Bone Harvest (6 page)

It is enough.

Wrath of God

Wrath of God.
Harold read it again and felt the seriousness of the situation sinking into him. The bad business had just gotten worse. Half a century ago—that was when the Schuler murders took place. Somehow what was happening with the pesticides was connected with them. He saw that the last three numbers at the top of the note were the date of the massacre. The first number, seven, was how many people had died that day.

His hand holding the letter shook. He needed to sit down. But first he needed to call the police. He wondered if they would let him put the letter in the paper. He knew he had to do that. His motto in life had always been: The truth must be told. Now he knew that someone else felt the same way.

July 7, 1952

Bertha Schuler didn’t think much about it when she heard the gunshot, a not uncommon sound around the farm. Otto had probably caught sight of the weasel that was stealing eggs out of their chicken coop. She hoped he got the darn thing.

She picked up the crying child and rocked her in her arms. Arlette. Her last baby, she prayed. Nearly forty, her body had had a harder time carrying this one. She had almost given birth on the farm, but Otto had scooted her to town in time. Arlette had been her smallest baby, barely five pounds, the size of a bag of flour.

Otto wouldn’t even hold Arlette for the first month, said they should be done with that. He tried to stay away from Bertha, tried to keep his hands off her, but then, in the middle of the night, he would take her feverishly and they would both wait to see if her blood came when it should.

Bertha had years to go yet before she’d be done with the chance of having another baby. What would they do? She had tried to get Otto to go buy protection, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it in Durand. Maybe when they went to Eau Claire.

But her sweet Arlette was a prize. Always sunny, smiling. Now, with her tiny fist, she rubbed her head and gave a little weak cry and then smiled at her mother. Bertha kissed the girl on her head where the spoon had hit her.

Bertha set the baby in her high chair and gave her a hard cookie to suck on. Footsteps running above her head told her the children were still playing. She should calm them down. Picking up the platter with the roast, she set it next to Otto’s plate for him to carve and serve.

When she heard the door push open, she turned to see who it was. The gun was what she saw. The gun coming into her kitchen.

She wiped her hands on her apron and turned to pick up her baby. Her last thought was how she had wanted to see them all grow up, her children, her angels on earth.

CHAPTER 7

“I’m an agronomist. Plants I can tell you about. Crops I can tell you about. Chickens, you got the wrong man.” Charles Folger’s voice came over the phone like a blast of cold air. “What am I supposed to do with this chicken? I don’t know nothing about chickens.”

Claire held the phone away from her ear for a moment and wished she didn’t have to deal with this cranky old guy, but it was her job. She contemplated correcting his double negative but didn’t think their relationship would stand up to the complexities of grammar. She needed this man. If he chose to cooperate, he could be a big help. She had sent the other two chickens to the crime lab, but it might be days before she’d hear back. She needed answers soon.

Claire had just received a call from Celia Daniels. Another chicken had died. The distress in the woman’s voice had been alarming.

“We’ll never be able to use these chickens again,” she had said to Claire. “We raise everything organic, and they’ve been poisoned. No eggs, no meat. I don’t know what we’ll do with the ones that survive. We’ll have to start over next year. Who could have done this?”

Trying to be reassuring, Claire had promised answers—even though she wasn’t sure they would be easy to get.

She needed Folger’s cooperation. She imagined him sitting there with a dead chicken on his desk, and a smile lit up her face. Someone had once told her that smiling made the voice sound sweeter. She tried again.

“What I’m really hoping is that you can analyze the feed. I sent you one of the chickens just in case it might help you out.”

She heard Folger grumbling at the other end of the line and imagined his digging through the papers on his desk as if he would find an answer there.

Just then Chief Deputy Sheriff Stewart Swanson squatted down in her line of vision and held his hands in the T position—time out—his signal that he needed her now. He had played football in high school. Claire was sure it had been the best time of his life. Even though he was in his early sixties he could still recite some of his plays.

She needed to wrap up this phone call. “I know you’ll do the best you can. I’ll call you back later today.” Without waiting for an answer she disconnected.

“Yeah?” She looked up at Stewy. He motioned her into his office.

Unlike him to be so secretive about anything, she mused. Following him, she was struck by how broad his back was. Lot of good meat loaf and pie went into maintaining that physique, she was sure. Mrs. Swanson was an acclaimed baker. Even at his age, she wouldn’t want to run into his sheer mass on a football field—or down a dark alley.

He held open the door to his office for her and then closed it behind them. “Claire, just got a call from the newspaper.”

She nodded.

“Harold Peabody. You know him?”

“I know who he is.”

“He just found a note on his counter. A threatening note. He thinks it’s related to the stolen pesticides.”

Claire hoped this editor wouldn’t leave his marks all over the note. “Is it from our guy?”

