fourteen

“But seriously,” Randy said. “How many people do you think are in that car?”

“You know, if you’re that curious, you could always go look,” Wren told him.

“The windows are fogged up.”

“If you tap on the door,” Death said, “they’ll probably open it.”

“And invite you to join them,” Wren added with a wicked grin.

Randy frowned at the other two. “Man, you guys aren’t right, you know that?”

The three of them were sitting in the back seat of Death’s Jeep, Death on the driver’s side with Wren cuddled up close beside him, and Randy angled against the passenger door. They were parked in a sea of cars, on the old, cracked, and rutted parking lot of the Feed-n-Seed Emporium. On the last Friday of the month, the Rives County Volunteer Fire Department, the East Bledsoe Ferry Fire Department, and the MedEvac Helicopter Rescue Service staged Drive-In Movie Night as a joint fundraiser for their various charities.

There was no actual drive-in theater in the area, and there hadn’t been for decades, but the whitewashed wall of the feed store served as the screen for a projection TV and they broadcast the sound as a podcast. Tonight, in honor of the onset of autumn and the approach of Halloween, the showing was a double-feature of classic horror movies. With no news on either of the police cases they’d become entangled in, they’d decided to take a night off and just enjoy themselves.

They could only hope that the movies would be scarier than being parked next to Farrington, Madeline, and whoever else they were sharing a vehicle with. There were at least three people in the car and they’d started a heavy makeout session early. Already the windows were fogged up and the car was rocking in a manner that suggested it needed new shocks.

“You know what they’re doing, don’t you?” Wren asked. “This is just like when they showed up in St. Louis. They’re trying to make Death jealous. Madeline’s trying to make Death jealous by letting him see her with another, um, something that passes for a man if you have a wild enough imagination. And Eric’s trying to make Death jealous by letting him see him with his ex-wife.”

“If they’re wasting their time trying to make me jealous,” Death said, “then I pity them. There’s nothing either of them has that I want.” He considered. “Well, I’d take Benji, but as long as I get to see him sometimes, I’m happy.”

“Where does the third person in their car come in?” Randy asked.

“That I don’t know. And I don’t want to know, either!”

“Hey,” Death said, “the movie’s starting! Turn on the podcast.”

Wren pulled up the podcast on her phone and they settled in to watch the film. “Man, these movies make me crazy,” she said. “How come the people in them are all so stupid? You know, if one of these demon-possessed, undead serial killers ever had to take out a cabin full of smart coeds, they’d never make it out of the film alive.”

“They don’t make it out of the film alive,” Randy said. “They make it out undead, the same way they went in.”

“Smartass.”

After half an hour of yelling at the screen, Wren took a deep breath, looked around at Death and Randy, and realized they were laughing at her.

“Oh, crap,” she said. “I’m sorry! I just can’t seem to keep my mouth shut. Am I ruining the movie for you?”

The brothers reassured her that she wasn’t.

“Are you kidding?” Death asked. “You’re way more fun than this movie. You do realize that the characters can’t hear you though, right?”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“Hey, look!” Randy said. “I think the blonde chick is going to put on her high heels and run through the muddy garden in search of help.”

“What?” Wren turned back to the movie. “What are you doing?” she shouted. “Don’t do that! If you can’t find real shoes, go barefoot! And don’t go out in the garden. There’s nothing in the garden. Find your friends! Build a barricade! Arm yourself, for God’s sake!”

“Oh, maybe she heard you. She’s going to look in the pantry for running shoes.”

“Is that what she’s doing? Do you think that’s what she’s doing?” There was no dialogue at the moment and they were having to figure out the characters’ thoughts and motivation from their actions.

“I think so. See, she’s looking at her feet, and then her shoes, and looking from the pantry to the back door and biting her lip, like she’s having trouble deciding what to do. Okay, now she’s headed for the pantry—”

“Because everyone keeps their spare shoes in the pantry,” Wren scoffed.

