Roger Dale had suspected that a woman who both could and would become the first female sheriff in the state was not somebody you’d want to mess around with. Now he knew for sure. She might not look much like a mountain county sheriff. All the others Fornby’d ever known were hamfisted, deep-chested good-ol’-boys so alike that they might have been produced by a cookie cutter. Louise Taylor looked more like a dignified, middle-aged English teacher. But Fornby had learned as a teen not to underestimate teachers like that, and he was not about to underestimate Louise Taylor. He agreed that the joint investigation would be on her terms.
Ten minutes later the two of them were settled into the back seat of her big, black official Ford with Davis driving them out to the scene of the murder like some kind of chauffeur.
“Know anything about the dead man yet?” Roger asked the chief deputy.
“Name’s Gregory Haynes,” Davis replied. “Driver’s license shows age thirty-six. Pictures of a wife and a couple of kids in his wallet. I called over to the bakery he was driving for in Sulphur Springs, Tennessee, and talked to the manager. He’d already been notified by one of the state troopers. He had to tell the family. I didn’t envy him none.”
“Did he know Haynes personally?” Fornby asked.
“Yeah. It ain’t a real big outfit. Everybody knows everybody.”
“Did he know any reason why anybody would want to kill him?”
“No. Said he was a heck of a nice guy. Hard worker, family man, deacon in his church, went to P.T.A., stuff like that. He said the warehouse foreman knew him better than he did, but he had sent the foreman out to make the dead man’s deliveries. Sounds kind of hard, don’t it? But life has to go on, I guess. Anyway, I figured we would catch the foreman in later, or else try to run him down over here on the route.”
Roger turned to the sheriff. “Not to be elementary, but right obviously if we could find out why somebody would want the breadman killed, we’d be a long way toward finding out who UNSUB is.”
Sheriff Taylor looked puzzled. “UNSUB?”
“Yeah,” Roger explained. “That’s who killed the breadman. UNSUB. Stands for unknown subject in FBI language. That’s your first lesson.”
As they talked, Davis piloted the big Ford along a narrow strip of asphalt that deserved its name of Blacksnake Road. For a few miles it twisted and coiled its way in and out along the face of Blue Rock Mountain. Then it ran straight out the side of a promontory of granite, and snapped back like a whip cracking. Davis slowed almost to a stop at the point of that hairpin turn. He pulled just far enough past the curve to be safe if somebody else came along, threw a portable blue light up on the dash, turned it on along with the car’s flashers, and stepped out. He led the other two back to the point of the turn.
“That’s where Haynes went off,” he told them.
The three looked straight down the face of the mountain. Far below they could see the mangled remains of the bread truck.
“Anybody done a search on the truck?” Roger Dale asked.
“Seth and Billy went over it. Didn’t find anything.”
“What exactly would they be looking for?” the sheriff asked.
“Whatever they could find,” Fornby told her. “Most of the time you don’t find nothing. But if you don’t look, you never will find nothing.”
After the fatal curve, the mountain’s face swung inward in a concave arc, then back out farther than the promontory. So the road turned back on itself across a narrow gorge. Davis pointed up the opposite face.
“Reckon the shot had to come from way up over there. You can see there ain’t nothing but rock for a good ways. He had to be up there on the park land where the laurel grows. Otherwise, even if he could have hung onto that rock and got a shot off, anybody could have seen him. It was beginning to get good light before he done the killing.”
“Pretty hard shot,” Fornby said.
Davis nodded. “I could have made it, though. You could, too. A lot of the deer hunters in the county could have.”
“It was a moving target,” Roger noted.
Davis shook his head. “Not moving hardly at all. Way that bullet went in he got him straight on as he was making the curve. It’s so sharp the bread truck would have to be hinged in the middle to make it around faster than five miles an hour.”
“It was going fast enough to crack the guard rail.”
Davis shook his head again. “Didn’t take that much speed. It was a heavy vehicle, and it set up high. Look how that old wood guard rail broke down instead of busting out. The truck just kind of fell over it. It wasn’t going very fast at all.”
Roger finally agreed. “We narrow the suspects down to good shots, then, but not to just the very best. Plus which, he had to get out through that laurel from somewhere a good ways back. He couldn’t just step on the parkway and come straight down at it. I reckon we can eliminate the aged and infirm.”
Sheriff Taylor looked skeptical. “Now that we know it was a good shot and someone at least reasonably healthy and agile, what good does that do us? We can’t very well make a list of everybody in the county who meets that description, even if we had some way of knowing that it was somebody from this county.”
Roger explained. “If we find somebody that’s a suspect that don’t meet that description, we’ll either have to eliminate them or look for an accomplice.”
As they climbed back into the car, Bud looked back at Roger. “Want to try to get out there and search the laurel?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Roger replied. “But we’ll have to drive all the way over past Scroggs Cove to hit the parkway, and then come back across it to where we can find a path down.”
Bud had another thought. “On the way,” he said, “we might as well swing over by Amon Scroggs’s store. That was supposed to have been the breadman’s first stop.”
“Let’s see if ol’ Amon can tell us anything,” Roger agreed.
A few minutes later they pulled up in front of an ancient brown wood and shingle building with two gas pumps out front and a large red-lettered sign identifying Scroggs Cove Grocery.
As they entered the little country store, a bald man in a cane-bottomed chair behind the counter rose. “Morning, Bud, Roger,” he said. He turned abruptly and busied himself with the canned goods on the shelf behind him, taking down each can, dusting it, and putting it back.
“Morning, Amon,” the deputy responded. “You know Sheriff Taylor?”
Amon glanced around.“Morning, Missus Taylor,” he said before he turned back to his busywork.
Fornby walked to a cold drink box at the back of the store and took out three sodas. Returning to the register, he laid a bill on the counter. This forced Scroggs to turn and face him.
“Reckon you heard about the breadman,” the agent said.
Scroggs nodded. “I heard.”
“Know him?” Fornby asked.
“I got bread from that bakery every Tuesday and Friday.” Amon replied.
“So you knew Gregory Haynes?”
“Yeah, I knew him.”
“How long?” Fornby asked.
The storekeeper shrugged. “Ten years. Twelve maybe.”
“Know any reason why anybody would want to kill him?”
“No.” The storekeeper snapped out the word and turned back to his shelves.
Davis picked up three packs of cheese crackers and threw them on the counter to turn the storekeeper from his cans again. But he got no more out of Scroggs than Fornby had. The three law officers went back out to the car.