able to get up on the other side without much problem. Or so it seemed to me. It hadn’t seemed important enough to either Rafe or Grimaldi to stop. Clearly the car in the ditch was a less urgent problem than Leslie Yung.
“You’re taking this pretty calmly,” I told Curtis as we moved along at a much slower pace now, looking for the entrance to Jacob Drimmel’s fishing hole. The road was thickly forested, it had been several minutes since we’d seen any sign of habitation, and from the somewhat vague map in my head, I knew we were close to the river.
He gave me a look. “That my grandfather might be a serial killer?”
None of us had mentioned that, as far as I could recall, and I had my mouth open to say so when he added, “He’s been watching the news about that woman at the truck stop all week. And reading about it in the paper. When I asked him if he hadn’t been at the truck stop on the day she was found, he told me to mind my own business.”
“That’s the case Agent Yung came here to consult on,” Rafe said, peering out the window at the trees. “That it?”
He nodded to a slim opening between two trees that made the entrance to Daffodil Hill Farm look practically opulent.
Curtis nodded. And then qualified it with an, “I think so.”
“Better cut the lights,” Grimaldi said and reached for the switch, but Rafe had already done so.
The SUV crept along the narrow track, with leaves brushing the windows and branches scraping the roof. “Doesn’t look like anyone else ever comes down here,” I said.
Curtis shook his head. “That’s why he likes it. He likes his privacy.”
“That why he told you to mind your own business?” Rafe glanced at him in the mirror.
Curtis shrugged. “I suppose. He’s always liked being alone. Whenever somebody’s truck broke down three states away, so he could be gone for a couple days, he was always excited about it.”
If those trips provided opportunities for him to stalk and kill women, I could well understand the excitement. “Was he on a trip that day last week when the dead women’s body was found at the truck stop?”
“Just up to Nashville,” Curtis said. “He don’t go out on the road like he used to when he was working. But that car in the garage? He went up to Nashville and picked it up.”
“And stopped by the truck stop on his way home?”
“He knows people at every truck stop in the country,” Curtis said. “He goes over to the one by the interstate and has lunch there at least once a week.”
So nobody would think anything of it if they saw him there. Especially if he was towing an antique car with fins behind the pickup.
I was going to ask Curtis about his mother, but before I could, Rafe said, “Looks like it’s opening up ahead. We got a plan for what we’re gonna do when we get there?”
“If Yung’s there,” Grimaldi said, pulling her gun out and checking it for bullets, “find and secure her. If she isn’t, take him into custody. Alive.”
Rafe nodded. “You want me to stop here so we can go the rest of the way on foot, or keep going?”
“Let’s take him by surprise,” Grimaldi said. “Keep going.”
The SUV rolled forward. The path opened up into a little clearing by the side of the river. The water was muddy and sluggish, the way the Duck River usually looks: an unpleasant sort of greenish-brown.
Jacob Drimmel’s truck was parked in the middle of the clearing. The engine was off and there was no sign of life.
Rafe glanced at Curtis in the mirror. “He carrying?”
“He keeps a gun in the truck when he goes on the road,” Curtis said. His voice was hushed, small, like either the place or the situation had finally gotten to him.
Rafe nodded. “Stay here,” he told me in the rearview mirror. I nodded, and watched as he pulled the gun from the waistband of his jeans and made his way toward the truck. Grimaldi slid out on the other side of the SUV and left her door open. I guess they didn’t want to startle Jacob, if he hadn’t heard the car pull up.
While Grimaldi made her way around the SUV, gun out and ready, Rafe sidled up to the rear of the truck and glanced into the bed and through the window before he made it to the