Back of Beyond ch-1 Page 6

  Swallowing six ibuprofens to blunt the savage pounding in his head, throwing them up in the kitchen sink, taking six more, finally drinking a beer and a raw egg for breakfast which eased him back into the slipstream and stopped his hands from shaking and made it possible for him to brush his teeth and shave without mutilating himself;

  Showing up for the eight thirty staff briefing with the town cops from across the hall, Undersheriff Bodean outlining the circumstances of the death of Hank Winters, sleeping through it with his eyes wide open until the sheriff stormed into the room waving the morning’s Independent Record, cursing Carrie Lowry and especially that damned Skeeter, who must have been the one who fed her full of lies about the accident being a murder and a lead left at the crime scene that would identify the killer, ordering all of his cops to boycott the local paper until they apologized and ran a front-page retraction;

  Feeling Larry’s absolutely chilling glare from across the room while Tubman ranted;

  Cutting out early after the briefing because he couldn’t concentrate and he needed a beer, taking his notes and camera with him;

  Spending the afternoon at the Windbag and the Jester, seeing his old friends, laughing at their stories and telling some of his own, feeling like it was a family reunion of sorts for the men and women who drank in the daylight, his people!;

  Taking the Ford back up the mountain as dusk came, shotgun in the rack and pistol in his holster, hoping to avoid hitting another elk, hoping against hope that whoever did this to Hank would read the paper and be puzzled as hell and return to the scene to try and retrieve whatever it was the cops found;

  Knowing it was nuttier than hell but somehow made complete sense;

  Parking the vehicle on a road a half mile from Hank’s place so it couldn’t be seen and hiking through the dark forest still dripping with rain from the storm that afternoon, carrying the shotgun, packing his pistol, and swinging a six-pack of beer by the plastic holder.

  * * *

  He didn’t know how long he’d been passed out when the sound of a motor woke him up. Cody moaned and opened his eyes. His head throbbed. He found himself sitting on the damp ground, leaning back against a tree trunk. The cold wet had soaked through his jeans and underwear, and his butt was freezing.

  Since it took a few moments to figure out where he was and why he was there, the sound of the tires on gravel and the motor confused him. Then he realized his plan had worked, that the killer had returned to the scene.

  He stood up and the waves of dizziness and nausea nearly buckled his knees. He kept his head down, waiting it out, trying to listen to what was going on through the roaring. He heard a man’s voice say, “Here it is,” and he thought: There’s more than one of them.

  Unless the guy was talking to himself, which was doubtful.

  “Here?” A woman’s voice.

  “There, on that frame that was once a couch. His body was there.”

  Cody took a deep breath of cold mountain air and it cleared the clouds from his mind a little. The night and his situation started to come into focus. He wished he’d been lucid when they drove up so that he could have seen them before they got out of their car. But that moment had passed.

  He left the three full beers and the empty bottle of bourbon in the grass, and took a step toward the back of the cabin. His legs were rubbery, and he lurched to the side, about to fall. Luckily, the trees were close together and his shoulder thumped into a trunk and kept him upright. He inhaled and held the cold air in his lungs, hoping it would sober him up.

  “So what are we looking for?” the woman asked.

  “I really don’t know,” the man said. “Whatever was left. If anything.”

  The unburned part of the cabin was between Cody and the visitors, so he couldn’t see them. A shaft of light sliced through the air-a flashlight being turned on-then quickly descended out of view. They were looking for something in the black muck.

  He thought, I have you now, you scumbags.

  “This is sick,” she said. “I wished I knew what we were looking for.”

  “Probably nothing,” he said. “It might be the sheriff’s idea of a stupid trick to make him look like he’s doing something. He may drag this out past the election, is my guess.”

  The back of the cabin was suddenly in front of him. Cody reached out with his left hand and touched the rounded logs. All he’d need to do was slip along the lengths of the logs until it opened up on the burned section, and they’d be there in the open.

