by Bill Crider
Ruth Grady was short and stout, but Benton didn’t tower over her. He waved his hands while he talked, and Rhodes thought he might be describing the explosion. He walked over so he could hear. Jennifer Loam was right behind him.
“I told you this was going to happen,” Benton said, catching sight of Rhodes. “Meth labs are notoriously dangerous.”
“A meth lab?” Jennifer said. “Are you sure about that?”
“She’s a reporter,” Rhodes told Benton. “Be careful. There are laws against libel.”
Benton looked thoughtful. “Then I’m not sure what it was. I thought it might have been a meth lab, but I could have been mistaken.”
Jennifer looked disappointed in his response. Rhodes said, “Was anybody hurt?”
“I don’t think so,” Ruth said. “At least nobody we’ve found. We haven’t been able to do much looking.”
“If anybody was in that place, they’d be in pieces by now,” Benton said. “I heard the explosion all the way over at my house. It sounded like a bomb, so I called the fire department. Then I called the EMS and your office.”
The red-and-white ambulance was parked a little farther up the road. Rhodes saw some of the EMTs standing beside it. There was nothing they could do at the moment.
“The Crawford brothers live here,” Rhodes said.
“Lived,” Benton said. “Drug dealers.” He looked at Jennifer. “Or so I’ve heard. Don’t quote me. Anyway, Sheriff, I tried to tell you about this place. Cars used to come to the gate all the time. They’d stop for a while and then drive away. We learned about those signs in the academy.”
Rhodes pointed to Loam’s recorder. “That thing’s taking down every word you say.”
“The Crawfords might have been selling Amway products,” Benton said. “I don’t really know.”
“We never caught the Crawfords at anything,” Rhodes said. “Not even selling Amway.”
“I don’t think what they did matters now,” Benton said. “Not if they were inside when the place blew up.”
Rhodes didn’t have any idea if anyone had been inside or not. He stood and watched the firemen hose down the wreckage, the water making silver streams in the bright sunlight.
After a couple of seconds, Rhodes’s gaze drifted over to the trees that lined the sides of the creek flowing by the Crawfords’ property. It was late summer, just about time for school to start, and the trees suffered from the heat and the lack of rain. Their leaves had already begun to turn brown and drop off.
The creek ran all the way across the county, through the big woods on the eastern side. Rhodes had already had one bad experience along the banks of that creek, and he didn’t want to have another one.
Benton took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief from his back pocket. His forehead extended quite a way back. Rhodes thought that Benton was probably one of the few people in the county who wore a hat and certainly one of the few who carried a handkerchief.
As Benton returned the handkerchief to his pocket, he turned and looked back down the road. Rhodes turned, too, and saw a rust-colored pickup headed their way. Dust billowed up behind it.
The pickup’s brakes squealed as it slid to a stop. Larry Crawford jumped out and started to run toward what was left of his home. He was chubby and unathletic, and his arms flapped against his sides. He had a small mustache, which was the only thing that made it possible to know he wasn’t Terry. His eyes were wild. He was wearing a T-shirt with lettering on the front: I’M WITH STUPID. Under the words, an arrow pointed to the left.
“Terry!” Crawford yelled. “Terry!”
He didn’t seem to see Rhodes or the others. Rhodes stepped in front of him and put out a hand to stop him. Crawford ran right on past, knocking Rhodes’s arm aside.
“I’ll get him,” Ruth said.
She ran along after him, then reached out and grabbed his belt. He dragged her for a couple of steps before he came to a stop.
He turned and looked at her. “My brother was in that trailer. I gotta get him.”
“You’ll have to wait,” Ruth told him. “It’s not safe right now.”
Crawford turned his round bald head and stared at the smoking remains of his home.
“What if he’s hurt? We gotta help him!”
“That’s what the EMTs are for,” Rhodes said, walking up to them, followed by Loam and Benton. “If there’s anything to be done for your brother, they’ll do it.” Rhodes paused. “You’re lucky you weren’t here.”
