by John McMahon
“No,” I said. “That was Pelo.”
“Right,” Remy said. “Adrian was the manager.”
I nodded, picturing John Adrian. Five foot ten. Wild, curly black hair. “Adrian felt more invested than an employee, Rem. But there was something else. It always felt like he was pushing me to talk outside.”
“To not stir up customers?” Remy asked. “Having a cop there?”
“That was my guess back then,” I said. “But now I dunno. Maybe he was avoiding something that I didn’t notice. Something illegal, hidden among the liquor bottles? Something . . .”
I walked over to the counter of the store, remembering my conversations with the manager.
“The store looks different now,” I said.
Presently, the counter was shoved against the far wall, opening up a giant space in the center of the store by the front door.
“Years ago, customers lined up here,” I said, motioning at where we were standing. “Made impulse buys of lottery tickets and rolling papers. Cheap cigars.”
As I stepped toward the counter, I heard a squeak. The kind of thing you only hear when a place is dead empty. A weak floorboard maybe.
I stepped forward and heard it again. Ehhh.
Back again. Ehhh.
Remy crouched, wiping at the dusty wooden floor with the back of the arm of her sweatshirt.
When she got the area a little cleaner, we noticed that a few of the planks didn’t match the others around them.
“This area would’ve been behind the counter, Rem,” I said. “Back then. On the cashier’s side.”
I crouched down and moved from board to board, feeling along the wooden floor. After a dozen pushes, one area popped back out at me, a spring-loaded door.
Remy grabbed at the edge and opened a hole about two and a half feet square, on a hinge. Propped it open upon itself.
Shining my flashlight into the hole, I stared down a set of concrete stairs. As I stepped down into the area, cobwebs covered my face.
“Jesus,” I said. Pulling the mess from my hair and mouth.
I shined the light around and saw a concrete room, maybe twenty by twenty, with three or four card tables set up in the center, and shelves lining each wall.
Remy followed me down, and both flashlights scanned the place.
If the upstairs felt like a land locked in time, so did this space. Except dustier. It smelled like dead soil and ammonia, and I heard Remy cough. She held her sweatshirt over her mouth.
I walked over to the shelves and saw only one item left behind. A busted money-counting machine.
What was someone doing down here that you couldn’t find out about? Purvis huffed in my head. That was worth killing a cop’s wife and son over?
My bulldog’s voice was raspy when it came to what happened to Jonas. He’d lost his best friend after all.
“So John Adrian . . .” Remy said, her voice trailing off.
“Yeah,” I said. “The manager must’ve been aware of what was going on down here.”
“And Pelo, the clerk, wasn’t,” Remy said, finishing my thought.
I stared around.
The subflooring was made of worn plywood and all around it were fresh scratch marks from some animal.
I pointed toward a wooden shelf at the far side of the room. It had a solid back to it, and none of the rest of the shelves did.
“That’s odd, right?” I said.
I walked over to it and ran my hands along the dusty wood. To my right I saw a set of two industrial-strength L-brackets mounted on a blank wall. The kind you might hang something heavy on.
I reached my hands around the sides of the shelves and lifted.
Off it came, a lightweight wood.
I carried it to the hooks and hung it there.
“Wow,” Remy said.
Behind where the shelf had just stood was a door.
“So if anyone came down here, looking around . . .” I said.
“They wouldn’t see a way out,” my partner answered.
We opened the door and found an angled stairwell. Followed it up into a tiny entry area maybe ten square feet wide with two more doors. One was locked, but by the direction, presumably led into another storefront. The other was a metal door that swung out onto a loading dock in the same alley we’d been in ten minutes ago.
“Huh,” Remy said.
We walked outside into another area cordoned off by a fence. But it was clear that we were behind the hardware store now, two doors down from the Golden Oaks.
“The partnership owned this place too,” Remy said. “I saw that in the paperwork. They shut down the hardware store the same week as the Golden Oaks.”
I left the door ajar, but glared out at the loading dock.
The exit was one of those kinds where the driveway angled away from the store. So you could step right into trucks from our level. Load boxes right from this back door.
“So someone running an illegal operation under the liquor store,” I said, “could use this as a way to ship—”
“To ship what?” my partner said. “It could be anything illegal down here, P.T. Anything.”
“Yeah,” I said, my flashlight cutting through thick dust that came off the stairs.
“What did you find out about the guy who robbed the liquor store anyway?” Remy asked.
“That’s why I kept coming back,” I said. “I figured the key was talking to this clerk Pelo, but he went MIA. I never saw him again.”
We walked back down the stairwell from the loading dock and into the big dusty room below the Golden Oaks. Above us, I could hear a rat moving with something clinking behind him. Some part of his body was probably caught in a trap, and he was carrying it with him.
As I scanned the shelves more carefully this time, I noticed three or four empty cardboard boxes, each lined with a plastic bag of some sort. The bags were empty, but had traces of powdery white residue on the inside.
