And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(84)

“What did Carl need the wrecker for last night?” Packard asked.

“How should I know?” Cora said. She tucked the remote into one of the huge pockets on her dress. Out of the other one she pulled a tangled tissue and wiped her nose.

“So he didn’t come to bed last night?”

“No.”

“Did he spend the night in front of the TV?”

“When he falls asleep in his chair, he’s usually still there when I get up at six thirty. He wasn’t in his chair and the TV was off when I got up. And the truck was gone.”

“Greta, did you see or hear anything last night?”

“Uh-uh. I took some Sudafed and NyQuil like every night so I could sleep.” She had a deep voice, adenoidal, like she never wasn’t suffering from allergies or struggling to breathe.

Packard was studying the wide concrete pad in front of the three garage doors. “You usually park in front of this far door?” he asked.

“No, me and Greta park in the first two stalls. Carl parks outside. The boat’s in that third one.”

“Was the wrecker parked here last night?”

“No, it was kittywampus across the other two.”

“Someone parked here recently,” Packard said, squatting down on his haunches and rubbing his finger through a dime-sized drop of engine oil.

“If they did, I didn’t see or hear ’em,” Cora said.

He walked to the edge of the driveway and wiped his oily finger in the grass, looking at the dirt tracks by the side of the house.

“Cora, what’s back there? What’s behind those trees?”

“It’s storage. He’s got car bodies and parts he’s saving.”

“Would he take the wrecker down there?”

“He would if he was towing a junker.”

“Get in the car, Shepard,” Packard said. “Let’s drive down and have a look.”

***

He let Shepard drive. The idea of sitting in the same seat Shepard filled with his farts all day made Packard shudder.

“It smells like cigarettes in here,” he said.

“I haven’t been smoking in my patrol car,” Shepard huffed. He reached between them and yanked down the immaculate ashtray.

“I don’t care how clean the ashtray is. It stinks in here.”

“It must come off of me after I been smoking outside.”

“That’s a pleasant thought.”

The trail through the grass was rougher than busted cobblestone. Shepard drove too fast. Packard held on to the handle over the door and rolled with the rocking car.

At the bottom of the hill they both got out. Packard made a mental note to look up whether you needed a permit of some kind to have this many junked cars and rusted car parts stored on a residential property. He noticed the new green grass coming up through the dead stuff from last year. Broken straw clearly showed footsteps to and from a navy-blue Blazer sitting on cement blocks to keep its chassis off the ground. No door, no wheels. Busted windshield.

Packard stuck his head inside the cab. In the seat was a yellow stocking cap with what looked like blood on it. The black streaks where a cigarette had been rubbed out against the dashboard smelled even stronger than the cigarette odor in Shepard’s car. Getting down on his haunches, Packard spotted the butt in the grass and a swipe of something reddish brown on the side of the Blazer’s seat. More blood.

“There’s a hat in here with blood on it. Blood on this seat, too,” he told Shepard.

“Yeah? New blood? Or from when it was wrecked?”

“Don’t know for sure but I’m guessing new. Not sure how long a bloody hat would sit in an open vehicle like this out here in the wild. The cigarette smell is fresh. I think someone sat here last night and smoked a cigarette. Someone with bloody hands.”

“Carl smokes.”

Packard walked past the rows of stacked cars. Where the dirt tracks gave way to tall grass he stopped. “Someone drove through here recently. You can still see the tire tracks. They went that way. All the grass is laid down in that direction.”

They got back in the car, Shepard driving again, and followed the trail, made a right turn into an electrical tower clearing, kept going until they saw the tracks make their way into the trees. “We’re by those quarries, aren’t we?” Packard said.

“Yup.”

Packard told him to stop. They got out and covered the rest on foot, walking through the trees that surrounded the pit. Packard studied the tire tracks in the dirt around the rim. “There’s two different tracks, but you can see where they came in, did a turn here, then backed up to the edge.” He squatted again where there were the most footprints, where people got in and out of the vehicle. He saw several spots that were darker than the rest of the dirt. He cut through where he imagined the invisible vehicle had been parked and saw more spots where the driver’s door would have been on the other side.

“Hey, Chief. You should see this.”

Packard walked to the lip of the quarry where Shepard was staring down at inky-black water that started about twelve feet below them. The surface shimmered with oil and gas rainbows.

“That doesn’t look right,” Packard said.

“Sure doesn’t.”

***

Packard got on the radio and requested a member of the dive team to Cora’s address. “Whoever can get here the quickest. Tell him it’s a quarry dive and to bring a good light.”