R.P. Dahlke - Dead Red 04 - A Dead Red Alibi (4 page)

“Is that so?
Well, until Homicide or the sheriff says otherwise, I go by the book. And since I can’t take the chance that y’all won’t go running off the minute my back is turned, you two get in the back seat and Karen and her dog ride up front.”

Spreading his arms wide he herded us to his patrol car. “Hurry up now, I haven’t got all day. Oh, and I’ll take your wallets and cell phones.
We’ll check your identities, and then maybe you can go home. Or not.”

“Dumb-ass,” my dad muttered again.

Deputy Abel got into the driver’s side and started the car.

“Deputy,
” Karen said, “if I hadn’t been out here looking for Mr. Bains, no one would’ve known where to look for the chief, much less find him.”

The deputy nodded, starting the engine. “Got that right.
Not when the man was supposed to be on his way to Wyoming. We wouldn’t have started looking for at least another week.”

“He was dead when I found him,” Dad said.

“Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. Either way, Homicide is going to have a lot of questions for you folks. Everyone buckle up now.”

Dad and I looked at one another, thinking the same thing—weren’t we glad my fiancé, Sheriff Caleb Stone, wasn’t here to see us in trouble again?

Deputy Abel gunned the engine and the patrol car bounced over the rutted road and up the hill. I was curious to see what an art compound would look like. Would it be some sort of hippy commune with farm animals and babies in the same crib? As we crested the hill, the blades of a colorful windmill caught the light like a child’s whirligig.

We
turned onto an unpaved road, passing a collection of
Do Not Enter
and
No Trespassing
signs, and finally stopped next to a big white two-story house. The house sat a hundred feet or so across from three small cabins set in a stand of poplars. Equidistant between the cabins and the house was a huge barn, the doors open, a bright acetylene torch telegraphing the message that someone was hard at work.

Putting on the brake, Deputy Abel hopped out and trotted over to the other deputy, and they both disappeared into the house.

I said what we were all thinking. “What’re the chances that the dead body here and the one my dad found are totally unrelated?”

.

Chapter Five:

My dad, exhausted from his six hour ordeal in an abandoned mine pit, had fallen asleep, his soft snores filling the
patrol car.

Karen’s Blue H
eeler had taken over the driver’s seat and was perusing the yard for something more interesting than my dad’s snores.

“Since it appears that we’re to wait,” I said to Karen, “can you tell me what the deputy meant by
mules
leaving dead bodies in mine pits?”

“
Wishbone and Cochise County have always been a corridor for immigrants out of Mexico and Latin America, but in the last few years we’ve seen a real uptick in drug-dealers using them to backpack the stuff across the border, hence the term
mules
. If the border patrol spots them, they will abandon their packs and run. But every once in a while, we find one of them murdered and dumped in a mine pit.”

“That’s awful.”

“The sheriff’s department gets weekly calls for human remains in the desert, too. The county tries to repatriate the bodies, after all someone is missing them and it’s the right thing to do. But it isn’t always possible.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“The coyotes lift cash, wallets, ID’s, anything of value before they abandon the body to the elements.”

I glanced over at my dad slumped against the door, his eyes closed. He had exhausted the last of his reserves.

“Karen,” I said, “my dad has a heart condition. Do you think when the EMTs get here they could take a look at him, check his blood pressure or something?”

At the mention of his heart condition, he awoke. “Now don’t go making a fuss,
Lalla. I’m all right. I’m just a bit tired.”

Karen
turned her head around to look at me. “I think it’s safe to say that we can’t count on Deputy Dumb-Ass. I’d call someone, but Dumb-Ass took all of our cell phones. Oh well, service isn’t worth a damn out here anyway.”

A
light winked on in one of the cabins, and from this angle I could see the man in the barn. He held a welding rod and torch, and he was working on a bronze sculpture of a horse.

“That’s odd,” I said.
“There appear to be people here, yet no one seems to be curious as to why there are deputies outside?”

