by Layton Green
“Of course.”
After introducing himself as Winston Hood, Wes’s father led Preach down the hallway to the second door on the left. Bass-heavy electronica pulsed on the other side. “Wesley?”
The music ceased. “Yeah?”
“Can you open up ?”
A sprawling computer cabinet filled with gaming equipment, hardware, keyboards, and speakers took up a large portion of the room. Under the stern gaze of his father, Wes Hood rose from his desk chair to shake Preach’s hand. Almost as skinny as Victoria, the kid was saddled with the unholy triumvirate of male adolescence: glasses, braces, and zits.
“I hadn’t seen him for over a week,” Wes said, when asked about the night David disappeared. “Football season and all. I have no idea where he was that night.”
“Wesley was here all evening,” his father said to Preach, as if reading his thoughts. “With us.”
“I assume David didn’t stop by or try to call?” Both father and son denied that he had. Preach said to Wes, “David’s mom mentioned you like to play video games together.”
“Yeah,” he said, with a glance to the side.
Preach read between the lines: the two kids had grown up in the same neighborhood, probably spent the night together a hundred times, but had grown apart over the years. David turned out to be goodlooking and popular, and Wes hadn’t.
Or was it that simple ?
Wes’s hand moved absently to the mouse, and he stared at the wall beside Preach.
“Someone I knew died in high school too,” Preach said quietly. “My cousin.” “Sorry.”
“It’s not fair.”
Wes slowly shook his head.
“I know the wound is fresh,” Preach said, “but if there’s anything you can think of that might help, I’d appreciate if you told me.”
“Son?” his father said. “Anything you have to say?”
“I think most nights he wanted to be here with me,” Wes said after a moment, speaking so softly Preach had to lean in. He got the feeling the shy teenager was speaking to himself, or maybe even to David, rather than to the adults in the room. “He loved video games but almost never played them.”
“Why do you think that was ?”
Wes shrugged. “He liked other things more. He liked being popular. He liked girls.” He caught himself, then glanced at his frowning father. “I mean, I like girls too. But David . . .”
He trailed off, embarrassed.
“I’m guessing you knew him pretty well,” Preach said. “If David was upset, really upset, who do you think he would turn to ?”
Wes pushed up his glasses. “I guess it depends on what it was about. Maybe me, maybe Vicky Summit. I think he liked talking to her. There was also this girl he used to work with. He liked her a lot. But it wasn’t mutual.” “Mackenzie Rathbun?”
“Yeah.” A grin slipped through Wes’s façade. “I never thought there’d be a girl David couldn’t get.”
“They never went out?”
“Not that I knew of. And I think he would have told me.”
“Can you think of anyone else ?”
Wes lifted his hands. “You can try the football guys. I don’t know them. I’m sure you know David hooked up all the time, with plenty of girls.”
His father’s frown deepened.
“Did he ever tell you about a fight he had with anyone?” Preach asked. “His mom, Brett Moreland?”
“He couldn’t stand Brett. When they started dating, David came over whenever he was at the house. He felt like his mom and Brett ganged up on him.”
That wasn’t the impression Preach had gotten from Claire. Then again, kids probably saw those sorts of things differently.
“Ganging up in what way?”
“Never taking his side, just wanting to be alone all the time. It’s tough when your mom’s dating around.”
“But no fights? Physical violence?”
Wes sank deeper into his chair, still fiddling with the mouse. “Not that I know of. Just that fight with Nate Wilkinson.”
“So there was a fight? I’ve heard it mentioned but no one’s confirmed it.”
Wes looked up. “Oh, yeah. Nate has this good-looking chick who David used to see. I don’t know how Nate got her, I guess because he deals—”
He cut off and glanced at his father, who had stiffened in his chair.
“Nate deals drugs?” Preach asked.
“Everyone knows,” Wes muttered.
“Do you know what the fight was about ?”
“Just that Nate didn’t like him, I guess. They had it out after practice one night, in the school parking lot. David pounded him.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what Nate was thinking. Maybe that his friends would step in.”
Preach compressed his lips. It was time to have a talk with Nate Wilkinson. “This happened when? Two weeks ago?”
“Something like that.”
He decided not to upset Wes’s father any further by pressing that topic. He could do his own investigation and come back as needed. After a few more routine questions, he left the house and returned to his car, driving slowly through the neighborhood. When he passed
Claire’s house and saw the living room light on, he resisted the impulse to swing by and run the new information by her.
Realizing he had barely eaten all day, he ignored his hunger and swung through downtown, deciding not to wait another moment to visit Nate Wilkinson’s trailer. As he drove, he digested the discussions with David’s friends, feeling as if he were starting to develop a better picture of Claire’s son.
But who, he thought, was she ?
Weak light from a lone street lamp at the entrance to Carroll Street Homes glinted off the puddles of muddy water. A white van with flat tires and a for sale sign on the dash was parked near a line of mailboxes. A muddy ditch to Preach’s left overflowed with litter. Though less than two miles from the center of town, just off the state highway that ran by the water tower, the mobile home park was as far removed from the progressive center of Creekville as it was from the Arctic Circle.
