Killerfind (4 page)

hetta
blasted the air
conditioner as high as it could go. She’d set it on moderately comfortable for
Woody, since he always said riding with her was like riding in a refrigerator.
For herself, she loved when the fan whipped the frigid air straight at her
face. She sang along to the oldies blasting on her satellite radio as she
inched her way across town again to Gordonville.

Kingshighway traffic was heavier than usual, with
folks who were probably running errands in anticipation of the Labor Day
weekend coming up. Being Friday, and the last day before the three-day weekend,
all the procrastinators in Cape had apparently decided to get their barbeque
supplies at the same time. The entrance to the shopping center was as crowded
as it was during the Christmas shopping stampedes. She wove through traffic
lined up to turn into the shopping mall.

Once past the mall, she pushed the accelerator up to
sixty and flew into Gordonville. She slammed on the brakes as she remembered
the twenty-five mile per hour speed limit along Main Street. This time, the
town constable eyeballed her from his favorite stakeout spot. Breathing a sigh
of relief when she passed him and his blue lights didn’t fire up, she coasted
at twenty-five until the she passed the
Thanks for Visiting, Please Come
Again
sign. Then, she floored it. Or at least as much “flooring” as the SUV
was capable of. It didn’t exactly burn any rubber like Cami did.

She thought about the wallet and the wrench. She
couldn’t conceive of a reason why they would have been in the Z28. She thought
back to the day she and Ricky had taken Ricky’s truck and trailer and gone
after the Z. She tried to picture the inside of the barn, but couldn’t recall
anything unusual in or around the area when she and Ricky had finally loaded
the car onto Ricky’s flatbed trailer. After Ricky had backed as close as she
could to the barn door, they had had to push the car to the doorway, so that
Ricky could hook up the winch. When the car proved too much for the two of
them, with the tires being flat and embedded into the dirt, Ricky enlisted the
help of three construction workers at the highway project down the road to come
and help. Offering a couple of six packs of beer was all it took to persuade
the men to push the car into position, and the winch did the rest. Three brawny
men and two petite women eventually got the job done.

She was so engrossed in her musings that she nearly
passed up Ricky’s road, and braked hard to avoid missing it. She swerved hard
to the left, irritating the driver of the red Mustang convertible right behind
her. He saluted her with his middle finger as he roared past.

*
* *

Ricky
had closed the shop and was outside waiting when Rhetta rolled up. Ricky stowed
the metal detector in the back of the Trailblazer, closed the hatch and slid
into the passenger seat.

“It’s cold enough to hang beef in here,” Ricky said,
fastening her seat belt, then turning the vent away from her face. “Go back. I
think I know where my parka is.”

“Very funny,” Rhetta said. She reached for the
climate control and turned the temperature up to 73 degrees. It had been set on
60. Lately, those annoying kindnesses called “hot flashes” struck randomly, and
when they did, she required plenty of cold air. Randolph had learned not to
protest. He usually just carried a sweatshirt, and let her turn the air as cold
as she needed, both in the car and at home.

“What are we looking for?” Ricky said.

“I’m not really sure, but there might be something
else out there that could be a clue to Malcom Griffith’s disappearance.” Rhetta
glanced over her shoulder and pulled out of Ricky’s driveway. At the end of the
gravel road, she turned right on to the main road going through town. After
easing though, she punched it up to fifty-five.

Within minutes she turned onto another gravel road. In
the distance, she spotted several huge earth-moving machines.

“Look over there,” Ricky said, pointing to the
equipment. “Jeremy’s company is building Oak Forest Subdivision. They’ve got
Plat One nearly ready to start installing the improvements.” All of the area
around where the barn was located had been cleared and platted. There were
survey sticks marking lot corners, and others marking the proposed streets.

“Have they torn down the old barn yet?” Rhetta
asked, turning into the tree-lined driveway. The subdivision entry used the
same scenic driveway lined with tall white oaks that once led to the farmhouse.

“Not yet. Jeremy said an old boy from Arkansas wants
the barn and is going to come up here and tear it down piece by piece, and haul
the thing away.” She clicked her tongue. “Now that’s a big job. But he paid
handsomely, according to Jeremy, to buy this piece of history.” She made air
quotation marks with her index and middle fingers as she said “piece of
history.”

“Hmm, I guess it’s hard to find these old wood barns
anymore, especially if they’re in good shape,” Rhetta said as they arrived at
the end of the lane, parking in front of a recently leveled bare, earthen spot.
She remembered the old farmhouse that had stood there. It had been recently razed.

Ricky grabbed the metal detector and waited for
Rhetta to change out of her city-slicker sandals into barn-exploring tennis
shoes. Rhetta kept a pair of running shoes in her car for those days when she
went to Cape LaCroix Creek Park to walk the trails for a break from office
stress. She wore off-white capris, probably not the best choice for barn
snooping, but much better than her usual business attire—a dress or skirt.

With Rhetta’s tennies tied and her sandals stowed in
the cargo hatch, the two angled toward the old wooden barn.

“Jeremy is developing this whole subdivision?”
Rhetta asked, scoping out the oak-lined fields around the barn.

“He isn’t doing it on his own. He has two partners,”
Ricky said. “The partners, slash investors, are actually from California. The
bulk of the responsibility is on him, though. They send the money and come out
here about every six weeks to check on the progress. The company is called JS
Properties.”

