Текст книги "Burn It Up"

Автор книги: Cara McKenna

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

Chapter 25

Casey went downstairs with Abilene and the baby, the three of them joining the periphery of the scene in the kitchen. Vince, Miah, and Christine were seated at one end of the long table, talking quietly. Christine’s expression was calm, but her eyes were red and her hands shaky. Miah had a hand on her back, circling slowly, thoughtlessly, as the three traded empty consolations and theories about how Don could be anyplace—way out at the other end of the range, maybe, or who knew where. But Casey had seen the man’s truck in the front lot, as had they all, he bet. These weren’t words of comfort, merely words that gave the Churches permission to live in denial a little longer.

Casey kept quiet, standing by with his arms crossed, and Abilene set the baby in her rocker while she went to load dishes in the washer, her motions careful and quiet, respectful. Fragile.

Casey felt much the same. Felt too many things, and none of them good. Yesterday he’d felt remorse about his old life, because it had cost him what he’d found with Abilene. Less than a day later those sour feelings had turned downright poisonous. He felt as though he were standing on the other side of his own selfish choices. Standing in the kitchen that might’ve belonged to the family of some firefighter, maybe, had one of his arson jobs ever gone tragically wrong. The thought alone had his throat raw and his eyes hurting. He swallowed the feelings down. They had no place beside Miah and Christine’s grief.

The phone had barely quit ringing since Casey had arrived, and when it trilled yet again, Christine stood with a weary sigh. “I can’t ignore it forever, I suppose.”

Miah got to his feet. “Let me.”

She waved him away. “No, I could use something to do. I’ll be in the office, if any of the Sheriff’s Department folks want me. Or if your father turns up,” she added, then hit the phone’s TALK button. “Hello? Marian, hi. Hang on one second.” She offered the room a distracted, lame smile, then disappeared into the hall.

Casey eyed Miah. He was usually the picture of casual confidence, but he was hunched in his seat, fingers drumming his opposite elbows, feet fidgeting beneath the bench. Casey couldn’t think of a single decent thing to say, aside from, “Anybody need a drink?”

Vince shook his head, and Abilene didn’t even turn from her task. Miah announced, “I’d better go and check on the animals. I’ve got my phone if anybody needs me.”

Casey and Vince nodded and let him go. Abilene turned once he’d left the room, locking her watery, worried eyes on Casey’s.

“Come outside a minute,” Vince said to him, getting to his feet.

Casey followed his brother out the front door and down the steps. Vince paused when they neared a pair of stressed-looking ranch hands who were smoking at the edge of the parking lot.

“I’ll give you a buck for two of those,” Vince said to one of them, pointing at their smokes.

“It’s nothing.” The kid handed Vince the pack he’d had in his shirt pocket. Vince accepted it with a nod and led Casey away, to the quiet far corner of the lot, where he knocked a cigarette from the pack and slipped it between his lips. “Gimme your lighter.”

Casey hesitated, wondering if his brother would recognize the thing. “You’ve been free of those things for almost a year. You sure?”

“It’s a fucking exceptional day,” he said, cigarette jumping at the edge of his lips. “Now, gimme a goddamn light.”

Casey pulled the Zippo out, flicked it open, and lit it, letting his fingers hide the insignia. No point triggering memories of their father, not when Miah’s was so conspicuously absent. Vince sucked the cigarette halfway to the filter inside a minute, looking like a man who’d just surfaced from a long dive and tasted fresh air.

“Fuck me, I missed that.”

“I won’t tell Nita.”

“Or Kim,” Vince added, and slowed down some. “This is only a one-off.” He glanced inside the pack. “A three-off,” he corrected, and knocked out the other two smokes, tucking one behind each ear.

“Miah said something to me,” Vince said, ashing to the side.

“Oh?”

“That tractor Don was fucking around with this morning—Miah had put the ad out himself, a few weeks ago, looking to sell it.”

“Okay.”

“So some guy calls late last night, wanting to see it this afternoon. Short notice, and maybe they knew it was old and in rough shape and would need some looking over, first. Maybe the guy even knew it was in the barn.”

Casey nodded, catching on. “Because he’d snooped around in there himself already.”

“It’s possible. Maybe he even fucked with it, to be sure Don would have a hell of a time getting it running. Maybe he never even set foot in there today, if he was smart enough to rig it to catch fire, somehow.”

“Maybe.” Though Casey knew for a fact that that was some hairy, precision shit right there. And it didn’t explain why Don hadn’t been able to escape once the fire had caught.

