Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

They had conducted their business entirely by e-mail.

She had been looking for a private investigator.

He wasn’t that, but he had been a cop.

A friend passed his name along to the American woman who was privately looking for a bodyguard. “I would like you to keep a close watch on our friend Lon Reynolds,” were her e-mail instructions. “Don’t let anything happen to him.”

She had not told him what that “anything” might be.

Maybe she had not even known for sure, herself, exactly what the danger might be, but he was pretty sure that she feared it might come from her own husband, if he was pushed too far.

Easter Island was a land of extremes, Manuel believed, a land at the end of the earth, a place where nothing ever happened and even if it did, there was nothing to be done about it afterwards. When he had watched the acrimony grow between the two old friends, he had believed he was witnessing the possibility that something very bad, something irrevocable was about to happen.

Lon Reynolds was an obnoxious, stubborn man.

Michael Peters was a defeated, humiliated one.

After their argument in the restaurant, Manuel had driven out to the volcano, parked his car where no one could see it, and then he had hiked up to the rim to wait. The first of them to arrive had been Michael Peters, bicycling quietly up the dirt roads, and also hiking up to wait. But when he arrived at the top of the precipitous ridge he had found not his old friend Lon but their “guide,” Manuel.

They had stared at each other, the two men from different cultures.

No words had been exchanged until Michael had said, “So you’re going to walk with him, to make sure he doesn’t fall off.”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll go back. There’s no reason for me to be here, then.”

The words could have meant anything. They hung in the tropical air.

Michael Peters turned, and carefully made his way back down, vanishing into the darkness for a while. When the headlights of the van appeared, and that door opened and then slammed, it was only by looking through binoculars that Manuel was able to see Michael take the bicycle out of hiding, get on it, and peddle away unobserved by his friend.

“You’re here!” were Lon’s first words when he reached the top.

“I thought it safer this way,” Manuel told him. “I won’t charge you.”

“That’s good,” Lon said ungraciously, “since I never asked you to do this.”

I won’t charge you for saving your life, Manuel thought, as he led the way along the ridge above the sea, because I’ve already been paid. Lon Reynolds would never know that Katharine had used money she couldn’t afford to spend in order to keep two old friends from destroying each other like primitive men in a battle for supremacy. Manuel wondered if Michael really would have pushed his old friend off the cliff, like one of the ancient islanders shoving a statue down. And he wondered what would happen to all of them when they returned home. Maybe this strange, charged episode between them would defuse things, maybe they would safely drift apart. There was only one thing Manuel knew for sure as the jet shrank to a dot in the sky and he turned around to leave the airport: Thanks to himself and to Katharine Peters, there was no crime on Easter Island.

Copyright (c); 2005 by Nancy Pickard.

Formerly a doctor at the University of Dayton, John H. Dirckx is now retired and free to produce more of his excellent short tales featuring African-American police detective Cyrus Auburn. This time Auburn investigates what appears to be a simple case of death in a traffic accident. But it soon emerges that someone has found a most ingenious method for murder. If you like your mysteries in the classical mold, you’ll enjoy this.

Gavin Hoopes’s mood was bleak as he gunned his semi along the exit lane from the truck scales and back into the stream of traffic on the westbound Interstate. The mandatory stop at the weigh station had put him about twenty minutes behind — twenty minutes closer to rush hour, when the volume of local traffic would increase from aggravating to downright unbearable. It was the middle of July, the height of the tourist season, and it was the time of day when, if you’re going west, the sun starts to fry your eyeballs right through your sunglasses.

As if all that wasn’t enough, he had just caught sight, from his vantage point ten feet above the pavement, of an oblong orange sign at the crest of the next rise. Even before he could make out the lettering, he correctly divined its message: ROAD CONSTRUCTION 2 MILES.

By the time he’d traveled those two miles, further signs had imparted more explicit warnings and directions: Left lane closed ahead. All traffic jog right. Trucks must use right shoulder. Speed limit 40 MPH. Fines doubled in construction area. No lane changing.

Already the traffic had begun to thicken up like pea soup in a funnel. Hoopes’s right foot danced back and forth constantly between the brake and the gas pedal as he jockeyed his heavy rig into the ever-slowing shoulder lane. The roar of the engine and the hiss of the air brakes drowned his yelp of profanity as a motorcyclist veered right in front of him out of nowhere just before the extreme left lane evaporated.

That was all he needed — having to eat the dust kicked up by a roller skate while he crawled along as part of this funeral procession.

During the last hour of the shift, Detective Sergeant Cyrus Auburn liked to relax at his desk, finishing up the day’s paperwork and pretending to be busier than he was. The mellow mood of dying day took on a subtle spice of excitement from the possibility that something might still break before he made it to his car out in the parking lot, and then the game would go into overtime.

At 4:39 P.M. Friday by the clock on the courthouse, Lieutenant Savage appeared in the doorway of Auburn’s office holding a strip of adding-machine paper, which was what he used to take notes at the phone. Auburn sighed inaudibly and cinched up the knot of his tie.

“We need to move fast on this, Cy. Dollinger’s waiting for you at the side door. Kestrel’s going along in the cruiser because there probably won’t be anywhere down there for him to park his van.”

“Down where?”

“The construction site on the westbound lanes of the Interstate, just east of the Sixth Street exit. A semi rear-ended a motorcycle and the driver of the motorcycle is dead at the scene. I know what you’re going to say, so don’t say it. This isn’t just any road kill. Stamaty’s on the spot, and he says there are bullet holes in the motorcycle’s windshield.”

“Any holes in the driver?”

“None he could see, but it’s not exactly the place to start the autopsy.”

“ID on the dead guy? Or is it a gal?”

“A Roger Mulreedy.”

“Local?”

“The side door, Cy. Stamaty says the traffic’s already backed up half a mile.”

Patrolman Fritz Dollinger was at the wheel of the cruiser and Sergeant Kestrel, the evidence technician, sat in the caged-in backseat holding his field kit on his lap like a crate of eggs. Once they were under way, Records radioed preliminary background information on the victim: age 37, married, no children, employed by a local heating and cooling contractor, no police record.

The scene of the accident, already badly congested by road-construction activities, was now a seething maelstrom of crawling, lurching, honking cars and trucks. Instead of joining the endless string of vehicles snaking past the spot from behind, Dollinger put on his siren and lights and turned the Sixth Street exit ramp into an access ramp by driving down the shoulder against the flow of traffic.