Henderson laid out the bottom line for him.
“A cylinder of Wet Eye may be unaccounted for.”, The CDO stared at him.
“No shit? You sure of this, you two?”
Henderson shook his head. “The destruction inventory audit doesn’t add up,” he said. “Mayfield here worked it all day, then another guy did it, and then Mayfield here told the sergeant, who had me do it again. We’ve been here since sixteen-thirty. It still doesn’t add up.” He paused. “It could be a fuckup at the other end, at Tooele,” he said hopefully.
“Let’s hope and pray it is. When was the shipment?”
“It left here by train not quite a month ago,” Mayfield said. “This report came in last Thursday.”
The lieutenant stared down at the report for a long moment. “Okay,” he said. “You two come with me. I’m going to call the CO.” “How about our chain of command?” Henderson asked. “Sergeant Mccallister is gonna kick our asses, we jump the. chain and go right to the CO.”
“You didn’t jump it. I did. And I’m the command duty officer. This looks like a possible shit storm to me, so I’m calling the CO. He’s always telling us, when in doubt, call, him. So I’m gonna call his ass, if it’s all the same to you, Specialist.”
Carson eased his government pickup truck down the street on which Bud Lambry lived. Used to live, he reminded himself. The dilapidated neighborhood was an enclave of old houses cornered by the airport rail lines on one side, a phalanx of trucking terminals on another, and Interstate 285. At this hour, the street was dark and empty.
Lambry’s house lay at the dead end of the last street, nestled under a fifty-foot-high embankment carrying the rail line. It wasn’t much more than a one-story shack, with sagging front and back porches, a few dying trees on either side, a rusty propane tank, and a dirt front yard containing three junked cars. There were some small outbuildings in various states of collapse out back at the base of the railroad embankment. The house across the street appeared to be abandoned; the house next door looked possibly occupied, but darkened for the night.
There was a mound of trash at the dead end of the badly potholed street, and one rusting car nosed into the embankment like some burrowing animal.
Carson rolled to a quiet stop in front of Lambry’s house and switched off the engine. He took a final drag on his cigarette and then mashed it out. It had taken him a few hours and a visit to the officers club’s bar to muster up the courage to come out here, and another hour to find the house. But if Stafford was going to start poking around into Bud Lambry’s sudden disappearance, then Wendell Carson” had better take a look inside Lambry’s house to see if he had stashed any sort of incriminating evidence. He wasn’t quite sure what he was going to do here. Given “
Lambry’s Alabama hillbilly antecedents, he could just imagine what it was like in there.
After waiting fifteen minutes to see if anything was stirring, he stepped out of the truck. He paused again to make sure there were no dogs. A quick scan of the street revealed nothing moving but a single gray cat skulking through the cone of light produced by the one remaining streetlight, which was about a hundred feet away. He walked as casually as he could to the side of the house, trying not to act like some kind of burglar.
A lot of things had changed since Friday night. He had the advantage of knowing that the owner would be out forever, so there should be no surprises here, unless Lam bry had a wife or someone else in the house.
That thought stopped him as he approached the trash-littered back porch.
No, no wife. Lambry had no dependents listed in his personnel file. But then again, Lambry, ever the secretive hillbilly, might not have bothered to tell anyone.
He took a deep breath and stepped up onto the back porch. The porch boards felt soft and spongy. He tried the back door, which was not locked. It appeared to be warped. He let himself into a kitchen area, where his nose told him instantly that this place was going to be every bit as bad as he’d expected. All the windows appeared to be closed, and the air was warm and fetid. He stood there for a moment in the dark kitchen, almost afraid to go farther into the house. It didn’t feel like there was anyone in the house, but he would have to make sure. He realized he hadn’t even brought a flashlight; some burglar he’d make.
Okay, he would have to depend on the dun streetlight filtering through dirty windows. “
The rest of the house was as cluttered and smelly as the kitchen area, but there was no one there. After a quick survey, he realized that he would never find anything that Lambry had purposefully hidden. More important, Lambry’s house definitely did not look like he’d left the area, but, rather, like he had just gone to work one day and not come back.
That was a problem. If Stafford or the cops came out here, they’d conclude at once that something had happened to Lambry. With a sinking feeling, Carson also understood there was no way he could make this place look like the owner had made a planned, orderly departure. Not in less than three days, anyway.
He looked around in despair. Then he had an idea. What if I could start a fire? Burn the damn thing down and then there’d be nothing to search.
But how, without triggering an arson investigation? He walked back out into the kitchen area and saw the flickering blue light under the hot-water heater in what looked like a laundry room. Gas. Propane gas — he’d seen the tank outside, now that he thought about it. He went over and checked the stove. Also gas. Well, hell, there it was. Leave a burner cracked on the stove, make sure all the windows were closed, and then let the pilot light of that water heater ignite the pooled propane.
He could be miles away when it happened.
He turned a stove burner on full blast to see if it had an automatic pilot, but it was an old stove that required matches. He reduced the gas to low, then went out the back door. And right back in, to wipe his fingerprints off the burner switch. Jesus, he thought. You make a pretty shitty criminal. Then he stepped back outside, wiped off the door handle on both sides, and went back to his truck. He stood by the truck for a moment, shook his head, and went back. He crossed the creaking porch carefully and reentered the kitchen, where he shut off the stove burner.
The stink of propane was already strong in the kitchen, so he cracked open a window.
He sat down at the kitchen table, careful not to touch anything. He wasn’t thinking too clearly here, he realized. Maybe too much of Mr. Beam’s liquid courage. Any decent arson investigator would catch the stove burner trick and ask why the house hadn’t gone up four days ago, if Friday was when its owner presumably last used the stove? Shit! It couldn’t be so blatant as leaving a burner on. He thought he heard a noise out front and rose to peer out a window, afraid that he might see a cop car out there by his truck. But there was still nothing stirring.
He commanded his heart to slow down.
A fire was the obvious answer, but how to ignite it and not arouse suspicion? He got up and started going through kitchen drawers, looking for a flashlight. He finally found one in a drawer with some hand tools.
He crouched down at the back of the stove and examined the gas line’s connection. It seemed to be a threaded coupling of some kind. He went back to the tool drawer and got out a pair of pliers. He was about to grab the coupling when he realized the tube and the coupling were copper. Soft metal. Which would show tool marks. He got back up and found a greasy dish towel, which he wrapped around the coupling. Then he unscrewed it until he heard and smelled propane.’He removed the rag and saw no tool marks. Good. This would do it. A leaky coupling — that might take a few days for propane to accumulate.