Knife River, page 28
“Assholes,” Griffin said.
“Where’s the chopper pilot?” I asked.
“These two are holding out for a deal before they give up his name,” Powell said. “Bridger Midland is on his way down here as we speak.”
I stepped closer to the older suspect, a florid-faced overweight man I placed in his midfifties, wearing an expensive haircut, pressed jeans, and Bally loafers. The khaki jacket he had tossed on the bunk had his name embroidered on the label of a private tailor with a Jackson, Wyoming, address.
“Pruitt Blankenship,” I said, reading the hand-stitched calligraphy. “You’re quite a ways off your home turf, pilgrim.”
“I’ll be back home in Wyoming by the end of the day.”
“Oh, I doubt that very seriously,” I said. “You’re facing a federal beef. A couple of Oregon statutes, as well. You should make plans to stick around for a bit.”
“A slap on the wrist and a few thousand in fines,” Blankenship said. “Just let me out now and save yourselves a passel of trouble.”
“A passel? My, my. That seems like a lot,” I said. “I believe I’ll take my chances though, chief. Something tells me you’ve got a room full of illegal hunting trophies at home in Wyoming, and I bet my two deputies here already called up a federal warrant to search your place. You could be looking at serious prison time, Pruitt. A passel of it.”
The man in the other cell went suddenly pale, his eyes wide as saucers. He crossed the length of his cell in three strides and hooked his fingers through the welded crossbars.
“I only do side work for this guy,” he said. “I’m—
“Save it for the DA,” I said. “Tell him all about it, and I’d be willing to bet you’ll be the one sleeping at home tonight, not Mr. Blankenship. Just tell the DA everything you know.”
I led the way back downstairs, listening to the murmur of expletives being traded between the caged inmates fading away behind us as we retreated from lockup and reentered the office. I took a seat at my desk and looked at Powell, whose expression was like that of a man who’d landed a world record blue marlin.
“How’d you catch this guy?” I asked him.
“Something you mentioned about Lily Firecloud’s husband being an amateur taxidermist. I made a few calls.”
“This is what the two of you have been cooking up the last couple days?”
“Roger that, Sheriff,” Griffin said. “But it was all Jordan. I just came along for the ride.”
“One thing: How’d you get Blankenship to drive all the way out here from Wyoming?”
“I had the taxidermist call fatso and tell him he couldn’t ship a mounted eagle through the mail, ’cause it would be a federal crime. He had to drive out here to pick it up personally.”
“What kind of crime did that jackass think killing a federally protected animal was?”
“Rich people think they know everything, Cap,” he said. “Assholes.”
I TOLD Powell to gather up his hat, coat, and gear and ride with me out to Jim Belnik’s office at the Daily Post. Fifteen minutes later, Powell was recounting the story to Big Jim’s crime reporter from his seat in a comfortable chair in the conference room, while a staff photographer snapped candid photos of my deputy’s interview. Belnik and I walked down the hall to his office while Powell was enjoying his well-deserved fifteen minutes of fame. I set the reel-to-reel deck I’d brought from the substation on Belnik’s cluttered desk and plugged it in.
“What’s this?”
“I promised you the story,” I said. “One caveat, though.”
Belnik hitched an eyebrow and leaned back in his swivel chair.
“I’m going to ask you to use some discretion here,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This is ugly stuff, Jim. These are real people. Some of them still live here in town.”
He drummed his desktop with his fingertips while he considered what I’d just said.
“What’s that quote from the John Wayne movie?” Big Jim asked. “‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend’?”
“That was from Liberty Valance,” I said. “And, yes. That’s pretty much what I’m talking about. I’ll play you the final few minutes of my interview. It’s all you’ll need. Frankly, it’s all you’ll want to hear.”
I cued the tape toward the end of the reel, to the recap of Jacob Swanson’s statement to me, but I still wasn’t prepared to hear his voice or his story again.
“Everything was fine,” Swanson said on the tape. “And then the kid had to go and get famous. Next thing I hear, they’re making a damned movie about him. I had set up a life for those two boys, sacrificed for it by erasing myself off the earth; now here it was about to blow up in my face.”
Swanson stopped talking and I could hear myself lighting a cigarette for him on the tape and handing it over to the man. I remembered he exhaled a cloud and gazed up at the ceiling, his face twisted into an expression of disgust.
“Local boy makes good,” he continued. “Comes back to town a big hero. What would you expect me to do? Everything that happened back then was dead and gone. Sleeping dogs, and all that. Now, if it all comes back to light and people start looking for me again, I’m going straight to prison, no quarter, no questions asked.”
He’d paused and taken another pull on his smoke, shook his head and looked at me with an expression of incredulity, as though his actions were the normal response of a man to his son’s unexpected success.
“Heather Lomax died with my child inside her,” Swanson admitted. The flicker of pride in his eyes had turned my stomach. “Shane knew it, too. Damn kid saw me with the girl. I told that boy I’d gut him if he ever said a word about what he’d seen, and I know he believed me. But there was no doubt Shane would talk about it once ‘Ian Swann’ started whining about their pathetic young lives all alone in Chicago without a mommy and daddy …”
The man had nearly spat as he ground out the stub of his cigarette, a man wronged and mistreated by the world. For some, an interrogation is a way of placing their sins on the altar. For this man, it was nothing more than a recitation of self-pity.