“I think so.” The sheriff looked at her. “You better go talk to him. He wants to run it in the paper tomorrow.”

The first thing Harold Peabody did after he called the sheriff was to make a copy of the note and put the copy safely away inside a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary on the page that included the definition for murder. He had bought the set in 1970 at a used bookstore for a hundred dollars. The dictionary was published in the 1950s, but he didn’t figure words went out of style.

He spent the rest of his time waiting for the deputy, clearing off his desk. The condition of his desk was an apt metaphor for the state of his mind: mildly organized chaos.

When Deputy Claire Watkins showed up, he ushered her to the back room and held out a chair for her. The chair, too, had been recently cleared of a stack of papers.

Then he sat down opposite her in his rolling chair and looked this deputy over. She was an attractive woman. Harold found that she resembled her name—there was something clear and open about the way she looked at him. She had the start of good lines in her face, and terrific eyes. She was growing outwardly into who she was inwardly—what one did in one’s forties. For better or worse.

“You’re the new investigator,” Harold commented. “I don’t think the sheriff’s department ever had one before.”

“No, this is a new position.”

“Good idea.” He had folded a piece of paper in two and placed it around the note so he could hold it without disturbing the surface. “Here it is.”

She pulled on a pair of latex gloves. First she read the note; then she turned it over and examined the backside of it carefully. She looked in the envelope, then put it in a plastic bag, and the note in another plastic bag. She placed the plastic-covered note on the desk in front of her so she could see it easily. When she was finished, she looked up at him. “Any idea what the numbers mean?”

“I think so. I think it’s a date. The date an entire family was murdered on their farm. The Schulers. Otto and Bertha Schuler and their five kids. Slaughtered on their farm on the tenth of July, 1952. The case was never solved.”

“But what about the first seven?”

“The number of people killed.”

Claire’s hand rose to her mouth and she closed her eyes for a moment. Harold could tell she was visualizing the scene. She knew murder scenes; she knew farms. She was putting them together in her mind.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Someone came and shot the whole family. A neighbor, who happened to be a deputy sheriff, went over to return something and he found them. But they could never figure out who did it or why. Had the whole county stirred up for months.”

“I can imagine.” Claire shook her head and then asked, “What do you think?”

He wouldn’t bite on such an open-ended question. “About what?”

“About the note. About the man who’s doing this.”

“Sure it’s a man?”

“About ninety-five percent sure.”

“That’s quite a bit. I happen to agree with you.”

Claire didn’t say anything more. She waited for him to continue. Good interviewing technique. Harold was pleased with this woman deputy. She knew her stuff. She took her time. Especially in this new age of technology, you needed to know how to take your own time.

Harold gathered his thoughts. He had thought of little else since he had read the note. “What do I think about him? I’ll tell you what I’ve figured out from his note. He’s slightly obsessive-compulsive. That’s shown by the numbers at the top of the note. He’s polite. He was raised well. And I’m sure that he’s an older man. He’d have to be if he’s been around for at least the last fifty years.” He paused.

Claire had been following his words closely. She gave one brief nod and said, “Right.”

Harold continued. “For other reasons, he’s got to be an older man. He addressed me as Mr. Harold Peabody. Anyone under forty wouldn’t do that. Titles have just about disappeared from daily life. Also, he asked that I put it in the paper—
please.
Again a nicety that shows he’s generally a civil man. But something’s got him horridly riled up. He’s religious. He reads his Bible. Might be the only book he reads. He has a mission. He thinks that God is backing him on this one. He might do anything.”

“Wow,” Claire said.

He was both pleased and surprised at her exclamation. It was to the point, but he wanted her to react more to all his work. He pressed his hands down on his desk and said, “That’s what I think.”

“You could be a profiler.”

At first Harold didn’t know what she was talking about. The first thing that popped into his mind were those old black cameo paper cutouts that were done of someone’s profile. Then he remembered that he had seen a TV show called
Profiler.
A woman solved crimes by studying the criminals’ behavior. He chuckled.

“I’m serious. Criminal profilers look at exactly the things you analyzed. I studied it a bit at the police academy. Let me ask you a few more questions. Do you think he’s a farmer?”

Harold scratched his thinning pate. “Could be. Probably if he’s lived in this area for fifty years. Seems like everyone used to be a farmer. If he’s not, he’d know quite a bit about it. Enough to be able to know how to use those pesticides.”

“Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“I’m afraid I do. As I’ve said, he’s riled up. He’s been on simmer about this happening for fifty years, and it looks like he’s about to blow.”

“What do you think he’ll do next?”

