Mercy River Page 5

  “So we’re sleeping in the truck.”

  “God. No. Vivian from my office found an acceptable rental house without a deposit holding it. She outbid the previous tenants by a wide margin, and the owner caved. So if we find a group of angry men with suitcases on the lawn, just smile and keep going. Thataway, pardner.” He pointed. I drove.

  “The chain of evidence against Leo is solid enough to hold up,” he said. “Sorry to disillusion you.”

  “Is there any good news?”

  “Not yet. The circuit court judge for the arraignment tomorrow is known to be a hard case. If Leo was a pillar of this fine community, maybe we could convince the judge to take the risk on bail. But he’s not. Turn here.”

  “I’ve got Leo’s meds and some clothes.” I nodded toward the grocery sack on the passenger seat floor. “He’ll need those tonight.”

  “I’ll take them to the jail after I shower,” he said. “It would be best if you don’t show your face at the station while Lieutenant Yerby’s around.”

  “Then you can also relay a message: his girlfriend wishes she could visit him.”

  I didn’t have to be looking in Ganz’s direction to know he was rolling his eyes.

  At the next stop sign, a band of schoolchildren dutifully checked both ways and moved as one through the crosswalk. No adult supervision, but safety in numbers.

  Ganz yawned. “You don’t seem tired. Why don’t you seem tired?”

  “Let me read the police report.”

  “Reports,” Ganz corrected. “One from the sheriff’s office, and one from the town constable. An actual constable, can you believe it?”

  “Beacham.”

  “Now, how did you know that? Wayne Beacham Jr. That’s how he signed it.”

  “He’s the cop who cracked Leo with his baton. And also the brother of Lester Beacham, the asshole who jumped Leo in the saloon.”

  Ganz glanced at me, but didn’t say anything. In another two blocks he pointed at a two-story house painted rose-pink. I pulled into its driveway, next to a four-door Chevy Malibu.

  “I hope this place doesn’t have roaches,” Ganz said, “because the nearest Kimpton is two hundred miles away.”

  “But there’s a decent dry ditch right over there.”

  I played bellhop and lugged Ganz’s two suitcases to the wooden porch of the pink house. His blazer and trousers were wrinkled. First time for everything. “The reports,” I reminded him.

  He set his attaché on the porch railing and opened it to retrieve a binder-clipped stack of papers. “I’ll need these back tonight.”

  “I’ll leave them here when I go to the Rally’s opening.” And maybe find out more about how the law worked in this town. I grasped the stack of papers in Ganz’s hand. He didn’t let go.

  “Van,” Ganz said, “I can see that look on you. Your grandfather had the same expression when somebody crossed him. It scared me then and it scares me now, I don’t mind telling you. A reminder of bad times. Just . . . just remember why we’re here, all right?”

  I’d never known Ganz to be hesitant.

  “I’ll keep it clean,” I said.

  “Good. Excellent.” He let go of the papers and went to retrieve a handful of assorted keys from under the mat. He handed one ring to me and held up a Chevrolet key. “With the money we’re paying, Vivian talked the homeowners into loaning us their car for a day. I won’t be forced to have you run me all over town.”

  “Only one day?”

  “By tomorrow evening Leo will be either free on bail or training the bedbugs in his cell to sit and stay. In either circumstance I will be en route to Seattle. You may keep the house through Monday if you’re that masochistic, but one night in Mercy River is more than enough for me. Now I need cleansing and a nap and an uninterrupted night to marshal our defense. Talk to you later.”

  Ganz unlocked the door and grabbed his attaché and one of the suitcases and disappeared inside. I heard him haul the suitcase in steady thumps up the stairs.

  I revised my opinion. Ganz wasn’t hesitant. He’d been unnerved. His hand on the stack of papers had trembled minutely. And the torrent of words that had followed had helped him regain his composure. Ghosts of our past, coming back to greet us.

  Hello, Granddad. I guess part of you really does live on through me.

  Beyond finding the first-floor bedroom and tossing my travel ruck onto the dresser, I didn’t waste time exploring our temporary home. I sat down on the slipcovered sofa in the living room and started poring over the police reports.

