Bone Maker: Will Finch Mystery Thriller Series Book 1 Page 4

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  Finch pulled the Ford Tempo to the side of the road and turned to the boy. “Is this about where it happened?”

  “I think so.” Ben Argyle tugged the earbuds from his ears and turned his attention to the gravel road ahead. He paused a moment to consider his surroundings. “The Mercedes was maybe twenty feet ahead and the bear itself another fifty yards or so.”

  The drive wasn’t quite as arduous as Finch had anticipated. However, the time they saved driving up the switchbacks through the forests below Saddle Mountain was lost in the hour-long agreement he had to negotiate with Ben’s father in the cafeteria at Astoria High School. Since Ethan Argyle didn’t know Finch from Charles Manson, Finch asked Wally Gimbel to call Ethan immediately. Gimbel quickly verified his reporter’s credentials and explained the urgent need to drive to the exact spot where Toeplitz had died. To further calm Argyle’s anxiety, Gimbel faxed a testimonial from Lou Levine, Parson Media’s attorney, to the high school. Finch also pledged to deliver the boy to his front door by seven o’clock so that he could eat dinner and bike over to his weekly scout meeting. Furthermore, Finch agreed to pay Ben a guide fee of fifty dollars. But what finally cinched the deal was Ben himself and the notion that two or three hours spent leading Finch through the gravel roads could count as his community service grad requirements.

  “That’d seal it, Dad. I’d be done for the year,” he’d said as if he’d found a dodge out of a long-dreaded school assignment.

  Ethan narrowed his eyes, nodded and shook Finch’s hand. “Okay.”

  Finch set the handbrake on the car, opened the door and grabbed his courier bag from the backseat and slung it over his shoulder.

  “All right. Let’s have a look,” he said and he stood for a moment to take in the surroundings. The crispness of the air hit him immediately. At once he felt braced with a sense of renewed fitness, yet utterly lost in the wilderness. Perched beside the car, he tilted his head toward the sun — at least toward where he figured the sun ought to be — somewhere above the blankets of clouds crawling eastward overhead.

  “I didn’t think it was supposed to rain that much way up here,” he called into the car. When Ben failed to respond Finch walked to the passenger door and opened it for the boy. “Can you walk me through it?”

  “I’ll try.” He curled his lips doubtfully and stepped beside Finch. Ben was a few inches taller than Finch, and like a lot of seventeen-year-olds, lean and unsteady. He looked as if he might teeter over at any moment.

  “We came off that hill,” he said and pointed to the ridge where his father had led them down to the road. Then he swung back to the gravel track and pointed with his left hand. “We saw the Mercedes right there.”

  “All right.” Finch walked forward but the boy failed to keep up.

  Finch had worried about this. While Ben had stowed his books in his school locker, the father revealed that his son might be too shaken to do anything more than point a way through the maze of switchbacks. The sight of Toeplitz’s corpse “shook him badly,” he’d said, but conceded that if Ben “could shoot a black bear when I’d missed my shot, then he can make his own decision about guiding you up there.” True enough, during the drive along the mountain roads, Ben barely moved except to hand-signal left and right through the labyrinth that climbed ever higher.

  “So where were you when you first sensed something was wrong?” Finch spoke in a very low tone and gently waved a hand, a gesture to bring Ben beside him.

  Ben moved forward until they were about five feet from where the Mercedes might have stood. Then he moved a little to the left. “We could see the window was wide open. And the bear nuzzling something another fifty yards ahead.”

  Finch walked forward to where the passenger door would have been. “So did you look inside?” He leaned forward as though he could be peering into the SUV.

  Ben pressed his lips together. “For just a second. Mostly it was Dad who checked it out.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we saw the bear making moves.”

  “Just up there?”

  “Yeah. That’s where we shot at him. I was standing right here.”

  Finch watched as Ben anchored his feet in the ground. Clearly he was re-living the worst memories of the episode.

  “Then your father took a shot and you took another. One shot each, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you hit his foot, you think. His right front paw?” Finch had already heard the story from Ethan Argyle, but he wanted Ben to confirm the details.

