Blind Dates Can Be Murder (29 page)

Jo opened the ice cream container, but before she put the spoon down in it, she paused. There was something wrong with the ice cream. It was a new container, but instead of a smooth vanilla surface, it had been all stirred up. Actually, it didn’t look like stirring at all.

It looked as though someone had dug through it with their fingers.

A chill started at the base of Jo’s neck. She looked at Chewie, who was looking back at her, a growl rumbling deep in his throat. Then she reached for the phone and dialed Chief Harvey Cooper’s cell phone number.

“Absolutely nothing,” Tank said as he struggled to climb over the wall of the well. Lettie gripped the back of his shirt and pulled, the sticky threads of spider webs clinging to her arm.

He managed to get all the way out and then he collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily. His clothes were covered with algae, bits of leaves and weeds, and dirt.

“I ain’t no mountain climber,” he gasped. “I’m never doing that again.”

For a long while he just sat there catching his breath. Lettie gave him some space, busying herself with untying the rope from around the tree. He had made a good knot that had become tighter with all of the pulling, so it took a while. As she worked, she saw him pulling out his cell phone.

“It’s me,” he said softly into it. “Nothing there…Yeah, of course, I went all the way down. It’s just a long, dry hole in the ground. Rocks at the bottom. Spider webs everywhere. It’s obvious that nothing in there has been disturbed.”

Lettie moved around to the back of the tree, to get a better angle on the knot.

“I see two possibilities,” Tank continued. “Either Frankie moved it to some other location before he died, or Jo Tulip came and got it that night after he died. Either way, it ain’t here.”

Lettie wished she knew what it was they were looking for. As if forgetting Lettie was there, Tank continued, revealing the truth after all.

“I’m telling ya, Mickey, that much money—even out of the pickle jars—would take up a good amount of space and weigh at least thirty, thirty-five pounds. It’s not like somebody coulda walked outa here with it in their pockets or something. If you know for a fact it was here on Thursday night and it was gone by Saturday morning, then either Frankie moved it out himself sometime on Friday or somebody came in here and took it that night after he was dead. My bet’s on the girl.”

Money
, Lettie realized.
They were looking for lots of money hidden away in pickle jars
.

“Yeah. Will do.”

With a beep, Tank disconnected the call. He stood and brushed himself off. Then he took the rope from Lettie, wrapped it into a coil, and slipped it into his sack.

“Let’s go.”

He began walking toward the house and then past it to the road, his stride so long that she had to run to keep up.

“Are we all done now?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got one more errand, but you’re finished for the night.”

Lights out never really meant sleep in Chuck’s building. With the men locked in their cells, the noise level went up, not down. One by one, they’d stop talking but there was always some idiot who kept yammering on and on and on, usually as loudly as possible. The others would yell at him to shut up, which only made more noise. Most nights, Chuck just laid there on his thin mattress for hours, trying to ignore the yelling and thinking about Lettie. Even on those nights when he managed to drift off by midnight or so, he was awakened at 4 AM for his job in the kitchen, always by a C.O. shining a flashlight in his face and banging on his bars.

Tonight was the last time he would ever have to endure such distraction. After three years, he could barely remember what it would feel like to get a good night’s sleep. High on his list of what to do once he got out was to find a nice, comfortable bed in a quiet place and simply rest. He’d sleep for a week, if he could.

But he couldn’t. There were too many other items on his list to do before that. Besides the liquor, steak, and women, he needed to have a conversation with Mickey and Frankie—a serious conversation, with lifelong consequences.

Looking up now at the dark, dirty ceiling of his cell, Chuck thought about Mickey and Frankie and how the two men had tricked him. They had used him, manipulated him—and he had been just angry enough and trusting enough to be a pawn in their scheme. The crazy thing was, Chuck hadn’t even realized what they had done until his encounter with the Torturer. Once the man started asking questions between punches, Chuck had figured it all out.

Mickey and Frankie’s scheme started the day Chuck went back to work for Mickey a week after his mother’s funeral. Chuck was having a few drinks before he set out on another skimming assignment, and he and Frankie were talking at the bar.

