by Shannon Hill
We shared a shudder. Then I pushed myself to my feet. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”
***^***
There’s this idea that everyone knows everything in a tiny town. Usually, they do. Unfortunately, Spottswood Lane isn’t really considered part of Crazy, though it’s in town limits. It is a freakish addendum built by the Ellers some years back to make money off the people who want rural privacy within an hour of either Charlottesville or Lynchburg. Back before the McMansions were built, Spottswood Lane didn’t exist. The bulk of it was actually the lower part of Turner Gap Road, off which Turner Mountain Road leads up to Aunt Marge’s house. Then the Ellers bought up a bunch of land, and put up the McMansions. There are thirteen of them, and most are on the inside of the semi-circle, their yards overlooking Spottswood Park. Which was bought by the Littlepages and donated to the town for a park as a slap against the Ellers for building the McMansions. And since most of the houses on Spottswood weren’t bought by locals, and the feud hung over the whole matter, very few people in Crazy pay any attention at all to the goings-on of Spottswood Lane.
To complicate matters, a third of the town’s commuters use Spottswood to get to Turner Gap Road, in hopes of avoiding the speed trap I usually set up somewhere on Piedmont. Asking which cars had been seen on Spottswood was more or less pointless.
Pointless as it was, we asked.
It never fails to amaze me that people who can tell you all about a neighbor’s inability to weed the flowerbeds, trim the hedges, properly bag trash or maintain control of a pet will still, in event of a crime, have noticed absolutely nothing of use to a cop.
I plodded over to what remained of the Weed house, and joined Punk. The firemen had trampled the grass, destroyed any hope of evidence beyond traces of the pipe bomb. And even half of those were probably washed into the mud.
Boris bounded past us and began sniffing eagerly around the perimeter of the back yard. I tossed Punk a cold bottle of Gatorade that Mrs. Vogt had given me. I could hear the thunk of her hammer as she nailed plastic over her broken windows. “Anything?”
Punk swigged, shook his head. “Can’t believe this,” he said, and perched on a beam from the collapsed deck. “Here. Hell, anywhere. Who’d hate enough to do this to someone?”
Rhetorical question, I knew.
“I mean, adults, okay, but kids…” He gestured broadly. “The neighbors’ kids.”
He passed me the Gatorade. I drank, and handed it back. “We’ll get ‘em.”
“Yeah.”
In the privacy of the destroyed house’s back yard, Punk’s hand crept over and came to rest on mine. I squeezed back. We let go simultaneously. It wouldn’t do to get caught on the job.
I suddenly noticed an absence of jealous cat. “Where’d Boris go?”
Punk and I both stood, began looking. We split up, pacing along the trees that ringed the yard. Another problem in our investigation. Every yard on Spottswood was surrounded by trees. Privacy is great, until you need a witness.
I caught a glimpse of black and white on a tree trunk. Relief flooded me. “Boris!”
He stayed on the tree, teeth bared, tail lashing. His claws scrabbled. I followed his line of sight and spotted the bird nest he was after. “C’mon now, baby,” I crooned under my breath. I held my hands up but Boris wouldn’t budge. “C’mon, sweetie. Let’s go. Leave the nice birds alone.”
Boris hissed up at the mama bird. She screeked. I winced. “Dammit, Boris, I am not climbing up there!”
He roweled, twisted, and leapt. I tried to catch him, missed, and swore. Next thing I knew, he was stalking away, making angry noises to himself. He plunked down under a hickory and started washing his belly with quick, angry licks, still grousing in pungent Feline.
Punk grinned. “He’s cussin’ up a storm.”
I stared at the cat. Then I stared beyond the cat. “Punk. Look.”
He looked.
Behind the tree under which Boris sat, someone had left behind two cigarette butts, and a plastic bottle that still held a little water. The brand was national, sold everywhere. That was only marginally helpful, evidence-wise. DNA doesn’t stick to everything quite the way TV shows tell you it does, and when it does, it’s not always usable. Not to mention you have to find the person it belongs to for it to be any good in court.
The cigarette butts, however, might be very useful. I grabbed the tweezers out of my little belt pouch of miscellaneous items, and dropped the butts into an evidence bag after Punk took a few photographs of them in the leaves. “They’re dry,” I said quietly.
