STORE YOUR STUFF, a banner clinging to the chain link read, AT SAFE, SECURE HIDDEN HILLS STORAGE.
But what Hidden Hills believed it was hiding from, I had no idea. After all, it sat inside the town’s corporation limit. But while it was locked up tight and was as bright as a state-of-the-art surgical suite inside the town line, just outside the boundary the tired lamps at the business next door cast light as yellow as a urine specimen. Behind a rusting wall full of graffiti, it was a junkyard and salvage center, but its bald tires and broken-down vehicles spilled out to meet the edge of the road. Camouflaged among the wrecks was a pickup truck in a familiar shade of squash.
“Bingo,” I said, and coasted to a stop.
I reversed into the shadows between the two establishments. Quickly, Barrett and I checked over Vance’s truck. He wasn’t in it.
“Got a PIN for the storage facility’s gate?” Barrett whispered.
I glanced at him and grinned. Because here’s the thing about many people and keypads: in an effort to come up with a code they can remember, folks can make a major mistake. Afraid they’ll forget their numbers, they choose a simple sequence. Like one, two, three, four. Against my advice, my clients did that all the time. And usually, they ended up regretting it.
I’d have been willing to bet Old Reliable would’ve worked here, too. But then the gate mechanism would grind into gear. The chain drive would shake and rattle as it dragged the panel open. And Vance—if he was inside the facility—would be alerted to our coming up behind him.
Not smart.
“You go your way,” I whispered. “I’ll go mine. Look for a break in the fence. If his brothers didn’t give him the code, Vance might have to climb his way in.”
Barrett wanted to protest. I could see that desire cross his face clearly, thanks to the harsh cast of the lights. But I took to my heels like my shoes were on fire.
I jogged along the grassy verge bordering the fence line, kept my eyes and ears peeled. Overhead, the powerful lamps buzzed. And the buildings that had appeared pristine from the roadway looked shabby up close.
About two minutes in, I found what I was looking for. The razor wire at the top of this portion of the fence sagged. And that was enough for a man like Vance to get a leg over it.
I shed my jacket, tossed it over my shoulder like a limp towel.
And sticking the toe of one beautiful brown-patent-leather-and-peacock-velvet oxford into the diamond made by the interlocking chain, I began to climb. I hooked my fingers into the wire. The links were cold and thin and they bit into the joints of my fingers just like the twine from the straw bales had. But I bore down and ignored the discomfort. Inch by inch, I boosted myself upward.
At the top of the fence, the razor wire was indeed floppy. I could see where it had been beaten down by time and maybe by Vance’s traversing it. I grabbed my jacket, laid it across the wire. It made a pretty good barrier. But not a perfect one. It wouldn’t take much for one of the razor-sharp edges to poke through my coat. And slice into my thigh.
Being ten feet in the air, however, I didn’t have a lot of options.
And I had no room for error.
Gingerly, I swung one leg over the fence, then the other. I even managed to extricate my coat as well. After all, it wouldn’t do to leave it as evidence of my passing.
On the far side, I descended partway, climbing down the fence as I’d climbed up, with fingers and toes. When a jump wouldn’t damage my ankles, I dropped the remaining distance. I hit the ground with a thump, bending low as my knees absorbed the shock.
No sirens went off. No caretakers with shotguns flew out of the buildings to fire at me. And no snapping, snarling guard dogs galloped toward me.
I ran for the cover of the first building, flattened myself against it. A row of overhead doors provided little alcoves that would shield me if I had the sense to stick to them. Numbers stenciled in white paint above them provided order.
There were three sizes of doors. Some of them were small, like the entrance to a house. Most were midsized, like a single-car garage door. But a few were massive. I imagined boats big enough to cruise Lake Ontario behind every one of them.
All the doors were locked, however.
I worked my way to the end of the warehouse, peered around the corner. I saw no sign of Barrett. And no sign of Vance.
Easing to the north face of the building to try the doors there, I came to a standard door with hinges and a triple-insulated pane for a window. This had to be the rental office. I pressed my face to the glass. No one lurked inside, but the interior decorating would’ve done Jim Rockford proud. A metal desk made to look like wood grain and a brown plaid desk chair took up most of the room. There was a single filing cabinet, too. And a monstrous 1970s table lamp served as a night light, thanks to a low-wattage bulb.
