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CHAPTER NINE
Jeffrey leaned against the tile, letting the hot water from the shower blast his skin. He had bathed last night, but nothing could get rid of the feeling that he was covered in dirt. Not just dirt, but dirt from a grave. Opening that second box, smelling the musty scent of decay, had been almost as bad as finding Abby. The second box changed everything. One more girl was out there, one more family, one more death. At least he hoped it was just one girl. The lab wouldn’t be able to come back with DNA until the end of the week. Between that and analyzing the letter Sara had been sent, the tests were costing him half his budget for the rest of the year, but Jeffrey didn’t care. He would get another job down at the Texaco pumping gas if he had to. Meanwhile, some Georgia state representative was in Washington right now enjoying a two-hundred-dollar breakfast.
He forced himself to get out of the shower, still feeling like he needed another hour under the hot water. Sara had obviously come in at some point and put a cup of coffee on the shelf over the sink, but he hadn’t heard her. Last night, he had called her from the scene, giving her the bare details of the find. After that, Jeffrey had driven what little evidence they found in the box to Macon himself, then gone back to the station and reviewed every note he had on the case. He made lists ten pages long of who he should talk to, what leads they should follow. By then, it was midnight, and he had found himself trying to decide whether or not to go to Sara’s or his own home. He even drove by his house, too late remembering that the girls had already moved in. Around one in the morning, the lights were still on and he could hear music from the street as a party raged inside. He had been too tired to go in and tell them to turn it off.
Jeffrey slipped on a pair of jeans and walked into the kitchen, carrying his cup of coffee. Sara was at the couch, folding the blanket he had used last night.
He said, “I didn’t want to wake you,” and she nodded. He knew she didn’t believe him, just like he knew that he was telling the truth. Like it or not, his nights had been spent alone for most of the last few years, and he hadn’t known how to bring what he had found out there in the woods home to Sara. Even after what had happened in the kitchen two nights ago, getting in bed with her, climbing in between the fresh sheets, would have felt like a violation.
He saw her empty mug on the counter and asked, “You want some more coffee?”
She shook her head, smoothing down the blanket as she put it on the foot of the couch.
He poured the coffee anyway. When he turned around, Sara was sitting at the kitchen island, sorting through some mail.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“I feel like . . .” His voice trailed off. He didn’t know what he felt like.
She flipped through a magazine, not touching the coffee he’d poured. When he didn’t finish his thought, she looked up. “You don’t have to explain it to me,” she said, and he felt as if a great weight had been lifted.
Still, he tried: “It was a hard night.”
She smiled at him, concern keeping the expression from reaching her eyes. “You know I understand.”
Jeffrey still felt tension in the air, but he didn’t know if it was from Sara or his own imagination. He reached out to touch her and she said, “You should wrap your hand.”
He had taken off the bandage after digging in the forest. Jeffrey looked at the cut, which was bright red. As he thought about it, he felt the wound throb. “I think it’s infected.”
“Have you been taking the pills I gave you?”
“Yes.”
She looked up from the magazine, calling him on the lie.
“Some,” he said, wondering where he had put the damn things. “I took some. Two.”
“That’s even better,” she said, returning to the magazine. “You can build up your resistance to antibiotics.” She flipped through a few more pages.
He tried for humor. “The hepatitis will kill me anyway.”
She looked up, and he saw tears well into her eyes at the suggestion. “That’s not funny.”
“No,” he admitted. “I just . . . I needed to be alone. Last night.”
She wiped her eyes. “I know.”
Still, he had to ask, “You’re not mad at me?”
“Of course not,” she insisted, reaching out to take his uninjured hand. She squeezed it, then let go, returning to her magazine. He saw it was the Lancet, an overseas medical journal.
“I wouldn’t have been much company anyway,” he told her, remembering his sleepless night. “I kept thinking about it,” he said. “It’s worse finding it empty, not knowing what happened.”
She finally closed the magazine and gave him her full attention. “Before, you’d said maybe someone came back for the bodies after they died.”
“I know,” he told her, and that was one of the things that had kept him from sleep. He had seen some pretty horrible things in his line of work, but someone who was sick enough to kill a girl, then remove her body for whatever reason, was a perpetrator he was unprepared to deal with. “What kind of person would do that?” he asked.
“A mentally ill person,” she answered. Sara was a scientist at heart, and she thought there were concrete reasons that explained why people did things. She had never believed in evil, but then she had never knowingly sat across from someone who had murdered in cold blood or raped a child. Like most people, she had the luxury of philosophizing about it from behind her textbooks. Out in the field, he saw things very differently, and Jeffrey had to think that anyone capable of this crime had to have something fundamentally wrong with his soul.
Sara slid off the stool. “They should be able to do the blood types today,” she told him, opening the cabinet beside the sink. She took out the sample packets of antibiotics and opened one, then another. “I called Ron Beard at the state lab while you were in the shower. He’s going to run the tests first thing this morning. At least we’ll have some idea how many victims there might have been.”
Jeffrey took the pills and washed them down with some coffee.
She handed him two other sample packs. “Will you please take these after lunch?”
He would probably skip lunch, but he agreed anyway. “What do you think of Terri Stanley?”
She shrugged. “She seems nice. Overwhelmed, but who wouldn’t be?”
“Do you think she drinks?”
“Alcohol?” Sara asked, surprised. “I’ve never smelled it on her. Why?”
“Lena said she saw her getting sick at the picnic last year.”
“The police picnic?” she questioned. “I don’t think Lena was there. Wasn’t she on her hiatus then?”
Jeffrey let that settle in, ignoring the tone she gave “hiatus.” He told her, “Lena said she saw her at the picnic.”
“You can check your calendar,” she said. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think she was there.”
Sara was never wrong about dates. Jeffrey felt a niggling question working its way through his brain. Why had Lena lied? What was she trying to hide this time?
“Maybe she meant the one before last?” Sara suggested. “I recall a lot of people drinking too much at that one.” She chuckled. “Remember Frank kept singing the national anthem like he was Ethel Merman?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, but Jeffrey knew that Lena had lied. He just couldn’t figure out why. As far as he knew, she wasn’t particularly close to Terri Stanley. Hell, as far as he knew, Lena wasn’t close to anybody. She didn’t even have a dog.
Sara asked, “What are you going to do today?”
He tried to get his mind back on track. “If Lev was telling the truth, I should have some people from the farm first thing. We’ll see if he goes through with the polygraph. We’re going to talk to them, see if anyone knows what happened to Abby.” He added, “Don’t worry, I’m not expecting a full confession.”
“What about Chip Donner?”
“We’ve got an APB on him,” Jeffrey said. “I don’t know, Sara, I don’t like him for this. He’s just a stupid punk. I don’t see him having the discipline to plan it out. And that second box was old. Maybe four, five years. Chip was in jail then. That’s pretty much the only fact we know.”
“Who do you think did it, then?”
“There’s the foreman, Cole,” Jeffrey began. “The brothers. The sisters. Abby’s mother and father. Dale Stanley.” He sighed. “Basically, everybody I’ve talked to since this whole damn thing started.”
“But no one stands out?”
“Cole,” he said.
“But only because he was yelling to those people about God?”
“Yes,” he admitted, and coming from Sara it did sound like a weak connection. He had made an effort to back Lena off the religious angle, but he felt maybe he had picked up some of her prejudices. “I want to talk to the family again, maybe get them alone.”
“Get the women alone,” she suggested. “They might be more talkative without their brothers around.”
“Good idea.” He tried again, “I really don’t want you mixed up with these people, Sara. I don’t much like Tessa being involved, either.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got a hunch,” he said. “And my hunch tells me that they’re up to something. I just don’t know what.”
“Being devout is hardly a crime,” she said. “You’d have to arrest my mother if that were the case.” Then she added, “Actually, you’d have to arrest most of my family.”
“I’m not saying it has anything to do with religion,” Jeffrey said. “It’s how they act.”
“How do they act?”
“Like they’ve got something to hide.”
Sara leaned against the counter. He could tell she wasn’t going to give in. “Tessa asked me to do this for her.”
“And I’m asking you not to.”
She seemed surprised. “You want me to choose between you and my family?”
That was exactly what he was asking, but Jeffrey knew better than to say it. He had lost that contest once before, but this time he was more familiar with the rules. “I just want you to be careful,” he told her.
Sara opened her mouth to respond, but the phone rang. She spent a few seconds looking for the cordless receiver before finding it on the coffee table. “Hello?”
She listened a moment, then handed the phone to Jeffrey.
“Tolliver,” he said, surprised to hear a woman’s voice answer him.
“It’s Esther Bennett,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Your card. The one you gave me. It had this number on it. I’m sorry, I—” Her voice broke into a sob.
Sara gave him a puzzled look and Jeffrey shook his head. “Esther,” he said into the phone. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Becca,” she said, her voice shaking with grief. “She’s missing.”
Jeffrey pulled his car into the parking lot of Dipsy’s Diner, thinking he hadn’t been to the joint since Joe Smith, Catoogah’s previous sheriff, had been in office. When Jeffrey first started working in Grant County, the two men had met every couple of months for stale coffee and rubber pancakes. As time passed and meth started to be more of a problem for their small towns, their meetings became more serious and more regular. When Ed Pelham had taken over, Jeffrey hadn’t even suggested a courtesy call, let alone a meal with the man. As far as he was concerned, Two-Bit couldn’t fill a three-year-old girl’s shoes, let alone the boots of a man like Joe Smith.
