“Who told you to call in the staties?”
“C’mon, Jesse,” she said. “Do you have any idea of how out of it you were yesterday after Suit and Elena left the reception? I’m surprised you can even stand up. And for goodness’ sakes, we tried calling you for a long time there. What would you have done? I was covering for you in case the mayor got wind of it. This way I could tell her you instructed me to get the state cops right on it.”
He knew she was right, that he owed her his thanks, not his anger, which should have been reserved for himself. Molly had covered for him over the years on the few occasions he had lost control of his drinking. Beyond that, she had made the right call. If the rest of the crime scene looked anything like the hallway, Peter Perkins would be overwhelmed.
“Where’s the body?”
“Upstairs.” Molly pointed with her pen. “The ME is still up there with her.”
“ID?”
“Maude Cain, ninety-one. She’s lived here her whole life.”
Jesse put up his palm. “Wait. Cain... Cain. Cain as in Zachariah Cain?”
“That’s right. Cain as in the man the library is named for. They go back to before Paradise was Paradise.”
Jesse knew some of the local history, but not as much as lifetime residents like Molly. Sometimes, as he had learned when the bodies of Ginny Connolly and Mary Kate O’Hara were found in a collapsed building on Trench Alley, small towns hid their pasts from outsiders. That’s why Molly, besides being the best cop he had, was invaluable.
“Why didn’t the Cains build up on the Bluffs like the Salters and Rutherfords?”
“They gave a lot of their fortune away to do good works. Their money was pretty much gone by the time Maude inherited this place from her mother.”
“I see she was selling the house.”
“She was old. I don’t think she could handle the upkeep anymore.”
“Okay, I’m going up. And, Molly...”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
As he walked to the staircase, he noticed the broken shards of porcelain, a few caked with dried blood, and the general destruction of the house. It didn’t take a seasoned homicide detective to figure out that whoever killed Maude Cain had come looking for something. The question was what had they come looking for? And had it been found?
11
King got back to the motel room with a sack full of fast-food cheeseburgers, a liter bottle of Coke, a six-pack of Coors, and the local papers. King winced at the pine disinfectant smell and the artificial floral stench of the cheap soap that hit him in the face when he stepped into the room. He kicked the door shut behind him and shook his head at the look of the place. All done up in deep browns and mustard gold, the place hadn’t seen new furnishings since the Carter administration, but they had to wait it out here only another day. Hump, his big body slouched across the ratty quilt, swung his legs off the bed at the sight of his pal. He muted the TV, the black preacher he’d been watching now silently waving his Bible around above his head like a machete.
“Here.”
King flung the bag of burgers on the bed and put the bottle of Coke on top of the fiberboard-and-veneer nightstand. He popped open a Coors and took the papers over to what passed for a desk.
“This is Coke, King,” Hump said.
“Yeah, and so what?”
“I wanted Pepsi. Didn’t they have no Pepsi? Coke is too sweet.”
“Hump, for chrissakes! You know how long it took me to find a fucking payphone. When I got to the store, I grabbed the first cola I found. Deal with it.”
“Okay,” he said, unable to hide his disappointment.
He felt a little better after inhaling two of the four cheeseburgers in the bag.
“King, there’s two burgers left. You want—”
“Knock yourself out. I ate.”
Hump liked that. He could’ve eaten a half-dozen more, but four was good for now. He took a big pull on the Coke and made a face.
“Why they make this stuff so sweet, King? Why do you think?”
“Like I give a shit.”
“They find the old lady yet? What’s the papers say?”
“Nothing.”
“They ain’t found her yet? Maybe it’ll be a few days and we can get far away.”
“Nah, Hump, they’ll find her today, most likely. Even though we left the truck in Salem, the delivery company will just follow the route back to the old lady’s house. Anyways, we aren’t goin’ anyplace. I set a meet for tomorrow.”
“But we didn’t find nothing in the house and we ripped the place all apart. Man, the walls in them old houses is tough to deal with. You can just punch through plasterboard, but those plaster-and-lath walls knocked the crap outta me.”
“The man don’t know we didn’t find anything, right?”
“I guess.”
“Then we’re good. We’ll get the money outta him.”
“How we gonna do that, King?”
“You let me worry about that, okay?”
“I always do. So when they find the old woman, what are they gonna do to us?”
King snorted. “They gotta catch us first.”
“I mean, it’s not like we really killed her or nothin’. She just kinda died.”
“I’m not a lawyer, Hump, but I don’t think the cops’ll see it like that.”
Hump got agitated, jumping off the bed. “But we didn’t try to kill her. And if she woulda just kept her yap shut, we wouldn’ta had to put nothin’ in her mouth.”
“Who you trying to convince?”
Hump didn’t like that, balling his huge hands into fists so tight the blood seemed to drain out of them. The veins in his thick neck popped out.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Relax, pal. Go back to watching your preacher and finish your food,” King said, finishing off his beer and popping open a second one. “When I’m done reading the papers, I’m going over to the office and see if they have a business center with a computer. This way I can find out up-to-the-minute stuff about if they found the body and what’s goin’ on.”
Hump calmed almost as quickly as he had gotten riled. He unmuted the TV, opened up the wrapper on his third cheeseburger, and took a bite.
“Let us, brothers and sisters, turn to Leviticus 24:17–21 for an answer to the question of vengeance and repayment for our most egregious of earthly sins. ‘If a man takes the life of any human being, he shall surely be put to death.’ Notice there’s no equivocation. No if, ands, or buts. No excuses. No guilty with an explanation. Now, what of a man at war as opposed to the greedy man who murders in—”
Hump couldn’t shut off the TV fast enough. His bite of cheeseburger went down hard. He took a big swallow of Coke. He stood up from the bed, looked in the mirror, and quickly headed for the door.
King was confused. “What’s up? I thought you liked the burgers.”
“I lost my appetite. I’m goin’ for a walk. I can’t breathe in here no more.”
King rubbed the stubble on his cheeks as he considered the danger of Hump leaving the room. He decided not to try to stop him. He knew he couldn’t have stopped him anyhow. Hump wasn’t an easy man to stop once he got an idea in his head. Ideas weren’t his strong suit, but when he got them, he hung on to them.
“Stay close. It’s gonna take a few days to play our hand. We don’t wanna attract attention.”
But Hump was already out the door, heading to the office to ask about local churches.
12