  The first account, less than a quarter of the thickness of the papers from the sheriff’s office, was by Wayne Beacham, the town constable. It was dry to the point of dehydration. Constable Beacham had been parked at the intersection of Main Street and Larimer Road, checking out a report of vandalism at a dress store. Erle’s Gun Shop was on Larimer. Beacham and the dress store proprietor had both waved to Erle as he drove past on his way to work, at about six-thirty in the morning. The proprietor had gone to get supplies to board up the window while Beacham checked the store for other signs of damage or theft.

  Around forty minutes later, a local man named Henry Gillespie stopped to chat with Beacham at his patrol car, while Beacham was helping board up the broken window. Another man named Zeke Caton had passed them, and Gillespie joined Caton to walk down the road to the gun shop. They entered the shop just before its official opening time of seven-thirty a.m. and found Erle lying on the floor. Gillespie had been the one to call 911, while Caton ran to fetch the constable. When Beacham arrived, he ascertained that Erle appeared to be dead, and that the back door to the shop was unlocked. He then closed the shop and radioed the sheriff’s office.

  That was the extent of Beacham’s report, except for the statements that he had taken from the two citizens. Gillespie had come to the shop to buy birdshot shells and shoot the breeze with Erle, who was a longtime acquaintance. Zeke Caton had wanted nine-millimeter rounds for the Rally shooting competitions on Saturday. Both men had Oregon addresses, Gillespie in Mercy River, Caton on a rural route somewhere outside the incorporated towns.

  It was Gillespie who had noticed someone pass them and walk down to the shop while he’d been jawing with the constable. Gillespie estimated the time as only ten or twelve minutes before he and Caton had walked down Larimer Road to the shop themselves. Beacham had shortened Gillespie’s description to the bare minimum: “Chinese or Japanese. Athlete’s build. Black hair.” Gillespie was less clear about what the man had been wearing, except that his jacket had been dark, maybe black leather.

  It was feasible that there were other men at the Rally who matched that description, although Rangers of Asian background were uncommon. Maybe not as rare as in Mercy River, which was pretty damn white, from what I’d seen. But Leo had worked at Erle’s shop for the past week. Too big a coincidence to imagine another buff Asian guy hanging around Erle’s place, a full two days before the Rally was due to start.

  The sheriff’s report dug that hole even deeper. Past the lead deputy’s narrative of arriving at the gun shop and securing the premises for the crime scene techs—who had probably still been cataloging the shop when Ganz and I had rolled into town—I found a stack of written statements from store owners nearby who identified Leo as a recent worker at Erle’s shop. One of those stores was a coffeehouse on Main Street, two blocks down from Larimer Road where the gun shop was situated. Leo had become a regular customer. I guessed that was the same coffeehouse that Leo’s secret girlfriend Dez had mentioned.

  The second half of the stack contained the incident report from the attack on Leo in the Trading Post Saloon. Most of it witness statements. A jumbled lot, but they largely confirmed what Seebright had told me: Lester Beacham physically assaulted Leo, the fight escalated, and Leo was pursued out of the saloon and into the hills. He had outrun the mob—no surprise there—but they’d chased him down with off-road vehicles. Someone had alerted sheriff’s deputies to the trouble, but by the time
they drove a Jeep up the hill, Constable Beacham had subdued and apprehended the suspect.

  Subdued. There was no report from Beacham about finding and clubbing Leo. I wondered if his narrative had been deliberately left out of the reports, or not written in the first place. Maybe Ganz could make something useful out of the omission.

  There was also no lab report from the crime scene team who’d driven to Mercy River from Prineville. We couldn’t expect that to be completed for at least a day or two. A single sheet, empty but for three lines, listed the items removed from the victim’s pockets—a ring of keys and a folding knife and a packet of Red Man. I checked the back of the sheet and flipped back through the reports again. The police didn’t mention taking a cell phone into evidence. Had Erle been the type to reject modern gadgets?