  Then he realized he’d left his shotgun back where he’d passed out. Hesitating, he considered feeling his way back to retrieve it. But he’d gotten this far in silence without slipping or stepping on a dead branch to reveal himself. Doing it twice more without making a sound was unlikely at best. He cursed himself and reached up and pinched his cheek so hard he winced. But it helped wake him up. Then he reached down and slowly unsnapped the plastic restraint on his holster and drew his Sig Sauer. As always, there was no safety to worry about and one in the chamber so there’d be no need to rack the slide.

  He’d had Trijicon self-luminous sights put on his weapon back in Denver, and he raised it and fitted the front green dot between the twin dots of the back sight. Although he’d never fired at anyone at night on the job, he’d put in hours at the range. He knew if he squeezed the trigger when the three dots were horizontal he should be able to hit what he was pointing at. His only issue was whether or not he’d take out the both of them without warning, or identify himself first. Of course, however it went, in his after-action report he’d say he ordered them to freeze and they didn’t, so he had no choice.

  Kill the man first, he thought. A double-tap into the thickest part of his torso as fast as he could squeeze the trigger, then swing on the woman and do the same. Then, if necessary, killshots to the head.

  Could he kill a woman? The idea sickened him. “There,” the man said, his voice rising. “Right there. Look.”

  Had they found it? he wondered.

  He saw the pool of their flashlight before he saw them. There was a glint of gold in the muck of the floor.

  “It looks like a coin,” she said.

  “Yes, it does,” he said, distressed. “I don’t know how I could have missed it.”

  Because, Cody thought, I put it there two hours ago. Gold-foil-wrapped chocolate coins went for $1.89 at Walgreens these days.

  And he cleared the edge of the logs and barked, “FREEZE, YOU FUCKERS!”

  She screamed and threw her flashlight into the air with the same motion that she covered her mouth.

  He blinded Cody with his light but before he did Cody saw a hand reach down and grip a pistol and raise it and there was a star-shaped explosion of fire tinged with blue and a deafening crack. And something white-hot and angry slapped the side of his face.

  And that’s when Cody shot the county coroner. Double-tap, two loud snaps and two yellow-green tongues of flame. Skeeter went down like a puppet with its strings clipped.

  Cody lowered his weapon, the sharp smell of gunpowder and his own blood biting at his nose, and said, “Oh, shit.”

  Carrie Lowry didn’t stop screaming until her sobs and admonitions took over.

  6

  Cody sat back in an uncomfortable chair across from Sheriff Tubman in his cramped little office. The door was closed, and had been for an hour. There had been no eight thirty briefing that morning. Undersheriff Bodean perched on the corner of Tubman’s desk, looking almost straight down at him. On the credenza behind the sheriff was his hat, brim-down, and the morning’s Independent Record with EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT: CORONER SHOT BY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT blaring across all four columns of the front page. Cody thought, Carrie got that big story I promised her after all.

  “You really ought to put your hat crown-down when you’re not wearing it,” Cody said. “You’ll ruin the brim that way.”

  Tubman closed his eyes, to keep from exploding, Cody guessed.

  “How you can joke at a
time like this is beyond me,” Bodean said, shaking his head.

  “Really,” Cody said, “it’ll flatten the brim. Trust me on this.”

  “Look at my phone,” Tubman said. “All the lights are blinking. Everybody wants a statement and they’re willing to stay on hold until they get it.”

  “Sorry,” Cody said.

  “Yes,” Tubman said, “you are.”

  Bodean cleared his throat and stuck his chin out. “In case you don’t know the procedure, Detective Hoyt, this is an officer-involved shooting, so give me your badge and your gun.”

  Cody shifted in his chair and unclipped the badge and slid it across the desk to Tubman. He pulled his Sig Sauer and handed it grip-first to Bodean. “Careful,” he said, “it’s loaded.”

  Bodean walked the weapon over and put it gingerly on top of a metal filing cabinet. He said, “You are officially on administrative leave with pay. We’ve got a call in to the state to send an outside team to investigate the incident. They’re likely to be here tomorrow, so stay in touch with us at all times.”

