Mike went to the bedroom. Bedding was rumpled and the room smelled faintly of a menthol sports cream, or maybe Vicks VapoRub. A small window, probably not up to snuff with modern fire codes, let in a little light – the trees were close, the forest crowding the house.
The closet looked full of clothes, an empty suitcase on the ground. He moved into the bathroom, which was tidy, the toilet lid open. On impulse, he peered in.
“I’ve got a phone,” Mike called. Lena came in and he pointed into the toilet water, where a flip phone and a battery rested at the bottom. “Let’s get crime scene here,” he said. He looked around some more, left the bathroom, then saw a phone cord running along the baseboard and followed it. “He’s got a landline, too?” The cord led around the corner to a phone in the kitchen – he hadn’t seen it when he’d first come in, mounted to the wall beneath the cabinets.
Bobbi and Rachel were seated at the kitchen table. Bobbi said, “Yeah, Lennox doesn’t use his cell phone much, usually just to make calls if he needs to.”
Mike picked up the handset from the cradle. The phone was so old it had the pigtail-style cord.
“Otherwise,” Bobbi went on, “he’s either at work or at home. Sometimes he goes walking, and he takes his cell with him.”
Mike dialed *69 from the landline. He listened as an automated voice read off the number of the last call received, from just before one o’clock in the afternoon, three days ago. Mike relayed the number to the women at the table. “That’s DSS, isn’t it?”
“Probably me,” Bobbi said, “calling to check on him.”
“But you didn’t talk to him.”
“No. I did earlier, I think – the day before.”
“He was definitely sick?”
“Yeah.”
“Like what? A cold?”
“Flu, I think.”
“Did he say anything? Was he worried about anything?”
“He was half-asleep when I spoke to him. There didn’t seem to be anything strange going on.”
“Alright.” Mike faced Lena and Mullins. “Let’s get his description out, get the BOLO going.” He stared at Lena. “Pritchard?”
“Has his bail hearing tomorrow, 2 p.m.”
“What about Jamie Rentz?”
She looked a bit stunned. “We still don’t know.”
Mike snapped a look at Bobbi, pointed a finger. “Was he who was outside your apartment three nights ago? Have you heard from him?”
“I don’t know. No, I haven’t.”
Lena was frowning. “Mike…?”
“Step outside with me, okay? Mullins, give us a sec, okay? Ladies?”
* * *
They huddled on the porch, the rain lashing in. Lena folded her arms in front of her, rolled her shoulders together. “What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter is I want to talk to Judge Cheever and get into Lennox Palmer’s old cases.”
“He works in child support…”
Mike shook his head. “As soon as I heard from Bobbi Noelle I called over to DSS, spoke with Jaquish. Lennox Palmer used to be a caseworker, same as Harriet and Lavoie. A lot of them start out that way, then move into other positions.”
“Ah, shit,” Lena said.
“In the meantime, we need to look at Dodd Caruthers some more. A long, hard look.”
“But Lennox wasn’t involved in his case that we know of.”
“He could have been, but for some reason he’s not in the paperwork. Anyway, we know Dodd has ideas about white and black skin; that’s enough probable cause to warrant a little surveillance. So I’m going to stake him out. Tonight, early in the morning, all day long. But I don’t want any word to get around about it. Small town, people will talk – we gotta make him and everyone else think we’ve lost interest. I don’t even want Mullins to know right now.”
Lena looked off into the rain, muttering, “Mullins’ cousin, Bob, is in the league. Hadn’t even thought of that…”
“Yeah. The grass tells the bugs and the bugs tell the birds and the birds tell the king.”
She pitched her head back, eyelids fluttering. “What?”
“Everybody talks.” He thought about Caruthers some more and said to Lena, “I want this guy. Bad.”
Twenty-Two
He picked her up in the middle of the night and the rain was still coming down. A decent mid-summer soaker. Between all the sweat and rain lately, Mike thought he was never dry. He opened the door for Lena as she ran down the walk from her house, then jogged around and got behind the wheel.
“Are we on a date?” she asked.
He checked the clock on the onboard computer – just going on 11 p.m. “Kinda late, don’t you think?”
“Did you bring snacks?”
“Right there.”
She pawed through the bag as he pulled away from the curb. “Cheetos? You brought Cheetos to a stakeout? There are no napkins in here.”
“Check the glove box.”
She did, no napkins, so she started going through his belongings. “You’ve got an Adele CD? Mike, I didn’t realize…”
“Hey, get out of there.”
She ignored him and kept shuffling through the mess of items. “Where’s your Michael Bolton? Actually, you seem like more of a Johnny Cash guy… Okay, here’s your registration; looks good, very nice… and what’s this? Is this Kristen?” Lena held up the picture, which was getting old, a folding crease running through it. It showed Mike with a young woman beside a pale blue jalopy.
“That’s her first car,” Mike said. “Thing had a cracked piston ring. She loved it though – kept quarts of oil in the car with her, topped it off every day.”
“She’s beautiful.” Lena studied the picture. “You look happy here. When was this? Had to be seven, eight years ago?”
“About that. Seven years. That’s the house there, too, in the background. We still have it. Five acres of land, there’s a creek in the back woods. Kristen hated the long bus ride, I mostly drove her to school once I got my schedule worked out.”
“Sounds nice.”
Lena lingered a moment longer then put it all back, snapped the glove box closed. Lake Haven wasn’t very big, and they were already coming up to Baker Street, where Dodd lived with his father.
“So, nothing so far on locating Lennox Palmer,” Mike said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Nope. Nothing.”
“And Maybelle Spruce is coming tomorrow to officially identify her sister’s body.”
“Yeah.”
The rain drummed the roof of Mike’s Impala. He slowed as he neared Dodd’s home, doused the headlights, drove in the dark a little ways, pulled off behind another car parked on the street. Dodd’s house was four doors down. There was a light on in the living room, and Dodd’s truck parked in the driveway, plus two motorcycles.
Mike reached beneath the seat and pulled out a pair of binoculars. He looked through the rain and got a better visual on the bikes. “Nice. Couple of Softtails.”
“Harleys?”
“Yup.” He passed her the binoculars.
“Well, then Dodd is definitely our guy,” she said, squinting through the lenses. “Only bad guys drive Harleys.”
“We’re just about to start week two of the Empire State Rally,” he said. “Motorcycles all over the place. I can hear them from my house, and we’re way back from the main road.”
“There’s someone in the window,” she said. “Oh, and look at that. Light just went on in the garage.”
He saw it without needing any magnification.
“Now they’re having their Nathan Bedford Forrest séance.” Her joke was flat with disgust. Thunder rumbled, but it sounded farther off. The storm was moving on, the rain starting to let up.
Lena set the binoculars on her lap, drew a long breath through her nose, rubbed her face.
They waited and watched.
* * *
One of the men came out of the house and fired up the bike, shattering the midnight silence. He dialed the throttle to rev the engine; the modified exhaust pipes blatted like popcorn thunder. The man left it gurgling and went back inside.
“What if Palmer is in there?” Lena asked.
Mike had been thinking it, and he knew Lena had been thinking it, for over an hour.
“I’m not sure if I hope he’s in there or I hope he isn’t,” Mike said.
“Isn’t,” Lena said. She gave Mike a disapproving look, adding, “We could always go ask.”
“Then we blow it, and whatever might be going on here, they scatter, and we never find him, maybe it screws up everything else, too.”