“Had a heavy dew last night.”
“Mm-hmm.”
I tracked into the woods. This patch separated the Spottswood Lane from the world. I found no footprints, but that was no surprise. The undergrowth was minimal, last year’s leaves were decently packed, and you’d need special training to find any traces of a person’s passage. On the other hand, I could soon see through the trees to Turner Gap Road.
I walked back to Punk. He and Boris were having a stare-down. As far as I could tell, Boris was winning.
“He could’ve parked over on Turner Gap.” I used my hat to fan myself against the afternoon sun. “We’ll give Aunt Marge a call. And the Reynolds family.”
There’s only one house within town limits on Turner Gap Road. It belongs to the Reynolds family, whose farm provides eggs, chickens, milk, veggies, the whole deal. They supply a lot of the produce for the Food Mart, and you can get it direct from them in a community-supported agriculture set-up they call “farm market on wheels”.
We had two other chances at witnesses. The Littlepage Eller animal shelter sits at the corner of Turner Mountain and Turner Gap roads. It was staffed entirely by volunteers controlled by Aunt Marge. The other hope was Aunt Marge and Roger. The Turner mansion has a damn fine view over the valley.
“You really think we’ll find anything?”
I shrugged. “Won’t find anything if we don’t at least look.”
I scooped up Boris and headed back to the road. We ducked around our own yellow tape, studied the house’s remains. Black, damp, charcoal-reeking, torn to splinters.
What kind of job do you have that you are grateful the worst that happened was a house blowing up?
Oh yeah. Mine.
***^***
Adam and Vicky Weed sat next to each other on the sagging orange couch in the Emergicare. Their kids flopped across two very rigid green chairs. Aida was crying steadily. Stone clung to his backpack like it was a teddy bear. Their fear cut me through the middle. It’s a fact of life that kids get screwed over, but to have your house blown apart and burned down was worse than the usual run of unfairness.
Vicky’s nails had left marks in Adam’s hand. “Who did this?”
Behind me, I heard Punk and Tom decamp. Cowards.
“We don’t know yet. It’s early.” I flipped open my notebook. “Let’s get some things ruled out.”
It’s always best to tell people you’re ruling things out. They get much less defensive. Less worried that what they say will be held against them.
I ran down the questions. Anyone come in to make repairs recently? Do yard work? Gas company issues? Funny smells? Excavations that hadn’t involved calling the 1-800 number? Any chemicals or paint or anything similar lying around? Anyone hanging around? Strangers? Cars they didn’t recognize? Anything at all out of the ordinary?
Across the room, Aida Weed stirred. “Um.”
Even in crisis, Vicky was a mother and English teacher. “Um is not a word.”
Aida cleared her throat. “I know, Mom, but…well…it’s…” She started to dig into the shoulder bag that passed for a purse. “This was in the mailbox and we have to do a current events thing in class so I thought this could be something to talk about.”
“Something to discuss,” corrected Vicky, who obviously didn’t feel like fighting about the whole “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” rule. “What is it, Aida?”
Aida slumped over. She stuck out a hand full of folded paper. I took it and unfolded it carefully. It looked superficially like one of those homemade political flyers, except it wasn’t on brightly colored paper, had no official organizational letterhead, and was lacking polish.
It read, and I include every typo and misspelling:
“SENATOR WEED HAS RUINED OUR COUNTRY AND THE FUTUR OF OUR KIDS HE HAS TO LISTEN TO US. HE WILL HERE WHAT WE GOT TO SAY. NO MORE GOVERNMENT IN OUR LIVES. Paid for by Americans.”
There was a logo on the flyer. It looked like some clip-art, an American flag with an eagle spreading its wings above it, and someone had drawn a crude pair of crossed guns across the flag. There was also a picture of Senator Weed, probably downloaded from some website. It had been superimposed on a swastika.
Oh, crap.
I hate politics.
