Nailed Page 37

  The mountain lion had cached the mortal remains of Didi DuPree between a sugar pine and a large boulder. Corrie carefully removed the soil, leaves and branches with which the animal had covered its leftovers. Didi was not a pretty sight.

  Both arms were gone, as was the left leg. Didi had been eviscerated, and the cat had packed his chest cavity with dirt to preserve the meat. Didi’s head was still aligned with his shoulders but was separated from them by twelve inches, and his face had been torn off.

  The intermediate scavengers such as coyotes and crows had yet to sup, but legions of bugs were having their turn at the killer turned coldcut.

  Corrie rose and kept her rifle levelled. Oliver had his handgun extended. The safeties of both weapons were off. They both sensed the mountain lion was nearby. A big predator didn’t stray far from the prey it had taken until all the food it could consume was gone.

  The game warden and the deputy chief looked carefully in every direction — including up — to make sure they were not the next entrees on the menu at the Fang ‘n’ Claw Cafe.

  They listened to the sounds of the forest as closely as their hearing would permit.

  As for their sense of smell, they tried their best to ignore it.

  “I do believe Mr. DuPree’s getting a bit ripe,” Oliver said. “Must’ve forgotten his deodorant or something. I think we’d better get his sorry ass tagged and bagged.”

  The deputy chief used his portable radio to summon help to remove the body. The overworked, overanxious Benny Marx showed up thirty minutes later with two other cops, Dr. Ryman, and two attendants from the morgue at Community Hospital. Benny photographed the scene. Dr. Ryman declared the life and times of Didi DuPree to be at an end. The attendants loaded Didi’s available parts into a bag and carried it away. Soon, Corrie and Oliver were left to resume their hunt.

  The deputy chief took his cigarette lighter out of his pocket. He was about to start flicking the top open and shut when he saw Corrie looking at him. He put it back in his pocket.

  “The sonofabitch beat it for a while when the crowd was here,” the deputy chief said of the mountain lion. “You feel that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But now he’s back.”

  “Unh-huh,” Corrie agreed.

  “I hate this shit.”

  “Hasn’t been my favorite hunt, either.”

  Then they moved off carefully through the trees, following the lion’s tracks. Not that they entertained any great hope of killing the animal that day. Or even sighting it. But simply waiting in place for the lion to show itself was too frustrating. Too damn scary, too.

  Guns and all, standing still made them feel like a pair of sacrificial lambs.

  Ron figured Marcus Martin had to want something from him. He thought it was too damn bad the sonofabitch didn’t wear a hat. He’d have loved to see Marcus come through his door with one in his hand.

  He knew Marcus hadn’t come to threaten or bluster. If that had been the case, the lawyer would have demanded to see the chief. No, he was here to ask a favor. It was always sweet to see your enemies humbled, Ron thought, but right now he didn’t have time.

  So, as soon as the lawyer sat down in a guest chair, the chief asked in a neutral tone, “What do you want?”

  “Reverend Thunder is in danger,” Martin said, being equally blunt.

  “From whom?”

  “A criminal named Didi DuPree, and one of the reverend’s own associates, Deacon Meeker.”

  The chief was pleased to hear that the news of DuPree’s horrific demise had yet to become common knowledge.

  “Why is Reverend Thunder associating with a criminal?” Ron wanted to know.

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “You mean you won’t answer,” Ron countered. The two men stared at each other. Martin looked away first. The chief moved on. “Why can’t he simply dismiss the deacon?”

  “He’s in fear for his life.”

  “Have you heard any direct threat to that effect? You know, something that would stand up in court.”

  Marcus Martin knew he was being mocked. He’d expected as much. But he’d come to achieve a goal and he meant to do it.

  “I’ve heard threats of blackmail. Attempts to coerce the reverend to participate in a criminal enterprise,” the lawyer explained.

  Which was just what Gayle Shipton had told Ron earlier that day.

