For an instant Jet flashes in my mind, but Jet can’t be standing at my door. It has to be Nadine. Getting up, I pull on a pair of Levi’s, then go to the door and pull it open.
Nadine stands there in a long T-shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, nothing else.
“The house phone rang,” she says. “You didn’t answer, so I got up and checked it. The caller ID showed it was from the Watchman office. As I was walking back to my room, I thought I heard your voice. You sounded upset. Is everything okay?”
“No. Sally Matheson has been shot. By Max, apparently.”
Nadine stares at me without blinking. “Shot dead?”
“That’s what my editor told me.”
“That’s . . . it seems impossible. Crazier than Buck getting killed.”
“I know. But it’s happened.”
She walks past me and sits on the edge of my bed, looking shell-shocked. “My God. She was so nice to me tonight.”
“She really was. It truly doesn’t seem real.”
Nadine looks up. “What are you going to do? Do you need to go down to the paper?”
“I should. But I don’t feel like it.”
“What do you feel like doing?”
An image of Denny Allman flying his drone fills my mind. “To tell you the truth . . . something crazy.”
“Like?”
“Every cop in this county, municipal or sheriff’s deputy, is going to have only one thing on his mind tonight: Sally’s death. This is the best chance I’ll ever get to sneak onto that mill site and do some digging. I mean literal digging—with a shovel.”
Nadine’s eyes widen, but she looks more intrigued than afraid. “What would you be looking for? Evidence that Buck was murdered there?”
“That, and Indian bones. And thanks to little Denny Allman, I know just where to look.”
Nadine covers her mouth with a fist while she transitions from shock to action. After a few seconds, she says, “I sure don’t see us getting back to sleep tonight. What the hell? Let’s do it.”
“The last guy who tried this wound up dead.”
She winces, but I can see she wants to forge ahead. Anything seems better than sitting around uselessly in the wake of tragedy. “We shouldn’t sneak down there,” she says. “Let’s put on the clothes we wore to the party, take a bottle of wine and a blanket with us. We’ll act like we drove down there to make out by the river. If there’s a guard, we’ll have a good excuse to be there. If not, we dig.”
“That’s a damn good idea.”
She nods and stands. “I’ll be dressed and made up in five minutes.”
“I’ll see you in the kitchen.”
Nadine spins and pads quickly down the hall, then turns into the guest room. I’m starting to see why she was such a good lawyer.
She’s a force of nature.
Chapter 22
Ben Tate dropped the Buck Ferris murder story into our web edition at 3:30 a.m., and it was like kicking over a hornet’s nest. Suggesting that Buck had been murdered was bad enough in the eyes of the town; backing up that implication with an opinion from the coroner was worse. But speculating that Buck had been killed at the paper mill site, then dumped upriver to hide that fact, made people crazy. Our main switchboard started ringing off the hook at 5:30 a.m., as the print subscribers began calling in to voice their displeasure. By 8:30 there were 336 reader comments beneath the story, and I’d received sixty-seven emails at my Watchman account.
None of that surprised me, and I was too tired to care anyway. By the time I limped into my office this morning, I’d only slept two hours, having spent the middle of the night at the paper mill site with Nadine, digging in the dark in my suit and dress shoes. After driving down to the industrial park, we parked beside the foundation of the old electroplating plant and waited to see if any guards would challenge us. None did. After ten minutes of ticking silence, I got out my small shovel and a handful of trash bags and started hunting for the concrete footing where Buck had found his Poverty Point–era pottery samples. Nadine stayed in the Flex to keep watch. If she saw anyone approaching, she was to switch on the headlights and speed-dial me. I would dump my tools and walk back as though I’d simply left the SUV to take a leak.
The GPS coordinates Denny had emailed me helped, but