Читать книгу Clouds without Rain - P. L. Gaus - Страница 17

4

Tuesday, August 8

8:05 A.M.

THE next morning, Professor Branden stood on the hill where, the day before, he had turned cars back north on 515 and watched through his binoculars as Robertson had struggled to save Phil Schrauzer. Again, he studied the crash scene in the valley below him. There were several cruisers from the State Highway Patrol, and a single line of traffic had been opened on the road. Troopers were posted at each end, with roadblocks to handle the flow of traffic, first in one direction and then in the other.

The semitrailer rig had been righted, and the cab stood on the west side of the road, the charred trailer on the east. A crew of several Amish men worked at the back of the overturned trailer to salvage light oak and dark cherry furniture, transferring it to smaller panel trucks. The blackened hulk of a car sat on its iron wheels where it had burned, and the one-way traffic passed slowly by, drivers rubbernecking at the destruction.

The extent of the fire had been much greater than Branden had realized. The road was blackened with soot for a good thirty yards behind the burnt car, and the grasses, shrubs, weeds, trees, and crops had been burned in large, semicircular patches on either side of the road. The blackened ground ran nearly to John R. Weaver’s house, set back forty yards on the west. In the field beyond Weaver’s house, the fire had burned to a stand of timber before the firefighters had brought it under control. That stand of timber followed a dried creek bed that edged the western border of the crops and curved around behind Weaver’s place, to within twenty yards of the back of his house. On the east, the damage was less extensive, because of the easterly breeze the day before. Here, along the edges of the blackened soil, there were still a few ribbons of smoke lifting gently off the ground.

Once down at the scene, Branden parked on the berm, well back from the investigation, and walked down the slope of the road to the point where Phil Schrauzer’s cruiser had backed up and stopped. The professor was dressed in jeans, a green and white Millersburg College T-shirt, and hiking boots. He wore a blue and red Cleveland Indian’s ballcap and a pair of mirrored sunglasses.

He saw Schrauzer’s cruiser, blackened with soot as far back as the rear doors. On the hood and windshield, under the layer of soot, he could make out the numerous dents and cracks where the car and windshield had been pelted with the debris from the buggy. The windshield was smashed inward over the steering wheel.

The remains of the carriage of the buggy sat off to one side, in the field where it had landed on impact. Several Holmes County deputies were walking slowly over the field, eyes down, gathering the smaller buggy parts to the side of the road. The sheriff’s forensics photographer, Eric Shetler, worked slowly there at the berm, taking photos of the debris that had been recovered. As Branden walked in the morning light, the sun was strong from the east, warm on his face and neck, promising another hot and rainless day.

The treads of his boots left waffle patterns in the heated blacktop. The heat reminded him of summer days in Phoenix. Caroline was there now, visiting her mother, a long-standing vacation that had risen to the status of an obligation. Branden had gone with her several times in earlier days, but had been glad, almost relieved, when Caroline had released him from that duty. Now, given the circumstances, he wondered if he shouldn’t have gone.

At the site of the impact, a sheriff’s deputy had rolled a backhoe down from its trailer and was working with the bucket to move the dead horse farther away from the pavement. A trooper was measuring the length of skid marks with a rolatape, and another trooper was bending into the cab of the semi, studying the gearshifter.

At the backhoe, Branden called up to the deputy and asked him to settle the horse on its left side. He knelt beside the flank of the horse and examined the crushed and lacerated hip and leg. The right hind leg had been torn viciously loose upon impact with the semi, and now it lay back, in line with the horse’s tail, almost completely detached, the severed flesh covered with buzzing flies and gnats. The eviscerated bowels of the horse had poured loose from a gaping tear in the belly.

Next, Branden asked to see the horse laid on its right side, and the deputy on the backhoe started working the scoop under the belly of the horse. After several attempts to roll the horse, the best they could manage was to set the forequarters of the horse on its back, its front legs stiff in the air, with the broken spine of the animal twisted, so that the hindquarters lay reasonably flat. Branden knelt beside the horse again and made a careful inspection along its flank, back toward the hip. The damage here was less severe, but there were deep scratches and skid wounds gouged into the skin so that the horse hair was torn loose in patches, showing pink underneath. The various wounds and road abrasions were laid down as raw, elongated streaks, encrusted with blood.

