Stony Mesa Sagas. Chip Ward

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       Chapter 3

      Bo Hineyman’s ranch hand, LaVerl Woody, found the body. It was flopped across a smashed glass table that held a diorama of a trout in a brook underneath a shimmering surface of blue-green glass. Bo bought it for ten thousand dollars in an art gallery in Santa Fe. The stuffed trout, suddenly free from its glass enclosure, stared blankly at Hineyman’s finely-tooled lizard skin cowboy boot, which was pointed at its face.

      The heads of a dozen dead beasts, including antelope, elk, cougars, deer, moose, and bison stared down from the wall at what was surely a classic crime scene. Bo Hineyman himself simply stared at the ceiling. His face was purple but there were no wounds on his body to indicate a struggle. But the overturned chairs, tipped lamps, and paintings tilted at odd angles testified to a violent struggle. The sheriff concluded Hineyman had been strangled but sent the body off to be autopsied just to be certain.

      The list of Bo’s potential enemies included just about anyone who worked for him or had encountered him, even briefly. The sheriff had two deputies and a dozen volunteers, mostly men with four-wheel-drive trucks who could help search for and rescue tourists who got lost on the county’s hundreds of miles of dirt roads. Sheriff Dunk Taylor had never investigated a murder but knew it would be more demanding than his small and inexperienced team could handle.

      The sheriff rarely ventured far from the pillar of his own perspective. He looked around and concluded there were good people and bad. Bad people rarely turned good but good people sometimes turned bad. Either way, people who commit crimes do so foolishly and recklessly. They make mistakes. Find the mistakes and you catch them. But fine-tuned forensic work and lab costs were more than Boon County could afford. It was easier to look first at motives so he could cut to the chase and avoid all that painstaking and expensive analysis. Sometimes it just wasn’t needed.

      Otis was the obvious suspect. Everyone knew he hated Bo. Otis was a nice guy but ever since he made a solemn vow to his mother to give up drinking, the man could be pretty ornery. Maybe he just lost control. The sheriff had seen otherwise good people do regrettable things when they lost their tempers. Or when they were drunk.

      An hour after he was notified of Hineyman’s demise and given a rundown on the crashed-up condition of the Hineyman house, Sheriff Taylor knocked on Otis’s front door. He wasted no time in case Otis had indeed gone nuts and was still a danger to the community that included his very own family, friends, and neighbors. As a precaution he asked his deputies, Eldon Pratt and Lamar Hanks, to stand behind him with their hands on their holstered weapons. “Don’t draw it unless I say so,” he told them. He was worried they might accidentally shoot him in the back and regretted his refusal to send them to the police training academy. The budget wouldn’t support that, and besides, the kind of crimes that happened in Boon County were pretty minor and didn’t require expensive training that Eldon and Lamar probably couldn’t pass anyhow. The job of deputy in Boon County was an entry level position. If you were good, you left for some place where they paid higher wages and had a better benefit package. It was no use investing in a guy who might leave as soon as he upgraded his resume.

      The sheriff knocked and knocked. Otis finally appeared, his comb-over undone in wisps above a week’s worth of whiskers. Otis wore stained sweat pants and a sleeveless t-shirt. He looked awful and didn’t smell much better. Dunk Taylor was greatly relieved to see he was non-frothing, even docile. Temporarily anyway.

      “Otis, where were you last night?” the sheriff asked.

      “Camping.”

      “Where?”

      “Spider Woman Mesa.”

      “When did you get back?”

      “I don’t know, what time is it? Maybe four hours ago. I was asleep when you knocked.”

      “Who was with you?”

      “‘I was by myself, why?”

      “What were you doing out there alone?”

      “I was screwing my horse and finding a cure for cancer. What the fuck, Dunk? Is there a problem?”

      “When was the last time you saw Bo Hineyman?”

      “I try not to see that bastard. It’s bad for my blood pressure. When was the last time you saw him, Dunk?”

      “This morning at his ranch. He was sprawled out on a coffee table in his living room staring at the ceiling. He’s dead, Otis. Dead.”

      Otis paused while he tried to process what the sheriff was saying. Then it dawned on him. “Oh shit, Dunk! You don’t think that I . . . oh shit!”

      It was soon clear that the mayor had no alibi. The company he kept on his camping trip was Jim Beam and Johnny Walker. He’d spent the previous two days falling off the wagon in an epic way. He was not the kind to drink alone but he had promised his mom, Ida May Dooley, to stop drinking after he ran over her favorite cat with his ATV, plowed through her flower bed, and passed out just as three members of the church choir arrived at Ida May’s for practice. Otis did not want anyone to know he was getting smashed, especially Ida May. The Fourth of July business with Bo had pushed him over the edge.

      On his way back from Spider Woman Mesa he promised himself that was the last time. He had worried that his lapse would have some bad consequence and now here it was.

      “Shit!”