While Kyle handled a variety of calls from murder to petty theft, the bulk of his duties were investigating traffic fatalities. The roads were not kind, especially to inattentive drivers and those unfortunate enough to cross their path.
He’d just come from a particularly nasty crash—a truck went over the guardrail up on Route 56 outside Colton two nights ago, landing in the reservoir. They didn’t have the equipment to bring the vehicle up until this morning, and when they did, there was no dead driver behind the wheel. The truck was being taken to the police yard for inspection while a team was finishing up the preliminary accident report, based on the physical evidence. Kyle was certain drunk driving was the cause. Based on the skid marks leading to the crash site, the truck had been going far too fast for the road. While there was no body, the driver could easily have been thrown from the truck and be at the bottom of the lake. They’d searched up and down both sides of the lake downstream and found nothing. They’d send down divers this weekend.
The truck was registered to James Benson. He had a deputy working on finding next of kin for Benson, a firefighter stationed up in Indian Hills. He was a single man of thirty-two with no offspring.
All Kyle wanted to do now was go home to Laurie and the kids and forget the senseless accident. Play some games, maybe barbeque some ribs, and listen to his three boys laugh.
“Hello, Margo,” he said to the secretary/clerk/office manager. He didn’t remember Margo’s official title, but the Sheriff’s Department would fall apart without her at the helm.
“Mrs. Fletcher called about the duplex on the corner of Elm and Sycamore. Three visitors between midnight and four a.m.”
“Maybe Mrs. Fletcher should take an extra sleeping pill,” Kyle muttered. The woman slept so lightly that she could hear a fly snore.
“The courthouse called to let you know that Jeremy Fisher cut a deal on the assault charges and you won’t be needed in court on Monday.”
“My day just got better.”
Margo looked at him blandly and said, “And a private investigator stopped by regarding a case he said Deputy Weddle is working.”
Kyle took the business card and message from Margo. Sean Rogan, Rogan-Caruso-Kincaid Investigative Services, Eastern Office. Sounded impressive, but P.I.s liked to bullshit. When he’d been a cop in Philly, he’d dealt with enough low-life P.I.s that he didn’t hold out hope that Rogan was any different.
He expected a message from Margo, but Rogan had written the note himself.
Detective—
I’m inquiring about the status of the investigation into the missing body of the female victim found in the Kelley Mine on Travers Peak outside Spruce Lake, as well as the statement myself and Ms. Lucy Kincaid gave to Deputy Weddle regarding evidence visually identified in the mine this morning, specifically hair strands and insects first observed on the dead woman before she disappeared.
I’ve been retained by Tim Hendrickson, who owns the property adjacent to the mine and has been the subject of escalating acts of sabotage aimed at preventing him and his brother from opening a family resort, which was approved by the county. I am interested in the status of this investigation as it may be related to my own. Please contact me at your earliest convenience.
—Sean Rogan
“I’m lost,” Kyle said.
“According to Deputy Weddle’s report, he closed the case yesterday after Fire and Rescue determined it was a crank call.”
“Crank call?”
“No body was found in the mine.”
Kyle was royally confused. “Track down Tyler. I want to talk to him before I call this P.I. back.”
“Yes, Detective.” She picked up her phone.
Kyle went to his small office and pulled up the report on the computer. A call came in from Hendrickson on Wednesday about an arson fire and the corpse in the mine. Two different locations. The arson investigation was active and assigned to the county fire marshal’s office. Standard. The other call was a prank?
Something didn’t jibe. He read Weddle’s notes.
… No body was found in the mine at the location Ms. Kincaid identified. They searched the immediate area, but no sign of any body, or evidence of violence, was seen. The area where Ms. Kincaid claimed to have seen the body is heavily shadowed, and an overactive imagination could easily have “seen” a dead person. When questioned, Ms. Kincaid admitted she didn’t approach the “body” but ran back to the mine shaft. This officer doesn’t believe the false report had been malicious, but simply a scared young woman who saw “something” in the dark.
