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“Green said she has a distant cousin in Kentucky coming in.”
“A bit after the fact.”
“Apparently it’s her only family. She and her ex divorced a long time ago and he left the area. They had no kids.”
He sat on the bed and looked around. What Decker liked more than anything else was to use his prodigiousmemory to spot inconsistencies. It was almost like placing a template over some fresh material. If something, no matter how seemingly insignificant, didn’t match, he would be able to spot it.
Yet somehow that method had failed him here.
But other assets he possessed had not. Like common sense.
“Green said she’d been living here for about a year,” he noted.
“Right.”
“The file also said she got laid off from JC Penney six months ago and had been unemployed ever since.”
“Right again.”
“So how did she pay her rent and other expenses? Her unemployment check couldn’t cover all of it. And if she had a bunch of money in savings, I doubt she’d be living in a place like this. And the file said her retail job offered no severance.”
“And she had a car. So there was gas, insurance, and expenses like that,” added Jamison. “You think someone was helping her?”
“Well, I don’t know that someonewasn’thelping her. And this looks like the sort of place that if your rent check was late, your ass is out on the street. Trust me, I’ve lived in places like that.”
“So have I.”
“Let’s check out herride,” Decker said.
The vehicle, a twelve-year-old gray Nissan, was parked on the street.
Decker used a key that Green had given him to open the car door.
“She was a smoker,” said Jamison, as she waved her hand in front of her face in an attempt to dispel the stench. “You could probably get lung cancer just by sitting in here for a few days.”
Decker hadsqueezed his big body into the driver’s seat of the compact car and was looking around.
Jamison noted a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror.
“Think she was into gambling?”
“Lots of people have fuzzy dice who never rolled a pair for real,” said Decker.
“I was just kidding.”
“From what Green and Lassiter could find out, the last timeanyone saw her was three days before her death.”
“A lot can happen in three days.”
“I also wonder how she was paying her credit card bill.”
Jamison said, “So again perhaps a secret source of money? Maybe it’s tied to her murder. Drugs? That would connect her to Swanson at least.”
They climbed out of the car and Decker walked around it. He stopped and kneltnext to the rear passenger tire. He used the car key to dig something out of the tread. He finally freed the object and held it up.
“A nail,” said Jamison.
“More precisely, it’s a framing nail, that they use in a powered nail gun.”
