“And someone got hurt. There were ambulances and you ended up here.” He motioned to the surroundings.
“Right.”
Tyson demanded, “Who? Another victim? This isn’t making any sense!”
“An officer was injured while trying to help someone who’d fallen into the river. Look, I can’t tell you any more than that,” Reed said, his guts squeezing as he thought about Morrisette and Nikki and the baby. “There are privacy laws.”
“Will they be okay?” Tyson asked.
“We’re hoping.”
“Oh, Lord.” Baxter let out a long breath. “This isn’t good,” he said, “not at all. We’re trying to sell the property, you know.” He motioned to include his son. “And we’ve got a couple of interested parties, two different construction companies, or is it three?”
“Two for certain and a third, maybe.” Tyson’s jaw tightened. “After all these years and finally the zoning is going through. It looks like a deal might finally go through and now . . .” He ran a hand through his short hair.
“And now this,” his father finished for him.
“Yes, and so we’ll need a statement from you,” Reed said, and spying a nurse, cell phone plastered to his ear, hurrying past, added, “Probably it would be best if you could come down to the station.”
“What!” Baxter said. “A statement? Why? We certainly didn’t have anything to do with what happened!” For a second he seemed panicked.
“Whoa, Dad. Slow down. We do own the property.” Tyson placed a steadying hand on his father’s forearm. “Of course the police are going to want to talk to us.”
Reed nodded. “We just need a thorough list of anyone who had access to the house, who lived in the house or nearby, who takes care of the place, that sort of thing.”
“And for that we need to go to the police department?” Baxter asked, his chin tightening.
Reed eyed the older man. “For privacy.”
“Makes sense.” Tyson was quick to agree as he stared out the window, and Reed, following his gaze, spied a news van roll into a parking lot near the emergency room. “We don’t need any bad publicity . . . or any more than we already have. Detective Reed is just trying to do his job and be discreet.”
“Well, yes. We want that. We need discretion.” Baxter, too, eyed the news van as it took up two parking spots in the lot. “We don’t want to lose any potential deal.” He was nodding to himself. “It happened before. We ended up losing a buyer on the property north of the house.”
“We’ve lost a lot of deals.”
“But that one stung, y’know.” He turned his gaze to Reed. “We had an interested investor from Chicago. Very interested. A big developer. But then he got wind of what had happened to Nell and . . . well, the deal fell through and we had to sell locally. Lost nearly two hundred grand on the deal.” He was shaking his head, lost in thought.
Tyson was having none of it. “Bodies were found on the property, Dad! What is it you’re not getting about that?”
“Nothing I can do about that,” Baxter pointed out.
Tyson held up his hands, palms out, to Reed, then let them drop. “Sorry. It’s just that we don’t want a lot of bad publicity.”
“Exactly my point.” Baxter threw his son a disgusted look.
Tyson explained, “The deal we’re working on, it’s been a long time in the works and a hard decision for Dad. We haven’t sold off any of the estate since the Cravens bought the parcel on the other side of the river, and that was years ago. So, what we don’t want is a media circus.”
“I can’t stop that,” Reed said.
“We know. Well, I do anyway,” he said, sending his father a sharp glance. “It’s just . . . just when you’re done with your investigation at the old house, if, you know, everyone could clear out.”
“We will,” Reed assured them. He thought of his wife, how she’d risked her damned life, as well as Morrisette’s, all for a story. “I can’t speak for the press, though. You’ll have to deal with them.”
“Great,” Tyson muttered.
“Signs,” Baxter chimed in. “More of those NO TRESPASSING signs that tell them they’ll be prosecuted if they set one foot on the property. And cameras! We’ll get some of those little spy cameras—you can pick them up online these days and they’re pretty cheap—so we catch the damned violators. That should do it. We’ll threaten them all with legal action, that’s what we’ll do!” His eyes actually brightened at the prospect as a woman in her twenties, phone in hand, scanned the alcove, then found a seat not far away, across the hallway, very much in earshot. She half-lay in a chair, long legs over one arm, flip-flops dangling from her feet as she texted like mad.
Tyson watched her and said, “Maybe you’re right. We should do this at the station. We can come up with a list of people who’ve been on the property that we know of, or people who were interested, but my guess is no one who was thinking about buying the place was stashing bodies there.”
“Include workmen. People you hired.”
“You were at the house today, right?” Tyson said as Reed nodded. “Then you already know we don’t exactly have a crew maintaining the place.”
“But you did have a caretaker?”
Baxter said, “Wynn. We had Wynn Cravens on the payroll for years. My mother hired him.”
“That’s right,” Tyson said. “Wynn took care of the place while Beulah, that’s my grandmother, lived in the house. Then, over time, you know, when we moved out of the place and eventually Grandma, we decided to sell off parcels and didn’t really need him.” Tyson slid his hands into his front pockets and rolled back on his heels. “Besides, he was getting older.”
“Just passed on,” Baxter said. “I read his obituary in the Sentinel.”
“What about his son or grandson?”
Baxter shook his head. “Didn’t deal much with Jasper. He wasn’t around much, and the grandson . . . what was his name, Buster?”
“Bronco,” Tyson supplied. “Well, really Bruno, but everyone called him Bronco.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s what it was,” Baxter agreed.
“And a real loser.” Tyson shrugged. “I was in school with him, he was a little younger, but he kind of faded into the woodwork, y’know. Wasn’t a jock, or a brainiac, just . . . kind of was.” He frowned, remembering. “We didn’t hang out.”
The woman in the nearby chair stood and stretched, then settled into the chair again, draped out over the cushions and once again started texting, just as a nurse pushing a rattling pill cart made her way down the hallway.
“Maybe you’re right,” Tyson said to Reed. “Maybe talking at the station would be better. Dad and I can come down there tomorrow, or the next day, and give a statement and a list of anyone we can remember who’s been on the property. We’ll call and set it up.” And then to his father, “Come on, Dad. Let’s go.” He was already striding toward the exit doors on the other side of the Information Desk.