Rough Country: A gripping crime thriller

by T. J. Brearton

“I was. I spoke to Eileen Smith. And the cook – the one with all the tattoos. Chase.”

  “He told me you was there.”

  “I told you I was there when I called you and left a message.”

  “Uh-huh. You’ve been getting around.” It was more observation than accusation. Snow was easing up. He looked at the open door to Kasey’s room. Silas had been in there half a minute, hadn’t said anything.

  Reed said to Snow, “I plan to contact the owners from New Jersey to obtain surveillance video. Unless you’re able to get it to me somehow.”

  “For what? What’s the diner got to do with it?”

  “The diner is in the area. Let me ask you – do you think Kasey’s boyfriend would hurt her?”

  Snow blinked a few times. The eye looked worse closer up – bits of yellow emerging in the purple. A bruise that was maybe a day old. “I told Kasey to have nothing to do with Tyson Wheeler. We both did.”

  Reed watched Ida, who seemed nervous. He wondered about the dozen or so people in the kitchen – pretending to talk and not eavesdrop – what they were thinking. What they knew. “Ida,” Reed said to her, “is that why you exchanged words with Tyson? You thought he did this?”

  Her eyes found him, red and exhausted, just as someone’s voice got loud in the back room.

  “God dammit!”

  Reed stepped around Snow and caught a flash of movement on the other side of the kitchen – someone shoving someone, it looked like. What was it with these people? He started through the kitchen as the voices got louder – two men shouting at each other in the living room – then a woman screamed and something broke. Reed hurried faster, bumping past some of the mourners, until he was grabbing a man’s fist in the air before the guy could land it.

  “Whoa! Hey!” Reed said, and got the guy’s arm back behind him. Older guy, in his sixties. The one opposite him, chest heaving, nostrils flared, was about the same age.

  “Hey!” Ida came next, walking in behind Reed. “The hell are you two doing in here? Ah Jesus, my lamp!”

  The lamp was shattered, having fallen from a tiered end table and broken on the way down.

  “Piece of shit,” the man in Reed’s grip snarled at the other. Then, “Ow! Let go of my arm!”

  “Are you going to behave?” Reed asked.

  The man in Reed’s grip spat at the other. The other wanted to come at him – good grief, these guys were gray-haired and wrinkled and full of rage. Maybe this was what had happened to Snow? Family squabbling?

  Reed let go of the man and quickly got in front of him, whipped out his badge and held out both arms. “Anything else? You guys want to do this? You’re going to spend the night in jail. Maybe the week.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” the other man said.

  “Augie,” Ida snapped, “that’s enough.” She pointed to the broken lamp. “I’ll expect you to fix that.”

  “Let’s everybody take a breath,” Reed said. The immediate threat past, he got a look at the room: Dim lighting, faded floral wallpaper, only one window, no TV. Some old-timey picture of a young man hung on the wall, black and white, standing near a big barn.

  The way a few men and women were sitting together on the couches, Reed got the weird impression he’d interrupted some kind of make-out session. He turned to the man he’d just had in a hold. “Sir? What’s your name?”

  “That’s Vincent,” Ida sneered.

  Reed looked into the old-timer’s lined face. “Vincent? That your first name or last?”

  The man had a tic going in one eye, like he was about to stroke out. “First.”

  Snow had followed Ida and lingered in the doorway.

  Reed said, “Why don’t you sit down, Vincent. Okay? Folks? Clear out of there. And somebody please lower that music.”

  Vincent sat, glaring at Augie as he did.

  “He needs to clean that up,” Ida said.

  “Fine,” Reed said. “Get him a broom and dustpan or whatever. Augie? You going to be cool?”

  Augie glared at Vincent. “I’ll be cool if he keeps his mouth shut.”

  Vincent started to get up and say something, but Reed shot him a look. He still had his arms out like wings, badge in hand. Augie at last went off sulking. He pushed past Snow and into the kitchen.

  Ida found the volume knob and turned it down.

