"Holy cats. How much?"
"We don't want to take it out until we get pictures, but I figure something upward of three hundred thousand, if it's all hundreds," Del said. "All the top bundles are hundreds-and all used. Not a single new bill, as far as you can tell from looking at the sides."
Lucas said to Dickerson, "You need to have three guys here with the money all the time, until it's counted. Make sure one or two of them are sheriff's deputies. You want both agencies involved. People are gonna ask how much of the money went into cops' pockets."
Dickerson nodded. "Right, we'll do that. Another thing. I walked across the highway and talked to Gene Calb, at the truck place. He was Cash's boss. He said he had no idea what was going on, but he said there was another guy living here, part time, named Joe Kelly. He said Kelly disappeared a month ago and nobody's heard from him since. The clothes in the other bedroom are Kelly's. We got a couple charge-card receipts with his name on them."
"Check the companies for new activity."
"Under way," Dickerson said.
"We got another thing," Del said. "Maybe."
"What?"
"I want you to look at it," Del said. "Then you tell me."
Lucas followed him, Dickerson trailing, down through the house to the basement. On the way down, he told Dickerson about Washington Fowler. Dickerson was unmoved.
"You're pretty calm about it," Lucas said. "The guy goes around starting fires."
Dickerson smiled. "That's your problem, general, not mine. You're the guy who's supposed to fix shit."
THE BASEMENT WAS unfinished concrete block and exposed joists, but with a new-looking furnace, a new hot-water heater, and new wiring and fluorescent lights. In one corner, a new bathroom had been built in a beige-painted cubicle, with a standard toilet and a sink, and a fiberglass shower booth with sliding glass doors.
Del said, "Well?"
"Well, they just remodeled it," Lucas said. He looked around, saw nothing of obvious interest. Del had to be thinking about the bathroom, and Lucas went that way. The bathroom was bare, and smelled of disinfectant. Large, lots of room to move around. Lucas swung the entrance door, then knocked on it. Looked like wood, sounded like a metal fire door. Knocked on the walls: not drywall, as he'd expected, but painted plywood. And heavy, probably three-quarter inch. Yale keyhole lock with a bolt, lockable from the outside. No keyhole on the inside…
He stepped back and said to Del and Dickerson, "It's a goddamn cell."
Del turned to Dickerson. "You heard it here first."
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Lucas, Del, and Dickerson walked through the gathering collection of cop cars in the yard. Letty was sitting on the hood of the car again, while her mother waited inside. When she saw them coming, she climbed out, and Lucas introduced Dickerson. "Hank will help you with the TV commentary. And he'll get you home."
"Cops say you found a bundle of money in there," Letty said to Del. "That right?"
"Just a rumor," Del said.
Dickerson, looking from Lucas to Del, asked, "What're you guys doing next?"
"Gonna talk to St. Paul, and maybe wander around some more," Lucas said. He looked back at the house. "This thing is getting interesting."
7
FREE OF LETTY and her mother, Lucas and Del caucused at the cars. "Moose Bay?" Del asked.
"That's a big topic," Lucas said. "Why don't we talk to this Calb guy?"
They both looked across the highway at the yellow metal buildings with the trucks parked out front, and Del nodded.
Calb had two buildings, an auto-body and tow building, and a truck-rehab building, connected by an unheated shed-like walkway. They went into the auto-body building, which consisted of a small office and a series of repair bays at the back; a woman in the office directed them through the walkway to the truck-rehab wing. The truck area was bigger and more open, forty feet long and thirty wide, with a thirty-foot ceiling; it smelled of diesel and welding fumes. A row of red toolboxes sat at the back, and an electric heater was mounted high on one wall and glowed down over a burgundy Peterbilt. Three men were clustered around the open door of the truck, peering inside, and one of them asked, "What the fuck were they carrying in there? You think there was some acid dripping in there?"
"I don't know… " Then one of the men saw Lucas and Del, and nudged the heavyset man who was deepest into the truck. He backed up, saw them, stood upright, and asked, "Can we help you fellas?"
"We're with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension," Lucas said. Del held up an ID case. "We need to talk to Gene Calb."
"That's me… I'll be with you in just a second." He turned to one of the other men. "I don't know, Larry. I'd go after it with a grinder, and if you don't get good metal… we'll cut another piece off a wreck and weld 'er in. There's a hulk down in Worthington, out of a fire, oughta work."
"Looks like it's rotten all the way to the bottom. I could push a nail through it," said an emaciated man in oil-stained Mr. Goodwrench coveralls.
"Well, cut through it and find out."
Calb shook his head as he turned to Lucas and Del. "The whole floor of the passenger side is eaten away. Not the driver's side, just the passenger side. It's not rust, exactly, but it's rotten. Like they spilled acid on it or something and then let it soak for a few years."
One of the other men said, "Cat pee? Cat pee'll rot holes in hardwood floors."
"Well, Jesus, how could he stand the smell?" Calb shook his head once more. "If I were you, Larry, I'd keep my hands out of it."
"You sure as shit can count on that," said the man called Larry.
TO LUCAS AND Del, Calb said, "C'mon this way, fellas. We'll go back to my office. You want to know about Deon? I already talked to some of you guys. With the BCA, right?"
"We're doing a little back-checking," Lucas said. "How well did you know Mr. Cash?"
They pushed through a door into another small office and Calb gestured at a couple of guest chairs, then settled behind his desk as he answered. A caution flag signed by Richard Petty, and a Snap-on tools calendar from the 1980s hung on a wall. Everything else was parts books.
"He worked for me," Calb said earnestly, leaning across the desk to Lucas. He had a big head and a blunt nose and square, mildly green teeth the size of Chiclets-the face of a plumber or a carpenter or a character actor playing a hardworking joe. "We weren't friends. An old Army buddy down in KC asked me if I could get him a driver's job. I knew he was just out of jail and, tell you the truth, I'm not sure he was that much reformed. With what's happened, it looks like he wasn't."
"What do you think happened?" Del asked.
Calb said, "Well-you know. Somebody took him out and hung him. I know it wasn't none of my boys, because none of my boys could do that. Jane too, killing both of them. I think it's gotta come out of KC. He was in jail, that's what it's gotta be. Somebody back there."
"How about Jane Warr?" Lucas asked. "How well did you know her?"
"Not real well. She didn't hang around or anything. She came up with Deon, from KC. She wasn't much-she was a card dealer up at Moose Bay, I'm sure you know."
"So… were they renting that house? Own it? What was the situation there?"
"They bought it, cheap-thirty-six thousand, I think. Then they fixed it up. Joe Kelly did some of the work, he'd once worked as a handyman, and they had a couple guys in from town, they did some of it."
"There are rumors around town that she might have had a relationship with a guy up at the casino," Del said.
"I wouldn't know about that," Calb said, shaking his head. "Like I said, she wasn't that bright, but I don't think she'd be dumb enough to play around on Deon. Deon had a mean streak. That's why he was in jail. If he'd found out something like that, he would have beat on her like a big bass drum."
"Mmm."
Calb picked up a piece of paper from his desk, something with a printed IRS seal, looked at it, flicked it off to the side. "Then there's the whole thing about Joe. Joe's gone-and nobody knows where he went. Never said a word to anyone. One day he was here, and the next day, he wasn't. He was from KC, too."