“What about our two guys’ prints?” Remy asked. “Vinorama and Dilmendes?”

“Other than on the steering wheel.” Carlos shrugged. “None of their prints either.”

I stood back, inspecting the car with a fresh eye. It was odd enough to see a professional hit in Mason Falls. A complete lack of prints was even rarer. Someone had been in that car. Took their time looking around. And then removed any trace of themselves.

“I’m thinking the guys in the car were low level,” Carlos said. “Couriers probably.”

“Based on what?” Remy asked.

“Their dress,” he said. “My point is—the odds are better that they had something than they knew something.”

“You think their killer searched the car for something these two had?” I asked. “Found what it was. Then wiped everything down after?”

“Possibly,” Carlos said. “’Cept I don’t know about the ‘found it’ part.”

I smiled at Carlos. “You wanna take the car apart?”

“I do.”

“You think what?” Remy asked him. “Inside some tube in the engine . . . someone was searching for something they never found?”

Carlos nodded. He had a good instinct for these things. What my father-in-law called “horse sense.”

“Make it happen,” I said. “We’ll clear the O.T. with the chief.”

I took a step back and stopped. “Wait. You said two things . . . that you found.”

“Yeah,” Carlos said. “There’s this guy Nick who delivers stuff from the lab. He’s got a handful of those same shirts you found in the back. The ones with the stupid slogans on them.”

“Okay?” I said.

“So I called Nick twenty minutes ago. Asked him where I could get a shirt like his.”

“What’d he say?” Remy asked.

“He told me about some gift store about three miles from where you found this car. Big signs all over it. Ninety-nine cents this. Two for twenty that.”

“I know that place,” Remy said. “It’s not the only thing out there either. There’s a liquor store. A bar.”

“If these guys were staying in town for a couple days,” Carlos said, “that bar might be where they were getting their drink on.”

15

As Remy drove north on 914, I thought about what we had so far on the double murder and what open questions existed. But mostly I tried to avoid thinking about Hartley. Which meant I mostly thought about Hartley.

Should I have said more to the man? Less?

Gotten angry?

Demanded more from the chief?

The sound of tires crunching on gravel signaled our arrival, and I stared up at the building that housed Art’s Novelties and Gifts. The place was a large wooden structure, with an angled tin roof that had a sign every ten feet or so. One read T-Shirts $5, while another shouted We’ve got . . . what you forgot.

I looked around.

When you work in patrol, you get to know every seedy corner of town, and the rural shitholes too. That’s why you gotta work patrol at least two years before you can even apply for your detective’s badge. But I hadn’t been out this way in some time, and the store was new since then.