The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,133

and then stops. Not without someone forcing them. Dang it, I should have thought of this earlier. I’m going to call back to the office and see if anybody can dig up Leroy Erickson in our records.”

Digging out his phone, he dropped onto the couch and talked quietly into the phone. Jem continued to study the pictures. As he had noticed on their last visit, the photographs spanned decades, some of them instant-develop prints like Polaroids, some of them from 35mm cameras, some of them obviously digital printouts that someone had trimmed by hand. In the earliest pictures, Leroy Erickson was probably in his late teens or early twenties, with wild hair and overalls. Others were much more recent, with Leroy’s head shaved and the black-ink Fozzie tattoo on his neck. The same party-loving side that Jem had noticed at the funeral/celebration, when Leroy had been dancing and drinking, emerged in the photographs. In one, Leroy and a tabby cat were dressed in matching Bubba Wallace NASCAR racing uniforms. In another, Leroy was Stockton and a black hound was Malone, the picture obviously taken in the 90s, man and dog both wearing Jazz jerseys.

“Ok,” Tean was saying. “Thank you, that’s very helpful. Yes, I’ll let you know if I’m coming back—”

“Tean.”

“Just a second, Norbert.” To Jem, he said, “Yes?”

“You need to look at this.”

“Be right there.”

“No, Tean. Right now.”

The couch springs creaked, and Tean said something into the phone, but Jem’s focus was entirely on the photograph in front of him. He’d noticed it on their first visit, but now he was seeing it as something else. In the photograph, Leroy was dressed as Captain Hook. Featured in the foreground was an alligator with a miniature clock on his back—obviously meant to be the crocodile from Peter Pan, although according to Tean, you could tell an alligator from a crocodile just by looking at it. It was a birthday party, with several other faces visible in the background, and was easy to see that the celebration had been recent: the photograph was unfaded, and in spite of the costume, it was easy to see that Leroy looked close to his current age.

“The crocodile,” Jem said.

“I told you, it’s an alligator.”

“Fine. Whatever. The alligator. Tean, the teeth. Could that thing rip off someone’s arm?”

Tean was silent a moment. Then he said, “Definitely. Alligators don’t chew their food. They can’t chew, actually. With bigger prey, they rip it apart and swallow the pieces whole.”

“This is it,” Jem said. He felt alive with the realization, crackling with the energy of it. “This is it.”

“I heard you,” Tean said into the phone. “Norbert, I’m right in the middle of something, but I might need you in a minute. Please stay on the line.” To Jem, he said, “I don’t understand, though. The alligator could have done that kind of damage to Joy’s body, including amputating the arm. And the shape of the mouth is right; its teeth are capable of leaving the marks I saw on the bone, although we’d need to take a dental impression to see if the imperfections match. But what’s his motive?” An angry voice buzzed on the other end of the phone, and Tean snapped, “I told you I’d just be a minute. Please hold on.”

“I don’t know,” Jem said. “I don’t know, but we’re right on the edge of it.”

More angry buzzing from the phone.

“Excuse me?” Tean said. “Do you want to try that again without a homophobic slur?”

For a moment, Jem forgot about the alligator and the dead woman and the rest of it. He reached for the phone. “Let me talk to him. Give me five minutes with him, and that walking case of crotch rot won’t ever talk to you like that again.”

Tean waved him away.

“Holy shit,” Jem said. He clutched Tean’s arm. “Holy shit!”

“Hold on, Norbert. Jem, I’ve got to—”

“He wasn’t trying to kill Joy. He was trying to save the crocodile. He was protecting it.”

Tean froze. Slowly, he pulled the phone from his ear. The voice on the other end continued to buzz.

“You see it?” Jem said.

“He doesn’t have pictures of humans,” Tean said. “He has pictures of animals. He doesn’t have a relationship with his daughter. He has animals. And he doesn’t have any animals here, which means—”

“He keeps them somewhere else,” Jem shouted, unable to help himself with his excitement. “That’s what Joy meant when she said she was going to her dad’s. She wasn’t coming here. She was going to