I was hesitant to let her roam around the place where Browning's body had been found, though. I had promised her I would never put her in another dangerous situation after she'd almost been shot at a stakeout one time. I looked around us. We were in the very middle of nowhere. Nothing but dirt road and stripped cotton fields until a row of houses started about a mile away to the west, and town half a mile to the north. I wasn't sure what, if any, hunting season we were in, but there would be no chance for dove or deer in these open fields, so I didn't really have to worry about hunters, either.
“She'll be fine,” Viv said.
“It's dark.” There was only a faint tinge of pale blue in the center of the sky, and it wouldn't take long for that to fade to dark, too.
“Is she afraid of the dark?” Viv asked. “Or are you?”
“I'm only afraid of snakes and of murderers returning to the scene of the crime,” I said.
“All the snakes are hibernating right now. Come on. Let's just go walk through and see what we can find.” No mention of a returning murderer, of course.
I sighed and hefted Stump out of the car. I could just hold her. I was more convinced all the time that there was no murderer to return to this scene.
Silently, Viv and I approached the mesquite trees. Four stood, each about fifteen feet tall, in a loose clump. I pointed my flashlight at the base of the trees. Browning's body had been found resting against one of them, but we didn't know which one.
I moved to the side and angled my light down, and things became clearer. The ground around the third tree was noticeably more disturbed than the other three. The dirt was rutted with boot prints dried in the mud and the grass was trampled. I thought I could even make out a faint depression in the dirt, where a body could have lain for three days of rainy weather, sinking slowly into the mud.
Stump grunted, and I shifted her to my other hip, trying to focus my flashlight on the ground. I wasn't sure what I was looking for, but I supposed if I found something besides a dirt clod or a stray cotton boll, I could take it to Bobby. Not that he would take it seriously, but I could at least know I'd done my duty.
“So many footprints,” Viv said. She had her own phone out and was using the flashlight to do the same thing I had. It was pretty cool, actually. The lights were very bright and very focused, so the eye could fully concentrate on one small area at a time.
Stump grunted again, and I finally set her down. There was clearly nothing to worry about out here. “I guess Bobby's group kept track of these footprints,” I said. “Still. Maybe we should take pictures.”
“Good idea.” She focused and snapped. “This is one. And here's a different one, smaller.” Another snap. “I can't tell if this is the same one or not. Oh well.” She snapped it anyway. “Look.” She pointed at the ground. “These don't have any sole markings. They're probably from the police, wearing those blue bootie things. The people on CSI wears those at crime scenes.”
Every time she snapped, the flash strobed and lit up the night, and it made the loud fake-camera snap sound.
“You know, you can turn off that sound,” I said.
“Now, why would I want to do that?” She snapped busily away, filling her phone with pictures that we would not know what to do with.
I studied the ground. There was a fairly definite difference between some of the prints—rounded toe work boots with a waffle sole, more pointed-toe cowboy boots with the square heel, and the ones Viv was talking about, which were just foot-sized depressions in the ground.
“What about the two kids who found the body? I guess some of these could be from them.”
“We'll need to get a list of people who were at this scene so we can account for all these prints,” Viv said.
“Yeah, I'm sure Detective Sloan will get right on that,” I said. I straightened and watched Stump busily sniff the area. I supposed it couldn't hurt for us to have a catalog of different shoe prints out here, but the truth was, we didn't know what we were looking for. I kept looking for something unusual, but was hampered by the fact that I didn't know what unusual meant, in this context.
Stump froze, staring at a spot of high weeds a few yards away.
She growled.
I froze, every nerve pointed toward the direction she was pointing. The dark, dark direction she was pointing.
Without moving one iota, I cut my eyes over to Viv. She'd heard it, too. She was also frozen, her hand pointed toward the ground at the end of the circle of light cast by the phone.
Something rustled in the weeds.
Stump barked once, loudly.
The sound made Viv jerk and the camera went off. The sky lit up, revealing a possum. Its white face and beady little rodent eyes flashed in the brilliant light.
It hissed.
Viv and I both screamed.
I grabbed Stump and took off running for the car. Viv was already halfway there.
I kept screaming, in fact, because that nasty little varmint had given me the heebie-jeebies. “Ewwww!” I screamed as I ran. “Ewwww! Yuck! Ewww!”
“It hissed at me!” Viv shouted over her shoulder. “It's probably rabid!”
We jerked open the car doors, slammed them behind us, and sat, breathing hard. Viv reached behind her and slammed the door lock down, and I did the same, even though I knew not even a rabid possum was going to be able to open the door of a '74 Monte Carlo.
“Did you see it?” Viv asked, peering over the hood of the car.
“Yes, I saw it,” I said. “Why do you think I kept saying 'Eww?'“ I shivered. “Those things give me the full-on creeps! Nasty little pointy-nosed rodents!”
“Did you see its little hands? It was waving its nasty little hairless hands at me.” Her voice sounded haunted. Suddenly she jumped up and peered over the back of the seat. “It didn't follow us back here, did it?”
