As we headed over to a bench on the side of the beach where dogs could be off leash, I asked, “Any luck tracking down Kitty Ives? Or that trucker she and Karl knew, Pete?”
“Not yet,” she said. “You’d think a bright red Mustang would be easier to find.”
“You sure she took it, then?”
“I think so, since she tried to sell it and couldn’t. I traced it back to where Karl bought it, off a pretty nice used car lot over in Bluffton.”
“Huh,” I said. “Thought he bought it new.”
“Just about. It’s a 2019, but somebody else bought it new, then changed his mind and traded it back in. I went and talked to the owner of the lot, and he remembered Karl because he paid in cash. He remembered Kitty too, since she came with him. He told me she swung by ten or twelve days ago driving it, looking real pretty, asking if he could help her and what she might be able to get for it.”
“Even though it ain’t hers?”
“That’s what he explained to her. From how he told me, he was real apologetic, and she was practically crying.”
“The old damsel in distress thing?”
“Or she really could be scared of something. I mean, she’s lived here going on ten years. It takes a lot to make a settled person skip town.”
I looked around, making sure the few other beachgoers present on a weekday afternoon were far enough off, before asking, “You think the heroin was her?”
“It could be. But there’s a lot of people it could be.”
We sat down and unleashed our pups. As Squatter watched, Buster barreled back and forth between the stretch of sand we were on and some nearby rocks.
I said, “Maybe I’m out of touch, but heroin just seems weird. I mean, on some middle-aged yahoo’s motorboat? When I think about the opiate crisis here, or anywhere in small-town America, I think OxyContin, fentanyl, that kind of thing.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Not some resin from a flower in Afghanistan.”
I thought about that a second. “Did Karl know any veterans?”
“Of Afghanistan, you mean? Hmm. I’ll look into that.”
“I imagine there’s a few on the police force.”
She nodded. “Yeah, several I can think of off the bat. Not Blount, but some folks he works with. Or used to, at least.”
“Or it could just be some junkie friend of Karl’s. He came over, they got high. Maybe Dunk is right, and things are mostly pretty simple.” I’d told her about my encounter with him at the Broke Spoke.
Squatter curled up against my foot to sleep. He’d used up his daily quota of energy.
She flicked a chunk of onion off her finger into the sand and said, “I wouldn’t go looking to Dunk McDonough for crime-solving tips. Or life advice, or whatever that was supposed to be.”
I said, “I don’t love the guy, to say the least. But I am curious what you got against him.”
She looked out at the breaking waves, thinking. I got the sense she was doing what I sometimes did: parsing through an answer to remove sensitive content before she spoke.
Finally she said, “Would you agree if I said you get the measure of someone’s character when you see how they treat folks who aren’t any use to them? And how they treat someone that they could get away with hurting?”
“Yeah, I think that’s a damn good barometer.”
She nodded. “So, the problem is, Dunk fails on both counts.”
I could tell from her voice that that was all I was going to get. The details were confidential.
I said, “You think we should be looking at him? About Karl, I mean?”
She shrugged. “I think we need to be looking for somebody like that,” she said. “But unfortunately, there’s a lot of people like that around here.”
“Damn. It must be hard knowing what you know.” With her eight years on the force, plus a decade as a private eye and however long volunteering in social work, I thought she probably knew the underbelly of this town better than most anybody else.
“It can be,” she said. “Hard, I mean.”
I looked out at the water with her. A couple of families with kids were playing in the surf. I figured if they were locals, she could see right through them: she probably knew if the kids were safe and if anybody was a wife beater, a druggie, or a drunk.
She looked up toward the rocks and said, with a smile in her voice, “That’s why I got myself a big old cheerful puppy.”
I followed her gaze. Buster was jumping around, trying to grab seagulls out of the air. The effort was futile, but he looked happy as hell.
I drove back to Roy’s office, trying to figure out where Karl had gotten the money to buy a $30,000 car in cash. The simple answer, the Dunk answer, would probably be that he was dealing drugs—or running them in his boat. But Karl had no history of any type of drug arrest, and in all our digging, nothing had come up about his ever being involved in drugs or having friends who were. The Mustang was his only luxury, the only sign of money. And, given how thoroughly the forensic report had analyzed every last fish scale found on his motorboat, I at least knew the boat couldn’t have been command central for any type of drug operation. That would’ve left far more than one solitary trace amount of heroin.
After work, I thought, I might swing by the fishing supply store where Karl’s brother Tim worked part-time, to see if he was there. He had his own preoccupations with the Mustang and with money, as I recalled. And he was the kind who seemed to say whatever the heck was on his mind,
