Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 20 - Compound Murder (22 page)

The figures disappeared into the brush in the vacant lot, and Rhodes heard a car start.

“The street,” he said.

He turned and ran toward the side street just in time to see a car break out of the brush and turn down the street away from him. The car lights were off, and so was the streetlight at the end of the block. Rhodes wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been shot out with a pellet rifle before the men started on the house. He couldn’t tell a thing about the car except that it was gray or black. He and Andy stood in the middle of the road as it sped away.

“Want me to go after them?” Andy asked. He was still breathing hard.

“They have too much of a head start,” Rhodes said, wondering how much adrenaline was still pumping through the young deputy’s body. “You’d never catch them.”

“We stopped them from stripping the house,” Andy said, which was true enough, but Rhodes didn’t see that they’d really accomplished anything by doing it. The house was never going to be used again, and Rhodes thought the city would soon force the owner to demolish it. On the other hand, if they’d caught the potential thieves, they might have stopped some future thefts.

“We did good,” Rhodes said. He gave Andy a pat on the arm. “You did everything right.”

Andy gave a weak laugh. “Well, I have to admit I got a little shook when they started shooting.”

“So did I,” Rhodes said, thinking about the first time he’d been under fire. He’d been weak in the knees for a couple of hours. “Who wouldn’t get a little shook?”

“John Wayne,” Andy said.

Rhodes was gratified that Andy knew the classics. He said, “Only in the movies. Give me your flashlight and let me take a look at your face.”

Andy unclipped the light from his utility belt and handed it to Rhodes, who turned it on and shined it on the deputy’s face. He saw a couple of bloody spots, but no splinters stuck out from the skin.

“After we finish here,” Rhodes said, “you’d better stop by the hospital and get somebody to take a look at you, just to be on the safe side. Right now, we’d better check to see if anybody stayed behind.”

Rhodes kept the flashlight and led the way up the back steps. When he reached the top, he saw that the boards that had been nailed across the doorway were lying on the floor of a small inside room atop broken glass from the windows. The odor of charred wood and smoke was strong even though the fire had been quite a while ago.

Holding the flashlight well away from his body, Rhodes directed the beam into the room beyond. It appeared to have been a kitchen, and Rhodes saw a burned table and some overturned chairs.

Rhodes listened for a minute or so. All he could hear was Andy breathing behind him and the usual noises of the night, a car passing on the street in front of the house and some insects buzzing.

Rhodes went inside, Andy still right at his back, and they went through the house a room at a time. Each room held burned furniture—a piano, a china cabinet, a desk, a bed—but there was no sign of anyone lurking in the darkness.

They did find where the Sheetrock had been torn away and some of the wiring stripped out, but that was all. When Rhodes was satisfied that there was nothing more to learn, he led the way back outside.

“You go on by the hospital now,” he told Andy. “Have them patch up your face. When you get back on patrol, check by here fairly often. Those fellas might come back.”

“I’ll drop by every hour or so,” Andy said.

Rhodes said every hour would be fine, and Andy went on his way. Rhodes went back to the car, and Ivy unlocked the door.

“I heard gunshots,” Ivy said.

Rhodes locked the shotgun back in position and got in the car. “So did I.”

Ivy gave him a stern look. “Don’t you joke about this, Dan Rhodes.”

Since she’d used his full name, Rhodes knew he was in trouble. “I didn’t mean to. I was overcompensating.”

“Don’t give me any psychology, either.”

Rhodes sat quietly, and after a while Ivy said, “I’m fine now. I don’t like to think of you being shot at.”

“I’m fine,” Rhodes told her. “Nothing even came close to me. Somebody was just trying to warn us off.”

He didn’t believe that was true, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

“You don’t have any prisoners,” Ivy said, “so the warning must have worked.”

“We’ll get ’em next time,” Rhodes said.

“I hope there’s not a next time, not with guns.”

“I could do without the guns myself,” Rhodes said.

He got on the radio and called Hack to let him know what had happened. He also told him to have Ruth check the brushy lot for tire prints in the morning.

“Ain’t rained in a month,” Hack said. “Won’t be any tire prints.”

“Have her check anyway.”

“If you say so.”

“I do,” Rhodes said.

