Out Of Time (29 page)

“Move it out,” he told the driver. “Bobby’s pulled up a truck at the end of the lane. Put it in the bed and come back for another load. We’ll go through everything down at the ball park where we can spread it all out.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” an SBI representative demanded, sticking his astonished face into the sheriff’s.

The sheriff pushed him aside like an annoying vine. “Forensics team is done with the site work,” he said calmly. “And there’s too much of a chance that evidence will be lost or destroyed if we leave it here. Look at all these damn people. I’m securing the evidence. We’ll go over it in a private location. Get your men out of the way.”

“You can’t do that,” three SBI men all yelled at the same time, stepping in front of the sheriff to block his way.

Their shouts were drowned out by the bellows of a cameraman who had been filming the earthmover as it loaded. “Holy shit!” he shouted. “Holy shit! Holy shit!”

A male reporter stared at him, mystified. “What the hell is it, Barry?” he asked. “Are we rolling or not?”

Definitely not. The cameraman’s equipment dangled to one side, unnoticed, as he started toward the small bulldozer. He pointed with an unsteady arm. “Look,” he said. “Look in the front of the loader.”

The driver had already made his turn and was heading out the trail but the shouts of the crowd stopped him. He looked back over his shoulder, beseeching the sheriff for instructions.

The sheriff, looking increasingly uneasy, glanced at the cameraman, hesitated, then waved the driver to return. The vehicle pivoted back toward the clearing with the bright-yellow loading claw held high in the air.

“It’s in there!” the cameraman shouted, pointing to the claw. Regaining his composure, he raised the camera and once again began to film.

The sheriff waved his hands down, directing the driver, and slowly the claw began to descend. It tipped forward as it did so and debris spilled over the lip, all the branches and junk tumbling out into a pile.

“It’s there,” the cameraman insisted. “I saw something. Look—there it is!” The dead body of a stocky white male tumbled from the loader and flopped unceremoniously atop the junk pile. Its head pointed downward, and one arm was extended in an arc, as if he were flamenco dancing.

A silence descended on the clearing. In the distance, a pack of hounds bayed at some unknown animal, their bugling sounding like the keening of some weird funeral song.

An officer inched closer. “It looks like he’s been shot in the head several times. Small caliber,” he said.

“Jesus Christ,” someone else said. “Who is it?”

“I know,” a cold voice announced. “It’s Pete Bunn. He owns this farm.”

Everyone stared at the speaker in surprise. When I joined in, I found that Steven Hill was staring back at only one person—me. And I knew I was in real trouble then.

I sat on a log, guarded by two troopers, while half of the state’s law-enforcement officers searched the junk pile under the direction of a very determined Steven Hill.

“What are we looking for?” a deputy asked as he hoisted up a broken jug and peered inside it.

“A weapon,” Steven Hill said calmly. “And, if I’m not mistaken, here it is.” He used a branch to poke beneath a mound of molding leaves unearthed during the search. He hooked the trigger of a small handgun with the stick and held the gun up to the crowd. The weapon gleamed pewter in the afternoon sunlight. My heart flip-flopped when I saw it. I knew that gun well. An Astra Constable. And it had once been mine. 

I went in for questioning voluntarily. Very voluntarily. If they arrested me and processed my fingerprints, my life as I knew it would be over. They’d quickly discover I had a felony record in Florida and that my N.C. investigator’s license was a fake. Not only would I lose my job and most of my friends, I was pretty sure they could also come up with enough legal violations to put me back behind bars. My only hope was to keep it friendly.

Too bad that wasn’t what Steven Hill had in mind.

They put me in a small room painted such a blinding white that it gave me a headache just looking at the ceiling. I stared out the window at the deepening twilight and wondered who had been dispatched to break the bad news to George Carter’s widow. I was glad it hadn’t been me. Would George Jr. cry when his mother began to sob? Or would he gurgle unknowingly?

