A Grant County Collection (106 page)

Jeffrey crossed his arms, wondering if what he was hearing was the truth or some carefully planned story to get his defenses down. Valentine hadn't exactly been forthcoming over the last few days, and now he was laying down his life story like he was testifying at a tent revival.

Valentine leaned back on his heel, put his hat on his head. 'You wanted to know who's been setting fires, who chased off Hank and got his place closed down?' He glanced back at the small house as if to make sure no one was listening. 'Answer to both questions is Boyd Gibson. He was working the bar, slinging Bud Light with meth chasers, when the ATF came in. As far as who stabbed him, I've got me some ideas, but I'm gonna have to trust you a hell of a lot more before I tell you that.'

'Did he torch the Escalade?'

'Wouldn't be surprised.'

'Why did my detective run?'

'I gather she's as hardheaded and arrogant as her boss. I arrested her because I think she's involved in this up to her eyeballs. I'm gonna find her again, and I'll be goddamned if I let her slip away from me a second time.'

Jeffrey spoke from experience. 'You're fighting a losing battle.'

'Yeah, well ...' He shrugged. 'We'll see about that.'

'Who's in charge?' Jeffrey asked. 'Who's running the skinheads?'

'If I could answer that, you and me probably would've never met.' Valentine's sloppy grin came back. 'Anyways, Chief, I guess I should warn you that the last time I saw Grover Gibson, he threatened to beat the shit out of me if I ever stepped foot on his property again.'

Part of Jeffrey relished the idea of the young sheriff getting his ass kicked. 'Maybe you should call some backup, then. I'm not really here in an official capacity.'

'I figured as much when you got into my squad car without your gun.' He gave Jeffrey a wink before heading toward the house, saying, 'I hope that pretty wife of yours really is a doctor. I have a feeling I'm gonna need some stitches.'

Deacon Simms was one of those men who always looked old and out of step with the world, even when he was in his twenties. Lena supposed Deacon had considered himself a rebel, that when his gray braid slapped against his back as he drove his ancient Harley to the bar, he had thought he was making some kind of statement against society. He still looked every inch the Hells Angel he'd been in his younger days: Handlebar mustache. Confederate flag on the T-shirt stretching across his gut. Leather chaps over faded jeans.

Even in the 1970s, he had looked like someone caught in a time-warp, an old hippie whose slow speech and delayed reasoning proved that you didn't quit being a pothead no matter how many years ago you stopped lighting up. Like Hank, Deacon was wrapped up in AA and NA and any A that would have him. Unlike Hank – please God, hopefully unlike her uncle – Deacon was dead.

Now, leaning over the man's body in Hank's attic, Lena guessed Deacon had been beaten to death. His face looked more like a bruised plum, his sunken cheeks caked with dried blood. His lip had been broken open, the split cutting into his mustache so that it hung off like an actor's prop. Deacon must have lived for a while. Lena wasn't a doctor, but she had seen enough bodies at Sara Linton's morgue to know that you didn't bruise like that unless your heart was still pumping blood. If Lena had to guess again, she'd say that he'd been dead a week, maybe ten days. How long had he waited to die? Had the con with the swastika stuck him up there? Had Hank?

There were certain procedures to follow when you found a stiff. Lena had learned them all her second week at the police academy, when they taught the important stuff they didn't want to waste on the cadets who washed out in the first week.

First, you roped off the scene, then you made the phone calls. By law, the coroner had to pronounce that the person was dead, even if the body was so putrid the smell made your eyes sting. It was the coroner's job to decide whether the death was suspicious or not. Deacon Simms was what you'd call a no-brainer, an instant call to your chief who would then radio out homicide to take over. Next, forensic evidence had to be gathered, pictures taken, the area around the body vacuumed and fingertip-searched for any trace evidence that might have been left by the killer. Only after that would they remove the body for autopsy and go over their findings in order to track the killer.

In the case of Hank's attic, someone would point out the way the rat turds and dust were disturbed in a large swath from the access panel to Deacon's final resting place and conclude that he'd been dragged there. Maybe they would notice the boxes stacked in front of the body and assume that he'd been hidden there, left to die. Certainly, they would see the deep cuts on his palms and forearms and say that he had tried to defend himself from someone who was wielding a very sharp knife. The fact of his missing clothes would indicate that there had been something on said clothes that the killer felt might lead back to him. Or maybe the doer got some kind of sick twist out of beating a sixty-year-old man to death and leaving him naked up in an attic to die.

