By two o'clock, the rain had turned into a steady, cold mountain mist that settled over the square in front of the courthouse annex. I drove the Econoline into the alley behind the jailhouse, parking it under the big sugar maple where the county trucks loaded their salt spreaders. The unmarked cruiser was parked by the basement steps, its rear doors unlocked and empty. Through the frosted glass of the justice office, I could see the yellow light from the overhead globes reflecting against the high tin ceiling.
I didn't use the front marble steps where the town folks gathered to pay their property taxes or argue about the school bus routes. I walked down the three concrete steps to the annex basement, pushing the heavy iron latch open with my good hip.
The property room was just a partitioned cage of heavy wire mesh set into the foundation stone, smelling of damp damp-proof masonry paint and dry ledger paper. Paul Miller was sitting on a wooden swivel chair behind the booking desk, his uniform coat hung over the back of the spindle, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows. On the table between his hands sat my gray steel toolbox, the bent latch pulled open, its trays resting neatly on the pine planks. Beside it lay the manila voucher with Claggett’s purple pencil script, sealed now inside a clear plastic evidence bag with three red county seals gummed across the top seam.
Ray Vance was sitting on a low wooden bench against the whitewashed foundation, twenty feet away. He had his shoes on, but they had taken his belt and his bootlaces according to the weekend lockup rules, and the ankles of his gray uniform trousers were bunched up over his socks like loose flour sacks. His hands were tucked deep into his pockets, his chin down against his collarbone. He looked younger without the duty leather, smaller, like the Vance boy who used to skip fifth-period algebra to smoke behind the lime kilns.
His uncle Wayne, the county road commissioner, stood by the radiator at the far end of the room. Wayne Vance wore a heavy wool overcoat with velvet on the collar, his gray hair slicked back with rosewater tonic that couldn't quite cut through the damp smell of the limestone cellar. His heavy gold signet ring clicked rhythmically against the iron pipe of the heating stack as he turned to face the door when the latch dropped shut behind me.
"Arthur," Wayne said, his voice carrying that smooth, Sunday-morning fullness that had won him four terms on the county board. He took two steps toward the desk, pulling a leather cigar case from his coat before remembering where he was and sliding it back into his pocket. "Paul told me you were over at the clinic. We’re sorry about that shoulder, Arthur. Nobody wanted an old neighbor getting shoved around on the ridge road."
"Ray wanted it plenty, Wayne," I said, stopping three paces short of the desk. The sling held my left arm like a plaster cast, but my feet were planted solid on the concrete floor. "He wanted twelve hundred dollars of quarry maintenance money worse than he wanted to keep his badge."
Wayne’s eyes twitched toward the property cage, where the clear plastic bag lay beside my toolbox. "There’s no need to use words like that in front of the state troopers, Arthur. Ray made an error in judgment about a haul permit. The boy got overzealous about county timber access. We’ve already talked to the county attorney about reimbursing the cooperative out of the road fund for any inconvenience on your relay contract."
"The road fund doesn't reimburse robbery, Wayne," Miller said from behind the desk. He didn't raise his eyes from the ledger. His pencil moved with that same deliberate, scratching scrape across the blue lines, recording the serial numbers from the stack of twenties he’d taken off my van’s hood. "And the county attorney isn't handling this docket. I handed the preliminary transcript to the district investigator ten minutes ago. When the recorder at the High Knob tower took down Ray’s voice over the open frequency, it went into the regional trunk line. The state attorney general’s office has an automatic copy of every transmission that touches an emergency band during a county disaster declaration."
Wayne stopped tapping his ring. His hand dropped to his side, his fingers knotting into the wool of his coat pocket. "What disaster declaration? It was an autumn shower, Paul. There wasn't four inches of water in the creek."
"The south ridge was under an emergency flood watch since six this morning," Miller said, looking up over the rims of his reading glasses. "The county judge signed the alert at sunrise because the culverts on the lower haul road were choked with illegal gravel tailings. That makes every county frequency a protected civil defense circuit until midnight. Interfering with a repairman on a declared circuit isn't a local misdemeanor, Wayne. It’s an unbailable state felony. Ray’s going to Nashville on the morning transport."
Ray didn't look up from his socks. A small, shuddering breath rattled in his throat, but he kept his face turned toward the damp floorboards between his feet.
Wayne looked at me, his mouth tightening into a thin, pale seam that looked like a scar across his jaw. "You’ve known my family since you were sixteen years old, Arthur. My father gave you the contract for the first municipal shortwave station back in fifty-four. You’d throw thirty years of ridge work into the ditch over a jurisdictional mix-up?"