Harry and I entered the department through the back door. Vince Raines from Vehicle Theft was in the hall sipping coffee and tacking a page to the bulletin board. It was in-house stuff: folks selling a car or boat or had a litter of kittens to dispense.
Vince saw us, nodded. “You guys don’t need a jon boat, do you? Just put one on sale. Two years old. Cost thirty-five hundred with a ten-horse motor. Yours for twelve hundred even.”
“I got a kayak,” I said. “And an aversion to motors.”
“I got an aversion to seasickness,” Harry said.
“Just thought I’d …hey, I just got back from vacation. Mitch Burdon told me you two stopped by, looking into something.”
“We were trying to track down some stolen cars,” Harry said.
“Find ’em?”
“Mitch checked by make and model,” Harry said. “Some upscale machines that weren’t in the system. Mitch thought they might have been yanked from the airport, owners still out in Hawaii or whatever.”
“Like what?” Vince asked.
“A ’97 Porsche Turbo, ’58 Mercedes Roadster, a 2004 Beamer, I forget what.”
Vince’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “I dunno. I got kind of a weird call last week. I was working alone. Got a call that some fancy cars were missing from a place off Highway 45. ‘Fancy’, that was the word the caller used. Went to a Quonset-type warehouse, climate controlled, a collection of cars in storage.”
“There’d been thefts?” Harry asked.
“That’s the strange part. The guy that called – a guard or something – was all worked up. Scared. He said to get there quick. I got there about a half-hour later. The guy, a big goofy hick, said it was all a big mistake. His boss, the guy who owns the vehicles, had sold some and the guy didn’t know. So that was that.”
Harry said, “I’d sure like to take a look at this place. Mind if Carson and me became vehicle-theft cowboys for an hour?”
“Saddle up, boys. Lemme draw you a map where this place is.”
The address led us to a defunct single-runway airfield between a melon field and scrubby woods. I think the KEEP OUT signs outnumbered the TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs, but not by much. The only action nearby was an old strip-mall cum flea market about a half-mile down the road. A twelve-foot cyclone fence surrounded a gray Quonset structure, a small guardhouse in front. An industrial-size air-conditioning unit sat beside the hut, and I heard it running. The security was an electronic lock keypad that seemed to control the main gate. I saw a second keypad unit by the door of the hut, two dozen feet away.
The guardhouse looked little used: weeds growing from pavement cracks, the door half ajar. There was a phone in the guardhouse, a sign on it saying, ‘In case of emergency, call …’ such and such.
Harry looked at me. “You got an emergency?”
“I have to take a leak pretty bad.”
“I’ll phone it in.”
Harry dialed the number. I wasn’t lying, and crouched between the car and guardhouse to lose some coffee.
“Someone’s on the way,” he said. “Ten minutes.”
We leaned against the Crown Vic and watched heat shimmer from the old runway. Eight minutes later a pickup truck pulled into the lot, kicking up gravel.
The driver jumped out, a heavyset guy, thirties, knock-kneed, belly drooping over a too-tight belt. His face was wide, his cheeks as red as if rouged.
“What’s the emergency?” he asked, looking worried.
Harry and I flipped out the buzzers. I said, “We’re following up on a report about some stolen cars.”
“That’s all cleared up,” he said. “Over a week back.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “The report got filed wrong again.”
Harry slapped his forehead. “What?” the guy said.
“We got a new girl sticking reports in the wrong box. We pick it up, see the address, head out. What happened?”
“It was a mistake. The cars got sold.”
Harry laughed, clapped his hands.
“Come on? Really?”
The guy grinned, happy to tell the story again. “See, what happens is I come by ever’ morning to do a look-see. I’m s’pose to check inside, make sure the temperature and humidity are set right. I opened the door and saw empty spots where three of the cars had been. Nothin’ there. I called the cops, told them. Then I called out to Mr Kincannon’s office, told his people about the cars bein’ gone.”
