Chapter 20 #2
Rankin nodded. “Coroner’s tied up on another scene,” he said. “Dispatch wants you to transport to the county morgue. We’ve got photos of the scene and the vehicle for the report.”
“Got it,” I said.
Fletcher and I each took a side of the basket and transferred the body carefully to our stretcher. The weight was average—young male, tall.
My hand hovered at the edge of the sheet.
I didn’t have to look. I could sign the transport, log the time, do the job. Name would come later, from a license or a family member. I could pretend the Alabama plate meant nothing to me. That I was making connections out of thin air. I could let myself breathe for a few more hours.
Instead, I pinched the corner of the sheet and peeled it back.
The kid’s face was pale in the scene light.
Blood matted his hair at the temple, a bruise blossomed along one jawline, lips parted slightly, one of them cut…
black eye. I remembered that shot he took to the eye.
His neck lay at an angle that said the coroner’s report would read “massive cervical trauma.”
Tyler.
My vision tunneled for a second. The sounds around me muffled.
Jesus.
He was supposed to be in a hospital getting care, or better yet, with Emily celebrating the knowledge of finding out they were having either a boy or a girl. My chest hurt. I shoved it down. Grief was a luxury. Grief got compartmentalized. That was the deal. I’d made it with myself a long time ago.
Later, I promised the part of me that wanted to sit down on the asphalt and put my head in my hands. Later you can feel this. Right now, you work.
Fuck!
Something gnawed at me, I didn’t know what, then I pulled the sheet back so I could see everything.
“What are you doing?” Fletcher demanded to know. I ignored him.
Tyler wasn’t wearing the hoodie I’d last seen him in. He was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt.
The buttons didn’t line up right—off by one, fabric skewed so the hem sat crooked on his hips. His boots were on the right feet, but loosely tied, laces uneven.
A kid who called people “sir” without thinking?
He wouldn’t misbutton a shirt. His laces would be even.
What’s more, this stretch of 441 wasn’t a shortcut to anywhere Tyler should have been going. If he’d headed home to Alabama from the fight, he should have been on I-75, not winding deeper into the Smokies.
This was a set-up, pure and simple.
I covered Tyler’s body again, then Fletcher and I snugged the straps and rolled the stretcher to the back of the rig. The loading system whirred as it lifted him in.
I jogged back to the edge of the embankment. “Rankin!” I called down.
He looked up. “Yeah?”
“Anything in the cab with him?” I asked. “Gym bag, duffel, anything like that?”
Rankin shook his head. “Glove box had registration, insurance card, old fast food napkins. Passenger seat was empty. Floorboard, too. No bag. You need anything else, we’ve got interior pics.”
“Copy,” I said.
No bag. No gear. No sign of the clothes he’d fought in.
I turned and climbed into the back of the ambulance where Fletcher was hooking him in.
“Do me a favor, pull his wallet.” I asked Fletcher.
“Why? You heard Rankin, they got everything they need off the insurance card,”
“I know,” I said. “Humor me. Check his wallet. I want to see something.”
“What the fuck are you doing, Post?” he demanded. “You gonna rob the dead now? That a new hobby?”
“Just do it,” I said, sharper than I meant to. “Please. I’m betting there’s nothing but ten dollars in his wallet, but I’m hoping I’m wrong.”
He muttered a curse under his breath but reached for the kid’s back pocket, pulling the wallet free. He flipped it open, using the dome light to see.
“You were close,” he said after a second. “Seven dollars. That’s it. Couple of crumpled ones and a five. No credit cards, just a debit card and a picture of a pretty girl.”
My throat closed.
Em.
“I thought you wanted to see if he had a wad of cash,” Fletcher said. “What the hell is going on?”
“If this was legit,” I said, keeping my voice low and even. “Even a shitty underground purse would’ve left him with a few hundred in his pocket, minimum.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Fight money.”
Fletcher’s head whipped around. “This is one of your guys?” he asked. “From…those fights?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tyler. From Alabama. Fought at a distillery last night. Took a bad knockout. Should’ve been in a hospital or on I-75 heading home.
Instead, somehow he ends up alone on a mountain road he had no reason to be on, in a truck with no bag, wearing a shirt he couldn’t have buttoned that crooked on his best drunk day, with seven bucks in his wallet and no fight money. ”
Silence stretched. I could almost hear Fletcher putting it together.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I had a bad feeling. Now I’ve got more than that.”
“Are you saying this was staged?”
I nodded.
“Then we head to the county morgue.”
“Yep. But I’ve got to make some phone calls.”
“Then let’s go,” Fletcher said as he jumped out of the back of the rig. I followed him.
“You’re driving,” I told him. “I have calls to make.”
Fletcher nodded.
We both climbed into the front of the rig.
I took my phone out of my pocket and stared at the screen for a second.
“Who are you calling?” Fletcher asked.
“Nash. And Simon after that.”
“Shouldn’t you call Sheriff Rivers first?”
“This is big. They set up these fights all the way to Nashville. I don’t have enough info to get them any more than just the recruiter. I’ve got nothing for Nash to hang his hat on yet, and he doesn’t have the resources that Simon does at Onyx Security.”
“But still, Nash is the sheriff. He needs to know this kid was murdered.”
“I know what you’re saying, Fletcher. But here’s the deal—at this point Nash can only shut down the one guy I know, Maurice. Simon could trace who Maurice answers to. But I promise to circle back to Nash.”
“When?” Fletcher was a stubborn son of a bitch.
“Within seventy-two hours. How’s that?”
“I suppose that’s good enough. Now I want to know everything.”
“You will as soon as I tell Simon.”
My thumb hovered over my phone, ready to start things really moving.
These fucks hadn’t just thrown a kid into a cage. They’d cleaned him up, staged his death, and written him off as wreckage.
I was going to make sure they paid. Whether they ended up in a cage of their own, or ended up over the side of a cliff, like Tyler did, either way worked for me.