Karen looked up. “What? Where?”

“Well,” I said, pointing, “there’s a man working in the barn, and someone’s in one of the cabins, but no one’s interested as to why two county deputy cruisers are parked outside?”

She
blinked at the scenery. “Yeah. That doesn’t seem right. Which reminds me, my husband’s going to be home from work soon and wanting his supper. Still, it might be fun to watch Deputy Dumb-Ass get his comeuppance.”

I leaned forward resting my arms on the backrest. “What do you mean?”

“Ian Tom is chief homicide detective with the county. He’ll sort this mess out soon enough,” Karen said, crossing her arms over her chest.

The doggy smell and cramped space in the back seat was beginning to get to me. “I’d like to stretch my legs
.”

“
Uh?” Karen said, rubbing at her eyes. “Oh, sure. Dumb-Ass putting you in the back like
you’re
the criminals. What the hell, let’s all get out. We’ll take Matilda for a walk, and if the idiot shows up, I’ll tell him she was about to pee on his front seat.”

Dad grunted his disgust at the locked door, then
seemed to remember that he was in a patrol car. He stretched and yawned, and thanked Karen for letting him out.

I shivered in the cooling air
. We were higher up, closer to the mountains and quicker to become shadowed.

“I’d offer you my coat,” Dad said, putting an arm around my shoulders, “but
I think I left it in the Jeep.”

“I’m okay
,” I said, watching Karen’s heeler intent on a new target.

“I’m not sure what she’s after,
” Karen said, “but let’s check it out.”

She gave the dog a command and Matilda lurched forward, weav
ing back and forth on her lead.

“Don’t you want to let her go, Karen?” I asked.

“She’s also fond of chasing rabbits, so probably not a good idea.”

Matilda circled around and headed back to the house, then angled off toward the cabins. She leaned forward, panting in her eagerness to get to
the target.

“There!” I cried. “There’s somethi
ng on the ground by that tree.”

Karen patted Matilda, gave her a treat, and stared at the item. It was a padded jacket, turned inside out, the f
lannel lining dirty and ripped.

Karen stopped my dad before he could pick it up. “Wait. This could be an important piece of evidence. Detective Tom will want to see it where it is.”

My father looked confused. “It looks like—”

We all turned at a man’s deep voice. “Karen? Is that you?”

“Ian Tom,” Karen said. “I’m
so
glad to see you. Lalla, Mr. Bains, this is chief homicide detective for Cochise County, Ian Tom. Lalla Bains owns the old Bains place now, Ian.”

The man looked to be in his mid-forties. Bronzed skin and epicanthic folds at the inside corner of his eyes hinted at a distant Native American ancestor. He was
also tall, maybe six-three, his big shoulders and flat abdomen under a neatly pressed dress shirt said he did more than sit behind a desk.

He shook my dad’s
hand, and I was pleased to see he wasn’t one to assume my dad was anything other than what he said he was—a retired crop duster from California.

I thought it odd when the
detective’s gaze landed on my hands. They were, as always, chapped, nicked from working, with short, unpainted nails and only my engagement band with the single diamond to mention my single or not status. Then again, was he looking to see if these were the kind of hands that could kill someone? When my eyes came up to meet his, I saw humor, as well as speculation, as he worked around the how and why I might be involved with this murder case. I had to agree with Karen, this was a man who could put two and two together and know what to do about it.

Introductions over, he asked about the jacket on the ground.

“Matilda led us to it,” Karen said. “I thought it might be a clue, since we started out looking for Mr. Bains. Of course, we also found the police chief.”

He shook his head, frowning. “The police chief? Back up a minute. What’s this have to do
with the police chief?”

“
Deputy Dumb-Ass,” my dad muttered.

I nudged him before he could add an expletive and said, “
A sheriff’s deputy.”

I started from the beginning, ending with Karen’s identifying the body in the pit as Wishbone’s police chief.

