Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 13, Mid-December 1994

Why the Breadman Died by Clyde Haywood

Maybe the killer thought that by the time the bread truck went off the road through a guard rail, flipped over a few times to land on its back at the foot of the mountain, and burned, nobody would notice that the driver had a hole in him the size of a .30-.30 bullet. But the truck didn’t burn. Maybe it would have worked that way anyway if somebody less observant or less conscientious had been the first officer on the scene. But Bud Davis got there first, and Bud faithfully accompanied the body down to the little morgue at Gibson County Hospital. There he stayed and watched while Doc Killian started working on it. It was Bud, not Doc, who first saw the oval hole in the breadman’s forehead when Doc washed the poor guy’s shattered face. Then Bud and Doc took Doc’s camera and magnifying glass and some surgical probes and worked out a trajectory establishing that the bullet had come from far above.

Doc tracked the wound down through the breadman’s brain, then his neck, then on down into his torso, where he finally pulled out of a rib a chunk of lead not nearly as mangled as Bud had been afraid it might be. Bud sent the lead down to the state ballistics lab in Raleigh by code three courier. Next, even before he talked to the sheriff, he phoned Roger Dale Fornby to tell him what had happened. Roger Dale had just walked into his office when the call came in. As soon as Bud hung up, Roger Dale called the FBI’s state headquarters down in Charlotte and asked for Jack Maloney.

“Hey, bossman,” Fornby greeted his long-suffering supervisor. “The new chief deputy sheriff in Gibson County just rang up and said there’s been a murder up in the west end of the county.”

“I take it you think this has something to do with you and me,” Maloney answered.

“Well, yeah,” Fornby drawled. “You know how murders are. If we don’t solve it right away, it might be weeks and weeks before we get it sorted out. So I thought I’d get right over there and help them. If you need me, you could get me through the sheriff’s office and their radios and all.”

“Roger Dale,” Maloney told him, “just because an FBI agent has been in a resident agency in a small town for several years, that doesn’t make him part of the local police. The sheriff is the chief law enforcement officer in Gibson County, not you.”

“I know, bossman,” Roger Dale said, “but with the sheriff and the chief deputy both being brand new, they’re going to need some assistance.”

“If I remember correctly,” his supervisor said, “that ‘new’ chief deputy was a regular deputy for three years, and a criminal investigator in the army before that. And didn’t you just last year talk me into getting him one of those local law enforcement courses at the Bureau Academy?”

“Yeah, I did. But, see, this would give us a real good chance to see how well they trained him. And that new sheriff is as green as a weed.”

Maloney resolved to be firm with Fornby this time. “Roger. You spend way too much time on local law enforcement assistance. There is plenty of federal crime for two resident agents, and you’re the only one assigned there right now. Unless this murder happened on federal land or we’ve got some other kind of federal jurisdiction, it’s the sheriff’s case, not yours.”

Roger Dale sighed. “Then I guess we’re out of luck, bossman. Davis says this victim was shot from high above out on Blacksnake Road. There ain’t nothing uphill from that road but the Blue Ridge Parkway and some other National Park land that goes with it. With UNSUB shooting from federal land, it looks like we’ve got federal jurisdiction.”

Maloney fell quiet for several seconds the way he always did while he accepted the fact that Roger Dale was going to do anyway whatever his supervisor didn’t want him to. “We’ll open a file on it,” he said at last. “You’ll keep us posted on what you’re doing?”

“I’ll do her,” Roger agreed.

“Good luck,” the supervisor signed off.

Fornby hurried to the sheriff’s office. On the way he rehearsed several versions of what he would say when he saw the sheriff. That is, he planned how he would offer his help without sounding like the S.O.B. from the FBI who thinks he knows more than the locals, even though he knew that’s exactly what he was.

“Sheriff Taylor,” he began as he hustled into the office where the sheriff and Davis were talking, “I just heard what happened. If the killer was on park land and the victim wasn’t, then both of us could have jurisdiction. I thought maybe it would be more efficient if we both worked on one investigation instead of falling all over each other.”

The sheriff nodded. “And besides, Bud called and asked you to run things because both of you figure you’ve been investigating crime in this county for years and I’m just a politician who happened to be in the right place with the right pull when this office came up vacant in the middle of a term. And anyway, neither one of you men really believes a woman can handle this job, but you think I’ll take bossing better from you than from my own deputy.”

Since Davis worked for her, he was in no position to say much of anything. Fornby thought of a couple of good responses but decided after an embarrassed pause that the truth would probably do better.

“Well, I guess that’s pretty much the facts except for that part about a woman not being able to do the job. What do you say? Can we work it together?” he asked.

The sheriff responded as calmly as before. “Yes, we can.” She placed a decided emphasis on the “we.”

“I mean,” she went on, “we can all investigate it together. I suspect that you were about to suggest that I stay here and pretend to supervise while you and Bud go out and really investigate. I promised the county commissioners when I bullied them into making me interim sheriff that I would learn the criminal side of the job. I mean to do just that. When I’ve learned how it’s done in the field, that will be the time to start supervising. For now, my secretary can cover the phone. You fellows are going to teach me how to investigate.”

