Another Man's Ground--A Mystery, page 12
Gallagher Enterprises had owned the showboat where the victim was found and that was destroyed soon afterward in an explosion—a big, fiery one that got rid of a barely afloat vessel and the responsibility for the many old, sick, and expensive-to-insure employees who lost their jobs when it sank. Hank was sure that Gallagher had ordered the destruction, even though fire marshals had ruled it an accident.
“I have a parishioner who lost her job when the Branson Beauty sank,” Tony said. “It makes me very unhappy to hear that it was a deliberate act.” He was silent for a moment. “And now, Mr. Fizzel is back, trying again to make you look bad. Hmm. I do not think it will work with most of what he said. People will see it for what it is.”
Hank forced a chuckle. “You have more faith in people than I do, Padre.”
“Well,” Tony said with a smile in his voice, “that is my job.”
Hank laughed genuinely this time. “I thought your job was to have faith in God,” he teased.
“No,” he said softly, “that faith is my privilege.”
Touché.
There was a shuffling in the background, and a muffled buenos días as Tony covered the phone.
“Ah, now I must go,” he said. “Both the cat and the boy need feeding.” They set a time for Hank to come and interview Javier, and Hank thanked the priest for his call.
“De nada,” said Father Tony. “Please take care of yourself, mi amigo, y Vaya con Dios.”
* * *
After a day of bone excavation and a dinner of soggy pasta and scorch-mark explanations, Hank left Maggie to bedtime-story duty and retrieved the stack of missing-children files he’d stuck in the corner of the living room. He would have rather read Barnyard Dance for the thousandth time. At least that had an ending. The sad collections of paperwork in front of him did not.
There were five cases. Once he knew Little Doe’s age and gender, he could narrow it down considerably, but that wouldn’t mean anything if the dead child wasn’t local. The skeleton could be from anywhere. He sighed and opened up the first folder.
An eleven-year-old girl from Kirbyville. Missing since August 20, 1960. Taken from a parking lot while the parent’s back was turned. Suspect was a local delivery driver, never charged.
A six-year-old boy from an unincorporated Branson neighborhood. Reported April 14, 1985. But no one outside the family had seen him for a week prior to that. Both parents questioned extensively and passed polygraph tests.
A nine-year-old boy from Rockaway Beach. June 5, 1976. Disappeared from the shore of Lake Taneycomo during a family outing. Multiple suspects. Not enough evidence to arrest anyone.
A seven-year-old girl from the city of Branson. July 12, 1993. Playing in her backyard. No suspects.
An eight-year-old girl from near Forsyth. February 22, 1994. Walking home from school in a snowstorm. Suspect, not arrested for lack of evidence, was an uncle who died two years later.
He closed the last of the folders and sat back. Each of the files was at least five inches thick. All of the disappearances had been exhaustively—desperately—investigated. And all of them had ended up in the same place. On a shelf, in record storage rooms, gathering dust. And he knew there were dozens more throughout the state. Just as dusty and just as impossible.
He gave himself a shake. He’d get information from the forensic anthropologists, narrow down the possibilities, and start getting DNA swabs from relatives. He could—he would—at least identify the bones. And allow someone the dignity of a burial.
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know you were in here working,” said Dunc as he walked in.
“No. It’s fine. There’s not much more I can do until I hear from the bone experts anyway.”
“Is it that kid skeleton?”
“Yeah. Just looking through some files of kids it could possibly be.”
Dunc sank into his easy chair by the fireplace and gestured toward the stack on the coffee table. “Is the Alton girl in there?”
The Branson PD case. Melissa Alton. He nodded.
“That was a big one. There were search parties and everything. She was in Marian’s friend Judy’s second-grade class. Tore Judy up something fierce.”
Hank considered his father-in-law. “Did Judy ever say anything about it? What she thought happened?”
Dunc kicked off his slippers and flipped out his footrest. “Let’s see. Not to me, certainly. Never much liked me, I think.” He stared at the ceiling. “I’m trying to remember what Marian said Judy had told her. The backyard was big, an acre or something, and wasn’t fenced. Everybody thought it had to have been a stranger, snuck in somehow.”
