“I’ll just roll these over to the forensic tent,” I said.
“You look beat,” Michael said. “Want me to do it?”
“Chain of custody,” I said.
As I dragged the wheeled box along, I found myself pondering how strange it was that the nephew I could still so easily remember as a cheerful toddler had turned into someone I instinctively trusted to take care of my own toddlers.
I found the chief and Randall talking just outside the tent that served as the mayor’s office.
“Brought you some more water,” I said. “Shall I stow it in here?”
“Maybe in my tent for safekeeping,” Randall suggested.
Randall and the chief helped me unload the evidence bags.
“Now if I can just find someone to take them down to the crime lab in Richmond,” the chief said, frowning at the sizable stack of bags. “Having to put several deputies on guard duty at the courthouse is making me shorthanded.”
Maybe he was hoping I’d volunteer. Maybe if things were a little less crazy, I might have. But the arrival of Josh and Jamie in my life made me realize that I needed to do a lot less volunteering and a lot more asking for help.
Like maybe accepting Rose Noire’s offer to take over talent coordination for Caerphilly Days.
Speaking of which …
“Got to run,” I said. “By the way—”
“Can I help you, Mr. Pruitt?” Randall asked.
Chapter 15
I started and turned. I didn’t like anyone sneaking up behind me, particularly not a Pruitt. At least it was only Hamish, peering into the tent with a surly expression on his face.
“I need to talk to you!” Hamish said to Randall.
“Lord,” Randall muttered under his breath. “Be with you in a minute, then. Chief?”
“I’ll see you later.” The chief rose and made his exit.
“Was there anything else you needed?” Randall asked me. I could tell from the expression on his face that he was hoping there was.
Hamish didn’t wait for me to answer.
“I came to ask when you’re going to take action on my request,” he said.
“And which one was that, Mr. Pruitt?”
“My request that you finally do something about that man!” Hamish snapped. “Does he have to kill off the whole town before you do anything?”
“Look, Mr. Pruitt,” Randall said. “I appreciate your point of view on this. I’ve been going in every day to try to talk some sense into Mr. Throckmorton, without any success so far. And if you ask me, today’s unfortunate events are going to make it harder rather than easier to talk him into coming out.”
“He doesn’t need to come out,” Hamish said. “Well, of course he does, and I don’t mean you should stop trying to talk him into it. What I mean is—haven’t you ever tried to negotiate the surrender of the town archives?”
“Why would I try to do that?” Randall sounded genuinely puzzled.
“You have dozens of file cabinets and hundreds of boxes full of papers down there!” Hamish exclaimed. “Many of them are valuable historical documents, or official documents necessary for the governance of the town. And they’re all down there in the hands of a criminal! Possibly a lunatic!”
“They’re all down there in the safekeeping of our official county clerk,” Randall said. He tipped his chair back on two legs and folded his arms, appearing to study Hamish. “I grant you, it might be more convenient if Mr. Throckmorton had moved them out of the courthouse along with everything else, but we’re making do.”
“But we have to get them out of there,” Hamish said.
I felt a sudden twinge of anxiety. Why was Hamish so stubbornly demanding that Randall do something that was clearly impossible—unless he’d found out about the tunnel and knew it wasn’t impossible after all?
“We’re getting along just fine,” Randall said. “We really need something, we call him up, and he sends us a copy—he’s got his little fax machine down there, you know. Or he scans and e-mails things to us. We’ve gone electronic. Joined the twenty-first century.”
“But—but—that’s preposterous! You can’t run a town like that.”
“So far we seem to be running the town and the county just fine,” Randall said. “Better than it’s been run in years, if you ask me. And even if I agreed with you that we ought to get the documents out, just how do you suggest we do it? Fold ’em all up small enough to fit through the chinks in the barricade? That’d take a while, and I don’t think we’d want to do that to all those valuable historical papers.”