“And the deputy got your particulars and took your statements?”

“Not exactly,” Karen said. “He was interrupted by a call to come here and secure another crime scene.”

The detective heaved a sigh and took out his notebook. “Let’s start over again. Karen, you said you and Miss Bains tracked her father to a mine pit where you also found the body of the police chief? Where exactly is this pit?”

Karen looked downhill,
“About a mile east, between the Bains’s place and here?”

Detective Tom
eye-balled my dad’s dusty clothes. “And how did you happen on the pit, Mr. Bains?”

The Adam’s apple on my dad’s neck bobbed. “I was enjoying my new Jeep you see, driving through gullies and over hills, looking for my uncle’s gold mine. That’s when I saw someone on the property. He must’ve seen me and sped off before I could get there.”

“What kind of vehicle?”

“A
truck. White, I think. That’s when I noticed the pit. The old boards covering it looked to have been messed with. I-I thought I saw something below. I took off my jacket and laid it on the Jeep fender, got out some rope, tied it to the bumper and went down the hole. Then the rope broke and … I just don’t know how
that
,” he said, pointing to the jacket, “got all the way up here.”

“What’re you talking about?” I asked.

“The wind couldn’t blow it this far, could it?” Karen said, looking uncomfortable with the suggestion.

I looked down at the item in question. “Are you saying this is—?”

“—my jacket,” my dad finished for me.

The detective tilted back his head and looked up at the quiet poplars. “I think it would be fair to say that someone brought it here. Leave it, and I’ll have a deputy bag it. I’ll send deputies to secure the pit until the coroner can get here. Karen, could I get you to guide the team for the extraction?”

“Sure.” She shrugged, apparently resolved to a late supper for her husband.

He closed his notebook and motioned for us to take a seat at a picnic table while he went to find Deputy Dumb
-Ass.

When he returned, I asked
if we could be allowed to leave.

“Yes, but as this is now a murder investigation of two people, we may still have more questions. You will be staying in Arizona for a while, won’t you?”

I mentally groaned. Here we go again.

.

Chapter Six:

It was five in the afternoon, and the dead police chief a
nd the art compound owner had already been carted off to the county morgue for autopsy.

Dumb
-Ass, aka Deputy Abel, returned us to the now empty mine pit and our waiting vehicles.

The deputy dumped our cell phones and wallets into our hands, jumped into his patrol car, spun his wheels and departed in a cloud of dust—which must’ve helped a lot after the lecture he got from Detective Tom on the care and handling of a crime scene and its witnesses.

I apologized again to Karen for getting her involved in a murder case.

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve never been on a rescue that turned out to be a real murder. I’ll be interested to see how this turns out.”

Dad snorted. “You mean in case one of us ends up behind bars, don’t you?”

Jingling the change in his pockets, he went to inspect the crime scene tape staked around the empty pit.

I tried apologizing for my dad’s rudeness, but she just laughed.

“He says what he thinks, which is pretty standard
for this part of the country.”

Dad, his profile in quiet gray shadows, gazed into the dark as if looking for answers. It was getting cold and none of us were dressed for it. I shivered, wondering what he was thinking.

“Did the detective tell you anything about the two dead people?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. Not as long as a case is still open.”

“You mean as long as my dad and I are suspects.”

She laughed again. “I believe Detective Tom so much as said you and your dad have been cleared.”

I should’ve been relieved, but history had a way of circling around until one of my family members was in the thick of it.

“The detective has deep family roots here in Cochise County
,” she said. “Before he came here he was a New York Police detective, and I’m pretty sure that if he saw anything that looked like you should be detained, he wouldn’t have released you.”

Karen nodded at my dad’s quiet
posture. “Why don’t you go talk to him, see if he’s ready to leave soon. Sorry, but I’m pretty sure I can hear my husband’s stomach rumbling from here.”

“
Of course,” I said.

“You keep in touch, won’t you?” She asked, opening the hatchback to the Bronco for Matilda. “Le
t me know how you’re doing?”

