Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Dead at the Scene by John H. Dirckx

Formerly a doctor at the University of Dayton, John H. Dirckx is now retired and free to produce more of his excellent short tales featuring African-American police detective Cyrus Auburn. This time Auburn investigates what appears to be a simple case of death in a traffic accident. But it soon emerges that someone has found a most ingenious method for murder. If you like your mysteries in the classical mold, you’ll enjoy this.

Gavin Hoopes’s mood was bleak as he gunned his semi along the exit lane from the truck scales and back into the stream of traffic on the westbound Interstate. The mandatory stop at the weigh station had put him about twenty minutes behind — twenty minutes closer to rush hour, when the volume of local traffic would increase from aggravating to downright unbearable. It was the middle of July, the height of the tourist season, and it was the time of day when, if you’re going west, the sun starts to fry your eyeballs right through your sunglasses.

As if all that wasn’t enough, he had just caught sight, from his vantage point ten feet above the pavement, of an oblong orange sign at the crest of the next rise. Even before he could make out the lettering, he correctly divined its message: ROAD CONSTRUCTION 2 MILES.

By the time he’d traveled those two miles, further signs had imparted more explicit warnings and directions: Left lane closed ahead. All traffic jog right. Trucks must use right shoulder. Speed limit 40 MPH. Fines doubled in construction area. No lane changing.

Already the traffic had begun to thicken up like pea soup in a funnel. Hoopes’s right foot danced back and forth constantly between the brake and the gas pedal as he jockeyed his heavy rig into the ever-slowing shoulder lane. The roar of the engine and the hiss of the air brakes drowned his yelp of profanity as a motorcyclist veered right in front of him out of nowhere just before the extreme left lane evaporated.

That was all he needed — having to eat the dust kicked up by a roller skate while he crawled along as part of this funeral procession.

During the last hour of the shift, Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn liked to relax at his desk, finishing up the day’s paperwork and pretending to be busier than he was. The mellow mood of dying day took on a subtle spice of excitement from the possibility that something might still break before he made it to his car out in the parking lot, and then the game would go into overtime.

At 4:39 P.M. Friday by the clock on the courthouse, Lieutenant Savage appeared in the doorway of Auburn’s office holding a strip of adding-machine paper, which was what he used to take notes at the phone. Auburn sighed inaudibly and cinched up the knot of his tie.

“We need to move fast on this, Cy. Dollinger’s waiting for you at the side door. Kestrel’s going along in the cruiser because there probably won’t be anywhere down there for him to park his van.”

“Down where?”

“The construction site on the westbound lanes of the Interstate, just east of the Sixth Street exit. A semi rear-ended a motorcycle and the driver of the motorcycle is dead at the scene. I know what you’re going to say, so don’t say it. This isn’t just any road kill. Stamaty’s on the spot, and he says there are bullet holes in the motorcycle’s windshield.”

“Any holes in the driver?”

“None he could see, but it’s not exactly the place to start the autopsy.”

“ID on the dead guy? Or is it a gal?”

“A Roger Mulreedy.”

“Local?”

“The side door, Cy. Stamaty says the traffic’s already backed up half a mile.”

Patrolman Fritz Dollinger was at the wheel of the cruiser and Sergeant Kestrel, the evidence technician, sat in the caged-in backseat holding his field kit on his lap like a crate of eggs. Once they were under way, Records radioed preliminary background information on the victim: age 37, married, no children, employed by a local heating and cooling contractor, no police record.

The scene of the accident, already badly congested by road-construction activities, was now a seething maelstrom of crawling, lurching, honking cars and trucks. Instead of joining the endless string of vehicles snaking past the spot from behind, Dollinger put on his siren and lights and turned the Sixth Street exit ramp into an access ramp by driving down the shoulder against the flow of traffic.

The downtown stretch of the Interstate passed through a veritable canyon formed by vertical concrete walls varying in height from ten to twenty-five feet. For the past three weeks, the two westbound lanes closest to the grassed median had been shut down for repairs. One of the lost lanes had been regained by diverting slow-lane traffic onto the right shoulder.

A semitrailer truck now stood immobile, its cab in the shoulder lane less than a yard from the concrete retaining wall and its fifty-three-foot trailer slued across the lane next to it, reducing the flow of traffic at that point to a single lane. Patrolman Johnny Myers was struggling valiantly to keep the traffic moving through the one clear lane.

The afternoon heat radiated from the pavement and the retaining wall in waves, and the air was poisonous with the exhaust of an endless stream of idling cars and geared-down trucks. Beyond a straggling colonnade of orange plastic barrels, workers in hard hats sweated in the closed lanes, and pieces of heavy equipment maneuvered awkwardly around each other in the narrow median. The earsplitting chatter of jackhammers, the hiss of compressed air, and the growl of bulldozers reverberated from the concrete surfaces, forming a background to the unceasing chirp of Myers’s whistle. Dollinger parked his cruiser on the shoulder, head-to-head with Myers’s cruiser.

In imminent peril from motorists gunning up to speed after passing the narrow point, Auburn and the others got out and squeezed in single file between the truck cab and the wall.

Nick Stamaty, the investigator from the coroner’s office, was squatting next to a body in the narrow wedge-shaped space between the truck trailer and the wall. Ten yards further along the wall, a motorcycle lay on its side. Beyond that they could see an ambulance with lights flashing. Patrolman Bystrom, who had been with Myers in the cruiser when they responded to the call, was talking to the ambulance crew. Although their services were obviously not needed, the crew were more or less trapped at the scene because Stamaty’s van had their ambulance blocked.

The bed of the trailer was so high that passengers in the cars snaking by could look under it and see Roger Mulreedy’s battered remains. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet, but it wouldn’t have made much difference if he had. Evidently he and his cycle had been bounced or raked along the retaining wall by the right front fender of the semi. Parts of him looked like illustrations in an anatomy atlas.

Stamaty acknowledged the arrival of the investigators from Public Safety with a genial nod, as if they’d just casually met on the steps of the courthouse. “Look but don’t touch, guys,” he said. “This red stuff you see all around here isn’t transmission fluid.”

In a rubber-gloved hand he held up the driver’s license he’d found on the body. The photograph matched the face, more or less. Kestrel had already put down his field kit and unstrapped his camera.

“Where’s the truckdriver?” Auburn asked Stamaty.

“Up in his cab, lying across the seat. Bystrom has his license.”

“Let’s see these bullet holes.”

“They’re not holes, Cy, and they may not have been made by bullets. But in the circumstances... Come on over and take a look.”

The motorcycle was a lightweight Japanese sport model. Although few of its aluminum and fiberglass parts now retained the shape they’d had when they left the factory, the low-slung, wraparound windscreen had escaped shattering. Stamaty didn’t need to point out the four starred pockmarks in the high-impact plastic. As Auburn crouched on the gritty pavement to get a better view, he sensed Kestrel’s hand hovering in the direction of his right arm, ready to intervene immediately should he so far forget himself as to touch the cycle before it had been duly photographed.