When Branden stood up from the horse, the deputy on the backhoe shut it down and scrambled off the machine. He walked slowly to Branden and asked, “What are you looking for, Professor?”

Branden held out his hand and said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

The deputy shook his hand and said, “Stan Armbruster. Newest deputy in the department, which I guess you can tell by the fact that I’m the one out here shoveling dead horse parts off the road.”

“Well, Deputy,” Branden said, “they say that horse halted in its turn into the lane, and that’s what caused the semi to strike the buggy. I was just curious why some of the witnesses would say that it looked like the back legs of the horse seemed to give out, halfway through its turn.”

“Find what you were looking for?” Armbruster asked.

“Not at all sure,” Branden said. “But I’d be a whole lot happier if we didn’t let anybody ship that horse to a fertilizer plant for the time being.”

“I’ll mention it to the LT,” Armbruster said.

“Who’s in charge this morning?” Branden asked.

Armbruster scoffed, “The ‘flying tires’ think they are, but Lieutenant Wilsher’s in the house.” He made an unfriendly gesture toward the state troopers, and shook his head with the exaggerated disdain typical of rookies.

Branden smiled, thanked Armbruster, reminded him about the horse, walked down the drive to the front porch of John R. Weaver’s house, and entered through the screened door. He found himself in a long hallway that led back to a kitchen. The wide floorboards were painted a muted gray. The walls were plain white, and the hallway was trimmed liberally with fine cherry wood.

The kitchen was fitted with a wood stove, a large metal sink with a hand pump for water, and a small wooden table and chair. There were dirty dishes scattered haphazardly about the counters and the sink, and the doorless pantry shelves seemed equally disorganized, stocked with a bounty of dried goods, canned foods, condiments, chips, flour, salt and pepper, herbs, and a couple of dozen two-liter bottles of pop. In one corner, there was a small icebox made of heavy wood, trimmed and bound with ribbons of thick black iron.

Branden glanced through the other doorways off the hall and found a bedroom, a dining room, and a sitting room, all done in the traditional plain Amish fashion of the hallway—gray floors, white walls, and rich cherry trim, the furniture old and unadorned.

Passing back through the kitchen, Branden walked out onto a wide screened porch and found a surprisingly large, boxy addition attached to the back porch, electric lights showing through the windows. An electric line ran to a corner of the addition, and a telephone line came in underneath. There was also a cable TV service wire. The roofline ascended to a peak that was even with the top windows of the second floor of the main house, and, through the tall windows of the new addition, Branden noticed a soaring, vaulted ceiling.

Inside, Branden found Dan Wilsher, in uniform, seated at a modern, black lacquer desk and computer console in the single large room. The console held a monitor, a keyboard, a color printer, and a phone/fax machine. There was also a TV set and a VCR in a far corner, with an easy chair.

The lieutenant was a tall man, somewhat overweight, about fifty years old. He was serious on the job, but handled his duties as lieutenant with a quiet ease that the deputies respected. Out of uniform, he had a reputation as a jokester, and several times he had arranged practical jokes on the sheriff, leaving Robertson to guess who had put the younger deputies up to it. This, too, Branden reflected, had made Wilsher popular with the deputies.

The latest had been one of Wilsher’s best, with Phil Schrauzer “walking point.” Even with Schrauzer gone, Branden remembered it happily. Phil had backed his car up to the Brandens’ garage on a night shift, and he and the professor had off-loaded several boxes containing the sheriff’s entire collection of Zane Grey novels, even the first-edition Harper & Brothers. Then they had met all of the other deputies, corporals and captains alike, at the jail, each bringing several old volumes scavenged from garage sales, attics, used book stores, neighbors, grandparents, even the Internet. The gag had taken the better part of a month to prepare, but the next day, on the shelves where the sheriff’s prized Zane Greys normally stood, Robertson found twenty-seven hardbound Nancy Drew mysteries. For as long as he could, he studiously ignored them.

Some days later, when he could contain himself no longer, he started in on the deputies one at a time. It took a week and a half, and it was Schrauzer himself who finally broke. Branden delivered the Zane Greys from his garage to the sheriff, and Robertson cleared out Schrauzer’s locker and glued the Nancy Drews together into a tight, immovable pack in the empty space.

