'You see anything inside we missed?' Wilcox asked.
Cowart shook his head.
'Tanny, we're wasting our time.'
Cowart looked up from the papers to see that the police lieutenant had stepped aside while he was reading, fixing his eyes on the old woman. She stayed on the edge of her porch, glaring back at him, their eyes locked onto each other.
'Tanny?' Wilcox asked.
The policeman didn't reply.
Cowart watched the detective and the old woman try to stare each other down. He was aware of the sweat streaking down beneath his shirt and the clammy damp that matted his hair to his forehead.
Brown spoke after a moment, without removing his eyes from the old woman. 'Look again,' he said. I think we're missing something obvious.'
'Christ, Tanny…' Wilcox started again, only to be cut off by the police lieutenant.
'Look at her. She knows something and knows we don't have a clue. Damn. Keep looking.'
Wilcox shrugged, muttering something under his breath which dissipated in the midday heat. Cowart dropped his eyes to the sheets of paper, trying to process them as carefully as the policeman had once processed the house. He went over the sheets, room by room, talking out loud toward Wilcox as he did. 'Front room: fingerprinting, all items inspected, none seized, floorboards loosened, walls tapped, metal detector used; grandmother's room: searched and examined for hidden items, none found; storeroom: cutting shears seized, cleaning rags seized, towel seized, floorboards removed; Ferguson's room: clothing seized, walls and floors examined, vacuumed for hair samples; kitchen: cutlery inspected and seized, stove ashes examined, sent to lab, crawl space inspected… ' He looked up. 'It seems pretty complete…'
'Hell, we spent hours in that place, checking every damn loose nail,' Wilcox said.
Brown continued to stare up at the old woman.
'It seems to be the same today,' Cowart said, 'except I guess she turned the storeroom into a toilet. Little room between hers and Ferguson's?' he asked.
'Yeah. More like a closet than a storeroom, really,' Wilcox said.
Cowart nodded. 'Toilet and basin now.'
Wilcox added, 1 heard Ferguson put that in. Used some of the money he got from some Hollywood producer who wanted to tell his life story. Progress reaches the sticks.'
In that moment, it seemed that the sunlight pouring down on top of them redoubled, a sudden explosion of heat that sucked all the air out of the yard.
'So before, where did they…'
'Old outhouse way 'round the back.'
'And?'
'And what?'
'It's not on the list here,' Cowart said slowly. He could feel a sudden pounding in his temples.
Brown spun away from Mrs. Ferguson, eyes burrowing into his partner. 'You searched it, right?'
Wilcox nodded, hesitantly. 'Ahh, yeah. Sort of. The warrant was for the house, so I wasn't sure if it was covered, exactly. But one of the technicians went inside, sure. Nothing.'
Brown stared hard at his partner.
'C'mon, Tanny. All it was was smells and shits. The tech went in, poked about and got the hell out of there. It was in the search report.' He pointed down to a sentence in the midst of the sheets of paper. 'See, he said hesitantly.
Cowart stumbled away from the car. He remembered Blair Sullivan's words: 'If you got eyes in your ass.'
'Goddammit,' he said. 'Goddammit.' He turned toward Brown. 'Sullivan said…'
The policeman frowned. 'I recall what he said.'
Cowart turned abruptly and started walking around the side of the shack, toward the back. He heard Ferguson's grandmother's voice driven across the heat toward him, penetrating like an arrow. 'Where you heading, boy?'
'Out back,' Cowart said brusquely.
'Ain't nothing there for you,' she shouted shrilly. 'You can't go back there.'
I want to see. Goddammit, I want to see.'
Brown caught up with him quickly, the crowbar from the trunk of the car in his hand. The two men strode around the corner of the house as the woman's protests slid away in the blistering sunlight. They saw the outhouse in a corner, near some trees, back away from everything. The wooden walls had faded to a dull gray. Cowart walked up to it. Cobwebs covered the door. He seized the handle and pulled hard, tugging, as it opened reluctantly, making a screeching sound of. protest, old wood scraping against old wood. The door jammed, partway open.
'Watch out for snakes,' Brown said, grabbing at the edge of the door and pulling hard. With a final tug that shook the entire structure, the door swung wide.
'Bruce! Get a goddamn flashlight!' Brown yelled. He took the end of the crowbar and swept more spiderwebs aside. A scuttling, scratching sound made Cowart jump back as some small beast fled from the sudden light pouring through the open door.
The two men stood, shoulder to shoulder, staring at the wooden toilet seat, carved from a board, polished by use. The stench in the small space was dull and thick. It was an old smell that clogged their breathing, a smell closer to death or age than waste.
'Under there,' Cowart said.
Brown nodded in agreement.
'Way down.'
Wilcox, slightly out of breath from running, joined them, thrusting the black flashlight toward his partner.
'Bruce,' Brown asked quietly, 'the crime-scene guy. Did he pull the seat?' Did he check through the stink?'
Wilcox shook his head. 'It was nailed down tight. The nails were old, I remember, because he made me come in and double-check. There was no sign that anything had been pulled up and then replaced. You know, like hammer marks or scrapes or anything
'No obvious sign,' said Brown.
'That's right. Nothing jumped out when we looked at it.' His eyes flashed angrily.
'But… 'Brown said.
'That's right. But, Wilcox replied, 'I can't guarantee he didn't have some way of getting down into the shit hole that we didn't see. The tech went in, checked with a light, and then came out, like I told you. I stuck my head in, looked around, and that was it. I mean, one of us would've seen anything shoved down that hole…'
'If you wanted to hide something, and you didn't think you had much time and you wanted to be sure it'd be the last place searched in the most perfunctory fashion…' Brown's voice hovered between lecture and anger.
'Why not take it out into the woods and bury it?'
'Can't be certain it won't be found, especially when we bring the damn dogs in. Can't be certain you won't be seen. But one thing's for sure. Nobody's gonna go down there into a shit hole that don't have to.'