t say I have. Oh, you know grouse season is open and occasionally we hear somebody popping off at one of them.”

“Yeah, I suppose. I suspect revolvers were used. Otherwise, the casings would have been flying off into the brush and hard if not impossible for the killers to find. I figure there had to be three shooters. I’ve got Lurch headed up here with a metal detector, and maybe we can find some casings, if the shooters were using automatics.”

Pete said, “We got trucks driving this road constantly, and I’ll spread the word to the other drivers. Maybe one of them heard some shots. There’s a driver either going up or down this road about every half hour. I’ll pass the word, see if anybody’s heard or seen anything.”

“Thanks, Pete. They may know something useful.” Tully dropped back to the ground. Pete gave him a little wave, and the truck went growling down the mountain.

Two hours later a caravan of cars came streaming up the road. Tully had built a small castle of rocks and was trying to think of something else to do when they finally arrived. He directed them into the logging road and walked up to the head of the line. They stopped behind his pickup, a hundred feet in front of the dead tree. It was possible Lurch might be
able to find some tread imprints from the shooters’ tires in that hundred feet, even though the women’s Suburban had been driven all the way to the tree. A couple of state patrolmen had joined the group, as well as a U.S. forest ranger. Susan arrived in a coroner’s van, trailed by another van. Stepping out the passenger door, she gave him one of her special smiles. They still hadn’t gotten back together after their last breakup, a result of Tully’s failure to be sufficiently attentive. Oh, yeah, and there had also been his brief affair with Daisy. That was before he made Daisy a deputy and issued her a department gun. It had later occurred to him that it wasn’t such a good idea to issue a gun to a woman with whom you had broken up. He had so many women in his life he might have to hire a secretary to keep track of them. Then he would probably end up having an affair with the secretary. That’s how his life went these days. Not bad, actually.

“Hey, Susan!” he said. “You get to go first.” He pointed down the slope in the direction of the bodies. “If you need some help with your stuff, I’ll haul it down for you.”

She grinned at him. “I know, you’re just trying to be attentive, Bo, but I’ve got some helpers along.” She looked down the slope at the bodies and shook her head. “This is just so terrible!”

“Yeah.” He remained on the road. Observing medical examiners at their work was not on his list of favorite activities.

Lurch hauled his metal detector over. Tully pointed out where he thought the shooters must have stood, and the Unit began sweeping the instrument back and forth. Nothing.
“Looks as if they picked up their casings, boss. Or maybe they were using revolvers.”

“Give it another pass down the slope a ways.”

Lurch walked a few steps down toward the bodies, swinging the detector back and forth. The instrument beeped.

“What is it?” Tully asked.

Lurch bent down and picked up the object. “A bottle cap.” He cocked his arm as if to throw the cap off into the brush.

“Stop!” Tully yelled. “Let me see it.”

Lurch climbed back up the slope and handed him the cap. “You think the killers took time out to share a beer?”

“Who knows?” Tully looked at the cap. “It’s a twist-off, Lurch. Dos Equis. Mexican beer. Look around and see if you can find the bottle. We could get fingerprints off the bottle. If you can’t find a Dos Equis bottle here, I want you to check the brush on each side of the road all the way back to that downed tree.”

Lurch shook his head. “You want to arrest these killers for littering?”

“Just see if you can find me the bottle, Lurch!”

“Maybe I can get a print off the cap, Bo.”

“Just find me the bottle! The guy twists the cap off the bottle here and starts drinking his beer on the way back to his car. When the bottle is empty, he tosses it out into the brush.”

“Jeez, boss, I’d have to scour ten acres of brush!”

“What else do you have to do? You want to go help Susan?”

“Only kidding. I’ll go look for the bottle.” He sighed and started scanning the brush.

“If you find it, Lurch, don’t mess up any possible prints.”

“Thanks, boss. I’d never have thought of that.”

Dave Perkins came walking up. He wore a buckskin shirt, jeans, and moccasins. His long gray hair hung in a thick braid down his back.

“I see you’re wearing your tracking clothes,” Tully said.

