If Arroyo Grande had been a sleepy little town a few days earlier, the tiny fires popping up all over the place threatened to engulf the town in hot gossip. The few law-abiding tourists who contacted local law enforcement about the wide variety of domestic disturbances probably meant well. Starting his morning investigating the fishy smell at the Playa Seca he scored a handful of bonus complaints about the midnight music set and subsequent gunshots, burying him in paperwork for the better part of the day. Between the sudden supercop evacuation and subsequent empty-handed return about an hour later, the sheriff had an unusually busy afternoon fielding complaints, and he couldn't get around to sleuthing until later in the afternoon.
Unfortunately, while everyone else with a badge had been busy chasing Ashley’s performance-tuned ass out of town, he was busy following up on his casual investigation of Hitch, or Stu, or Paco, or whatever his name was, still hunting for missing car parts before those meatheads called in a drone strike. Call after call stacked up on Sheriff Etherton’s phone, and he hardly had time to answer one before the next chimed through. Placing yet another caller on hold, he forwarded the remaining calls to Trigger and Nutsy and shut off his business line while he snooped around the house where Terrence and Earl dropped the new guy off every evening.
Whatever the new cook’s name was, he wasn’t the legal owner of the house on Buena Vista Drive. Etherton called the real estate agent advertising on the sign, only to receive a detailed description of recent renovations and an invitation to tour the house whenever he had the time. Rather than volunteering for an hour-long sales pitch, the sheriff decided that the theft of a dozen catalytic converters was probable cause to give himself a tour around the place. Peering through the large bay windows, Etherton found nothing amiss inside the house, still staged for a sale that would likely take several more months. Snooping around the garage, however, the sheriff discovered a trash bin overflowing with Sancho’s Styrofoam take-out boxes lined with the familiar red and white checkered paper. In the movies, this is where the cop should pull out his gun. He peered in the side window cautiously, realizing that if he did run into the guy, his sidearm was still in the glove compartment. The scrawny old cook didn’t look threatening sitting out behind the restaurant, but the flippant ease with which he had offered up a series of fake names left the sheriff nervous. Rather than retrieve it, he tried the side door and found it unlocked. Leaning hard on the probable cause, he knocked politely before strolling in to find the third cook’s squat.
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Whoever the guy was, he traveled light. While it was obvious that someone had been living there, the garage was empty of personal effects. His makeshift living quarters seemed assembled of furniture left by the previous occupants. A folding lawn chair sat in the corner, piled with moving blankets. A few more takeout boxes sat piled on a folding card table with an ashtray and clip-on mechanics lamp for mood lighting. The only intriguing bit was an electronics soldering station littered with disassembled toys, various electrical components, and a pile of discarded circuit boards. Spread over the remains of the workbenches in the garage were parts of an electric lawnmower, almost completely disassembled. If the sheriff had been expecting an amateurish meth lab, walking in on what looked like a bomb-building setup was far worse. Before he had time to consider the chain of command in a potential terrorist plot, his phone rang through, scaring him half out of his wits.
Shutting off the business line served to silence his phones for nearly an hour while he snooped around the house, but the MENSA folks down at emergency dispatch discovered the dead-end line and rerouted all of the emergency calls to his line. Dispatch, who had already heard the news about the Cooper girl, felt that Etherton might want to handle a polite call from a local celebrity who just couldn’t seem to figure out where her sport-tuned mini muscle car had gotten off to. Closing the door quietly behind him, he considered the pile of discarded electronics, wondering how a man might go about building a bomb out of old lawnmower parts in the first place.