*   *   *

Ivy didn’t do any talking on the drive back home, and Rhodes tried to get his thoughts in some kind of order. He had a feeling that he had just about everything he needed to make a case against somebody, but the problem was that he didn’t know which somebody to make the case against.

Harold Harris was clearly worried, probably about somehow being caught getting his score changed on ProfessoRater, and he’d lied about being at the faculty lounge the day Wellington died. That is, he’d lied unless both Mary Mason and Seepy Benton were wrong. Rhodes didn’t think either of them was wrong. If Wellington had uncovered the problem with the scores, Harris could have argued with him and accidentally killed him. Harris might also have tried to shift suspicion to Ike. Rhodes still wasn’t sure about that. Maybe it was just a coincidence that he’d mentioned Sandi Campbell.

Dean King was another possibility. She was intent on doing whatever was necessary to protect the college. She wouldn’t want the word to get out about Harris’s cheating, and she was easily strong enough to whack Wellington’s head against the trash bin.

Ike Terrell was a puzzle. Rhodes was pretty sure he knew something, too, but he was caught between his father and his desire to get away from the compound. Rhodes didn’t know how real that desire was. He had only Sandi Campbell’s word for it, and a young man Ike’s age was apt to say anything he thought a pretty girl wanted to hear.

There were a number of other things bumping around in Rhodes’s head, too, and he figured that sooner or later they’d stop bumping into each other and line up in orderly fashion so he could look at them and sort through them.

“Why so quiet?” Ivy asked when they stopped in their own driveway.

“Thinking,” Rhodes said.

One thing he was thinking was that she’d been the quiet one.

“Why don’t we have some ice cream and talk about it,” she said.

“We have ice cream?”

“I put some in the freezer the other day. I thought you’d have found it by now.”

“I wasn’t looking.”

“You were going after those M&M’s.”

“I’d rather have ice cream.”

Ivy got out of the car. “Then come along,” she said.

*   *   *

Rhodes and Ivy sat at the kitchen table with bowls of vanilla ice cream in front of them. The cats were sitting up, grooming themselves without any interest in each other or anything else. Yancey sat in the doorway, looking into the kitchen with mournful eyes.

“Yancey will get over it,” Rhodes said. “I give him one more day of trying to make us feel guilty, and then he’ll be back to normal.”

He took a bite of the ice cream. It wasn’t a Blizzard, but it would do.

“Have you interviewed that Mary Mason yet?” Ivy asked. “I’ll bet she has something to do with all of this.”

“As a matter of fact, I did interview her, and she had some helpful information. She didn’t have anything to do with Wellington’s death, though.”

Ivy looked disappointed. “Who did, then?”

“That’s what I can’t figure out.”

Rhodes went through his various scenarios with her and asked her what she thought.

“I still think Mary Mason did it,” she said.

Rhodes ate some more ice cream, slowly enough to avoid brain freeze. When he’d had a few bites, he said, “If only it were that easy.”

“What about that Dr. Harris?” Ivy asked. “He’s obviously hiding something. You should take him to the basement and give him the old third degree.”

“There’s a problem with that,” Rhodes said. “Two problems, really.”

“What?”

“First of all, we don’t give our suspects the old third degree these days. I’ve heard they used to right here in Blacklin County, sixty or seventy years ago, but someone who’s getting beaten up will confess to anything to stop the pain. When you get that kind of confession, you don’t have much.”

“I knew that,” Ivy said. “What’s the other thing?”

“The jail’s like the Alamo,” Rhodes said. “It doesn’t have a basement.”

“Darn,” Ivy said. “That’s inconvenient. I think Harris is the one, though. You just need to figure out how to get him to talk.”

“I’ll work on it,” Rhodes said.

He finished off his ice cream and was considering getting another dip when the telephone rang.

“I’ll get it,” Ivy said.

“Never mind,” Rhodes said, getting up. “It’s bound to be for me.”

It was Mayor Clement, and he wanted to know if Rhodes had anybody locked up for killing Wellington.

“Not yet,” Rhodes said. “I have a lot of suspects, though. I’m thinking about taking one of them down to the basement and giving him the old third degree.”

