No Woods So Dark as These Page 12

  DeMarco raised a few eyebrows when he informed the others that they had hired the young stringer to help them with research.

  “We do our own research,” Bowen said.

  Jayme jumped in. “Miller has contacts we don’t, Captain. Street-level contacts. The kind who freeze up when they see a uniform or even someone older than them. We wouldn’t have talked to Miller if we didn’t think he would be useful and trustworthy.”

  Bowen said, after a pause, “You’d better sit on him. Keep him on a short leash.”

  DeMarco immediately thought of two responses: the first would reference all the years he had been the station commander’s babysitter, and the second would point out Bowen’s mixing of metaphors. You want us to sit on him and keep him on a short lease? But with Flores present, he shouldn’t tease the station commander. Still, the thought of doing so brought a smile to his face.

  “In fact,” Jayme continued, “he already gave us something to start with. The two burn victims were prostitutes. According to Miller, they worked out of the Hadley rest area.”

  “Which means out of a car or truck,” Boyd said. “The Santa Fe?”

  “We don’t know that yet,” DeMarco answered. “But it seems logical to assume that the male victim would have been the females’ associate in the same line of work.”

  Flores said, “Do you think they were killed for encroaching on somebody else’s turf?”

  Bowen said, “We patrol that rest area every night. Anybody hear anything about it being used as a brothel?”

  The four others shook their heads. Boyd said, “Flores and I can check the security cameras. See if we can catch anybody moving from one vehicle to another.”

  DeMarco said, “I think we also need to revisit some of the citizens up in Otter Creek. The ones who got our radar beeping. See what a little extra pressure might shake out.”

  “Roger that,” Boyd said. With a nod toward Flores, he said, “We’ve both been digging into those individuals on our lists. All told we have three with drug arrests, two others with non-drug-related offenses.”

  “Any outstanding warrants?” Jayme asked.

  “None,” Boyd answered.

  DeMarco said, “What about the Reddick family? Joe Loughner all but insisted we focus on Luthor Reddick.”

  Bowen nodded. “Joe called me after your lunch yesterday. Actually before and after. Made the same pitch. Though he, uh… Was he drinking during lunch?”

  DeMarco answered with a lift of his eyebrows, knew that Bowen would get the gist of it. “He might have had a beer or two.”

  Flores said, “I haven’t typed anything up yet, sir, but yes, I’ve been looking into Reddick. Everything Loughner told you about Reddick Jr. and Sr. appears to check out.”

  “Anything at all new on Reddick Jr.?” DeMarco asked. “Anything we can use to rattle him a little?”

  “Not yet, sir. I’m sorry. He does have a business website, but you can’t get past the first page without a password. It’s restricted to antique dealers. Members of the NWPALRnet Collectors Organization. Of which I can find nothing. It’s not listed with the Antiques Dealers’ Association of America, or anywhere else, for that matter.”

  “Northwest Pennsylvania Luthor Reddick network,” DeMarco guessed.

  “Fake storefront?” Jayme asked.

  “Sounds that way, doesn’t it?”

  Boyd said, “We have Carmichael trying to breach the gate, but no luck so far.”

  “What about some old-fashioned surveillance?” Flores asked. “There’s only that long gravel driveway up to his place, trees on both sides of it. We could watch that driveway, see who comes and goes.”

  Captain Bowen’s mouth twisted up at the corner. “That’s a lot of man-hours dedicated to a hunch.”

  DeMarco said, “Would you authorize some game cameras?”

  “We could do that,” Bowen replied. To Boyd and Flores, he said, “Requisition a couple. Take a drive by this afternoon to scout for the best placement. Then contact the property owner for permission, and get the cameras up ASAP.”

  “Yes, sir,” Flores said.

  Boyd asked, “What if Reddick owns all that property? The whole way up to the road?”

  “What’s on the other side?” Bowen asked.

  DeMarco answered. “A private home. But it’s set way back, a good forty yards off the road. And it’s all clear-cut, as I recall. Open yard from the house to the road.”

  Flores said, “I seem to remember some trees along the edge of that property.”

  “Okay, check it out,” DeMarco told her. “Let me know how it goes.”

  “Yes, sir. Can do.”

  To Jayme, he said, “I guess you and I could go ahead and go on up to Otter Creek. Start the follow-up interviews.” To Boyd, he said, “Can we get a list of those individuals with a history?”

  “No problem, sir.”

  “And yes, I remember,” DeMarco told Bowen. “We need a uniform with us. Who can you spare?”

  Flores said, “I can be all squared up here in thirty minutes, Captain. And then scout locations for the game cameras on my way back. If you don’t mind me taking a unit out on my own.”

  Before Bowen could answer, DeMarco said, “Thirty minutes is great. Gives us time to run home and see how much of the house the mutt has chewed up.”

  “You got a dog?” Bowen asked.

  Jayme answered. “Ryan rescued him from his previous owner. And he doesn’t chew anything except his dog food. He’s remarkably well-trained for a puppy, though we suspect that the training methods were extreme.”

