Avenging Angel by Rex Burns Read Free Book Online Page B

alone whiskey. They do drink a lot of soda pop,” he added. “The kind the church is a major stockholder in.”
    “No other motive? Robbery?”
    “Hell, Mueller never had a thing but that cabin and maybe a few hundred acres of timberland around it. When he needed a little cash, he’d hire out as a hand. Most of the time he didn’t even bother with that. Look, Detective Wager, I may be just a county sheriff, but by God I been in law enforcement work almost thirty years. I know enough about this business to look for the motive in a killing. And I can’t find one in the Mueller case—no enemies, no robbery, no relatives, no mysterious avenging angels.”
    “But there is that drawing. According to the investigating deputy—Roy Yates?—it was folded up and stuck between Mueller’s fingers so it wouldn’t be missed.” Wager half shrugged at the obviousness of it. “That fits the m.o. of the Denver killing, and that angel’s an exact copy of the ones we found in Denver and Pueblo.”
    Tice sighed. “Yeah.” Then he grabbed his Stetson from a corner of his desk and grunted to his feet. “There is that damn picture, and there are some damn fools it scares hell out of. Come on—let’s get some lunch. Yates should be down from Rio Piedra in an hour or so and then you can worry him about it. Whenever I get puzzled I get hungry, and that damn picture’s ruining my diet.”
    Openness. That was the word Wager searched for in his mind when a relaxed and belching Tice led him from the restaurant and around town by way of introduction. The people on the streets had none of that squinty-eyed I’m-as-good-as-you-are look that so many newcomers to Denver assumed after they’d been out west for six months. Instead these people assumed that, since Wager didn’t have long hair, he was as good as they were, and they would treat him that way unless he proved otherwise. It was the kind of easy acceptance he remembered in his old neighborhood, before the bulldozers leveled it first for parking lots, then for the blank glass faces of classrooms and office buildings. Here, the openness in attitude matched the openness of the ranch and farmland scattered across the broad plateau between the steep crest of eastern mountains and the long, falling distances to the western horizon. It was an openness that was emphasized by the hardness of the afternoon sunlight, which glowed as much from the earth as from the sky. Even Deputy Yates, to whom he was introduced when they got back to the sheriff’s office, and who was to take him out to Mueller’s ranch, seemed genuinely glad after a few moments of cautious sniffing—two dogs of the same breed meeting for the first time—to tell Wager all he knew about the homicide and everything else.
    “That kind of thing doesn’t happen much in this neck of the woods, Gabe.”
    Tice had introduced him as Gabe Wager from DPD, and Yates went right to his first name. Which was friendlier than Tice was and all right with Wager. “Not many homicides in the county?”
    “Nope. We get some shootings, suicides and accidents mostly. One or two a year. And if we do get a homicide, it’s because of a fight; somebody gets beat up in a bar and wants to get even, or somebody messes with another man’s woman.” Yates turned the four-wheel-drive car onto the bumpy state road that led back north to Rio Piedra and Mueller’s isolated ranch. “Burglary’s the big thing around here—we’re starting to get transient construction workers coming in, and they’ll rip off whatever ain’t tied down. Dope, too.” He bobbed his head toward the jagged snow-covered peaks fifty miles away. “The ski people bring that in. But the marshal up there won’t move against them. He calls it the ‘community life-style.’” Yates slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “He says those people hired him, and those people’s standards are what he’s paid to uphold.” He added, “No matter how low.”
    “What