“Must have been pretty low-velocity projectiles,” said Auburn. “Maybe from a BB gun. Whatever they were, they were four of a kind. Each of these marks looks exactly like the other three. Otherwise I’d say maybe it was some chips kicked up by a jackhammer, or gravel flying off something traveling in front of him. No bullet wounds on him?”

“Hard to be sure, the shape he’s in. I couldn’t find any holes in his shirt or his pants. And I didn’t see anything that looked like bullet marks anywhere else on the cycle.”

Somewhere a clock was striking five.

Patrolman Fritz Dollinger hauled his ponderous frame erect after examining the motorcycle. “Those marks don’t look all that fresh to me,” he said. “Could have been there a long time. Could be the outer edge of a shotgun burst.”

Bystrom had joined the group. “The trucker said the biker lost control suddenly and flipped over, and he couldn’t stop in time to keep from hitting him.”

“If somebody did shoot him out of the saddle,” remarked Stamaty, “they could have been up there on the Sixth Street overpass. Maybe some crazy kid with a slingshot or a wrist rocket.”

“Pretty fast reloading for a slingshot,” said Kestrel, who had seldom been known to agree with Stamaty about anything.

“It could have been a pellet gun,” said Bystrom. “Maybe somebody that didn’t like bikers — or anyway this particular biker.”

“Let’s not impanel the jury till we talk to the truckdriver,” said Auburn. “He was here when it happened, and we weren’t.”

Stamaty had photographed the scene before they arrived, but they had to wait while Kestrel took pictures of the motorcycle (seemingly from most of the thirty-two compass points) before they unlocked its cargo compartment with the key on Mulreedy’s ring. A careful search turned up no alcohol, drugs, or firearms. They did find tools, a mostly empty lunchbox, and papers pertaining to the heating and cooling business that Mulreedy worked for.

Auburn strongly doubted that the marks on the windshield had anything to do with Mulreedy’s death. At this point he thought it likely the truck driver would be charged with vehicular homicide. He got the keys to the cruiser from Dollinger, locked the contents of the cycle’s cargo compartment and a plastic bag containing the articles from the victim’s pockets in the trunk, and came back with forms on a clipboard.

Before approaching the truckdriver, he walked back between the wall and the trailer to get more information from Bystrom. Myers’s whistle still shrieked with unflagging vigor as he waved the traffic past the narrow spot, first blending two lanes into one. The thudding of a traffic helicopter hovering directly overhead was now added to the symphony of noise surrounding the scene.

Bystrom and Myers had arrived less than five minutes after Hoopes, the truckdriver, had radioed a report of the accident to the State Highway Patrol on Channel 9. Because of the location within the city limits, the Highway Patrol dispatcher had routed the call to Public Safety, and the cruiser had been just three blocks from the scene. The ambulance crew from the downtown Fire and Rescue station had arrived within a minute after them. They had found Mulreedy obviously beyond help and Hoopes in a state of mild hysteria.

“Did you walk him?”

“Are you kidding? In this circus?” Bystrom’s father was a retired fire captain, and he’d known Cyrus Auburn since he was eight.

“Somebody better do it.”

“He’s all yours. Here’s his license. And the accident report.”

Dollinger had just finished helping Stamaty tuck a blue plastic tarpaulin over Mulreedy’s body. “Fritz,” Auburn told him, nodding toward the closed lanes and the median, “somebody over there has to have seen something. And those guys are going to be knocking off work about now. Get with their foreman and talk to as many of them as you can.”

Gavin Hoopes was just climbing down from his cab. He was a rangy, weather-beaten man in his mid thirties wearing cowboy boots. A pair of sunglasses hung in the V-neck of his pink T-shirt. He looked pale under his tan and his teeth chattered slightly. He smelled faintly of diesel fuel and less faintly of sweat.

Auburn showed his badge.

“Another city cop?” asked Hoopes. “Hey, man, I called a ten-forty-two in to the troopers, and I ain’t seen Smokey yet.”

“Our courts have jurisdiction over the part of the Interstate that’s inside city limits.”

Hoopes did a double take at the mention of courts. “Man, I didn’t even know we was in the city.”

“How many beers did you put down at lunch, Mr. Hoopes?”

“Zip.”

“Taking any pills? Been smoking anything?”

“Man, I’m clean.” He made a sweeping gesture with both palms down.

“What happened to your arm?”

Hoopes examined a long shallow abrasion on his right forearm and shrugged it off. “Must have hit something up in the cab.”

In the space between the truck and the wall, Hoopes successfully walked a more or less straight crack in the pavement, touched his nose with his eyes closed, and picked up a nickel from the ground.

“Did I pass?”

“So far. Blood tests for alcohol and drugs are mandatory after a fatal motor accident. You have the right to refuse, but in this state that’s an automatic six months’ suspension of your driver’s license.”

“Man, like I said, I’m clean. Let’s do your tests and get it over with.”

“Do you own this rig?”

“No, sir. Owner is Culver-Vaughan in Atlanta. I need to call in.”

“Couple other things first.” Auburn wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Could we get in the cab to talk?”

“Come up to my boudoir,” said Hoopes with a giddy quiver in his voice. He walked around to the driver’s side and climbed up behind the enormous wheel. Auburn mounted on the passenger’s side.

“Where were you headed, Mr. Hoopes?”

“Wheeling. Hey, I already told all this to the guy with the big moustache.”

“I know. I have Patrolman Bystrom’s report right here. He took your statement about the accident for reporting purposes, as required by law. I’m talking to you because, in this particular accident, a man died. That makes this a homicide investigation.”

The chattering of Hoopes’s teeth became more pronounced as Auburn read him his rights.

“What kind of cargo have you got back there?”

“Steel office furniture.” From a recess beside the seat Hoopes produced a battered aluminum case and handed it to Auburn. It opened like a book and each half contained a shallow compartment with a spring clip at the top to hold papers. Auburn quickly scanned a computer-generated cargo manifest, a routing slip, and a voucher from the truck scales east of town.

“Just tell me in your own words what happened.”

“Like I told the other guy, this biker cut in front of me a couple miles back east, just before we dropped down to three lanes and I had to jog onto the right shoulder. I figured he was heading for the next exit — otherwise he wouldn’t have come over in the slow lane.”

“Was he traveling alone? I mean, were there any other bikers with him?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you notice anything odd about the way he was driving?”

“Not then. And I was watching him pretty close, too, because he was right there like a fly on my nose.”

“Were you crowding him?”

Hoopes shrugged. “He knew I was there.”

“So what happened?”

“About three hundred yards back, I seen him let off his throttle and go into a kind of a wiggle, and then he went over. Man, I mean he went over. Him and that bike rolled like they was two alligators trying to eat each other.”

“Any idea why he lost control?”

“No, sir, unless he was full of booze or dope.”

“You didn’t see anything hit him or his bike? Like a rock, or something that came off a rig up ahead?”

“No, sir.”

“We didn’t find any goggles or sunglasses. Could he have been blinded by the sun?”

“Sure — could have been.”

“You say he cut in front of you. Could he have been wrangling with somebody else on the road?”

“Could have been. I didn’t see it.”

“And then you hit him?”

