Silent Night: A Raine Stockton Dog Mystery Read online

  “I don’t think anyone’s here,” I said, unnecessarily.

  “Yeah, looks like it.” Buck straightened up and handed Cisco’s leash to me.

  “Maybe she got scared when her daddy didn’t come home and went to a friend’s house.”

  “Probably.” He moved toward the front door and I followed, keeping Cisco close. “Might as well make sure.”

  He pushed the buzzer, which made no sound, then knocked on the sagging storm door. After a moment, he opened the storm door and knocked again, loudly, on the main door.

  I kept my voice low, just in case someone was home. “Where did you find him?”

  “Somebody spotted his truck down a gully off the old Switchback Road. His body was in the camper. I figure he’d been there less than a day, but in this weather it’s hard to tell by guessing.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “He wasn’t the most popular guy when he was drinking. We’re doing some interviews.” Most of the violent crimes around here were either family disputes or drug and alcohol related, and they were fairly simple to resolve. Most of the time the perpetrator would be at home waiting for the deputies when they came to arrest him. On the other hand, crimes that weren’t solved within the first twenty-four hours became exponentially harder to solve. I knew that Buck was counting on his deputies making an arrest tonight.

  He knocked again. Again there was silence.

  “Come on, let’s check around back.”

  He turned on his flashlight to light our path as we rounded the dark corner of the trailer. There were a couple of overflowing trashcans, a pile of rotting lumber beside a metal storage shed, and a propane gas tank. The three wooden steps to the back door were too narrow for all of us, so I let Buck go up while Cisco and I waited. He knocked, and the door swung inward a few inches. He glanced down at me. I came up the steps behind him.

  Buck pushed the door open and called, “Ashleigh? It’s Sheriff Lawson. Are you here?”

  He stepped inside the threshold, and because he had not brought me along for nothing, I added my woman’s voice, “Ashleigh, it’s okay. Don’t be scared. We just want to talk to you.”

  But the trailer was clearly empty.

  Buck moved his flashlight beam around the small kitchen until he found the light switch. He pressed it and a cluttered, untidy kitchen with faded brick-patterned linoleum and stained wallpaper came into view. There was a box of cereal on the table and crumbs scattered around. A loaf of bread was open on the counter. There were dishes in the sink.

  Buck’s brows drew together as he sniffed the air. “Do you smell bleach?”

  “So? Someone did the laundry.”

  But his frown only deepened. “I don’t know. Doesn’t look to me like the housekeeper has been in today. Stay here,” he said and moved toward the front of the house.

  I heard him call out again, “Is anyone here? It’s the police.” And I sighed, glancing around. I don’t always do what Buck tells me to—in fact, I almost never do—but it was pointless to follow him through an empty house.

  There was a shelf above the greasy microwave that held a stack of mail, a small vase of plastic flowers, and a couple of framed photographs. I glanced through the mail, which consisted of two months’ worth of telephone, electric and water bills, as well as a letter from Fidelity Mortgage which I could not imagine contained good news. I picked up a photograph of a man and woman in wedding attire. The frame was sticky with kitchen grime and the glass was dull. I turned it over and slipped the cheap cardboard backing up into the frame a little. On the back of the photograph someone had written “Amy and Earle, 6-22-89”. I replaced the photograph and picked up the one next to it, a school photograph of a dark-haired young girl I assumed to be Ashleigh. Why did she look familiar to me?

  While I had been nosing around I had let the leash go slack in my hand. A crackling sound distracted me, and I turned to see that Cisco had taken advantage of my preoccupation to put his front paws on the counter and help himself to the open loaf of bread.

  I don’t usually yell at my dogs, but counter-surfing—especially someone else’s counter, in someone else’s house—was a huge No-No, and every dog I had ever trained knew it. I took a deep breath and bellowed at the top of my lungs, “Cisco, wrong!”

