Barbara Graham - Quilted 05 - Murder by Sunlight (22 page)

“No, sir, but from what I gather, it is of grave concern to a new resident out there. He’s threatening to shoot all of Mr. Henry Rankin’s porkers.” Rex’s voice returned to its normal professional tone. “I tried to diffuse the situation on the phone, but I think someone with a badge ought to pay them a visit. I’d hate to have this escalate.”

Tony knew Wade was still tied up with the fingerprint project. “Tell Mike to go now. I’ll be out later.”

Besides being a smart, capable deputy, Mike and his bloodhound, Dammit, comprised the county canine unit. But more importantly in this situation, Mike also had a black belt in aikido. Tony thought it might be nice to have Mike’s special skills at hand when he interviewed the irate resident and Mr. Rankin, the pig farmer. Other than diffusing the argument, there really wasn’t much he could do. The pigs were there first, and they were a fair distance from town. Unless the homeowner was prepared to buy the pig farm, so to speak, he was stuck.

The name O’Hara was jiggling something in his brain but he couldn’t place it. Too much excitement of late and too little sleep. He thought he should identify it before heading to the farm.

Mrs. Fairfield.

“Sheriff?” The muffled voice on the other end of the call was one Tony had become all too familiar with in the past few days. The pathologist assigned to do the autopsy of Candy Tibbles had the unfortunate name, Dr. Death. Actually, his last name was Deaton, but no one used it, including the doctor. He was as wide as he was tall and had a flair for telling jokes. “I’ve got a cause of death for your Ms. Tibbles.”

“What killed her?” Tony guessed blood loss but was not qualified to make the call.

“Sunlight.” Death waited, presumably for a reaction. He didn’t wait long.

“Excuse me?” Tony said. “Sunlight?” For a moment he wondered if the doctor was telling a joke, but as macabre as the man could be, he was all about having justice for the dead. “How is that possible?”

“Ms. Tibbles suffered a terrible blow to the back of her head. Cracked the skull, and you know how head wounds like to bleed. A bit melodramatic, if you ask me. Well, anyway, she was undoubtedly knocked out cold, and the dirt boys will have their own job figuring out the blood loss.”

Tony started to wonder if the man was being paid by the word instead of the body.

“I’ve examined Ms. Tibbles, and I’ve studied the photographs of your scene,” Dr. Death said. “I’m going to say she would probably have survived if she had been hauled out of the greenhouse and into the fresh air. She would have needed a hospital to get that head fixed up, but your woman was baked to a crisp. Freshly sunburned where she lay. I can show you. It’s not a lot of sunburn because she died fairly quickly, but it’s there.”

“When you say she might have lived if she was pulled outside,” Tony said, “are we talking seconds, minutes, or hours?”

“Well, the sooner the better. I’d say minutes.” Deaton must have shuffled some papers into the receiver and it created a terrible racket, then stopped. “When whoever pulled the tarp back and exposed her to the midday sun, they killed her as sure as if they’d shot her in the head. The angle of the sun and the missing tarp put her face in the direct path of the light. Hence the sunburn. Living bodies are not happy in ovens.”

“So the manner of death is homicide?” Tony asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Death said. “Excellent question, Sheriff. I believe you’re getting the hang of this business. By the way, good luck with the upcoming election. I’ve met your opposition, Mr. Barney, and I can’t say I think he’d be an asset to any department. I’ll bet he can’t even cut his own meat much less run an investigation into missing chicken drumstick at Sunday dinner.”

“Thank you, Dr. D.”

Tony hated to question the boy. Alvin had been back from plant camp for only a few minutes. He had called Tony’s office for a ride home when Candy Tibbles’s remains had been returned for burial. After a short visit with the undertaker, Calvin Cash-dollar, Alvin was delivered for a visit with Tony.

“Blackmail?” Alvin Tibbles looked bewildered. “Why would people pay her?”

“For the usual reasons.” Tony didn’t think the boy was really taking in the whole situation. He looked ten years older than he had when Tony visited him at plant camp. “People will pay to keep people from finding out something potentially illegal or embarrassing.”

