Page 85 of Holmes, Margaret and Poe

“Any idea why he would have been on your campus at four thirty in the morning?”

“No,” she said. “He often came in on the weekends to work on class plans. But not that early.”

“Did he have a key to the school?”

“To the south entrance, the one bordering the playground and the baseball field.”

Thinking that Laurel was at least a twenty-five-minute drive, even at that early hour, I said, “Do you know what kind of car he had?”

“Red Toyota Tacoma,” she said. “He was very proud of that truck.”

After a few more questions, I thanked her, offered my condolences, and asked that no one notify Dalton’s wife. We wanted to break the news to her in person.

Walking back down Tenth Street, I scanned both sides of the road for a red Tacoma but didn’t see it. I returned to the baseball field.

Sampson turned away from the medical examiner. I told him about my conversation with Helen Lawton and finished with the red Toyota Tacoma.

He dug in his pocket and came up with an evidence bag containing keys he said had been in McCoy’s pants pocket. He pressed the panic button through the plastic.

A whooping noise came from over on I Street, just east of Tenth. He shut it off. We left the field and walked south on Tenth.

“I have to believe our guy made another big mistake here,” Sampson said, gesturing to the well-maintained row houses that lined the west side of the street. People were looking out the windows at us. “Someone saw him, or one of those fancy doorbell cameras caught our guy.”

“Good chance,” I said. We turned left on I Street and immediately spotted the Tacoma halfway up the block on the opposite side.

We went to the little pickup. John opened the driver’s door with the key fob. There was a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the holder and a zippered bag advertising a CrossFit gym in Laurel and a canvas briefcase in the passenger seat. Otherwise, the Tacoma was spotless.

The gym bag contained a change of clothes, jeans, a leather jacket, and a Washington Nationals ball cap. The briefcase held an iPhone, a fresh yellow legal pad, two new pens, an iPad, and a power cord.

I pressed the power button on the iPhone. The screen lit up and showed a picture of a beautiful brunette in her thirties crouched next to a little boy and girl playing on a beach.

“We need to go talk to his wife before she hears this from someone else,” I said, seeing the phone was password-protected.

Sampson’s face clouded, but he nodded. “She might know what he was doing here and what his passwords are.”

I picked up the iPad. The screen was blank, the batterydead. “Let’s have the truck impounded in the meantime,” I said, shutting the door.

“Here’s your rake, by the way,” John said, gesturing into the bed of the pickup.

There was indeed fresh sandy soil under the iron rake that lay in the back of the Tacoma along with several other gardening tools. After taking a picture of it all with our phones, we started back.

I happened to look through the ball-field fence all the way across to the playground.

“Son of a bitch.”

“What?”

“There’s someone here who should not be here.”

Sampson followed my line of sight and said, “Oh, that’s not cool.”

“Yeah, I’ll be right along after I nip this in the bud. Where did you park?”

“Tenth, north of Georgia,” he said.

“I’ll meet you there in ten,” I said. I jogged east, crossed Eleventh, and headed north past the New Hope Free Will Baptist church.

When I was opposite the playground, I returned to the west side of the street and went to the chain-link fence, which put me about thirty yards from the small figure crouching by an internal fence and aiming a camera toward Rodgers and her assistant as they loaded the corpse of Dalton McCoy into the coroner’s van.

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