by Dudley Lynch
I don’t know what surprised me most — the audacity of what he was describing or the ease with which this clever teenager had seen through the veneer of Garrick Drasher’s con job. Either way, I knew the perfect reply for my audience. “Not Gucci.”
“This isn’t either.”
He reached for his phone and started cycling through his visuals. “I was playing around with my drone camera the other day after I finished up at the nursing home. Launched it in the front parking lot and did a 360 degree sweep all the way around the place. Now, you tell me — you ever seen anything like this at a nursing home?”
He handed me his phone. He was showing me an entrance at the back of the building. I’d never noticed it before because it had been camouflaged by a high fence. A fence, I was thinking, that had been placed there for the exact purpose of keeping people from seeing what was on the other side.
The door was an industrial-sized double-garage-type door, and it was up. Open. This allowed me to see inside the loading area served by the door.
Twice, I used my fingers to enlarge the images on the screen. Even so, I wasn’t sure I understood everything I was looking at. One thing in particular. The intended use of the vehicle parked in the back of the unloading area.
The lighting over the truck wasn’t the best, but I had ample reason to suspect that I was staring at an armored transport of some kind. A SWAT team–like van? An armored cash-in-transit car? A military fighting vehicle? One thing I did know. It wasn’t a necessary conveyance for taking old folks to their dental appointments.
The other thing I noticed there could be no question about. It was an elevator door. The door was open, and two people could be seen waiting for it to close and the elevator to move. The Pecan Mountain Nursing Home building had another floor. A basement.
I gave Judson back his phone. “What’d you think when you saw this?”
His answer was quick and mature. “That it was something I needed to show the local sheriff at the first opportunity.”
“So why didn’t you show it to me at the office Wednesday?”
“Just forgot it. Lots going on that day, if you’ll remember.”
I asked if he had talked with anyone else about all that he’d seen at the nursing home. “Your mom, perhaps?”
“Not my mom. My dad. It bothered him too. Really, really bothered him. I know because I overheard him a little later talking on the phone.”
“Talking to whom?”
“Somebody who knew what he meant when he said they’d waited too long. They should have gone ahead and initiated action when they first talked about it.”
I didn’t expect Judson to be able to answer my next question, but I had to ask it. “Do you know what kind of action they were talking about?”
When he shrugged his massive shoulders, I moved on to a question I knew he could answer. “When was this?”
“When they first talked about it?”
“No, when you showed your dad this video.”
He thought for a moment. “Monday night, after I got back from . . . well, from meeting you.”
“Do you know where I can find your dad?”
“Somewhere on Galveston Bay.”
That’s when I saw the look again. I knew he was lying about his dad. He saw the doubt in my face and decided to embellish his lie. “He’s a licensed commercial pilot. He flew down yesterday — he has his own plane. Said he wanted to see if the speckled trout and flounder were biting. We keep a boat at Kemah.”
I decided to play along. “Do you know when he’ll be back?’
“Monday or Tuesday, I’d guess. He’s got a medical practice to run.”
“What kind of medicine does he practice?”
“General. But then he does a lot of geriatrics too. He’s Professor Huntgardner’s visiting physician at the nursing home.”
I held my expression steady so that Judson couldn’t see the surprise. One more realization that this conversation had produced. I should have spoken with the good doctor long before now.
I had one more question for my guest. “Any thoughts on what might have happened to the professor? Where he might be? Who might have taken him?”
For the fourth time since we’d met, I was certain that he wasn’t going to tell me everything he knew about something that mattered. And I still didn’t understand why.
Not Gucci.
Chapter 31
Fridays are wind-down days in most offices, and ours was no exception. Normally, the fact that we still had serious crimes to solve and were willing to keep our noses to the grindstone didn’t earn us any reprieves from other people’s habits. We were still slaves to their itch to leave early for the weekend cottage or fishing hole. I didn’t object when my own staff left early, but I tended to stay late. And my weekends were different from most of my people’s.
Sometimes I’d thought that my head’s approach to work was like that of the young widow Ruth in the Old Testament. The “whither thou goest, I will go” Ruth. Where my head went, my work went too. That meant home on the weekends.
I’d waved goodbye again to young Mayes in the burger joint’s parking lot. Then called Helen to see if she minded waiting a few more minutes. I was headed in to check on the status of a few things.
First, I needed to know if cranky old Judge Kincannon had issued our search warrant for the warehouse. Second, see how our efforts to collect personal histories, DNA, and dental and medical records on the nine victims we thought we’d identified were going. Third, check if our BOLOs on our growing menagerie of suspicious vehicles had produced any sightings. Fourth, find out when Doc Konnie expected to have a report on the victims’ blood work. Fifth, learn if any analysis had been done on the sliver of plastic she’d found in victim number ten’s pelvis. Sixth, check if there was anything new about who that tenth victim might be.
