Die Like an Eagle (33 page)

“Just getting in there's going to be murder.”

“More like suicide,” I said. “I don't like the look of those dogs.”

“Now, now,” she said. “Just because they seem to have some pit bull in their ancestry, that doesn't mean they're vicious.”

“I don't care what their ancestry is,” I said. “I'm talking about their behavior. I wouldn't climb into a yard with a cocker spaniel who was acting like that.”

Just to demonstrate, I reached out and rattled the fence a little, pulling my hand back quickly as both dogs hurled themselves at the spot where my fingers had been.

“So how did you get in there before?”

“I didn't,” I said. “I looked at the outside and realized it was pretty foolish to try. And that was before seeing the dogs in action.”

“Some detective you are.”

“What's so all-fired urgent all of a sudden about getting the tracking device back?” I asked.

“I figured it wasn't important when all it did was confirm his alibi for Shep's murder,” Caroline said. “But when I heard about the hit-and-run I got them to run the data from the tracker for that time period. He was there.”

“At the scene of Callie's accident?”

“Yes,” Caroline said. “I went out there with another tracking device to be sure. He stopped right where her accident was—some accident!—stayed twenty minutes, then came back here. We need to get that device.”

“What we need to do is tell the chief about the device,” I said. “If we go in and find it, we might just destroy any value it has as evidence. It would be our word against his that he ever had it. Make the call. Get Festus involved.”

She continued staring at Biff's ramshackle building for what seemed like a couple of hours. Finally she sighed and looked down at her shoes.

“Fine,” she said. “I'll call Festus when I get home.”

“Let's call him now.”

She grimaced, but she didn't protest when I took out my phone, dialed Festus, and put it on speaker.

“Meg?” Festus answered. “Something wrong?”

“Caroline Willner's ready to tell the chief about the tracking devices she planted on Biff,” I said. “Can you arrange to have that happen as soon as possible?”

“I'll make the call now,” he said. “Have her plan to meet me at the police station at eight a.m. tomorrow. If the chief wants to talk tonight, I'll call her.”

“That work for you?” I said to Caroline.

She rolled her eyes and nodded.

“Meg?” Festus sounded impatient.

“She's nodding,” I said. “She'll be there.”

And so would I, to make sure she didn't weasel out. I wished Festus a good night and signed off. Caroline was still scowling at Biff's fence.

“Go home and get some rest,” I said.

She didn't answer.

“Or if you're not in the mood to sleep, talk to the zoo security people and have them start gathering up all the data on where Biff's been over the last few days.”

“Might as well,” she said. “No sense standing around here all night.” She stomped back to her car, got in, and took off, going way too fast for the rugged, potholed road.

I took a long look around. The place was even creepier by night. I couldn't get over the notion that eyes were watching me. Eyes other than the dogs'. I went back to my car and got in, calmly and deliberately, so at least any hidden human eyes wouldn't know how spooked I was.

And I breathed a sigh of relief when I got back to the Clay Swamp Road.

I was almost back at the main road to our house when Michael called.

“Are you still delivering Eagles?” he asked.

“I finished that about half an hour ago,” I said. “I stopped to help Caroline with something. Fill you in when I get there.”

“See you soon then.”

“Soon,” I echoed. “I just have one more stop on the way.”

“Be careful,” he said. “They're still looking for Biff.”

“I will be.”

I didn't tell Michael where my planned stop was because I was afraid he'd try to talk me out of dropping by the ball field, even though I had no intention of getting out of the car unless there was someone else nearby. Someone trustworthy. And preferably several trustworthy someones. I wasn't that keen myself on visiting the field, but as the new acting league president, I needed to know how close it was to being ready for tomorrow morning's games. And however much we might associate the ball field with Biff, given all the activity that had been going on there this afternoon and evening, wasn't it really the last place in the county he'd be? Odds were he was miles away by now. So however creeped out I was at going to the ball field by night, I wanted to get over the feeling. It wasn't Biff's field, dammit—it was
our
field. Our field, for which I was responsible. Was I going to let Biff stand between me and my responsibility?

Chill, I told myself. The Shiffleys were probably still there in force. If they weren't, I could fulfill my responsibilities from the safety of my car.

And as I approached the field, it looked as if I'd be staying in the car. I should have seen the glow of the big work lights about the time I turned off the main road, but the skies were inky black. I pulled into the freshly graveled lot and parked right behind home plate, where I could look out over the field.

The completely and utterly dark field. With my headlights on, I couldn't see a thing for the glare reflected back by the fog and mists, and with the headlights out it was like sticking a pillowcase over my head.

“Damn Biff, anyway,” I muttered. At any other time I wouldn't have felt the least bit nervous about getting out of my car to inspect the field. But until they caught Biff … No.

Maybe if I let my eyes adjust for a minute or two I could see something from here. I fished under the seat, pulled out my binoculars, and trained them on the field. They didn't help much. Instead of utter darkness I saw a few blurry, utterly dark shapes against the almost-as-dark background.

“I give up,” I muttered.

I pulled out my cell phone and called Randall.

“There's no one here at the field,” I said. “Is everything ready for tomorrow?”

“As ready as we can get it,” Randall said. “We've gone over the whole field with wet/dry vacs and used a ton of that infield drying compound. Now we just need to keep our fingers crossed that we don't get any more rain. The boys and I will be going out there in the morning to run the wet/dry vacs again and pile on more drying compound if it's needed, but I don't think there's anything more we can do tonight. How does it look to you?”

“It looks dark,” I said. “I could probably figure out how to turn on those portable lights to get a better look, but that would require getting out of the car and wandering around by myself in the dark. And quite apart from the fact that we've had enough rain to turn any really low-lying places into quicksand, there's still a murderer on the loose.”

