let him use the phone.”
With a little luck, Willie Faison could still get in half a morning’s work.
Back upstairs, Dwight stuck his head into the room that Percy Denning had fitted up as a lab so that not every single piece of evidence had to go to the SBI’s lab in Garner. “You can compare the prints on Faison’s guns with those of the two victims,” he said. “Faison says he lent one to Wentworth. And anything on the shell casing you found?”
“It’s a .32. We’ll have to wait and see what the ME finds in the bodies.”
A handgun then, and not a rifle.
“Richards called. She and Dalton just dug a slug out of the side of the trailer that’s consistent with the line of fire. Says it looks like a .32 to her, too.”
“Jason Wentworth have a cell phone?”
“I didn’t see one. Want me to call Richards and ask?”
“Yeah. And check if there’s a land line. See who called him the last few days.”
He started to leave, then paused. “What about the Johnson girl’s phone?”
“Not much on it. She must have cleared its memory earlier that evening. We’ve asked for the records, though, and the company’s promised to email them to us today.”
“When they come, see if any of the called numbers correspond to a phone connected with Matt Wentworth’s name, okay? He told his stepmother that Mallory Johnson was his girlfriend.”
Denning rolled his eyes. “In that case, there’ll be at least eight or ten calls a day to him.”
Dwight grinned. Denning had a teenage daughter.
Twenty-five minutes later, after making a few phone calls of his own, Dwight turned into one of the older neighborhoods on the edge of Cotton Grove. This street had attractive, well-maintained homes, each on a spacious landscaped lot, each surrounded by mature oaks and maples. Unfortunately, last night’s ice storm had laid one of those tall oaks across the roof of a two-story brick house and there was a gaping hole where one of the branches had broken into the attic.
Dwight pulled in behind a truck whose panel door read “Barefoot Roofing Company” and got out to join the group of people who stood watching as a man with a chainsaw cut up a tree that would easily measure two feet in diameter. He expected to recognize Nelson Barefoot from his high school years of playing basketball with Jeff Barefoot, and he was fairly certain that one of the men was an adjuster from Triple J Insurance, but he was surprised when the owners of the house turned as he approached and greeted him by name.
“Well, hey, Dwight!” Diane Hobbs called above the ear-piercing whine of the chainsaw. “You come to watch the fun?”
Her husband, Randy, an older man and a former magistrate, stepped forward to shake his hand. “Haven’t seen you since my retirement party, young man,” he said loudly. “How’s life at the courthouse these days?”
“Not half as exciting as this,” Dwight told him, gesturing toward the roof and the tree that was rapidly becoming a pile of firewood and sawdust. The clean acrid smell of freshly cut oak drifted on the morning air.
“Did you ever see such a mess?” asked Diane, who had a closer acquaintance with the tall deputy.
Abruptly, the chainsaw went silent as the workman paused to stack the logs he had cut from the branches and to roll the larger rounds out of his way.
Petite and bubbly with brown hair and snapping brown eyes, Diane Hobbs was the hygienist at Dwight’s dentist. Twice a year, he leaned back in that padded chair and opened wide so that she could poke around with a pickax and jackhammer and scold him for not flossing twice a day. “And don’t think I can’t tell, mister.”
Up on the roof, one of Barefoot’s men was clearing away the fast-melting ice while another used a broom to sweep aside the water before it could drip into the attic and soak through the ceiling below.
“That’s our bedroom there on the corner,” Diane said, loosening the buttons of her bright red jacket as the sun warmed up the morning air. “When that tree hit in the middle of the night, I thought we’d been bombed or something. Thank goodness the weather’s supposed to stay mild and sunny through the weekend. It won’t feel much like Christmas, but at least our bedroom won’t get soaked. And this nice man’s going to make it all good as new by Christmas morning, aren’t you?”
She gave Nelson Barefoot a winning smile, but he was not willing to commit to her agenda.
“Now, honey,” said Randy Hobbs. “You know that Carl here’s got to give us an insurance estimate first.”
“I do know that,” she said sweetly, “but
Amused, Dwight watched Diane finish wrapping her husband and Nelson Barefoot around her little finger and heard the big gruff man allow as how he reckoned he could get on it tomorrow or the next day.
“We’ll let the sun finish drying it good today,” he said, “and I’ll send one of my boys over this afternoon to put a tarp over it from the ridgepole down so y’all won’t have to look at the stars tonight.”
“Stars?” Diane glanced at her husband. Her face was serious, but her eyes sparkled with mischief. “Long as the hole’s already there, honey, why don’t we let’s put in a great big skylight so we can lie in bed and watch the moon?”
“Moon?” Randy yelped. “Skylight?”
“Oh, no, now, Miz Hobbs,” Barefoot said, tilting his brown felt hat back on his head. “There’s no way I can put you in a skylight before the first of the year and you’re not gonna want to live with that hole that long, are you?”
“I guess you’re right,” she said, feigning reluctance to give up the idea. “So you’ll definitely be here tomorrow to fix it back the way it was?”
