The Wild Hog Murders (5 page)

“Right,” Ivy said. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. “Sometimes I forget how careful you are.”

She left, and Rhodes finished the cereal. Sam looked at him as if hoping Rhodes would give him the milk that was left in the bowl.

“You wouldn’t like it,” Rhodes said. “Trust me.”

He ran water in the bowl, then put it and the spoon in the dishwasher.

“You behave yourself today,” he told Sam, but the cat didn’t deign to answer. The cat never did.

*   *   *

The crime scene looked hopeless. The churned-up ground didn’t take tracks, and no one had helpfully dropped a driver’s license. Rhodes scanned the area for more than an hour without turning up a thing.

He had a feeling that Ruth Grady was having the opposite kind of luck in fingerprinting the car. She would be finding more prints than they could possibly sort out. Maybe she’d find something useful in the car itself, but Rhodes didn’t think it was likely.

The county had bought a metal detector a few years back, and Rhodes had brought it along. He wasn’t going to give up on the scene until he’d tried everything. He slipped on the headphones and turned on the machine.

After another half hour, he was ready to quit, but he kept going. After ten more minutes, he got a faint signal. It took him a few seconds to zero in on the object, which was hidden under a leaf in a hog track.

A shell casing. Rhodes picked up a convenient nearby stick and stuck it in the casing’s opening. He put the casing in a paper bag and set it aside while he searched some more.

Eventually he quit without finding a second. Either the shooter had picked it up or it had eluded him. Well, one was good enough, Rhodes figured. Now all he had to do was find a gun to match it to. It was possible, even likely, that the killer had ditched the gun—in a creek, in a ditch, even somewhere else in the woods. If he hadn’t, however, the shell casing might very well prove useful later on.

Rhodes gave up on the crime scene after another half hour and walked back through the woods. He didn’t know where the hogs holed up during the daytime, but he was sure they weren’t anywhere nearby. Or if they were, they were quiet and well hidden. If there was any solution to the problems they caused, Rhodes didn’t know what it was. Live traps didn’t work. Hunting didn’t work. Rhodes wouldn’t be surprised if the whole countryside was overrun by hogs before long, and after that the towns.

He got back to the car and started for the Chandler place. He’d just turned around when a call came through from Hack.

“Mikey Burns has the answer,” Hack said.

“The answer to what?” Rhodes asked.

“The hogs.”

“He told you that?”

“He just got off the phone.”

“What’s the answer?” Rhodes immediately regretted asking. He knew Hack wouldn’t tell him.

“You’ll have to ask him,” Hack said.

“He didn’t tell you?

“He did, but you oughta hear it from him.”

“I can hardly wait,” Rhodes said.

*   *   *

Mikey Burns was a county commissioner, and he and Rhodes had a prickly relationship. Burns never seemed to think Rhodes was doing his job as well as it could be done by someone who was smarter and quicker on the uptake, but since Rhodes had won the previous election by a landslide, having run unopposed, Burns was stuck with him.

Burns’s most recent great idea was to have the county buy an M-16, the kind of gun that could fire nearly a thousand rounds a minute and take out a tank, that is, if any terrorists in tanks happened to invade Blacklin County, a possibility that Rhodes considered more remote than Burns did. The purchase had fallen through, and Burns hadn’t been happy about it.

The county barn where Burns kept his office was a big metal building with long covered sheds in back where the road equipment for Burns’s precinct was kept. The office was in the building in front, and it was presided over by Mrs. Wilkie, a woman who’d once had it in mind that she and Rhodes would make a good team. She’d given up on that idea, and she was now pursuing Mikey Burns.

She patted her orange hair and gave Rhodes a cool look when he entered. Rhodes thought about warning her against workplace romance, but he just smiled and asked if Mikey was available.

“
Mr. Burns
is in,” she said. “You may go in.”

“Thanks,” Rhodes said, and he went through the connecting door to Burns’s office.

