And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(80)

Mac, the dispatcher, called while Packard was waiting for the water in the shower to get hot. “I came in early to work on that name etched on the stock of the .38. Carol in the Recorder’s office looked it up in her files. I think we have a good idea where Sam got the gun.”

“Tell me.”

“The stock was carved with D. Chambers. We found a marriage license for a Donald Chambers of Irving and Gertrude Nelson also of Irving. Married in 1949. They had one daughter that we found a birth certificate for named Myra Chambers.”

None of the names so far meant anything to Packard. Irving was a tiny town in Sandy Lake County about twenty miles north. It was little more than a post office, a flag pole, and a bar across the street.

“Myra Chambers of Irving married Emmett Burr of Sandy Lake in 1978. Emmett Burr was one of the names on the prescription bottles.”

“Thielen went out and talked to him yesterday. Who is he?”

“Emmett used to own the welding shop in town. It’s that old building with the red peeling paint that looks like the roof is about to fall in over on Elm. Sign out front says Burr Welding.”

“I know that place.”

“He closed up shop maybe ten, twelve years ago. I think he had a lot of physical problems that made it so he couldn’t do the work anymore.”

The bathroom was filling with steam. Packard wiped his hand across the mirror and stared at the circles under his eyes. “So my next question is—”

“Whether or not he reported the gun stolen. Or reported anything stolen.”

“Exactly,” Packard said.

“He hasn’t. No record of any calls out to his place, either from him or from anyone else.”

“Do you think that’s odd?”

“Kind of,” Mac said. “Unless he didn’t realize the gun was gone.”

“And his pills, don’t forget. His pain medication and a handgun go missing and he doesn’t notice either?”

“Maybe he’d quit taking the pills. Maybe the gun was tucked away somewhere and he doesn’t realize it’s not there anymore.”

“But not somewhere so hidden that a teenager breaking in can’t find it,” Packard said.

“Right.”

“All right. It’s curious. Thielen mentioned he lived alone yesterday. Is Myra not still in the picture? Dead? Divorced?”

“I don’t know,” Mac said. “I’ll have to go back to Carol and ask her to look. We stopped when we hit on Emmett’s name.”

“Thielen didn’t know about the gun yesterday. I think it’s worth another visit to ask him about. I’ll get hold of her. One of us will go visit him again today.”

***

Packard showered. Ate hard-boiled eggs and a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Put on his uniform. He felt the idea of something starting to coalesce in his mind, just over his right eye. They had pills and a gun that had come from Emmett Burr’s house. It didn’t make him any more involved than the other three whose names had shown up on the prescription pill bottles in Sam’s house, but it still made him stand out. Packard wished he’d been the one to interview Burr yesterday. Thielen had described him as elderly and in terrible physical condition. Mac said he was in bad shape years ago and had to quit working. Bad enough to need eighty-milligram pain pills? The prescription bottle at Sam’s with Emmett’s name on it was for something else. That didn’t mean there weren’t others.

Packard also knew Emmett’s address was north of town, which was the direction the kids had gone according to the location of the cell tower Jesse’s burner phone had pinged. So was Martin Hughes’s place, the other guy Thielen had visited yesterday. Seventy percent of the population outside of the town of Sandy Lake lived north. It wasn’t much to go on.

He was zipping his vest over his uniform shirt when Michael, the nurse from Minneapolis—the nurse he did want a date with—called.

“You didn’t tell me you were a cop.”

Packard closed his eyes and dropped his head. In Sandy Lake, he wanted to be known as only a cop. Away from work, his job was the last thing he wanted to talk about with strangers. “I didn’t tell you I wasn’t a cop, did I?”

“No, but… I saw you on the news this morning. Detective Ben Packard, it said on the screen. You were talking about a couple of missing teenagers.”

Packard wiped a hand across his face. “Yeah, that was me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Wait a minute. Today’s Monday. That press conference was Saturday. It’s news in the Cities two days later?”

“I saw it near midnight last night on the suburban station that mostly shows infomercials and syndicated reruns. I didn’t have time to call until just now. It might have been a rerun of the Saturday news considering the channel it was on.”

Packard was conflicted about whether he should be happy the story was running in the Cities or pissed that it was little more than filler on a low-rent station almost no one watched.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were a cop?”

Packard pinched the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he strapped on his equipment belt. “We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about our careers when I was down there.”

“You said something like you worked for the county.”