In the past, most of North Carolina’s crowded mobile home parks were a ghetto for white people. These days, the residents came from all sorts of backgrounds. Rather than contributing to racial violence, Preach had observed that impoverished but multicultural communities thrown together in close confines tended to be more color-blind than homogenous wealthy neighborhoods. It was hard to hate the other when they were hunkered down in the same god-awful foxhole.
Tidy single- and double-wide trailers, parked along country roads or even tucked into city lots, were common fixtures in the South. Plenty of middle-class folk Preach knew had grown up in one. Trailer parks, on the other hand—not the ones near the entrances to state and national parks but the ones meant to provide bargain basement or transitional housing—were another story. Like their inner-city counterparts, living quarters were so tight and squalid it was tough to escape unscathed. Even then, some of the parks weren’t as bad as the others, and they contained poor but hard-working residents who worked with the police to keep the bad elements out.
Carroll Street Homes was not one of those places.
Preach had gone there a dozen times in the last month alone, usually on domestic violence calls. Surrounded by woods and containing several hundred homes—huge by trailer park standards—it was a haven for drugs and gangs. Despite all this, fearing McMansions and bland office parks above all else, the residents of Creekville had lobbied hard over the years to keep the developers away. But crime in the park had gotten so bad in recent months that public opinion had started to shift.
Everyone had their limits, Preach knew, when it came to crime in one’s own backyard.
Tolerance was all a matter of degree.
From the moment he pulled in with his window lowered to soak in the environment, he felt eyes on the unmarked cruiser, tracking his progress, wondering who he was and probably guessing correctly. A blond man in his late thirties
, clean haircut, double-breasted overcoat, driving a nondescript sedan?
Either a property developer or a cop, and developers drove much nicer cars.
Carroll Street Homes resembled a trailer park graveyard more than a functioning community. The manufactured homes were strewn haphazardly over the lot, many of them mired in weeds and mud, as if they were abandoned relics from a former generation. Between some of the trailers, the junk was so dense it covered the entire yard. He saw stray dogs roaming the lots; windows covered in black tape; tarps in place of roofs; an open entrance with the door removed and leaning against a parked station wagon; screen doors banging in the wind; A/C units askew; rusting toys and bicycles in the yards; the remains of a demolished trailer on a concrete slab, as if struck by a localized tornado and left to rot.
Not many people were out. He rolled past an elderly white man returning inside with a basket of laundry, and a group of Latino teens gathered around an old Mustang, passing around a brown bottle and eying Preach like they were hunters and he was a wounded deer limping through the forest. Members of Los Viburos, he guessed.
Preach had pulled Nate’s address from the system, though the kid’s last arresting officer had moved out of state the year before. The cheap numbering had fallen off many of the trailers, but after figuring out the pattern and counting down a few homes, he guessed it was the peach- colored trailer streaked with rust on the back side of the park.
A bout of knocking produced no results, despite the lights in the living room and the television blaring through the thin walls. He took a step back and eyed the trailer end to end. None of the other lights were on.
He rapped harder.
Finally the door opened, revealing a short, obese woman with stringy auburn hair and brown spots on her teeth. She reeked of cigarette smoke. Just inside the door, a roach scuttled across a stack of empty pizza boxes.
“Mrs. Wilkinson?”
She looked him up and down, wary. “Yeah?”
When he produced his badge, her eyes narrowed even further. “I’m Detective Everson. Is Nathan Wilkinson your son?”
“Yep.”
“Is he around tonight?”
“Nope.”
“Do you know when he’ll be home?”
She fished a cigarette and a lighter out of the pocket of her sweatpants. A pale green blouse with fishnet sleeves struggled to cover her voluminous bosom. “What’s he done now?”
“I didn’t say he did anything.”
“You just stopped by to say hi ?”
“Have you heard about the murder of David Stratton?”
She lit the cigarette in a corner of her mouth. “‘Course I heard. What’s that got to do with Nate ?”
“Nothing, as far as I know. But I’m told the two of them had a fight at school. Did you hear about this?”
“Nope” she said, a little too forcefully. “A fight at school’s hardly murder.”
“I agree. I just want to talk with him.”
“I don’t see why.”
Preach’s eyes slipped beside her, noticing a cloth sofa and a flat- screen television sitting atop a coffee table. Cheap beige carpeting, unraveled at the edges, covered the floor.
“Like I said, he ain’t here. He comes home late most nights, usually after midnight. Don’t know if you heard, but he got suspended again. Two weeks this time. If he graduates, somebody better call the Pope, cuz it’ll be a miracle the likes ofJesus coming back.”
Preach handed her one of his cards. “I need to talk to your son. I’d like you to set up a meeting time and call me.”
She blew a cloud of smoke that barely missed his face. “I’ll see what I can do.”
As Preach walked back to his car, he noticed the face of a teenage girl peering out of a window from a few trailers away, backlit by an eerie purple glow that reminded him of those gimmicky black lights that were popular when he had been a kid. When he turned, the face vanished as quickly as it appeared. The blinds were open but he couldn’t make out anything inside the room.
