Lucy and I walk toward the Kiffin house. I point out the campsite where we found the bed linens and baby carriage, and experience a combination of anger and sadness about Mr. Peanut. I don’t trust the story about the dog’s supposedly going off to die. I worry that Bev Kiffin did something cruel, maybe even poisoned her, and I intend to ask her what happened along with a number of other questions. I don’t care how Bev Kiffin reacts. After today, I am grounded, out of commission, suspended from my profession. I can’t know for a fact I will ever practice forensic medicine again. I might be fired and branded for life. Hell, I might end up in prison. I feel eyes on us as we climb the Kiffins’ front-porch steps.
“Creepy place,” Lucy says under her breath.
A face peeks out from behind curtains and then ducks out of sight when Bev Kiffin’s older son catches me looking back at him. I ring the bell and the boy answers the door, the same boy I saw when I was here. He is big and heavy-set and has a cruel face speckled with acne. I can’t tell how old he is, but I place him at twelve, maybe fourteen.
“You’re the lady who was out here the other day,” he says to me with a hard look.
“That’s right,” I reply. “Can you tell your mother that Dr. Scarpetta is here and I need a word with her?”
He smiles as if he knows a mean secret that he thinks is funny. He stifles a laugh. “She ain’t in here right now. She’s busy.” His eyes get harder and wander in the direction of the motel.
“What’s your name?” Lucy asks him.
“Sonny.”
“Sonny, what happened to Mr. Peanut?” I casually ask.
“That dumb dog,” he says. “All we can figure is somebody stole her.”
I find it impossible to believe that anyone would have stolen that old, worn-out dog. In the first place, she wasn’t friendly to strangers. If anything, I might have expected her to get hit by a car.
“Oh yeah? That’s too bad,” Lucy answers Sonny. “What makes you think somebody stole her?”
Sonny gets caught on this. He gets a vapid look in his eyes and starts to tell several lies and keeps interrupting himself. “Uh, some car pulled in at night. I heard it, you know, and a door shut and she was barking, then that was it. She was gone. Zack’s all tore up about it.”
“She disappeared when?” I want to know.
“Oh, I don’t know.” A shrug. “Last week.”
“Well, Benny was pretty torn up about it, too,” I comment, watching for his reaction.
That cold look in his eyes again. “The kids at school called him a sissy. And he was one, too. That’s why he killed himself. Everybody says so,” Sonny replies with stunning callousness.
“I thought the two of you were friends?” Lucy is getting aggressive with him.
“He bugged me,” Sonny answers. “Always coming over here to play with the dang dog. He wasn’t my friend. He was Zack and Mr. Peanut’s friend. I don’t hang out with no sissies.”
A motorcycle engine roars and rumbles to life. Zack’s face pops up in the window to the right of the front door, and he is crying.
“Did Benny come over here last Sunday?” I come right out and ask Sonny. “After church? Maybe twelve-thirty, one o’clock. Did he eat hotdogs with you?”
Sonny is caught again. He wasn’t expecting the detail about hotdogs and now he is in a bind. His curiosity overwhelms his untruthfulness and he says, “How’d you know we had hotdogs?” He frowns as the motorcycle we saw a few minutes ago rumbles and bumps along the dirt path that leads from the motel to the Kiffin house. Whoever is on it heads right toward us, dressed in red-and-black leather, his face obscured by a dark helmet with a tinted face shield. Yet there is something familiar about the person. The realization stuns me. Jay Talley stops and gets off his motorcycle, nimbly swinging a leg over the big saddle seat.
“Sonny, get in the house,” Jay orders. “Now.” He says this with cool ease, as if he knows the boy very well.