Roger Dale had suspected that a woman who both could and would become the first female sheriff in the state was not somebody you’d want to mess around with. Now he knew for sure. She might not look much like a mountain county sheriff. All the others Fornby’d ever known were hamfisted, deep-chested good-ol’-boys so alike that they might have been produced by a cookie cutter. Louise Taylor looked more like a dignified, middle-aged English teacher. But Fornby had learned as a teen not to underestimate teachers like that, and he was not about to underestimate Louise Taylor. He agreed that the joint investigation would be on her terms.

Ten minutes later the two of them were settled into the back seat of her big, black official Ford with Davis driving them out to the scene of the murder like some kind of chauffeur.

“Know anything about the dead man yet?” Roger asked the chief deputy.

“Name’s Gregory Haynes,” Davis replied. “Driver’s license shows age thirty-six. Pictures of a wife and a couple of kids in his wallet. I called over to the bakery he was driving for in Sulphur Springs, Tennessee, and talked to the manager. He’d already been notified by one of the state troopers. He had to tell the family. I didn’t envy him none.”

“Did he know Haynes personally?” Fornby asked.

“Yeah. It ain’t a real big outfit. Everybody knows everybody.”

“Did he know any reason why anybody would want to kill him?”

“No. Said he was a heck of a nice guy. Hard worker, family man, deacon in his church, went to P.T.A., stuff like that. He said the warehouse foreman knew him better than he did, but he had sent the foreman out to make the dead man’s deliveries. Sounds kind of hard, don’t it? But life has to go on, I guess. Anyway, I figured we would catch the foreman in later, or else try to run him down over here on the route.”

Roger turned to the sheriff. “Not to be elementary, but right obviously if we could find out why somebody would want the breadman killed, we’d be a long way toward finding out who UNSUB is.”

Sheriff Taylor looked puzzled. “UNSUB?”

“Yeah,” Roger explained. “That’s who killed the breadman. UNSUB. Stands for unknown subject in FBI language. That’s your first lesson.”

As they talked, Davis piloted the big Ford along a narrow strip of asphalt that deserved its name of Blacksnake Road. For a few miles it twisted and coiled its way in and out along the face of Blue Rock Mountain. Then it ran straight out the side of a promontory of granite, and snapped back like a whip cracking. Davis slowed almost to a stop at the point of that hairpin turn. He pulled just far enough past the curve to be safe if somebody else came along, threw a portable blue light up on the dash, turned it on along with the car’s flashers, and stepped out. He led the other two back to the point of the turn.

“That’s where Haynes went off,” he told them.

The three looked straight down the face of the mountain. Far below they could see the mangled remains of the bread truck.

“Anybody done a search on the truck?” Roger Dale asked.

“Seth and Billy went over it. Didn’t find anything.”

“What exactly would they be looking for?” the sheriff asked.

“Whatever they could find,” Fornby told her. “Most of the time you don’t find nothing. But if you don’t look, you never will find nothing.”

After the fatal curve, the mountain’s face swung inward in a concave arc, then back out farther than the promontory. So the road turned back on itself across a narrow gorge. Davis pointed up the opposite face.

“Reckon the shot had to come from way up over there. You can see there ain’t nothing but rock for a good ways. He had to be up there on the park land where the laurel grows. Otherwise, even if he could have hung onto that rock and got a shot off, anybody could have seen him. It was beginning to get good light before he done the killing.”

“Pretty hard shot,” Fornby said.

Davis nodded. “I could have made it, though. You could, too. A lot of the deer hunters in the county could have.”

“It was a moving target,” Roger noted.

Davis shook his head. “Not moving hardly at all. Way that bullet went in he got him straight on as he was making the curve. It’s so sharp the bread truck would have to be hinged in the middle to make it around faster than five miles an hour.”

“It was going fast enough to crack the guard rail.”

Davis shook his head again. “Didn’t take that much speed. It was a heavy vehicle, and it set up high. Look how that old wood guard rail broke down instead of busting out. The truck just kind of fell over it. It wasn’t going very fast at all.”

Roger finally agreed. “We narrow the suspects down to good shots, then, but not to just the very best. Plus which, he had to get out through that laurel from somewhere a good ways back. He couldn’t just step on the parkway and come straight down at it. I reckon we can eliminate the aged and infirm.”

Sheriff Taylor looked skeptical. “Now that we know it was a good shot and someone at least reasonably healthy and agile, what good does that do us? We can’t very well make a list of everybody in the county who meets that description, even if we had some way of knowing that it was somebody from this county.”

Roger explained. “If we find somebody that’s a suspect that don’t meet that description, we’ll either have to eliminate them or look for an accomplice.”

As they climbed back into the car, Bud looked back at Roger. “Want to try to get out there and search the laurel?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Roger replied. “But we’ll have to drive all the way over past Scroggs Cove to hit the parkway, and then come back across it to where we can find a path down.”

Bud had another thought. “On the way,” he said, “we might as well swing over by Amon Scroggs’s store. That was supposed to have been the breadman’s first stop.”

“Let’s see if ol’ Amon can tell us anything,” Roger agreed.

A few minutes later they pulled up in front of an ancient brown wood and shingle building with two gas pumps out front and a large red-lettered sign identifying Scroggs Cove Grocery.

