“Yeah. It’s cut.” The back of my hand wiped at my nose, and the amount of blood left behind told me it wouldn’t stop.
“It’s cut?”
“Don’t involve me in this.” My foot stepped on the brake and my hand pulled the gearshift down. My foot lifted off the brake and the truck rolled back slowly.
“Whoa, whoa,” the cop said, stepping toward the yard.
After going back about fifty yards, I eased the truck into a driveway and then pulled onto the street. In the rearview mirror the cop stood in the middle of the road watching me, his hand lifted to his face like he was trying to keep the sun out of his eyes. At the first stop sign, my hand felt along the door panel for something for the blood, and my other hand flipped down the visor to check the mirror. The blood around my nose was still damp, but it was already starting to harden and turn brown.
The closest gas station had a pay phone in the corner of the parking lot. The girl’s picture was somewhere in the glove compartment, and my hands riffled through the papers looking for the same face that had been stapled to the cafeteria wall back in Gastonia.
Inside the station, a tall, skinny kid with a ponytail and an older woman stood behind the counter and stared while the picture was unfolded on the counter in front of them. My finger pointed down at the photo. “Have you seen this girl?”
The kid with the ponytail took his eyes off the photo and looked at me, but the woman put on a pair of glasses that hung from a string around her neck and stretched her neck until her face was close to the picture. She took her glasses off and looked up. “And who are you?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. Have you seen this kid or not?”
“It certainly does matter,” the woman said, leaning her hip into the counter and folding her arms across her chest. “Are you the police, or are you just some kind of weirdo?”
“Police.”
“Well,” she said. “I’d like to see a badge.”
Both the kid’s and the woman’s eyes followed my hand as it reached for my back pocket. They waited, expecting to see a badge, but instead they saw five twenties laid out on the counter. “Have you seen her or not.”
The kid looked at me, and then he looked down at the money. He reached out and scooped it up and folded it into his pocket. “She was in here,” he said. “It wasn’t even twenty minutes ago.”
“Damn it, Cody,” the woman said. She smacked his arm.
Cody raised his finger and pointed out the door behind me. “They went across the street.”
Inside the Waffle House, a young blond-headed waitress was cleaning a booth by the door. She turned and looked when she heard the door close, a newspaper folded under her arm. The girl’s picture was still in my hand, and when the waitress saw it the newspaper fell out from under her arm, and she lifted her hands to cover her mouth.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “They just left. They were sitting right here.” She turned and pointed to the booth she’d been cleaning, the plates still full of food, two crisp twenties in the middle of the table.
“Did you see them leave?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you know where they went?”
She looked down at the newspaper at her feet. It was open to the sports section, a picture of McGwire and Sosa looked up at her. “St. Louis,” she said. “To see a baseball game.”
Brady Weller
CHAPTER 23
Sandy’s car was parked out in front of my office on Friday morning, and when I pulled into my spot he stood up from the sidewalk like he’d been waiting on me. He had a cigarette in his hand, and he looked like he’d been awake for hours. I opened my car door and stood up. “When did you start smoking again?”
“I’ve got some bad news, Brady,” he said.
“What is it?”
“It’s bad,” he said.
“You already said that. What is it?”
“It’s about Wade Chesterfield.”
“What about him?”
“The cops in Charleston found his mother’s body yesterday afternoon.” He took the last drag off his cigarette and flicked it into the parking lot behind me. Then he fished a pack out of his breast pocket. “It’s bad, Brady: the way they found her.” He held the pack out to me. I took a cigarette and so did he.
“What happened to her?”
He lit his cigarette, and then he held out the lighter and I lit mine. “She was murdered: blunt force to the head. She had a lot of injuries. Somebody took their time.”
“Any idea who?”
“That’s the thing,” he said. “Doesn’t seem to be much of a motive. Nothing taken, nothing damaged, no sign of a break-in. But there is something else.”
“What?”
“They found her in Wade’s room,” he said. “The room he grew up in. It still had his posters and shit all over the walls. And she was beaten with a kid’s baseball bat.” A train engine blew its horn on the tracks a few streets over, and Sandy smoked and waited for it to pass before he said anything else. “Wade’s prints were all over the scene too: the front door, the bedroom. They think he might’ve been the one who called it in.”
“How do they know?”
“His prints were on a pay phone at a gas station down the street from his mom’s house. And that’s where the call came from.”
“Anybody ID him?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But they saw one of the girls: the oldest one.”
“Easter.”
“She came into the gas station looking for a key to the outside bathroom right around the time the call was made.”
“Did she seem okay?” I asked.
“They said she might’ve seemed a little nervous, but they didn’t think anything of it. They forgot all about it until somebody came in a little bit later with a picture of Easter, asking if they’d seen her. Whoever it was didn’t seem like a cop: black baseball hat, sunglasses, black clothes-had a blown-up picture of Easter he was carrying around folded up in his pocket.”
“Who the hell is this guy? And how’d he get Easter’s picture?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “No one knows. Right now all they have is a dead body with Wade Chesterfield’s fingerprints all over the scene. It doesn’t look good.”
“Come on, Sandy. Of course his fingerprints are there; it’s his mother’s house.”
“I’m not saying he did it, Brady. But we both know he’s capable of kidnapping, and now he shows up at a murder scene. I mean, for somebody to beat that woman like that would take real anger, Brady-maybe his mother said something or tried to do something he didn’t like.”
“Or, ‘the man in black’ killed her,” I said. “You don’t know who this guy is. He could’ve done it.”
“Sure,” Sandy said. “Anybody could’ve done it. But Wade was there. That’s all I’m saying.”
“And all I’m saying is there’s room for doubt-a lot of room. Broughton could have somebody out there; this guy carrying Easter’s picture around could be him. Maybe Wade’s mother got in the way.”
“What? Have you turned into a conspiracy theorist on me?”
“No. I’m a realist. And I’m thinking like a cop. You should be thinking like one too.”
“Look, Brady: I just wanted to let you know what I heard,” he said. “I told you I’d keep you in the loop. Consider yourself looped in.”
“Are you headed down there?”
He looked at me, and then he dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and stubbed it out with his toe. “No,” he said. “I got my hands full up here with the Feds. You know that. This is South Carolina’s mess now. We’ve got a mess of our own to worry about.”
“Those girls were taken from Gastonia, Sandy,” I said. “And I know they ain’t worth millions of dollars, but they’re worth something. And they deserve to be found before anything bad happens to them.”