“Not till after he flipped a couple times like a hog on ice and bounced off the wall.”

“What was your speed at the time?”

“Probably doing about forty.”

That response was automatic: the posted limit in the construction zone. Auburn preserved a rhetorical silence, his pen suspended above the page.

Hoopes squirmed. “You ever drive an eighteen-wheeler before?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Well, let me tell you, you don’t drive it, it drives you. Man, when you got twelve, fifteen tons of steel rolling behind you, you don’t tell it what to do, you ask it, real polite, and hope you asked soon enough. I stomped on that brake as soon as I seen he was out of control, but by the time we stopped, the rig had skated fifty, sixty — hey, can’t you measure my skid marks and tell how fast I was going?”

“There’s an evidence technician down there right now, sir. He’s going to measure those skid marks to the nearest centimeter, and take pictures of them from one end to the other. But the length of a skid mark depends not only on how fast the vehicle was going when the brakes were applied, but also on the coefficient of friction between the tires and the pavement. The judges in this jurisdiction won’t accept skid marks in evidence without at least three comparison sets of marks that have been made at different speeds by the same vehicle with the same tires on the same pavement.”

“Man, you’d have to shut down the whole Interstate to do that.”

“Exactly. But your speed isn’t the only issue here. However fast you’re going, the law requires you to stay far enough behind whatever’s in front of you to assure a safe stopping distance. If you kill somebody because you were tailgating, that’s manslaughter.”

Hoopes bit down hard on nothing. “So what am I looking at here? A fine, the slammer, what?”

“That’s up to the judge. On the basis of what you’ve told me and what I can see at the scene, I’m citing you for unlawful operation — following too close and causing a fatal accident. As we gather evidence and testimony from any witnesses we can find, those charges may be dropped, or others may be added.”

“So what’s next?”

“Next we go to the hospital, get a dressing on that arm, and have them draw blood for some tests.”

“Then do I get my license back?”

“Depends on what the tests show.”

“And in the meantime the rig is going to sit right here in the middle of the Interstate?”

“No, sir. We’ll have a driver move it off the highway. Unless it has to be towed.”

“Shouldn’t. She’s got some body damage to the front fender, but the tires and the steering should be okay.”

Auburn finished writing out Hoopes’s citation and had him sign a form indicating he understood he was summoned to appear in municipal traffic court on the following Tuesday morning. After verifying the truck’s Vehicle Identification Number from a plate riveted to the dashboard, he climbed down from the cab to recheck the registration number, examine the damage to the fender, and look for pellet marks on the front of the truck matching those on Mulreedy’s motorcycle. He found none.

Contrary to Auburn’s expectations, there was no indication that the road construction crew were getting ready to stop work for the day. The racket of the jackhammers went on unabated, and the excavating equipment and dump trucks still performed their clumsy adagio dance around one another. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a State Highway Patrol cruiser bouncing across the median from the eastbound lanes.

The lone trooper parked on the far shoulder, got out of his cruiser, and stood with hands on hips surveying the accident scene from beyond the stream of cars and trucks whizzing past the obstruction. “Can that thing roll under its own power?” he called to Auburn.

“I think so. We’ve got a citizen down here on the shoulder between the trailer and the wall.”

“I understand that. Anybody else injured? Can’t the rescue crew handle the removal?”

Stamaty had joined Auburn in front of the cab. “Not in this county,” he called across to the trooper. “That’s a separate contract. The other guys are on the way, but their hearse hasn’t got a siren or a light—”

“All right, but you’ve gotta open up another lane. You’ve got cars and trucks backed up all the way to the Heron Pike interchange. If just one of them overheats or runs out of gas...” He started moving orange barrels aside. “I’m coming over there.”

While Myers held back the traffic, the trooper, whose name was Cullenbaugh, piloted his cruiser across the rubble-strewn closed lanes and parked it in line with the two Public Safety cruisers in front of the truck. After a rapid survey of the scene and a consultation with Auburn, he went back to his cruiser and arranged to have a driver dispatched to the scene to move Hoopes’s rig off the highway. Hoopes turned over the keys to the truck in return for a receipt signed by Auburn.

Meanwhile Dollinger had come back from his trip to the construction zone. None of the workers had seen or heard anything unusual until they noticed that the westbound traffic, which they estimated had been zooming through the constricted area at close to 60 miles an hour, had bogged down. The racket of machinery and the roar of traffic ricocheting among concrete surfaces would have drowned out the screech of Hoopes’s tires and the noise of the collision.

“And also the sound of a pellet gun up there,” Auburn told Dollinger, nodding towards the Sixth Street overpass, behind which the sun was just sinking. “I’m taking this driver to the hospital to get a scratch on his arm taken care of and have them draw some blood. As soon as Kestrel arranges to get what’s left of that cycle downtown to the garage, you and he ought to go up there on the overpass and take a look around.”

Dollinger squinted at him whimsically in the afternoon glare. “Am I supposed to give him that order, Sergeant?”

“I think if you just make the suggestion, he’ll jump at it.” Auburn jingled the keys to the cruiser. “You’ve both got to find something to do till you have a way back to headquarters.”

Auburn drove Hoopes to Chalfont Hospital to have his scratched arm scrubbed and wrapped up. While a technician was drawing blood samples for alcohol and drug tests, Auburn called headquarters and initiated background checks on Hoopes and his employer. Lieutenant Savage had gone home for the day, and no one had made any effort yet to reach Roger Mulreedy’s next of kin.

Auburn called Mulreedy’s home phone number and got no answer, not even an answering machine. Since there was no one else with the same last name listed in the phone book, his next call was to Mulreedy’s employer, Welbeck Heating and Cooling. Jerry Welbeck, the owner of the business, answered the phone himself.

“Mr. Welbeck, this is Sergeant Auburn with the Public Safety Department. I understand Roger Mulreedy is an employee of yours?”

“Roger, sure, Roger works for me.”

“I have some bad news for you, sir. Mr. Mulreedy was seriously injured in an accident a few minutes ago.”

You feed them the story in little bites and see how they swallow each one before you give them the next.

“An accident where? At the rink?” Welbeck sounded as if he might be worrying about expenses, insurance, time lost from work — anything but the well-being of somebody he cared about.

“No, sir. This was a motorcycle accident on the Interstate. Mr. Mulreedy was killed outright.”

Silence. Was the man at the other end of the line struggling to master his grief, or was he grinning from ear to ear?

When at last Welbeck spoke, his tone was almost hostile. “Why are you calling me?”

“I’m trying to trace his next of kin. I understand he was married. Do you know how I might reach his wife?”

At the end of an even longer silence, Welbeck said, “They’re separated, but I can find you her number, sure. What I’d like to know is what Roger was doing on the Interstate at this time of day.”

“We don’t know that, sir. He was traveling west through the construction zone downtown, and a witness said he lost control of his bike and rolled it. Was there somewhere else he was supposed to be this afternoon?”

“Well, sure. He’s been doing a big installation job in Wilmot, and I would have thought he’d have been tied up there till six or seven tonight.”

“Would you know if he’d had any personal troubles lately, any drinking problems...?”