  DeMarco said, “Jayme had him castrated.” And immediately regretted his words. Joking at somebody else’s expense—he had to be better than that. Neutering Buddy had been the responsible thing to do, but that didn’t lessen the cruelty of lopping off a guy’s testicles. He winced every time he thought of it. Though maybe it was a male thing. Maybe only a person with testicles could empathize with a neutered dog.

  He added, “Actually we both did it. And now all he does is mope around.” He almost said to the station commander, Is that why you’re so mopey all the time? But only said it inside his head and fought the urge to smile.

  Everybody else was frowning, even Boyd, who usually kept his facial expressions to himself. So DeMarco slapped his hands down on the edge of the table and abruptly stood. To Flores he said, “See you back here in thirty.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Outside the building, on their way to DeMarco’s car, he apologized to Jayme. “That was stupid of me, saying you had him castrated. One second I thought it was funny, next second I wanted it back.”

  “Next time pause long enough for the second thought to kick in.”

  He opened her car door, held it while she crossed behind him. “I know you told me not to do this for you. But this time I feel like I owe it to you.”

  She climbed in. “You do,” she said, and gave him a soft punch in the belly. “I’ll let you know when you can stop.”

  Thirty

  While Jayme brushed her teeth, DeMarco took Buddy for a walk around the backyard. Then they changed places while DeMarco went inside. After another walk around the yard, Jayme sat on the edge of the porch and held the long snout in her hands and kissed the dog’s forehead. “It was for your own sake, I promise,” she whispered. “You have no idea how crazy those things would have made you. This way, we only have your daddy’s to worry about. And that’s my job, not yours. And we can all be happy together.”

  “What are you two conspiring about now?” DeMarco asked from the threshold, two plastic bottles of cold water in each hand.

  “None of your business,” she told him, and escorted the dog inside.

  * * *

  As they neared their first stop in Otter Creek Township, with Flores in a gray state police SUV two car le
ngths behind, DeMarco put on the turn signal, pulled as close to the drainage ditch as he could, and waved Flores forward.

  She came ahead slowly, then stopped her vehicle abreast of his and lowered the passenger window. “You lead the way from here,” he told her. “Pull up as close to the house as you can. With your lights on.” The flashing lights of a police car in the front yard would add several degrees of gravity to their visit.

  At the first and third homes, nobody answered Flores’s heavy knocks. At the second, a haggard woman who looked twenty years older than her age told them that her husband was “in a bar somewhere. Probably in Locust Grove.” She squinted at the flashing lights and said, “What’s he done?”

  Flores told her, “We need to talk to him.”

  “If you arrest him for something,” the woman said, “can you get his wallet and let me know if there’s anything in it? LaDonna’s got this fourth grade party I’m supposed to bake something for, and there’s nothing in the house to bake with.”

  Flores stood there with her mouth grim. Then she looked around. Saw no other vehicles. “Do you have a way to get to the store?” she asked.

  “I’ll find a way,” the woman said. “I can maybe get one of the neighbors to take me. Either that or I’ll thumb a ride.”

  Flores nodded. Then turned away abruptly, returned to her vehicle, and proceeded to their next stop.

  At the fourth home, a one-story bungalow whose buckled vinyl siding had once been yellow, with a sullen, hungry-looking rottweiler snugged up to a post in the yard, its chain wrapped tightly around the post, the metal water bowl turned upside down in the circle of dirt surrounding the post, Flores hammered on the screen three times before the owner squeaked open the interior door.

  He was a small black man in baggy jeans and a faded blue Southpole T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His eyes had that sleepy, confused look of somebody who was either deficient in sleep or brain activity. His gaze floated from Flores to DeMarco to Jayme, where they landed. To her, he said, “What are you doing back here?”

  Flores held up the photo of the dead black man. “You told Trooper Boyd you don’t know this man.”

  “Yeah? Well?”

  “We know you do.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” she told him. “You are either going to tell us who he is and how you know him, or we are going to come in and collect what’s left of your weed, and then I’m going to throw you in the back of that vehicle and haul you off to jail.”

  The man squinted and blinked and worked his lips up and down as if they were itchy. “I don’t have any weed.”

  “Your eyes and the smell pouring out through the door tells me otherwise.” She reached for her handcuffs.

  “Oh, him?” he said, and nodded at the photo. “Yeah, maybe I seen him around somewhere.”

  “What’s his name?” she asked.

  “I only know him as Choo Choo.”

  “Last name?”

  He shrugged. “Same as the first one, I guess. Choo.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “I think I might’ve seen him at a party somewhere.”

  “Where was this party?”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “I suggest that you start remembering, Mr. Palmer. What else do you know about him?”

  He scanned the three grim faces staring back at him. The blue and red lights silently flashing atop the gray SUV flickered in his otherwise dull eyes. “I remember he wasn’t from around here. The way he talked, he was from down south somewhere.”

  “Keep going,” she said.

  “I don’t know where from. I didn’t ask him. Hardly even talked to him.”

  “What else?”

  “I know his picture was in the paper not long ago. I know he’s dead.”

