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“Thanks for reminding me.”
“No pictures of family. No testimonials from work. No college degrees. Nothing to show the guy even lives here.”
“Except for the books.”
“Right, except for them.”
“Well, this was his parents’ house. Maybe he just has his stuff somewhere else.”
“No, Paul told us their parents bought the place after they got married and before their son was born. This is the only home Roy has ever known.” He looked around some more. “I suppose if he had a computer the cops took it.”
“Good bet.”
They headed to the barn. The doors were unlocked. They opened them and went in. The space was big and mostly empty. There was a hayloft reached by a wooden ladder, some workbenches, and an assortment of rusty tools hanging on pegs on the walls. An old John Deere tractor was parked at the far end of the ground floor.
Michelle studied a patch of the dirt floor that had been dug up on the left side of the barn to a level of about five feet.
“I’m guessing the burial ground was here?”
Sean nodded and walked a perimeter around the turned-up soil.
“How’d they know to look here?” she asked.
“File says an anonymous tip was called in to the police.”
“That’s really convenient. Anybody try to run down this tipster?”
“They probably tried. But it also probably would have led nowhere. Throwaway phone card. Untraceable. That’s standard operating procedure for homicidal maniacs these days if the tipster was actually the murderer.”
She circled the site carefully, studying it like an archaeological dig. “None identified as of yet. Were their faces disfigured or their prints burned off somehow?”
“Don’t think so. They’re just not in any database, apparently. It happens.”
“Kelly Paul seems convinced of her brother’s innocence.”
“Half brother,” Sean reminded her.
“Still a sibling.”
“I find her more interesting than her brother in some respects. And I noted there were no pictures of her in Roy’s house, and no pictures of him in her house.”
“Some families aren’t that close.”
“Granted, but still, they seem to be really close right now.”
“Well, to be fair, we’ve never even heard the brother say anything. And she was equal parts loquacious and stingy with details.”
“Regarding details about her personal history, which was my point earlier.”
Michelle looked around. “Okay, we’ve seen the burial grounds. Now what?”
Sean examined some old tools on the workbench. “Let’s assume he was framed. How do you get six bodies in here, bury them, and no one knows?”
“First of all, the place is in the middle of nowhere. Second, Roy wasn’t here all the time. He worked outside the house and also spent time in D.C. Or at least so we were told.”
“So, easy enough to plant the evidence. Then the question is why?”
“Meaning if he was an unimportant cog in the nation’s mighty tax collection machine, why go to all the trouble?”
