“It will,” I agreed, lifting my arm in the air to admire the way it looked and imagining how it would look when paired with the blue forget-me-nots of that other bracelet. “I just wish I had something for you.”
“Actually, you do.” He grinned and tugged at the waistband of my Carolina sweatshirt. “But first we need to get rid of these flannel pajamas.”
CHAPTER 22
—“The Flying Stars,” G. K. Chesterton
MAJOR DWIGHT BRYANT— TUESDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 23
Good job, everybody,” Dwight said next morning as his briefing with the CCSD drug squad wound down.
While most drug users claimed they were hurting no one but themselves, meth labs with their volatile chemicals were serious health hazards to everyone living at the site, especially any children; and decontamination was a growing drain on EPA resources. Sometimes the only solution was complete demolition, which was the probable fate of the van they had seized last night.
“Wish we had some good news for you, too, Major,” Deputy Mayleen Richards said glumly when he asked for a progress report on the Wentworth shootings.
“It’s like we’ve hit a brick wall on this case,” Raeford McLamb said. “No leads. Just dead ends. We’ve talked to every name that’s come up. Jason had pissed off the usual number of people for someone like him and so had the younger kid, but as for what motivated someone to gun them down?” He gave a frustrated display of empty hands. “He was drawing unemployment, but Employment Security Commission’s pretty overwhelmed these days and all they could say is that his paperwork was in order. No help there.”
“What about Mrs. Higgins’s bumper?” he asked Denning.
“I brushed along the place where she made contact, but I don’t know if there’s enough there—one really tiny chip and some paint dust. We did get lucky in that the car’s been in her garage since Friday. She doesn’t drive in ice and her daughter took her to church on Sunday, but I don’t know, boss. White on silver?”
“Did that Barbour kid the stepmother mentioned give you anything?”
“Nothing we didn’t already know. He last saw Matt at school on Thursday, right after they announced that the Johnson girl had died. He says the same as everyone else—that if Matt claimed they were an item, he was lying, but he did say that Matt seemed pretty shaken up about her death. Nate Barbour made a smart-ass remark and Matt started cussing him. They mouthed off to each other some more in the parking lot, then Matt drove off alone. Our boy Nate’s been caught with some pot. He’s out on bail right now for shoplifting two cameras from Target, and I gather there was an assault charge that got dismissed. Turns out he worked part-time at the Welcome Home store last summer, but he denies all knowledge of how the store’s stuff wound up in Jason’s shed and was all innocent wide eyes when I asked him about it. I expect we’ll be seeing more of him down the road.”
“What about the grocery store where Matt worked?”
McLamb gave a sour laugh. “Nothing missing, if that’s what you mean. And the manager had no complaints. In fact, he said Matt was pretty reliable. His hours were five till eight, nine if they were really busy or shorthanded, and he usually showed up on time. Did what was expected of him. Thursday night was the first time he’d missed without first calling.”
“Anything from the bullets that killed them?” Dwight asked Denning.
That deputy shook his head. “Sorry, boss. All the slugs show the same characteristic marks, but until we get a gun to match them to, it’s another dead end.”
“What about the rifles you took from Faison’s truck Sunday night? He’s asking for them back.”
“He can have ’em far as we’re concerned. Both guns were dirty so it’s hard to know when they were last fired. Faison’s fingerprints were on both and the victims’ on just one. Nobody else’s. And, of course, they aren’t the murder weapons.” Almost as an afterthought, he said, “One odd thing. I found a piece of plastic wedged into the top of the rifle barrel that Jason borrowed.”
“Plastic?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind?”
Denning handed him a small baggie with a shard of clear rigid plastic inside. There was nothing distinctive about it, so far as he could see. Thinner than window glass. Flat. No discernible curvature.
“There were new scratches on the outside of the barrel tip. Like somebody’d smashed the rifle through a sheet of this plastic. Want me to send it to the SBI lab? See if they can ID it?”
“As backed up as they are? It’ll be six months before they could get around to this.”
“I saw bits of plastic like that on the floor of the trailer when Dalton and I were there yesterday morning,” said Richards, glancing up from her paperwork. “Looked like something got broke and no one got up all the pieces. Want me to go back and get them?”
“No, I have Joy Medlin coming in this afternoon and I’d like you to sit in on the interview.”
“I’ll go,” said Dalton. “It was there at the end of the couch, right, Mayleen?”
She nodded.
“Probably a waste of time,” Dwight said, “but if we do eventually wind up sending it to Garner, might as well send them enough to work with.”
Dwight stopped by the break room, refilled his coffee mug, and went on down to his own office to dig into some of the paperwork that had accumulated on his desk. This was his least favorite part of the job, but he learned long ago that if he did not keep up with the stuff as it came in, disposing of it would take even more time because he
