The Perennial Killer: A Gardening Mystery (7 page)

“Amazing?”

“Yes,” said Louise, “all this privacy. Where I live, in the northern Virginia suburbs, we all get to know each other’s business in a hurry.” She smiled, thinking of home. “Of course, it’s even easier in our immediate neighborhood, because we live in a cul-de-sac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of what’s going on.”

He grinned over at her. “You sound like a real nosy type. Let’s get over to this next batch,” he said, nodding down the hill toward another cluster of small graves. “This must be the kiddie graveyard.”

“It looks as if lots of kids died.”

He focused his camera on the first gravestone. “Get this, Louise—
‘Nathaniel, Who Gave Us Three Years of Happiness With Which to Light Our Lives. Born 1946. Died 1949.’
They may die young, but they get a hell of an inscription.”

A bit callous, Louise thought, but just like a cameraman. He enthused on, “If we still manage to do the show up here, Louise, we’ll use these shots for B-roll material. We’ll be rife with good stuff—that row of old cow skulls hung on the barn, the abandoned blacksmith shop, the ramshackle sawmill…”

Strong, evocative images were always needed as background to the narration in the script, and the place was rife with them. Without meaning to join him in his callousness, Louise thought of some more. “How about that beat-up Porter Ranch sign? And there are even more marked graves. Why don’t you get them all while you’re at it?”

She looked up and saw that Earl Tatum had spied them. He started out in a walk, then began loping toward them
at top speed across the huge yard. Louise realized that he was in good condition despite that spare tire around his middle. “Better hurry up,” she warned Pete. “The law approaches—and
fast
.”

Pete was faster. He quickly photographed the few remaining children’s gravestones, and just had time to scramble back up the hill as Tatum arrived. The camera whined as Pete casually exposed a few shots on the end of the roll. With deft hands, he extracted it from the camera and stuck it in one of his vest pockets. Then he turned toward the sheriff, smiled, and straightened his old hat.

Despite the sunglasses, the twitch in Tatum’s cheek told Louise that he was angry. Nevertheless, he downplayed the matter, saying casually, “Takin’ pictures of graves, huh. Lotta good that’ll do you.”

“But why would you object, Sheriff Tatum?” Louise asked sweetly. “It’s just picturesque old headstones. Pete’s the cameraman who will be taping TV programs for me, and we might use these shots for background.”

Tatum approached Louise and shoved his face so close that she could smell his breath—garlic mixed with herbs—probably from lunch in some upscale Boulder watering hole. “Look,” he said, “that film is
mine
. I think you better mind your own business. This isn’t your property, and he’s shootin’ pictures at my suff’ rance, and turnin’ ’em over to me when he’s done.”

She tried to look polite, but she must have failed. “And ma’am, don’t look so doubtful at me. I wouldn’t want you—bein’ from the East and all—to think we’re backward. I’m no
hick
. You better believe I know how to enforce the law. Now, I say, he’s shot the body and the scene, so he’s shot
enough
pictures.”

The incident had taken some polish off the man. Hadn’t she just told Bill this wasn’t Hicksville—in jest? How did this guy ever get elected in Boulder County, which she had
heard was one of the most educated communities in America?

Tatum moved away from her, and Louise was grateful. He seemed to want to patch things up with Pete, at least. He said, “Actually, Fitzsimmons, it was just as a courtesy that I came back here t’tell you people what’s what. From the look of things, this murder’s the work of a poacher. They’re dangerous people, and there’s big money in poaching these days—twenty grand alone for a single elk, d’ja know that? My guess is Jimmy tried to stop one of ’em.”

Pete busied himself covering his camera lens and pulling film rolls out of his vest pockets preparatory to turning them over to the sheriff. Louise looked at Tatum in disbelief.

Silently, Tatum escorted them back to the ranch entrance, then peeled off to issue a few orders to his deputies. Managing things was a tall, competent woman named Sergeant Rafferty. Louise noted he had a more deferential attitude toward the sergeant than he displayed toward Louise and Ann, and she wondered what the woman had done to wring respect from him. She caught the sergeant’s eye as they passed, and the woman smiled good-naturedly. Louise gave her a thumbs-up.

