The Sheriff arrived in a fit, caterpillar mustache bouncing with frenetic energy. He barked madly at the air. A kaleidoscope pulse of emergency lights punctuated his outbursts, provoking an atmosphere of hysteria.

“What the hell did you do, Pierce? Jesus man. Ever since you got to this town you’ve made it your job to turn things upside down. A man is stabbed to death, a child traumatized, and now this! God almighty in heaven and earth! What am I going to do?”

Hat cocked back at a wild angle, the bulk of his ursine frame circumambulated its way to the body. He bent over his deputy, squatted down, stood up, squatted, stood. 

I stared at the scene with my eyes as wide as the dead Mr. Spiesz.

Air thick with the scent of fear and tension mixed with the faint odor of exhaust from the sheriff’s idling patrol car.

“Holy shit!” He turned a glare on me, intense look of accusation and anger flashing in time to the lights of his patrol car. His mustache twitched with agitation. His neck swiveled to ogle Spiesz splayed beneath the Goodrich All-Terrain T/A. “Holy shit! This can’t be happening. I can’t lose anyone else.”

The ordeal had me tied in knots. A bitter taste of unprovable innocence filled my mouth. Fists balled, I resisted the impulse to punch his face for blaming me. An urge to bolt like a startled deer electrified the outer skin of my legs. Notions for redirecting the man’s assumptions of my guilt popped like corn on a hot griddle. One brilliant redirect might get Sheriff de Lude to calm down and start thinking rationally. But my thoughts tied his loyal deputy to criminal enterprise. Tell him Spiesz was involved in a human trafficking ring and watch him twirl into a Tasmanian cyclone. 

This was not gonna be a good day for Sheriff de Lude. Even if the tooth fairy and Santa Claus showed up with a $40,000 bass boat. Which meant it was not gonna be good for moi either.

Tony walked over to the sheriff and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Give it time to settle. Nothing will make sense for the time being.” The mustachioed duo made this tragedy appear momentarily comical.

Sheriff de Lude buried his face in his hands. The muffled sound of “shit shit shit” resounded in the bubble of chaos that surrounded the immediate crime scene. Tony’s palm remained on the sheriff in quiet support.

Lights from the patrol car cast an eerie glow on the surrounding trees, giving the appearance of a magical forest fire that didn’t burn. It was as if nature itself was mourning the loss of yet another life.

I watched the episode unfold with a sense of detachment. Every eye on the scene glanced my way, assessing the degree of my guilt, casting judgment based on Sheriff de Lude’s claims of my delinquency. A shiver ran the lengths of my arms and down the center of my back.

Ollie stood a few feet behind, eyes wide with shock and jaw hanging slightly open as he stared at the chaotic happening before him. His stunned expression reminded me of a wounded Whitetail staring over the edge of a cliff with a pack of coyotes gathering behind him.

Doc Gibbons’ Jeep Cherokee pulled up behind the patrol car. 

I inhaled a long, deep breath, hopeful that her appearance might bring a large dose of common-sense with it. 

The pandemonium of the foregoing minutes exhaled as she stepped out of her vehicle with the grace of a movie star. Her fluid movements and composed demeanor provided instantaneous order.  

She mouthed appropriate shock. “My God. That is the last thing I expected.”

De Lude lifted his head.

“You going to be okay, Bernie?” the Doc asked, moving next to the Sheriff’s side.

“I’ll be fine,” de Lude said with his eyes averted. “You just find out what the hell happened to my deputy.”

She smoothed a hand over his shoulder before stooping down to examine Deputy Dead.

Sheriff de Lude turned to Officer Gerulis. “Do you know what he was doing out here?”

Ollie kept his thousand miles stare locked on the lifeless eyes of Stan Spiesz. 

“Ollie!” The sheriff stepped between Ollie Gerulis and the dead man. “I need you in the game, Ollie. What was Deputy Spiesz doing out here?”

Ollie looked up, confused. “He said he was… he was interviewing somebody. Said he had to talk to a witness for the Judge. I don’t understand, Sheriff. He just said he had an interview.” Ollie Gerulis flapped his arms in time with his words like a duck reaching for purchase. 

“Didn’t say who with?” de Lude asked.

“No, Sheriff.” It looked like Ollie was in need of a paper bag to catch his breath. This surprised me, seeing him rocked back on his heels. With his jovial nature and common sense, Ollie had struck me from the beginning as the modern embodiment of  Native American enlightenment—grounded in the circle of life. But here was an irony, that a man who understood the cycle of seasons was struck speechless by a colleague’s death. 

