Murder One Read online

  Murder One

  A Colby Tate Mystery

  Allen Kent

  Copyright © 2019 by Allen Kent. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the cases of brief quotations imbedded in articles or reviews, with attribution shown.

  For information address AllenPearce Publishers,

  16635 Hickory Drive, Neosho, MO 64850

  AllenPearce Publishers © ©

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Allen Kent

  Murder One

  Kent, Allen

  DEDICATION

  To Holly:

  my constant support and inspiration

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful thanks to my team of readers: my wife Holly, Diane Andris, and Judy Day. You all made this a much better book.

  And special thanks to Uvi Poznansky for her wonderful cover!

  1

  The moment she turned onto the gravel lane that descended the hill into the river bottoms, Brenda Castoe knew Nettie was dead. The woods have a way of letting you know such things. She could see it in the skeleton of the tree that stood beside Nettie’s doublewide. The old red oak had been struggling to hang onto its own life for the last couple of years, ravaged by an attack of bark beetles. The top had died back to bare, black tentacles, every one lined with turkey vultures. Brenda said they were thick as pigeons on a powerline, all hunched forward with ugly red heads craned in the direction of Nettie’s broken screen door.

  Brenda had stopped her Rav4 right there at the top of the downhill and climbed out. Even that high on the hillside, the air was tainted with the smell of death. Other than the distant murmur of the brook that tumbled from a spring at the back of Nettie’s property and splashed in front of her ramshackle home, nothing broke the silence of the little valley. Most any time during daylight, you could hear cardinals whistle and gobblers taunt each other on the edges of the meadow behind the house. But Brenda heard nothing. She said it sounded as quiet as, well, death.

  She pulled her cell out of the cup holder between the car seats while she was still high enough on the ridge to get a signal and called my office. No sense calling 911. They would just relay the message to me. Most people in the county know my number as well as they know the emergency code. The local phone company here is still privately owned and they made it simple by giving me the same last four as the desk phone at the office. 1188. Folks around here simply know to call “aces and eights.”

  My name is Colby Tate. And yes. I’m one of the Huckleberry Ridge Tates. For people who grew up here in the county, then moved away, it surprises them when they come back to visit to see me wearing a sheriff’s star and not an orange jumpsuit. Jerry Covell tells me that when they come into his Family Market, they’ll say to him or to anyone else standing around, “Did we see that you got a Tate serving as sheriff? This can’t be the same county I remember!”

  They’ve got good reason for wondering, but it just shows they lost track of me somewhere along the line. For some reason, unbeknownst to me or anyone else, when my cousins were all raising hell and doing what they could to aggravate the law, I got into books. Read everything. In fact, my only venture into larceny was that I found ways to stow an extra book or two in my backpack when I left the county library. I always returned them, mind you, when I’d had time to digest them. I just slipped the extras into the night deposit rather than drop them at the desk where Edith Ellison could tell with a single glance if you were retuning more than you’d taken out. Those books, and a couple of great teachers through the years, kept me in school and got me a scholarship afterward. All but eleven of my classmates either got married straight out of high school, went to work for the modular home manufacturer that employs half of Crayton, or joined the Marines. And I don’t mean just went in the military. They joined the Marines. Down our way, there’s a difference. In fact, I was back at the high school speaking at a career day a few months back when one of my old classmates walked in wearing his uniform. One of the senior girls was just clueless enough to say, “Hey, Louie. I didn’t know you was a soldier!” To which Louie said without the slightest trace of good humor, “I’m not a soldier. I’m a Marine”—like all the other branches were just support organizations. Even I did my tour of duty. But that’s another story. And I need to get back to the call from Brenda Castoe.

  I was sitting with my heels on the desk in what we affectionately call the Blockhouse—a stone bunker of a building on the west side of the square that had once been the old bank. There was a time when every town with more than a thousand breathing citizens had its own K-12 schoolhouse, its own grocery store, and its own bank. The schools across the county have long since been consolidated, placed out in the middle of a cornfield far enough from everyone that every kid has to be bussed, but no community can lay claim to the school being theirs. That happened long enough ago that the internecine squabbles that once bordered on something akin to gang warfare have simmered down to snide references to rival towns and family origins.

  We’ve managed to keep Jerry’s Family Market alive by stubbornly paying the extra five to ten percent it costs to keep one of our neighbors in business. But the bank closed, replaced out on the highway by a branch of one of the city banks. Two tellers, an ATM, and a drive-up window. The city police laid claim early to space in the old junior high/high school cum city hall. So when the sheriff’s department decided to relocate from a drafty metal building on North Madison Street, we got the old bank building. In some ways, we were the lucky ones. The vault gives us a secure evidence room, and two of the offices in the back were converted to a jail. I have the little glassed cubicle that once put the loan officer right up front where everyone could see her. But I’ve let my story get away from me again.

  “Sheriff,” Brenda Castoe said when she called, “I’m out on the road above Nettie Suskey’s place, and things don’t look right. I’d just as soon not go down there without someone with me.”

  I dropped the booted heels to the floor and asked what made her nervous.

