This story fit the facts. If it turned out to be true, then Faye would probably be finding no more precious jewels in her back yard.
Chapter Twenty
The sheriff had told Faye to be at his office bright and early, ready to help him and the federal officers draw up a list of questions to ask Herbie. And ready to be paid again at a generous hourly rate. She was beginning to wonder why she was wasting her time chasing a Ph.D., when law enforcement folks were so anxious to write big checks with her name on the line that said “Pay to the order of—”
Her clients knew that there might or might not be enough evidence to connect Herbie to the charges being pressed against Nita and Wayland, so Faye’s expertise was essential. Where did Herbie’s merchandise come from? Did he know that it had been illegally obtained? And what laws were being broken when it was sold?
When she arrived, she found the sheriff trying to calm a large, overwrought woman with bottle-red hair. Liz was a wreck.
“He’s gone. Chip wouldn’t go off without telling me. He’s never done it before. Something’s wrong.”
The sheriff patted her hand and shot Faye a look that said, “Help me.”
Faye perched on the desk next to the spot where Liz sat hunched and weeping. “Do you think it’s the girlfriend?” she asked. “Most men Chip’s age spend a night away from home now and then. They just tend to do a better job of hiding it from their mothers.”
“Maybe. I’d like to think so. But he didn’t show up for work last night, and I know he needs the money. I don’t pay him all that much.”
“Smart woman,” the sheriff murmured.
“I still see him as my baby boy, but I know he’s an adult. Is there anything you can do, Sheriff? Or is there a law that you have to wait for twenty-four hours or something before you look for him? Because twenty-four hours is an awful long time.”
“Usually we wait forty-eight hours—”
Liz groaned and laid her head on his desk.
“—but that’s not written in stone. We don’t wait a second if the missing person’s mental state could be impaired, or if we think he might be a danger to himself or to somebody else.”
“Well, I don’t think he’s dangerous. And his mental state seemed fine to me, though a young man with a girlfriend can act real unbalanced. Does that count?”
“Testosterone is not a controlled substance.” He shot a glance at Faye, as if he knew she was thinking, Maybe it should be. Rubbing a hand over his jaw, he said, “Do you have any reason to think he’s in danger? Other than just the fact that he’s missing?”
“No reason, other than the fact that somebody got stabbed to death in my parking lot lately.”
“That’s good enough for me. I’ll have all my staff keep an eye out for him, and I’ll assign somebody sharp to head things up. You have to understand something about missing persons cases, though, Liz.”
She lifted her head from the desk and looked him in the face.
“There’s more than one reason for those guidelines that say ‘Wait twenty-four hours,’ or ‘Wait forty-eight hours.’ First of all, an adult has a right to go where he pleases and do what he pleases.”
“Chip’s been telling me that for years.”
“Second, most missing persons show up pretty soon, so looking for them right away can be a waste of time.” He put his hand on the woman’s wrist. “Are you listening to me, Liz? The odds are good that he’s just fine.”
Liz’s nod was jerky. Faye took hold of her free hand.
“And third, most law enforcement people are way overworked. Those waiting periods keep us from wasting time looking for people who just took off in a huff, planning to come home in a day or two. That means we can’t count on a whole lot of help from departments in other counties, at least not for a couple of days, but that’s okay. We can do a whole lot from right here in Micco County.” He reached in a drawer and pulled out a notepad. “So tell me about the condition of his room. Any sign of a struggle?”
“No. Nothing was out of place. His bed hadn’t even been slept in.”
“Were any of his possessions missing?”
“A duffel bag. And some clothes. All his underwear was gone, except for a couple of pairs in the hamper. His work clothes seemed to be all there, but that makes sense. I make him wear long pants and polo shirts to work, but he’d never wear that kind of gear anyplace else. It looked like he didn’t take nothing but some t-shirts and shorts and socks and basketball shoes. And a pair of flip-flops.”
“Toothbrush? Razor? Other toiletries?”
“His toothbrush and toothpaste were gone. His electric razor was still there. He doesn’t use all that many toiletries, as you call ’em, but I didn’t see any deodorant on his bathroom counter. Oh, and his New Orleans Saints cap was gone. He’s loved the Saints since he was just a little boy.” Her face sagged again.
“So he packed up and left peacefully.”
“Or somebody made it look like he did,” Faye added, trying to help. Immediately, she wished she could take it back. Or maybe she should just bite her tongue out. There was no point in speculating about foul play in front of a woman whose face was crumpled like a lost kindergartener looking for her parents.
The sheriff continued his list of questions, and Liz continued her truthful but unhelpful responses.
“No sign of a struggle? Any unsavory characters around last night…other than your usual wholesome crowd, I mean?”
“Nope and nope.”
“You don’t give a guy much to go on, Liz.” The sheriff laid his pen on the pad and just looked at it for a second, as if he thought it should be able to write out the answer to this problem all by itself. Picking the pen back up, he said, “I’ll need a description of the car. If you have the license plate number, that would save me from having to look it up.”
