Killerfind (2 page)

Barn
: noun, a large outbuilding on a
farm used to store grain or shelter livestock

Find
: noun, a discovery

Barnfind
: noun,
“In the auto realm, it
is the near mythical, all original, parked-for   decades and all but forgotten,
much prized and potentially very valuable, collector car.” Malcom Griffith

KILLERFIND
: noun, a barnfind turned deadly

hetta
McCarter swiveled her
office chair and stared at the “before” picture of a bedraggled-looking 1981
Z28 that occupied the left side of a double frame on her desktop. The blank
right side waited for the “after” picture. Her grasp on the phone tightened.

She
stood, her voice rising. “Did I hear you right? You found a wallet belonging to
Malcom Griffith in the frame of my Z28?”

James
Woodhouse “Woody” Zelinski, one of her employees, stopped on his way to the
copier. “Malcom Griffith disappeared fifteen years ago,” he said, stopping at
her desk, making no effort to hide his eavesdropping.

Rhetta
glowered at him, and went on speaking to Ricky. “How can that be? That car was
in that barn for twenty-five years.”

Rhetta,
the branch manager of Missouri Community Bank Mortgage and Insurance, paced the
small square of carpeting in the cube that was her office. She waited for some
kind of reasonable explanation from her best friend and mechanic, Ricky Lane of Fast Lane Muscle Cars. Ricky, short for Victoria, was working her magic on a
1981 Camaro Z28, a replacement for Cami, Rhetta’s beloved ’79 Camaro that was
destroyed in a fire several months earlier.

When
LuEllen, office secretary-cum-receptionist informed her that Ricky was on the
line, Rhetta assumed Ricky was going to catch her up on the car’s progress, and
ask for a payment for parts. Rhetta had already pulled out her checkbook and
clutched her pen, ready to write. At last estimate, Ricky thought it would take
about three more weeks to complete the restoration.

“
Not really,
”
Ricky said.

“Thank goodness. That’s not funny. You had me going
there for a minute.” Rhetta let out a sigh of relief. If it had been true, it
could mean at least a six months’ delay if the police had to impound her car.

“It was more behind a front inner fender well.”

“Crap.” Rhetta ran her hands through her mass of
spiky brown hair, tinged in blonde this week. She glanced at the calendar to
see when six months would be. At that rate, she doubted if she would even have
the car for next summer. She groaned.

Ricky continued, “When I loosened the fender well,
it fell out, along with an old pair of sunglasses, and a wrench.”

“Tell me about it.” Rhetta said, snapping her
checkbook shut, and sticking the end of the pen in her mouth, chewing rapidly.

 “The sunglasses were pretty old and beat up. One
arm was bent. The wrench is good, though.”

“Ricky, I don’t care about the sunglasses or the
wrench.” Rhetta threw the pen down on the desk, snatched a tissue, and wiped
her mouth, hoping that no ink had streaked her face.

“Right. Naturally, I looked at the wallet, too.”
Ricky chuckled. “How else would I know who it belonged to? Malcom Griffith’s
driver’s license picture stared at me as soon as I flipped it open. I glanced
through it, and discovered quite a bit of money and some credit cards, too.”

 “Great. Now that you’ve fondled the thing, you’ve
probably messed up any DNA or fingerprints.”

“No, I didn’t. For your information, I was wearing
vinyl gloves, like I always do when I use rust dissolver. As soon as I saw
whose wallet it was, I called you.”

“Did you call the police and report it?” Rhetta
backed into her chair and sat heavily. The defective hydraulic lifter caused
the chair to sink all the way to the lowest point and she nearly grazed her
chin on the desk top.

Ricky hesitated. “No, I called you first.”

Rhetta reached down, grabbed the chair handle and
tugged. The chair popped upward. “I know you have a reason, so tell me when I
get there. I’m coming right over.” Rhetta disconnected, pushed the chair back
and snatched her purse off her desk.

