“It is,” Sherlock said, crowding in on him. “Why would you have a Fort Knox lock on a shack?”
“Good question.”
I walked around the cottage to the large glass window behind the sink in the kitchen. I whistled as I gently broke the glass. Now this was breaking and entering, for sure.
I managed not to cut myself as I pulled myself in over the sink and jumped to the linoleum floor. The lock on the front door was elaborate, state of the art. It took a minute to figure out. Finally, I flipped three switches and opened the door for Savich and Sherlock.
“A guy lives here?” Sherlock said, looking around.
“Alone? This place is as neat as ours, Dillon, just after Julie our housekeeper’s been there.”
“Morrison’s got a housekeeper too, a retired Alaskan fisherman named Mr. Thorne. I’ve never met him, but he sure does good work.”
We got to it. Twenty minutes later, we gathered in the living room, not a whit wiser than twenty minutes before. We’d found a file drawer that held his insurance papers, medical records, car repairs from three different mechanics, and a few odd letters from relatives, nothing interesting or informative. There were a few framed photos around, but the only one that made me stop cold was one of Jilly, set in a gold frame, facedown on the bedside table. She was standing on a cliff, smiling big, wearing a sundress and big sunglasses.
“The shed beside the house,” Savich said. “I want to take a look in there.”
The shed looked as old as the dirt it sat on, the wood rotting and smelling of damp, the door rickety. It was locked. Savich gave it a solid thump with his fist. The door shuddered off its hinges and fell inward. An ungodly odor slammed out at us.
“What is it, Dillon?” Sherlock was crowding him.
“Jesus,” Savich said, turning slowly and taking her arms. “Stay back.”
We hadn’t found Jilly.
We’d found Rob Morrison.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I looked on as Maggie watched them put her lover into a body bag. Two men heaved the body bag up into the coroner’s van and slammed the doors. She just stood there, watching the van disappear around a curve about half a mile away from Rob Morrison’s cottage.
She’d looked only once at his body, her hand covering her nose and mouth, then walked away and said nothing to any of us for at least ten minutes. Then we’d waited for nearly an hour before the Salem coroner’s office and forensic guy showed up, Detective Minton Castanga in charge. Until now, he’d said nothing at all to Maggie, done nothing more than greeted us.
It had started raining just as the coroner’s van pulled away. Castanga motioned all of us into the house.
“Talk to me,” he said, and sat down on Rob Morrison’s sofa.
We told him everything, except we told him we broke into the house after finding the body.
Castanga scratched his chin with his pen and said, “Now, let me get this exactly straight. You federal people have been all over this town for nearly a week now, then you four came here expecting to find Mac’s sister, Jilly. Or because Morrison might know where she is?”
“That’s right,” I said. Laura sat beside me, listing slightly to the left, against my shoulder.
“Do you have any idea who killed Rob Morrison?” He lifted a beautifully polished red apple from the full bowl on top of the coffee table, rubbed it on his jacket arm, and took a big bite.
“None of us know who killed Rob Morrison,” I said. “None of us know anything about this. His murder must somehow be connected to the drug operation that’s being investigated, but we have no direct knowledge of that. We were just looking around, saw the shed door hanging open, and checked it out. There was Morrison, dead.” So the door hadn’t been exactly open. I didn’t think Castanga needed to know we were searching Morrison’s property.
“Two gunshots in the middle of the back,” Castanga said. “Someone wanted him gone and took care of it efficiently. It appears he’s been dead for at least four days.” Castanga put down the apple core on the polished coffee table, frowned, then gently set it atop the other apples. “Don’t want to stain the wood,” he said.