Jeffrey scanned the vacant parking lot, wondering how Esther Bennett knew about this place. He couldn’t imagine the woman eating anything that didn’t come from her own oven, picked from her own garden. If Dipsy’s was her idea of a restaurant, she’d be better off eating cardboard at home.
May-Lynn Bledsoe was behind the counter when he walked into the diner, and she shot him a caustic look. “I’s beginning to think you didn’t love me no more.”
“Couldn’t be possible,” he said, wondering why she was making an attempt at banter. He’d been in this diner maybe fifty times and she had never given him the time of day. He glanced around the room, noting it was empty.
“You beat the rush,” she said, though he doubted people would be banging down the door anytime soon. Between May-Lynn’s sour attitude and the tepid coffee, there wasn’t much to recommend the place. Joe Smith had been a fan of their cheese and onion home fries and always asked for a triple order with his coffee. Jeffrey imagined Joe’s sudden heart attack at the age of fifty-six had put some people off.
He saw a late-model Toyota pull into the parking lot and waited for the driver to get out. The early-morning wind was whipping up dirt and sand in the gravel parking lot, and when Esther Bennett got out of the car, the door caught back on her. Jeffrey went to help her, but May-Lynn was in front of the door like she was afraid he’d change his mind and leave. She was picking something out of her back teeth that caused her to put her pinky finger into her mouth up to the third knuckle as she asked, “You want the usual?”
“Just coffee, please,” he said, watching Esther quickly take the steps to the entrance, clutching her coat closed with both hands. The bell over the door clanged as she walked in, and he stood to greet her.
“Chief Tolliver,” Esther said, breathless. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“You’re fine,” he told her, indicating she should sit down. He tried to take her coat, but she wouldn’t let him.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, sliding into the booth, her sense of urgency as palpable as the smell of grilled onions in the air.
He sat across from her. “Tell me what’s going on.”
A long shadow was cast over the table, and he looked up to find May-Lynn standing beside him, pad in her hand. Esther looked at her, confused for a second, then asked, “May I have some water, please?”
The waitress twisted her lips to the side as if she’d just calculated her tip. “Water.”
Jeffrey waited for her to saunter back behind the counter before asking Esther, “How long has she been missing?”
“Just since last night,” Esther said, her lower lip trembling. “Lev and Paul said I should wait a day to see if she comes back, but I can’t. . . .”
“It’s okay,” he said, wondering how anybody could look at this panicked woman and tell her to wait. “When did you notice she was gone?”
“I got up to check on her. With Abby—” She stopped, her throat working. “I wanted to check on Becca, to make sure she was sleeping.” She put her hand to her mouth. “I went into her room, and—”
“Water,” May-Lynn said, sloshing a glass down in front of Esther.
Jeffrey’s patience was up. “Give us a minute, okay?”
May-Lynn shrugged, as if he was in the wrong, before shuffling back to the counter.
Jeffrey took his turn with the apologies as he dabbed up the spilled water with a handful of flimsy paper napkins. “I’m sorry about that,” he told Esther. “Business is kind of slow.”
Esther watched his hands as if she had never seen anyone clean a table. Jeffrey thought it was more likely she’d never seen a man clean up after himself. He asked, “So, you saw last night that she was gone?”
“I called Rachel first. Becca stayed with my sister the night we realized Abby was missing. I didn’t want her out in the dark with us while we searched. I needed to know where she was.” Esther paused, taking a sip of water. Jeffrey saw that her hand trembled. “I thought she might have gone back there.”
“But she hadn’t?”
Esther shook her head. “I called Paul next,” she said. “He told me not to worry.” She made an almost disgusted sound. “Lev said the same thing. She’s always come back, but with Abby . . .” She gulped in air as if she couldn’t breathe. “With Abby gone . . .”
“Did she say anything before she left?” Jeffrey asked. “Maybe she was acting differently?”
Esther dug into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a piece of paper. “She left this.”
Jeffrey took the folded note the woman offered, feeling a little like he had been tricked. The paper had a pink tint, the ink was black. A girlish scrawl read, “Mama, Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back.”
Jeffrey stared at the note, not knowing what to say. The fact that the girl had left a note changed a lot of things. “This is her writing?”
“Yes.”
“On Monday, you told my detective that Rebecca has run away before.”
“Not like this,” she insisted. “She’s never left a note before.”
Jeffrey thought in the scheme of things the girl was probably just trying to be considerate. “How many times has this happened?”
“In May and June of last year,” she listed. “Then February this year.”
“Do you know any reason why she might run away?”
“I don’t understand.”
Jeffrey tried to phrase his words carefully. “Girls don’t usually just up and run away. Usually they’re running away from something.”
He could have slapped the woman in the face and got a better response. She folded the note and tucked it back into her pocket as she stood. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”
“Mrs. Bennett—”
She was halfway out the door, and he just missed catching her as she ran down the stairs.
“Mrs. Bennett,” he said, following her into the parking lot. “Don’t go like this.”
“They said you’d say that.”
“Who said?”
“My husband. My brothers.” Her shoulders were shaking. She took out a tissue and wiped her nose. “They said you would blame us, that it was useless to even try to talk to you.”
“I don’t recall blaming anybody.”
She shook her head as she turned around. “I know what you’re thinking, Chief Tolliver.”
“I doubt—”
“Paul said you’d be this way. Outsiders never understand. We’ve come to accept that. I don’t know why I tried.” She pressed her lips together, her resolve strengthened by anger. “You may not agree with my beliefs, but I am a mother. One of my daughters is dead and the other is missing. I know something is wrong. I know that Rebecca would never be so selfish as to leave me at a time like this unless she felt she had to.”
Jeffrey thought she was answering his earlier question without admitting it to herself. He tried to be even more careful this time. “Why would she have to?”
Esther seemed to cast around for an answer, but didn’t offer it to Jeffrey.
He tried again. “Why would she have to leave?”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Again, he pressed: “Why would she leave?”
She said nothing.
“Mrs. Bennett?”
She gave up, tossing her hands into the air, crying, “I don’t know!”
Jeffrey let Esther stand there, cold wind whipping up her collar. Her nose was red from crying, tears running down her cheeks. “She wouldn’t do this,” she sobbed. “She wouldn’t do this unless she had to.”
After a few more seconds, Jeffrey reached past her and opened the car door. He helped Esther inside, kneeling beside her so they could talk. He knew without looking that May-Lynn was standing at the window watching the show, and he wanted to do everything he could to protect Esther Bennett.
He hoped she heard his compassion when he asked her, “Tell me what she was running away from.”
Esther dabbed at her eyes, then concentrated on the tissue in her hand, folding and unfolding it as if she could find the answer somewhere on the crumpled paper. “She’s so different from Abby,” she finally said. “So rebellious. Nothing like me at that age. Nothing like any of us.” Despite her words, she insisted, “She’s so precious. Such a powerful soul. My fierce little angel.”
Jeffrey asked, “What was she rebelling against?”
“Rules,” Esther said. “Everything she could find.”
“When she ran away before,” Jeffrey began, “where did she go?”
“She said she camped in the woods.”
Jeffrey felt his heart stop. “Which woods?”
“The Catoogah forest. When they were children, they camped there all the time.”
“Not the state park in Grant?”
She shook her head. “How would she get there?” she asked. “It’s miles from home.”
Jeffrey didn’t like the idea of Rebecca being in any forest, especially considering what had happened to her sister. “Was she seeing any boys?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “I don’t know anything about her life. I thought I knew about Abby, but now . . .” She put her hand to her mouth. “I don’t know anything.”
Jeffrey’s knee started to ache and he sat back on his heels to take off the pressure. “Rebecca didn’t want to be in the church?” he guessed.
“We let them choose. We don’t force them into the life. Mary’s children chose . . .” She took a deep breath, letting it go slowly. “We let them choose when they’re old enough to know their own minds. Lev went off to college. Paul strayed for a while. He came back, but I never stopped loving him. He never stopped being my brother.” She threw her hands into the air. “I just don’t understand. Why would she leave? Why would she do this now?”
Jeffrey had dealt with many missing-children cases over the years. Thankfully, most of them had resolved themselves fairly easily. The kid got cold or hungry and came back, realizing there were worse things than having to clean up your room or eat your peas. Something told him Rebecca Bennett wasn’t running away from chores, but he felt the need to calm some of Esther’s fears.
He spoke as gently as he could. “Becca’s run away before.”
“Yes.”
“She always comes back in a day or two.”
“She’s always come back to her family— all of her family.” She seemed almost defeated, as if Jeffrey wasn’t understanding her. “We’re not what you think.”
He wasn’t sure what he thought. He hated to admit it, but he was seeing why her brothers hadn’t been as alarmed as Esther. If Rebecca made a habit of running away for a few days, scaring the crap out of everybody and then coming back, this could be just another cry for attention. The question was, why did she feel she needed attention? Was it some sort of teenage urge for attention? Or something more sinister?
“Ask your questions,” Esther said, visibly bracing herself. “Go ahead.”
“Mrs. Bennett . . .” he began.
