Grady pointed at the fence, with its strips of sheet metal, chicken wire, and sticks of rebar pounded around the edges. “One of the dogs is a digger?” he guessed.
“Two of them are, and goddamn them both.”
When Grady reached the small porch, they shook hands.
“This one’s smart enough to dig like a Virginia coal miner but too dumb to stay out of the road. Got a death wish, he does.”
“Well, he’s a cute little guy.”
“They’re all assholes, but they’re my assholes.”
An army of ankle-high canines spilled out of the house, swarmed Grady’s feet like furry piranhas, and followed both men back inside—where they thoroughly sniffed the newcomer, deemed him harmless, and immediately began fighting over whose belly he’d pet first.
Whiteside said, “Have a seat, man. Can I get you a drink? I mean a soda or something, since I know you’re still on duty.”
“I’m on my lunch break, but no, thanks. I can’t stay long—I just wanted to touch base.”
“About an old case, you said. The one with that kid, dead in the back seat of his own car, at the bottom of the reservoir.”
“Tod Sandoval. He wasn’t exactly a kid, but he was young. Barely thirty when it happened. I think there might be a connection between his case and another one I worked a year or two ago.”
“Some lead popped up, and now it’s got you looking even further back?”
“Something like that, combined with a real strong feeling,” Grady said, not clarifying that the feeling belonged to someone else. “I’ve read through the files but wondered if you might have any insight you feel like adding to the stack. Anything at all: any impressions you might’ve gotten that were too vague to write down, or connections that felt like connections but didn’t—I don’t know—connect.”
Whiteside nodded sagely. “That was a weird one, I tell you what. And God Almighty, the Sandoval widow.”
“His widow? I didn’t think he was married…”
“Maybe not. You got a word for a surviving girlfriend, because I don’t. I remember her clear as day: a flaky, feisty brunette who couldn’t keep her voice down and had real strong opinions about every goddamn thing, if you know what I mean.”
Grady badly wanted to laugh, agree, and high-five the man—but he tamped it down. “Oh, I’ve met her. She’s something else.”
“Something else—that’s putting it mildly. Whole lot of personality, that’s what my late wife would’ve said. Crazy as a soup sandwich, that’s how I’d put it. I know she’d just lost her husband, but—”
“Fiancé.”
“Whatever. It was tragic, that’s for sure, but woo boy howdy. That girl could raise hell and make it wish it’d never shown up.”
Grady grinned, despite the subject. “She’d lost someone she loved.”
“Just a kid, that one. Plenty of other fish in the sea, and all. She’d only been with the guy a couple of years. How well could she have even known him?”
That wasn’t a fight Grady was willing to pick, so he gently redirected. “Long enough to care that he was gone, but there’s nothing I can do about that—except find whoever killed him. I know the official word was that it must be a carjacking gone bad, however…”
“However”—Whiteside picked up the thread—“there were a dozen little things that didn’t fit the scenario. Why was the guy in the back of his car? What was with the woman they found downstream? At first, I thought there was no way the cases were connected. Grim coincidence, that’s all it was—finding two bodies in the water, a week apart, in different places. We’d found her car a couple of miles away; it looked like she’d had a minor wreck and got out to go look for help. Then ballistics came back, and I had to throw the coincidence out the window. Even if they didn’t know each other, even if they never met, alive or dead, the same gun definitely killed them both.”
“Yeah, I’m having that same problem,” Grady admitted.
The old detective sank deeper into his easy chair. A second and third dog leaped into his lap, joining the one he still held in the crook of his arm like a loaf of bread. “There was no evidence that the two ever so much as shared a bus. All I could figure is that the intended victim was one of them—and the other got caught up in the murder by accident.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?”
“A bad case of it, for sure.”
“But the question is… which one?”
Whiteside’s big round head bobbed up and down. The ambient light flashed off the top of his crown, which was quite bald and rather shiny. His remaining hair, still cropped close in traditional cop style, was mostly white with streaks of the same yellow as an old nicotine stain. “I went back and forth on that. Some days, I was sure it was the guy. Others, I was sure it was the girl.”
“Did anything leave you leaning one way or another?”
Thoughtfully, he said, “If you held a gun to my head and forced me to pick, I’d say that the girl was the original target. She was young and reasonably attractive, if you don’t mind them a little thick. She’d had trouble with a boyfriend, once upon a time, but he didn’t pan out.”
“Right, he was in Afghanistan, wasn’t he?”
“Uh-huh. His CO confirmed that he was deployed a few thousand miles away when she died, so we could safely cross his ass off the suspect list. But if she had a problem with one guy, she might’ve had a problem with another one, that’s my thinking. She might not have even known it, or known the full extent of it. Some of those creepers hide it real well, right up until they don’t—and things go south.”
“So all things being equal, you think it’s more likely that Amanda had somebody out to get her.”
“Neither victim had any known, current problem people in their lives. It was either someone with a very quiet grudge, or a totally random act of violence that caught up two strangers and a 2007 Toyota Corolla.”
“Anything ever turn up at work? For either one of them?”
“Nah. Sandoval was a bottom-rung Amazon employee, ticking boxes and pulling levers, and everyone seemed to like him. The worst thing a coworker had to say about him was that he was too earnest and too quick to take on extra tasks.”
“Made other employees at the same level look bad?”
“Not that bad. Nobody was on the verge of getting fired, and he wasn’t up for any promotions in competition with anyone else. I know, because I checked. And as for Crombie, she was fresh off her master’s degree in accounting. She’d only been working at her job for a few months, and everyone seemed to think she was great at it. Her boss said she was the best damn accountant he’d ever had.”
“Hmm,” said Grady. “Sometimes accountants find things they aren’t meant to, especially if they’re extra good at their jobs.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t chase that angle too hard. The company folded, like I said. I talked to her old boss again after that, it was a guy… what was his name… Elliot something.”
It was Craig Elliot, but Grady didn’t want to contradict him while he was on a roll. “I’ll look him up when I get back to town.”