Matt held his hands in the air. “That’s enough. Tell us about after the robbery. We can account for you, Carlton, Dodson, and Waits, but Miller vanished. And you know what happened to him, don’t you?”
Campbell’s head dropped. “I don’t know, Sheriff.” His hands grasped his bald head. “I don’t know.”
“Bullshit,” Crash said. The word came out as an angry hiss, and she slammed her fist on the table. Campbell jolted upright and drew backward, his face pale, as if he was ready to have a heart attack. “There’s no way you don’t know where he is. You pricks killed him so that there’d be one less person to split the cash with.”
Matt set his hand on Crash’s shoulder and pulled her back into her chair. Her eyes shifted over to him. She was a clenched fist, angry and wanting to strike out. Matt squeezed her shoulder slightly, and she took a deep breath and settled back into the chair.
Matt walked around the table to be closer to Campbell. “Campbell, you’re an old man already staring at federal prison time, so you are running out of things to lose. Lying to us will not help your situation. Tell us what happened to Miller. Let a woman know what happened to her husband. Give her that much mercy.”
Campbell turned away from Matt. His eyes went toward the rear of the kitchen, where silhouettes of feces stains were still on the wall. “He’s…downstairs.”
Matt and Crash traded glances.
Crash leaned across the table. “Repeat that.”
Campbell said, “He’s downstairs.”
Campbell led Matt and Crash downstairs into an unfinished basement. There were plastic storage boxes stacked against the concrete wall, black garbage bags, a washer and dryer, and power tools scattered across the floor.
Campbell pointed toward the far wall and let himself drop onto one of the plastic boxes. “He’s in there.”
Matt placed his hands on his waist as he stared at the concrete.
“Tyson Miller is in the wall,” Matt said.
Campbell nodded and buried his face into his age-rattled hands.
Matt heaved a deep breath. “Goddamn but this got gothic out of nowhere, didn’t it?”
Crash stepped up next to Matt. “I feel like we’ve officially hit the point where this is bigger than us.”
“I can call in the dayside guys. They won’t like it, but they’ll like the overtime pay.”
“I don’t mean us as in you and me. This is bigger than the department.”
“Then what are you suggesting?” Each word dropped slowly, with intention.
Crash let her silence answer the question. Matt knew.
“No,” he said. “No fucking way.”
“We have to. We’re not equipped for this kind of shit. We don’t have another choice.”
Matt grimaced. “I’m going to fucking hate myself for this.”
28
“Jesus Christ,” Jackie Hall said. “This all took a turn, didn’t it?”
“That it did,” Matt said. They stood in the basement next to one another as two state troopers, stripped down to T-shirts and gray uniform pants, respirators pulled over their faces, took swings at the concrete wall. As cracks and gaps appeared, they used crowbars and hammers and chisels to pull away the loosened pieces before going back to swinging.
Matt called Jackie out of sheer reluctance. Crash was right. This was bigger than the sheriff’s department could handle alone, and calling the state police was the only sane option. The dings to Matt’s pride didn’t matter; he knew this wasn’t the time for a dick-measuring contest.
The two men stood shoulder to shoulder, arms crossed, with their own respirators draped around their necks and hanging against their chests. Crime scene tape had been put up, and they watched from the other side, out of reach of concrete dust.
“The robberies were all men who belonged to the Benevolent Order,” Jackie Hall said.
“That’s what Campbell said.”
“Goddamn. My old man, he belonged to that group when I was a kid. All I ever remember them doing was raising money for cancer and driving those little cars in parades, wearing funny hats.”
“I suspect the national charter didn’t sanction the bank robberies.”
“I don’t suppose they did.” Jackie Hall shook his head. “What’s going on in the world to have shit like this happening?”
“Can’t blame this on now. You’re talking almost twenty years ago. Not the same place now it was then. It was changing then too. This has nothing to do with the world. This is all people. People and greed. Not accepting that the world’s not what it was for their fathers and grandfathers.”
