She walks past me and sits on the edge of my bed, looking shell-shocked. “My God. She was so nice to me tonight.”
“She really was. It truly doesn’t seem real.”
Nadine looks up. “What are you going to do? Do you need to go down to the paper?”
“I should. But I don’t feel like it.”
“What do you feel like doing?”
An image of Denny Allman flying his drone fills my mind. “To tell you the truth . . . something crazy.”
“Like?”
“Every cop in this county, municipal or sheriff’s deputy, is going to have only one thing on his mind tonight: Sally’s death. This is the best chance I’ll ever get to sneak onto that mill site and do some digging. I mean literal digging—with a shovel.”
Nadine’s eyes widen, but she looks more intrigued than afraid. “What would you be looking for? Evidence that Buck was murdered there?”
“That, and Indian bones. And thanks to little Denny Allman, I know just where to look.”
Nadine covers her mouth with a fist while she transitions from shock to action. After a few seconds, she says, “I sure don’t see us getting back to sleep tonight. What the hell? Let’s do it.”
“The last guy who tried this wound up dead.”
She winces, but I can see she wants to forge ahead. Anything seems better than sitting around uselessly in the wake of tragedy. “We shouldn’t sneak down there,” she says. “Let’s put on the clothes we wore to the party, take a bottle of wine and a blanket with us. We’ll act like we drove down there to make out by the river. If there’s a guard, we’ll have a good excuse to be there. If not, we dig.”
“That’s a damn good idea.”
She nods and stands. “I’ll be dressed and made up in five minutes.”
“I’ll see you in the kitchen.”
Nadine spins and pads quickly down the hall, then turns into the guest room. I’m starting to see why she was such a good lawyer.
She’s a force of nature.
Chapter 22
Ben Tate dropped the Buck Ferris murder story into our web edition at 3:30 a.m., and it was like kicking over a hornet’s nest. Suggesting that Buck had been murdered was bad enough in the eyes of the town; backing up that implication with an opinion from the coroner was worse. But speculating that Buck had been killed at the paper mill site, then dumped upriver to hide that fact, made people crazy. Our main switchboard started ringing off the hook at 5:30 a.m., as the print subscribers began calling in to voice their displeasure. By 8:30 there were 336 reader comments beneath the story, and I’d received sixty-seven emails at my Watchman account.
None of that surprised me, and I was too tired to care anyway. By the time I limped into my office this morning, I’d only slept two hours, having spent the middle of the night at the paper mill site with Nadine, digging in the dark in my suit and dress shoes. After driving down to the industrial park, we parked beside the foundation of the old electroplating plant and waited to see if any guards would challenge us. None did. After ten minutes of ticking silence, I got out my small shovel and a handful of trash bags and started hunting for the concrete footing where Buck had found his Poverty Point–era pottery samples. Nadine stayed in the Flex to keep watch. If she saw anyone approaching, she was to switch on the headlights and speed-dial me. I would dump my tools and walk back as though I’d simply left the SUV to take a leak.
The GPS coordinates Denny had emailed me helped, but they required that I use an unfamiliar app on my phone to exploit them. I felt like a World War I soldier crossing no-man’s-land with a lighted cigarette as I carried that phone around the mill site. The whole time, I wished I’d stuck my father’s Walther into my waistband instead of leaving it under the seat of the Flex, but I didn’t want some sheriff’s deputy catching me out there carrying. Eventually I figured out the GPS app, and I ended my search by sliding down into a trench beside the exposed concrete footing of a foundation pier.
I know nothing about archaeology, but with the LED light from my phone, I saw what looked like defined soil strata on the face of the five-foot-deep hole. As quickly as I could, I scraped shovelfuls of dirt from the lowest two feet of the trench and dumped them into doubled Hefty yard bags. After collecting about twenty pounds of dirt, I hauled that bag over to the Flex and loaded it into the back. Then we drove to the next set of coordinates, which turned out to be two plots of turned earth in the middle of a patch of Johnsongrass. I figured this work would be in vain, but for Buck’s sake I dug up another thirty pounds of dirt and bagged it.
As I started back to the Flex, my right foot kicked something hard, and I cursed. Shining my light down, I saw a brick protruding from the soil. On closer inspection, it appeared to be one of the reddish-orange bricks that Byron Ellis had referred to as “Natchez brick.” Turning in a circle with my phone light, I saw three more—fragments rather than whole bricks. Setting down my Heftys, I untwisted one plastic neck and dropped in the bricks. Then I slung the heavy bags over my shoulder and humped them back to the Flex, which was parked thirty yards away, on a strip of Johnsongrass.
“Somebody’s coming down Port Road,” Nadine hissed as I tossed the bags under the hatchback. “Headlights just hit the bottom of the hill.”
Looking up, I saw the lights, and my pulse kicked into overdrive. I started to hide my shovel under the trash bags, but on impulse I shut the hatchback, took the shovel by its handle, and hurled it as far into the dark as I could. By the time the sheriff’s cruiser pulled up beside us with its red lights flashing, Nadine was lying across my chest, kissing me deeply. The shock of her cool tongue in my mouth blanked the cruiser from my mind, until I heard a male voice over a PA ordering us out of the vee-hickle.
Nadine broke the kiss, squeezed my shoulder, and said, “Play it cool.” Then she winked.
I got out, holding both hands up in clear sight. A flashlight beam blinded me, and my heart began to pound as I remembered the ghastly wound in Buck’s skull. Then Nadine got out, making a show of straightening her cocktail dress.
I didn’t know the deputy, but after he got a look at Nadine, it didn’t take much effort to sell our story. Once he recognized my name, he felt compelled to tell me about the murder at the Matheson house. I feigned ignorance to give him the pleasure of shocking me with a bloody tale. We were lucky. If we’d gotten a different deputy—or, worse, a private security guard who knew my connection to Buck—things would have gone differently. This deputy did shine his flashlight into the Flex, but he didn’t question the trash bags. I wondered if the shovel would have triggered more suspicion or if I’d made a mistake by tossing it into the dark. But since the deputy let us go, I made myself forget about it.