“How in the hell do I know?”
“Because you’re batting pretty well already,” Joe said. “So if you don’t mind, keep swinging.”
“I don’t know. Paulson doesn’t have a wife or a girl, lives by himself. I got no idea who’d be driving his car at the ass-crack of dawn while he’s on duty.”
“What about the guy you mentioned earlier, the one you said customized the exhaust on that Ford?” Perry asked. “Said his name was Double?”
“His full name is Thomas, I guess, but nobody around here has called him anything but Double since he was a kid. Not sure why, exactly. I think it’s because whatever trouble you had in your life before he showed up, it doubled on you the moment he got there, you know? Matter of fact, I’ve heard it said it was his first-grade teacher who started that nickname. You know a kid is a problem when a teacher tags him like that.”
Joe said, “Does Thomas, or Double, or whatever the hell he’s known by, move drugs?”
“Probably.”
“Coke?”
“I don’t know. That boy walks down the sidewalk and I cross the street, right? I ain’t exactly in his inner circle. But it surely wouldn’t surprise me.” The maintenance man grew reflective. “Matter of fact, I recall one story about him. Highway patrol stopped him somewhere north of Valdosta, and he was running something, I think maybe it was coke but I can’t say for sure. Anyhow, between the time they ran his license and the time they made him get out of his car, he keistered it. The car search came up empty and they let him go with just a ticket for the expired plates.”
“Keistered it,” Perry echoed.
“It’s when you shove the drugs right up your asshole.”
Perry lifted a hand to ward off any further imagery. “I followed the mechanics, thanks. I was just unfamiliar with the term. I’ll file that one away, though. So he does have a drug history, and he’s close with the local police, particularly the officer who was first on the scene. Correct?”
“I wouldn’t argue that. He runs a chop shop, everybody knows that, and Paulson surely does, but he hasn’t done anything about it. In exchange, Paulson got a thousand-dollar set of pipes put on his truck, and a pretty bitchin’ grill that you can’t see in the video. It doesn’t match the rest of the truck, but still, it looks tough.” He said it with admiration and envy, and Joe cut in to bring his mind away from the truck and back to the murder scene.
“What are the odds this guy would have given Antonio Childers, that’s the shooter’s name, the black guy from out of town, a ride away from that scene?”
“Pretty slim, I’d think. Because he’s Nora’s brother.”
There was a pregnant silence, and then Joe said, “The guy who worked on that truck was the victim’s brother?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How many people live in this town?” Perry asked. “Five?”
“Just over three hundred.”
The video was still running.
On the screen, Paulson and another officer, one who appeared to hold rank over him, were searching the Mustang and cuffing the guy in the one shoe, Detective Jeffrey Tolliver of Birmingham, Alabama. Every now and then Paulson would glance sideways, but his gun never traveled with him. Could be that he was checking to make sure there was no other threat in the area. Could be that he was checking to make sure his truck was long since out of sight.
“Somebody got Childers away from that scene in a hurry,” Joe said. “But maybe we’re looking at it backwards. We can’t see what happened. The truck comes and goes, and Antonio comes and goes. Maybe with a friend. But maybe not.”
The maintenance man had that reflective gaze going again. “You know, that’s not a bad point.”
Joe had never felt less validated by a positive review of his police work, but he pressed it. “Supposing that girl, Nora, was intending to steal the car, then her brother is the likely recipient, right? You said he runs a chop shop. So he’d be the guy who takes over once she’s snagged the car.”
The maintenance man nodded.
“Let’s imagine her brother is waiting on her and sees what happens. Watches Antonio shoot his sister in the stomach. He’s not just driving away then, is he? A guy like you described, he’d be all over the screen right now, he’d have killed Antonio, shot him where he stood, or at least stayed with his sister and waited for the cops.”
That drew a frown and a slow, thoughtful shake of the head. “I can’t say I agree with that, no.”
“This guy you told us about, the hell-raiser, you think he’d just let it go? Watch his sister be killed and then clear out?”
“Oh, no. That’s not what I meant, at all. I was just thinking. Old Double, if he did see all that? He’d have wanted to take some time on your boy, there, what’s his name, Antonio? Double wouldn’t have let that end easy for him. Not after what he did to Nora.”
For a moment they were all quiet, watching Paulson arrest Tolliver on the screen, and listening to the rattling of snow and ice off the window. Then Perry said, “Let’s have a look around that car, Joe. Maybe there are more cameras, more angles.”
Joe nodded, but he didn’t turn away from the screen.
He was watching Nora Simpson’s blood spread out over the pavement.
Double wouldn’t have let that end easy for him, the maintenance man had said.
And he nearly smiled.
Antonio might have made one hell of a mistake leaving Cleveland for Georgia.
These crackers might not be all that easy to handle.
3:06 P.M.
JEFFREY PACED AROUND THE TINY holding cell in his underwear and T-shirt. He was still wearing one shoe and one sock. It was the only control he could assert over his person.
Thanks to his hangover, he had slept some, but now he was fully awake and fully freaking out. Claustrophobia had never been an issue for him until now. There wasn’t enough saliva in his mouth. His heart was vibrating like a tuning fork. He was sweating profusely despite the cold that whipped past the single-paned, barred window high up in his cell.
Ten hours ago he had asked the Helen chief of police to call sheriff Hoss Hollister in Sylacauga so that Hoss could vouch for him. He knew that ten hours had passed because there was a giant clock on the wall opposite his cell, mounted over the empty desk that held a telephone, a fax machine, and a computer the size of a dog’s coffin—corgi, not malamute—with a giant monitor on top of it. For the last ten hours, he’d listened to the tick-tick-tick of the clock, the second hand passing for something like Chinese water torture.
Occasionally, he heard voices in the next room, but nobody entered the holding space or sat behind the desk or checked on his welfare. Every once in a while the stainless steel toilet/sink inside his cell would gurgle, or his stomach would grumble, but other than the clock, those were the only sounds.
The phone never rang.