BY NOON, Remy and I had made our way to the other two supply houses that sold aircraft cable. At each, we were fortunate to find a computer on the counter. And without a subpoena, each business handed us a list of folks who’d bought our specific gauge of cable in the last month. Call it Southern hospitality.
As we drove away from the last place, I couldn’t help imagining that the main use of the cable was to get Kendrick up in that loblolly.
We got onto State 902, and Remy talked about some details that had been bothering her. The lottery winnings in Harmony the same day as the murder. The strange lightning storms on the land where Kendrick had been killed.
I pulled off the highway and headed toward my house. I didn’t think the storm or lotto mattered much, but the carving in the tree where someone had waited for Kendrick didn’t sit well with me.
Then again, I also knew that my partner was young and impressionable. And evidence was what mattered most, not your gut.
“Every time I think there’s something bigger at play on a case,” I said, “I discover there’s just some regular guy—some evil man doing evil things.”
I turned onto my street, where Remy had left her car that morning.
“The only conspiracy,” I said, “is when you and I stand idle. Let the assholes get away.”
I dropped Remy outside my house, and she hung by the car window for a moment.
“I’ll be in in an hour,” I said. “Just gonna let Purvis out.”
“It might do you well to get something solid in your system,” Remy said.
It was the first time my partner had referenced my drinking out loud, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
I moved inside, raiding the pantry. I found some cornmeal and self-rising flour and made batter for some hoecakes.
I let Purvis out back, and he sniffed around an old swing set that I’d built in the backyard when Jonas was five. His brown and white tail unconsciously moved left and right as he smelled the earth.
The links in the swing chains were rusty from mist from the morning sprinklers, and I noticed something I hadn’t before. There had always been an area of dirt under each swing where my son’s feet had dragged along the ground. Grass could never grow there, but now the two areas were overgrown with green marathon.
I made my way back to the kitchen and fried the hoecakes in Lena’s old wrought-iron skillet.
I stared out the kitchen window as I cooked. The east side of the house gave way to a forested area with slash pines so dense you could hardly walk through them. But weedy cogon grass with white flowers had grown up all around them, seeding themselves into the trunks and slowly strangling the trees.
Have Remy and I gotten ourselves into something twisted? Rotten?
I ate at the stove until I was full as a tick, the grease and flour pouring into my system and soaking up any liquor left over from last night. The sun threw shadows through the blinds onto the floor, and it looked like stairs heading to nowhere. I thought about how many cases hit dead ends and how many dirtbags never got caught.
My cell rang, and it was Abe.
“I found a financial transfer between McClure Towing and Stormin’ Norman Tow.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Nope, seventy-five hundred bucks. Paid from Stormin’ Norman to McClure.”
Money from neo-Nazis to McClure.
“We got him,” I said.
“Could be everyday business,” Abe warned. “But between that and the StormCloud tat on Virgil Rowe . . . plus the cord three hundred yards from the McClure house. It should be enough for a friendly judge to give us a search warrant.”
An hour later, I met Abe outside of McClure Towing near downtown. The judge had denied us a warrant for the McClure residence, but gave us paper on the towing business.
Vaughn McClure met us at the door, and Abe badged him, handing him the warrant.
“The hell is this?” McClure asked. He was in his early forties. Chiseled face and thick black hair. He looked like a model for men’s hair dye.
Abe motioned McClure outside to talk while I did a quick once-over of the place.
The small lobby up front was spare. Water jug for customers. Those pointy paper cups in a stack atop it. A couple worn-out chairs.
I began by rummaging through the desk drawers. Nothing. Then the file cabinet. In a folder in the last drawer, I found a stamped invoice from Stormin’ Norman for the same dollar amount that Abe had located. The invoice read “Three Trucks—Supplemental Support.”
Abe, meanwhile, had moved to the garage while a patrolman sat with McClure out by the curb. Abe’s job was to find the aircraft cable—not the three-eighths inch used in tow trucks, but the five-sixteenths that matched the cord used in Kendrick’s abduction.
I walked outside and showed Abe the file. The garage smelled of motor oil and coffee grinds. “I got jack diddly out here, P.T.,” Abe said.
