“What do you mean?”
“I know Mike Cribbs, the traffic-ticket magistrate. If I asked, he’d dismiss the ticket.”
“Thanks, but let’s hold off on that for now. If what I’m working on pans out, bogus traffic cites will be the least of Trent’s concerns.”
“Well, there must be something I can do.”
“There is—vote for Tina Barron next month. Trent’s just a symptom of a much bigger problem. We need a new county sheriff.”
“Already a step ahead of you. Check this out.” Lolly led me to the rear of his pickup truck where a rectangular piece of plywood was wired to the tailgate. It bore a message in bright red spray-paint: barron 4 sheriff.
“Very nice, but when Trent sees that he’s going to go into low-earth orbit.”
“Let him. That boy had no call to behave that way.”
There was an uncomfortable pause. “Son, Ash told me what you’re up to and I have to ask you a question.”
“Am I going to keep your daughter safe?”
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“Yeah.”
“I’ll do everything in my power, but she insisted on coming and you know what happens when she sets her mind to do something.”
“Don’t I just.” Lolly chuckled.
“And all we’re going to do is take a little cruise upriver, so please don’t worry.”
“Okay, I won’t. So, where is Ash?”
“Upstairs, I think.”
“Good. You’ll love this one.” Lolly leaned closer and continued in a conspiratorial tone, “This fella wearing a clown suit goes into this proctologist’s office and says—”
“Good morning, Daddy!” Ash emerged from the front door carrying my cane and a lightweight knapsack.
Without missing a beat, Lolly turned and said, “Hi, honey. Brad and I were just talking about your trip.”
“I love the sign on your truck,” said Ash, giving her dad a hug.
“Hey, congratulations! We saw you on the television last night and I expect you’ll be in tomorrow’s paper.”
“Thank you. How’s Momma?”
“Just fine. She’s getting ready for church, which I should be too. I’ll get the boat off the trailer and into the water.”
“Thank you, Daddy.”
Ash handed me the cane. “Sweetheart, you’re going to need this.”
I sighed in what was now conditioned disgust. “My cane. Can’t leave home without it. God, I’m a gimp—like Lionel Barrymore in
Key Largo
.”
“He was in a wheelchair and you are not a gimp.” She kissed me on the cheek and gave me the knapsack.
I looked inside. “Camera, spare batteries for the camera, binoculars, Massanutten County map, notepad, two 96
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bottles of water—don’t drink from mine because I don’t want girl cooties—”
“I’ll try to remember that.”
“Ibuprofen and pens. Great, honey. Looks like we have everything we need.”
“Not everything.” Ash pulled something from her pants pocket and pushed it into my hand. “I think you might want this.”
It was my black leather case that contained the SFPD
retiree badge and ID card I received when the city showed me the door. Since that day, I hadn’t so much as looked at the badge; I’d hidden it away in a box because the last thing I needed was something to remind me of how much I missed being a homicide detective. Unfolding the case, I gazed down at the gold seven-pointed star with the word
“Inspector” inscribed on it in royal blue letters. I was surprised to find there was a lump in my throat. Without looking up, I asked, “Where did you find it?”
“I’ve always known where it was.” She wrapped her arms around my shoulders. “And I figured that as long as you’re back in the investigations business, even if it’s only temporarily, you’d better have your badge.”
“Thank you, my love,” I said, slipping the badge case into my back pants pocket.
A few minutes later, the boat was bobbing in the river, secured to a sycamore tree with a rope. As Lolly began to give Ash a quick refresher course on operating the Evinrude outboard motor, I took Kitch inside the house and secured him in his crate. It wasn’t necessary for me to know the intricacies of the motor because the job of piloting the small craft belonged solely to my wife. She’d grown up along the banks of the Shenandoah and was learning to steer a boat on the river when I was still riding a bike with training wheels. My assignment was to be the JAFO, which in the police helicopter service stands for The Mournful Teddy
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“Just A Freaking Observer” . . . except cops use a slightly more colorful term than “freaking.”
