Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112) by Sheila Simonson Read Free Book Online Page B

behind the garage, head bent. Good luck to him. He would need it.
    Just how upset was Carol Tichnor, and why? And what about the old lady? The soul of propriety. He’d known women like that, older women mostly. There are two kinds of social constraint, guilt and shame. Some people worry about their souls, and others worry about what the neighbors will think. Charlotte Tichnor was apparently the second type.
    Rob made a mental note to get the King County Sheriff’s Department to talk to the Tichnor ladies. A patrol car parked in front of the house with its lights flashing would be just the thing in a super-respectable neighborhood. As he recalled, Charlotte Tichnor was the widow of a surgeon. What would the neighbors think?
    Neighbors. His tired brain slid back to Klalo. Commissioner Brandstetter and the egregious ridgeback. The Wheelers: wholesome couple, nice little boy. Dennis Wheeler was a sports bore and proudly red-neck. Darcy was into crafts and good deeds. Rob liked her but thought she needed a job, something with a lot of office intrigue. As it was, she came across as intrusive sometimes, even downright nosy.
    After Hazel’s death, Darcy had kept bringing him pies and cookies and casseroles with orange cheese melted over them. She’d told him he should replace Hazel’s furniture with country kitsch. He wondered how much she knew about the Tichnors. She had hung out at their garage sales.
    All of the neighbors would have to be interrogated. The hell of it was, he wasn’t sure of the time line. It would be unfortunate if the crucial month was August, and it probably was. People took their vacations in August. He had. He’d driven his daughter, Willow, up to Tyee Lake for two solid weeks of fishing and bonding. A good time.
    He forced his mind back to the case. Had the Wheelers gone away, too? And what about the folks across the street? Three houses, two with elderly couples who went to bed early, one with three girls who didn’t and a red Mustang in cherry condition.
    Two of those young women were wind surfers. They supported their passion with jobs in the tourist trade. The third, Kayla, the nurse, was a pistol. Their older neighbors had gossiped about drugs, but he thought it was mostly talk. The surfers paid their rent and mowed their lawn. One of them had a Lhasa Apso.
    Towser. Something would have to be done about that dog. He was well trained and amiable but he needed scope—twenty square miles of African veldt, ideally. Towser was Tammy Brandstetter’s, and she was too lethargic to give him the exercise he needed. Hal didn’t care. The dog had become a nuisance after the Brandstetter son left home.
    There was something about Brandstetter’s son. What? A pot bust, Rob thought: possession, not a serious charge. Tom was a quiet boy, into black T-shirts and nose rings, but polite enough the few times Rob had spoken to him. Rob thought Tom had moved to Portland. He wondered if the Brandstetters heard from the kid these days, or if he’d dropped out of sight. Tom had dark hair when it wasn’t purple or green. Maybe he’d given up nose rings. The corpse had no studs or rings or tattoos Rob had noticed.
    He thought about Earl Minetti off in Vancouver. What if the victim the ME cut open was Tom Brandstetter? Better Earl than me, Rob thought wearily. He hated autopsies almost as much as Earl did.
    He walked back to the desk, bent down, and wrote “Bootlegger’s cache, how many knew where it was?” on his notepad. It would be great if nobody did outside the family. Somehow he didn’t think that would be the case.
    He sat down and picked up the phone. Time to get on to the agencies that might have information on looting and looters—the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Land Management, and the Inter-tribal Fish Commission. He thought he was looking for a collector as well as a thief or thieves.
    During the ten years since the Lauder Point theft, Rob had kept track of the sale of native artifacts, or tried to. It