Eleven Little Piggies (14 page)

LeeAnn said, ‘Matt Kester is here, Jake.'

Damn! Nobody here but me!

‘I set him up in interview room two, is that all right? The video recorder's all set to go.'

‘Good girl. Be right there.'

It's better to have at least two investigators working an interrogation. The observer will notice details that may elude the number one examiner, who may get focused on covering all the questions. But now that we finally had Matt Kester in the building, I wasn't going to let him walk away without a chat. The video equipment would have to be the second pair of eyes.

I stopped at LeeAnn's desk before I went in and said, ‘If Ray gets back while we're still talking will you call me?' I set my cell to vibrate before I unlocked the room.

Matt looked like Kester Lite. Smaller and slimmer than his brothers, he had the same hairline but lighter hair. His eyebrows were bleached by the sun the same way Owen's had been, and he was tanned and fit-looking, with a dimple like his mother's. That little dent in his cheek probably accounted for some of her special fondness for him, I thought – her other two sons were virtual copies of their father.

He was wearing a blue button-down shirt with clean Levis, and a belt buckle the size of a salad plate. It featured a lot of silver and turquoise and said he had won first prize in calf-roping at the Frontier Days rodeo in Cheyenne, Wyoming. That kind of artifact has been known to raise a snicker from Minnesota working stiffs like me, but secretly we would all like to look the way Matt Kester does in tight pants and western boots.

He kept his pale hazel eyes on me as I sat down. I dug out a card and laid it in front of him. Without glancing at it he gave me a mocking smile and said, ‘I'm not a mad dog, you know. You don't have to lock me in a cage.'

‘What? Oh . . . the door. Sorry about that; it locks automatically when you close it. But this is the best place we have to talk in private.' Which wasn't true, exactly – he'd have been more comfortable in my office – but I wanted the conversation on videotape. And since we'd had to chase him for four days to get him in here, I wasn't quite as concerned about his comfort as I might have been earlier.

I put out my hand and said, ‘Jake Hines.' He shook it without getting up. His hand was smallish but surprisingly strong. The sleeves of his shirt, rolled up two precise turns, showed muscular forearms, taut wrists, and a heavy steel watch with several extra dials on its face. It looked as if it might be the last timepiece working after the building collapsed.

He wasn't quite ready to let go of the locked door issue. ‘Seriously, this is kind of offensive, Sergeant – is that a camera light up there? I thought Ethan said you just wanted to visit.'

‘Captain.' My pay grade's not an issue till somebody makes it one. It was plain enough on the card he refused to look at. ‘The videotape protects you as well as us, Matt – there's no argument later about what we said.'

‘Ah.' He glanced at the card finally. ‘Oh, so you're the head Sherlock, hmmm? Well. Good, then.' He gave me a friendly smile, and the air in the room cleared up a little. ‘You going to help us figure out which hunter shot my brother?'

Was he really still that far behind the information curve? I said, ‘Didn't Ethan tell you? We've eliminated the goose hunters from the list of suspects.'

‘No, I – I guess I've only talked to my mom. She still seems to be sure it was an accident. She said it must have been the hunters – who else was out there shooting that day?'

‘I don't know yet but the evidence plainly shows the shot could not have come from the goose hunters.' I began to explain about the ammo again, wondering, as I did so, why didn't Ethan tell him this? Or his father? Are none of the men in this family talking to each other?

I was just getting into the details about mandated steel shot for waterfowl when my phone buzzed and I excused myself to take the call.

Ray said, ‘I'm here. OK to come in?'

‘Yes, please.'

He must have been right outside the door – he came in as I closed my phone. He was not the very model of the clean-cut police investigator – in fact, he looked as if he might have run through a wire fence and into a chipper before he found the station. His shirt had lost most of its buttons, and stray patches of his skin were missing too.

I introduced him blandly, as though I saw nothing amiss, and he surprised the hell out of me by treating Matt to a big, friendly smile. Ray Bailey is not a schmoozer and I have gone many days without seeing a smile that warm on his face.

