Page 55 of Evil Bones
“Right.”
Slidell paused in the hall and kicked the door. Hard.
“Yo.”
I got up, crossed my office, and opened it wide.
Skinny stood holding a cardboard box crammed with what appeared to be case files. A long roll of paper cut diagonally across the top stuck out behind his sweat-stained left pit.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You gonna let me in, or do I die of old age standing here?”
I stepped back.
Skinny entered and dumped his load on my desk.
“We’re going old-school,” he said, pulling out another laundry-challenged hanky to wipe his brow.
“Old-school,” I repeated in way of a question.
“This joint got a bulletin board?”
“I think there’s a portable somewhere in storage.” Since the dawn of the digital age. I didn’t add that.
“How ’bout you bring it to the conference room.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense to upload all the data—”
“Just get the goddam thing.”
Locating the goddam thing took longer than I thought.
By the time I pushed through the conference room door, the late-afternoon sun was hanging even lower in the sky. A soft tangerine glow lit the long mahogany table, interrupted by diagonal shadows cast by the Venetian blinds’ slats.
Slidell was aglow, too, the orange tinge looking brash coming off his grease-slicked hair.
Skinny was laying out a series of plastic containers. Each held pushpins, one set with blue caps, one with green, one with yellow, one with red.
“Help me with this,” he ordered, unfurling the scroll. Which turned out to be a map of North and South Carolina.
As I held each corner down, Slidell tacked it in place.
“We’re gonna start by plotting every case of a missing pet that never turned up.”
“Going how far back?”
“Three years.”
Though skeptical, I went along with Skinny’s plan. He mined the files—old-school, one spit-moistened finger running through the hard copy in each. As he called out names and locations, I worked the board.
Ninety minutes later, dozens of blue pins dotted the map.
“Now we’re going to add calls involving animal mutilation.”
“Hopefully there aren’t many of those,” I said.
“You’d be surprised.”
