The Branson Beauty (16 page)

*   *   *

“All units. Table Rock Lake. East shore. Exact twenty unknown. Witness reports large explosion heard.”

“Union-two-oh-four, copy. Is fire responding?”

“Affirmative. Appears to be something behind the trees, possibly out on the lake … stand by … caller pretty far away from the scene. He states it appears to have come from the same area where the
Beauty
came in for emergency docking. Over.”

“Union-two-oh-four, responding. Six twenty-three
A.M.
”

Hank stared in horror at the radio on his dash. What the…? He yanked the wheel, barely making the turn down the state route to the lake. He had been planning to go straight and check in on the Brysons before heading back to the boat, but now … The back end of the car fishtailed before he got it back under control, loosening his grip on the wheel only long enough to turn on his emergency lights. He pressed his foot to the floor, and the car shot along the ice-crusted roads toward a horizon that was turning red. And it wasn't the sunrise.

*   *   *

The air reeked of oil and charred wood. The noxious fumes pricked at his eyes and tickled his nose—which had miraculously cleared, so he could smell every horrible scent wafting through the frigid air.

“It looks like it got blown apart pretty good.” Larry Alcoate appeared at his side.

Hank didn't look up from the water. “What are you doing here? Nobody was hurt.”

“I'm emergency services, and a big-ass explosion qualifies, even if there are no injuries. I wasn't going to pass up seeing this.” He gleefully rubbed his hands together. “This has been the best week ever. Rescues and explosions and snowstorms. It's better than KC.”

Well, it is certainly different than KC, Hank thought as he turned a full circle on the dock. There was no deputy in sight. No one had been guarding the boat—the crime scene,
his
crime scene—when it exploded. And now it was at the bottom of Table Rock Lake. Fantastic.

He turned away from the polluted water and saw Lovinia standing off to one side, her hands stuffed in her green ski coat. He wondered how long she'd been there. He'd actually gotten to the scene before her, which was rare.

“Hey, Lovinia.”

She snuggled deeper in her coat and gave him a sympathetic smile. “Not the best way to start your day, is it?” she said.

He shook his head. “No. It's not.” He gave her a rueful grin. “I did beat you, though. That's something.”

She chuckled, and her gray curls bounced against the turned-up collar of her jacket.“Don't get used to it. I decided to finish reading the newspaper first, otherwise I would have beat you.”

Hank turned his back on the oil-slicked water. He knew that wouldn't make it go away, but focusing on something other than a crime scene for a few seconds always helped him clear his head for the investigation to come.

“Six is awfully early to be up reading the paper when you're retired,” he said.

“Oh, I don't sleep much anymore. Not since Walter died.” She shrugged. “I just try to keep busy.”

Hank knew her husband had died shortly before Hank became sheriff. “When did you two move down here?”

Her smile was wistful this time. They'd come to Branson about five years earlier, she said, and bought the house out on Roark Creek just a little northwest of Branson. Walter loved to fish and she loved to hike, and they'd intended to spend their retirement enjoying the beautiful Ozark Mountains and area lakes.

Lakes.

They both turned and stared at the decidedly un-beautiful water in front of them. “When's the state fire marshal going to get here?” she asked.

“Not for a couple of hours. And when he does get here…” He swung his arm wide, taking in the black water, the burnt flotsam, and the charred gangplank, which reached out from the dock like a severed limb. “This is what he'll get. One big, wet, inaccessible mess.”

“That's for sure.” Bill Freedman walked up, pulling gloves out of the pockets of his blue water patrol parka and putting them on. “I don't think we'll be able to get a diver down there. Weather's too iffy.” He glanced up at the sky, where a wall of storm clouds was advancing slowly from the south. “And the visibility down there. Awful. No point putting somebody in danger just to confirm that the boat's a goner.”

Hank gritted his teeth. “It'd be for a bit more than that, Bill. Why'd it explode all of a sudden?”

Bill shrugged. “Probably something to do with hacking the paddle wheel off. Poor thing couldn't have liked that much.” He started to turn toward the water and then stopped. “Actually, you tell me. Didn't you have somebody down here … you know, guarding it?”

