Long Upon the Land

by Margaret Maron

  A moment later, he had a call from the police chief down in Makely, about twenty-five minutes south of Dobbs. “Major Bryant? Jimmy Locklear here. I think we’ve found that red Ford pickup you’re looking for.”

  “No joke?”

  “No joke.” He rattled off the license plate number and it matched Vick Earp’s. “Guy from Cotton Grove said he read today’s paper before driving down here to see his mother. He stopped to pick up some spark plugs at one of our auto repair shops and the truck was parked out front. He took pictures of the license plate and the windshield with the bullet hole on the passenger side and then drove right over to the station. Give me your email address and I’ll send them to you.”

  “Is it still there?”

  “Sorry. I drove past a few minutes ago, but it was gone and I didn’t stop ’cause I figured you’d want to speak to the manager yourself.”

  “Thanks,” Dwight said.

  Without waiting for the pictures, he called to Ray McLamb and the two of them headed for Makely. Normally, Dwight drove a sedate four or five miles under the speed limit, but today it was flashing blue lights and a siren as he wove in and out of traffic in the unmarked sedan. Once inside the town limits, Dwight turned them off so as to approach inconspicuously. By then, Mayleen had relayed the pictures. Two men stood in front of the truck, but both had their backs to the camera.

  Locklear had given him directions to the repair shop, part of a national chain. When they entered, no one was inside except a clerk who was stocking the shelves and the manager who was on his computer. He stood up briskly when they entered. “Help you, gentlemen?”

  The name embroidered on the pocket of his green denim shirt was L. Roberts.

  Dwight showed him his badge and then the picture on his phone. “This you, Mr. Roberts?”

  Clearly it was. The same green shirt, the same khaki pants, same stocky build, same head of thick white hair.

  “What’s this about?” he asked in an accent that sounded more like Chicago or Cleveland than Colleton County.

  “We’re looking for this truck and whoever’s driving it.”

  “Because of that bullet hole?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “Y’know, I had a feeling something wasn’t right with that kid. Real antsy he was.”

  “You know his name?”

  Roberts shook his head. “Never saw him before. He wanted an estimate for the windshield and a new paint job.” He gestured toward the computer. “That’s what I was looking up. Doubt if he can afford either one. Just another goofy kid. Doesn’t look like his old man’s name is Rockefeller either. I did get his number, though. Told him I’d call him and let him know how much it was gonna run.”

  “You think you could talk him into coming back in?” Dwight asked.

  “You still didn’t say why you want him.”

  “The truck belonged to a murder victim over in Cotton Grove.”

  “Really? Hmmm. Let me think.” Roberts ran his hand through his prematurely white hair. “Okay. This might do it.”

  He touched the numbers on his cell phone and Dwight heard him say, “This is Les. You the guy that was in the repair shop about an hour ago? You wanted an estimate on some replacement glass for your F-150? It’s your lucky day. I found what might work for you already here. Some guy ordered it and never picked it up. I was going to send it back by UPS this afternoon, but if it’ll fit your truck and you can get over here before I pack it up, I can let you have it real cheap. Save me the cost of shipping.”

  He listened with a smile on his face and flashed Dwight and Ray the OK sign with his thumb and index finger. “Okay, pal. See you in twenty minutes.”

  His smile grew even broader as he clipped the phone back to his belt. “My girlfriend keeps telling me I ought to be a writer, all the stories I make up.”

  The skinny young white man who got out of Vick Earp’s truck twenty-two minutes later had a bad case of acne and stringy yellow hair that brushed his shoulders. No more than seventeen or eighteen, Dwight decided, and still climbing Fool’s Hill if he thought painting a red truck black would be enough to disguise it without a different license plate. He came bounding through the doorway and up to the counter with a happy smile of anticipation on his face, but as soon as Dwight tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Colleton County Sheriff’s Department,” he whirled around and raced back outside, straight into the arms of Deputy Ray McLamb, who had waited there in case he tried to run.

  Dwight thanked the shop manager for his help and joined Ray in the parking lot.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  With his hands cuffed behind him, the boy was defiant. “I don’t have to tell y’all anything. I want a lawyer.”