Wilsher came out of his reverie, turned to Branden, waved an arm to indicate the whole of the room, and said, “Pretty amazing, don’t you think?”

Branden stepped into the room and turned in place to see what Wilsher had indicated. On three of the walls behind him, high up in the vaulted space, there were large game trophies, North American for the most part, but several from Africa, too. There were deer, elk, moose, bear, and a cougar, plus kudu, wildebeest, steenbok, and warthog. As they hung with their eyes looking down into the room, they seemed to press in on Branden like guards in a private art gallery, making the unwanted visitor nervous by their unpleasant attentions.

Beneath the trophy heads, along two of the walls, there were wooden shelves, crammed with books, travel guides, and hunting magazines. The room was paneled in dark walnut and finished with a luxuriant blue carpet. In each of the four angled ceiling lines of the vaulted room, there was a large skylight.

Branden stared at the massive heads, feeling vaguely uneasy. Wilsher said, “Come over here and have a seat. It doesn’t spook you quite so much when you’re sitting down.”

Branden crossed the large room and took a seat on a desk chair in front of the monitor. He swiveled gently left and right and counted the imposing trophy heads, eighteen in all. Then he pushed up from the chair and walked over to a wall rack beside the TV, where four hunting rifles were held vertically in place inside a felt-lined walnut case. The case had slots for five rifles, but the middle slot was empty. Branden took one of the rifles down and sighted the scope through a window onto a distant hillside. He opened the bolt and inspected the chamber. Next he studied the scope, a Leupold variable-power model, with extraordinarily fine, custom cross hairs. The rifle itself was a classic Remington 700 series, mounted to a modern, black composite stock. Branden took a bill out of his wallet, wrapped it around the barrel, and slid it freely between the barrel and the stock. To Wilsher he commented, “Free-floated barrel,” with admiration, and stood the rifle back in the case where he had found it.

Wilsher said, “Guess he was a big hunter,” and continued browsing through the desk drawers.

Branden came over to the desk, and said, “Those aren’t run-of-the-mill firearms.”

Wilsher turned in his chair to face Branden and asked, “So how do you figure a guy in a buggy makes it over to Africa to hunt dangerous game?”

Branden shrugged and said, “Better yet, figure a guy in a buggy with a modern, electric addition off his back porch.”

The two fell silent for a moment and then Wilsher turned back to the desk. Branden rose to study the contents of a tall metal filing cabinet next to the computer console. He opened the top drawer labeled “Lands Owned.” The other drawers were marked “Lands Sold,” “Lands Leased,” and “Prospects.”

Wilsher said, “Weaver has land deals dating back to 1976, as far as I can make out.”

Branden studied the numerous file folders in the “Lands Owned” drawer and said, “He also owned half of several townships. Come look at this, Dan.”

Wilsher stood up and went over to the filing cabinet. Branden had one file opened, the pages laid flat on top of the drawer. There was a bill of sale, a record of the auction price, a receipt for cash, copies of the deed, and a computer version of a surveyor’s drawing attached to the deed. The drawing bore the initials JRW and was dated “Mar 06 ’96.” A separate page described the parcel in detail, giving its location in township, parcel, and lot numbers, along with a reference to county and township roads. In pencil, there was listed an estimated value on the land. The price had been erased several times and updated values had been penciled in over the old ones. In the lower right-hand corner was a notation reading “B. Sommers, 8%.” Branden put the folder away and began counting the folders in the drawer. When he was finished, he said, “Thirty-nine properties, scattered over three townships.”

Wilsher whistled and said, “Big game hunter and land baron, too.” He watched curiously as Branden opened the drawer marked “Lands Sold.”

In this drawer, nearly fifty manila folders were packed together so tightly that it would have been difficult to add another to the collection. Branden worked a few of the folders loose and laid one open on top of the drawer. It contained the same types of documents as the folders in the first drawer, but on the outside of each of these folders there was a tabulation of dates, purchase price, sale price, and profit. Several had notations in the lower right corners about B. Sommers, 8 percent here, 7 or 10 percent elsewhere. Wilsher began pulling folders, and Branden ran a tally in his head. When they had worked through the drawer, Branden stood silently for a long moment, and then closed the drawer slowly, saying, “That’s 2.3 million in profit, in the last five years alone.”