“That stuff’s not going to help you, Sheriff. Chip’s car is right where he left it—in the parking lot next to the meat locker.”
Faye couldn’t say why this bit of information was more chilling than everything else that had been said. She couldn’t shake the mental image of a young man carrying a duffel bag as he walked down a lonely road, then climbing into an ordinary-looking car or truck and riding away, never to be seen again.
***
After seeing a shaken Liz to her car, Faye couldn’t recapture the total outrage she’d felt over the rape of her hotel site, not compared to the enormity of Liz’s situation. She couldn’t even completely recapture her repulsion at Herbie’s completely mercenary approach to history, but she was trying. This odious man charged people for the privilege of destroying a battlefield. And battlefield was just another word for graveyard.
After that, he charged them to camp on that desecrated graveyard and he rented them equipment for camping and for digging. He profited still more by selling them food and drink. And he profited a fourth time by posing as an antiquities broker, then collecting a nice percentage for doing nothing more than setting up an EBay listing. Most of those things were not illegal, just unethical as hell. Faye wanted nothing more than to put a bunch of miles between her and Herbie.
Unfortunately, the sheriff had changed his tune about what he wanted from her. He didn’t just want her to help him draw up a list of questions for the profiteering pig. He wanted her present during the questioning, because he thought her expertise would come in handy. He said it didn’t make any sense for her to give him a list of questions, then study the answers, only to say, “But you should have followed up that answer with a question about thus-and-so. Haul Herbie back in.”
It would be a most unpleasant assignment, but Sheriff Mike still had access to the governmental dollars that were backing up her consultant’s checks. Faye’s money-grubbing little heart couldn’t bear to pass this job up. Nor could she walk away from the tiny sliver of a chance that Herbie’s pothunting business might somehow be related to Douglass’ death, and Wally’s.
S
he thought she knew why she couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for grilling Herbie about his activities, no matter how much he disgusted her. So what if the sheriff or the federal agents or whoever had jurisdiction over this mess could prove he’d been doing all those things? What would it change? Herbie would still own the battlefield. He could still dig it up himself. He could probably still get away with charging other people to dig there. And she knew of no law against selling legally obtained goods online.
Faye didn’t want to waste her time on the likes of Herbie, but the sheriff thought it was important. She’d figured she should rise above the queasy feeling he put in the pit of her stomach. So here she was, across a table from him.
Herbie was pale and he looked damp. Faye didn’t know whether it was appropriate for her to shake hands with him, since she was just supposed to act like a fly on the wall. This was a relief, because those flabby hands probably had sweaty palms. His black hair stuck to his head like a wet swimcap.
The sheriff began talking with no more than the necessary greetings and introductions. They had been joined by the Wakulla County sheriff and a federal agent, but neither sheriff said much. Sheriff Mike ceded the conversation to the soft-voiced agent who began by saying, “We just want to ask you some questions about two people in custody who were caught digging artifacts on federal land. You haven’t been charged with anything.”
Faye thought she’d want a lawyer, all the same, if she were in Herbie’s shoes, but he didn’t ask for one. She kept her mouth shut, which is what she’d been asked to do.
“Nita and Wayland Curry tell me that they work for you,” the agent added.
“I never asked ’em to do anything illegal. As far as I know, they never have. At least, not while they were working for me.”
The agent rearranged the papers in front of him. “That may be so.”
“It is so. And if those two tell you any different, just remember that it’s my word against theirs. I know you checked my record, so you know I ain’t never been arrested. And I have a regular job that pays my bills. Benefits and everything. You can’t say any of those things about Wayland and Nita. My word is a helluva lot better than theirs.”
Nobody said, “That’s not saying much,” but Faye was thinking it.
“They tell us that you pay them by the pound—that you don’t even look at their goods before you pay them. Now why would you do that? I can’t figure it out. Our archaeologist,” he nodded at Faye, “tells us that there’s nothing of value in the box of stuff we confiscated when they were picked up. Can you help me understand something? If it’s not even worth selling on EBay, why would you buy it?”
Herbie’s mouth gave a nervous twitch when the word “EBay” was mentioned, but he recovered well. “I’m a collector. If it’s old, I want it.”
Faye’s temper crept up another notch. People like Herbie and his customers had cost the world a lot of history, just because they wanted stuff. They wanted to own stuff, possess stuff, keep it in a place where no one else could appreciate it or learn from it. Herbie’s customers had no idea what they were doing when they tore up Herbie’s property, and they would continue tearing it up until there was nothing left. What would Herbie do for extra cash then?
A thought struck her so hard that she had to suppress a nervous twitch just like Herbie’s. Faye scrolled back through her last thoughts.
Herbie’s customers had no idea what they were doing.
They would continue tearing his property up until there was nothing left.
What would Herbie do for extra cash after that?
She reached for Sheriff Mike’s notepad, wrote down exactly what the interviewing officer needed to say, and passed it to him.
“We know what you do with the junk Nita and Wayland Curry bring you.” Again, there was a not-quite-suppressed twitch. “What will your customers do when they find out you’ve been salting the battlefield with any old junk you can find?”