  “Do you know who killed him?”

  “How would I know that?”

  “Did he sell you drugs?”

  Palmer chewed his upper lip, then his lower.

  Flores said, “I am either leaving here with you handcuffed in the back of that vehicle, or I am leaving with information about the man you call Choo Choo. You have three seconds to decide which it will be.”

  “All I do is buy a little weed now and then. I’m not hurting anybody.”

  “You were high when you lied to Trooper Boyd yesterday, and you’re high now. So it’s not just a little weed, is it?”

  “I got pain in my back I need it for.”

  “Do you have a prescription?”

  “It costs eighty dollars just to go ask for one.”

  “Then a bunk in the county jail isn’t going to feel very good on your back, is it?”

  “He went around with a couple of girls. One of them was a white girl. The other one was from Vietnam or somewhere, I think she said.”

  “You talked to this girl?”

  “Little bit.”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “Nothing else. We weren’t there to conversate with each other.”

  “And where was there? Where did you meet her?”

  He kept chewing on his lips. Turned his head, looked at the dog, and kept chewing.

  “You know she’s dead too now, right?” Flores said. “All three of them are dead. And I am giving you one last chance to tell me what you know about that.”

  Again, he looked at each of the faces in turn. Not a single smile. Not a single sympathetic eye.

  “Damn it all,” he said. “There’s parties in the summer sometimes. Up in the woods. Out along Fredonia Road. I been there once or twice is all. There’s always somebody there with whatever you want. People have to live, you know. Gotta get by some way or the other. Don’t mean we go around killing people. I never hurt nobody. Always on the other end of being hurt. And that’s it. That’s everything I know about them people. And that’s all I want to know.”

  He stood there slumped forward, leaning into the doorframe.

  Flores looked over at DeMarco. He gave her a little nod.

  To the man, she said, “You untangle that dog and get it some water, Mr. Palmer. And if you hear anything useful, any little thing, you need to call the state police immediately. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand,” he said.

  With that she turned, walked briskly back to the SUV, and waited by the door for DeMarco and Jayme to join her. When they did, they all spoke quietly as they watched Palmer come out into the yard and walk his dog around the post, unwrapping the chain.

  “You did well,” Jayme told her, and DeMarco smiled his concurrence.

  “Except that I forgot to ask him about Reddick.”

  “I don’t see Reddick as the kind of guy who goes to parties in the woods,” DeMarco said. “A guy so secretive with his website wouldn’t be peddling nickel bags at parties.”

  Jayme asked, “So you think he’s not involved?”

  “I didn’t say that. What we know now is that Mr. Palmer has more or less corroborated what Miller told us. This guy Choo Choo sold drugs, at least weed, and pimped out the two female vics. We know he had a southern accent. What we don’t know is their real names or who killed them. Let’s go check out Linn Tyro Road for those game cameras.”

  “You mind if I head back the other way?” Flores asked. “You really don’t need me for placing the cameras. I’m thinking I might make a stop in Locust Grove.”

  Thirty-One

  At the bar in Locust Grove, Flores paused just inside the door to let her eyes adjust to the dimness. As the door fell shut behind her, the incoming light was snuffed out, leaving only the beer signs and dirty overhead lighting to illuminate the room. Music was playing off to the side somewhere, probably in the kitchen, Kings of Leon singing “Use Somebody.” The air smelled of deep fry
er grease, spilled beer, and sweat.

  She felt every eye in the place on her, and in an instant she was taken back through time to when she was seven years old and sent inside that very same bar to find her grandfather, who unless he had already passed out would dig a greasy five- or ten-dollar bill out of his pocket and tell her to tell her father that any man who can’t feed his own child doesn’t deserve to be alive.

  She shook off the chill of that memory and surveyed the room, let nothing remain inside but the heat of anger. Four older men seated at the bar, empty stools between them. Two men in a booth; they glanced her way briefly, then continued their whispered conversation. Two men playing pool near the farthest wall, their laughter loud, one of them cackling like static.

  That one, she told herself. Blue jeans and T-shirt, unshaven, mussed-up hair, just like a million other guys. But it was his posture that gave him away, that loose-jointed stray-dog slouch, that garbage-stealing smirk on his face.

  She strode across the room, looking at no one but him. She loved moments like this and the danger in them, the way the promise of violence sent all five senses into overdrive, her radar on high alert. Later would come the crash, the sadness that had no end. But it would have an end, always did anyway, and would lift in the morning after her shower, as she put on a clean uniform, strapped on her resolve once again.

  He held her gaze until the last second, as if he had realized himself her target. He turned away and pretended to watch the other man line up a shot. Told him, “Watch it now, boy. You’re gonna leave me the nine.”

  She strode to within a foot and a half, stuck out her hand and said, “Give me your wallet.”

  He turned, laughed to hide his fear, and said, “Why in the world would I do that?”

  “Because you’re a deadbeat with a wife and little girl at home. Give me your wallet and do it now.”

  The other man pulled out of his shot, straightened up and said, “Jesus, Ed. How long you been in here anyway?”