  I had intended to startle him, and that was exactly what I did. He dropped from the counter and scooted across the room with such force that he jerked the leash from my hand, lost traction on the slippery floors, and slid the last few feet across the linoleum on his butt. His momentum was stopped by a wooden door, which popped open a few inches when he hit it. He sat there, grinning at me sheepishly, and it was hard not to laugh back.

  Buck called, “Hey, what’s going on?”

  “We’re okay!” I called back and went to collect Cisco. For good measure, I muttered under my breath as sternly as I could, “You rotten dog. You know better.”

  I bent to retrieve Cisco’s leash and knew immediately I had found the source of the bleach smell.

  I nudged the door all the way open and peeked inside. I expected a laundry room, but when I turned on the light I realized it was a bathroom. The first thing I noticed was a smear of blood on the yellowing white tile of the floor. The second thing I noticed was that the tub was filled with water, what appeared to be bed sheets, and a great quantity of bleach. The water was pink.

  I closed my eyes briefly and swallowed hard, hoping this didn’t mean what I thought it meant. Buck came up behind me and surveyed the scene silently for a moment. Then he said, “Damn.”

  He took out his radio and called for backup.

  ____________

  SEVEN

  The Hanover County Sheriff’s Department had twelve deputies, and Buck pulled six of them off parade and traffic control duties to conduct door-to-door interviews of the neighbors while he and Deke secured the trailer as a crime scene. All of this activity naturally drew some attention, and it wasn’t long before a cluster of neighbors, many of them with coats thrown over their pajamas, was gathered in the tiny yard.

  Cisco and I sat on the front stoop, out of the way of the investigators, as ordered, but standing by in case we were needed to help conduct a search in the field that surrounded the trailer park, also as ordered. It would have been warmer in the car, but I didn’t want to be that far away from the action. And since very few people can resist coming up to pet a waggy-tailed golden retriever, I was in a good position to keep up with what was going on.

  My phone rang two or three times, but when I looked at the caller ID, it was only Miles. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to him, exactly, but this wasn’t the time or the place. And there was absolutely nothing he had to say to me that was more important, or more interesting, than what was going on here. Finally I turned my phone off, and I only felt a little guilty about it.

  “Hey, is this a drug dog?” someone wanted to know. “I heard ol’ Earle was up to some pretty sneaky stuff, but I didn’t know it was drugs.”

  I explained that Cisco was not a drug dog, but a search dog. “What kind of sneaky stuff?” I wanted to know.

  The original man shrugged and wandered away, and someone else said, “Aw, he wasn’t such a bad sort. Just fell on hard times is all.”

  “A man that hung out with the kind of trash he did was bound to get hisself offed sooner or later,” observed a middle-aged woman in a pink fleece bathrobe, puffing hard on a cigarette. “No better than he deserved, if you ask me.”

  “Now, Ellie,” said another woman with a note of reprimand in her voice, “he wasn’t so bad when he wasn’t drinking. And he was purely devoted to his wife. It just about tore him apart when she died. That’s what started him on the downhill if you ask me.” She reached down to scratch Cisco’s head. “What a sweet dog. They don’t let us have pets here.”

  I said, “What did his wife die of?”

  “Cancer, I think.” She straightened up. “He kept her wedding band on a chain that hung from his rearview mirror in hi
s truck. He gave me a ride into town one day when my car broke down on the side of the road and when I said something about it he told me he started every day by kissing that ring for good luck. Now, you can’t tell me a man like that is all bad.”

  Something stirred in my memory, and I frowned a little. “You wouldn’t happen to know if there was engraving inside the ring, would you?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell. What do you suppose happened to the girl?”

  Another woman said, “Somebody said they saw her go off with her boyfriend somewhere this afternoon.”

  I said, “Excuse me,” and stood up. My back side was practically frozen from sitting on the cold concrete steps. “I need to find out how long I’m supposed to wait. Cisco, let’s go.”

