Page 20 of The River We Remember

Brody nodded. “That Tolley was loaded with buckshot, not birdshot. Whatever Quinn planned on shooting, it wasn’t prairie chickens.” He knelt and touched the stained earth. “All this blood, Connie. The shotgun blast opened him up wide. Big hole for blood to run out of.”

“But if the force of the blast sent him into the river, that’s where he would have bled out, right?” Graff argued. “There’d be some blood here, sure, but not like this.”

“So you’re saying he bled out right here? Then how did he get in the river?”

“The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” Graff eyed the dark-stained ground, the flow of the Alabaster, the terraced slope of Fordham Ridge. Then he said, in a voice too low for Wicklow, who was standing near the cruiser, to hear, “When I was a patrolman in Kansas City back during Prohibition, I helped keep gawker crowds away from a couple of places where some of the local gangsters caught it. A lot of those lowlifes were shotgunned, just like this. I left K.C. after the Union Station Massacre. Didn’t care to work law enforcement in such a violent place. Here, when somebody’s been killed, it’s always been suicide or some kind of obvious accident or in front of witnesses, usually during a bar fight. Never had anything wasn’t pretty clear cut.” He drilled Brody with his hard gray eyes. “This is different, Brody. This is like K.C.”

“Ah, come on, Connie,” Brody said. “Don’t go there.”

“I don’t think it was an accident. And I don’t think it was suicide.” Graff looked down at the big dark area around his feet. “And I’m thinking more and more that Quinn wasn’t alone here when he died.”

“Look, let’s just finish up, and then we can figure this thing out,” Brody said.

They closed the tackle box and took that into evidence, along with the fishing rod and the Coleman lantern, and they placed everything they’d gathered in the trunk of Brody’s cruiser.

“So?” Sam Wicklow said. He’d been helpful and he’d been patient, and that simple word was his request for some kind of payback. He was, after all, a newspaperman.

“Okay, this is for print,” Brody told him. “What we know is that James Quinn was found yesterday in the Alabaster River. He’d sustained gunshot trauma to his torso, but we won’t know the official cause of death until after the autopsy is completed later this morning. His family reported that he’d left his farm Thursday evening, indicating that he intended to go fishing. He didn’t return. After his body was discovered—”

“Okay if I print Herman Ostberg’s name?”

“Yeah. It’ll probably make him a local celebrity, at least for a while.”

“Go on,” Wicklow said.

“Last evening at around eight-thirty p.m., sheriff’s personnel found Quinn’s pickup parked on Inkpaduta Bend. Preliminary indication is that Quinn had come here to fish and that, while he was here, his shotgun discharged and the blast killed him. But, again, we need to have the coroner officially confirm cause of death.”

“Was he alone?”

“We’ve found no evidence that someone was with him, so, yes, we believe he was alone.”

“Had he been drinking?”

“It appears so.”

Wicklow’s eyes flicked to the riverbank. “I watched your pantomime over there. Were you trying to visualize a suicide?”

“That’s one of the possibilities we’ve been considering.”

“Could it have been an accident?”

“It could have been. Another possibility we’re not discounting.”

Wicklow’s pen poised over his little notebook, and his eyes studied Brody’s for a moment. “Could it have been murder?”

Brody replied quickly and a little sternly. “At this point, we’re not officially considering foul play at all, Sam. I don’t want to see anything like that in your paper.”

“Is it all right if I interview his family now?”

“If they’ll talk to you. I’m meeting Marta and J.P. at Brown’s at ten for the official ID. I suppose you could approach them after that’s done. Just keep in mind what they’re going through.”

Wicklow said, “I’d be very interested to know what they’re going through. I’ve been trying to imagine myself in their situation. Honest to God, I don’t know if I’d be broken up or dancing.”

Graff pulled a pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket, drew a leaf of cigarette paper from the pack he kept in that same location, and commenced to rolling himself a smoke. He said, “Human beings are a complex species, Sam. I think it’s entirely possible for the Quinns to be doing both those things at the same time. Jimmy’s absence will be a great hardship in some ways, but a profound relief, I imagine, in others. One thing’s for damn sure. For quite a while, it’ll be giving folks in Black Earth County something to talk about besides the weather.”

Wicklow said, “Anything else here?”

Brody shook his head. “We’ll be wrapping it up. When you have those photos developed, you’ll drop them by the jailhouse?”