“I’d have paid too, some days, if she’d have promised to tell people she lied about being my mom and said she had kidnapped me from a normal family. I knew she couldn’t really help herself, but some things she did were more awful than others.” A flash of humor lit the boy’s wan expression. “Did you know she told me your aunt owed her big bucks and wouldn’t pay? I didn’t understand what she meant at the time or why your aunt would owe her anything.”

“Any idea what for?” Tony could imagine his aunt getting into an argument with Candy, especially if there was a student of hers involved. He could not quite wrap his mind around his aunt having any secret worthy of cash payments. Not even the fifty-dollar variety.

“I asked Mom.” Alvin shook his head. “She said I should stay out of it, and I told her to leave your aunt alone.”

Not for the first time, Tony found himself feeling sorry about the burden the boy carried. Children should not have to take care of their parents, at least not until they were adults, certainly not when they were still in school. “Your mom has a notebook where she apparently checked off monthly payments. Some appeared to be only once-a-year items, but there are only code names. Did she have a great memory?”

“Not even close.” Alvin started laughing. “She loved the whole idea of spies and having secret codes. We played secret agent games all the time when I was little. Before my grandparents died, she was irresponsible, but she could be kinda fun.” His laugh trickled away, turning into obvious grief.

“So the names she assigned each person probably mean something? Were they based on initials? You know, maybe switching Triceratops Aardvark for Tony Abernathy kind of thing?”

“Not necessarily.” Alvin gulped back threatening tears.

Tony hated having to ask the boy these questions. “We can do this later.”

“No.” Alvin remained in his chair. “Did you find the code book?”

“There’s a code book?” Tony felt like slapping himself. No wonder it had seemed so easy. Easy even for Candy on one of her bad days. “What does it look like?”

“It’s this little pink book, with a white kitten on the cover.” Alvin’s hands shook as he indicated something about the size of a deck of cards. “When we played spy, she kept it in her pocket so she could reach it and interpret her code. I had to help her set it up, but she coded everything for years. I’m sure she couldn’t come up with another one on her own. She wanted to be a spy.”

“Do you know where she kept it after you stopped playing the game?”

Alvin nodded. “She keeps it under her pillow.”

“Either Candy has changed her hiding place, or someone else beat us to it.” Wade frowned. He’d checked every bed in the house, had been through the covers inch by inch, inside the pillow cases and under the bed where he’d had to fight through monster dust bunnies. Nothing.

“I’m calling Vince. Maybe the TBI boys have it.” Tony wasn’t on hold for very long when the answer came. No. None of them had found the code book. It would have been bagged, tagged, and on the list they’d given him.

“Did you read the list?” Vince’s words burned through the telephone.

Tony had. He had also heard the undertone of righteous indignation in Vince’s voice.

Tony apologized profusely for his ever even considering such an improbable scenario and heard himself promising to never imply such a thing again. “I was desperate and not thinking clearly.”

Only his offer to buy the whole team dessert the next time they had to explore a crime scene in Park County soothed them. The responding comment about the probability of their being needed again fairly soon in the crime center of Tennessee, he let pass without comment. He deserved the backlash.

“You know, for such a messy house, there’s nothing in the trash cans.” Wade returned from his search of the upstairs. “Either she never even threw away the cardboard center from a roll of toilet paper, or someone collected all the garbage about the time she died.”

“Claude.” Tony liked the trash hauler, but he didn’t like the way his name keep coming up in their investigation. He also thought Wade might be adding one and one and coming up with three but he was grasping at straws himself. “He could have taken the code book and the trash out to the dump.”

Wade shook his head. “He signed his name, so we know he made the most recent month’s payment.”

“True. I’m not saying Claude knew about the code book. The killer could have slipped it into the trash to protect his—or her—identity, knowing Claude would probably pick it up before anyone knew she was dead. Once it arrived at the dump, it would be next to impossible to find.”

“You think the killer came into the house after bashing her in the head and threw it away?” Wade looked out the window and down the driveway where the trash would have been placed. “There’s a lot of people who could see someone, not Candy, putting something in her garbage in broad daylight.”

“If I thought there was any chance the notebook would connect me to a murder,” Tony mumbled as he chewed absently on an antacid, “I’d take it with me, rip the pages out, and run them through a paper shredder.”