Faye mentally congratulated the interviewer on the phrase “any old junk.” She hadn’t phrased the question in quite that way, but it succinctly summarized precisely what Herbie was doing…buying old junk, burying it on his property, then selling people the experience of digging up “genuine” artifacts. And he could continue doing it forever because, so far as his customers knew, his property would never be stripped clean.
“It’s not illegal.” Herbie’s voice had climbed a half-step. “I charge people to come dig up artifacts. They belong to me. I bought and paid for them. I didn’t ever say how long they’d been in the ground. They just…assume…that the stuff’s been there a long time.”
“Nobody’s said anything about it being illegal,” the interviewer said in a soothing voice. “Is that the only reason you’ve been buying junk from the Currys?”
“Yes. Yes, it is. Only if they find something especially nice, I don’t bury it. I keep it for myself and sell it online. And that’s not illegal, either.”
Faye could tell that he was trying hard not to look at her. No wonder he’d been in such a hurry to get her off his property. Customers like Herbie’s insist that their antiquities be “genuine” and “authentic.” With her archaeological training, Faye could have told them the truth about Herbie’s battlefield in an instant, if she’d been allowed to look at it.
Though the sheriff had told her to keep quiet, she couldn’t resist asking a single question. “I noticed quite a few holes next door to the battlefield, at the Bachelder house site. Are you digging there for artifacts, so you can salt the battlefield with them?” It would have been simpler just to open the house site to his customers and let them dig for junk themselves.
“Nobody digs there but me.” Herbie had regained a bit of his composure. He answered her in a swaggering tone of voice. “And what makes you think that my property was in the Bachelder family?”
“The property records say so. So do the headstones in the family cemetery out back.”
“You know all that, and yet you wonder why I keep people off that property?” Herbie was still a human puddle of perspiration, but this question seemed to stiffen his backbone a bit. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. She could have sworn he was smirking. “Some archaeologist you are. You don’t even know the history that’s sitting right under your nose.”
That’s all Herbie would say.
Chapter Twenty-one
Emma didn’t even know Chip, and she was fretting about him. “How could he go off and leave his mother to worry? Look at her,” she said, gesturing at Liz, who was slaving over a hot grill and tending bar. “And what if the boy didn’t just go off? What if somebody took him? Or what if they tricked him into coming with them of his own free will?”
There wasn’t anything to say to Emma. Faye could soothe her with reminders that young men wander all the time into places their mothers don’t know about. Most of them come back home safe and grow up to be nice, respectable people. Chip was almost certain to come waltzing home that night, and he was almost certain to go back to college and do everything his mother dreamed for him. Get a degree. Teach high school history. Marry a nice girl and have strapping young man children who would come hang out at their grandmother’s bar in the summertime.
Except he might not. Some nice young men didn’t come home. Sometimes bad things happened to people who didn’t deserve it. Nobody knew that better than Emma.
Emma stopped talking long enough to take a bite out of her hamburger. “It sure is good to get out of the house. And to eat something besides casseroles. Funeral food is delicious, but anything gets old after a week or so.”
Faye bit into her own burger, enjoying the tangy mustard and the crunch of onions and dill pickles. The meat was juicy, with a perfectly browned crust. Liz had never, to Faye’s knowledge, burned a burger, nor served one that was underdone.
How many patties of ground beef had Chip left behind, already patted up and ready for his mother to grill? He’d been go
ne all day. Had he made the hamburger she was eating, or had Liz already been forced to make them herself? She had a couple other part-time employees, but only because she had to sleep and eat now and then. Faye wasn’t sure she would trust the burger-making to anybody who wasn’t kin.
This evening, Liz wasn’t even trusting an employee with the busboy chores. She had refused to bring anybody in to take Chip’s shift, because she’d gotten through the day by hanging on to the hope that her son would show up for work. He was nowhere to be seen, so the dirty dishes were piling up.
Liz’s well-brought-up customers had figured out what was going on. They were stacking their own plates on a cart parked at the end of the bar. Her more worthless customers just left their dishes where they lay.
Joe, displaying his keen powers of observation, had noticed the general filth of the dining room. Wearing Chip’s apron and pushing another cart around, he was busing tables and whistling.
Emma, who was remarkably motherly for a woman who had borne no children, turned her penetrating brown eyes on Faye. “What did you do to Ross?”
Faye didn’t know whether to cry or to bark, “None of your business.” She opted for answering the question honestly. “I just can’t see myself living in Atlanta. I told him so.”
That wasn’t strictly what she’d told Ross, but it was close enough.
Emma raised an eyebrow. “I figured as much when he suddenly had a work crisis and needed to go home. He said he thought Joe could take care of both you and me, now that we were staying in the same house. And he’s right. I feel safe enough. How about you?”
Faye felt safe. Safe and alone. Was that why she’d pushed Ross away, so that she could be alone? Loners never had to compromise, and they always got their way. Was that her problem? Was she too strong-willed to share her life with anyone?
Findings Page 20
