LAKE FRANCIS IV

 The chores were well underway at the Scheels ranch the next morning. Driscoll found Stan and Wendy in the barn treating a sick calf. He said good-morning to them.

“Stan, they’re pretty sure it’s your dad in that old car; they want to wait for the DNA test to come back before they’re completely positive, but the dental records match.”

“That’s good news,” Stan said, then he frowned, “well maybe not good news, but at least we can get some closure.” He looked at the sheriff. “That isn’t everything is it?”

Driscoll looked grim. “We believe he was murdered. They found a thirty caliber bullet in the left front tire of the car and another one lodged in the back of his jaw on the left side. It was powerful enough to penetrate the windshield and still hit him, travel along his jaw and embed itself on the jaw hinge. It wouldn’t have killed him immediately but it could’ve caused him to lose control of the vehicle and drive straight into the lake.”

Stan nodded then looked away for a moment.

“I realize that this happened more than fifty years ago so there’s not a lot to go on. I’ve looked at motive and opportunity; two people had motive: your mother, and Hunter Walker, the husband of the woman your dad was seeing. Walker lived in Dupuyer and could have easily snuck away and waited for his wife and your dad to come around that corner, shoot them and quickly run home.”

“That’s not what you think happened though.” 

“From what I learned, Hunter and his wife had been on the skids for some time, and a divorce was on the way. However, your mom wasn’t that amicable.”

Stan swung around and gazed at Driscoll. “I agree with you,” he said with a surprising amount of conviction. “Mom was off-kilter. She spent a lot of time in the psychiatric facility. She was convinced that Dad was beating her up and was going to kill her. Dad caught her many times hoarding ammo and playing with his old M-1 Garand. She used to tell me how easy it would be to knock him off; she even mentioned that if it was planned and done properly, the evidence could disappear forever.

“I just dug up a couple of shell cases behind the berm beside the boat launch. They look like thirty-aught-six to me. I just dropped them off at the lab.

“When I was in Sixth Grade,” Stan continued, “Mom came into the school, flipped out on the teacher and attacked her, accusing her of sleeping with my Dad, and causing all the trouble in our family; the teacher would’ve been in middle school when Dad disappeared. Mom was arrested and sent to the ‘bin,’ never to come out again.” Stan led the sheriff over to the house where he brought out his father’s old service rifle and gave it to him. “Check this out and see if it’s the one,” he said. “It will at least give me some closure.”

The summer wore on. The cars in the lake were down to occasional chats in the coffee shop and business was easing back to normal. Unfortunately this left Driscoll quite unsettled from time to time. The bullets they had recovered from Scheel’s body and his car had been run through ballistics and compared with fresh shots from the M-1 carbine that Stan had turned over. The results were a ninety percent match. Maybe if the suspects were still alive a case might have grown out of it but there wasn’t much sense pursuing it any further; the case of Charlie Scheels, Doug Bond, and Beth Walker was about to be officially closed. It appeared that the prime suspect would have been Roberta Scheels; she had the motive and the opportunity, and, from what those who knew her said, she was lopsided enough to actually carry something like that out.

But that still left the case of the Camaro and the demise of Jacob Weiss. Jacob had been positively identified and a surprising number of people had come forward to offer information about the night Weiss disappeared. It was right after high school graduation. There had been a party in the sandstone hoodoos just south and west of Sweetgrass. Jacob had gotten quite drunk and was being a total jerk, in addition to driving his car very hard. His girlfriend, a girl from the Choteau area, was there and was very reluctant to go home with him but Jacob had gotten belligerent, and all but forced her to ride with him. It was a hot night, and Becky managed to persuade Jacob to stop at the Circle K back in Choteau to pick up a soda. They had gotten into a big argument right after that and Becky ran off on foot. She managed to elude Jacob but still watched him patrol the town for close to an hour before he lit out like a scared rabbit. Becky Clark, now Becky Prentiss, was officially the last person to see Weiss alive.

