Her Grave Secrets (Rogue River Novella Book 3) (2 page)

His vision narrowing, Zane spun around and stared at the nearby river, breathing heavily.

Not-so-lucky shirt.

Roy Krueger’s home sat within a dense grove of firs. It was nearly a mile off the main highway; his driveway was a winding dirt path that’d been patched numerous times with gravel and oil. Stevie and Zane bounced through the ruts, leaving a billowing cloud of dust behind them. She’d rolled up her window and cranked up the air-conditioning, not wanting to feel the grit of dust in her teeth. Although it was nearly eight at night, the temperature still hovered in the nineties—too hot even for August.

“I’ve stopped by a few times since he vanished around Memorial Day,” said Zane. “It’s looked the same every time. House locked up tight. Weeds getting taller. No vehicles. I was hurt that he’d left town without saying goodbye.”

“My mother was hurt too,” added Stevie. “Roy, her, and my dad had been friends for decades. When I went so long without hearing from him, and one of the last things he’d told me was that he wanted to retire, I finally accepted that meant he’d packed up and left for a beach in Mexico.”

“Not in Mexico,” Zane muttered. He parked the Solitude police car and the two of them sat quietly, studying the one-level home.

Zane had been right about the weeds. Even with the county’s long dry spell, the weeds had taken over, stretching up to over two feet in height. They got out of the car and approached the front door. Stevie tried the handle. Still locked. Zane stepped to the side and cupped his hands around his eyes to peek through a front window. “Can’t see much. Pretty dark inside.” He looked at Stevie. “Ready?” He nodded at the heavy battering ram in her hand.

“Give me a hand,” she said. “I wish there were a different way.”

“I’ve tried to find keys. I’ve asked everyone, and he doesn’t have any family who might have a set. We’ve got no choice.”

Zane grabbed the two handles on the opposite side of the ram and braced his legs. “Wait,” he said. “Can you swing your side with just your right hand?”

Stevie took her left hand out of the handle and used it to simply balance the back half of the ram. “Good idea.” She mentally kicked herself for nearly abusing the hand that’d been pierced by a bullet two months ago. The truth was, it’d healed so well she often forgot about the injury until she lifted or pushed with heavy force. Then she paid for her negligence with three days of pain.

They swung the ram back and slammed it into the front door next to the knob. The door flew open. The jolt shot up her right arm and into her shoulder, making her thankful she’d not used her left hand.

Stale air blew out of the home. It smelled dry and dusty and rotten.

“He didn’t have pets, right?” Zane asked, setting the ram down outside the door.

“Oh, God. No. Can you imagine?”

“Hello?” Zane shouted into the house.

Silence.

They gloved up and slipped on booties, and Stevie followed Zane into the dark. On the left was an entrance to a kitchen and to the right was a long hallway she knew led to a few bedrooms and bathrooms. They moved straight back into the living area, which was lined with big windows and a slider that gave a nice view of a forested backyard and small deck. She’d been in Roy’s house dozens of times, and his absence was palpable. He’d been one of her father’s closest friends, earning the title of
uncle
from Stevie and her three siblings. He’d married once, long ago, but it hadn’t lasted, and he had looked out for Stevie’s family as if they were his own.

“That you guys?” Zane pointed at a photo collage on the wall.

“Yes,” she said simply, biting her cheek to keep back the tears. The pictures in the collage were old and had paled from exposure to light. She looked about six, which made her brother James about ten, and her sister, Carly, about four. Bruce hadn’t been born yet. Roy had accompanied her family on a camping trip to Crater Lake and though the intense blue of the water had faded in the photos, the essence of family still leaped out. Stevie looked away and moved into the kitchen, where the rotting smell was stronger.

She opened a door under the sink. “Ugh. The garbage needs to go out.”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll let you have that particular job.”

“Do we need to get Rogue County’s forensics team in here?” Zane asked. “Or ask for a state team?”

“I don’t know.” Stevie looked around the kitchen. It was clean and neat, but seriously out of date. Nothing had been changed in at least twenty years. “We’ll send what we need to their labs, but I think you and I can handle the evidence collection, right?”

“Depends what we find,” answered Zane. “One look at Roy’s scene on the riverbank this morning, and I knew we needed help to process it. Part of the curse of a small-town department.”

