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“So you think he staged his own death?” I asked.
CHAPTER
33
THE OLD DETECTIVE TIPPED his beer my way, said, “Thirteen months after he killed Little Boar. Took almost that long to get the estate through probate and establish that Thierry had a legal right to sell the land. But it went through and he turned the land over, got his money, bought a brand-new Ford pickup, and started partying hard.”
The Crossfield Mining Company gave Thierry a month to sell the hogs and clear off the property. Two nights before they were set to bulldoze the pig farm, Baby Boar was seen drunk in town. Later that same night, around three a.m., someone traveling on Route 20 North spotted a fire burning up high on the ridge above Hog Hollow.
Jones gestured through the windshield toward the cliff. “Back then there was no guardrail here. Carrying a full tank of gas and going better than sixty by the trajectory, Thierry’s new truck dropped two hundred and twenty-two feet and exploded in a fireball when it collided with a big boulder down there on the flat. It was a dry year and it lit the whole damn woods down there on fire, took them two days to put out the flames.”
“Was there a body?” I asked.
“Squished pieces of one burned black as charcoal,” Jones replied. “We recovered enough to say he was male, and that was about it. The fire that took the truck was incredibly hot, melted the steel, so hot the fire marshal thought there might have been a second accelerant on board, like naphtha or something. But we never found evidence of it. Then again, our chemical forensics weren’t exactly first class back then.”
I nodded. Naphtha was what was burned in camping stoves. It was extraordinarily combustible stuff. A truck soaked in naphtha that was also carrying a full tank of gasoline would have created an incredible explosion.
“How’d you identify Thierry?”
“Couldn’t,” the old detective said. “Little Boar believed in dentists less than in schools. Thierry had never been to a dentist in his life, and there was no such thing as DNA testing back then. Everyone just assumed it was him. Happened on the Mulch road in a Mulch truck with a male driver. Must have been a Mulch at the wheel.”
“But you didn’t think that added up?”
Jones shook his head. “No, I think he killed someone else, a transient or a hitchhiker, put him in the truck, and sent it flying off the cliff.”
The old detective started to cough then, one of those long hacking sessions that shook his entire body. When he finally calmed, he said weakly, “I think we better start back, Dr. Cross. My daughter will be all shook up I’m not there when she comes for dinner.”
“We’ll get you back in time,” I said and started the car.
One of those huge yellow ore trucks was climbing the last grade out of Hog Hollow, but I had plenty of room to pull out in front of it and start down the windy, pitted road to the state highway. The washboard was worse heading downhill because of all those massive trucks hitting the brakes before the tight turns, and I had to fight the wheel; the unmarked car shimmied as if a big dog had hold of the front bumper and was shaking it violently.
“What about the five million dollars?” Ava asked. “Where’d it go?”
The old detective had his bony hand on the dashboard, bracing himself, but he cracked a smile at me, said, “She’s sharp. I was just getting to that.”
“She is sharp,” I said. I glanced in the rearview and saw her blush.
Jones said he couldn’t find a record of Thierry depositing the $5.5 million in any bank in the state or in any of the states that border West Virginia.
“Was the check cashed?” Ava asked.
The old detective smiled again. “You got serious instincts, young lady. It took years to get Crossfield’s attorney, a guy named Pete Garity, to talk to me candidly. He kept citing attorney-client privilege. But three years after Thierry’s pickup was found burning with a body in it, I brought Mr. Garity a bottle of Maker’s Mark and we got into it, and finally he admitted that young Mr. Mulch had been much shrewder than he appeared at first glance. The mining company had wanted to pay Thierry with a certified check, but he’d insisted on bearer bonds.”
My head whipped toward him, and I was starting to say the word bearer when I caught bright yellow motion in the rearview mirror. Fifty yards back, one of the ore trucks was coming at us like a juggernaut.
“Hold on!” I shouted and stomped on the gas.
CHAPTER
34
DETECTIVE TESS AALIYAH DRANK down her second double espresso since rising after six fitful hours of sleep and heading back to the office that Saturday afternoon. The murders were still in that critical forty-eight-hour window when most lethal crimes are solved, and she didn’t want to waste a moment of it.
Aaliyah got to her desk around two and picked up a six-inch pile of files and reports, early forensic findings, and summaries of interviews patrol officers had conducted with Cross’s neighbors.
She scanned through the early reports, finding the one that matched Bree Stone’s blood type to that of Jane Doe, and another that matched Damon Cross’s blood type to that of John Doe. There was a sticky note attached to the second report that said the FBI had pushed the DNA work on both bodies to the front of the line, but even in this day and age, it was roughly a fifty-hour process, which meant results on Jane Doe and Bree Stone were a day away, maybe more. And the tests on Damon would be back Monday at the earliest.
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