A Dime a Dozen (35 page)

The detective thanked me for the information, and I told her there was one more thing, that they would probably want to get a warrant for Snake’s car because in his trunk they would find some road flares that might match the one that started the fire at Luisa’s trailer.

“I’m not even going to ask you how you know that,” the detective said.

She thanked me again for my help, and I hung up the phone.

Though I ought to be exhausted by now, I was running on a second wind. When we got home, I called back my hacker friend in Seattle and asked him if he had been able to come up with anything on Zeb Hooper’s travels.

“I’m sorry, Callie,” he said. “I found some pretty good credit card records, but as far as I can tell, he hasn’t been out of the country—or if he has, he didn’t pay for it with plastic.”

“Not even the Caribbean?” I asked, thinking of the Bahamas or the Caymans.

“Nope. The only tickets I’ve seen are flights from Asheville, North Carolina, to LaGuardia.”

“New York?” I asked. “Can you give me dates?”

He read off what he had, and my heart was pounding as I hung up the phone.

“Harriet!” I said, interrupting her as she was brushing her teeth.

“What?”

“Do you have the Su Casa records here with you?”

“No,” she replied, pausing to spit toothpaste into the sink. “They’re down at the office.”

“Can you remember the dates of any of those big cash deposits?”

She finished brushing her teeth, thought for a minute, and then said, “Just two: January tenth and July second of last year.”

I looked at the dates I had written on the pad in front of me: Zeb Hooper had gone to New York City on January 8 and July 1 of last year. My guess was that he was either delivering something or selling something and then coming back home and depositing the money in the bank, laundering it through Su Casa.

The question was, what on earth could that something be?

Thirty-Nine

After a night spent tossing and turning, I was up by six the next morning. Sitting up in bed, I decided it was just as well. There was some exploring I wanted to do, and I’d be better off doing it early in the morning before anyone else might be around to see me.

I threw on some clothes, left a note for Harriet, who was still asleep, and headed out to my car. The morning was chilly, and I was glad I had worn a sweater. I had the key in the ignition, ready to turn, when a movement in the rearview mirror caught my eye. Snapping my head up, I realized that someone was just walking by on the road, whistling softly to himself as he went.

It was Zeb Hooper! I froze, feeling fairly confident he wouldn’t notice me unless he specifically turned to look inside my car. Sure enough, he walked on by, his gate slow and steady. Once he was past, I quietly opened my car door and climbed out. Then I stuck to the tree line and crept across the muddy ground to the road, watching his back as he continued down the hill to his own home. As he went, I noticed that his clothes were filthy. Once he turned into his driveway, I knew there was nothing more to see. The mud under my feet gave me an idea, however.

Sure enough, along the shoulder of the road, right where he had been walking, his footprints remained, deep indentations in the mud. Without hesitating, I decided to take a little walk myself, in the opposite direction of the footprints, to see where they had come from.

The prints led me up past two more houses and around a curve toward the crest of the hill. When I was nearly to the top, I was surprised to see that the prints simply veered off into the brush beside the road.

They led to an empty lot filled with bushes, weeds, and kudzu blocked by a barbed wire fence and posted with several bright yellow “No Trespassing” signs. Bending over, I studied the footprints in the mud, noting that it looked almost as though he had simply walked right through the fence! I stepped closer and studied the wire, and I soon realized there was a latch on the fence post. By unhooking it, I was able to swing the wire in easily, step forward, and then close it behind me. Looking around to make sure I wasn’t being observed, I carefully continued to track the prints on the ground. To avoid leaving prints of my own, I tried stepping on leaves and grass.

Soon, however, I lost the trail. The ground was higher here, and a bit rocky, and there just wasn’t enough mud to make tracks. I stood where I was, looking ahead and side to side. As far as I could tell, I was in the middle of nothing, a bit of woods along the road with absolutely no indication of a home, a trail, a stream, or anything else except kudzu and rocks and trees.

Disappointed, I let myself out of the fence and walked all the way back down to my car. I decided that tonight, when Zeb Hooper took his walk again, I would be ready for him. I was going to track him in person this time and see which way he went once he reached this point.

Eager to keep moving, I got in my car, drove over the top of the mountain and just a little bit back down the other side. From what I remembered, there should be a street coming up on the left, a gravel road.

I turned onto it and drove a short ways, bouncing in the ruts and the mud. Afraid I might get stuck, I finally pulled over to the side and turned off the car. The rest I could do by foot. I got out and set off at a slight jog down the road, hoping I didn’t have far to go. Eventually, the house showed up on the left, a tiny run-down shack that definitely looked deserted.

Zeb Hooper’s boyhood home.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but my suspicion was that Enrique might’ve been murdered in that house. It was back behind the high block, and though the police had given it a cursory going-over during their initial search for Enrique, I wanted to take a second look. I had to wonder if someone had lured Enrique in there, killed him, and then brought the body back down the hill just a short ways to where a bin sat full of apples, waiting to be picked up by the truck. There, the killer or killers hid the dead body down in the apples, and later that same day it was moved into storage, no one the wiser.