With the tail of my turtleneck, I grasped the doorknob, just to test it out. A tremor passed through me like a low-voltage shock. Startled, I practically jumped out of my skin. And realized the knob wasn’t electrified. My cellphone, in my trouser pocket, was vibrating.
Immediately, my phone lit up with an incoming text.
WHERE R U? Barrett had typed.
Great. First, he wanted to get rid of me. Now he wanted to keep tabs on me.
With speedy thumbs, I replied, OUTSIDE UNIT OFFICE.
A moment later, the shadows morphed to form Barrett’s beautiful boxer’s body. Together, we checked the remaining units occupying the building. And between this warehouse and the next, I walked through an invisible cloud that made my eyes water. It stank of cat pee but stronger. This was ammonia and it was a dead giveaway that someone, somewhere, in one of these storage areas, was cooking methamphetamine.
Meth may’ve been the drug of choice for many, because it was cheap and could be made in your kitchen, but it was also a poisonous concoction and highly volatile. Illegal labs routinely caught on fire, if they didn’t explode first. The stench emanating from this one promised one hell of a flash and burn.
My sinuses and soft tissues were already suffering from it. Until Barrett grabbed my hand, towed me to fresh air. We ducked into the shade of the second building.
“Locked,” Barrett whispered as he tugged on the first padlock we came to. Nearly every overhead door out here was secured with a padlock. Squat, fat things, they felt heavy in my hand.
“This one isn’t.”
The rolling door, a skinny one designed to accommodate an average guy and an armful of boxes, was four doors down from the one Barrett had tried. No padlock held its bolt closed. And through its metal surface, I heard the rush of laughter. Like an audience at a live comedy show. Or the laugh track on an old sitcom.
I grabbed hold of the bar at the door’s foot and hauled the thing open.
The storage unit was no bigger than a good-sized broom closet. But no closet I’d ever seen had corrugated walls of steel. And none of them had a portal that had apparently been cut in one of those walls with tin snips, either.
I ducked through the gap with Barrett at my back. Now the laugh track was even louder. We were in an adjoining chamber, an even larger storage unit.
Barrett fired up the flashlight app on his phone. In the beam, I could make out cardboard boxes of all sizes stacked from the floor to the ceiling. In fat black Magic Marker, they were labeled with descriptions like GOOD CHINA and BED LINENS.
The boxes had been shoved this way and that to form corridors. Feeling like a rat in someone else’s maze, I followed the corridor. And when Barrett shined his phone ahead, I began to see signs of life.
A sofa of goldenrod brocade had been wrapped in plastic and tipped on end. Headboards of upholstered vinyl rested against twin mattresses. And another hole had been cut in the next wall, too.
As I neared it, the laughing studio audience gave way to the plaintive tones of Lucy Ricardo. Blue light flickered across the concrete floor. In this chamber, there was even more furniture—but none of it was packed away.
A
n old-fashioned console television set held pride of place in the middle of the space. A digital adaptor sat on top of it like a fat cat. Its power cord curled around a two-by-four and ran up to the rafter where a junction box had been mounted on the joist. Someone had added a multi-outlet surge suppressor, too. Its red on/off switch glowed like a wolf’s eye in the gloom.
An orange wing chair squatted with its back to us. The floor lamp beside it was a combination light, magazine rack, and end table. An open can of Natural Light sat on a coaster.
The chair was covered in the kind of fabric that had seemed like such a good idea in the 1970s. From personal experience, I knew it looked like burlap but felt like fire ants. The hand that had clamped down on my nose and mouth in Miranda Barrett’s kitchen rested on the arm of the chair.
From this distance, it looked as if Vance had fallen asleep while reaching to take another sip from his beer.
But something in my gut warned me not to go any closer.
“Vance?” I called.
He didn’t respond.
“Hey, Vance,” Barrett said, stepping past me. “What’re you doing, man?”
