Chapter Sixteen
The Beans’ trailer was a dingy white single-wide, its lawn littered with gutted cars and trucks. It gave Miah chills to pull up along the edge of this road, to park mere yards or feet from where he had in the early hours of that morning in late February. From the back of a cruiser, he’d watched the sky cycle from indigo to purple to red to orange, the sunrise all the more vivid for the smoke still hazing the sky to the east, above the range. He tried to push it from his mind, the way Lorna Bean probably had to do whenever her attention wandered to the spot where Miah had tackled her bleeding husband to the dirt, or the stretch of road where he’d been loaded into an ambulance not long after. If she’d seen any of it.
“Déjà fucking vu,” Casey muttered as they crossed the lawn together.
“And how.”
“You cool with this?”
“A hundred percent.”
“You lead. Gimme a look if you want me to jump in.”
Miah nodded, knowing he’d do exactly that; Casey was an idiot in a lot of ways, but a genius in some other, very sketchy ones. Where Miah was out of his depth, Casey could swim like a goddamn pearl diver.
Miah gave the bell beside the door a ring. Hearing nothing, he rapped on the wood.
“Hang on,” came a female voice from inside.
He heard footsteps, then silence. There was a peephole, and he bet she was frozen right there, two feet from him with a door in the middle, no clue what to do.
“It’s Jeremiah Church,” he called. “I’ve just got a quick question for you, Lorna. I don’t mean any harm.”
A long, long pause, and just as Miah was about to panic, the door swung in with a hiss. She looked drawn, beyond cautious. “Hello.”
“Hi. This is my friend Casey,” he said, nodding over his shoulder. “Could we come in a minute?”
“My daughter’s napping.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Could you step out here a minute, then?”
Another pause, her gaze moving between the two of them, but finally she slipped out, along with the strong scent of cigarettes, shutting the door behind her. Miah moved to stand on the front walk with Casey.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I’m trying to understand what happened,” Miah said. “Who it was who got my father and your husband killed.”
“Ain’t that the cops’ job?”
“Should be,” he said, and smiled tightly, grimly. “I’m afraid I’ve lost some faith in the authorities of late.”
“Ain’t you friends with one of them? That lady cop?”
Miah hoped his face wasn’t coloring, and that Casey wasn’t just behind him, eyebrows hitched, curiosity piqued. “She’s nothing to do with the investigation. That’s all down to the detectives. And between you and me, I’m starting to think they’re either lazy or incompetent. You of all people could understand my wanting answers, even if I have to seek them out myself.”
She nodded. “I could. But what do you want from me?”
Miah kept his voice low, knowing she wouldn’t want any neighbors overhearing this conversation. And neither did he. “Do you know how much they promised Chris to do the job?”
“Six grand.”
Miah nodded, and glanced to Casey, unsure what this amount might say about the mastermind. He looked back to Lorna. “I’m guessing you never saw a dime of it.”
Her face went strange, as though it had turned to stone.
“Lorna?”
“We saw some. They paid him half up front. But the rest, no.” Suddenly that stoniness was gone, her lip quivering, nose bright pink. She was on the verge of tears.
“It’s okay,” Miah said. “I’ve got no judgments about the money. We’re just trying to learn whatever we can about who hired him, is all.”
Her voice was thick now, emotion like a physical presence in her throat. “I never wanted it. Not when it was for arson, and not once we knew what they were really after. I respected your father—your whole family. Your dad and me were the only ones with any faith in Chris. Probably too much, but anyhow, I never wanted that money. I wanted Chris to keep his nose clean—wanted him to get clean. Maybe even get his old job back someday.”
Miah nodded again. He looked to Casey, unsure where this line of questioning was meant to lead.
“Did Chris spend it all?” Casey asked.
She shook her head. “No. He gave it to me. He knew not to trust himself with that much. He was determined that money was for household stuff—for the bills, and to finally get our car insurance back.”
“You remember much about it?” Casey asked. “Like, if it was in an envelope, what denominations of bills, anything.”
She went cool and wooden again.
“What, Lorna?” Miah asked softly.
“I ain’t spent it. I . . . I couldn’t bring myself to give it to the police, neither. You gotta understand, I don’t even make three grand in a year, on my own—”
“It’s okay,” Miah said again. “We’re not judging you for it.”
