Page 12 of Always Murder (The Last Picks #9)

We went in Bobby’s cruiser, and we left Keme to take the Pilot home. I tried to make a bet with Bobby that Keme would immediately go find Millie and show off his new wheels. Bobby said something to the effect that he hadn’t been born yesterday. Then he said I still owed him a hundred million dollars from the time I’d bet him I could eat an entire batch of Indira’s chocolate chip cookies, which goes to show that you can never really trust someone.

It was a quiet drive. The tension from the night before—if it had even been tension, and not just Bobby being tired and ready for sleep at the end of a long, hard day—was gone. Bobby put his hand on my leg. I pretended I was a normal human, like this wasn’t one of my favorite things in the whole world. Other people probably got used to it, but I couldn’t imagine ever not loving how casually Bobby did it, and the weight of his hand, that feeling of connection. (Plus, I got to watch Bobby drive, his body loose but in control, with that easy, confident way he steered, only one hand on the wheel—look, I like what I like.)

Then we got to the Turnleys.

They lived in what could only appropriately be described as a compound. Think, off-the-grid prepper meets Montana Militia with a dash of cousin-lovin’. The property was located near what had to be the eastern limits of Hastings Rock, and although there was no fence topped by razor wire, it was impossible to miss the boundary: tattered, sun-bleached NO TRESPASSING signs had been stapled to the ragged line of pines that intersected the dirt road. Beyond the trees, several single-story buildings were visible. There wasn’t any sense of order or arrangement; it looked like the structures had gone up wherever it was convenient, and clearly in stages—the newer ones looked like they still possessed some degree of structural integrity, but the older ones had bowed siding and drooping gutters and—most worrisome of all to a homeowner like myself—the sagging roofs that suggested untold amounts of water damage. Algae covered the siding, and moss spider-webbed across the shingles. Strands of Christmas lights glowed wanly in the weak daylight. Somebody had started with big, old-fashioned, multi-colored bulbs. Then they’d switched to the little white ones. And then, halfway along the first house, they’d given up.

It was the kind of place that looked lived-in, and not in a good way. Battered garbage cans, overflowing with black trash bags, lined several of the buildings. It was obvious that raccoons, or some other wildlife, had become accustomed to an easy dinner, because the bags were torn and had spilled garbage across the ground. A four-wheeler was snugged up under the shallow eave of another building, half-covered by a blue tarp that flapped in the wind. Lawn chairs, their polyester webbing disintegrating in the sun, huddled around a firepit that was overflowing with ash and half-burned logs. And there was nobody out and about, which only made the whole thing creepier.

As Bobby drove us onto the property, I said, “When you told me they were more like a clan, I wasn’t expecting—”

“This?” Bobby asked.

“Yeah.”

He sounded surprisingly grim when he said, “Wait for it.”

We pulled to a stop in front of one of the oldest structures. It was painted blue, with board-and-batten siding and a single-pitch roof that made me think of an overgrown shed. Two large windows were set into the front of the house, and they were made up of lots of small panes of glass that looked thin and wavy. The door was the same—splintered wood, peeling white paint, and lots of panes of glass. Trying to keep the place warm this time of year was probably a nightmare.

Bobby killed the engine and looked over at me.

I made the Scout sign. “I will be super-duper careful.”

“It’s three fingers,” he said.

“It is? Wait ! Were you a Boy Scout?”

“There’s zero chance I can talk you out of this?”

I thought about how to answer that. Finally, I said, “It’s Millie.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said and got out of the car.

As we approached the house, a skinny girl who looked about twelve years old came outside. She was bundled up in a man’s canvas work coat that fell almost to her knees, faded blue jeans, and the kind of ugly black boots meant for stomping. Her hair was hidden by a watch cap. She dragged an old cooler out from the side of the house and sat. And then she produced a pipe and a tobacco pouch.

“Sissy,” Bobby said.

The girl kept her gaze on the pipe as she packed it. Her voice was high when she said, “Deputy Mai.”

And then she went on packing the pipe.

I waited a few seconds, but Bobby didn’t say anything, so I asked, “Is Anthony around?”

“What do you want him for?”

“We’re looking for Paul Naught,” Bobby said.

The girl—Sissy—made a sound of acknowledgment. She worked a box of matches out of her pocket, struck one on the narrow concrete apron, and went to work lighting the pipe. If you’ve never seen a twelve-year-old do it, it’s really something.

“Could you get him?” I asked. “You wouldn’t have asked why we wanted to talk to him if he wasn’t here; you would have told us he wasn’t home.”

