“I went by where Faison was working and asked him if he knew anything about it since he was the one who took the rifle out of that trailer,” said Dalton. “He looked a little freaked, but he didn’t say anything.”
“Well, damn!” As he suddenly recognized what this plastic had once covered, Dwight slapped the table so hard that the pieces slid apart. “Of course! Go haul Faison’s sorry ass in here.”
“Huh?”
In a few terse words, Dwight told Dalton why. “And get a search warrant for his truck.”
Grinning, Dalton hurried off to do as he was told, and in less than two hours he was back with a very apprehensive Willie Faison. Dalton had also retrieved the broken flashlight Dwight had remembered seeing in Faison’s truck box Sunday night and had bagged it up along with a few more shards of the rigid plastic lens, which he had found on the bottom of the box.
“It’s yours, right?” Dwight asked him when they were seated in the interview room with the flashlight on the table between them.
“Yessir.” The slender young man wore muddy jeans, scuffed leather high-tops, and a red plaid wool work shirt over a red tee. His dark eyes were wary as he searched the big deputy’s face for a hint of what was coming.
“Part of the
“And he went and broke it,” Faison said indignantly. “You know how much them things cost?”
“I can imagine,” Dwight said. “Halogen bulb? That’s a real powerful light for crawling around under houses looking for busted water pipes. What was Jason going to use it for?”
Faison shrugged his thin shoulders. His hands were large and work-stained and already well callused. When he nervously brushed back a lank of dark hair from his forehead, Dwight saw skinned knuckles where the young man had evidently lost a struggle with a rusty pipe joint.
“There was no deer stand and no Wednesday morning deer hunt, was there, Willie? We know why Jason borrowed your gun and this flashlight. He was going to show his little brother how to hunt deer at night, wasn’t he? Did you go along to hold the light?”
“No! I didn’t go. I told you—I quit doing dumb stuff like that. He already lost his own gun for doing that and I told him if he wound up with the law taking mine, I was gonna take it out of his hide with a pipe wrench.”
“So who did go on that hunt with them?”
“Guy named Jack McBane was supposed to go with Jase. It was just gonna be the two of them, but they had a falling-out, so he said the hell with it, he’d take his brother instead.”
“What was the falling-out about?”
“Something to do with Jack’s girlfriend. That’s all I know. Honest.”
“Jackson Dwayne McHenry, aka Henry Jackson, aka Dwayne Jackson,” said McLamb, reading McBane’s adult record off the computer screen. It was a record of escalating violence. He had punched out a store clerk at the age of sixteen, torn off part of someone’s ear in a bar fight at eighteen, was arrested for shooting up a car at twenty.
As the list grew, they were beginning to think this could be their man, until McLamb uttered an involuntary expletive.
“He was tried in district court here last Friday. Found guilty of a misdemeanor DWI, Level One, and was immediately taken into custody. Damn! Talk about an ironclad alibi.”
“McHenry’s probably not the only violent guy Jason Wentworth ran with,” Dwight said. “Maybe the flashlight got smashed in a fight. Keep digging.”
Joy Medlin showed up at 1:30 right on schedule. To Dwight’s surprise, however, she had been driven there not by her mother or father but by Jessica Knott, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Deborah’s brother Seth.
Dressed in a dark blue warm-up suit, the injured cheerleader maneuvered into the interview room on crutches. The room was bare except for a metal table and four chairs. As Mayleen pulled out one of the chairs and reminded her that they had met before, Dwight shot an inquiring glance at his niece by marriage. Tall and sturdily built, with her grandfather’s clear blue eyes, she wore black stretch pants and a red cardigan over a white turtleneck jersey. Her earrings were small gold bells that gave a tiny jingle when she moved her head.
Giving him a don’t-blame-me shrug, she murmured, “Sorry, Uncle Dwight. She seems to think you won’t be as rough on her if I’m here.”
“And why would I be rough on her?” he asked.
She did not answer, but moved on into the room to take her friend’s crutches and prop them in a corner.
He and Mayleen sat down at the table across from the two girls. When introductions had been made all around and the girls had asked to be called by their first names, Dwight said, “Joy, I’m told that you and Mallory Johnson were best friends since first grade?”
The girl nodded, her eyes wide and frightened.
Of what? Dwight wondered. Taking a second, harder look at her, he could see that she was basically a pretty young woman. Or had been. Today her face was gray and pinched. There were deep shadows, almost like bruises, under her eyes, and her jaw was tight, as if she were clenching her teeth.
Why?
And then he remembered that Jessica had told him at lunch yesterday that Joy planned to wean herself off all painkillers over the holidays.
“Are you sure you feel up to this?” he asked.
She nodded. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not trying to quit your pain medication cold turkey, are you?”
