“I wouldn’t argue that. He runs a chop shop, everybody knows that, and Paulson surely does, but he hasn’t done anything about it. In exchange, Paulson got a thousand-dollar set of pipes put on his truck, and a pretty bitchin’ grill that you can’t see in the video. It doesn’t match the rest of the truck, but still, it looks tough.” He said it with admiration and envy, and Joe cut in to bring his mind away from the truck and back to the murder scene.
“What are the odds this guy would have given Antonio Childers, that’s the shooter’s name, the black guy from out of town, a ride away from that scene?”
“Pretty slim, I’d think. Because he’s Nora’s brother.”
There was a pregnant silence, and then Joe said, “The guy who worked on that truck was the victim’s brother?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How many people live in this town?” Perry asked. “Five?”
“Just over three hundred.”
The video was still running.
On the screen, Paulson and another officer, one who appeared to hold rank over him, were searching the Mustang and cuffing the guy in the one shoe, Detective Jeffrey Tolliver of Birmingham, Alabama. Every now and then Paulson would glance sideways, but his gun never traveled with him. Could be that he was checking to make sure there was no other threat in the area. Could be that he was checking to make sure his truck was long since out of sight.
“Somebody got Childers away from that scene in a hurry,” Joe said. “But maybe we’re looking at it backwards. We can’t see what happened. The truck comes and goes, and Antonio comes and goes. Maybe with a friend. But maybe not.”
The maintenance man had that reflective gaze going again. “You know, that’s not a bad point.”
Joe had never felt less validated by a positive review of his police work, but he pressed it. “Supposing that girl, Nora, was intending to steal the car, then her brother is the likely recipient, right? You said he runs a chop shop. So he’d be the guy who takes over once she’s snagged the car.”
The maintenance man nodded.
“Let’s imagine her brother is waiting on her and sees what happens. Watches Antonio shoot his sister in the stomach. He’s not just driving away then, is he? A guy like you described, he’d be all over the screen right now, he’d have killed Antonio, shot him where he stood, or at least stayed with his sister and waited for the cops.”
That drew a frown and a slow, thoughtful shake of the head. “I can’t say I agree with that, no.”
“This guy you told us about, the hell-raiser, you think he’d just let it go? Watch his sister be killed and then clear out?”
“Oh, no. That’s not what I meant, at all. I was just thinking. Old Double, if he did see all that? He’d have wanted to take some time on your boy, there, what’s his name, Antonio? Double wouldn’t have let that end easy for him. Not after what he did to Nora.”
For a moment they were all quiet, watching Paulson arrest Tolliver on the screen, and listening to the rattling of snow and ice off the window. Then Perry said, “Let’s have a look around that car, Joe. Maybe there are more cameras, more angles.”
Joe nodded, but he didn’t turn away from the screen.
He was watching Nora Simpson’s blood spread out over the pavement.
Double wouldn’t have let that end easy for him, the maintenance man had said.
And he nearly smiled.
Antonio might have made one hell of a mistake leaving Cleveland for Georgia.
These crackers might not be all that easy to handle.
3:06 P.M.
JEFFREY PACED AROUND THE TINY holding cell in his underwear and T-shirt. He was still wearing one shoe and one sock. It was the only control he could assert over his person.
Thanks to his hangover, he had slept some, but now he was fully awake and fully freaking out. Claustrophobia had never been an issue for him until now. There wasn’t enough saliva in his mouth. His heart was vibrating like a tuning fork. He was sweating profusely despite the cold that whipped past the single-paned, barred window high up in his cell.
Ten hours ago he had asked the Helen chief of police to call sheriff Hoss Hollister in Sylacauga so that Hoss could vouch for him. He knew that ten hours had passed because there was a giant clock on the wall opposite his cell, mounted over the empty desk that held a telephone, a fax machine, and a computer the size of a dog’s coffin—corgi, not malamute—with a giant monitor on top of it. For the last ten hours, he’d listened to the tick-tick-tick of the clock, the second hand passing for something like Chinese water torture.
Occasionally, he heard voices in the next room, but nobody entered the holding space or sat behind the desk or checked on his welfare. Every once in a while the stainless steel toilet/sink inside his cell would gurgle, or his stomach would grumble, but other than the clock, those were the only sounds.
The phone never rang.
The computer wasn’t even turned on.
He sat down on the narrow metal bed with no mattress, pillow, or blanket. They’d even taken the string out of his one tennis shoe. He clasped his hands between his knees, not praying so much as begging his brain to start working. There was a dead woman. Nora. Someone had killed her. She deserved justice. Some kind of acknowledgment that her life had mattered more than the last few seconds at the end.
Flashes of memories kept coming back to him.
The bartender had poured a little more generously when Nora had shown up. The room she’d taken him to was freshly cleaned, no toiletries or suitcase to indicate a guest was staying there.
What were these called?
Clues?
It was a scam, but then the scam had gone horribly wrong.
Nora had stayed the night. He wanted to think that was because he was damn good in bed, and not because she’d drunk too much and he’d not drunk enough. She was obviously a grab-and-dash kind of woman. Get the wallet, get the keys, go to the alley, and meet up with whoever was going to take the car for chopping.
But she’d stolen the wrong car.
Then there was the old blue pickup. The two shapes in the cab. The black guy in the Cleveland Indians baseball cap.
His head pounded out each memory like a chisel on a stone tablet.
He’d provided the Helen chief of police with Hoss’s home phone number because he’d been close to the lawman his entire life. Hoss was the reason he became a cop. The guy had been a surrogate father, keeping him out of trouble, providing a nudge or a kick in the ass when needed. And Hoss would be a hell of a lot nicer about this current misunderstanding than his lieutenant back in Alabama, who would probably fax over a termination of employment letter the minute he hung up the phone.
But if the Helen chief had talked to Hoss, if he understood that Jeffrey was not, in fact, a murdering, coke-dealing, drug-running Yankee asshole from Cleveland, but an honest, God-fearing, law-abiding southern boy, the Helen chief wasn’t letting on.
He stood and started pacing again.
Sock, shoe. Sock, shoe.
Tick tick tick.
If the Helen chief of police wasn’t making phone calls, was he trying to build a case? By law, he only had forty-eight hours to hold a suspect before he had to charge him or let him go. The weekend was basically here. The courts would be closed for two days, maybe more if the storm turned bad. He should’ve been allowed a phone call, but in the last ten hours no one had been around to ask for that privilege. Today was almost a year that the cops who were accused of beating Rodney King had been acquitted of all crimes. If the Helen chief of police moved him to the county lockup, his life would be worth less than a pound of dog shit.