I put the knapsack on, clambered into the boat, and sat down on an aluminum bench near the bow. Ash gave her dad a hug and then got into the boat and took a seat on the bench at the rear near the outboard motor. She gave the engine some gas and we began to slowly churn our way upriver. We both waved to Lolly and a few seconds later he was invisible behind an emerald wall of trees and foliage.
At first, there wasn’t much to see. The west side of the river was hemmed right down to the water’s edge with forest while a low bluff blocked our view to the east. Peering into the shallow water, I caught a glimpse of a largish fish that might have been a trout, and a few moments after that I saw a very chubby raccoon scramble along a fallen log and disappear into the underbrush. It all seemed so pristine and idyllic, yet I knew the South Fork of the Shenandoah is still badly polluted with toxic chemicals such as mercury, even though the factory waste was dumped into the river decades ago. Ordinarily, I’m not a proponent of capital punishment, but if we could ever find some of those scumbag industrialists who fouled this river because it meant a bigger profit margin . . . well, lethal injection is
way
too good for them, if you ask me.
Ash scanned the west bank. “So, honey, what exactly are we looking for?”
“A miracle.”
“Huh?”
“I was hoping we’d find some signs of a struggle that would tell us the actual place our victim was thrown into the river, but now that we’re out here, I can see that may not have been a realistic goal.”
“Be patient. We’ve just started.”
After about a half-mile, we came to “the island,” which 98
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was actually an overgrown sandbar, slightly more than a half-acre in size and shaped like an inverted teardrop, studded with maybe a couple of dozen morose-looking cedar trees. In the summer, you can leap across the meandering western channel to the island, and even in the wake of a hurricane, the water wasn’t much wider than a residential driveway.
Keeping to the eastern channel, Ash soon pointed to a crumbling stone foundation that was overgrown with brush and vines and said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the engine, “The mill.”
I’d heard about the place but never seen it. Invisible and all but forgotten, this quadrangle of stones was all that remained of the original Remmelkemp Mill—the building rescued from Yankee arson by brave Southern soldiers.
The ironic postscript to the story, which isn’t mentioned on the peculiar-looking monument, is that about a week after the heroic episode, sparks from a Confederate sentry’s campfire set the mill’s wooden shingles ablaze and the building burned to the ground.
A moment later, we motored past the south end of the island and then under the Coggins Spring Road overpass.
The river ahead looped lazily to the right and widened slightly. About a mile ahead, on the east side of the river, I saw Caisson Hill jutting just above the tree line. It’s a small and sparsely wooded knoll that got its name because it was an overnight home for one of Thomas
“Stonewall” Jackson’s artillery batteries just before the Battle of Port Republic in 1862.
That tiny geographic fact illustrates something amazing about life in the Shenandoah Valley. It’s so permeated with the past that it’s like taking up residence in an American history book. The roads are full of historical markers and they don’t merely record episodes from the Civil War. Just a few miles to the east is Swift Run Gap, the The Mournful Teddy
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place where English settlers first entered the Shenandoah Valley in 1716. Go north to Winchester and you can visit George Washington’s office during the French and Indian Wars or travel south and you’ll find Cyrus McCormick’s farm where the mechanical harvester that changed agriculture forever was invented. The sheer volume of history is just mind-boggling.
The river continued to loop to the west for about 200
yards and then gradually curved back toward the east. For the first time, I noticed a sturdy diamond-mesh galvanized steel fence running along the water’s edge to our left. The barrier was six-feet tall, topped with rusted strands of barbed wire, and every few feet bore a rectangular metal placard that read no trespassing in red letters. I wasn’t surprised to see many of the warning signs were pitted and dented as a consequence of being used for target practice. The vandalism was forgivable—perhaps even admirable—because there was something very arrogant and intrinsically wrong about this prison fence standing next to a waterway so beautiful that the original Native American inhabitants christened it Shenandoah—Daughter of the Stars.
I hooked a thumb at the east shore. “Whose land is that?”
“Liz Ewell’s. She put that fence up shortly after she stole the land from us. I wonder if it’s still electric.”
“The more I hear about this woman, the more I want to meet her.”
“Better you than me, if I see her I’m liable to slap her.”
