Bone Harvest - Mary Logue [11]
“Yeah.”
“All night?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you give me their names?”
He lifted his head and looked out from under straw-colored eyebrows. “Do I have to?”
“Is there any reason you wouldn’t want to?” she asked him, surprised at his reticence. She was just looking for an alibi.
His face tinged red. “Well, one of them might get in trouble.”
Claire thought she knew what was going on. “You have a girlfriend?”
Ray looked at her like she had just guessed the right answer on a quiz show, mouth slightly ajar. She would wait him out on this question.
She took a sip of her Coke. Not a bad drink, but a little too sweet for her. It needed ice and a lemon slice floating in it.
“Are you going to have to talk to her?” he asked.
“How late were you out together?”
He ducked his head and then came up for air. “Her parents don’t know. They don’t know she was out with me Friday night.”
“Where do they think she was?”
“At a friend’s.”
“But she was with you?”
He nodded.
“All night long?”
He slumped in his chair, not denying the statement.
“Where did you hang out?”
“There’s an old deserted church up on Double N. You can get in through one of the windows. We spent part of the night there.”
Claire knew the church. They must be in love to put up with that place for a night. She would have thought an open field would be better, but the mosquitoes could be bad. “Does your father know?”
Ray shook his head.
“You might want to tell him.”
“Are you going to talk to her?” he asked.
“What’s her name?” Claire asked back.
“Tiffany. Tiffany Black.”
Claire thought, I should have guessed. Half the girls in the county were named Tiffany. “I will talk to her, but I don’t need to say anything to her parents.”
“Cool,” he said.
“I hope you’re being careful.” She was surprised when the words came out of her mouth. She couldn’t help it. She was a mother.
Ray stared at her, then finished the Coke in another swallow. This time he looked right at Claire. “Thanks for the Coke.”
Charles Folger was glad that Sorenson had warned him that the deputy was a woman. He had heard about this one from the big city. Too big for her britches—and she was wearing britches. Getting ahead of men who had been working for the sheriff for years. She had made some enemies.
Deputy Sheriff Claire Watkins was sitting across the desk from him. He was ready for her.
“So you are the agronomist for the cooperative, Mr. Folger?” she said, referring to a notebook she opened.
She probably didn’t even know what that meant. Folger had his spiel down pat. “I am a specialist in the art and science of crop production.”
She smiled at him and wrote something down. She had good teeth, he noticed. Large and white. She looked like a very healthy woman. But he did not approve of women working as police officers or deputies or whatever name you wanted to give them in law enforcement.
“How long have you been working for the cooperative?”
“Why? Do you want to know how old I am?”
She looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Have you been working here since you were born?”
So she thought she could be funny. “I’m seventy-one years old. No mandatory retirement. I’ve been working here since I was twenty-seven. That’s probably longer than you’ve been around.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” She gave him a look and then continued, “Have you had a chance to examine the plant that Ron Sorenson took from the garden that was destroyed in front of the sheriff’s department?”
“Yes,” he answered. Make her work.
“And what did you find?”
“It was, as suspected, Parazone.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
He would do his job. Just because she was a woman didn’t mean he would thwart the investigation. It was not his way. “Yes. Whoever did this has probably used this product before.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He added a nonionic surfactant to the spray.”
She stared at him, waiting for him to continue. He said nothing more.
“And what is that, please?”
“It is an agent we recommend adding to Parazone because it gives it a better spread. In layman’s terms, or in this case laywoman’s,