Dan Weed was from one county over, and he was considered notoriously liberal. He’d gotten elected to the US Senate after fifteen years in Richmond doing not much in the state senate except somehow giving the impression that he was a hard-core fluffy-bunny liberal. I wasn’t sure how that had happened. Just about everyone knew he was married to some big tobacco money, and his daughter was engaged to big chemical money. Since he’d gone up to DC, he had a reputation as a pretty solid moderate. He’d been in the news a week or so ago for speaking in favor of some sort of Medicare reform, but someone always hollers about Medicare reform, one way or another.
“Mind if I keep it?” I asked brightly. “You’re not supposed to stick stuff in mailboxes like that. Makes the post office upset.”
Aida did something with her shoulders that was a not-quite-shrug. I turned my back on the pretense of calling Boris away from a potted plant, and tucked the flyer into an evidence bag. It might be a coincidence, the fact the victims and the politician in the flyer had the same last name. Or it might not. There’d been a little almost-incident up by Charlottesville a while back where someone with the same last name as a politician had some trouble at his house with people who seriously disliked that politician.
If there’s one thing I never underestimate, it’s the blind stupid malice of the human race.
I asked a few more routine questions. I thanked the Weeds. I picked up Boris. I sauntered to my cruiser, where I could finally, safely, express a serious profanity. The last thing I wanted was to go up against someone with a bomb fetish.
It’s not that I’m against dissent. It’s practically built into the Constitution, when you think about the Bill of Rights and all the freedoms of speech and assembly and all. We’re supposed to dissent. The key part being, dissent peacefully. Not with explosives.
Boris merowed and butted me in the chin. Then he rubbed his cheek against me. Clearly, he was saying, it was best to be a cat.
“Got that right,” I told him, and went back to the office to start the investigation.
5.
I have a white board. Two white boards. One is a calendar that tracks my rare court appearances. The other is for investigations. I finished jotting down what we knew, stepped back, heard an agonized rubber squeak, and kicked Boris’s mousey across the room. He bolted after it, and vanished behind the couch. I heard a clatter of claws, mousey, and squeaks, and Boris re-emerged covered in dust bunnies with a furry catnip chipmunk in his mouth.
“Y’know,” I said, “we really need to clean behind the couch.”
Punk swung his prosthesis up on his desk. “You want me to see to it before or after I bake the cookies?”
God save me from touchy men. Which is all men, when you come down to it.
I held onto my temper. Our department was not adjusting well to Kim Lincoln going from trusted friend and co-worker to confessed felon. It was the small stuff, like dust bunnies, and unwashed coffee cups. I shook my head at Punk, and called Aunt Marge, because some problems need solving even more than pipe bomb cases.
She answered on the third ring. “Yes, dear?”
I explained succinctly, “We need housekeeping help over here. Any chance you can organize some?”
I’ve always thought Aunt Marge would have made a phenomenal dictator. “Any preferences, dear?”
“Brevity and discretion,” I replied. “I can’t pay.”
“I know just the person. She’ll start tomorrow.”
Even I was taken aback. “Shouldn’t you ask her first?”
“Nonsense!” said Aunt Marge briskly, without any trace of the faintly British accent she sometimes affects if she watches too much BBC on PBS. That was Roger’s influence. He preferred cable movie channels. “My cousin Veronica will be happy to help, and she can even make the meals for any inmates.”
That solved another problem. “You sure?”
“I will see to it.”
God having spoken, I hung up the phone. I cocked an eyebrow at Punk. “Now can we get some work done?”
He looked a little chagrined, and sat up straight. Good.
“We’ve got no witnesses so far, no idea how many people got those flyers, and no idea if the flyer is connected to the pipe bomb. And no pieces big enough to get a fingerprint, that’s for damn sure.” I sat at my desk and reached for my stash of chocolate. “How many people you figure in this county could build a good solid pipe bomb? One that didn’t blow off their own hands, I mean?”
Punk groaned and put his hands behind his head. “Hell. Well, figure half the guys in this county were in the service…half of ‘em hate the government for something…Hell. How many people we got in this county?”
“Fifteen thousand, give or take, and assume half of them are men.” I hate to be sexist, but the truth is, women just don’t go in for bombs the way men do.
Punk grew thoughtful. I could practically hear his mental calculator ratcheting along. “Maybe a thousand might do it,” he judged. “If you don’t got an age bias.”