“You still have it?” Casey asked, looking dumbstruck.
She nodded, looking nervous now.
“We need to see it,” he said. “I swear to Christ, you can keep every fucking penny, but you’ve got to let us just look at the money.”
“Why?”
He crossed his arms officiously. “I’m not proud to tell you I’ve fielded a good number of cash transactions in my past, and a certain percentage of them weren’t what you’d call legal. Those bills could tell us a lot about whoever got your husband killed. A lot.”
She didn’t look sold. Miah didn’t want to push, to scare her, but he was so desperate for any kind of progress, he let Casey drive.
“Is it inside?” Casey asked.
She paused, and in that tiny eternity Miah’s hopes sank down to the parched grass.
Casey asked, “Is it in the bank?”
She cracked a little smile, surprising Miah. “You think I got a fucking bank account?”
“Where?” Miah asked, and he let her hear the pain in his voice, how hurting he was for any scrap of a lead.
She huffed a silent sigh, then glanced to the side of the house. “Follow me. But I’ll tell you right now, it ain’t gonna be where it is now for long, you understand? I hate that money, but if my daughter comes down sick tomorrow, I won’t hesitate to use it.”
Miah nodded. “I don’t care about the money. I just want to know what my sketchy-ass friend here makes of it.”
“Hey.”
Another tight little smile from Lorna. “Fine.” She led them to a sun-bleached old shed, a cheap vinyl number whose door was hanging by one plastic hinge. Miah and Casey waited a few feet away, and she returned shortly holding an oversize coffee can.
“Just like Vince,” Casey murmured. His brother kept his bookmaking profits in coffee cans, secreted around the bike garage.
“Inside,” she said, heading back around front. “Wake my daughter and there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Understood.”
They followed her into the little trailer home, and she walked to a nearby coffee table and sat on a wicker rocker. She peeled away the lid and began fishing out fistfuls of rusty old bolts and nuts and washers, piling them on the table’s scuffed wood.
Miah and Casey stayed standing. Miah’s heart was hammering. He still didn’t understand what Casey expected to learn from all this, but he could sense excitement rising in the man, like the way the air hummed when you walked under the massive power lines out by the foothills.
Lorna drew a manila envelope from the can, folded into quarters. She flattened it on the table and undid the little clasp, then withdrew a small roll of bills.
“May I?” Casey asked, and with obvious hesitation, she handed it over.
He took a seat on the arm of a couch and slipped off the rubber band, flipping through the stash. “Okay, this is great.”
“What is?” Miah asked.
“All hundreds, and all fucking crisp as shit.”
“So?” Lorna asked.
“This money’s from a bank. From a teller, not an ATM, probably—not many ATMs give you hundreds.”
“So?” Miah echoed.
“So this is a pro of some kind. These aren’t twenties and fifties all wadded up and creased from somebody’s dresser or pocket. Somebody—somebody with an account—marched into a bank and took this money out. And if they’ve got an account, they’ve got a motherfucking name.”
The importance of this struck Miah like a wrecking ball. “Fucking hell.”
“When did they give this to Chris?” Casey asked Lorna.
“I’m not sure . . . Not too long before the fire. A day or two, three, tops.”
“The detectives know you have this?”
She shook her head. “They asked if Chris ever got paid, and I told them . . . I lied. I told them he had been, but that Chris kept it. You got to understand, I couldn’t have them thinking I had it! My daughter needs me—”
Casey cut her off. “It’s cool. Did you tell them you saw the money yourself?”
She frowned. “I don’t remember. I don’t think they asked.”
“The detectives could actually use this,” Miah said, thinking aloud. “They could narrow down when the money was taken out, get some kind of subpoena to find out who made cash withdrawals of three grand in the county around that same time.”
Casey nodded, but Lorna shot to her feet. “You didn’t say nothin’ about gettin’ me tangled up with no cops. I been questioned more times than I can count as it is—”
“It’s to find out who got Chris killed,” Miah said. “Hell, if they want to confiscate the money, I’ll pay you back myself.”
But Casey was shaking his head. “Might not even need to. Your husband was an addict,” he said. “Nobody’d be shocked if he blew it all on drugs the next day, right?”
She didn’t reply, looking ten shades of pissed off.