“I’m coming with you,” Woody said. He beat his boss
to the door.

*
* *

Woody
folded his tall frame into the front seat of Rhetta’s silver Trailblazer. Being
nearly a foot taller than Rhetta required that he slide the seat all the way
back before he could fit. He barely had the door shut before Rhetta slammed
into reverse and backed out of the parking slot. She spun the SUV around and
headed south on Kingshighway, bound for Ricky’s shop in Gordonville, about ten
minutes away from their office in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, when the traffic
was light or when she exceeded the speed limit. The trip today might take
longer, since traffic was crawling along William Street.

 Rhetta usually drove her SUV only in the winter, or
when grocery shopping. She’d preferred enjoying the exhilaration of driving
Cami during spring, fall and summer. Southeast Missouri rarely had winter
weather, and that was only for a couple of months after Christmas. Since Cami
was gone, she was making the effort to convince herself she was looking forward
to Cami’s replacement. Knowing there was still plenty of nice weather left to
enjoy it had kept her spirits buoyed. When the car was destroyed, Rhetta was
devastated. Eventually, between her husband, Randolph, and her friend Ricky’s
enthusiasm for the replacement, she was slowly coming round. She hadn’t,
however, come up with a name for the Z28 yet. She named all their vehicles, as
well as their farm and even the garage. She christened the Trailblazer Streak,
short for Silver Streak. Although it didn’t streak anywhere. It was no speed
machine, like Cami, but it was practical. She longed for her old Camaro.

“Can you believe the bad luck? Ricky finds Malcom
Griffith’s wallet in the Z28.Wonder how long that will hold up the restoration?
Crap. The cops will probably impound the car.” She tapped impatiently on the
steering wheel as they stopped for a red light. Woody further maneuvered the
seat to his comfort. Or, at least to where his knees weren’t up around his
chin.

“Wasn’t Malcom Griffith that high-rolling real
estate developer who disappeared without a trace?” Woody asked. Once the seat
was in place, he finished snapping the seatbelt buckle, and wriggled to get
comfortable.

“Sure was. His wife appeared on television several
times in the first few weeks after his disappearance, pleading for whoever had
him to return him. You know how it is, the media interest soon died down.”
Rhetta swerved to avoid a bicyclist pedaling furiously alongside her. “Rumor
had it that Griffith made off to a foreign country with his money and
then-current extra marital affair, an exotic pole dancer, who coincidentally
vanished about the same time. In fact, Randolph was the judge who declared him
dead several years later. His wife never remarried.”

She wove through traffic lined up to turn into the
shopping mall where Jenn, Woody’s wife worked, then sped along Route K and
through Gordonville. She breezed past the fire station where a constable car
usually parked. She glanced at her speedometer, slowing reflexively when she
saw the needle pointing at fifty. On the highway on either side of town, the
speed limit was fifty miles per hour, but in town, the posted speed limit was
twenty-five. Luckily, no constable occupied the decades-old cruiser today. When
the old white sedan parked there, constable or no, it served as a great speed
deterrent. Except for Rhetta.

Past the edge of town, Rhetta turned left onto the
county road leading to Fast Lane. Streak stirred up billowy grey dust as they
rolled along the chat-covered road. Although the limestone-derived gravel made a
firm road base, the dust covered all the foliage and everything else that grew
along the sides of the road, from weeds to trees. A good rain would wash it
off. Without the rain, growth would shrivel and die from being smothered.
Everything, that is, except kudzu, which was nearly impossible to kill.

“Did you call Randolph and tell him what’s going
on?” Woody asked, glancing sideways at her.

Rhetta peered over her reading glasses at Woody.
He’d been at her side since she got the phone call, so he knew full well she
hadn’t called her husband. Woody stared straight ahead. Did she detect a smile
tweaking the corner of his mouth? Hard to tell under the grey whiskers that
made him appear older than forty-two. Two tours as a Marine contributed to the
grey. Hard to know about any grey in the hair on his head since Woody kept his
head shaved smooth. In fact, it was hard to tell if Woody even had any hair on
his head.

