TheCart Before the Corpse (6 page)

Geoff cradled the phone under his cheek, shucked his coat and hung it up. His extra-large mug of coffee steamed on his desk blotter where it wouldn’t make a mark on the top. He wanted that coffee badly. He did
not
want Amos Royden trying to embroil him in Georgia police politics. “If he brought us in, he’d be admitting his presence didn’t awe the criminal element into total submission.”

“Governor Bigelow does not think that way. A few years back, he let his momma, Ardalene, bring in a bunch of convicts to landscape her garden.”

Geoff leaned back in his chair and ran his hand down the back of his head. His coffee looked cool enough to drink without causing major damage to the roof of his mouth. One sip told him he’d been wrong, so he set it down again. He’d never courted pain. “I heard about that. Didn’t they plant a bunch of opium poppies in the side yard?”

“Pretty things. Big orange red blooms. Pity the Governor’s security detail had to pull them all out and dispose of them.” Amos hesitated. “I’ve always wondered just how they did that. If they burned ’em in the incinerator at the dump they’d have turned Bigelow into one giant opium den. Whole county would have been stoned. Vast improvement, come to think of it.”

“Bet there wasn’t a dry eye in the prison when they heard they got caught,” Geoff said. “Actually, it might have quieted down the hard cases for a while if they’d gotten away with it.” He hesitated and tried the coffee again. Good to go. “I still can’t come up there and butt into the Sheriff Campbell’s investigation.”

“What investigation? I just spent half an hour on the phone with him and twenty minutes talking to the medical examiner in Bigelow. The sheriff’s ignoring the medical examiner’s preliminary findings that the man was knocked out first and then had his throat crushed by a carriage wheel.”

“Hell of a way to die if it actually was murder and not a crazy accident.”

“Oh, it was murder all right,” Amos said. Then he chuckled. “Peggy Caldwell, one of our leading citizens, who has read entirely too many Agatha Christie’s, came into my office this morning before I had my
first
cup of coffee to show me a bunch of what she called ‘crime scene photos.’”

Geoff choked on his coffee. “Say what? The last thing we need is some dotty Miss Marple turning an accident into a killing to amuse her bridge club. Where the heck did she get the photos?”

“Took ’em on her digital camera before the cops arrived. Darn good, too. Shot everything I would have shot. Thing is, Geoff, after talking to her and the medical examiner and going over those photos, I’m as certain as I can be without seeing what happened first hand that something’s not right about Hiram’s Lackland’s death.” He took a long breath. “If you can’t investigate the death, then come up here and investigate the break-in at Lackland’s apartment that happened last night. Got to be connected.”

“Could have been one of your local felons who figured the pickins were good and the coast was clear. What was taken?”

“At first glance, not a thing, but whoever did it made one hell of a mess.”

Geoff leaned back in his chair and ran his hand over his head. “C’mon, Amos. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation also does not send officers at my level to penny-ante break-ins where nothing was taken in burgs like Mossy Creek that have their own estimable police forces led by police chiefs of exemplary character.”

“
Riiigght
. Look, Geoff, the guy was murdered. He was a nice guy, and he chose Mossy Creek to start up his retirement business. I don’t give a hoot whether he was actually offed in Mossy Creek proper. I feel personally responsible and really pissed off. The mayor’s placing Hiram’s place in the Mossy Creek reserve zone, so we can say it’s technically under our jurisdiction. Ida loves doing sneaky, underhanded things to Bigelow. She’ll make it happen, but maybe not right away, and right away is when I need you. Consider it a personal favor.”

“It’s not by the book.”

“The heck with the book, Geoff. For God’s sake unbutton your damned starched collar before you choke yourself. You can be the most hidebound, ornery, stuff-shirted, stiff-necked pencil-pushing . . . ”

“That’s because doing it by the book wins cases against defense lawyers, my friend. My cases do not get thrown out of court on technicalities, nor do the people I arrest get off because some tech screwed up. Or I did, which is worse.”

“So don’t screw up. Find the right killer, make the case and get the SOB out of Mossy Creek.”

“Amos, you do not need me. You are a fine officer.”

