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Lauren caught up with him as he was yelling at the driver. The man got into the truck and worked a lever, and the back of the dump truck went down. Lauren hopped onto the running board and looked into the truck bed: empty.
Hurd was yelling at Meeton again to shut off the shredder. Meeton walked from behind the dump truck, waved at the shredder operator and drew a finger across his throat. The man pulled a lever, and the noise stopped.
Hurd turned to Meeton. “We’ve got to get into the hopper,” he said.
Meeton led the way up a rickety flight of stairs next to the hopper, and Hurd and Lauren followed. Lauren looked into the huge hopper and saw a dozen or so tires lying on a conveyer belt, ready to be fed into the shredder.
“There’s a ladder over here,” Meeton said. He flung a leg over the edge and found the top rung of a steel ladder bolted to the inside of the hopper. Hurd and Lauren followed him down.
“Your chances of finding a specific tire are slim and none,” Meeton said, pointing to the remaining tires. “But you’re welcome to look.”
Lauren spoke up. “Bruno’s tire would have gone onto the top of the pile,” she said, “which means it would have been at the bottom of the truck bed. We’ve got a shot.”
She and Hurd began picking up tires and looking at them. “Bruno’s was a Michelin,” Lauren said. “I remember that.”
Hurd was looking at the names on the tires and pushing them aside. “Lots of Goodyears,” he said.
Lauren looked, too. “Here’s a Michelin,” she said. Hurd joined her as they rolled the tire so as to see the whole tread. “Not this one,” she said.
They continued to look through the remaining tires but found nothing.
“Well,” Hurd said, “it’s gone.” As they climbed back to the top of the ladder, he pointed to the rear of the shredder. There seemed to be no piece of a tire larger than what would fit into his hand.
They stopped back on the stairs and Lauren looked at the shredded rubber. “I guess we could go through all that,” she said.
“What’s the point?” Hurd replied. “Even if we found exactly the right piece, we couldn’t prove it came from Bruno’s car.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said. They were both filthy from handling the old tires. “Is there some place we can wash up?” she asked Meeton.
Lauren and Hurd were glum on the ride home.
36
Teddy Fay sat at his computer, looking at a digital map of Vero Beach. He found James Bruno’s street. It was a few blocks from the local airport. Teddy printed out the map, then got into his car and followed it to Bruno’s neighborhood.
He turned off Indian River Boulevard, drove past a large church and found himself in a neighborhood of ranch houses that appeared to have been built in the 1950s. They were well-kept, their lawns mown and their flower beds tended, but Teddy suspected that when demand for land grew in Vero, this would become a neighborhood of teardowns, with single houses bought up, razed and their lots combined to accommodate larger, more ostentatious houses.
Teddy found Bruno’s house. There was no car in the carport, but Lauren had said that Bruno worked odd hours, so Teddy had no way of knowing when to expect Bruno to be at home. He drove past the house, then turned right at the corner and right again, to put him behind Bruno’s property.
He found himself looking across a concrete drainage channel that had only a small stream of water flowing through it. After a tropical storm or a hurricane, Teddy reckoned, this would be a raging torrent.
On the other side of the hedge was a tall, ill-kempt hedge with a number of gaps in it that was the rear border of Bruno’s property. Through the gaps, Teddy could see a weedy backyard and the back of the house, whose trim needed painting. This had all the ear-marks of a rental, since the other houses on the street were so well kept, but it looked good to Teddy. It would have old hardware and easy locks.
It was late afternoon, and people were arriving home from work, a lot of them probably from the Piper aircraft factory only a few blocks away. A light airplane flew overhead, then made a turn toward the airport. There were lots of students studying at the flight safety school, which trained hundreds of new pilots every year.
Teddy drove away from the neighborhood and stopped at a large home-building supply store, where he bought a few things, then stowed the paper bag in the trunk of his car. Then he headed toward the Publix market on US-1 to pick up a few things for dinner.
Holly was coming out of the market, carrying two bags of groceries, when her cell phone vibrated. She set the bags down on the sidewalk and took the phone from its holster. “Hello?”
“It’s Josh. Don’t cook; I’m bringing dinner.”
“Now you tell me? I’m just coming out of the market with a bunch of stuff.”
“We’ll save it for another time. Have you got red wine at home?”
“Yep.”
“Then I’ll see you at seven. Bye-bye.”