“You’re thinking like a cop,” said Welbeck, not answering the question, “and I’m thinking like an engineer. I still can’t figure out what he would have been doing in that place at that hour.”

Welbeck’s reaction to the news of Mulreedy’s death seemed so cagey and odd that Auburn hesitated to pursue his inquiries over the telephone. He could hear people shouting and dogs barking at the other end of the line.

“Are you at home now, sir?”

“Actually I’m at my dad’s place by the river. We have a cookout here with some of the guys from the shop after work every Friday during the summer months.”

“Could you give me your address there?”

“Sure. You go north on Calthrop Road till you hit the river. It’s the big farm on the left — you can’t miss it. You thinking of coming out here tonight?”

“Possibly. Will you be there for a while?”

“Possibly,” Welbeck echoed. “But this is my cell phone I’m talking on. It picks up all incoming calls when the office is closed, and it rides with me wherever I go.”

According to Welbeck, Mulreedy’s estranged wife lived with her parents. Welbeck told him their name and the street they lived on, but when Auburn tried their phone number he got no answer.

He caught up with Hoopes in the office of the hospital lab, where he was sweating out a phone interview with the home office of his company in Atlanta. On seeing Auburn, he covered the mouthpiece of the receiver and asked, “Hey, am I under arrest?”

“Depends on what the blood tests show.” Auburn moved away while Hoopes relayed that message and finished his conversation.

Getting the results of the tests would take more than an hour. Since Auburn needed to keep an eye on Hoopes until he was cleared of a DUI charge, they had dinner together in the part of the hospital cafeteria reserved for visitors. Hoopes professed not to have any appetite, but then proceeded to put down an amount and variety of food that would probably have sent Auburn down the hall to the emergency room.

Hoopes had been driving professionally for twelve years. He denied ever having been involved in an accident of any description before. Auburn listened to his nervous chatter with one ear while pondering various details of Mulreedy’s death — the pockmarks on the windshield of the cycle, Welbeck’s evasive manner, and Hoopes’s highly plausible account of Mulreedy’s sudden loss of control of the cycle.

At length the results of the blood alcohol and preliminary drug screen became available, and showed that Hoopes was, to use his own word, clean. Auburn drove him to a truckers’ stop where he would stay at least overnight.

When he returned with the cruiser to headquarters, Auburn found that Dollinger and Kestrel had hitched a ride back with Myers and Bystrom. Dollinger reported that he and Kestrel had visited the Sixth Street overpass after Mulreedy’s body had been removed from the scene and the semi had been moved to the State Highway Patrol post at New Leyden. They had found no indication that anyone had lurked on the sidewalk there or used the low concrete parapet as a rest for a firearm.

Auburn tried to reach Mulreedy’s widow again by phone, without success. It was a little after 7:30 and still broad daylight. He decided to see Jerry Welbeck face to face in an effort to get some tangible information about Mulreedy’s background, associations, and recent history.

It took him almost a half-hour to get to the Welbeck farm, where Calthrop Road dipped into a valley to end abruptly at the river. The inscription “RIVERDALE FARM. SIMON WELBECK. 1897” was emblazoned across the front of a big red barn in black letters. Auburn followed a graveled driveway between a field of tall standing corn on one side and the sloping riverbank on the other.

Beyond the barn, about a dozen cars and trucks were parked helter-skelter under widely spaced mature trees. All the trucks were identical — charcoal-gray panel trucks belonging to Welbeck Heating and Cooling, with flamboyant lettering and striping in canary yellow, each with a rack on the top bearing a red fiberglass extension ladder. Auburn parked his car and got out.

Welbeck’s description hadn’t quite prepared him for the size of the crowd down on the riverbank. He estimated that at least forty people, mostly men in work clothes but also a few women, were gathered on a level stretch of turf around a stone fireplace and picnic benches. Some were eating and drinking, and a few were pitching horseshoes. Three canoes lay inverted on a moss-grown stone landing.

It was ten degrees cooler here than in the city. As Auburn made his way down to the level of the water, four or five mongrel dogs came sniffing and whimpering around him. Somebody whistled them back and called reassuringly, “They won’t bother you, buddy, they’re just kind of stupid.”

Under the trees the evening light shimmered like swirls of green and gold dust. The air was spiced with the smell of wood smoke, roast meat, and barbeque sauce. A radio was playing softly, barely audible above the steady chirping of crickets and locusts. The mood of the crowd seemed somber. Most of them wore gray work uniforms with shoulder patches bearing the company name. A man in a short-sleeved shirt with a clip-on bow tie came forward to meet Auburn.

“I’m Jerry Welbeck,” he said. His manner was suave but he didn’t offer to shake hands.

“Sergeant Auburn. We talked on the phone.”

“Sure.” Welbeck glanced with a perfunctory nod at Auburn’s identification. He had broad shoulders, smooth features, and prematurely white hair. He held his elbows out from his sides like a wrestler getting ready to pounce. He pointed to a galvanized steel tub full of melting ice. “Pull up a brew. Plenty of food left. Do you like hot wings?”

“Thanks, I just had dinner. I still haven’t been able to reach Mrs. Mulreedy. I thought I’d come by and talk to you personally if you’ve got a minute.”

“Sure, sure. All the time in the world. This is our guys’ weekly happy hour. Only thing is, everybody’s a little down tonight after hearing about Roger.” The lower part of his face kept changing shape, as if he were trying out one type of smile after another before deciding which one he would finally adopt. “You find out anything more? About how it happened, I mean?”

“No, sir, but we feel it may not have been an accident.”

“You mean maybe this truck driver ran him down on purpose?”

The other men were watching and listening with unconcealed curiosity. Eight or ten of them drifted close around Welbeck and Auburn. They showed their boss no particular deference, and seemed disposed to allow him no privacy.

“Not exactly that,” said Auburn. “But there are some unanswered questions about exactly what caused him to lose control of his motorcycle.”

“Like maybe somebody tampered with the brakes, the steering...?”

“Possibly that. Or somebody may have done something at the time of the accident.”

“But who? How?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. I asked you on the phone about any problems he might have had recently...”

“And I weaseled out of answering,” Welbeck admitted frankly. “Any of these folks here will tell you Roger was kind of a prickly pear. As a service technician he was second to none, and he never missed a day of work. But whenever I could, I had to have him work alone, because he couldn’t get along with the other guys. Estimates and sales — forget it. Sooner or later he’d get in some stupid argument with the customer, and then the whole deal was off.”

“Had he had any trouble with anybody in particular lately?” Auburn directed his question to the whole group of Mulreedy’s coworkers, fully aware that this might be like asking the kindergarten class who spilled the Kool-Aid. “Any threats, open confrontations, fist fights...?”

There was a general shaking of heads. “Roger wasn’t about to use his fists,” observed a wiry, sharp-featured man who was nearing retirement age. “He had a tongue on him like a rattlesnake, but that was about the only kind of fighting he was into.”

“I understand he was separated from his wife.”

Most of the men suddenly looked at their shoes, and Welbeck fidgeted uncomfortably. “Like I told you on the phone,” he said, “Patty’s been back living with her folks for five or six months now.”

