He said, ‘My tire iron?’
Faith leaned into the car and popped the trunk. The tire iron was snapped into a kit mounted inside the rear quarter panel. She hefted the weight of the long, heavy metal bar in her hand. It was the single-handle type, L-shaped with a socket on the end to loosen the wheel lugs.
Perfect.
Collier was watching from the window when she went back into the house. Faith grabbed a chair from the cheap dining set and dragged it down the hallway. Collier followed, asking, ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m beating this asshole.’ She stood on the chair and swung the tire iron into the ceiling. The socket end lodged into the Sheetrock. She shoved the bar in farther, turned it at an angle and pulled down. A chunk of ceiling dropped to the floor. She took another swing with the tire iron. She thought about the Mesa Arms’ website, how it promoted its energy-efficient upgrades, like the spray foam in the attic that made it possible to break open the ceiling without getting a face full of pink insulation.
Faith dropped the tire iron, pleased that her guesstimate had worked out. The two file boxes were within arm’s reach. All she had to do was fight the flies to get to them.
‘Hey, lady,’ one of the unis called from the hall. ‘You know there’s some stairs right here.’
‘There’s a rat,’ Collier told him. ‘Like, Godzilla’s brother.’
‘You mean Rodan?’
‘Chibi, man. Rodan was a surrogate. Chibi was blood.’
‘Goro,’ Faith said, because she had spent three years of Saturdays watching Godzilla movies when Jeremy went through a phase. ‘Collier, help me with these boxes.’
‘She’s right,’ Collier said. ‘It definitely looked like Gorosaurus.’ He bared his teeth and made his hands into claws. ‘Like it was out for blood.’
Faith let the first box drop on his head.
Annoyingly, Collier still managed to catch it. He put the box on the floor and waited for her to pass down the second one.
The uni said, ‘You need us for anything else, man?’
Collier shook his head. ‘I’m good, bro.’
‘The closet,’ Faith reminded him.
‘Oh, right.’ Collier motioned for them to follow him into the other room. Faith took a precarious step down with the heavy second box in her hands. She put it on the floor beside the first. From the other room she heard a discussion about the best way to pull pins from the hinges, like they had never seen a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver before.
Faith clapped dust from her arms and ran her fingers through her hair to get rid of the grit. The rotting meat smell was so pungent that she had to open the bedroom windows. And push out the screens because the flies were starting to swarm. Ripping down the ceiling probably hadn’t been her best idea, but logic tended to go out the window when she was pissed off, and she was really pissed off at Dale Harding.
At the GBI, Faith had investigated her share of bad cops, and the one trait that they all had in common was that they thought they were still good guys. Theft, rape, murder, extortion, racketeering, pimping—it didn’t matter. They still thought the crimes they had committed were for the greater good. They were taking care of their families. They were protecting their brothers in blue. They had made a mistake. They would never do it again. It was annoying how they were all the same in their insistence that they were still basically good human beings.
Harding hadn’t just embraced his badness. He had forced it on others.
And now she had to go through even more of his crap.
Faith dragged the chair over to the window. She kicked the boxes in the same direction, then she sat down. She tried not to think about why the lid on the first box felt damp, but her mind still conjured up the useful fact that rats leave a trail of urine wherever they go.
She shuddered before digging into the stack of neatly labeled files.
Dale Harding had been a private eye, and the first box contained the sort of glamorous work done by PIs the world over: photos of cheating spouses in cheap motels, photos of cheating spouses in parked cars, photos of cheating spouses in alleyways and roadside gas stations and inside a kids’ play house in the backyard.
Harding’s record-keeping was meticulous. Receipts for gas and meals and developing photos were stapled to expense reports. Daily logs followed the movements of his targets. He wrote in tiny block lettering and his spelling was exactly what you’d expect from a guy who probably went from high school to the police academy. Not that Faith hadn’t done the same, but at least she knew the difference between you’re and your.
Collier stood in the doorway. ‘Closet’s clear.’
‘You probably should’ve had the bomb squad check it.’
Finally he registered something other than cocky self-assuredness as they both realized that considering Harding, it wasn’t exactly a joke.
He said, ‘Something was in the closet at some point. There’s an impression in the carpet. Round, like a five-gallon bucket.’
Faith stood up so that she could see for herself. The two unis were back on their phones, heads down, thumbs working. She could probably murder Collier with the tire iron right in front of them and they wouldn’t notice.
The closet door had been propped up against the wall. Faith used the flashlight app on her phone to examine the inside of the four-by-eight walk-in closet. It was just as Collier had said. In the back corner, a circle impression was imprinted into the brown carpet. She scanned the rest of the closet. The rods had been removed. Wires dangled down where the light fixture should have been. The white walls were scuffed at the bottom. The enclosed space had a lingering odor of raw sewage.
Collier said, ‘We see this a lot. Drug mules come up from Mexico with pellets or powder heroin in their stomachs. They shit them out in a bucket, take their money, then head back to Mexico to fill up again.’
‘You think a place like this, where they have to specifically ban lawn jockeys in the yards, wouldn’t be lighting up nine-one-one if they saw a bunch of Mexicans going in and out of Harding’s house?’ She told the unis, ‘Turn the door around.’
‘We gotta boot. Dispatch called.’ Neither looked up from their phones as they walked out of the room.
Collier seemed impressed. ‘Good guys, right?’
Faith wrapped her hands around the edges of the door. Of course it was solid wood. She tilted it onto its corner and swiveled the door around. She lost her grip at the last minute. The top edge of the door slammed into the wall, leaving a gash. Faith stepped back to look. There were scratch marks low on the wood. She double-checked the hinges, making sure she was looking at the side that faced into the closet.
‘The rat?’ Collier guessed.
Faith took a photo of the scratches. ‘We need to get forensics in here.’
‘My guys or your guys?’
‘Mine.’ Faith sent the photo to Charlie Reed, who would likely be open to a change of scenery after processing Marcus Rippy’s nightclub for the last seven hours. She texted him the address and told him to process the closet first thing. She wasn’t a scientist, but a five-gallon bucket and a locked closet door with scratches on the back probably meant that someone had been kept inside.
Or it could be more of Harding’s bullshit waste of their time.
Collier said, ‘The closet door was locked when we got here. Why lock the door when there’s nothing in there?’
‘Why did Harding do anything?’ Faith went back into the other bedroom. She sat down in the chair and started putting the cheating spouse files back into the first box. Collier stood in the doorway again. She told him, ‘There’s nothing here, at least not the kind of thing you’d hide behind a rat.’
‘I don’t care what Violet said. That thing looked pregnant.’ Collier sat down on the mattress. It made a farting sound. He gave Faith the exact look that she expected him to give. He pushed the lid off the second box. There were no file folders, just a stack of pages with lots of nude photos on top.