Some of her composure had returned. “I think if you’re going to ask me if my daughters were being molested by my brothers, you should at least call me Esther.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of?”
“No,” she said, her answer requiring no thought. “Monday, I was afraid of you telling me that my daughter was dead. Now I am afraid of you telling me that there’s no hope for Rebecca. The truth scares me, Chief Tolliver. I’m not afraid of conjecture.”
“I need you to answer my question, Esther.”
She took her time, as if it made her sick to even consider. “My brothers have never been inappropriate with my children. My husband has never been inappropriate with my children.”
“What about Cole Connolly?”
She shook her head once. “Believe me when I tell you this,” she assured him. “If anyone did harm to my children— not just my children, but any child— I would kill them with my bare hands and let God be my judge.”
He stared at her for a beat. Her clear green eyes were sharp with conviction. He believed her, or at least he believed that she believed herself.
She asked him, “What are you going to do?”
“I can put out an APB and make some phone calls. I’ll call the sheriff in Catoogah, but honestly, your daughter has a history of running away and she left a note.” He let that settle in, considering it himself. If Jeffrey had wanted to abduct Rebecca Bennett, he’d probably do it just like that: leave a note, let her history protect him for a few days.
“Do you think you’ll find her?”
Jeffrey did not let himself dwell on the possibility of a fourteen-year-old somewhere in a shallow grave. “If I find her,” he began, “I want to talk to her.”
“You talked to her before.”
“I want to talk to her alone,” Jeffrey said, knowing he had no right to ask this, just as he knew Esther could always renounce her promise. “She’s underage. Legally, I can’t talk to her without the permission of at least one of her parents.”
She took her time again, obviously weighing the consequences. Finally, she nodded. “You have my permission.”
“You know she’s probably camping out somewhere,” he told her, feeling guilty for taking advantage of her desperation, hoping to God he was right about the girl. “She’ll probably come back on her own in a day or so.”
She took the note back out of her pocket. “Find her,” she said, pressing the page into his hand. “Please. Find her.”
When Jeffrey got back to the station, there was a large bus parked in the back of the lot, the words “Holy Grown Farms” stenciled on the side. Workers milled around outside despite the cold, and he could see the front lobby was packed with bodies. He suppressed a curse as he got out of his car, wondering if this was Lev Ward’s idea of a joke.
Inside, he pushed his way through the smelliest bunch of derelicts he’d seen since the last time he’d driven through downtown Atlanta. He held his breath, waiting for Marla to buzz him in, thinking he might be sick if he stayed in the hot room for much longer.
“Hey there, Chief,” Marla said, taking his coat. “I guess you know what this is all about.”
Frank walked up, a sour look on his face. “They’ve been here for two hours. It’s gonna take all day just getting their names.”
Jeffrey asked, “Where’s Lev Ward?”
“Connolly said he had to stay home with one of his sisters.”
“Which one?”
“Hell if I know,” Frank said, obviously over the experience of interviewing the great unwashed. “Said she had diabetes or something like that.”
“Shit,” Jeffrey cursed, thinking Ward really was jerking his chain. Not only was his absence wasting time, but it meant Mark McCallum, the polygraph expert the GBI had sent, would be spending another night in town courtesy of the Grant County Police Department.
Jeffrey took out his notepad and wrote down Rebecca Bennett’s name and description. He slid a photograph out of his pocket, handing it to Frank. “Abby’s sister,” he said. “Put her details on the wire. She’s been missing since ten o’clock last night.”
“Shit.”
“She’s run away before,” Jeffrey qualified, “but I don’t like this coming so close to her sister’s death.”
“You think she knows something?”
“I think she’s running away for a reason.”
“Did you call Two-Bit?”
Jeffrey scowled. He had called Ed Pelham on his way back to the station. As predicted, the neighboring sheriff had pretty much laughed in his face. Jeffrey couldn’t blame the man— the girl had a history of running away— but he had thought that Ed would take it more seriously, considering what had happened to Abigail Bennett.
He asked Frank, “Is Brad still searching the area around the lake?” Frank nodded. “Tell him to go home and get his backpack or camping gear or whatever. Get him and Hemming to go into the Catoogah state forest and start looking around. If anyone stops them, for God’s sake, tell him to say they’re out camping.”
“All right.”
Frank turned to leave but Jeffrey stopped him. “Update the APB on Donner to include the possibility he might be with a girl.” Anticipating Frank’s next question, he shrugged, saying, “Throw it at the wall and see what sticks.”
“Will do,” he said. “I put Connolly in interrogation one. You gonna get to him next?”
“I want him to stew,” Jeffrey answered. “How long do you think it’ll take to get through the rest of these interviews?”
“Five, maybe six hours.”
“Anything interesting so far?”
“Not unless you count Lena threatening to backhand one of them if he didn’t shut up about Jesus being Lord.” He added, “I think this is wasting our fucking time.”
“Have to agree with you,” Jeffrey said. “I want you to go ahead and talk to the people on your list who bought cyanide salts from the dealer in Atlanta.”
“I’ll leave right after I talk to Brad and update the APB.”
Jeffrey went to his office and picked up the phone before he even sat down. He called Lev Ward’s number at Holy Grown and navigated his way through the switchboard. As he was on hold, Marla walked in and put a stack of messages on his desk. He thanked her just as Lev Ward’s voice mail picked up.
“This is Chief Tolliver,” he said. “I need you to call me as soon as possible.” Jeffrey left his cell phone number, not wanting to give Lev the easy out of leaving a message. He rang off and picked up his notes from last night, unable to make any sense of the long lists he had made. There were questions for each family member, but in the cold light of day he realized that asking any one of them would get Paul Ward in the room so fast that his head would spin.
Legally, none of them had to talk to the police. He had no cause to force them to come in and he doubted very seriously if Lev Ward would deliver on his promise to take the lie detector test. Running their names through the computer hadn’t brought up much information. Jeffrey had tried Cole Connolly’s name, but without a middle initial or something more specific like a birth date or previous address, the search had returned about six hundred Cole Connollys in the southern United States. Opening it up to Coleman Connolly had added another three hundred.
Jeffrey looked at his hand, where the bandage had started to come off. Esther had gripped his hand before she left this morning, begging him again to find her daughter. He was convinced that if she knew anything, she’d be spilling her guts right now, doing whatever she could to get her only living child back in her home. She had defied her brothers and her husband by even talking to him, and when he had asked her if she was going to tell them whether or not they had spoken, she had cryptically answered, “If they ask me, I will tell them the truth.” Jeffrey wondered if the men would even consider the possibility that Esther had done something on her own without their permission. The risk she had taken was indication enough that she was desperate for the truth. The problem was, Jeffrey didn’t know where to begin to find it. The case was like a huge circle, and all he could do was keep going round and round until somebody made a mistake.
He skimmed through his messages, trying to focus his eyes long enough to read. He was exhausted and his hand was throbbing. Two calls from the mayor and a note that the Dew Drop Inn had called to discuss the bill for Mark McCallum, the polygraph expert he had ordered for Lev Ward, didn’t help matters. Apparently, the young man liked room service.
Jeffrey rubbed his eyes, focusing on Buddy Conford’s name. The lawyer had been called into court but would come to the station as soon as he could for the talk with his stepdaughter. Jeffrey had forgotten for a moment about Patty O’Ryan. He set the note aside and continued sorting through the stack.
His heart stopped in his chest when he recognized the name at the top of the next-to-last message. Sara’s cousin, Dr. Hareton Earnshaw, had called. In the note section, Marla had written, “He says everything is fine,” then added her own question: “You okay?”
He picked up the phone, dialing Sara’s number at the clinic. After listening to several minutes of the Chipmunks singing classic rock while on hold, she came on the line.
“Hare called,” he told her. “Everything’s fine.”
She let out a soft sigh. “That’s good news.”
“Yeah.” He thought about the other night, the risk she took putting her mouth on him. A cold sweat came, followed by more relief than he had felt when he had first read Hare’s message. He had sort of reconciled himself to dealing with bad news, but thinking about the possibility of taking Sara down with him was too painful to even fathom. He had caused enough hurt in her life already.
She asked, “What did Esther say?”
He caught her up on the missing child and Esther’s fears. Sara was obviously skeptical. She asked, “She’s always come back?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know that I would’ve even taken a report if not for the fact of Abby. I keep going back and forth between thinking she’s just hiding somewhere for the attention and thinking she’s hiding for a reason.”
“The reason being Rebecca knows what happened to Abby?” Sara asked.
“Or something else,” he said, still not sure what he believed. He voiced the thought he’d been trying to suppress since Esther’s call this morning. “She could be somewhere, Sara. Somewhere like Abby.”
Sara was quiet.
“I’ve got a team searching the forest. I’ve got Frank checking out jewelry stores. We’ve got a station full of ex-addicts and alcoholics from the farm, most of them smelling pretty ripe.” He stopped, thinking he’d be talking for another hour or two if he kept listing dead leads.
Out of the blue, she said, “I told Tess I’d go to church with her tonight.”
Jeffrey felt something in his gut squeeze. “I really wish you wouldn’t.”
“But you can’t tell me why.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s a gut instinct, but I’ve got a pretty smart gut.”
“I need to do this for Tess,” she said. “And myself.”
“You turning religious on me?”
