I looked up. There was no net waiting to fall.
“Gimme a second, and we’ll see.” He looked around.
“Branch.” I pointed.
He picked it up. “You stay here. At least six feet away from the string.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the other side.” He stepped carefully over the fishing line, giving it as much room as he could. “I have to get to where I can pull the string that way. The way somebody would pull it if they walked into it.”
That made sense. Whoever came from the other direction would know about it. Or so it seemed safe to assume.
So I stayed six feet back, up on the path, and watched as Rafe moved as far away from the string as he could, while still being able to reach it with the tippy-top of the branch. He snagged it, and pulled.
For a second, nothing happened. Then there was a whistling sound, and a long branch came whipping through the air. It hit the path a few feet beyond the wire, and a little too close to where Rafe was standing. He must have thought so too, because he jumped back. “Shit!”
No kidding.
“What is it?” I asked from where I was standing.
He waved to me. “You can come this way now. I don’t think anything else is gonna happen.”
After a second he added, “Not here. But we’re gonna have to be careful as we go on.”
I moved forward. Meanwhile, he lifted the branch. When I came close enough, I saw the line of nails that had been pounded through it. Five of them, in a straight line, all about three inches long.
“That would have hurt if it had hit you.” The nails had dug deep into the ground, soft from yesterday’s rain.
Rafe nodded and let it go. “Robbie’s got something back here he didn’t want anybody to see.”
“Dog fighting arena?”
“Could be. There’s gotta be a different way to get to it, if so. The people coming to watch wouldn’t walk in this way. They’d drive in.”
“There were other driveways we passed on the way here,” I said. “It might be one of them.”
He nodded. “If that’s what’s back here, I guess we’ll find the way out and follow it. C’mon.”
He started moving again, even more slowly. This time, I didn’t wonder why.
Two minutes later, we came across one more booby trap. Not a whippy branch with nails hammered through it this time. A shallow pit dug in the path, a foot or so deep and maybe two feet across, filled with sharpened sticks standing on end. Six or eight of them, close enough together that if you stepped in, you had no chance of avoiding at least one of them. It wasn’t fatal—the branch with the nails wouldn’t have been, either—but at the very least you would have impaled your foot, and at worst broken it. I wouldn’t want to be out here with a broken foot. Not with Robbie’s dog—and Robbie himself—around.
To add insult to injury, it was sheer luck that we even saw it. All the rain yesterday must have washed the grid of thin branches clean of mud so the pit was visible. On a rainy day with bad visibility, or even a sunny one with the grid of branches properly covered with dirt and mud, I’m not sure we would have noticed. Or at least I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have.
“Robbie meant business,” I said.
Rafe nodded. “Let’s move past.”
We went past.
There were no other traps after that. Not on this path. But after another few steps, I could hear a sort of humming sound. There was also a not-so-nice smell wafting our way on the wind. My nose wrinkled, but before I could comment on it, we came out of the trees into a clearing with a building in the middle.
Rafe stopped. I did the same.
The building was twice the size of Robbie’s trailer. And it looked home-built, but it wasn’t one of the old log structures you see up in the hills, sagging and awful from sitting in the same place for a hundred years with no maintenance. No, these materials looked new. The planks hadn’t faded too much yet, but still looked yellow and sort of fresh. The reek was stronger here, and I covered my nose and mouth with my hand. “What is it?”
Rafe shot me a glance. “Can’t you smell it?”
“Of course I can. It smells terrible. Was Robbie having skunk fights, too?”
Rafe’s lips twitched. “This ain’t a dog fighting arena, darlin’.”
“What is it, then?”
There was a door in the side wall. He walked toward it. After a second, I scurried after. It was locked by a hefty padlock, and it took him a minute or so to open it, with the tools he keeps in his pocket. I was peering over his shoulder when he pulled the door open. Into a green world of bright lights and plants. Hundreds of plants. Some as small as houseplants, in little pots, and some as big as Christmas trees. All of them with spiky, jagged leaves.
They looked familiar, but it took me a second to place them. “Is that...?”
He nodded.
Pot plants. A lot of them. And I mean a lot. “How much would this be worth on the open market?”
“Plenty,” Rafe said. “More than enough to kill someone over.”
He reached for his phone. I watched the fortune of pot plants growing under the bright lights and breathed through my mouth while he dialed the sheriff.
Twelve
There was indeed another way out of there. A rutted track led through the trees in the other direction of the one we’d come in, and while we waited for the sheriff to arrive, we headed down that way. It was going to take him thirty or forty-five minutes to get here, after all, and there wasn’t anything else to see.
“Do we need to look for booby traps?” I asked Rafe as we trudged along, side by side now, separated by a broad strip of grass that separated the two tire tracks.
He shook his head. “This looks like a private road. They prob’ly drove along it, and they wouldn’t want nothing to happen to their trucks. We’ll keep an eye out, but I don’t think we’ll find anything.”
We didn’t. After about fifteen minutes, though, we ran into another structure, much like the first one. New wood, some modular pieces—to make it easier to put up quickly, I guess—and motion detector lights on the corners.
“Another marijuana grow,” Rafe said.