“I know it’s a ticklish thing for you to talk about, but — were there lots of hard feelings there, on either side?”

Welbeck nodded rapidly, as if he were eager to dismiss the subject. “Lots, I’d say. On both sides. Some of the girls could tell you better.” The women were busy tending the fireplaces, collecting the garbage, feeding the scraps to the dogs. None of them had ventured to join the tribal pow-wow.

“Were you expecting Mulreedy here tonight?” Auburn asked Welbeck.

“Frankly, I wasn’t. Roger’s been here a couple times over the years but, like I said, he didn’t really mix very well, and he didn’t drink. I still can’t figure out what he was doing out on the Interstate this afternoon.”

“I can tell you that,” said a burly youth with blond hair cut in a burr. He stepped forward with the ungainly strut of a bodybuilder. Unlike the others, he was wearing a set of camouflage fatigues, spattered and smeared with red, blue, and green paint. “I was at the shop cleaning out the bins like I do every Friday afternoon,” he said, addressing both his boss and Auburn. “Roger came in to make a long-distance call to Dooley’s about the specs on that air handler at the rink. After that he got another call, and about five minutes later he took off on his cycle.”

“Who called him?” asked Welbeck.

The man drank noisily from a can of beer before answering. “I don’t know. I was in the back. He answered the phone himself.”

“Left his truck at the shop?”

“Sure. It was still there when I left at six.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“Him tell me anything? Go figure.”

“What time would that have been?” Welbeck was asking Auburn’s questions for him, and doing just fine.

“Maybe four. Little after.”

“Did you see which direction he went?” asked Auburn.

“No, sir, I didn’t.” There was something vaguely military in the way the man answered.

“Is there any way to trace that call?”

“I wouldn’t think so,” said Welbeck, “unless it was a collect toll call.”

“This rink you mentioned...”

“The new Roundhouse Rink up in Wilmot. We’re doing the climate-control system.”

Auburn recognized the name because the owner of the rink, a sleazy local real-estate developer named Chuck Fibbiger, had aroused the wrath of two or three citizens’ groups by applying for, and getting, a liquor license. The people of the suburb of Wilmot, descended from English and Scottish settlers, had a largely undeserved reputation for stodginess and conservatism. But their indignation over the liquor license was understandable, in view of the expectation that at least three-quarters of the patrons of a roller-skating rink would be under drinking age.

Deciding that he’d learned everything he was likely to from this bunch, Auburn thanked them and started back toward his car.

“Sir!” The call was peremptory, almost insolent. Auburn turned to see the young man with the paint stains on his fatigues stalking him under the trees. “Talk to you a minute, sir?”

“Sure.”

The man drew closer, looking back over his shoulder to see whether he was observed by the others. “I just thought I ought to let you know why you couldn’t get Patty on the phone before.”

Auburn eyed him expectantly. Again he was struck by the other’s military bearing, which was probably accentuated by the camouflage fatigues.

“She was right here. She only left about a half-hour before you got here.”

“Mulreedy’s wife was here? At the cookout?”

“Yes, sir. She pals around with some of the other girls. She comes around sometimes even though she and Roger are busted up.”

“Do you know if Welbeck told her her husband was dead?”

“Yes, sir, he did.”

At least, thought Auburn, I’ve been spared that chore. But his relief didn’t distract him from wondering what hidden agenda had prompted this musclebound mug to tell him that Patty Mulreedy had been enjoying herself at the cookout while her estranged husband was getting himself killed on the Interstate.

“Did she go home from here?” he asked.

“Her folks’s home, sure. She came out with one of the guys and his wife, and they took her back.”

“How upset was she?”

“She took it pretty rough.”

“Had they been trying to work things out, do you think, or were they getting a divorce?”

“Neither one. She wouldn’t talk divorce but she couldn’t stand living in the same house with him.”

“Did he beat her up?”

“That I wouldn’t know.” Auburn’s informant fell silent, as if he had suddenly decided he’d said too much, or maybe that the exchange was degenerating into a gossip session.

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Greg Wamblitt.”

After Auburn reached his car, he took the time to record the registration numbers of the two motorcycles and five private cars in the parking area, also noting which car had a National Rifle Association logo on its rear window and which one had a bumper sticker reading “The Devil Is My Godfather.”

From the Welbeck farm, Auburn drove straight to the home of Patty Mulreedy’s parents, the Dermotts. Since it was almost on his way back to town, he decided not to call first. The house was a modest two-story brick in an old but still respectable residential district.

The man who came to the door might have been wearing that hard, dour face because his son-in-law had just been killed, but Auburn suspected he had looked exactly the same way for about the past twenty years. He bent awkwardly at hips and knees to view Auburn’s identification through his bifocals, then conducted him without a word into a family room, where his wife was administering what comfort she could to their daughter.

Roger Mulreedy’s widow was curled up in a corner of the couch where she’d probably cried over many a broken heart before. She wasn’t looking her best tonight, what with red eyes, smeared mascara, and peeling sunburn on her nose. On Auburn’s arrival she pulled herself together and took him to a screened back porch where it was nearly dark and where they could talk privately.

She vanished into the shadows of an overstuffed chair, while Auburn sat in a wicker rocker that squeaked at the slightest movement. He expressed his sympathy and his regret that he needed to bother her at such a time.

“It’s all right,” she said in a hushed contralto. “If you hadn’t come to me I would probably have come to you.”

“About your husband’s death?”

“Yes. Are you calling it an accident?”

“That seems the likeliest possibility. But the investigation has just started. Do you think maybe it wasn’t an accident?”

She was silent for a few moments, and when she finally spoke she seemed to be picking her words carefully. “I don’t have any way of knowing that. After I heard the police were looking for me, I called headquarters downtown, but they wouldn’t tell me much because I wasn’t calling from home and I couldn’t prove who I was.”

As nearly as Auburn could judge in the semidarkness, this woman was genuinely grieving. He gave her a brief outline of what had happened on the Interstate, without mentioning the pockmarked cycle or the arrest of Gavin Hoopes.

“I think you ought to know about something that happened a few weeks ago,” she said. “Something that couldn’t have been an accident. Somebody tried to kill Roger.”

“Can you tell me about that?”

“I’ll tell you what I know. He was installing an air-conditioning system. He cut the power and locked it off, but somebody turned it back on again. He only found out by accident that the power was on again, when a tool touched two wires and threw a spark. It was a high-voltage line. If it had been his hand, he could have gone up in smoke right then and there.”

“When did you say this happened?”

“Between three and four weeks ago.”

“And where was he working at the time?”

“It’s a big remodeling project up in Wilmot. They’re turning an old canning factory into a skating rink.”

“Why couldn’t it have been an accident?”

“It just couldn’t. You don’t unlock a high-voltage circuit breaker until you know who locked it off and why.”

“Did he have any idea who did it? Who else had a key?”

“They use combination locks. Nobody but the person who locked off the power to work on the circuit is supposed to know the combination.”

“Was this reported to the authorities?”

“I don’t think Roger told anybody but me.”

