Dead in Hog Heaven (A Thea Barlow Mystery, Book Three) Page 8

  She took me into another small room where I had to repeat my version of the events at Hog Heaven into a recorder.

  Eventually, we traded places. I went into the sheriff's office, and presumably Dan went with Rhonda. My eyes lingered on the sign on the door, which said Deputy Sheriff, Randall Metzger. Rusty stood, motioned me to a chair in front of his desk, then relaxed back into his own.

  "I saw you reading the sign on my door," he said pleasantly enough. "As you know, everyone calls me sheriff. In fact, I'm a deputy contracted by the county to run this office. But don't be mistaken," he said with a chilly little smile, "I am in charge here." That point made—which I'd never doubted in the first place—he got to the business at hand.

  "You're aware that a serious accusation has been made against you. I want to assure you that I've made no judgments at this point and won't until we've investigated every aspect of the case." He pushed a recorder forward on the desk, and again I told my story, this time interrupted repeatedly by questions.

  I was taking advantage of a lull while Rusty consulted his notes to collect my thoughts when we heard the outside door crash open.

  "Metzger! What in hell is going on here?" a voice roared.

  Max. I jumped up. As did Rusty. He slammed his notebook shut with a look of complete exasperation, and went out to meet him. I followed.

  Max was nose to nose with Rhonda, still bellowing. "What do you mean, he's interrogating her?" Clyde, Twila, and Dan stepped into the entry from whatever rooms they had been in. Twila slipped out the front door.

  "Calm down, Max," Rusty said. "Opal Bodie has been murdered."

  Dan gave Max a venomous glance. "And she did it," Dan said, jerking his head toward me.

  Max lunged for him. "Why, you little—"

  Rusty grabbed his arm. "Hang on, or I'll throw you in the lock-up."

  "I caught her, knife in hand, Holman."

  "Shut up, Dan," Rusty barked. "Rhonda, get these people out of here. You," he said to Max, still maintaining the death-grip on his arm, "come with me."

  "You're out of your mind if you think for one minute that Thea could have anything to do with Opal's death. You can't—"

  The door opened and Twila came back in, carrying her chicken wrapped in a soft cloth. Max stopped mid-sentence, stared at the bird, then Twila and the sheriff. His expression was a wondrous mix of disbelief and outrage. I smothered an incipient rise of giggles.

  Twila looked to the sheriff, too, her chin raised in defiance. "It was too hot in the truck, so I brought Sugar in."

  Rhonda took charge, ushering Twila, Clyde and Dan down the hall and back into separate offices.

  Max looked at me, noticing for the first time my prison-issue clothes. "What on earth?"

  "They took my clothes. Evidence."

  Before he could explode again, Rusty led him to his office. Grim-faced, Max listened while Rusty gave him a brief version of the day's events.

  "But you're not holding her," Max said when he finished. It was not a question.

  "No," he said, his voice as hard and determined as Max's. "Not yet, anyway."

  Max grabbed my hand. "Come on, then. Let's get out of here."

  We walked out into a blast of afternoon heat. The brightness hurt my eyes. I felt as if I'd been buried in darkness for days. Heat waves shimmered up from the tarmac coating on the parking lot. When we got in Max's truck he pulled me into his arms. "Are you sure you're okay?"

  "I think so."

  "Was it pretty awful?" I nodded. "Do you want to tell me about it?"

  To my surprise, I found I did. It was a relief to let all the fear, horror, and confusion pour out without worrying how it would sound, or how it would be construed.

  Max was the perfect listener, nodding, or emitting sympathetic grunts now and then, but no questions. He drove slowly through town, letting the words flow over him and, still without interrupting, pulled into the tiny Rustlers drive-in and ordered hamburgers and coffee before heading out into the country. He placed a foil-wrapped burger in my hands. I stared at it, soft, warm, redolent of happier times; the essence of comfort food. I couldn't eat it, but held it close in both hands, not even pausing long enough to take a breath.

  "Oh Max, don't you see? I could have killed Opal. I fell on the knife. What if she wasn't dead, and it was me falling on that knife, jamming it farther..."