Voices brought me back to the room. Everything I said was being immortalized by tape recorders and a video camera. It was a regular party. Hill sat at the head of the table, flanked on each side by two other Durham investigators. All, I suspected, were from the Professional Standards Division or the Detective Bureau’s Homicide Squad. One of the FBI agents sat in a chair against a wall, looking bored. The other agent had disappeared. That made it six to [adeowtex one. I wasn’t even counting the Chatham County sheriff who, through sheer stubbornness, still clung to the case by the skin of his false

teeth. He sat next to me at a far end of the table, staring at me as if I were a perplexing specimen that defied classification. I was doing my damnedest to treat him with respect. At this point, I considered him my only friend in the room— which tells you how very desperate I was. But at least he was outside of Steven Hill’s sphere of influence.

“Were you aware that Pete Bunn was the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Professional Standards Division?” some sourpuss with glasses asked me.

“No, of course not,” I said. “How could I know that? When I met with Mr. Hill, he wasn’t talking.”

Mr. Hill? Ack. But now was not the time to be anything but a well-behaved, demure lady investigator. I’d have batted my damn eyelashes at that point if I’d thought it would do me any good.

“Any idea who illegally accessed the department’s data files?” Hill asked in a neutral voice. Uh, oh. That meant Hill knew I’d been snooping around in his personnel records. This could get personal real quick.

“How could I know that?” I answered again. “I don’t work for the Durham P.D.” No way was I giving up my pal Marcus Dupree. They could break out the bamboo shoots and start sticking them under my chipped fingernails. I wasn’t talking.

“You’ve got to admit that it seems a little odd that you would find Carter’s body so easily, after professionals have searched for him for months.” This was offered by another officer. And it made me mad. I forgot to be demure.

“First of all,” I said. “I am a professional. Second, I haven’t run across a shred of evidence that anyone ever actually bothered to look for Carter. It seems to me everyone just assumed he’d taken off on his own. If you had bothered to look, you would have found him. All I did was go out to question the last person outside of his family known to have seen him—and that was Pete Bunn. That’s standard investigative procedure. Maybe finding the bloodstained shirt was lucky. Or maybe I was just more thorough.”

“Would it surprise you to learn that we did go out to the Bunn farm shortly after Carter’s disappearance and that we questioned him thoroughly?” a beefy Durham cop asked. “He was as baffled as the rest of us that Carter had disappeared.”

I looked at Steven Hill innocently, but I hoped the Chatham County sheriff got the message. “It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that at all,” I answered. “I bet I can even guess which one of you went to see him.”

Only one person in the room got m [he heiy true meaning and it was the wrong one. Steven Hill’s glance flickered over me like a lizard’s tongue, and, instead of being a warning, it was something far worse: it was a cold and confident dare that let me know it was useless however hard I worked. He had laid the groundwork far too well. I was no one to these men, while he was one of their leaders.

I was going to lose either way. If Steven Hill was an honest cop, he thought I was dirty, and that meant I was going down. If he was a dirty cop, he had placed himself in the perfect job to cover his tracks, and that meant I was going down, too. There was no way I was going to extricate myself without help. But I didn’t know where to turn. I couldn’t just sit there and continue to tap-dance around Hill’s loaded questions. He was gunning for me, and, if I hadn’t gotten the message yet, Hill’s next question made it very clear.

“Do you own a gun?” he asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“It’s very simple. Do you own a gun or not?”

“Of course I own a gun,” I answered, evading the issue. “I’m a private investigator. Why are you asking? I can’t possibly have shot George Carter. I hadn’t even heard of the man two months ago. As for Pete Bunn, are you trying to say that I’m stupid enough to kill him then lead the cops to the exact spot where I’ve hidden the body and the weapon?”

The men shifted uncomfortably, but Hill had a point he wanted to make and my answers weren’t going to stop him.

“You might well do exactly that,” he said. “Did you figure the sheriff here would be so grateful for having you lead him to Carter’s body that he wouldn’t bother to look through the rest of the junk pile? Was this some sort of game you were playing?”

“Are you serious?” I demanded. “Am I a suspect here? Or are you just being a complete asshole?” Okay, I know I said I was going to tone it down, but come on—the guy was out to hang me.

But Hill’s remark had provoked the wrong person.