Burns’s name was Michael, of course, but everyone called him Mikey. Rhodes had a feeling that Mrs. Wilkie did, too, when no one was around.

Burns stood up at his desk. He wore, as usual, a bright aloha shirt, this one something in green and yellow with coconuts and palm trees on it.

“Hack tells me you have an answer to the hog problem,” Rhodes said.

“I do,” Burns said. “Have a seat.”

Rhodes sat in one of the two chairs in the office, and Burns settled down behind his desk.

“All right,” Rhodes said. “Tell me. What’s the answer.”

“Robin Hood,” Burns said.

Chapter 5

Rhodes knew who Robin Hood was. He had no connection to either Errol Flynn or Sherwood Forest.

“Robin Hood?” Rhodes said. “You mean Dr. Qualls?”

Dr. William Qualls was a retired college professor who’d moved to Blacklin County to escape the big-city life, and some of the humidity, that he’d had to put up with in Houston. Qualls bought himself a house in the country, where he’d found himself living near a huge chicken farm that as far as Qualls was concerned had polluted the county’s air with its stink for far too long. As a way of protesting what he saw as a lack of concern on the part of county officials, Qualls had begun sticking notes to telephone poles with arrows. He’d even shot an arrow into one of the tires on Burns’s prized red Pontiac Solstice.

“Not Qualls,” Burns said.

The commissioner’s mouth twisted as he spoke the name. The professor had paid his fine after being caught, but he hadn’t served ten years in the state pen, which was what Burns had planned for him.

“Who, then?” Rhodes said.

“Bow hunters.”

“Bow hunters?”

“That’s what I said. Lots of people like to hunt those hogs, but they’re not organized, and hunting at night is dangerous. So is hunting with rifles. What we’d do is get the bow hunters organized, send them out in the daytime with a deputy leading them. Or if not a deputy, maybe a graduate of the Citizens’ Sheriff’s Academy.”

Rhodes thought about some of the graduates. Seepy Benton came to mind.

“That might not be such a good idea,” Rhodes said.

“Bow hunting? It’s a lot safer than hunting with a rifle. The arrows don’t carry too far, so nobody’s likely to get hurt. How many hogs has that animal control officer of yours trapped this month? Five? Ten?”

Boyd wasn’t Rhodes’s animal control officer. He worked for the county, but Rhodes knew it wouldn’t do him any good to try to correct Burns, who hadn’t even given Rhodes a chance to tell him it was the academy grads and not the bow hunting that wasn’t such a good idea.

“He averages about twenty a month,” Rhodes said. “He has a lot of other things to do.”

“I know,” Burns said. “That’s why we need the bow hunters. A good team of them could hunt down no telling how many hogs in a month. Even if they didn’t kill a lot of them, people would at least see that we were trying to do something about the hogs.” He paused and looked at Rhodes. “And it’s a lot better than bringing in people in helicopters.”

“It hasn’t come to that yet,” Rhodes said. “Have you talked to your constituents about this?”

Burns sat forward in his chair. “What does that mean?”

“It means that Mrs. Chandler’s in your precinct. She doesn’t like people who hunt hogs. She’d like someone who organized hunts even less.”

“I see what you mean,” Burns said. He leaned back. “She has a lot of money, too. She might try to get someone to run against me.”

“She might even run against you herself,” Rhodes said.

“Hah. She wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“Maybe not, but if someone saw a chance to step in and make it a three-person race…”

“I still think bow hunting’s a good idea.”

“Maybe so,” Rhodes said, “but not for my department. We enforce the law. We don’t lead hunting parties.”

“If the deputies were off duty…”

“No,” Rhodes said. “Not even then.”

“I knew you wouldn’t go for it,” Burns said. He flicked the front of his shirt with his fingers as if getting rid of a pesky speck of dirt. “You’re never receptive to new ideas.”