Hank asked for Judy’s last name and slapped a sticky note with it in the Alton file. He was so used to Dunc, and usually so exasperated with him, that he forgot how helpful his father-in-law’s deep knowledge of Branson could be. The guy had lived here his entire life, leaving only for his stint in the Army and his time at Mizzou in the early ’60s.
He asked if Dunc remembered any other child abductions. He vaguely recalled the other cases in Hank’s stack, and an additional one the county over that involved a brother and sister. That was further back, he said, possibly the ’50s. That had Hank scratching out another sticky note.
“You probably go through a lot of those, don’t you?” Dunc said.
“Yeah. Way too many.”
Dunc nodded and contemplated the stack for a moment, and then Hank.
“What?”
“Oh, it’s just that you work real hard. And I know I bitch about that sometimes, but really, it’s pretty impressive. You really do care about it. And you’ve come in here from outside and you’re battling away and not giving in. I’m proud of you.”
Hank was speechless. He’d never gotten anything remotely like that in the almost twenty years he’d been with Maggie. He stuttered out a thank-you.
Dunc stowed his footrest and pushed himself to his feet.
“I’m off to bed.” He turned toward the hallway and the stairs down to the basement, then stopped, thoughtful. “You ever talk to Darrell Gibbons?”
That was a left turn. Hank stared at him. “Huh? Um. Yeah. Once.” He paused. “The only time I’ve ever talked to him directly was about three months ago, right at the end of the Mandy Bryson murder case. He told me I was too rigid. That I needed to play the game better. And he made sure I knew how valuable his endorsement would be in the election.”
Dunc smiled at Hank’s bitter tone. “That sounds like Darrell. And yeah, his endorsement will mean a lot around here. I know he’s been quiet so far, but that just means he’s testing the wind. Which way it’s blowin’. He’ll figure that out before he endorses.”
“Really?” Hank said. “I figured I didn’t stand a chance. Tucker was one of his favorites when he was sheriff.”
“Yeah,” Dunc said, “but Darrell doesn’t like to back losers. He likes to act like he knew what the outcome was going to be all along. Done that in a couple of commission races over the years. Ended up endorsing the guys he didn’t agree with because they looked likely to win.”
“And did they win?”
“Every time.”
Dunc ambled off to bed, and Hank sank into the couch and thought about that. What a slick old bastard. Gibbons could say that his endorsement helped the candidate win. That he’d done the guy a favor. And someday, he’d come around asking for one in return. From a politician who never would have been a Darrell ally otherwise. Hank was sure Gibbons had accumulated a good number of those chits in his eighteen years as sheriff. Chips in the game. That was what he had called them when he had come to see Hank in February. He’d said that Hank had one after finding out Fizzel was taking money from Henry Gallagher in return for advancing the businessman’s interests. Hank scowled. He was still trying to figure out a way to press charges for that.
He suddenly sat straight up. A chip in the game. Fizzel also would likely endorse a sheriff candidate at some point. And if Hank used his chip, his leverage over the Gallagher thing, could he get Fizzel to endorse him? And would that help—or hurt? Fizzel was an idiot, and a lot of people knew it. A lot of people didn’t, though.
He started pacing the length of the living room, wondering about voter demographics and turnout rates. He could ask Darcy and—good God, what was he thinking? He stopped and sank down onto the stones of the fireplace hearth. Fizzel was a corrupt asshole who needed to be slapped with campaign-finance violations. That was his course of action. Not trying to operate like some kind of mafia don. What was this election doing to him?
CHAPTER
17
It seemed that Rotten Doe had some chipped ribs.
Hank and Sheila stared at the speakerphone and then each other. No kidding. He’d been flattened by a falling immigrant. Hank reminded Whittaker of this and got an amplified chortle in response.
“I know that, young man. I didn’t say ‘breaks.’ The whole ribcage is broken ten ways to Sunday, thanks to your illegal landing on top of him. But—several ribs are also chipped. By small pellet projectiles.”