“Goddamn Shane,” Swanson said. “I told you before, Sheriff, that boy should have been put to sleep after his mother’s car accident.”
I had heard enough, but I could see Big Jim was rapt, as mortified and appalled as I was, and the tape continued to unspool as Belnik took furious notes on a yellow legal pad.
I stood and began to pace in Belnik’s office, the drone of Jacob Swann’s voice driving my mind down a path of its own. I gazed out the window into a small town spring day, where everyday people proceeded with everyday chores and routines, unknowing of the evil that might walk right past them on the sidewalk or the grocery store aisle, the wickedness being revealed in this room.
For seven years, the boy that had renamed himself Ian Swann and his brother survived on the largesse of others; busking on the streets and El stations of Chicago, keeping the rent current in the tiny room the two shared using the dwindling insurance proceeds their father’s counterfeit death had provided them.
Once Jacob Swann had been declared legally dead and the insurance money paid out, Ian and his brother lived with the self-created myth that their father had died as an act of self-sacrifice, another single-car accident, his vehicle salvaged from the river, but his body never recovered. In truth, the man’s disappearance had been driven by cowardice and paranoia. Jacob Swann believed he was in the clear from his crimes, but another part of him could never seem to let go of the looming possibility he’d be discovered; that one day his son, Shane, would reveal what he’d witnessed, and the manhunt for Heather Lomax’s killer—a rapist and sexual predator—would ensue in earnest.
Jacob Swanson had convinced himself of the need to rescue Heather Lomax from an abusive father—a mission he viewed as unfit for his fourteen-year-old son, Paul—and Jacob Swann’s psyche began to twist itself into a knot, his quest rapidly degenerating into obsession, rape, and murder.
“You got my confession right there on your tape recorder,” Jacob Swanson said as the interview wound to a close. “I told you I got the stain on me, Sheriff. Now, I’m finished talking.”
Jim Belnik’s office fell into silence as the empty tape reel continued to spin. I stepped away from the window and clicked off the machine.
“You can’t unhear that shit, can you?” Belnik said. His complexion had gone pale, and a dark ring of sweat had appeared on his collar.
“When you write your story, go easy on the hospital for fudging the time frame of Ian’s death,” I reminded him. “Whatever they did, it was because I asked them to.”
“What about the record producer?”
“Him, too. I don’t know if we would have caught Swanson if Kaanan hadn’t agreed to talk on TV.”
“So, what’s it going to be, the truth or the legend?” Big Jim asked me.
“Like always,” I said. “A little of both.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I DROPPED Jordan Powell at the substation and saw the DA, Bridger Midland, had already arrived and was speaking to the poached eagle’s taxidermist in the interview room.
“You got a call from Captain Rose,” Griffin said and handed me a pink message slip. “He says he’s got something for you on those prints I rolled on the kid at the hospital.”
I didn’t have the heart to inform Rose that his information was already superfluous, so I let him tell me that the prints had come back to a California resident named Paul Ian Swanson. He went on to tell me that this person was the musician who went by the stage name Ian Swann, though he hadn’t had it legally changed. I told him I appreciated the rush he had placed on my request, thanked him, and hung up without letting him know it was a day late and a dollar short. He’d find out soon enough on his own.
I picked up my keys and drove back to the ranch, leaving Griffin and Powell at the office with the DA and their two captives. They still had a long day of processing ahead of them.
I parked in the shade of the larch at the back of the barn and looked up at the mountains, where the white sun shone across ribbons of wildflowers blooming in the creases cut into the high slopes. I walked down the path toward the corral and saw Caleb with his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows, repairing the pump on a water trough. He looked up when he heard me come up behind him, then stood and shook a knot of green moss from his hands.
“What brings you back here at this time of day?” he asked.
“Knocking off early,” I said. “Felt the need to apologize to you for last night.”
He pushed back the rim of his Stetson and knelt down on a haunch and returned to his work on the water pump.
“You know,” he said. “I think I might’ve hit my head in my sleep last night. I don’t recall much about yesterday evening. But we got a stretch of fence that needs mending up on Amantes Camp. Want to come along and give me a hand?”
THE EVENING sun illuminated a rooster tail of fine dust from the caliche road as I was setting the table for dinner. I left the dining room and stepped outside just as a white Chevy Suburban rolled to a stop in my driveway. I waited as the driver climbed down from the cab, recognized Len Kaanan as soon as he moved into the light.
“Sorry to drop in unannounced,” he said. “But I wanted to come by in person to thank you.”
“Thank me for what?”
“For catching Ian’s killer.”
The look on his face was not exactly a smile, but it was as close as the situation allowed.
“Word travels fast,” I said.
“Someone from your local paper called me for some background on a story they’re doing on Ian. They mentioned you’d caught the man who killed him.”