I grabbed Barrett’s arm. Because now I could smell what had happened. A salty odor assailed my nose, but it wasn’t the salty scent of beer and potato chips. Circling wide, I rounded the chair, knowing what I’d find.
Vance’s hand still reached for his drink, all right. But his other one lay in his lap, curled around my Beretta 9000S. And the contents of his cranium soaked into the rough fabric of the chair, changing it from orange to blood red.
Chapter 31
Sheriff Luke Rittenhaus personally responded to Barrett’s call reporting the death of their high school pal Vance McCabe. Of course, he brought along an entire contingent of deputies. And while they locked down the scene of Vance’s demise, the sheriff himself wasted no time rousting the storage facility’s owner and demanding he come to the office.
We needed to know who’d entered the facility between six P.M. or so, when Vance had fled from the Barrett Orchard, and just after ten, when we’d found him with a hole in his head. So Rittenhaus put the question to the owner. The man might’ve been willing to meet with us about it, but he wasn’t too helpful.
Well past middle age, he was a short guy as wide as he was tall. Clearly, he’d been home in bed when he’d received Rittenhaus’s call. He’d tucked his striped pajama top into rumpled trousers for the trip out to meet us, and the laces on his brown shoes weren’t tied. When he saw Rittenhaus had a lady present, he raked his fingers through his comb-over. It did little to improve his charms.
He let us into his time warp of an office, invited me to sit in his brown plaid desk chair.
I respectfully declined.
“Enough of the niceties,” Rittenhaus growled. “Who was on the property tonight, Ralph?”
“Dunno,” the owner replied. “Got no camera on the gate. Can’t run a profitable business if you’re spending all your income on stuff like that. Besides, every customer’s got a code. All’s I gotta do is look up what code got used.”
“Unless,” I said, “someone showed up and just started punching in random numbers.”
“Like what?” Ralph asked as he pecked at the keyboard of an ancient desktop computer.
“One, two, three, four, for a start.”
“Hey!” Ralph pointed at his monitor. “Says here a person went through at 8:23 with that exact code. How’d you know that?”
Rittenhaus and Barrett leaned over Ralph’s shoulder to glare at the screen.
“Whose code is this?” Barrett demanded.
Ralph scooted a decrepit Rolodex across the desk and let his fingers do the walking. It took a lifetime for him to flip through each card. At last, he came up with a particular one.
“Got it,” he said. “That code belongs to Miranda Barrett.”
“No way,” Barrett said.
“Why not?” Rittenhaus asked.
I directed my question to Ralph. “Do you have paperwork to support that? A signed contract, maybe?”
“Sure.”
Ralph dug around in his filing cabinet for another eon.
But he came up with bupkis.
“Huh. Everyone has to fill out a rental agreement like this one.” Ralph waved a blank form in triplicate at me. “It’s the law. I don’t have one under the name of Barrett, though.”
“That’s because she didn’t rent a unit here,” Barrett told Rittenhaus.
But the sheriff wasn’t convinced.
He wanted to hear the denial from Mrs. Barrett herself.
So like some kind of law enforcement wagon train, we drove to the orchard. Andersen, the junior deputy, led the way in his patrol car. Barrett and I were allowed to follow in my Jag. Rittenhaus, however, tailgated me all the way in his cruiser.
Elise and Theodore met us at the front door when we arrived. And Elise sat on the sofa with her grandmother when we moved into the living room. I made myself sit in the rose-patterned side chair. Barrett, the sheriff, and the deputy kept to their feet. That didn’t do a thing to put the two women at ease.
Rittenhaus did all the talking. But he didn’t say a word about Vance’s untimely death. Instead, he asked Mrs. Barrett when she’d rented her storage unit at Hidden Hills.
She made no bones about her reply.
“I’ve never had an account at that storage place. I’ve never had an account at any storage place. Why would I need to? I’ve got a perfectly good barn to store things in right here. There’s a garage, too. We’ve got a spring house, a garden shed, a perfectly good attic, and a dry basement.”
I believed her. Especially since the owner of the facility couldn’t produce her registration when every other customer seemed to have one on file. Rittenhaus, however, was harder to persuade.
