High Country Fall

CHAPTER 14

TUESDAY, 11:05 A.M.

While two of Sheriff Horton’s detectives gave the Ashe home a final thorough search, several patrol officers spread out along Old Needham Road. The sheriff himself stood on the lower terrace with Lucius Burke and Captain George Underwood and looked down across the treetops into Pritchard Cove. The walkie-talkie in his hand occasionally emitted staticky bursts of speech. Somewhere down there, a couple of his men with binoculars were carefully scanning the mountainside for anything that might be a man. Already they had sent their colleagues scrambling to investigate two fallen trees and several rocks. It didn’t help that their description of Norman Osborne included brown slacks and a russet-colored sweater over a dark plaid shirt.

“Too bad he wasn’t wearing red,” said Burke as they waited.

“Wouldn’t make it any easier. Half the damn trees are red, too,” Horton said, nodding sourly toward a particularly brilliant maple.

“Yeah,” said George Underwood. As head of the detective squad, he had a pair of binoculars slung around his own neck and had already scoped out the area from here. “And even if they were all still green, you ever try to spot a cardinal singing in an oak tree?”

They agreed it was amazing the way bright-colored birds could melt into sunlit foliage.

“I keep telling the commissioners they need to let me have a bloodhound,” Horton grumbled. “God knows enough tourons get lost every year to justify the cost.”

Burke and Underwood maintained a discreet silence. Most tourists who wandered off the hiking trails usually wandered right back on again, and whenever someone did stay lost, as happened once or twice a season, they could always borrow a bloodhound and its handler from one of the larger neighboring counties. Cheaper to compensate the helpful authority than to fund a man and dog full-time, never mind that Sheriff Horton made it clear that he felt humiliated for the honor of Lafayette County each time he had to ask somebody else to send over a dog.

“Well, the hell with it,” said Horton, as much to himself as to the others. He was sixty-three years old and he’d already decided he wasn’t going to run again. Let his successor fight with those penny-pinching commissioners. Maybe some college-educated hotshot like Underwood here could take them on, pry loose a few more dollars. He was tired of going hat in hand every year to beg for enough money to do the job properly. From here on out, he’d do his job, but bedamned if he was going to exert himself too much. They’d get what they paid for and nothing more.

It no longer fretted him that he’d never have a house like this one. He’d done all right for someone who’d barely scraped through high school. A lot better than his brother, who’d gone all the way through college—first Horton ever to get a degree. Law enforcement might not pay much, but it sure paid more than teaching math to horny, dumbass teenagers. ’Course now, if he’d been willing to bend the law the way Bobby Ashe had when he was first starting in real estate … Not that anything had ever been proved, but look at the way his kids had turned out. Apples don’t roll far from the tree, do they?

“Anybody thirsty?” asked Joyce Ashe from the doorway. She carried several bottles of water.

“Now, that’s real kind of you,” Lucius Burke said. He unscrewed the cap from the pale blue bottle and drank deeply. The others followed suit, although Horton shook his head in amazement as he first studied the label.

“Who’d ever think you could get people to pay good money for plain old water?” he asked.

Joyce grinned. “Don’t you wish it was you and me?”

Horton grinned back. For all her big house and fancy car, Joyce Ashe was okay. Hadn’t got above her raising. And she’d worked hard for everything she had. Too bad there were things money couldn’t buy, because for all the money they’d made, they might as well have dug a big hole in the front yard and dumped half of it in. That’s probably what it’d cost them in lawyers and rehab over the years. He still remembered how she’d cried the first time Bob Junior got picked up for dealing and—The walkie-talkie gave a screech.

“Yeah?”

“Sorry, Sheriff. That dark shape Carmichael saw? It was just another rock.”

Horton sighed and took a swallow of the water.

Underwood set his bottle on the dark wood railing and went back to scanning the hillside to the left of the terrace. Even though the morning had a light nip in the air, the water was cold enough to give off beads of condensation.

“Saw you talking with that substitute judge this morning,” Horton told him. “She a friend of yours?”

“Friend of a friend. Or rather girlfriend of a friend of a friend.”

“Lucky friend,” Lucius Burke said lightly.

“Sorry ’bout that,” Joyce said to him. “When I met her back in the summer, she didn’t seem to be attached to anybody.”

“She here with you last night?” asked Underwood.

“No, I just gave her a ride back to town.”

“Thought you were still seeing some lady lawyer over in Boone,” Horton said.

Burke shrugged. “Didn’t work out.”

Joyce Ashe glanced at her watch. “I need to make a few phone calls. Get anybody anything else?”

Burke and Horton shook their heads.

“Me either,” said Underwood as he lifted the bottle and drank another swallow.

A drop of condensation dripped onto his binoculars and he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe it away, then frowned. The handkerchief had a small wet spot of brownish red.

He wiped the bottom of the bottle. More staining.

“What’s that?” asked Horton.

Underwood put his nose close to the damp spot on the railing where his water bottle had sat and sniffed. “Smells like blood.”

“The hell you say!”

“Tell them to take another look right under us.”

Horton barked orders into his walkie-talkie and soon the officers converged directly below the damp place on the railing, where oaks and laurels grew thick and bushy.

They found Norman Osborne’s body halfway up a tree, folded in half over a limb.

The ground dropped off so sharply there that Horton needed to hold on to a rope to work his way down through the laurel thicket.

“Damn it all,” he said, glaring at the men who’d first worked this spot. “How many times you gotta be told to look up when you’re searching a wooded area? It ain’t enough to cover the ground. You gotta look in the fuckin’ trees, too.”

Underwood agreed, and yet, with so many limbs and trunks and the bushes that crowded all the spaces between, even knowing the body was here, the eye didn’t automatically home in on it.

Osborne hung across a limb like the first dead buck of hunting season. His head was nearly even with his feet and there was a deep laceration on the back of his head.

“Careful, Sheriff,” said Underwood. He put his hand on Horton’s arm to keep him from walking closer and pointed to the ground where ants and flies were busily feeding on the gore that had puddled on the brown leaves.

“Poor bastard must’ve bled out,” Horton said.

Underwood nodded. “Just like Ledwig.”

“Oh, shit!” said Horton as he and Lucius Burke shared a startled glance.

“Hey, now, wait just a damn minute here,” said Burke.

Underwood shrugged. “Two men going off decks? Friends? Both with head wounds?”

“Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re related,” Burke argued.

“Don’t it?” Sheriff Horton gave a cynical, seen-it-all snort. “I wanna be there when you try telling that to the Freeman kid’s lawyer.”