Wade said, “I might just rip out the page that listed my code name and leave the book in place. But if I was really smart, I’d leave it alone and be interviewed with all the other names in the book. It’s the blackmail payer who is not in the book I’d like to talk with.”

Tony sighed. “We have so many theories, they have their own zip code.”

“If you’ve got your heart set on digging through the stuff I col-lected”—Claude stared out at the pits and piles in the dump—“I do have a master plan.”

“So you can suggest a general area where we should search.” Tony squinted against the blinding light reflecting from a piece of mirror. The hot garbage gave off a powerful aroma. He did
not
want to do this.

“Yep.” Claude walked toward a medium-high pile. “This is the most likely area. You’ll know if you start finding Kwik Kirk’s on napkins and bags, it’s probably near Candy’s stuff. She doesn’t generally have much more than a black plastic bag or two. Not like the couple with the baby. They make up for Candy with all those diapers.”

“Do you have a shovel we can borrow?” Tony walked along the edge of the pile, hoping to see a bag from Kwik Kirk’s on top.

“Yessir.” Claude ambled off and returned with two shovels, two pairs of work gloves, and a gallon jar of water and two chipped cups. “Have at it.”

It didn’t take Tony long to decide he didn’t enjoy digging in garbage. The stench was amazing. He’d never imagined this aroma, plus the sound of flies. He’d have opened his mouth to complain but was afraid the bugs would fly in. Nasty. A glance at Mike, who was filling in for the fingerprint-occupied Wade, showed another unhappy man. Dammit lounged in the shade of a massive magnolia tree by the house. The bloodhound looked quite comfortable.

About the time Tony was ready to call a halt to their search, Mike found a couple of black bags surround by Kwik Kirk’s trash. Opening them crushed their excitement. Lots of empty chip bags, plastic pop bottles that should have been recycled, and an exceptionally revolting collection of chicken bones.

No book.

“I’ve located the Pingel family. The parents of the baby who died and accused Candy of negligence.” Ruth Ann handed Tony a piece of paper with an address and telephone number written in her beautiful calligraphic penmanship. “And I looked into their employment situation, as well.”

Tony wasn’t sure if he wanted to cheer for Ruth Ann or hide from her. “What did you learn?”

“They’re living in the tri-cities area. He’s driving big rigs, and she has a home-based business, selling cosmetics.” Ruth Ann hesitated. “They are behind in their mortgage and credit card payments.”

Tony applauded her work. “Okay, so Wade, you can continue your fingerprint work, and I’m going to ask the sheriff up there to have a little chat with the couple.”

Wade nodded and trotted off to his cubicle again.

It didn’t take long for Tony to get his counterpart, a Sheriff Brown, on the telephone. He explained the situation and almost before he finished his tale, the sheriff was promising to find out all he could about the family and their lives in the past few days. Tony’s contribution was to supply, thanks to Ruth Ann, their employment information and address.

While he waited, on hold, Tony plowed through several reports and files. Paperwork was the bane of his existence. He was deep into the arrest records for the Fourth of July, awestruck by the number of calls taken by 911.The dispatch team deserved medals. If he was doing the math correctly, one firecracker exploding had created thirty phone calls.

“It didn’t take me long to get your answers,” Sheriff Brown’s voice boomed through the line. “Always happy to help. Maybe someday your department will help us.”

Tony promised they would. “I don’t suppose you know where the husband was at the approximate time Candy was left to die?” Tony couldn’t help but believe the motive for the heinous way Candy was murdered had to be revenge. But revenge for what? Why else would someone treat her that way? As soon as he had the idea, he pushed it aside. Never make assumptions. He wasn’t some naïve boy anymore. He knew people were capable of committing any number of horrors. They only had to make sense to the perpetrators.

“Oh, yes, and I think you’ll find it very interesting indeed.” The sound of pages of a report being shuffled came through the receiver. “The husband was making deliveries in the Knoxville area. According to what I’ve learned about the man’s timetable and route, he could have passed right by your office on the day your lady died. I’ll fax you this schedule.” Sheriff Brown cleared his throat. “But also—”