He left Andersen with the ladies, took Barrett and me onto the porch for a chat. It was a divide-and-conquer approach and I didn’t appreciate it. Standing outside, I felt like the darkness was alive with listening things. It cloaked our cars and the old Chevy, too. It hid the burned-out patch where Dawkins had died—and it made me want to scurry into some cozy hole and hide.
I doubted Rittenhaus felt the same way. To Barrett, he said, “I’m not saying your granny did anything underhanded, but you’ve got to admit it looks awfully suspicious.”
“A good many things around here look suspicious,” Barrett snapped.
And a muscle jumped in Rittenhaus’s cheek.
I said, “Sheriff, you can’t honestly believe Miranda Barrett rented a storage unit, destroyed the paper trail, and waited until Vance was into a rerun of I Love Lucy to sneak into Hidden Hills and blow him away.”
“No,” he agreed, “but I can believe Adam’s granny has a unit to store some odds and ends, and that you’ve been in this house long enough to ferret out the passcode. After Vance attacked you, you could’ve left Adam here, gone over there, used the code, and shot Vance with your nine.”
“Except,” Barrett spat, “Vance stole Jamie’s nine this evening.”
“So you said when you reported the assault. Which suggests Vance committed suicide. Just like Eric.”
And that’s when fury got the better of me.
I said, “You’ve got an awful lot of suicides around here, Rittenhaus. And an awful lot of deaths in general.”
I stopped short of ticking them off on my fingers. But I didn’t need to give him an itemized list, anyway. A shadow passed over his face and I knew he was thinking of his deputy, Dawkins, dead in disturbing circumstances. He also knew I’d tentatively connected that killing with Pamela Wentz’s alleged suicide, thanks to her autopsy photographs. And Rittenhaus knew as well as I did that the shotgun blasts at the scene of Eric’s death called that supposed suicide into question, too. Kayley was dead due to an outright murder. Add the hikers who’d died soon after I’d arrived and Rittenhaus had one hell of a head count hanging over him.
But confronted with that tally, Rittenhaus did the one thing
I never expected him to do.
Brandishing his handcuffs, he said, “I hate to do this, Adam, but Miss Sinclair’s right. I should treat Vance’s death as a homicide. Turn around and place your hands behind your back.”
“What?” I sputtered. “No!”
Concern creased Barrett’s forehead. And fear gripped me with its cold fingers. But Barrett followed the sheriff’s order.
“What’s the charge?” Barrett asked as Rittenhaus tightened the bracelets on his wrists.
“Just taking you in for further questioning since we’re getting no place out here.”
“You can’t do this,” I said.
I heard weakness wavering in my voice.
And I heard iron in the sheriff’s.
“Miss Sinclair, can you testify Adam didn’t go to Hidden Hills to confront Vance McCabe earlier this evening?”
“Of course I can. Barrett was with me.”
Upstairs. All hot and bothered. Until an intruder in the house escaped in Eric Wentz’s Mercury.
“Now, when you say with, is that in the biblical sense?”
Barrett turned. His chocolate-brown eyes flashed fire. “Watch it, Luke—”
“Let her answer,” the sheriff warned.
But I knew answering falsely was a criminal offense.
“Not exactly,” I replied, caught out and knowing it.
Rittenhaus had us where he wanted us: on the defensive. Because presumably, if I was willing to sleep with Barrett, I’d be willing to lie for Barrett. Theoretically, he’d do the same for me. And there wasn’t an attorney, judge, or jury who wouldn’t make the same assumption. So a defense attorney would say our best bet would be to confess the facts about the storage unit and Mrs. Barrett’s code—except there were no facts to confess.
“You’re making this up as you go along,” I challenged. “Barrett’s been defending Vance since he got to Fallowfield last week and you know it.”
“But Vance McCabe attacked you tonight,” Rittenhaus said, eyeing my turtleneck. I knew the underside of my jaw and a couple inches of flesh were exposed. And I was sure the bruises Vance had put there had turned deep and ugly by now. “Looking at those marks on your neck, it seems to me Adam might’ve had plenty of reason to borrow his granny’s code and go after him. Unless you’d like to confess to doing so yourself.”
The Kill Box Page 22
