nothin’ out of her when I was questionin’ her. Trey, go in and see if she’s all right.”
Trey nodded again and left the room.
“You were taking pictures,” Patricia pointed out.
“Yeah, evidence. We’re just a small-town department, Patricia, so whenever something happens here that qualifies as a major crime, we write up the report and collect whatever evidence there is, then turn it over to the county sheriff’s. They’ll be doin’ the investigation. Right now, the county coroner’s office is out on the Point, pickin’ up the bodies.”
“But if the Hilds were murdered several miles away . . . why are you treating this bedroom like the crime scene?”
“‘Cos it is, now that I looked around.” His hand tiredly gestured the closet and some open dresser drawers. “The Hilds were murdered like a city drug execution. Are ya squeamish?”
“Try me,” Patricia said.
“Ethel was stripped naked and chopped in half at the waist with an ax. Wilfrud was tied to a tree and knifed. And he had a couple bags a’ crystal meth in his pocket.” He pointed again to the closet and dresser. “Then look what I find in there.”
Under some linens in the dresser drawer, she noticed dozens of little plastic bags containing either yellowish granules or yellowish chunks of something that looked like pieces of rock salt.
“Crystal meth,” Sutter said. “Redneck crack. In the city where you live, crack is the big drug, but out here in the boondocks? That stuff’s the ticket. They snort it, smoke it, shoot it up—one of them little bags costs a couple bucks to produce; then they sell it for twenty. It’s superspeed, keeps ya high for eight hours. And it’s just as addictive as crack.”
Patricia looked at the bags, astonished. “The Hilds were using this stuff?”
“Not using, selling, it looks like. See all that other stuff in the closet?”
A large plastic bag sat on the closet floor. When Patricia opened it, she couldn’t have been more bewildered.
“Matches?” Ernie said when he looked in too.
There must’ve been a hundred of them in the bag: matchbooks. Just plain old everyday books of matches. “What does this have to do with—”
“It’s part of the process. Meth-heads soak the matches in some kind of solvent to get some chemical out of it—not the matches themselves, but the strike pads on each book. Then, up there on top, that’s the main ingredient.”
On the closet shelf sat about a dozen bottles of store-brand allergy and sinus medication that could be purchased over the counter in any drugstore.
“They soak the cold medicine in alcohol, then boil it and filter it,” Sutter informed her. “That becomes the base for the crystal meth. Then they mix it with the stuff from the strike pad and add some kind of iodine compound, and cook it all down and distill it. I don’t know the whole process—it’s pretty complicated. But any cop in the world’ll tell you that’s what Wilfrud and Ethel Hild were into.”
“Cain’t believe it,” Ernie said. “I known Wilfrud ‘n’ Ethel all my life. They were weird, sure. But drug dealers?”
“More than dealers,” Sutter reminded him. “Producers. It takes all kinds, Ernie, and sometimes—a lot of the time, actually—people ain’t what they seem.”
Patricia supposed he was right about that. Sometimes people changed, became corrupted, and not much else could corrupt a person’s values more effectively than poverty. But this was utterly shocking. With all her education, and all her experience living in a large modern city, Patricia was inclined to think that she knew a lot about human nature and the world in general. But now she felt oblivious, even ignorant.
This was a
Chief Sutter rose, walked his girth to the open window, and what he said next provided an eerie accompaniment to what Patricia had just been thinking. “There’s a secret world out there that folks like us either don’t see or just forget about’cos it don’t affect us.” He was looking out at the fringes of Squatterville, the ragtag tract of Judy’s land covered with tin shacks and old trailers. “And the world of crystal meth is right out there somewhere, right under our noses. The shit’s been poppin’ up more and more in our country over the past few years. Shit, just the other day me ‘n’ Trey caught a couple of punks from out of town tryin’ to sell this selfsame shit down here. Crystal fuckin’ meth.” Then he pointed out the window. “And all that out there is why they call it redneck crack. Any one of them little shacks or trailers could be a meth lab.”
Patricia knew she couldn’t not believe it; that would be naive.
“So you say Wilfrud and Ethel were murdered by other drug dealers?” Ernie asked.
“Had to have been,” Sutter answered. “That’s how these people do it—real psycho. The Hilds’ operation must’ve been cutting in on someone else’s territory.”
“The same thing happens in the city with the crack gangs.” Patricia at least knew that much. Just a month ago in the Post she’d read about how drug dealers would kidnap and dismember the girlfriends of rival dealers. “In the corporate world you buy out the competition, but in the drug world you
“Sure.” Sutter knew as well. “Old as history. The Hilds were probably movin’ in on someone else’s turf, and now they got themselves killed for it.”
Car doors could be heard thunking from outside.
“Now the fun starts,” Sutter muttered. “You two better git on back to Judy’s. County sheriff’s just pulled up, and when they see all that shit in the closet, they’ll be callin’ the state narcotics squad.”
“Do you think they’ll get warrants to search all the
Squatters’ homes?” Patricia asked.
“Oh, I’m sure. Let’s just hope this is isolated. If there was a whole lot of other Squatters workin’ with the Hilds, we’re all in for a big headache.”
Patricia and Ernie walked back out to the foyer with Sutter. The door stood open in another room; inside, Sergeant Trey could be seen quietly questioning a very shaken Marthe Stanherd. The thin, elderly woman looked like a bowed scarecrow as she murmured answers to Trey’s queries.
She and Ernie slipped out, leaving Chief Sutter to brief the incoming county officers. As they walked back across the rising hill—the sun beating down, and the cicadas out en masse—Patricia took another glance back at the humble sheds and shacks of Squatterville, and wondered if last night’s brutal murders were a fluke, or a new beginning for Agan’s Point.
The fringes of Squatterville were marked with small, uneven vegetable patches that the clan’s children would tend, mostly spring onions, soy beans, radishes. Patricia thought of Marthe Stanherd once more when she spied a genuine scarecrow mounted at the field’s edge: old straw-stuffed clothes and a grimacing potato-sack face beneath a corroded hat. The crucified thing seemed to reach out to them with skeletal hands fashioned from twigs.
Around its neck hung, not a cross, but a small wooden board acrawl with elaborate squiggles. . . .
“Patricia! Goodness!” Judy called to her the instant she stepped into the kitchen. Despite last night’s overindulgence with liquor, and the mental aftermath of her husband’s funeral, Judy looked peppy, vibrant, her grayish-red hair flowing in a mane around her face. “Byron called and he’s worried sick about you! Shame on you for not calling him!”
The exclamation caught Patricia totally off guard. “Byron called the house?”
“Yes,” Judy sternly replied. “A little while ago. He said he’s been leaving messages on your cell phone since yesterday.”
Judy wagged a scolding finger. “Don’t you
Ernie stepped up, interrupting. “Uh, Judy, lemme talk to ya a minute. The police are at the Stanherd house right now. There was some bad trouble last night. . . .”