  “Watch a lot of cop shows, huh?” said Ray. “Where you want him, boss?”

  The rear of the unmarked car they’d driven down in was outfitted with bars and a divider for transporting suspects.

  “Put him in the cage,” said Dwight and he put in a call for a tow truck to take the pickup back to Dobbs.

  The crime scene team was waiting when the tow truck made it to the department’s parking lot and they went right to work on Vick Earp’s truck.

  In the interrogation room, the young truck thief had given them his name—Wayne Booker—but continued to insist he wanted an attorney.

  “Good idea,” Ray said easily. “Hope you can afford a smart one. Maybe he can get you off with life instead of a death sentence.”

  “Death?” Booker’s voice went up two octaves and all the blood drained from his face. “I didn’t kill nobody!”

  “Wish you could tell us about it,” said Dwight, regret in every syllable. “But we can’t ask you anything till your attorney’s present. Do you have one?”

  Booker shook his head.

  “Then you’ll have to sit in jail till you can come before a judge who will appoint you one. In the meantime, Wayne Booker, I’m arresting you for the murder of Victor Earp. Anything you say—”

  “Who the hell is Victor Earp?” the boy cried.

  “The man whose truck you were driving. The man you carjacked.”

  “Carjacked? No! I didn’t! I never! Honest! I found the truck.”

  “Book him,” said Dwight.

  “No! Wait! I take it back. I don’t want a lawyer. I want to talk.”

  “You sure? You want to speak on the record of your own free will?”

  Booker nodded.

  “Okay, then. Turn on the recorder, Ray.”

  After the formalities were recorded, Dwight said, “Now then, Wayne Booker. Tell us how you came to be driving Victor Earp’s pickup.”

  “I found it. I thought maybe it’d been abandoned because of the way the windshield was shot up.”

  “Found it where?”

  “Down by the railroad tracks, near the creek. I live on the south side of Cotton Grove where Forty-eight and Old Forty-eight and the tracks all cross Possum Creek.”

  Although passenger service had been discontinued decades earlier, a freight line still bisected Cotton Grove on its way to Fuquay-Varina and points west. Trees and thick shrubbery hid most of the track from view and muffled the noises in summer, but in winter, when Dwight was a boy and the wind was right, the train whistle could be heard at night all the way out to the farm. A lonesome sound, yet somehow, oddly comforting.

  “I cut through there on my bicycle all the time and I saw the truck backed up in the bushes last week.”

  “When?” asked Dwight. “What day?”

  “Monday. I didn’t think nothing about it. Thought someone was out on the creek fishing. But it was there on Tuesday, same exact spot. Wednesday I went fishing and it was still there. Hadn’t been moved. It was unlocked and when I was opened the door, the keys were just laying there on the seat, so I cranked it up. Half thought someone would come running and yell at me, but nobody did. There’s a service track beside the railroad, so I put my bike in the back and drove it on down to an old shed I know an
d I left it there till today. I figured somebody might recognize it if I tried to get the windshield fixed there in town, so that’s why I took it to Makely. How’d y’all find me so quick?”

  “We’ve been asking people to keep an eye out for that truck,” said Dwight. “I guess you don’t read the newspaper.”

  “I don’t read nothing. Get all my news offen the TV,” Wayne Booker said with a scornful shrug of his thin shoulders. “Wait a minute, though! Is that the dude that got dumped out on Kezzie Knott’s land?”

  “You know Kezzie Knott?”

  “Know who he is. My grandmother’s brother used to make shine for him.”

  Dwight sighed. Sometimes he felt as if everybody in the whole damn county was connected to Mr. Kezzie one way or another through moonshine whiskey.

  After lunch, with Wayne Booker fingerprinted and stashed in an interrogation room but not yet formally charged, Dwight and the team working on the case gathered to discuss what had been learned from Vick Earp’s pickup.