“Yeah, they help me concentrate.” He glanced down at Susan and the three bodies. “Some really bad people running around nowadays. Maybe there always were. These guys look pretty young.”

Tully nodded. “Yeah, I figure none of them is over twenty. No ID on any of them, at least that I could find. I did check their hands. Lots of calluses. I make them out to be farm laborers.”

“Latinos?”

“Nope, all gringos, far as I can tell. They’ve been doing some hard labor, though, and I don’t think they’ve been paid much, if anything. Their clothes are barely holding together.”

Dave squinted down at Susan, then jerked his head around and gave an exaggerated shudder. “I can’t believe you once dated her, Bo.”

“Yeah, it was rough duty, particularly when she rehashed her day’s activities while we were having supper.”

“So what do you want from me, Sheriff?”

Tully told him about the possibility of an intended fourth victim who may have gotten away. “If I had been one of the
intended vics, I’d have been very suspicious of anyone who took me up to pick huckleberries. At the first shot I would have taken off and run like a deer. So I walked down through the berry patch and found a tiny spot of blood on a branch down there. If one guy did get away, he may have been hit pretty hard, but I don’t think so. Still, it’s possible you’ll find his body down the slope somewhere. On the other hand, if he was only nicked by the bullet, maybe he’s alive and out there someplace. If we find him alive, we’ll nail the killers.”

“It’s possible,” Dave said. “Won’t hurt for me to take a look in any case.”

“You come up with Pap?”

“Yeah.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of his truck.

Tully looked back down the road but couldn’t see his father. “I’ll have him drive your rig back to town. Once you’ve cut the track, if there is one, mark it and head out to the road. I’ll pick you up on my way back into town.”

Dave nodded. He circled far out around Susan and the victims and headed down the slope, zigzagging back and forth in order to cut the track, if there was one. Tully watched him until he was out of sight.

Pap came ambling up the road and stood beside him. He wore jeans, a denim work shirt open at the collar, cowboy boots, and a khaki vest similar to his son’s. His thick white hair was cropped close to the scalp. The old man had been out of law enforcement for over ten years but he seemed as fit as ever. “A triple murder! You have all the luck, Bo.”

“Yeah, don’t I?”

Pap stared down at the bodies. “I see you got Susan up here already, along with most of the county. Everybody loves a murder, and here you land a triple. In all my years as sheriff, I didn’t have but two triples.”

“One that you committed?”

Pap blurted out an obscenity. “Those were three bank robbers and you know it! I killed them fair and square! Got plugged three times myself and even was awarded a commendation from the governor.”

“I believe you’ve mentioned that to me a few hundred times. What was the other triple?”

“You made me mad, Bo, so I ain’t going to tell you.”

Tully glanced at his father. The old man was tall and lean, his skin deeply tanned from a lifetime of hunting and fishing and roaming the mountains. “Tell me,” he said. He knew the old man couldn’t resist.

“They was all gamblers. They cooked up a scheme to rip off one of the joints. Not a good idea. It was one of the few crimes I never solved.”

“That because you had an interest in the joint?”

Pap laughed. “That’s for me to know. I see you’ve notified just about everybody in the entire state, Bo. So I was wondering why the FBI hasn’t showed up.”

“The FBI? Why should I notify them?”

“This is a national forest. The last time I looked, national forests were on federal land. The FBI usually likes to investigate murders on federal land.”

“Is that right? I didn’t know. Well, as soon as I get back to
town, I’ll have to give them a call. If I don’t forget. So why do you think these fellows might have been killed?”

“A killing like this, Bo, you got to figure it’s about money.”

“You think these fellows were done for money?”

“Somebody wanted to dispose of them, that’s pretty obvious. The question is why. You usually dispose of a person because you don’t want him blabbing something he knows about you. These fellers look pretty young, from what I can see of them. It’s doubtful any of them knew enough of anything to get them killed. So what does that leave?”

“Beats the heck out of me.”

“You’re so dumb, Bo. The only other sensible reason to kill a person is money.”

“I don’t think these guys had any money at all.”

“Maybe they was killed to keep them that way. And maybe to keep them quiet, too.”

“You may be right.”

