The Treacherous Teddy (29 page)

Wade looked over at his wife and then reached down to shut off the engine. As he slowly climbed from the ATV, Tina holstered her pistol and yanked the rifle from his shoulder. Then the farmer stuck his jaw out and began to spout insults and noisy self-pity. He was so busy running his smart mouth that he didn’t notice Marilyn, who was marching across the yard toward him with her hands balled up into fists.

Arriving in front of her husband, Marilyn delivered a powerful roundhouse sucker punch that Wade never saw coming. The blow connected solidly and he tumbled backward against the ATV and then fell to his knees. Wade massaged his jaw and stared up at his wife in confusion.

Marilyn stood over the farmer and pointed an accusing finger at him. “Damn you! I have flat had enough of you feeling sorry for yourself and losing your temper. This time it’s got us both in real trouble. Now, Wade, I love you, but a husband shouldn’t do things that make his wife think she has to lie for him. Did you kill Ev Rawlins?”

Wade was looking at Marilyn as if this were the first time he’d ever seen her. “No, baby, I didn’t kill him. I told you that.”

“No, you didn’t, you worthless excuse for a man. You let me think you might have done it and put me in an awful spot.”

“I’m . . . I’m sorry, Marilyn.”

It was both too late and too soon for apologies. The only thing that the request for forgiveness accomplished was to make Marilyn that much more angry. She made as if to take another swing at her husband, but Ash restrained her. Meanwhile, I watched in quiet amazement as the belligerent farmer who’d threatened me with a screwdriver yesterday now knelt and quailed before his wife’s long overdue eruption of fury.

Marilyn shouted over Ash’s shoulder, “Wade, you tell these people exactly what you did on Thursday night or we’re done! I’ll be out of here before you can blink twice!”

Wade now wore a look of panic. In a pleading voice he said, “Marilyn, I know I’ve been a damn fool, but please don’t go. Please! I promise I’ll tell them the truth.”

“You’d better!”

“I think it might be best if I took Mrs. Tice in the house,” said Ash.

“While we get a
voluntary
statement from her husband,” I added. “And you
do
want to talk to us, Mr. Tice, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” Wade climbed to his feet and watched Ash and Marilyn as they went inside the house.

Tina said, “But before we get into that, I have to ask, do you want to press charges on your wife?”

“For what?”

“Domestic violence. It’s against the law for her to hit you like that.”

“And what happens if I do?”

“We’ll take her to jail when we’re done here.”

Wade reached into his mouth to experimentally wiggle a tooth and then said, “No, I don’t want to press charges. I reckon I’ve had that slug coming for a while.”

I thought,
Oh, you think?

“Fine, but remember that I gave you the chance.” Tina removed the ammunition magazine from the hunting rifle, snapped open the bolt, and peered into the breech to ensure that there weren’t any bullets in the weapon. Then she held up the rifle and said, “This isn’t what you usually hunt with. Where is your hunting bow?”

“Gone.”

Tina frowned at him. “Look, Mr. Tice, I’m tired, I’ve got a headache, and I’ve got a prosecutor who’s in a hurry to put
someone
on trial for murder. If you don’t want to be that person, stop playing twenty questions. Where are your bow and arrows?”

Wade rubbed the spot where his wife had slugged him. “I threw them in the river, yesterday.”

“Why?”

“Because after I got done talking to him”—he nodded in my direction—“I got afraid that I was going to be blamed for Rawlins’s murder.”

“But not because you did it, of course.” Tina made no effort to conceal her disbelief.

“Hey, I keep telling you I didn’t kill Rawlins. You’ve got to believe me.”

Tina carefully leaned the rifle against the side of the ATV and then folded her arms across her chest. “No, I don’t, considering you lied your butt off to Mr. Lyon. Didn’t you tell him that you never left your home on Thursday night?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Wade hung his head. “That was a lie. But I’m telling the truth now.”

“We’ll see about that.” Tina glanced at me.

I nodded. “Mr. Tice, what happened on Thursday afternoon when your wife came home?”

He took a deep breath. “She told me that Rawlins was selling his land to some amusement park company . . . said she’d seen the paperwork and it was a done deal.”

“How’d that make you feel?”