  “That must be how he was transported out to where he was dumped, Major,” said Sam Dalton. We found blood on the gas pedal and in the truck bed. Probably his. Crabtree’s taken them out to Dr. Singh.” He grinned. “She said she’d try to sweet-talk him into giving her a rough analysis right away.”

  Deputy Janice Crabtree was thirty-seven, blond, and attractive. She also had an associate degree in biology from the community college and loved to talk medical forensics with Dr. Singh, so there was a very good chance they could hear the results before the end of the day.

  “We got the slug that went through the windshield.” Dalton handed Dwight a small plastic bag. “Looks like a deer slug from a smooth-bore twelve-gauge shotgun just like the one we brought in from the brother. We can get a warrant for his ammo and do a test firing.”

  “Find any prints?” Dwight asked.

  “The only useable ones in the cab are Booker’s and the victim’s. In fact, Booker’s seemed to be on every surface—glove box, radio, CDs, mirror, GPS. I swear he was like a monkey looking for peanuts. We found a lot of Earp’s prints but Booker’s are the only clear ones on the steering wheel, gearshift, door handles, or the vinyl. His prints overlay all the others. Same with the latch on the tailgate.”

  “Maybe we can get something useful if the kid shows us where he found the truck,” said Dwight.

  “Earp was killed over a week ago,” one of the team said dubiously.

  “But it hasn’t rained since then,” Dalton reminded him. “We’re supposed to get some tonight, though, so right now’s probably our best chance.”

  “Get Booker,” Dwight told McLamb.

  Considering the amount of traffic on Highway 48—called “New 48” by longtime locals—and the old highway that followed the creek into Cotton Grove, the spot where the rails crossed under both roads was surprisingly isolated, a bit of waste ground made unattractive by the underpass, which sank the rails several feet lower than the surrounding ground level. Before the county built waste disposal sites twenty years ago, it had been an illegal dumping ground and an occasional refrigerator or box springs could still be seen rusting away under the weedy bushes.

  They parked off the road near a break in the shrubbery that masked the railroad tracks. This was where Booker said he usually entered on his bike to get to the creek bank. Following along behind him, they cast their eyes right and left for any possible evidence that someone besides Wayne Booker had walked there. The ground was hard and baked dry by the last ten days of hot August sun. Even the wiregrass and sandspurs looked withered and half-dead.

  “Yonder’s where he probably drove in,” said Booker, pointing to a rough dirt lane that led from Old 48 to the tracks.

  Beyond that, around a bend in the service road that paralleled the tracks, was a stand of tall trashy shrubs: privet, wax myrtles, and sumac.

  “And right here’s where I found it,” said Booker.

  The bushes showed broken twigs with withered and dying leaves and several had been snapped off entirely. Tire tracks were still visible and there were faint tracks from Booker’s bicycle. If the killer had left shoe prints when he got out of the truck, they were now scuffed over by the kid’s sneakers.

  Dalton paid particular attention to the twigs that might have snagged a shirt or hair when the driver got out of the cab, but came up empty.

  “You see?” said Booker. “Somebody backed it in here as far as it would go and just left it, so it wasn’t really stealing. It’s like when somebody leaves stuff out with the garbage and you take it off the curb. I got a guitar like that once. Nobody wanted it.”

  “And you really thought nobody wanted a two-year-old pickup in good running condition?” McLamb asked sarcastically.

  Still trying to justify his actions, the boy was insistent. “Y’all saw that bullet hole in the windshield. Looked to me like somebody’d been trying to kill whoever’s truck it was and he just didn’t want to drive it anymore ’cause he was like a moving target, you know? That’s why I was going to get it painted black. It was here at least three days. Maybe even longer, so it wasn’t really stealing. Come on, you guys. I helped y’all. You know I did. You’d still be looking for it if I hadn’t driven it down to Makely.

  Dwight shook his head, amused by the boy’s reasoning. “Next time you find a vehicle hidden away somewhere, call us first, okay?”

  “I can go?” Booker asked hopefully.

  They hadn’t officially charged him, so he wasn’t in the system yet and Dwight didn’t see much point in hauling him into court for the slap on the wrist that he’d probably get.

  “Yeah, you can go this time.”

