He sighed. “Well, let’s hope that’s what it was… a heart attack.”
“That’s unlikely. I’ll wait here for you to arrive.”
Grady arrived in record time, and he followed me and Caesar back inside.
“So,” Grady said with a resigned tone. We’d filled him in on what we’d found, and he was less than happy. “The body was in a closed vat, so not likely an accident.”
“I guess we’ll have to drain the vat…” Caesar said. “God, Roy’s going to kill me if this turns out to be, well, a prank or something. I mean the toupee would probably contaminate the beer anyway, but…” He worried his hands and looked around the room as if hoping Roy would pop up and take control. “Maybe we should wait and see if he shows up.”
“Caesar, son, this is a crime scene.” Grady clamped his large hand on Caesar’s shoulder. “So that means I’m in charge. And I’m going to decide if the vat needs to be emptied. No one else. If anyone has a problem with that, you send them in my direction, okay?”
Caesar nodded but was looking queasy again.
As a bear shifter, our sheriff had always been pretty good at reading people. And it was obvious Caesar was a nervous wreck. “You know what?” He gave Caesar a kind smile. “I want you to wait for my deputies by the parking lot. They’re just a minute or two behind me. When they get here, I want you to explain to them what we’ll need to get the beer out of that vat.” Grady squeezed Caesar’s shoulder. “You go on now and do that while I have a chat with these folks. But don’t leave. I’ll need to talk to you, too.”
Caesar didn’t have to be told twice. He bolted for the door.
Grady took in our little band of misfits and everything else about the room. His dark eyes didn’t seem to miss a thing, including the open vat and the dripping toupee.
“Nobody else has been up there or touched anything,” Declan said. “Just the four of us.”
Grady nodded. “Thank you for that.”
“I’ll take you up top,” I said. “Show you what we found.”
Grady’s mouth was a flat line as he followed me up the steps to the walkway.
Declan started to follow us, but before he climbed the first step, someone else walked in. For just a second there, I let myself hope it was Roy coming to announce that we’d all been worrying for nothing. Except it wasn’t Roy. It was Josh.
I watched as Josh’s face lit up when he saw Declan.
“Dexy,” he called out, using that stupid nickname that Declan said he hated, and before I could stop it, a growl escaped my throat. Declan looked up at me, and I feigned innocence while Josh continued to talk. “Where is everyone? And why do you all look so grim?”
“Oh, man, I really need to start carrying around popcorn,” Sandy whispered, but of course with my shifter hearing, I heard him.
“What are you doing here, Josh?” Declan asked.
“I’m here to cover the brewery tour. This will be marketing gold for Kettlebrook’s newest brewmaster. Let me see if I can find Roy,” Josh said, glancing around the brewery. “He’ll set you up with a flight of beer, and that’ll be sure to put smiles on your faces. Where’s he hiding?”
While I’d watched Josh make his grand entrance, Grady had been doing something at the vat. There was a grunt, then another, followed by a sloshing sound. I spun around to see Grady use his bear strength to haul a very large, very person-like shape from the vat.
“Roy’s not hiding,” I said. “He’s dead.”
Chapter Fifteen
Stop Thinking About the Toupee
Declan
After a long, exhausting afternoon at the brewery, we were all crammed into the microbus again and on our way back to town. We followed Perry’s food truck, which kept Elwood’s speed down to something manageable. Az caught a ride back with him, not wanting to leave the sensitive bigfoot alone after the afternoon’s shocking turn of events.
No one spoke. I almost wished Tulip would threaten to drown Josh again, just so things felt a little more normal.
I couldn’t quit thinking about the toupee.
I mean, it would’ve been normal to think about Roy’s beer-bloated body, right? But nope, it was the toupee that my thoughts kept returning to. It had stayed on the walkway where Gideon had placed it for a long, long time before one of Grady’s people finally took a picture of it and tucked it into an evidence bag.
It was all I could see when I closed my eyes. How the strands of hair had drooped in a messy array around the lumpy mass in the middle, and how the beer kept leaking from it to drip through the slots in the metal walkway to the concrete floor below…