As they entered the little country store, a bald man in a cane-bottomed chair behind the counter rose. “Morning, Bud, Roger,” he said. He turned abruptly and busied himself with the canned goods on the shelf behind him, taking down each can, dusting it, and putting it back.

“Morning, Amon,” the deputy responded. “You know Sheriff Taylor?”

Amon glanced around.“Morning, Missus Taylor,” he said before he turned back to his busywork.

Fornby walked to a cold drink box at the back of the store and took out three sodas. Returning to the register, he laid a bill on the counter. This forced Scroggs to turn and face him.

“Reckon you heard about the breadman,” the agent said.

Scroggs nodded. “I heard.”

“Know him?” Fornby asked.

“I got bread from that bakery every Tuesday and Friday.” Amon replied.

“So you knew Gregory Haynes?”

“Yeah, I knew him.”

“How long?” Fornby asked.

The storekeeper shrugged. “Ten years. Twelve maybe.”

“Know any reason why anybody would want to kill him?”

“No.” The storekeeper snapped out the word and turned back to his shelves.

Davis picked up three packs of cheese crackers and threw them on the counter to turn the storekeeper from his cans again. But he got no more out of Scroggs than Fornby had. The three law officers went back out to the car.

“He knows something,” Roger said as they got in.

Davis nodded agreement.

“Why would he be lying, do you think?” the sheriff asked.

“He’s not lying, exactly,” Roger told her. “You have to understand hillbillies.”

“Roger Dale, I grew up in this county,” she reminded him. “You didn’t.”

“I know that,” Roger said. “But you grew up in town, as Judge Roland’s daughter. And you went all the way through high school and off to college with the other honor students. And you go to First Presbyterian in town instead of one of them little deep water, shouting churches back in the cove. Even politicking, the only ones of the cove people you meet are them that might make it to a meeting at the schoolhouse, and they ain’t the typical ones.”

She interrupted him. “This sounds like a long lesson. I’m sure I’ve got a lot to learn, but right now tell me the part that has to do with Amon Scroggs.”

“I didn’t mean to lecture,” Roger told her.

“You did too. Now tell me about Amon.”

“The people that live way back in one of these coves are clannish in the oldest way. They’re all kin to one another, and they don’t trust outsiders, even from two, three miles outside the cove, let alone all the way down in town. The most important thing in the world to one of them is to not let down another one. They won’t tell on each other any more than young’uns will when the teacher’s trying to find out who wrote a dirty word on the blackboard. But to the best of them — and Amon’s one of the best — the next most important thing is their word.”

“Yeah,” Bud put in. “When I go to arrest one of them, if he’ll promise to meet me in town the next morning I don’t go to the trouble of taking him in.”

Roger went on. “So when a fellow like the storekeeper who’s generally friendly and talkative enough don’t want to talk to us about something as interesting as a murder in his own neighborhood, it’s because he feels like he can’t. He don’t want to lie to us, and again he don’t want to tell us the truth. That means he knows something, and it has to do with some of his people — some of these Scroggs Cove folks.”

The whole time they were talking they remained parked in front of Amon’s store. Davis hadn’t even started the engine.

“By us sitting out here like this, won’t he realize we’re suspicious of him?” the sheriff asked.

Both men winked and nodded. “That’s the idea,” Fornby said. “Let him sweat a little more. But I guess we’d better get on with it.”

As procedure required, Davis radioed in to the office as he started the engine. Sheriff Taylor’s secretary responded to his call.

“Bud, I mean G.S. Two, the lab called from Raleigh. That lead you sent down was from a .30-.30 just like you thought it was.”

“Thanks. Anything else important going on?” he asked.

“Yes. One more thing I think you’d want to know. You remember Jubal Scroggs from up there in the Cove? He called in and said somebody broke into his house last night and stole his best rifle. He said it was a .30-.30. I started to dispatch Seth or Billy, but with it being the same kind of gun that was used in the murder, and y’all being out that way already, I thought maybe you’d want to cover it yourself.”

“That cannot be a coincidence. You done good, Betty,” Davis told her. “We’re on our way. Sheriff, let’s put a badge on that girl and get another secretary.”

The radio crackled again. “Y’all know how to get there?” Betty asked.

“I think so, but give us directions anyway,” Bud said as he pulled out of the store lot and turned up Scroggs Cove Road.

“Which way do you figure it?” Bud asked Fornby as they rode.

“Too early to say,” Fornby answered.

“What do you mean, ‘which way’?” the sheriff asked.

“Well, it’s got to be one of two ways,” Roger told her. “Maybe somebody did steal ol’ Jubal’s gun and kill the breadman with it. Or maybe Jubal killed the breadman. He’s a deer hunter. He could get out to the laurel patch, and he could make that shot. He might have thought that everybody would miss that one bullet hole in a burned up body and call it an accident. Once he heard, maybe from Amon, that we know it’s murder, he got scared. Even up in Scroggs Cove folks know we can match up a bullet to a gun that fired it. So he got rid of the murder weapon. Then, to turn suspicion away from him, he reported the gun stolen.”

“Wouldn’t that be sort of stupid?” Sheriff Taylor asked. “I mean, as many good shots as there are in this county, we might never get around to him if he didn’t call attention to himself with that theft report.”

