Rarities Unlimited 03 - Die in Plain Sight

hurt.”
    “Seems like the Savoys have had a lot of bad luck with booze.”
    “The newspapers and gossips call it the Savoy Curse. I call it stupidity. Any cop can tell you that booze or drugs cause damn near a hundred percent of the ‘bad luck’ cops get paid to clean up after.”
    Ian didn’t disagree. It was one of the reasons he no longer worked for city, county, state, or federal police. He’d been real tired of cleaning up after stupid drunks who weren’t a hell of a lot smarter when they woke up sober in a cell where the cement floor was covered with puke on good nights and shit on the rest of them.
    “Any other dirt on the Moreno County cops?” Ian asked.
    “Oh, the usual. A handful of local police taking protection money, winking at gambling and prostitution, after-hours drinking, that kind of thing.”
    “Sounds pretty normal. Not pretty, just normal. So why did you and Chuck quit the department within a few days of each other and move back to Bakersfield?”
    There was such a long pause that Ian thought he wasn’t going to get an answer to his question. In the background he could hear a commercial for denture cleaner on Carl’s TV. The old man was hard of hearing and wouldn’t admit it, so his TV was loud enough to scare sheep. Fortunately he lived out in the countryside with cattle, and they didn’t give a damn.
    “I was on duty when Three and the artist died,” Carl said finally. “I was new to the county and I’d been butting heads with one of the other deputies over the correct way to investigate an unattended death. Morley came in, booted me out, and got on with it. Same thing on the artist’s death. If it happened on Savoy Ranch, it was Morley’s. He did the investigation, wrote the reports, and if you didn’t like it you could find another job.”
    “Again, not pretty but normal,” Ian said. “Money buys a lot of special attention.”
    “Yeah, well, twelve years later I was on duty the afternoon the older Mrs. Savoy died. I was doing the routine death scene investigation and things weren’t adding up real well.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I was following the horse’s tracks. It spooked, went sideways about five feet, like something had jumped out from a bush, except that the ground was swept clean. There was some broken shrubbery farther on where the old woman landed, got to her hands and knees, stood, walked about ten feet, and then fell.”
    “Yet she died of a broken neck?” Ian asked.
    “That’s what the coroner’s report said.”
    “I can’t see her getting up and wandering around with a broken neck.”
    “Neither could I, and I said so,” Carl muttered. “Sheriff told me he’d seen stranger things fighting his way through the South Pacific during the war.”
    Ian chewed on that for a minute. Again, it wasn’t something he could argue with—during times of extreme adrenaline, people sometimes performed feats that could only be called miraculous.
    “What about other tracks?”
    “Everybody with feet tramped around the scene. Anyway, I didn’t find any human tracks besides hers. The ground was real clean.”
    “You think somebody tidied it up?”
    “Could be,” Carl said. “The sheriff wasn’t much impressed by the idea. It was windy, the ground was dry. Never prove it either way now.”
    “Who found her?”
    “Some ranch hand. Must’ve scared him to death. He went back to Mexico the next day.”
    “Did he talk with the sheriff first?” Ian asked.
    “That’s what the report says.”
    “What do you say?”
    Again there was a pause so long that Ian wondered if Carl was going to answer. This time the TV was selling adult diapers and Caribbean cruises. Ian wondered if his great-uncle was watching reruns of The Love Boat.
    “I didn’t want any part of it,” Carl said. “None of it. Not the investigation that was a joke, not the pampering of the Savoy family. I’d had a gut full of the whole damn shootin’ match.”
    “What about Gem Savoy Forrest’s death?” Ian asked.
    “I was long gone by then.”
    “No contacts in the sheriff’s department when it happened?”
    “What are you after?” Carl asked.
    “There’s a painting of a woman being murdered in a spa. The woman is a blonde. The bracelet she’s wearing resembles one that once belonged to Gem Savoy, who died about nine years ago in her spa.”
    “Shee-it. Where’d the painting come from?”
    “Legacy from a young woman’s grandfather.”
    “Any connection to the