The Wild Hog Murders (6 page)

“That’s not exactly comforting.”

“Best I can do. The killer could be anywhere by now. Houston. Canada. Mexico.”

“So you think he’s an illegal immigrant?”

“Munday again?”

“He didn’t make any accusations, just mentioned the possibility.”

“Look,” Rhodes said, “here’s what happened.”

Jennifer got out her little recorder. She also took notes, and Rhodes went over the whole story with her, step by step. When he’d finished, he said, “There are just too many possibilities for me to settle on any one of them. We have a lot of work to do, but we’ll catch the killer if he’s still around here. We always get our man.”

“You really want me to print that?”

“Maybe not the last part,” Rhodes said.

Jennifer looked over her notes. “So the killer could be someone who was with the victim in the car, one of the hog hunters, or someone else who was roaming around in the woods.”

“Maybe he shot himself,” Hack said.

Rhodes looked at him.

“It could happen,” Hack said.

“I’ll check with Dr. White later and find out,” Rhodes said, but he didn’t believe it for a minute. He turned back to Loam. “Don’t put that in your story.”

“I won’t, but Hack’s right, you know.”

Hack grinned so wide that Rhodes thought he might split his face open.

Loam asked a few more questions and left. Ruth Grady came in almost at once.

“Find anything?” Rhodes asked.

“Plenty of fingerprints,” Ruth said. “Enough to keep the IAFIS computers busy for a month or two.”

Rhodes had been afraid of that. IAFIS was the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and it was generally pretty fast, but not with single prints and not with as many as they’d be sending.

“Anything that looks like a solid lead?” he asked.

Ruth shook her head. “Not a thing. Oh, there was a lot of stuff in the car, and I’ve got it bagged and tagged, but most of it was trash. The rest looked like it belonged to the owner and not whoever was driving the car. We can go over it and see if any of it’s any use, but I don’t think it will be.”

Rhodes hadn’t expected anything different.

“One more thing,” Ruth said.

“A good thing?”

“I don’t know. There were some blood spots in the carpet in the trunk. I sent them off for analysis. Eventually we’ll get a report.”

“It might help us,” Rhodes said.

“Or it might not,” Ruth said. “I know. But there’s some good news, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Since you said the guy stole some gas, I printed the gas cap and the filler cover. Got some good prints. And I printed the victim. If those prints match…”

“We’ll know he’s the one who stole the gas,” Rhodes said. “Now all you have to do is figure out which of the other zillion prints belong to the other passenger.”

“Or if any of them do.”

“Yeah,” Rhodes said. “There’s that. Even if they do, what does that prove? Not that he’s the killer.”

“So what’s next?” Ruth asked.

Rhodes was way ahead of her on that one, at least. He already had a list.

“You get the driver’s prints into the system. I’ll talk to the Chandlers and see what they can tell me about last night, and then I’ll check on the autopsy. And why don’t you see if you can find out who some of the hog hunters are. We need to find out who was in those woods last night.”

“All right,” Ruth said. “That should be easy enough. To find out who some of the hunters are, I mean. I’ll bet nobody’s going to admit being in those woods, though, not if they’ve listened to Milton Munday.”

“You hear his program today?” Hack asked.

“I listened while I worked,” Ruth said. “It’s always a pleasure.”

“I’ll bet,” Rhodes said.

Chapter 6

Blacklin County had no medical examiner, so Rhodes considered himself lucky to have someone like Dr. White, who knew what he was doing, kept good records, and wrote comprehensive reports. He was even certified by the American Board of Pathology, though that wasn’t required, either.

Blacklin County didn’t have a morgue for Dr. White to work in, but Clyde Ballinger, who owned the largest funeral home for miles around, let White perform autopsies there. He even had a room set aside for it and didn’t charge the county a penny. He said he liked being a good citizen.

Ballinger lived alone in a little house in back of the funeral home. The house had once been the servants’ quarters for the large mansion that now served another purpose entirely.

When Rhodes went in, Ballinger was sitting at his desk reading a paperback. The funeral director was a short, compact man with black hair and a suit to match. It was a nice suit, and Ballinger had probably bought it in Houston or Dallas. There was no longer a store in Clearview that sold suits.

Maybe that was the reason that Ballinger was one of only two or three men in town who still wore suits to work, Rhodes thought. Even some of the bankers and lawyers didn’t wear suits anymore.

The suit might have been unusual for Clearview but not for a funeral director, and there was nothing at all unusual about Ballinger’s having a book in his hand. He read a lot. What struck Rhodes as odd was that the book Ballinger held appeared to be brand-new.

“What’s up with that?” Rhodes asked, indicating the book.

Ballinger held it up for Rhodes to see. The title was
Baby Moll,
and the cover looked like one that would have been right at home on the books Ballinger used to find in the local garage sales.

“It’s what they call the retro look,” Ballinger said. “It’s a retro
book,
too.”

“You’re a poet and don’t know it,” Rhodes said.

Ballinger grinned. “Sure I know it. Anyway, lots of the old stuff’s being reprinted now. Good thing, too, since I can’t find much in garage sales anymore. People are buying all the old books and trying to sell ’em on eBay, and they bring more than the new ones do. It’s a shame if you ask me. Takes all the fun out of it.”

“You’re still reading, though,” Rhodes said.

Ballinger put the book down on his desk. “Why would I quit? Finding the books might not be any fun now, but reading them still is.”

Rhodes nodded. “Murder in books is always more fun than the real thing.”

“Like the guy you sent here yesterday,” Ballinger said. “He was murdered, right?”

“Right.”