“A murderer who's looking a whole lot more like Biff every minute,” Randall said. “Because even if he hired someone to do the actual deed, which sounds more and more plausible, that still makes him a murderer. Did you hear that after reading those files Mrs. Brown brought in the chief put out a statewide BOLO on Biff?”

“Then if they haven't found him by now it probably means Biff's long gone from here,” I said. “But just in case he isn't, instead of stumbling around a pitch-black baseball field at well past midnight I'm going to go home to get some sleep.”

“Probably wise,” Randall said. “Even if Biff's long gone, the chief's still keeping an eye on the seventy jillion people who had it in for Biff and might have offed Shep by mistake. They're all still in town. Don't worry about the field. It'll be as perfect as we can make it. I'll be there at five in the morning to make sure of that.”

“A whole five hours from now,” I said. “My apologies for waking you.”

“Wasn't sleeping anyway,” he said. “Been lying in bed listening to the police band radio, hoping to hear that they've caught Biff. Unfortunately it's been a quiet night. See you in the a.m.”

“Later in the a.m.,” I added, and we both chuckled before signing off.

I put away my binoculars and started the car. But as I was backing out of my parking space my headlights fell on something—the Brown porta-potty, standing in solitary splendor at the far end of the field, a location that would have been massively inconvenient if anyone had actually wanted to use it. And the words
Brown stinks!
were still scrawled across the door, in slightly luminescent paint. If I were Biff, I would certainly have cleaned that off before hauling the new porta-potty over. And—

Wait a minute. The porta-potty with
Brown stinks!
scrawled on it was the one that had been here at practice Thursday night. And so it should have been the one in which I found Shep's body Friday morning—the one that was now gracing the locked lot at the police station. Unless someone had defaced more than one of Biff's porta-potties in an identical fashion.

I drove over as close as I could to the porta-potty and turned the car off, leaving the headlights on and pointed at the porta-potty. I pulled out my phone, turned it on, and began flipping through the photos I'd taken Thursday night and Friday morning. Surely some of them would show the porta-potty, if only in the background. Then again, I'd probably been doing my best to take my shots against pretty backgrounds, like the woods that surrounded the field. Aha! Here was one from Thursday evening of Josh, Jamie, and Adam with their arms around each other—and the porta-potty in the background. I used the phone's zoom feature and confirmed that the words
Brown stinks!
were clearly visible on the side. But what about Friday morning? I flipped on through my photos. Of course, Horace would have taken dozens of photos of the porta-potty from every conceivable angle, so what I really should do was let the chief know about this. But it would be nice to have confirmation that I wasn't imagining things—after all, it was possible that someone with a grudge against Biff went around scrawling graffiti on all his porta-potties, and maybe even his trucks and tractors to boot. Although I didn't remember seeing any similar graffiti at his scrapyard. And it was hard to imagine that the unknown graffiti artist always made that little extra line at the top of the second
S,
as if he'd started out to write “stinkz” and then changed his mind and opted for the more conventional spelling. And—aha! My picture of Dad and Horace squatting in front of the porta-potty door with grave expressions on their faces. Enough of the porta-potty's side was visible to show that it was bare of graffiti.

“Someone swapped the porta-potties,” I muttered. “And I bet that someone is Biff.” I knew from Caroline's tracking devices that after leaving our house Thursday night he'd made a brief visit to the ball field and then gone back to his scrapyard and, supposedly, stayed there all night—which made sense if he was currently living in a room there. Vern and Aida had seen way too much of him between ten and two for him to have been over at the ball field killing someone.

But what if the murder hadn't happened at the field—but at the scrapyard? What if Biff had run into Shep there and had an argument. Perhaps he'd caught Shep in the act of copying incriminating documents like the ones Gina had delivered to the chief.

“What if he killed Shep, stuffed him in the porta-potty, and called nine-one-one to give himself an alibi.” I said it aloud to see if it sounded completely ridiculous. It didn't. It sounded like the kind of brazen thing Biff would try to get away with. He'd have to hide the blood somehow—according to Dad there would be a lot of it. But given how huge and cluttered the scrapyard was, there were plenty of things he could put over it, and Aida and Vern would be looking for a live intruder, not a crime scene. Always a risk that they'd find the body while looking for the supposed intruder, but he'd be sticking to them like glue, making sure of his alibi, so in the unlikely event one of them was about to check inside the fateful porta-potty, he could find a way to warn them off or distract them.

And at some point he'd come up with the idea of swapping the porta-potties. A crazy idea, because if anyone spotted him rattling along the back roads of the county at three or four in the morning in a truck with a porta-potty on the back, the odds were they'd remember it the next day when his own half brother's body was found in a porta-potty. But he'd gambled, and it had worked. And the tracking device in his car had stayed put because he'd hauled the porta-potty in his truck—along with Shep's Harley, no doubt, the one that had been found abandoned in the woods near the field. And he'd probably shed the jacket with the other tracking device in the pocket before tackling the strenuous job of loading and unloading the porta-potty singlehandedly.

After all, it was a
porta-
potty. How had we all forgotten that?

Maybe the chief hadn't. Maybe he'd already figured all this out and was playing it close to the vest. Maybe that was the reason he was so convinced that Biff was involved in the murder. But just in case …

I dialed the chief's number. And got his voice mail. I wasn't keen on trying to explain this whole thing to the official police answering service. I always imagined that it was waiting impatiently for me to leave a succinct, businesslike message. “Just the facts, ma'am.”

“Hi,” I said. “It's Meg. I just stumbled over something that might be an important clue to the murder. Give me a call, no matter how late.” And I rattled off my cell phone number just in case he was collecting his messages on a phone that didn't already have a few dozen messages from me in its call history.

I sat there for a few moments, hoping he'd call right back. And then told myself it was stupid.