The most disturbing part was the trophy – the patch of skin that had been removed right above Deacon's left nipple. Blood surrounded the area, but the wound had not been fatal. It was just the skin the killer had wanted, a two-inch by two-inch square that had been expertly peeled from the body. The faded tattoos surrounding the missing flesh offered some clue as to what had been drawn on the removed section. Before his death, Lena had never seen Deacon without his shirt on, but she was more than familiar with the scenes adorning his chest. Deacon was Hells Angels, the original hate-mongers.

Someone had carved off his swastika.

The only good thing the missing skin told her was that Hank had not been involved in Deacon's death. The two had argued just about every day of their lives together, but Hank would never have hurt the only person in the world who could be called his friend. No matter what dark places Lena had let her mind go to over the past few days, she knew now without a shadow of a doubt that Hank would never intentionally harm anyone but himself. He was not a murderer.

The thought brought Lena to an obvious question: what had Hank been doing while someone had beaten Deacon to death and left him in the attic to die?

She had to find Hank. The local police would assume Hank had something to do with Deacon's murder. They would see a desperate drug addict and a violent death and leap to the obvious conclusion. Even Jeffrey would have a hard time believing Hank was innocent. He'd want to know how many days had passed with Hank living in the house and Deacon lying dead right above him. He'd want something more concrete than a missing piece of skin to prove Hank's innocence. Lena couldn't give him any of that. The fact that Hank was missing sure didn't do much to help matters. You only bolted if you had something to hide.

Or maybe Hank was hiding from someone. Maybe he was hiding from Lena.

She crawled back across the attic on her hands and knees, then dropped down onto the kitchen chair. Lena reached around the access panel and moved the box back in place. When she was finished, she found a rag in the bathroom and wiped the trim around the panel's opening so that her dirty fingerprints didn't show. She put the chair back in the kitchen, turned off all the lights but the one over the kitchen sink, then locked the door behind her.

She felt like a criminal as she drove her Celica through town. Hell, she
was
a criminal. Not only had she failed to report Deacon's death, she'd hidden the body, wiped off her fingerprints. She could just imagine sitting in Al Pfeiffer's office, the old fart leering at her as she told him what had happened. Al would find Hank. He'd bring him in and have him up on murder charges before Lena could even open the phone book and look for a lawyer.

Some of the outside lights were on at the bar as Lena pulled up, but there were no other cars in the lot. She assumed the lights were on timers, but then saw the rigged cords where Hank had strung together some cheap solar panels. The bulbs were a pale, fading orange and she doubted they would stay on for much longer. She leaned over and got the flashlight out of the glove compartment before getting out of the car.

Tape with the logo of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms still crisscrossed the front door. Lena checked the seal with her flashlight to make sure it hadn't been broken before heading to the back of the building. She felt the hair on the back of her neck go up as she crossed out of the semi-lit parking lot and walked along the dirt path that led to Hank's office. Considering the week she was having, she didn't think her paranoia an unhealthy emotion.

She had tried to cover the hole she'd kicked in the wall of Hank's office with a couple of trashcans from the bar. Unless you knew what you were looking for, the damage wasn't as obvious as she'd thought. She glanced over her shoulder, shined her light toward the woods, before pushing aside the trashcans and going into the office.

Inside, the shack looked exactly as she'd left it. She couldn't decide if it was a good thing or a bad thing that Hank hadn't been back. Deacon Simms was dead. Other than Charlotte Warren, Hank didn't have any friends he could turn to. There was no couch he could crash on, no spare room he could hole up in.

The checkbook was still open on his desk. She sat down in the chair and went back through the register. As far as she could remember, everything was the same as when she'd found Charlotte's letters. Still, Lena flipped through the checks, making sure none were missing. Next, she went through the desk again, this time looking for anything that might connect to Deacon Simms. All she found was Hank's spare set of keys under a beat-up old copy of
I
Am the Cheese.

Lena pocketed the keys and flipped through the book, which bore the stamp of the Elawah County Library on the spine. Glued on the back of the cover was a paper pocket with a checkout slip tucked inside. 'Lena Adams' was scribbled on the strip where she'd signed out the book a billion years ago. She'd needed it for an English paper. Lena had loved the book but blown off the assignment. When the teacher had called Hank to let him know, Lena had lied, told him she'd lost the book. In addition to tanning her hide, Hank had made her pay for the book out of her allowance.

And the asshole had kept it this entire time.