As we rounded the bend, Ash leaned closer to me and pointed to a rolling grassy meadow behind the fence and at the base of Caisson Hill. The field looked as if it’d once been cultivated but was long since given over to the weeds. In an icy tone, Ash said, “That’s the piece of land Liz Ewell stole from us.”
We were traveling almost due east and at last that 100
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damned fence turned inland and away from the river.
Caisson Hill was now directly to our left, and ahead, the upper ramparts of the Blue Ridge Mountains were visible above a dying cornfield that adjoined the river. Then the Shenandoah curled southward again, and as Ash guided the boat through the turn, we both saw something that definitely qualified as a clue.
On the east side of the river, a metallic red Chevy S-10
pickup truck was parked behind a colossal pick-up-sticks jumble of fallen tree trunks.
Chapter 9
“Well, isn’t that interesting.” I got the binoculars out and scanned the terrain surrounding the S-10 for any signs of other people, but soon saw that we were alone. “Honey, just how much farther upriver is the Island Ford Bridge?”
Ash peered southward. “A couple of miles.”
“Okay, let me get this straight: In order to buy the sheriff ’s theory, we’re supposed to believe that the dead guy parked his—”
“He wasn’t dead yet.”
“You know what I meant, my love, and please don’t interrupt—I’m a soliloquizing detective just like in those silly mystery novels of yours, and if life were like fiction, Kitch could talk with a voice like Sebastian Cabot’s and he’d tell us how the guy really died. Anyway, we’re supposed to be stupid enough to believe that the soon-to-bedead guy—”
“Much better.” Ash tried to suppress a giggle.
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“Parked his truck here in the middle of nowhere and then hiked a couple of miles to the bridge—”
“In the dark and through muddy fields.”
“Correct. And then jumped from the bridge to drown himself.”
“Yet, you don’t sound as if you believe that.”
“Oh, you think? So, can we land over there and take a closer look?”
“Sure, but not right next to the truck. The bank is too steep.”
“That’s just as well because I wouldn’t want to risk destroying any shoe impressions we might find in the mud.”
A couple of minutes later, we’d tied the boat to a tree and were picking our way through the dense undergrowth toward the truck. Actually, Ash wasn’t having any problems and she was carrying the knapsack. However, I was finding the going increasingly tough and was relying more and more on my cane as my leg began to ache. Gnats and large flies buzzed around our heads and I swatted uselessly at them. Finally, we came to the clearing and saw that the Chevy had been abandoned at the end of a dirt lane that was invisible from the river. The road led up the low bluff and into the cornfield. The truck was exactly as Sergei described it, with the exception of a pair of two-inch rounded scars on the driver’s side of the windshield that I knew were caused by bullets striking, but not penetrating, the sloped safety glass.
I glanced into the cab and cargo deck and was immensely relieved not to find a bullet-riddled body beginning to turn into corpse pudding in the warm weather.
You haven’t lived until you encounter the cloying stench of a dead body that’s been inside a car for a couple of days in the summer sun. It permeates everything. You can smell it on your clothes, on your skin, and in your hair.
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It’s one of the few things about being a homicide inspector I definitely don’t miss.
“I take it I’m not supposed to touch anything,” said Ash.
“Not until we get Tina to process the truck for latent fingerprints.”
Since the passenger window was open about five inches, I decided to take a closer look inside the cab. The first thing I noticed was a handheld Uniden Bearcat police radio scanner lying on the front passenger seat—standard equipment for a professional burglar. Other than that, there wasn’t much to see. The glove box was closed, there were no vehicle keys visible, and the ignition system hadn’t been punched or hotwired.
“It’s got to be the victim’s truck. There’s a scanner on the seat.”
“And who goes out without one of those?” Ash nodded in the direction of the windshield. “Are those marks what I think they are?”
“Yup, somebody capped a couple of rounds at the truck. Probably with a pistol or revolver.”
“How can you tell?”
“Your average handgun bullet doesn’t have the mass or enough velocity to puncture safety glass—which is pretty tough stuff. What usually happens is that the projectile gouges the glass and ricochets off.”