by Bill Crider
Rhodes ignored the whining. Hack didn’t mean it, anyway. He just liked to whine.
“What did she find?”
“Found just what I said she’d find, which was nothing. Ground’s too hard to take any prints. Some of the bushes was broken, but that’s no help to you.”
Rhodes got the feeling that Hack was holding something back. That was his usual method of operation.
“There’s more,” Rhodes said. “Tell me.”
“Well, she did say that there was a little bit of something stuck on one of the bushes, maybe a piece of cloth from somebody’s shirt. Anybody could’ve been in that vacant lot, though, so it won’t do you much good as evidence.”
“It might,” Rhodes said. “She saved it, of course.”
“Sure she did. You think she’s not good at her job? Got it all locked up in the trunk of the car. She’ll bring it in at the end of her shift.”
“Good. I’m going back to the college. I need to talk to Ike Terrell.”
“He don’t strike me as the talkative type,” Hack said.
“He’ll talk to me this time.”
“You really think so?”
“I know so,” Rhodes said.
* * *
Rhodes got to the campus just as the eleven o’clock class was ending. It would be the last class of the day for many of the students and for a lot of the faculty members. Rhodes went to Seepy Benton’s office. He didn’t want the students to see him accosting Ike in the hallway, so he sent Seepy Benton to fetch him.
“Do I get a badge?” Seepy asked.
“No, you don’t get a badge. Just do it as a favor to me.”
“If that’s the way you want it.”
Seepy left and returned shortly with Ike Terrell. Tagging along was Sandi Campbell.
“She insisted,” Seepy said when he saw the look on Rhodes’s face.
“You two go have a talk about the quadratic equation somewhere,” Rhodes said. “I need to talk to Ike privately.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” Sandi said. “He might need somebody with him. Maybe a lawyer.”
“This isn’t about anything he’s done,” Rhodes said. “Just a friendly little talk.”
“You say that a lot,” Ike said.
“It’s always true, too,” Rhodes said. “I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say.”
Ike looked at Sandi and nodded. “All right,” she said, “but I’m not going to talk about the quadratic equation. Whatever that is.”
“How about Pringles potato chips?” Benton said, picking up the can that sat on his desk and giving it a little shake. “I know some fascinating stuff about potato chips.”
“Really?” Sandi said.
“Really,” Benton said. “Come on with me. We’ll go down to the student lounge and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Ike nodded again, and Sandi followed Benton out of the office. When they were gone, Rhodes shut the door and said, “She’s in for a big surprise.”
“What?” Ike asked. “You mean he doesn’t know anything about potato chips?”
“I mean he does know a lot about potato chips. Just not the kind of things Sandi might be expecting.”
“What about you?” Ike asked. “What are you expecting from me?”
“Let’s sit down and find out,” Rhodes said.
Chapter 22
Rhodes got right to the point by telling Ike that he knew all about Duffy’s nighttime excursions into town to steal metal.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been stealing it all over the county,” Rhodes said. “He’s pretty good at it. I don’t know who’s with him, though. Last night there were two others. They were at a vacant house, the old Post house.” He paused to let that sink in. “Was one of the others you?”
Ike looked at the floor. “You said this was a friendly talk.”
“I’m not accusing you of stealing metal,” Rhodes told him. “I’m just curious. I know it was you at the Beauty Shack stealing hair, so I wondered. Was Duffy with you then?”
Ike raised his head. “No. I did that on my own. Duffy didn’t know about it. Nobody knew about it. It was stupid, but … but I did it. That’s all, though. I never stole anything else. Never.”
“You ran when I got to the college a couple of days ago. It wasn’t just because of the hair in your trunk. I wouldn’t have had any reason to search the car, and you knew that. So why did you run?”
Ike’s gaze went back to the floor. “I was scared.”
“I’ll bet you were, but I don’t think you were scared of me. I think you were scared of Duffy. He knows that Dr. Harris saw him on the campus. He’s threatened Harris by phone. I don’t think he’d like it if he knew you’d seen him, too. You did see him, didn’t you?”
