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“No reason at all. And I sure as hell hope she’s not. Her boyfriend, however, is another case…”

“What about the boyfriend?”

“I haven’t seen Skipper Olde since we graduated from Episcopal Academy.”

“ ‘Skipper’?” he said, and spelled the last name aloud as he wrote.

“Right. J. Warren Olde,” Matt furnished, “initial J-Juliet, though I have no idea what it stands for. Also known as Skipper. He’s my age, twenty-seven.”

“Was he into drugs back then?”

Matt shook his head. “Not that I know of. Mostly beer and whiskey, and a lot of it. He led Becca Benjamin, who’s a couple years younger, down that path. Not that she maybe wouldn’t have gone down it on her own. Just sure as hell not so far and so fast.”

Harris nodded, then asked, “Is Olde the same as-”

“Yeah. Olde and Sons, the McMansion custom home builders. Philly, Palm Beach, Dallas. His old man J. Warren Olde, Sr.”

“Oh boy.”

Matt heard something in Harris’s tone that suggested more than mere annoyance at the mention of another wealthy family name.

“What ‘oh boy,’ Tony?”

Harris didn’t respond directly. He looked inside the motel room, and Payne followed his eyes.

“What in the hell happened here, Tony?” Payne then said, shaking his head in disbelief.

“On the assumption that that wasn’t a rhetorical question, I thought I told you-a meth lab. They’re volatile as hell.”

“But is that all that this is about?”

Tony Harris shrugged, then said, “I don’t know if it’s ‘all,’ but it’s certainly a large component.”

Payne nodded. “So were those two crispy critters in the body bags running the lab, and selling to Skipper? Or was it Skipper’s lab? Or had he come to throw them out of his motel? I cannot understand why he’d bring Becca, in Becca’s Mercedes that screams everything that this place is not, here…”

“Well, as you point out, there’re a number of possible scenarios. My money’s on the one that says your prep school pal-”

“He’s not my pal,” Payne interrupted. “Becca, however, I do like.”

“-okay, this Skipper guy, then, was in the illicit drug manufacture and distribution trades, specifically crystal meth. Maybe the girl, too. But we won’t know until we can talk to them. If we can talk to them. He was unconscious after he collapsed. And she was in and out of consciousness when the boys wheeled her out of here in the meat wagon.” Harris heard what he’d just said. “Sorry, Matt. No offense.”

Matt motioned with his hand in a gesture that said, None taken.

“Till then,” Harris went on, “any other pieces to the puzzle you can fill in…”

Payne thought, If anyone can figure this out, it’s Tony.

He then told him everything that Chad Nesbitt had said in the diner.

Harris finished writing that in his notes and said, “You were right. You’re really close to this. Anything else?”

Matt Payn

e made eye contact with Tony Harris.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Yeah, there is, Tony. I want in on this job.”