“There’s something I need to see for myself,” she told him. “I can’t talk about it now, but I’ll tell you later.”
He wondered if she was still mad at him for sleeping on the couch. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong— really. I just need to think some more before I can talk about it,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got a patient waiting.”
“All right.”
“I love you.”
Jeffrey felt his smile come back. “I’ll see you later.”
He slid the phone back on the hook, staring at the blinking lights. Somehow, he felt like he had gotten his second wind, and he thought now was as good a time as any to talk to Cole Connolly.
He found Lena in the hallway outside the bathroom. She was leaning against the wall, drinking a Coke, and she startled when he walked up, spilling soda down the front of her shirt.
“Shit,” she muttered, brushing the liquid from her blouse.
“Sorry,” he told her. “What’s going on?”
“I needed to get some air,” she said, and Jeffrey nodded. The Holy Grown workers had obviously spent the early hours of the morning toiling in the fields and had the body odor to prove it.
“Any progress?”
“Basically, all we’ve got is more of the same. She was a nice girl, praise the Lord. She did her best, Jesus loves you.”
Jeffrey didn’t acknowledge her sarcasm, though he wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment. He was beginning to see that Lena’s calling them a cult hadn’t been that far off. They certainly acted as if they were brainwashed.
Lena sighed. “You know, actually, looking past all their bullshit, she seemed like a really nice girl.” She pressed her lips together, and he was surprised to see this side of her. As quickly as it had appeared, it passed, though, and Lena said, “Oh, well. She must have had something to hide. Everybody does.”
He caught a glint of guilt in her eye, but instead of asking about Terri Stanley and the police picnic, he told her, “Rebecca Bennett’s missing.”
Shock registered on her face. “Since when?”
“Last night.” Jeffrey handed her the note Esther had pressed into his hand outside the diner. “She left this.”
Lena read it, saying, “Something’s not right,” and he was glad that someone was taking this seriously. She asked, “Why would she run away this close to her sister dying? Even I wasn’t that selfish when I was fourteen. Her mother must be going nuts.”
“Her mother’s the one who told me,” Jeffrey said. “She called me at Sara’s this morning. Her brothers didn’t want her to report it.”
“Why?” Lena asked, handing back the note. “What harm could it do?”
“They don’t like the police involved.”
“Yeah,” Lena said. “Well, we’ll see how they don’t like the police involved when she doesn’t come back.” She asked, “Do you think she’s been taken?”
“Abby didn’t leave a note.”
“No,” she said, then, “I don’t like this. I don’t feel good about it.”
“I don’t either,” he agreed, tucking the note back into his pocket. “I want you to take the lead with Connolly. I don’t think he’ll like his questions coming from a woman.”
The smile on her face was brief, like a cat spotting a mouse. “You want me to piss him off?”
“Not on purpose.”
“What are we looking for?”
“I just want a sense of him,” he said. “Find out about his dealings with Abby. Float out Rebecca’s name. See if he bites.”
“All right.”
“I want to talk to Patty O’Ryan again, too. We need to find out if Chip was seeing anybody.”
“Anybody like Rebecca Bennett?”
Sometimes the way Lena’s mind worked scared him. He just shrugged. “Buddy said he’d be here in a couple of hours.”
She tossed her Coke into the garbage as she headed toward the interrogation room. “Looking forward to that.”
Jeffrey opened the door for her and watched Lena transform into the cop he knew she could be. Her gait was heavy, like she had brass balls hanging between her legs. She pulled out a chair and sat across from Cole Connolly without a word, legs parted, her chair a few feet back from the table. She rested her arm along the back of the empty chair beside her.
She said, “Hey.”
Cole’s eyes flashed to Jeffrey, then back to Lena. “Hey.”
She reached into her back pocket, took out her notebook and slapped it on the table. “I’m detective Lena Adams. This is Chief Jeffrey Tolliver. Could you give us your full name?”
“Cletus Lester Connolly, ma’am.” There was a pen and a few pieces of paper in front of him alongside a well-worn Bible. Connolly straightened the papers as Jeffrey leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. He was at least sixty-five if he was a day, but Connolly was still a fastidious man, his white T-shirt crisp and clean, sharp creases ironed into his jeans. His time in the fields had kept his body trim, his chest well developed, his biceps bulging from his sleeves. Wiry white hair jutted up all over his body, sticking out from the collar of his T-shirt, sprouting from his ears, carpeting his arms. He was pretty much covered in it on every place but for his bald head.
Lena asked, “Why do they call you Cole?”
“That was my father’s name,” he explained, his eyes wandering back to Jeffrey. “Got tired of being beat up for being named Cletus. Lester’s not much better, so I took my daddy’s name when I was fifteen.”
Jeffrey thought that at the very least this explained why the man hadn’t come up on any computer checks. There was no doubt that he had been in the system for a while, though. He had that alertness about him that came from being in prison. He was always on guard, always looking for his escape.
“What happened to your hand?” Lena asked, and Jeffrey noticed that there was a thin, one-inch cut on the back of Connolly’s right index finger. It wasn’t anything significant— certainly not a fingernail scratch or defensive wound. It looked more like the kind of injury that happened when you were working with your hands and stopped paying attention for a split second.
“Working in the fields,” Connolly admitted, looking at the cut. “Guess I should put a Band-Aid on it.”
Lena asked, “How long were you in the service?”
He seemed surprised, but she indicated the tattoo on his arm. Jeffrey recognized it as a military insignia, but he wasn’t sure which branch. He also recognized the crude tattoo below it as of the prison variety. At some point, Connolly had pricked his skin with a needle, using the ink from a ballpoint pen to stain the words “Jesus Saves” indelibly into his flesh.
“I was in twelve years before they kicked me out,” Connolly answered. Then, as if he knew where this was going, he added, “They told me I could either go into treatment or get booted.” He smacked his palms together, a plane leaving the ground. “Dishonorable discharge.”
“That must’ve been hard.”
“Sure was,” he agreed, placing his hand on the Bible. Jeffrey doubted this meant the man was going to tell the truth, but it painted a pretty picture. Cole obviously knew how to answer a question without giving away too much. He was a textbook study in evasion, maintaining eye contact, keeping his shoulders back and adding in a non sequitur to the equation. “But not as hard as living life on the outside.”
Lena gave him a little rope. “How’s that?”
He kept his hand on the Bible as he explained, “I got banged up for boosting a car when I was seventeen. Judge told me I could go into the army or go to jail. I went right from my mama’s tit to Uncle Sam’s, excuse the language.” He had a sparkle in his eye as he said this. It took a few minutes for a man to let down his guard with Lena, then he started to treat her as one of the boys. Right before their eyes, Cole Connolly had turned into a helpful old man, eager to answer their questions— at least the ones he deemed safe.
Connolly continued, “I didn’t know how to fend for myself in the real world. Once I got out, I met up with some buddies who thought it’d be easy to rip off the local convenience store.”
Jeffrey wished he had a dollar for every man on death row who had gotten his start robbing convenience stores.
“One of ’em ratted us out before we got there— cut a deal for a reduction on a drug charge. I was cuffed before I even walked through the front door.” Connolly laughed, a sparkle in his eyes. If he regretted being ratted out, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of bitterness left in him. “Prison was great, just like being in the army. Three squares a day, people telling me when to eat, when to sleep, when to take a crap. Got so when parole came around, I didn’t want to leave it.”
“You served your full term?”
“That’s right,” he said, his chest puffing out. “Ticked off the judge with my attitude. Had me quite a temper once I was inside and the guards didn’t like that, either.”
“I don’t imagine they did.”
“Had my fair share of those”—he indicated Jeffrey’s bruised eye, probably more to let him know he was aware that the other man was in the room.
“You fight a lot inside?”
“About as much as you’d expect,” he admitted. He was watching Lena carefully, sizing her up. Jeffrey knew she was aware of this, just like he knew that Cole Connolly was going to be a very difficult interview.
“So,” she said, “you found Jesus inside? Funny how he hangs around prisons like that.”
Connolly visibly struggled with her words, his fists clenching, his upper body tightening into a solid brick wall. Her tone had been just right, and Jeffrey got a fleeting glimpse of the man from the field, the man who didn’t tolerate weakness.
Lena pressed a little more gently. “Jail gives a man a lot of time to think about himself.”
Connolly gave a tight nod, coiled like a snake ready to strike. For her part, Lena was still casually laid back in the chair, her arm hanging over the back. Jeffrey saw under the table that she had moved her other hand closer to her weapon, and he knew that she had sensed the danger as well as he had.
She kept her tone light, though, trying some of Connolly’s own rhetoric. “Being in prison is a trying time for a man. It can either make you strong or make you weak.”
“True enough.”
“Some men succumb to it. There’s a lot of drugs inside.”
“Yes, ma’am. Easier to get ’em there than it is on the outside.”
“Lots of time to sit around getting stoned.”
His jaw was still tight. Jeffrey wondered if she had pushed him too far, but knew better than to interfere.
“I did my share of drugs.” Connolly spoke in a clipped tone. “I’ve never denied it. Evil things. They get inside you, make you do things you shouldn’t. You have to be strong to fight it.” He looked up at Lena, his passion replacing his anger as quickly as oil displaces water. “I was a weak man, but I saw the light. I prayed to the Lord for salvation and He reached down and held out His hand.” He held up his own hand as if in illustration. “I took it and I said, ‘Yes, Lord. Help me rise up. Help me be born again.’ ”
“That’s quite a transformation,” she pointed out. “What made you decide to change your ways?”
