If anything was missing, it wasn’t instantly apparent, and just as he reentered the living room, the television screen went black, as did the lights.
They waited a few minutes to see if the electricity would come back on, then Raeford McLamb shook his head pessimistically. “A tree’s probably down across the power line.”
Except for their flashlights and the portable floodlights, they would have been in total darkness, so they went back outside. As they passed the Honda and the pickup, Dwight said, “Y’all check out the vehicles yet?”
Upon receiving negatives from McLamb and Richards, he opened the door of the Honda. The door was frozen to the frame and he had to brace one foot against the car to wrench it open. A rabbit’s foot and a pair of fuzzy green dice hung from the rearview mirror and schoolbooks were piled on the front passenger seat.
“Must be the younger kid’s,” said McLamb.
They found a flat plastic baggie with about an ounce of marijuana under the floor mat. Other than that, the car yielded nothing immediately useful.
Same with the truck, but Dwight noted a gun rack. “Anybody see a gun inside?”
“I’ll take another look,” Mayleen Richards said.
The truck box on the pickup was locked and Dwight called for Jason Wentworth’s keys. A half-inch sheet of ice went flying when the lid was lifted. Inside were some ropes, a tow chain, a bottle of motor oil, another of washer fluid, a nail apron with an assortment of rusty nails in the pockets, a hammer, a crowbar, a large monkey wrench, a bolt-cutter, a new-looking three-foot aluminum level, and a set of Allen wrenches in a shrink-wrapped orange plastic box that had never been opened. If these were the tools of the victim’s trade, they were hard-pressed to decide what that trade might be.
“A jackleg handyman?” McLamb hazarded, stamping his feet to get some feeling back in his toes.
Richards came back and reported that there was no long gun in the trailer, but she had found a handgun in a drawer in the bedroom—a .38 special, fully loaded. “Lying there in plain sight if anyone opened the drawer.”
They all knew that guns and televisions are the most commonly stolen items when a house is burglarized. This was looking less and less like a burglary gone wrong and more and more like deliberate murder where the only things taken were two lives.
“There’s a little shed out back,” McLamb said. “Why don’t I take a quick look?”
He disappeared around the corner of the trailer and Dwight said, “I guess we’re about through here for the night.” He told Denning to take the two rifles from Faison’s truck and process them. “Make sure one of them’s not our murder weapon.”
He turned to Richards and said, “Station one of the uniforms here. Tell him he can sack out on the couch inside if he wants as long as the doors are locked. No one’s to come in except on my say-so.”
Mayleen started to go, then hesitated. “Sir, you want me to notify his people?”
He gave her a tired smile. “Yeah, I’d love to hand it off to you, but I’d better do it myself. You go on home and thaw out.”
At that moment, they heard McLamb call, “Hey, Major! Back here.”
They followed the sound of his voice to a ten-by-ten utility shed backed up against the rear of the trailer.
“Look what I found!” he crowed and flashed his light across three brand-new push mowers, several garden hoses, a small generator, and an array of power tools still in their original boxes. “I guess we know now what sort of work Wentworth did.”
Dwight shook his head. “Wonder what he did with the Jesus statue?”
CHAPTER 15
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MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT— SUNDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 21 (CONTINUED)
Midnight and Dwight was a mile down the road before he began to see lights in the houses he was passing.
The sleet seemed to be lessening, but the accumulations on the ditchbanks glittered when his headlights lit them up, and more tree limbs would be falling, if not some trees themselves.
Cotton Grove sprawls along the banks of Possum Creek, a few miles north of the Knott farm and twenty-five minutes due south of Raleigh. The four-block-long mercantile center almost dried up before the state’s population surge encouraged the town to turn the creek frontage into a park and bill itself as a place of small-town values (whatever those were) within easy reach of big-city attractions. Stores were restored to their 1920s look, ornamental iron streetlights were installed, and fast-growing crepe myrtles were planted along the sidewalks. The original oaks and maples that once nearly met overhead had been cut down forty years earlier when the streets were widened in the town’s first attempt at revitalization.
These days, Main Street was one-way so that more nose-in parking slots could be created for shoppers drawn to the new businesses. During the early evening hours, tasteful wreaths trimmed in clear twinkle lights hung from each lamppost. A tall Christmas tree sat in the center of the park and kaleidoscopic reflections of its multicolored lights shimmered on the surface of the slow-moving creek. To save on energy costs, both sets of lights were turned off at ten when the last restaurants closed.
The old modest Craftsman bungalows that filled in around the business section had been snatched up and restored. Leafless wisteria or rambling roses now climbed the porch railings. In summertime they would flower and their hip new owners would brave the heat and sit out on the porches in their wicker rocking chairs to sip iced tea and try to look like natives. Here on this wintry night, a few houses had left their decorative lights on, and more than one roofline dripped with a fringe of electric icicles that were now coated with real ones.
