The Fallen (Amos Decker #4)(24)

“Green said she has a distant cousin in Kentucky coming in.”

“A bit after the fact.”

“Apparently it’s her only family. She and her ex divorced a long time ago and he left the area. They had no kids.”

He sat on the bed and looked around. What Decker liked more than anything else was to use his prodigious memory to spot inconsistencies. It was almost like placing a template over some fresh material. If something, no matter how seemingly insignificant, didn’t match, he would be able to spot it.

Yet somehow that method had failed him here.

But other assets he possessed had not. Like common sense.

“Green said she’d been living here for about a year,” he noted.

“Right.”

“The file also said she got laid off from JC Penney six months ago and had been unemployed ever since.”

“Right again.”

“So how did she pay her rent and other expenses? Her unemployment check couldn’t cover all of it. And if she had a bunch of money in savings, I doubt she’d be living in a place like this. And the file said her retail job offered no severance.”

“And she had a car. So there was gas, insurance, and expenses like that,” added Jamison. “You think someone was helping her?”

“Well, I don’t know that someone wasn’t helping her. And this looks like the sort of place that if your rent check was late, your ass is out on the street. Trust me, I’ve lived in places like that.”

“So have I.”

“Let’s check out her ride,” Decker said.

The vehicle, a twelve-year-old gray Nissan, was parked on the street.

Decker used a key that Green had given him to open the car door.

“She was a smoker,” said Jamison, as she waved her hand in front of her face in an attempt to dispel the stench. “You could probably get lung cancer just by sitting in here for a few days.”

Decker had squeezed his big body into the driver’s seat of the compact car and was looking around.

Jamison noted a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror.

“Think she was into gambling?”

“Lots of people have fuzzy dice who never rolled a pair for real,” said Decker.

“I was just kidding.”

“From what Green and Lassiter could find out, the last time anyone saw her was three days before her death.”

“A lot can happen in three days.”

“I also wonder how she was paying her credit card bill.”

Jamison said, “So again perhaps a secret source of money? Maybe it’s tied to her murder. Drugs? That would connect her to Swanson at least.”

They climbed out of the car and Decker walked around it. He stopped and knelt next to the rear passenger tire. He used the car key to dig something out of the tread. He finally freed the object and held it up.

“A nail,” said Jamison.

“More precisely, it’s a framing nail, that they use in a powered nail gun.”

“She could have picked that up anywhere at any time.”

“Don’t think so. Look at the tire.”

With the nail removed, it was already deflating. They could hear air escaping.

“It’s not rusted or anything. And if it had been there a while and she had driven on it, the nail would have worked itself through the surface of the tread and the tire would have started leaking and then gone flat. And this tire looks newer than the others. The inspection sticker on the windshield shows that she had it inspected this month. I bet the tire didn’t pass inspection and she had to replace it with this one.”

“Okay, but she still could have picked up the nail anywhere, like the parking lot of a hardware store.”

“Possibly, but these nails are set in a strip carrier, sort of like an ammo belt on a machine gun. They don’t just fall out.”

Jamison took a picture of the tire and nail with her phone. “Anything else?”

“Tanner’s car is here, so that means she got to the house where her body was found another way, unless whoever killed her drove it back here.”

“Maybe she went in her killer’s car?”

“Or did she go separately? Maybe with Toby Babbot?”

“Decker, the police can show no connection between those two.”

“You’re wrong, they have one very strong connection.”

“What’s that?”

“They died together.”





Chapter 15



BEFORE HE WAS murdered, Toby Babbot didn’t live in a house or an apartment. He resided in an old dented mobile home trailer a few miles outside of town. The road in was part gravel and part dirt, and the small plot of yellowed grass surrounding the trailer was encircled by trees.

Jamison pulled their SUV to a stop in front of the trailer and they got out.

Decker immediately pulled his gun. “Someone’s inside,” he whispered to Jamison, who also drew her weapon.

Decker had glimpsed a shadow pass in front of one of the trailer’s windows.

“Do you think there’s a back door?” asked Jamison as they approached.

The next moment they heard someone running away from the rear of the trailer.

“I guess that answers that,” said Decker as he raced toward the dwelling, Jamison hard on his heels.