CHAPTER NINE

Ella slouched against the desk in the cramped office she and Luca had commandeered at the Liberty Grove precinct. The A.C. sputtered asthmatically, and asbestos hung in the air like tinsel. How this joint hadn"t been condemned by the health department was anybody"s guess – probably some old-boy network at work, keeping the place limping along out of pure spite.

Home sweet home for the foreseeable future, but that was the job. It couldn"t always be Miami high-rises and L.A. mansions. Sometimes it was mold-choked backrooms and creaky small-town cop shops. Hunt monsters, put them in the ground, rinse and repeat.

A glamorous life. No wonder every cop she'd ever met had a drinking problem.

But hey, being holed up in here beat roasting her ass off in the midday sun while she waited for Luca to finish charming the locals. His pretty mug opened doors hers tended to slam in her face, so she left him to it.

Ella shook off that cheerful thought and turned her attention back to the task at hand – namely, plumbing the depths of Ricky Toledo"s closet for skeletons that might point to his untimely demise. According to her online research, the man had more smiling photos than a used car salesman, grip-and-grin shots with everyone from elementary school cherubs to blue-haired grannies. Kid knew how to work a crowd, she"d give him that much. But like any politician worth the polyester of his cheap suit, he was no doubt packing scandals like candy on Halloween. It was just a matter of prying up the right floorboards to find where the bodies were buried.

Her eyes started to cross from reading between the lines of Toledo"s social media pages, a study in calculated folksiness if she"d ever seen one. Childhood snaps of good ol" Ricky hoeing the back forty, palling around with ruddy-cheeked farmhands. Fast forward a decade and there he was at Yale, collar popped and oozing a lacrosse bro smarm so thick you could grease a skillet with it. Rubbing elbows with the future Masters of the Universe, no doubt learning the secret handshake and the best way to short a stock over single malt scotch.

A meteoric rise, the proverbial rocket strapped to his ass. One that made a brief pit stop in the public defender"s office – just long enough to snag some photo ops with weeping widows and wrongly accused – before vaulting into Adams County politics with all the subtlety and grace of a cannonball into a wading pool. A few terms on City Council, shaking the right hands and flashing those white teeth, and he was all set to Make Bristol Great Again.

At least until someone decided to cast their vote via murder.

Ella gnawed the end of her pen until the plastic creaked in warning. It didn"t add up. There were no overt threats in Toledo"s inbox, no rage-fueled screeds or garden-variety crackpot keyboard warriors. His credit card had no unusual charges, no red flags tripped with the banks. The mistress line item was conspicuously absent, though Ella had no doubt it existed in some tax-sheltered island haven"s ledger. He was a single man, no wife or children to speak of.

So who"d want a glad-handing empty suit like Ricky Toledo dead badly enough to go the concrete shoes route? And what message were they trying to send by dumping him in a town as dry as the Sahara?

The office door banged open and Luca sailed through with a six-pack of bottled water dangling from each hand like the world"s saddest barbells. He plunked them down on the desk.

‘What"s this, planning for the apocalypse?'

Luca snorted. ‘Might as well be. If you want coffee, you gotta use bottled water. I just got my ear chewed off by some woman for running the tap.'

Ella fought the urge to laugh. ‘You never been in a drought before?'

‘I thought they only happened in California.'

‘Apparently not. Did you find anything useful on the street?'

‘Loads, but it was the same old story every time. People around here think Toledo was as corrupt as it gets. Bribes, misusing funds, all that kind of stuff. And he was the one who championed this dam up in Bristol. Said it would reduce water costs down here, benefit the environment, even create jobs. '

Odd, Ella thought. That was the polar opposite of what she'd found online. ‘Anything solid?'

‘No. Just rumor and trust me, it happened kinda stuff.'

Ella fished a bottle from the collection and cracked the seal. It was tepid and tasted vaguely of nickels, but it beat the alternative.

‘Alright, let's go through it one more time. Just so we"re on the same page.'

Luca pushed a hand through his hair, a few strands falling artfully over his forehead. Damn him and his effortless coif.

‘Ricky Toledo,' he said, ticking off the points on fingers. ‘Big fish in a small pond. Golden boy of Bristol with his eye on a senate seat.'

Ella nodded, digging a finger into her temple where a headache was starting to pound. ‘He's from Bristol. That's his constituency. Only he winds up in a dead cornfield fifteen miles south in Liberty Grove – which, by the way, is a misnomer if I"ve ever heard one.'

‘Nothing free about it,' Luca agreed. ‘Especially not the water, apparently. That dam upriver"s choking them out.'

She hummed, pieces clicking together in the jigsaw of her brain. ‘So we"ve got a town full of pissed off farmers, a politician with more slime than spine, and a whole lot of bad blood between them. Recipe for murder soup.'