Hank high-fived Sheila. Their theory, based on the shotgun pellets found at the scene, was correct. “Yes, indeedy,” Whittaker continued. “X-ray showed a fair number of the little suckers, concentrated in the upper chest area. From the lack of dispersion, it’s likely that the shot was fired at fairly close range.”
Hank tried to contain his exasperation. Why hadn’t the damn doctor started with that information in the first place, instead of chuckling about falling immigrants? This guy drove him more and more crazy every time he dealt with him.
“Course, I still don’t have any idea who the fella is,” Whittaker said. “So you’ll need to start doing some investigating. I’d like to get him off my books.”
“You’d like to—” A glare from Sheila stopped Hank before he could tell the good doctor what he really thought. Instead, he glared back and didn’t bother to return Whittaker’s cheerful good-bye. He leaned back in his chair and looked at Sheila.
“So was this guy killed there in the woods, or somewhere else and then dumped in that hole?” she said.
“Good question,” Hank said. “Either way, it’s a location the Taylor boys could have easily known about if they’re the ones who’ve been out stripping down trees.” He rose to his feet. “I think I’ll go have a chat with the one we’ve got.”
* * *
Hank walked out of the building and around to the main public entrance of the jail. He liked to come in this way every once in a while. Nothing gave him a better feel for how it was going inside than the people waiting outside to visit. But this morning the lobby was empty. He said hello to Earl, who had, as usual, a crisply ironed tan polo shirt that denoted him as a civilian department employee. He looked at two new pictures of the latest grandbaby, asked after the wife’s bunions, and thanked him for the neatly kept visitor log.
No one had come to see Lloyd Taylor.
Earl buzzed Hank in through the two sets of security doors. They swung silently shut behind him, and all the ambient noise of the free world disappeared. Instead there were shouted cell-to-cell conversations, clanking as inmates rapped on the metal of their doors, and the smell of substandard food, which this morning was … he sniffed … likely biscuits and sausage gravy, judging from the odor of greasy meat and lack of any fresh-bread aroma.
He stopped at the guard station to see the inmate roster. There were meth addicts who’d been in and out so many times, they requested the same cells when they inevitably got rearrested. There were the drunk drivers in for a night or two until they could make bail. There were the poor folks who had been picked up on bench warrants because they hadn’t shown up for a court date to settle a stupid traffic ticket. And there was always someone who’d beaten up his wife or girlfriend. Occasionally, there were ones who’d abused a kid. They had to be separated from the general population for their own safety.
He looked up Taylor’s cell number, which, come to think of it, was the job of the duty officer, who was not there. Who—
Shit.
“You want something? Boss?”
Gerald Tucker sauntered up to the guard station, crossed his arms, and stared at Hank. This day really could not get any worse.
“You’re not allowed smoke breaks while you’re on duty,” Hank said.
“I was takin’ a—I was using the facilities. There’s no rule against that.”
There wasn’t, but Hank was sure the Good Ol’ Boy spent more than a reasonable amount of time away from his post during his shifts. Hank had put him on permanent jail assignment since he’d left his post—the man did have a pattern—watching over the Branson Beauty showboat once it had been towed to shore without its paddlewheel. Shortly after he said he’d gone home (without permission), the boat had exploded. Accidentally, my ass, Hank thought. Someone had done it deliberately, and he knew exactly who it was as he stared at the man who wanted his job.
“Blown anything up lately, Tucker?”
Tucker smirked. “Just your campaign.”
The day could get worse.
Hank forced himself to smile back, because he couldn’t think of a response. He stepped away from the guard station and headed down toward where Taylor was kept.
“Heeeey, Sherf.”
An almost inconceivably thin man rose from his bunk and came to the door of his cell, which was the one directly next to Taylor’s. As tall as Hank, he looked like he weighed less than a hundred pounds. Drugs will do that to you.
“What’d you do this time, Gursey?”