I
waved goodbye, then went to see if I could nudge my dad into leaving for home.

“What’re you thinking?” I asked.

He grunted something unintelligible. I was used to his monosyllabic responses, but then he surprised me with a question. “What does the phrase tunnel vision mean to you?”

“Uh, well, I guess it has two meanings. You know, like when you get dizzy and your peripheral vision disappears until there’s nothing left but a narrow tunnel? The other, I suppose, is a metaphor and it refers to how we tend not to see the whole picture because we’re only seeing what’s right in front of us. I presume you have a point?”

He winced as if he’d just experienced a painful memory. “Tunnel vision. I had that when I had my heart attack. Everything got smaller until there was only this pinpoint of light. When I was down in that hole, I did the only thing I could think of to keep from looking at the dead guy next to me; I stared at the walls. There are bits of quartz between the rock and dirt and they catch the light like a prism. Quartz carries gold you know.”

“Uh-huh, I think you told me that.
Tomorrow we can go into town and get some books at the museum or maybe the tourist center. Can we go now? I’m starved and you should be, too.”

“In a minute. I could only look at quartz for so long before my eyes crossed, and since my
cellmate had nothing to say, I looked up. Do you know what? I didn’t see one single cloud. I could get used to Arizona if they have blue skies like this every day.”

“Yeah, me too. Can we go now, Dad?”

“Just let me finish. I let my mind shift from one subject to another—the ranch, goats, airplanes, Shirley, you and Caleb, a dog. I was thinking I should get another dog.”

I opened my mouth to object. It was late. I was cold, tired and hungry, but he was still talking.

“That’s when the bird flew over. I thought it must’ve been a really big bird because it completely blotted out the sky.”

My stomach rumbled a complaint.

“You were annoyed because I knocked dirt in your eyes.”

“Exactly. You
knocked dirt into the hole because you were standing too close to the edge. But how in the hell could a bird sling dirt into that hole?”

“Are you saying a bird dropped something in
to the pit?”

He shook his head. “I very much doubt it. And how could I tell that it was a bird in the half second it took to
pass over the narrow opening?”

“Karen said you were delusional from dehydration. Or maybe it was some other kind of bird. We can get a birding book tomorrow. Now can we go? It’s late and I’m getting cold.”

His bushy eyebrows rose, daring me to get the punch line he just handed me.

I ignored my stomach and closed my eyes. All I could come up with was that he had been delusional from th
e dehydration. “I got nothin’.”

He
tsked at my lack of imagination. “A bird in flight couldn’t have knocked dirt into that hole. I mistook the dark for a bird shadowing the sun. I was mistaken. It was something else, something big enough to come between the sun and the pit and kick dirt down the hole.

“Like a coyote? He could’ve smelled the dead police chief. Good thing he couldn’t get to you.”

He shrugged. “Do you really think a coyote stole my jacket, ran with it all the way up to the art compound and dropped it where the sheriff’s deputies might find it?”

“Oh. Right.”

“Yeah. It also makes you wonder what kind of person wouldn’t help a poor soul stranded in an abandoned mine pit.”

I hesitated, swallowing hard. My mouth was suddenly too dry to comment.

He nodded at my slack-jawed expression. “I think the son-of-a-bitch was satisfied I wouldn’t be getting out of there anytime soon, but just in case, he took my jacket to put at another crime scene.”

“To incriminate you,” I said, the implication driving away the cold.

He brushed the dust off on his pants and backed away from the edge. “Either that, or someone’s got a really perverse sense of humor.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “If that’s true, he’ll know you lived. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we have to call Caleb.”

He reached out and tugged on my ponytail, lightening the mood. “Let’s go home, get cleaned up, drive into Wishbone, have supper, and then we’ll call him.”

Caleb would ask how I managed to go from secluded
hideout to the middle of a murder investigation so fast. I had no idea on how to answer that question.