moment passed. “Well, you gonna get ‘em?”
“Yup.” I took another swig of coffee, not moving.
“Today?”
“Nag.”
I climbed from the chair, opened the shed and found the tongs. Returning to the fire heap, I began rooting around the ashes for bones, Sal standing a couple of feet away. Piece by piece, I placed the still-hot bones on the adjacent lawn in approximation of their actual skeletal location. Sal called up a medical library on his iPhone and refined the placement by comparing the bones with an image on his screen.
In an hour we just about had it right.
Standing back, the two of us looked at the slightly charred remains. I leaned down and touched one of the thigh bones. “Cool enough.”
Sal took a series of pictures with his phone and we both returned to the deck chairs, poured more coffee from a carafe Cookie had placed on the table.
“Little guy. What do you figure, 5-foot-4 or so?”
Sal nodded. “He’s all there.”
Flipping open my phone I speed dialed Chief Forte.
“Nick. I was just going to call you. We got a problem.”
“What’s up?” I asked, punching the speaker button so Sal could hear.
“We found Jacob Cobb with a bullet hole in his head.”
Dread first, then an “aw shit” moment.
“Where?”
“At his home.”
“When?”
“Looks like he was shot maybe early this morning. Sometime after midnight for sure. He had a couple of small tree-cutting jobs after he left us at the golf course, finished up around 7 and went to the Arcade for a couple beers. We know he left around midnight to go home. At least that’s what he told the bartender.”
“Related to the tree man?”
“Don’t see how, but sure is coincidental, don’t ya think?”
“I think.”
“Could use you and Sal to give the scene a look-see if you’ve got the time.”
“Be there in 15.”
I stuck my head through the slider. Cookie and Tatiana were sitting at the dining room table laughing over something.
“Sal and I are heading to town. Someone shot Jacob Cobb this morning.”
“Oh, no,” both women said in unison. Jacob was a fixture in town who we often called to clear a dead tree or make room for new outbuildings. He and I worked together in the woods some years back so whenever I needed an extra hand to cull the shore pines at Willow Weep he’d help. He was a master with a chain saw and could drop a tree within inches of where he wanted it to fall.
Sal and I climbed into the Crown Vic and rumbled up to Highway 101, turned south and aimed the flames toward Bandon.
“What the hell is this about, Nick?”
“Got me. Jacob’s one of those guys who doesn’t make enemies. Trying to figure out how cutting down an old Madrone could possibly make someone angry enough to kill him.”
“Crazy environmentalist, maybe? It was a 120 year old tree.”
The Vic thundered across the Coquille bridge and we swung east on Highway 42. A quick right and up a gravel road where Cobb lived. Past a half dozen clapboard houses with “country lawns” and into a gravel driveway behind two Bandon cop cars. Shutting down the engine, the sidepipes ticked as they cooled.
“Let’s find out.”
Chief Forte and three patrol officers were standing on the porch of a freshly painted white salt box house waiting.
Forte met us at the car.
“He’s in the living room. Single shot in the back of his head. Close range, by the look of it. The doc says it was about midnight.”
“Was the front door open or closed?”
“Closed,” Forte answered. “Either he knew the person or at least didn’t feel threatened by him…”
“Or the killer already had the gun aimed at Jacob when he opened the door.”
“Position of the body indicates they were already way into the room. Want to see?”
Forte, Sal and I climbed the porch steps and the Chief pushed open the door with his knuckles. “The county is sending over one of their forensic guys to dust for prints and collect any trace evidence so we shouldn’t go in.”
Not necessary. The entire room was clearly visible from the open doorway. Jacob’s body lay face down at the far side of the living room area in front of a passageway to a small dining room. A pool of blood surrounding his head. From the position of the body it was, as Forte had said, clear enough that he had been walking toward the dining room when shot from behind, fell forward, face down.
“Never saw it coming,” Sal said.
The furnishings in the room said bachelor. Wood, heavy, browns and dark greens, well worn. Neat but not fussy. I recognized the small coffee table having made it for Jacob from an old piece of reclaimed American Chestnut a dozen years before as a gift for helping me clear a particularly stubborn patch of Shore Pine at Willow Weep.
Jacob, like me, had an affinity for unusual or hard-to-get wood and the American Chestnut tree had been all but wiped out by a blight that started in New York in 1904 and virtually downed all four billion Chestnut trees in the U.S. by the start of World War II.
Attempts at repopulating the U.S. with the tight grained hardwood haven’t succeeded even though efforts began in the 1930s. California and the Northwest are the only remaining areas where the American Chestnut still survives in any significant numbers, but even at that they’re typically single trees among forests of others.
Jacob and I had been working for a logging company east of Myrtle Point and ran across three American Chestnuts in a single afternoon. We cleared everything around them and convinced the foreman that we couldn’t fell those particular trees because of the rarity.
A few weeks later only two were standing. Seems the foreman knocked one of them down and hauled it away to make some cash on the side. When Jacob heard about it, he and I made a special visit to the foreman, left him with a broken nose and some busted fingers and the threat to chainsaw his house to the ground if he touched the last two trees.
Don’t get me wrong, I consider forests a crop to be thinned, turned into lumber and used. After all, who wants plastic toilet paper? But I have no patience for unnecessary destruction. But, hey, that’s me. And was Jacob.
A light blue Chevy Silverado pulled into the drive, county seal on the door. A small, thin man with a moustache and only a fringe of hair climbed