Harold leaned forward. Now they were getting to the heart of the matter. “Talk about the man all you want, but what you must do is outguess him, know where he’s going to be, know what he’s going to do before he does it.” He listed the acts thus far. “First he stole the pesticide. Then he destroyed the flowers. Next he killed the birds.”

He paused. Claire waited.

“I’m afraid it’s escalating,” Harold said. “I’m afraid he’ll move on to something bigger. It could be cows; it could be horses.” Then he forced himself to say what he was really afraid of. “It could be people.”

“Yup.” Claire tapped her pencil on the front of his desk. “That’s what I’ve been thinking, too. Imagining the things he might do makes me sick. We are all so vulnerable. This is a place where people leave their keys in their car in case someone needs to borrow it. Doors are unlocked. People are used to being friendly.”

“It’s worse than that,” Harold told her. “This man is one of us. He knows our ways. He knows where to get us.”

“Want to venture a guess who it might be?”

Harold had been afraid she would ask him that. He had a couple thoughts, but wasn’t sure he was ready to tell her. “Let me think on it. This is serious business. I hate to run my mouth off about people and get them in trouble. It was obviously someone affected by the Schuler murders.”

“Do you think it’s the killer?”

Harold puffed out his lips. “More than likely. If he’s still alive, he’d be an old man like me.”

“Well, if you have any more ideas, let me know, the sooner the better. This guy is on a timetable.”

“Where will you be tomorrow?”

“With my daughter. Watching the fireworks. But you can always reach me on my cell phone. If the bluffs don’t interfere.” Claire gave him her number. “Also, any information you can give me on the Schuler murders would be appreciated. I’ll go to the cold cases and pick up the file on that.”

“I’ll put together articles from the time it happened.”

“Thanks, Mr. Peabody.”

“Harold.”

She stood. “After I’ve talked to the sheriff, I’ll let you know what you can put in the paper.”

Harold came around his desk to walk her to the door. This was the only false step she had made in their meeting.

“That won’t be necessary.” The deputy turned to look at him. He continued: “It’s running. The note is running. Consider it a courtesy that I let you know about it before you read it in the paper.”

Meg heard about the chickens from her friend Katlyn, who lived near the Danielses. Katlyn said that everyone said that maybe Rich’s pheasants would be next to be killed. Meg said that Rich had a huge security fence and that no one could get in to hurt his pheasants. When she hung up the phone, she was surprised that she had lied. It was not like her.

Meg walked over to the refrigerator, opened the freezer, and pulled out a lime Popsicle. Then she went onto the porch and sat on the floor under the fan. The thermometer out back said ninety degrees, but the guy on the radio today had been talking about something called a heat index and he said it would feel like one hundred. Hot enough to make her have to eat her Popsicle fast before it dripped down onto her hand.

She wondered what it was like for kids who had sisters and brothers. She found it hard sometimes not to have anyone to talk to about all the things that worried her. It was a big responsibility to be an only child. And it only made it worse when her dad died. Now her mother was totally her concern.

She decided to call Rich. He would understand. Knowing Rich, he might even be able to help.

He answered the phone. “Haggard’s Pheasants.”

She said, “Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Pop.”

“Pop who?”

“Popsicle.”

There was silence for a moment; then he asked, “Did you make that one up, Megsly?”

“Yup. Just for you.”

“I’m honored.”

“Mom’s not home yet.”

“Another long day?”

“Yeah, she called and said she’d be home soon. She said I could come home and let myself in and wait for her.” Meg was done with her Popsicle. She stretched out flat on the cool stone floor of the porch. She stared up at the overhead fan, which was a blur above her head.

“Good.”

“I heard about the chickens.”

“News travels fast around here.”

“What are you doing to protect your pheasants?”

“Staying put.”

“But what about tomorrow—the Fourth of July? What about our barbecue and the fireworks?”

“No one would do anything on a holiday.”

“Bad guys take days off?” she asked. “Are you kidding me?”

“I am kidding you. But I’m serious when I say that I’m not too worried about my birds. I don’t think this guy is after me. I don’t think he’s after all the poultry in the county. I think he’s got something else in mind.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure, but whatever it is, your mom will figure it out.”

Meg thought for a moment. “My mom is really smart, but she doesn’t know everything. She makes mistakes, too.”

“Of course she does. But I think this guy wants to be stopped.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s leaving clues.”

Meg liked the idea of the clues. It made it more like a Nancy Drew mystery, something that could be solved and then everything would fall into place.

“You know that I’m going to my grandparents this summer.”

“Yeah, when?”

“Not sure, but, I just want to be sure that you’ll keep an eye on Mom. I didn’t want her to know that I’m worried, but I am.”

Rich didn’t say anything for a moment; then he cleared his throat. “I will keep an eye on her. You know you can count on me. But I know she wants you to have a good time on your trip and not to worry about her.”