Sinking Suspicions

Chapter 4

26 Chapter 4 Lance checked the time—5:00 a.m.—while he sat in his truck in front of Buck Skinner’s house and sipped coffee, waiting for Sheriff O’Leary to arrive . Lance wanted a closer look at the letters from the IRS he’d seen the day before. However, he didn’t want to enter Buck’s house without the sheriff present in case there were any questions later. Lance spent a lot of time in Eucha due to the fact that he couldn’t stay away from Sadie for any length of time, but that didn’t put Buck’s house or this investigation in his jurisdiction as a lawman. Lance didn’t really have a connection to Buck other than he was Sadie’s neighbor and Lance knew Sadie thought the world of him. Lance knew Buck was Cherokee, grew a huge vegetable garden that he generously shared, loved wild horses and homemade chocolate brownies, and that was about it. Buck seemed friendly enough, but always kept to himself, an apt description of a lot of Indians in Delaware County. Lance had a sixth sense when it came to people. He didn’t know if it came from his years in law enforcement or was simply a trait he had inherited from his ancestors, but he didn’t think O’Leary, a white man with political ambitions, would spend much more time looking for an old Cherokee man. That uneasy feeling had caused Lance to make arrangements with the Cherokee marshals to cover for him while he took a few days off from his 27 job as the police chief of Liberty, Oklahoma. If he was going to find Buck Skinner and run down who had stolen the old man’s identity, he was going to have to do it on his own time. O’Leary had already told him he had other people in Delaware County to worry about and he couldn’t keep spending county money looking for someone he wasn’t even sure was missing. Lance also thought that sorting out Buck’s problems would help keep his mind off Sadie while she was out of town. He could hear her asking him why he hadn’t worked harder at finding her friend, and he knew she’d never forgive him if something really bad had happened to Buck and he had failed to find him. O’Leary drove up next to Lance’s truck and rolled down his window. “This’d better be good, Smith. I haven’t even had breakfast, yet. Hell, it ain’t even daylight.” Lance got out of his vehicle and waited for the sheriff to do the same. “Just wanted to get another look at those letters we saw on Buck’s table. If he’s not out here on the property somewhere, maybe he went looking for whoever is causing him all those problems with the IRS.” “You’ve got to be kidding me.” O’Leary shook his head and cursed. “You got me out of bed for this? You’re on a wild goose chase, Smith.” Lance smiled and followed the sheriff to the door. O’Leary rapped loudly on the door and then turned to Lance. “He probably came home drunk last night and is inside sleeping it off. That’d be about par for the course.” With a stone face, Lance crossed his arms and waited. O’Leary pushed the unlocked door open and the two men entered the house. Lance immediately went into the kitchen, flipped the light switch, and found the letters he’d seen the day before. He opened the top letter and studied it, then took a small, spiral-bound notebook out of his shirt pocket and started making notes. When he finished, he turned to the sheriff. “Mind if we take a walk through the house again?” “I can’t imagine anything has changed from the last time we looked, but go ahead.” The small, one-bedroom house looked like the obvious home of a bachelor —bare and in need of a woman’s touch. A tattered map of the Hawaiian Islands and the southern Pacific Rim hung on the bedroom wall, attached with thumbtacks. Lance glanced at the map and noticed it had been marked 28 with an ink pen as if tracing several routes, all beginning and ending on Maui. He continued to...