Chuck was going on and on about Silver Shield Insurance and how they had killed his mother by denying the bone marrow transplant. Frankie had said to him, “Ya know, Chuck, there’s a Silver Shield office in a little strip mall on Dixon Pike. I’m wondering if maybe you should go over there and teach ’em a lesson.”

Chuck knew the place Frankie was talking about. Sandwiched between a check-cashing store and a barber shop, it was a branch office with maybe 20 employees. Chuck had gone there once—as he had with all of the local branches—trying to find someone to change their mind about his mother’s denied insurance claim.

Of course, once Frankie planted the seed, Chuck had to let it grow. In subsequent days, as he talked about bursting open the door with a machine gun and taking everyone down, Frankie had said, “No, no, you gotta do something after hours, when nobody’s there. You don’t wanna take the rap for a bunch of murders. You’ll do just as much damage to the company by destroying their office.”

In another conversation, Frankie offered to hook Chuck up with a guy who processed explosives. After that, it was only a matter of time before Chuck was set and ready to take down Silver Shield with a big kaboom.

“Let us know when you’re gonna do it,” Mickey had warned him. “So’s we can give you an alibi.”

Like a fool, Chuck had walked into Swingers on a Thursday night and whispered to Mickey and Frankie together: “Tomorrow night’s the night. Ten o’clock.”

The two had looked at each other and smiled.

Chuck should have known then that there was more going on than he could have guessed or imagined. He was playing right into their hands.

“But why?” Jo said, watching as the technician dusted black powder on her bathroom medicine cabinet. “Why would someone have been searching through my things?” At this point, with no answers to be had, her question was purely rhetorical.

Jo had waited in her office for the cops to arrive, but once they were there and they went on into the house, she was shocked to realize that the entire place had been gone through.

She felt utterly violated.

Now, the chief waved her out of the bathroom and into the living room, where another technician was lifting prints from the entertainment center knob. According to the chief, the Mulberry Glen police department didn’t do fingerprint dusting to this extent; they had neither the equipment nor the expertise. Instead, he had had to call in people from Moore City. Had the situation not been somehow related to a recent abduction and possible murder, he wouldn’t have gone to such extremes.

“You’re sure nothing was taken, nothing was stolen?” he asked.

“No. Not that I can see.”

“Then obviously somebody was here looking for something they didn’t find.”

Jo was glad the chief had responded so seriously to her call for help, but despair lapped at the edges of her brain nevertheless. She felt lost and frightened—and without Danny there, she didn’t even have her usual tower of strength to lean on. Adding stress to the mix was the fact that the black magnetic powder was making a giant mess all over her house. Still, she wasn’t going to tackle cleanup until the morning.

It was 1
AM
by the time they were finished, and as they packed up to go, Jo wasn’t sure whether to stay there alone or spend the night somewhere else. Finally, she decided that she was overreacting; she would stay. Her mother had given her a portable bar brace door lock for Christmas several years before. Though Jo had tucked it away in a closet and never used it, the package claimed that it was impenetrable. Taking the package at its word, once the chief and the technicians were gone and she had locked the house up tight, she barricaded herself and Chewie into the bedroom, following the directions to brace the long metal bar up under and against the doorknob. Once that was done, she figured that she was about as safe as she could be.

And though Chewie had calmed down considerably, Jo was pretty much a wreck as she climbed under the covers. In the darkness, she prayed for safety and for peace of mind. Then she tried to drift off to sleep, though most of the night she spent wide awake, starting at every light and shadow that flashed across her window.

16

J
o was up at 6
AM
, wondering if she’d slept at all. She felt safer once the sun began to come up, and when she removed the bar lock and emerged from her bedroom, it was to find the house exactly as it had been when she went to bed the night before.

Feeling better, she opened the back door for Chewie, grabbed the morning paper, and pulled out the coffeemaker. Then she realized that the intruder had probably dug his fingers through the coffee grounds, so she got out a big trash can and tossed the whole can. After that, she went through the pantry and the freezer, throwing away every single item that wasn’t canned or factory sealed. It seemed horribly wasteful, but she wasn’t about to eat anything that had been pawed through, and she didn’t feel right giving the food to anyone else, either. When she was done, she was starving, so she boiled a few eggs and ate them standing at the counter. It was either that or canned soup.