“Only a thousand. You’re an optimist. I figured closer to fifteen hundred.”
“Gotta take booze into account.”
Good point.
I studied the list of known facts. “I don’t like this timeline. Broad daylight’s damn bold. Unless it had a remote detonator, but that’s a little more sophisticated than I’d expect.” I shook my head, and lifted my feet as Boris and his chipmunk came skittering through. “I dunno. Maybe it’s just me, but politics makes a lousy motive for blowing up someone’s house.”
“It’s just you,” Punk said.
I glared. He gave a shrug. “Buildings get blown up all the time for politics.”
“I know that,” I retorted. “I said house. That’s personal.”
“Politics gets personal.”
I counted to ten. It only gave me more time to get pissed off. “You have anything helpful to say?”
Punk got up in a hurry and snatched up his hat. “You could always ask Steve.”
He stomped out.
Boris hopped into my lap and dropped the fake chipmunk into my hands. He said, “Mrrp!”
“Thank you, sweetie,” I said, and kissed him where the black spreads over his face like the shadow of a jauntily tilted hat. I jerked a thumb at the closed door. “And that is why we neuter.”
***^***
I re-interviewed the Weeds the next morning. I tackled the kids first, with their mother present. I did it at the Country Rose, where Lynn was giving them a free week’s stay. If I’d dragged them into the office, I’d have a PR nightmare.
We sat on the breakfast porch. At that hour, it was deserted, except for the butterflies and hummingbirds in Lynn’s garden. Boris settled in on a chair to watch them. That was fine by me. Nobody wants to believe me, except maybe Punk, but Boris twitches his tail exactly twice in the presence of a lie.
“Okay, Stone,” I said to the boy. “Tell me about…this whole last week. You excited that school’s about done?”
That earned a tiny glimmer of a smile.
“When do you have your last test?”
I barely heard his “Fr
iday.”
“Are you going to camp this summer?”
“Bible camp,” he specified, mouth twisting. “I wanna go to soccer camp but it’s too far.”
I’d say. There isn’t a soccer camp in the county. Three Bible camps and summer school, that’s about all we’ve got. There was a rumor Cousin Jack intended to let someone run a horseback riding camp thing up at the Littlepage estate, but until Aunt Marge confirmed it, I wouldn’t believe it.
I listened to Stone tell me that he hated math, loved graphic novels about zombies, and hadn’t been allowed to play outside for nearly two weeks because he’d left his bicycle in the driveway and his mother ran over it, and it messed up her car. Instead, he had to read a chapter a night from a big book and write a page about it.
I hid my grin. “Aunt Marge did that to me,” I informed him. “I had to read Charles Dickens. Hard Times.”
Stone dipped his head. He whispered, “I have to read a book about a girl.”
Ouch.
I moved on to Aida. I didn’t take her pout personally. It comes with puberty, like the pimples and roller coaster of hormones. “Okay, Aida, how about you? What’s your week been like?”
Vicky tapped her nails on a table. “Does this all have a point? Shouldn’t you be catching the person who blew up the house?”
Two things caught my attention. First off, she hadn’t bothered to divert me from Stone. Second, she called it the house. Not our house or my house. Interesting. Not necessarily relevant, but relevance is what you figure out as you go. Early in, you note everything. Sooner or later, some of it will stick.
“It’s absolutely necessary,” I smiled to Vicky Weed. “Your kids might’ve noticed more than you did.”
Her eyes narrowed. She had a teacher’s glare. After a childhood with Aunt Marge, I was immune to it. No teacher can glare more fiercely than a quasi-hippie dietitian who catches you with a Twinkie.
“All right, Aida,” I said, “How about you?”
Her days consisted of getting up, walking on the treadmill in the living room for an hour, going to school, hating school, being bored by school, and coming home to do her chores. Bring in the mail, sweep the steps and porch and deck, see to the crockpot meal du jour, make sure Stone didn’t turn into a zombie from all his video games, and do her homework. Then her parents would come home, they would eat supper at the same table like some kind of old TV show, and then she could go upstairs to her room and listen to her iPod and text her friends about how they couldn’t wait to get out of this no-horse nowhere county, and never come back.