When Ghosts Come Home(19)

In the cockpit, Rountree had opened a small notebook, and he stood there, his back to Winston and Rollins, writing something. Rollins looked at Winston and nodded toward the open cargo doors, and Winston turned and stepped out. Rollins followed. The two men walked a few yards away from the airplane. They stopped on the edge of the runway by the spot where Rodney Bellamy’s body still rested beneath the tarp. The morgue was slow in coming, and Winston was frustrated that Bellamy’s body was still on the scene, especially now that the FBI was there to witness it.

“Look, Winston,” Rollins said, “you know we’re going to—”

“I know,” Winston said. “I know.”

“I imagine you could use a big case before the election, and I think we can work together to—”

“I know,” Winston said again. “I was just hoping that—” But he was embarrassed to say it, to say that he wanted to prove himself in front of his community before they made their decision about his fate. But he couldn’t say it because it was a stupid thing to think, much less to say out loud. “Never mind.”

“Well,” Rollins said. He slipped a pair of aviator sunglasses from his breast pocket and put them on, and then he shrugged off his windbreaker and folded it and dropped it at his feet. He turned his head to the right and stared down the runway for a moment, and then he looked at the tarp. “Let’s have a look,” he said. He bent at his knees and lifted a corner of the tarp and peered beneath it. Winston looked away. He’d seen all he’d needed to see of Rodney the night before. “What can you tell me?” Rollins asked.

“He’s a local man named Rodney Bellamy,” Winston said. “Black, mid-twenties. His wife said he went out for diapers last night. They got a new baby boy.”

“That’s a shame,” Rollins said.

“Yeah, it is.”

From the corner of his eye, Winston saw Rollins let go of the tarp and pick up his windbreaker. He stood. “How’d he end up out here in the middle of the night? You think he was up to something?” Rollins nodded toward the airplane. “Maybe he was helping unload this aircraft, and then something went sideways?”

“I don’t think so,” Winston said. His gaze had turned back to the tarp, and he recalled seeing Rodney’s face last night in the flashlight’s beam, and then he recalled the faces of Rodney’s father, his widow, and his baby boy that he’d seen just that morning. Winston wanted to tell Rollins that Rodney Bellamy wasn’t just one more Black man taken out with a bullet, but what did that even mean? And why did he feel the need to say it, to even think of saying something like that? “I think he went out for diapers, and I think he saw a plane come in low in the middle of the night. He must’ve come out here to check it out.”

“Any arrests or convictions?”

“No,” Winston said. “He’s clean. Always has been as far as I know. My daughter went to school with him, and I know his daddy. He teaches over at the high school. He’s a good man.”

“A lot of good daddies have bad kids, Winston.”

“Not this one.”

Winston felt the presence of someone behind him, and he turned and found Rountree standing just a few feet away. Rountree still held his open pad, but he clicked his pen closed and slipped it into his breast pocket.

Rountree looked at Rollins. “We’ll send this out on the teletype back at the office,” he said. “This aircraft needs to be processed in a covered hangar, and there’s not one big enough here. Best bet’s Wilmington.”

“You going to fly it?” Winston asked. He’d meant for it to be a joke, but the words came out tinged with the anger he still felt after Rountree’s dig at him over the fingerprints.

“No,” Rountree said. His face portrayed neither humor nor amusement. “But we’ll find somebody who can.” He nodded toward Rodney’s body. “And we’ll find out what happened to him.”

Winston followed Rountree’s eyes down to the tarp at Rollins’s feet. And that was when he saw it, when they all saw it. Perhaps the angle of the sunlight was perfect, or perhaps no one’s eyes had come to rest on that exact spot just yet. Whatever the reason, all three men spotted the shell casing at the same moment. It rested in the grass only a few feet off the runway, but Rountree was the first to move toward it. He pulled the pen from his pocket and bent toward the ground and slipped the tip of the pen into the empty casing. He stood and held it up as if he were pinching a tick between a pair of tweezers. No one said a word until Rountree’s gaze moved from the casing on the tip of his pen to Winston’s face.

“I thought your office processed this scene, Sheriff,” Rountree said.

“I thought we did too,” Winston said.

Rollins stepped forward, lifted his sunglasses from his eyes. “Looks like a nine-millimeter,” he said.

“It is,” Rountree said. He took a baggie from his pocket, snapped it open, and dropped the casing down inside. “Maybe I can actually get us a fingerprint after all.”

Winston and Rollins were quiet as they watched Rountree seal the bag and slip his pen back into his breast pocket. Winston looked at the two agents, and he understood that if he was going to have a role in this investigation then he was going to have to take it.