I was here. Well, nobody who was
But how brilliant. We needed to search his house, and here we were.
When I caught up to the others, I found them studying the front door. Jesse was asking, “Can you make out what it says underneath the paint?”
Chance leaned in for a better look. “Mar . . . and some numbers. Eight-three-six, I think.”
“March?” I offered. “Is it a date, you think? Or a time?”
The others shrugged.
Shannon stepped to the side and peered through the window between the gap in the ragged sheers. “I don’t think anyone’s here. Are we going in?”
Since the guy was dead, it didn’t seem likely anybody was home, unless Curtis had a roommate.
I cleared my throat. “I’m taking Jesse around back. Chance, if the door happens to pop open while we’re gone, give us a holler.” I thought that was better than making Jesse watch him pick the lock. Even if he was suspended and well outside his jurisdiction, I figured he probably didn’t want to see active lawbreaking.
Rummaging in his pockets, Chance didn’t acknowledge me as Jesse and I rounded the house. Shannon stayed with him to watch him work.
“So your ex is a house-breaker too,” Jesse said, sounding amused. “As I’ve said before, you have the most interesting friends, Corine.”
I thought about Chuch, the ex-arms dealer, married to Eva, the forger, and grinned. “Yeah. They sure come in handy, don’t they?”
He smiled back, bitter chocolate eyes roving my face in an appreciative manner. “I don’t think I should comment.”
“That’s probably wise.”
We circled the house and found a bunch of disgusting garbage cans that should have been set out weeks ago. If I were truly devoted, I would have suggested going through them for clues, but you couldn’t have paid me enough to touch one.
Instead of calling to us, Chance opened the back door and waved us in. “The front was open,” he said mildly.
Jesse raised a brow. “Fancy that.”
“Small town,” I said. “People just don’t see the need to lock up.”
I climbed two steps and crossed the sagging porch, stepping into Farrell’s house. We’d gotten there before the police, assuming the sheriff would even bother. The place looked like a cyclone had hit it, though; clothes everywhere and dirty dishes piled in the sink. Added to the trash in the back, it seemed as if Curtis hadn’t been home in a while—at least, I couldn’t imagine a human being living like that.
“Have a look around.” Jesse took charge as if this were his crime scene. “I’ll take the kitchen. Corine, you search the bathroom. Chance, take the bedroom, and Shannon, check out the living room, please. I guarantee we don’t have to worry about leaving DNA on the scene, but don’t touch anything with your bare hands. They probably have a fingerprint kit even out here in Hooterville.”
Shannon snickered, but she took his advice and pulled the sleeves of her hoodie down past her hands as she headed for the living room. Once in the bathroom, I did the same with my sweater. Ew. I really had to search in there? It smelled like something had died, and green fuzzy stuff grew in the grout between the tiles. Man, I thought Jesse liked me better than that.
From within my handbag, Butch whined. The smell was getting to him too. “There’s no help for it,” I told the dog. “We have to be brave.”
I heard a thunk from the bedroom and peered out. Using a broom handle, Chance poked gingerly at the piles of clothing spread across the floor. He flashed me a wry smile. “I think Shannon got the best deal in this division of labor.”
“Well, she’s young. He didn’t want to traumatize her—oh dear God.” I caught my breath at the sight of a dead rat in the cupboard beneath the sink.
It was going to be a long day.
Unearthed Secrets
In the end, Shannon found what we were looking for.
“Mark 8:36,” she called, excitement thrumming in her voice. When we gathered in the living room, she read from the book in her hands. “ ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ This passage is highlighted.” She showed us the Bible, where someone, probably Curtis Farrell, had marked the verse scrawled on his door.
“Sounds like a threat,” Chance said quietly.
“Somebody knew something,” Jesse agreed. “But were they blackmailing Farrell or trying to get him to stop?”
An excellent question. Farrell hadn’t displayed the confidence of a career criminal. He’d seemed hesitant, like he didn’t know what to do when confronted with resistance. His job had been spelled out for him—and I still wasn’t sure what he’d intended to do to Miss Minnie—and once things went wrong, he didn’t know how to respond.
“Is this a religious thing?” I asked. “Or someone just using the Bible for a convenient code?”
“Impossible to say.” Jesse took the Bible from Shannon and flipped through it. As he gave the book a last shake, a scrap of paper tumbled toward the floor.
With his preternatural reflexes, Chance snatched it before it touched. He scanned it and then looked at me with a half frown. “Robert Frost? It’s that ‘Two roads diverged in a wood’ poem.”
“ ‘The Road Not Taken’?” I took the torn yellow sheet from Chance; it looked as if it had been pulled from a legal pad. “Wish we had a sample of Farrell’s handwriting. Then we’d know whether he wrote this down himself or someone else gave it to him.”
“Can I?” At Shannon’s question, I passed it along. Her eyes widened. “This is John McGee’s writing. I’d recognize the crabby little letters anywhere.”
“So Farrell had been talking to McGee,” Jesse mused. “And they both ended up dead.”
I wondered aloud, “Could that have been the point? Someone may have sent Farrell to Miss Minnie’s house right then, knowing we were there.”
A thundercloud frown knit Chance’s brow. “Knowing we wouldn’t react well to a robber threatening an old lady.”
“If that’s the case,” Shannon said, “then the guy on the roof wasn’t working with Farrell. He was there to keep us pinned down until we noticed something was wrong inside.”
Jesse gave her an approving nod. “Good thinking, Shannon.”
She flushed with pleasure. “Just makes sense, right? He didn’t try too hard to hit us. He might’ve been trying to drive us back inside the house, and then Butch heard the intruder.”
It would’ve taken a dog’s hearing to notice someone jimmying the back door with the varmint rifle pinging away. But then, everyone in town knew I took Butch everywhere. As theories went, this one seemed to make sense.
That put a scowl on Saldana’s face. “If that’s true, it makes it even more embarrassing that he got me.”
I didn’t look at him. He’d been shot trying to protect me. I couldn’t make light of that, even if it hadn’t been strictly necessary, but there was no evidence to support any of our hypotheses, anyway.
“We sound like crazed conspiracy theorists,” I said in disgust. “It was this; it was that; it was—”
“Bigfoot,” Chance said, deadpan.
He startled a laugh out of me. “Definitely.”
“Nothing else was underlined,” Jesse murmured, getting us back on track. “I think it’s safe to say our guy isn’t a scholar or a church-goer.”
Shannon nodded. “No shit. I expect to find a closet weed farm somewhere in here. But if you want to scope out the church scene, there’s a potluck dinner every Saturday night.”
“That’s your grandfather’s territory,” Chance pointed out. “Is that going to be a problem for you?”
