Chapter 5
FIVE
GABE
“What happened?” Elton asked. Concern deepened the lines in his face as he turned away and headed to his kitchen.
“Coffee first,” Gabe replied, following behind him.
Elton poured coffee into a waiting mug, the one Gabe had found at Pick Me last month, much to his glee. It had a silhouette of Richard Nixon on it, his bulbous nose elongated like Pinocchio’s. Now Elton made him use it whenever he came over.
“Well? Spit it out,” Elton demanded as he handed the coffee over.
“A body. I found a body.” There was no point in sugarcoating his morning.
Elton’s eyebrows shot upward. “Another one?”
“Yes, another one,” he said with a sigh.
“Don’t you think this is becoming a bad habit? Maybe cut down on your salt intake or something and the bodies will quit showing up.”
“Ha, ha, ha.”
“Are you hungry?” Elton asked.
A flash of the grisly scene at Heron’s Roost popped into Gabe’s head, extinguishing any hunger pains.
“After finding a body? No, thank you, I’m good.”
“Good, because I still have to go to the grocery store. Now have a seat and tell me what happened so we can figure out what we’re going to do about it.”
Gabe ignored the last bit of Elton’s sentence. There was no we in this situation.
“The headline is ‘Gabe Found a Body.’ A guy named Roy Wilson. Have you heard of him?”
Elton was not a churchgoer, but if Wilson had been in the area for a while, he’d have some knowledge of the man. Elton seemed to know just about everyone in Twana County, after all.
“Royal Wilson,” he repeated. “Huh.” The grunt was one Elton might have made if he’d stepped in a pile of dog shit. “Now there’s someone I haven’t thought about in quite some time.” He wrinkled his nose as if he actually smelled something unpleasant on his shoe.
“Tell me about him.” Gabe flopped down on the couch without spilling a drop of liquid on himself or the furniture and set his bag down next to his feet.
Elton settled into his recliner and set his own cup of coffee on the small table by his elbow.
“Well, now,” Elton began, rubbing his palms together. “Roy’s a bit younger than me—was, I suppose. We weren’t friends, but the Wilsons lived on Heartstone for a while. When they up and moved to Westfort, everyone here was glad to see their backsides.”
“Why did they move, and why were you glad to see them go?” Gabe sipped at his drink, savoring the bitter brew.
“Roy’s father—name escapes me—was a criminal.
But he was never actually caught doing anything.
He and Roy were nasty pieces of work. Dad ran an auto repair place for a few years that was a front for stolen cars, chop shop-type thing, but one of the employees took the fall when they were shut down.
I suspect there was an organized crime element to the various Wilson enterprises.
The family moved because they came into money, supposedly. Roy Wilson called you out of the blue?”
Gabe sat forward, and the couch protested.
“Yep, and I’ve been thinking about that.
Maybe it wasn’t Wilson who called me. What if it was someone setting me up?
It’s not as if I’d recognize his voice. I’d never heard of the guy.
Even weirder, whoever it was said that Emmett Spurring gave him my number. What else do you know about Wilson?”
Gabe had zero connections to Roy Wilson, but he sure did to Spurring.
Which made him think someone had wanted Gabe to find Wilson’s body.
Spurring? Or someone else? If it was someone else, they had to have known Gabe’s curiosity would be piqued if Spurring was mentioned.
Then again, if the caller had legitimately been Wilson, and Spurring had been his point of contact between them, why?
The question rattled around in his head like a loose ball bearing, and Gabe worried he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he teased out the answer.
“Roy expanded the family business geographically and added bribery and extortion to the list of services. There were even rumors that the Wilsons had Russian connections in Aberdeen. Personally, I think they were just trying to make themselves sound tougher than they were. Then Roy found his true calling.” Sarcasm dripped from those last two words.
“Any ideas where the Russian angle rumor came from?” Rumors usually didn’t mean much, but he sure wished he’d paid more attention to the whispers when he’d met the Anderson brothers. Heidi had always said that the source was more important than the rumor itself.
An expression Gabe could only label as guilt crossed Elton’s face. But maybe it wasn’t guilt. Regret?
“Can’t say where I heard that for sure, but maybe Knute. He was my criminal information source for a long while.”
