6.Who murdered Abdul?

     Possibly a guy named Butch Rogers

     Shadya Warsame was offered a plea bargain:  A reduced sentence if he testified in the upcoming trials of Dougherty (aka Rafferty) and others he implicated in the international sex trafficking ring.  One of these “others,” in turn, got a reduced sentence for providing the testimony that linked the owner of the Montana hunting lodge, Butch Rogers, with the illegal enterprise.  Testimony established that Rogers and Furbush conspired to bring the Thai girls into the United States without visas by crossing the Canadian border using the mountain passes that Furbush, a former hunting guide, knew had no border patrol.  After a short stay at the “hunting lodge,” the girls were sold into slavery in various places as far away as Chicago and Dallas.

     Meanwhile, rumors rose to a fever pitch in Boulder, Montana, that the incumbent sheriff knew about all this and purposefully looked the other way.  With a total loss of public confidence, he resigned and our man Heck, Eloise’s friend who went to Vancouver with her, won the special election to replace the disgraced sheriff.  Once in office, Heck made good on his pledge to “Turn over every boulder getting to the bottom of things.”  One of the first things he learned was that the deer rifle allegedly used to kill Abdul was registered to Furbush, but kept at the hunting lodge, in a place also accessible to said Butch Rogers. 

     Heck also was determined to learn the motive behind Abdul’s killing.  From leads provided by Warsame, he knew that Butch Rogers and Dougherty were trying to muscle their way into a total takeover of the Vancouver operation, to squeeze out the middle-men getting the girls to Dougherty, and double their profits.  Abdul, of course, was one of these middle-men, and Heck theorized that somehow they lured Abdul to Boulder and finished him off.

     With help from the FBI, Heck learned how Rogers and Furbush first got to know Dougherty:  They’d all met at a Patriot Party gathering in Utah several years before.  Asking around, he also learned that Furbush had vowed on a number of occasions how he was going to get back at the government for taking his family’s land for back taxes in the ‘60s.  

     Heck then found a witness who had seen Rogers in town on the night of Abdul’s murder, and after looking at the video tape from the Circle K for that night, discovered that Rogers’ car was in the Circle K parking lot near the time Abdul was murdered.  So maybe it was Furbush, but maybe it was Rogers, Heck surmised.  The last piece of the puzzle fell in place when one of the men having relations with a female at the lodge told Heck that he saw Rogers take a rifle out of the gun case about an hour before Abdul was murdered.  A Jefferson County Grand Jury found all this to be enough evidence to indict Rogers on First Degree Murder. (Of course, double jeopardy applied as to any re-trial of Furbush.)  

     Rogers’ trial was still pending when this account of the Rumpkins travels started playing in theaters across the country.  The day after the Rumpkin-foiled bombings, Patty got a call from that producer back in Hollywood who had first turned her down.  “Yeah, you can be a co-producer,” she was told, after Patty conceded – at the producer’s insistence, to increase the sex scenes – “but mostly in the context of amplifying the romances,” she added.