“You say all this to Miah?”

“You crazy? His fucking father’s probably dead. Last thing he needs is conspiracy theories before the body’s even found.”

“True.” But he was with Vince, brain skipping ahead past the ugly truth yet to come, chasing answers.

“What else is on your mind?”

“It’s even possible this cocksucker picked today on purpose,” Vince said, “figuring most of the workers would be away from the bunks and the stables, watching the eclipse.”

Casey nodded, not liking how premeditated this was now feeling. And not liking at all how uncomfortably it echoed his own recent past. His so-called career. That regret that Abilene had wished he’d felt . . . Well, it was creeping in now, too real for his comfort, nagging and pawing at him with ragged, catching nails.

“You think somebody wanted Don dead?” Casey asked his brother.

“Do you?”

“I can’t think why. He had industry rivals, no doubt, but who the fuck would want to kill him?”

“Maybe they wanted something else,” Vince said. “Wanted to corner him, demand something, and maybe he couldn’t deliver it? I dunno. Though I do know Miah’s been bitching about how cutthroat some of the property scouts have gotten lately.” He finished the first cigarette, lit the next off the butt before crushing it beneath his boot.

“This is so fucking messed up,” Casey muttered, feeling frustrated and hot.

“We need to get you in there,” Vince said. “How soon can that happen?”

“Depends. They’ll be digging through it all soon enough. If they find . . .” He trailed off. He’d nearly said “a body,” but it felt far too cold. “If they find him,” he said carefully, “everything will grind to a halt for a few hours. They’ll investigate before they move the body,” he said, flinching inside, “but then they’ll take it away to be autopsied. They’ll mill around documenting everything for a long time, but eventually they’ll clear out.”

“Will anybody be left to guard the scene?”

Casey shook his head. “Unlikely. They’ll probably just put up tape, once the forensic people have made their sweep.”

“Then you go in.”

“Sure.”

“But don’t be a dumb-ass about it,” Vince warned through a cloud of Camel. “Don’t go leaving your shoe prints or a load of red hairs all over the place.”

“You say that like this hasn’t been my job for three years.”

Vince nodded, gaze on the horizon.

“I got no clue what I’ll find,” Casey said. “This guy could be a pro or a total hack. But I’ll do my best.” He didn’t hold out much hope, however. Fires spoke volumes about the way they started but didn’t tell you jack about who struck the match. Not unless the person in question happened to drop a business card on their way out. “I can tell you if it was started on purpose, but if anybody stands a chance at saying who by, it’s Miah.”

“I can’t ask him now . . . But it’ll have to be soon. I’ll see if he can’t find out who answered that ad about the John Deere.”

“Good a lead as any.” Better than some dark-colored truck, some tallish, vaguish description of a white guy in a ski mask and jeans.

“Not much, though,” Vince said grimly. “It’d take an idiot to reply to the ad with their actual e-mail address or leave a real phone number.”

Casey stole the final smoke from behind Vince’s ear and lit it for himself. It tasted like a thousand ancient memories. It tasted like ass, in all honesty, but the nicotine wasn’t unwelcome. He blew out a long jet of smoke and told his brother, “We better hope we’re dealing with a world-class fuckwit, then.”

•   •   •

The news everyone had been dreading came around dinnertime.

Casey heard it from Vince, who’d been in the kitchen with Miah and Christine when the mayor, of all people, had come by to break it to them, with Fortuity’s acting sheriff in tow, who also served as the county coroner.

Casey had gone into town to fill in Kim and Nita, then Raina and Duncan, and had pulled in just behind the sheriff’s cruiser. Freeman, he thought the new sheriff was called—Wes or Les Freeman. He was tanned and tall and lanky, far younger than Tremblay had been—may that motherfucker rot in hell. He wore the uniform’s matching khaki hat that Tremblay never had, and it made him look like a cartoon. Especially when Mayor Dooley joined the tableau, the squat little Napoleon in seersucker climbing out of the sheriff’s car, ivory bolo swinging. The mismatched men headed for the house, and Casey hung back, knowing it couldn’t be good. The mayor didn’t show up at the home of the most prominent family in town to hand out happy news.

Casey sat on his own hood for nearly half an hour before the men emerged. He nodded at Freeman, who’d come by the bar a couple times as a patron. Dooley he didn’t know aside from seeing his pompous face in the papers, and he didn’t offer him jack. That dick had brought the casino to town, after all. And the casino had gotten Alex killed. He couldn’t say he was much of a fan of the mayor, no.