“I sense you’re having difficulties with your suspension of disbelief,” Death observed sagely.

“You’re an observational genius.”

“This has been said.” Death cocked an eyebrow at the screen. “Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t the short guy hide in the pantry a little while ago? Ten bucks says she finds his body.”

“Ha. No bet,” Randy said.

They watched as the blonde chick, as Randy had dubbed her, crept nervously across the kitchen and reached for the pantry door. The house, in the movie, was dark. The premise, as far as they could tell, was that a group of college kids had gone to an isolated vacation cabin for a weekend of debauchery, only to come across the path of an undead demonic serial killer who was now stalking them and leaving their gory corpses for their friends to find.

The blonde eased open the door. Her body stiffened. She put her hands to her mouth and let out a horrified, terrified wail. The camera lingered on her back as she stood in a convenient moonbeam, screaming into the pantry. Then it showed them a close-up of her screaming, and finally switched to the cause of her distress.

As Death had guessed, the body of the short guy dangled from the pantry ceiling, a piece of bloody metal protruding from his chest.

“Is that a meat hook?” Wren demanded. “Why is there a meat hook? Who keeps a meat hook hanging from the ceiling on a chain in a vacation cabin? You don’t keep meat hooks in vacation cabins. You keep paper plates and, if you can remember to bring one, a can opener. Did the killer bring it? Is he walking around with a pocket full of meat hooks, just in case he comes across some drunk college kids?”

“You know,” Randy said, “I do think you’re being a little harsh with the college kids. After all, they’re drunk and their friends keep getting killed and it’s dark and all.”

“It doesn’t have to be dark. All they have to do is turn a light on.”

“But the killer cut the power. Didn’t you see?”

“He turned off the main breaker. All you have to do is turn it back on. Do none of them understand how a breaker box works? It’s not that hard!”

“So what would you do?” Randy asked. “If you were there, in that cabin, just like that, being stalked by an undead demonic serial killer”

“Well, for starters, I’d turn the power back on.”

“But wouldn’t he just turn it back off again?”

“Then I’d turn it back on.”

“So you’d spend the whole film flipping a switch at each other? You know, this could get to be an awfully boring movie.”

“Oh, but he wouldn’t turn it back off if he didn’t know I’d turned it on.”

“Wait, what?” Randy asked. Death was just sitting back in his corner of the backseat, holding Wren and laughing too hard to talk.

“I wouldn’t let him know I’d turned it on. I’d make sure all the lights were out, then I’d turn the main breaker back on so there’d be power in the lines. Then I’d take that big lamp there and break the bulb, but leave it in the socket, and when the killer came looking for me, I’d stab him with it.”

“So, what? You think that’d electrocute him?”

“Wouldn’t it?” Wren asked. “Like sticking a fork in a light socket, is what I thought. You’d probably have to make sure the lamp was turned on.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But he’s undead and demonic. Can you electrocute undead demonic serial killers?”

“It’s worth a try.”

“What if it didn’t work? Then what would you do?”

“I’d hit him with the lamp!”

Behind Randy, the car with Eric and Madeline, et al., finally stopped rocking and bouncing. Wren saw a hand wipe clear an area of the rear window and Madeline peeked out at the Jeep. Her face, in the reflected glow of the movie, looked wistful.

The front door opened and Eric stumbled out. He was shirtless. His belt hung loose, his pants were undone, and his hair was a mess. He gave the Jeep a drunken, lopsided grin and a thumbs-up, closed the front car door, opened the rear car door, and climbed inside. A woman’s hand came out and caught the handle and pulled it closed.

“Now that,” Wren said, “that over there? That’s scary!”

_____

“Man! Why you gotta do this to me?”

When Death picked Randy up after work, he already had a passenger in the back seat of his Jeep. A sullen, handcuffed, complaining passenger.

“You wouldn’t have to do this if you’d made your court date,” he told the man.