“Viv, it couldn't possibly have run that fast.” Still, I had the overwhelming urge to lift my feet off the floorboards. I looked back the way we'd come, but I couldn't see anything except the trees. The possum was probably far away by now, as scared of us as we were of it.
“Let's get out of here,” I said, still struck by the occasional shiver at the memory of that hiss.
“Absolutely.” Viv started the car and maneuvered a rough three-point turn in the dirt road.
I shivered again. I looked back over my shoulder, terrified that I was going to see the red beady eyes of a rabid possum looking back at me.
Nothing. Even the trees were too dark to make out now that the headlights were pointed the other way.
I faced forward and adjusted my seatbelt.
“Wait,” I said, leaning forward. “What's that?”
Viv peered through the windshield. “Tail lights?”
We looked at each other. “Tail lights?” we said at the same time.
How could that happen? We'd been blocking the entire road.
“Did someone come down the road and turn around?” Viv asked.
“Not that I saw. But I was busy looking at the ground. And the possum.”
It was certainly weird, though. The trees weren't that far from the road—forty yards or so? If someone had come by and tried to get by the car, we would have noticed. If someone had come by and turned around, we would have noticed.
Viv looked at me, then floored it. “Let's see who it is.”
I slammed against the back of the seat. I hissed in a breath and pulled Stump into my lap. “I don't think whoever it is is trying to get away.”
“No?” She leaned forward. “It looks like they're getting further away, not closer.”
The lights did seem to be getting further away, but it was hard to tell. I squinted. Was it a pickup? Were there lights along the back of a cab? We were too far away to tell.
We bounced hard over a rut and the car fishtailed a bit on the soft dirt.
“Slow down!” I shouted. “What are we going to do if we catch them? Apologize for being in the middle of the road?”
“And what if it is the killer? What are we going to do?”
Viv frowned, and for a second her foot lifted off the pedal. She shifted in her seat. “Reach back there and pull out my gun.”
“Umm, no.” The car veered toward the right side of the road. “Keep to the middle.” We dipped into the ditch and weeds slapped hard against the undercarriage. “Keep to the middle, please.”
She sighed and focused on keeping us on the road. “Look. He's gone.”
I looked up. Sure enough, the lights were gone.
She frowned at me and sat back in her seat, her shoulders slumped.
“Sorry I was so focused on keeping us from dying in a ditch that I let an unknown person who was probably nobody get away.” I pulled out my phone.
“Who are you calling?”
“Bobby. I'm going to tell him we were at the scene of the crime and someone else was there but we don't know who or why.”
“He'll love that.”
Fortunately, Bobby didn't answer. He probably saw it was me and let it go to voicemail. That was fine by me, I was just doing my duty anyway. This way I could do my duty and report what little I knew without having to listen to him laugh at me.
“Bobby, it's Salem. Viv and I just went to the scene where Browning's body was found. We took a bunch of pictures of different footprints. We were also attacked by a rabid possum.”
Viv nodded. “That happened.”
“Anyway, an interesting thing happened and I am being careful and reporting it, even though it was probably nothing.”
“Probably something.” Viv leaned over and shouted into the phone. “Probably the killer.”
“So we had my huge cruise ship of a car parked diagonally in the middle of the road. We were the only ones around, of course. But if someone had come by, we would have seen them. We would have been in their way. No one came by. But still, when we left, we could see taillights down the road.”
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, a thought occurred to me. I pulled the phone away from my mouth. “There wasn't a cross road, was there?”
“No,” Viv said. Then she tilted her head. “Was there?”
We looked at each other. I ended the phone call.
“Do you think we should go back and check?” I asked.
Viv shook her head. “Nah. I'm hungry now.”
I started to point out that this was crazy, then noticed the time.
“I could eat,” I said. I chalked my hunger up to the near-death-by-rabid-possum experience. Probably life needing to reassert itself after all that trauma.
We reached a Road Ends sign and turned left, back toward town. I looked carefully both ways but saw no more taillights, or headlights, or any lights.
Viv sighed and shrugged. “Oh, well. Let's get some Chinese food and go back to your place to plan our strategy from here.”
After a trip through Little Ling's drive-thru, Viv and I carried bags of cardboard cartons up the steps of the wooden deck to my trailer in Trailertopia. I set Stump on the ground and let her sniff around our little yard and take care of her business, relieved that we were all safe at home again.
Stump, basically, was my life. I felt guilty that I had let her, once again, get caught in a potentially deadly situation, but I told myself that she might have saved us from a deadly rabid possum attack. Maybe that was a stretch, but it was possible. She was an excellent sidekick.
She was also my baby, a true companion that I'd found early in the days of my sobriety when I was clinging by a very tenuous thread, and we'd rescued each other.
Although the sight of her always squeezed my heart, Stump could not be called attractive in the traditional sense. Her legs were ridiculously short, and her body was very wide and solid as a brick. The width of her nose and the length of her legs were exactly the same. She was black, with a sprinkling of white on her muzzle. Her tail had a tiny screw tip with three or four red hairs at the very end. It was as if she'd been put together from leftover parts of three or four different dogs and a metal toolbox.
