“Yeah, you could say so. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. Just wondered if you’d talked to Reid this afternoon?”
“Not yet.” Dwight fanned some message slips with Reid’s name on them. “You know what all these are about?”
“I probably ought to let him tell you.”
“Probably. But all I’m getting is his answering machine, so why don’t you go ahead and tell me yourself?”
Dwight listened in silence till I got to the part about Bobbie Jean Last-name-unknown being afraid of what her husband would do to Jerry Somebody if he found out they’d gone bass fishing together somewhere up in Massachusetts.
“Bobbie Jean Pritchett and Jerry Farmer.”
“You know them?”
“Be nice if Bagwell had told us this before,” he sighed.
“Before what?”
“Before Cecil Pritchett gave Farmer three broken ribs, a concussion, and a broken jaw.”
“Last night around nine. Pritchett made bail this morning. Farmer’s over in Memorial Hospital. Bobbie Jean’s hightailed it. Probably to her sister in Massachusetts for real this time.”
“Can Farmer talk?”
“Could when he finally came to last night,” said Dwight. “His jaw’s wired shut right now, though.”
“Can he communicate well enough to corroborate Bagwell’s story?”
Dwight gave a palms-up gesture. “Who knows? I’ll tell Ed Gardner, but I wouldn’t count on him turning Bagwell and Starling loose anytime soon though. Starling might not’ve struck the match, but that’s sure his printing on the walls.”
“But if those boys didn’t do it,” I said, “you’ve got an arsonist running around loose.”
“But if they did do it, we don’t have to worry about any more fires right now God knows we’ve got enough on our plate as it is.”
“What?” I asked, realizing that he was more weary than a late drive home should have caused. “Something else has happened, hasn’t it?”
He nodded. “Guess you might as well know. It’ll probably be on the six o’clock news if it isn’t already. They found another body out at Mount Olive.”
21
“Who is it?” I asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Dwight said. “At the moment, all we’ve got are charred bones.”
That explained the dark smudges on his shirt.
As Dwight described it, work had begun today for Mount Olive’s reconstruction. Two members of the church were bulldozer operators and a construction company had given them the use of some earthmoving equipment to clear the site. Others had volunteered to come help, too.
With that low pressure system moving in from the west, they were double-timing to get as much done as possible before the rains got here.
Starting at sunrise this morning, two big yellow bulldozers worked to push off the remains of the fellowship hall and send it to the landfill in heavy-duty dump trucks. By lunchtime, they were ready to start the more delicate operation of pulling off the burned parts of the main building, beginning with the old Sunday School classrooms and the choir stall where the sexton’s body had been found. One forkload of burned choir benches and collapsed flooring went into the dump truck. When the second forkload swung up over the truck bed, a piece of debris fell from the air and landed a few feet from the man supervising the operation.
It was a leg bone.
The supervisor stopped the forklift in midair, took a look into the hole, and sent someone to call the Sheriff’s Department.
“And we put a tarp over it, then called the Medical Examiner and the Feds,” said Dwight. “Deja vu all over again.”
“You didn’t recognize the body?”
“I wasn’t exactly down there nose to nose.”
“Male or female? Gunshot wounds or blunt trauma?”
“Give it a rest,” he said with a big yawn. The chair creaked again as he sank deeper into it.
I thought of how hot it’d been all week and wrinkled my nose. “Must have been quite a stench.”
