Slow Dollar (13 page)

“Just give me your keys,” I said. “I’m too hungry for you to drive.”

On the way over, Dwight let go of a few more details. There had been a bloody shoe print on the floor of the Dozer, and they’d found tissue samples and nasal mucus around the heel area.

“No distinctive tread, though,” said Dwight.

They were going to look into Braz’s auction buys and eBay sales. “The mother says they’ve got a place this side of Widdington and he’s been storing some of his buys there till they head back to Florida next month. We’ll go out with her tomorrow, and I may send Mayleen or Jack around to any self-storage units in the area where he’s bought stuff, but I still think we’re going to find the killer right there in the carnival. You do know the speed limit’s forty-five through here, right?”

“Why in the carnival?” I asked, ignoring his question.

No trooper pulls you if you’re doing less than eight over the limit.

Okay, so I was doing ten. I eased off the gas a hair and Dwight relaxed a little, too.

“Most homicide victims know their killers.”

“To know is not to love?”

“Familiarity sure does breed contempt,” he agreed. “Carnies don’t usually want to talk to lawmen, but we’ve found a couple who say Braz Hartley was a liar and a petty thief, a blowhard and a coward. They say he used to bully his brother till his brother got old enough to kick ass back. Always full of big schemes to make a million dollars and leave the carnival, yet every year he was back on the road with the Ameses, who, incidentally, seem to be pretty well liked and respected.”

“You may not like the idea of strangers like the Lincoln brothers,” I said. “All the same, money’s a big motive, and Tally told me they’ve had some high-dollar finds in those self-storage lockers. A watch worth thousands, for instance. I haven’t read the statutes lately, but as I recall, if the operator of a self-storage facility follows the procedures for notifying the owner, then it’s a good-faith sale and neither the operator nor the buyer has any obligation to the owner.”

The forty-five gave way to fifty-five and Dwight’s truck obligingly moved right on up to sixty-three.

“Think of how the Lincolns reacted over a few tools worth a couple of hundred at most,” I said. “If someone with the same sort of faulty logic lost something worth thousands, especially if they lost it over a technicality like missed rental payments, don’t you think they could get violent if the buyer wouldn’t give it kick?”

“But he hadn’t bought anything particularly valuable this time out,” Dwight objected. “Just four lockers. Two were some old furniture and a couple of gilt-framed pictures.”

“Antiques?”

“Not that kind of old. More like made-ten-years-ago old that’s falling apart. And the pictures are the kind you see in motels. Then there was one locker that only had used cans of paint and pieces of plywood that look like somebody’s kid painted them for a Halloween party. Lots of skeletons and devils, Ames told us. Hartley bought them cheap, and Ames took them off his hands for twenty or thirty bucks and hauled 
‘
em out to their place near Widdington. He’s going to nail them around the outside of the haunted house that he’s planning to rebuild. Oh, and one funny thing—two racks of expensive nightgowns and bathrobes in all colors of the rainbow. Satin and lace. All on fancy padded hangers. Matching bedroom slippers, too. Hartley had to bid pretty high for that. Stuff is good quality and barely been worn, according to Mayleen. Who would store stuff like that in a locker?”

“Maybe it’s from a lingerie store that was going out of business?”

“Mayleen says it’s all the same size.”

I merged onto 1-40. The speed limit here was seventy, and the truck seemed pathetically grateful to get a chance to stretch its horses.

Mischievous thoughts occurred to me. “Maybe it was a gift from a secret lover and the only time she could wear it was when she was meeting him? Or maybe she’s a catalog model for Victoria’s Secret.”

Dwight wasn’t amused. “So why let the rental payments lapse?”

“Well, jail time did it for the Lincoln boys. Sickness? Death? The storage facility has to send a certified letter, but letters get tossed. Or lost. Especially during crisis times.”

Before I could speculate further, the car in the lane beside me misjudged my speed and started to cut in front of us without signaling. I had to swerve to avoid hitting him, and I gave a blast of the horn that sent him back into his own lane as I accelerated to get away from him.

“Jesus H, Deb’rah!” Dwight yelped. “
Eighty-eight?
”

“Oops,” I said, and kept the speedometer on a sedate seventy till we hit the Chapel Hill exit.

Visitor parking’s almost nonexistent on UNC’s north campus around the Old Well that actually furnished water for the first students back in the 1700s. I stopped beside Old East, slid out, and told Dwight to circle the block while I went looking for Stevie. “There’s his Jeep, so he shouldn’t be far.”

I had no qualms about disturbing the scholar. He’d had at least four hours to study if he’d gone straight to the library after dropping Eric off in Raleigh.

“Steve Knott?” asked the first student I saw when I entered his stairwell. “Yeah, he just went up. Next floor. First room on the left.”

The lights were on and the door was ajar, and when I pushed it open, Stevie, was hanging freshly pressed shirts in his closet. He was, shall we say, surprised to see me.

Indeed, his first words of welcome were “Oh shit, Deborah. What’re you doing here?”

“Dwight wants to talk to you.”

“Dwight
Bryant?
He’s here?”

“Yep. Wants to know why you and Eric decided not to leave your names Friday night. Since you wouldn’t come talk to me this afternoon, you can talk to him now.”

“You sicced him on us? I don’t believe this.”

“Nobody sicced him on you, honey. Nobody had to. We talked to both of you at that Pot O’Gold slide, remember? When Dwight looked over an alphabetized list of attendees, you think he wouldn’t notice which Knott wasn’t on it?”

“Did y’all talk to Eric yet?”

It occurred to me that he might be more forthcoming if he thought we knew something he didn’t, so I merely shrugged. “Dwight’s keeping an open mind. He wants to hear your version.”

“Oh Christ!”

“So why don’t we get on downstairs before he gets tired of driving around in circles?”