  The front door had been sealed off with crime scene tape, so I went around to the back. The back door was open and all the lights were on inside, but there was a strip of police tape across the opening of it as well. Deputies managed to go in and out by ducking under, but I knew better than to try the same thing. Forensics units tend to take a dim view of dog hair all over their crime scenes. I stood on the ground at the edge of the steps, which put my head about even with the threshold of the door and called, “Hey, Buck!”

  In a minute he came to the door, looking busy and preoccupied. “Yeah, you can go on home, Raine. We’ve got three people who said she left in a blue or green Chevy this afternoon, and that she had a duffle bag with her. We might be looking at a runaway, so we’re going to follow up on some leads before we declare her missing.”

  I said, “I need to ask you something.”

  Someone inside said, “Buck, you got a minute?”

  He glanced over his shoulder, and then back at me, trying to hide his mild annoyance. “Okay, but make it quick, will you?”

  He ducked under the tape and came down the steps. A couple of deputies were poking around the wood pile and searching the area around it with their flashlights, and his gaze flickered toward them. “Y'all take down that wood pile piece by piece and lay it out,” Buck called. “And check out that storage shed. We’ve got a warrant.”

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “The murder weapon, maybe. There’s a knife missing from the stand on the counter, and we didn’t see it anywhere in the house.”

  “Did you look in the dishwasher?” I suggested.

  He looked at me for a moment, then walked back to the door and said something to one of the men inside. I felt smug. Buck looked impatient when he returned. “Was there something you wanted, Raine?”

  “Hey, it’s not like I’m having a great time standing out here in the cold either, you know.” And for a moment I was so irritated I almost turned and stalked away. “I could be at home watching It’s a Wonderful Life.”

  He tried, not very successfully, to look apologetic. His eyes kept wandering to the boys with the flashlights. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you out here so long. What did you want to ask?”

  I hesitated. The whole thing sounded a little farfetched now that I said it out loud, “Did you guys find Lewis’s wedding ring on a chain hanging from the rearview mirror of his truck?”

  For the first time, I had his attention. “Not that I know of. How come?”

  “Because his wife’s name was Amy, and someone said he kept his wedding ring on a chain hanging from his mirror. And tonight I was in the diner and this guy in front of me—a strange fellow dressed in camo with a kind of crazy look in his eyes—he dropped a wedding ring that was engraved Forever, Amy inside. He had a big buck knife on his belt and blood all over his jacket. I just thought it was a coincidence, the names and all.”

  Buck stared at me.

  “Hey, Sheriff!” The guys had opened the shed door and were shining their lights inside.

  “Stay here,” Buck said tersely. “Don’t move.” And he hurried across the narrow strip of dirt yard to the shed.

  Well, I didn’t go far—just far enough to see that what the deputies had uncovered was a shed filled with flat screen TV’s, laptop computers, stereos, smart phones, and MP3 players, among other things, many of them still in their boxes. There was also a couple of pairs of skis, an outboard motor, two generators, and enough power tools—all still sealed in boxes—to open a woodworking shop.

  “Looks like Santa Claus got here a little early,” one of the guys observed.

  And somebody else agreed, “I guess we cracked our burglary ring.”

  “And found a motive for murder,” Buck said.

  Buck took my statement about the man in the diner, and took another statement from the woman who had told me about the wedding ring. He sent Deke back into town to interview Lucy, who had gotten a much better look at Camo Man than I had.

  “Do you think it might really be something?” I asked, both excited and a little worried by the possibility. To think I had stood that close to a cold-blooded killer—and had even given him a quarter—was a little unsettling, to say the least. Knowing that he was still out there somewhere was even worse.

  “Could be.” Buck was writing in his notebook. “We’ll search the truck again for the ring. But it’s pretty clear Earl was involved in these burglaries we’ve been trying to track down, and if he had a partner, and if they had some kind of disagreement that went bad…” He gave a small lift of one shoulder without looking up. “Somebody tried to mop up an awful lot of blood with those bed sheets that were in the tub, and we know the body was moved from wherever he was killed to the back of the truck. A hunting knife would match the wound.”