“Right,” Roger answered. “It would be kind of stupid. One of the reasons we catch most murderers is because we’re smarter than they are. And for me and ol’ Bud to be smarter than them, some of them have to be pretty stupid. Hey, Bud, ain’t we supposed to turn left up there?”

“Yeah. Just past that sign,” Bud answered.

The sign, which stood in front of a neat little crackerbox of a house, read FLO AND DOLLY’S BEAUTY SHOP.

“I didn’t know there was a beauty shop all the way up in here,” Roger commented. “It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been this far back in the Cove.”

“That’s about when they opened it,” Bud told him as they swung off the asphalt onto a sharply rising gravel lane. “Two sisters, Dolly and Flo Wilson. I think they do pretty good. There ain’t another beauty shop between here and town.”

Just then they passed a sign informing them that they were on a Private Road. A few yards farther a second ordered them to Keep Out. A third, a hundred yards past the second, announced that TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

“Either he’s awfully possessive or he values his privacy more than most folks,” observed the sheriff.

“His ancestors fought for this land,” Roger told her.

“From the looks of it, they must have been hotheads,” said Bud, glancing around at the thin, rocky soil. He drove past an old gray barn and pulled in view of a white frame house almost at the top of the ridge. “You know, he’s Enos Scroggs’s son. Enos killed a man over a dollar.”

“Why did he kill a man over a dollar?” Sheriff Taylor asked.

“Your daddy asked him that in court. He said, ‘Enos, why would you kill a man over a dollar?’ And Enos just looked at him and said, ‘It was my dollar.’ It was before my time, but they tell it for the truth.”

Bud stopped the car in front of the house. As they got out, they heard dogs barking wildly from behind it.

Bud pointed to a sign warning, Biting Dogs.

“Reckon he put them dogs up, knowing we was coming,” he opined.

“Or maybe he just turns them loose when he wants ’em to bite somebody,” Roger said.

As they started up a long flight of wooden steps to the front porch, a tall, lean man stepped out the door.

“Come around to the back,” he ordered curtly. “That’s where they got in.”

With that, he turned and stomped through the house, leaving them to walk around the outside. The house was set into the side of a steep hill, so that it was over two stories high in the front, but barely one in the rear. As they came up to the back comer of the building, the man they had seen in the front beckoned to them from just inside a solid wooden door.

Again he offered no greeting, just called out, “Over here.” He pointed to two neat screw holes in the wood of the door frame. “Looks like they took a screwdriver or something and popped the hasp right off her.”

“You don’t have a latch and knob on the door,” Bud noted.

The man shook his head. “Not the back door. It don’t go right into the house. It’s a kind of a storage room, and my paw just put a hasp and a padlock on it when he built the place. We used to lock the door between it and the rest of the house, but I reckon I got out of the habit. Come in, and I’ll show you what they done in there.”

He opened the door wider and threw his arm back like an usher. As they passed in, Bud tried awkwardly to supply the introduction that still hadn’t taken place.

“Jubal, you know Roger Dale, I reckon, and this here’s Sheriff Taylor.”

Jubal grunted acknowledgment, then pushed around them to lead the way out of the storage room and into the main house.

“Come on over through here into the living room. That’s where my gun case is at,” he told them.

Roger Dale tried to slow him down. “Hold on a minute, Jubal. Let’s look around in here and see if they damaged anything else.”

“No,” Scroggs insisted. “I done looked, and they ain’t nothing. Now, come on in here.”

Roger Dale shrugged and followed. “There it is,” Scroggs said, pointing to a handsome glass-fronted gun cabinet built into a wall. One of its doors stood open. The other lay on the floor, squarely in front of the cabinet.

The cabinet had racks for six long guns. Two shotguns, a.22 rifle, a reproduction of a muzzle loader, and an over-and-under stood in five of them. Scroggs rested his hand on the empty rack.

“This is where it stood,” he announced. “My best rifle. Only had it three years, and I bought it new. They tore my gun rack up, too. Built it myself.”

“How’d they do it?” Roger asked as he bent to examine the apparently undamaged door.

“Well, I had it locked. But when I built it, I put them good piano hinges on it. They must have took their screwdriver or whatever and popped the pin out of that one. It’ll be a sight of trouble to get another one.”

“Where were you at when they done it?” Roger Dale asked him.

“Me and them dogs was out running coons from sundown to about six this morning. They could have done it anytime.”

“It ain’t coon season,” Fornby told him.

“No, but it will be,” Scroggs said. “And them dogs needed work.”

Roger thought a minute. “You was out running dogs all night on a Thursday. Didn’t you have to work today?” he asked.

“No. I got some time coming at the foundry, and I was going to take today off. I was going to sleep a little and farm a little. Now I’m going to have to work on fixing them doors. Anyway, it don’t matter none about that. What are y’all gonna do about whoever busted into my house and stole my rifle?”

“The more information we’ve got, the better chance we’ll have of catching them,” Roger Dale told him. He looked around the living room. On an end table not far from the gun rack stood a framed eight by ten of Scroggs with a very attractive blonde woman and a small boy. Across the room on the interior wall hung a montage of the same woman and the boy, the child aging from infancy to about four years of age across the range of the photos.

Fornby gestured at the eight by ten. “Where was your wife when they came in?”

Scroggs bridled. “You leave my wife out of this.”