Gursey’s face split in a lopsided grin, and his spindly fingers reached up to scratch his nose.
“I don’t right remember, Sherf. They say I stoled cough syrup from Nixon’s Drug Store. I can’t see how, though. I don’t even like cherry flavor.”
Gursey was a frequent flier. In and out of jail constantly. Forsyth businesspeople had given up pressing charges. If they did, they just ended up spending a lot of time in the courthouse hallway waiting to testify. And Gursey would be diverted into a drug treatment program that stuck—for a bit. Then it would be back to his old ways.
So instead, folks called the cops just to get him out of their stores, and he ended up here until he came off his high and stayed clean for a couple of days.
“How you feeling now? Doing okay? Did you eat your breakfast?”
“Oh, yeah. Biscuits and gravy. Tasted so good. The biscuits was like those throwed rolls at that place up by Springfield. I had them once. My mom took me.”
If he was sober enough to remember things like that, it was probably about time to release him, Hank thought. He wondered where Gursey’s mother was now. Nowhere he needed her, that was for sure. Maybe he could track down some other relative who would take the kid in and keep him away from cold medicines, oxy, and everything else he enjoyed consuming.
He gave Gursey a smile and turned toward the next cell. Compared with his neighbor, the reed thin Lloyd Taylor looked positively bulky.
“Get up, Taylor. We’re going to go have a conversation.”
Taylor glowered at him and didn’t move off his bunk. Hank reached to the back of his belt and brought out his handcuffs.
“Easy or hard, Lloyd. You decide.”
Taylor sat up and swung his legs off the cot. His right shoulder was still wrapped in bandages and he held it close to his body as he carefully rose to his feet. Hank unlocked the cell and took his left arm. Lloyd did not appreciate the courtesy.
“I’m gonna sue your ass. My shoulder hurts like a son of a bitch and…” He ranted all the way to the interview room. Hank sat him down on the far side of the table, locked his ankle into the shackle bolted into the concrete floor, and settled himself into the opposite seat. Cushioned and with arms, it was a much more comfortable chair than the molded plastic one Taylor was stuck in. He had a feeling they’d be in here awhile. Taylor showed no signs of shutting up, and he had no plans to make him. He leaned back and listened while Lloyd called him names, questioned his mother’s virtue, mocked his haircut, accused him of having inappropriate relations with farm animals, and told him exactly where he could shove those “Hank Worth for Sheriff” election signs.
He started to lose steam after about fifteen minutes. Hank just continued to stare at him. He doubted any cop had let the bozo go on this long before, because Lloyd didn’t know what to make of it. So then he did what any self-respecting sleazeball would do—proclaimed his innocence.
“You got no reason to hold me, man. All I done is earn a living. And I can spend my paycheck any way I want. Getting a tattoo ain’t a crime.”
Hank pretended to stifle a yawn.
“Look,” Lloyd snapped. “I load up my truck and I drive it where they tell me. I don’t even know what the shit is. Plants. And not pot. It’s nothing illegal. I take it to the places they tell me and I get paid. That’s it.”
There it was. Hank kept his face impassive. “I thought you only drove for one company. Why more than one place?”
“One place.” Lloyd shifted in his seat. “That’s what I said.”
“No.” Hank leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “That was not what you said. You said ‘places,’ plural. You know, more than one.”
Lloyd started twitching his foot and jangling the cuff.
“Who else did you deliver to, Lloyd?”
“Nobody.”
“Well, where do you take the plants and bark that you’ve stolen?”
“That goes to—” He froze.
Hank bit back a smile and waited. Lloyd didn’t move. Didn’t even blink. Hank half expected him to roll over and play dead in a minute. He even looked a little like a possum, come to think of it.
They stared at each other for a bit, until Lloyd had to blink.
Hank switched tacks.
“Who’s Ned Bunning?”
Lloyd was so surprised the “huh?” escaped his lips before he could stop it.
“Did you meet any other delivery drivers in the course of picking up those plants?”
Hank took Lloyd’s sneer as a no.