Jackie Hall looked down and saw the dust piling up on his shoes. He took a step back and observed the clean space on the floor where his feet had been. He looked back to the demolition work. “What’s your problem with me?”
Neither man said anything for a moment. Jackie said, “I’ve been in Parker County a fair number of years now, and you and I come across each other regular enough, and I try to be the best sort of person I can be. But every time you see me, you act like you caught me pissing in your pool. Can’t help but say it feels somewhat passive-aggressive.”
Matt laughed. “Passive-aggressive? Really?”
“My wife teaches elementary school, and passive-aggressive is the default mode for most of her students.”
“You comparing me to grade school kids?”
“If the shoe fits.”
“Fair enough. I suppose if I’ve got to be honest, Lieutenant—”
“See, it’s that right there. ‘Lieutenant.’ I ask you every time to stop calling me that, to call me Jackie, and you keep on calling me Lieutenant.”
“Okay then, Jackie, if you’re asking me to be honest, then no, I don’t like you much. By now, I’m not sure how much of it is you and how much of it is the amount of grudge I’ve built up against you over the years.”
“Would you mind sharing with me what I’ve done to earn that hostility? Because while there’s plenty of people I work overtime on making miserable, I doubt I’ve ever said a harsh word to you.”
“You’ve done nothing, Jackie. That’s the damn thing, is you’ve done nothing. All these years, you’ve been nothing but courteous and professional. You don’t walk into our cases swinging your dick, wanting to take things over, acting like we’re nothing but a bunch of rubes and imbeciles.”
“You run a clean department, with a good closure rate. Not much reason to tread into your jurisdiction without a need. Then what is it?”
“I guess if I have to narrow it down to something, it’s that everything just fucking seems to work out for you.”
Jackie twisted his head to stare at Matt. He furrowed his brow, the skin on his forehead rolling on top of one another into folds. Matt stared straight ahead at the wall.
“I suppose you heard about me having cancer,” he said.
“I’ve heard things.”
“Then you know there’s a good likelihood I’m not long for this world. I’m the black banana of the local law enforcement community. Which blows, because on any other scale, I’m not doing too bad. But my wife will end up a widow much, much sooner than I ever expected. Plus, we never got to have kids. I wanted them but she didn’t, and once we divorced, I gave up on all of that. By the time we got back together and things found that equilibrium again, the doctors told me I was sucking down on ‘The Big C,’ which sounds way more sexual than I had intended it to. Moving on.
“You, though. We keep on dealing and meeting with one another, and your life seems great. You’re good at your job. You’ve got a wife and family and they seem to love you. Your life, Jackie, is good. It’s the life I dreamed about when I was in the army in Germany busting drunk grunts. All I wanted was to come back to Parker County and settle down and live out my life, peaceful and quiet, with Rachel and a passel of kids who’d hate me when they were teenagers, then someday give me grandchildren. But that’s not the plan the universe worked out for me. Call it God or Mother Na
ture or whatever you opt to term it—it all decided that I’d be better off with liver cancer. The entire time I’ve known you, my life has been in one form of disintegration or another. You, on the other hand, seem to be infinitely blessed. And no, I would never want anything to happen to you or your family. But I suppose I’d like a smidge of the luck you seem to have. If you wouldn’t mind sharing some of that with me, I’d be grateful.”
Again, they fell into silence, all except for the steady pounding of the sledgehammers smashing the wall into chunks. They stood there without another word, the dust swirling around them.
A deputy was ready to take a swing when another deputy held his hand up, stopping him, and peeked into the growing hole in the wall. He pulled his head back and pulled off his respirator and gagged a little. Took a deep breath and said, “Lieutenant! Sheriff! You’ll wanna get a look at this.”
Matt and Jackie stepped underneath the yellow crime scene tape. Jackie yelled to a trooper to turn one of the work lights around toward the hole.
