SAFELY BURIED Chapter 8: Blind Horse Hollow

“You working too hard, Phil?”

“That must be it.”

His office had two windows, beige walls, and an incessant low hum. His desk was covered with neat piles of paperwork. The only thing that seemed out of place was the big oak desk itself. It was the same one he had used in the courthouse when he was auditor and clerk. Black singe marks along the edge showed where his cigarettes had burned grooves in the wood before he quit smoking.

“Have you found my hitchhiker yet?” I asked.

“Not that I know of,” he said, “but let’s get your fingers dirty. Then you can ask me some more questions I can’t answer.”

He led me down the hall and told a female deputy to take my prints. She was a new hire, and he hung around to watch her work. I asked her if it was true that no two persons have identical fingerprints.

Without looking up, she replied, “I suppose we’d have to fingerprint everybody in the world to know for sure, but it’s not likely that two people with the same prints would show up at the same crime scene.”

I glanced at Carl to show I was impressed.

He told her, “As soon as you’re finished, shoot those over to Lieutenant Bakery at the state-police post in Versailles.” The name of the town had lost its French pronunciation over the past few centuries. It was now “Versales.”

Carl disappeared while I was washing my hands. I tracked him back to his office to find out if there were any developments in the case.

“I haven’t heard of anything,” he told me, “but you probably ought to talk to Lieutenant Bakery.”

“Will he be here today?”

“I don’t know. I expect he will.”

“Any sign of Paula Henry yet?”

“I haven’t heard of any.”

I told him I’d had a funny feeling she was watching me when I was out at the Garth house yesterday.

“Maybe she was,” he said. “Or maybe it was my deputy.”

“The police were gone.”

“Travis wasn’t.”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

Carl leaned back in his wooden swivel chair and put his hands behind his head. “That was the general idea.”

“He must have been parked in the cornfield then.”

“Could be.”

I got up to leave.

“You got some good pictures in the paper, Phil,” he said. “Everybody at Mackey’s was talking about the murders this morning. It looked like a tent city the way the papers were poking up over the tables.”

“I hope Edward saw it.”

“I should have ate breakfast at home. I got hit with the same questions over and over.”

“You should have referred them to Lieutenant Bakery.”

I went back to the Gleaner and held a quick meeting with my staff. Then I had a little talk with our new sportswriter. She was covered up with work because the sports editor had just gone on vacation. I told her I’d help her as much as I could. She was just a few months out of J-school, and she looked hot and stressed. I was afraid she might quit. She knew how to write grammatical sentences, and I didn’t want to lose her.

After the meeting I got myself a cup of coffee in the lounge and went back to my keyboard. It was already after twelve, so I decided to skip lunch. While I was batting out a wrapup of Thursday night’s action in the Church Softball League, the phone rang and I heard a voice I had not heard in years:

“How’s it goin’, Phil? This is Chuck Martin.”

Martin had held the sheriff’s office for one four-year term. He had lost his reelection bid to Carl Eggemann in 2006. A burly, muscular man with wavy gray-white hair, he appeared to be far better equipped—physically—to be sheriff than Eggemann did; however, as Carl had enjoyed pointing out during the campaign, the sheriff’s office was an administrative position, not a job for a street brawler. Martin had made another run for sheriff this year, but his campaign came to a screeching halt when he finished third in the Republican primary in May.

We got the pleasantries out of the way, and then Martin said, “I read your story about the two people that were murdered, and it set me to thinking. That house where you found them two bodies—if I’m not mistaken, that’s the same place where we found a pretty good-sized crop of marijuana growing back when I was in the sheriff’s department.”

“Tell me more,” I said.

He snickered smugly. “It was a little before your time, but there was a story about it in the paper. We found it growing in a cornfield, in between the rows of corn. The field was full of it. We pulled it out and had a real blaze.” He laughed, remembering. “I’m surprised none of the boys got high.”

When Chuck Martin was sheriff, we had a lot of stories in the paper about marijuana plants being chopped down and burned. “When was this, Chuck?” I said.

“Well now, let me think. . . .”

I pictured him rubbing his chin and pretending to be trying to recall something he already knew.

“If I remember rightly,” he went on, “it was eleven years ago this summer. You can look it up. There was a real nice picture in the paper, right there on page one.”

“Are you thinking there’s some connection with these murders?”

“I can’t say that, Phil. Hell, how would I know? I haven’t been sheriff these past two years.” He chuckled in a self-deprecating way, but underneath lay contempt for his successor. “No, the people who were killed—Mr. and Mrs. Garth—they weren’t living here then, so I don’t see how there could be a connection. I just thought I’d mention it to you, in case you might like to remind people what happened out there. Some of your readers might be interested.”

“You said it was eleven years ago. You weren’t sheriff then, were you?”

“No. I was first deputy.”

“I see. All right. I’ll look up the article, Chuck. Thanks for calling.”

“That’s all right, Phil. Keep up the good work.”

His last remark was just to butter me up. He was probably planning to run for sheriff again. This could be the start of his next campaign—reminding people he was tough on crime.

I hacked out the rest of the sports stuff as fast as I could, and then I took several reels of microfilm out of the vault. We had an old mechanical reader in an alcove off the main office, so I sat there and cranked through back issues of the Gleaner. After ten or fifteen minutes I found the article. Under a two-deck headline, “County Police Harvest Marijuana Crop in Blind Horse Hollow,” a large photo showed four deputies gawking at the camera in front of a pile of weed going up in smoke. One of them was Chuck Martin. In the distance was the house where the Garths had lived.

Blind Horse Hollow. I had never heard the name till now. Damn, I should have asked Glenn Neidig what the place was called.

The article said the marijuana had an estimated street value of $50,000. The plants had been found growing on a farm owned by Mrs. Esther Dubbs of Brickton. The eighty-one-year-old woman was described as “visibly shaken” when police told her that marijuana had been discovered in her cornfield. “She denied any knowledge of the plants,” the story said. “She told police that ever since her husband died in 1995, she has been renting her cropland to another farmer, Clyde Cooper, Brickton Rt. 1.” According to the story, Cooper also claimed to know nothing about the illegal plants and was not a suspect in the case. The article concluded, “The sheriff said he believes someone surreptitiously planted the marijuana between the corn rows and was planning to harvest it when it was fully grown.”

It did not sound like the best police work or the best newspaper story. Why hadn’t the police staked out the cornfield to catch the pot growers when they would return for their weed? I knew what the answer would have been: the tightfisted county council would not appropriate the funds to hire the number of deputies needed to run the sheriff’s department the way it ought to be run. And even if they had caught the druggies, the county prosecutor would have plea-bargained the case down to a slap on the wrist. Such attacks helped get Martin elected sheriff in 2002.

The marijuana story gave me an idea. I went across the street to the county surveyor’s office in the basement of the courthouse and bought a copy of the plat map of Blind Horse Hollow. Then I went up to the auditor’s office to get the names of the current property owners there. It turned out that Glenn Neidig owned 40 acres, Jacqueline Grapevine owned 10, Clyde Cooper owned 86, someone named Walter Boofey owned 23, and Esther Dubbs owned more than 1,100. The rest of the hollow and most of the knobs were part of the Meridian County State Forest, which belonged to the state of Indiana.

The interesting thing was that Boofey’s property included the Garth house. The Garths themselves had owned nothing in Blind Horse Hollow. They must have been renters.

I wondered if Detective Lieutenant Bakery had also discovered this. Most likely he had, but if not, I could enlighten him. I went back to the office and gave him a call, but he was not at his desk. I left a message for him to call me back.