Weddle had closed the case. So what evidence was Rogan talking about?
“Margo?” Kyle called out into the main room. “Did Weddle log in any evidence today?”
“No, Detective.”
“Have you reached him?”
“He’s off duty. I left a message.”
Kyle glanced at the clock. 3:10. Typical of Weddle and a few others who didn’t raise a finger after they clocked out. When their budget was slashed and overtime had to be preapproved, half the deputies protested by clocking in and out right on time. Most went back to the old way, but a few, like Weddle, didn’t.
Kyle didn’t have a college degree, but he’d been a cop for over twenty years. A good cop. He smelled something rotten, and feared it was his own deputy. Kyle almost called the P.I., then decided to wait. He needed something more than his gut instinct before he brought the situation to the sheriff, who was currently in Albany fighting for more funding. Ever since the state screwed the counties in the last budget, they’d been unable to hire more deputies, upgrade their computer system, or perform more than minimal maintenance on the county jail. Tyler Weddle had better have a logical—and provable—explanation for the conflicting information or Kyle would string him up.
The only thing Kyle hated more than an unrepentant criminal was a bad cop.
Margo buzzed him. He didn’t want to answer—thirty minutes until he was off-duty—but of course he did.
“We found Mr. Benson’s next of kin,” she said. “He’s the legal guardian of his seventeen-year-old nephew.”
Kyle rubbed his face. Damn. A minor.
“Do you want me to have a deputy inform the family?”
“Where does he live?”
“Spruce Lake.”
“Send me the address; I’ll do it.” Kyle’s instincts were buzzing. Spruce Lake, of all places—he never heard anything out of that dead mining town for the last six years since Paul Swain’s drug operation was busted, and in two days there was a report of arson, a dead body, a missing dead body, and now a firefighter was apparently dead in a car accident, but his body couldn’t be found.
He definitely wanted to pay a visit to Spruce Lake.
As Ricky pulled out of the high school parking lot that afternoon, he thought he saw Sean Rogan, the guy he’d tricked into falling down the mine shaft.
He had to be wrong.
When he looked again, he didn’t see anything but a blur of the white truck as it made a U-turn and went in the opposite direction. Ricky tried to breathe easier, told himself his mind was playing tricks on him, but that didn’t help. It was guilt, he knew, that had him on edge. He was relieved Rogan hadn’t died, but he hadn’t been able to eat or sleep much in the last two days. He knew he’d survived the fall—everyone in town had heard about the friend of Tim Hendrickson’s who’d fallen down the mine in pursuit of an arsonist—but that didn’t appease Ricky.
He kept his eyes on the rearview mirror until he was confident that Rogan, if it had been Rogan, wasn’t following him. He decided to take a roundabout way home, partly because he really didn’t want to face his uncle right now. Uncle Jimmy had been furious when he first found out Ricky had been working for Reverend Browne. That was months ago.
“I’ve done everything to keep you safe and out of harm’s way,” Jimmy had said. “Make sure you go to college and get out of this backwater. And you’re walking right into the shit. Who are y
ou, Rick? Are you your mother’s son or your father’s son?”
Ricky hadn’t spoken to Jimmy for a week after that. His uncle knew how he felt about his father. Ricky wanted to do the right thing, but he no longer knew what was right. And Jimmy was a hypocrite. He was in deeper illegal shit than Ricky.
He promised to lay low, but Ricky had been terrified after Rogan had fallen down the mine shaft, and he had to tell Jimmy the truth. Maybe Jimmy wasn’t still upset with him. He couldn’t be madder at Ricky than Ricky was at himself.
He felt awful about setting the fire. He hadn’t wanted to do it in the first place. He hadn’t wanted to do anything to Joe Hendrickson’s place. He’d liked the old man, missed him more than he’d miss his dad if he croaked.
The reason he agreed to help Reverend Browne was because he hated Adam Hendrickson. Adam hadn’t even remembered him.