  “Blackmail’s painful, but usually not lethal,” the chief said. “And, by the way, did Jimmy go along with the plan?”

  “He did not.”

  “That’s when you heard the death threat?”

  “It was implicit,” Martin hissed.

  Ron nodded. “I believe you. But proving it could be tricky. You know how defense lawyers are.”

  “Are you going to help or not?” Marcus Martin demanded.

  Ron watched his lifelong nemesis practically quiver in righteous indignation.

  “Cops are handy people to have around when you need them, aren’t they, Marcus? Even me.” Ron got up. He’d spent too much time already jerking the lawyer’s chain. “Come on. Let’s go see the reverend. There’s something I want to ask him anyway.”

  “What?” Martin asked defensively.

  “You gonna play lawyer games at the same time you’re pleading for help, Marcus?”

  Marcus Martin insisted on knowing what Ron wanted to ask Jimmy Thunder.

  When Ron told him, the lawyer couldn’t find a single reason to object.

  Except that he couldn’t figure out what Ron was up to.

  On the way to Ron’s car, the chief and Marcus Martin ran into Lauren and Daniel Gosden. Greetings were exchanged. Ron was even civil enough to introduce Marcus Martin.

  “Oliver’s not here,” Ron explained to Lauren. “He’s out on duty.”

  “I know,” Lauren said in a tone of mock disapproval. “You sent him out into the woods with a young blonde.”

  “It’s okay,” the chief replied. “She only has eyes for me.”

  “Why, Ron Ketchum. You dog.”

  Marcus Martin cleared his throat. He wanted to get going.

  Lauren turned and gave him a look that guaranteed no interruptions from him for at least the next five minutes. But she got down to business.

  “I wanted to talk to you, anyway, Ron. You heard about Daniel’s problem yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we got that all worked out. And since Oliver told me how much you liked my last button, Daniel wanted to give you my new one.”

  Lauren looked down at her son, who was still laboring under the weight of lessons recently learned. He raised his eyes to Ron and extended his arms to be picked up. Ron obliged.

  “This is it,” Daniel said, showing the button to the chief. If featured a picture of Lauren as a toddler, taking her first steps, with her older, and white, brother and sister each holding one of her hands. All three children were beaming. Beneath the image were the words: Mitigate Your Hate. Daniel asked, “Where should I put it, Uncle Ron?”

  “Right here. Straight across from my badge.” Ron helped the boy pin the button to his shirt. Then Daniel gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  “Would you like one, Mr. Martin?” Lauren asked. She had a plastic bag filled with buttons.

  “Of course,” he said. He pinned the button to the lapel of his suit.

  He was far too shrewd to do anything else.

  Lauren said she planned to distribute the buttons at Community Hospital, and she asked Ron if it would be all right if his officers wore them, too. He said sure. Have Sergeant Stanley make them available to anybody who wanted one.

  Then he put Danny down, said goodbye, and he and Marcus Martin went to his patrol unit.

  Ron looked at their matching buttons and said, “Looks like we’re finally members of the same team, huh Marcus?”

  The lawyer took his button off and put it in his pocket.

  Chapter 51

  Sergeant Stanley had his button on when he
dropped into Clay Steadman’s office.

  The mayor noticed. “Nice button, Caz. Where’d you get it?”

  The sergeant told him, and offered his to the mayor, telling him he could get another one. The mayor accepted and pinned it to his sport coat. Then he listened as Sergeant Stanley told him that the mountain lion had finally claimed a life — fortunately, not a life that would be greatly missed. He filled Clay in on the saga of Didi DuPree, Colin Ring, and Gayle Shipton.

  Clay laughed mirthlessly.

  “What’s funny?” the sergeant asked.

  “I was just thinking nature plays fairer than the movie business. In Hollywood, the writer would have been eaten alive and the heavies would have survived.”

  “If you say so, Mr. Mayor.” Casimir Stanley was one of the few Goldstrike cops who didn’t aspire to celebrity.