‘You thinking this was some kind of revenge kill? Locals making an example out of the guy who screwed them?'

It tracked. Rage and desperation made for one hell of a toxic cocktail. And God knows these folks had reason enough to want Toledo to suffer.

But something about it didn"t sit right. A niggling little itch at the back of her brain, a sense of a picture not quite in focus.

‘Could be,' she allowed. ‘But it feels...I dunno. Too easy? I mean, drowning a man and dumping his body sends a message for sure. But why not just cap him and call it a day? Why go to all the trouble of, dosing him, snatching him, watching him drown and then dumping him out here?'

‘Did you find anything out about him online?' Luca asked. ‘Any thongs in his dirty laundry?'

She was too professional to throw her pen at him, but Lord, was it tempting. ‘No. A few posts about him being a grade-A scumbag, but plenty of the opposite too. Tons of people singing his praises, especially up in Bristol.'

‘Peachy.'

She pushed away from the desk with a growl, pacing to the grimy window and back again. Three steps each way, like a chicken scratching out its coop. Someone had painted the glass with whitewash years ago, and no one had bothered to scrape it off. Not much of a view even if she could see through it, she reckoned. Just another back alley in a dehydrating town.

Times like this she wished she smoked. Or drank heavily. Or had some unhealthy addiction she could cling to for hope.

But all she had was a partner who kept slanting her looks when he thought she wouldn"t notice, some Mayberry reject"s freeze-dried coffee crystals, and a dead politician nobody seemed to give two shits about beyond how photogenic he"d be in his casket.

Ella blew out a breath and planted her hands on the desk, leaning over the scattering of papers and gory eight-by-tens like a general surveying a war map.

‘Okay, let"s think this through. Toledo turns up dead fifteen miles from home. We don't know where he was when his killer abducted him, or where he was killed, and the water in his lungs isn't from any river or lake or reservoir.'

‘Right.' Luca scooted his chair closer to the desk. He picked up a crime scene photo and tilted it to the light. ‘Doc says it"s from stagnant H2O, the kind you find in places where water ain"t flowing too good.'

‘That means our killer would"ve needed a place to carry out his little passion play. Somewhere private, isolated. With a water source rank enough to cling to Ricky like eau de stagnant.'

‘Agreed. No way that kind of odor comes from anything but sitting water.'

‘So, a vat? A tank?'

Ella thought of Elisa Lam, the young tourist who'd ended up in a hotel water tank about a decade ago. When the authorities pulled her out, apparently she smelled like absolute hell.

‘How many of those are gonna be in a place like this?'

Fair point. Liberty Grove wasn"t exactly an industrial hub. A bunch of farms, a feed store, a truly tragic little strip that passed for downtown. Unless their killer was hiding out in some prepper"s bunker, his choices were limited.

Luca began hammering away at his laptop. Ella turned back to the whitewashed window and lost herself in the stain. She replayed the route into town, the dusty roads and wilting fields. The occasional glint of tin, the hulked-out silhouette of a grain silo. The grimy windows of a warehouse long abandoned, an empty parking lot devouring itself in brittle weeds and some kind of graveyard for trains.

Minutes passed, ticked by on the water-stained wall clock above. Ella paced, too amped to sit. Gnawing on her thumbnail as she looped the small room, thoughts racing like greyhounds after a rabbit.

Outside the grimy windows, the dusty streets of Liberty Grove baked under a merciless sun. Ella made out a bleak little grid of storefronts and squat houses, as withered as the folks who scraped by there. It was the kind of place people ended up, not where they escaped to. An hour to the east was the carbon copy town of Abingdon, the place Ella swore she'd never die in.

For a long moment, the only sound was Luca clacking on his keyboard. But then he jolted upright like he'd been struck with a cattle prod.

‘Hold the phone, partner. I think we might be thinking too deeply about this.'

Ella swiveled to face him. ‘Do tell.'

‘You checked Toledo's home life, right?'

‘Of course. Single, unmarried, no kids. Lived alone.'

Luca spun his laptop to face her and tapped the screen. It was a satellite view of something. An odd shape yawned in full-color display, all turquoise water and flagstone lip.

She hustled over and took a closer look. The side panel read: 152 Hemlock Lane Bristol, VA 24201.

‘What am I looking at?'

‘You're looking at a clapboard colonial that screams tax evasion, but more importantly, you're looking at Ricky Toledo's house.'

Ella squinted, then suddenly the bottom dropped out of her stomach. It couldn"t be. It was too easy, too obvious. And yet there it was in lurid technicolor, begging her to investigate it in the flesh.

It was a beautiful home on the outskirts of Bristol.

And it had one hell of a swimming pool.