  Cody nodded.

  “Don’t go anywhere for seventy-two hours. That’s when we’ll take your statement and based on what the state criminal investigation team says, you might be placed under arrest.”

  Even though he knew it could happen, Cody felt a chill crawl through his scalp.

  Said Bodean, “It’s my duty to advise you to keep your mouth shut until you give your official statement. At that time, you should be aware that under Garrity versus New Jersey, you may be disciplined if you refuse to answer questions about your conduct on the job. You have no Fifth Amendment rights as a cop. In the meantime, the only person you should talk to is a peer counselor we’ll assign. Do you understand what I just said?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t mind talking. And if you send a social worker to my place I’ll mace him,” Cody growled. “It went down exactly like Carrie Lowry wrote in the paper. Skeeter drew first and fired after I told him to freeze. I shot him in self-defense.”

  Tubman continued to shake his head, as if he were watching his career slink away.

  Bodean said, “She wrote that you didn’t identify yourself.”

  “I didn’t get the chance. Skeeter was fast for a ghoul.”

  “You refused to take a breathalyzer test.”

  “It’s my right. I don’t trust those portable things. I took one later here at the station.”

  “Hours later,” Bodean said, “after the alcohol in your system had a chance to metabolize. And you still came in a.88. That’s barely sober and it was four hours after the shooting. And the officer on the scene said you smelled like a still.”

  “Dougherty wouldn’t know a still if he tripped over it,” Cody said.

  “You’re lucky Skeeter was wearing a vest. Your first slug hit him here,” Bodean gestured toward his heart. “The second one was above the armor and really messed up his shoulder. But he should be okay and giving press conferences any time now.”

  Instinctively, Cody reached up and touched the compress taped over his right ear where Skeeter’s round had clipped him. The bullet had taken a half inch of his earlobe and the wound bled like crazy until they got it stopped.

  After the emergency room docs had bandaged and released him, he’d tried to talk to the coroner, who was upstairs in the same hospital. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to yell at Skeeter or apologize or shoot him again. He didn’t get an opportunity to make the choice because a hospital security officer wouldn’t let him past his desk until visiting hours.

  “Why in God’s name was Skeeter wearing a vest and carrying a weapon in the first place?” Cody asked. “He’s the coroner. And he shouldn’t have snuck a reporter into a crime scene just so she could get some photos. That’s not right. He was acting suspiciously.”

  “We’d all like to know that and it’ll come out in the investigation,” Tubman said. “He might be in as much trouble as you are or more. But in this instance I’m glad he had the vest or we’d have a homicide investigation going and you’d be in our jail.”

  Cody shrugged. “Speaking of homicide,” he said, “I’d still like to help on the Hank Winters murder investigation.”

  “It wasn’t a homicide,” Tubman said with force.

  “It was,” Cody said.

  “Stay away from it,” Tubman said. “Stay away from this office. Stay away from Larry.” He leaned forward on his desk and balled his fists. “And stay the hell away from me.”

  The door opened and Edna stuck her head in. “Sheriff, the governor is on the line. He wants a briefing.”

  Tubman moaned and sat back. To Cody, he said, “Go away. Go straight out the door and go home. Don’t even talk to anyone. And stay by your phone.”

  Before Cody left the room, he ducked behind the sheriff and turned the offending hat over.

  * * *

  Larry was alone in the detective room, scrolling through digital images of the crime scene Cody had shot two nights before. Although his shoulders tensed when Cody entered the room, he didn’t greet him. And when Cody shut the door behind him, Larry seemed to be studying the screen even more intently than before.

  “I’ll be out of here in a minute,” Cody said.

  He went to his desk and started filling an empty box he’d grabbed outside the evidence room with his papers, gear, and the nascent murder book he’d begun.

  “Next time,” Larry said finally, “go for a head shot.”

  “Ha.”

  “Man, when you dive in you go deep. I’ll give that to you.”

  Cody grunted.