“My last year there, Thomas started making the rounds. He is the Lord’s conduit. Working through him, the Lord showed me a better way.”
Lena clarified, “This is Lev’s father?”
“He was part of the prison outreach program,” Connolly explained. “Us old cons, we liked to keep things quiet. You go to church, you attend the Bible meetings, you’re less likely to find yourself in a position where your temper might be sparked by some young gun looking to make a name for himself.” He laughed at the situation, returning to the genial old man he had been before his outburst. “Never thought I’d end up being one of those Bible-toters myself. There are folks who are either for Jesus or against him, and I took against him. The wages of my sin would have surely been a horrible, lonely death.”
“But then you met Thomas Ward?”
“He’s been sick lately, had a stroke, but then he was like a lion, God bless him. Thomas saved my soul. Gave me a place to go to when I got out of prison.”
“Gave you three squares a day?” Lena suggested, referring to Connolly’s earlier statement about the military and then prison taking care of him.
“Ha!” the old man laughed, slapping his hand on the table, amused at the connection. The papers had ruffled and he smoothed them back down, making the edges neat. “I guess that’s as good a way of putting it as any. I’m still an old soldier at heart, but now I’m a soldier for the Lord.”
Lena asked, “You notice anything suspicious around the farm lately?”
“Not really.”
“No one acting strange?”
“I don’t mean to be flip,” he cautioned, “but you gotta think about the sort of people we’ve got in and out of that place. They’re all a little strange. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t.”
“Point taken,” she allowed. “I mean to say, any of them acting suspicious? Like they might be involved in something bad?”
“They’ve all been in something bad, and some of them are still in it at the farm.”
“Meaning?”
“They’re sitting in a shelter up in Atlanta feeling all sorry for themselves, looking for a change of scenery, thinking that’ll be the final thing that makes them change.”
“But it’s not?”
“For some of them it is,” Connolly admitted, “but for a lot more of them, they get down here and realize that the thing that got them into the drugs and the alcohol and the bad ways is the thing that keeps them there.” He didn’t wait for Lena to prompt him. “Weakness, young lady. Weakness of soul, weakness of spirit. We do what we can to help them, but they first have to be strong enough to help themselves.”
Lena said, “We were told that some petty cash was stolen.”
“That’d be several months back,” he confirmed. “We never caught who did it.”
“Any suspects?”
“Around two hundred,” he laughed, and Jeffrey assumed that working with a bunch of alcoholics and junkies didn’t exactly foster a lot of trust in the workplace.
Lena asked, “No one more interested in Abby than they should be?”
“She was a real pretty girl,” he said. “Lots of the boys looked at her, but I made it clear she was off-limits.”
“Anyone in particular you had to tell this to?”
“Not that I can recall.” Jail habits were hard to break, and Connolly had the con’s inability to give a yes-or-no answer.
Lena asked, “You didn’t notice her hanging around anybody? Maybe spending time with someone she shouldn’t?”
He shook his head. “Believe you me, I have been racking my brain since this happened, trying to think of anybody who might mean that sweet little girl some harm. I can’t think of nobody, and this is going back some years.”
“She drove a lot by herself,” Lena recalled.
“I taught her to drive Mary’s old Buick when she was fifteen years old.”
“You were close?”
“Abigail was like my own granddaughter.” He blinked to clear his tears. “You get to be my age, you think nothing can shock you. Lots of your friends start getting sick. Threw me for a loop when Thomas had his stroke last year. I was the one what found him. I can tell you it came as a hard reckoning seeing that man humbled.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Jeffrey could see Lena nodding, like she understood.
Connolly continued, “But Thomas was an old man. You can’t expect it to happen, but you can’t be surprised, either. Abby was just a good little girl, missy. Just a good little girl. Had her whole life ahead of her. Ain’t nobody deserves to die that way, but her especially.”
“From what we’ve gathered, she was a remarkable young woman.”
“That’s the truth,” he agreed. “She was an angel. Pure and sweet as the driven snow. I would’ve laid down my life for her.”
“Do you know a young man named Chip Donner?”
Again, Connolly seemed to think about it. “I don’t recall. We get a lot in and out. Some of them stay a week, some a day. The lucky ones stay a lifetime.” He scratched his chin. “That last name sounds familiar, though I don’t know why.”
“How about Patty O’Ryan?”
“Nope.”
“I guess you know Rebecca Bennett.”
“Becca?” he asked. “Of course I do.”
“She’s been missing since last night.”
Connolly nodded; obviously this wasn’t news. “She’s a strong-headed one, that child. Runs off, gives her mama a scare, comes back and it’s all love and happiness.”
“We know she’s run away before.”
“At least she had the decency to leave word this time.”
“Do you know where she might have gone?”
He shrugged. “Usually camps in the woods. I used to take the kids out when I was younger. Show ’em how to get by using the tools God gave us. Teaches them a respect for His kindness.”
“Is there any particular spot you used to take them?”
He nodded as she spoke, anticipating the question. “I was out there first thing this morning. Campsite hasn’t been used in years. I’ve got no idea where that girl might’ve gone off to.” He added, “Wish I did— I’d take a switch to her bottom for doing this to her mother right now.”
Marla knocked on the door, opening it at the same time. “Sorry to bother you, Chief,” she said, handing Jeffrey a folded piece of paper.
Jeffrey took it as Lena asked Connolly, “How long have you been with the church?”
“Going on twenty-one years,” he answered. “I was there when Thomas inherited the land from his father. Looked like a wilderness to me, but Moses started out with a wilderness, too.”
Jeffrey kept studying the man, trying to see if there was a tell to his act. Most people had a bad habit that came out when they were lying. Some people scratched their noses, some fidgeted. Connolly was completely still, eyes straight ahead. He was either a born liar or an honest man. Jeffrey wasn’t about to lay down bets on either.
Connolly continued the story of the birth of Holy Grown. “We had about twenty folks with us at the time. Of course, Thomas’s children were pretty young then, not much help, especially Paul. He was always the lazy one. Wanted to sit back while everybody else did the work so he could reap the rewards. Just like a lawyer.” Lena nodded. “We started out with a hundred acres of soy. Never used any chemicals or pesticides. People thought we were crazy, but now this organic thing’s all the rage. Our time has really come. I just wish Thomas was able to recognize it. He was our Moses, literally our Moses. He led us out of slavery— slavery to drugs, to alcohol, to the wanton ways. He was our savior.”
Lena cut off the sermon. “He’s still not well?”
Connolly turned more solemn. “The Lord will take care of him.”
Jeffrey opened Marla’s note, glancing at it, then doing a double take. He suppressed a curse, asking Connolly, “Is there anything else you can add?”
He seemed surprised by Jeffrey’s abruptness. “Not that I can think of.”
Jeffrey didn’t need to motion Lena. She stood, and Connolly followed her. Jeffrey told him, “I’d like to follow up with you tomorrow if that’s possible. Say, in the morning?”
Connolly looked trapped for a second, but recovered. “Not a problem,” he said, his smile so forced Jeffrey thought his teeth might break. “Abby’s service is tomorrow. Maybe after that?”
“We should be talking to Lev first thing in the morning,” Jeffrey told him, hoping this information would get back to Lev Ward. “Why don’t you come in with him?”
“We’ll see,” Connolly said, not committing to anything.
Jeffrey opened the door. “I appreciate you coming in and bringing everybody.”
Connolly was still confused, and seemed more than a little nervous about the note in Jeffrey’s hand, as if he very much wanted to know what it said. Jeffrey couldn’t tell if this was habitual thinking from his criminal days or just natural curiosity.
Jeffrey said, “You can go ahead and take back everybody else. I’m sure there’s work to do. We don’t want to waste any more of your time.”
“No problem,” Connolly repeated, jutting out his hand. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”
“Appreciate it,” Jeffrey said, feeling the bones in his hand crunch as Connolly shook it. “I’ll see you in the morning with Lev.”
Connolly got the threat behind his words. He had dropped the helpful-old-man act. “Right.”
Lena started to follow him out, but Jeffrey held her back. He showed her the note Marla had given him, making sure Connolly couldn’t see the secretary’s neat, grade-school teacher’s cursive: “Call from 25 Cromwell Road. Landlady reports ‘suspicious smell.’ ”
They had found Chip Donner.
Twenty-five Cromwell Road was a nice home for a well-to-do family living back in the thirties. Over the years, the large front parlors had been divided into rooms, the upper floors sectioned up for renters who didn’t mind sharing the one bathroom in the house. There were not many places an ex-con could go to when he got out of prison. If he was on parole, he had a finite amount of time to establish residency and get a job in order to keep his parole officer from throwing him back inside. The fifty bucks the state gave him on the way out the door didn’t stretch that far, and houses like the one on Cromwell catered to this particular need.
If anything, Jeffrey figured this case was opening up his olfactory sense to all different kinds of new experiences. The Cromwell house smelled like sweat and fried chicken, with a disturbing undertone of rotting meat courtesy of the room at the top of the stairs.
The landlady greeted him at the door with a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. She was a large woman with ample folds of skin hanging down from her arms. Jeffrey tried not to watch them sway back and forth as she talked.
