The Overnight Guest(63)

“No!” Cutter protested. “I keep my truck clean. I like it clean.”

“And the cover?” Levi pushed.

“My dad wants me to move some of these barn boards.” Cutter gestured toward a pile of lumber. “People pay money for crap like that. I needed to take the cover off so I could load the truck.”

“What do you think we’d find if we got a forensics team out here to check things out?” Levi asked.

“Nothing! You won’t find anything,” Cutter said, his face red with heat and indignation. He tried to move past Levi, who sidestepped right along with him.

“You’re probably right.” Levi sighed. “If I wanted to get rid of evidence, I’d probably toss it in with the hogs.” Levi reached over Cutter’s shoulder and pounded on the confinement building. Startled by the sound, inside the pigs squealed and snorted and jostled for position. “Let’s go take a look.” Levi grabbed Cutter by the elbow and frog-marched him to the doors of the hog house.

“Hey, hey!” Cutter cried. “You can’t do this—let me go.”

“I tried to be nice to you, Brock. You were speeding, probably drunk or high, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt the other night because I grew up with your cousin, who happens to be a nice guy. You, on the other hand, are a little shit.

“Then the next time I see you, you lie to me and say you hadn’t seen Ethan or Josie or Becky at all the day of the murders. Come to find out that you had seen them and proceeded to feel up a thirteen-year-old girl.”

“I nev...” Cutter began, but Levi shook him into silence.

“Are you calling Josie Doyle a liar, Brock?” Levi asked. He knew he was on the edge of losing control, but he was so tired and time was running out. They had search dogs and roadblocks and hundreds of people looking for Ethan Doyle and Becky Allen and had come up with nothing.

Levi would bet his badge that Cutter knew something, probably more than something. He probably knew a lot, and neither of them was leaving this godforsaken cesspool of pig shit until Levi knew what it was.

Levi yanked the door to the hog barn open and shoved Cutter inside. The smell was overwhelming and Levi swallowed back the urge to gag. “Hogs eat everything you put in front of them, but I bet you already know that, don’t you?”

“Let me go, man, you’re crazy,” Cutter tried to squirm away, but Levi held tight.

“Now, Brock, if you have any information about what happened to the Doyles and where Ethan and Becky Allen are at, you need to tell me right now.”

“Fuck you,” Cutter spat.

In one swift move, Levi kicked Cutter’s feet out from beneath him so that he fell to the ground, his fingers landing just inches from the hogs rooting along the edges of their pen.

Cutter tried to pull his hand back but, Levi lowered the heel of his shoe atop Cutter’s wrist, pinning it into place. Levi watched as the hogs’ fleshy, leathery snouts snuffled at Cutter’s fingers, their sharp canines grazing across his knuckles.

“Okay, okay!” Cutter cried out. “Ethan had a thing for that Allen kid. He was all over her that day.”

Levi removed his foot from Cutter’s wrist and pulled him up by the collar of his shirt.

“You can’t do that shit,” Cutter exclaimed, his eyes wide. “You’re not supposed to do that!”

“What else?” Levi asked, ignoring Cutter’s protests.

“Ethan hated his parents. Hated them. Said he wished they were dead,” Cutter said, sliding his arm across his dripping nose.

“So Ethan said he wanted his parents dead?” Levi asked. “He told you that?”

Cutter nodded. “He couldn’t stand it in that house. He couldn’t wait to be rid of them. He told me.”

“You better not be lying to me, Brock,” Levi said as he pulled him from the hog barn.

“I’m not. I promise,” Cutter insisted.

“When was the last time you saw Ethan, Josie, and Becky?” Levi asked.

“I don’t know, after dinner. Around six or so. We went shooting,” Cutter said.

“Shooting?” Levi asked. This was the first he heard of this.

“Yeah, just at targets, though. It was nothing. We shot a few rounds and I went home.”

“But you were driving around after midnight, why?” Levi asked.

“I don’t know, I was just bored,” Cutter said. Levi grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and started dragging him back toward the hog barn. “Okay, okay,” Cutter said, twisting away from his grasp. “After Ethan’s dad made him walk home for not handing over the shotgun, I met up with him. We drove around, went to Burden because Ethan wanted to talk to that old girlfriend of his.”

“Kara Turner?” Levi clarified.

“Yeah. We stopped to see Kara and her dad was pissed. Then we drove around for a while, shot a few more shells, then I dropped him off at the top of the lane and left.”

“What time was this?” Levi asked as they moved into the shade of a gnarled crab apple tree. The fallen ones squished beneath their feet, emitting a smell more like rotten cabbage than apples.

Cutter gnawed at his lip. “I don’t know, around eleven, I guess. I’m not sure.”

“I stopped you at about one, Brock,” Levi reminded him. “What were you doing for the next two hours?”