The Ranger - Ace Atkins [36]
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“I imagine you’ll know when you see it,” Lillie said.
“This is a file on a vehicular homicide,” he said. “Some drunk ran over a fella out on County Road 389.”
“Keep going.”
“Why would he keep these here?”
“He’d have no reason to take these from the office, unless it was something active he wanted to work personal.”
“He do many investigations himself?”
“When you got eight folks looking out for one county, everybody pitches in.”
“And no police department.”
“Jericho still can’t afford to put anyone on the payroll. Let alone any of those hamlets.”
“Here he’s got five files all for some fire out in Carthage. Does that make any sense? I thought that’d be the fire marshal’s business?”
“When was it?”
Quinn scanned the top sheet. “Looks like back in June.”
“I know that fire,” Lillie said, reaching for the file. “Two men were killed. A couple kids, too.”
She stood up and moved to the edge of the bed, spreading the file out beside her. Quinn sat next to her, reading over her shoulder, Lillie pulling back her curly hair and tying it up with a band from her purse. She read for a long while, flipping through pages like crazy, reaching for the next file and tearing into it.
Quinn stood.
He picked up the photo he’d set aside of him and his uncle with that prized deer. That had been the year after he’d been lost, about the time his dad had gone back to California and Uncle Hamp had taken him out every weekend during deer season, even letting him be late to school once or twice, walking up deep into his hundred acres of land and sitting in silence in the tree stand. Quinn holding that bow line taut, right over that buck without that buck getting wind of him, knowing that even some dirt off his boots should scare him away.
He’d taken a perfect shot, hitting that buck right through his heart. An instant kill—the animal running for a hundred yards without pain or even knowing it was already dead—the way you want all kills to be. Something he’d learned from his uncle.
They’d dragged it back to the house, hoisted it up, and gutted it.
“Here it is,” Lillie said.
“What?”
“You got two folks who made it out of that hot box alive. A man and a woman.”
Quinn waited.
“This one fella was airlifted to the burn unit in Jackson,” Lillie said, still staring at the pages on Quinn’s old bed, the springs and slats creaking under her. “I recall that, meeting the helicopter and the ambulance out there. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“And the woman?”
She looked up and said: “The woman was Jill Bullard, the preacher’s daughter.”
12
Quinn and Lillie found the cutoff and cleared land through a thicket of pine trees and headed down the muddy road on foot, fearing getting her Jeep stuck. The thicket opened up onto the burn site just as it started to sleet, nothing left but a footprint of gravel and concrete blocks, the charred remains of the trailer heaped into three piles of dirt and shorn metal. The whole site had been scraped clean and neat, no power or telephone lines ever reaching this far off the main roads of Tibbehah County. Quinn squatted to the ground and sifted through some dirt, finding some blackened and twisted PVC pipe and a rusted screwdriver with a melted handle. Lillie kicked around the site, toeing at piles with her boots and walking toward the edge of the land, looking south toward where the gentle, deadened slope gave way to the highway leading back to Jericho.
She kept her hands in her pockets, a sharp cold wind kicking her hair up off the collar of her jacket.
Quinn threw down the pieces and joined her at the edge.
“Not much left,” he said.
“I’ll check the property records in the morning.”
“You don’t think they owned the land?”
“They could’ve been squatting,” Lillie said. “Lots of trailers just set down where people won’t bother them. Don’t expect much.”
“Is the fire marshal still Chuck Tuttle? He signed off on this deal.”
“Yeah, he’s still around.”
“You don’t like him?”