I stepped from the road onto the overgrown lawn, but as soon as I did, three wild dogs flew out from under the porch and started racing toward me, yelping and snarling. Heart pounding, I moved backward, my mind racing for some sort of defense. I thought the dogs were being territorial and that they might stop when I reached the road. But they kept coming, teeth bared, barking furiously.

Finally, I turned and began running, the smallest and nastiest of them nearly latching onto my ankle as I went. I knew I couldn’t outrun them to my car, so I angled across the road to the woods on the other side and then simply jumped into the trees, grabbing for a branch and trying to swing myself up onto a limb. It didn’t work. My hands slipped and I fell— but I fell far and hard, because the ground slanted steeply down at the base of the trees. When I hit the ground, I rolled another ten feet down, grabbing for something to hold on to, ripping kudzu vines as I went.

I came to a stop at the base of a tree and did the only thing I could think of to do. I curled myself into a tight ball, arms around my head, and clenched my eyes shut against the inevitable. After a moment, when I realized no snarling mutts were sinking their sharp teeth into my body, I opened my eyes. Looking up toward the noise, I saw that the dogs were now perched on the edge of the precipice, barking and growling down at me but not attempting the steep drop-off to where I lay.

I screamed back at them, frozen in place, grateful when, slowly, one by one they gave up and went away.

Gingerly, I ran my shaking hands along my legs and then my arms, checking for injuries. Though I had some nasty cuts and scratches, none of them were bleeding very badly, and I didn’t think anything was broken. Knees wobbling, I slowly stood and got my bearings, brushing leaves and twigs and vines from my clothing. I turned and looked around to see that I was on the high block of Tinsdale Orchards, at the very back. I decided to call Harriet and have her pick me up at the road and drive me to my car. With those dogs still up there, I wasn’t taking any chances. Fortunately, Harriet was still at the cabin, just putting on her makeup, and she said she could come as soon as she got dressed.

I reached the highway before she did, so I found a big rock near the trees and sat, still feeling jumpy and growing more achy by the minute. As I waited there beside the road, I looked at the neatly tiered farmland in front of me, the endless rows of apple trees broken only by the sloping black roof of the small Su Casa building that jutted away from the hillside on the next tier down.

Su Casa.

Rubbing a sore elbow, I thought of all I knew about Su Casa. Like a bunch of tiny threads weaving through an ugly tapestry, it kept appearing throughout all of the bad things that had happened here. Snake—who was being duped into vandalism—worked at Su Casa. Zeb Hooper— who was probably laundering money—was doing it through Su Casa. Enrique—who was found dead in a box of apples—disappeared somewhere near Su Casa. I sat up, the hairs on my arms rising.

Enrique must’ve seen something
, I realized. Whatever Zeb Hooper was doing to bring in money, Enrique must’ve stumbled across it. His cryptic conversation with his son, Pepe, must’ve been about that, about what a man should do when he knows something he’s not supposed to know and can’t decide whether to tell or figure out whom to trust.

I stood and looked at the building below me, wondering what secrets it held inside. Did Zeb Hooper kill Enrique Morales? If so, what was it that had been worth killing for?

Harriet showed up then, pulling to a stop with her eyes wide.

“Callie!” she exclaimed. “What happened to you? You look like you went to the mat with a rabid squirrel—and the squirrel won!”

I got in and directed her to my car, explaining as we went. Feeling bruised and frustrated and itchy, I climbed into my vehicle, turned it around, and drove back home, theories bouncing around in my head like popcorn.

Once there, I called the Webbers’ house, and Dean answered the phone.

“I have a quick question about last fall,” I said to him. “I know when Enrique disappeared, a search was made of the orchard. Can you remember if anyone looked inside the Su Casa building?”

“They couldn’t look inside,” he said. “It wasn’t built yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it was under construction at the time. It was just going up.”

“Just going up? Su Casa isn’t a new charity, Dean. We’ve been going through several years of records for them.”

“No, the charity isn’t new, but the facility is. Su Casa used to operate as a separate business right out of the Hooper Construction building. But last year Butch talked Lowell Tinsdale into donating some land so that they could build a separate facility just for Su Casa. As I said, at the time when Enrique died, that building was just being built.”

“Can you recall how far along the construction was at that point? I mean, was it just a cement slab or had it been framed out or what?”

He hesitated for a moment.

“Oh, goodness, Callie, I don’t remember exactly. Hold on.”

I could hear him talking with Natalie about it, and then he came back on the line.

“From what we can recall,” he said, “the cement foundation was definitely in and a little of the framework was up, but not much. The materials were all there, though, because I can remember we spent some time checking behind stacks of plywood and bales of shingles and things when we were first searching for Enrique. Seems like the back wall was built already. The building sits right against the hill there, you know, so that whole section was done with cinder blocks, if I’m not mistaken. But the rest of it wasn’t up yet, except maybe for the main beams.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s what I needed to know.”

We got off of the phone, and I was glad I had a clearer picture now of the lay of the land when Enrique was killed. I decided to keep playing with the idea that he had seen or heard something he shouldn’t have, and that was why he was killed.

I climbed under the pounding water of a hot shower, thinking that it didn’t matter how many credible—or incredible—theories I could come up with. There was only one real truth about what had happened to the man. The hard part was digging through all of the lies to get to it.

Forty