“I understand you and he were separated.”

“Not legally. We just decided to give each other some more space, so I moved back here.” A long silence followed, during which Auburn could hear dogs barking, neighbors dragging trash cans out to the curb, children playing boisterously in an alley, somebody tuning up a car that needed a new muffler worse than a tune-up.

“He could be awfully difficult,” she said at length. “Bull-headed, unreasonable. There’s a broadloom floor mat about ten feet long in our back hall. It seems logical to me that it ought to run straight down the middle of the hall, parallel to the two side walls. But Roger thought it should lie at an angle, closer to the outside door at one end, and closer to the kitchen door at the other. So every time he walked through the hall, he’d move that rug off center.”

And, thought Auburn, every time you walked through the hall, you’d move it back straight. It takes two to keep a conflict smoldering, whether it’s an all-out war or a petty marital squabble. Maybe it was hearing such tales of discord and strife year in and year out that had thus far kept Auburn single.

The list of grievances went on. “He made me get contact lenses,” she said, “because he didn’t like the way I looked in glasses. And then he made me pay for them. But that was all right. I was making more money than he was.” Just as, moments earlier, he could feel her pain in the dark, he now sensed something different — a smug conviction of superiority to the dead man.

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a speech therapist. And I also teach.”

“I understand you were out at the Welbeck farm this evening when I called.”

“I didn’t know it was you that called.” She paused only briefly and then went on, apparently feeling that Auburn expected some kind of explanation. “I went with Ginny Caruso and her husband. They live just a couple of blocks from here.”

“Did you expect your husband to be there?”

“Oh, no. Roger was never welcome there and he knew it.”

“How’s that?”

“Those cookouts are for Jerry’s pets, and that didn’t include Roger. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he wouldn’t pad estimates.”

“Do you think one of Welbeck’s ‘pets’ might have unlocked that circuit breaker and turned it back on?”

“No. No, I can’t believe that. But if Roger’s death wasn’t an accident, whoever was behind it was probably the same person who played that trick with the circuit breaker.”

“Any guesses who that might be?”

She sighed heavily and he could see her vague silhouette shifting in the deep chair. “It was probably one of Chuck Fibbiger’s goons,” she said, her voice now barely above a whisper, as if she were afraid of being overheard. “But you’ll never prove it. I can’t even imagine the police department taking him on.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he’s got too much clout. Look how the newspapers always treat him like some kind of saint, even though everybody knows he’s as crooked as—”

“I mean, why did you say he might have been behind your husband’s death?”

“Because he wanted Roger to double-cross Jerry Welbeck on the skating-rink job, and Roger wouldn’t do it.” She seemed very positive of the basic facts, but couldn’t supply any more details.

She had some questions about funeral arrangements. Auburn wrote Nick Stamaty’s name and phone number for her on the back of one of his own cards and left it by the porch door without going back through the house.

At eleven o’clock that night, the local radio and TV newscasts included an appeal for information to anyone who had seen the accident in the construction zone on the Interstate. Auburn watched to be sure the announcer used the exact text of the message he’d e-mailed to the station, in which he’d carefully avoided the word “witness,” with its connotations of stuffy courtrooms, bullying defense lawyers, lost time from work, and endless red tape.

Ten minutes after Auburn arrived at headquarters next morning, Stamaty called him from the coroner’s office at the courthouse across the street with the preliminary results of the autopsy. Auburn abandoned once and for all the hypothesis that Roger Mulreedy’s death might have been accidental.

His skull and rib cage had been shattered, his brain and internal organs pulped, and all four limbs nearly wrenched from his torso. The forensic pathologist, who knew about the pockmarks on the windshield of Mulreedy’s motorcycle, had taken X-rays, and these showed two.50-caliber steel balls buried in his neck.

“Fifty caliber?” repeated Auburn incredulously. “We’re talking cannonballs here!”

“Near enough,” agreed Stamaty.

“Were they the cause of death?”

“Not directly. I mean, they didn’t get near his spine or cut any major blood vessels. But they sure must have taken his mind off his driving.”

“Two,” said Auburn, deep in thought. “And four dents in the windshield. Any way these could have come out of a piece of machinery up ahead?”

“I think maybe that’s what somebody wants us to think, but I wouldn’t buy it. If a ball bearing accidentally came apart up ahead on the highway and flipped out a handful of balls, they couldn’t have had enough velocity to penetrate the skin, even with him coming to meet them at fifty or sixty miles an hour.”

“So either there were a half-dozen hoodlums up there on the Sixth Street overpass with slingshots...”

“Or there was one hoodlum up there with a semi-automatic weapon of some kind that lobs half-inch ball bearings. A smooth-bore weapon — there weren’t any rifling marks on the projectiles.”

The lab tests had shown no alcohol or drugs in Mulreedy’s blood.

The Records Department, shut down to a skeleton crew for the weekend as of five o’clock the previous afternoon, had completed partial background reports on Hoopes, Mulreedy and his wife, and Welbeck and his business. So far there was no evidence that any of them had police records, bad credit ratings, or suspected criminal associations. Patricia Mulreedy, nee Dermott, was a hospital volunteer in her spare time and Jerome R. Welbeck was a deacon at his church.

From the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, Auburn had obtained the names and addresses of the people to whom the private cars and motorcycles at the Welbeck farm were registered. According to the city directory, every one of those people was employed by Welbeck Heating and Cooling. Auburn asked Records to initiate background checks on all of them, and did such investigating as he was able to do on his own.

Also pursuing his own research on Fibbiger, he found no record of arrests or convictions. But an Internet search turned up lots of newspaper references, including several pertaining to the liquor license for the skating rink in Wilmot. Besides the projected rink, Fibbiger was proprietor of an electronic penny arcade called Total Aggravation at an upscale suburban mall, identified by persistent rumors as a hard-drug distribution center.

As Patty Mulreedy had said, the papers tended to handle Fibbiger with kid gloves. But the cumulative impression one gained from all the articles was that of a callous and unscrupulous slum landlord, a predator who bought at rock-bottom prices from people who had to dispose of real estate to settle an estate or a divorce or to avoid bankruptcy, an ambitious and unprincipled promoter of schemes that often went sour at other people’s expense. Whether he was capable of murder remained to be determined.

Radio and TV appeals for information had so far yielded no returns.

At ten o’clock Auburn met with his immediate superior, Lieutenant Savage, who had pulled weekend duty as first watch commander. They agreed that all charges against Gavin Hoopes should be dropped, and then discussed what direction the investigation should take.

“If this is just a random killing by some loony with a pellet gun,” said Savage, “we’re not going to get very far with it. But it sounds to me like this Mulreedy was the kind of misfit who gets people’s backs up pretty easily, and I’ve got a feeling the killer knew exactly who he was taking down. Especially since there’s a question of a prior attempt. So it’s basically a matter of nosing around till you find somebody who had a clear motive, and opportunity for both attempts.”

“The widow said she thought her husband was in some kind of trouble with Fibbiger. He could have paid somebody — she said one of his ‘goons’ — to do the job while he was somewhere else establishing an alibi.”