The smell caught up to them before they saw it. Maybe it wasn’t the right way to phrase what was there, but Matt couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. What stared back at them had been human once upon a time, but that time had worn it down to nothing but bone and ragged bits of flesh. The skull hung loose on the body, as if the slightest movement might snap it free. A small dark hole rested in the middle of the skull’s forehead. A cockroach, large and glistening in the light, skittered out of an empty eye socket and down into the mouth, vanishing into the gaping maw. Clothing had mostly rotted away or melded to the bone and fleshy tendrils, making it hard to know where anything began or ended.
But Jesus, the smell that smacked both men hard was heavy and putrid—a sweet yet sour stink, a stench that obliterated the all-too-familiar smell of bloated, rotting roadkill in the summer sun, or the occasional corpse found locked up in a house for weeks on end, left to stew and fester in its own literal juices.
No, this was a new kind of foul—something that neither man was ready for. This was what dead smelled like. Dead in the worst way imaginable. Dead without dignity or formality. The smell of twenty years spent hidden away, now released into the world. They had, until that moment, thought they knew what that smell was, and right then and there they understood they hadn’t known shit.
Jackie lost it first. He turned his head and puked, the splattering against the ground like someone dumped a bucket of chunky soup across concrete. There went the fried chicken he had at lunch, the bag of Fritos he ate while filling out evaluations in the afternoon, the roast beef and potatoes at dinner, the two slices of chocolate cake for dessert, both Snickers bars he’d eaten on the drive out to the crime scene…all of it right there for everyone to see.
Matt made it to the other side of the tape and across the room to a small garbage can that had already been there. His day had been lighter—a sandwich at lunch, tilapia Rachel had made for dinner, ice cream—and it took less time to void his gullet. He was more accustomed to vomiting than Jackie was, he suspected. Such was the beauty of cancer.
The police around watched and said nothing and waited for it to be done so they could go back to work. They’d probably talk about it later. But for now, nothing but the sound of puking. That sound rattled between the walls.
29
Jackie and Matt came upstairs from the basement and walked into the kitchen. Crash sat at the table with Campbell. She looked at the men. Both chewed gum like their lives depended on it.
To Matt, she said, “You got any more gum?”
Matt shook his head. “I need all I’ve got.”
She shifted her gaze from Matt to Jackie. “You?”
“Sorry,” Jackie said. “I’m working the half of the pack he gave me.”
Her eyes darted back and forth between the two men. A thin gauze of sweat covered their faces.
“You both look like you’re on the wrong side of death’s door,” she said.
Matt lifted his eyebrows.
Crash shrugged. “Poor choice of words. You okay?”
Matt said, “I’m gonna say I’ve been better.”
“Was Miller down there?”
Jackie nodded. “He most definitely was.”
Matt pulled a chair away from the table and sat across from Campbell. Leaned in close to the old man.
“There’s a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead,” Matt said.
Campbell nodded. “Yes.”
“I’m not asking for confirmation; I’m stating as fact. What I want is for you to tell me how it got there, because I’ll bet Miller didn’t put it there himself.”
Campbell’s chest rose and fell with a heaving breath. “Roger killed him.”
Jackie moved in closer. “Roger Waits, who happens to be dead?”
Matt settled back in his chair. “Jesus. That’s convenient as hell, isn’t it? Waits is dead, so he can’t defend himself. But the problem becomes how the dead body is in your house—walled up in your basement, even. Before you tell me more about how Roger killed Miller, I need you to consider that there are zero reasons to believe you, how the Feds will show up in a few hours and bury you underneath a literal shit-ton of federal charges, and compound it all with you being older than shit on the underside of a rock. You may as well make the choice to be honest about this because lying won’t do a goddamn thing about the prison time you’re facing. What it will do is be one less thing to tick off your conscience before you meet your maker.”
