“Why in the carnival?” I asked, ignoring his question.

No trooper pulls you if you’re doing less than eight over the limit.

Okay, so I was doing ten. I eased off the gas a hair and Dwight relaxed a little, too.

“Most homicide victims know their killers.”

“To know is not to love?”

“Familiarity sure does breed contempt,” he agreed. “Carnies don’t usually want to talk to lawmen, but we’ve found a couple who say Braz Hartley was a liar and a petty thief, a blowhard and a coward. They say he used to bully his brother till his brother got old enough to kick ass back. Always full of big schemes to make a million dollars and leave the carnival, yet every year he was back on the road with the Ameses, who, incidentally, seem to be pretty well liked and respected.”

“You may not like the idea of strangers like the Lincoln brothers,” I said. “All the same, money’s a big motive, and Tally told me they’ve had some high-dollar finds in those self-storage lockers. A watch worth thousands, for instance. I haven’t read the statutes lately, but as I recall, if the operator of a self-storage facility follows the procedures for notifying the owner, then it’s a good-faith sale and neither the operator nor the buyer has any obligation to the owner.”

The forty-five gave way to fifty-five and Dwight’s truck obligingly moved right on up to sixty-three.

“Think of how the Lincolns reacted over a few tools worth a couple of hundred at most,” I said. “If someone with the same sort of faulty logic lost something worth thousands, especially if they lost it over a technicality like missed rental payments, don’t you think they could get violent if the buyer wouldn’t give it kick?”

“But he hadn’t bought anything particularly valuable this time out,” Dwight objected. “Just four lockers. Two were some old furniture and a couple of gilt-framed pictures.”

“Antiques?”

“Not that kind of old. More like made-ten-years-ago old that’s falling apart. And the pictures are the kind you see in motels. Then there was one locker that only had used cans of paint and pieces of plywood that look like somebody’s kid painted them for a Halloween party. Lots of skeletons and devils, Ames told us. Hartley bought them cheap, and Ames took them off his hands for twenty or thirty bucks and hauled ‘em out to their place near Widdington. He’s going to nail them around the outside of the haunted house that he’s planning to rebuild. Oh, and one funny thing—two racks of expensive nightgowns and bathrobes in all colors of the rainbow. Satin and lace. All on fancy padded hangers. Matching bedroom slippers, too. Hartley had to bid pretty high for that. Stuff is good quality and barely been worn, according to Mayleen. Who would store stuff like that in a locker?”

“Maybe it’s from a lingerie store that was going out of business?”

“Mayleen says it’s all the same size.”