“I had to go to Wal-Mart to get some groceries. Terry wanted to go with me, but I told him to stay here. I gotta find him.”
He tried to run toward the double-wide again, but Ruth still had hold of his belt. His feet slipped in the sand.
“If your brother was in there, you won’t be much help to him now,” Rhodes said.
Crawford’s shoulders sagged. “Goddammit,” he said.
“You shouldn’t talk that way in front of women,” Benton said. “It’s not polite.”
Crawford looked at Benton the way he might have looked at a Martian had one walked up.
“You’re that nosy asshole who lives down the road,” he said.
“Usually only my students call me that,” Benton said. “Mainly the ones who have trouble with fractions.”
Crawford glared at him. “I’ve never been any student of yours. And I might not know much about fractions, either, but I know I can kick your ass.”
Benton gave him a superior smile. “I don’t think so.” He struck a pose that looked to Rhodes like something out of The Karate Kid. “I’m a master of the martial arts.”
Rhodes hoped Ruth had a good hold on Crawford’s belt. Otherwise, he’d probably kill Benton right then and there. Not that Rhodes didn’t respect the martial arts. He just didn’t believe Benton knew anything about them.
“I also play guitar,” Benton went on. Rhodes noticed that he was looking at Ruth, not Crawford. He raised up on his toes and sank back down a couple of times. “And I do fifty push-ups every morning. Except when I do a hundred.”
Crawford struggled to get to him, dragging Ruth along, but she managed to hold him back. After a few seconds, he relaxed, and Benton dropped his pose.
“I just want to find my brother,” Crawford said.
“We’ll take care of that,” Rhodes told him.
But they didn’t. After they got Crawford calmed down and after there was no more danger of fire, they determined that there was no body to be found, not unless it was covered by some of the wreckage that was too heavy and hot to lift, which was always a possibility.
Crawford twitched with agitation. “I don’t know where Terry could’ve got off to. He has to have been in there. He wasn’t one to go wandering around.”
“Do you have another car?” Jennifer asked.
“Just that old Ford.” Crawford looked at the car crushed under the roof of the mobile home. “Nobody’s going anywhere in that.”
“Terry will show up,” Ruth said.
Crawford shook his head. “I wish he was here right now.”
“Where will you stay?” Rhodes asked him.
He wanted to know, because if it was determined that there had been a meth lab in the mobile home, as Rhodes suspected was the case, Crawford might be subject to arrest.
“I got a cousin out at Obert,” Crawford said. “Jamey Hamilton. I can stay with him.”
Rhodes knew Hamilton. He had a one-chair barbershop in Obert. He’d been written up a time or two for traffic violations, nothing serious. As far as Rhodes knew, he’d never had anything to do with drugs.
“We’ll let you know if we find anything,” Rhodes said.
“I just don’t believe he’d wander off,” Crawford said. “That wasn’t his way.”
“You should be glad he did.”
“I am. I am. But it don’t seem right to me. Something’s wrong about this, Sheriff. I mean, I can see how the propane tank might blow up, but we were always careful w
ith it. And where’s Terry?”
“Propane tank?” Jennifer said.
“Sure. That’s what blew up. It had to be.”
Rhodes almost smiled. Crawford was already getting his cover-up established.
Jennifer questioned him some more, but Rhodes didn’t listen. He wondered himself what might have happened to Terry. He had an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. How had Terry gotten out of the house? Or, if he’d been out when the explosion occurred, where had he gone?
Crawford left after awhile. Rhodes walked to the pickup with him. The bed was littered with junk: a tire, a hubcap, a crowbar, and a couple of wrenches. The cab wasn’t much cleaner.
“You stay around the county,” Rhodes said. “I’ll need to talk to you again.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Crawford replied.
He drove away and was soon followed by the ambulance, Ruth Grady, Benton, and the fire trucks. Only Jennifer Loam, the fire chief, and Rhodes remained.