Rhetta remembered seeing a sign as they drove down
the lane. It bore a green oval logo containing the letters JSP in the middle.
She recognized the logo from several billboards around town.

They stopped at the walk-through door at the gable
end of the two-story wood barn and peered at a freshly installed padlock.

“That’s strange,” Ricky said, taking the lock into
her hand, and jiggling it. “There’s nothing in this old barn anymore. I wonder
who padlocked it. I doubt Jeremy would have.” She led the way around to the
long side of the barn to a sliding door. She tugged it, but it held fast. “This
one must be locked from the inside,” she announced as Rhetta reached her.

Ricky glanced up. “I can climb through there,” she
said, and pointed to an opening approximately two feet by three feet just above
their heads. She stepped back several paces, ran at the barn, and leapt,
gripped the ledge and easily pulled herself over and through.

In a moment, she slid the door open.

Rhetta picked up the metal detector and ventured in.
She gazed around, allowing her eyes to adjust to the dim interior. The solid
old barn allowed little daylight to penetrate. Long vertical slivers of
sunlight oozed through the spaces between the wallboards, casting shadows along
the dirt floor. Dust motes danced in the skinny rays, and a musty, stale hay
odor clung to the walls.

Inside, the temperature was significantly cooler
than the late summer heat of the day. When her eyes had adjusted, Rhetta
recognized the impression in the ground where the Z28 had been parked under a
tarp. “Turn on that thing and check over here,” she said, handing Ricky the
metal detector.

Ricky began a sweeping motion in front of her as she
walked slowly around the area where the car had been stored. The metal detector
stayed mostly silent, with just an occasional feeble whimper.

After circling the area, and finding nothing but a
few bolts and rusty nails, they stopped, and Ricky turned the machine off.

“I thought for sure we’d find something else,
another clue,” Rhetta said. She wiped perspiration off her forehead with the
back of her hand. Her hair had begun to stick to her face. Although initially
the barn air had felt cooler, there was no escaping the humidity.

Ricky propped the metal detector against a wall,
wiped her face with a tissue and stuffed it into her pocket. “There’s nothing
much here. I guess we should go.”

Rhetta eased over to the spot where the car sat for
so long, and squatted to study the ground. She spotted the twin drag marks
where she remembered pushing the car. The rims had dug channels into the earth.
There were four deep wheel impressions on the ground where the car had rested
for so many years.

She studied them, then inched her way backward,
examining the ground a few feet back. “Ricky, come over here a second. Look at
this.” Ricky hunkered down to join Rhetta, who pointed at four faint
impressions. “What does that look like?”

“It looks like car wheel impressions,” Ricky
answered. She stood, studied the surrounding area and stepped gingerly away.
“It looks as though the car may have first sat right here for a time, and then
was moved forward about a car length.” She pointed to the fainter set of
impressions.

Rhetta stood. “Let’s not mess up these tracks.”

They both stepped back.

“Grab your metal detector again,” Rhetta said. “I
think someone moved the car to where it was when we got it. I wonder why. Sweep
the area under where we found the car one more time, real carefully. Let’s do
it in a grid, like they do in the detective movies. Start here.” She pointed to
the newer impressions. Using her foot, she connected the four dents, making a
rectangle out of the area. She searched for something other than her foot when
she saw how much dirt had glued to her tennies. Spotting an old section piece
of a ladder rung lying nearby, she used it to scratch in the dirt and divided the
whole thing into smaller squares.

Poised over the first square, Ricky flipped the
switch on the detector. It hummed quietly as she started at the first square
and made a thorough sweep of it before moving to the next. At the square
closest to what would have been the left front wheel of where the car was
parked when they picked it up, she was rewarded with a solid beep.

“There may be another tool or something in the
ground there,” Rhetta said, pointing to the spot where the metal detector had
pinged the loudest. She bent over and ran her hand across the dry soil. She
found nothing.

“What can we use to dig?” asked Ricky, peering
around the empty barn. “I don’t see anything resembling a shovel. In fact, I
don’t see anything resembling anything I can identify, except maybe some really
dried cow patties.” She screwed up her face at the distasteful objects.

“I’ve got one of those emergency portable shovels in
Streak,” Rhetta said. “Randolph makes me keep a whole kit in there in case I
ever get stranded in winter and have to dig myself out.” She rolled her eyes.
“He must think we’re in Montana instead of Missouri. I’ve never had to use it,
but now’s a good a time to break it in.”

*
* *

Rhetta
returned with a flashlight and a camping-style folding shovel. Ricky took the
shovel from her while Rhetta shone the beam on the spot to dig.

“Dig slowly, so we don’t tear up whatever that is.
It may be more evidence.” Rhetta crouched and aimed the flashlight.

After removing a few shovels of dirt and making a
hole about six inches deep, Ricky glanced up. “This plastic shovel can barely
tear up this dirt, so I don’t think we have to worry very much about it tearing
any—” Before she could finish, the shovel connected with something hard, making
a thud as it did. Ricky prodded again. “I don’t want to mess anything up, so I
think we should use our hands.”

Ricky laid the shovel aside, and Rhetta propped the
flashlight against it. Both of them hunched over the small hole. They carefully
sifted handfuls of soil, then tossed them aside, forming a small pile.

“I feel like an archaeologist, or anthropologist, or
one of those
gists
,” Ricky said, and giggled.