Gun Shy (11 page)

I felt a shaft of relief and cautious encouragement when Cisco abruptly veered off the trail and through the woods toward the logging roads. I followed him at a clumsy jog, trying to keep his line from getting tangled in the undergrowth. At this point I usually unleashed Cisco, but to be honest, I wanted to make sure he wasn’t tracking a deer or a raccoon before I let him go. I had spent too many exhausting hours chasing my otherwise reliable dog through the woods to trust him entirely.

Fifteen feet ahead of me Cisco paused, excitedly sniffed the ground and bounded off down the logging road, all but dragging me behind him.
Deer,
I thought in dismay, for he was far too sure of himself to be on the track of anything useful.
Great
. I opened my mouth to call him back. But just then Cisco skidded to a stop, sat down abruptly and gave a single startled bark.

I should point out that this behavior is Cisco’s “alert”; it means he has found what he was looking for. In this case the bark did not sound triumphant; it was not the bark of a dog who had done his job and was eager for his reward. It sounded surprised, confused and a little disappointed. No wonder. Cisco had not bravely tracked his victim through thicket and bramble only to find him helpless but grateful in a leaf-covered ditch—which is how we practiced in tracking class. He had, in fact, practically bumped into his target as the Boy Scout came strolling around a bend in the road, drinking a Coke and munching on a giant-sized bag of potato chips.

I stared at him. “Hey,” I said.

“Hey,” he replied, looking far less surprised to see me than I was to see him.

“Are you Ryan?”

“Yeah.” He glanced at Cisco. “Is that your dog?”

A little belatedly, I remembered my training and dug quickly into my backpack for the knotted rope toy that was Cisco’s reward for a good find. “Good boy, Cisco, good find,” I told him and tossed the toy. He caught it in midair, gave it a few happy shakes and then dropped it on the ground, looking expectantly at Ryan—or rather, at the bag of chips.

I said, “Cisco is a search and rescue dog. He’s been looking for you.”

“No kidding.” He looked moderately impressed and munched a handful of chips. “Well, here I am.”

I took out my walkie-talkie and spoke into it. “Base, this is K-9 One,” I said. “We have him. He’s ambulatory and appears unharmed.”

Rick’s voice crackled back, “Where are you?”

I said, glancing around, “About half a mile from Haw-kins Mill, on the north ridge logging road. If you send a jeep we wouldn’t object to a ride back.”

“On our way. Good work, Raine. Tell Cisco I’ve got a dog biscuit with his name on it.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to do better than dog biscuits to compete with what he’s got his eye on now. K-9 One out.

“A lot of people have been looking for you,” I told Ryan, tucking the radio back into my pack. “Your scoutmaster was very worried.”

“Does your dog like chips?” Ryan asked.

“No,” I lied, although it was hard to sound convincing while Cisco was licking long strings of drool from his lips and gazing at the bag of chips with all the yearning of a lost soul for the pearly gates.

Ryan tossed Cisco a potato chip and Cisco caught it in midair with a satisfied crunch. Ryan laughed and I said, “Please don’t feed my dog.”

“He likes them,” insisted the little smart aleck and dug in the bag for more.

“He’s allergic,” I told him, which gave him pause. And then it occurred to me that no one had mentioned that the sunrise hikers had been outfitted with drinks and giant bags of chips. As I looked closely I saw that the pockets of his uniform were bulging with what appeared to be chocolate cookies. “Where did you get those, anyway?”

A wary look came over his face. “It wasn’t really stealing. The car was empty, and the door was open. I called and looked around, but no one came. Besides, the first rule of survival is to find food and shelter. I should get a merit badge.”

I wanted to tell him that the first rule of survival was not to get yourself lost in the first place, but about half a beat behind his words, I actually heard what they meant.

I said, looking at him closely, “What car? Where?”

He gestured back down the road. “Down there, off in the woods. There were lots of groceries and stuff inside, but looks like squirrels and possums already got most of it. I drank most of the Cokes,” he added. “My dad will pay.”

I said, hardly daring to think what I was thinking, “Is it very far? Do you think you could show me where it is?”

