Cruel Comfort (Evan Buckley Thrillers Book 1) (16 page)

He decided to give Guillory a call
to put him in the picture. With any luck he could get the case assigned to him.

'Do you know what time it is? Do you
even know what day it is?' he said, when he finally picked up.

'It might be the last day of Matt
Faulkner's life,' Evan said. Maybe it was a little melodramatic but it sure got
Guillory's attention.

'What the hell are you talking
about?'

Evan took him through the morning's
events but didn't say anything about his suspicions yet.

'Are you still at Faulkner's place?'
Guillory asked when he'd finished.

'Yeah, I'm still here with the tub
of lard that let me in.'

'Wait there. I'm on my way over.
I'll call the department and let them know I've got it.'

He got there in under ten minutes.
Evan was relieved to see that he didn't have his partner, Ryder, with him. The
fat guy was still sitting on the packing crate, busy excavating the contents of
his nose with his finger. Evan called him over and introduced him to Guillory. His
name was Briggs. He'd got a bit of color back into his face and had stopped
looking as if he was going to be sick any minute. Guillory asked him to tell
him what he knew and Briggs ran through the morning's events.

'What about last night?' Guillory
asked, when he'd finished.

'I was out having a couple of quick
beers with some of the guys.'

'Good for you. Did you see anything
unusual is what I meant?'

Evan reckoned Briggs would have been
lucky to be able to see his trailer after the
couple of quick beers
he'd
consumed. He certainly hadn't seen his dick in the last twenty years.

'No. Nothing. Sorry.'

'What time did you go out?'

He made a pretence of thinking about
it. Evan would have bet dollars to donuts that he’d gone to the bar at the
exact same time for the last twenty years.

'About six, I suppose.'

'When did you get back?

'About eleven.'

'As you say, just a couple of quick
beers.’ Guillory said, nodding. ‘Lots of people see you in the bar?'

'Yeah, everyone knows me.'

'I bet. How come you've got a key?'

'Because I'm his neighbor and that's
what neighbors are for.' He was getting indignant again. 'You're as bad as
him,' he said, jabbing a none-too-clean thumb in Evan's direction. At least it
wasn’t the finger most recently seen buried in his nose.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but
there are a lot of other people live here. They’re all neighbors too.’

‘Probably because I’ve been here the
longest, then.’

'Okay, Mr Briggs, I think we're done
here. Someone will be round to take a statement later. I think your wife wants
a word.' He nodded towards Briggs' trailer.

Briggs turned and looked at the
diminutive woman standing in the open doorway to the trailer with her hands on
her hips. His face dropped.

'Sure you don't want me to hang
around? Something might come to me.'

'Well if it does, you be sure to let
us know.'

Guillory turned to face Evan. Behind
him Briggs gave him the finger and then walked unhappily back to his trailer.

'Okay Peeper, what have you got for
me. I can see you're fit to burst with something.'

'I'm pretty sure I can tell you
exactly when it happened and who did it.'

Guillory made a show of looking at
his watch. 'And it's not even eight o'clock yet. Not bad. How about motive? Or
do I have to wait until eight thirty for that?'

Evan ignored the sarcasm. 'I was
here around seven last night. That's when I arranged to go fishing with
Faulkner.'

'Fishing?'

Too good to pass. 'Yes, you know -
you go out in a boat with a rod and a reel and catch fish. Millions of people
do it every day. It's called a hobby.'

Guillory gave him a look but didn't
say anything. Evan was sure he wanted to laugh.

'Anyway, when I got here, Faulkner
had a visitor. There was a Dodge Ram in the driveway.'

'A Dodge Ram.’ He shook his head in
mock amazement. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve seen one of those for I don’t
know how long…must be two or three minutes at least. I don't suppose there can
be more than two hundred thousand of them in this state.’ He raised his finger
as if something had just come to him. ‘That's okay though, if you took down the
license number.' He raised his eyebrows in anticipation of a positive response.

Evan shook his head. Guillory
nodded. 'Maybe next time. Did you see who the visitor was?'

Evan shook his head again. 'Faulkner
shut the door so I couldn't see in.'