“I am not an investigator. I’m a keep-the-peace policeman. I’m the kind of cop that when somebody says, ‘round up the usual suspects,’ I know who they are, where they are, and what they probably did. Not this time. I’m out of my depth and out of my league. Damn it, Geoff, I want this guy. You can get him.” He paused. “Besides, you owe me.”

Wheeler leaned back in his desk chair and propped his shoes on the edge of his metal wastebasket. “I knew you’d bring that up sooner or later. How long before we’re even? Blackmail is a crime.”

“What blackmail?”

Silence. Finally, Wheeler said, “All right. I’ll give it ten days max.
If
I can get my superiors to agree, and if you’ll promise me that your mayor will cover my ass.”

“I’ll call her this minute. I can almost guarantee she’ll call the powers that be at the GBI herself. Wait a couple of hours before you bring this up to your superiors. Thanks, Geoff.”

“Up yours, old friend,” Wheeler said and hung up the phone.

He swiveled in his chair and aligned his telephone carefully with the edge of his desk blotter. A cluttered desk meant a cluttered mind, and a cluttered mind missed things. His colleagues called him a fuss-budget. They also said he had a ramrod up his back. They could call him anything they liked so long as he made cases that stood up in court.

Amos’s case should be relatively simple. Chances were the man had been killed either by a friend, family member, or employee. From the crime scene Amos had described, an opportunistic killing seemed a remote possibility.

Normal people really did want to confess if given the chance. He was a genius at convincing them he truly understood why they had done what they had done.

He didn’t.

Most killers fell into a kind of no-man’s land, where the inability to control a sudden rage led to a bloody corpse on the floor. Those people were generally appalled at what they had done. They tried to hide, of course. Nobody ever really wanted to pay for crimes committed, but sooner or later they broke and confessed.

He hoped the killer of this man in Mossy Creek would be one of those.

His gut told him otherwise.

Chapter 9

Monday Morning

Merry

“I’ve got time to drive out to Hiram’s place and check on those horses before I meet Sheriff Campbell in Bigelow,” I said to Peggy. “Just tell me how to find it.

“I’ll drive you. You won’t find it yourself,” she said. “Not without MapQuest, a GPS and the triple A.”

“You don’t want to get stuck with me,” I said. “I have to meet Sheriff Campbell, but I’ll probably spend the rest of the day at the farm.”

“Then I’ll drive my own car and you can follow me in your truck. That way I can turn you over to Jacob Yoder and come home to wait for the locksmith to change the locks on Hiram’s your apartment.”

“May I take you to dinner tonight? Give me a chance to see some of Mossy Creek.”

I expected her to hem and haw, but she accepted readily. “I’d be delighted. We have a good restaurant in Mossy Creek that doesn’t cost a fortune or serve tall food.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Those stacks of puff pastry, one sixth of a zucchini and an ounce of steak drenched with brown goo in the center of a big white plate. Always makes me want to stop at Wendy’s on the way home. No tall food at Mama’s. You’ll like it.”

Sounded like my kind of place. We climbed into our respective vehicles and drove out of town to see where my father had died.

Fog still lay in the hollows as we left Mossy Creek and drove along a two-lane back road between thick woods. This high the trees were not yet fully leafed—two weeks behind where they had been in Tennessee—but gave off a green glow.

This was pretty country. Property around Aiken and Southern Pines is so expensive that only the rich-rich can afford land, but this looked like a reasonable alternative, especially if Hiram had found flat land on top of his hill. It was on a general line from Southern Pines down to Ocala and Wellington, Florida, where most of the full-time horse people spent a couple of months each winter. Easy to drop off and pick up horses for training and carriages for repair or restoration.

Easy, as well, to pick up a load of drugs in south Florida and drop it off in Atlanta. I shook my head. I refused to think of Hiram as a drug mule until I was forced to.

The curvy back road was impossible to drive fast. Good thing, since deer bounded across in front of Peggy’s car twice. Once, a half dozen good-sized does bounced from the bank on one side and disappeared instantly on the other down a narrow trail between the trees. Then a doe with a pair of dappled fawns sprinted across and into a fog bank on the downhill slope. I even saw a cock pheasant strolling along the grass verge with his tail dragging in the gravel. He barely turned his head as we passed.

