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“I’m Detective Althof with the sheriff’s office. I understand you called the station?”
The guy’s blond hair is sticking up all over the place and his eyes squint against the morning light as he opens the door, only half awake.
“Last night, yeah.”
“I was told you’re looking for someone?”
“Yeah, yeah…”
He runs a hand through his hair as he walks into the messy room, leaving the door open behind him, which I take as an invitation to come in. I regret it almost instantly when my brain registers the rank miasma of smells inside. The scent of spoiling food, bad BO, and stale beer is an offense to my nose, but not surprising, seeing the state of the motel room. For the life of me, I don’t get how some people are willing to live. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some clean freak, I’m not even fastidious, but I sure as hell know how to get rid of my garbage and pick up my dirty laundry.
The guy is thankfully pulling a pair of dirty work pants over his threadbare boxers. The T-shirt he plucks from the pile on the floor isn’t much cleaner, but at least he’s covered up the one offensive marking I recognized tattooed on his chest. There are likely more, but now I don’t have to look at them.
“Dispatch mentioned a missing colleague?” I prompt him.
“Yeah, you’re the guy who broke up the fight on Thursday, aren’t you?”
“That would’ve been me. I didn’t get your name.”
“Cody Withers. But, uh…I was hoping you’d know where Doug went?”
“Your foreman?”
He nods, his blond hair flopping over his eyes. “Yeah, after we closed the hole like you guys told us to, we went to the hospital to check on him, but they said he left.”
Since the crew wasn’t able to produce a valid work order, and the company they worked for didn’t have a record of any such order, we had them put Sacha Levi’s property back the way they found it.
“He actually skipped out before they had a chance to look at him,” I confirm.
“I heard. Anyway, he never showed up. Never came to grab his shit or pick up his truck. Been waiting for him all weekend. The others already headed back home—the company has another job starting for us today—but I wanted to wait around a bit longer. I didn’t just wanna leave his stuff behind. But I’ve got a buddy giving me a ride back this morning, and I don’t know what to do with this.”
Odd. I would’ve expected Severin to collect his things at some point. Definitely his wheels, but I spotted the truck sitting outside when I got here.
Doug Severin wasn’t what you’d call high on my priority list, especially not after the dispute with Levi appears to have settled, but he just moved up a notch or two.
Wanting to avoid confrontation with law enforcement is one thing, but leaving behind a fairly new truck that must’ve set him back at least forty or fifty thousand dollars is definitely suspicious.
“How’d you get his truck here?” I want to know
“Drove it. He kept a spare set in a magnetic box in the passenger-side rear wheel well.”
Cody does his best not to look at me directly. Likely because he’d failed to inform us of that little bit of information on Thursday.
“Does Doug have any family that you know of? Anyone we can check in with?”
I’d already asked the company these guys work for the same question before the weekend, but they didn’t have much more than the address of a small apartment building in an older section of Spokane where he was reported to live alone.
Cody shakes his head. “Nah. The only relatives he mentioned were his parents, both dead. I think he may have been married at some point, but he had no kids.”
“No siblings? Aunts, uncles?”
He shrugs and shakes his head. “Not that I know.”
“Okay…in that case, I’ll take his stuff, hold it for him.”
And maybe have a quick look through his duffel bag and his truck.
Dana