He slid a copy of Bunning’s driver’s license photo across the table. It showed a thirty-four-year-old man with a lined face that suggested life up to that point hadn’t exactly been easy. He had brown eyes, a scruffy goatee, and a full head of brown hair.
“I have a parishioner who lost her job when the Branson Beauty sank,” Tony said. “It makes me very unhappy to hear that it was a deliberate act.” He was silent for a moment. “And now, Mr. Fizzel is back, trying again to make you look bad. Hmm. I do not think it will work with most of what he said. People will see it for what it is.”
Hank forced a chuckle. “You have more faith in people than I do, Padre.”
“Well,” Tony said with a smile in his voice, “that is my job.”
Hank laughed genuinely this time. “I thought your job was to have faith in God,” he teased.
“No,” he said softly, “that faith is my privilege.”
Touché.
There was a shuffling in the background, and a muffled buenos días as Tony covered the phone.
“Ah, now I must go,” he said. “Both the cat and the boy need feeding.” They set a time for Hank to come and interview Javier, and Hank thanked the priest for his call.
“De nada,” said Father Tony. “Please take care of yourself, mi amigo, y Vaya con Dios.”
* * *
After a day of bone excavation and a dinner of soggy pasta and scorch-mark explanations, Hank left Maggie to bedtime-story duty and retrieved the stack of missing-children files he’d stuck in the corner of the living room. He would have rather read Barnyard Dance for the thousandth time. At least that had an ending. The sad collections of paperwork in front of him did not.
There were five cases. Once he knew Little Doe’s age and gender, he could narrow it down considerably, but that wouldn’t mean anything if the dead child wasn’t local. The skeleton could be from anywhere. He sighed and opened up the first folder.
An eleven-year-old girl from Kirbyville. Missing since August 20, 1960. Taken from a parking lot while the parent’s back was turned. Suspect was a local delivery driver, never charged.
A six-year-old boy from an unincorporated Branson neighborhood. Reported April 14, 1985. But no one outside the family had seen him for a week prior to that. Both parents questioned extensively and passed polygraph tests.
A nine-year-old boy from Rockaway Beach. June 5, 1976. Disappeared from the shore of Lake Taneycomo during a family outing. Multiple suspects. Not enough evidence to arrest anyone.
A seven-year-old girl from the city of Branson. July 12, 1993. Playing in her backyard. No suspects.
An eight-year-old girl from near Forsyth. February 22, 1994. Walking home from school in a snowstorm. Suspect, not arrested for lack of evidence, was an uncle who died two years later.
He closed the last of the folders and sat back. Each of the files was at least five inches thick. All of the disappearances had been exhaustively—desperately—investigated. And all of them had ended up in the same place. On a shelf, in record storage rooms, gathering dust. And he knew there were dozens more throughout the state. Just as dusty and just as impossible.
He gave himself a shake. He’d get information from the forensic anthropologists, narrow down the possibilities, and start getting DNA swabs from relatives. He could—he would—at least identify the bones. And allow someone the dignity of a burial.
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know you were in here working,” said Dunc as he walked in.
“No. It’s fine. There’s not much more I can do until I hear from the bone experts anyway.”
“Is it that kid skeleton?”
“Yeah. Just looking through some files of kids it could possibly be.”
Dunc sank into his easy chair by the fireplace and gestured toward the stack on the coffee table. “Is the Alton girl in there?”
The Branson PD case. Melissa Alton. He nodded.
“That was a big one. There were search parties and everything. She was in Marian’s friend Judy’s second-grade class. Tore Judy up something fierce.”
Hank considered his father-in-law. “Did Judy ever say anything about it? What she thought happened?”
Dunc kicked off his slippers and flipped out his footrest. “Let’s see. Not to me, certainly. Never much liked me, I think.” He stared at the ceiling. “I’m trying to remember what Marian said Judy had told her. The backyard was big, an acre or something, and wasn’t fenced. Everybody thought it had to have been a stranger, snuck in somehow.”
