Chapter 24
CHAPTER 24
"I 'm assuming you didn't kill him," I said to Pike for lack of anything more intelligent to say. I remembered my introduction to these fields when I'd stumbled into them trying to leave Rocky Start and been shot at by the Weed Brothers, or at least by Reggie. One day they're pointing a gun at you, the next they're saving your ass from drowning, and then there's a dead body in their field of product. "What about the tripwire?"
"That's why I came out here." Pike pointed at a thin green wire set at ankle level that was stretched between two trees. It extended all the way around the fields. "It went off forty-five minutes ago."
"Sid's been out there longer than that," I said, noting the frost on the body. He'd died hours ago given how cold the body would have to be for that.
"Yeah," Pike said. "Someone tripped the alarm deliberately to make sure the body was found. Otherwise, he'd have rotted out here until the spring, or more likely been dragged off by the animals if they could stomach him. We were done with the fields."
"So someone is sending another message, and it's directed at us since they left him here. Somebody wants us to know . . . something."
"Yeah," Pike said. "That sign on his chest? Sid's the one who put that in the window of Melissa's place."
"Someone didn't think it was funny," I said.
"Nobody thought it was funny. Sticking it on his body was vengeful."
We both heard a low hum, like a flying saucer coming in for a landing, but when we turned, it was just Luke in his high-tech, electric 1993 Town and Country minivan. He called the dull tan minivan with wood paneling a "classic." I'd learned to not speak ill of it. The front end was banged up from when I'd crashed it into the front of Oddities. Another reason for me not to make any snarky comments. Besides the fact that Luke could pound me into the ground like a tent peg if he desired.
Luke parked next to the Pathfinder and walked over. Pike simply pointed. Luke looked and then shook his head. "Why'd you call me?"
"I'm too old to be hauling bodies around," Pike said, and neither of us believed him. He was trying hard to link Luke and me as a team, like he had been teamed with Ozzie. Luke and Max, the Replacements, coming in off the bench.
"You guys just been staring at it, waiting for me?" Luke asked.
"I didn't know Pike had texted you," I said. "I just got here. Do two deaths make it a serial killer?"
Pike shrugged.
"Well, let's see how Sid was ushered off this mortal coil," I said, taking a step over the tripwire.
"Hold on." Luke was scanning the field.
"What are you looking for?" Pike asked.
"Anything," Luke said. "Footprints. Whatever."
"Since when did you become Davy Crockett?" Pike groused.
"Actually," I said, "Luke went to Malaysian tracking school once upon a time. It's run by headhunters."
"Former headhunters," Luke corrected. "As far as we knew. What they did after school hours was their own business." He frowned. "I did pass on the big feast they had after graduation."
Pike looked at me, then Luke, trying to decide if we were trying to pull one over on him. Luke stepped over the wire and moved toward the body, doing side-to-side sweeps.
Pike started to follow, but I told him, "Wait."
Luke got to the body, then began to spiral out from it, checking the ground carefully, once or twice getting on his knees. He finally made it back to us. It took a half hour, by which time Pike and I were almost as cold as Sid.
"Well?" Pike said.
"White male," Luke reported, "between thirty-two and thirty-five, five foot-nine, brown hair, brown eyes, and walks with a limp."
Pike blinked.
Luke added. "Had waffles for breakfast."
Pike stared at Luke for a moment, then said, "Fuck you."
"All I know is whoever carried the body out there obscured their tracks enough to not give me anything." Luke pointed. "They parked here, so we wiped out any tire tracks, not that there's much you can do with those anyway since we don't have that kind of forensics available to us. Whoever it was carried the body straight to that tree. Set it down. Posed him. That's all I've got."
"So much for the headhunters," Pike muttered. "Let's go."
Pike and Luke were at my side as we went up to the corpse. I knelt on one side while Pike did the other and Luke towered over us.
"Is that cocaine?" Luke asked about the white powder.
I know in the movies and cop shows someone wets their finger and takes a dab and tastes it, but that's a good way to die of poisoning. "Looks like it might be." I looked at Pike. "Was Sid a dealer?"
"Just my medicinal marijuana," Pike said. "Lots of people with PTSD in town."
I'd smelled quite a bit of that medicine being smoked during Ozzie's celebration, but cocaine was on a different level.
"No obvious knife or bullet wounds," Luke said, examining the body.
"Someone's fucking with us," Pike said. "And now we have another problem. Sid was our backup coroner."
"Does it really matter how he died?" I asked. It wasn't like we were true detectives. "I don't think anyone is going to miss him."
Luke disagreed. "That little redhead who used to show up every couple of weeks. Pretty sure she spent the night occasionally. She called him Sidsie." Luke shook his head. "We're gonna need another coroner."
Priorities.
I looked at Sid, as weird in death as he had been in life, with evidently an even weirder girlfriend. "You think somebody's taking out coroners? That's good news, then. We only had two. The killer is done."
"I don't think this person is done," Pike said.
"Me neither," Luke contributed.
Neither did I, but they could have been more supportive of my hopes and dreams. "So who are our suspects?" I asked.
"Always depends on the motive," Luke said. "He was a sleazy drunk, and apparently a drug dealer, but that's not enough motive." He looked at me. "He was after Rose pretty hard."
"I'm pretty sure Melissa wasn't after Rose," I said. "I've never seen her in Oddities. Different motive, maybe."
"Maybe Geoffrey took Melissa out to cut the competition," Luke said. "He's been mooning after Rose for years."
We all three thought about Geoffrey and his headphones, marching to the beat of a different drummer, removing Melissa and Sid with prejudice.
"I thought he wasn't a player," I said.
"He wasn't," Pike said. "Doesn't mean he doesn't kill."
"We can put him on the list," I said doubtfully. "But this isn't the work of an amateur."
"There's also Lionel after her," Pike said. "And Harvey. And Oxley Crothers. And I think Barry's interested. If it's to get Rose and her money, the list is pretty long."
"Harvey?" Luke asked?
I looked back over the field at Sid's body. "I really liked Sid for this."
Luke slapped me on the back. "Let it go, Max. Moving on."
Pike nodded. "I want him out of my field. Let's take him to his basement."
So for the second time, Luke and I helped Pike move a body.