“We never had no trouble from him at all,” she assured Jeffrey as she led him into the house. Deep green carpet on the floor had once been a nice shag but was now flattened down from years of wear and what looked like motor oil. The walls probably hadn’t been painted since Nixon was in the White House and there were black scuff marks on every baseboard and corner. The woodwork had been stunning at one time, but several coats of paint obscured the carvings on the molding. Incongruously, a beautiful cut-glass chandelier that was probably original to the house hung in the entranceway.
“Did you hear anything last night?” Jeffrey asked, trying to breathe through his mouth without looking like a panting dog.
“Not a peep,” she said, then added, “Except for the TV Mr. Harris keeps on next door to Chip.” She indicated the stairs. “He’s gone deaf over the last few years, but he’s been here longer than any of them. I always tell new boys if they can’t take the noise, then find somewhere else.”
Jeffrey glanced out the front door to the street, wondering what was keeping Lena. He had sent her to get Brad Stephens so that he could help process the scene. Along with half the rest of the force, he was still out in the woods, searching for anything suspicious.
He asked, “Is there a rear entrance?”
“Through the kitchen.” She pointed to the back of the house. “Chip parked his car under the carport,” she explained. “There’s an alley cuts through the backyard, takes you straight in from Sanders.”
“Sanders is the street that runs parallel to Cromwell?” Jeffrey verified, thinking that even if Marty Lam had been sitting on the front door like he was supposed to, he wouldn’t have seen Chip come in. Maybe Marty would think about that while he sat at home on his ass during his weeklong suspension.
The woman said, “Broderick turns into Sanders when it crosses McDougall.”
“He ever have any visitors?”
“Oh, no, he kept himself to himself.”
“Phone calls?”
“There’s a pay phone in the hall. They’re not allowed to use the house line. It doesn’t ring much.”
“No particular lady friends came by?”
She giggled as if he had embarrassed her. “We don’t allow female visitors in the house. I’m the only lady allowed.”
“Well,” Jeffrey said. He had been postponing the inevitable. He asked the woman, “Which room is his?”
“First on the left.” She pointed up the stairs, her arm wagging. “Hope you don’t mind if I stay here.”
“Have you looked in the room?”
“Goodness, no,” she said, shaking her head. “We’ve had a couple of these happen. I know what it looks like plain enough without the reminder.”
“A couple?” Jeffrey asked.
“Well, they didn’t die here,” she clarified. “No, wait, one did. I think his name was Rutherford. Rather?” She waved her hand. “Anyway, the one the ambulance picked up, he was the last. This was about eight, ten years ago. Had a needle in his arm. I went up there because of the smell.” She lowered her voice. “He had defecated himself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought he was gone, but then the paramedics came and toted him off to the hospital, said he still had a chance.”
“What about the other one?”
“Oh, Mr. Schwartz,” she remembered. “Very sweet old man. I believe he was Jewish, bless him. Died in his sleep.”
“When was this?”
“Mother was still alive, so it must have been nineteen . . .” She thought about it. “. . . nineteen eighty-six, I’d guess.”
“You go to church?”
“Primitive Baptist,” she told him. “Have I seen you there?”
“Maybe,” he said, thinking the only time he’d been in a church in the last ten years was to catch a glimpse of Sara. Cathy’s culinary arts gave her great sway with her girls during Christmas and Easter, and Sara generally let herself get talked into going to church services on these days in order to reap the benefits of a big meal afterward.
Jeffrey glanced up the steep stairs, not relishing what was ahead of him. He told the woman, “My partner should be here soon. Tell her to come up when she gets here.”
“Of course.” She put her hand down the front of her dress and rooted around, seconds later producing a key.
Jeffrey forced himself to take the warm, somewhat moist key, then started up the stairs. The railing was wobbly, torn from the wall in several places, an oily sheen to the unpainted wood.
The smell got worse the closer he got to the top, and even without directions he could’ve found the room with his nose.
The door was locked from the outside with a padlock and hasp. He put on some latex gloves, wishing like hell he’d donned them before taking the key from the landlady. The lock was rusty, and he tried to hold it by the edges so he wouldn’t smudge any fingerprints. He forced the key, hoping it wouldn’t break in the lock. Several seconds of praying and sweating in the dank heat of the house yielded a satisfying click as the padlock opened. Touching only the edges of the metal, he opened the hasp, then turned the handle of the door.
The room was pretty much what you would expect after seeing the front hall of the house. The same filthy green carpet was on the floor. A cheap roller shade was in the window, the edges pinned down with blue masking tape to keep the sunlight from streaming in. There wasn’t a bed, but a sleeper couch was halfway open as if someone had been interrupted during the process of unfolding the mattress. All the drawers of the one dresser in the room were open, their contents spilling out onto the rug. A brush and comb along with a glass bowl that contained about a thousand pennies were in the corner, the bowl shattered in two, the pennies flooding out. Two table lamps without shades were on the floor, intact. There wasn’t a closet in the room, but someone had nailed a length of clothesline along the wall to hang shirts on. The shirts, still on hangers, littered the floor. One end of the clothesline was still nailed to the wall. Chip Donner held the other end in his lifeless hand.
Behind Jeffrey, Lena dropped her crime scene toolbox on the floor with a thud. “Guess it was the maid’s day off.”
Jeffrey had heard Lena’s tread on the stairs, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the body. Chip’s face looked like a raw piece of meat. His lower lip had been nearly ripped off and was resting on his left cheek as if someone had just brushed it aside. Several broken teeth dotted his chin, the pieces piercing the flesh. What was left of his lower jaw hung at a slant. One eye socket was completely concave, the other empty, the eyeball hanging down the side of his cheek by what looked like a couple of bloody threads. Donner’s shirt was off, his white skin almost glowing in the light from the hall. His upper body had about thirty thin red slashes crisscrossed all around it in a pattern that Jeffrey didn’t recognize. From this distance, it looked like somebody had taken a red Magic Marker and drawn perfectly straight lines all over Donner’s torso.
“Brass knuckles,” Lena guessed, pointing to the chest and belly. “There was a trainer at the police academy who had the same thing right here on his neck. Perp popped out from behind a trash can and laid into him before he could pull his piece.”
“I can’t even tell if he still has a neck.”
Lena asked, “What the hell is sticking out of his side?”
Jeffrey squatted down for a better view, still standing just shy of the doorway. He squinted, trying to figure out what he was seeing. “I think those are his ribs.”
“Christ,” Lena said. “Who the hell did he piss off?”
CHAPTER NINE
Jeffrey leaned against the tile, letting the hot water from the shower blast his skin. He had bathed last night, but nothing could get rid of the feeling that he was covered in dirt. Not just dirt, but dirt from a grave. Opening that second box, smelling the musty scent of decay, had been almost as bad as finding Abby. The second box changed everything. One more girl was out there, one more family, one more death. At least he hoped it was just one girl. The lab wouldn’t be able to come back with DNA until the end of the week. Between that and analyzing the letter Sara had been sent, the tests were costing him half his budget for the rest of the year, but Jeffrey didn’t care. He would get another job down at the Texaco pumping gas if he had to. Meanwhile, some Georgia state representative was in Washington right now enjoying a two-hundred-dollar breakfast.
He forced himself to get out of the shower, still feeling like he needed another hour under the hot water. Sara had obviously come in at some point and put a cup of coffee on the shelf over the sink, but he hadn’t heard her. Last night, he had called her from the scene, giving her the bare details of the find. After that, Jeffrey had driven what little evidence they found in the box to Macon himself, then gone back to the station and reviewed every note he had on the case. He made lists ten pages long of who he should talk to, what leads they should follow. By then, it was midnight, and he had found himself trying to decide whether or not to go to Sara’s or his own home. He even drove by his house, too late remembering that the girls had already moved in. Around one in the morning, the lights were still on and he could hear music from the street as a party raged inside. He had been too tired to go in and tell them to turn it off.
Jeffrey slipped on a pair of jeans and walked into the kitchen, carrying his cup of coffee. Sara was at the couch, folding the blanket he had used last night.
He said, “I didn’t want to wake you,” and she nodded. He knew she didn’t believe him, just like he knew that he was telling the truth. Like it or not, his nights had been spent alone for most of the last few years, and he hadn’t known how to bring what he had found out there in the woods home to Sara. Even after what had happened in the kitchen two nights ago, getting in bed with her, climbing in between the fresh sheets, would have felt like a violation.
He saw her empty mug on the counter and asked, “You want some more coffee?”
She shook her head, smoothing down the blanket as she put it on the foot of the couch.
He poured the coffee anyway. When he turned around, Sara was sitting at the kitchen island, sorting through some mail.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“I feel like . . .” His voice trailed off. He didn’t know what he felt like.
She flipped through a magazine, not touching the coffee he’d poured. When he didn’t finish his thought, she looked up. “You don’t have to explain it to me,” she said, and he felt as if a great weight had been lifted.
Still, he tried: “It was a hard night.”
She smiled at him, concern keeping the expression from reaching her eyes. “You know I understand.”
Jeffrey still felt tension in the air, but he didn’t know if it was from Sara or his own imagination. He reached out to touch her and she said, “You should wrap your hand.”