“Jubal, we’ve got to find out if she saw anything,” Roger told him calmly.

Scroggs’s lips tightened. “She left me a week ago. Took my boy. One of my cars, too.”

“Where’s she staying at now?” Roger asked him.

“Ain’t none of your concern,” Scroggs snapped. “She wasn’t here, so she couldn’t have seen nothing.”

“We might want to talk to her just in case she can think of somebody that might have done it. It pretty much had to be somebody that had been here.”

“What do you mean?” Scroggs asked.

“Well, looky here,” Roger said, gesturing at the remaining guns. “He didn’t just break in here to rummage around. He left five pretty good guns and just took the one real good one. He knew what he was looking for, and he come in here and got it.”

“That don’t mean he’d been here,” Scroggs said. “He could have just been somebody that knowed guns. He broke in here and seen a real good one, and he took it.”

“Jubal,” Roger retorted, “that don’t make sense. Somebody that knew guns didn’t just happen to come all the way up the Cove, find you and your dogs gone, and happen to see a Smith and Wesson .30- .30 and steal it. It had to be somebody that knew what you had and come up here after it.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been nobody that had been here,” Jubal insisted. “There hasn’t been nobody here but me and my family for a year or so. And there wouldn’t be none of them do that to me.”

“That being the case,” Fornby said, “it had to be somebody that knew you had that gun from somewheres else. Where all had you had it at?”

“Nowhere. Not since deer season last year. It ain’t deer season this year.”

“No. But like you said about coon season, it’s fixing to be,” Roger said. “Ain’t you been taking target practice and trueing in your rifle?”

“Not off the place,” Jubal answered.

“Yeah, I guess you’ve got plenty of room right here,” Roger agreed. “I reckon you stand out there in front and set your targets down toward the springhead. With them big oak trees and that little hill behind it, you’d know where your round was going and not have to worry about killing one of your cows or something.”

“What if I do?” Jubal snapped. “How does that catch whoever it was that stole my gun?”

Bud walked over and patted him on the shoulder. “Ol’ Roger Dale’s just trying to get the facts. If you’ll tell him all you can, it’ll help us get started.”

That seemed to satisfy him. “Okay. That’s where I shoot.”

Roger Dale slid a small notebook out of his jacket pocket and wrote in it for several seconds. Then he looked up at Jubal again. “So you can’t think of anybody who could have seen you with that gun lately?”

Jubal shook his head.

“That’s all the more reason we need to talk to your wife. Where’d you say she’s staying at?” Roger asked.

“I didn’t,” Jubal grunted. “She called, but she never said where she’s at. Maybe her sister’s, Mabel Wade, over beyond Gibsontown.”

After a few more unproductive questions, Bud got a camera out of the car and took pictures of everything. Then the officers went out, assuring Jubal that they would try to recover his rifle.

When they were back in the car, the sheriff spoke first. “I suppose we sit here and talk a while so he’ll begin to wonder if we’re suspicious of him.”

“You learn fast,” said Fornby.

“Looks like he done it, all right,” Bud observed.

“Either that or we’ve got the most considerate and careful burglar that ever turned on a flashlight,” said Roger. “Lucky, too. Hits a house a mile and a half from anywhere on the only night in recent memory when there ain’t nobody home all night. Then he steals one gun with the least possible trouble for himself. And the gun just happens to be the same caliber that killed the breadman.”

“I think we know one more thing,” the sheriff put in. “He really is as stupid as we talked about. He couldn’t have faked a less likely burglary if he had tried.”

Bud nodded. “He ain’t got it in him to break anything that’s his. And if he reported the rest of his guns stolen he’d be without guns. He’d never be able to explain it when he used them again.”

“Maybe so,” Roger said, “but while we’re sitting here talking about how stupid he is, we still don’t have the first piece of evidence that he committed a murder that we know he’s guilty of. No motive. No weapon. No nothing.”

“Where you think he got rid of that rifle?” Bud asked.

“I was going to ask you that,” Roger said. “You know I’ve always said that if you want to find where somebody hid something, you’ve got to think like he does. You know him best, Bud. Where would you get rid of it if you were him?”

Bud thought a moment. “He’s worked down at the foundry for years and years. He’s likely got a key. The breadman got it about six. He might have had time to go down there and destroy that gun before anybody came into work. Or, he hunts all down through Fish Hook Lake, and there’s all them bottomless pits and pools down through there. He might have had time to pitch it in one of them. Either way, we’ll never find it.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Roger. “Anyway, even if we knew he had it in his bedroom, we ain’t got enough evidence to make probable cause for a search warrant. Let’s go get on with it. We need to search that laurel patch and do a bunch of other stuff.”

Bud started the car. When they had passed the barn and were out of sight of the house, but not yet to the road, the sheriff spoke.

“Stop a minute and flip open the trunk,” she told Davis.

Bud turned off the engine and pushed a yellow button in the glove compartment. As the trunk lid opened, the sheriff got out of the car.

“Don’t look around,” she ordered.

“Why not?” Roger Dale asked.

“I’m going to change clothes,” she answered. He studied her a moment. She was wearing the same uniform silver-tan slacks and military shirt that her deputies were, unlike her male predecessors, who had always worn dark business suits to distinguish them from the rest of the department.

