WHILE SHEgot dressed, Soto went back in the bathroom to wash his hands with soap. Lots of soap.
“You know that kid?” Kort asked rhetorically, from the bedroom.“If I ever see that little fucker again, I’m gonna take him apart with my side-cutters. I ain’t jokin’, either.”
“At least you saved the DeWalt,” Soto said, referring to Kort’s battery-powered saw. “That’s a couple hundred bucks right there.”
—
THAT NIGHT,they drove the two cars to an Ace Hardware store, where they bought a gas can, then out to a Mapco Mart, where they filled up the gas can, then back out to the country, where they hosed down the Camry and torched it.
As they drove away, with Kort lying on her side in the backseat, she asked, “You believe in that DNA shit?”
“Yeah, maybe. But anyway, even if it works, some guy told me that fire wipes it out,” he said. “Smart guy, too. We got nothing to worry about.”
By that time, the rental car looked like a firefly in the rearview mirror, burning hard a mile away.
8
THE MISSISSIPPIBureau of Investigation had e-mailed Lucas a list of people who’d gone to the funeral of Dora Box’s uncle, and he spent all morning and half of the afternoon driving around the south Nashville area, knocking on doors, doing interviews, getting nowhere, on a day that turned out to be too hot for a shoulder holster, gun, and sport coat.
The newspaper obituary, as it turned out, had been placed by the funeral home as a teaser offer for funeral services, so that lead was a dead end.
Most of the people at the funeral had at least known Box, if not well. One woman told him, “I believe that somebody who knew Dora, but didn’t know Jack very well, heard about Jack’s death andcalled her, but didn’t bother to come to the funeral. I told the same thing to those officers from Mississippi. Wasn’t anybody there, far as I know, who was good friends with Dora. She came alone and left alone, and I can’t recall anyone even talking to her, other than maybe to nod or say hello.”
That jibed with what Natalie Parker had told Lucas.
He’d worked his way through most of the funeral list when Lawrence Post called from the TBI at three o’clock in the afternoon. “We’ve probably got something on those people who killed the Pooles,” Post said.
The TBI had taken a call from a county sheriff’s office about a home invasion that had taken place early that morning in Franklin. The two invaders had tortured a woman by using a hacksaw on her leg.
“Her eleven-year-old son was in the house, they didn’t know about him, he was sick and home from school. When he heard his mother screaming, he got his dad’s gun and opened up on them,” Post said. “We’re looking at hospitals for gunshot wounds, but don’t have anything that sounds good yet. We don’t even know if they were hit.”
Lucas asked, “You got anybody down there?”
“Crime scene support, but no investigator. The local cops have done a decent job of working through the possibilities. The two perpetrators were strangers to Miz Campbell, so it’s not like we have to figure out which friend or enemy did it. They were asking about Miz Campbell’s brother John, who used to run with Gar Poole. I’ll e-mail you everything we got on John Stiner as soon as we get off the phone.”
“The drug people got a lead from somewhere,” Lucas said. “Maybe Miz Poole, before she died.”
“Looks like it. And something else. This kid apparently shot up the car the perpetrators were in. It was only a.22, but the car’s going to look like it was in a hailstorm, according to the sheriff,” Post said. “He said the kid had two twenty-five-round magazines. He fired most of one magazine inside the house, but the other one he fired in the yard and at the car. It could have a couple of dozen bullet dings on it.”
“Make and model?”
“Don’t know. Small, red, probably Japanese. We’ve got people looking for it all over the state and all the surrounding states, so I think we’ll probably find it,” Post said. “I just can’t tell you when.”
“Tell me where I can find the Campbells,” Lucas said. “I’m going down there.”
—
MARILYN CAMPBELLwas at the Williamson Medical Center in Franklin, a hospital-looking place of reddish brick and glass, and Lucas found Marilyn Campbell in a private room reading a women’s golf magazine. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in her late thirties, she had black bruises across her face, one eye was swollen half closed with corduroy blood bruises around it. Her nose was covered with an aluminum brace, and one leg was wrapped in hard plastic and elevated. Lucas followed a nurse through the door and she looked over the magazine and asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m a federal marshal,” Lucas said. “I’m looking for the people who hurt you, and also for your brother John and a man named Gar Poole, who set this whole thing off.”
Her husband and son had gone to get something to eat,Campbell said, and would be back soon. She’d be happy to tell him about the attack, but confessed that she was still frightened.
“I keep flashing back to it,” she said. “To that woman standing on the porch. I thought she was a Mormon or a Witness or something... maybe the gas company, she had a clipboard.”
She told Lucas about the attack, in detail, descriptions of the man and woman who’d attacked her, how the woman had hit her with the steel clipboard, talking faster and faster as she relived it, and the nurse took her hand and said, “We’re getting a little excited here, let’s slow down.” Campbell said to Lucas, “We’regetting excited. The doctors and nurses here keep saying that ‘we’ thing. Isn’t that weird?”
“Supposed to show empathy and that we’re all in this together,” the nurse said. “Of course I didn’t get attacked.”
