When Ghosts Come Home(85)

“Sheriff,” Glenn said. Winston turned and looked back into the car. “Get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” Winston said. “You too.” He closed the door and walked to his cruiser and climbed inside. He turned around in the cul-de-sac, and as he passed the scene he could see the light from Glenn’s flashlight searching the ground around the house.

Winston had only made it out to the development’s entrance when Glenn’s voice called to him over his walkie-talkie. Winston stopped the car and took the radio from his belt. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Sheriff,” Glenn said, “you might want to turn around.”



Winston parked in front of the house and walked up through the muddy yard where Glenn waited at the corner of the garage. Around the corner, the driveway ended at an aluminum door, large enough to accommodate two cars. Here, the side of the house was burned black and charred, except for the spot where Glenn held his flashlight beam on a sheet of bright, new construction plastic that had clearly been placed on the house after the fire.

“What do you make of that?” Glenn asked.

“I didn’t think Englehart was in the construction business,” Winston said.

Glenn raised his flashlight and shone it along the expanse of the garage. “No windows,” he said. “All the other garages in these houses have windows.” Winston turned to look at the houses in the distance to see if Glenn was right, but it was too dark, and the other houses were too far away.

“You try raising the garage door?” Winston asked.

“It’s locked,” Glenn said. “Front and back doors are too. So are all the windows on the first floor.”

“A big gust of wind could tear that plastic loose,” Winston said. “We might’ve found it that way.”

“I think that is how we found it,” Glenn said. He stepped forward, and without speaking, he reached out and tore the plastic off the corner of the house. The staples popped free, and the sheet came down easily. Glenn kept tearing it, backing up as he pulled the whole sheet free. Beneath the plastic, the flames had burned a hole through the plywood and the insulation beneath, revealing charred wall studs and damaged drywall. Winston used his flashlight to knock some of the drywall loose, and he found that it left behind a hole large enough to stick his head and shoulders through. He and Glenn looked at each other, both of them thinking the same thing: they had done something together that they probably shouldn’t have done; but Winston was also thinking something that he knew Glenn could not possibly have been thinking: they had come back to one another in this moment of complicity.

Glenn held the flashlight while Winston bent at the waist and braced his hands against the house’s exterior and poked his head through the wall. There wasn’t enough light, and he’d been able to see only a little of what was inside the garage, but what he saw was enough for Glenn to take a crowbar from one of the home sites and pry open the garage door. Only then, standing at the entrance to the garage, did they have a full appreciation of exactly what they’d found. In the garage’s back left corner, their flashlight beams passed over four pallets loaded with brown-paper-wrapped squares that had been shrink-wrapped and stacked waist-high. One of the pallets had been unwrapped, and it was clear that packages had been removed. In the middle of the garage sat a folding table, piled with scales, baggies, ties, and various items. Whoever had been at work here had been comfortable; they’d left behind empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, wadded-up bags of potato chips.

“I’ll be damned,” Glenn whispered.

For Winston, it all came into focus: the comments Englehart had made about Bellamy on the runway the morning after the plane came in; Bradley Frye’s showing up at the crime scene and asking about the FBI; his insistence that Winston keep people out of Plantation Cove; and his willingness to employ Englehart to serve as the night watchman. He’d wanted Jay turned over to him because he was afraid of what the boy might have seen, which was the scene that Winston was taking in at that very moment, the scene Englehart had tried to keep anyone from seeing.

“We’d better find Englehart,” Winston said. He called in to Rudy and had him pull everyone off patrol to head for Plantation Cove except for one deputy tasked with locating Englehart. But he was nowhere to be found.

In the hours remaining before dawn, Winston and Glenn set up a perimeter around the scene, and, along with a few fresh deputies, they began the process of cataloging every shred of evidence inside the garage, beginning with those shrink-wrapped pallets.





Chapter 14




Winston arrived home as the sun was rising, three boxes packed away in his trunk, each item in each box cataloged and filed. The pallets of drugs had been moved and locked away in the evidence room at the station, waiting for the FBI to claim them, but Winston wanted to hand-deliver the evidence in his possession to Rollins and Rountree up in Wilmington. He and his men had cracked this case wide open, and he wanted that to be clear. The knowledge of what they’d found, how it implicated Bradley Frye, and the high it gave him all coalesced to push his exhaustion aside.

He set the coffeepot in the kitchen, and while it was brewing, he snuck upstairs and peeled off his clothes in the bathroom and took the hottest shower his skin could stand. His mind swirled with ideas and possibilities, some of them hard to decipher through the haze of the past several hours. While they’d worked, Winston, Glenn, and the deputies on the scene had parsed everything that had happened, from Rodney Bellamy’s murder to Frye’s to the discovery of the drugs there and down in Myrtle Beach. So much of it had come together, and while Winston didn’t know exactly who had killed Rodney, he felt certain that he knew why Rodney had been killed: he’d stumbled upon something he wasn’t supposed to see, and he may have even recognized people like Bradley Frye. Questions remained about who had murdered Frye, but Winston hoped those questions would wane with time. Bradley Frye had been exposed as a drug dealer—and if the bullet that killed Rodney ended up matching Frye’s weapon, probably a murderer too. It was fine with Winston if people in the county believed that the same unseen hand that had landed the airplane was the same one that had shot and killed Frye to keep him quiet.