  "You didn't fall, you were pushed. The guilty person is still guilty, Thea. Don't torture yourself with useless speculations."

  "But that's not the only thing. I..." I hesitated, finally stopping to catch my breath. I wondered how to put my thoughts into words.

  "What?" Max said, concern tightening his jaw. "What else happened, Thea?"

  I sighed. "I don't know what it was, but it was... awful." An involuntary shiver shook my upper body with enough force to startle Max.

  He slowed the pickup and eyed me warily. "Out with it."

  "I don't know if I can explain without sounding stupid. But it was after I found Opal and heard someone stalking me outside. Something weird happened, I felt like some other person took over my body. I filled the room, Max. I grew. When Dan kicked in the door, I pulled that knife out without a thought, and I wanted to use it, Max." I could still see my hand, feinting, flicking the blade at him, threatening, daring him to come closer.

  Max threw back his head in relief. "Jeez, Thea, there's nothing wrong with that. You did exactly what you should have done. What do you want to be, some kind of wimp? Think—"

  "But I am a wimp. That wasn't me, Max. My arms were huge and powerful. I could feel the muscles pumping." I hesitated, then plunged on. "Opal told me yesterday that strange things had happened to her in that old building. Maybe... I mean, not only was I in the body, but I was watching it from somewhere above."

  Max laid his foot on the gas pedal and brought the pickup's speed up to its usual flying mode. His lips twitched. "Out of body, huh?"

  My mouth dropped. "Oh lord," I said with a laugh, "you're right. Astral projection. I'm getting to be as weird as everyone else around here."

  I laid my head back against the seat. I knew what my problem was. I didn't want to be that knife-wielding thug. The image was too repellent. And it scared the hell out of me. The idea of being taken over by some supernatural being was much more acceptable. But there was no way I could escape the fact that the hand that had held the knife was mine. Surreptitiously, I flexed the fingers of my right hand. Muscle memory was there. I knew the heft of the blade, and the taunting motions I'd made that had flicked drops of Opal's blood onto the hard-packed floor.

  "Dan was right to be frightened of me," I said in a low voice.

  "Hey," Max said, glancing over at me. "It's okay. Adrenaline can do funny things."

  I gave him a weak smile. "That's what the sheriff said." But I knew it was something more than adrenaline. Suddenly, I thought again of Sheila Rides Horse, and wished fervently that she were here. None of this would seem strange to my psychic Indian friend.

  "Look," Max said. "Don't worry, okay? Dan's a jerk, nobody's going to take his word over yours. Rusty's a good man."

  "Are you sure? How well do you know him?"

  "You're off the wall there, Thea. Rusty's okay."

  I couldn't argue the point. I felt like a well gone dry. Max turned off onto a graveled country road, and eyed the hamburger I still held. "You going to eat that?"

  I shook my head and handed the sadly squished sandwich to him. He downed it in a few bites. I took my coffee from the holder. Still warm. I sipped it and glanced around. "Where are we going?" I asked, totally unaware of our surroundings.

  "The house. And there's some other stuff I want to show you, too."

  Then he began to ask questions, and I filled in the things I'd left out or forgotten to mention. Then he wanted to know more about my first encounter with Ronnie Mae.

  "There wasn't much to it, Max. I was getting my car filled with gas and talking to Clyde. Ronnie drove up, madder than hell."

/>   "Did she come from the highway, or from the Bodie land?"

  "From the land. She was on the road that winds behind the store to that big butte. She was really nasty to Clyde. Accused him of giving permission to some geologist to snoop around. I know it was dumb, but I thought of you immediately, and I mentioned your name," I said apologetically. "That's probably why she accused you."

  He flashed me a grin. "No, she was right. It was me she saw."

  "You were trespassing?"

