Page 44 of Brimstone Hollow

“Charming,” Tina says. And then to me she says, “By the way, the officer who came out to check Honey’s brake line didn’t find any prints.”

“None?” I ask.

She says, “I wore gloves to remove it. Seems whoever filed the line down did too.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been Joel Shepherd,” Hollis says. “Aside from the fact that he’s even more ancient than me, he’s on house arrest as far as I know. Do you really think he’s connected to your case? To Ezra King?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “But this is three dead bodies in three days. Ezra King for sure died on Friday night. Billy Shepherd’s place went up sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, but he probably didn’t die until sometime Saturday afternoon. And now Dean Griffon, who was alive enough last night to probably screw with my brakes, is gonna be riding to Frankfort tomorrow in the back of the coroner van with Billy. So if Joel is—”

“Wait, Dean Griffon’s dead?” Hollis says, his attention now focused. “When? How?”

I glance from him to Tina. She’s giving me a look I’m familiar with from way back. The look that saysYou’re in deep shit again, aren’t you?

At about that time, the back door of the Dairy opens with a bang and Crystal—the waitress who’d skipped out on Frankie the night before—stomps out, her ear pressed to her phone.

“What—No. What do you mean? He was just…” she says, her voice high and breathy, almost panicked. When she sees us at the picnic table, she veers away and drifts toward the parking lot. The rest of her conversation is unintelligible.

“Hmm,” Hollis says. “She and Dean been on-again, off-again for years. She’s gonna be all tore up about this.”

I watch as Crystal leans against the hood of a blue Toyota RAV4. She holds the phone to her face with one hand and wipes tears away with the other. I remember, just this morning, Crystal taking my order at the window and telling me how her boyfriend had told her about the private investigator he’d seen in the Dairy the night before. I watch as she doubles over in tears, then crouches down, leans against the car, and cries.

“What the hell happened?” Hollis asks. “How’d he die?”

When I tell him what we found in Griffon’s garage, he issues a loud whistle.

“Damn,” he says. “You have any clue who did it?”

“Not much,” I say and I explain the silver truck I saw on Griffon’s security footage.

“There wasn’t anything else about it? Nothing to ID it?” Hollis asks.

“There was a sticker on the window,” I say. “A Harley-Davidson shield. It was odd though. The truck was glossy. It looked brand new. But the sticker was faded, washed out like it was sun-bleached.”

“Hmm,” Hollis says.

Tina slurps some more Coke, sucking at the straw until it’s only sweet bubbles she’s getting. Then she puts the cup down.

“Faded?” she asks. “Or differently colored?”

I make a sound likeUmmm?around a mouthful of BLT.

Tina leans forward like this is important and says, “Could the shield have beenpinkinstead of orange andblueinstead of black?”

I swallow and say, “It could’ve been, I guess. The angle and the light made it sort of hard to tell. Why?”

She grins and pulls out her phone, gives it a few taps, and then shows me the screen. It’s the Facebook page for the Bluegrass Biker Babes, a Harley club for Kentucky women.

“That’s it,” I say, looking at the pink-and-blue logo. “That’s the shield I saw.”

Tina hands her phone to Hollis and says, “You recognize any of these ladies?”

He smokes a whole cigarette while he swipes through them and then finally slides the phone back across the table to me.

“That right there,” he says, “is Scarlett Nickels.”

“Scarlett Nickels,” I repeat, studying the photo. She’s tall and thin and very tan with straight brown hair and knife-sharp cheekbones. In her Facebook photo, she wears a tank top, Daisy Duke cutoffs, and motorcycle boots while she straddles a huge Harley and winks at the camera.

“She seem like the stabbing kind?” Tina asks Hollis.