  “But I don’t suppose we can count on the lion being so discriminating in the future. I don’t think the townspeople will take much comfort in the fact that it was a bad guy who got eaten. This news is going to crank up the panic and the anger.”

  “You have to announce it?”

  Clay gave his old friend a look, telling him he should know better.

  “Yeah. Fortunately, I’ll also be able to announce I hired that houndsman from Louisiana. He’ll be landing in Reno tonight. Ready to go tomorrow. And the governor promised we’ll have more help from the state for Warden Knox by the morning, too.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s an improvement,” the mayor conceded. “But I’m going to impose a dusk to dawn curfew starting tonight. It’ll stay in effect until we kill this animal. Have the chief come by when he gets back in and we’ll work out the details.”

  The sergeant stood up and saluted.

  “Send Annie Stratton in, too, will you, Caz?” the mayor asked. Then he paused and sighed. “You know, all this stuff is beginning to wear on me. If I didn’t have a reputation as a macho sonofabitch to uphold, I’d let Annie make some of these announcements.”

  Ron thought Jimmy Thunder looked like he was on the brink of a breakdown: mental, emotional, physical. Take your pick. In just the few days since Ron had seen him last, his deterioration was stunning. His skin looked lifeless and gray. His body slumped as if he’d lost the will and the wherewithal to stand upright. His eyes had sunk deeply into his face, and the light behind them was so dim it made the chief wonder if the man was functionally aware of his surroundings.

  But the reverend had enough presence of mind to enrage his lawyer.

  Jimmy Thunder told Ron that Marcus Martin must have misunderstood his conversation with Didi DuPree. Nothing criminal was either mentioned or implied.

  Deacon Meeker, whose brow had suddenly beaded with sweat at Ron’s appearance with Marcus Martin, now smiled. He was sure he had the situation sized up. One con didn’t rat on another, not even years after both of them got out of the joint.

  Meeker’s cocksure attitude crumbled and turned surly, however, when Jimmy Thunder informed him his services would no longer be needed. Jimmy told the deacon he thought he would be more at home in the secular world. The reverend’s one-time acolyte looked like he might have argued the point with his fists, had Ron not been there. As it was, he merely confirmed the reverend’s opinion of him by removing the little gold cross from his collar and grinding it under his heel before he stomped out.

  Jimmy Thunder watched the deacon’s departure for a moment and then turned to Ron. “Have you found the man who killed my son?” he asked.

  “Mahalia Cardwell is sure you did it,” the chief said impassively.

  For just a second, anger flared in Thunder’s tired eyes, but it quickly faded.

  “I’ve given that woman every reason in the world to hate me.”

  “That’s her opinion, too. But there’s another little matter.”

  “What’s that?” the reverend inquired, though he sounded past caring.

  “You were seen driving your car on the night your son was murdered. Not far from where he was murdered. When you said you were here playing cards with Texas Jack Telford.”

  Marcus Martin stepped forward and took Jimmy Thunder’s arm.

  “Don’t say another word to this man, Reverend.”

  But Jimmy did. He nodded at Ron and said, “That’s a beautiful button you have there. Wouldn’t it be something if we could all get along like that?”

  “Yeah,” Ron replied. “It would.”

  He took off his button and handed it to Jimmy Thunder.

  Then he asked the reverend the question that had brought him to the man’s house and he got an answer that didn’t surprise him at all.

  The information the chief got from Jimmy Thunder led him to the estate next door to Thunder’s own acreage. A discussion with the neighbor was the first link in a chain of six brief interviews Ron conducted that morning at some of the more lavish properties in town. At the final stop, he was given a long-distance telephone number.

  But when he returned to his office and called it, the houseman who answered the phone told him the party he was trying to reach was abroad for the summer and wouldn’t be returning for another two weeks.

