Page 42 of In Cold Blood
About to pull out, Noah glanced in his rearview mirror and saw a white truck parked at the mouth of the lot. He’d seen it when they came out of the pub but didn’t give it much thought. The windows were tinted and it was idling, with exhaust fumes spiraling up behind it. As he reversed and spun his truck out, he caught sight of the driver, but it was hard to tell if it was a male or female. The moment he put his truck in drive and drove toward it, the truck tore away.
Something about the speed in which it did caught his attention. It wasn’t normal. Not for a place like this where people took their time, and enjoyed the peace and relaxation of RVing and camping. Instincts told him he was being tailed.
Maybe his gut instinct was wrong but he was more than willing to apologize if that was the case… Noah slammed his foot against the accelerator and took off after it.
The F-150 bounced over speed bumps down the narrowwinding road out of the forest. He knew the white truck would have to stop at the T-junction up ahead. Narrowing his eyes, he tried to read off the license plate but only caught the first three letters — FAE — before it swerved around a bend out of view.
“All right, you are going to have to…” Noah said, expecting the driver to stop.
Nope. There was no stopping this lunatic. The white truck blew through a stop sign, hung a hard right, and bounced onto the main road, almost clipping a blue sedan in the process. Horns honked. Brakes screeched. Before Noah could make the turn and close the distance, a huge 18-wheeler turned in to deliver gas to the station that was on the corner. He crushed the brakes just in the nick of time.
His truck fishtailed, coming dangerously close to hitting the 18-wheeler. Noah gritted his teeth and slapped the steering with both hands as he watched the white truck vanish through a gap between the cab and the trailer.
12
Callie Thorne waded through more paperwork inside the Adirondack County Sheriff’s Office. The two-story brown brick building that doubled as the County Jail was set back from Highway 12 about seven miles north of Elizabethtown and roughly thirty minutes east of High Peaks.
Inside it was a functional space with a utilitarian design. It was divided into a reception area, a waiting room for visitors, and a work area for officers. On one wall was a whiteboard with a bulletin board for important announcements and notices. It was designed to be practical and efficient, but not overly comfortable or inviting. Callie squinted at the fluorescent lighting that was making her head throb.
She reached for a bottle of Tylenol, unscrewed the top, and tossed two back before swallowing down a mouthful of water and adjusting her glasses.
“Another headache?” Deputy Hendrix asked, passing her desk and slumping down behind his own.
Distracted by what she was reading, she muttered, “It’s this new detox I’m on.”
“I didn’t think you were one for all that hippie nonsense,” he said, munching loudly on an apple.
She swiveled in her chair. “When you’re breaking out in hives, you try anything.”
“That’s stress.” He tossed the half-eaten apple into a bin like he was part of the NBA. It landed with a hard thud and he raised both arms in victory. “And the crowd goes wild.”
“Did you read that article Lena Grayson wrote?” she asked.
He laughed. “Which one?”
Noah’s ex had made a name for herself in the county as a muckraker or as she liked to say, a truth-teller. Like any good reporter, she’d become accustomed to writing pieces that either pointed fingers or uncovered problems. If there was dirt to be found, she’d find it. To be fair, she was good at her job, maybe a little too good, but she wasn’t always right and this was one of those times.
Callie tapped the tip of her pen against the desk. “You remember that double homicide over at that new condo?”
“Yeah, the sheriff pulled me out of bed for that one. I still haven’t caught up on my sleep.” He yawned and fished into a drawer for some gum.
“Well, you’re going to love this,” she said, rolling her chair across the office and handing him a printout.
Hendrix sniffed hard and scanned it before laughing hard. “What the hell? Accusing us of covering up crime at ‘ghost hotels.’ Whatever’s next?” He handed back the article. “And to think her brother-in-law used to work here and her father is a lawyer. Puts the family to shame. Besides, isn’t there an unwritten rule about not slinging mud in your own home? Now I understand why Noah’s marriage fell apart. She was probably plying him for information.”
Ghost hotels was a term that was associated with short-term vacation rentals. The name came from the absence of managementor anyone around to control guests. It was a shady practice that had risen with the popularity of Airbnb. Those with more money than sense would scoop up a unit in a condo or a suburban house in a quiet neighborhood and then rent it out short term for a weekend, or every day for a week. Strangers would come and go, and more often than not they weren’t the quiet types. Dwellings in quiet neighborhoods would be turned into party city and then if neighbors tried to intervene and ask for the music to be turned down, fights would break out.
Essentially the host would create rules and then expect the municipality to enforce them. Domestic assaults, people running up and down the road, loud music, car tires spinning out, college drunks leaping off roofs, it had become an almost full-time job chasing them up. While renting out a cottage was accepted, this wasn’t anything like that. Units in condos and homes were being rented out per night without any oversight.
“She thinks that because we didn’t provide any incident reports regarding calls to any of these vacation rentals that they must have been buried so that we don’t steer people away from our… good community.”
He shook his head, chuckling. “Yeah, we don’t want the public to know and so they’ve instructed us to not write up these calls. Like we haven’t got better things to do with our time. Geesh. I must say she is a pushy one, isn’t she? I always thought the Graysons were level-headed, now I have to wonder.”
Across the room, the door to Sheriff Daniel Roberts’ office opened.
He came out chuckling with that spindly-looking fella from State in his shadow. The stranger reminded Callie of a door-to-door salesman trying too hard. He wore a black suit that was slightly too big and he looked like bones with a layer of thin skin. Something wasn’t right with his diet, that was for sure. Then again, hers wasn’t much better. Frequent stomach troubleand her eyesight had been plaguing her for years. The doctor said it was the stress of the job. At thirty-eight, with all the aches she was having, she didn’t even want to imagine what her retirement years would be like.
She tried to look busy as Roberts made a beeline for her.