  “A gold-wrapped chocolate coin?” Larry laughed.

  “It worked, sort of,” Cody said. “If the killer thought he’d left one behind…”

  “You know what’s going to happen,” Larry said. “Skeeter knows he’s in trouble, too. So he’s going to try and get out ahead of it with the press and the voters. He’s going to start yapping and paint you in the worst light possible and try to taint the investigation.”

  Cody shrugged.

  “So, what happened with the sheriff?”

  “I’m suspended until they clear me.”

  “You are so fucking lucky, Cody. You could have killed the coroner or gotten killed yourself. And I don’t doubt for a second that you were hammered at the time.”

  “I was blitzed,” Cody said. “But when I pulled the trigger I felt completely sober. Strange how that happens. Adrenaline trumps alcohol: remember that.”

  “Are you over it? The binge, I mean?”

  Cody said, “I think so. I’m not promising anything, though.”

  “Yeah,” Larry said, finally swiveling around in his chair to face him, “I found out how solid your promises are.”

  “I’m really sorry about that,” Cody said, looking out the window at the lawn in front of the Law Enforcement Center. “And I want to thank you again for covering for me.”

  “The last time,” Larry said. “Ever.”

  “That’s reasonable.”

  Larry let a beat pass. Then, “I’m rethinking the Winters death.”

  “You are?” For the first time in forty-eight hours, he felt a little nudge of hope.

  “Yeah. While you were partying with your old pals yesterday, I was doing police work.”

  “And?”

  “The preliminary autopsy shows blunt head trauma. Of course, they don’t know yet whether is was pre- or postmortem. I mean, the guy was covered with the beams from his roof that fell on his noggin. But there wasn’t any smoke in his lungs. Meaning he was likely dead before the fire got out of hand. As you know, it’s never the fire that kills ’em. It’s the smoke.”

  “Interesting there was no inhalation.”

  “And there’s another thing good about all that rain and cold weather,” Larry said. “According to the lab, there had been too much time between the death and the discovery of the body to find out if there was any alcohol in his bloodstream. Plus, the heat of the fire could have literally burne
d it out. But because the body was kept fairly cool, they’re going to cut his eyes out and test ’em.”

  Cody winced. “His eyes?”

  Larry read from his notes. “The vitreous humor can be tested. This is the jellylike substance within the eyeball. Alcohol can be detected there and it lags behind the blood level. That is, it reflects the blood level about two hours prior to death. If it is elevated, the ME can say that the victim was likely intoxicated. They can’t get a blood alcohol level, but they can possibly say it was there at the time of death.”

  “When will they call you back?”

  Larry shrugged. “Soon, I hope. It’s not definitive, but if there’s no smoke in the lungs and no sign of alcohol consumption, it will pretty much kill my accident or suicide theory. Because that means somebody opened a bottle and left it to be found with the body, and somebody opened the door of the stove.”

  Nodding, Cody said, “So our killer bashed him in the head, drank or poured out the bottle, and set the place on fire.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions,” Larry said.

  “Well,” Cody said, “here’s another jump. Whoever did it knew Hank once had problems with alcohol. Since Hank hadn’t had a drop in five years, they’d have to know Hank’s history. A stranger wouldn’t likely know that, would he?”

  Larry started to argue but the edges of his mouth turned down and he nodded. “I see where you’re going. But who would know, besides you?”

  Cody didn’t answer. He let Larry figure it out.

  “Every other person in your AA group,” Larry said. “You people confess everything to each other. They would know.”

  Cody said, “Exactly.”

  Larry said, “So we need to establish the whereabouts of all of the Helena AA members between the hours of eight and midnight three nights ago.”

  Cody paused. “How’d you determine the time of death? The ME?”

  “Naw. The receipt from when Winters bought the steaks had the exact time on it: 6:03 P.M. It takes almost an hour to drive from the store to his cabin, so let’s say he was there by seven. Montana Power and Light said the cabin had a power outage at midnight, which I attribute to the fire. So there’s our window.”