“What are you fixing to change about them?” he asked.

“I keep some civilian clothes in a garment bag in the trunk, just in case I need them during the business day.”

Roger Dale nodded. “I do the same thing with a fishing pole in the bureau car,” he said.

“Now, don’t look around,” she told them again.

“Wait a minute,” Roger said. “You can order your deputy not to look, but you have to ask me.”

“Don’t look around, please,” she amended.

“Yes, ma’am,” Roger said.

A few minutes later she stepped back into the car wearing a simple blue dress and carrying a pair of pumps and a purse. As she slipped off her black uniform shoes and slid her feet into the pumps, Roger Dale commented:

“That’s the kind of outfit my wife would say you could wear about anywhere.”

She nodded. “I never know where I’ll need to wear it.”

“One of the few places you wouldn’t want to wear it is out to that laurel patch on the face of Blue Rock Mountain.”

“I’m not going there,” she said. “You and Bud may be, but I’m not.”

She took a comb out of her purse and began to frizz out her crisp hair. “I’m going to stop at Flo and Dolly’s and ask them to work me in for a trim.”

“You’re what?” Bud exploded.

“Jubal’s wife fits into this mystery somewhere or other,” Sheriff Taylor said, “and I’m going to find out more information about her at the beauty shop than we could anywhere else in this county. In every picture he has of her, she looks like she’s just had her hair done — done well, too. I bet she’s in there every week. Even if she isn’t, they’ll have other customers who talk about her. You guys go climb the mountain. I’m going to get my hair done.”

As Bud drove down the hill, Roger spoke. “I ain’t sure we ought to go up on that mountain, either. We can radio Seth and Billy to do that ground search. Me and ol’ Bud might do more good to run over into Tennessee and see what we can find out about why some fellow would want to kill Gregory Haynes.”

“Either way,” the sheriff told him, “leave me at the beauty shop for a couple of hours. Whether they can work me in or not, I can be talking and listening to them and their customers.”

As Bud pulled up in front of the shop to let her out among several parked cars, he asked, “Why did you bother changing clothes? Everybody in this county knows you’re the sheriff in or out of uniform.”

“They’ll know it when I go in,” she said. “But if they don’t have the uniform to remind them, by the time I’m in the chair I’ll be just one more gray-haired lady in a blue dress. And everybody will be relaxed and talking.”

“I believe we’ve just had a couple of lessons from her,” Roger told Bud.

“I don’t much believe they’ll be the last ones,” Bud said.

Sheriff Taylor stepped out of the car and started toward the shop. Then she turned and called back to Fornby, “Oh, and thanks, Roger Dale.”

“What for?” he asked.

“For not looking around when I was changing clothes,” she answered.

“You’re welcome,” he responded. “And thank you, too, Louise.”

It was her turn to ask what for.

“For not remembering how many mirrors there are on this police car,” he called through the open window as Bud pulled back onto the asphalt and headed toward Tennessee.

A little more than two hours later, Bud and Roger drove back to Flo and Dolly’s. It was nearly dark, and most of the other cars were gone. Louise Taylor came almost running out as soon as they pulled up. Her bright blue eyes were dancing, and her lips were fighting against a smile.

“You look like the cat that didn’t only just eat the canary but knows where there’s another one with a busted wing,” Roger told her as she hopped in. “We done all right over in Tennessee, too. You tell us yours, and then we’ll tell you ours on the way back to see Amon at the store.”

“You suppose Amon will still be there?” she asked. “That would be a long day if he opened this morning.”

“He’s there about sixteen hours a day,” Bud said. “Six, sometimes seven days a week. He’ll be there.”

Sheriff Taylor began to spill her news. “Donna Scroggs is a regular customer, as I guessed. She’s been in every Thursday for the last two years except yesterday. Says she wants to look her best on Friday. Sometimes she borrowed their phone and made long distance calls. She always got the time and charges and paid them for it. The number that showed up on their bill was in Tennessee. They had a recent bill, and I called it. It was the East Tennessee Bakery. Wasn’t that who Greg Haynes drove for?”

“Yeah, it was,” Bud said. “It sure was. And Amon said they delivered on Tuesday and Friday.”

The sheriff went on. “The only problem is, they heard her call a name a few times, and it wasn’t Greg, or Gregory.”

“Was it Frank?” Roger asked.

“Yes!” she cried out. “What have you found out?”

“Louise, did I tell you your hair looks good?” he teased.

“Roger, now!” she almost shouted.

“Here we are at Amon’s store,” he grinned as Bud turned off the road.

A customer was leaving, but Amon was otherwise alone. Fornby turned the Open sign around so that it told the world that the store was Closed.

When Amon saw that the officers were back, he sank into his chair. He did not look any of them in the eye. He did not speak.

“Amon,” Fornby said, “we need to ask you some more questions.”

Still he said nothing.

“This morning you said the bread company delivered Tuesday and Friday, right?”

Amon nodded.

“But Greg Haynes didn’t come Tuesday and Friday, did he?”

Roger Dale got out his notepad.

“I need you to speak up so I can write it down,” he told Amon. “Was that a ‘no’?”

“That’s right,” Amon mumbled.

“Haynes just came on Tuesday, right?”

Amon nodded.

“Speak up,” Roger Dale told him.