“You don’t understand what it’s like,” Ike said. He looked off at Benton’s messy bookshelves, but Rhodes didn’t think he was seeing anything.
“You might try telling me,” Rhodes said. “Maybe I can help.”
Ike sat there for a minute, staring at the bookshelves. Then he said, “All my life I’ve been at the compound. It wasn’t so bad when I was a kid. We had some space there to roam around in. We had woods and trees, and I got to shoot pistols and rifles and crossbows. We had TV.” He paused. “The TV was probably a mistake.”
“Lots of people think TV is a mistake,” Rhodes said.
“Not for the reasons it was a mistake for me to see some of the programs. I found out about what life was like outside, and I wanted to try it. I wanted to see things for real instead of being inside a fence. My father wouldn’t let me, not for a long time. Finally I started getting away now and then. He didn’t like it, but he knew if he didn’t let me out occasionally, I’d run away forever.”
“Might not have been a bad idea,” Rhodes said.
“Don’t take what I said the wrong way,” Ike said. “I liked it at the compound a lot of the time when I was growing up. There were some other kids, and going to school at home was okay. Sure, Duffy was a terrible math teacher, nowhere near as good as Dr. Benton, but my mother was pretty good with English, and I could learn a lot of stuff from the Internet. It wasn’t enough, though. You know what I mean.”
“You wanted some help with your math, for one thing.”
“Yeah, school was part of it. Not all.”
“Hormones?”
Ike looked at Rhodes and grinned. “That was part of it, for sure. My father knew he couldn’t keep me there away from girls all my life, but it’s hard to meet anybody when you’re cooped up most of the time. He finally gave in and let me come to the college, and I met Sandi. I like her a lot.”
“She’s not thrilled about what you did at the Beauty Shack.”
“I know that, and I don’t blame her. I meant it when I said it was stupid. I can’t take it back, though. She knows that, and I’ll take what’s coming to me. I hope I can finish the semester, but if I can’t, that’s just too bad.”
Rhodes didn’t think this was the time to mention the possibility of probation. He needed to get the subject back to what really mattered.
“It must’ve been hard to keep secrets in the compound. Everybody in this town knows everybody else’s business. In the compound it had to be a hundred times worse.”
“You know it. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t even breathe. Just one more reason I needed to get out. My father thinks the world has gone crazy. He thinks the government’s going to collapse, and he’s ready to defend his little compound when that happens. I don’t believe he’s right. He’s been thinking it for twenty years, and the world’s still going on. He’s the one who needs to get outside and see what’s what.”
Rhodes wanted to talk about secrets, not about Able Terrell’s views, as interesting as they might be.
“Duffy gets outside,” Rhodes said. “He strips air conditioners and houses. He probably steals a few pickup tailgates, too. Lot of those going missing around town lately. Able had to know about it.
You did, too.”
“I don’t know what my father knew.” Ike looked at the dry-erase board, but Rhodes didn’t think he was interested in the equation. “He never talked about Duffy.”
“What about you? Did you know?”
Ike still wouldn’t look at Rhodes. “I kind of got the impression that Duffy was doing something wrong. I found out what it was one day when I overheard him talking to Alf Dewberry.”
“Who’s Alf?”
“Another guy who lives in the compound. He goes outside with Duffy now and then.”
“If you knew all this, your father must have known it, too.”
Ike shrugged. “Maybe. If he did, he never told me. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing we talked about.”
Rhodes didn’t think it was possible for Able not to have known, but it didn’t matter when it came to Wellington’s death.
“You saw Duffy leave the campus the morning Wellington was killed,” Rhodes said. “Isn’t that right?”
“I didn’t see him leave the college.” Ike was emphatic. “That’s not true.”
“You saw something, though.”
Ike thought it over for a while. Finally he said, “Yeah. You could say that.”
Rhodes felt as if he were finally getting somewhere. “So tell me what it was.”