Hank's scowl deepened. When he got ahold of that fat, insolent Good Ol' Boy …

*   *   *

“I don't know what you're talking about.” The words were followed by a stream of cigarette smoke as GOB exhaled directly in Hank's face. “I finished my shift and came home. Nobody told me to do no different.”

“So you just left the boat unguarded. You left a homicide crime scene unsecured.”

GOB shrugged. “It was all taped up. That's secured.”

Hank literally counted to ten before speaking again. “You should not have abandoned your post.”

GOB crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the railing of his front porch. “Look, nobody authorized me overtime. I wasn't staying and not getting paid.”

“All you had to do was call in and ask.” Hank knew he was about to veer into soapbox territory, but he couldn't help himself. “I find it very sad that you put money over the safety of this county's citizens and the sanctity of the investigation.”

“Sanctity?” GOB snorted. “This ain't church, boy. This is a job. This is business. You authorize the overtime, I stay. You don't, I go. Seems simple enough that even a city boy could understand.”

Hank's fist clenched of its own accord. He forced it to relax. “It ain't church? Funny, it seems to me like it's exactly that. The breaking of one of the Lord's Commandments, isn't it? And we are charged with finding the killer.”

GOB shook his head. “Nope.
You
are charged with that, boy. This … all this is on you.” He jabbed his finger at Hank's chest.

I am very aware of that, Hank thought, but I will not be poked at by a lousy, lazy law-enforcement apostate. He slowly raised his own finger and leveled it at GOB's face. “Because of your devotion to duty, you can report for your next shift at the county jail in Forsyth. That will be your new permanent assignment, one more fitting for someone with your … initiative.”

The puffs of cigarette smoke stopped coming, and Tucker began to turn purple. Outrage … or a heart attack. Hank doubted he'd get that lucky. He slowly lowered his hand and walked away from Tucker's small frame house, leaving his deputy to stew in a preexisting pot of anger that he knew he had just set to boiling.

*   *   *

By the time he got back to the boat, the fire marshal was there, staring at the water much like everyone else. A big, burly man with gray hair, he was even less receptive than the water patrol to Hank's suggestion that a few divers be sent down to look at things. The guy pulled at his mammoth mustache and adopted a look that Hank was sure he used when teaching at whatever fire marshal training school they sent stupid rookies to. There were such things as priorities, Mustachio explained. No one was hurt, no one was killed. The boat had been severely damaged the day before, and it was quite possible—no, quite likely—that as a result, gasoline had leaked and something had ignited it. Did the boat have a generator? That could have malfunctioned. Provided an ignition source.

Hank pointed out—perhaps a little too loudly—that the boat was also “quite likely” insured, and was worth a darn sight more in burnt pieces than it would be moldering in dry dock with an amputated paddle wheel. Mustachio nodded with what Hank took to be feigned sympathy and turned away to ask Freedman how the wife and kids were doing. Hank stood there, alone on the crowded dock, and stared at the water. It was flat and slick and shot through with oily rainbows, and for the moment, completely impenetrable.

 

CHAPTER

14

Hank rang the doorbell again and waited. The little front porch was swept clean of any blown snow. A fake ficus, all glossy-leafed health, swung in complete incongruity next to the icicles descending from the eaves. He blew on his hands and swung his arms as he waited. Finally, the lace curtain in the front window twitched. He pulled the badge off his coat and waved it at the movement. He heard a heavy scraping, and then the door swung open.

He introduced himself, and the
Beauty
's private dining room cook led him into a living room full of more ficus plants and way too much flower-print furniture. He sat where instructed, in a huge, overstuffed easy chair with lace doily things on the arms. He avoided them and put his hands in his lap.

“Goodness,” Mrs. Pugo puffed as she pulled a wooden dining table chair out of the entryway and sat across from him. “I'm sorry about that. I got no locks, you see. And well, this business…”—she dropped her voice to a whisper—“…
this murder
 … well, it just has me in a fright. A real fright, I tell you. So I shoved the chair under the doorknob. I didn't know what else to do. That seemed to work. It would work, wouldn't it, Sheriff? It would keep the bad folk out … wouldn't it?”