“Yeah,” Amon said. “Just Tuesday.”

“Another fellow come on Friday, didn’t he, Amon?” Fornby asked.

“Yeah,” Amon answered.

“Was his name Frank Britt?”

Amon nodded, then mumbled. “Yes, Frank Britt.”

“This morning,” Fornby continued, “you said you didn’t know any reason why anybody would want to kill that breadman. That was Greg Haynes. You do know a reason why somebody would want to kill Frank Britt, don’t you?”

Amon stared at the floor.

“Maybe,” he said at last.

“You got to do better than that,” Fornby told him. “Do you know a reason or don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do,” Amon almost whispered.

Roger Dale wrote on his pad. “Who had reason to kill Britt?” he asked.

Amon didn’t answer.

“Who was it?” Roger Dale asked again.

Still Amon did not answer.

“Was it Jubal Scroggs?”

When Amon still didn’t answer, Fornby stood silent, just letting the question hang in the air. Amon stared at the floor. At last he stole a glance at Roger Dale. The agent was staring down at him. Still silent.

Finally Amon nodded. “Yeah.” Again he almost whispered.

“Yeah what?” Fornby pressed.

“Yeah, Roger Dale, it was Jubal.”

Fornby wrote it down. “Britt was seeing Donna Scroggs, wasn’t he?”

Amon stared at the floor.

“Tell me out loud,” Roger demanded.

“Yeah, Roger Dale, he was seeing Donna.”

Fornby wrote it down. “Did he see her on Friday mornings while Jubal was at work, when Frank came over here to make deliveries?”

“Yeah, Roger Dale, that’s when he seen her.”

Roger wrote it down. “And I reckon he first met her when he was making deliveries — maybe right here at your store.”

Amon nodded. Then at last he began to tell the story. As Roger had planned, once the first few truths had been forced out, the rest poured out like olives from a bottle.

“He met her right here,” Amon began. “Maybe two years ago, maybe longer. She used to always shop early on Friday mornings. Jubal had to go in to work early on Fridays. Since she was awake anyway, and since I open at seven, she used to be my first customer, every Friday. Frank would come in to make his delivery, and he’d see her every week. At first he used to just kid her about being the early bird, and did she want to buy some worms.

“Then they got to talking about one thing and another. Then he started carrying her groceries out to the car. Wasn’t too long till he was driving out of here heading up into the Cove a few minutes after she’d left, instead of toward town where his next delivery was. Then a couple of hours later I’d see his truck go by again, heading into town.”

Roger wrote it all down.

“ ’Course, people got to talking after awhile,” Amon went on. “They would see that bread truck parked here and there up in the Cove. I never heard of anybody actually seeing her pick him up, but everybody knew she was. Jubal had to hear of it after awhile. Yeah, Jubal had reason to kill him.”

Roger wrote it all down. When there wasn’t any more, he and the two county officers finally walked out to the car and sat down.

“Just to put it all together,” Fornby told the sheriff, “over in Tennessee we talked to the warehouse manager. He told us, of course, that Britt was the regular Friday man, not Haynes. Haynes always had Fridays off. Then yesterday Britt all of a sudden asked for today off. Haynes said he’d drive for him. Company didn’t care. They pay by miles and sales, not hours. So it didn’t cost them overtime or nothing.

“So then we started asking him about Britt. Britt wasn’t like Haynes. Haynes was a straight arrow, and as regular as a clock ticking. They knew within minutes when Haynes would hit every store on his route. Britt was less dependable. They liked him okay, but he was less dependable.

“About two years ago, everybody on Britt’s Friday route except Amon started calling, wanting to know where he was at. He’d started running two or three hours late. Then they just got to looking for him later and quit calling. Storekeepers didn’t care much as long as he came, and the company didn’t care at all. Like I said, they didn’t pay by the hour anyway.

“And since Britt wasn’t a straight arrow like Haynes was, they just figured he had him a girlfriend somewhere. So when we put that together with what you found out at Flo and Dolly’s, we know why the breadman died, and who UNSUB is.”

The sheriff nodded. “UNSUB killed the wrong breadman. But we still don’t have enough to convict him, do we?”

Roger Dale nodded his head. “We don’t have enough to convict, but we’ve got motive. We know the means. We’ve got enough for probable cause to get a search warrant. Then I reckon ballistics will give us the hard evidence we need to convict him.”

“Ain’t you forgetting something?” Bud asked him. “We don’t know where to get a search warrant for. We ain’t got no idea where that gun is.”

The sheriff nodded agreement.

“Now, just you two think,” Roger told them. “Sometimes the most important information is what you remember about what you already know instead of what you can find out. Remember, you don’t have to have a gun to make a ballistics match. You have to have the bullets that came out of it. Now, let’s get down to your night magistrate and get a search warrant. And while we’re doing that, we’ve got another problem to worry about.”

“Frank Britt?” said the sheriff.

“Right,” said Fornby. “He must’ve come over here hunting for Donna when he hadn’t heard from her like he expected to. By now he knows about the murder and he’s figured out it’s Jubal, same as we have.”

Sheriff Taylor pursed her lips. “I guess we need to put some protection on Jubal Scroggs.”

“I reckon so,” said Fornby. “He ain’t much, but we don’t need another murder on our hands, even if the victim’s him. How many deputies you got on night duty?”