“You could just tell the detectives you saw the money. Tell them you didn’t even know what it was for, or whatever corroborates any story you told them in the first place. Just tell them how much it was, when it showed up, tell them the bills were all hundreds, and brand-new. That’s all they’d need to know.”
“They got no reason to believe me.”
“Sure they do,” Miah said. “They’ve produced fuck-all breakthroughs in this case. If they weren’t willing to listen, they’d be morons.”
“Or as crooked as whatever cocksucker made this withdrawal,” Casey said, giving the bills a little flap before tossing them in a curly stack onto the table.
Miah wasn’t ready to embrace the paranoia required to imagine the investigators were corrupt, but Lorna clearly was.
“Amen,” she said. She slid the money back inside its envelope and folded it, held it tightly in her lap, looking pensive.
From elsewhere in the house came a small voice, a plaintive, “Momma.”
“Shit,” she hissed, looking all around.
“Thanks very much, Lorna,” Miah said. “We’ll leave you be.”
She shooed them with her hands, but Casey cut in. “Whatever you do,” he told her, “don’t get cold feet. Miah, how much will you pay Lorna if she follows through and talks to the cops?”
He considered it, drawing a blank. “How much could you use?” he asked her.
She looked dumbfounded, then her daughter’s call yanked her back into reality. “The other three grand,” she blurted.
Miah nodded. “You’ll get it, soon as I hear you’ve spoken to them.”
Lorna cast them each a wild-eyed glance and disappeared down the hall.
They let themselves out and Miah stared at Casey as they walked to the bikes. “You’re some kind of fucking smart when you feel like it,” he said, awed.
Casey shrugged. “I have my uses.”
Miah reached out and slugged him one on the arm, at a loss for words to adequately express his shock and excitement and gratitude. Then another, another, until they were laughing and fake fighting, and ultimately hugging like a couple of idiots at the edge of the road. Miah finally shoved Casey away, tempering his nerves and hope even as both were pumping through him, adrenaline times ten.
Casey fished his keys out of his pocket. “She said you got a friend in the BCSD. A lady-friend.”
“Deputy Ritchey. She’s been good to me and my mom since the fire. She was there when Lorna dropped off that letter.”
“Oh, I know who you mean. She’s sexy, right?”
He felt heat chasing up his neck into his cheeks. “She’s a good-looking woman.”
“Tell her what we found out.”
Miah felt sweat break out under his arms, nothing to do with the heat. But as he considered Casey’s proposal, he calmed. Nicki didn’t need to know a thing about him going to see any drug dealers. She might not be impressed that he went to pester Lorna, but he bet she’d let it go, knowing what a wreck he was.
“I’ll tell her everything, minus the fact that Lorna’s still got the money,” Miah allowed.
Casey shot him a look. “Fuck that. Tell her every goddamn thing. Minus the fact that I was ever here, maybe.”
Miah frowned. “I’m not throwing Lorna under the bus. She stuck her neck out, coming to me in the first place.”
Casey gaped. “She was fucking the man who killed your dad.”
“She was married to an addict, and she’s the mother of his child—a man who got in over his head and made the worst mistake imaginable. And paid with his life.”
“You’re way too fucking forgiving.”
Miah rankled inside, then spent a second unpacking Casey’s words.
No. Forgiveness didn’t make him weak or a fool. And he didn’t think his was misplaced where this family was concerned. If he’d been in Chris’s position, trapped, forced to choose between hurting someone or letting someone else hurt his mother or one of his friends . . .
“I’m forgiving of Bean . . . Maybe. In time. Of the person who hired him . . . ?” No goddamn chance. Ever. “I’m not gonna fuck Lorna over—not unless she skips town. If her conscience gets the better of her and she wants to tell them she held on to the blood money, that’s her choice.”
Casey rolled his eyes. “That’s your choice. But fine. Tell your cop friend to tell the detectives everything else we found out. If Lorna drags her feet, they could come out and find her first.”
“I will.”
“And for fuck’s sake, leave me out of it,” Casey reiterated.
Miah snorted. “Too late.”
“You owe me a beer and a shot.”
“I owe you more than that . . . Fucking genius,” he muttered, straddling his seat.
“What was that?” Casey asked, his grin cocky.
Miah didn’t reply, just started his bike, feeling too many good things to trust.