  “Cool! Thanks, Major Bryant!” he said and loped back down the way they’d come, toward his home.

  Turning to his deputies, Dwight said, “I’ll go talk to Mrs. Earp again and let her know that we’ve found the truck. Y’all spread out and canvass the houses along the tracks and on both sides of where the truck probably drove in. I know it’s been at least ten days, but maybe someone will remember seeing something. Unless the killer had an accomplice, he probably left on foot.”

  “Or on a bicycle like Booker,” McLamb said, wiping the sweat from his face. “Too bad the South got so air-conditioned. Not many people sitting out on their porches these evenings. They’re all inside where it’s cool, with their eyes glued on some screen or other.”

  As they walked back to their cars to begin the canvass, a freight train slowly rumbled past pulling dozens of flatcars, all loaded with pine logs harvested from tree farms down near the coast. McLamb turned to Dwight with a broad grin. “What d’you think, Major? Reckon our killer hitched a ride? Slow as it’s going, it wouldn’t be hard to grab on the side and step up on one of those bars.”

  “I don’t know, Ray. At night?”

  “Full moon that night,” McLamb argued.

  Just then, Dalton turned to Dwight with his phone to his ear.

  “It’s Crabtree, boss. Dr. Singh’s done a quick and dirty and says it looks like Vick Earp’s blood for both samples.” He laughed at something Janice Crabtree must have said. “Singh wants to know if it’s a tiger this time around.”

  “What? He found more cat blood?”

  “That’s what she says. From the bed and from the gas pedal.”

  They paused by Dwight’s truck to discuss what this might mean.

  “So maybe someone drove up in the yard while Vick Earp was picking up the broken glass,” Dwight mused.

  “Someone Earp’d pissed off,” said Ray McLamb. “And the cat gets between ’em and one of them stomps it to death.”

  “Or maybe Earp killed it,” Dalton suggested, “and the other person says, ‘Hey, good idea!’ and stomps Earp?”

  “But where’s the cat?” asked Dwight. “Why put it in the back of the truck? And cat blood on the gas pedal? When did Earp drive the truck after the cat was killed?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t the only one who stepped in the cat blood. It could’ve been whoev
er killed him and drove the truck out to the creek,” said Dalton. “I don’t know how we missed it unless some animal dragged it off, but we could go back out to where Earp was dumped and take another look for it.”

  Dwight nodded. “Get the canvass started, Ray, while I go talk to Mrs. Earp and I’ll meet you and Dalton out there in an hour.”

  At the Earp house, Marisa Young’s minivan was once again parked under the carport beside Mrs. Earp’s car. As he walked up the drive a man was loading cardboard boxes into the back of the van. Sweat dampened the back of his gray T-shirt. The trunk and backseat of the car were packed with clothes and cartons of small kitchen appliances. The tool shed’s double doors stood wide open and the shed was now crammed with tables, chairs, and some floor lamps. More boxes were stacked on the back porch.

  The door was open, but before he could call or knock, Rosalee Earp came out with her arms full of men’s clothing still on hangers.

  “Tyler, you can— Oh! Major Bryant!”

  Startled by his unexpected appearance, she stepped back and a winter jacket slid off the hanger to fall on the floor between them.

  “I thought you were Tyler,” she said.

  “Sorry.” He picked up the jacket. “I should have called first, let you know I was coming.”

  “That’s okay.” As the man came over to them, she said, “Do you know Vick’s brother?”

  “Dwight Bryant,” he said. “Sheriff’s Department. You’re Tyler Earp?”

  “Yeah. These for me, Rosy?”

  When Mrs. Earp nodded, he took the clothes and carried them over to his truck.

  Not only did the brothers have the same beefy build, thought Dwight, they both favored red Ford pickups. But whereas Vick’s had been uncluttered and clean except for the blood, the back of Tyler’s held an assortment of paint buckets, ladders, and some paint-smeared tarps. The cab had a gun rack over the rear window. Empty now.

  “Tyler’s helping me move,” said Mrs. Earp, “and I’m giving him Vick’s things.”