“Just two, like always,” said the sheriff. “For the whole county. I can order one of them to patrol the road around Scroggs Cove and alert him to be looking for Britt. Bud, do we have a special deputy good enough to run surveillance on Jubal’s house?”

Davis nodded. “Yeah. Bill Johnson just retired from the Wildlife Service. He’s got experience and time on his hands.”

“I’ll call him in,” she said. “And put out a bulletin to other law enforcement to be looking for Britt.”

As she keyed the mike to relay the message throughout her office, Roger signaled Bud to start the car. “Let’s go get that search warrant,” he said.

Early Saturday morning Jubal Scroggs heard someone pounding on his front door. Then he heard a shout.

“Jubal. You in there? Come on out.”

He pulled on his pants and raced to the door. When he threw it open, Roger Dale and Sheriff Taylor were standing on his porch. The sheriff was holding a paper. Roger Dale was holding a pistol.

At the foot of the steps stood Bud, Seth, and Billy. Bud was holding a shotgun, Seth a chainsaw, Billy an axe.

Bud pointed to the giant oaks downhill from the house. “Seth, you and Billy can get started on them trees in a minute,” he announced loudly.

“The devil they can,” Jubal shouted. “What in the name of sand do you think you are doing?”

“We’re executing a search warrant,” Roger Dale told him. “That’s it the sheriff’s holding. We’ll read it to you in a minute or two. But what it says is that there is probable cause to believe that in them trees there’s lead from your .30-.30 and that it will match up with the lead that came out of a dead bread truck driver. After we read it to you, we’re fixing to go down to that oak grove. And whenever we find a scar on one of them trees, we’re going to cut a chunk of it to take down to the lab.”

“You’re not cutting my trees,” Jubal said.

“Yeah we are, Jubal. Unless you want to tell us where the rifle is at.”

Everybody stood silent for thirty seconds that seemed like that many minutes.

Then Jubal looked straight into Roger’s eyes.

“If I tell you, you won’t cut down my trees?” he asked.

“Not if you tell me the truth.”

Jubal paused again. “It’s wrapped in an oilskin in a metal box buried in the first stall down at the barn. There’s a load of manure and some straw on top of it,” he said at last.

Roger Dale turned to Louise Taylor. “Give him his rights,” he told her.

The sheriff took out a pocket card and read the Miranda litany.

“Why’d you do it?” Fornby asked.

He had learned long ago that if you ask a man like Scroggs, “Did you do it?” he’s liable not to answer. But if you ask, “Why’d you do it?” he just might tell you. Jubal did.

“He was messing with my wife,” Scroggs said. “Everybody in the Cove must have knowed it but me. Then I heard somebody laughing about it down at the hardware store when they didn’t know I was there. They was laughing at me. Talking about her and the breadman. So I made one of them tell me what was going on. Then I found out he came every Friday.”

“So that’s why you killed him?” Fornby asked.

“Yeah,” Jubal said. “Don’t you see, Roger Dale? I had to do it. She was my wife.”

“And where is she now, Jubal? We checked with her sister. She hasn’t talked to her in months.”

Again there was a long minute of silence. At last Jubal spoke. “She’s buried down in the first stall too.”

“Your boy!” Roger shouted. “You didn’t kill your boy!”

“No.” Jubal didn’t hesitate this time. “No, I didn’t kill my boy. This place,” he gestured expansively, “this is all for him.”

“Where is he, Jubal?” Roger Dale asked.

“Over at the reservation. I’ve got an Indian woman looking after him. I give her my other car to do it.”

Roger motioned to Davis to come up the steps. “Cuff him, Bud. Seth! Billy! Lose that saw and stuff. Y’all take Jubal on downtown and come back with some shovels.”

As the deputies led Scroggs away, Fornby turned back to the sheriff. “I’d rather be in Hell with my back broke than be Jubal Scroggs when he finds out he killed the wrong breadman.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But at least he killed the wife he meant to.”

As they talked, they walked on down the stairs to the sheriff’s car. Bud Davis was waiting in the driver’s seat.

“We had better follow them, hadn’t we?” the sheriff asked. “I mean, we still haven’t found Britt, and it’s not out of the question that he might try to shoot Jubal right there between my deputies.”

Davis shook his head. “That’s what I thought, too. But I just got a radio call from the Tennessee state police responding to that bulletin we sent out. They found Britt at home, loading everything he owns into a pickup. Had a map marked up on how to get to California. He was just fixin’ to go by the bakery and draw his pay. Reckon he’s a lover, not a fighter.”

“I suppose that night patrol was a waste,” said the sheriff.

“No, it wasn’t,” said Fornby. “If you had needed it and not sent it, that would have been a waste.”

The next morning Roger Dale called his supervisor again.

“Bossman, we’re in luck. We got a collar out of it. The state’s taking murder one for him killing his wife. The breadman he shot from federal parkway land, and we’ve charged crime on a federal enclave for that one.”

“Good,” Maloney told him. “You ready to quit playing sheriff and be an FBI agent again?”

“Bossman,” Roger said, “I think Gibson County is in very good hands.”

“That’s very comforting,” said Maloney.

“Just one thing, bossman. There’s three other counties in my territory.”