“Violence in these mountains was here long before Mr. Vanderbilt bought the Smokies and gave them to the government for a park,” I said. “I imagine it takes a hard individual to live off the land out here.”
“Who was the girl in the truck?” she asked, a little too casually.
“Rowena Creigh,” I replied. “Grinny’s daughter. She seems to think very highly of herself. She showed up in her truck after I’d been dismissed. It beat walking back.”
“Was she the one the man said he saw leaving your cabin earlier this evening?”
I was surprised, but then remembered that second witness. “No,” I said. I didn’t elaborate. I sensed that somehow all these unknown women had become important to Mary Ellen, although, superficially at least, she had no claims on my loyalty. And vice versa.
“There going to be formal repercussions from Ranger Bob?” I asked.
She smiled. “I don’t think so. I think he’s more upset about you than me.” She hesitated. “Bob’s carrying a bit of a torch, I think. I keep fending off, but someone must have told him persistence pays. One day I’ll have to get firm, I suppose. Mostly it’s harmless.”
I remembered the hostile looks Bob had been shooting my way during my little debrief. I wondered how harmless the guy really was. Mary Ellen was a striking woman who took her beauty in stride; she might be a whole lot more important to Ranger Bob than she knew.
“All the more reason for me to get out of Dodge,” I said, finishing my coffee. “I’m glad I could be of some help. I think.”
She smiled. “We’ll have a ton of paperwork to do after today. I’ll let you know what they find out about the victim and the second hangman.”
Once she’d left I thought about taking the dogs out for a final night walk. I decided against it. One unscheduled truck ride was enough for one evening. I decided on a nightcap after all. As I sat out on the porch in the dark, I wondered if my association with the lovely Mary Ellen Goode wasn’t drawing to a close on more fronts than just the Howard case.
We’d met by chance during the cat dancers investigation, and I’d been smitten, probably like every other normal man who saw her for the first time. But the fact was, the entire context of our time together had been violent and especially frightening for a park ranger with a Ph. D. A man and a woman may draw very close under those circumstances, but in the cold light of day, it was common ground you both wanted to go away.
Frack came out to the porch and flopped down on the rug. We both decided to sit there and listen to the creek go by.
4
The muttskis roused me early the next morning with some tentative woofing on the front porch. I grabbed my bathrobe and went to the door, where a deputy stood waiting patiently, flat hat in hand and mirrored sunglasses firmly in place. He looked to be at least thirteen. Or perhaps I was getting old.
“Morning, Deputy. What’s up?”
“Sheriff needs to see you,” the deputy replied, looking nervously at the shepherds now that I had the screen door open. They were sitting behind me, waiting for breakfast. “Problem in Robbins County.”
“What kind of problem?” I asked, wondering why the early-morning summons.
“Um,” the deputy said, knotting his hands. “Sheriff Mingo says you killed a man over there last night?”
I blinked in the bright morning sunlight. “News to me,” I said, “but you tell the sheriff I’ll be right over.”
“Do I need to wait for you, Lieutenant?” the deputy asked, pointedly.
“Nope. I need a shower and some coffee, and then I’ll be right along. Want to come in and meet my shepherds?”
“No, sir, reckon I don’t. Big dogs make me nervous.”
“Okay, then. Tell him thirty minutes.”
The sheriff was waiting for me at his office a half hour later.
“Shit magnet, reporting as ordered,” I said. The sheriff smiled grimly and offered coffee. He then explained that M. C. Mingo had called over from Rocky Falls and asked him to round up one Mister C. Richter and deliver him to the Robbins County Sheriff’s Office, forthwith, as they say in the big city.
“Says he has a complaint report of a fight at Grinny Creigh’s place on Spider Mountain wherein you assaulted two men, one of whom was sixty-three years old. The Creigh people say one’s got a broken leg and the old guy’s dead from a fist to the head.”
“It was an elbow,” I said. “It still hurts. He have a warrant out?”
“Now that you ask, he didn’t actually mention any warrant. You said last night two guys tried to administer a little discipline and you put ’em down. Care to amplify?”
I went through the fracas in detail, reminding the sheriff that I had been abducted by these two men, chained into the back of a pickup truck, and taken against my will to the hills for my “conversation” with Grinny Creigh. “The older guy was out cold but definitely breathing when I left; the other guy did seem to have a broken leg. But I’ll claim self-defense in the context of a kidnapping. And I will get a warrant for the whole damn clan.”
The sheriff drummed his fingers on his desk for a moment. “Lemme call him back. Why don’t you wait out in the bullpen.”
“Ask him if he can produce a body,” I said from the doorway. “You know, habeas corpus?”
“Don’t tell me my business, young man,” Hayes snapped, and waved me out of his office. He summoned me back in ten minutes. I had taken the time to make a call of my own to my estate attorney in Triboro, J. Oliver Strong, Esq. Lawyer Strong was a wills-and-probate guy, but his firm had a stable of criminal defense lawyers. Strong told me to sit tight and that one of them would call me back within the hour.
“Seems M. C. does not have a warrant,” the sheriff reported. “Although he says he can scare one up one pretty quick. FYI, the magistrate over there is married to a Creigh. The habeas question got a little bit murky, though. He hasn’t personally seen a body, nor have any of his deputies. Whole thing’s ‘verbal’ at the moment, pending lots and lots of further investigation.”
“They’re really all over it, aren’t they.”
“I told him what you said about getting a warrant out for Grinny and her whole crew. He started in with nobody having proof of any abduction until I told him we had witnesses at the lodge, plus the fact of Rue Creigh delivering your tired ass back to the lodge around midnight. That definitely slowed him up some. I asked how likely it was that she’d be offering you a ride in her pick-’em-up truck if you’d just killed one of their people with your bare hands right there in her front yard.”
“What’d he say to that?”
“That it would probably have turned her on. Rue’s got kinda of an exotic reputation in these parts.”
“Yikes. So where are we? I have lawyers in motion.”
The sheriff shrugged. “Ball’s in his court right now. If the Creighs can produce a body, and he can get his warrant, he may or may not follow through with it. He has to know that the feds have been looking for a way into Robbins County for months now.”
“And?”
“Kidnapping is a federal crime. A perfect handle for them to get right into the middle of all this. You know how they do-come in riding one charge and then suddenly growing arms like an octopus. My guess, even if that guy did kick? Mingo’s gonna think on it and then fail to produce a corpus. One less Creigh isn’t worth a federal invasion. In the meantime, however, I need you to stick around.”
“Damn, I was just about to declare victory and leave town.”
“Be still, my heart,” he said wistfully. “Right now I need to see what the jungle drums are saying up in the coves and hollers. Maybe find out who this supposedly dead guy was. And, more importantly, whether or not he has kin of his own.”
“As in, if M. C. isn’t going to handle it, some irate relatives might?”
“As in, you bet your flatlander ass. You better stay out of open windows and keep those dogs with you.”