“Flaming mad. He was going to collect six million bucks while we had to deal with Six Flags over Hell.”

“That’s an understandable reaction. What did you do next?”

There was a long pause before he said, “I acted like a damn moron. I went over to Rawlins’s place to send him a message about how pissed I was.”

“What kind of message? Flowers? Greeting card? Singing telegram?”

Wade gave me an irritated look, but maintained his temper. “No, it’s stupid but I decided to shoot a hunting arrow into the side of his house.”

“Why?”

“He’d know it was from me, but wouldn’t be able to prove it.”

“So . . . would it be fair to say that you meant to frighten Mr. Rawlins?”

“Yep. There was nothing I could do to stop him from selling his land, but I
could
make the time he had left on that farm miserable.”

“Nasty. Every time he went outside he’d worry that there was another arrow inbound.”

He made no effort to sound penitent. “That was the idea. So I grabbed my bow and arrows and rode my quad over most of the way to his house. Then I walked the rest of the way.”

“Did Marilyn go over there with you?” I asked, giving him the opportunity to mitigate his guilt by spreading some of the blame onto his wife.

He shook his head vigorously. “No! She stayed home and told me that I should, too.”

“You should have listened to her.”

“I know. Anyway, I got close enough to see the house, but not so close that his man-eating dog would know I was out there.” He shrugged. “And then I took aim at the side of the house and let loose with an arrow. But I made sure I didn’t aim close to a window. Like I said, I just wanted to scare him.”

I rolled my eyes. “Then you should have bought a fright mask. You don’t do it by firing a razor-sharp broadhead hunting arrow at an occupied dwelling. That’s reckless endangerment, even if you don’t intend to hit anyone.”

“But it was the only kind of arrow I had.”

“And you were in a hurry to do something mindnumbingly idiotic. Okay, what happened after that?”

“I moved a little closer toward the house. I wanted to see him crap his britches when he saw the arrow sticking out of the wall.”

“Even though Mr. Rawlins might have released his man-eating dog?” Tina asked suspiciously. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I’d . . . well, I’d nocked another arrow.” Wade stuck his hands into his jeans pockets. “No brag, but I hit what I shoot at with a bow. If he’d set Longstreet on me, I’d have dropped that big old dog like a sack of wheat.”

“So you were willing to kill his pet, just to satisfy your evil curiosity?” I asked. “For God’s sake,
the dog
wasn’t responsible for Mr. Rawlins selling his farm to the theme park company.”

He smoothed his beard and gave me an uncomfortable look. “I guess I didn’t think that part through all the way.”

“No kidding.
Did
Mr. Rawlins come out of the house?”

“Yep. At first, he just stood on the porch looking around. Then he kind of wandered around the house. But . . .” There was the faintest trace of exasperation in Wade’s voice.

“What happened?”

He grumbled, “He walked right past the arrow and never saw it. I mean, he was so close to the damn thing that I wanted to shout,
Stop and look up, you goggle-eyed old miser!
”

“So you went through all that commando low-crawling and Rambo sniper action in the dark for nothing. That must have been frustrating.”

“Frustrating ain’t half the word.”

“Did that make you mad enough to shoot another arrow at the house?” Tina asked.

It was an excellent question. We’d been assuming that the same arrow that had killed Everett Rawlins had left the hole in the wall. However, there was the chance that Wade had used the bow more than once.

“And maybe
by accident
that second arrow hit Mr. Rawlins? It wouldn’t be murder, if you didn’t mean to hit him.” Tina pressed the point, while offering Wade room to minimize his responsibility for the act.

“I’ll say it again: I didn’t kill Rawlins! Not on purpose and not by accident! I only fired one arrow and it hit the house
exactly
where I aimed.”

I said, “But he never saw the arrow, which, by your own admission, made you even more angry. Is that why you came out from your hiding place to deliver your message to Mr. Rawlins in person?”

“I didn’t do any such thing.”

“So, how’d Mr. Rawlins end up with an arrow in him?”

“Beats the hell out of me! I stayed in that thicket until I went back to the quad. I never went near him and he was alive when I left.”

“So you say. But you’d made nothing but terrible decisions up to that point, so why should we presume that you’d suddenly wised up?”