“But that’s also the good part. The fact that we rarely need a forensics team shows that our crime is manageable. Trust me. Daily multiple murders aren’t glamorous.” Her five years with the LAPD had left many mental scars, images she could never forget but could only hope would fade over time.

Zane glanced around the neat kitchen. “I don’t see anything odd in here.”

Stevie opened the refrigerator with one gloved finger. “The utility bills must be piling up. I bet they’re about ready to cut the power.” She checked the date on the milk carton: June 3. “This matches up with when he vanished.” A pile of dark brownish-green slime greeted her when she slid open the produce bin. “Yuck. Let’s check the other rooms.”

The bedrooms were sparse and neat. In the master bedroom, the bed was unmade and a single toothbrush stood in a cup near the sink. Zane peeked in the drawers of the dresser and pronounced them relatively full. The closet held six pairs of shoes, from boots to flip-flops. “Hard to tell, but I don’t see signs that he’d packed for a trip. All I see are indicators that he intended to stick around.”

“So someone grabbed him from here or met up with him somewhere else,” Stevie stated.

“But where’s his truck? It hasn’t turned up abandoned anywhere.”

“Let’s check the outbuilding.”

Zane opened the slider and stood back. As Stevie walked through, his hand lingered at her waist. Because of her bulletproof vest she felt the pressure but not the touch of his fingers, and she smiled at him. Skin crinkled at the corners of his eyes and her heartbeat briefly skidded, in spite of the sad surroundings.

How lucky am I?

Working together had turned out to be a positive thing. They meshed well. Zane was a smart cop and a natural leader, and Stevie was proud to serve with him. At the office they kept it business as usual; when she stayed at his cabin in the woods, it was anything but professional.

She sucked in a breath of the fresh air, feeling like the stale odor of the house clung to her hair and uniform. They strolled the fifty feet toward the big utility shed.

“You’re going to help out at Mom’s barbecue on Founder’s Day, right?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t miss it. Patsy put me in charge of the smoker last year. That’s a heavy responsibility at an institution like her celebration. I haven’t heard what chore she’s assigned me this year.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it an institution.” Stevie smiled. “Mom and Dad always took any excuse to invite half the town over to feed them. Mom’s happiest when she’s surrounded by hungry people.”

“Or animals,” Zane added.

“That too,” said Stevie, thinking of the menagerie in her mother’s barn. If it was hurt, lost, or lonely, her mother adopted it. She had a soft heart and a knack for providing refuge for all those down on their luck. Stevie smiled, thinking of her sister, Carly, who’d moved into the guesthouse on her parents’ property after her marriage went south. Carly and her daughter, Brianna, had provided her mother with some much-needed company after the death of her father in May.

“Have you gone to the Founder’s Day rodeo before?” Stevie asked.

Zane raised a brow at her. “Of course. How can you live in Solitude and not go to the rodeo? That’d be a sin.”

“And you’d hear about your absence from everyone in town until the following year.”

“Or longer.”

They stopped at the big shed, momentarily stumped by the chain and padlock. “You circle around, see if there’s another way in,” Zane directed. “I’ll get the cutters from the car.”

Stevie did a quick trip around the shed. No windows; no doors. Zane reappeared with a flashlight and bolt cutters that looked like they could cut a chain as thick as her thigh. He snapped the chain and pulled it off. He pushed the rolling door to one side and let the light into the big shed.

“Hello, beautiful,” Zane said to the boat. “You seen this?” he asked Stevie.

She shook her head, dumbfounded at the expensive boat in Roy’s shed. “What happened to that beat-up old thing he always hauled out for fishing?” This boat looked straight from the showroom floor and was mounted on a trailer to match. “When did he get that?”

“I’ve only seen the old one. I haven’t fished with Roy since last fall, and he didn’t have this back then.”

Stevie blew at the dust on top of the boat. “It looks like it’s never seen the water. It’s a shame to have it closed up in here.”

“Maybe he bought it for his retirement.”

“Could be.” She held out her hand for Zane’s flashlight and flicked it on as she walked to the back of the boat, more and more convinced it’d never been wet. “Holy cow, look at this!” She shone the light toward the back of the shed. Two WaveRunners sat on a double trailer, ready to head out for a trip to the lake. “Zane, did you know he had these?”

