“Who cares?” Arlen snapped back.
“You should!” Brady cried. “Arlen, whoever was driving that vehiclemurdereda law officer!”
Arlen held out his hand and wobbled it, and Brady had to concede.
“Okay, they wreaked vengeance on a pedophile,” Brady muttered, clutching the phone to his chest. “Either way, don’t you want to get to the bottom of that?”
“The phone or the crispy critter there?” Arlen asked.
“Can we do both?” Brady asked.
Arlen rolled his eyes. “Son, you’ve got an inflated opinion of our little station house. What do I got? Eight, ten deputies? For how many square miles?”
“Then call in the CBI!” Brady told him. The California Bureau of Investigation wasmadefor things like this, right?
“They’d just make a lot of fuss about that phone,” Arlen said, spitting again. The spit still sizzled, so neither of them were going anywhere.
“They should!” Brady burst out, and Arlen’s pose of annoyance gave way to absolute hostility.
“We don’t need to be digging into what’s already dead,” he said with conviction. “Now give me that thing, and I’ll put it in an evidence locker?”
“And let it rot?” Brady yanked it back from him. “No. No, Arlen. I’m taking this thing to the CBI in Sacramento if I have to drive there myself.”
Arlen blinked at him slowly—not as though he was surprised, but like a rattlesnake, calculating how and when to strike.
“You think you can do that?” he asked.
Brady fought the temptation to swallow. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll leave as soon as I clock—”
Arlen snatched the phone from his hand, and while Brady had fast reflexes, he pulled back before he broke the older man’s arm.
“What in thefuck?”
“You swear like a faggot,” the old sheriff said. “I don’t need you to do my job for me. Go write a ticket or something.”
While Brady stared at the old man, he hawked back in his throat and made to spit again—on Brady’s feet. Brady hopped backward, practically dancing, completely disgusted, and Arlen Cuthbert laughed.
“Go home, ya fuckin’ pansy. Or go back to your desk. Or go suck dick. I don’t fuckin’ care. This was one of ours. We’ll take care of him, and we don’t need no help fromyou.”
Brady’s eyebrows went up to his SCSD baseball cap, because this wasn’t Texas, but he still needed something to shade his eyes. “Roy and his brother haven’t been in Southern California much longer than I have,” he said, stung.
“Yeah, but I grew up with their daddy. Go the fuck away, Deputy Carnegie. I don’t fucking need you.”
“I’ll go file an accident report,” he said with dignity. He didn’t add,With the CBI,asshole! Because he didn’t think Arlen knew about that.
And he was on his way to do just that, heading west toward Barstow, when he got a call on his radio. Dispatch—who apparently didn’t know Arlen had lost his mind—was calling for all officers in the area to come to the residence of one Donnie Ray Kuntz.
He’d been murdered.
Brady was close enough to be the first responding officer on the scene, and as he stood in the man’s study, looking inhorror at the puddles—puddles—of blood that had drained from the man’s arm as he’d sat half-naked at his desk in front of his computer, Brady listened to the screaming and sobbing of the women in the childcare wing of the house/church and had to fight off nausea.
There were pictures on that computer to match the ones on the phone near Roy’s flaming corpse.
Pictures, Brady was certain, that had been taken somewhere inthis house.
Without second-guessing himself, he pulled out his cell phone and called his local FBI contact, Missing and Exploited Children department, and told them about the murder—and the evidence.
And then he told them that they had to get their asses out to the church before Arlen Cuthbert destroyed the crime scene the same way Brady was certain he was going to destroy the phone.