“I will. I want to see it first before he makes us
call the police,” Rhetta said. Woody’s right eyebrow shot up. He had a way of
making her feel like his younger, capricious sister, even though she had a full
year on him. Fourteen months, to be exact.

Her husband, a retired judge, would insist she call
the cops. He was anal about law and order details like that. “Besides, he’s
probably in his studio, painting. He went there straight after our run this
morning.” Rhetta rose early to run almost daily, in an effort to discourage any
middle-aged relocation of body mass. Randolph joined her most mornings. On the
days when she craved extra sleep, she thought about throwing in the towel and
letting Nature take its course. Then she’d look in the mirror and go running
again.

“His cell phone doesn’t work in the studio?” Woody
studied the gravel road ahead of them.

“You know as well as I do, he’d probably call the cops
right away. They’d beat me to Ricky’s and I wouldn’t get a chance to inspect
the wallet.”

“You shouldn’t be inspecting it anyway. Leave that
to the cops.”

“Is that why you came along, to make sure I call the
cops?”

“Heck, no. I came along because I’m as nosy as you
are.”

*
* *

Fifteen
minutes later, Rhetta emerged from a maelstrom of dust and swung a left into
Fast Lane’s paved driveway. Ricky’s shop was located in a converted wooden barn
that sat about fifty feet from an old farmhouse that Ricky had inherited and
painstakingly restored. She’d installed a green, metal-roofed breezeway that
connected the house and shop; the breezeway matched both for one continuous
roof.

Ricky stood in the open roll-up doorway to the shop
and waved them in. Her long red hair was pulled back into a ponytail that
dangled through the back of a ball cap emblazoned with her garage logo. She was
outfitted in full mechanic garb—a pair of pale green mechanic’s coveralls that
camouflaged her petite frame. When she worked at her day job as a real estate
agent, she looked so different that most folks who knew her as a Realtor never
recognized her alter ego. Her true passion was restoring muscle cars, and she’d
recently told Rhetta that she would soon be doing that full time and putting
her real estate license on inactive.

Ricky was an inch taller than Rhetta’s five feet
two. Due to Rhetta’s passion for wearing high-heeled sandals or shoes, Rhetta
always appeared taller than Ricky. Rhetta dressed up every day—the fashionista
to Ricky’s garage-ista.

“Let’s see what you have, girlfriend,” Rhetta said
as she followed Ricky through the shop, carefully dodging the assorted parts
and tools spread out near her car, and stopping in front of the workbench. She
glanced at her buff-colored sandals to see if she’d attracted any grease along
the way.
Not a spot, thank goodness!
She really should’ve changed into
the tennis shoes she carried in the back of her vehicle.

A worn leather tri-fold wallet lay atop a clean
paper towel on the workbench. Next to it sat a forlorn-looking pair of
sunglasses, one metal arm badly distorted. A narrow wrench, which appeared to
be stained with dried grease or oil, lay on a separate towel alongside the
first two items.

“So, tell me, how did all this just happen to fall
out of my Camaro?” Rhetta cocked her thumb toward the car.

“Come here, I’ll show you,” Ricky said, leading
Rhetta around to the front of what remained of it. The hood was off, the engine
was out and both doors sat propped against the wall. The nose, which included
the bumper, or front clip, as Ricky called it, was also missing. The body was
an empty metal hulk, stripped bare of the old interior. The new custom
upholstered seats sat covered by a tarp under the workbench. Ricky had started
sanding the body, readying it for painting.

Woody trailed after them, peering over the two
women’s shoulders into the Camaro’s empty engine compartment. It awaited the
LS1 Corvette powerhouse that was still on a truck inbound from Ohio. The inside
fender covering the passenger side front wheel was still in place.