“Drugs?” Remy asked.
“I dunno,” I said. I opened my wallet and found a parking receipt on hard card stock. I scraped it along the inside of the bag, collecting the residue. Then folded it upon itself and saved it in my pocket.
In movies you always see a cop taste powder he suspects to be drugs. Which always drives me crazy when I see it. I mean, would you put some unknown foreign substance in your body? You wouldn’t.
“It could be construction materials,” Remy said about the powder.
“Yeah.” I nodded. Concrete and plaster were placed in bags, and shipped in boxes. I looked for markings on the sides of the boxes, but there were none.
“So they were moving something illegal . . .” I said, my voice trailing off.
“Only problem is—there’s nothing down here now,” Remy said. “Other than the rats.”
Remy was right, and we spent the next thirty minutes confirming it. Inspecting each shelf and empty carton for evidence. First down here. And then upstairs after. But for Lauten Hartley, who owned this place, there was no crime to chase him over, unless failure to dust was a felony.
“Let me ask you a question, P.T.,” Remy said after we’d searched every shelf.
“Shoot.”
“Where do you think this is going to lead anyway?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “By ‘this,’ do you mean us sneaking around?”
“Yeah.” She nodded.
“We’re gonna get to the bottom of this old crime,” I said.
“And then what?” my partner asked. The look on her face was legitimate curiosity.
“Put these guys away,” I said. “Hartley. Whoever he’s with.”
“When you called me last night, you were sitting on the deck of that houseboat, right?” she asked. “That’s what you said.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded.
“Where was Kelly Borland?”
I stared at Remy. Had she been spying on me? Or more likely, had Marvin given me up? Described the woman I was with when I dropped off Purvis?
“She was inside,” I said. “Asleep.”
“By herself?”
I wasn’t sure where Remy was going with this. “Yeah.”
“Why weren’t you with her?”
I sneered at my partner. “It’s none of your business who I do or don’t sleep with.”
“I just want to understand how this ends,” my partner said. “Let’s say we find the guy who hired Tarticoft to take out your wife,” Remy said. “What then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I was gung ho before,” she said, pausing to look around the dusty rat trap. “But . . . will it be over for you?”
“Are you for real?”
Her voice softened. “I need to know, P.T., if this is just another mission to distract you from the rest of your life.”
A flare of anger shot through me.
We were back under the liquor store, and I balled up my fists. Climbed back up the ladder. “You have no clue what you’re talking about.”
“Really?” Remy asked. She followed me up.
“You’re a single person running around, having fun,” I said. “You wanna sleep with a co-worker, you do it. A subordinate at work? Even better. You have no idea what it’s like to commit to someone and make a family and then have that taken away from you.”
“And you have no idea what it’s like to watch someone torture themselves,” she said. “Someone who’s full of regret that they did something wrong—even though they just worked late one night.”
I moved closer to Remy’s face. I was mad enough to chew nails. But I just turned and climbed out the back window. Over the fence and out to my Silverado.
I crossed the dark street ahead of my partner, but sat in my truck for a moment. My body shook with anger, and I heard Remy’s Alfa start up in the alley.
I waited until she was gone, fired up my truck, and drove home.
26
Wednesday, September 11, 1:55 p.m.
Easton Pappas had always been one of the popular kids. A favorite of the girls and envied by the boys. He was picked first in sports. And by now, in eighth grade, he was king of the campus. On the verge of high school cool.
Easton had been known to brag. He talked trash while playing point guard for the middle school basketball team. And at the debate for eighth-grade president, he ran circles around this smart, nervous girl from the honors classes.
Which was why it was odd that Easton had dropped his backpack now and stood, speechless, outside the art class.
“You okay, bruh?” a younger kid asked.
Easton nodded, but didn’t speak. The smaller kid flipped the door open and hustled into math class, two doors down, the bell for the next period about to ring.
The man Easton had seen inside the art room wore a green flannel shirt and jeans. And hiking boots. Expensive ones.
He also held a .38 toward Mr. Tanner.
Mr. T, who Easton had last year for Life Science.
Easton blinked, a wave of nausea rising inside him. The eighth grader who’d won the election in a landslide was suddenly reduced to a gesturing monkey. And no one was paying any attention to him.
“Mrs. . . .” he croaked to a teacher passing by.
“Shouldn’t you be in class, young man?” the teacher asked, heading in a nearby door.
He found the fire alarm then. Smashed the glass and reached inside. Pulled.
A bell walloped into action, and the same teacher from a moment ago emerged from her classroom.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
And Easton finally found his voice.
“Gun,” he screamed. Pointing at the art class. “Man with a gun in that class.”
27
The morning sky across northern Georgia bore a streak of blue, the kind so pure you could paint a nursery with it. Except in the distance, there was an orange band that signaled rain might be coming.