Mayor Clement didn’t think it was funny. “I don’t care if you waterboard the lot of them. I want a confession. I want this thing wrapped up. You understand that, right?”

“I understand,” Rhodes said.

“Good. Get it done.”

“Shouldn’t that be ‘Git ’er done’?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” Rhodes said. “I’m working on it.”

“You’d better be,” Clement said, and he hung up.

“It’s always a pleasure to talk to our mayor,” Rhodes said, sitting back down at the table.

“He does have a way of putting a smile on your face,” Ivy said, “but I could do a better job of that. Want to bet?”

Rhodes grinned. “You’re on.”

Chapter 20

Rhodes’s first stop the next day was the college. He got there early, before classes started, and went straight to Harold Harris’s office, but the door was closed and locked. Rhodes knocked. No answer. Rhodes didn’t think Harris was hiding in there, so he went to the faculty lounge. Seepy Benton was inside, chatting up Mary Mason and a man Rhodes didn’t know. Among the others who were there, Rhodes recognized only Tom Vance. Everyone but Benton was drinking coffee. There was no sign of Harris, so Rhodes called Benton outside.

“Let’s go to your office,” Rhodes said. “I want to talk about Harris.”

Benton didn’t ask any questions. He just went to his office with Rhodes at his side. The formula Benton had written on the dry-erase board the previous day was still there, and Rhodes had to resist the urge to pick up the eraser and wipe it off.

“What about Harris?” Benton asked when they’d taken a seat.

“He’s not here,” Rhodes said.

“You think that’s significant?”

“I do. I talked to him at his home yesterday. He’s worried and maybe a little scared.”

“You would be, too,” Benton said, “if you’d been caught cheating on your ProfessoRater score.”

“He hasn’t been caught,” Rhodes said. “We just think he might have done that. What I’m more interested in is why he told me he was in the faculty lounge on the morning Wellington died.”

“You think he was outside with Wellington?”

“I don’t know what to think. When I talked to him at his house yesterday, he wouldn’t say anything helpful. I’m going back for another visit if he doesn’t show up here soon.”

“He’s not in his office?”

“If he is, he wouldn’t answer the door.”

“You should check his schedule and see if he has an early class today,” Benton said. “He’ll have to show up there. I can just look the schedule up right here on my computer. Can I have my badge back?”

“Just check it for me, please,” Rhodes said.

Benton turned to his computer and with a few mouse clicks had Harris’s schedule displayed on the monitor.

“Here it is,” Benton said. “He has an eight o’clock, all right. American Lit. In room two-sixteen. I can show you where that is.”

“I can find it,” Rhodes said. “You need to get ready for your own class.”

Benton picked up a can of Pringles potato chips from beside his desk. Rhodes hadn’t seen it there when they walked in.

“This is my lesson,” Benton said, shaking the can.

“You’re teaching a class in potato chips?”

“The potato chips are merely illustrative. What I’m teaching is hyperbolic parabaloids, of which a Pringles chip is a perfect example.”

“Right,” Rhodes said.

“It’s an important part of multivariable calculus,” Benton said.

“I should have remembered that.”

“You certainly should. It’s going to be on the final exam.”

Rhodes was happy he wasn’t going to have to take the final exam.

“You can use a graphing calculator on the final,” Benton said. “If you need one, that is.”

“That’s good to know.” The bell rang, for which Rhodes was grateful. Probably Benton’s students were, too, now and then, though not as grateful for the bell to begin class as for the one to end it. “Time for class. Thanks for looking up the schedule.”

“Anytime,” Benton said.

Rhodes left the office and walked down the hallway to the room where Harris’s class was to meet. Students went by, some of them texting on their phones, some of them talking on their phones, and one or two of them talking to each other. Rhodes wondered how much longer that would last. In a few years, maybe communication between two people sitting next to each other would be conducted by phone, too.

He noticed a student standing by the wall, holding up his phone and aiming it at Rhodes. Down at the end of the hall another student was doing the same thing. It took Rhodes a second or two to realize that they were either taking a picture of him or recording a video. He hoped the videos wouldn’t appear on Jennifer Loam’s Web site later that day with headlines like
SHERIFF PROWLS THE GROVES OF ACADEME!