Driscoll had been to the forensic lab in the city and had gone over the Z-28 with the lab crew and they all agreed that the hole in the driver’s door could have been caused by a gun shot. The car had been checked from one end to the other but there was no slug to be found. He was missing something.

He thought about the driver’s door and the angled hole in the skin next to the upper hinge. He mentioned it to the technician who took a probe and followed the path of trajectory, but there was nothing at the end of it. The skin was removed and the inside cavity was examined, to no avail.

The inner door panel was mostly plastic. It wouldn’t offer much resistance to a bullet coming through but it could possibly cause a deflection and alter its course.

Another week went past and they were almost ready to put the case of the Camaro and Jacob Weiss into the cold files. Driscoll was in his office dealing with a truck accident about six miles out of town. His cellphone chirped its usual tone.

“Driscoll,” was the usual greeting. He paused while the caller filled him in. He then killed the call and headed out to his vehicle. “I’m headed for the lab,” he told Larson as the door closed behind him.

In the lab, Driscoll could see that the front of the Camaro had been jacked up. Both front wheels had been removed and one of them was on a work table nearby; the tire had been separated from the rim. The technician directed Driscoll to the rim itself.

“The bullet went through the tire where the side wall joins the tread, right here,” he indicated with a plastic straw. “Now this is freaky. This is a tubeless tire, typical of what cars ran back in the 70s. But the stem was missing. I pulled the tire off the rim, and of course, it was half filled with sludge from the lake. But we washed that through the screen and found the inside part of the rubber stem. The bullet caught that at the perfect point and not only severed the stem but lodged itself—crossways—in the inner lip. Whoever shot this should’ve gone out and bought lottery tickets. We’ve got a slug.”

“What about those cases I gave you?”

“Thirty-Aught-six, but too rough to get a good match. Fifty percent at best. I’ve sent them to Washington to let the FBI have a go at them.”

“And the slug?”

“They’re just setting it up now.”

Driscoll followed the technician into the ballistics lab where the slug was being set up under the microscope. The technician made a final adjustment then let the sheriff examine it.

“The one on the right is from the jaw of the driver of the old car; the one on the left is the one that just came from the valve stem.”

“I’ll be damned!” Driscoll said.

The sheriff didn’t bother to check the time when he drove into the Scheel’s yard. He knew it must have been after eleven but not much later because he could see the flash from the television, indicating that Stan, or Wendy, or both, were watching the nightly news. Through the curtains, Driscoll noticed two figures stand up as soon as he rang the doorbell. They both looked quite tired when they opened the door.

“Sheriff,” Wendy said, “come in.”

“You picked one heck of a time for a visit,” Stan added.

They sat at the kitchen table and Mark readily accepted a cup of coffee. He gazed at his host and hostess. He never saw it before but Wendy looked awfully tired. Driscoll told her so.

“We just got some bad news today, Sheriff,” Wendy said. “Looks like I’m going to be headed for Great Falls again—St. Jude’s.”

When someone talked about places like St Jude’s that meant one thing and one thing only: the Big-C. “Sorry to hear that.” Mark was truly sympathetic.

Wendy sighed. “I’m not giving up. They took a breast from me ten years ago; looks like they’ll be taking the other one now.”

“We’re praying that it hasn’t gone malignant,” Stan added.

“I’ve got friends in Conrad,” Mark said, “she got sick about five years ago; had to lose one. But she’s doing really good now.”

“Well, I hope she continues to test negative,” Wendy said. “It’s a terrible disease.”

“I can’t imagine. My mother smoked like a factory for most of her life; no physical problems whatsoever; got an infection from a knee injury, and died from it at eighty-nine. My stepfather—Mac—developed prostate cancer when he was in his eighties. When they opened him up, they just closed him up again and gave him three months to live. He fooled them though; he lasted just over six.”

“So, there’s got to be an official reason you’re driving all the way up here in the middle of the night,” Scheels said.

Mark nodded and sipped his coffee. “I might as well tell you; they found a bullet in the tire of the Camaro; it’s from the same rifle—.”