BY LATE AFTERNOON, the bodies had been loaded into the coroner’s vans to be hauled back to Susan’s lab. She stood at the edge of the road, her face glistening with sweat, a wisp of hair stuck to her cheek. “I have to find another line of work,” she told Tully.

“Can’t blame you for that,” he said. “So, can you tell me when they were killed?”

“Right now all I can tell you is, within the last couple of days, because—”

“Skip the details, please! Just give me your best estimate.”

“That is my best estimate, Bo. I’ll be able to narrow down the time once I get them back to the lab. If any of them has a record, you might be able to get an ID from his prints. My guess is that at least one of them has been arrested for something
one time or another. You usually don’t meet guys at a church social who wind up shooting you in the back.”

Tully tugged on the corner of his mustache. “Yeah, I guess you’re right about that. Print them for me, please, and I’ll see if Lurch can find a match.”

“I’ll get them over to Byron tonight. Since you keep him working night and day, you might have at least one ID by tomorrow.”

Tully laughed. “Sounds as if you’ve been listening to Lurch complain. Which reminds me, I’ve got him checking out a partial tire track as well as looking for a beer bottle.”

Susan shook her head and climbed into the passenger side of the last van to back out. Other hangers-on had left the scene earlier. A few were standing around in groups out on the Scotchman Peak Road. The Unit came walking up carrying a plaster cast.

“You able to get anything we can use, Lurch?”

“Maybe. The lady pickers’ car pretty much rolled over the top of the lower track, but I was able to cast several inches on the edge. The vehicle that made the lower track had very wide tires. Could even be dual tires. Probably made from the shooters’ tires because the track looks just a bit older than the Suburban’s. Has to be from a truck tire, or maybe a big van. I’m pretty sure if we find the vehicle, we can get a match.”

“A big pickup maybe? Then the shooters would be in the cab, with at least some of our vics riding in the bed.”

“Has to be, if this is a print from one of their vehicle’s tires.”

“Good work, Lurch. I’ll see you back at the office. Did you ever find the Dos Equis bottle that goes with the cap?”

“As a matter of fact I did. I’m not sure if it goes with the cap, but it probably does. It smells pretty fresh.”

“See if you can get a print off it. We don’t have much else to go on.”

“You bet.”

Tully could see Pap out on the road talking to Harvey Grant, the forest ranger. He walked out and joined them. Most of the other vehicles were pulling out and heading down the road.

Tully said to the ranger, “Harvey, I wish you would patrol these woods a little better and cut down on the murders.”

Harvey shook his head. “It’s getting almost as bad as the cities. I personally wouldn’t go out in the mountains anymore without a weapon. And that’s pretty sad, if you ask me. When we were kids, we hiked and camped all over these mountains and never once carried a gun. By the way, I was just telling Pap the FBI is going to be in one hot fuss they weren’t notified, this being federal land.”

Tully smiled. “Must have slipped my mind. On the other hand, I was up here in the woods all by myself. What’s a person to do?”

“You got everybody else alerted. A person can do only so much.”

“That’s right, Harvey. That’ll be my story and I’m sticking to it. Well, I’m sure Pap has been keeping you entertained with accounts of his own murders, but I need him to drive
Dave Perkins’s vehicle back into town. I’ll pick up Dave on my way in.”

“You got Dave out doing some tracking for you?” Harvey said.

“Yeah. I think maybe there was a fourth intended victim, and he might have got away. It’s a long shot, but if anyone can turn up any sign of him, it’ll be Dave.”

Harvey smiled. “It’s probably that Indian blood. He get his casino started yet?”

Tully rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right, Harvey. Over my dead body.”

Pap got in Dave’s pickup, whipped it around on the road, and sent rocks flying over the embankment. He headed down the mountain. Tully shook his head, then drove up to a turnout and made a similar maneuver with his own pickup, only much slower. Then he followed the trail of dust left by Dave’s truck. A mile down the mountain he found Pap and Dave standing at the edge of the road. Pap was constructing one of his hand-rolleds. Tully parked on the edge of the road, got out, and walked over to them. “Find anything, Dave?”