“That took some nerve,” I said with a touch of admiration.
Next came a lot whose fence was screened by blue tarps. I pointed. “What’s in that one?”
“Cars seized from drug dealers, mostly,” he said.
“Why the tarps?”
“To keep people from gawking,” he said. “Your average drug dealer tends to drive a better class of car—we’ve got Acuras, Cadillacs, Mercedeses—and we had a problem with looky-loos hanging around window-shopping.”
“Seems like the tarps would attract more people,” I said. “Make ’em wonder what’s in there that you don’t want anybody to see.”
“There’s a troublemaker inside you just waiting to get out,” he said.
Art pulled into the fourth lot, which was tucked at the farthest corner of the compound, back behind a security building outfitted with rooftop surveillance cameras at every corner. This lot contained hard-core specimens: cars flattened by high-speed rollovers or accordioned in head-on collisions. Many of them were missing doors and roofs, the metal chewed away by the Jaws of Life or slashed loose with a Sawzall. Several vehicles were covered with tarps—cars in which shootings had occurred, Art said. Off by itself, along the westernmost side of the fence, was the burned-out shell of a car. The windows were gone and the paint had blistered off, but I could tell by the lines that it had been a fairly new and expensive car just a couple of weeks before.
A clean-cut young man in his early thirties was peering into the vehicle’s interior. When he heard the crunch of the tires on the gravel, he straightened and turned toward us. He was wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt with a yellow tie. The shirt stretched tight around his neck and shoulders, which looked like they’d been borrowed from an NFL linebacker. His crew cut and military posture suggested he’d been either a soldier or a cop before he became a D.A.’s investigator. As the three of us shook hands all around, I said, “I hear good things about you from your boss.”
“You’ve been talking to my wife?”
I laughed. “No, the district attorney.”
“Oh, my day-job boss.” He grinned. “I’ve been lucky so far.”
“Lucky my foot,” said Art. “Darren was the one who broke the Watkins case last year.”
I hadn’t been involved in it, but I remembered reading about it and being shocked. “Watkins—that was the guy who took out the two-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy on the little girl, then drowned her in the backyard pool?”
Cash nodded. “His granddaughter,” he said. “The policy had a two-year waiting period on the death benefit. The really sick thing about that case—”
Art broke in. “You mean besides the fact that a man would drown his own granddaughter?”
“Yeah,” said Cash, “even sicker than that. He took out the policy, put in the swimming pool, and then waited exactly twenty-five months. That little girl had a rattlesnake coiled around her feet for two years.”
“That is sick,” I said. “How on earth could somebody do that to his own granddaughter—for any price, let alone a couple hundred thousand bucks?”
“Some people are just plain evil,” Art said. “No other explanation for it, I don’t care what the forensic psychologists say.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” I said. “I’m not sure about God anymore, but I’m starting to believe in the devil. Not some red-suited guy with a pitchfork and horns, but regular-looking folks. A guy who drowns his granddaughter in the backyard. A woman who feeds her husband arsenic every night.”
“A pedophile who trolls the Internet for gullible kids,” said Art.
“A husband who kills his wife,” said Cash, “and lets her rot for days before burning her body.”
I took that as the investigator’s hint that we should get down to business. I nodded toward the burned-out car, a short, sleek SUV. “This looks like it used to be a pretty nice car,” I said. “What is it?”
“Lexus RX, 2006,” he said. “Probably around forty thousand new.”
“That’s a lot,” I said. “Would have been cheaper to take her on a hike in the Smokies and push her off a bluff—say she tripped and fell.”
“Bill loses more hiking buddies that way,” Art said. “Never, ever go to the mountains with him.”
Cash laughed. “Thanks for the warning.” He nodded at the vehicle. “Book value on the vehicle’s more like twenty-five thousand now,” he said. “But the bank owns most of that. Deductible on the insurance policy’s five hundred. Five hundred is dirt cheap if it works to cover your tracks and give you an alibi.”