And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(39)

“How come you two focused on me?” he asked her. “You broke into my house at least three times—”

“Not us,” she insisted. She closed her eyes and hung her head while she waited for a wave of pain to roll over her. “We were never here before.”

Emmett stared at her in disbelief. The first break-in had happened a year and a half ago while he was out shopping for groceries. He’d come home to find the sliding door wide open, the yellowed curtain billowing halfway across the deck like a ghost caught in the act. Inside, the house was a bigger mess than usual. Drawers were pulled out, all the cabinet and closet doors open. The contents of the medicine cabinet had been dumped in the sink and scattered over the bathroom floor. The pills by his bed and by the kitchen sink were gone. OxyContins and Percocets and Valium, even his blood pressure and arthritis medication. Also a 1.75-liter Jim Beam bottle full of change and a handgun from his nightstand.

A few months later, someone forced open the garage door and made off with welding equipment, a bunch of old copper pipe, tools, and a rolling creeper for sliding underneath a vehicle.

Then they broke into the house again, took his pills again. He’d started locking the sliding door when he left and ended up with a broken window in his bedroom for his trouble. He had Carl help him screw a piece of plywood over the window and tape a black garbage bag around the frame to keep the cold air out.

It got to where Emmett didn’t dare leave home. Meals on Wheels brought him lunch three days a week, but it wasn’t enough to live on. When he had no choice but to leave the house, he tried to make it as early or as late as possible, and he took all his pills with him.

If the girl was telling the truth, she and the dead boy weren’t behind the other break-ins. Someone else was. The thought turned him cold to the core.

“How did you know I had the pills you were looking for?”

The girl had her bandaged hand in her lap and was struggling to tear off a piece of tape to secure the wrapping. Emmett stepped forward with his knife and sliced it. He helped pin one end to her wrist with his thumb while she wrapped it around.

“Who told you to come here?”

“No one.” She stared at her bandaged hand. She was lying.

Emmett reached into his pocket and showed her the pills he was carrying for himself. “This is what you came here for. This could take your pain down to nothing. You want me to help you, tell me who told you to take my pills.”

The girl hung her head. When she looked at him again, he could see her doing desperate math in her head. Balancing the cost of telling him what he wanted to know versus not. Estimating how bad her pain was now and how much worse it could get.

“Jesse never told me—”

Emmett pocketed the pills and reached for the light. “You’re lying. I’ll let you sit in the dark for a couple of days and think about it.”

“No! Please don’t,” she begged. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what I know.”





Chapter Thirteen


Packard woke Saturday morning feeling like he’d stood out in the rain all night, which he had.

The overturned semi ended up being a bigger mess than anyone could have imagined. The truck driver broke his leg and his pelvis in the rollover. In the ambulance he told them the white Chevy Cobalt had tried to pass him on the single-lane ramp coming down to the highway. He was taking the curve wide and jerked the wheel in surprise when he saw he was about to crowd them off the road. He was hauling a load of thirty-foot lodgepole pines, some as big as twenty-four inches in diameter. When the wheels on the inside of the curve lost contact with the road, the whole load landed on top of the car. It was clear that both people in the car were dead.

The scene already smelled like marijuana when the first deputies arrived. A peek with a flashlight into the car’s crushed trunk showed it was full of green bricks wrapped in black garbage bags.

At the hottest part of the afternoon, the air was ripe with the skunky smell of weed and pine sap and sawn wood. It got late and started raining while they waited for another logging truck and a forestry crane to arrive on scene. Traffic on the highway and the overpass backed up in all directions for miles. The truck came but they were still waiting for the crane when the water-slicked logs, some weighing more than a ton, suddenly shifted. Everyone shouted, “Whoa! Look out!” and jumped back as more logs rolled on top of the Cobalt.

It was dark by the time the fire department guys were able to get to the car and cut the roof off. Sean White Cloud was standing next to Packard as they watched the jaws of life in action. The sound of the rain pelting their waterproof gear sounded like static from a radio.

“Has Susan heard from Jenny yet?” Sean asked.

Packard shook his head. “Not a word.”

“Damn.”

The roof of the car came off like the lid of a box, giving them their first look at the pulped bodies inside.

“I need a bucket for these two, not a stretcher,” Sean said.

***

It was 1:00 a.m. before Packard got home and into bed. His alarm went off at seven. He made breakfast, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, and called Marilyn to make sure it was okay to stop.

At ten he found himself back at the Shaws’ for the second time that week. Stan didn’t bother trying to sit up in his recliner this time. He looked grayer than just a few days earlier.