  He nodded. “I know I hit him,” he managed to say.

  Finch squinted and tried to imagine the scene. But in the gray air all he could make out was the low scrub brush on the side of the gravel road and the still hills rising from the ravine. Very little suggested life of any kind, let alone death and dismemberment.

  “Let’s have a look,” Finch said, sensing the boy’s unsteady wavering. Perhaps he should simply move forward a step at a time.

  “Sir, I don’t think — ”

  “Just up here, you say.” Finch forced a smile to his lips. Easy, steady, calm, he told himself. Just take the boy at his own pace.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to wait in the car.” He turned and then added, “You don’t have to pay me if you don’t want.”

  “All right.” Finch nodded and released a heavy sigh. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay you. I appreciate you getting me up here, Ben. Good job.” As he headed up the road he heard the car door close and the locks click into place.

  Finch soon found the spot where the bear had mauled and devoured Toeplitz. The dried mud captured a record of events. He pulled his phone from his pocket and took a three-sixty video of the entire scene, turning slowly on the spot. He reviewed the video to confirm that it provided a clear context of the scene, and then took a series of single-image shots. The gravel had been swept aside and a dark smear blotted the edge of the road. He sat on his haunches, patted the stained earth with the palm of his hand, held it to his nose and inhaled. Blood? There were very few other tracks visible in the grade and he could see the heavy tire imprint from the ambulance that had wound its way up here, turned, backed in and wheeled about. He heard a dry rattle as a light wind picked through some of the scrub. Beside him a trail of broken stems and branches led down the ravine. He took several more pictures, stood and walked a few feet along the ridge where the wounded bear must have tumbled downwards.

  He walked back to where the Mercedes had been parked and studied the terrain. He could see a second set of heavy prints embedded in the road. Likely the tracks from the Mercedes shackled to Wriggly’s tow truck as they moved. His eyes found a pattern: forward, back, wheel around and exit. After capturing a few more images on the phone, Finch walked from the roadside into the tall weeds. There, laying at his feet gleamed a piece of brass. The shell casing from a spent round. He drew a latex glove from his bag, yanked it over his right hand and examined the brass carefully. He took three steps backward and there, smiling brightly at him, sat a second brass bullet shell. Two of them, likely from the Argyles’ rifles. He placed the brass in a ziploc baggie that he carried for just such occasions and slipped it into his courier bag. Feeling a renewed vigor, he decided to scour the area by walking in a spiral pattern that widened from where the Mercedes had been parked over to the weeds on both sides of the road.

  When he determined that no more information could be recovered from the site, he pulled the rubber glove from his hand, unlocked the car, dropped his courier bag in the rear footwell of the Tempo, sat in the driver’s seat and stared through the window. Only one question remained unanswered: what had become of the bear? Beside him Ben appeared to sleep, his head buried in the furrows of his hoodie, pressed against the passenger window. Without waking the boy, Finch started the engine and began the drive back to Astoria.

  Once he’d found the way to the highway, far from the remote site of primitive horror, he knew the boy would come
around. That’s when he’d ask him about the bear, allow Ben to unfold the story from a hunter’s perspective, express his awe of the powerful forces he’d had to contend with: five or six hundred pounds of untamed, malevolent fury swerving toward him. Finch would ask him to tell every hunter’s favorite story. About the one that got away.

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  After they emerged from the hills and re-entered the cell phone grid, two text messages pinged into Finch’s phone. One from Fiona Page, the other from Bethany Hutt. Both texts demanded the same thing: “Call me.”

  Before he called anyone, Finch decided to take Ben to the local McDonald’s, buy him a burger and milkshake and then drop him off at his home. Finch had Ben call his father to assure him that he wouldn’t have to rush his son through dinner so that he could make it to the scout hall on time.

  “Are you an Eagle scout?” Finch asked as they settled into the plastic booth with their food trays.

  “Since last month.” He took a bite out of his Quarter Pounder BLT and chewed it in silence.