“I forgot, all right? I just got the days mixed up. You couldn’t cut me some slack, man?”

“You shouldn’t have tried to run.”

“What did he do?” Randy asked.

“Attempted theft.” Death tilted the rearview mirror so he could look back at his prisoner. “Grandy here thought he could run with the big boys, but Salvy caught him in the act at that place over on Second.”

The East Bledsoe Ferry police station was on the town square, sitting kitty-corner to Death’s office. The street was made up of two lanes separated by a line of parking spaces, with the inner lane travelling clockwise around the courthouse and the outer lane going widdershins. On a normal day, it was crowded but not packed.

Today was not normal. The entire inner lane was blocked off and half the central parking places were taken up by equipment vans and food trucks. Workers were busy building booths and a stage on the courthouse lawn, while a carnival set up rides and games in the street.

Randy looked around at the chaos. “What in the Sam Hill is going on here?” he asked.

“It’s, ah, some kind of harvest festival,” Death said. “Heritage Days or something. There’s stuff going up all over town, but it seems to be centered here. Wren was telling me about it. I guess it’s an annual thing.”

“Huh.”

Death maneuvered into a parking place in front of the police station and they went in to deliver his prisoner. When Grandy had been checked in and taken back to the cells, Death and Randy lingered to talk.

“What are you doing playing bounty hunter again?” Chief Reynolds asked. “I thought that was just a fallback if the private eye gig dried up.”

“Favor for a friend,” Death replied. “Hagarson’s out of town and one of his clients skipped, so he called me. So, ah, have you heard anything new on the Dozier case?”

“I don’t know anything you don’t,” Reynolds said. “I’m assuming, because of the way they’re acting, that there’s no hard evidence connecting Dozier to the murder scene in the crypt. No fingerprints or anything. The KC cops haven’t come right out and said as much, but they haven’t announced that they’ve got it wrapped up, either.”

“We need that cell phone,” Death said. “There’s a good chance Jones recorded his own murder.”

“I agree, but how are you going to find it? The last place it pinged before the battery died was out at Warriors’ Rest. We’ve been over that ground with a fine-tooth comb. Tried dogs and metal detectors. Nothing.”

“Have you considered a psychic?” Randy joked.

“Do you know one?” Reynolds countered.

“Well, uh … ”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Now, I did date this girl once who always knew who was on the phone before she looked at caller ID. Sometimes she’d know before it even rang. Couldn’t ever come up with lottery numbers or anything like that, though, so probably that wouldn’t be very helpful.”

The back door to the room swung open and Eric Farrington strutted in. He saw Death and Randy and his eyes lit up.

“Hey, Bogart! I was just thinking. Did you ever see that show about wife swapping? Well, I thought—”

“No.”

“But—”

“No. And pray I don’t tell Wren about this conversation.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Reynolds asked Farrington. “I thought I gave you a job to do.”

“I did it. It’s done. I did a helluva job, too.”

“He did, Chief.” Officer Grigsby had come in behind the jailor. “Those cells are practically sparkling. Of course, there were only two he could clean. The others are occupied.”

“Well, good. Now he can go move the prisoners out of two of the other cells and clean them. And keep doing that until he’s got them all.”

Farrington’s face fell. “But if I put prisoners in the clean cells they’ll just get them dirty again. And if they see me having to clean them all, the prisoners I haven’t gotten to yet will mess up the ones they’re in.”

“Yeah.” Reynolds smiled. “It’s gonna be a helluva job. Maybe while you’re doing it, you can think about all the reasons you shouldn’t be running around with a civilian trying to ‘execute a search warrant.’”

_____

“And-a-fifteen-and-a-fifteen-got-a-fifteen-and-a-sixteen-and-a-sevente—” Wren broke off in mid call. “Just a second here. Do you two know that you’re bidding against each other?”