“You mean like Buck Kincannon?” I shot Harry the eye.
“The one. Got a helluva collection of cars in there. Great to be rich, huh?”
“What happened next?”
“Mr Kincannon came over. Buck. Mr Nelson, too. I was outside and I heard Mr Buck inside having a real shit fit. Just yellin’ and screaming and throwing things. But when he come out he was smiling and said the cars was sold a few days before and he was sorry he’d forgot to tell me. Then he took off back to work. Then the cops come about ten minutes later and I explained it all.”
“Why do you think Buck Kincannon was yelling?”
The guy shrugged; it didn’t fall under his purview.
“I got no idea why rich people do the way they do.”
We returned to the department. The detectives’ room was pretty much deserted, with Roy Trent and Clay Bridges back in the conference room laying out files on their own mean-ass case, two biker gangs going toe-to-toe to carve out drug-sales turf. They had three bodies and no leads, biker types not prone to ask for police assistance.
I filled Harry in on my conversation with Tyree Shuttles.
“Fixated on me? Logan?”
“I don’t really know what that’s all about. Shuttles was pretty shook. I told him to relax, wait it out. Logan’s out of here in around a month.”
Harry drummed his fingers on his desk.
“Two times Logan’s been wandering around in our area. He said he was back looking at the Wookiee drawing that time.”
“I remember. It was on the floor.”
“The second time he’s sitting on my chair and says he’s reading the murder book.”
We sat at our desk and looked at Logan’s area, twenty feet distant. Like our arrangement, Logan and Shuttles had abutting desks in a tri-walled cubicle.
“What’s the saying about turnabout?” Harry asked. “It’s fair play?”
Harry walked over to Logan’s desk, sat. I followed, stood behind him, and kept an eye on the door. Logan was, strangely enough, a tidy kind of guy. Harry lifted a stack of papers, looked in files, checked in Logan’s desk drawers. He lifted Logan’s calendar, then his desk pad.
“Guess they didn’t slide into the trash by mistake after all,” Harry said, pulling out the two crime-scene photos missing from the Franklin book. Taken by the Forensics team, one photo was a wide shot of the Mazda and fifty or so feet surrounding it, rain-wet sidewalk, water running down the gutter. The other was basically the same, except the photographer had climbed the side of Arlin Dell’s truck cab to get the wide downward angle: Mazda, background. A dozen feet ahead of the car I saw the yellow marker indicating where the knife had been found.
“Why in the hell would Logan want these?” Harry said. “They’re location setters, not close enough to show anything important.”
He slipped the photos back under the pad and returned to his desk shaking his head.
“Souvenirs, maybe? The last scene he never worked? Shuttles is right, the son of a bitch is weirding out.”
Harry headed to the Prosecutor’s Office, a final meeting before the trial on Monday. Harry would be on the stand a fair amount, grilled by a defense lawyer, and everyone wanted to get their acts down. I was just happy the PO preferred Harry to me on such cases. But I had a tendency to ramble when questioned whereas Harry kept his answers brief, to the point, and had the presence of Thurgood Marshall in a room full of Munchkins.
I had an idea we hadn’t yet considered: having sketch artist Terry Baney do a drawing of Crandell. We concluded he was running his operation from a rental house, somewhere with land around the dwelling, so he could remain anonymous and not make neighbors suspicious with what would probably be comings and goings at all hours. But he’d still have to be near Mobile.
We could put a sketch on the air, accompanied by a “wanted for information” type of line. I made a phone call, but forgot it was Saturday; Baney worked standard hours, wouldn’t be in until Monday.
I scrawled my usual reminder – Call Baney: Drawing of Crandell – set it front and center on my desk. I spun a few times in my chair.
I looked at my watch. Clair was stopping by tonight at seven, and we were finally going to have our talk. I wiped my palms dry on my jeans and went home to sweep the sand from my floor.