  The last pages showed Leo’s fingerprints, and photographs of the initial print dustings of the .45 shells found at the scene. The lab techs had yet to confirm it, but the prints looked like a match to me. A Vietnam-vintage Colt M1911 had been found on the floor of the shop, apparently wiped clean. On the outside. Rounds still in the chamber and magazine carried more of the same fingerprints.

  Add that to the blood found on Leo’s shoes, which I couldn’t delude myself might turn out to be some other person’s than Erle’s, and the case against Leo edged past bleak to verge on insurmountable.

  The only bright spot—or at least not another black hole—was the absence of any video. An appendix to the report noted that Lieutenant Yerby and the crime scene team had viewed the gun shop’s security feed, and determined that Erle had entered the shop at 6:32 a.m., and switched off the cameras himself at 6:40. Nothing had been captured after that. The sheriff’s office would be reaching out to the security firm on the off chance that additional footage was sent to the cloud. That sounded like a Hail Mary to me, but it showed that for all Yerby’s faults, he was at least competent enough to run down every lead.

  Erle had turned off his cameras, and within—what? half an hour?—he’d been shot and killed. With nobody in or out of the shop except Leo, and an eyewitness to prove it.

  Damn. I’d been holding out hope that the witnesses had ID’d the wrong man, or that the cops had bungled the evidence. But if anything, the police report had shaken my certainty about Leo’s innocence.

  Worst of all was his attitude. He must have entered the shop, seen the body, and for some bizarre reason not reported it. His arrest wasn’t simply a screwup by the cops, as he claimed. Why hadn’t Leo told me that he’d found Erle dead? My friend’s evasiveness rang like a missing key on a piano, a hollow note that couldn’t be ignored. If a jury saw it the same way, Leo was tailor-made for a fast conviction, and a long stretch in a small box.

  Eight

  I left the police reports on the coffee table and grabbed my barn jacket and Mariners cap to set out for town on foot. My leg muscles were aching for a walk after all of the driving during the past day. The sun had begun its dive behind the hills, leaving a clear sky and that same steady cool wind that had blown all afternoon.

  The walk gave me time to think about Leo. I had to believe he was innocent, despite the evidence and his own strange behavior. He’d told me straight out that he hadn’t killed Erle Sharples. If I didn’t trust him on that, I didn’t trust him on anything.

  So who had shot Erle? And why? Whoever the killer had been, they must have arrived at the shop before Leo that same morning. Neither Beacham nor the two witnesses had reported seeing anyone else. The back entrance had been found unlocked. Erle had turned off his security cameras. Had he been doing something that he didn’t want captured on the feed, when someone slipped in and shot him? Or had Erle been expecting them? Maybe Erle had let his killer in through the back door himself.

  I wanted a look at the gun shop. Its address put it roughly between my path through the residential blocks and the town center, and I changed course to stride past the school’s athletic field. Any fall season football or soccer practices had ended for the day. A few high school kids in MRHS Rams sweatshirts and shorts jogged around the track in loose packs, more socializing than exercising.

  Erle’s Gun Shop and Firing Range lay at the terminus of Larimer Road, a sloped dead-end branch off Main, no more than a hundred and fifty yards from end to end. At the top of the road, I passed the dress store where Constable Wayne Beacham had been investigating their vandalized window on the morning of the murder. Wood slats and cardboard covered the broken pane of glass. From the dress store I could see an unbroken stretch of Main Street for a quarter mile in both directions. The heart of the town to the north, and the long reach south toward residences and farms and eventually isolated homesteads like Dez’s.

  The short road was quiet at dusk and looked to stay that way. Only one structure stood within a hundred feet of the gun shop. A two-story brick storefront, under renovation, its rooms empty and X’s of masking tape still marking newly installed windows.

  Instead of the imitation western façade of the town center or the boutique trimmings of its dress store, Erle had limited his design efforts to broad corrugated steel sheets bolted directly onto the shop’s adobe walls. There were no windows. An accordion gate extended the breadth of the locked entrance to create a second barrier. Or a third, if you counted the police tape sealing the doorjamb.