I placed the invoice in a sealed evidence bag, and McClure walked over. He had white sweat stains on his black polo shirt.
“What’d you take?” McClure nodded at the evidence bag. I had a couple inches on him, but his arms were like granite.
“Why don’t you come with us downtown, Mr. McClure. You can have your attorney meet you there.”
McClure made a call to his wife and got in the black and white. I followed the patrol car in my truck so I could talk to Abe. It was three p.m., and I’d hoped we’d be heading back with more than the paper evidence of what Abe had already found digitally.
“There was nothing incriminating in that office,” I said to Abe once we were by ourselves. “And the problem with this”—I held up the invoice—“is Stormin’ Norman’s a legit towing business. Per this invoice, McClure just provided some extra trucks to someone in his industry.”
“Sure,” Abe said. “But there’s, you know—”
“The optics of it?” I finished the sentence with Abe’s go-to phrase.
“If McClure is innocent and he’s really just protecting his business,” Abe said, “he’s gonna want to talk to us now, podna.”
“Says who?”
“Well, if he doesn’t,” Abe said, “we just give the Deb Newberrys of the world a little morsel about Stormin’ Norman and the Nazi connection to Kendrick. Let the market take care of the rest.”
The word “market” was Abe’s expression for the press. Meaning that if the media had this information, they would make the same connection we did between the neo-Nazi tow truck company and Vaughn McClure. And then they’d eat McClure alive. Protesters outside his business. Media trucks outside his home. If he was only trying to protect his family and business, we’d use that instinct against him.
But if he was a Nazi bastard in hiding, like we suspected, he’d lawyer up hard and we’d know to start digging holes in his life ’til we found something else.
We got back to the station, and Alana McClure was already there, along with an attorney. The wife was a heavyset redhead, the lawyer a skinny white guy in his seventies who I’d seen in court. His name was Kergan.
We put the lawyer and the McClures in a room and let Kergan go for a minute. The usual attorney speech about his client being harassed.
Then I laid it down on the desk. The invoice. The article about StormCloud and their holdings. The lead of metal cord.
“I’m not gonna beg you to tell me a thing, Mr. McClure,” I said. “You know what this is?” I put my hand across the table. “It’s me, putting a hand out to you, while your boat goes down in a storm.”
“We don’t need to be here,” Kergan said, pushing his chair back.
“When the press hears that you might be connected to a black boy getting burned alive,” I said. “And you won’t help his parents . . . ?”
“You’re gonna blackmail my clients now?” Kergan interrupted.
“And our chief suspect,” Abe added, “is a Nazi white supremacist who you do business with.”
Abe let that hang in the air, and I dealt the final blow. “Kendrick was grabbed in the field a hundred yards from your house,” I said. “To a lot of folks that might look like you purposely sent him packing Saturday night—into the arms of a neo-Nazi you get money from.”
“We’re leaving.” Kergan stood up.
“Siddown,” Vaughn McClure said to his attorney.
The lawyer took his chair.
Vaughn McClure exhaled. He seemed nervous. But just as much, he was pissed.
“This thing.” He picked up the invoice. “Stormin’ Norman needed a second company to help them clear some old cars off a property. So they hired us. We worked three days alongside their drivers. We never talked politics, and we didn’t know shit about ’em, except they paid net ten.”
“You got any eagle tats, Mr. McClure?” Abe asked. “When we book you, are we gonna find hate ink on your shoulders?”
Vaughn McClure looked to his wife and then back to me.
“We didn’t want to feel like we were piling on,” Vaughn McClure said. “And talk bad about Kendrick.”
The energy in the room shifted.
“Meaning what?” I said.
“Listen, we love Kendrick,” Alana McClure said. “He’s had supper at our house twenty times. But in the last year, it’s been tough to have him over. And it happened again Saturday.”
“What happened?” Abe asked.
“Kendrick’s behavior,” Vaughn McClure said. “Pushing the other boys around. Specifically my boy. I’m no helicopter parent, but eventually I step in.”