Bobby opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, the girl shouted around the stem of the pipe, “Anthony!”

The wind picked up, and overhead, power lines swayed. I hadn’t noticed them until now—black cables running from building to building. Something told me that Pacific Power hadn’t been the one to hook them up. Part of it had to do with how low to the ground the power lines ran. Also, the fact that one of them was propped up with a forked branch.

Steps shuffled toward us from inside the building, and a moment later, a man appeared. He wore a coat over a hoodie, with joggers and unlaced boots. He had his hood pulled up, and to judge by his mussed hair and puffy eyes, Anthony had just been rudely awakened. He was taller than me, and he had the rawboned look that made me think of country boys. I put him at somewhere in his early twenties. He was definitely the man I’d seen talking to Ryan.

Anthony looked to Sissy first, then me, then Bobby. He mumbled, “Deputy Mai.”

With a nod, Bobby said, “Hi, Anthony.”

“They want to ask you something,” Sissy said. She struck another match and turned her attention back to her pipe.

“We’re looking for Paul Naught,” I said.

Anthony stared at me. Through me, actually. Like I wasn’t even there.

“I understand you’re looking for him too,” I said. “I wanted to know why.”

Anthony still had that half-asleep look in his eyes. After a couple of seconds, he turned to Sissy and said, “Am I looking for Paul Naught?”

Sissy shook her head.

“I’m not looking for Paul,” Anthony said.

“Well,” I said, and I glanced at Bobby for help.

“Ryan Naught told us you approached him,” Bobby said. “He said you wanted to know where Paul was, and you told him Paul owed you.”

Anthony checked Sissy, but she was still focused on her pipe. He turned back to us and said, “He’s lying.”

“He’s not lying, actually,” I said. “I was there, at the Christmas tree farm. I heard you.”

“Nope,” Anthony said.

“That was some other guy,” Sissy said.

“Must have been some other guy,” Anthony said. Genius must have struck because he added, “Somebody who looked like me.”

“All right,” Bobby said. “Thanks for your time, Anthony.”

After a quick glance at Sissy, Anthony shuffled back inside.

“That was amazing,” I said. “Are you a Jedi? Was that a Jedi mind trick? ‘These are not the droids you’re looking for.’” A more worrisome thought occurred to me. “Are you a Sith Lord?”

“He’s the one that keeps catching all those killers?” Sissy said to Bobby.

“He’s the one.”

Sissy frowned around her pipe at me. “Scrawny, isn’t he?”

“Hey!”

“Cute, though. Like someone tried to drown a kitten, and somehow, he got out of the bag.”

“Okay, first of all, thank you. I think. Second of all, you should not drown kittens. You give them to the Humane Society or—I don’t know, somebody. ” I drew myself up. “Bobby, arrest her.”

“Sissy,” Bobby said in a surprisingly conciliatory tone, “this is more of an unofficial visit—”

“And circling back to the scrawny comment,” I said over him—because now I was in the full glory of my righteous indignation—“at least I don’t look like I’m late for the middle school 4-H club.”

Bobby’s eyes widened.

Sissy, in the act of adjusting her pipe, froze.

I realized—as the rush of my righteous indignation faded—that maybe, possibly, it was significant that Anthony had been taking his talking points from this girl.

Who was not, I was beginning to suspect, late for the middle school 4-H club.

And then Sissy laughed. It was a weird, cackling laugh, high-pitched like her voice, and distorted by the pipe in her mouth. Then she started to cough, so she plucked the pipe away but kept on laughing. Bobby still held himself like he thought he was going to have to draw down on her, but as the moments trickled past, some of the tightness in his shoulders loosened.

“Good God,” Sissy said when she could breathe again. She put the pipe back in her mouth and considered me again. “You’re something, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m really something.” And then, to Bobby, “She’s in charge, isn’t she?”

Still a little wide-eyed, Bobby nodded.

“Figures,” I said. To Sissy, I said, “Does it help if I tell you I didn’t know?”

“Is it better if you thought you were arguing with a middle-schooler?”

“Um, maybe?” I didn’t pursue that line of thought, though. “Is it too late to apologize?”

She waved the words away and puffed on her pipe, but amusement—and a dangerously sharp interest—lingered in her face as she studied me.

“You’d better tell him about the cats,” Bobby said, “or he’s going to keep worrying about it.”

Sissy’s eye roll wasn’t exactly flattering. “I don’t drown kittens. It was a figure of speech.”