He shrugged. “Sure.” He tossed Cisco another chip and turned back down the road. “Say, do you think I’ll get my picture in the paper?”

“I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” I murmured, and gathered up Cisco’s leash. “Come on, boy, let’s go.”

Less than an hour later, I was perched on the open tailgate of a forest service vehicle, stroking Cisco’s fur while he enjoyed the dog biscuit Rick had promised him, watching as sheriff’s deputies roped off the area surrounding a silver PT Cruiser at the bottom of a small gorge. The path the car had taken when it left the dirt road was easy to see—downed saplings and crushed shrubs marked a swath. However, the car had managed to bury itself in the foliage of an uprooted hemlock when it came to rest, and it might have been months before a vehicle passing on this seldom-used dirt road spotted it.

Ryan Marcus, boy of the hour, was on his way back to base camp in a forest service Jeep, where he would be welcomed as a hero, have his picture taken for the paper and be bundled home to his mummy and daddy. There he would be showered with all the chips he could eat and soda he could drink. This was one of the good stories.

So far.

Buck made his way back up the slope to me, a task made slightly more difficult by the fact that the path of least resistance—the one the car had left on its way down—was now bracketed on either side by yellow crime scene tape. He lifted his hat when he reached me and wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve.

“The registration papers say the car belongs to Michelle White,” he told me. Resting an arm on the car roof, he leaned down to ruffle Cisco’s neck fur. “Good job, boy.”

Cisco grinned up at him.

“Keys were in the ignition,” he said, and nodded toward the path the car had taken when it left the road. “Looks like the driver tried to take the curve too fast and plowed right off into the woods.”

“That would be easy to do at night,” I observed.

He shrugged. “Or if the driver was drunk, or swerving to miss a deer, or just not paying attention.”

I guess that’s why they paid him the deputy money. He never went for the obvious answer just because it was easy.

“The air bag deployed when the car hit the tree,” Buck went on. “So far no clue about the driver.” He glanced at Cisco. “I don’t suppose . . .”

I shook my head. Aside from the fact that I
hate
doing police work—the last time Cisco and I had assisted in a police search I had stumbled over a body with its face blown off and I still wasn’t over that one—this was an easy call. “The kid’s scent is all over the car and all around it. Cisco’s not discriminating enough yet to ignore that find and understand that he’s supposed to go after another one. It would just be a waste of time. You’re better off waiting for Hank to get here with the bloodhounds.”

Hank Baker was my team leader and the real expert when it came to search and rescue. The fact that he lived two hours away, however, meant that the best I could do when things got complicated was to try not to contaminate the trail too much before he arrived.

Buck nodded, squinting back down the slope. “We popped the trunk,” he said. “There are a couple suitcases, a wheelchair and a service dog harness. We’re not going to move anything until the state crime lab van gets here, but it looks like enough luggage for a couple of weeks, maybe more. The backseat is full of groceries—dry goods mostly, cereal, coffee, paper towels, sodas; the kind of things people bring with them to a vacation house. The bags were from a Publix outside of Mount Pleasant. What the kid didn’t eat, the varmints got to. Looks like a chipmunk’s picnic in the backseat.”

“No dog food?”

He shook his head. “Not even an empty bag.”

“So when Jeff didn’t have the brand he was looking for, he must have decided to go someplace else for it.”

“Where else is there?”

I shrugged. “No place around here. But lots of places in Asheville.”

Buck looked skeptical. “Come on, honey, that’s over an hour away. Who drives that far on a vacation for dog food?”

I said simply, “Someone whose life depends on their dog.”

He didn’t look convinced. “This is not exactly on the way to Asheville.”

I said, “Right. You’d have to be pretty lost to end up this far off the highway looking for a pet store.”

“Or pretty scared.”

I lifted an eyebrow questioningly.

“You’re thinking dog food, I’m thinking homicide,” Buck said. “A guy who has just killed his wife is a lot more likely to run his car off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere than a guy who is on his way to Asheville for dog food.”