It wasn’t her responsibility to point it out and a lot of auctioneers wouldn’t have, but not doing so would have felt dishonest. Integrity was one of the cornerstones of Keystone and Sons.

The two women bidding from opposite sides of the crowd craned their necks to see one another.

“Mother?”

“Darlene! What are you doing? I said I was going to buy it.”

“I didn’t see you and I thought you were losing out, so I was bidding for you.”

Wren tapped the top of the little wooden jewelry chest she was selling. “Okay, let’s go back to the last bid we had from a third party.” She pointed to a gentleman in the crowd. “You bid eleven, right?”

He nodded.

“Okay, then, starting with eleven … ”

Later, after she’d handed the stepladder and microphone off to Roy’s son Tim, Wren wandered around the kitchen of the house where the auction was being held. They weren’t selling the house; the owners had opted to go through a realtor in the hopes of getting a higher price. It was a split-level ranch style home from the seventies, with an open floor plan and a lot of blond paneling.

“Whatcha doin’?”

She turned at the voice to find that Felix Knotty had come in behind her. Like Death, Felix was a Marine combat vet, but his war had been Vietnam. He’d been friends with the twins since they’d gone to school together and he worked now as an odd-job man for the auction company.

“Just looking around. You know, I’ve never really looked at any of the places we’ve sold from the perspective of a home buyer before.”

“Are you thinking you might like to live here?”

“No, I can’t see it. It feels sterile and mildly depressing and there aren’t any trees in the yard.” Wren shrugged and turned in a circle. “Anyway, we need to get our financing in order and figure out what we’re looking for. It’s kind of scary. How do you know you’re choosing the right place? What if you make a mistake?”

“Are you talking about the house or about Death?”

“What? Why, the house of course!”

“I’m just saying. You’re uprooting your whole life for a man you’ve known for less than a year. And a damaged man at that. That doesn’t scare you?”

“No! Not at all!”

“How do you know you’re doing the right thing?”

“I just do. It just … ” She searched for an explanation. “It just feels right. It feels like the most right thing I’ve ever done.”

Felix smiled. “Well then, I wouldn’t worry about the house. That’s just a detail. Finding the right person is the main point. Once you’ve done that, the details will work themselves out.”

_____

“Come to do some more horseback riding?”

Death’s “no” was drowned out by Randy’s “yeah, he did!”

“No, I didn’t. You know I didn’t.”

“But you could, as long as you’re here.”

“It couldn’t hurt.” Robinson joined the argument. “It’s good exercise and relieves stress. Helps rebuild confidence. And Sugar likes you. He’s not going to dump you off and you’re not quite clumsy enough to fall off on your own. And it’s not like your brother would think less of you if you did fall off.”

“Right,” Randy agreed. “You’re my big brother. I’ve thought you were an idiot all my life.”

“Ha ha. Listen, I came out here because I wanted to talk to you about that missing cell phone.”

“Man, I don’t know where it is. I don’t know anything about it beyond what I told you. Jones was talking on it the last time I saw him and that’s the last time I saw it, too.”

“I know. But it pinged on this property a week after he was killed. There’s at least a chance that it’s still here somewhere, only hidden well enough that no one could find it.”

“I don’t see how that could be. You know the cops searched for two whole days. They pulled up the floorboards in the cabins, looked in the attics, brought in the dogs and metal detectors, and crawled through the woods on their hands and knees. They even went through my wife’s underwear drawer. I don’t even go through her underwear drawer! And you know what they found? Nothing! A whole hell of a lot of nothing!”

Death sighed. “I understand that. Look, I’m just trying to do what you asked me to do. I’m trying to clear Tony Dozier. The best way to do that is to figure out who killed August Jones. Now the cops, they have all kinds of fancy forensics to fall back on. Maybe they’ll find something at the murder scene that points to the killer. But all I’ve got is my eyes and my gut. I just think if I could get a better idea of the layout, I could maybe come up with some idea of what, exactly, happened that day.”