She clasped her hands and turned huge brown eyes toward him. Short and round, she looked exactly like one of those plump, kindhearted housekeeper/nanny/godmothers in Disney films. All she needed was a flouncy little cap and a singing crab. She blinked and waited for his approval. As he was busy sinking ever farther into his excessively cushioned seat, she actually had to look down at him from her perch on the solid wood chair. He felt that the positioning did not do any favors to his authority as he explained that while it had been a very good idea, a chair was no substitute for a good deadbolt and perhaps she should think about going to the hardware store today to get one.

She nodded solemnly and then dived right in. “I expect you're here to talk to me about that sweet young thing?” Hank nodded and asked when she had first seen Mandy on the boat.

“Oh, it was before we launched,” she said. “All the sudden, she comes bursting in the kitchen door. She was white and trembling, like a ghost that had gone and scared itself. I sat her at the table and got her a glass of water. She looked like she was going to be sick. I didn't have much to do right then, so I sat with her. Plus, I was worried. I didn't know what was wrong with her.”

It had taken Mandy quite a while to tell the good Mrs. Pugo what happened. “Oh, I just felt so bad for her. She was so upset. She didn't want anybody to see her, and I can't say I blamed her. To give that horrible boy the satisfaction of embarrassing her? Not if I had anything to say about it.”

She kept Mandy in the kitchen. They were the only two people there, she said, unless you counted Roy Stanton. The way she said it had Hank asking whether he shouldn't count Roy for some reason.

“That man is enough of a hassle on a normal day,” she said. “He was beyond that something considerable on Sunday.”

Hank began to piece together “Captain” Roy's problem. The people who rented out the private dining room had told him that they did not want his hosting services. In fact, they didn't want him in the room at all. That had led the rejected Roy to spend the cruise sulking in the kitchen, which distracted Mrs. Pugo from the person in the room she felt had a legitimate reason to be upset—Mandy.

“I tell you, Sheriff,” she huffed, “I about gave him a piece of my mind. He could plainly see this poor girl was hurting, and he still went on and on about his insulted dignity and whatnot.” She paused to puff a bit, and Hank cut her off before she could build up more steam.

“Ma'am,” he said, leaning forward in his deep cushions, “I need you to think about this for a minute. Who else came into the kitchen? At any time during the cruise or after the crash—who else besides you and Mr. Stanton?”

Mrs. Pugo's face screwed up in thought. Hank waited.

“Well, Tim, of course. Tim Colard, the waiter. He was in and out. He's the one has to set the table and everything before and then clear it all up after. But he didn't finish with the clearing, actually. That was when the boat crashed. Then he and Tony Sampson moved all the folks in the dining room over to the lounge. They all used the hallway, of course. No one came through the kitchen.”

“Nobody else? Just Tim Colard and Roy Stanton? They were the only other two who would have seen Mandy?”

Mrs. Pugo nodded hesitantly. “I'm pretty sure. After the crash, it got real crazy, though. All us in the kitchen—well, not Mandy—ran into the hallway, and all them in the dining room was running around, too. It was hard to know what was going on, exactly. I guess somebody could have gone into the kitchen then, but it would have had to be one of the folks already there. There weren't nobody unusual on that level of the boat. And when I went back into the kitchen, Mandy didn't say if anybody had come in or not. She just asked what was going on.”

People continued to wander around, getting more and more upset, she said. So that's when all the guests were shown into the lounge. She made up the coffee, Tim served it, and then the three of them and Mandy started playing cards. “Just some go fish, mind you. No gambling or nothing.” Hank hid a grin.

“Mandy started getting restless. All fidgety-like. I didn't blame her. The poor thing, stuck in a tiny kitchen with three old fogies. I told her that she should get some air. She didn't want anybody to see her, so I said she should go up to the pilothouse. To get there, you turn right down the hallway. That's past the dining room, which was empty, instead of left and past the lounge, which had that awful boy in it.”