Sheriff Freeman tipped his hat but didn’t smile, and then both men disappeared inside the cruiser. Casey waited until they’d hit the road, then headed to the farmhouse on legs made of lead.

The scene he found in the kitchen about tore him to shreds.

Miah was holding his mother. Her face was buried against his neck, her shoulders hitching uncontrollably. Miah was crying as well, his voice breaking as he spoke to her. Vince was standing by the sink with his arms crossed, and he motioned for Casey to follow him and strode for the door.

“They need space,” he said, heading for the den.

“They found the body?” Casey whispered, sitting on the coffee table when Vince took the couch.

He nodded. “Beside the tractor he’d been working on. One of the investigators said it started from diesel, and maybe Don had got caught up in it, if he’d spilled some on his clothes, or had grease on him or something. Nothing conclusive. That’s all they said about it.”

Spilled? Doused, more like. “Autopsy?”

“Still going on. They only came to say he’d passed.”

“Does anybody need to go downtown to ID him?”

“Thank fuck, no. I guess they had enough to go on.”

Casey nodded, and in a breath, the heft of the news came down on him. “Fucking shit. This can’t actually be happening, can it?”

Vince didn’t say anything, just stared ahead and exhaled slowly. A deep and cutting pang of guilt sank between Casey’s ribs, as he tried to imagine having been here when the news about Alex had broken. Fortuity had always been quiet. If somebody died, it was of old age or maybe cancer, or drunk driving, or some freak hunting accident. This place was no stranger to fights and domestic violence, but murder? Alex had been the first—or rather, technically the second, though the undocumented worker whose bones had caused so much trouble last year hadn’t been uncovered until a few months later. Sheriff Tremblay had been killed in his cell after his involvement in Alex’s death had come to light—number three. Now Don made four. Though Casey supposed this latest one couldn’t be blamed on the casino.

He was poised to ruminate on the thought, but Vince spoke. “The fire crews have all cleared out. Once it’s dark, we get to work. I’ll keep watch; you do your thing.”

Casey shook his head. Above them, he caught the far-off chime of Abilene’s phone. “I’ll go alone. It’s less conspicuous that way.”

Vince looked dubious, but nodded. “What will you need?”

“Not much.” Maybe a tarp to cut up and tape around his feet, to keep his treads covered. There wasn’t much he could do about clothing fibers on short notice, plus at least a dozen people had been tromping through the debris already. He’d draw his hood and don some gloves and call it good enough. His primary concern just now wasn’t covering his own ass, but finding out how this had happened, and more importantly, by whose hand.

“I have to get home soon,” Vince said, glancing at his phone. “I’ll check on Miah one more time; then I’m off. But if you change your mind and decide you want a lookout, call me. I could come out after midnight.”

“I won’t, but thanks.”

Vince frowned and pocketed his cell. “Lemme know if you find anything.”

“I will. And you better stop at the gas station and buy yourself some mints or something. You smell like an ashtray.”

“Call me,” Vince reiterated as he got up and headed for the kitchen. Casey listened as the voices there rose and mellowed, then to the footsteps, then the click and hush of the front doors as Vince saw himself out.

He glanced at the ceiling, wondering what Abilene was up to. Who had called her. But just then the guest room door popped open, and she emerged. She peered down into the den, eyebrows rising as their gazes met. He watched her make her way down the steps silently in her socks, the baby apparently left in her crib.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey. I have a favor to ask.”

“Okay.” Yes, please—any goddamn thing to keep him busy until late tonight.

“Raina called. She tried you first, but you didn’t answer.”

“I think my phone’s in my car. What’s going on?”

“She wanted to see if one of us could bartend with Duncan, so she could come see Miah.”

Of course. They might be exes, but they’d been friends far longer. “I can go in,” he offered. “I couldn’t stay until close, but until midnight or so.”

“She was just hoping for a couple hours. I could go, too. I’d like to, actually, if you could watch Mercy. Until ten, maybe?”

He nodded. “Sure.” The bar might be good for her, just now.

“She ate a half hour ago, and I just changed her, so she should be fine, apart from maybe wanting some attention.”

“I’m on it.”

“Thanks. And I’m sure Raina would say the same.”

He tailed her upstairs, hefting the baby from the crib while Abilene got her shoes on, then followed her back down to the den.

“Thanks again,” she said, finding her keys in her purse.

“Anytime. Have fun,” he added, though the sentiment sounded awful stupid the moment it left his lips.