“That’s a fact,” I said. “Won’t likely get out before he meets the cold lonesome.”
A cluster of jays erupted in a noisy outburst from the underbrush beyond the house. Kaanan ran a hand through his silver hair and looked like a man who had nowhere to be.
“We were about to have dinner,” I said. “Would you care to join us?”
“I believe I would like that very much, Sheriff.”
“Here at home, I’m just Ty,” I said. “Come on inside.”
Jesse and Cricket prepared a dinner of chicken and dumplings, with a side of fresh vegetables from the garden. We drank wine and spoke of Len Kaanan’s plans for the film he intended to make about Ian, an artist frozen in time; a generational anomaly whose life was at once ascendant and abbreviated, as gentle and open as he was enigmatic.
As Jesse and I cleared the table for dessert, Kaanan excused himself and went out to his truck. Cricket brought in a peach pie from the kitchen and placed it on a trivet as Kaanan returned to the table carrying a hardshell guitar case with Ian Swann’s initials embossed on the side.
“This is for you,” Kaanan said to Cricket. “Ian would want you to have it.”
Cricket knelt to the floor, tripped the locks on the case, and folded open the shell. Inside was a vintage Martin D-35 acoustic guitar resting on a bed of crimson velvet.
“This guitar was his favorite,” he said.
I expected my daughter to burst into tears, but I should have known better by now. Instead her eyes appeared to light from inside, her lips touched by a smile that looked like a new memory had sprung to life.
“He played this guitar for me once,” she said softly.
She ran her fingers along the instrument’s smooth body, laying the palm of her hand across its strings and holding it there.
“I can’t keep this,” she said. “It belongs in a museum.”
“I beg to differ, young lady,” Len Kaanan said. “Museums are for strangers. This guitar belongs wherever you are.”
THAT NIGHT I slept without dreaming.
EPILOGUE
NEW CHAUTAUQUA
IF THERE IS such a thing as mercy in this world, I hadn’t seen much of it that year, only echoes of quixotic impulses I wish I could have ignored. Even so, there was no denying that in the long and often pitiful account of human advancement, mankind has yet to tire of ignoring its own history, much less learn anything from it.
MY GENERATION was conceived and born during the Great Depression and came of age in its shadow. Its effect on our collective emotional and spiritual psyche is imprinted on our faces as clearly as a tribal tattoo. There is a distance between what we want, what we need, and what we receive in life, and in the gap is where we spend our years.
Most of all, however, mankind is fickle, most especially in its bestowal of respect or praise. Ian Swann knew the truth of this, I was certain. At first they had ignored him, then they considered him, and they finally honored him; in the end, they would likely forget him entirely, as people most usually do.
But insanity is insanity, and hard as we try to understand its origins and motivations, they escape us, and we are left to our own devices when it comes time for us to cope with the losses dealt out by the harvesters of chaos, pain, and violence. The reapers among us know no boundaries, and the victims no solace. Some are born to push the stone of Sisyphus, others experience the fates of Icarus or even Midas; nevertheless, the gods had been merciful enough to leave humankind with hope, and I have chosen to accept that tender mercy as reward enough for this life.
TWO DAYS later, the story about Jordan Powell and the fallen eagle went public and afforded the town of Meridian the opportunity to celebrate the efforts of a truly good man. That same day, Cricket extended her college spring break and elected to remain with us at the Diamond D for an extra week before heading back.
Cricket never strayed far from the ranch in that time, spending most of her days on horseback, or hiking the deer trails that crisscrossed the hills, or exploring the banks of the Knife River bend and the blue bottleflies in the bulrushes where a young eagle had been so mercilessly slain. But the creature’s short life had not been without value, for in death it had revived the flagging spirit of my young deputy, and it perhaps even provided blood atonement and the restoration of hope for an entire town. The workings of fate are unpredictable at best, its origins and outcomes operating well beyond my pay grade.
That afternoon, Cricket found me in my ranch office, happy mischief in her shimmering blue eyes.
“I saw the flies hatching up on the Knife,” she said. “Want to come fishing with me?”
I folded away the ledgers I had been studying and slid them into my desk drawer. I laced my fingers behind my head and narrowed my eyes at her.
“Do we have to talk?” I asked.
“Nope,” she answered, grinning.
“I’ll get my stuff and meet you at the truck.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere gratitude to two great friends who provided me with some invaluable insight and background for this book. The first is my author pal, Bruce Robert Coffin, whose expertise with police protocols is profoundly appreciated; Bruce is also hell of a gifted (award-winning) author. Secondly, another great author buddy, Rich Zahradnik, who helped me understand some of the finer intricacies of the newspaper profession. Rich is a Shamus Award winner and fantastic author. Thank you both for your expertise and your generosity with your time. I don’t know why these guys let me hang out with them.
As always, to my family, for their endless supply of enthusiasm, love, and encouragement. Christina, to whom this book is as lovingly dedicated as I am, and to Allegra, Britton, Christan, Nick, Ashton, Kheler, Liam and Declynn.… Aloha pau ole!
