If She Hid

“Hey there, Sheriff.”

“Floyd, hey yourself. How are you today?”

“Okay, I guess. Working on an old dirt bike motor for the Wells family. The bike is older’n hell. Seems like a waste to me, but he already paid, so…”

He stopped here, clearly distracted as he tried to take in the two women on either side of Barnes. He looked both shaken and slightly excited. Not because there were women on his property, but because it was something unexpected—something new and out of the ordinary.

“Floyd, these two ladies are with the FBI. They’d like to ask you some questions.”

“FBI? What the hell for? I ain’t done nothing.”

“Oh, I don’t expect you have,” Barnes said. “But tell me, Floyd: when was the last time you spoke with Jeremy?”

“Ah shit, what’s he done?”

“We don’t know yet,” Kate said. “Maybe nothing at all. We’ve come here to find out for sure.”

“He’s been involved with Mercy Fuller,” Barnes explained. “Alvin and Wendy’s daughter. We have him down at the station for questioning. I thought you should know that.”

“What? Damn, Sheriff.” Floyd shrugged and shook his head. “It’s no wonder, though. That boy never tells me anything. It’s probably been about three weeks since I saw him. He stayed here a few nights while Randy was tending to his own stuff. But I’m pretty sure he came by for a little while a few nights ago when I was out at the bar. He left the light on in his room. He comes over here sometimes to watch movies. Porn, mostly, I think. Little weirdo.”

“And he never mentioned Mercy Wheeler?” Kate asked.

“No. Hell, we barely even spoke at all. Talked football, some. How the Redskins are going to shit. He asked about his ma but I wasn’t about to have that conversation, you know?” He paused here, as if suddenly struck but a thought. “Damn. The Fullers? I heard about what happened to them. Did Mercy get killed, too?”

“No,” Barnes said. “In fact, she’s gone missing.”

“We spoke to Jeremy about his involvement with her,” Kate said. “He told us that Mercy didn’t like her parents and he’s suggesting that Mercy had something to do with their murders.”

“I don’t know why he’d lie about it,” Floyd said. He did not sound offended that they were making such an accusation. In fact, he seemed rather detached from the whole situation, like he simply didn’t care at all. “Were they dating?”

“Jeremy says it was just a physical relationship,” DeMarco said. “But he also said that she would confide in him—telling him how she hated her parents. How she wanted to kill them.”

“Forgive me for asking such a dumb question,” Floyd said, “but why are you here? Hell, Sheriff Barnes…you probably know Jeremy better than I do.”

“Does he have a room here?” Kate asked.

“Yeah. Last one down the hallway.”

“Would you allow us to look around it?”

Floyd hesitated here, unsure of how to answer. He looked to Barnes, as if for help or backup of some kind.

“You got something in that trailer I might not approve of, Floyd?” Barnes asked.

Instead of answering outright, Floyd asked: “Just Jeremy’s room. Right?”

“For now,” Barnes said with some skepticism. “Thanks, Floyd.”

Barnes escorted Kate and DeMarco to the trailer. As they walked up the rickety porch, Kate looked back out at Floyd Branch. He was walking back into his shed, seemingly unaffected by the exchange.

“He wasn’t nearly as bad as you were letting on,” Kate said.

“Apparently he’s getting a late start on drinking today.”

They walked inside the trailer and Kate was surprised by what she saw. She had been expecting it to be in a state of disrepair, cluttered and messy. But Floyd apparently owned very little, including anything that could consist of clutter. The place was fairly clean, though it had the same sort of smell Kate had experienced at his son’s trailer earlier: stale beer and something slightly pungent that was probably old pot smoke.

The hallway was thin and only held three rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a smaller bedroom near the back. Kate and DeMarco entered Jeremy’s room while Barnes hung back.

“I’m here for any support you need,” he said. “But there’s barely enough room for the two of you in there, much less the three of us.”

He was right. The room was very small, taken up mostly by a twin mattress sitting on the floor and an old desk that was piled up with DVDs and CDs. A small television and dusty DVD player sat on the floor at the foot of the mattress, their wires and cables snaking around the floor. A cell phone sat on top of the television, hooked to a charger that ran to a multi-outlet adapter that also powered the TV, DVD player, and the small box fan in the window.

Kate picked the phone up. It was an iPhone, about three models behind the most current. When she pressed the Home button, the screen instantly popped up. No password needed. The home screen showed only a few apps: a few games, settings, photos, and clock. She figured this was just a passed down phone, one with no service but still used for games. She had a few friends who had eased their older kids into owning a cell phone this same way. Before gifting them with a full-service phone, they had allowed their kids to have a hand-me-down without full services, capable of only texting selected users and playing games that did not require Wi-Fi.

Behind her, DeMarco was flipping through the movies. “Floyd really wasn’t kidding about his son watching porn back here. Half of these are amateur porn titles. The other half are Cinemax-style sex stuff.”

Kate kept looking through the phone. She opened up photos and found that it was packed. Some were of girls, all partying. A few were topless. A few were kissing one another, the expressions on their faces a clear indication that they were wasted. There were a few videos of these events, all rather brief. She slid right past these until she came to one that was just under five minutes long. In the thumbnail of the video, she saw Mercy Fuller’s face.

She pressed Play and it took her less than three seconds to understand what she was seeing before she shut it off. In the video, Mercy was lying on her back, being videoed from just above her. The director was apparently Jeremy, filming while having some fairly rough sex with her. It was not forced, if the sounds coming from Mercy were any indication.

“Jesus,” Kate said, sliding out of Photos.

“What was that?” DeMarco asked.

“Proof that Jeremy Branch was telling the truth about at least one thing: they were definitely having sex.”

Kate saw that while the phone in her hand had no access to Contacts—it did not need it, as calls were impossible from it—she did see that there were a few text threads. She opened up the messages and saw only three conversations. One was with a contact that had been titled BRO and the texts made it obvious that they were to and from his brother, Randy. One of the others was to a guy named Chuck and the entire thread was about which celebrities they would like to have sex with and why.

The third message thread was from a contact Jeremy had titled BOOTY CALL. The little picture above the name was Mercy Fuller, head tilted and making a kissing face.

“I might have hit the jackpot over here,” Kate said.

DeMarco came over and they both started reading through the thread. It was quite long, spanning back over the last several months. The vast majority of it consisted of long drawn-out messages from Mercy with very short, often only one-word responses from Jeremy. The more they read, the clearer it became that Jeremy Branch had been lying to them. He may have been truthful about the nature of their relationship, but the picture he had painted of Mercy and her parents was totally untrue.

And that raised a very important question.

If he was lying about that, what else was he hiding?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Kate walked back into the interrogation room as calmly as she could. DeMarco was with her and while she, too, was irritated, she had agreed to let Kate run the bulk of this second interrogation. Similarly, Barnes was also hanging back, fielding a few calls about other local interests in his office.

Kate sat down across from Jeremy, her expression blank. She could already tell that Jeremy was nervous, his eyes shifting back and forth between Kate, DeMarco, and the surface of the desk between them.

“The good news is that you’re a very convincing liar,” Kate said. “The bad news is, you aren’t particularly bright.”

Jeremy said nothing. He continued to sit there, looking dumbfounded, waiting to see where Kate took the conversation next. Kate took the old cell phone out of her pocket and placed it on the desk.