Shallow Creek

“Uh, no,” Brendan said, reluctant to admit to his own clumsiness.  He rubbed the bump on the back of his head, which stung at the slightest touch.  “Not exactly.”

“But you say there was a gas leak?”

“If your men have half a nose between them, they can corroborate that easily enough.  It probably stank up half the barn when they cracked that trapdoor open.  I can’t have been down there that long before your troops showed up, otherwise I’d be brain-dead or something now.”

“So your story is that you followed someone out there, watched the barn until it was empty, entered the barn, and then got locked in the basement?” she asked a bit incredulously.  “All because you thought they were involved in drugs somehow?”

“Yes, ma’am.  That’s the long and short of it.  Those bastards installed the lock while I was down there.  I was setting up to break out and take them down, gently of course, when they got the padlock on there and trapped me.”

“Did they know you were down there?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“I could hear them talking,” Brendan said.  “They didn’t know I was there.  My plan was to incapacitate whoever came to check on the place in the morning, and just hope only a couple of them came down.”

Spee tidied up her pages of notes and slid them into a manila folder.  Very deliberately, she closed the folder and brought her gaze up to Brendan.

“Who did you follow out there, Mr. Rhodes?”  When Brendan said nothing, she asked, “Was it your brother, Grant?”

Against his better judgment, a sense of brotherly loyalty held Brendan’s mouth shut.

“Would it surprise you to find out you’re the deed owner for that property, Mr. Rhodes?”

“Yes, ma’am.  It would.”

“In that case, you should read this.”

With that, she opened her folder back up and leafed through it to find the document she desired.  She turned it Brendan’s way on the table and slid it to him.

“As you can see, your name is featured prominently here, and has done since last year, about this time.”

Brendan didn’t bother looking at the piece of paper.

“That’s impossible,” he said flatly.  “I was still enlisted.”

Spee retrieved the document and replaced it in her files.

“I’m well aware of that, but if we can’t come to some consensus on why your name is on the deed, I’m going to hold you in a cell until the answers magically appear.”

Brendan stared her down.  “You don’t think I have anything to do with this.”

“And why is that, Mr. Rhodes?”

“Because if you did, you’d have arrested me already, or at least kept the cuffs on me.”  He pointed at her files.  “To a stupid person, this little detail would look like evidence, but anyone with two working brain cells could figure out I had nothing to do with this.”

“Mr. Rhodes, we found you locked in the basement of your own property, a property that we removed two unsavory characters from moments before finding you,” she explained.  “What am I supposed to think?”

“You only caught two guys out there?” he asked.

“Yes, how many should we have caught?”

“I counted seven leaving the barn before I entered, but none of them were—”

He stopped talking before implicating Grant.  Spee wasn’t about to let that end stay loose.

“None of them were what?” she asked.  “But none of them were your brother?”

Still Brendan couldn’t answer that question.  Spee sighed in response.

“Mr. Rhodes, your brother bought land in your name and built a meth lab on it,” she stated, much more aggressively than before.  “That is what this looks like to me, because I’ve been investigating him for a while now.  I don’t know what more motivation you need to wake up and accept your brother is a criminal, but I suggest you come to terms with it soon.”

Chapter 36

The situation was far from clear, but Brendan now had a sneaking suspicion that if Grant had doctored one legal document with his name, more were sure to follow.  The bastard had probably plastered Brendan’s name all over the place either as a poorly thought-out decoy, or to implicate Brendan in everything and make his life that much more difficult.  And he did it all with a brotherly smile on his face.

“How are you so sure Grant’s involved?” he asked.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss those details with you here,” Spee said, suddenly telegraphing all kinds of signals.

“Fine.  I followed Grant out there.”

“What made you do that?”

“I spoke with some people in town,” he replied.  “Some people who’ve had suspicions about Grant for a while.”

“I’ll need their names.”

“You already talked to Kim.”

Spee made a note.  “Who else?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I need to talk to them.”

“I don’t care.”

“We’ll come back to that.  What kinds of things are suspicious about Grant?”

“Same stuff Kim talked about at her apartment: The expensive vacations, all the nice stuff in their double wide.”  Brendan sighed.  “I know that doesn’t sound like hard evidence, but Michelle doesn’t work and Grant sells chemicals to farms.  There can’t be that much money in it.  Oh yeah, and he drives a damn nice new truck, too.”

“What do you know about Michelle?”