Despite his best intentions, Luther didn’t make it to the Command Center briefing. There’d been rumblings there a few weeks ago, when Rachel was missing, and now at least half the assholes in the building would think his brother was a freaking pedophile. In the end, he found himself parking in front of the Sheriff’s Department instead.
The few cars scattered around the parking lot likely belonged to officers picking up department vehicles or riding with someone else. The front door was locked, and most of the lights were off. Still, no doubt there was someone in uniform wandering around the halls or taking a dump, ostensibly ready to field any emergencies. Luther went to his desk and peeled off his coat. He settled to cogitating, as Rudy Beck would have said. A dangerous proposition.
Luther considered his first step. Photographs of Les’s place (the crime scene) would have been downloaded at the Command Center, but if there was some way to access those remotely, Luther was damned if he knew it. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet on his desk. He didn’t have what you’d call a photographic memory, but he was pretty good at remembering visual things and recognizing the unusual. Luther shut his eyes.
Mouth open and face slack, the flesh hung heavy and loose beneath Les’s stubbly chin. Flecks of vomit had caught there, and on his blue lips. His lips were so blue, like a corpse on an examining table— Luther nearly fell from his chair rising to stand. Jesus Christ. A choked sob caught in his throat as he paced around the office. Jesus, Les. Luther pinched his nose between his fingers hard, willing the tears to not fall.
He took a wheezing, uneven breath and wiped his eyes. This was not going to work. Visualizing his brother dying next to a pool of vomit wouldn’t do anything except make Luther useless, which was close to being the case already.
So if he didn’t have easy access to the evidence gathered tonight, what did that leave? There was the trunk-or-treat scene of Aaron’s abduction, but the bulk of that material was also at the Command Center. And there was Rachel Nicholson’s abduction. If he went on the assumption that the two kidnappings were related, what unanswered questions remained about the Nicholson case?
One D’Antonio constantly revisited was how Virgil Rutledge got to and from the cabin out by Pine Gap, or anywhere else for that matter. They’d never found an abandoned vehicle near the cabin’s access roads. He certainly hadn’t hitched a ride with Rachel tucked under his arm. There were no witnesses to Rachel’s abduction, and they hadn’t gotten any usable tire tracks from there or the DNR cabin where they’d found some of Rachel’s belongings. The anonymous tip that led them to the scene had pointed at a dark van. Granted, a van was the stereotypical pedophile’s ride of choice, but that anonymous tip felt more suspect to Luther by the moment. He needed to track down the original tip sheet, and a recording if they had it.
That brought to mind the white van spotted at Aaron Schofield’s abduction that led them to the raid in Loganville and the arrest of its owner, Randall Vogler. Despite the drugs he was carrying, the man had no prior arrests. After waiving his rights, he’d said his wife had kicked him out of the house a couple of weeks before (the Feds were tracking her down) and his business van was the only vehicle he’d had access to since then. Vogler claimed that Friday night, while the boy was being kidnapped, he’d gone to a Halloween party with some friends. If his alibi checked out, it seemed unlikely Vogler was directly involved with the boy’s kidnapping, but D’Antonio felt—and Luther agreed—there was something there. For now, he was being held on the drug charges and they were working on getting the van impounded for forensic analysis.
Luther swallowed, and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. The missed meals and crappy coffee had left him with a vile taste, and he wished he had a toothbrush. He stood and walked toward reception. He’d stopped keeping peppermints at his own desk, but maybe Beth had some in the candy dish out front…
The candy. What ever happened to the goddamned pinwheel candy he’d noticed at the DNR cabin, that Les had been chomping on at the Command Center? That candy had set Luther’s search for his brother in motion. When he’d finally tracked Les down at home, they’d argued—Luther felt the thin red line on his hand from the freshly healed cut. Luther had bagged the candy he’d found in Les’s house, intending to run it for prints. But they’d taken Virgil into custody soon after, and processing the candy slipped his mind. Had he left it in the vehicle?
Luther’s hip bumped painfully against the front desk as he hurried outside without his coat. If the parking lot were better lit, Luther would’ve seen his exhalations. The cold jolted him a little closer to awake. He’d been driving the department’s SUV that night. He dug everything out of the glovebox and piled it on the passenger’s seat, even shone a flashlight around the area and beneath it, but the candy was nowhere to be found. Someone must have tossed it by now.
It was his own fault, but he couldn’t get too upset. Learning anything from the candy had been a longshot. Maybe… He jammed everything back in the glovebox. Then Luther sat in the dark and called up the scene from Les’s trailer again. This time, he tried to look past his brother’s body, to the coffee table next to him. Had there been a pinwheel wrapper there, or was his wishful imagination creating it?
He knew one way to find out. Grant wouldn’t have called everyone in for the middle-of-the-night briefing, but Luther was sure he would’ve wanted Beth. And, although they had gotten off to a rocky start, Luther thought Beth was starting to soften toward him. He hoped he was right on both counts, and pulled out his cell phone. It rang several times before she answered.
“Luther, where the hell are you?” she asked, voice a loud whisper. “You know you’re supposed to be here.”
Luther opted for honesty. “Would you have showed up, if you were me?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“And what do you think the chances are I would’ve made it out of the building without laying somebody out?”
She made a sound that was close kin to a laugh. “Point taken. What do you want?”
“I need you to check something for me, if you can, without making a spectacle of yourself,” Luther said. “Have the photos from Les’s place been downloaded?”
“You don’t ask much, do you? Tell me what you’re looking for, and I’ll give you a call back in a minute.”
Luther did, and true to her intent if not exactly to her word, Beth called him back in four minutes. “You were right—there was an empty wrapper, and it was taken into evidence. I’ll see if I can’t encourage it toward the front of the line on fingerprints.”
Luther smiled. “Thanks, Beth. I owe you a beer.”
“You wish,” she said. “You owe me at least two.”
Luther shivered, the cold finally catching up with him. He locked up his vehicle and headed inside. Then he cleaned out the coffee pot and prepped the next batch. Back in his office, he set his head on his desk, just for a minute. Or maybe just a couple of hours…