Rhodes knew Burns was thinking about the M-16. He hoped the commissioner didn’t want to start that discussion again, though the M-16 would indeed be effective against the hogs as long as you didn’t mind all the collateral damage that was certain to ensue.

“You talk to the other commissioners,” Rhodes said. “If they want to get some hunting parties together, that’s up to them, and to you. Just don’t ask my department for help.”

“You wouldn’t try to stop us?”

“Not if all your hunters have licenses.”

“Hogs aren’t game animals.”

“You need a license to hunt them all the same,” Rhodes said. “You can check with the game warden if you don’t believe me.”

Burns didn’t respond to that, not directly. He said, “Maybe it’s not such a good idea after all. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

Rhodes stood up. Burns apparently hadn’t heard about the murder yet, and Rhodes didn’t intend to tell him. Burns would find out soon enough, and then he’d berate Rhodes for not having brought in any suspects.

“If I come up with any good ideas about getting rid of the hogs,” Rhodes said, “I’ll let you know.”

“You did all right with the chicken farm,” Burns said.

“That wasn’t me. That was Qualls.”

Through a series of events, including murder, Qualls had found himself the owner of the very farm he’d protested against. He’d taken all the right steps to clean things up, and the air in Blacklin County was the better for it. Not perfect, but better.

“You never like to take credit, do you, Sheriff,” Burns said.

Rhodes hadn’t thought about it, so he shook his head.

“I know we don’t always get along,” Burns said, “but sometimes you do good work. Now get out of here and do some of it.”

Rhodes didn’t know exactly how to respond, so he just said, “I’ll try,” and left.

*   *   *

Rhodes’s next stop was the jail, where he put the shell casing in the evidence locker.

“You gonna buy you a bow and arrow?” Hack said after Rhodes logged the evidence. “Get you a green outfit with a feather in the cap?”

“I do look a little like Errol Flynn,” Rhodes said.

Hack laughed. “’Bout as much as I do.”

He might have carried on with the conversation, but Jennifer Loam came in. She was a reporter for the
Clearview Herald.
Rhodes had often thought she’d move on to some bigger and better newspaper. She had the ability and talent, but now that big-city newspapers were laying off reporters and their daily editions were shrinking to the size of the
Herald,
Jennifer wasn’t going anywhere.

“Good morning, Mr. Jensen,” she said to Hack. “Good morning, Sheriff.”

Rhodes and Hack said, “Good morning,” and waited. Rhodes knew what was coming.

“I’d like to get a statement about the murder last night,” Jennifer said.

Rhodes knew she checked the reports every morning. He said, “You already know as much as I do.”

Loam was blond and had innocent blue eyes. She looked young and harmless, but she was professional and tenacious. She didn’t let Rhodes get away with that.

“You were there,” she said. “I wasn’t. Maybe you have a few more details you’d like to add to the story before I write it down. Or maybe you’d like to reassure people that there’s not a murderer running loose in the county ready to cut their throats while they sleep.”

Rhodes looked at her, and she grinned.

“That’s what the competition is saying,” she told him.

“Milton Munday,” Rhodes said. He didn’t listen to the show. It got his blood pressure up. “It figures.”

“What else is he sayin’?” Hack asked.

“Aside from the fact that the sheriff is incompetent, that nobody is safe, and that we should all lock our doors at night?” Jennifer asked.

“Yeah,” Hack said. “Aside from that.”

“Not much.”

Munday thrived on fear, other people’s fear, and it worked for him. Rhodes didn’t think he’d be a resident of the county for long. Radio, unlike newspapers, wasn’t dying, and Munday seemed destined for bigger markets.

“You think he believes any of that?” Hack asked.

Jennifer shrugged. “Who knows? I can give you a little fairness and balance, though, Sheriff. Just give me something to work with.”

“We’re doing all we can,” Rhodes said, “but that’s not much. We don’t have any suspects, and we don’t have anybody in custody.”