It was a safe bet. But to make sure of it, he went to work on the padlock again, and opened the door into another brightly lit room full of spiky, green plants. The reek flooded out and hit me in the face with the force of a dead fish.
“Gah!” I stumbled back a couple of feet as my stomach turned.
“Sorry.” Rafe slammed the door shut again.
“It’s all right. It’s a strong smell.” The morning sickness had followed me into the second trimester, but had left soon after. I’d thought I was finished with it. Now I felt my stomach heave in a way I hadn’t felt in a few months.
Rafe’s arm came around me. “Deep breaths.”
He supported me while my stomach lurched. After a minute the nausea passed, and I was able to breathe without smelling that awful stink again. But it was nice to lean on Rafe, to hear the steady beat of his heart against my ear, so I took my time before I straightened and pushed away. “I’m all right.”
He kept his hand on my back for a moment, rubbing circles, before he dropped it. “Ready to walk? Or do you wanna stay here and wait for me?”
“The farther I get from the smell, the better I think it is. Back the way we came, or forward?”
The track continued past the building.
“How long since we called the sheriff?” Rafe asked.
I thought it might have been twenty minutes, at most. “I don’t think he’ll be here quite yet. It’s a bit of a trek from Sweetwater.”
“We can probably spare a couple more minutes. This way.”
He headed off, not down the track, nor back the way we’d come, but around the building.
“What are we looking for?” I asked, trudging after him.
“That.” He pointed.
“Another path.”
He nodded. �
��I’m pretty sure where we are, but we can take five minutes to make sure. C’mon.” He headed for the entrance to the path. Just before he got there, he added, with a glance over his shoulder at me, “And this time, we do need to keep an eye out for traps.”
Of course we did. But since we’d already found a few, it was easier to spot them this time. We knew what we were looking for. We circumvented another pit full of stakes, another tripwire resulting in a branch with nails whipping through the air and smacking into the ground between us, and—just as we reached the tree line, where the growth was more dense—a good, old-fashioned bear trap. Luckily, Rafe was looking for it. If one of us had stepped on it, the sharp metal teeth would have bit deeply into our ankle.
Rafe pushed the brush aside and peered out. “Thought so.”
I peered out past him, at the back of another mobile home, and—some yards away—an old, dented Airstream trailer. Beyond both of them, yellow crime scene tape flapped in the air.
“Art Skinner’s place?” It looked familiar, if backwards from what I’d seen yesterday.
Rafe nodded and let the brush go. It closed back up to screen the path from prying eyes. “Cilla and her boyfriend were killed in the Airstream. Art, Linda, and A.J. in the trailer.” He turned away from the crime scene. “C’mon. It’s time we get back.”
It was. I followed him back down the path, hopping over the various booby traps, until we got to Art’s part of the marijuana operation. From there, we headed down the track toward Robbie’s place.
“If we went that way,” Rafe told me, with a thumb over his shoulder in the other direction, “we’d prob’ly end up at Darrell’s place. The Skinners must own all the land up here on the hill. I wonder what else is tucked away in the woods up here.”
“Maybe nothing. I mean, this is enough, isn’t it?”
“It’s plenty. Hundreds of pot plants. Some of those plants in there—the big ones—are probably worth a couple grand each, if not more.”
“How much pot can a plant produce?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know a lot about the drug business. Hector had his fingers in it, but I didn’t. But I know it’s big money. There could be half a million dollars worth of weed between those two buildings. More if Darrell’s got a greenhouse up behind his place.”
“You’ll have to find out.”
He nodded. “Easier to come at it from the front. Drive in and walk the path. And take out any booby traps while we’re at it.”
“There has to be a way to drive in,” I said. “These tracks,” the ones we were walking along, “were made by some kind of vehicle.”
“It might be up at Darrell’s place. We’ll check and see. But first we better get back and meet the sheriff.”
He held out a hand. I took it and focused on keeping up as we made our way back to Robbie’s place.
The sheriff had arrived by the time we had skirted Robbie’s marijuana barn and made our way up to the trailer.
“I wanna take the cars up to Darrell’s place,” Rafe told him. “There’s no way to drive in from here or from Art’s, but there could be from Darrell’s. I think they’re all three connected through this road in the back. And the boys had to get all those materials in there somehow, and I don’t think they carried’em in by hand.”
I shook my head. The sheriff nodded. “Let’s go.”
Rafe turned to me. “You go on back, darlin’. I’ll get a ride with the sheriff.”
Fine by me. I’d already seen what the mysterious caller had wanted us to see. And now that I knew that Rafe was safe, that nobody was out here to get him and that he had backup if something happened, I had no more desire to tramp around the woods, on soggy ground with still-wet branches slapping me in the face. Darrell’s place would just be more of the same. “Look out for booby traps,” I warned them.
Rafe said he would. “See you later, darlin’.”
He leaned down to kiss me. The sheriff looked away, politely, but Rafe kept the kiss brief. “Be careful.”
“You, too. I’m not going to be the one stumbling around the woods where seven murders took place just a day or two ago.”
“Good point.” He gave me a nudge. “Get going. And stay outta trouble.”