He said, ‘Pleasure to meet you. You've got quite a reputation as a rodeo rider, haven't you? I looked you up and you're all over the place, a list of awards as long as . . .' He indicated most of his arm and turned to me. ‘Did you know that this man was ranked near the top in earnings every year, the last three years he competed?' He turned back to Matt, who was looking pretty pleased now too, and said, ‘I'm curious. Isn't farming kind of quiet after all that applause?'

‘Oh, you know' – Matt stretched and smiled, flashing a gold tooth – ‘I was starting to think I probably had enough pretty belt buckles, tell you the truth.' He turned a little sideways, casually, but moving just enough so Ray could see the one he had on.

Ray asked him, ‘You got bored with winning? Is that why you came back?'

‘Well, and there was a spot for me here – they bought another farm.' He had a little half-laugh like Ethan's. ‘I felt needed at last! River Farm desperately needs a new house, but it's beautiful hay land and there's a little barn for my horses. And of course, having been raised by Henry Kester, I knew all about how to put up hay.'

‘Your father said you boys did plenty of work growing up.'

‘Better believe it.'

‘He was a hard taskmaster?'

‘Oh, yes, indeed.' Time seemed to have boiled off any bitterness and left only irony.

‘Is that enough to keep you busy, just putting up hay?'

‘Well, that and the riding school. It was plain that Doris needed help with that. I couldn't believe it, she was taking all night to teach those kids how to side-pass through a gate.' His mocking put-down laugh was like Ethan's, too, but gentler: it only put people down about half as far.

‘So there it was, you see, two big jobs I already knew how to do. I was shovel-ready, as they say.' This time the laugh was for him. Or the two big jobs? Hard to tell. ‘And I thought, hey, from now on I can stay on the horse – I don't have to keep jumping off with a piggin' string in my teeth.'

He didn't seem to realize he was admitting to burnout. His face still held the self-satisfied half-smile of the coolest Kester. But I was beginning to notice some body language – a line under his jaw that looked like an imperfectly healed injury, a little stiffness in his left knee when he crossed that leg over the other one. I decided maybe Jude Law would not be too old for the part.

It seemed to me that Ray had probably buttered him up enough for us to get on with the business at hand, so I said, ‘I guess Matt has really been out of touch. I was just explaining to him about the size and composition of shot that eliminated the hunters as suspects.'

I went over the information again while Matt watched me, looking bemused. Surprisingly the same information that Doris had understood right away seemed puzzling to him. Even after I explained, for the second time, the law about steel shot for waterfowl, he couldn't seem to accept the information. He liked his mother's explanation and he didn't like mine.

‘I don't understand you,' he said. ‘You sound as if you think it might not have been an accident.'

‘It's early in the investigation,' I said. I wanted to move him along, to tell him about the certainty that the body had been moved, but he was so adamant I thought I'd better take it in easy stages. ‘The bird hunters didn't shoot your brother. Homicide's a strong possibility.'

‘Well, that's the craziest thing I've heard in quite a while,' he said. ‘I mean, come on. Who would want to kill a sweet guy like Owen?'

‘Well, see, Matt,' Ray said, leaning forward, sounding confidential, ‘that's what we wanted to ask you.' He was friendly but earnest. ‘You seem to have been closer to Owen than anybody but Doris, so you're the best one in the family to help us figure this out. What's he been involved in that might make somebody want him out of the way?' His thin fingers held his ballpoint poised delicately above his notebook as if he really expected the answer to come tumbling out of Matt's mouth so he could write it down.

I had never seen Ray's gullible shtick before and I found it surprisingly effective. His normally gloomy face had taken on very appealing lines. If he turned that look on me, I thought, I'd probably tell him every bit of what little I know.

But Matt was shaking his head. ‘Owen wasn't
involved
in anything,' he said. ‘Owen was a
farmer
, to the marrow of his bones.' The little mocking laugh again, and then an imitation. ‘“
Why's that heifer walking like that? How many days till
the hay's ready to cut?
” That was Owen, every day of his life.'