A man named Parker was the fire chief. He and Rhodes had worked together on a case or two before, most recently one involving a dead man whose body had been found in a burning house. Jennifer had been right there for that one, too.
Rhodes thought that Parker looked relieved that this time there wasn’t a body, though it was hard to see his face under the helmet he wore. Parker took off the helmet and wiped his face with his hand.
“What do you think happened to Terry Crawford?” he asked.
Rhodes shook his head. “I don’t have any idea. What do you think caused the explosion?”
Parker looked at Jennifer and her little recording device. “Hard to be sure at this point.”
“You can make a guess, can’t you?” Rhodes said.
Parker shook his head. “I don’t like to guess.”
“I won’t hold you to it, and neither will Ms. Loam. This is off the record.”
Jennifer gave Rhodes a look, but she nodded and turned off the recorder.
“Could the Crawfords have been running a meth lab out of this place?” Rhodes said when he was sure Jennifer was no longer recording.
“Well,” Parker said, “that’s a possibility, but I don’t think it’s what caused the explosion.”
Rhodes was surprised, but then he realized he should have known it couldn’t have been a meth explosion, not if there wasn’t a lab.
He was almost certain there hadn’t been a meth lab. He’d have smelled it if there had been any trace. For that matter, people living nearby, even someone as far away as Benton, would have smelled it long ago. No matter what Benton thought he’d seen, he hadn’t smelled anything, not that he’d mentioned to Rhodes at any rate.
“What do you think was the problem?” he asked.
“I think the propane tank blew up,” Parker told him.
Chapter 3
THEY WOULDN’T KNOW FOR SURE ABOUT THE PROPANE TANK until after a complete investigation, which Parker promised would be done the next day.
“You’d better chain the gate when you leave,” he told Rhodes. “That’ll keep people away from here. I’ll leave you a padlock. We always carry a spare, and there was plenty of slack in the chain.”
He got Rhodes the lock and left. Rhodes put the lock in his car, then stood on the hill and remembered the last time he’d been there, years earlier, when he was just a boy. The mobile home hadn’t been there, but an old frame house had been. It had long since been torn down.
Rhodes’s father had told him that a hill by a creek was a good place to look for arrowheads, and Rhodes had ridden his bicycle out of town to this very place. He’d found a couple of arrowheads, too, and he still had them stuck away somewhere or other.
It was too hot to walk around and look for arrowheads now, but Rhodes had to do some walking anyway. It wouldn’t do to leave the scene and not give it a careful going-over. What was left of the Crawfords’ house would be examined by the fire department’s inspector, but Rhodes wanted to check out the surrounding property. Besides the fact that it was standard procedure, Rhodes couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling he had.
Not that there was much to see. The grass was mostly dead, and the weeds, though they still stood tall in places, were brown and dry. The good news was that the dryness wasn’t good for chiggers, and even the fire ants would be somewhere underground and out of the way. After a good rain, the ant mounds would pop up everywhere, and the chiggers would be out in force, but it had been so long since it had rained in Blacklin County that Rhodes wasn’t in any danger of getting bitten or stung that day. He thought the ants might appear soon, however, at least on those parts of the ground that had been soaked by the fire department.
Off to Rhodes’s left were the road and the bridge. The trees were thinner there, but downstream on the right, they were much thicker, a regular little woods that covered several acres. The Crawfords must have owned at least ten acres in all, and only about half of it was cleared.
The cleared part was peppered with mesquites, some of them nearly as high as Rhodes’s head. If they weren’t dug up or poisoned, the entire hillside would soon be covered with them. Even in the heat and the drought, their leaves were green. It took more than a drought to kill a mesquite tree.
The weeds whisked and husked as Rhodes walked down the hill, and grasshoppers flew up all around him. Some of them hit him and bounced off. Others flew on by. Unlike the chiggers and fire ants, they didn’t seem bothered by the lack of rain. They were like the mesquites that way.
Occasionally, Rhodes looked down to see a piece of the mobile home, a twisted bit of blackened metal that the explosion had tossed a long way from its origin.