“What exactly is it you’re trying to say?” the sheriff asked, turning to Hill. “That my reputation for stupidity tempts criminals into being even more stupid than I am?” He ignored the disapproving stares of the other men with the calm of a man who has selectively enforced local law for years and been reelected a zillion times by his neighbors as a result. He had true job security: every person in Chatham County owed him a favor. If the city cops wanted to be morons, his attitude said, that was fine by him. But he didn’t want to waste any more time than he had to. “What would be this little lady’s motive?”

I forgave him the “li [e h/font>

“Money,” Hill said. “Gail Honeycutt’s family would pay a lot to have her off death row. Killing Carter and Bunn makes it look like Roy Taylor may have been mixed up in something illegal. It would be enough for a stay of execution. It might even be enough for a pardon.”

“Oh, so now you think the governor is stupid, too?” the sheriff asked. The others scowled, annoyed that the sheriff was failing to toe the line.

“All I’m saying,” Hill said, “is that we’re verifying if the weapon we found is the one that killed Pete Bunn. We’re running the serial number on the gun right now. If it comes back registered to Casey, then she’s in trouble. A lot of trouble. She’d be a whole lot better off if she just let us know the truth right now.”

Something in his voice gave him away. He was too confident. That was when I knew for certain that Steven Hill was the one. He had killed Pete Bunn and Peyton Tillman. And probably George Carter. And maybe even Roy Taylor, too. Because only the person who had stolen my gun and registration would be so confident it was traceable back to me. He was going to let me take the fall—and that meant he had planted more evidence along the line to implicate me. I had to find it before anyone else did.

My one hope was that my gun registration was fake. As someone who had served more than a year in jail, I was not allowed to legally own firearms in North Carolina. The trace would come back showing that my gun had been purchased by one Ruby Woods of Mecklenburg County. Further investigation would reveal that Ruby had been dead for forty years. I know, because I’d paid a lot of money for a gun with a clean pedigree.

I wondered what Hill would do when the trace came back. He couldn’t pull out the fake registration papers without making it clear that he had been the one to steal them from my office. If I could get someone in power to believe my story, Hill’s reaction to the gun trace might confirm that I was telling the truth.

“I want to make a phone call,” I announced.

Hill looked pleased, like he had me on the run. The others were annoyed. I was screwing up their schedule. Fortunately, the sheriff came through again.

“I need to make some calls myself,” he said. “Since she’s here voluntarily, why don’t we take a break?” Just to prove he could, the sheriff rose, hitched up his belly so it cleared his belt and strode from the room. It was a nifty move. I didn’t have his belly, at least not yet, but I could stride with the best of them.

The FBI agent stopped me at the door and glanced at Steven Hill.

“It’s okay,” Hill said, waving a dismissive hand. “Let her make her call.”

You arrogant son of a bitch, I thought, pressing my lips together to keep from speaking out loud. I’m going to stuff your Armani tie up your ass by the time I’m done. I pushed past the agent and was petty enough to step on his foot on my way out the door. I hoped my size-nine clompers hurt.

I rode down the elevator to the lobby’s main bank of phones wondering who the hell I could call. Every favor extended, every favor ever owed ran through my head as I scrambled for someone to come to my aid. When this whole mess was over, I really needed to spend a little more time winning friends and influencing people. Loners ended up, well, alone. Like I was right now.

I weighed my options. Since I hadn’t been arrested yet, introducing a lawyer into the situation was unlikely to do anything but raise the very issue I wanted to avoid. Bobby D. could get me out of any jam, but he was laid up at Wake Med, snoring and belching his way into the Patient Hall of Fame. Bill Butler had made it clear that he was on Hill’s side. I could call Jack, but what could he do? He was a bartender. Get the cops so drunk they let me go? There was Slim Jim, but I was frankly afraid of what he might do. Slim Jim’s anti-government sentiments had been simmering for years. I had visions of a horde of mountain men descending on Durham police headquarters, faces shrouded with bandannas as they dynamited a hole in one of the supporting walls and whisked me away to perpetual exile somewhere along the Blue Ridge.