Ricky didn’t know Tim, the older brother, but Adam spent nearly every summer here. They’d gone fishing half a dozen times. The last time, Adam was seventeen and Ricky was twelve, two months before his mom died. Joe had taken them on an overnight fishing trip. They’d camped under the stars and Ricky desperately wished that Joe was his dad and Adam was his brother and his mom wasn’t dying.
Stupid, stupid childish fantasy.
Adam didn’t even remember Ricky, and why should he? Ricky had been a runt until recently, and when Adam went to college he stopped visiting Spruce Lake. That was fine with Ricky. He had Joe all to himself. He started helping him with chores every Saturday. Joe paid him, but Ricky did it for the company, not the money.
Then he died. A heart attack, Doc Griffin said. Ricky had found Joe on the kitchen floor when he’d come by the first Saturday in March, over a year ago. After that, he started doing odd jobs for Reverend Browne.
“I’ll help make this right. I mean what I say.”
Ricky felt queasy as he remembered Rogan’s words. Why would a stranger offer to help him? Rogan was a friend of Tim Hendrickson, which meant he was one of them. And even if he tried to help, what could he do? Ricky just needed to lay low, stay out of Rogan’s sight, and eventually the dude would go home. The resort wouldn’t open, and everyone would finally relax. Get back to business as usual. It was the whole resort thing that made everyone crazy. And while Ricky understood the resort wouldn’t be good for the town’s illegal business, he didn’t understand why everyone was so freaked out.
He turned down a long, bumpy street that bordered the so-called town of Spruce Lake. The potholes were so bad he had to work on his alignment damn near every month. The sad houses mirrored their occupants—tired, sagging, appearing older than their years. Everyone had big lots filled with cars and junk. The skinny Doberman across the street from his house barked at Ricky, teeth bared. The chain-link fence didn’t keep the attack dog in the yard, but the rope he was tethered to did. Ricky suspected that one day, the dog would bust the rope and rip out someone’s throat.
He pulled into the carport, relieved Uncle Jimmy wasn’t home yet. He worked a three days on, three days off schedule at the fire station. Ricky went in through the side door, dumped his backpack on the kitchen table, and opened the refrigerator. Nearly empty, but at least the milk was fresh. He took the container, drank half from the bottle, and put it back.
As he closed the refrigerator door, his peripheral vision caught movement to his right. He glanced around, looking for something to defend himself with, when he recognized the intruder.
“Hello,” Sean Rogan said. “Now, why don’t you tell me why you tried to kill me? Spare no details. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
EIGHTEEN
Sean stared the kid in the eye. First reactions tended to be the most honest.
The kid was scared, but ready to defend himself. A survivor. Cocky and cautious, a familiar combination. So much like the young Sean Rogan that he could have been looking at himself in a mirror fifteen years ago.
Still, because he, too, was a survivor, Sean watched the kid’s body language for signs that he had a hidden weapon. Sean didn’t think so—but there could be a gun under a table or cabinet.
“I could kill you for breaking into my house,” he said.
“So James Benson is your dad? He seems kind of young to father a teenager, but anything’s possible.”
The kid couldn’t hide his surprise. “You followed me?”
“I thought you’d spotted me at the school, but I didn’t need to follow you,” Sean replied. “I tagged the license plate number, ran it, found the registered owner was James Benson at this address.”
Benson lived in town, one of the few side streets off the main road that intersected the highway two miles west. About half the nearly four hundred residents lived in the one-mile-square “town” on large parcels with small, ramshackle homes where the “newer” houses, like Benson’s, were still more than fifty years old. The rest of the town lived in the “country” on acreage, but most of the houses were just as rundown.
“I didn’t want to follow you,” Sean continued. “Didn’t want you to do something stupid like drive off the road trying to get away. This way, I could do a little research. Like figure out that James Benson is an employee of Fire and Rescue. And he’s one of the few residents here who still owns his house. Very interesting to me, since Jon Callahan owns seventy percent of the properties in Spruce Lake. Been buying them up for the last couple years.”