But she was my world, and I loved her. I felt guilty because, until a few months ago, I took her everywhere with me. Then Viv and I got caught in a wild shootout in an alley, and I was certain she would be hit. After that, I vowed to never put her in danger like that again, and I probably shouldn’t have taken her with us tonight. I missed having her with me, though.
Chapter Eight
The Grenade
Frank must have smelled the mushu from his trailer next door. He had his butt in my recliner before I got the sacks unloaded. I grabbed forks and plates from the dish drainer and we all dug into the food around the coffee table.
We tried to take stock, we really did. We kept saying that we were going to make a list of all the facts we knew, once we got some food in our bellies.
But as soon as the food hit my belly, it was as if every bit of energy got diverted into digestion or something.
Viv seemed to have the same problem.
“I think I've hit a wall,” she said, leaning back in my saggy sofa.
“Me, too.” I was having difficulty stringing two thoughts together. It was either sucking down the Chinese food too fast or a crash from the adrenaline rush.
Frank looked back and forth between the two of us. For the most part, Frank didn't speak unless spoken to, and even then his answers were mostly one word and were as likely to be in Spanish as in English.
He stood and walked to the door, then back.
“Where's your car?” he asked Viv.
“Oh, blast,” she said. She lolled her head in my direction. “We left it at Flo's.”
“Ugh,” I said. I shifted to rise. I would have to take her to Flo's to get her car so she could get back to Belle Court.
“I'll take you.”
Viv and I both looked at Frank.
“What?”
“I'll take you back to your place,” he said.
I was too tired to hide my shock. “You're volunteering?” I immediately felt guilty, but if Frank was easily offended, he would have not been my friend.
“You're in no shape to drive,” he said. “Neither one of you.”
Viv looked touched. “No one's said that to me since I got sober.”
For some reason, this struck me as hilarious. They left me cackling on the sofa, with Frank looking not entirely sure I was sober at all.
Stump and I made it to bed, and I fell asleep almost immediately. Unfortunately, I woke up way too early the next morning and couldn't go back to sleep.
I decided to make up for lost time from the night before and jotted down a list of all the facts I knew. It added up to precious little.
I thought about Trisha's insistence that I watch Peter's interview with David Baucum, so I decided to pull that up. Again, I wasn't able to find the links she'd sent us, but I kept searching until I found some stuff on Donald Baucum, the grandfather war hero who had started Baucum Engineering. I turned on the lamp beside my bed and jotted down notes on the back of an envelope my utility bill had come in.
Donald Baucum was, indeed, a World War II hero. I read an entire scholarly paper on his mission to gather soil samples at Sword Beach, and I could understand almost all of it. On the face of it, it doesn't sound like it would be that scary to swim to a beach, stick a thing in the sand and then swim back out, but when you factor in German soldiers who would have been quite happy to shoot first and ask questions later, it made the danger a bit more apparent. Add that to the fact that just the two of them went ashore, and they couldn't carry any weapons for defense in their wetsuits, and I became sure that I wouldn't have been able to do it.
Baucum came home from the war and went to college and said he chose the major he did because he had begun to see what an interesting field it would be. He liked the world of building, but he didn't necessarily want
to work in construction. He married and had a son and a daughter.
Donald Junior, or DJ, followed in his father's footsteps. He worked in the firm and helped make it even more successful. He married and had a son, David. (Apparently, he was loyal enough to keep the same letter, but not enough to carry through to Donald the Third.) Unfortunately, DJ also smoked a lot, and liked his bourbon. He was playing golf on a beautiful March afternoon and dropped dead of a heart attack.
His wife remarried and had another son, and soon after that David followed granddad—who was still alive for a few more years—into the fold of Baucum Engineering and grew the firm with jobs from the highway department, major shopping centers, and, of course, schools. David never married and had no off-spring, so there was no other D. Baucum to take over. Which I supposed was just as well, since there appeared to be nothing left to take over now.
Once the story broke about the soil report, he lost a couple of big jobs. That was news, but only because of the earthquake school connection. I checked the comments on that story. In typical Internet comment style, they were horrible. “Good,” people said. “They deserve it after what they did to that little girl.” As if the entire Baucum firm stood there and shook that building until it fell on her.
More jobs were lost, and a civil lawsuit was filed. More clients fled. Before the suit even went to trial, Baucum closed the company. Within a week, he was dead of an overdose of alcohol and Ambien. The speculation is that it wasn't an accident, but no one really knew for sure.
I checked the clock. Still an hour before I needed to get in the shower. I clicked another link for a story about the family who’d been injured when the building failed.
Peter began by holding up a framed family portrait of a young family – Mom and Dad, two boys and a girl between them. The scene switched to the family in the backyard, with Dad at the grill, Mom and little sister sitting at the picnic table, laughing at the boys who ran around the back yard throwing a ball and chasing the dog.
Matthew Logan was the head of construction, and the building of the school was a family event. He had three kids who would attend NorthStar Elementary the day it opened. His son was in fifth grade, his only daughter going into third, and another son who would begin kindergarten there.
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