Page 83 of Brimstone Hollow

“How’d they pay?” I ask.

“Cash.”

“Shit,” I say, but then realize why Dishman’s calling me. “But wecango back through the footage. Just looking at that time stamp.”

“Exactly,” he says.

“On my way.”

TWENTY-THREE

WHEN I GET TOthe station, Dishman is standing behind Gavin’s computer as he scrubs through the checkout footage.

“Find him?” I ask.

“Not yet,” Gavin says. “Oh… okay. Here… it’s this guy. You can see the paint.”

I go around the desk and stand beside Dishman so we’re both looking over Gavin’s shoulder. The view is from a camera about two aisles away so the man in the footage is small and grainy, but I can just make out the stuff on the conveyor belt: a dead bolt and doorknob kit, a can of what I assume is paint, and a little tub that could be wood putty.

I look from the stuff on the checkout line to the guy buying it.

“It’s not Nathaniel Nickels,” I say, leaning closer to the footage. “Is it?”

Nickels was tall with a lean build and a long blond ponytail. But the guy on camera is average height with a softer body. He’s wearing a tan boonie hat with a wide, floppy brim and sunglasses so most of his face and all of his hair is obscured. He also wears a baggy long-sleeved T-shirt in navy blue, and dark work pants. When he turns completely away from the camera to face the cashier, I see he’s wearing a necklace, some kind of braided gold chain. When he turns again—side-on to the camera—I look for a watch or wedding ring or even tattoos on his neck or hands, but I can’t see anything.

“No,” Dishman says, shaking his head. “It’s hard to say for sure how tall this guy is with the angle of the camera, but he doesn’t look tall enough.”

“Or lean enough,” I say. “Unless Nathaniel Nickels has put on thirty or more pounds since posting that last photo on Facebook.”

“And there’s no ponytail,” Gavin says, obviously disappointed.

I return to the desk I’d been using the night before, open the Walmart door camera footage, then scrub it up to 10:20PM. I scrub forward, waiting and watching, until finally the guy in the hat and blue shirt exits the store carrying his plastic bag.

“There he is,” I say. “This is him leaving.”

But I can see even less of him in this video than the other. His head is tilted down, away from the camera, so the brim of his hat almost completely obscures his face. I run the footage back until I find him entering, his face still obstructed, twenty-two minutes earlier.

Dishman goes to another desk, finds the same man outside on the parking lot camera, just walking away in a side view. He disappears between a big old truck and a horse trailer and then he’s gone, out of the camera’s range.

We spend another twenty minutes going through the rest of the security footage for the duration of time the guy spent there, but never catch sight of his face.

“So, we’re not looking for Nathaniel Nickels?” Gavin asks. “If he didn’t buy the stuff then…”

“No,” Dishman says. “We definitelyarestill looking for Nickels. It’s just, now we’re also looking for a completely separate and unknown accomplice.”

“Could it have been Dean Griffon?” Gavin asks, racking back to the guy checking out, taking a wad of cash from his pocket, handing it over.

“I think Dean was too short,” I say. “He was basically my height and this guy looks more average. What about Billy Shepherd? Could this have been him on a shopping tripbeforethe fire?”

Dishman pulls his reading glasses up in front of his eyes and stares at the footage again before shaking his head.

“Maybe,” he says at last. “It could be. We’ll send the footage to Frankfort, see if they can get any details from this that we can’t. They have a backlog, but I’ll do what I can to push them.”

He stands and stretches and looks from the footage to Gavin to me. He looks like he’s about to say something when Melissa Charles hollers at us from the front of the station, “Chief! Sounds like some kids from that church camp are driving golf carts out on Route 9 again. By the sound of it, they’re raising hell on the old McGinley property.”

Dishman nods. There are dark circles under his eyes and his cheeks are sunken.

“I’ll take care of it,” Gavin says, getting to his feet.