'Uh huh. Does this get any better? I
don't exactly feel like I'm drowning in a sea of hard facts.'

Evan ignored him. 'When I was
driving home I had to stop on the shoulder to make an urgent phone call. While
I was sitting there, the same Dodge Ram went past me, going like a bat out of
hell.'

'You're sure it was the same one?
Even though you didn't have the license number.'

'It was the same color. I'm pretty
sure it was the same one.’ He could hear how weak it sounded as he said it. ‘I
can’t be one hundred percent certain,’ he admitted.

'Shame. That's what license plates
are for I suppose. Okay, what happened next?'

Evan was starting to feel like
Guillory wasn't taking him seriously. He'd soon change his tune.

'I followed it.'

'Any particular reason?'

'Nothing I can put my finger on, but
that doesn't matter. What matters is who was driving it...'

'For Christ's sake Buckley, just
spit it out.'

'Carl Hendricks. I followed the
pickup to his farm and saw him get out of it.'

He was disappointed with Guillory's
reaction. He didn't get the
Hallelujah
he was hoping for. Guillory
didn’t even whip off his hat and toss it in the air. Instead he folded his arms
across his body and cradled his chin in his hand.

'Let me get this straight - your theory
is that Carl Hendricks was the man in Faulkner's trailer and shortly after
seven last night he brained him with some unidentified heavy object and then
hightailed it back to his farmhouse. And this theory is based on the
possibility
that the two Dodge Rams you saw were one and the same.'

Despite Guillory's sceptical tone,
Evan was sure that was exactly what had happened. 'Yes, that's exactly what I
think.'

'Any ideas about why he might have
done it?'

'No, but I heard Faulkner and the
other man arguing.'

'You didn't mention that. Did you
hear what it was about?' Luckily he didn't give Evan a chance to say no, he
didn't know that either.

'Doesn't matter. I'll allow for the
possibility that the man in the trailer was the one who attacked Faulkner. But
you've still got a problem connecting the two pickup trucks.'

Evan felt completely deflated.
'Don't you even think it's worth looking into?'

'Did I say it's not worth looking
into? Did I?' He gave Evan an exasperated look. 'I'm just not going to go
jumping to conclusions before I've even started - unlike some people I could
mention.’

He put a hand on Evan’s shoulder and
steered him towards his car. ‘If it was up to you, Hendricks would be in prison
already. You ought to forget this detective stuff and get a job as a hanging
judge.'

Evan realized he was actually quite
disappointed that he wasn't going to spend the day afloat, catching fish and
drinking cold beers with Faulkner. Apart from anything else, he now had an empty
day to try to fill. Whilst most people spend Monday to Friday wishing their
life away and don't want the weekend to end, Evan couldn't wait for the working
week to start again. Sadly, he was going to have to. He decided to give
Jacobson a call to see if he had any news.

'Didn't you get my text?' Jacobson
asked him.

Evan checked his phone. 'No, there's
nothing.' It reminded him it was time he bought a new one.

'I spoke to the person I told you
about.' Jacobson said.

'That's good.'

'I told her what a nice young man
you are. She can't wait to meet you - and fill you in on five, ten, twenty
years of local gossip, whatever you want.' Evan could feel Jacobson's smile on
the other end of the line. 'I'd allow three to four hours if I were you. You
didn't have any plans did you?'

Evan told him about his aborted
fishing trip.

'So what do you think's going on? Do
you think Hendricks, or whoever it was, is trying to shut Faulkner up?'

It suddenly struck Evan that he
didn't know what he thought. He'd told Guillory that he'd overheard an
argument, but he had no idea what it meant, or even if it had any bearing on
anything he was doing. They could have been arguing about football for all he
knew.

'I'm not sure. I don't really know
what I think.'

'You sound a bit despondent. Go and
talk to Audrey Aubrey. Hell of a name, eh? Maybe some of the pieces will fall
into place.'

Jacobson gave him the address and a
phone number. As soon as he'd finished with Jacobson, Evan called her and she
said he could drop in any time.