He had taken off the bandage after digging in the forest. Jeffrey looked at the cut, which was bright red. As he thought about it, he felt the wound throb. “I think it’s infected.”
“Have you been taking the pills I gave you?”
“Yes.”
She looked up from the magazine, calling him on the lie.
“Some,” he said, wondering where he had put the damn things. “I took some. Two.”
“That’s even better,” she said, returning to the magazine. “You can build up your resistance to antibiotics.” She flipped through a few more pages.
He tried for humor. “The hepatitis will kill me anyway.”
She looked up, and he saw tears well into her eyes at the suggestion. “That’s not funny.”
“No,” he admitted. “I just . . . I needed to be alone. Last night.”
She wiped her eyes. “I know.”
Still, he had to ask, “You’re not mad at me?”
“Of course not,” she insisted, reaching out to take his uninjured hand. She squeezed it, then let go, returning to her magazine. He saw it was the Lancet, an overseas medical journal.
“I wouldn’t have been much company anyway,” he told her, remembering his sleepless night. “I kept thinking about it,” he said. “It’s worse finding it empty, not knowing what happened.”
She finally closed the magazine and gave him her full attention. “Before, you’d said maybe someone came back for the bodies after they died.”
“I know,” he told her, and that was one of the things that had kept him from sleep. He had seen some pretty horrible things in his line of work, but someone who was sick enough to kill a girl, then remove her body for whatever reason, was a perpetrator he was unprepared to deal with. “What kind of person would do that?” he asked.
“A mentally ill person,” she answered. Sara was a scientist at heart, and she thought there were concrete reasons that explained why people did things. She had never believed in evil, but then she had never knowingly sat across from someone who had murdered in cold blood or raped a child. Like most people, she had the luxury of philosophizing about it from behind her textbooks. Out in the field, he saw things very differently, and Jeffrey had to think that anyone capable of this crime had to have something fundamentally wrong with his soul.
Sara slid off the stool. “They should be able to do the blood types today,” she told him, opening the cabinet beside the sink. She took out the sample packets of antibiotics and opened one, then another. “I called Ron Beard at the state lab while you were in the shower. He’s going to run the tests first thing this morning. At least we’ll have some idea how many victims there might have been.”
Jeffrey took the pills and washed them down with some coffee.
She handed him two other sample packs. “Will you please take these after lunch?”
He would probably skip lunch, but he agreed anyway. “What do you think of Terri Stanley?”
She shrugged. “She seems nice. Overwhelmed, but who wouldn’t be?”
“Do you think she drinks?”
“Alcohol?” Sara asked, surprised. “I’ve never smelled it on her. Why?”
“Lena said she saw her getting sick at the picnic last year.”
“The police picnic?” she questioned. “I don’t think Lena was there. Wasn’t she on her hiatus then?”
Jeffrey let that settle in, ignoring the tone she gave “hiatus.” He told her, “Lena said she saw her at the picnic.”
“You can check your calendar,” she said. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think she was there.”
Sara was never wrong about dates. Jeffrey felt a niggling question working its way through his brain. Why had Lena lied? What was she trying to hide this time?
“Maybe she meant the one before last?” Sara suggested. “I recall a lot of people drinking too much at that one.” She chuckled. “Remember Frank kept singing the national anthem like he was Ethel Merman?”
“Yeah,” he agreed, but Jeffrey knew that Lena had lied. He just couldn’t figure out why. As far as he knew, she wasn’t particularly close to Terri Stanley. Hell, as far as he knew, Lena wasn’t close to anybody. She didn’t even have a dog.
Sara asked, “What are you going to do today?”
He tried to get his mind back on track. “If Lev was telling the truth, I should have some people from the farm first thing. We’ll see if he goes through with the polygraph. We’re going to talk to them, see if anyone knows what happened to Abby.” He added, “Don’t worry, I’m not expecting a full confession.”
“What about Chip Donner?”
“We’ve got an APB on him,” Jeffrey said. “I don’t know, Sara, I don’t like him for this. He’s just a stupid punk. I don’t see him having the discipline to plan it out. And that second box was old. Maybe four, five years. Chip was in jail then. That’s pretty much the only fact we know.”
“Who do you think did it, then?”
“There’s the foreman, Cole,” Jeffrey began. “The brothers. The sisters. Abby’s mother and father. Dale Stanley.” He sighed. “Basically, everybody I’ve talked to since this whole damn thing started.”
“But no one stands out?”
“Cole,” he said.
“But only because he was yelling to those people about God?”
“Yes,” he admitted, and coming from Sara it did sound like a weak connection. He had made an effort to back Lena off the religious angle, but he felt maybe he had picked up some of her prejudices. “I want to talk to the family again, maybe get them alone.”
“Get the women alone,” she suggested. “They might be more talkative without their brothers around.”
“Good idea.” He tried again, “I really don’t want you mixed up with these people, Sara. I don’t much like Tessa being involved, either.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got a hunch,” he said. “And my hunch tells me that they’re up to something. I just don’t know what.”
“Being devout is hardly a crime,” she said. “You’d have to arrest my mother if that were the case.” Then she added, “Actually, you’d have to arrest most of my family.”
“I’m not saying it has anything to do with religion,” Jeffrey said. “It’s how they act.”
“How do they act?”
“Like they’ve got something to hide.”
Sara leaned against the counter. He could tell she wasn’t going to give in. “Tessa asked me to do this for her.”
“And I’m asking you not to.”
She seemed surprised. “You want me to choose between you and my family?”
That was exactly what he was asking, but Jeffrey knew better than to say it. He had lost that contest once before, but this time he was more familiar with the rules. “I just want you to be careful,” he told her.
Sara opened her mouth to respond, but the phone rang. She spent a few seconds looking for the cordless receiver before finding it on the coffee table. “Hello?”
She listened a moment, then handed the phone to Jeffrey.
“Tolliver,” he said, surprised to hear a woman’s voice answer him.
“It’s Esther Bennett,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Your card. The one you gave me. It had this number on it. I’m sorry, I—” Her voice broke into a sob.
Sara gave him a puzzled look and Jeffrey shook his head. “Esther,” he said into the phone. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Becca,” she said, her voice shaking with grief. “She’s missing.”
Jeffrey pulled his car into the parking lot of Dipsy’s Diner, thinking he hadn’t been to the joint since Joe Smith, Catoogah’s previous sheriff, had been in office. When Jeffrey first started working in Grant County, the two men had met every couple of months for stale coffee and rubber pancakes. As time passed and meth started to be more of a problem for their small towns, their meetings became more serious and more regular. When Ed Pelham had taken over, Jeffrey hadn’t even suggested a courtesy call, let alone a meal with the man. As far as he was concerned, Two-Bit couldn’t fill a three-year-old girl’s shoes, let alone the boots of a man like Joe Smith.
Jeffrey scanned the vacant parking lot, wondering how Esther Bennett knew about this place. He couldn’t imagine the woman eating anything that didn’t come from her own oven, picked from her own garden. If Dipsy’s was her idea of a restaurant, she’d be better off eating cardboard at home.
May-Lynn Bledsoe was behind the counter when he walked into the diner, and she shot him a caustic look. “I’s beginning to think you didn’t love me no more.”
“Couldn’t be possible,” he said, wondering why she was making an attempt at banter. He’d been in this diner maybe fifty times and she had never given him the time of day. He glanced around the room, noting it was empty.
“You beat the rush,” she said, though he doubted people would be banging down the door anytime soon. Between May-Lynn’s sour attitude and the tepid coffee, there wasn’t much to recommend the place. Joe Smith had been a fan of their cheese and onion home fries and always asked for a triple order with his coffee. Jeffrey imagined Joe’s sudden heart attack at the age of fifty-six had put some people off.
He saw a late-model Toyota pull into the parking lot and waited for the driver to get out. The early-morning wind was whipping up dirt and sand in the gravel parking lot, and when Esther Bennett got out of the car, the door caught back on her. Jeffrey went to help her, but May-Lynn was in front of the door like she was afraid he’d change his mind and leave. She was picking something out of her back teeth that caused her to put her pinky finger into her mouth up to the third knuckle as she asked, “You want the usual?”
“Just coffee, please,” he said, watching Esther quickly take the steps to the entrance, clutching her coat closed with both hands. The bell over the door clanged as she walked in, and he stood to greet her.
“Chief Tolliver,” Esther said, breathless. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“You’re fine,” he told her, indicating she should sit down. He tried to take her coat, but she wouldn’t let him.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, sliding into the booth, her sense of urgency as palpable as the smell of grilled onions in the air.
He sat across from her. “Tell me what’s going on.”
A long shadow was cast over the table, and he looked up to find May-Lynn standing beside him, pad in her hand. Esther looked at her, confused for a second, then asked, “May I have some water, please?”
The waitress twisted her lips to the side as if she’d just calculated her tip. “Water.”
Jeffrey waited for her to saunter back behind the counter before asking Esther, “How long has she been missing?”
“Just since last night,” Esther said, her lower lip trembling. “Lev and Paul said I should wait a day to see if she comes back, but I can’t. . . .”
“It’s okay,” he said, wondering how anybody could look at this panicked woman and tell her to wait. “When did you notice she was gone?”
