“You signed the search warrant,” he said. “You tell me.”

“You mean they really found those stolen boards?”

Before he could answer, Dwight’s door opened and I glanced back over my shoulder to see a hugely smiling Lamarr Wrenn step out into the hallway. He wore a Shaw sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out, shorts, and sandals. His right ankle was taped with an elastic bandage. One big arm was around a middle-aged woman in a blue suit who scowled up at him, the other hand carried one of those crudely painted scraps of plywood. The woman was clearly his mother. She was giving him a come-to-Jesus lecture about the evils of theft, and what’d he want with those weird old pictures anyhow, and don’t think for one minute she wasn’t going to take every penny out of his hide, but he just kept smiling and hugging her as they went on down the hall.

The white man who followed them more slowly was also smiling as he put a slip of paper in his wallet. It was Arnold Ames.

“Thanks for your understanding,” Dwight said. “I really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” said Ames. “A quick dime’s better than a slow dollar any day of the week, far as I’m concerned, and this way everybody gets what they want, right?” He shook Dwight’s hand. “Good doing business with you, Major Bryant.”

“What was all that about?” Bo asked when Ames was gone.

“I’ll try to have the full report for you tomorrow,” Dwight said from his doorway, “but basically, it’s about why Lamarr Wrenn really punched out Friday night’s homicide.”

“He’s not the perp?” asked Bo.

“I don’t see how he could be,” said Dwight. “The next-door neighbor confirms the time he says he got there. She also says he was wearing sneakers, and whoever stomped Hartley was wearing hard-soled shoes.”

“But the Halloween pictures?” I asked.

“Not Halloween,” he told us. “Bascom Wrenn, Ms. Wrenn’s daddy, got religion big time about five or six years ago and started painting these strange pictures of the Last Judgment—the eye of God, the dead rising from their graves, souls in hell. Lamarr thought they were great, which was news to Ms. Wrenn. She was under the impression that they embarrassed the hell out of both of them. In fact, she was so sure the pictures were evidence that Mr. Wrenn was getting cracked and senile that he used his little pension to stick them in a self-storage unit out on the bypass to keep her from seeing them and he’d go over there to paint.”

I laughed. “The storage locker was his studio?”

“Yep. So when he died, nobody knew about the locker and the rent lapsed. Bostrom, the guy who owns the facility, jumped through all the legal hoops—sent a certified letter to his home, posted it here in the courthouse, notice in the Ledger, the whole works. Ms. Wrenn says if a letter was forwarded, she doesn’t remember signing for one. The sale went forward and Braz Hartley bought the contents of the locker for thirty bucks. Old cans of paint and those hellfire and damnation pictures. His stepfather saw a use for the pictures and gave him thirty-five for the lot.”