If he was expecting Audrey Aubrey to
be a matronly old lady with a blue rinse, he couldn't have been more wrong. Her
hair was cut short and it was gray, not blue. It would have been called
distinguished in a man. He didn’t know how old she was but he was sure she
didn’t look it.

No doubt she was in huge demand with
the pension industry advertisers who targeted
active seniors
and put
full page adverts in the Sunday supplements - the ones with the seniors
freewheeling downhill on their bicycles with their legs sticking out and huge
grins plastered on their faces.

She invited him in and got him
settled in the living room and went off to make some coffee.

'I hope you don't want decaf,' she
called from the kitchen. 'I wouldn't have that crap in the house. What a complete
waste of time that is. I like a good dose of caffeine to keep me regular.'

That was a little more information
than Evan felt was appropriate in the first two minutes of their acquaintance,
but he liked his coffee strong too, so he said that would be just fine. She
brought it in with a piece of cake about the size of a shoebox.

'This is my maple-pecan danish
coffee cake,' she said proudly as she put it down on the side table. He was
sure the table dipped under the weight. 'You look like you need feeding up.'

He noticed she didn't take a piece
for herself but he tucked in just the same.

'I don't eat it myself,' she said.
Looking at her still-trim figure, he could believe it. 'Tom Jacobson says it
rots your teeth. Sugar, not just my cake, of course.' Evan was sure that if he
listened closely enough he would actually hear the decay eating into the enamel
of his teeth.

'I had a lot of dental work done,'
she carried on. 'Look at this.'

She did what people always do when
they're telling you about their teeth. She put as many fingers in her mouth as
she could comfortably fit and then pulled it wide open and put her head back so
that Evan got the best possible view. It was very impressive too. He made a
mental note to compliment Jacobson on his work.

Then, just like everyone else, she
carried on talking with all her fingers jammed in her stretched-open mouth, so
that he couldn't understand a word she was saying. He never understood why
people did that. Luckily, in his experience, they didn't suffer from the same
compulsion to show-don't-tell when they were describing their hemorrhoids.

The maple-pecan danish coffee cake
was heavy going so he just let her prattle on about her dental work for a while
longer while he worked on it.

'Tom tells me you're the go-to
person for local knowledge around here,' he said, feeling pleased with the
adroit way he segued from Tom the dental maestro to Tom the
flatterer-of-old-ladies.

She smiled indulgently. 'Tom's full
of shit, but he's right, up to a point.  I worked on the local paper for
twenty-five years. There wasn't much went on I didn't hear about. But that was
back then. Now I'm retired and I don't really get out so much.'

'That’s not a problem. It's the
background information that I'm interested in.'

She leaned forward with her hands
resting on her knees. 'What is it you need to know? Tom wouldn't tell me what
this is about.'

'I'm sure it's nothing, really. Just
something that's been bugging me. There's a farm a few miles out of town called
Beau Terre
...'

'The Saunders place.'

'That's it. So you know it?'

'I've been out to the house a few
times. I knew Mary Saunders fairly well, and her husband George. Before they
moved away.'

'Did they have a son?'

The question seemed to throw her.
She stood up and walked through to the kitchen. 'Do you want any more coffee?'

He was afraid it would come with
another couple of pounds of cake so he said no. She came back carrying a refill
for herself. He wasn't sure whether she was buying time to marshal her
thoughts, or whether she was just committed to her caffeine-keeps-you-regular
routine.

'There was a son,' she said
carefully, 'called Jason.' The look on her face suggested the memories of Jason
Saunders weren't all good. Either that or the caffeine was starting to kick in
ahead of time.

'What was he like?'

'He was a little shit when he was
growing up,' she said with unexpected force, 'and made his parents' lives a
complete misery. I don't think he was actually kicked out of school but it came
pretty close. And he was no better when he grew up.'

She leaned back and crossed her
legs. Evan was treated to a view of her still-shapely calves. He was thankful
she was far too old for there to be any risk of a repeat of the previous day’s
events.

'What happened to him?'

'Luckily for everyone around here,
he got a totally uncharacteristic attack of patriotic fervor and joined the
army. Unluckily, he didn't get blown to pieces in some godforsaken hell hole.'
She looked down and started picking imaginary pieces of lint from her white
blouse.

