Chapter Eleven
ELEVEN
BEHIND ME, THERE’S A click as Dishman taps the nearby light switch with his elbow.
A bank of fluorescents high above us illuminates the space in cold, buzzing light.
Beyond Dean’s body is an RV, gleaming in maroon and silver, looking freshly washed.
There’s a block of fancy scrolled text on the side in glittering white paint:
THERE IS HOPE! THERE IS HEALING!
EZRA KING: CHURCH OF THE HEALING REDEEMER
TENT MINISTRY AND GOOD WORKS
Past the RV, there’re a couple of motorcycles, a janky Honda, and a little dragster disassembled at the far end of the garage. Several big tables are covered messily with tools, among them the sort of metal file that could’ve been used to tamper with Honey’s brakes.
“We should check his phone,” I say, looking again at Griffon’s body.
Dishman stares at me as if I’ve just said, We should cut off his head.
“Chief, we should check his phone,” I repeat. “Will said he got a text and ran off.”
“I’ll get a warrant for that,” Dishman says. “And a tech guy.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Well, what do you suggest?”
“Let’s just check it now.”
He gives me a long, dubious look. “Well, we can’t. If we’d brought my cruiser, maybe, but I don’t have my crime scene kit. No gloves.”
I open my bag and dig out the pouch of stuff I keep for situations just like this. I open a baggie of nitrile gloves, hand him a pair, and keep one for myself. As I’m tucking everything back in place, Dishman looks in my satchel and asks, “Is that a lock-picking kit in there?”
“Nope,” I lie, and push the kit deeper into my bag before snapping on my gloves.
Dishman squats down, gloves on, pats Dean’s front pockets, and comes up with a phone. He taps it but the Face ID denies him entry.
“Sorry,” he says flatly. “It’s locked.”
I grunt, snatch the phone from his hand, and hold it in front of Dean’s still-open eyes. The phone unlocks.
“Presto,” I say.
Dishman stares at me. I can’t tell if the look is admiring or aghast.
“You know,” he says, “you’re disturbingly comfortable with dead bodies.”
“Have you attended many murder cases, Chief Dishman?” I ask.
“Enough,” he says. “Never gotten used to it though.”
“Me neither. Not really. But I have a job to do so I just push it down, lock it in the vault.”
Dishman frowns at me. “That vault ever get too full, Miss Gore?”
I ignore him and open Dean Griffon’s messages, but there’s no recent text.
I go to the notifications instead. Looks like there’s a pop-up from his security camera.
I open the app and we watch as a silver truck appears under the lens, driving slow.
There’s the sound of a truck door opening, then the crunch of gravel as someone walks close by, then it cuts off.
“Can you go back?” Dishman asks. “Look at the plates?”
I scrub backward but the camera never catches the plates. There’s only a glossy sheen of silver as the truck—yet another Ford F-150 by the look of it—barely comes into frame. There’s a sticker on the window: a faded Harley-Davidson shield. But nothing else to identify it.
“How many silver Ford pickups you got in town?” I ask.
He says, “Almost as many as we got black ones.”
I shake my head and look back down at the phone, the list of recordings.
“There’s more,” I say. “After Dean left the picnic.”
We watch the next video. It clearly shows Dean arriving in his black truck, getting out, heading toward the RV garage.
Then there’s a third video, the silver truck leaving.
Even less visible now as it rolls out behind Dean’s truck.
Then, finally, there’s the red Bronco as Dishman and I arrive.
There’s nothing else for today except Griffon leaving around ten AM, with his truck bed full of plastic folding chairs.
I go back to flicking through Griffon’s phone while Dishman walks around the scene.
“Look!” I say, finally holding it out to him. It’s my own website. “He was checking me out. He has an article open about me. The case I worked in Quartz Creek.”
“Half the town’s probably got information about you open on their phone. Your website’s open on my computer back at the station. So, Dean got curious, like everyone else—it doesn’t mean he cut your brakes.”
He holds his hand out for the phone and I grudgingly give it to him. Then, while he pulls his own phone out, calls the police station, and reports the crime, I walk away from him and Griffon’s corpse and back to the door, where I inspect the busted lock.
When Dishman hangs up, he looks back at the body and says, “We’ll see if the coroner can ID the murder weapon.”
“I can save him the trouble,” I say, pointing at the door. “I’d guess the door was jimmied open with a sharp screwdriver. Whoever it was broke in here to get something, Griffon saw them on the camera, came home, surprised the thief, and was killed with the screwdriver in the process.”
