“Do you think there’s treasure in one of the tunnels?”
“Oh—I’d like to think there is.” Harry curled her toes.
“Car! Car! Car!” Tucker warned and ran from under the bed to the front door.
“Cut the lights,” Officer Cooper commanded. “Get on the floor!”
Harry hit the floor so hard she knocked the wind out of herself and found herself nose to nose with Mrs. Murphy, who had started to wiggle out from under the bed.
Officer Cooper, pistol in hand, crept toward the front door. She waited. Whoever was in the car wasn’t getting out, although the headlights had been turned off. The living room light gave evidence that someone was home and Tucker was hollering her head off.
“Shut up.” Mrs. Murphy bumped the dog.“We know there’s a car outside. Cover the back door. I’ll take the front.”
Tucker did as she was told. Officer Cooper flattened herself beside the front door.
The car door slammed. Footsteps clicked up to the front door. For a long agonizing moment nothing happened. Then a soft knock.
A harder knock, followed with“Harry, you in there?”
“Yes,” Harry called out from the bedroom. “It’s BoomBoom Craycroft,” Harry told Officer Cooper.
“Stay on the floor!” Cooper yelled.
“Harry, what’s wrong?” BoomBoom heard Cynthia Cooper’s voice and didn’t recognize it.
“Stay where you are. Put your hands behind your head.” Officer Cooper flicked on the front porch light to behold a bewildered BoomBoom, hands clasped behind her head.
“I’m not armed,” BoomBoom said. “But there’s a thirty-eight in the glove compartment. It’s registered.”
Mrs. Murphy slunk behind Officer Cooper’s heels. If anything went wrong she would climb up a leg—in BoomBoom’s case a bare one—and dig as deeply as she could.
Officer Cooper slowly opened the door.“Stay right where you are.” She frisked BoomBoom.
Harry, on all fours, peeked around the bedroom door. Sheepishly she stood up.
BoomBoom caught a glimpse of her.“Harry, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
“Can I come inside?” BoomBoom’s eyes implored Officer Cooper.
“Keep your hands behind your head and the answer is yes.”
As BoomBoom entered the house, Cooper shut the door behind her, gun still cocked. BoomBoom had plenty she wanted to say to Harry but the presence of Officer Cooper inhibited her.
“Harry, I’ve ransacked Kelly’s office. Ever since you dropped by I’ve just gone wild and—I found something.”
35
Crumpled sheets of yellow legal paper, the penciled-in mileage numbers smeared, shone under the kitchen light. Harry, BoomBoom, Officer Cooper, Mrs. Murphy, and Tucker gathered around the old porcelain-topped table. Still leery, Coop kept her pistol in her hand.
“I checked the mileages of the trucks against the depreciation in Marie’s ledger. They don’t jibe,” BoomBoom pointed out. “Nor is there any accounting for this bill.” She produced a faded invoice for a huge amount of epoxy and paint resin. The bill was from North Carolina.
“Maybe the added mileage on the trucks reflects hauling the materials back here?” Harry said.
“It’s three hours to Greensboro and three hours back. We’re looking at thousands of miles.” BoomBoom’s misty-mocha fingernail pinned down the long number as though it were a butterfly. “Another thing. I asked around the plant if anyone had done extra hauling over the last four years. Noone had. This isn’t to say that someone might not be lying but my hunch is, whatever was being carried, Kelly drove it.”
Officer Cooper flipped through the four years of mileage figures.“There’s no way to tell if these were short hops or long ones. You only have the monthly figures.”
“Right. But I subtracted them from Marie’s figures, or rather I subtracted Marie’s figures from these, and it averages out to one thousand miles per month for the big panel truck. The other trucks have less mileage on them.”
“Jesus, that’s a lot of resin.” Harry pushed back her chair. “Anyone want a drink?”
“No, thanks,” they both said.
“He wasn’t transporting resin and epoxy. I found one bill for that. I mean, there could be others but that’s all I found, so I think he was taking something else in the panel truck as well as occasionally using a smaller truck.”
“BoomBoom, one thousand miles a month is a one-way trip to Miami, drug capital of the U.S.,” Coop observed. “I take that back. Any city over five hundred thousand people is a drug capital these days.”
“If Kelly was moving drugs he’d certainly be smart enough to disguise it as something else.” Harry had always liked Kelly. “And he often drove the trucks. He liked being outside; he liked physical work. I suppose he and Maude linked up four years ago. She must have helped him package the stuff—if it was drugs.”
“Don’t get fixated on cocaine, or even heroin,” Officer Cooper advised. “There’s a big market in speed and steroids. He’d avoid the South Americans that way. Those boys play rough.”
“He brought in drugs before, though, didn’t he?” Harry asked.
BoomBoom closed her mouth.
“He’s dead. There isn’t anything I can do about crimes of the past,” Coop said.
BoomBoom sighed.“He gave it up. He gave up using the stuff. He used to say that the drug lords and high government officials were in collusion over the drug trade. The congressmen and senators on the take, as well as the people under them, didn’t want their nontaxable income removed. ‘It’s a damned sin,’he’d say. ‘The American people are losing billions of dollars in taxes from drugs, taxes that could help people. Why is alcohol a state-supported drug to the exclusion of other drugs? You can’t stop the trade. You can’t legislate human behavior.’ He was impassioned about it.”
“Tobacco,” Officer Cooper added laconically.
“What?” BoomBoom asked.
“It’s a legal drug. Most addictive drug we’ve got. Ask Rick Shaw.” The vision of Rick sneaking another cigarette made Coop laugh.
“Here in Virginia we know all about tobacco.” Harry examined the yellow pages. “Where’d you find these?”
“Behind the frame of the poster he had on the wall. You know, the one where the duck is sitting in the lawn chair sipping a drink and there are bullet holes over his head. It was the last place I looked, and the corner of the backing was bent.”
“I’m going to confiscate these.” Cooper reached for the papers in Harry’s hand.
“I don’t want any of this in the paper. When you finally find out who the killer is you’ll find out what they were really doing. The publicity has been grueling enough. No more!”
“I can’t control the press, BoomBoom,” Cooper truthfully replied.
“That’s up to Rick, not Officer Cooper,” Harry reminded BoomBoom.
“Do what you can, please,” BoomBoom begged.
“I’ll try.”
BoomBoom left. Harry and the policewoman watched her pull out of the driveway.
Mrs. Murphy, who had politely listened to the coversation, emitted a loud shout.“Go up to the tunnels. That’s why I threw the papers on the floor. It’s worth another look.”
“What lungs.” Cooper grinned.
“You ate leftovers from Susan’s tonight.” Harry used her Mother voice.
“Listen to me!” Mrs. Murphy bellowed.
Tucker sniffed at Mrs. Murphy’s tail, hanging over the table.“Save your breath.”