Evan was shocked at the intensity of
her dislike for him. He wondered if there was any personal animosity but didn't
push it.

'So he came back?'

She looked back up at him. 'No, he
didn't come back. Not so far as I know. He left the army with a dishonorable
discharge and drifted around.'

'What did he do to get a
dishonorable discharge? That's got to be pretty serious.'

'I don't know for certain. All I
heard were rumors and I don't want to spread them around - despite what Tom
Jacobson thinks.' She seemed keen to be able to claim some of the moral high
ground from Jacobson. ‘Do you know, he told me that if patients start gossiping
in the chair he drills a bit deeper?’

Evan smiled. He made a mental note
to look up the sort of offences that could result in a dishonorable discharge.
He had no idea whether records of specific cases were in the public domain or
not. Probably not, as the U.S. Army weren't known for washing their dirty linen
in public.

'What happened after he left the
army?'

'It gets better and better.’ She let
out a short, harsh laugh. ‘He really was a son to be proud of! I know he spent
some time in prison down in Texas. That much is fact. Again, I only heard
rumors about why he was in there.'

Evan would have loved to push her
into disclosing the rumors she'd heard. It would have been interesting to find
out if the crimes inside and outside the military were the same. Unfortunately,
he could tell there was no way she was going to tell him. She desperately
wanted him to go back to Jacobson and tell him that she wasn't an idle gossip.

'It completely destroyed George and
Mary,' she went on. 'There were all these awful rumors flying around.' Her face
darkened and she fell silent as she thought back. 'It got so they couldn't bear
to go out.'

'What happened to them?'

'They moved away. At their time of
life, they had to leave that beautiful farm and move away.' She shook her head
sadly, her mind full of the cruel injustices that lie in wait around every
corner.

'Did you know they gave, or sold,
the farm to Jason?'

She sat up straight faster than if
Evan had goosed her. 'Well I never knew that. Some source of local information
I turned out to be.'

'I went to the County Recorder's office and looked it up. That's where I start to get confused.'

'I don't understand.'

'The records show the last transfer
was from George and Mary to Jason. There's nothing after that.'

'So?'

'The man who lives there now is
called Carl Hendricks.'

A slight frown creased her forehead.
'That name rings a bell.'

Evan explained briefly about the case
he was working on and Hendricks' job as the school bus driver.

'I missed all that,' Audrey said. 'I
retired right around then and went on a six month world cruise. I'd always
wanted to go. I vaguely remember hearing things when I got back but it had all
died down.'

'None of that is really why I wanted
to talk to you. It's just that I went out to Hendricks' place and ended up
thinking how come he was living there. The place must be worth millions. Tom
thought you might know.'

'I can't help you I'm afraid. I
didn't even know Saunders came back.'

'Tom suggested that Saunders might
have changed his name to Hendricks. That makes sense after what you've just
told me about his past.'

'But there's no way on earth he'd
have got the job as a school bus driver with a criminal record like that.'

'You're right. It can't be the same
person and I'm back where I started.' A flashback of what happened after he
found himself back at square one with Barbara crossed his mind. He stood up to
go.

'Even so, it's worth checking to
make sure. Have you got a picture of Hendricks?'

Evan said that hadn't but he could
get one.

'Don't bother; I know where I can
get one of Saunders. I'll email a copy to you.'

Evan gave her his email address. He
was pleased he'd kept his face under control and not looked too surprised when
she'd said she would email him.

'I feel so sorry for his parents,'
she said again at the door. 'It's totally beyond me how their son could turn
out so bad when you think how well their daughter did for herself.'

'Their daughter?'

'Yes. Didn't you know. They had a
daughter called Brenda. A lovely girl.'

Evan didn't know how he was supposed
to have known. And whilst it was nice to hear that Brenda was a lovely girl and
had done so well for herself, it didn’t have any bearing on anything he was
interested in. She wasn't living at the farm now. But he ought to show some
interest to be polite.

'What did she end up doing?'

'She married the future Chief of
Police, Matt Faulkner.'