I had been gone for three days, and although Remy had partially caught me up in the alley last night, I needed a full download on our double murder—and quick.
I pushed through the lobby and nodded at Hope Duffy. Hustled up the stairwell and found my partner. We hadn’t exchanged a word or a text since last night.
“How about we get coffee?” I said. “I’m buying. You can officially catch me up on the case.”
Remy stared at me, her dark eyes searching my face. Wondering if I was still angry about the argument last night. But the reality is—I don’t have a ton of people in my life that I trust. And some days, it seems like Remy, Marvin, and Abe are the only ones. It was too short of a list to write any of them off.
“Sure,” she said. “Let me grab my iPad.”
We walked down the steps to the first floor and out the door. There was a guy who set up in the park down the block and served Italian coffee from a cart.
“So what’s the latest on our old guy?” I asked. “We never discussed that part.”
“We’ve had a BOLO out on him for three days now, and no reports. Patrol’s been canvassing.”
“You said last night you picked up a motel card from the guy who escaped out the window. The one who got shot.”
“Thiago Carilla,” she said. “We’ve also gone through his phone records. I told you about the text we saw, right?”
“He wanted more scratch.”
“Exactly,” Remy said. “We also found earlier texts to Vinorama and Dilmendes. So we know for certain they were all buddies.”
We walked across this spongy material on the playground and over to the coffee cart.
“And what’s the latest on them?” I asked. “The two dead guys in the car.”
“We still suspect they’re drug couriers,” Remy said. “From Carilla’s texts to them, it’s obvious they’re friends. He told them he had something to deliver and could pay them a grand for their trouble. Were they up for a little road trip?”
“They said yes?”
“‘Por supuesto,’ is what they said.” Remy did her best Spanish accent. “Of course.”
We got to the coffee cart, and I ordered an Americano.
“For you, honey?” the coffee cart guy asked Remy.
“Fior di Zagara,” she said.
I paid the guy, and he got under way with making our drinks.
A mom and her son were flying a kite in the distance, and a green dragon flipped and danced against the sky. It smelled like fresh-cut grass outside.
“P.T.,” Remy said. She hesitated, her brow a mess of lines. “Last night—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
I grabbed my coffee. “So the two guys up front in the Caprice both have charges for drug possession,” I said. “And Carilla referred to them as drivers. Can we assume this whole thing is about drugs?”
“Or drug money,” Remy said. “Or what Abe and I were working on. Which is drug equipment.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“A pill press,” she said. “We figure that’s what left those lined impressions in the back seat of the Caprice.”
“So the theory from outside the liquor store last night?” I said. “About Carilla and the old guy in the back of the car?”
“Works out perfect for this,” Remy said. “That might be what the old guy was after. Plus, I asked the night shift guys to hit the Caprice with Luminol. In case the shooter cleaned up after Carilla ran out of the car.”
“And?” I asked.
“And this is what they found.” Remy showed me a picture on her phone.
The photo was shot in the dark and showed smears of a bright blue color across most of the back seat
of the Caprice, where someone had cleaned up. Except there was a rectangular void across the middle of the back seat with no chemiluminescence.
“So something was on that seat when the old guy shot at Carilla,” I said. “Something the shooter took with him?”
“Exactly,” Remy said. “Abe thinks it was a pill press. A desktop unit. The same folks who used to run Oxy up here a couple years ago . . . a lot of ’em are now running other pills. Seemingly legal, but not.”
“Fakes of legal drugs,” I said.
Remy nodded. “Filler mostly. Stamped with a die that makes it look like real pharmaceuticals.”
Remy grabbed her tea drink, and we turned toward the precinct.
“You’re talking about a small tabletop pill press?” I asked. “The kind you set up on a dresser in a bedroom?”
“Exactly.” Remy nodded.
“Rem,” I said. “You know I go out with the narco squad once in a while, right? On raids. Neal and I over there have been buddies since the academy.”
“Sure,” she said.
“Well, I haven’t done it in six months, but I’m on a text chain with those guys. They seized a pill press last month. It’s probably still in the evidence room.”
Remy saw where I was going. “We can test this theory,” she said.
“Exactly.”
I texted my buddy in narco and asked for a heads-up to the guy who ran the evidence room.
We came in through the front of the precinct then. Passed through the lobby, but didn’t go upstairs. Headed instead down to the basement.
When we got to Evidence, I saw Ed Udall, who had to be seventy this year and still working. He’d been eligible to retire when I was a rookie.
“Ed,” I said. “You get a heads-up about a pill press we wanna check out?”
“What business is it of yours?” he asked. Classic Ed, which is to say hard-ass. “Not your case, Marsh. Not even your department.”
I explained how Remy and I wanted to test out a theory, and Ed made a couple calls, even though narco had already given him the green light.
Ten minutes later, Ed wheeled out a pill press on a rolling cart.
“Wow, it’s small,” Remy said as she saw the machine coming toward us.