The Case of the Yellow Diamond

Free The Case of the Yellow Diamond by Carl Brookins

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Authors: Carl Brookins
perfect but I was happy. I thought I’d be able to get pretty close to the place the shooter had stood or laid to make his shot.
    When I dismissed the boys with thanks and turned back to the house, I discovered an interested audience. Hillier and Al Pederson were standing, drinks in hand, watching from the lakeside veranda.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Pederson inquired.
    Normally I wouldn’t say. Normally I wouldn’t give somebody like Alvin Pederson the time of day. I knew his type. He thought he was an insider and any bits of gossip he could scrape up gave him a supposed advantage over someone. Alvin Pederson was a bottom feeder.
    The other reason I wouldn’t normally give him a passing glance was that we detectives liked to be a little mysterious from time to time. Other times we weren’t sure ourselves what we were doing or why; it’s just something that feels right at the time. In this case, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to explain and the telling might shake something loose, depending on who they talked to.
    â€œI want to recreate the scene of the crime,” I said. “When I look at blowups of these pictures together with pictures of Calvin’s injuries, I’ll learn a few things.”
    Both Hillier and Pederson nodded as if they understood exactly what I was saying. I wondered if I did as I left the premises and drove back to Roseville.
    At home in my basement office I downloaded the digital pictures to my computer and made a series of quick prints on plain paper. I laid out the ones that showed Jeff Brooks in the closest position to Calvin’s body when he’d been shot. By superimposing a tracing of the wounds I made from memory, I was able to determine several things. Some of them I already knew.
    The shot had been fired from outside the house. I thought it likely the cops would have a tough time recovering the slug. If my calculations were correct, after it passed through Calvin’s hand and along his ribs to exit at the top of his shoulder, it had probably tumbled to the ground somewhere in the vicinity of the bramble patch beside the lilacs that separated the Brooks’s place from the Bartelmes’.
    I pulled a topographic map of that end of the lake from my file. Coincidence? Nah. Over the years I made it my business to collect such documents and even tried to keep them reasonably up to date. Useful tools of the trade.
    After some peering and jockeying of the map and a crude drawing I produced for myself, I was able to diagram an oval on the opposite shore of the bay that would have likely been where the shooter had stood. It was far from ideal, but it was a woodsy grove with thick underbrush below the pines and ash trees, so it did provide concealment for the presumed shooter. And the bay was pretty narrow at that point.
    I called the hospital to check on Calvin’s progress. I got the runaround jabber about patient privacy and they couldn’t find either Tod or Josie. I left the house and journeyed back to White Bear along now crowded Highway 96. The afternoon had waned and home-bound traffic was jamming up the road, so it took me longer than usual to get to the place on the other side of the bay where I thought the shooter must have been located.
    I pulled the car off onto the shoulder as far as the trees allowed. The left rear fender hung over the white stripe they paint at the outside edge of these roads, but I figured my car was pretty easily seen. I brought my small, efficient pair of binocs along. I walked to the edge of the property and stood on a large boulder and scanned the opposite side of the bay until I located the Brooks place and next to it, the raft and the Bartelme home. The shoreline was empty of people. The sun was still hot and low to the horizon. Behind me critters rustled and muttered in the grass and weeds. A lethargic sparrow hopped from tree branch to tree branch, keeping one eye on me and the other, presumably, alert for

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