“I was just kidding.”
“From what Green and Lassiter could find out, the last time anyone saw her was three days before her death.”
“A lot can happen in three days.”
“I also wonder how she was paying her credit card bill.”
Jamison said, “So again perhaps a secret source of money? Maybe it’s tied to her murder. Drugs? That would connect her to Swanson at least.”
They climbed out of the car and Decker walked around it. He stopped and knelt next to the rear passenger tire. He used the car key to dig something out of the tread. He finally freed the object and held it up.
“A nail,” said Jamison.
“More precisely, it’s a framing nail, that they use in a powered nail gun.”
“She could have picked that up anywhere at any time.”
“Don’t think so. Look at the tire.”
With the nail removed, it was already deflating. They could hear air escaping.
“It’s not rusted or anything. And if it had been there a while and she had driven on it, the nail would have worked itself through the surface of the tread and the tire would have started leaking and then gone flat. And this tire looks newer than the others. The inspection sticker on the windshield shows that she had it inspected this month. I bet the tire didn’t pass inspection and she had to replace it with this one.”
“Okay, but she still could have picked up the nail anywhere, like the parking lot of a hardware store.”
“Possibly, but these nails are set in a strip carrier, sort of like an ammo belt on a machine gun. They don’t just fall out.”
Jamison took a picture of the tire and nail with her phone. “Anything else?”
“Tanner’s car is here, so that means she got to the house where her body was found another way, unless whoever killed her drove it back here.”
“Maybe she went in her killer’s car?”
“Or did she go separately? Maybe with Toby Babbot?”
“Decker, the police can show no connection between those two.”
“You’re wrong, they have one very strong connection.”
“What’s that?”
“They died together.”
Chapter 15
Before he was murdered, Toby Babbot didn’t live in a house or an apartment. He resided in an old dented mobile home trailer a few miles outside of town. The road in was part gravel and part dirt, and the small plot of yellowed grass surrounding the trailer was encircled by trees.
Jamison pulled their SUV to a stop in front of the trailer and they got out.
Decker immediately pulled his gun. “Someone’s inside,” he whispered to Jamison, who also drew her weapon.
Decker had glimpsed a shadow pass in front of one of the trailer’s windows.
“Do you think there’s a back door?” asked Jamison as they approached.
The next moment they heard someone running away from the rear of the trailer.
“I guess that answers that,” said Decker as he raced toward the dwelling, Jamison hard on his heels.
They reached the corner of the structure and stopped for a few moments, scanning the area behind it.
“There!” barked Jamison, pointing toward the right side of the thick woods.
She and Decker reached the tree line and plunged ahead. Though Decker was big and bulky and not in the best of shape, he maneuvered around the trees with a surprising nimbleness. Only he had lost sight of the person and stopped so abruptly that Jamison ran into him.
Gasping, Decker looked around. The sounds of the person running seemed to echo from all directions.
“Where did he go?” said Jamison.
Decker shook his head. “Lost him.”
They heard a car door slam shut and an engine roar to life.
Decker once again sprinted forward, yet he broke free of the trees only in time to see twin taillights disappearing down another gravel road.
Jamison joined him a few moments later. They were both bent over sucking in air.
Regaining her breath, Jamison said, “I will never pull your chain again about not being in shape.”
Decker straightened and muttered, “Well, I wasn’t fast enough to catch the person. I couldn’t even see if it was a man or a woman. And I got zip on the vehicle, not even a letter on the license plate.” He kicked a rusty old can lying on the ground.
“Decker, we did all we could.”
“Let’s at least see if we can find out what they were looking for,” he grumbled, stalking off toward the trailer.
They went in through the rear door.
“No forced entry here. And the front door didn’t look damaged either.”
“So it was either open or the person had a key,” reasoned Jamison.
Inside, the place didn’t look like it had been searched. Yet there was stuff everywhere, neatly stacked on tables, chairs, counters, and the floor.
“Pack rat,” said Decker knowingly. “But when you don’t have a lot, you don’t throw anything away.”
“Green said they got no prints from here other than Babbot’s.”
“So no visitors, unless they wore gloves.”
“Well, the place just had a visitor,” Jamison pointed out.
When they were finished searching, Decker leaned against the wall in the tiny kitchen. “No grab bars or special toilet in the bath. No wheelchair access. But a bunch of empty bottles for prescription painkillers. So what was his disability?”
“Green said he was going to check.”
“If it were obvious he wouldn’t have to check. And where’s the guy’s car?”
Jamison looked out the front window. “Maybe he didn’t have one.”
“He did at some point. There are wheel ruts in the dirt. He probably parked in the same spot every time. And there are old empty cans of Valvoline motor oil behind the trailer.”
“Maybe Babbot drove his car to the house where his body was found.”
“If he did, that should have been in the file. Since it wasn’t I’m assuming that’s not what happened.”
Decker went back over to a table built into the wall halfway between the kitchen and the front room.
There was a large pad of graph paper on it.
He sat down at the table and looked at the pad. “I wonder what this is for?”
Jamison joined him and stared down at the paper.
“I used something like that when I would do my math homework in high school, but my pad was a lot smaller.”
Decker bent down and looked more closely at the top sheet. “There are impressions on it.”
“You mean from whatever was written on the sheet above it?”
Decker nodded. “I think so.”
He carefully tore off the sheet and handed it to Jamison, who slid it into a plastic evidence pouch she had brought from the SUV and then placed it into her bag.
Decker picked up some magazines from a table and flipped through them. He did the same with some books on a small shelf. “Babbot had an interesting mix of reading tastes,” he said. “From porn to mechanical to guns to history to conspiracy theories.”
“Sounds just like a lot of America,” said Jamison impishly.
Decker next picked up an empty prescription bottle from the kitchen counter. “And unfortunately, this is a lot of America.” He eyed the label. “This was Percocet. But there were other empty bottles for Vicodin, OxyContin, Tylox, and Demerol. All potent stuff.”
“And all addictive. Overmedicating. It’s one reason we have an opioid crisis.”
“Dr. Freedman,” he said, reading off the prescription label. “That was the name on the other bottles.”
“Then Freedman might know about the disability,” replied Jamison.
Decker looked around. “I wonder how long Babbot lived here? He was on disability. It doesn’t exactly pay enough to allow you to live in luxury. And if he had to move recently because his bills were adding up, we could at least have a shot at talking to a neighbor. They might be able to tell us something helpful about Babbot. Green will probably have that information.”