Chapter 48

Two marked Wolfville RCMP cruisers roared along Melanson Road, past the lumber mill, blowing past Sgt. Biz Digby and Cpl. Ross Agarwal who were pulled over in the parking lot of Reid’s Meats, a local butcher.
Agarwal ate a stick of homemade hot pepperoni.
“Two-three-seven, this is two-nine, we’re headed up the Mountain.” One of the uniform cops said over the radio.
Digby picked up the handset looped by the cord around her receiver’s antennae, and responded. “-Four. We’re behind ya. No rush. Code nothing.”
The major crime investigators climbed into the Jimmy and pulled out to follow, at a leisurely pace.
They arrived well behind the cruisers at the Missions’ family home, 1623 Melanson Road, but Digby didn’t expect the element of surprise to be a factor in this particular raid.
She was pretty sure neither of Darroll Missions’ parents, nor any Missions family member would be at home today.
All told, she had called close to 50 people with the last name Missions in the Valley phonebook. Not one person had answered their telephone.
The tiny home was hidden from the main road by new-growth trees and sumac bushes.
Digby had never seen a house so small in her entire life.
It looked like a place to house the family pigs or like a cabin at an underfunded children’s church camp.
Three or four wild looking hound dogs barked and lowed brassily from behind a chain-link fence pen attached to a strange little white outbuilding in the backyard. The large yard was overgrown with outbuildings, junk, big piles of dog shit or cow pies maybe and hundreds of tiny Christmas tree saplings.
Several beat-up junker Volkswagons were strewn around in the snow, including three camper vans.
The house appeared to be in the middle of a botched re-siding job. There was yellowed white vinyl siding on the left half of the house, and black roofing shingles tacked up on the right, with a foot-wide border of ripped tar paper running down the middle. By the look of things, the Missions family had gotten halfway done re-siding the house with roofing shingles, years ago, and just gave up.
The uniforms were standing at the front door. One of them pounded with his fist.
“POLICE. OPEN UP.”