“And maybe she paid a goon to do it while she was fifteen miles out in the country establishing an alibi.” Savage got up and started pacing slowly around his desk. “Whoever did the actual killing must have known Mulreedy was going to be at that exact spot at that time.”

“Maybe because they told him to go that way,” suggested Auburn. “The one witness, Wamblitt, says Mulreedy got a phone call at the shop right before he headed for the Interstate. We probably can’t get anything from the phone company without a court order, but I’d like to try.”

“Okay, but you might as well put that on a back burner. On a Saturday you’re not going to get anything out of the business office at the phone company but a bubbly voice on an answering machine. What were you planning to do this morning?”

“I thought I’d try to see Fibbiger, if I can get past his answering machine. I’d like to find out if he knows anything about this alleged incident with the circuit breaker at the skating rink. Or if he’ll admit he had some kind of fight with Mulreedy.”

“Okay, but tread carefully, Cy. Fibbiger’s lawyers are getting paid more to keep him out of court than you and I together are getting paid to... do whatever it is we’re getting paid to do.”

After leaving Savage’s office, Auburn got Gavin Hoopes out of bed to tell him all charges against him had been dropped and that he was free to hit the road again. Then he called Chuck Fibbiger’s office and arranged to meet him later that morning.

The sky was the color of an oyster shell, with a vivid luminosity that hurt the eyes. The air was still, but the threat of a summer storm added a brooding sense of tension and expectancy to the oppressive heat of the dog days.

Fibbiger conducted his real-estate business in a restored row house on Wasatch Court. Like most of the other houses in the row, this one had business premises on the street level and living quarters upstairs. Fibbiger probably owned every building in sight.

An ornate receptionist took him straight back to an oak-paneled office, where he found Fibbiger at a desk surrounded by framed awards, gilded plastic trophies, and pictures of buildings, Irish setters, and grandchildren. His face was familiar to anybody who read the local papers, but in the years since that oft-published photograph had been taken, he had lost some hair and gained a lot of weight. And nothing Auburn had ever seen in the papers had prepared him for the fact that this reputed crime boss was about five feet two. In an old plaid shirt and a pair of faded jeans, he looked like a retired jockey.

Fibbiger made a point of not looking at Auburn’s ID. “Detectives and realtors have to work weekends, don’t we?” he remarked breezily. When he smiled, his brows shut down like a trunk lid, converting his eyes into jagged slits. He waved Auburn to a seat opposite the desk. “What have I done this time?”

“Just a routine investigation, sir. A man who’s been working at the new skating rink up in Wilmot was killed last night on the highway. Maybe you saw it on the news?”

“Somebody who works for me got killed last night?”

“Actually he was working for Welbeck, the heating and cooling contractor. A Roger Mulreedy.”

“Okay. Okay.” He nodded slowly, as if memories were filtering through. “I know who you mean. What happened to him?”

“He wrecked his motorcycle on the Interstate, in the construction zone downtown.”

“Hey, I’m sorry to hear that.” His tone was detached and perfunctory, like that of a realtor pretending to commiserate with a client who waited to read the fine print until after signing the contract. “So how can I help you?”

“We’re trying to figure out what he was doing on the Interstate yesterday between four and four-thirty. Would you have any ideas about that?”

“Not a clue. I haven’t been up to the rink myself for more than a week. And I let my contractors look after their own guys.”

“Mulreedy got a phone call at the shop right before he headed for the Interstate. We thought he might have been coming here.”

“I wouldn’t think so. Anyway, I didn’t call him.”

“Had you had any discussions with him about the job, deadlines, costs...?”

“No, sir. Like I said, my business was with Jerry Welbeck. This guy was just one of his peons. I didn’t even remember his name.”

“There was one other thing,” said Auburn. “Mulreedy told his wife that, about a month ago, up at the rink, somebody turned on a power line while he was working on it. Did you hear anything about that?”

“Oh, yes,” said Fibbiger, again nodding reflectively. “It’s all coming back to me now. Here’s what happened, the way I remember it. The carpenters and plasterers wouldn’t start work until the air conditioning was installed. They said their adhesives and joint compound wouldn’t set up right in the heat and humidity. But you know as well as I do that it was their own sweet selves they were worrying about.

“Anyway, I asked Jerry to get the air conditioning going as quick as he could, and what does he do? He sends in this guy — what’s his name? — Mulreedy, with a chip on his shoulder about the size of Canada. Right away the whole project turns into one big nightmare. The plumbers get in a fight with the flooring contractor. The roofers say the bricklayers stole part of their scaffolding. And then Mulreedy claims one of the electricians tried to fry him because he borrowed some wire.”

“This was reported to you, then?”

“Not directly. I probably heard about it a week or so after it happened.”

“So you don’t know how much truth there might be in it?”

“No, sir, I don’t. And I don’t see what it’s got to do with a traffic accident on the Interstate, either.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” said Auburn. “Mulreedy was shot.”

“Now I know why you’re here.” Fibbiger grinned disarmingly, showing a gold tooth. “I’ll bet you play a fierce game of chess.”

“I could never remember all the rules,” said Auburn with perfect truth.

Welbeck Heating and Cooling was headquartered outside the city limits on Hanover Road, in a district of small factories, machine shops, specialty garages, and warehouses. The business occupied an L-shaped one-story building that was almost completely surrounded by woods. Only a big white sign running along the driveway was visible from the road. Auburn counted eleven company trucks in the parking lot. Three private cars were there as well, two of which Auburn had seen at the cookout the evening before.

He entered the building by a door marked COUNTER SALES. The salesroom was long and narrow. Displays of humidifiers and cartons of furnace filters were arranged along one wall neatly but with little sense of market appeal.

Greg Wamblitt, the arrogant young man who had stood at parade rest last evening while making sure that Auburn knew Patty Mulreedy had been at the cookout, was behind the counter. Auburn’s research earlier in the day had informed him that Wamblitt was a first sergeant in a local National Guard unit. Another man was talking on a phone at the counter, taking an order from a customer.

Jerry Welbeck, who evidently — like realtors and detectives — had to work on weekends, was busy at a computer in a glassed-in office. As soon as he saw Auburn he came to the door of the office and invited him in.

His manner was cooperative rather than cordial. “Find out anything yet?”

“I’m afraid we did. Roger Mulreedy was shot in the neck with a couple of steel balls.”

Welbeck instantly broke eye contact and stared unseeingly through a picture window facing the woods. The long silence that followed reminded Auburn of the intervals in their phone conversation on the previous afternoon.

“Are you sure about that?” he asked finally.

“Well, the forensic pathologist seems to be. That makes it homicide. I’d like to ask you about something that happened a few weeks ago when Mulreedy was working up at the rink. He told his wife that somebody unlocked a circuit breaker while he was working on the circuit. Did you know about that?”

“Did I ever! Roger as much as accused me of issuing him a lock that somebody else knew the combination to. Like I told you, he was a very paranoid guy. My guess is that he didn’t shove the shackle all the way down in the lock. Whoever found it that way figured it had been unlocked and took it off the breaker. So you found Patty?”

“I talked to her last night.”