“I saw Duffy on the road from the college. He was coming up the overpass as I was going down. He didn’t notice me. When I got to school, I knew something was wrong, and I didn’t want to get involved in it.” He shook his head. “I should’ve just parked and stayed in the car. I wouldn’t be in this mess now if I’d done that.”
“You might be in a bigger one,” Rhodes said. “You can’t ever tell. Where were you going to sell the hair?”
“I hadn’t thought it through. I knew it was easy to sell, though. I heard about it on TV.”
Suspicions confirmed. “You’d have to leave the county to get rid of it.”
“Yeah, I thought of that. I could do it easy. I’ll bet there were places in Derrick City I could’ve sold it, but I didn’t get a chance. You stopped me, and I appreciate it.”
Ike sounded sincere, but sound and meaning weren’t always the same, as Rhodes well knew.
“How about Duffy? Where does he sell the metal?”
“I don’t know,” Ike said. “I guess he has a way to get rid of it if he’s stealing it, but I don’t know what it is.”
Rhodes figured that Duffy probably had someone meet him at the recycling center at night, or maybe he just turned it over to someone at an arranged meeting spot and let a third party sell it for him. He might even be selling it in Derrick City instead of at the recycling center. It didn’t matter. Duffy was going to be shut down soon enough.
“What’re you going to do?” Ike asked. “About Duffy?”
“I’m going to arrest him,” Rhodes said.
Ike didn’t look happy about that. “I don’t see how you can. You can’t get into the compound. Nobody can get in there if my father doesn’t want them to.”
“We’ll see,” Rhodes said. “How many people are usually inside?”
“There’s Duffy and Alf and Cleon, plus Alf and Cleon’s wives. There’s AJ. He’s not married. Alf has two kids, a boy and a girl, about ten and twelve. Cleon has a son. He’s twelve, too. There’s my father and mother.”
“How much resistance will they put up?”
“I can’t say. Duffy’s not going to volunteer to come with you, though, and my father’s not fond of the law. Neither is anybody else in there. They won’t send Duffy out, and you can’t get in. You’d better just leave well enough alone.”
Rhodes didn’t want to get into some kind of prolonged standoff, and he didn’t want to create a situation where anybody was going to get hurt, much less killed. He’d just have to hope that Able would decide to cooperate. That would be the easiest thing for everybody.
Or he could leave well enough alone. If Duffy never came back out of the compound, wouldn’t that be just the same as being in prison? Able didn’t think so, but Ike would agree that it was.
Nevertheless, Rhodes was going to arrest Duffy. Or try. That was his job, and he didn’t believe in not doing his job.
“I’ll go down there and talk to him and see what happens,” he told Ike. “You can stay out of it.”
“Don’t worry,” Ike said. “I’m a law-abiding citizen. I want to do what’s right.”
It sounded good to Rhodes, and he wanted to believe it.
* * *
Rhodes left Ike at the college and went back to the jail. He told Hack to call the deputies on duty and tell them to meet him at the courthouse.
“What for?” Hack asked. “Why the courthouse? What’s goin’ on?”
Rhodes knew that if he didn’t tell Hack, the dispatcher would pester him endlessly and would never forgive him.
“We’re going to the compound to arrest Duffy.”
“Can I go?” Jennifer Loam asked.
Rhodes hadn’t heard her come into the jail. He’d been too wrapped up in his thoughts about Duffy and the compound. He turned to Jennifer and said, “No. You can’t go.”
“I’ll stay out of your way.”
“I’m sure you would, but you don’t need to be there.”
“Freedom of the press. First Amendment. Who’s Duffy, by the way?”
“That’s what I want to know,” Hack said. “I talked to him on the phone, but I don’t know who he is.”
“He’s a suspect in the death of Earl Wellington,” Rhodes said, “and a suspect in a lot of thefts that have been going on in the county.” He looked at Jennifer. “That should be enough for your Web site. I’ll give you everything else later.” He turned to Hack. “Get the deputies now. I’ll be at the courthouse.”
