THE CRAFTY TEDDY
Bear Collector's Mystery #3

Peaceful Massanutten County is becoming a little hazardous. First, someone takes a shot at Brad and barely misses. Then three Yakuza roll into town and, shortly thereafter, the director of the local history museum turns up murdered. The investigation is going nowhere fast, until Ash notices something unusual about the antique teddy bears on display in the museum...

Available in 2007 from Berkley Prime Crime

Excerpt:

            The lonely two-lane road followed a lazy and meandering course northward through dense forest along the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  It was beautiful country, wild yet mellow, verdant, and basically unchanged from the time when the Shawnee lived here.  However, I really wasn’t in the proper frame of mind to appreciate the scenery, because there was no sign of the Ford pickup.  I sped up, but couldn’t go too fast, in case the truck had turned on to one of the unpaved driveways that occasionally intersected with the highway.  Glancing at my cell phone, I saw that I still didn’t have any service.

            I drove across a creek on a narrow bridge and soon came to a fork in the road.  On the left side, the trees gave way to a dead cornfield and this gave me an unobstructed view of the lane for a couple of hundred yards to the west.  The truck wasn’t visible, so I had to assume the man had turned right and followed the road farther back into the hills.  I swung the Xterra to the east and slammed my foot down on the accelerator, choosing speed over caution.

            The road became increasingly serpentine and I couldn’t always see very far ahead.  I was traveling way too fast and this fact was driven home a second later when, while rounding a tight curve, I almost smashed into the rear of the Ford as it poked along the road.  I slammed on the brakes and slued to a stop, while the guy in the pickup truck looked at me in his rearview mirror.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a good look at him due to the “Gun control means hitting what you aim at” and “PETA—People Eating Tasty Animals” bumper stickers on the truck’s back window.  Talk about botching a rolling stakeout.  I could have given the FBI lessons.

            The standard operating procedure for a mobile surveillance is that if your target has burned you, you’re supposed to go past him and pretend he doesn’t exist.  That tactic might work well in an urban setting with a full surveillance team, but it’s pretty much useless on narrow roads in a rural environment and when you’re working solo.  My options were limited, so I remained behind the Ford as it made its leisurely way down the road.  Then, after about three hundred yards with the right turn indicator on, the truck turned east onto a rutted dirt track that led up a hill.

            I drove past the turnoff and made a big production out of stomping on the gas, in the hope I’d convince the truck driver that I’d been frustrated by the delay.  Continuing about a quarter-mile farther down the road, I made a U-turn and went back to where the Ford had gone up the hill.  I pulled over to the side of the road and checked the phone again, but it still couldn’t find a cell signal.  The smart thing would have been to withdraw and return with Tina, some deputies, and maybe even Sgt. Preston of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and his dog, Yukon King, because the terrain looked pretty damn rugged.  But there was no guarantee that this was a driveway and if it was an old road, it might come out anywhere.  The bottom line was that being cautious could mean losing a potential investigation lead.  I slipped the Xterra’s transmission into four-wheel drive mode and slowly drove up the hill.

            Pine trees and fallen logs hemmed the road.  It looped around the hill and started upwards at a more acute angle and I wondered if I wasn’t already inside the National Park.  I crested the steep ridge and had to stop.  The Ford was parked directly in my path and there was no way around it, due to the boulders and dense foliage.  Furthermore, there was no safe way to back down the hill.  Then the driver stepped out from behind a pine tree and I saw he was brandishing an old baseball bat.  Can anybody say, “ambush?”  And I’d driven right into it.

            Now that he was no longer in the vehicle, I could see the man was in his late fifties and big and burly—like a coke machine with arms.  He had thick salt-and-pepper hair with a curly mullet, a bushy gray moustache stained yellow in places with nicotine, and he wore a blue ball cap with a Colt Firearms logo above the black silhouette of an M-16 rifle.  Approaching the driver’s side of the SUV, he casually swung the bat and smashed out my left headlight.  It was a big bat, and I suddenly wondered if we’d jumped the gun in identifying the weapon that had killed Merrit…

Coming in November 2007 from Berkley Prime Crime