A.L. looked at Rena. He was pretty sure she wasn’t breathing.
Then the door was halfway up. Dark inside. They flipped on their flashlights.
Five more inches.
“Jesus,” Rena whispered.
Indeed.
“What the fuck is this?” A.L. asked.
Rena had no words.
A.L. took two steps into the garage. Had to stop there. Because there was a zebra in his way. A stuffed one, that is.
And the zebra had friends. Lions and tigers and bears. Oh my. And on the shelves that lined two walls, there were possums and squirrels and, yep, that was a hawk. She looked at A.L.
“Close your mouth,” she said softly. She found a light switch and flipped it.
He turned to look at her. “Take a good look around.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?” she asked incredulously. “Take a good look around,” she repeated.
“I don’t know what else to say,” he said.
“You think Troy did these himself?” Rena asked. She was moving carefully among the animals, making sure that there was no five-year-old child hidden somewhere. “That he’s a taxidermist?”
“I don’t know. Some of these seem pretty old,” he said. “Like this one,” he said, pointing at a stuffed monkey that looked as if it had seen better days. Better dead days, that is.
“Right,” she said. “You think he forgot about this place or is this a secret he’s trying to hide?”
“Leah never said anything about it, either.”
“Maybe she’s embarrassed. Or maybe she doesn’t know.” Rena paused. “I’m not going to be the one to tell her,” she added.
“Pete Seoul deliberately led us here,” A.L. said.
“Yeah, that’s interesting,” Rena said. “I guess it’s possible that he knew about the storage shed but never had the opportunity to get a glimpse inside. Or he had and he wanted us to know that Troy Whitman had an unusual...habit, collection, fetish... Hell, I don’t know the right word.”
“When I talked to Troy, he made it sound like he and Davy, Cory and Pete didn’t just work together but they were good friends. I sort of got that feeling from Davy, although I think he’s just a friendly type. I definitely didn’t get that feeling from Cory or Pete.”
“Agree. Is this more of what we saw between Troy and his parents? He either can’t help but paint a rosy picture or he’s obtuse to the way things really are.”
“Whatever, we’re done here.”
They flipped the light off, stepped outside the garage and A.L. closed the door. They walked back to the truck, where the owner still sat.
“Everything okay?” the man asked.
“Yeah. Fine,” A.L. said.
“Whew. That’s a relief. I like Troy Whitman and I’ve been feeling real bad for that family. My wife and I made a donation to the fund. We were happy to do it. We got three kids of our own. Just wanted to do something to help, you know.”
“Thanks for meeting us here,” Rena said. They got into A.L.’s vehicle and drove off. “You know, in the movies, after the bad guy kills somebody, they do a flashback to when he was a kid and he killed the neighbor’s cats. That isn’t this, is it?”
A.L. didn’t answer.
“I saw a story once about a guy who collected toenail clippings. That would be even odder, right?” Rena said.
Now A.L. gave her a sideways glance.
“I’m rambling, I know,” she said. “That was just so...odd. I’ll be quiet now.” She sat for a minute. “I don’t like it that Davy Grace has a connection to Dover. That he was, in fact, in Dover the day that Emma went missing. And that he spent substantial time in Dover.”
“Agree,” A.L. said.
“I’m going to follow up on the uncle’s obituary.”
“I’m going to go talk to Troy and get an explanation of where he was between 7:08, when Elaine pulled away, and roughly 9:00 when he arrived at work.”
“Maybe he was at the casino, filming Leah who was filming Elaine,” Rena said.
“That would be fucked up, wouldn’t it?” A.L. said, shaking his head. “After that, I think I’d better go see Barrett and Gi-Gi Thompson.”
“I wonder if Gi-Gi is short for something.”
“I’ll make sure to ask her,” A.L. said.
* * *
Troy was no longer in the garage. He was in the basement. Leah was in bed. A.L. got all this from a young FBI agent who was playing solitaire on his computer at the dining table.
Everybody filling in hours in their own way.
A.L. opened the basement door and walked downstairs. He saw Troy stretched out on an old leather recliner, a TV remote in one hand and what looked to be a cocktail in the other. He was flipping through channels.
A.L. knocked on the wall. Troy looked over his shoulder. “News?” he asked, putting his footrest down.
A.L. shook his head. “Sorry, no.” Without invitation, he sat on the couch. “Have a minute?”
“Yeah,” Troy said, shutting off the television. “I wasn’t watching anything. Can’t concentrate.”
A.L. was reminded of something that Doug Franklin had said about Corrine Antler’s parents. That in a week they’d aged about ten years. It had been about half that for Troy Whitman but he looked well on his way.
His eyes were dark, his hair was unkempt, and it looked as if he was sleeping in his clothes. “Did you hear,” he asked, “that one of the drones thought they had something today?”
A.L. had. One of the heat-seeking drones had identified an object in a barn. It had been promptly investigated. It had been a child, just two years older than Emma, watching over her dog that was having puppies.
“Guess the good news is that they found something that was there,” Troy said.
“Right,” A.L. said. “Nobody has given up hope.”
Troy shook his head. “I think Leah has. She took some pills to go to sleep. Said she just can’t stand this anymore. That’s why I’m here and not out searching. I figured somebody needed to be here for the phone.”
A.L. glanced at the empty glass. “Got to stay sober for that,” he said.
“Stopped at two,” Troy said. “When I really wanted the whole fucking bottle.” He stared at A.L. “You got kids?”