  "Yeah, and I've done it more than once. The first time was accidental. The land I bought abuts their property, and I was checking a boundary line. We're neighbors," he said a bit defensively. "And this is real neighborly country, but not Ronnie Mae, or Dan. I think they run some sheep now, but the sheep probably belong to the Bodies. Clyde and Opal sold off most of their stock a long time ago. It's pretty much hard-scrabble stuff now. But all of a sudden they've got No Trespassing signs hung all over the place. Dan chewed me out good that first time, waved one of those damned No Trespassing signs in my face. Said if I had any problems about the boundary markers we could go to the county courthouse and work it out."

  "And I gather you took exception to that?"

  "Right." He reached over and ruffled my hair. "It made me damned curious, is what it did."

  His face turned somber. "There's something strange going on over there, Thea. I can't figure it out. At first it was just a game for me, snooping around, taking pleasure in aggravating Dan and Ronnie Mae. But now... Opal was a good woman. Clyde's okay, too. This whole thing stinks, Thea, and I'll be damned if I'll let you get mixed up in it."

  He'd stepped on the gas in his vehemence and we careened around a curve and up over the crest of a low hill, then rattled across a cattle guard.

  "We're on my land now," he said. "And there's the house," he added without much enthusiasm. A few minutes more and we pulled up in front of a long, low, adobe-style structure. Three men were working out front, rolling sod. "Come on, I'll give you a quick run-through."

  The house was beautiful, luxurious. There were no traces of the unusual building material that formed the core of the walls. It simply looked like any other well-designed home with soft, Southwestern styling. Small person that I was, I was most interested in the decorating, wanting to sneer at Jennifer's taste if at all possible, but of course, it wasn't. I could find fault with nothing, except there being, perhaps, too many soft shades of the Southwest. This was just the antidote I needed. I wanted to poke around all the corners, decide where a touch of bilious yellow or fire-engine red was needed. But Max was antsy. Enough so that it piqued my interest.

  "Seen enough?" he asked, urging me toward the entrance. "We can come back again later. What I really want you to see is out on the... uh... property." He ushered me out, nodded to the workmen, and we climbed back into the truck.

  Following a trail that snaked behind the house and through strange pale hillocks bare of any growth, we traveled roughly parallel to a three-strand barbed wire fence on our right. Across the fence I could see two tall hills appearing as lone sentinels against the horizon, one a conical shape, almost volcanic looking, the other more squat, less precisely shaped, its middle ringed with clumps of rocky detritus. Beyond by not quite a mile was a long, gracefully shaped butte. It took a minute before I realized what I was looking at.

  "Oh," I said. "Now I know where we are. That's Clyde's sleeping dragon." I pointed to the long butte. Viewed from Hog Heaven, the two hills on the other side of the fence appeared to be much closer to the butte, forming part of the dragon's head. I craned around to see if I could see the store from here, but it was obscured by distance and the lay of the land.

  Max drove the pickup into a weedy draw and parked behind some pine scrub. I followed his lead and jumped out of the truck to trail behind him as he walked down the length of the fence, carefully scrutinizing every inch of the two hills.

  "What are we going to do?" I asked.

  He grinned. "Indulge in some larcenous behavior." He looked at my feet. "Good. You've got decent shoes on." He stepped on the fence's bottom wire and pulled up on the top two strands. "In you go."

  I ducked through. "Trespassing, huh?"

  "Yep. I don't see any activity out there, and I can't imagine anyone will be around after what happened at Hog Heaven this morning. I want you to see this."

  We walked with no attempt at stealth toward the first hill, angling around behind. It was a fair hike to the second hill, and I noticed that at this point Max chose a more discreet path, taking advantage of the deep erosion trenches that runneled through the area.

  As we got closer I saw an area where the ground had been scraped flat and a shallow tunnel scooped out of the hill.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "That's what I'd like to know."

  We walked up to the side of the hill and Max poked around in the shallow, scooped-out area. Beyond sat a bulldozer parked by another worked area.

  "When I first heard the 'dozer working out here I just thought they were building a reservoir or something, stuff like that goes on all the time. In fact, I wouldn't have paid any attention to it at all if Dan hadn't got on my ass for trespassing. Too damned secretive. Then I thought they'd made some kind of mining discovery, you know, uranium, copper, gold or something. But I've looked over the area and can't find a thing, at least nothing obvious. I even thought about diamonds."