I was about to point out the flaw in this logic when there was a shout from below. Buck turned and I hopped to the ground, moving for a better look at the activity down below. Cisco followed, tail held high and waving. He barked a greeting to two of the familiar faces who, after another moment, started up the hill toward us, a leather satchel held in careful balance between them. As they grew closer, I could tell they were struggling under the weight, trying not to let the satchel hit the ground. Buck scrambled down the slope to help them up the last few yards.

“What’s the deal?” I heard him say. “I thought we weren’t moving anything until the crime techs had a go at it.”

“Sheriff’s orders,” said one of the deputies, breathing hard as they reached flat ground. “Said we ought to secure this in a patrol car until the van gets here.”

“What’s in it?” Buck asked.

Instinctively I slipped my hand through Cisco’s collar and took a few steps backward as I had an awful thought about what—or who—might be in the satchel. Too many gruesome crime movies, I guess.

Without another word, one of the deputies flipped the latch on the bag, and the two men spread it open between them by the handles. I couldn’t help myself. I looked.

The bag was filled with gold coins.

“Well, quite a day’s work, all in all, I would say,” remarked Maude, lifting her teacup to me in a small salute. “You resolved the identity of a dead woman, opened a homicide investigation, tracked down the rightful owners of a valuable service dog, found a lost Boy Scout and discovered a bag full of treasure. Nicely done. Nicely done indeed.”

“Not to mention cussing out my new neighbor and alienating one of the richest men in the Southeast,” I pointed out. I sat back in my chair and swung my feet up onto the battered hassock in front of it, affecting an attitude of smugness. “Not bad at all.”

Maude still likes to take an afternoon tea break, although during the busy time of the year she doesn’t often get to do it. I prefer cocoa, myself, and even though I still had several hours worth of work waiting for me in the kennel, I felt I deserved a celebratory cup. We had a fire going in the fireplace, the dogs were sprawled out in their various favorite places and even Hero had been persuaded to leave his crate and come lie beside my chair. Cisco, who was gnawing on a hard rubber bone on the other side of my chair, was the picture of contentment. At four thirty in the afternoon the sun had already begun to drop behind the mountain, and the room was bathed in a pleasant dusky glow. It was one of my favorite times of day.

I said, sipping the cocoa, “What kind of person keeps a bag of gold coins in his car, anyway? It’s like something out of a fairy tale.”

The police were not releasing the fact that a bag of coins had been found in the car trunk until the state investigators gave them clearance, but telling Maude was not the same as telling the media. Unless my uncle ordered me directly not to do so, I always felt free to discuss cases with Maude.

“I doubt very seriously whether he was accustomed to carrying around a bag of gold coins,” Maude pointed out. “Obviously he, or she—let’s not forget the car was registered in her name—intended to do something with them. And since gold is internationally negotiable, I suspect that what he intended to do was to leave the country.”

“He sure picked an odd starting point. We aren’t exactly next door to an international border.”

“Perhaps he was on his way to the airport when the car crashed. Asheville has international flights, and the logic might well be that security would be less intense at a smaller airport.”

“Makes sense I guess,” I agreed. “Of course, you’d have to connect through Atlanta to go anywhere, but if you checked your baggage through to your final destination you might have less trouble getting through security in Asheville.”

“Certainly the wait time is less, if time was a consideration.”

“True enough.”

I reached down absently to scratch Hero’s ears, and Cisco looked up alertly.

“Is the theory that the poor man is injured or dead?”

“They didn’t find any blood in the car,” I said. “But I can’t think of any other reason why a man would walk off and leave a bag full of gold coins. He may have tried to hike back to the road and gotten lost. After all, if a Boy Scout can get turned around just a few yards off the trail, a city slicker from Charleston wouldn’t have much of a chance. Hank and the bloodhounds will be out looking first thing in the morning.”

“I’d like to know what he was doing out there in the first place. That old road isn’t easy to find.”

“Well, if we knew that, I guess a lot of questions would be answered.”

Maude frequently brings me homemade goodies. My favorite are her blueberry scones, but running a close second are the tea cakes that were arranged on a china plate with a paper doily and set on an end table carefully out of reach of curious dog noses. Cisco watched intensely as I reached for one, and didn’t stop watching until I had consumed every morsel.