“That’s a good story.”

“That you were never here?”

“Right,” I said.

“And the management company?” she asked.

“Let the police call them,” I said. “But even the call to the coroner to get things going. Wait five hours after I leave before you make it.”

“Okay,” she said.

“And, Maria,” I said. “I’m gonna hold on to that I.D. I took from the kid. But let me give you some advice on your business.”

She stared at me.

“You got a big trunk in your car?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Big enough for that Mac and a couple hard drives? ’Cause cops might start looking around after they find a body.”

“Done,” she said.

I held up the skull. Pointed at a hole in it that I could tell was made by a .45. “When you talk to the coroner,” I said, “make sure you tell her that the skull you found—it’s got a bullet hole through it.”

Maria swallowed.

We went upstairs then, and I washed up in her sink.

Maria’s place was cute. Her living room was decorated with pictures of northern Georgia that I guessed she took herself. Amicalola Falls from the footbridge. The head of the Appalachian Trail near Ellijay. And downtown Dahlonega around Christmas.

I was exhausted from sleeping in my truck and wanted to get home. Grab a couple hours of rest before the banquet honoring my role in ending the school shooting.

Maria grabbed a bottle of rum and took a shot. “Is that John Adrian’s body down there?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“So it’s someone he killed?”

“More likely,” I said. “Do you remember exactly when they filled that in?” I pointed at the building.

“December of that year,” she said, referring to two years ago. “A couple days before Christmas. Maybe the twenty-first or twenty-second.”

Which jibed perfectly with the robbery at the Golden Oaks on December 12. Christian Pelo probably met them out here around the eighteenth. By the twenty-first, the smell might’ve made the place pretty ripe if Pelo hadn’t been buried right.

“Did Lauten Hartley show up for that?” I asked. “When they filled in the dirt?”

“Yeah,” she said. “He was here.”

“With Adrian?”

“No, Adrian had left town a couple days before that. Some family thing. I remember I was officially manager, even though I didn’t know shit yet and wasn’t taking over ’til January.”

“So just Hartley by himself?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, he came with this other guy. A guy he comes with still once in a while. He’s the one who wheel-barrowed a lot of the dirt down there.”

“Muscle?” I asked, but she stared. Unclear as to what I was saying.

“A bodyguard,” I clarified.

“No,” she said. “I mean, he’s muscular, sure. Blond guy. Younger than Hartley. They work together. You can tell they’re familiar.”

“This guy got a name?” I asked.

Maria shrugged. “He doesn’t talk much, but—I think Hartley calls him Iron or something. They come here together.”