A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(98)

Reid was determined to do his best to make Ike’s work count. Reid was supposed to be taking over an investigation that Ike had stalled, but what he was really doing was letting his friend direct the investigation from his bed.

Reid’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he answered. “Reid.”

“It’s me,” said Ike.

“What’s up? Did the night nurse show up again?”

“This morning. She also just sent us a whole bunch of photographs with dates and times and places. I’m going to forward them to you in a minute.”

“Anything we can use?”

“I’m not going to wait to study them before I e-mail them to you, but I think there’s a lot.”

“I’ll let you know what I can make of them after I—” He stopped in midsentence, and took a breath.

“What?”

“I think they found something. Let me call you back in a minute.” Reid ended the call and stepped closer to the spot where the two Caledonia cops had stopped digging. They were kneeling in the hole now, only about two feet down. His heart began to beat faster. After questioning Walter Slawicky, Reid had known that if Slawicky had buried anything, he would not have dug very deep. He just wasn’t the kind of man who would spend several hours sweating to move five or six feet of earth out of a hole and then back in again.

The two cops lifted and pulled up a black polyvinyl chloride pipe about nine inches in diameter and four feet long. He was aware that some of the other cops were shaking their heads in frustration, thinking that the two diggers had just broken the house’s sewer line, but not the two diggers.

As they lifted the pipe higher he could see it was capped at both ends. They set it beside the hole and climbed out onto the grass. The lead police detective stepped up and took charge, while Reid stayed back a few feet. “Okay, great work, you guys,” the detective said. “It’s capped at both ends, so what we want to do next is take one cap off. Jerry, can you do that for us? Then take a flashlight and look inside. Don’t take anything out or touch anything inside, but I want a preview of what it is.”

A technician, presumably Jerry, stepped up putting on latex gloves, then spread a tarp beside the pipe and used a tool that looked like a carpet knife to slice away the plumber’s tape that had been used to seal the cap. He then unscrewed the cap. He bent forward on the tarp, pressed his forehead to it, and aimed a small flashlight into the pipe.

He sat up again and looked at the detective. “It’s a rifle,” he said. He leaned forward again. “And I can see a twenty-round box of ammo. Thirty-aught-six Federal Power-Shok, one eighty grain.”

“Could this be the rifle?”

“We’ll have to do the test and compare the ballistics. But it’s hard to think of why he’d bury it if it wasn’t that rifle.”

“Okay, Jerry. Cap it again and take it to your lab. Prints, DNA, anything and everything, okay?” The detective turned away while the technician obeyed. He looked past the two diggers and spotted three other cops who had been standing around.

“Bill, Hank. Go to the station and read Mr. Slawicky his rights.” Slawicky had been in the act of loading suitcases into his new Porsche the night after Ike Lloyd’s shooting had taken place in his yard, and he had been held for questioning.

The detective saw two technicians folding the tarp and carrying the tube to their truck. He called out, “Pictures, guys. Lots of pictures.”

Art Reid stepped away from the scene and took out his cell phone. He saw that he’d received an e-mail, but he knew what it was, so he didn’t stop to look. He called Lloyd’s number, and let it keep ringing until Lloyd’s voice came on.

“Lloyd.”

“Hi, Ike. They found the rifle. It was right where you thought it would be.”

WALTER SLAWICKY HAD BEEN THROUGH booking and processing. When the detectives came in to talk to him he said he would wait until he had talked to his attorney, so he sat in a holding cell for an interminable period of time, just waiting. They had taken his watch, so he couldn’t even measure the time. Then there was a van that took him and two other men to the county jail. The intake ritual was long and unpleasant, a lot of standing on lines painted on the floor to wait for his forms to be created, for guards to issue him clothes, for a shower, for a cell assignment. Every single thing that got done took fifty times as long as it needed to, and all the time he was watching.

Jail was a dangerous place. Slawicky had thought about this many times since he went to work for Dan Crane. He had always stayed off Crane’s payroll, doing the break-ins and a few odd jobs. He never liked being an employee, and since he’d fallen off the forklift when he’d run it into the high shelf at the big box store a few years ago, he’d been on full disability. He hadn’t wanted to mess that up.

He had assumed his cell would be with the two men who had been transported in the van with him. Nobody had been allowed to talk, but he had formed an opinion about them, and he didn’t think they would be a problem. There had been no crazy-eyed stares, no signs of belligerence.

One of them was a young guy the cops called Oakes who kept watching everybody else for cues, probably because he thought the older guys must have been through this before. The other seemed to Slawicky to actually have been in jail a few times. He was at least fifty and the tattoos on his hands and forearms had not been done by a professional. He was called Gordon, and he had the lean look of a man who had lived a marginal life for a long time. His eyes had squint lines and his teeth and fingers were stained brown from smoking. Slawicky figured that the man’s chain-smoking had probably been a reasonable decision, because he didn’t seem to be likely to live much longer anyway.