But I never got around to asking about any of this. The box sitting on my desk was the reason.
I hadn’t seen a box like this in a while. From the odors it was giving off, it had been a long spell since anyone had seen it. Or bothered to open it. The musty-smelling cardboard had absorbed mold from somewhere. And cigarette smoke. And other sundry odors donated by the march of time. The whole thing had a long-ago smell.
I turned the storage carton over so I could see how it was marked. At minimum, it should have a category and a year. Like “DUI Cases — 1988.” Instead, my eyes were treated to a designation I’d never seen on our records shelves before. For certain, I’d have remembered anything that outlandish. The box was labeled “The No Cock Crowed Cases.” The final “s” had been added later using a different colored marker. Along with an arrow showing where it went.
Another thing I’d not seen before was the way the box was dated. The year “1973” was centered beneath the main description. You’d have thought this was the only year for which the box was intended to hold records. But then, a string of later years had been added.
Each time, the marking pen had to have been different. You could tell from the color and the variations in the width of the felt tip. The dates on the box were “1973–1974–1975–1976.” Since it started in the middle of the box, the line of dates was getting close to the box’s edge.
I knew enough about how the department’s records had been kept over the years to know this box dated to my granddad’s era. Luther Haines “Sheriff Luke” McWhorter, the man whose first name I bore, had been sheriff from 1972 to 1988. He’d been the first of us keep-hanging-around McWhorters to pin on the star.
For whoever had put it there, lugging the box to my office must have been a pain.
It had to have come from the wire security cage in the basement of the old county records building two blocks away. The aging structure had no elevator. The only way to get boxes and files down into — or up from — the basement was to hand-carry them or use a hand truc
k to transport them one step at a time. For a single box, provided it wasn’t too heavy, hand-carrying was a lot less trouble.
But it was still trouble. So my first question was who’d have bothered. The next question was why they’d placed the box in the exact center of my desk blotter. The geometry was as precise as a place setting at The Ritz. Taken together, the questions made me confident statements were being made. Possibly, statements of some importance. Given what else had been going on in Abbot County this week, they could be ominous statements.
Helen had kept hawk’s eyes on me through the glass wall between our offices, so I had a pretty good idea where to start pursuing answers.
I waved at her to join me. Waited until she found herself a seat. Let her arrange the geometry of her physical presence as she wished. And gave her no choice but to join with me in staring at the box. She sat still as a watched worm for a time. Then pincered a transient thread off her blouse. Her first sound was an attempt to clear her throat.
The phlegm failed to cooperate, so she did it again.
Then a third time.
Watching her, I could see that she had grown emotional. I’d been watching her with such concentration that I’d become a captive to her rhythms. I was breathing harder myself. This encounter was assuming a greater intensity than I’d had any reason to expect. It felt like we had already passed the ominous point and were approaching an “end of the world as we have known it” fork in the road.
“I promised your daddy that I’d never show you the contents of this box.”
“Mercy’s sake. What’s in it?”
She seemed to choose that moment to revisit some scene in the past. When she answered, I decided this was exactly what she’d been doing.
“That’s just it, your father would never tell me. He’d give me file folders or notebooks or photographs or whatever and tell me to take them down to the storage room and put them in this box or one of the others. There’s more down there like this, you know. Five more, at least — hidden behind regular file boxes at the very far end of the stacks. But I had strict orders never to rummage through them. Or examine what I put in them.”
“But this is from my grandfather’s time in office, not Sheriff John Aubrey’s. You never worked for my grandfather. And didn’t work for my father all that long. What was it? Six years?”
“Can’t tell you more than that. I was a good girl. Just did what I was told.”
“So why break your promise now?”
Helen shifted in her chair. “I know you’re looking hard for answers these days. I’d never forgive myself if I could have helped and hadn’t done it. Besides, there’s the other thing.” She looked around the room like she was searching for the right words. She was, I knew. I’d give her time to find them. It was only a few seconds, but it seemed like forever and a day before she decided what else she was going to say. When she spoke again, she said nothing all that profound; it wasn’t even that original. But her meaning was clear.
“Both your daddy and your granddaddy knew this, but they could never figure out what it was. At least, I don’t think they did. But there’s something rotten in Flagler.” Her eyes dropped to the box again. “Has been for a long time. And this time, it’s gone too far.”
Chapter 32
Angie knew about my penchant for working on Saturdays but had insisted on honoring a ritual. She called it Little Piggies Come to Dine. I had no idea why. The name sounded cute and seemed to make her happy, and it was something private to the two of us, so I’d not objected. We’d been doing it for months now — and it was a ritual.
Little Piggies Come to Dine always happened at my house. We’d never talked about the reason for that either. It could have been that I had more kitchen utensils. Or a bigger refrigerator. Or a bigger kitchen in general. Or this was where Little Piggies Come to Dine had happened the first time, and it had become a habit.