She offered a weak smile and left him alone with Mercy. He struggled to imagine how on earth so many things could have happened in the past thirty hours. Two confessions—one of feelings, one of past crimes—then a breakup, an awkward breakfast, the eclipse, the fire. Soon, a night spent prowling around a dark murder scene.

He took a seat on the couch and got the baby comfortable, then switched on the TV and turned the volume down.

“You’re awful lucky you won’t remember any of this,” he told Mercy, passing over the news stations until he found a channel playing an old western.

She also won’t remember Don, he thought. He’d held her only once or twice, and somewhat reluctantly, but he’d also given her a home for a time, and the protection of his family.

“You missed out on knowing a real good man,” Casey told her. “As good as they come.” He felt tears welling then, and blinked them away.

Chapter 26

Casey passed a quiet evening. Raina arrived about an hour after Abilene had departed, accompanied by the smell of pizza. That drew him off the couch, and he carried Mercy to the kitchen to join the world’s most miserable dinner party.

“I didn’t think any of you would feel like cooking,” Raina was saying, setting three large white boxes on the counter as Casey entered. She cast him a lame smile. There were a lot of those going around today.

The meal was somber, and after perhaps forty minutes, Miah asked to be left alone with his mom. Casey and Raina excused themselves, finished their beers in the den, then bid each other a heavy good night. Abilene returned not long after and retired upstairs with the baby.

Casey waited until midnight, until he couldn’t sit still any longer. He had a Maglite in his trunk, and he fetched it, stowed it in his pocket. With an idle thought about criminals returning to the scene, he got his pistol as well. He couldn’t think where to find a tarp without looking suspicious himself, creeping around in the dark, but he did nab some extra-thick trash bags from under the sink and took two of those and a roll of duct tape with him, plus a pair of rubber dish gloves.

It was a dark night, the moon out of sight. Darker than it had been during the eclipse. A million times quieter, with a million stars now glittering above. He gave the bunks and stables a wide berth, hugging the fence that bordered the road. If anybody asked what he was doing . . . Shit, he had no fucking plan. Pretend he was drunk, maybe. He’d spent years caring about nothing more than covering his own ass, but just now, it was way too hard to give a shit.

The barn was in near darkness, with just the weakest trickle of light making it over from the bunkhouse windows. There was yellow tape up, but nothing more. To most people this looked like the scene of a tragic accident.

Lucky them, Casey thought, weary to the marrow with all the death that had begun skulking around his hometown.

He sat on the dirt, taped two layers of heavy plastic around each foot, and donned the gloves. Switched the flashlight on but kept it trained low, mere centimeters from the ground.

It had been a huge barn, but a secondary circle of caution tape narrowed ground zero—the spot where Don’s body had been uncovered beside a small industrial tractor, black now, but surely the telltale green and yellow not twelve hours earlier. The floor was covered in junk. Charred wood, fat old nails, slate tile scraps everywhere. Casey turned his attention to the tractor first, to its engine, exposed where one panel had been propped up. He couldn’t make much sense of anything with just one beam. Couldn’t say where the fire had started, which way it had spread, how hot it had gotten. Only daylight could tell him those things. But tonight, he wasn’t after the how. He was after the who.

He swept the light around the mess underfoot, shifting debris, looking for anything unusual and wishing he owned one of those doohickeys his father had had when he’d been little—a strong magnet on a long rod, for fishing dropped bolts and screws from underneath cars or behind workbenches. There might be a single tiny staple somewhere in this mess—the only clue left behind from a pack of matches. Even if there was, though, talk about a needle in a hay—

His hand froze, locking the beam on something square, just where his rustling, plastic-booted foot had pushed aside some litter. Square and black and familiar. He moved the Maglite to his left hand and picked it up.

A cigarette lighter.

It wasn’t unlike his own—a chrome deal, though a gas station knock-off, not a real Zippo. He didn’t dare wipe at the soot, on the off chance any fingerprints had survived, but instead peered at it by the beam of the flashlight. Like his, it, too, had an emblem on one side. Faux enamel, it looked like, and the plastic once coloring it had melted away, leaving only the metal relief of a cheesy skull-and-daggers motif.

Don didn’t smoke, far as Casey knew, and even if he’d had a secret habit, he sure as shit wasn’t dumb enough to have lit up while working on a greasy old tractor engine.