“Was she okay?”

“She seemed to be doing all right. I understand she was at your cookout when I called you.”

Wamblitt wasn’t visible to either of them at the moment, but Auburn would have sworn that Welbeck’s eyes shifted for a fraction of a second in the direction of the salesroom before he answered. “That’s right, she was,” he said, with a hint of discomfiture. “She came with my sales manager, Caruso, and his wife. They live just up the street from her folks.”

“And after you and I talked on the phone, you told her her husband had been killed?”

“Actually, I told Ginny Caruso, and she took Patty aside and broke the news to her.”

“I’d like to trace that phone call Mulreedy got just before he hit the road yesterday. Have you checked on that?”

“I don’t really know how to check on it.”

“I thought maybe you had a phone that records the source of incoming calls.”

“I’ve got five phones, not counting this cell phone. But they’re all just your generic squawk boxes.”

“You should be able to get the number by calling the phone company from the phone it came in on. But not on a Saturday. I think your counter man said Mulreedy picked up the phone himself.”

“I think he did too, but let’s ask him. He’s right out there.”

Wamblitt repeated his story of the previous evening, to the effect that he had been working in the storage area behind the salesroom when Roger Mulreedy came in to make a long-distance call to a manufacturer. When the phone rang at the counter, Mulreedy had picked it up, spoken briefly, hung up, and left the premises without a word to Wamblitt. Wamblitt wasn’t even sure which of three phones he’d been talking on.

As Auburn left Welbeck’s, the big white sign at the end of the parking lot caught his eye again. It appeared to have been decorated with graffiti in red, yellow, and green. Only when he got up close, he could see it wasn’t graffiti but blotches of paint.

By the time he returned to Welbeck’s shop late that afternoon, accompanied by Patrolman Bystrom, Auburn had put in three hours of intensive investigation. After an illuminating session with a State Highway Patrol officer, he had tracked down Lieutenant Howell Dunbar, Chief of the Robbery Division, who had the weekend off. He had also applied for and obtained search and arrest warrants.

Welbeck and Wamblitt were both still at the shop. This time Welbeck came out of his office to meet Auburn. “This looks ominous,” he said when he saw Bystrom’s uniform.

“I’d like to verify some times,” said Auburn without preamble. “Can you tell me when Mrs. Mulreedy arrived at the cookout last night?”

“She was there when I got there,” said Welbeck.

“And what time was that?”

“Well, let me think. I cleaned out the cash register about three-thirty and took some cash and checks to the bank. I probably got to the farm about four-thirty or a quarter to five.”

“Can you confirm that, Mr. Wamblitt?”

Wamblitt looked up from a tray of parts he was sorting at the counter. “I’m afraid not, sir.”

“Mr. Welbeck,” said Auburn, “when I was at the farm last night you said you couldn’t figure out what Mulreedy was doing on the Interstate at that hour.” He turned to address Wamblitt. “And that was when you told us about the phone call Mulreedy got just before he left. You hadn’t told your boss about that earlier because you weren’t at the cookout when I called, were you?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” said Welbeck. Auburn had noticed during their prior interviews that Welbeck was one of those dangerous people who smile when they’re at a loss — when they’re stumped, cornered, or about to explode with rage. But he wasn’t smiling now. “Greg?” he said.

“Gregory Wamblitt,” said Auburn, “I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of first-degree murder.” He recited the canonical warnings.

Wamblitt, pale and sweating, came to attention and put his back against a steel cabinet. “Wait a minute here,” he said, stuttering slightly. “You’re making a mistake.”

“There’s no mistake, sir, and you know it. The commanding officer of your National Guard unit, Colonel Dunbar, also happens to be a division chief with the Department of Public Safety. He and I had a long talk this afternoon about the field exercises you run for the troops, where two teams try to capture each other’s flags without getting shot. Shot with paint balls, that is.

“I found out a whole lot about paint guns today. They’re powered by compressed air or carbon dioxide and they shoot soft gelatin balls filled with oil-based paint — fifty-caliber balls. A fully automatic paint gun can get off a burst of ten or more balls a second. The guns used in league play are limited to a muzzle velocity that won’t do any harm to unprotected skin even at fairly short range. But you were playing for keeps, weren’t you? And your gun was loaded with half-inch steel balls.”

Wamblitt took a deep breath and let it out slowly while he tried to gauge how much of Auburn’s accusation was guesswork and how much of it might be based on hard evidence. “I own some paint guns,” he admitted, “but I’ve never used one to shoot anything but paint balls. And I wasn’t anywhere near the Interstate yesterday afternoon.”

“Let’s see if I can boost your memory a bit,” said Auburn. “When I left here around noontime today, I got on the Interstate to retrace Mulreedy’s route from here to the spot where he got killed. But I never made it.

“Just before the highway enters the city limits, there’s a truck weighing station. When it’s open, all trucks over a certain size have to leave the highway and get on the scales to make sure their axle and cargo weights aren’t over the limits. The inspectors also do a safety check and verify the driver’s ID. The driver or owner gets fined for weight or safety violations, or if the truck shoots past the station without turning in.

“In order to catch the ones who sneak past, there’s a TV camera mounted over the highway just beyond the access ramp to the weigh station. The inspectors take turns watching the monitor and alerting the troopers patrolling the highway when a trucker guns on by. The whole thing goes on videotape so they have evidence to prove violations. And at five after four yesterday afternoon, you were taped driving west on the Interstate with Roger Mulreedy following right behind you on his motorcycle.”

Wamblitt seemed about to speak, looked from Welbeck to Bystrom, and remained silent.

“The paint gun mounted on your luggage rack shows up on the videotape as plain as a lizard on a rock. We could even see the trip wire running to the window on the driver’s side. You took a few practice shots at the sign outside here first, didn’t you, to get your range — sighting through the rearview mirror?”

Seeing all hope of a successful defense crushed, Wamblitt nodded dispiritedly. “There wasn’t any phone call,” he admitted. “I told Roger that Patty had been in an accident and that I was supposed to lead him to the place. When we got to the construction zone on the Interstate, I slowed down so Roger crowded up on me, and the semi in back of him crowded up on him. As soon as I got him in range, I let him have it.”

“What was your particular beef with Mulreedy,” asked Auburn, “if you don’t mind my asking?”

Wamblitt was still standing at attention but his military snap and most of his vitality seemed to have disappeared. “I’ve been in love with Patty ever since we were kids,” he said. “She made a horrible mistake when she married Roger, and she knew it, but she wouldn’t divorce him. So I figured it was up to me to help her work things out.”

“You tried it once before, didn’t you? Up at the rink, when you sneaked in and unlocked that circuit breaker. You seem to be sort of the quartermaster around here. You probably issued him that combination lock yourself—”

“Have you got that on videotape, too?” asked Wamblitt, with a half-hearted show of defiance.

Auburn produced a search warrant. “Let’s go out and take a look in your car, Mr. Wamblitt.”

One of the automatic paint-ball guns in Wamblitt’s trunk was still partially loaded with half-inch steel balls.

Copyright (c); 2005 by John H. Dirckx.