  “Vultures,” she said, and told me about the buzzards, the putrid odor, and the quiet. Any two of the three would have been enough to convince me she had good reason to stay put until help arrived. Vultures can smell death from miles away and, though it’s not uncommon for them to roost on bare branches, they generally don’t choose to be that close to a house. And Nettie’s valley is never quiet.

  My chief deputy is Grace Torres. On that particular afternoon, Grace was over in the courthouse giving testimony in a case involving the theft of toys from a storage unit where the police department keeps its stock of donations until our local “Christmas for Kids” day rolls around. A little hard to believe, isn’t it? That someone would be stupid enough to break into the place the police store toys people have donated to give to poor kids at Christmas? We caught the three numbskulls when they tried to make a deal with another Christmas charity up in Green County. Said they had a bunch of never-been-opened toys they would sell real cheap. Fortunately for the thieves, they were also from Green County. If Judge Werner had really wanted to punish them, he would have sentenced them to having to live down here among the citizens of Crayton for the next ten years. People here have absolutely no tolerance for stealing toys from kids. Grace had responded to the call from the Green County charity, had made the arrest, and was over in the courthouse when Brenda called.

  Rocky D’Amico, who we call our Jail Commander, watches over the rare prisoner we might be holding, keeps an eye on the evidence room, and cruises the area just beyond the city limits every few hours. Rocky’s in his late fifties, about sixty pounds on the heavy side, and
as friendly a guy as Mr. Rogers. People around Crayton love him, but he’s slow on the hoof and a heart attack waiting to happen. I try to leave Rocky within spitting distance of the office.

  That would leave Frankie Ritter to go out to Nettie’s if I didn’t. He patrols the north half of the county and would probably be closer. But Frankie has his own set of issues. He’s a small, weasel-eyed man with a pencil-thin mustache who keeps an obstacle course in the backyard of his place up in Willston. That’s a wide spot in the road about halfway between here and the county line. The first time I visited his house, I was responding to a call from a neighbor who reported shots fired from the direction of Frankie’s back yard. I found him practicing a “drop, draw, and roll” maneuver under a two-foot high bar, drawing his weapon as he tumbled and swinging back up onto one knee to fire off a shot at a silhouette target he’d braced against a pile of sandbags. The closest I’ve come to letting one of the deputies go is when Frankie tested the move when responding to a backup call from a state trooper.

  The patrolman had chased down and nosed in front of a speeding vehicle with deeply tinted windows, but couldn’t get anyone to leave the car. Frankie pulled up nose-to-nose on the shoulder of the two-lane road with the trooper’s vehicle, threw open the door of his own squad car, and practiced his “roll and draw” into a marshy roadside ditch. In the heat of battle, he’d left the car running, failed to shift into park, and his empty cruiser rammed the trooper’s front fender. Frankie heard the collision, thought the suspect had surged his own vehicle forward into the patrolman’s, and said he would have fired if he hadn’t been screened from his target by a thick stand of cattails. This may sound like a pretty questionable bunch to be providing law enforcement to a county of just under 50,000, but we get the job done and people generally feel safe and watched after.

  The other two deputies are night patrol, so when Brenda called, I really had no choice but to head out there myself. It’s about a twenty-five-minute drive on winding, two-lane roads overhung by oak and hickory. I told Brenda to just sit tight and wait till I got there.

  I can’t say that I know Brenda Castoe that well. She lives up in Springfield and works for one of those medical alert companies. Some job that takes her around to check up on all the people who subscribe to their service. So we run into each other every now and again. A pleasant woman. Maybe forty-five and what I hear referred to as “full-figured.” She’s always dresses in Sunday-go-to-church clothes, even when she’s visiting someone way out in the hills. Maybe that’s something the job requires, but I suspect it has more to do with her religion. Ankle-length dresses and long hair rolled up on her head. The dresses have a way of making me feel under-dressed when I’m around her, like a sheriff shouldn’t be wearing jeans, even if they’re pretty new and worn with a neatly-pressed khaki uniform shirt.

  She was waiting in her Toyota, but climbed out when I turned down off the ridge and pulled up beside her. As I expected, she was wearing a pretty dress in a rose color, but had on shoes my mother would have labeled “sensible.” Good solid soles and heels.

  “Sorry to drag you out here, Sheriff,” she said, which showed we really didn’t know each other all that well. Everyone in the county calls me Tate. “But things just don’t look right to me. I called down the hill after I phoned, and nobody came to the door. And that flock of buzzards didn’t budge.”

  I wanted to tell her that a flock of vultures is called a committee, one of those bits of trivia I picked up from all that reading. But I’ve found that correcting people on things that don’t matter much isn’t a good way to connect. It also makes you look like a know-it-all—something some folks here already think anyway. I work hard at not adding to the perception.

  I could smell death on the air from where we were and listened for a moment to the quiet of the valley below. “Yeah,” I told Brenda, “I think you made a good decision. Things don’t seem right. You out here for one of your visits?” It seemed like a pretty obvious thing to be asking. But when something doesn’t look right, I always like to know what brought people to that place at that time.