Rhodes ignored the grasshoppers and the bits of metal and looked for a sign of something or other that might be a clue. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. Nothing in particular, that was for sure.
But even with his uncertainty, he ran across something almost at once, not far from an old well that had served the house originally built on the property. It’s probably dry now, Rhodes thought, but broken and flattened weeds showed that someone had passed that way not too long before, headed in the direction of the creek.
Rhodes followed the fresh trail down toward the trees that lined the creek. From the side of the hill, he could see that only a thin stream of water, hardly more than an inch deep and less than a foot wide, trickled through the creek bed. Rhodes remembered a time not so long ago when the water had run deep and swift enough to expose the bones of a mammoth. A lot more was exposed before that episode was over, he thought, hoping that he wouldn’t make any grim discoveries.
But he did. He was almost to the creek when he found Terry Crawford. He lay on his back, his dead eyes staring up at nothing. He wore a T-shirt identical to his brother’s, except that the arrow pointed to the right.
And except for the blood, quite a bit of it, almost obscuring the arrow and the wording.
Rhodes always felt a hollow sadness when he saw a dead body. Maybe it was pity. There was something about the absence of light in the eyes that affected him. Terry Crawford might not have been of much account, but he didn’t deserve to be killed for no reason and left to lie in a dry field for the buzzards to find. Or the sheriff.
Rhodes looked away, first down to the dry creek bed and then up at the cloudless sky. No buzzards yet, but they’d be along soon enough if he didn’t get the body moved. That couldn’t be done until the crime scene had been worked.
A grasshopper hummed past. Rhodes swatted at it and missed. Then he started back up the hill.
“Well, it’s obvious that he didn’t die in the explosion,” Ruth Grady said.
Rhodes nodded. He’d called Ruth on the radio and told her to come back because he wanted her to work the scene.
“The JP should be here in a few minutes,” Rhodes said. “The ambulance is on the way back, too. You see what you can find out here, and I’ll go tell Larry about his brother.”
“He’s not going to take it well.”
“Yo
u think?” Rhodes said.
Rhodes could have driven to Obert on the county road, but he went back to the highway and took that route. He’d worked a few cases in Obert, the most recent one involving the rock crusher that had moved into town, blasting away at the limestone hill where Obert sat, the highest point in the county. As a result of a murder and a conviction, the rock crusher had been shut down. It would eventually be sold, and the blasting would start again, but that would take quite some time. Meanwhile, the residents of Obert had a little break from the noise, dust, and disruptions.
Obert, as even its residents would have had to admit, wasn’t much of a town. Its population was around four hundred, and only a few buildings and stores remained. Most of them faced the highway that was the town’s main street. One of the buildings was Jamey Hamilton’s barbershop. Rhodes parked in front of it and got out of the car.
A short red-and-white barber pole hung on the brick wall, and a sign that said CLOSED hung on the inside of the glass door. Rhodes rattled the doorknob and tapped on the glass, but nobody showed up. He peered through the glass and saw only a barber chair and a couple of regular chairs for the customers.
Rhodes went next door to Michal Schafer’s Antiques Emporium. A black-and-white cat slept, unmoving, in a window display that included a couple of old school lunch boxes with Disney cartoon characters on them, a few dishes with designs that might have been hand-painted, a couple of motors for ceiling fans, a board with samples of different kinds of barbed wire attached to it, and three lightning rod arrows with colored glass where there would have been feathers on an actual arrow.
Rhodes opened the door and went inside, causing an overhead bell to jingle. Michal was in the back of the large, dimly lit room, standing behind an old candy counter that held baseball cards, some paperback books, a stack of 45 rpm records, and a pile of eight-track tapes, but no candy.
“What can I do for you, Sheriff?” she asked when Rhodes made his way back to her through the crowded aisles. “Could I interest you in some baseball cards?” She tapped with a fingernail on the glass top of the candy counter. “I have a Jeff Bagwell rookie card here.”