  “And the girl? Do you think she’s okay?’

  He snapped the notebook closed. “We won’t know until we find her. Listen, Raine, I’ve gotta go. We’ll be up all night cataloguing this stuff and I’ve still got a lot of people to talk to. See you later, okay?” He was walking away before he finished speaking.

  “You’re welcome,” I called after him.

  Buck, of course, did not look back.

  The minute I parked in front of my house I knew something was amiss. All the downstairs lights were on, and even if I had accidentally left the front lights on in my hurry to leave, I hadn’t even been in the kitchen, and I could see the light from the kitchen window spreading a pool over the side yard. I could smell wood smoke faintly, and though I did like to keep a fire going in the woodstove in the kitchen, I was almost certain it had gone out long before I left to take Santa Dog on his first therapy visit. I went up the steps and opened the door cautiously, Cisco swishing his tail excitedly beside me. The sound of the television reached me from the living room. I called uncertainly, “Mischief?” How in the world had she learned to work the remote control?

  I heard the sound of paws hitting the floor and Mischief and Magic came trotting out of the living room, grinning happily, and were met in the hallway by Miles Young, who came from the kitchen with a glass of wine in his hand. My mouth fell open in astonishment.

  “Before you say anything,” he said and seemed surprised that I didn’t interrupt him. He went on, “I must have called you six times. Is your phone broken? And we waited almost an hour in the car. Your door was open so….”

  “You did not.” I found my voice at last, and my outrage bubbled up. “You did not just walk into my house and make yourself at home! This is over the line, Miles, and I mean it. I can’t believe you would do such a thing.”

  “I told you she would be mad,” sang girl’s voice from the living room.

  “She’s not mad, honey, she’s just surprised,” Miles called back. To me he said, with deliberate emphasis, “I told her people did things differently in the country. I told her they were more neighborly.”

  I thought my eyes would pop out of my head with things I couldn’t say in front of a child.

  The Aussies wriggled and pressed up against me and I petted them absently. Cisco sat hopefully in front of Miles and he produced a dog biscuit from his pocket. It was easy to see how he wouldn’t have had any trouble getting
past my faithful guard dogs. He never made an appearance without a pocketful of dog biscuits and he had trained them well.

  He pressed the glass of wine in my hand. “I hope you like white,” he said. “It’s all I had left. I figured you’d need it after the night you’ve had. Come on in the kitchen,” he urged. “I made a fire. Let me explain.”

  Unfortunately for him, I was not quite so well trained. I stared at him with clenched jaw.

  “She’s mad,” Melanie called over the sound of the television.

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Yes, she is,” I muttered, low enough so that hopefully only he could hear.

  He said, “I brought pie. Meg had another one in the back.”

  Damn him, anyway.

  I followed him down the hall to the kitchen, past the living room where Melanie had made herself at home on the sofa with a bag of chips and a cola and was watching some vampire show on TV. The dogs hesitated when they saw the little girl and the chips, but they calculated the odds and decided their best bet was the kitchen, with us. Or perhaps they understood the word “pie”.

  My kitchen is one of the big old-fashioned types, with a wood burning stove on the center wall, and a door that can close it off from the rest of the house. I smelled coffee and wood smoke, and it was pleasantly cozy, which infuriated me. I closed the door and turned to Miles, fuming.

  “Five seconds,” I said.

  “No heat, frozen pipes, carbon monoxide poisoning,” he replied, deadpan. “I tried every motel in town. The nearest vacancy is Asheville. It’s ten o’clock, the overpasses are icy, I thought you’d be home. I left six messages.”

  I exploded in a hiss, “Are you kidding me? You’re in charge of multi-billion dollar building projects and you can’t even defrost a frozen water pipe?”

  His eyes grew cool. “Darlin’,” he said, “I can re-plumb that entire house with garden hose and silicone caulk if I have to, but I’d prefer not to do it while my daughter’s lips are turning blue.”