I said, ‘Doris mentioned that he also said, “Over my dead body will anybody dig sand pits on my beautiful River Farm”. Did you agree with him about that?'

‘That River Farm's a beautiful place? Sure. I mean, it lacks a few basic essentials like a decent house, but it's good hay land with a nice view of the Mississippi, so I agreed it was a good buy.'

‘And you weren't anxious to sell it to the sand miners?'

‘Oh, I didn't get into that fight. That's Ethan's baby. He's hot to sell while the price is high.'

‘But you didn't care about the money?'

‘Oh, come on, everybody cares about money. But Owen was my buddy, so I said, “Whatever you say”, and after that I just stayed out of it. Ethan and Owen would argue while the world burned down around them. It was better not to get caught in the middle between those two.'

‘All right then, you've explained that very well,' Ray said, still with that strange Boy Scout smile on his face.

I found myself reciting,
trustworthy, loyal, helpful
 . . .

‘So what I think we should do next,' Ray said, with the ballpoint twitching above the lined paper, eager to be used, ‘is go back to the beginning, and cover the same ground we've been asking everybody else to go over. Starting with this: tell me where you were every hour Saturday morning from four a.m. until noon.' He sat back, looking pleased with himself for saying that right, and then leaned forward again with an apparent afterthought. ‘Oh, and who you were with that can verify that.'

Gullible Ray Bailey didn't seem to play as well with Matt Kester as he did with me. Till now, I would have described the youngest Kester's personality as ‘mostly sunny'. But the longer Ray talked, the cloudier Matt's expression got. And when he heard the word ‘verify', his personal weather forecast appeared to change from ‘partial overcast' to ‘lightning and thunder with a strong chance of hail'.

‘Mom said Ethan told her you were trying to blame this terrible tragedy on the family,' Matt said, his eyes flicking suspiciously back and forth between the two of us, ‘but I didn't believe it. I said, “Oh, that's just Ethan being paranoid again, I'll go in and straighten it out”. But now, by God, it looks like she was right, you
are
trying to pin this on us.'

‘Nobody's trying to pin—'

‘So let me tell you something right now that you had better keep in mind,' he said, getting up, looking more like Ethan every minute. ‘This family has been farming in Hampsted County for almost a hundred and fifty years, adding land as we went along and getting a little better off with each generation. And we didn't get where we are by being anybody's pushover, you know what I'm saying? We survived by sticking together and watching out for each other. So you better be careful who you accuse of premeditated murder, Mr Chief of Detectives,' he said, pointing at my chest. His anger had somehow slid off Ray and fastened on me. ‘Because four generations of Kesters didn't maintain this good life here all this time just to let some upstart who doesn't even know what his real name is or where he was born—'

‘All right,' Ray said, ‘that's enough now.' He was on his feet, reaching out for Matt, who stood facing me with his fists clenched. Matt's face was white with rage, and Ray, I noticed, had the cover off his Taser.

‘It's all right,' I said, keeping my voice pleasant. ‘He's just looking for a way to change the subject. Everybody needs to chill now, OK?' The two of them stood over me, breathing hard. I went on sitting because hardly anybody throws a punch at a seated man in front of witnesses. After they both took a few more breaths I said, ‘We're in the middle of a very busy day here, so it's fine with us if you want to end this conversation now and go home, Mr Kester. Eventually you will have to answer these questions, and you're going to like it even less if you're doing it in court.'

‘We'll see about
that
, too,' Matt Kester said. He reached back, picked a beautiful white Stetson off the console behind him, and set it on his head at a jaunty angle. It looked exactly right with his belt buckle.

I couldn't help but admire the figure he cut as he walked out on us. I was in a good mood anyway, because Matt Kester, without answering any questions directly, had just told us a whole lot of useful stuff.

R
ay wasn't discouraged by Matt's rejection of his Good Cop act. He said it just confirmed what he'd suspected. ‘Underneath all the flash he's still a Kester, isn't he?'

‘Yup,' I said. ‘And you're still Ray Bailey, whose life is just one fight after another, isn't it? I'm glad to see you're not bleeding, much.