“Might’s well meet ’em here,” Hack said. “Now that ever’body knows what’s goin’ on.”
He had a point. “All right. Call them in.”
“Can I stay?” Jennifer asked. “I’ll be quiet. Promise. I won’t say a word.”
“No video,” Rhodes said. “No photos. No note taking.”
“You’re a hard man, Sheriff.”
“Tell me about it,” Hack said. “He’s touchy, too. You’re lucky he ain’t started snappin’ at you by now.”
“Call the deputies, Hack,” Rhodes said.
“See how he is?” Hack said, but before Rhodes could say any more, he turned to the radio and started making the calls.
* * *
Jennifer Loam did as she promised. She sat on the opposite side of the big room and didn’t say a thing while Rhodes went over the situation with Buddy, Duke, and Ruth.
“I’ve been telling you that this county needs a SWAT team,” Buddy said. “Mikey Burns agrees with me, too.”
Commissioner Burns had once told Rhodes that what the county really needed was at least one M-16 rifle. For firepower. Rhodes had thought at the time that it was a goofy idea. Maybe he’d been wrong.
“You and Burns can discuss that some other time,” Rhodes said. “Since we don’t have a SWAT team, we’ll just have to go with what we’ve got, and that’s us.”
“What’s the plan?” Ruth asked.
Rhodes explained what the compound looked like and what the layout was on the inside. “There are five men, three women, and three children in the compound. I don’t know what will happen when we get there. Able might decide to turn Duffy over, but I doubt it. I’m sure that the other men are involved in the metal thefts with Duffy. Maybe Able is, too. That makes it tricky.”
“What about the walls?” Duke asked. “How solid are they?”
“Solid and braced. We might be able to pull them over, but that would mean an all-out fight. I hope we can avoid that.”
“If we can’t avoid it, then we can’t,” Buddy said, sounding a little too eager. Rhodes wanted to be sure he never sent Buddy and Shelby out together.
“I don’t want anybody to be hurt,” Rhodes said. “Not them, not us.”
“Especially not us,” Ruth said.
“That’s right,” Rhodes said, “so let’s not get excited. No shooting unless I tell you. We’re just there to make a peaceful arrest.”
“If they’ll let us,” Buddy said. “What if they won’t?”
“We’ll see,” Rhodes said.
Hack, who hadn’t made any promises to be quiet, said, “Seems to me you need yourselves a plan B.”
“I’ll come up with one,” Rhodes said.
“You gonna tell us what it is?”
“I don’t remember you being a part of this discussion.”
“Just tryin’ to help,” Hack said. “No need to get touchy about it. You’re always gettin’ touchy.”
“I’m touchy because I don’t have a plan B,” Rhodes said.
* * *
Rhodes led the caravan to the compound. The county cars were almost bumper to bumper as they left the highway and navigated the dirt road through the trees. When they came to the clearing, Rhodes drove off the road and stopped well away from the compound fence. He got out of the car as the deputies stopped nearby. They joined him, and Buddy said, “Now what?”
“Now I make a phone call,” Rhodes said.
He took out his flip phone and punched in the number that Duffy had used to call the jail. He’d gotten the number from Hack before they left, and he hoped it would work.
It did. Duffy answered.
“That you, Sheriff?”
“It’s me,” Rhodes said. “How’d you know?”
“We’re real up-to-date here. Got caller ID and everything. Plus you made quite an entrance.”
“I thought you might notice.”
“I bet you did. What can we do for you?”
“I want you to come on out, Duffy.”
“Why would I do that?”
“One reason would be that you’re under arrest.”
Duffy laughed. “Nope. You got that all wrong, Sheriff. I’m in here, you’re out there, and I’m a free man. Not coming out. You might’ve brought some friends along to help you, but it won’t do you any good. You can’t arrest me if you can’t get to me. Besides, I didn’t do anything.”
“You stole metal from air conditioners. I’ve seen Wellington’s video.”