which made sense, considering that Theo worked noisy construction sites. Otherwise we never would have heard it, because Theo was lying on his stomach.
His arms reached out beyond his head, and his legs were splayed awkwardly. In the flashlight beam, the puddles of blood on the back of his shirt gleamed like oil.
FORTY-THREE
I didn’t realize Sally had come up next to me, and when she started to scream I nearly jumped out of my skin. I put my arms around her and turned her back to Theo’s body so Sally couldn’t see it. And now, with the Maglite pointing up into the trees, she wouldn’t get a very good look at him even if she could peer around me.
“Oh my God,” she moaned. “Is it him?”
“I think so,” I said. “I didn’t get real close, but it sure looks like him.”
She clung to me, shaking. “Oh my God, oh my God, Glen, oh my God.”
“I know, I know. We need to get back to the trailer.”
It occurred to me, suddenly, that whoever had done this to Theo might still be close by. We could be in danger in this isolated spot. We needed to get away from here and call the police. I wasn’t convinced that being back in the trailer was the safest place to do that from.
“Come on,” I said.
“Where are we going?”
“My truck. Come on. Quickly.”
I hurried her along, out of the woods, across the yard and down the rutted lane to my truck. I got her into the passenger side, giving her a boost up to the seat, then ran around to the driver’s door. The whole time I was scanning the surroundings, as pointless as that was a couple of hours before the sun came up, wondering if whoever murdered Theo now had us in his sights.
I didn’t know for sure Theo had been shot, but it was my best guess. Out here, in the country, you could fire off a shot or two and it was unlikely anyone would hear it, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t do anything about it.
We were sitting ducks right now, even in the truck. Sally was still muttering “Oh my God” repeatedly as I keyed the engine and dropped it into drive.
“Why are we leaving?” she asked. “Why are we running away? We can’t just leave him there…” She started to cry again.
“We’ll be back,” I said. “After we call the police.”
I tromped my foot onto the accelerator, kicking up gravel as I pulled away from the shoulder. The back tires squealed as they hit pavement.
Maybe a quarter mile on, doing sixty, something caught my eye in the rearview mirror.
Headlights.
“Hello,” I said.
“What?” Sally said.
“We got someone coming up behind us.”
“What do you mean? Following us?”
I couldn’t make out whether it was a car or a truck, but I could tell this much: The headlights in my mirror were getting bigger.
I took the truck up to seventy. Then seventy-five.
Sally had twisted around in her seat. “Is he falling back?”
“I don’t think so.” I was looking in my mirror every couple of seconds. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. “Okay, let’s see what he does if I slow down.”
I took my foot off the gas and let the truck coast down back to something approaching the speed limit. The headlights started to loom large, and extremely bright, in my mirror. I could see now that they sat up high, so it was a truck or SUV of some kind.
And the son of a bitch was riding with his high beams on. I reached up and hit the mirror with my fist to shift the glare out of my eyes.
The vehicle was almost on my bumper now.
“Hang on,” I told Sally.
I hit the brakes, not hard enough that the driver behind would hit me, but enough to slow my truck so that when I turned in to the gas station I wouldn’t end up sending us ass over teakettle.
A horn started blaring the moment my brake lights flared. And the horn kept going as I swerved into the gas station lot. The truck steered briefly into the oncoming lane, but instead of slowing down, sped up even more. As I slammed harder on the brakes I glanced to my left.
It was a black Hummer, its horn blaring as it drove off into the night.
Sally and I were both panting as we sat there by the dimmed gas pumps.
“False alarm,” I said.
I got out my cell, punched in the three digits, and waited to talk to the emergency dispatcher.
Dawn was breaking when we got back to the scene. A police car had met us at the gas station. I had turned around and led the cop back to the end of Theo’s driveway. With the sun coming up, it was easier to lead the officer into the woods and find the body. When we got to within ten feet of it, I pointed and stood back with Sally.
It wasn’t long before another half a dozen state police cars had arrived and that stretch of road was closed off. A black cop by the name of Dillon did a preliminary interview with Sally and me, trying to get the sequence of events right. He said a detective would be wanting to talk to us all over again, which turned out to be right, but we had to wait an hour for that round of questioning.
We’d been told not to leave, so we spent a lot of our time sitting in my truck, listening to the radio. Sally seemed numb. For long stretches she just sat there, staring at the dashboard.
“You okay?” I asked every few minutes, and usually she’d just nod once.
I reached over one time to give her a comforting pat on the arm, and she pulled away.
“What?” I asked.
She turned and studied me. “You set all this into motion.”
“Excuse me?”
“Going around accusing Theo and Doug of things.”
“We don’t know what happened here, Sally.”
She looked back through the windshield, avoiding eye contact. “I’m just saying, you go see Theo, and then you go see Doug, and in the night they were talking to each other, and something happened.”
I wanted to defend myself, to tell Sally I acted on the information I had, and on the things I had discovered. That I never intended for anything like this to happen. But instead I said nothing.
I decided it was best to wait for the facts to come in. Maybe, when they did, it would turn out that everything Sally was saying was right.
And I’d have to deal with it then.
I told the lead detective, whose name was Julie Stryker, that we had found Doug Pinder’s number on Theo’s outgoing call list. I had to tell her where the police could find him, up at his mother-in-law’s place.
“But he’s a good guy,” I said. “He wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“No kind of bad blood between them?” Stryker asked.
I hesitated. “Not… really. But they might have had a few things to say to each other. There’d been some developments yesterday.”
Detective Stryker wanted to know what those were. I filled her in on the report I’d had from Alfie at the fire department and how that related to Theo. Then I explained about the stuff I’d found in Doug’s truck and how that tied in as well.
“So, these two, they might be wanting to blame each other for what happened at your job site,” Stryker reasoned.
“It’s possible,” I agreed. “I can call Doug, see if-”
