“Nope. Eric was the golden boy. Led the basketball team to state also that year. And he pitched well enough he would have been drafted, but Ron made it clear that football was king and young Eric intended to play quarterback and then go on to the NFL.”
The article continued on the next page, accompanied by another photograph of Eric, this time wearing a letterman jacket adorned with more patches than a Boy Scout uniform, and reclining easily against the side of what was likely the precursor to the SUV—a Jeep maybe—with a cloth canopy.
Tracy held the paper up and angled it to better catch the yellow light. She realized that it was actually a Bronco with off-road tires. But her initial euphoria quickly dissipated. She could make out some of the tire tread but not much, and she could see very little of the sidewall, where she knew the make and model number were placed. “Damn,” she said.
“What are you looking for, chief?”
“The tire. I need to know the make and model number of that tire.”
“Let me see it.” Goldman took the paper, raised his glasses onto his forehead, and studied the photograph. “We cropped this,” he said.
“You cropped it?” Tracy asked.
“Sure. Had to crop it to get it to fit.”
“Would you still have the original photo?” Tracy asked, cautious but optimistic, given Goldman’s seeming penchant to keep everything.
Goldman gave her a knowing smile. “You underestimate me, hero.” He started toward a row of file cabinets lining a side wall. Each drawer contained a white card in the front slot, the ink faded and in some instances barely visible. Goldman again raised his glasses to the ridge of his forehead, bending to read the cards in the muted light. “This one,” he said, flipping the button with his thumb and pulling the drawer open. “We kept the photographs for each issue. Never knew when you might need a canned shot.”
Like the boxes of newspapers, the drawer was neatly organized, with tabbed hanging green files. Goldman went through them front to back, his pace slowing as he neared the last files. “Nope,” he said.
“You don’t have it?” Tracy asked.
“Wrong drawer.”
Goldman slid the drawer closed and pulled open the drawer beneath it, repeating the process, slowing, and pulling out one of the hanging files near the front. “This is it.” He took the file back to the makeshift Bekins box table. Inside the file were loose black-and-white photos. Goldman went through them as fast as a card dealer, setting aside the photographs that had nothing to do with Eric Reynolds or his father.
“Here they are.” He flipped through shots of Eric leaning against a stucco building, some with his letterman jacket on, some with it off. “It was Adele who suggested we take the picture of Eric leaning against the car, to give us better contrast.” Goldman held up one of the photographs. “She said these looked too much like mug shots.”
Goldman handed Tracy the shot of Eric leaning against the Bronco. Someone, likely Goldman, had used a red grease pen to draw a rectangle to delineate the area of the photo that would be used in the paper. Outside that rectangle, below the Bronco’s front fender, the camera had captured more of the oversize tire than had been published in the newspaper. Tracy could see the tread, as well as a portion of the sidewall, but she couldn’t see the make or model number, at least not with the naked eye.
“Sam, I’m going to have to take this picture and this negative. Copies won’t work. You have my word I’ll scan the photo and bring it back. The negative I have to send to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab in Seattle.”
Goldman’s eyes were blazing with excitement. “Now, that’s a story to tell the grandkids,” he said.
Another thought came to her. “Can I see the issue covering the parade—the one with the collage?”
“That’d be the issue—Tuesday, November 9, 1976,” Goldman said.
After finding the box, Goldman found the issue and opened it as if it were a centuries-old relic, carefully laying it on the box lids. Tracy studied the photographs capturing the parade. The residents of Stoneridge lined the streets, smiling and yelling, and cheerleaders carried a hand-painted “State Champions” banner at the head of a procession that included the band. Players and coaches filled trucks and convertibles. Several of the photographs were taken at angles that captured the vehicles carrying the team members in their jerseys—a station wagon, a Mustang, a pickup truck with several players standing in the bed, and a flatbed truck carrying another two dozen or so, seated with their feet dangling over the side while they waved to the crowd.
Tracy considered more closely a photograph capturing three of the Four Ironmen—Eric Reynolds, Hastey Devoe, and Archibald Coe sitting atop the backseat of a convertible Cadillac. Reynolds held a trophy aloft over his head, and Devoe had his index finger raised and a broad smile. Coe stood beside them with a blank stare, looking as impassive as he’d been at the nursery. Tracy noted Darren Gallentine’s absence and scanned the other photographs, but she didn’t see his face or his jersey number in any of the pictures. She also didn’t see Eric Reynolds’s Bronco, and she wondered why, since with its removable soft top, it would have seemed a natural for the parade.
Tracy’s cell phone rang. She recognized the number.
“They just pulled over Hastey,” Jenny said.
CHAPTER 25
The Klickitat County sheriff’s main office remained located in Goldendale, a fifty-minute drive, but Buzz Almond had opened a “West End” office in Stoneridge to better serve that portion of the county and, if he was honest, probably to shorten his commute. When she arrived at the sheriff’s office, Tracy decided to let Hastey Devoe cook for a few minutes while she and Jenny scanned and sent the photograph of Eric Reynolds leaning against the Bronco’s bumper to Kelly Rosa and Michael Melton. Tracy asked Rosa to consider whether the bruising pattern on Kimi Kanasket’s back and shoulder matched the tire tread in the photograph. She advised Melton that she was having the negatives driven up to him in Seattle by a deputy sheriff and asked that he compare the tread with the tread in the photographs from the clearing.
The deputies who brought Hastey Devoe in told Jenny that he had refused a Breathalyzer test in the field, didn’t respond to their questions, and asked to make a phone call. Being brought in for suspicion of driving under the influence may have seemed like nothing but a minor inconvenience to Devoe, since he probably figured that his brother, Lionel, chief of police, would iron everything out.