Chapter Ten

 

Stoeffel called a meeting in his office. He had them all crammed into the small space except for Ayleen, who was painting her nails while she ostensibly manned the front desk.

“Right,” said Stoeffel. “Let’s break it all down. Leroy, what do you have for me?”

Leroy sniffed loudly. “`Kay. Here´s how it reads. Reason Links has a sheet. Nothing much. Mostly teen stuff. Bit of shoplifting over in Minerstown. Got into some fights. One drug arrest for holding a few joints of marijuana. But all this was some twenty years ago.”

“That all?” asked Stoeffel. “Nothing harder than the MJ.”

“Nope all it says is he was carrying weed when the Highway Patrol pulled him over one time. This will interest you though. His boy, Brian, has a drug bust too. More recent. And it’s for a coke possession.”

“Mm-mm,” hummed Stoeffel. “What was he holding?”

“Not much really. Just a rock of crack. No big deal.”

“So, is he a user or a dealer? I wonder?”

“It’s common among a lot of youngsters these days,” cut in Summersby, knowledgably. “Been escalating since the nineties. We´re getting so it’s a disease, more and more busts that are cocaine related. Over half of all arrests in Atlanta, New York and Chicago test positive. The DEA busted 60 keys in one year recently. That’s a thirty six percent increase on previous years. And hell, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Okay, enough with the statistics for the rest of the country, let’s concentrate on here. So, Leroy, what about the toys?”

“That’s weird, Chief. Nobody stocks them. Least no one in Lodrun. There´s a label on its ass says it was made in China (changed Japan to China, because even the Japanese have lost out on the stuffed toy market to the Chinese), not in the U.S.”

“Did you check further out?”

“Um, no I didn´t, Chief.... reckoned you only wanted local.”

Stoeffel sighed. “Do it,” he said. “State wide. Take a picture of the damned thing and email it around to all law enforcement offices. Check with Customs too, find out who imports them.”

“Sure, Chief.... er, right now?”

“Yes. Right now!”

Red faced, Leroy scurried from the room in an embarrassed rush.

Stoeffel rubbed his face in his hands tiredly before looking up at Jimmy Luke and Summersby.

“Hope you got something better for me.”

“Well,” began Summersby. “That place up there in the woods was definitely a factory. There´s traces of the shit all over the place. We distilled and analyzed a lot of ash samples and read out high amounts of hydrochloride salt deposits.”

“What about the John Doe?”

Jimmy Luke read off his report. “No ID yet. Male victim, about thirty-five years old. He was burned to death, that’s a fact, crisped real good, so no fingerprints. We´ll get something off the teeth maybe. How he got to where he was we don´t know but guess someone moved him out there against the tree stump just prior to or post death. Bugs and the forest critters finished off most of the body tissue postmortem. We reckon the time of death was about three to four weeks previous.”

“One thing though,” added Summersby. “His gut held some residue of a substance called cocaethylene. Now you get this in human liver when cocaine and alcohol are mixed. It creates a greater high for the user but potentially increases the risk of sudden death.”

“You reckon that’s what did our boy?”

“My guess is the guy was working in his lab there, snorting his own stuff and drinking as well. He fumbles around, knocks over a gas lamp or something and whoompf, the place goes up. But he didn´t die in there, somebody got him out. With his degree of burns there´s no way he could have dragged himself out so it tells us the guy had one or more partners.”

Stoeffel hummed thoughtfully. “Question is, are these people still around or did they take off after the fire?”

Summersby looked doubtful. “Something’s going on up in those woods, Chief. My gut feeling is they´re still around.”

“But I can´t take that to DEA in Charleston. We need something more positive to show it’s a live one.”

Summersby looked grim. “We´ll find it, we just have to keep digging.”

Stoeffel looked at him for a moment and wondered at this sudden display of determination.

“Well, we have a definite capital offense on our hands with the Links girl. Let’s keep our priorities right. So, Jason, the Links boy, how´d he check out?”

Legrand offered Stoeffel the time sheets.

“Not too well, Chief. It says here he was back in the storeroom at one thirty but I got a witness that says he turned up at about three thirty and was definitely seen with the little girl prior to that.”

George, who had been sitting silently throughout, grunted.

“He´s our perp. Got to be, Chief. A drug sheet. Gives the girl the toy with the drug traces on it. Seen with kid just before it happened. Lying about his times. Has to be.”

Stoeffel nodded. “It certainly doesn´t look good for him. The missing time indicates he could have committed the crime and then been back at work. All it took was a clock-in on his sheet, then a disappearing act for a few hours. But where is the motive, why would he kill his own sister?”

Summersby shrugged. “You know how it is as well as me, Chief. Most family homicides are com- mitted by a close relative. You may not like statistics but that’s what they say.”

“Okay, we´ll bring him in for questioning. George, go fetch him. No rough stuff though, remember he´s only a suspect as yet and that family have gone through enough already. It´s a damned shame if we´re wrong but we´ll need to get a search warrant. If we find the murder weapon in that house it´s a done deal.”

“One more thing, Chief,” said Legrand. Stoeffel raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“Bubba Rose has a bunch of guys working for him. They look a little rough. And one of them has prison tats on his arm. Aryan Brotherhood stuff. I´d like to run a check on them.”

Stoeffel nodded and looked out the window at the gathering darkness. “Sure. Do it.” He remembered he had a place to be.