“Oh, sure,” he says. “I mean, you’ve got no evidence. No prints. No photos. No testimony. Just speculation and conjecture, but sure. Congratulations, you’ve cracked it. Now, get out of here. Go back to working your own case.”
“Chief,” I say, taking a step toward him.
“This is my case. Dean Griffon worked for Ezra King. Ezra helped Griffon get sober and Griffon helped Ezra with the revival circuit. Now they’re both dead and both of their doors were tampered with.
Maybe whoever it was that broke in here also broke into Ezra’s place and killed him too, but in that case, they had time to go back and cover their tracks. So—”
“Wait, wait,” he says, cracking an ironic smile.
“Let me get this straight. The story you’re trying to tell me is that someone broke into the parsonage and killed Ezra with a snake.
Then, while Ezra slowly succumbed to venom, the killer moseyed over to the Walmart nearly an hour away, bought new door hardware, drove back to Mount Zion, and installed the set to cover his tracks.
Well, hell, maybe that’s where our killer is now!
Off to Walmart to get a new doorknob. Maybe all we have to do is wait here and he’ll come strolling up. ”
I roll my eyes and he gives me a look that oozes disappointment and impatience. It’s the daddest thing I’ve ever seen.
“Okay, listen, I didn’t say it was a perfect theory.”
He snorts.
“But someone broke into the parsonage and—”
“Someone might have broken into the parsonage,” he corrects. “Or maybe Ezra just replaced the dead bolt and forgot to give anyone the receipt.”
“But someone did break into this garage,” I say. “And Ezra’s RV is right here. Maybe the killer was looking for something at Ezra’s house, didn’t find it, came here to look instead.”
“Fine,” he says, exasperated. “Fine, let’s give it a look.”
We both walk around the RV and my heart jumps when I see more scuff marks around the RV door. It’s been pried open.
Dishman gives me a glance warning me not to tell him I told him so and opens the RV door. I follow him up the steps and inside. I don’t know much about RVs, but this seems like a newer model. It’s all gray or gray-stained fake wood and it’s all fairly clean.
We both use our lights, in the cramped space, to search the RV’s interior and it’s not long before Dishman says, “Here it is.”
The paneling on the wall that stands at a right angle to the refrigerator is scratched up. Dishman gives it a nudge one way and then another, and a section of the panel swings open to reveal a hidden compartment about the size of a microwave.
“Empty,” Dishman says.
I lean in closer, shining my light around the inside. There’s a scattering of particles, like black sand, along the edges of the compartment. I swipe my gloved fingertip over them, picking up some of the granules, and give it a sniff.
“Coffee grounds,” I say. “Weird. Why hide coffee?”
When I look at Dishman, he’s chuckling, so low it’s almost soundless.
“What?” I ask.
“Not coffee,” he says. “Drugs. Somebody was probably using coffee to throw off drug dogs.”
“What?” I laugh. “That wouldn’t work.”
“No,” he says. “Not in real life. They probably got it from Beverly Hills Cop.”
“Ah. I’m afraid I never got around to watching that one.”
“Well, you should. It’s a classic.”
But the way he says it, it sounds like more than just a classic. It sounds personal. When I grin at him, his cheeks redden.
“Yeah, okay,” he says. “That old movie’s probably the reason I became a cop. I saw it at the drive-in. Started cutting the bottom third of my sweatshirts off like Eddie Murphy. He was the absolute pinnacle of cool.”
“And the coffee grounds thing?” I ask.
“The bad guys in the movie do it. Back in the nineties, a lot of low-rung dealers tried to mask their drugs with coffee. Since then, most have wised up or, I guess, are probably too young to have watched the movie, but when I first became a cop, I saw this a lot.”
He smiles again at the memory and then we both go back to staring into the empty hidey-hole. Eventually, he says, “I’ll get the guys in here to swab it. We’ll find out what was actually being moved.”
“Chief, what if Dean Griffon was smuggling drugs in Ezra’s RV,” I say. “And what if whoever he was involved with got spooked and came here to get them out of the RV and killed Griffon when he caught them?”
“I thought your whole theory before was that it was Griffon who tampered with your brakes. But now you think he was a victim?”
“No, not a victim, just—What if he was using Ezra’s revival circuit as some kind of cover for his dealing?
Maybe Ezra found out about it and became a liability.
I mean, Griffon traveled around with Ezra so maybe he knew how to handle snakes too.
Maybe he and the other guy—whoever it was in the silver truck—were in on it, and killed Ezra or beat him almost to death, then used the snake somehow to cover their tracks.
Maybe Silver Truck Guy came here to get rid of Dean and tie up loose ends. ”