They reached the pole fence where Jimmy Porter had died. Blood still festooned the wagon, the fence, the perennials, and the ground. When they joined Ann at the car, Louise sank gratefully into the passenger seat and started pulling off her boots. She turned to Pete, who was observing the boot removal without comment. “If Jimmy Porter wasn’t armed, why would he allow a poacher to come so close?”

“Makes no sense,” said the cameraman. “That’s why I’m findin’ it a little hard to agree with the sheriff on that. I have a different take. I grew up around here—don’t
know if you knew that. In Hygiene, a little community a few miles east of Lyons. My parents were ranchers, and I’ve known ranchin’ since I was little. Ranchers hate things that kill their stock, especially coyotes. Know what they do after they kill a coyote?”

“No.”

“They throw the carcass over a fence. Know why? It’s to warn other coyotes to stay away.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the ranch. “Someone killed Jimmy Porter and he ended up like a coyote carcass on a fence. I’d say maybe that was a warning.”

“D
RINK IT DOWN, AND THEN
we gotta get outta here.” Marty Corbin was a large, heavyset man in western garb, his hatless brown curly hair blowing in the wind. He had placed one hand on a hip in order to project the image of the ever-cool producer, but his big brown eyes, filled with resentment and fright, gave him away. The slanting, top-of-the-world landscape in Rocky Mountain National Park had not been kind to him this morning, and Louise knew he was waiting for another bad thing to happen.
They had fallen behind schedule in their Monday shoot and were stopping once more to take a coffee break at twelve thousand feet. Louise happily drank her second cup, exhilarated both by the brisk atmosphere and by the caffeine. But Marty had her worried.

It had rained Sunday night, ending the oppressive heat wave and helping Louise feel like a new person, despite Bill’s defection—oops, departure—and Janie heading to camp. Her producer, however, who had just flown in yesterday from the East Coast, was the picture of a man out of place—a city guy plunged into a world filled with overpowering mountains staring him down from all sides. Now it would be Marty’s turn to get adjusted to this place.

He was standing on the path next to the spongy tundra and was about to place a big foot on a clump of miniature forget-me-nots. “Stop!” Louise cried, rushing over to put a restraining hand on his arm. In a quieter voice she said, “You
have
to watch where you step, Marty. Did you know it could take a hundred years to restore those flowers you nearly stepped on? And I promised Derrell we wouldn’t disturb anything.”

Derrell, a tall, thin, poker-faced young park ranger, was going to appear in the wildflower segments with Louise and furnish details about the alpine and tundra plants. At the moment, he stood ten paces away and glowered at the clumsy producer. Hawk-eyed and hawk-nosed, he was a botanist and the park’s wildflower expert, and Louise could see he wasn’t going to permit defenseless plants to be ground under the vulgar boot of this East Coast TV big shot. To Derrell, Marty must seem as crude as a Hun to an ancient Roman. The producer, sensing the ranger’s disapproval, glanced crankily at the fellow. “What’s he gonna do, throw me in some little jail carved out of a mountain?” As if reverting to his days growing up in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood, he petulantly added, “Anyway, I
could take him in a fight—no problem.” He muttered the hostile words as he wandered off the path again in search of a perfect place to shoot. But now he stepped gingerly, as if he might encounter eggs in his path instead of plants.

Louise smiled indulgently. Before leaving Washington, D.C., Marty had decided a location shoot out West demanded that he look the part. He had arrived wearing new jeans, shirt, and cowboy hat, and now was left with only the jeans and shirt. He had thrown the crew into a panic when he tripped down the wide steps of the steep mountain path. Amidst shouts and laughter, he rolled fifteen feet or so before it ceased to be funny. The sound man ran to his rescue and helped him back onto his unsteady feet, breathless and gasping. It took the entire crew to soothe his nerves and assure him he wasn’t hurt.