“Besides,” Bobby said, “she helped the animal shelter build their cat wing.”

“That was an anonymous donor,” Sissy said, and there was no missing the warning in her tone.

Bobby nodded, but one of the things I liked about Bobby was that he could nod and be polite and try to keep the peace, and you never once got the sense that anybody was pushing him around. Nobody, I suspected, had ever compared him to a bedraggled kitten.

“Why do you want Paul?” Sissy asked.

“Because I’m worried something bad happened to him,” I said. And then I laid out the bare bones of what had happened so far: the stolen packages, Paul’s disappearance, the conversation I’d overheard with Anthony. When I was done, I said, “Like I said to Anthony, I wanted to know why you were looking for him. And if you knew where he was.”

“And if we’d killed him,” Sissy said drily. Then she was silent again. Smoke rose in little curling wisps above her, and I was surprised to find the smell strangely pleasant. “This is an unofficial visit, you said?”

“I’m on my lunch break,” Bobby said.

“If somebody around here was looking for Paul—and that’s if , got it?—they’d be looking for him so they could help him understand that he needs to stay out of the neighbor’s yard, so to speak. And make restitution.”

“For trampling the flowers,” I said.

“Exactly,” Sissy said. “For stomping all over a nice, neat flowerbed.”

“But Paul didn’t steal those packages.”

At least, I didn’t think he did; I didn’t want to get into the possibility with Sissy that maybe, yes, he had stolen them.

All Sissy did, though, was shrug. “I said if .”

“And you don’t know where he is?”

“If somebody was looking for him,” she said, “they wouldn’t know where to find him, would they?”

“I guess not.”

I glanced at Bobby; I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. (My remaining questions were personal rather than professional, like, How did you become so terrifying? and Teach me your ways .)

Bobby was studying Sissy with an expression I’d seen a few times before. It was somewhere between How did these crumbs get in the bed? and I just came up with a new exercise plan for Dash . “I don’t suppose you’d consider providing some information in a professional capacity.”

Sissy’s face went cold and flat. “I’m not a snitch.”

“I meant more like a consultant. A specialist. Share your expertise—with the understanding that anything we talk about would be purely theoretical.”

“Purely theoretical,” Sissy said slowly, some of the ice thawing. “It wouldn’t look good, me taking money from a deputy.”

“What about a charitable donation instead, then? The Hastings Rock Animal Shelter is doing their holiday fundraising drive.”

The wind picked up again; the air was so wet that it speckled my glasses, and I fought the urge to take them off and wipe them. After letting another cloud of smoke snake away on the breeze, Sissy said, “What kind of expert consultant?”

“Assume Paul isn’t actually the one taking these packages,” Bobby said. “What could explain why all his packages are the ones going missing? We already talked about the possibility that someone is following his truck. But what else could it be?”

Sissy puffed, eyes turned up as she thought. “If it’s not someone following the truck, it might be someone who had another way of knowing where he’d be. Or where he’d been.”

“Maybe someone chose Paul for a reason,” Bobby said. “Someone at CPF who knew he’d already gotten into trouble, so when the thefts were reported, Paul would be the obvious suspect—especially if they only hit his deliveries.”

I thought of Luz Hernandez. Paul had suggested her as the culprit from the beginning, and she hadn’t exactly earned any brownie points with me when I’d tried to interview her.

“Maybe Paul gave someone a reason to target him,” I said. “He did that stupid livestream of himself with that copy of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate .”

“That idiot livestreams everything,” Sissy said.

I opened my mouth—and then I stopped.

Please, Paul, I thought. Please don’t be that stupid.

But I took out my phone and started to search.

He probably streamed other places, but I found him on YouTube first. His username was naught_paul_blart. I wasn’t sure if it was because he loved the Paul Blart movies or if it was—well, honestly, I had no idea why anyone would have chosen that name. But the videos were there. A quick look told me he’d been streaming regularly, multiple times per day: at home, at work. One was titled I COULDN’T FIND MY SOCK and then a bunch of emojis I couldn’t parse.

And a lot of the videos he’d streamed while he was working.

I played one of the work recordings. Paul’s face filled the screen. From what little I could see of the background, he appeared to be in the back of a delivery truck.

“Merry Christmas,” Paul said with a grin, and the expression made the resemblance to Millie even stronger. Then the angle of the camera shifted, and he held up a large brown box. The delivery label was visible and legible—name, address, everything. And then Paul gave the box a shake and said, “Best Buy. I’ve delivered, like, ten of these. Someone is totally getting an Xbox.”