“No.”

The grim tone of his voice made Stevie turn and look at him. “What is it?”

“Where’d this stuff come from? Roy’s told me a dozen times how financially strapped he was. I was surprised when he said he was retiring because he’d always told me he’d have to work until he keeled over in his uniform.”

“Money problems?” Stevie’s heart sank. She’d been out of touch with Roy while she was in LA, but she’d never stopped caring. “So this isn’t at all what you expected to see in here.”

“Hell, no. And I don’t like it.”

“Let’s check out the storage.” Stevie pulled open the nearest huge cabinet door and stared at enough fishing rods for a Boy Scout troop. “I’m starting to understand why the chain on the door was so thick.”

Zane opened another door. “Decoys. For every type of waterfowl hunting possible. And camping equipment.”

“It’s starting to look like a Cabela’s outdoor store in here,” Stevie muttered. “And it all looks relatively new.”

“Damn it.”

“Stealing this equipment can’t be the motivation for his murder,” Stevie pointed out. “It’s still here.”

“Maybe we don’t know what’s gone missing. Maybe the killer already cleared out half the stuff.”

“But where’d Roy get the money to buy it all? You thought he was too broke to retire.”

“That might be our murder motivation right there.”

The hair on Stevie’s neck stood up.

Roy, what did you get into?

“You think he was doing something dirty? Like what?” she whispered.

“We’ve suddenly had a drug problem here in Solitude the last few months. I don’t need to remind you of that. We’ve had a few people die from that C-22 street drug, whose manufacturing source we can’t locate.” Zane waved a hand at the contents of the large shed. “Roy came into some money somehow.”

“No!” Stevie didn’t believe it. “He wasn’t that type of man. He’d never stoop to doing something illegal like that. He hated that sort of thing.”

We don’t have a drug problem.

Roy’s words from the night the teen died at O’Rourke’s Lake echoed in her brain. The boy had clearly died from something he’d ingested or injected, but Roy had been absolute in his insistence that Solitude didn’t have a drug problem. Even while the evidence lay dead at his feet.

And he’d abruptly retired that night.

“No,” she repeated.

“You don’t sound as certain now,” Zane stated.

“Roy left the force the night Hunter Brandt died. The first teen to die from the C-22. Did Roy know what was happening?” Stevie’s brain spun in a dozen directions.
Did Roy leave because the drugs got too close?

“He told me the boy’s death had made him take another look at his life.”

“Did it seem like he was running away from something?” Stevie asked. “I never saw him again after the investigation that night.”

“No. He seemed like a man who’d had a change of heart and a revelation about his life.”

“Maybe he did,” Stevie said softly as a piece of her world broke away. She couldn’t ignore the identical timing of the drug death and Roy’s departure. “Maybe he saw the results of something he’d had a hand in and the guilt got to him. We need to look at his bank and credit card records and see if there are any unexplained deposits.” She paused. “I have a feeling we’re not going to like what we find.”

The next morning Stevie jogged up the stairs to her mother’s wide wraparound porch, her work boots clomping in an unfeminine way. Her mother had the door open before Stevie could touch the handle. Patsy smiled, but Stevie could see the puffiness around her eyes and the strain in her face. Her mother had lost her husband and now one of her closest friends in fewer than ten weeks.

“Hey, sweetheart.” Patsy opened her arms for a hug, and Stevie stepped into her petite mother’s embrace, feeling the stress melt away. She felt her mother quiver slightly, and Stevie squeezed tighter.

“I’m sorry, Mom. He was one of a kind.”

Patsy stepped back, her eyes damp. “What happened?”

“What have you heard?” Stevie wanted to know what had traveled through town on the local gossip train. She kept an arm around her mother’s shoulders as they moved through the big house to her sun-filled kitchen. Stevie took a stool at the kitchen island while Patsy set a fresh cup of coffee in front of her and slid over a plate of powdered-sugar heaven.

“Ohhh. You didn’t.”

“Brianna can’t get enough of my beignets.”

“What’s Carly say about that?”

“Usually ‘Keep them away from me.’ ”