The Search The Secrets of Crittenden Cou - By Shelley Shepard Gray Page 0,68
as Mose seemed to do. “Hey, what did you find out from the DEA?”
Mose stretched his arms like they were sitting at the park, watching a ball game. “Well, when I talked to Chris Ellis, you know, the man in Frannie’s house from the Drug Enforcement Agency?”
“I remember him,” Luke said sarcastically. “You’re talking about the guy who just got the stuffing beat out of him by a mysterious group of men in a blacked-out Suburban, right? The guy you never told me was working undercover?”
Mose shifted uncomfortably. “I wasn’t supposed to share the news, Luke.”
“Not even with me?”
“Not even with you.” After a moment, Mose shrugged. “Anyway, when I was visiting with Chris, he told me that the dealers had recently taken to needing a new signal to meet.”
Everything fell into place. “You think that’s what the sunglasses were?”
“Un-huh. In some places, sunglasses like those would be a dime a dozen. Here in Crittenden County? Not so much.” He cleared his throat. “I happened to look them up on the Internet, on eBay and Amazon.com. Those glasses can go for over four or five hundred dollars, Luke.”
Mose said the amount like he could never have imagined such a thing, but after living in Cincinnati and not only dealing with the wealthy folks in the city but also some of the well-off drug lords in the area, five-hundred-dollar sunglasses weren’t shocking. Luke had seen some at the Oakley store at Kenwood Mall priced at over a grand. “That makes sense.”
“Shame that Perry wanted Frannie to have a pair, though.” Mose scratched his closely trimmed beard. “What do you think Perry’s motivation was? Give a gift to his girl for cheap . . . or that he wanted her to start carrying drugs for him?”
“I couldn’t tell you. I never met the kid.” Luke’s voice hardened. “But I do know that Frannie never would have done such a thing.”
“My money is on the business aspect of it,” Mose said after another two bites of sandwich and a slurp of soup. “Perry might have still had feelings for Frannie, but those men he was dealing with aren’t easy or flexible.”
“If Chris’s body is any indication, they aren’t shy about using pressure, either.”
After pushing his plate to the center of the table, Mose stretched out his legs. “So, we now know who Perry was working for. We know that the men who beat up Chris had been his contacts. So is our murder solved? Did one of those men who beat up our DEA officer decide Perry Borntrager wasn’t worth the trouble to beat and decide just to put him out of his misery?”
Remembering Chris’s bruises, Luke pursed his lips. “I’m just not sure. Perry was hit on the back of the head, then his body was hidden. I could see these guys beating him to death, then laying him out so everyone could see.” Holding out a finger, he made another point. “And, Chris had been beaten up pretty good. With Perry, if they were going to prove a point, they wouldn’t have only hit his head with a brick or a rock. Perry would have had a heck of a lot more bruising.”
“Maybe they just wanted to kill him?”
“But if they wanted him dead right away, why not simply shoot him?”
“So if it wasn’t them, who could it be?”
“Between you and me, Mose . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I still have no idea.”
Mose closed his eyes. “I was afraid you would say that.”
Frannie was keeping company with a pot of hot tea when Chris Ellis trudged down the stairs, looking as if his whole body was in pain.
It probably was.
“May I get you something to eat or drink before you go?” she asked when he set his duffle bag down by the door.
“You’re not going to try to keep me here?”
“I’ve given up forcing my guests to stay where they don’t want to be.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to be here. It’s nothing personal.”
“I know that, Chris. Giving you something to eat before you leave is the least I can do.”
“All right. I’ve got to wait for my ride, anyway.”
She looked at him curiously. “I thought you had a car.”
“I did, but I can’t take it with me. By now the guys who picked me up earlier have probably marked it.”
“What are you going to do with it? It isn’t going to stay here, is it?” She hoped not, the last thing she wanted was to see any of those scary men lurking