  Finch nodded and sipped his Coke and picked at some fries. He set aside the Filet-O-Fish he’d bought, thinking he’d save it for later. “Me, too,” he said and thought back to his own adolescence. Scouts was an anchor for him during a turbulent period in his life. “In Montreal. My mother was French-Canadian, my dad was from New Jersey. So in Canada, Eagle scouts are called Queen scouts.”

  “Same in England,” he muttered between chews. “It’s from Lord Baden-Powell. He started scouts.”

  “That’s right.” Finch nodded to acknowledge this bit of arcane history. “Then when I was your age, we moved back to New Jersey. The scouting skills were useful, too. I can’t count the number of times I used them when I was in Iraq.”

  “You were in the army?”

  “Public Affairs specialist,” he said. His standard cover story.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s like journalism, except in reverse.”

  “What?”

  “Instead of the news, you report the messages the military wants everyone to hear.” Finch shook his head to allay any more questions. Then he decided to add, “I met the President through that job. I actually shook his hand.”

  The boy stopped his near-compulsive eating. “Really?”

  Finch nodded and then stopped himself. He wasn’t fond of rose-colored autobiography. His four years in public affairs helped him enter and then graduate from Berkeley’s journalism school. From there he talked his way into a job as a copy editor at the San Francisco Post. Only then did he feel like he’d landed on his feet. Just in time to secure a front-row seat where he could witness the slow-motion implosion of the print journalism world.

  When Ben finished the burger Finch leaned forward slightly. “Hey, I was wondering. What kind of rifles were you and your dad using up there?”

  Ben drew a long pull on the milkshake and nodded. “Dad has two Winchester 70s. Inherited from Mom’s side of the family.”

  Those would account for the brass, Finch thought. “You didn’t have any semi-automatics?” If Gruman was right and the Argyles were preppers or survivalists, they’d certainly be warehousing something like a semi-automatic Bushmaster 15 — the weapon of choice for mass murder across the nation.

  “Dad keeps them locked up. But when we’re stalking deer, we just use the lever-action rifles. Dad says one shot trains you to focus.”

  Deer stalkers. He smiled and thought of Sherlock Holmes’s cap. “Old school, huh?”

  Ben nodded and finished his milkshake, wiped his lips with a paper napkin and leaned against the bench. “Thanks,” he said and smiled.

  When they reached Ben’s home, Will cut the ignition and studied the modest bungalow. “Look, Ben, I appreciate all your help today. I really do. If you can think of anything having to do with that bear or Mr. Toeplitz, I’d appreciate it if you’d contact me. I’m staying at the Prest.” He handed him a business card. “I just want the story I’m writing to have all the facts. It’s about telling the truth. Scouts’ honor.” He raised the three-finger salute and forced a light laugh through his lips.

  They walked to the front porch and Ben’s father swung the door open. Either he’d just noticed the car pull up or he’d been waiting. The look on his face revealed that he expected some kind of report. Natural for a school teacher, Finch guessed.

  “Ben did a fine job,” he said as they stood at the front door. “We didn’t take a single wrong turn the whole time, did we Ben?”

  He nodded and turned to face his father. “He met the president,” he said. “And shook his hand.”

  “Really?” Ethan Argyle didn’t seem impressed.

  Finch shrugged it off. “I fed him at McDonalds,” he said as he handed Ben sixty dollars. “There’s a little extra for putting up with all my questions.” He traded a fist-bump with him, then the boy slipped past his father and disappeared into the dark hallway. Finch realized there were no lights on anywhere in the house. Must be a survivalist’s sense of energy conservation. “By the way,” he continued and held Argyle’s eyes, “have you heard any news about that bear?”

  “Nothing,” he said and leaned heavily against the doorframe. “Ben nailed him right through the front paw so he’s in no shape to kill on his own anymore. At some point, he’ll nose around somebody’s cabin looking for an easy meal. That’s when we’ll hear about it.”

  “I guess. Have you ever come across a situation like this with a bear? Hauling a man from his car?”

  “No. But he could be sick. Rabies, maybe.” He narrowed his eyes. “Besides, bears are totally unpredictable. Despite their size, they’re not street smart, if you know what I mean.”