Kurt Robinson frowned and thought about it. “So would you like a guided tour of the property?”

“It might help, yeah. Could you do that?”

“Oh, sure. Absolutely. On horseback.”

_____

“You know, I’m glad you suggested this,” Death said. “I think I could get to enjoy horseback riding.”

“Shut up,” Randy growled. Like his brother, he was mounted. His horse was a big chestnut stallion. Randy was clinging to the saddle horn every bit as desperately as Death had on his first ride. Death could swear the horses looked amused.

He certainly was.

“If you look off to the right, that’s south, you can still see remnants of an old barbed-wire fence. That’s the property line between our land and the Hadleigh House.” Robinson drew his own mare to a halt and pointed toward a line of trees. “The gully that Roy put his truck in runs down along the other side of that fence, crosses over onto our property just past this rise, then turns south again and crosses under the road through a culvert. The cops went through the gully with dogs and metal detectors and had a guy crawl through the culvert, but they didn’t find squat.”

Death looked back up at the Hadleigh House, high overhead and nearly hidden behind the trees. A trail of pin oaks, younger than the surrounding woods, wound its way up the hill.

“Your driveway used to be connected to the Hadleigh House drive,” he observed.

“Yeah. This was all part of the plantation back in the day.” Robinson led the way over a low rise and stopped beside a small bridge that carried the camp’s driveway over the creek. The gully wasn’t as deep here, but it was wider. The water was shallow and danced and sang over the rocks.

“If the creek leaves the property here,” Randy asked, “what’s the creek that runs between your land and the cemetery?”

“That’s a little tributary to this creek. We’re ringed on three sides by water.”

“How much does it restrict access on foot?”

“It doesn’t, really,” Robinson said. “This is the only place you can drive across the creek, but there are a lot of places where you can get a horse down and back up the other side if you want to ride across, and you can climb down and cross it on foot almost anywhere.”

Death grimaced. “You know that doesn’t help me a hell of a lot?”

“Yeah. I know.” Robinson nodded across the bridge. “Our property this way is a little, rough quarter-circle—or quarter-oval, really—between the creek, the road, and the fence line. Do you want to look at it or head on toward the north and the cemetery?”

“Let’s go look at the cemetery and the woods between here and there.”

Kurt Robinson turned his horse to the north and led the way through a low meadow that ran between the creek and the rise. Trees were beginning to lose their leaves now and here and there the gray-white gravel road was visible between the branches.

“I’m trying to get the timeline nailed down,” Death said. “Jones was murdered on the 7th. That is, he was attacked on the 7th and then died in Dozier’s car sometime during the night of the 7th to 8th. Because he had an arrest record—”

“Who had an arrest record?” Randy interrupted.

“Jones. Pretty much all the members of the CAC have been arrested at some time or other. Trespassing, disturbing the peace, etc.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, so because he had an arrest record, they were able to identify his body immediately. But they didn’t find out he carried a cell phone until several days later, because it wasn’t registered in his name. They started pinging it on the 13th and it showed as being somewhere on this property. That was a Tuesday, the Tuesday after the funeral. Who was here then, do you remember?”

Robinson sighed. “That was almost a week after the funeral. You’ve gotta understand that we only started this place up a couple of years ago. We’ve been putting it together on a shoestring. During the summer we have stuff going on pretty much all the time. Like a summer camp only for vets instead of kids. But aside from the one Nichelle and I live in, none of the cabins are insulated or set up for winter weather. So, after Labor Day, things start slowing down. We still do programs at the weekends, but weekdays are pretty slow.”

“Just you and Nichelle, then?” Death asked.

Robinson hesitated, then sighed again. “Us and Dexter. He spent a couple of days here that week.” He pulled up his horse and turned to look at Death directly. “He wouldn’t kill anyone. I swear to you. On my grandmother’s grave, I swear to you. Dexter wouldn’t kill anyone.”