“Help me turn him on his side.”
“Shit,” Rhys said, holding his breath as he rolled the body onto its side so Kendra could check the back pockets.
“Nothing,” she said, stripping off the gloves with two declarative snaps. “Where else could he have it?”
Her partner shook his head as he let the body settle onto its back again. “Nowhere else for him to carry it.”
“Maybe it fell out and it’s in the bag somewhere,” Kendra said, looking at Rhys.
“What?”
“Feel around.”
He met his partner’s look with one of disdain. “You’ve already been digging around in there. You do it.”
“I just took off my gloves.
Why don’t we just call the number and listen for the ring?”
“I don’t have a number for his personal cell phone. Do you?”
“No. Come on,” she said. “Snap on a pair and give it a go.”
He didn’t miss her double meaning. She knew he was squeamish about bodily fluids — other than blood — and the bag was swimming in it.
Fuck it.
He pulled on the gloves and felt around inside the bag, right into all four corners, under Cox’s lifeless legs, around his head. He withdrew his hands, carefully peeled off the gloves, saying, “Nothing.”
“Son of a bitch,” Kendra said.
“Yeah,” Rhys said.
“Could it be in any of the garbage bags?”
The bags of material removed from the trailer were still in their van and Todd’s Hyundai, outside. Their next stop was to be a nearby junkyard, where the car would be crushed into a cube, never to be found again.
“We would have noticed it, wouldn’t we?” he said.
She briefly closed her eyes, as though seeking some sort of divine guidance. “I think we would, but we need to check.”
“We leave the bags in the car, let it get crushed with everything else, does it matter?”
“We’ll never know,” she said. “We have to know. The phone matters. It’s something he handled. There’s more traces of him on that than just about anything else.”
He knew she was right.
Confident now that the phone was not in the body bag with Todd, they could at least proceed with this stage of their duties. They moved the bag and its contents onto the platform in front of the door to the furnace. Rhys fired it up, and they waited for it to reach the desired temperature, then watched as the body was conveyed into the raging furnace.
That done, they went back outside to the Hyundai, parked in back of the funeral home, and hauled out all the bags.
“There’s no easy way to do this,” she said.
They dumped everything out onto the parking lot. Cleaning rags, clothing, bedding, the laptop, all of Todd’s most personal items, like his toothbrush and comb. They spread the items out on the pavement. They found the cheap flip phone that had been on the kitchen table in the trailer, but that was it.
Rather than put everything back into bags, they tossed it all, loose, into the trunk and the back seat.
Kendra said, “We have to go back.”
Rhys leaned up against the Hyundai and hung his head. “I’m so fucking tired.”
“I know. Let’s get rid of the car, get some breakfast, mainline some caffeine, we’ll go back.”
Wearily, he nodded. “You take the car, I’ll follow.”
They went to the junkyard, asked for “Harry,” who was happy to put the car into the crusher after Rhys slipped a thousand in twenties into his greasy palm. They stayed until they saw the Hyundai go into the crusher and be reduced to a small cube of mangled metal and plastic.
They found a nearby Denny’s and demanded coffee immediately. Kendra ordered a veggie omelette, Rhys went for the steak and eggs.
“You know, I usually work alone,” Rhys said as he sipped on his first cup.
“Same,” she said. “But the client was right, figuring this was a two-person job.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Different.”
“So, Rhys, you got a real name?”
“I do. But how do you know it isn’t Rhys?”
“No one would really want to be named Rhys. If it was your name, you’d change it.”
“How about Kendra? Sounds like you walked out of a Chanel ad.”
“Okay, so I’m not Kendra and you’re not Rhys.”
Rhys raised his mug and smiled. “To us, whoever we are.”
She raised her mug and clinked his, as if they were wineglasses.
Their waitress arrived with the food, and even before the plate had been set down in front of her, Kendra had her fork in her hand. She speared some home fries, shoveled them into her mouth. While chewing, she said, “This one is a weird gig.”
“Gig? What are we, a band?” he asked, cutting into his steak, checking to see whether it was rare, as he’d ordered.
“Everything’s a gig to me,” she said. “You don’t have questions?”
He shrugged and chewed. “Everything’s a job, a task to be completed.”
“This list, though,” she said. “What’s the connection? Why the special instructions about cleaning the scene? The fires?”
Rhys slowly shook his head. “Only know what you need to know.”
They ate hurriedly and soon were back in the van, heading to Todd’s trailer outside Springfield. Nearly an hour later, when they were within a mile of their destination, Kendra yawned and said, “I should’ve had one more coffee.”
“Did you see that place we passed about two miles back?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you let me out, I’ll look for the phone, you go back and get us a couple more coffees, come back. If I haven’t found it by then, you can help me.”
Kendra nodded. She saw the driveway up ahead.
“Don’t bother pulling in. Just drop me,” Rhys said.
The van slowed and came to a stop at the end of the driveway. Before he opened the door, Rhys hit the button on the glove compartment and opened it, then removed a silencer-equipped Ruger and tucked it into a deep, inside jacket pocket.
“Expecting trouble?” she asked.
He smiled. “Like the Boy Scouts say.” He opened the door. “Maybe get a donut or something, too, if they’ve got it.”
He slammed the door and started walking up the driveway while Kendra waited for the traffic to clear so she could do a U-turn.
Rhys approached the trailer, mounted the cinder block steps to reach the door, and went inside. The place still smelled of bleach. He closed the door, behind him and immediately got to his knees, peering under chairs and the living room couch. He worked his way to the kitchen and, using the flashlight app on his phone, peered into the cracks between the stove and fridge and cabinetry.
“If I were a phone, where would I be?” he said under his breath.
He stood, briefly, to walk down the hallway to the bedroom at the trailer’s tail end, then went down on his knees again.
That was when he heard the approach of a vehicle.
It was too soon for Kendra to be back with the coffee, and besides, this did not sound like the van, which was a well-tuned machine. Whatever was coming down the driveway sounded like the proverbial bucket of bolts. Rattles, squeaky springs, perforated muffler.
He crept to the closest window, went up on his knees, and peeked outside.
It was an old piece of American Motors shit. A Pacer. A young woman was driving, a middle-aged guy in the passenger seat.
“Fuck.”
He moved away from the window and considered his options.
The trailer had a so-called back door, but it was on the same side as the front door. He couldn’t slip out without being seen.
He heard the car’s two doors slam shut. Voices. The man and the woman were having a conversation as they got closer.