It could have already been here. Just another forgotten bit of junk cluttering up this disused barn. But Casey doubted it. Doubted it as surely as he could picture the amateur arsonist who’d started this fire—picture him flicking it open, striking the wheel, perhaps dropping it in surprise or pain when those flames lashed back at his hand, more aggressive than expected, startling him.

He set the lighter on the hood of the tractor and resumed the search.

Casey couldn’t say how long he was there, scrabbling around on his hands and knees, peering at blackened scraps and bits of junk by the beam of the Maglite. He only knew that when his back began to ache and his head to throb that it must’ve been hours.

He checked his phone. Hours indeed. It was pushing six, and though he wasn’t sure when dawn was due, precisely, he knew he’d be stupid to still be here once the sky grew light.

One cheap lighter wasn’t much, but it was something. He slipped it into a sandwich bag from his pocket and picked his way through the rubble, the scorched earth, and eventually found grass and gravel beneath his feet once more. He ditched the taped-up plastic and the gloves, wadding them up and stashing them in his trunk for the time being. Sloppy, but time was of the essence.

He found his front door key and let himself into the farmhouse, relieved to find it dark and silent. Normally Christine would be up by this hour, but he had no doubt she needed to sleep in . . . if she’d dropped off at all. He fucked around until he found the right light switch, then crept up the front stairway to the Churches’ wing of the house, hoping Miah’s room was where he remembered, the last door on the left.

Casey knocked firmly. No answer. He turned the knob and eased the door in on a dark room. “Miah?”

“Yeah.”

He pushed inside, letting the light from the hall reveal Miah, who was sitting on his bed, fully clothed, with his back against the wall and his hands linked atop his belly, staring at the far window.

“I got no doubt you don’t feel like talking just now,” Casey said quietly, “but I found something that I could really use your opinion on.”

“What?”

“Turn on that light.” He nodded to the lamp on Miah’s deep windowsill, and he turned it on. He looked about fifty by its mellow glow.

“I found a lighter in the barn, beside the John Deere. Any chance you recognize it?”

He handed Miah the baggie, and the man’s eyes were wide in an instant.

“You know it?”

“Yes, I fucking know it.”

“Whose?”

Miah spoke so quietly—a simmering growl of a sound—Casey could only just make out the name.

“Bean?” he echoed.

“Chris Bean.” Miah sat up, still staring at the bag. “He used to work for us.”

“When?”

“Must’ve hired him five, six years ago. Fired him two winters back.”

“Why?”

“Drugs. He was one of our best hands, until he got mixed up with amphetamines. I was the one who caught him at it. I’d know that lighter anyplace—I found him camped out in one of the outbuildings, and I saw it on the floor beside a couple of folded-up sheets of aluminum foil, with tweaker streaks burned all over them.”

“You think this is revenge, for your dad firing him? That’s pretty fucking extreme.”

Miah shook his head. “Dad didn’t fire him. I did. Dad gave him more second chances than he deserved, even paid for him to go to rehab. I’m the one who got sick of it and kicked him out.” His head jerked to the side, facing the open door like he might jump to his feet and stride out into the predawn darkness at any moment.

“There any chance he could’ve dropped that in the barn back when he was still working for you?”

“None. I hustled him out that night. Stood there watching while he packed.”

“He drive a dark truck back then?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean shit.”

Well said. “You know where he is these days?” Casey asked.

“I know where he used to stay, after he left.”

“Has he been in touch since? Started anything, with any of you?”

“Nothing. But I’m only happy to start something with him right fucking now.”

“It’s six a.m.,” Casey said, but Miah was already swinging his legs over the edge of the mattress and reaching for his boots.

“I’m coming with you.” Casey didn’t trust the hate blazing in Miah’s eyes and wouldn’t put it past the man to do something rash.

He followed his friend out of the room, down the stairs, and they grabbed their coats in the front hall. Miah didn’t hold the door for Casey, just flung it wide and went striding into the dark. “We need answers, Miah, okay? Answers first, justice later.”

“If you come, you stay the fuck out of my way.”

“I can’t promise that.”

Miah stopped short. “That cocksucker murdered my father. You have any fucking clue what he has coming to him?”

“Miah—”

He began walking again. “Come with me and you’ll find out.”

“Just don’t get yourself shot or thrown in prison for the rest of your life, man. Your mom needs you.” Hell, fucking Fortuity needed him. Needed the ranch. Vince needed him. “You got too much riding on your shoulders to fuck this up, Miah.”

“You come, you better keep out of my way,” he said again.

And what choice did Casey have, really?