Hank asked for Judy’s last name and slapped a sticky note with it in the Alton file. He was so used to Dunc, and usually so exasperated with him, that he forgot how helpful his father-in-law’s deep knowledge of Branson could be. The guy had lived here his entire life, leaving only for his stint in the Army and his time at Mizzou in the early ’60s.
He asked if Dunc remembered any other child abductions. He vaguely recalled the other cases in Hank’s stack, and an additional one the county over that involved a brother and sister. That was further back, he said, possibly the ’50s. That had Hank scratching out another sticky note.
“You probably go through a lot of those, don’t you?” Dunc said.
“Yeah. Way too many.”
Dunc nodded and contemplated the stack for a moment, and then Hank.
“What?”
“Oh, it’s just that you work real hard. And I know I bitch about that sometimes, but really, it’s pretty impressive. You really do care about it. And you’ve come in here from outside and you’re battling away and not giving in. I’m proud of you.”
Hank was speechless. He’d never gotten anything remotely like that in the almost twenty years he’d been with Maggie. He stuttered out a thank-you.
Dunc stowed his footrest and pushed himself to his feet.
“I’m off to bed.” He turned toward the hallway and the stairs down to the basement, then stopped, thoughtful. “You ever talk to Darrell Gibbons?”
That was a left turn. Hank stared at him. “Huh? Um. Yeah. Once.” He paused. “The only time I’ve ever talked to him directly was about three months ago, right at the end of the Mandy Bryson murder case. He told me I was too rigid. That I needed to play the game better. And he made sure I knew how valuable his endorsement would be in the election.”
Dunc smiled at Hank’s bitter tone. “That sounds like Darrell. And yeah, his endorsement will mean a lot around here. I know he’s been quiet so far, but that just means he’s testing the wind. Which way it’s blowin’. He’ll figure that out before he endorses.”
“Really?” Hank said. “I figured I didn’t stand a chance. Tucker was one of his favorites when he was sheriff.”
“Yeah,” Dunc said, “but Darrell doesn’t like to back losers. He likes to act like he knew what the outcome was going to be all along. Done that in a couple of commission races over the years. Ended up endorsing the guys he didn’t agree with because they looked likely to win.”
“And did they win?”
“Every time.”
Dunc ambled off to bed, and Hank sank into the couch and thought about that. What a slick old bastard. Gibbons could say that his endorsement helped the candidate win. That he’d done the guy a favor. And someday, he’d come around asking for one in return. From a politician who never would have been a Darrell ally otherwise. Hank was sure Gibbons had accumulated a good number of those chits in his eighteen years as sheriff. Chips in the game. That was what he had called them when he had come to see Hank in February. He’d said that Hank had one after finding out Fizzel was taking money from Henry Gallagher in return for advancing the businessman’s interests. Hank scowled. He was still trying to figure out a way to press charges for that.
He suddenly sat straight up. A chip in the game. Fizzel also would likely endorse a sheriff candidate at some point. And if Hank used his chip, his leverage over the Gallagher thing, could he get Fizzel to endorse him? And would that help—or hurt? Fizzel was an idiot, and a lot of people knew it. A lot of people didn’t, though.
He started pacing the length of the living room, wondering about voter demographics and turnout rates. He could ask Darcy and—good God, what was he thinking? He stopped and sank down onto the stones of the fireplace hearth. Fizzel was a corrupt asshole who needed to be slapped with campaign-finance violations. That was his course of action. Not trying to operate like some kind of mafia don. What was this election doing to him?
CHAPTER
17
It seemed that Rotten Doe had some chipped ribs.
Hank and Sheila stared at the speakerphone and then each other. No kidding. He’d been flattened by a falling immigrant. Hank reminded Whittaker of this and got an amplified chortle in response.
“I know that, young man. I didn’t say ‘breaks.’ The whole ribcage is broken ten ways to Sunday, thanks to your illegal landing on top of him. But—several ribs are also chipped. By small pellet projectiles.”
