CHAPTER SIX

Thirty minutes later I had an arrest warrant for Doyle Raynes along with a search warrant for his home and car. Before I went upstairs to see Judge MacGregor, I’d told Maylene to have the dispatcher call Toby and tell him to come to the office. I also had her call two experienced deputies in from patrol—Billy Don Smith and Otis Tremmel—both steady men with several years on the force. Toby arrived first.

“What about my autopsy report?” I asked him.

“Linda said they’re going to fax it over as soon as it’s official, but he put the time of death at sometime between three and six this morning.”

“Well, hell,” I said in exasperation. “I could have told him that. She was seen alive at two-thirty and found dead at about six. How about the bullets?”

“Already filed in the evidence locker.”

“Good. We’ll get those two Bureau boys on that tomorrow. What we’ve got on our plate right now is more important.”

Soon Smith and Tremmel arrived, and I got everybody clustered around my desk. “Toby and I are going to take the front,” I said. “I want you two guys to take the unmarked car and make sure the kid is at home. He might have flown the coop or just be out or something, and there’s no point in mounting an assault on an empty house. If his car is there, then there’s every reason to think he will be too.”

“What kind of car is it?” Billy Don asked.

“An Olds Cutlass, maybe ten or fifteen years old. Tan with a gray front fender. If it’s there, go ahead and get your flak jackets on and park down the street a few yards from his drive where he can’t spot you. When you see us pull up behind you, drive around to the rear and get up behind that garage. Now does anybody know the layout of this place?”

“I do,” Tremmel said. “It has a long flight of stairs on the side that go up to the apartment. There’s no way to get to the landing without passing the windows.”

That description rang a bell with me. “Does this happen to be Matt Jones’s old place, by any chance?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Smith said. “I think it is.”

“Then nobody, and I mean nobody, is going up those damn stairs. About twenty years ago the DPS narcotics people were pulling a bust on that very same apartment, and a young officer got a belly full of squirrel shot on that stairway. The boy wound up with a colostomy bag, and he still isn’t healthy. So we’ll either use the bullhorn or I’ll call him on the phone. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try tear gas. Hell, I’ll burn him out before I’ll let one of my people go up that stairway. Now is that clear to everybody?”

They nodded. I motioned to Smith and Tremmel. “You two get rolling.”

Ten minutes later Billy Don Smith called on his cell phone with the information that Raynes’s car was in the drive right in front of the apartment. Maylene checked the phone book and found a number listed under the kid’s name at the right address. I jotted it down, and then had Toby get a tear gas gun and three canisters out of the armory. We both grabbed Remington 870 riot guns and loaded them with number-four buckshot. Then we were on our way without a hitch. Or so I thought until I got out in the hall and saw Sheila.

“Bo,” she said.

“Sheila, don’t ask.”

“That’s not fair, Bo. After all, I’m the one who talked to Tommy.”

I sighed deeply. She was right about that. And she had always given me help in the past when I’d asked for it and asked little in return. Which brought to mind that verse in the Bible about not binding the mouths of the oxen that tread the grain. “Will you do exactly what I tell you to do?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I made a snap decision that the commissioners wouldn’t have approved of. Not that I cared. “Come on, then.”

*   *   *

The garage apartment was behind a frame bungalow in a part of town that had been developed in the 1920s. Originally a solidly middle class neighborhood, now it was a little seedy and weather-worn and occupied mostly by young, low-end blue-collar families and marginal retirees.

We’d taken the department’s big black Chevy Suburban. When Smith and Tremmel saw us turn onto the street they drove around the block toward the rear. Toby and I got out of the truck and donned our flak gear. I parked Sheila across the street with an admonition to stay put until I called her. A couple of minutes later my cell phone buzzed. It was Billy Don Smith telling me they were coming up the lane behind the garage. Toby and I climbed back into the Suburban and wheeled into the driveway. He stopped well back from the garage and cut the engine, and we piled out and got behind our vehicle.

The air was fiercely hot around us, and the world seemed silent as the afternoon sun beat down relentlessly. I felt a fine dew of sweat on my forehead, and it wasn’t just from the heat. I’d seen situations like this go bad and end up with people dead because of nothing more than a misspoken word.

I took out the card on which I’d scribbled the boy’s phone number. I punched the number into my cell phone, and he answered on the third ring. “Doyle Raynes?” I asked.

“Yeah?” he answered.

“This is Sheriff Bo Handel, and I need you to come downstairs and talk to me.”

“What for?”

“I’ve got a warrant here for your arrest.”