  “Yes. I try to drop by at least once a month. Test the alert systems and make sure our clients are happy. I was over at the Gilreath’s and thought I’d swing by while I was this close.”

  “And how is Maribel?” Maribel Gilreath is a little like Nettie, but a widow. Nettie has just chosen to stay single. Both live by themselves, don’t have any living kin to speak of, and are too old to be out here in the woods alone. But God help the concerned soul who tries to tell them that.

  Brenda’s smile was a little sad. “Same old Maribel. She still drives that old pickup into town for groceries but has to use a walker to get around the house. I asked her how she gets her foot from the gas to the brake. She told me she drives in low all the time, and there’s only one stop sign between her place and the market. If there’s no traffic coming, she doesn’t stop. That way she only has to move the leg once as she gets close to the store, and she has plenty of time to plan for it.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Yup. That’s Maribel. I stopped her once for going so slow. It was when I first came back and didn’t know her truck. Thought I was tailing a drunk. She has blocks taped to the pedals so she can reach them.”

  “You couldn’t get her off the road?”

  “She hadn’t done anything wrong. Had a valid license. The county license people don’t seem to have the heart to turn some of those old-timers down.”

  Brenda sniffed. “I hope she decides to give it up before she meets someone at that stop sign and doesn’t have time to get that leg in motion.”

  “We can hope,” I said. “Let’s go check on Nettie.”

  We left Brenda’s car where she’d parked it and rolled slowly down the hill toward the trailer in my Explorer. The buzzards wagged their hideous heads from house to car and back. A couple spread their wings like sails and tried to look threatening. None left the dying oak. I parked by the walk to Nettie’s sagging steps and we both sat for a moment, looking at the silent house. As soon as I opened my door, we knew Brenda’s fears were founded. Death hung in the air like swamp gas.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” she murmured, covering her nose and mouth with a quivering hand. I reached over and flipped open the glovebox, pulling out a thick fiber mask.

  “You’d better wait here.” I fixed it over my face and pulled the elastic straps back over my head.

  Brenda shook her head. “I’d like to come in. I’ve been a hospice nurse. This won’t be anything I haven’t seen before. And she’s my client.” She fished a handkerchief from her knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag.

  I didn’t argue. There are plenty of things I prefer to do completely on my own, but finding a dead body isn’t one of them. We both slid from the Explorer and Brenda followed me up onto the porch.

  The screen door was latched but not locked. The inside wooden door was ajar and the stink of decomposition poured out like raw sewage from a ruptured septic tank. I pushed it open and noticed then what I should have seen when I drove up. Every curtain was closed tight. The inside was pitch dark. Beneath the suffocating scent of death, I picked up a more permanent stale mustiness.

  “Anybody home?” I yelled, knowing there would be no answer. We both eased into the dusky living room and stood for a moment, letting our eyes adjust. And there she was, sitting upright in a faded green overstuffed chair with her head lulled back, eyes bulging, and mouth agape. Her face and hands were as blue-white as her wild shock of unkempt hair. Eyes I remembered as pale blue had faded to dull gray. I pulled a pair of clean cotton gloves from my pocket, something I’ve learned to carry for just these occasions, and stepped to the wall. Using just a fingernail, I flipped on the light. The dark had been kind to Nettie. In the light, we could see the work of rodents that shared the house. A rat the size of a red squirrel skittered from beneath her chair and disappeared under a sofa that filled most of one wall.

  “Oh, my God!” Brenda wheezed. She h
ad pulled the neck of that rose dress up across her face.

  “Not exactly hospice,” I guessed, stepping closer to the corpse where I could have a better look. Brenda didn’t say anything and hung back by the door.

  “Been dead a few days,” I said, mainly to myself. “You must be the first person to come by.” Brenda grunted an acknowledgement.

  Though Nettie had practically nothing in the house, her few belongings were scattered recklessly about the room. A corner china cabinet stood open, most of its porcelain contents shattered into delicately painted shards that covered the floor like a spilled basket of flower petals.

  I crouched near the arm of the chair. “That face looks like sheer terror. Like she was frightened to death.”

  Brenda took a step closer. “You’re too new to this job, Sheriff. A heart attack or suffocation will do that to a person. Crushing pain or the inability to draw a breath. Pretty terrifying. I wonder why she didn’t trigger her alert?” The small white pendant with its red button hung uselessly about the woman’s neck.

  I pointed at dark bruises across the center of both forearms. “Depending on what happened, she may not have had time. Looks like she was pinned down.” I pulled out my pocket knife, an eight-inch Buck knife I’d guess every able-bodied male in the county over the age of six carries somewhere on his person. Next to a cell phone, it’s about the most useful tool one can have. I flipped open the blade, slipped the back into the cup of Nettie’s partially clawed right hand, and lifted it off the arm of the chair.

  “Like I thought,” I told Brenda. “Rigor has started to relax. She’s been dead a couple of days. And look here.” I pointed with my free hand at traces of blood on the tips of the woman’s fingernails. “She struggled with someone.” I gently returned the hand to its resting place and tucked the knife back in my pocket. “Time to call in the state police.”