“Kendrick’s was the bad behavior that ended the sleepover?” Abe asked.
“Go ahead and ask Eric,” Vaughn McClure said. “He was there too.”
“I blame some bad influences,” Alana McClure spoke up. “People at the church.”
This sounded like bullshit to me. Then again, we’d been looking at this from the Websters’ point of view.
“Influences like who?” I asked.
“There’s a guy at the church,” Vaughn McClure said. “Tattoos down to here.” He pointed at his wrists. “A lot of the boys think he’s cool. He’s been to prison. Talks to them about girls.”
I looked to Abe.
“I checked every employee at First Baptist,” he said.
“I think he’s a volunteer,” Alana McClure said. “Lives in a shed on the property. Rides a speed bike.”
The motorcycle detail popped. We’d seen a single set of tracks near the crime scene.
We talked to the McClures a bit more, and then I heard three quick knocks on the observation window. This was Remy’s signal, and I excused myself. Left Abe in there with them.
Inside observation, Remy had her laptop flipped open.
“Tell me this is bullshit.” I pointed at the two-way window. “That we didn’t just lose our best suspect.”
“There’s a new handyman at the church,” Remy said. “Cory Burkette.”
In the picture Remy had open, Burkette was a pasty shade of white. Stocky. He wore an orange prison jumpsuit.
“He got out of Rutledge a month ago,” Remy said. “Served eight years for attempted robbery.”
“And he rides a bike?”
“A 2011 Suzuki GSX.” Remy pulled up a picture.
“How does Burkette know the Websters?”
“Some church outreach program with Rutledge prison,” Remy said. “The reverend counseled Burkette while he was locked up. After he got paroled, Webster invited him to stay at First Baptist.”
Remy stepped outside to call Eric Sumpter, the other boy at the sleepover. As she did, I found the photos of the motorcycle tracks out at Unger’s farm. I thought about the irrigation channel where Kendrick’s BMX bike had been found. A motorcycle would be an easy way to get Kendrick’s body out of there fast.
Remy opened the door, and I knew right away from her face. Eric Sumpter had verified the reason the sleepover ended. The McClures were in the clear.
“Shit,” I said.
Remy shrugged, grabbing her keys. “One door closes, ’nother one opens. Right? Let’s pick up Burkette.”
I nodded, and twenty minutes later, we pulled onto the church grounds. The place was desolate at four p.m. on a Tuesday.
Remy knew the area from growing up around here. “There’s an access road that loops around the back.” She pointed.
I pulled down a curving driveway that moved behind the church and past a set of dumpsters.
“There.” She pointed.
A shed, maybe ten by fifteen, was located in between the back of the church and the side of the Websters’ house. It was a tan prefab fiberglass number, with a dark brown plastic roof, molded to look like shingles on top.
My eyes traced a power line running from the church, looping over a wafer ash tree and dropping down atop the shed. Burkette was probably using it to power the tiny outbuilding.
I steered to the curb and got out. As Remy crossed in front of the truck, she pulled her sidearm from under her blazer.
I shook my head at her, patting my side. She got the message about not pulling her gun on church grounds and reholstered her weapon.
The front of the shed was opposite our approach, and we crossed the lawn slowly. About halfway there, I noticed a set of tire tracks in the grass.
The marks were shallow and smooth, like the ones photographed at the crime scene.
I motioned Remy around the west side of the shed, while I moved east.
Getting around to the front, we threw the door open.
No one was there.
Inside, a mattress was set up on the floor. Beside it sat an old thirteen-inch television. The TV had rabbit ears made out of a metal hanger.
I walked into the small space. An old wooden dresser sat near the mattress, and each drawer was flung open. The place smelled of Aqua Velva aftershave and dirt.
“Someone left in a rush,” Remy said.
She ran her flashlight over a single pair of white boxer briefs in the top drawer, her light ending on the tag.
A size 26 waist.
Burkette was five foot ten, two hundred pounds.
“Burkette stopped wearing a size 26 years ago, Rem.”
“But Kendrick didn’t,” she said. “So what the hell is his underwear doing in Burkette’s dresser?”