“So no one knew what the hell he was doing out here?” the Sheriff asked, panning the tiny crowd. His head rotated back until he found me. “I suppose you have a theory, Pierce?”

“You’ll not like it, Sheriff.” The words lay heavy in my mouth, verbal stones waiting to drop into a murky pond. Their ripples could disrupt the labyrinthine balance of a magnificent deception that had held the Eureka law enforcement team together for years. Truth pressed outward from within my chest, begging its freedom. But I knew the Sheriff would not want to hear it, could not bear to believe that one of his own was involved in such a heinous crime. And so I paused, searching for syntax that might make the idea palatable.  

The sheriff couldn’t hold his restless energy. “Speak dammit! Even if it’s shit, I need something to gnaw on.” His bared teeth gleamed with red, white and blue scintillation.

I dove in. “Spiesz was involved in something hinky.” Pressure built in my chest to get the words out. “My guess is human trafficking.” Stopping at that point made sense. My mouth felt dry and numb, a bitter taste of betrayal and corruption lingering on my tongue. 

Sheriff de Lude opened his mouth in a half-snarl, ready to chew me to pieces. His ruddy, country face turned so red his beard bristled. Veins bulged in his neck until he took on the appearance of an enraged robot. 

The only sound was the heavy silence of onlookers holding their breath. The weight of my words dangled above the two of us like the counterbalance on a tree removal crane. A cool breeze brushed my skin, giving me a shiver. 

“Don’t be too quick to blow up on the man,” Doc Gibbons chimed in, drawing the sheriff’s attention away from me. “I’ve been concerned about Deputy Spiesz’s behavior myself.”

Sheriff de Lude jerked his head to look at each of us in turn. “So what, now everyone’s going to tell me that my deputy is part of a conspiracy?” He was damn near spinning like a top in his effort to face all of these accusers. “What the hell is going on? Has everybody around me lost their fucking mind?”

“I, I didn’t think that,” Ollie stammered. “That he was part of human traffic, trafficking, sir.” The cool, collected Native American appeared to stumble in his effort to support the home team against this incredulous accusation. 

“I didn’t say that,” Doc Gibbons stated. “Right now I’m just trying to find out what killed him.” 

“You just told me you agreed with Pierce here that my deputy was part of some kind of human trafficking organization.”

“You’re taking a big leap with your words there, Bernie. I told you I suspected something was odd with him. I recognized his behaviors as inconsistent. Usually means a body has a secret they aren’t sharing with folks. Which now seems quite evident by the fact that he has 4000 pounds of police vehicle parked on his chest.”

The topic had Sheriff de Lude puffing and stomping, an angry bear trapped in a box canyon. “None of this makes any sense to me and I just want to find out what the hell happened to my deputy.”

“That kind of goes to the point, Sheriff,” I heard myself say. Red heat traveled up my neck and I bristled against de Lude’s likely reaction.

“Hey, Sheriff,” a male voice hailed, interrupting the natural course of our battle. The interruption came from the outer edge of our circle, along the side of the road. A man in his early 30s wearing the tan and brown of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department beckoned from beyond the pavement. “I can’t be sure,” he said, “but it looks like I’ve got a boot track. Deep enough to be running.”

Sheriff de Lude redirected his scowl toward the interloping Deputy. He marched over, face as red as sunset with nostrils flared like the proverbial toro bravo.

Tony and I trailed behind, keeping a good distance from the Sheriff in case he spontaneously combusted. 

“What’ve you got, Springstep?” de Lude asked the exuberant tracker.

“Looky here, Sheriff. It’s a small footprint and I’m not sure I can make good sense of it. Nothing like Stan could do, for sure. Might be unrelated to the homicide. Got to be a kid or a woman.”

“Well that don’t make much sense,” the sheriff said. “What’s a kid or a woman got to do with my deputy getting bowled over?”

Deputy Springstep held his ground. “No way to say for certain, Sheriff. It’s the running that gets my attention. Could be someone part of the fiasco or a witness.” He glanced at the unsettling crime. “Could be they saw the thing happen and hightailed it into the woods to avoid being identified.”

“Or worse,” Tony added.

De Lude grunted. “Alrighty then,” he said to the deputy with the apropos name. “Let’s follow it through.”