The main part of the compound had been neatly mowed, but weeds were high around the side and Dwight soon saw where two vehicles of some sort had recently driven in there and turned around. Ragweed and goldenrods had been snapped off or crushed down and were barely wilted.

“Any of your people park there?” he asked.

Both Mrs. Ames and Fish shook their heads.

“Who knows you have this place?”

“All our own people have been out here moving equipment in and out,” she answered. “And some of the independents know about it. Braz told Skee, the guy runs the duck pond? His wife was like a grandmother to Braz. And Skee probably told the world if it sat still long enough.”

Dwight laid a ruler across the tire tracks and took careful pictures, but he knew he was just going through the motions. The tracks appeared to be the width of standard tires, the weeds hadn’t held any tread marks, and if there had been shoe prints in the dirt immediately in front of the wooden steps, their own shoes had obliterated them.

Bostrom’s Bigfoot U-Store was out on the bypass at the edge of Dobbs, and Bob Bostrom himself was standing in the doorway when Deputy Mayleen Richards got out of her patrol car. He was about her height, of slender build, with brown hair and brown eyes that were wary at first.

“Your feet don’t look very big to me,” she said in greeting.

The wary look disappeared and he laughed. “That was my dad. Size thirteen triple E. I got my momma’s feet, thank goodness. What can I do for you, Officer?”

When she explained and showed him the receipt he’d given Braz Hartley a couple of weeks ago, he led her into his small office and pulled out a file drawer. No computers here.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Now I remember. Young black guy showed up here wanting his granddaddy’s stuff back.”

He described the man’s outrage in a vivid, almost word-for-word reenactment for her.

“He said, ‘Gibsonton, Florida? This white bastard trucked my granddaddy’s pictures to Florida? How you got the right to let him do that?’

“I told him, ‘The state of North Carolina gave me that right when your granddaddy let the rent run out on his locker and the certified letter I sent him came back.’

“ ‘But he died!’

“I told him even dead people got debts, debts him and his family ought to’ve paid, and you shoulda seen him puff up at that,” Bostrom told Richards. “He was a lot bigger’n me, but I just started cleaning my nails with my pocketknife here”—as if by magic, a wicked-looking switchblade appeared in his hands—“and he climbed back down. I told him to chill. He didn’t have to go all the way to Florida. The buyer was with a carnival right here in North Carolina. Ames Amusement.”