Tracy was pretty excited as she told it. Clearly, what with Morton Dewart and now Tiff Riley, she was having a terrific week, journalistically speaking.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He got stabbed.” She pointed to her own stomach. “Right here. Couple of times. I took a peek in there. There’s all kinds of blood on the floor. The guy who got eaten by the bear? That was the first dead body I ever saw, and now, like two days later, I get to see another one. Do you think there’s any chance The Metropolitan would hire me on? Like, as staff? I could move to the city, no problem. I know you get a lot of dead bodies down there, and I could look at one every day if I had to.”
“You’d probably be best talking to Sarah about that,” I said. Just inside the garage door I could see Orville questioning an older man in a green shirt. “Excuse me,” I said. I walked over, approaching from Orville’s blind side so I could hear what they were talking about without him having a big hissy.
The man in the green shirt was saying, “He was on late last night. It’s not like we have a security guard or anything, we’ve never had much need for anything like that, but Tiff was always happy to work late if that meant not going home to Edna, and there was a lot of tidying up to do, so he offered to hang in and make a bit of overtime, lock up when he was done. Got here this morning, didn’t notice much out of the ordinary, but Tiff was due in at nine, and by ten-thirty there’s still no sign of him, so I called Edna, and she hadn’t seen no trace of him either. So we started to wonder where he was.”
“Who found him?” Orville asked.
A young woman in a green shirt took half a step forward. She looked rattled, like she’d been crying earlier. “I was just doing some inventory work when I found him, found Tiff, down aisle nine. He’d been, like, stuffed in between some bags of fertilizer so you wouldn’t see him if you were looking down the aisle, you’d only see him once you got there.”
“Tiff have any enemies?” Orville asked.
The older man and the other employees shrugged. “Not really,” said one. “Everyone liked Tiff,” said another.
“Is there anything missing?” I asked.
Orville whirled around. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I said nothing, hoping maybe someone would answer my question. I guess the employees sensed the instant tension between us and decided it was better to answer questions posed to them by the police chief, rather than strangers.
Orville turned his back on me, hesitated a moment, and said, “Well, is there?”
“Uh, we haven’t really done a complete check yet,” said the older man, who I figured must be a manager or owner, or both. “We’re going to do that, just as soon as we can. We’re all a bit shook up.”
“Some of the fertilizer’s gone,” said the woman who’d found him.
“Fertilizer?” said Orville.
“Quite a bit,” she said. “Twenty, thirty bags, I’d say. I’ll have to check.”
Orville scribbled down some notes. “What the hell would anyone steal bags of fertilizer for?”
I said, “Maybe so there wouldn’t be a way to trace that kind of stuff to the purchaser.”
Orville turned around slowly, let out a sigh. “Okay, why would anyone not want somebody to know they’d bought a lot of fertilizer?”
“Maybe because of what it contains.”
Dad had worked his way over and had heard the last few exchanges. “Ammonium nitrate,” he said. Dad, I seemed to recall, was fairly good at chemistry back in his high school days.
“What the hell is ammonium nitrate?” Orville asked.
“If Timothy McVeigh were still alive,” I said, “you could ask him.”
14
DRIVING BACK INTO TOWN, I said to Dad, “Wasn’t one of the reasons you moved up to Braynor so that you wouldn’t have so much to worry about?”
Dad snorted. “Wasn’t that why you moved to the suburbs?” We hadn’t talked a lot over the years, Dad and I, but he knew all about what had happened when I moved my family from downtown to the suburban enclave of Oakwood, where my friend Trixie still lived and plied her trade. The plan had been to find a safer place to live, and it had backfired rather spectacularly.
“Things don’t always work out the way you expect, do they?” I said, offering him a grin.
“I didn’t move up here trying to avoid a high crime rate,” Dad said. “I just wanted a simpler life.”
“I was remembering that time we came up around here with the tent trailer,” I said. “I found you down by the lake, your feet in the water, just sitting there, and you looked more peaceful than I’d ever seen you. And then, once we got home, you were your old, cranky self.”
Dad smiled. “I don’t know how I did it for so long. The whole nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday thing, commuting, the suit and tie, the ass-kissing, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year of numbers. Numbers, numbers, numbers.”