  Stymied from that angle, the chief called the librarian in Berkeley he’d talked to yesterday — the one who remembered Isaac Cardwell stopping in before he’d come to Goldstrike with Colin Ring. She answered, but in a state of high agitation.

  A radical protester shouting about the over-representation of white male writers in the library’s collection had just tried to set the contemporary fiction section on fire. But the can of lighter fluid the protestor had been using as the accelerant for her homemade flame thrower had blown up in her face. It was just terrible. The protester was horribly burned. The emergency sprinklers had put out the fire, but had also soaked thousands of books. And the library’s acquisition committee had scheduled an emergency meeting to heighten the sensitivity level of its purchasing policies.

  The librarian was courteous enough to take the name Ron gave her and promised to see if there was any reference to it in the library’s magazine collection, but she couldn’t promise to call him back immediately.

  He said as soon as she could find the time would be fine.

  As Ron tried to think of another approach to his problem, Sergeant Stanley knocked on his door and entered his office with a stack of DVDs in his hand.

  He said, “Here you go, Chief. All the surveillance video from the two home centers and the lumber yard. The two hardware stores are your no-tech, mom and pop places, but the owners both promised to do their best if you want to bring a picture in to show them.”

  The sergeant put down the discs and rolled out Ron’s TV stand.

  “We’ve got discs going back two weeks at the home centers, and a month at the lumberyard. Where would you like to start?”

  Ron sighed at the prospect that lay before him. He looked at the ten DVDs Sergeant Stanley had secured for him. There was no way of guessing which, if any, of them showed the face he wanted. Still, he knew he had to look.

  “Start with the lumberyard,” he said.

  Sergeant Stanley powered up the TV and the DVD player and inserted the first disc to play. He handed Ron the remote control and said, “I’ll be right back with a cup of coffee, Chief.”

  Ron said thanks.

  Then he settled in to watch the first of the low-resolution black and white videos that retail management used to see who was stealing more from them on any given day — their customers or their employees.

  Ron got lucky.

  He didn’t have to play all the discs before he found the face he wanted. He’d had to slog through barely more than half of them. With judicious use of fast-forwarding, that had taken him only two hours.

  He viewed the transaction three times. By his watch, it had taken only thirty seconds for the killer to plunk the item down on the counter, tender his cash, receive his change and walk away with his purchase. But there was no mistaking the man’s face. And th
ere was no doubt he’d just purchased a box of the same kind of nails used in the crucifixion of Isaac Cardwell.

  The chief stopped the video at the point where the buy occurred and ejected the disc from the player. The date and time stamp on the video’s jewel box indicated it had been shot a week ago, last Thursday afternoon. Just hours before the murder.

  Ron was pinning down the details of the crime piece by piece, but the one element that still eluded him was motive. Why had the crime been committed? And why had Isaac Cardwell been the victim? None of the old standby reasons — money, sex, and vengeance — seemed to fit.

  Insanity was another reason, of course, and nailing somebody to a tree was certainly a sign of a disordered mind. But Ron would bet courtside tickets to the NBA Finals that the killer had never hurt another person in his life. In fact, when he called Sergeant Stanley in and gave him the man’s name, and told him to run it through the state and federal databases for criminal histories, the Sarge said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Ron said he wasn’t.

  He also asked Caz Stanley to have a sandwich and a soda sent in. He was getting hungry.

  The last thing he reminded Caz to bring him was Colin Ring’s writings.

  Maybe he’d find his answer there.

  Chapter 52

  There were still two hours until sunset, but Corrie Knox decided to call it quits for the day. When she and Oliver had paused to have granola bars for lunch, the deputy chief had called in to headquarters, and Sergeant Stanley had given him the good news about the imminent arrival of the houndsman and the additional officers from the Department of Fish and Game. He also mentioned the curfew the mayor was imposing. In light of those developments, Corrie decided there was no point in pushing their luck.

  Especially since for the last hour both hunters had felt the sensation that they were being stalked had increased dramatically.