“I didn’t kill anybody,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and silently called on the good Lord for help. It was clear to me that this boy was never going to be admitted to MIT. But it was also clear that he was just dumb enough with just enough fear in his voice that he might decide to fight it out if he was armed. Time for diplomacy.

“We didn’t say you did, son,” I said, my voice as pleasant as I could make it. “Besides, this whole thing is a long way from the courtroom. What we need to do is just talk things over and see if we can’t take care of business.”

For several seconds he said nothing, and I could tell he was weighing the options he didn’t have. He appeared at the window for a moment, the phone at his ear, then vanished once again back inside.

“You still there?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Then don’t do anything silly. We’re armed to the teeth down here, and you haven’t got a chance if you get cute. You come on down and we’ll treat you decent. No rough stuff. I give you my word.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“It’s just a warrant, Doyle. That’s all. You’ll get a free lawyer if you need one and plenty of time to prove you’re innocent if you are. And son, the new jail is air conditioned and the food’s pretty good. They tell me it beats the hospital. I know for a fact that it beats being in the graveyard.”

There was another long pause during which I barely breathed. “What do you want me to do?” he asked at last.

“Just come out on the landing with your hands on the top of your head. Then walk slowly down the stairs. Don’t make any quick moves.”

“Okay, just let me get my shoes on.”

I didn’t like that business about giving him time to get his shoes, but I didn’t have any choice in the matter. I turned to Toby. “If he comes out shooting, or even with a gun in his hand, aim low and get his legs. If that doesn’t take the fight out of him, cash his check.”

“Okay, boss.”

But such precautions proved unnecessary. Doyle Raynes appeared on the landing, skinny and shirtless, his hands above his head, and made his way slowly down the rickety stairs. Up close he didn’t look like much—watery brown eyes and a wisp of a goatee and stringy hair that had been cut in a pageboy. As soon as he was cuffed I read him his Miranda warning and then served the search warrants.

“You’re going to search my car and my apartment too?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“Can I be here when you do the apartment? I don’t like people going through my stuff.”

“No,” I said. “But we’ll be careful and not damage anything.”

I turned and saw Sheila standing at the end of the driveway and motioned her to come on back. She pulled a digital camera out of her purse and started snapping away. I was just about to say something to her when Toby called me over to Raynes’s car.

“Look inside,” he said. “And take a sniff too.”

I peeked into the interior of the Cutlass, then examined the outside once again. The car’s body was dusty and covered in road film, but the interior had been vacuumed and washed and was as neat as a pin. Or at least it was as neat as an old junker belonging to a dopehead could ever be.

“What do you smell?” Toby asked.

“Lysol,” I said.

“Right. Somebody went to some real trouble to clean up the interior of this thing.”

I stood back and looked at the car for a minute, thinking. Then I said, “Toby, get in there and pull that backseat out of its socket and see what you find behind it.”

A few seconds later the seat had been wrestled a few inches forward and Toby was shining his penlight into the crevice behind it. Then he stuck his hand in and said, “Blood. And some of it’s still tacky, even in this heat. How did you know?”

“The Twiller kid said he heard a commotion, so that means there must have been at least two of them. It just made sense to me they would have hauled the body in the backseat. Call the Department of Public Safety. We’re going to need a whole forensics team on this. We’ll hold up on the search until they get here. I want them to help with the apartment too.”

I turned to Raynes. “Are you going to talk this afternoon, or are you going to lawyer up on me?” I asked.

“I think I better get one, Sheriff. Don’t you?”

“I can’t answer that question for you, but you need to realize it may be tomorrow before the judge can appoint somebody. I’m guessing you want a court-provided attorney. Do you have any money for one on your own?”

“No, I’m pretty broke.”

“I thought so.” I pecked my knuckles on the primer-painted fender of the old car and shook my head. “You know, son, this car probably wouldn’t bring fifteen hundred dollars on a good day. If you’d taken it out in the country and torched it you might have skated on this thing.”

“I couldn’t do that, Sheriff. It’s my baby. I’m restoring it.”

A friend of mine says the most important thing about a person is not how much money he has, or what he owns, or how he looks, or even what he’s accomplished, but what he wants out of life and hasn’t gotten yet. I looked at Doyle Raynes’s old heap with its sagging springs and wheezy engine and torn upholstery, and I saw him getting that front fender in a wrecking yard somewhere. I saw him lovingly bolting it in place and dreaming of the day his baby would sport a fancy new paint job. When I saw all that, I felt a stab of sick pity deep in my heart and shook my head sadly.

“Take him on to the jailhouse, Billy Don,” I said, turning away. “He’s got a killing to answer for.”