“I recognize that Bronco,” Adam said. “The Gruders are back.”
I groaned. Will and Vince Gruder were our local bad boys. The ones who kept the county flush with drugs. “Think they know something?”
“I think we should ask.”
I pulled into the lot and parked our cruiser next to the Ford Bronco. Adam and I both got out. The SUV’s rear windows had been covered with duct tape, so we couldn’t see into the back. Hundreds of bugs were splattered across the windshield, and the front seats were a mess of fast-food wrappers and Walmart bags. A plastic jalapeño, wearing a sombrero, dangled from the rear-view mirror, with “Welcome to El Paso” printed across the green skin of the pepper.
I knew what the jalapeño meant. Will and Vince traveled to Mexico every summer, and they cooked what they brought back into meth in a lab hidden somewhere in the woods. We’d chased them for years, but they were sly like foxes about covering up their business and had never spent so much as a day inside the Mittel County jail.
There was no sign of the Gruders outside the school, but I heard the springy thump of a basketball behind the building. Adam heard it, too, and he headed off across the green grass without a word to me. I jogged to keep up with him.
I was used to Adam taking the lead. Technically, he and I were both deputies, but he was three years older. You can guess where that left me in the pecking order, at least in Adam’s mind. It didn’t help that I was the daughter of the sheriff. It also didn’t help that Adam had asked me out in high school when he was a senior and I was a freshman, and I’d shot him down. Adam didn’t hear the word “no” very often. He was used to girls falling for the jeans, the shades, the smirk, and the tight little curls in his short brown hair. He wasn’t tall, but he had the cool factor going for him back then. Cool kids weren’t my type. Not that I knew what my type was.
Adam was a good cop but a little reckless, because he always felt like he had something to prove. He’d grown up in the shadow of his mother, who was a local hero in Mittel County. She’d competed in the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid and taken home a silver medal in cross-country skiing. She was pretty and TV-friendly, and she’d parlayed her success into a lot of money in sponsorships. Sooner or later, Adam was going to inherit some big bucks. Maybe that’s why he never looked happy living an ordinary life. I think he always felt that his mother wanted him to do something more with her DNA than hand out traffic tickets on the county roads.
The two of us went around to the rear of the school building, where the athletic fields were arranged in a giant rectangle. The basketball courts were closest to us, and we saw the Gruders playing a fierce game of one-on-one with a white-and-purple basketball. As I watched, one of the brothers sunk a hook shot through the rusted hoop, but I didn’t know which brother it was. They were identical twins, twenty-two years old.
“That’s Vince,” Adam said, reading my mind.
“How do you know?”
“Because Vince can shoot, and Will sucks.”
We strolled over to the court. The Gruders saw us coming, and they dribbled the ball to the fence to meet us. Both wore jeans and high-tops, and both were bare-chested, with sweat dripping in streaks down their suntanned skin. They had the same long, greasy blond hair and the same green eyes and even the same nose rings in their right nostrils. They were tall and skinny, and I could smell pot on their breath.
“Deputy Twilley,” Vince announced, as if we were all old friends, “and Deputy Lake. Look at that, our two favorite law enforcement professionals are here to welcome us home. You want to shoot some hoops with us?”
“When did you get back into town, Vince?” Adam asked, ignoring the small talk.
“A couple of days ago. We rolled into Witch Tree late on Wednesday.”
“Where did you go on your trip?”
“Oh, here and there. We hit us some beaches, drank us some beer. What’s summer without a road trip, right? Still, there’s no place like home. Nothing beats the scenery around here.” As he said this, Vince gave me an up-and-down look that belonged in a brown paper wrapper.
“We’re looking for Jeremiah Sloan,” Adam said impatiently. “Have you seen him?”
Vince bounced the basketball in his hand. “Who?”
“He’s Adrian Sloan’s little brother,” I told him. I noticed that Will Gruder kept scratching his leg with his foot, and I shot a quick glance at the ragged cuffs of his jeans, which were loaded with sharp little prickly burs. When I saw that, I quickly added, “I mean, you guys know Adrian, don’t you?”
The two brothers exchanged looks, and the look from Vince said Shut up.
“Sure, we know Adrian,” Vince said. “Football player, right? What’s up with his brother?”
“Jeremiah is missing,” Adam replied. “We found his bike on the dirt road that leads to Talking Lake. There’s no sign of the boy. His parents are pretty worried.”
Will shot a concerned glance at his brother. “He’s missing? Really? I mean, we just—”
“Hey, that’s too bad about the kid,” Vince interrupted before Will could say anything more. “Wish we could help you out, but we haven’t seen him. If we spot him hanging around, we’ll give you a call.”
“When did the two of you last see Adrian?” I asked.
Vince didn’t blink. He just stared right through me. “Adrian? Heck if I know.”
“Are you sure you didn’t see him today?”
“Today? No, we haven’t seen Adrian since we got back. Not sure why we would. You guys need anything else? Or can I get back to kicking Will’s ass on the court?”
“Go ahead.”
Vince grabbed his brother’s shoulder and dragged him back to the basketball court. I waited to see what Will would do, and sure enough, he glanced back at me with a shifty, nervous expression that told me the two of them were lying. I turned my back on the brothers and walked away toward the front of the school. This time, Adam had to jog to catch up with me.
“What the hell was that about?” he asked. “Why were you asking about Adrian?”
“Burs.”
“Huh?”
“Will had prickly burs stuck to his jeans and shoelaces. A lot of them.”
“So?”
“Adrian Sloan did, too. He was picking them off while Dad was talking to him.”
Adam looked back at the brothers, who were hanging around on the court and watching us go. “You think the Gruder boys were with Adrian? Because of a few prickly burs? That’s pretty thin, Shelby.”
“Yeah, I know. Maybe I’m wrong about this, and it’s nothing. But if I’m right, then Will and Vince saw Adrian in the national forest today. And that means Adrian’s lying to us.”
Chapter Five
When you’re in the midst of an investigation that involves a child, you always feel as if your heart is in your mouth and you have to remind yourself to breathe. So it was a relief when Monica called us to say she had a report of an unidentified, unaccompanied minor in our old town cemetery. I told her we’d check it out immediately. My first thought was that Jeremiah had gone to visit his grandfather’s grave, and I allowed myself to hope that our fears had been misplaced and we’d have the boy back with his parents soon.
The dead of the Mittel County Cemetery have always been like friends to me, because the graveyard backs up to our house. When I was a girl, I used to wander the cemetery trails at night with a flashlight, hunting for ghosts. Rose thought it was creepy and wouldn’t go along, but the place never bothered me. Remember, I’m the girl who doesn’t scare easily. I still walk in the cemetery whenever I can. Sometimes I’ll take my guitar and sing songs for the dead, because they’re good listeners and don’t heckle me when I’m off-key.