  They waited as Augie came back in. He was still hot – you could see a vein bulging in his temple – but he had a broom and swept up the broken lamp. A woman, a new face, showed up with a garbage bag, and Augie emptied the dustpan and picked up the remainder of the fixture and dropped it in. Reed found himself looking at the walls again, the picture of the young man.

  “Put it out back,” Ida said, bringing Reed back around. Now Ida sounded tough as nails. Her range of emotions was striking, from shrinking violet to large and in charge.

  With Augie gone, Reed looked down at Vincent. The volume had been lowered as he asked, but the music was still going. He listened a moment as Gregg Allman sang about a floating bridge he’d never forget.

  Reed said, “Good song.”

  “You bet your ass,” Vincent said.

  Reed looked at the stereo. “Nice setup, too. You don’t see many component systems like that anymore.”

  “These days, it’s all junk,” Vincent agreed.

  “That guy, Augie – he call you an asshole or something?”

  Vincent blinked, not sure what to make of a cop talking like that. Then he frowned and shook his head. “That’s Dan Wheeler’s uncle,” he said. “August Wheeler.”

  Ah, Reed thought. “What’s he doing here?”

  Vincent started popping the knuckles in his left hand. Then he switched to the right. He shrugged. “Augie can’t take the truth.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He don’t want to hear about Tyson. None of ’em do. They want to deny it.” Vincent’s eyes flicked to Ida’s. Reed looked there too – Ida saw him and averted her gaze, then walked out. Daryl Snow was gone, too. Damn.

  Reed said, “What’s going on here, Vincent?”

  Vincent held Reed’s eye and said, “Same shit that’s been going on for years.”

  Reed heard Silas calling for him. He said to Vincent, “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  But all Vincent said was, “Human nature,” and turned his face away.

  Reed excused himself and walked back through the kitchen, smiling and making eye contact, smelling the miasma of cigarettes and greasy food that would probably sink into his clothes and stick around longer than any dead body. He reached Silas standing in the victim’s bedroom doorway.

  He wanted to go after Snow, but Silas looked impatient. “Would you like to have a look at the victim’s bedroom now, Investigator Raleigh?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Let’s do it.”

  Almost immediately after stepping in, he thought: Oh… Okay.

  It looked like a hotel room. Or even a soldier’s quarters: bed neatly made, a few winter clothes folded crisply in the closet, tape marks on the wall where posters or pictures once hung. Nothing at all like a place inhabited by a teenaged girl.

  10

  Snowfall in May, you could say

  The artist sat outside the funeral home, puffing on his mod. It was full dark, the family dinner mercifully over, and he’d managed to convince his father to let him leave to meet friends. It was embarrassing, being his age and having to get permission from your old man to live your life. Embarrassing to have to sit through a family meal at the one restaurant in town and listen to his father explain about the Stevens girl getting strangled and the Wheeler dude burning his shit down.

  That was the price you paid, he reasoned, for living at home.

  But it was worth it, because he had a plan. Because he was saving mad money. His father had no idea the type of coin he was pulling in from the ink work; people were coming from all over to get their tribal tattoos and their half-sleeves and their So-and-So Forever wrapped in thorny roses – he’d made almost a thousand
bucks off Minnie and Logan Terrio and Chase McNary alone. It was a resurgence in tattoos that no one had seen coming, and he was cashing in. By the end of the summer, he was going to have enough money that he’d never have to look at his father’s ugly fucking face ever again.

  Or think about the Stevens girl.

  The artist exhaled a huge boll of vapor, and a breeze took it and tore it up into strips before pushing it away. He watched a car coming down the road – a mini SUV, just some old lady. A minute later, he saw Logan coming in the Jeep. Logan Terrio was about the only friend the artist had, but that was fine. Less to leave behind.

  The Jeep pulled into the funeral home parking lot, heavy bass thumping. The artist took his time, got up and sauntered over at an easy pace. He looked at the funeral home as he walked. Sickos. Only sickos dealt with dead people anyway. The perfect job for his father. Hilarious how his old man thought the artist was going to pick up the family business after he got tattooing “out of his system.”