  Attached to the side of the shop was a simple carport, another large sheet of galvanized steel held aloft by four-by-four posts. A Honda ATV sat within like a faithful hound, squatting low on fat muddy tires, its bright red paint turned purple by the shadows.

  From under the narrow awning above the door, a closed-circuit camera stared down at the space in front of the shop’s entrance. The housing of the camera had been painted over with the same brown paint as the wooden awning. But the trim shape of the camera was familiar. Distinctive.

  I looked around. No one in sight. I risked climbing up to balance on the railing of the front steps and scratched at the brown paint with my car key.

  Under the flecks of brown, the side of the camera was emblazoned with the maker’s logo. One word crowned by a blue laurel wreath. Kjárr.

  I knew Kjárr. Every thief knew it. An alarm firm based in Oslo. Top of the line, for the private sector. Around Seattle, I might expect to find a Kjárr system installed at a Saudi exile’s Broadmoor estate, or in a tech exec’s penthouse condo in Bellevue. I would not expect to find Kjárr providing a line of defense for what was, at most, a hundred grand worth of merchandise in backwater Oregon. The Kjárr system alone probably cost that much.

  Erle Sharples might have been paranoid. Or he’d landed a serious deal on a used system and reinstalled it at his shop. But if that were the case, why not go ahead and plaster the famous brand name on every door to ward off burglars?

  No. Erle wanted his shop very secure, and to keep that security to himself. The question was why.

  I could beat a Kjárr, given time and some computer-assisted equipment to fool the Wi-Fi signal. But I didn’t have to. The alarm had been turned off when Erle was killed. Any man security-conscious enough to want a top-flight system wouldn’t trust the local LE with the codes. Odds were good that Yerby and team had simply left the alarm off and relied on the shop’s dead bolts to keep things secure.

  I’d test that theory later. Right now, I wanted to join the crowd for the Rally’s opening night, to see if I could catch wind of Constable Wayne Beacham or his brother Lester. If the constable really had been spouting off about the shooting to his family and God knew who else in town, maybe Ganz could use that as grounds for moving Leo to another location. A safer one.

  The Mercy River town hall was an actual hall, extending for half a block beyond its comparatively small entrance. A bronze plaque on the post by the broad stone steps declared that the original hall had been built in 1898, and thanked the sponsors who’d overseen a renovation in 2005. Those benefactors had opted for a timeless aspect, red brick and white-paned windows, unremarkable but sturdy.

  Dozens of me
n milled around the grass, talking and laughing with language raw enough to blister paint. It took me back. There was something unique about Spec Ops when we got together in large numbers. Even separated by different social classes and generations—I saw motorheads and Hawaiian shirts and businessmen in Burberry raincoats, ears with gauges stretching their lobes into circles and ears with hearing aids—we all examined the world with similar eyes. Watchful. Assessing. Categorizing everything in our surroundings into threat or opportunity or neither, even as we laughed and hugged one another in greeting. It didn’t matter if we were honed like razors off our last deployment or carrying twenty years of civilian chow around our middles. Put a hundred of us together, and you could feel a charge in the air like ozone foreshadowing a thunderstorm.

  I liked it. I’d missed it.

  The average age of the men in the crowd was a fraction below thirty. It might skew even lower as more active-duty men arrived for the Rally on forty-eight-hour passes. Which meant the overwhelming majority of us hadn’t known service without being at war. I could have figured that out by counting the number of KIA bracelets adorning wrists. Each ring of black metal engraved with the name of a fallen brother.

  I spotted Moulson and Booker, the active Rangers. They had changed from their camos into golf shirts and jeans. Moulson waved me over.

  “This the starting line?” I said.

  “Just in time,” said Booker. No one had given a signal, but the volume of conversation quieted and men dropped cigarettes to crush them out, as the crowd began to move toward the entrance.

  The space inside the long hall had been cleared, benches and plastic folding chairs pushed to either side along the walls. A few rows at the very front had been left alone, close to a stage. Three men in wheelchairs chatted in an open area next to the rows. A portly man in a knit sweater excused himself as we made room for him to pass. He supported his gait with a cane in each hand as he walked slowly toward the seats in front.