Gabe suspected that the information had in fact come from Elton’s lifelong friend Knute Bakke, which meant it carried a bit more weight. Knute had been a cop in Westfort until retirement a few years ago, which explained his familiarity with the criminal underworld of Twana County.
“Petty criminal to pastor. Funny, that doesn’t seem that big a leap to me.
Maybe Knute will have more insight. Does he know Spurring?
” Gabe figured that all the LEOs in the area were at least familiar with each other.
It occurred to him that Knute could be a great source of information if Gabe wanted to get to the bottom of today’s fuckery—and he did.
“Maybe,” Elton said noncommittally.
“Did you guys have a falling-out?”
That question was answered with a glower. “Knute’s been busy, haven’t talked to him lately.”
“Well, quit acting like a petulant teenager and get on the horn. No time like the present.” Gabe pointed at Elton’s cell phone sitting next to his coffee cup. “Get over it and give him a call or shoot him a text.”
With an irritated grumble, Elton picked up his phone and poked at the screen for several minutes. “Happy now?” he said, setting it down with a click.
“Was it that hard to reach out to one of your oldest friends?” Gabe teased.
All he got for his effort was a harrumph and silence.
Deciding it was best not to poke the bear, Gabe suppressed his smile and took another sip of his coffee.
He pretended not to notice Elton shooting his phone sideways glances.
What was going with the two of them anyway?
Filing that question away for another day, Gabe returned to contemplating the murder of Roy Wilson and why he’d been tapped to find the body.
Three scenarios seemed to be in the running for most conceivable.
One, Wilson had called Gabe, and he’d legitimately wanted Gabe to look into something for him.
The man hadn’t bludgeoned himself to death, so someone else had gotten to him before Gabe arrived.
Two, a yet-to-be-named person knew Wilson would be at Heron’s Roost that morning and for reasons wanted Gabe to find the body.
Or they’d had no idea Gabe was on the way.
Which meant that Gabe turning up might have been a problem?
It certainly was for Gabe. He was putting that one in the possible column.
The last option: Emmett Spurring had been the one to contact Gabe.
Gabe wouldn’t necessarily recognize his voice, and he could have been disguising it.
By why? That would mean for reasons yet unknown, Spurring wanted Gabe to discover the body.
Had Spurring killed Wilson himself? The last one seemed the most far-fetched.
Gabe was no expert, but Spurring seemed like the bumbling sidekick, not a vicious killer.
On top of all this, what the hell was Wilson doing at Heron’s Roost with a full set of golf clubs?
“Have you irritated anyone recently?” Elton asked, breaking the silence.
Gabe laughed. “Always a possibility, Elton. But not that I’m aware of.” He probably annoyed Casey on a daily basis, but he was working on breaking his lifelong habit of tossing dirty clothes on the floor before bed. And a blow job went a long way to mitigating Casey’s annoyance.
Elton pressed his lips together and crossed his arms. Then he said, “I just remembered something else, might be important, might not. Don’t know why it didn’t come to me right away. Probably because it seemed best to forget I ever knew.”
“What?” Eyebrows raised, Gabe sat forward, encouraging Elton to spill.
“I feel like I’m sharing a secret that’s not mine to tell.”
“Elton,” Gabe growled. “Whatever it is, spit it out.”
The old man narrowed his eyes at Gabe. Gabe didn’t flinch. He’d been brought up by Heidi Karne, after all. Elton’s glare was amateur hour.
“Maybe just tuck this away. I seriously doubt it has anything to do with what’s happened.” He sucked in a deep breath and then said, “Roy Wilson is—was—Mickie’s biological father.”
It took everything Gabe had to not spit out the coffee he’d just sipped.
“What the fuck? And by that I mean, what. The. Actual. Fuck?”
“But,” Elton added hastily, “that was his entire participation in Mickie’s life.
He got a young girl pregnant and escaped the consequences, probably because his daddy had money.
” Elton glared at his coffee. “It was all bullshit. We all knew Roy was no angel. I’ve often wondered if that hint of tainted goods was one of the reasons it was so easy to put Mickie behind bars. ”
Gabe sat in stunned silence while he tried to process what he’d just learned. It was going to take more than a few seconds.
“Roy Wilson, pastor of Westfort Abundance of Light Church and former criminal who maybe wasn’t all that former, was Mickie’s sperm donor?” he finally said.
Elton nodded.