“You, too.” I twiddled my fingers at Bob Satterfield. “Bye, Sheriff.”
He twiddled back. “Give my love to your mother.”
I promised I would. “She could use a shoulder to cry on. I know you’re busy with the investigation, but if you could spare thirty minutes sometime today, I think she’d appreciate it.”
The sheriff’s grizzled brows rose. “What happened?”
“I’ll let Rafe tell you about it,” I said, with a glance at him. It would give them something to talk about on their walk through the woods. “He and my mother talked this morning. He might be more up to date than I am on how she’s feeling.”
Rafe nodded. The sheriff looked at him, and looked curious, but didn’t ask any questions. “Let’s get going,” he said instead, and slid back into the sheriff’s department SUV. I headed toward the Volvo while Rafe got in on the other side. The two of them waited until I’d made my sixteen point turn and was going in the right direction, and then they followed me down the driveway to the road. Once there, I headed down the hill and they headed up.
It was a much nicer day than yesterday to go driving in the country. The sun was shining, and I didn’t have to worry about hydroplaning and slipping off the road.
Like yesterday, I took the turnoff to Damascus instead of going through Columbia. And since I was going that way, I decided I might as well stop by Yvonne’s house and ask her about the pot, as well as about the mysterious caller who had drawn our attention to it.
At this point, I had to assume the grow operation was what the mysterious caller had wanted us to find. There sure hadn’t been anything else of interest behind Robbie’s trailer. Not unless something had been there, and it had blown away in the rain and wind yesterday. Or the crime scene crew had picked it up, but if so, we would have already known about it. Or at least Rafe would.
So it appeared somebody knew the Skinners had been growing pot. Large quantities of pot. I didn’t know much about it, either—less than Rafe—but I do know it’s big business. I tended to agree with him that a half million dollars worth of weed made for a dandy reason for murder.
Except... nobody would benefit from this. As Rafe had said earlier, Kayla would probably inherit anything of Robbie’s, as his next of kin. Cilla’s baby would eventually inherit anything she or her parents had own, I guessed. And who knew who benefitted from Darrell’s demise?
But the pot was illegal, so it wasn’t like Kayla would get any of that. As soon as the police got involved, the value of the pot dwindled from half a million to nothing. The sheriff or the TBI would confiscate the plants and destroy them.
Maybe the caller had been someone who didn’t care about padding their own pockets, but who just didn’t want the Skinners to benefit, then.
Although in that case, they could have just called the police about the marijuana earlier. No need to kill the Skinners to stop the drug dealing. All they’d have to do was turn the Skinners in. The evidence was right there. The result would have been the same: the pot would be confiscated and destroyed, and the Skinners wouldn’t benefit from it.
So maybe this wasn’t as cut and dried—no pun intended—as I’d assumed. I turned down Yvonne’s street still mulling it over. The pot had to be connected somehow, or so it seemed, but damned—darned—if I could see how.
* * *
Yvonne’s decrepit little car was parked in the driveway, so I parked the Volvo behind it and got out. She must have heard the engine, because she opened the door before I made my way up to it, and certainly before I’d had the chance to knock. “Savannah. What are you doing here?”
“I’m on my way back to Sweetwater from the Devil’s Backbone,” I said, “and thought I’d stop by and see how you are.”
She turned a sh
ade paler. “Did something happen? Who else is dead?”
“Nobody that I know of. May I come in?”
While the weather was nicer, it was still chilly to stand out here.
She stepped back. I climbed the couple of steps to the stoop and crossed the threshold.
She shut and locked the door behind me. “You want something to drink? Sweet tea? Coffee?”
I told her that tea would be all right, and watched her walk past me to the little kitchen. “How’s Rafe today?” she asked on her way past.
“A few bruises and a split lip. Nothing too bad.” I leaned in the kitchen doorway and watched her pull a pitcher out of the fridge and pour tea over ice in two glasses. “He said the bartender at Dusty’s hit him.”
Yvonne nodded. “We walked in, and the next thing I know they’re going at each other.” She shook her head. “It was crazy.”
“At least it didn’t last long.”
She shook her head. “He had the guy on the ground in under twenty seconds. One swing, and that was it.”
I’m not sure whether the one swing had come from my husband or the guy he’d put on the ground, and I preferred not to know. Changing the subject, I told her, “We got a phone call this morning from someone—a man—who told us—or Rafe—to go look behind Robbie Skinner’s trailer. Can you think of anyone you met or talked to yesterday who might have called my mother’s house to leave a message for Rafe?”
“Princess,” Yvonne said as she handed me my glass and walked past me to curl herself up on the sofa, “everyone knows Rafe married you.”
“Surely not everyone.” How could that be interesting to the kind of person who spent their time in Dusty’s Bar or the Pour House in Thompson Station?
“Your aunt put it in the newspaper,” Yvonne said, “remember?”
Oh. Right. She had.
My Aunt Regina, in addition to being the keeper of family secrets, is also the society reporter for the local newspaper.
I took a seat in the chair on the other side of the coffee table. “Who do you know who reads the society column in the Sweetwater Reporter?”
Bad Debt (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 14) Page 13