Ballinger opened a drawer on the side of his desk and brought out Dr. White’s report. He handed it to Rhodes and picked up his book.

Rhodes read through the report. He didn’t see anything he didn’t expect to find. The victim had been in good general health and had died of two gunshot wounds, one of them to his heart. The bullets had been recovered from the body and had been fired from a .38. The bullets were now in a locker in the autopsy room.

The victim’s only identifying mark noted was a large mole on his right shoulder. There were no personal effects except some car keys that had no doubt belonged to the person the car was stolen from. According to the report on the car, it had been stolen a couple of months earlier. The owner had left the keys in it while buying a lottery ticket at a convenience store. The victim must have liked to steal things at convenience stores.

“Any help there?” Ballinger asked when he saw that Rhodes was finished with his reading.

“Not a bit,” Rhodes said.

“Milton Munday says you’ll never catch the killer,” Ballinger told him. “He doesn’t like you much.”

“He doesn’t even know me,” Rhodes said.

“You’ve met him, though, haven’t you?”

“Only once, and we didn’t talk long.”

“He’s sure livened up the radio in this little county,” Ballinger said. “Nearly everybody in town listens to him.”

“Not me,” Rhodes said.

“I’ll bet the commissioners don’t listen, either, or the mayor. Munday does love to criticize the power structure.”

“You think I’m part of the power structure?”

“Well, sure. You’re the sheriff. We all know you’ve single-handedly brought law and order to this small frontier village.”

“I didn’t think you read Westerns,” Rhodes said.

“Now and then I do. Some of those old writers I like wrote Westerns and mysteries, too, but I like those Sage Barton books better.”

Rhodes didn’t want to talk about Sage Barton, a character created by two women who’d come to Blacklin County to attend a writers’ workshop in the small town of Obert. There’d been some trouble at the workshop, and a man had been killed. Rhodes had solved the crime, and the two women had written a novel about a tough, good-looking Texas sheriff they’d called Sage Barton. The book had sold and so had the sequel, and people liked to tease Rhodes by saying that the Barton character was based on him.

Barton’s life, however, was considerably more colorful than Rhodes’s. Barton had weapons that would make Mikey Burns’s dream of an M-16 seem like a paltry thing. He romanced FBI agents in pursuit of terrorist masterminds. He didn’t chase criminals in a car, either. Instead, he used the county helicopter, which he piloted himself. Barton made Navy SEALs look like sissies by comparison. He could probably strangle a feral hog with his bare hands.

“I don’t read those books,” Rhodes said, though it wasn’t strictly the truth. He’d scanned them, and Ivy had read both of them and reported to Rhodes on their contents.

“You should give ’em a try,” Ballinger said. “You might pick up some pointers.”

Rhodes said he didn’t think so.

“Well, I do. That Sage Barton has a lot on the ball. You take things too easy.”

Rhodes didn’t mind the criticism, mainly because he knew Ballinger was joshing him.

“I’m not cut out for the kind of adventures Sage Barton has,” Rhodes said.

“I wouldn’t say that. Lose a couple pounds, work out a little, you might be just like him.”

Rhodes stood up. “I don’t have time to work out. Too busy catching crooks.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Ballinger said.

*   *   *

Rhodes was almost at the Chandler place when Hack came on the radio.

“Mikey Burns is mighty upset with you,” Hack said.

“You might not want to broadcast that,” Rhodes told him. Quite a few people in town had police band scanners and nothing better to do than listen in.

That didn’t bother Hack. “Oh, I expect half the town knows about it already. Seems there were a couple of things you forgot to tell him this morning.”

Rhodes hadn’t mentioned the damage to the car, but he had a feeling Burns still didn’t know about that.

“He’s heard about the Milton Munday show,” he said.

“He sure has, and he’s not happy. I told him you were hot on the trail of the killer, so you couldn’t see him. That’s the truth, ain’t it?”

“Absolutely,” Rhodes said.

“You better see him tomorrow, then. You might want to have a talk with Munday, too.”

“Or I might not,” Rhodes said.

*   *   *

The Chandlers’ house sat in the middle of what would have been a green yard in the summer, but the fall weather had already turned most of the grass to brown. Rhodes turned the county car at the open gate and drove through.

Both sides of the short road leading up to the house were fenced with hog wire, so the gate was usually open. The wire glinted in the sun.

Rhodes parked in front of the house and got out. He could smell the hog pens, but they didn’t smell nearly as bad as the chicken farm that was located on the opposite side of the county. Or as bad as the farm once had. Qualls had cleaned things up as well as was possible, and Rhodes thought most people were okay with that.

Janice Chandler came around the house from the back. She wore an old-fashioned sunbonnet and a pair of overalls over a red and blue plaid shirt. White cotton work gloves covered her hands.

“Hello, Sheriff,” she said. “I thought you might be dropping by.”

“Now why would you think that?” Rhodes asked.

“I heard Milton Munday’s show this morning.”

Rhodes thought she was grinning, but he couldn’t tell for sure because the bonnet shadowed her face.

“Why would that make you think I’d be coming by?” he asked.

“From what he said, it sounded like somebody killed a hog hunter,” Janice said. “I figured I’d be the first person you’d want to see. I’ll tell you right now, though, that I didn’t do it.”

Munday didn’t know as much as he liked people to think he did, since the dead man hadn’t been one of the hog hunters. Or maybe he had been. It hadn’t occurred to Rhodes that he might be because he had on a blue shirt, as had the driver of the car, but there were lots of blue shirts in the world.

The dead man had worn slacks and casual shoes, however. No self-respecting hog hunter would be dressed like that.

“What about Andy?” Rhodes asked.