“Really? Hmm…I wonder what he wanted with all that old stuff.”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
CHAPTER 60
Henry knew he had the rock quarry killer. The entire trip back to the station Wally Hobbs kept complaining about his stomach hurting. In that tinny voice he begged Henry to stop the car so he could throw up. Well, at least the bastard waited until they got to the County Sheriff’s Office. He thought about making Hobbs clean up the mess, but he knew he shouldn’t push his good fortune.
Now he had Hobbs handcuffed to a metal folding chair in their interrogation room. Actually, it wasn’t really an interrogation room but a break room with a coffeemaker and an empty plate of crumbs.
He had already read him his rights, or his version of them. Sometimes he knew he left out a word or two.
“What do you think you were doing, Walter?” He wondered if he could bully the little man into confessing. Then he remembered that Hobbs’s partner was the biggest bully in town. He had probably built up some kind of immunity. “You want me to call your sister?”
“No. Don’t call Lillian.”
“What’s wrong? You don’t want your sister knowing you dig up bodies and slice them up?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve seen your handiwork, Hobbs. What is it with you? You kill some and when you get bored you dig some up?”
“I haven’t killed anyone.”
“How could you dig up someone like Steve Earlman? Don’t you have any respect for the dead?”
“I didn’t dig him up.”
Wally Hobbs’s eyes were the size of quarters and sweat poured down his forehead. Henry could smell him.
“How many have you killed and how many have you dug up?”
“Wait. You’ve got to listen to me. I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Right.”
“Marley and Calvin and me, we just wanted to make some extra money.”
“Marley? Jake Marley?” Henry sat down on the edge of the table. “Marley’s in this with you?”
“We didn’t think it would hurt anybody. Life insurance policies usually pay for everything, so it’s not like we were taking it out of the families’ pockets.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I was just trying to fix it so that if anyone checked they wouldn’t know.”
“Check what?” Suddenly it was hot in the room and Henry needed to open a window.
“If anyone checked…you know, Steve Earlman’s grave. Marley sells them the vault, but we don’t actually use a vault. We divide the money three ways.” Hobbs looked scared. “It was Marley’s idea.”
Henry rubbed a hand over his face and he couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Wally Hobbs was a weasel and a thief, but he was no killer.
CHAPTER 61
Adam Bonzado didn’t like what he was thinking. It couldn’t be possible and yet it made sense.
He had driven back to West Haven, all the way to his lab at the university to retrieve the rest of the Polaroids Dr. Stolz had given him. It was bad enough that the victims’ head wounds matched the exact angle of the pry bar he kept in the El Camino, but now he needed to check something else.
He grabbed the photos and rushed out of the lab, bumping into several of his students, barely mumbling a greeting. Now in the parking lot once again, he stood at the tailgate of his pickup. He stood there, hesitating with the Polaroid in his hand. It was a photo of the victim with the pronounced livor mortis on her back.
Adam knew that livor mortis was the result of gravity pulling and settling all the blood to the lowest area of the body. This victim had been laid on her back for several hours after her death. That’s why the skin on her back was so red. Called the bruising of death, livor mortis also had the tendency of transforming the skin’s texture. The skin often took up the pattern of the surface it was laid out on. So a body laid out on a brick sidewalk might have indentations resembling brick and mortar. A body found dead on a gravel road might have a pebbled texture. And in this case, a body laid out in a pickup with a waffle-pattern bed lining might have a waffle-pattern imprint.
Adam pulled down the tailgate and held up the Polaroid. The pattern matched the dead woman’s back. And as much as he didn’t want to believe it, he knew that Simon Shelby was the only person who had borrowed his pickup.
CHAPTER 62
Maggie knew she couldn’t wait for Watermeier. Wherever he was he wasn’t responding to any of her phone calls and her cell phone was on the verge of completely dying.
Jennifer Carpenter had to have been killed within the last twelve hours, which meant that the killer was becoming more and more paranoid. If he still had Joan Begley and was keeping her alive, Maggie knew it wouldn’t be for much longer.
She drove slowly on Whippoorwill Drive, in the opposite direction of the rock quarry. Luc sat quietly beside her. She hoped he hadn’t blanked out on her again. At least not until he showed her where Simon Shelby lived.
“Turn up here. In that direction,” he said, pointing with an animated wave of his whole arm. “You can’t see the buildings from the road. The mailbox is one of those big galvanized steel ones that sits on a barrel. You know, one of those big wooden barrels.”
Maggie glanced at him. He had to be kidding. A barrel? But Luc didn’t see the irony.
At the courthouse, the clerk who helped Maggie look up the estate sale records of Steve Earlman told Maggie that Simon Shelby was a very nice young man. “Poor fellow,” she told Maggie without any prompting, “he lost his father when he was just a boy. Loved his daddy. I remember going to the butcher shop and seeing him there on Saturdays, helping Ralph. He had a cute nickname for Simon. I can’t remember what it was, though.
“Simon really was crushed, just crushed when Ralph died. I don’t think Sophie knew what to do with the boy. I think that’s when he started getting sick a lot. We all felt so bad for Sophie. All that worry probably sent her to an early grave. But he’s such a nice young man now.” The woman rambled on and Maggie, who usually hated small talk, simply nodded and listened, noting all the coincidences.
But it was more than coincidence when the clerk said, “He’s working his way through college now, the University of New Haven.”
“Really?” Maggie had said, still more interested in the individual auction items.
“Something to do with bones, of all things,” the clerk told her, and Maggie almost dropped the book of records. “I suppose that makes sense in some way, huh? I mean being the son of a butcher.” The woman had laughed. “Frankly, I think it’s a little morbid myself. But he must enjoy that sort of stuff. He works part-time at Marley and Marley Funeral Home, too. Such a hard worker.”
“That nickname his father used?” Maggie asked the woman, although by this time she had felt certain she already knew the answer. “Was it Sonny?”
“Yes, that’s it. How did you know? Ralph called him Sonny, Sonny Boy.”
Now Maggie saw the mailbox on the wooden barrel before Luc’s arm started waving at it, but she drove past the driveway.