Wilsher chuckled and ran his fingers through his hair. “Big game hunter, land baron, and millionaire,” he ventured. After a moment’s hesitation, he added, “No wonder the good farm land in this county has been disappearing!”

Branden nodded. He drummed his fingers on top of the filing cabinet, looking disconcerted. He glanced around the room again and settled his gaze on John Weaver’s black lacquer desk with its computer. He said, “Did you find anything in there to suggest where he’s got all that money stashed in a bank, or are we going to find it buried in cans out in the backyard?”

Wilsher sat at the desk, opened the top right-hand drawer, and pulled out a folded, leather-bound collection of papers. He dropped the package on the desk and said, “He’s got a trust fund at the bank in Millersburg. The same B. Sommers on these folders is listed as trustee.”

“Britta Sommers,” Branden said. “I went to school with her. She was popular. Junior prom queen the year I graduated. Jimmy Weston was her escort. I’ve known her all my life.”

“The Jim Weston who was out here yesterday?” Wilsher asked.

“Yes,” Branden said. “He was a sophomore. A little scat-back runner on the football team. Ran with the ‘in crowd.’ Britta was something else in those days.”

“Still is, from what I hear,” Wilsher said, leading.

“Like I said, junior prom queen and then senior court the next year. She was my eighth-grade sweetheart, but she threw me over for a football player. Little Jimmy Weston. If I remember right, she and Weston stayed together even after she left for college. They never married, though. She found someone better after college. At least she thought he was better.”

Wilsher sat and thought for a moment, studying the trust papers. Then he said, “I guess Sommers has got some work to do, then. Now that Weaver’s dead, I mean.”

“You going to call her out here?” Branden asked. He took the leather trust folder from Wilsher and leafed idly through the pages.

Wilsher took the folder back, folded the leather pouch, snapped it shut, and said, “I’ll start by running these into Millersburg.”

“Let me do that,” Branden said, and held out his hand for the folded leather pouch. “I know Britta Sommers well, Dan. I’m going back to town for an afternoon conference, but I can get the papers to her first thing in the morning.”

Wilsher smiled mischievously and asked, “What are you longhairs doing today? Debating who really won the Civil War?” There was a wide grin on his face as he dropped the trust papers into Branden’s hand.

“Actually,” Branden said, amused, using a professorial tone, “if you take the long-term view, you might argue that the eventual loss of the big manufacturing industries in the North and the resurgence of Southern life that we’re seeing today . . .”

Wilsher cut him off with a wave of the hand and quipped, “Oh, brother. Why’d I even ask?”

When the two had walked back through the house to the front, they found Deputy Armbruster arguing with a man in a baggy suit. The squat little man complained, “I’m supposed to be the first one to go over the scene,” as Wilsher and Branden walked up.

Wilsher asked, “We got a problem here, Stan?”

The man in the suit turned to Wilsher, took in the lieutenant’s gold bars, and said rancorously, “I’m Robert Cravely. Insurance. And you’ve moved all of the buggy parts, Lieutenant.”

Wilsher responded calmly, “We’ve merely laid them out beside the road to clear a lane for traffic.”

Cravely removed a wallet badge from his inside suit pocket, displayed it briefly, and said pompously, “I am a specialist in buggy crashes. I’ve been retained by the insurance carrier for the furniture company that owns that truck over there. I study debris scatter. Impact analysis. And you should not have moved anything until I had a chance to go over the scene.”

Branden touched Wilsher’s arm, and, holding back a laugh, said, “I’m gonna take these papers to Sommers in the morning.”

Wilsher nodded and turned back to the insurance agent. As Branden walked away, he could hear the lieutenant explaining, somewhat indignantly, why he thought it more important to clear a lane for traffic than to have expert analysis of buggy debris, considering that they had three solid witnesses who had observed the crash firsthand.

At his truck, Branden tossed the leather pouch onto the passenger’s seat, climbed in behind the wheel, hit the ignition, and swung around on the pavement. As he climbed back up to Walnut Creek, he used his cell phone to call Melissa Taggert in her coroner’s labs. He told her what he had discovered about the horse, asked her to have a look herself, and then explained why, and what he thought she would find in her inspection.