  Yeah. Right.

  Oh, Dad, please, let me play with dead people the rest of my life just like you, you sick fuck…

  The artist opened up the passenger side and sank into the seat, the bass from the blasting hip-hop song rattling his rib cage. Logan bobbed his head a second, grinning, and said, “Wait, wait for this part,” and then mouthed the words along with the rapper.

  “Dude,” the artist said after a minute, “my parents are going to come by. My dad always checks on the place at night.”

  “What?” Logan looked annoyed. He turned down the music.

  “My dad checks on the place. Let’s go.”

  “They’re going to be busy, huh?”

  The artist made no comment about the sudden uptick in business.

  Logan grew somber and shook his head. “It’s fucking crazy, man. Fucking crazy. Dude – that Wheeler kid burned his fucking house down.”

  “I know.”

  “You think there’s anything left?”

  “Of the house? Probably not.”

  Logan’s eyes got wide. “Let’s go take a look.”

  “Nah.”

  “Yeah, let’s.” He backed up, turned around and screeched the tires as he got onto the road.

  “There’s people all over down there,” the artist said. “There’s cops all over this town. Probably a state trooper or a local cop guarding it.”

  “There’s always cops all over this town,” Logan said. “We’re just a couple of interested parties.”

  “Fine,” the artist said after a minute. He puffed on his mod and watched the exhaled vapor slipstream through the open window.

  Logan said, “After this, I know where we can go.”

  “Shut up, man.”

  “Didn’t she used to babysit for you? For your brother and sister?”

  “I said shut the fuck up.” The artist rummaged around in his knapsack, then pulled out a bottle of pills and popped one right away.

  Logan’s mouth hung open. “You’re not sharing?”

  He handed them over.

  No, leaving here wouldn’t be a problem at all.

  Reed sat in the Ford Transit with a plastic grocery bag of ice applied to the side of his jaw; he hadn’t realized it at the time, but Vincent had inadvertently banged heads with him during the fracas at Ida’s.

  Overman was on the phone. Apparently IAB had called him, and executive powers were breathing down his neck about the shoot-out and fire. “So you made damn sure no one else was in the place?”

  “We couldn’t be completely sure about the father,” Reed said. “But we had it on good authority that he was an hour away. We knew Brayden Wheeler was at school. And we didn’t initiate any action – Tyson Wheeler started shooting. Nobody shot back.”

  Reed reminded himself to call the hospital and check in on Pyle.

  “I know all that,” Overman said gruffly, but not irritably. “It’s just all about confirming the location of Brayden Wheeler during the shooting.”

  “I hadn’t seen him at the school personally. Kruse saw him. Kruse talked to him.”

  “With the group of students selected for interviews?”

  “Yes. He was the third kid.”

  “So there’s paperwork on it.” Overman seemed relieved. He was as by-the-book and honorable an investigator as they came. Nicest guy in the world until you crossed him. When justified, though, it was a righteous anger, and you’d better watch out for hellfire coming down around you. But it seldom went like that – Overman had a way of keeping things smooth with most people. Though Internal Affairs was its own animal.

  “There’s paperwork on it,” Reed assured him, “and we didn’t shoot into that house, Captain.”

  “All right, all right. Now, how about this thing with Kasey Stevens’s bedroom?”

  Reed watched Ida Stevens’s house – lot of people still in there, shadows going past the windows, music vibrating – as he explained to Overman about Kasey’s bedroom being shockingly bare.

  “So she wasn’t really staying there,” Overman said.

  “Ida said it was Kasey’s official residence so she could remain in school in the district,” Reed told Overman. “But I think the truth is that mother and daughter weren’t getting along. Ida admitted that back in March, right around her fifteenth birthday, Kasey ran away. Ida has got a temper, so she cleaned that room out, torched all the girl’s things, dropped her clothes in the Goodwill bin. She later regretted it, she said.”

  “Where did she go? The girl.”

  “She eventually turned up at Tyson’s house.”