Tina jumped back in. “Mr. Tice, do you use a glove when you go bow hunting?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“What kind of glove?”

“A three-finger release glove,” he replied.

I noticed that he involuntarily clenched and unclenched his right hand, which suggested he wore the glove on that hand.

“What’s the glove made out of?” Tina asked.

“Leather. Bison leather, I think.”

“And what color is it?”

“It was brown. It’s pretty stained now.” Wade obviously felt the questions were foolish and gave her an impatient look.

“You didn’t throw that glove in the river, too, did you?”

“No. No reason.”

“Good. Where is that glove? I want it.”

“It’s upstairs with my hunting gear. But why?” Wade huffed.

Tina gave him a hard stare. “Because the crime lab found tiny bits of brown leather on the shaft of your arrow.”

His jaw worked for several seconds before the words came out. “And you think they came from
my
glove?”

She nodded. “Right now, the evidence says that you were the only person out there wearing gloves.”

Wade drew himself up to his full height. “Listen good, Sheriff: I don’t know nothing about any leather on that arrow. Maybe it happened when I pulled it from the quiver. And even if I’d thought about going over and getting in his face—and I ain’t saying I did—I couldn’t have, because of that car coming down his driveway.”

I hated to admit it, but it sounded as if he was telling the truth. I asked, “What kind of car?”

“I don’t know. All I saw was headlights. I thought maybe he’d called the law and it was a sheriff’s car. That’s when I lit out of there.”

Tina and I exchanged quick glances, and I could tell we were both thinking the same thing. There was a good chance that Wade Tice had witnessed the arrival of Sherri Driggs’s Saab. If so, the amusement park exec had just taken the brass ring as our most likely suspect.

“I know things look bad for me, but it seems to me that you might want to talk to whoever it was in that car before you try to ramrod me for murder,” Tice grumbled.

“You’re absolutely right, Mr. Tice,” Tina said thoughtfully. “But in the meantime, I’m going to want to send that glove to the crime lab.”

“Okay. But before that, will you do me a favor, Sheriff?”

“That depends on the favor.”

Wade fixed her with an earnest gaze. “I’d be obliged if you told Marilyn that I cooperated with you and told the truth . . . even when it made me look like a dummy.”

“Yeah, I can do that,” said Tina. After a moment, she added, “And if it does turn out that you lied to us, I’m thinking maybe I should just call and tell Mrs. Tice. It would save the county the cost of a trial.”

Wade gave her a hangdog look and nodded.

As Tina and Wade headed for the house, I limped over to the Xterra and leaned against the hood in an effort to take some of the weight off my throbbing shin. I was suddenly exhausted. I’d been running on adrenaline, strong coffee, and willpower for almost two days now, but I could tell that I was coming very close to my limit. The knowledge that I could no longer do the things I’d been capable of as a young man left me feeling both discouraged and a little frightened.

The police radio inside the patrol car crackled and I heard Tina pick up, but couldn’t make out what they were saying and didn’t really care, as I was too busy having a self-pity party. A few moments later, I heard the clatter of rapid footfalls on the wooden porch steps and looked up. Ash and Tina had come out of the house and were trotting across the yard toward the sheriff’s cruiser. Both women looked excited.

Ash yelled, “Follow us to the station, so that you can ride over with us! We’re going to New Market! The local cops just found Roger Prufrock’s car at a motel!”

“Did you get the glove?” I asked.

Tina raised her right fist and waved the brown archery glove at me. “It’s right here! Now let’s go!”

Their eagerness was infectious, and I suddenly felt a little less weary and sore. I knew this sense of rejuvenation was artificial. It was born of an adrenaline rush, and once those drugs had worked their magic, the fatigue and pain would come back with a vengeance. But that didn’t matter right now. We had a murder to solve. I hopped into the SUV and almost beat the patrol car back to the sheriff’s station.

Twenty-four

At the sheriff’s department, we all bundled into a cruiser and headed out again. As we drove past the church community center, I noticed that the parking lot was now mostly empty. There were only a few teddy bear artists left, packing up their stuff.

Turning to speak through the Plexiglas barrier separating the front and back seats, I said, “You did a great job of organizing the show, honey. I’m just sorry I missed so much of it and that we had to leave early.”