  "Diamonds? Why would you think diamonds?"

  He shrugged. "Well, there are a lot of diamond place names around here. Diamondville, Diamond Mountain, Diamond Creek."

  After my last Wyoming escapade, when I had inadvertently learned a lot about jade, I'd done a fair amount of reading about rocks and minerals in general, gemstones in particular. But I didn't bother much about diamonds. They seemed a thing apart, too high on the food chain for me. I was more taken with the romance of the colored stones, sapphire, rubies, topaz, that one might actually be able to go out and dig up from the ground. But diamonds?

  "I heard of a Diamond Dovey," I offered, interested. "One of the girls who worked at Hog Heaven in the old days."

  "No kidding?"

  "Yeah, Opal told me about her. I guess she had a diamond inlaid in one of her front teeth."

  "Well, it doesn't matter much. I found out that the place names stem from the days of the great diamond hoax in the early eighteen-seventies. The site was just fifty-some miles south of Rock Springs. But, anyway, the idea of diamonds isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. There are several known diamond-bearing locations in Wyoming, even a producing mine close to Laramie, but I've scoured this area, and as far as I can tell there are no kimberlite deposits around here."

  "Kimberlite?"

  "Kimberlite is the formation where you find diamonds."

  "As in Kimberly, the great South African mine, De Beers, and all that?"

  "Exactly. Either the mine was named for the formation, or vice versa, I can't remember. Anyway, it's a kind of blue-gray rock that formed as enormous plugs in underground vents of ancient volcanoes. The deposits aren't easy to locate, even if you know what you're looking for, but I swear there's no kimberlite around here." He pushed back his hat and scratched his forehead, surveying the landscape with a puzzled frown. "So what do you think?"

  "Me? What do you mean? You're the geologist."

  "I'm a petroleum geologist, not a rock man, and it's been a hell of a long time since I've been in school. But my mind is stuck in a mining rut. It's got to be something else. I need your opinion. What else could this be?"

  "You're asking me to be imaginative? Today of all days?"

  We scrambled up to a higher point that also looked as if it had been intentionally leveled off.

  "The only thing I can think of," I said, looking over the site much as he had, "is that it might have something to do with Feng Shui. These hills are part of the formation Clyde calls a sleeping dragon."

  "What in hell is Feng Shui?"

  "Clyde claims it's some kind of mysti
cal science, that priests or monks have told him applies to land. He has great plans to turn all this into some kind of tourist attraction, or"—I raised my shoulders, still bewildered by the concept—"or an adjunct to the Institute of Astral Projection." I told him what I remembered of my conversation with Clyde. "Maybe they're going to dig a room out, for a... a gift shop or something." We both snorted with laughter.

  "Yeah, the tourist trap from hell. But if that were the case, you'd think they'd put in electrical lines first."

  We picked our way back down to the lower level. "And you think this has something to do with Opal's death?" I asked, then grabbed his arm as my feet slid out from under me, pulling him along with me on an awkward, painful descent that nearly tore off the seat of my pants.

  "Whoa," Max said, tumbling beside me. At least it got us down the hill quickly. We'd barely gotten back on our feet when a shot rang out. Max grabbed me, shoved my head down, and we scrabbled into the shallow tunnel.

  "Shit," he said softly. "Shit, shit, shit."

  We cowered into a shadowy corner, not really hidden, and listened to the grinding gears of a truck. The sound traveled on the wind, elusive, hard to track, which is probably why we hadn't heard it before. We scrunched against the rough rocks. Silence, then more blasts from a gun. Two, three shots. Closer, somewhere behind the hill.

  "What in hell?" Max breathed in my ear.

  "What is he shooting at?"

  "I don't know. At least it's not us—yet. Birds, maybe, or just target shooting."

  The truck started up again, coming closer, much closer. Silence. This time the gunshots were so near, the blasts rang in my ears.

  "Shotgun," Max said, gripping me tightly as I winced with the next blast. Whoever it was was shooting directly on the other side of the hill from where we crouched.