to him.” She glanced at Rafe from under her lashes.
“He woulda been fine without me being there,” the latter said calmly. “Tucker wasn’t gonna hurt him. But maybe you have some idea who his friends might be, that ran off and left him there?”
Lynn looked at him for a second before she admitted, “I might.”
“If you wanna come to the police station one day and tell me about it, I’d be happy to listen.”
“I might do that,” Lynn told him. And added, “I’d better get these drink orders in. I’ll be right back.”
We all nodded, and waited until she was out of range before we went back to the conversation. “You don’t suppose Art Mullinax,” I said again, “is the serial killer? Maybe he and Noah Trent killed Jurgensson together back when Noah was in high school, and Laura Lee found out about it? She dated Noah for a while, her mother said. I’m not sure exactly when, but Mrs. Drimmel said he was the boyfriend before Frankie, so it would have been after the episode with Jurgensson.”
“And then maybe Noah told his uncle Art what Laura Lee had figured out,” Dix added, getting into the spirit of the thing, “and Art decided that Laura Lee had to go. So he killed her, and it either broke him, so he started killing other women too, or he killed the others to cover up Laura Lee’s murder.”
“To make it look like the work of a a serial killer,” I said.
“Darlin’…” Rafe looked at me patiently, “it is the work of a serial killer.”
“You know what I mean. He could have done it compulsively, the way serial killers do, or he could have done it deliberately, to cover up Laura Lee’s murder.”
“He’d be a serial killer either way,” my husband informed me. “What about Noah? You got an explanation for that death, too?”
Dix opened his mouth, and I got in first. “Noah figured out what Uncle Art had been up to, and was horrified by it, not to mention afraid he’d be implicated, so he killed himself.”
“Or Uncle Art killed him,” Dix added, “and made it look like suicide.”
I nodded. “Mullinax sounds sort of Roman, doesn’t it? Like… I don’t know, Claudius or Tiberius.”
Rafe’s mouth curved. “Can’t say they sound all that similar to me, but you may be right.”
Bob’s head had swiveled back and forth as he looked from one to the other of us. “That’s a nice theory,” he said now, “but you understand there’s no proof?”
Of course. “A theory is a good thing, though. Right? Then you can go about trying to prove or disprove it.”
“One thing comes to mind,” Rafe said, “and I didn’t see Mullinax—don’t think I ever met the man—how’d he look, driving into a truck stop to dump a victim? Like he’d belong?”
Not precisely. “He’s at the upper end of the profile age wise,” I admitted. “Probably more like seventy-five. But he looked like he was pretty healthy. He golfs.”
“Healthy enough to strangle a full-grown woman and carry the body?”
Hard to say, really. But he hadn’t looked unhealthy, so that was something. Maybe.
When I didn’t answer, Rafe went on. “Any reason to think Mullinax would look at home at a truck stop? Did you see a truck? Anything with a diesel engine?”
I shook my head. “It’s a farm, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a thing existed.”
“I don’t see him traveling up and down I-65 on a tractor, darlin’.”
Well, of course not. “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “All I meant is that there might have been a pickup truck or something in the garage. It was a big garage.”
“You didn’t look inside?”
I hadn’t. “I don’t think it had any windows, and the doors were all closed. But practically anything could have fit in there.”
Except maybe an eighteen-wheeler. But the cab of one might.
“I guess it couldn’t hurt to go out and take a look,” Rafe said, with a glance at Bob.
The latter nodded. “We can run out there this afternoon, see what we see.”
He shifted sideways as Lynn leaned in to put Rafe’s drink on the table.
“Not this afternoon,” Rafe told him, leaning the other way as Lynn’s hip brushed his arm. “Thanks, Lynn.” To Bob, he added, “I have something else I gotta do later.”
“I have an open house,” I told Bob, leaning too, as Lynn came closer with my iced tea, “at the house on Fulton, and Rafe’s taking David back to Nashville. Thank you, Lynn.”