Since I was an early riser, I was assigned to get fresh donuts. This meant a trip to the Donut Shoppe, sometimes before the sun was up.
By the time I returned, she would be in the kitchen making Bloody Marys or mimosas. I hadn’t imagined how good warm donuts went with a Bloody Mary. Or, if it was during what Angie called the “Orange You Glad You Met Me” months, she’d be extracting fresh citrus with my electric juicer, then I’d fry bacon or sausage and get out my omelet pan. She’d make waffles.
As we cooked, we’d tell jokes. Or whoppers. Trade playful squeezes in front of the stove. Tug each other’s apron string loose, then turn retieing it into a romp and a hug. But that wasn’t happening much today because of the gorilla in the next room.
Six gorillas, to be exact.
They were the five cartons Helen had steered me to in the old records building basement plus the one she’d put on my desk. I’d brought them home. Carried them one at a time into my dining room. Parked them on the floor against the dining room’s far wall. And arranged them single file.
As we ate, Angie could see me glancing at them through the door. “If they could talk, what do you think they’d say?”
I borrowed Helen’s line. “That something’s rotten in Flagler.”
Angie thought that was funny. “Besides ten near-fleshless corpses lying in the medical examiner’s autopsy cooler?”
“Those too — for sure.”
“Then let the humble special agent for the FBI you seduce so regularly assist you with her remarkable nose for finding the truth.”
“I’d be much obliged.”
We cleared away the dishes on my bar, then moved to my dining room where I put away the artificial flower arrangements on my dining table. “Makes sense to take them in chronological order. You want the first box or the second?”
She slumped against the arm of her chair and deliberated for a moment. The voice she answered with was her on-the-job voice. “You need to know how all this started. You go first.”
She scurried out of her chair and grabbed the second box in the row and placed it on the table facing where she’d be sitting. So I’d gone second anyway. I didn’t comment. It’d be awhile before I became conscious of it, but those were the last words either of us would say for long minutes. The voice breaking the silence was Angie’s. As was customary, she started with a question. One with a tinge of one-upmanship. That was habitual too. Some of her friends shrugged and said that it went with the job. I’d told them, no, it went with the person. “Did your grandfather always put dumb names on his records boxes?”
The end of my box was facing her.
I turned the box end with the writing toward me. “Figured that out. My granddad always loved Sherlock Holmes stories. Used to read them to me when I was a boy. One of his favorites was called ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze.’ It was about —”
“The dog that didn’t bark in the night.”
I gave her a thumbs-up. “So I think early on my granddad suspected the strange goings-on in Abbot County had more to do with things that hadn’t happened than the things that had. The old boy had a weird sense of humor. Instead of labeling the box ‘The No Dog Barked Case,’ he went barnyard and wrote ‘The No Cock —’”
There was admiration in her voice. “‘The No Cock Crowed Case.’”
“Right. And when the dead-end evidence kept growing, he added, or had somebody add, the s and the additional years.”
I patted one of the growing piles I’d been creating on the tabletop. “Don’t know what you’re finding, but to me, this seems like our own local version of >The X-Files. Endless paranoia. And horseplay that doesn’t amount to much.”
My comment sent her rummaging through one of her own piles. “That would explain this letter. From the head of the Texas Rangers, if you can believe it.”
She slid the document in my direction. The underlined headline read: “An Official Notice to the Sheriff of Abbot County to Forward No Further Requests for Un
dercover Assistance without Sufficient Reason.”
She chased it with her conclusion.“The Rangers got tired of listening for the cock to crow.”
I couldn’t argue the point.
Chapter 33
We got tired of listening for the cock to crow too. The shadows outside my hilltop house were growing. So was Angie’s and my eye fatigue.
We’d talked about quitting, but if there was a smoking gun in the boxes, I wanted to find it now. Not later.
We’d agreed to skip to the final box and divide the contents between us. Angie would take a document, then I’d take the next one, peat and repeat, back and forth, until we were finished. And we’d renewed our commitment to give everything a careful look, tired eyes or not.
The mix of materials hadn’t changed much.
In every box, there had been letters, clippings, and documents. File folder after file folder, often with meager contents.
Interview notes and interview transcriptions, sometimes paper-clipped, sometimes stapled, sometimes sitting loose. Memos dictated or handwritten by a sheriff or a deputy or unknown parties. And lots of photos: snapshots, Polaroids, dark-room-produced 8x10s. Some of them showed people who had some connection to events that had happened in Abbot County. Others had people I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t understand why a lot of the images had been included in the file boxes.
And, in the final box, one of my father’s reelection campaign posters. It was folded into quarters. When I opened it up, my eyes were drawn immediately to the crude block letters someone had written below his picture: “GIVE IT UP OR DIE!”