For the last few years, I’ve lived in fastidiously groomed flat country in Kentucky. This place with its wild woodlands, hills and dells called to me. I could feel my shoulders relax, even though I was going to the site of my father’s death.

“You did good, Hiram,” I whispered. I was happy he’d been able to enjoy his farm for a few months. He should have had years. If things had worked out between us, we might have shared those years. “Whoever did this, I hate you!” I snarled and hit the steering wheel.

Ahead of me Peggy’s right turn signal came on, and she slowed. At first I couldn’t see where she planned to turn, then I saw a pair of thigh high boulders marking either side of a gravel drive that curved up and seemed to disappear into the forest. Peggy was right. I’d have driven right by if she hadn’t showed me where to turn.

The drive followed the twists and turns at the edge of the hillside. On the right, the trees and underbrush walked straight up out of sight. On the left—without a sign of a guardrail, mind you—I could stare down into a shallow valley. We drove over a drainage pipe laid under the road that allowed water to cascade from a small waterfall and down into a stream that I could barely glimpse through the trees at the bottom. If that causeway ever gave way, the road would give way as well, marooning anyone at the top of the hill.

Surely there must be another way down.

Just when I had decided we were driving up Mt. Everest, Peggy turned a final curve, and the road flattened out into a large gravel parking area in front of a big old barn, freshly painted red and sporting a new metal roof. This must be the barn where Peggy found Hiram.

I pulled in alongside her car. On the left edge of the parking area a white diesel crew cab four-by-four truck was parked, and past the truck, nose facing out, stood a thirty-foot extra tall, extra wide, aluminum gooseneck stock trailer. Neither truck nor trailer was new, but looked well tended. The trailer had a wide side door that could be used to load carriages. Hiram’s truck, Hiram’s trailer. He always took good care of his trucks and trailers.

Where were the horses? Where was this Jacob Yoder?

As I climbed out of my truck to join Peggy, a scream of pure rage rent the air, and I jumped a foot. Took me a second to realize what I’d heard. A donkey bray is like nothing else in the universe. Some of them start off with a series of grunts like a lion gearing up to roar, then they let fly. Some, like this one, started off at top decibel level and kept on. And on.

“That’s Don Quixote, known as Don Qui,” Peggy said as she disappeared around the left side of the barn. “That’s his ‘where in Sam Hill is my breakfast’ bray.”

An instant later he was joined by the whinnies of several horses.

“I thought you said this Jacob Yoder was looking after them,” I said.

“He was certainly supposed to. Hiram will kill him . . . Sorry, I keep forgetting.”

Beyond the original barn, which, from the height of its eaves, looked as though it might at one time have been used to dry tobacco, I saw Hiram’s new stable across a track that ran at right angles behind the old barn. The stable was gleaming tan metal with a brass ventilation cupola on top.

Standing in the paddock beside it, five equines stared at us with baleful dark eyes. The smallest and obviously the most annoyed was Don Qui, three feet of miniature donkey with ears nearly as long as his face. He cut off in mid-bray when he saw us and glared, certain he’d gotten his point across.

Next to him stood a tubby Halflinger pony, gold with a flowing flaxen mane and tail. Then came a pair of dark bays approximately sixteen hands high. Morgan, maybe, or Standard bred off the trotting track, or even some sort of European warmblood. The final horse dwarfed the others. Solid black with flowing mane, and probably feathered hooves hidden in the dewy grass, he stood at least seventeen hands and undoubtedly tipped the scales around a ton. His back was as broad as the average loveseat. Had to be a Friesian.

“They should have been fed hours ago,” I said. “They swear they haven’t been, but horses lie like rugs when it comes to food. Where is this Jacob person, anyway?”

“I am coming, blast you,” said a gravelly male voice. A moment later a man I assumed was Jacob Yoder stepped out of the new stable. Since he stopped dead when he saw Peggy and me, he’d been damning his charges and not us.

He had several halters and lead ropes over his shoulder. I couldn’t see his face because of the long-billed baseball cap he wore, but Central Casting would have hired him to play Ichabod Crane in a heartbeat. I probably weighed more than he did, and he stood at least six four. His bib overalls hung on him like faded blue elephant skin.

“Morning,” I said and walked to him with my hand outstretched. “Could you use a hand getting them in?”