If I wasn’t someone who noticed things for a living, Preach thought, I wouldn’t have seen her.
It was probably nothing, but the trailer park’s vibe felt worse than usual, and he was frustrated about Nate. On a hunch, he walked over to the trailer where the girl’s face had appeared, a grimy single-wide with a brown door and a homemade seesaw in the front yard, long since fallen into disrepair. Behind the trailer was a swampy tract of woods.
Just like at the Wilkinson’s, it took repeated pounding to get anyone to answer. Finally, a willowy girl in her mid-teens, her face framed by long dark hair that needed a comb and trimming at the ends, opened up. She had a wild look about her, not just her hair and the skittishness in her eyes but the way she stood with her body angled away from the door, a deer ready to bolt into the forest. She was wearing a pair of old Doc Martens, jeans ripped in half a dozen places, a touch of black eye shadow, a studded leather band on her left wrist, and a black Chinatown T-shirt that depicted an image of Faye Dunaway’s face floating inside the smoke wafting off of Jack Nicholson’s cigarette.
She peered at the badge he was holding up, then at his face, her eyes unreadable.
“I’m Detective Everson,” he said. “Is one of your parents home ?” She shook her head.
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions ?”
“Why?”
“You’re not in trouble or anything,” he said, trying to put her at ease. “Are you a high school student? At Creekville High?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve heard about the murder of David Stratton?”
“Sure.”
“The night he was murdered—October 2—do you remember if you were home ?”
“Probably.” Her voice was tart, challenging.
“All night long?”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Do you remembering seeing David that night ?”
“Why would I ? He doesn’t live around here.”
Preach’s head bobbed as he thought. “That’s a no?”
“Yup.”
“What about Nathan Wilkinson? Was he around that night?” He pointed. “He lives in that double-wide over there.”
“I know where Nate lives. And I have no idea if he was home that night. When I get home, I usually stay in my room.”
“So you don’t remember anything unusual about that night ?”
She looked off to the side, her foot tapping. “Just another night in the big city.”
He handed out another card. “What’s your name?”
“Blue. Annie Blue.”
“Thanks for talking to me, Blue. Let me know if you hear or remember anything about that night, okay?”
“Sure thing.”
“Hey,” he said, just before he walked away. “Good movie.” “What?” she said with a puzzled expression, before glancing down at her shirt. “Oh. Yeah.”
On his way into town, Preach called the Courtyard to see if Mackenzie Rathbun was working. The Courtyard was a high-end steakhouse owned by her family, one of the local dynasties that had made its fortune in the early twentieth-century manufacturing boom. Textiles or tobacco or transportation, he couldn’t remember which. Probably all three.
The restaurant was located just outside Chapel Hill. Mackenzie was a junior at UNC, and he thought it might be easier to catch her at work than at school. Unfortunately, the hostess informed him Mackenzie wasn’t due in until Saturday. Depending on how the next day played out, he might try to track her down sooner. Though if David had been seeing the older girl, Preach had the gut feeling he would have confided in his friends.
Was it possible, he wondered, that David had taken a complete stranger home that night? Or at least someone no one else in his life knew about?
Another thought struck him—what if the mystery woman in the house was Nate Wilkinson’s girlfriend? What if David had hooked up with her again, and Nate had found out, and he had taken revenge on the football hero who had
beaten him up at school?
According to the principal, the kid’s suspension ended on Monday.
Nate’s mother sure wasn’t going to help him before then, but Preach thought he knew a way to find him sooner.
His cell buzzed with a text. Claire.
After a quick reply, he turned right at the next intersection, cut across the north side of town on Spring, passed beneath a train trestle he and Wade Fee used to walk across as kids, and circled back to Wild Oaks.
After hearing him pull up, Claire met him in the doorway, wrapped in a lavender, knee-length, kimono-style wrap.
“You okay?” Preach asked, though he could tell by her red-rimmed eyes and the set of her mouth that she was not.
She curled a finger and turned inside. He closed the door behind him and followed her down a hallway to her bedroom. A black bra and a pair of matching panties tossed atop a pile of clothes drew his eye. The haphazard nature of the pile suggested a careless stripping of clothes each night. Pulling his gaze away from the intimate items, he noticed a pair of men’s jeans draped across the white comforter.
“Brett’s or David’s ?”
“Brett’s,” she said, her tone full of venom. She handed him a small, crinkly receipt. “I found this in the back pocket.”
He took a closer look, stretching out the paper. The date immediately caught his eye. The night of David’s murder. His eyes roamed lower and noted the amount, forty-seven dollars and thirty cents, and the place of business, a BP gas station.
“I looked up the address,” she said. “It’s the one on Simpson Road.”
His eyes flew to meet hers. The BP on Simpson Road was about a mile out of town—and right on the way to Barker’s Mill, the woods where David’s body had been dumped. “Is that on Brett’s way home ?”
“From here ? It’s not far off. But he wasn’t here. He told me he was home all night, working for a new client.”
Preach checked the time on the receipt. Eleven forty-five at night. The timing was right. He sucked in a breath and said, “I’ll need to keep this. And the jeans.”