Hank high-fived Sheila. Their theory, based on the shotgun pellets found at the scene, was correct. “Yes, indeedy,” Whittaker continued. “X-ray showed a fair number of the little suckers, concentrated in the upper chest area. From the lack of dispersion, it’s likely that the shot was fired at fairly close range.”
Hank tried to contain his exasperation. Why hadn’t the damn doctor started with that information in the first place, instead of chuckling about falling immigrants? This guy drove him more and more crazy every time he dealt with him.
“Course, I still don’t have any idea who the fella is,” Whittaker said. “So you’ll need to start doing some investigating. I’d like to get him off my books.”
“You’d like to—” A glare from Sheila stopped Hank before he could tell the good doctor what he really thought. Instead, he glared back and didn’t bother to return Whittaker’s cheerful good-bye. He leaned back in his chair and looked at Sheila.
“So was this guy killed there in the woods, or somewhere else and then dumped in that hole?” she said.
“Good question,” Hank said. “Either way, it’s a location the Taylor boys could have easily known about if they’re the ones who’ve been out stripping down trees.” He rose to his feet. “I think I’ll go have a chat with the one we’ve got.”
* * *
Hank walked out of the building and around to the main public entrance of the jail. He liked to come in this way every once in a while. Nothing gave him a better feel for how it was going inside than the people waiting outside to visit. But this morning the lobby was empty. He said hello to Earl, who had, as usual, a crisply ironed tan polo shirt that denoted him as a civilian department employee. He looked at two new pictures of the latest grandbaby, asked after the wife’s bunions, and thanked him for the neatly kept visitor log.
No one had come to see Lloyd Taylor.
Earl buzzed Hank in through the two sets of security doors. They swung silently shut behind him, and all the ambient noise of the free world disappeared. Instead there were shouted cell-to-cell conversations, clanking as inmates rapped on the metal of their doors, and the smell of substandard food, which this morning was … he sniffed … likely biscuits and sausage gravy, judging from the odor of greasy meat and lack of any fresh-bread aroma.
He stopped at the guard station to see the inmate roster. There were meth addicts who’d been in and out so many times, they requested the same cells when they inevitably got rearrested. There were the drunk drivers in for a night or two until they could make bail. There were the poor folks who had been picked up on bench warrants because they hadn’t shown up for a court date to settle a stupid traffic ticket. And there was always someone who’d beaten up his wife or girlfriend. Occasionally, there were ones who’d abused a kid. They had to be separated from the general population for their own safety.
He looked up Taylor’s cell number, which, come to think of it, was the job of the duty officer, who was not there. Who—
Shit.
“You want something? Boss?”
Gerald Tucker sauntered up to the guard station, crossed his arms, and stared at Hank. This day really could not get any worse.
“You’re not allowed smoke breaks while you’re on duty,” Hank said.
“I was takin’ a—I was using the facilities. There’s no rule against that.”
There wasn’t, but Hank was sure the Good Ol’ Boy spent more than a reasonable amount of time away from his post during his shifts. Hank had put him on permanent jail assignment since he’d left his post—the man did have a pattern—watching over the Branson Beauty showboat once it had been towed to shore without its paddlewheel. Shortly after he said he’d gone home (without permission), the boat had exploded. Accidentally, my ass, Hank thought. Someone had done it deliberately, and he knew exactly who it was as he stared at the man who wanted his job.
“Blown anything up lately, Tucker?”
Tucker smirked. “Just your campaign.”
The day could get worse.
Hank forced himself to smile back, because he couldn’t think of a response. He stepped away from the guard station and headed down toward where Taylor was kept.
“Heeeey, Sherf.”
An almost inconceivably thin man rose from his bunk and came to the door of his cell, which was the one directly next to Taylor’s. As tall as Hank, he looked like he weighed less than a hundred pounds. Drugs will do that to you.
“What’d you do this time, Gursey?”
Gursey’s face split in a lopsided grin, and his spindly fingers reached up to scratch his nose.
“I don’t right remember, Sherf. They say I stoled cough syrup from Nixon’s Drug Store. I can’t see how, though. I don’t even like cherry flavor.”