  “Oh boy…”

  “Yeah. Ida and Dan Wheeler connected on it, and Dan Wheeler said it was fine, that she could stay until things blew over. Wheeler says he made them sleep separately. She left two weeks later, and the two of them had broken up.”

  “Still. It keeps the focus there.”

  “It does.”

  Overman was quiet, probably thinking. “Didn’t the best friend tell you that the victim called her mother? That she’d called Ida to ask about staying over?”

  “Ida admitted she was trying to track Kasey down,” Reed said. “Ida acted the part of the parent wanting her kid home, but she was really just trying to locate her.”

  “So where’s the girl, Kasey, been staying since the breakup with Tyson?”

  “When she left, she said she was going back to her mom’s. But she never did. And Ida claims she doesn’t know where she was.”

  “Why did this woman never call the cops?”

  “I’ll find out,” Reed said. “But in the meantime, I sort of got an idea.”

  “Uh-oh…”

  “Daryl Snow lives in Keeseville. I guess it’s just twenty minutes from here. The thing that struck me about Snow – he seems to be watching all of this unfold like he knows what’s going to happen next. He’s got a nasty black eye. People are fighting all over the place. And there’s things between them – Ida and Snow – not being said.”

  “You think the girl was staying with him?”

  “I called him a minute ago, and this time he answered. We’re going to meet at the truck stop diner. Got a few things I’d like to go over with him.”

  “Listen – take a couple of guys with you. This guy’s got an aggravated assault and a domestic battery in his jacket. If he feels backed up against a wall…”

  Reed pictured the man with his burly beard, gimlet eyes. “Yeah. I will.”

  “Okay – what else?”

  Reed told Overman about Vincent Morrow and August Wheeler.

  “You didn’t want to pull in those old boys for fighting?”

  “It was in Ida’s house. No one was looking to press charges, and I wasn’t going to push it – I want those old boys to trust me, much as possible. People are going to start talking. This thing has more to it than these two kids. I really get that sense.”

  “Like what? Drugs?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe. Or sex.”

  Overman was quiet. “All
right, listen – how are you doing?”

  “I need to eat.”

  “So eat. That’s your stomach. How’s your head?”

  “They’re linked. Stomach and head.”

  Overman blew air. “Stay in touch.”

  The night was cool and the stars were out. Reed stopped at the local grocery store and bought a premade turkey-and-Swiss. From downtown Elliston to Betty Beaver’s took ten minutes, just enough time for him to finish eating and be picking his teeth as he pulled into the dirt lot. The state police vehicle, dark blue with an orange, iridescent strip down the side, waited with two troopers in it.

  All the men got out and shook hands – the troopers were both young guys pulling night shifts, each of them beefy, sporting sidewall haircuts and latently excited. Reed filled them in on a few things, keeping it brief.

  “Snow is a character,” one of them said afterward.

  The other one checked his weapon. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  Reed asked, “What could you say about it?”

  The troopers exchanged looks. The first one, Raimi, said, “Ah, he likes to have a good time, I guess. He’s the type of guy that his Harley costs more than his house, you know what I mean?”

  “And the mortgage is on the Harley,” added Trooper Charleston.

  Reed looked at the diner. Closed now, with the sole light source coming from somewhere in the back. Snow’s big Dodge truck was parked in the dirt lot – no Harleys in sight. “How’s the food here?”

  Charleston answered, “Not bad. Depends who’s cooking. The kid is decent. The old woman, she’s better.”

  “Ah,” said Raimi dismissively, “it all comes out of cans. Military surplus.”

  Reed started for the door and they followed. He knocked, got no answer. “Huh.”

  “He knows we’re coming?” Raimi asked.

  “Truck’s right there. Yeah, he knows.”

  “You were at the house earlier? Ida Stevens’s place?”

  “Right.”

  “I heard about the girl’s bedroom,” Raimi said. “Weird shit.”

  Reed cupped his hands against the glass in the door and looked at the dark tables, chairs hung upside down for cleaning.