At the mention of Callahan, the kid tensed.
“I offered to help you,” Sean said, “and you tried to kill me.”
The kid spoke. “I didn’t want to kill you.”
“You’re lucky my girlfriend is smart and tracked me down. Otherwise, I could have died down there. So right now, you have two options. I haul your ass to Canton and have you arrested for arson and attempted murder or you tell me what the fuck is going on, starting with your name.”
Sean watched the teenager weigh whether he was serious or not. Sean let him stew.
Finally, he said, “I don’t want your help.”
“Fair enough. Come with me.”
“I ain’t going anywhere.” He backed away, eyeing a butcher block of knives.
Sean was getting pissed. “Look, kid, I can draw my gun faster than you can grab one of those knives, and that’s not taking into account that I doubt you know how to throw a knife with any accuracy. I want to help you. But you have to want help. You can think there’s no way out, that you’re drowning in whatever shit you’re stuck in, but I promise you—there’s always a way out. Might not be pretty, but when you’re drowning and someone offers you a life preserver, you’d be smart to grab it.”
Sean held out his hand. “You know my name. I don’t know yours.”
“You found Jimmy, I bet you can figure it out.”
Jimmy. That meant either an older brother or an uncle.
“Let me tell you what I think is going on. I think Jimmy has you doing something you don’t want to do. That he’s mixed up with some people and got you mixed up with them, too. First you start small—basic sabotage. Slows construction at the Hendrickson place, costs them a bit of money, but doesn’t stop them.”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Jimmy has you by the throat, and he’s going to get you killed or in prison if you don’t take my help.” He held out his card. “I’m being straightforward with you, kid.”
“Jimmy’s not—” He cut himself off and grabbed the card. Stared at it as if it were a lifeline, his face trying not to show how worried he was. How scared. How protective of Jimmy.
“Jimmy’s not what? Maybe I should just hang out here until he gets done with his shift, talk to him, find out if he knows what you’ve been doing while he’s been working seventy-two-hour shifts.” Sean pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. He leaned back, pretending to relax.
“You can’t stay here. You gotta leave.” His voice cracked as he looked at the closest exit.
“I don’t want to play
games with you. But you nearly killed me, and worse? You scared my girlfriend. I want to help, but right now I don’t like you much. Give me a reason.”
The kid looked up as if asking God for help, but not expecting any.
“Start with your name. First name, that’s all.”
Through clenched teeth, he said, “Ricky.”
“Good. I don’t know what’s going on in this town, but I’m pretty sure you—and Jimmy—aren’t orchestrating it. I will find out the truth.”
A car door slammed and Ricky jumped. Panicked, he craned his head toward the kitchen window, so he could see down the driveway. “You’re a liar,” he said to Sean.
Sean looked out. A sheriff’s truck was parked behind Ricky’s car, but the man who was walking up the weed-infested path wasn’t Deputy Weddle. This guy was ten years older and out of uniform, though he had a badge clipped to his utility belt next to his gun.
“I didn’t call the cops, Ricky.”
“Right.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Prove it.”
There was a knock on the door. Sean glanced around, motioned toward the bathroom at the end of the hall. “I’m not here.”
Ricky looked skeptical, but Sean walked to the bathroom and quietly closed the door. A moment later, he heard the front door open.
The house was small and the walls were thin, so Sean was able to hear nearly everything the cop said.
“Are you James Benson’s nephew?” he asked.
“Yes,” Ricky said. “Why?”
“I’m Detective Sergeant Kyle Dillard. What’s your name, son?”
“Ricky. Where’s Jimmy?”
“Do you have any other relatives in town?”
“No. What happened? Did he get hurt? Why didn’t his chief call me?”
“He wasn’t hurt on the job,” Dillard said. “May I come in a moment?”
There was a long pause, then Sean heard the door click close. “I’m really sorry, son, but your uncle’s truck went off the bridge outside Colton Wednesday night. He’s presumed dead.”
If I Should Die Page 13