Gursey was a frequent flier. In and out of jail constantly. Forsyth businesspeople had given up pressing charges. If they did, they just ended up spending a lot of time in the courthouse hallway waiting to testify. And Gursey would be diverted into a drug treatment program that stuck—for a bit. Then it would be back to his old ways.
So instead, folks called the cops just to get him out of their stores, and he ended up here until he came off his high and stayed clean for a couple of days.
“How you feeling now? Doing okay? Did you eat your breakfast?”
“Oh, yeah. Biscuits and gravy. Tasted so good. The biscuits was like those throwed rolls at that place up by Springfield. I had them once. My mom took me.”
If he was sober enough to remember things like that, it was probably about time to release him, Hank thought. He wondered where Gursey’s mother was now. Nowhere he needed her, that was for sure. Maybe he could track down some other relative who would take the kid in and keep him away from cold medicines, oxy, and everything else he enjoyed consuming.
He gave Gursey a smile and turned toward the next cell. Compared with his neighbor, the reed thin Lloyd Taylor looked positively bulky.
“Get up, Taylor. We’re going to go have a conversation.”
Taylor glowered at him and didn’t move off his bunk. Hank reached to the back of his belt and brought out his handcuffs.
“Easy or hard, Lloyd. You decide.”
Taylor sat up and swung his legs off the cot. His right shoulder was still wrapped in bandages and he held it close to his body as he carefully rose to his feet. Hank unlocked the cell and took his left arm. Lloyd did not appreciate the courtesy.
“I’m gonna sue your ass. My shoulder hurts like a son of a bitch and…” He ranted all the way to the interview room. Hank sat him down on the far side of the table, locked his ankle into the shackle bolted into the concrete floor, and settled himself into the opposite seat. Cushioned and with arms, it was a much more comfortable chair than the molded plastic one Taylor was stuck in. He had a feeling they’d be in here awhile. Taylor showed no signs of shutting up, and he had no plans to make him. He leaned back and listened while Lloyd called him names, questioned his mother’s virtue, mocked his haircut, accused him of having inappropriate relations with farm animals, and told him exactly where he could shove those “Hank Worth for Sheriff” election signs.
He started to lose steam after about fifteen minutes. Hank just continued to stare at him. He doubted any cop had let the bozo go on this long before, because Lloyd didn’t know what to make of it. So then he did what any self-respecting sleazeball would do—proclaimed his innocence.
“You got no reason to hold me, man. All I done is earn a living. And I can spend my paycheck any way I want. Getting a tattoo ain’t a crime.”
Hank pretended to stifle a yawn.
“Look,” Lloyd snapped. “I load up my truck and I drive it where they tell me. I don’t even know what the shit is. Plants. And not pot. It’s nothing illegal. I take it to the places they tell me and I get paid. That’s it.”
There it was. Hank kept his face impassive. “I thought you only drove for one company. Why more than one place?”
“One place.” Lloyd shifted in his seat. “That’s what I said.”
“No.” Hank leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “That was not what you said. You said ‘places,’ plural. You know, more than one.”
Lloyd started twitching his foot and jangling the cuff.
“Who else did you deliver to, Lloyd?”
“Nobody.”
“Well, where do you take the plants and bark that you’ve stolen?”
“That goes to—” He froze.
Hank bit back a smile and waited. Lloyd didn’t move. Didn’t even blink. Hank half expected him to roll over and play dead in a minute. He even looked a little like a possum, come to think of it.
They stared at each other for a bit, until Lloyd had to blink.
Hank switched tacks.
“Who’s Ned Bunning?”
Lloyd was so surprised the “huh?” escaped his lips before he could stop it.
“Did you meet any other delivery drivers in the course of picking up those plants?”
Hank took Lloyd’s sneer as a no.
He slid a copy of Bunning’s driver’s license photo across the table. It showed a thirty-four-year-old man with a lined face that suggested life up to that point hadn’t exactly been easy. He had brown eyes, a scruffy goatee, and a full head of brown hair.