  Finch shook his head, no.

  “Around humans. Unlike coyotes or raccoons, say, they haven’t figured how to live with people.” He held a fist to his mouth, coughed, and looked into the hallway.

  Finch sensed that Ethan had little time for any more conversation. “I’m sure you’re busy,” he said. “Thanks for loaning me your son. He’s a good kid.”

  Argyle smiled and eased himself away from the door frame. “Let me know if I can do anything more,” he said and took a step into his house.

  “Thanks.” Finch paused. “By the way, can I give you my cell number?” He handed him a business card. “Whenever he emerges, I really would like to know what the heck became of that bear.” His eyebrows notched with an expression of anticipation. He knew that whoever bagged the bear would contact Argyle, probably within a few hours.

  Ethan Argyle took the card and studied it a moment. “Sure, I’ll call you.”

  “Thanks again, Mr. Argyle.” Finch departed with another scout salute, middle three fingers to the side of his brow, and climbed back into his car.

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  Will Finch sat in the Ford Tempo at the junction just off Navy Pipeline Road and chewed idly on his Filet-O-Fish. He didn’t like to think about the number of hours he’d loitered in various cars to track down a story. During his first year on the job, he’d wait for one source or another, someone like Senator Franklin Whitelaw, to leave his home, or office, or girlfriend’s apartment. Then Finch would stride up the sidewalk and buttonhole the unsuspecting quarry for a quote that he could use to frame an article. The tactic, known as “ambush journalism,” worked best when you had fresh allegations of scandal in a breaking story, especially when a denial could be more damning than a confession. You’d prepare two questions and fire both barrels at once: “Senator, have you heard that your girlfriend says you’re not the father of her baby? What does your wife have to say?”

  Disgusted by such tactics, he soon moved on to more credible journalism. Nonetheless, almost every story required patience and an ability to play the waiting game. This time, however, Will wasn’t waiting for a source to appear. He was waiting for one to disappear. When he saw Bob Wriggly’s rusting Ford Econoline slip past him and roll toward town, he scrunched the last of his fish burger in the paper wrapper and tossed it into t
he passenger footwell.

  “Take your time, Bob,” he whispered and he steered the Escort up the road, through the open gate and into Bob’s property. He parked as close as he could to the front entrance of the auto shop where Toeplitz’s SUV was stored. While he studied the property, the building, the dozens of wrecked cars littering the yard, he tugged on his latex gloves. Everything appeared much the same as it had earlier in the afternoon, except now the door to the shop was shut.

  “Worried about break-ins way up here?” he said aloud. He tested the bolt mechanism of the front door. Locked.

  Remembering the rear access to the building, Finch worked his way around the south side of the structure in the shade of the cedar forest that bordered the small acreage. When he reached the east side of the building he smiled. The back door stood ajar and with a light push of his hand it swung into the dark interior of the auto-body shop.

  Finch drew a flashlight from his courier bag and clicked it on. He swept the light over the chain link fence where Wriggly had secured Toeplitz’s Mercedes-Benz with a five dollar padlock. Before he stepped inside, he listened to the sound of the room. Apart from the dull hum of white noise coursing through the ventilating system, he heard nothing suspicious.

  Satisfied that he was alone, he moved quickly past the tool racks to the steel box where he’d seen Wriggly store the key. Inside, a shallow tray held a dozen candidates and he pushed his index finger through them hoping to spot the Ace brand embossed on one of the brass slugs. Yes, that one.

  He took the key to the fenced gate and applied it to the lock. Click. He opened the shackle and walked back to the tool chest and returned the padlock key to the interior tray. Then he pulled his motel key from his pocket and walked to the area where he’d paced back and forth in front of the chain link fence as he interviewed Bob Wriggly. He spotted a gray asphalt shingle on the floor and tucked the motel key under the thin edge of the shingle.

  After he swung the gate open, Finch walked past the front of the car to the passenger side and gazed through the shaded glass. With his flashlight held next to this shoulder, he began a careful investigation of the GLK.