When he fell, his western designer hat had gone sailing off into the clear mountain air. Louise reflected that it might become a bonus for some passing tourist, or might rest in perpetuity in a crevice between two rocks. Now, Marty reached up often and fruitlessly and tried to smooth his hair. The wind was blowing everything, including the sound, straight east to Nebraska.

More practical after five days in the West, Louise was finally acclimatized. She was also wearing proper clothing; her shirt and jeans were broken in now, and she knew enough to secure her cowboy hat with an under-the-chin rawhide strap. Her hair was imprisoned in a sensible ponytail, so it didn’t fly around in the wind like Medusa’s. And she had ditched her tooled boots; her feet were now shod in climbing boots with soles that gripped the rocks and gave her a budding sense of being a western woman.

The producer, one eye on the watchful park ranger, returned to the path and swigged down the last of his coffee. “
Jesus
, what a place!”

“Don’t you love it, Marty? Above treeline, above almost
everything. And look at those mountains.” She grabbed his arm and pointed to the white peaks only a few miles from where they were standing. “They just cry out to you, ‘Climb me!’”

“Climb me, hell,” he grumbled, bending to stuff their coffee cups into a small duffel bag with the thermos. He straightened slowly, panting from the effort, and gave her a weary look. “Gimme a little slack, Louise, a little more time to adjust. How much do I have to suffer for
Gardening with Nature? Hell
, we should call it
Risk-Taking With Nature
. I’ll love it here if we ever get any good footage out of today.”

Derrell came to the rescue, finding the best display of tundra flowers for the fussy producer to use in the shoot. Pete was whistling contentedly, already happy because he had wandered off by himself and gotten some unexpected shots of bighorn sheep. The sound man was as nervous as Marty. He checked his sound mixer, then looked at the producer and shook his head. “Jeez, what a wind! It’s going to be tough getting a good level, even with the wind screen on the shotgun mike.”

“We’ll do the best we can,” said Marty. “Okay, Derrell—heads up. Louise, sweetie, keep the pace even now. This shoot is weird enough as it is, without having a hurry-up, slow-up effect screwin’ it up. So let’s get started.” Pete, walking backward on the perilous incline with the aid of the grip, taped Louise and die young botanist as they approached what looked like a rock garden full of small plants growing out of the tundra. These species favored the environment of a fell field, which was ground covered with small rocks. The high-altitude plants were growing in a climate where a tree could not survive. Never attaining normal size, they sprang up from old roots during a six-week growing season, and received only a few inches of moisture in the form of melted snow.

Derrell’s impassive face came alive as he described the qualities of each tough little speciman. He pointed out one of the park visitors’ favorites, old-man-on-the-mountain, only a foot high, with protective hairy leaves and showy yellow daisylike flowers. Then he and Louise crouched down to look at the other varieties growing nearby: a cluster of white bistort; the buttercup-flowered avens; the even more diminutive blue forget-me-not; and smallest of all—a mere pink blotch upon the earth—the pink-flowered dwarf clover.

Finally, Marty was satisfied. “Yeah—that’s got it!” the producer cried, looking more comfortable now that something seemed to be working. “Good job, Louise, with those dinky little plants. And, Derrell, by golly, you were a real pro. Didn’t know you had it in you. I really admire the two of you for not letting your teeth chatter. As for me, I’m freezing my tushy!”

Still hyper, Marty hustled them onward to the next task. “Let’s get outta here. We shoot in that wildflower meadow next, and I sure hope a chinook isn’t blowing there, too. I gotta confess—they make me edgy.” He rubbed his ample stomach. “But first, let’s grab lunch. I’m starved. Derrell, how many miles do we have to go to eat?” The park ranger had apparently become Marty’s new pal.

“There’s a good place near the entrance to the park,” Derrell told him, smiling faintly. “It’s only an hour away.” Groaning, Marty led the way back to the cars, while Pete dropped back to fall in step with Louise. The cameraman gave her a sideways glance. “How’re your cheeks?”