Lena tossed the book onto the desk, accidentally knocking over a stack of receipts. She was scooping them up, trying to put them back in a pile, when she saw the telephone underneath. The phone was old, the kind they started making shortly after getting rid of the rotary dial. Lena reached behind it and followed the cord under the desk, looking for the answering machine. She guessed that as with the electric supply, Hank hadn't bothered to pay the phone company to get service all the way out to the shack. The galvanized pipe with the extension cord that led back to the bar was about two inches round – there was plenty of space for a long telephone extension cord.

She tucked the checkbook under her arm and knelt down to leave the shack through the hole. There wasn't anything worth stealing in the office, but she moved the trashcans back in front of the hole.

The back door of the bar was padlocked, but that had been Hank's doing, not the drug agents. As with the front door, ATF had stuck their usual tape across the jamb but she easily cut the seal with one of the keys. Lena matched the Kryptonite key to the padlock, then a smaller Yale key to the deadbolt. The metal door groaned as it opened, the pungent odor of stale smoke and beer spilling into the night air.

The soles of her shoes snicked across the rubber fatigue mats as she walked through the kitchen. Something ran over her foot and she stood stock still, hoping that it was just a rat then hoping that it was alone. She used her flashlight to find the light switch, her mind conjuring a host of rabid rodents eager to attack. There was a noise in the corner that she chose to ignore as she walked to the front of the bar.

Lena coughed, her lungs not quite used to the stale smoke and lack of oxygen. She turned on the light switches as she walked through, one of them triggering the jukebox into starting up in the middle of a song. Trash was scattered everywhere and she saw the sheen of spilled drinks that had left sticky spots on the linoleum. It didn't take a detective to read this scene. The cops had come in, cleared everybody out, made their arrests, and turned off the lights on their way out.

Suddenly, Lena remembered something. She knelt down behind the bar and rapped the floor with the back of her knuckles, straining to hear over the jukebox. She finally found what she was looking for and took out her knife to pry up a tile. Underneath, she saw a cigar box cradled between the joists. Hank's hidden stash. Lena opened the box; there was about two thousand dollars in it. She hesitated, feeling suddenly like a thief. This was Hank's money. Was it stealing from him if she took it so he couldn't buy dope?

She stood on the top of the bar and tucked the money behind a bottle of scotch that was so cheap the coloring had turned to sediment in the bottom. She jumped down and returned the empty cigar box to its hiding place. Some country crooner Lena didn't recognize was just dipping into a ballad as she pressed her heel into the tile, snapping it back in place. She felt better now, like she had done something to help Hank instead of contributing to his demise.

The telephone was behind the bar under the cash register, just where it always was. The answering machine beside it read twelve calls. Lena pressed play, and figured that the most recent calls came first when her own voice said, 'Hank, it's Lee. Where are you?' She was shocked at her tone as it echoed in the bar, the anger that radiated from every word. Did she always sound this hateful when she called him? Lena shook her head: another thing she couldn't think about right now.

The next call was from Nan, Sibyl's lover. Her words were kinder but her message was clear, 'I haven't heard from you in a few days and I was getting worried. Please let me know if you're doing all right.'

Message ten came on, a staticky silence Lena was about to fast-forward through when she heard the beginning of an automated message that made her stomach knot.

Georgia, like just about every state in the union, used an electronic system to handle calls from prison inmates. A computerized voice announced the prison from which the call originated and advised the listener to be sure they understood the charges before they pressed a button to okay the call. Then, every two minutes, the same automated voice came on the line to remind the recipient that he or she was talking to an inmate in a state prison. The exorbitant charges helped pay for listening software to monitor inmate calls as well as protect unsuspecting strangers from getting a twenty-dollar bill for a two-minute call.

The recording was pretty standard, first announcing the origin of the call, then allowing a three-second spot for the inmate to say his name. Over the years, for various cases, Lena had listened to some of the inmate calls coming out of the Grant County jail. It was amazing what the perps could fit into the short bursts the three seconds allowed. They seldom said their names – it was more like the world's fastest opportunity to beg somebody to talk to you. They ranged from, 'Mama, I love you, please talk to me,' to her personal favorite, 'I'm gonna kill you, bitch,' from a man who kept insisting to the judge that he posed no threat to his wife.

Hank's machine played the fifth message, a duplicate to the four that preceded it. 'This is a collect call from an inmate in Coastal State Prison. Press one if you wish to talk to inmate—'

Lena put her hand on the bar to hold herself up. She let the machine play, her throat feeling as if she had swallowed glass.

Five times the same message played, five times she heard his voice. She could not stop herself. She listened to the next one, then the next. All of them were the same. All played that hard, emotionless voice that seemed to echo the computer's own.

The number one flashed on the machine as the final message played.