Free The Orchard by Charles L. Grant Page B

paid for the permission with unaccountable worry, but Les on his return hadn’t been sympathetic. He accused his father loudly of not trusting him, of treating him like a child, that it was bad enough having a cop in the family, and now he couldn’t even walk in the door without having his whereabouts questioned.
    “For god’s sake, Dad, when the hell are you gonna ease up?” He had clenched his fists, and he looked ready to cry. “She’s right, you know. She really is. I ought to get a place of my own where I could at least have some peace.”
    “Who’s right? Who are you talking about?”
    “None of your business,” Les snapped. “Just leave me alone.”
    The outburst had been a shock, and the “she” could only be Evelyn Zayer.
    This morning, Les had gone to school early, without saying goodbye.
    Yeah, he thought, the Foreign Legion sounds great. Sand and camels and no kids to figure out.
    Pushing away from the desk, daring those who passed his office to come in and annoy him, he rubbed his forehead with the heel of one hand, trying to drive off a headache that had lodged there since he’d wakened. It felt like someone had tied an iron clamp around his head and now, in malicious delight, was trying to crush his skull without crushing his brain.
    “Gilman,” he said to the beaded glass on the door, “you are in bad shape. Real bad shape.”
    The telephone rang three times before he picked up the receiver, listened for a moment, and returned it to the cradle.
    “Please, God,” he said as he reached for his sport jacket, “please, let it be a simple breaking and entering, with lots of fingerprints and footprints and the guy’s wallet at the scene. C’mon, God, how about it?”
    He didn’t need a car. He crossed Chancellor Avenue, hurried past the Mariner Cove, and cut through the parking lot to a small blacktopped area behind the Regency Theater. Two patrolmen were standing near the building’s corner, keeping a handful of people from going in back; a third met him as he approached.
    “What is it, Nick?” he said, already feeling his stomach tighten, his throat begin to dry.
    Officer Lonrow, his face blotched and his hands quivering, only pointed behind him.
    The theater’s back wall was unbroken by any doors, and in its center squatted a large green dumpster whose lid had been thrown up against the brick. Brett started for it, and hesitated when he saw a hand dangling over the side. A young hand. One silver band. A silver bracelet. A thread of dried blood from the hump of one knuckle.
    He stopped for a moment and drew his lips between his teeth with a hiss, took several deep breaths, and listened to a woman moaning, a man’s voice raised in excited curiosity, a car grinding gears as it turned a far corner.
    Then he took a look inside, blinked, and turned away as slowly as he could. Lonrow joined him, and they studied the thick line of trees that separated the theater from the houses behind.
    “How did you find her?” he asked.
    “Just doing my rounds, as usual,” the younger man said between harsh clearings of his throat. “I saw the lid up and was going to close it when I saw … the hand. I called you right away.”
    “Do you know who she is?”
    Lonrow shook his head. “Do you?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Evelyn Zayer. She’s … she was a friend of my son’s.”
    “Oh, boy,” the man said, but Brett made no comment, only poked into the trees and held his breath when he saw indentations that might have been footprints. He knelt, frowned and squinted, and could find only two, with maybe a third. They were clearly not made by shoes or bare feet, and faint as they were on the hard ground and fallen needles, they could have been made by anything from a dog to a prowling cat. He wasn’t surprised; why the hell should things get easy now?
    He stood with a groan and waited for the forensic crew to get to work. As soon as he was no longer needed, he let a patrol car take him to the