Campbell sat upright and planted his palms flat on his legs. What Matt saw in that moment was a man resigned to his fate, who, in a flash, made his peace with the world. “No chance of going easy on an old man?”
“None whatsoever.”
“I had to make the effort,” Campbell said. “After the second robbery—after Roger shot that girl—we met back at one of Pete’s work sites. Everyone was on edge. We all yelled at Roger, and Roger was pissed off because we were mad at him. Murdering that girl didn’t bother him. He kept saying he had saved us because the dye pack would have ruined the money and the whole thing would have been for nothing.” Campbell shook his head. “Those years I’d known Roger, he’d never been what you’d call a compassionate soul—he was the last to volunteer to ring the bell at Christmas every year—but whatever had been in him died then and there.”
“About the corpse in your basement,” Matt said.
“I’m getting there. Anyway, we were angry, but Tyson was furious. Told Roger he should have stayed in the car, that he had no business trying to make something like this work from the inside. He and Roger got into a tussle—”
“A tussle?” Jackie said. “Like pushing each other around?”
“Yes. It didn’t seem like anything serious, and we tried to break it up, but then Roger landed a punch right to Tyson’s jaw, and everything flipped. You know, the life Tyson lived, he’d been in fights, he knew how to handle himself, and Roger was nothing but a guy who’d spent his life pushing money from one column to another. But he was doing so much coke, he was a wild man. Tyson snapped and got Roger square in the nose. It shattered Roger’s nose, and blood poured down his face. Tyson stepped back, Roger wiped blood away, and then he had a gun in his hand, and—”
“Roger shot Tyson,” Matt said.
“Right in the head,” Campbell said. “The hole in front, it wasn’t much, but the back of his skull shattered, and the mess splattered everywhere. The floor, the walls. It took hours to clean it up.”
Matt’s right hand curled into a fist then relaxed. Again and again. “That mess had a wife and a baby on the way, Mr. Campbell.”
“I didn’t kill him, Sheriff. I swear on my darling Wilma’s life. Roger pulled a pistol and shot Tyson. He did it like it was nothing too. If I could have stopped him, I would have. That’s the truth, Sheriff. When this started, no one was supposed to get hurt.”
Matt exhaled through his nose and ran his hands through his hair, rubbing his head then patting his
hair back into place. Such a long fucking night.
Jackie crossed his arms over his chest, letting them rest on his gut, and leaned back against the wall. “How’d it become a good idea, you stick the body in your basement?”
Campbell shifted in his seat. “No one had a clue what to do with it. We could have poured him into concrete at one of Roger’s projects, except business was as dead as Miller was. We thought about burying him out in the woods, but we worried someone going squirrel hunting would be out there and their dog would luck along and dig him up. But I was having the basement worked on, and I said we could just put him in the wall. We wrapped him in a tarp, brought him back here. We threw quicklime on him to keep the smell down, and then everyone helped me dodge up a new wall. The space was small enough, Wilma never noticed the difference. She didn’t care so long as the washer and dryer kept on working.”
Jackie held up an open palm. “Stop for a minute. You had a dead body in your basement for almost twenty years. Fine. I’ve got that part of things. What about the money? What happened to it?”
“It’s gone,” Campbell said. “We split it. Everyone got their shares, and I don’t know what they did with it.”
Matt said, “But when the people attacked you in your house, they asked you for the money from the Guthrie job, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t tell us because you knew it might tie you back to the robberies, and to the murders.”
“I’m an old man, Sheriff. There’s not much more left in my world. I had Wilma, but the doctors asked me today how long I want to keep her on life support. My daughter, she walked away from me years ago. Whoever’s doing this, they’ve taken goddamn near everything I’ve got, and telling you the truth didn’t seem the best way to keep what I had for the time I have left.”
Matt looked back at Jackie. “Can you get your guys in here to keep an eye on Mr. Campbell, and the three of us step out for a few?”
The Righteous Path: A Parker County Novel (The Parker County Novels Book 1) Page 16