“I got up to check on her. With Abby—” She stopped, her throat working. “I wanted to check on Becca, to make sure she was sleeping.” She put her hand to her mouth. “I went into her room, and—”
“Water,” May-Lynn said, sloshing a glass down in front of Esther.
Jeffrey’s patience was up. “Give us a minute, okay?”
May-Lynn shrugged, as if he was in the wrong, before shuffling back to the counter.
Jeffrey took his turn with the apologies as he dabbed up the spilled water with a handful of flimsy paper napkins. “I’m sorry about that,” he told Esther. “Business is kind of slow.”
Esther watched his hands as if she had never seen anyone clean a table. Jeffrey thought it was more likely she’d never seen a man clean up after himself. He asked, “So, you saw last night that she was gone?”
“I called Rachel first. Becca stayed with my sister the night we realized Abby was missing. I didn’t want her out in the dark with us while we searched. I needed to know where she was.” Esther paused, taking a sip of water. Jeffrey saw that her hand trembled. “I thought she might have gone back there.”
“But she hadn’t?”
Esther shook her head. “I called Paul next,” she said. “He told me not to worry.” She made an almost disgusted sound. “Lev said the same thing. She’s always come back, but with Abby . . .” She gulped in air as if she couldn’t breathe. “With Abby gone . . .”
“Did she say anything before she left?” Jeffrey asked. “Maybe she was acting differently?”
Esther dug into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a piece of paper. “She left this.”
Jeffrey took the folded note the woman offered, feeling a little like he had been tricked. The paper had a pink tint, the ink was black. A girlish scrawl read, “Mama, Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back.”
Jeffrey stared at the note, not knowing what to say. The fact that the girl had left a note changed a lot of things. “This is her writing?”
“Yes.”
“On Monday, you told my detective that Rebecca has run away before.”
“Not like this,” she insisted. “She’s never left a note before.”
Jeffrey thought in the scheme of things the girl was probably just trying to be considerate. “How many times has this happened?”
“In May and June of last year,” she listed. “Then February this year.”
“Do you know any reason why she might run away?”
“I don’t understand.”
Jeffrey tried to phrase his words carefully. “Girls don’t usually just up and run away. Usually they’re running away from something.”
He could have slapped the woman in the face and got a better response. She folded the note and tucked it back into her pocket as she stood. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”
“Mrs. Bennett—”
She was halfway out the door, and he just missed catching her as she ran down the stairs.
“Mrs. Bennett,” he said, following her into the parking lot. “Don’t go like this.”
“They said you’d say that.”
“Who said?”
“My husband. My brothers.” Her shoulders were shaking. She took out a tissue and wiped her nose. “They said you would blame us, that it was useless to even try to talk to you.”
“I don’t recall blaming anybody.”
She shook her head as she turned around. “I know what you’re thinking, Chief Tolliver.”
“I doubt—”
“Paul said you’d be this way. Outsiders never understand. We’ve come to accept that. I don’t know why I tried.” She pressed her lips together, her resolve strengthened by anger. “You may not agree with my beliefs, but I am a mother. One of my daughters is dead and the other is missing. I know something is wrong. I know that Rebecca would never be so selfish as to leave me at a time like this unless she felt she had to.”
Jeffrey thought she was answering his earlier question without admitting it to herself. He tried to be even more careful this time. “Why would she have to?”
Esther seemed to cast around for an answer, but didn’t offer it to Jeffrey.
He tried again. “Why would she have to leave?”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Again, he pressed: “Why would she leave?”
She said nothing.
“Mrs. Bennett?”
She gave up, tossing her hands into the air, crying, “I don’t know!”
Jeffrey let Esther stand there, cold wind whipping up her collar. Her nose was red from crying, tears running down her cheeks. “She wouldn’t do this,” she sobbed. “She wouldn’t do this unless she had to.”
After a few more seconds, Jeffrey reached past her and opened the car door. He helped Esther inside, kneeling beside her so they could talk. He knew without looking that May-Lynn was standing at the window watching the show, and he wanted to do everything he could to protect Esther Bennett.
He hoped she heard his compassion when he asked her, “Tell me what she was running away from.”
Esther dabbed at her eyes, then concentrated on the tissue in her hand, folding and unfolding it as if she could find the answer somewhere on the crumpled paper. “She’s so different from Abby,” she finally said. “So rebellious. Nothing like me at that age. Nothing like any of us.” Despite her words, she insisted, “She’s so precious. Such a powerful soul. My fierce little angel.”
Jeffrey asked, “What was she rebelling against?”
“Rules,” Esther said. “Everything she could find.”
“When she ran away before,” Jeffrey began, “where did she go?”
“She said she camped in the woods.”
Jeffrey felt his heart stop. “Which woods?”
“The Catoogah forest. When they were children, they camped there all the time.”
“Not the state park in Grant?”
She shook her head. “How would she get there?” she asked. “It’s miles from home.”
Jeffrey didn’t like the idea of Rebecca being in any forest, especially considering what had happened to her sister. “Was she seeing any boys?”
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “I don’t know anything about her life. I thought I knew about Abby, but now . . .” She put her hand to her mouth. “I don’t know anything.”
Jeffrey’s knee started to ache and he sat back on his heels to take off the pressure. “Rebecca didn’t want to be in the church?” he guessed.
“We let them choose. We don’t force them into the life. Mary’s children chose . . .” She took a deep breath, letting it go slowly. “We let them choose when they’re old enough to know their own minds. Lev went off to college. Paul strayed for a while. He came back, but I never stopped loving him. He never stopped being my brother.” She threw her hands into the air. “I just don’t understand. Why would she leave? Why would she do this now?”
Jeffrey had dealt with many missing-children cases over the years. Thankfully, most of them had resolved themselves fairly easily. The kid got cold or hungry and came back, realizing there were worse things than having to clean up your room or eat your peas. Something told him Rebecca Bennett wasn’t running away from chores, but he felt the need to calm some of Esther’s fears.
He spoke as gently as he could. “Becca’s run away before.”
“Yes.”
“She always comes back in a day or two.”
“She’s always come back to her family— all of her family.” She seemed almost defeated, as if Jeffrey wasn’t understanding her. “We’re not what you think.”
He wasn’t sure what he thought. He hated to admit it, but he was seeing why her brothers hadn’t been as alarmed as Esther. If Rebecca made a habit of running away for a few days, scaring the crap out of everybody and then coming back, this could be just another cry for attention. The question was, why did she feel she needed attention? Was it some sort of teenage urge for attention? Or something more sinister?
“Ask your questions,” Esther said, visibly bracing herself. “Go ahead.”
“Mrs. Bennett . . .” he began.
Some of her composure had returned. “I think if you’re going to ask me if my daughters were being molested by my brothers, you should at least call me Esther.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of?”
“No,” she said, her answer requiring no thought. “Monday, I was afraid of you telling me that my daughter was dead. Now I am afraid of you telling me that there’s no hope for Rebecca. The truth scares me, Chief Tolliver. I’m not afraid of conjecture.”
“I need you to answer my question, Esther.”
She took her time, as if it made her sick to even consider. “My brothers have never been inappropriate with my children. My husband has never been inappropriate with my children.”
“What about Cole Connolly?”
She shook her head once. “Believe me when I tell you this,” she assured him. “If anyone did harm to my children— not just my children, but any child— I would kill them with my bare hands and let God be my judge.”
He stared at her for a beat. Her clear green eyes were sharp with conviction. He believed her, or at least he believed that she believed herself.
She asked him, “What are you going to do?”
“I can put out an APB and make some phone calls. I’ll call the sheriff in Catoogah, but honestly, your daughter has a history of running away and she left a note.” He let that settle in, considering it himself. If Jeffrey had wanted to abduct Rebecca Bennett, he’d probably do it just like that: leave a note, let her history protect him for a few days.
“Do you think you’ll find her?”
Jeffrey did not let himself dwell on the possibility of a fourteen-year-old somewhere in a shallow grave. “If I find her,” he began, “I want to talk to her.”
“You talked to her before.”
“I want to talk to her alone,” Jeffrey said, knowing he had no right to ask this, just as he knew Esther could always renounce her promise. “She’s underage. Legally, I can’t talk to her without the permission of at least one of her parents.”
She took her time again, obviously weighing the consequences. Finally, she nodded. “You have my permission.”
“You know she’s probably camping out somewhere,” he told her, feeling guilty for taking advantage of her desperation, hoping to God he was right about the girl. “She’ll probably come back on her own in a day or so.”
She took the note back out of her pocket. “Find her,” she said, pressing the page into his hand. “Please. Find her.”
When Jeffrey got back to the station, there was a large bus parked in the back of the lot, the words “Holy Grown Farms” stenciled on the side. Workers milled around outside despite the cold, and he could see the front lobby was packed with bodies. He suppressed a curse as he got out of his car, wondering if this was Lev Ward’s idea of a joke.
Inside, he pushed his way through the smelliest bunch of derelicts he’d seen since the last time he’d driven through downtown Atlanta. He held his breath, waiting for Marla to buzz him in, thinking he might be sick if he stayed in the hot room for much longer.
“Hey there, Chief,” Marla said, taking his coat. “I guess you know what this is all about.”
Frank walked up, a sour look on his face. “They’ve been here for two hours. It’s gonna take all day just getting their names.”
Jeffrey asked, “Where’s Lev Ward?”
“Connolly said he had to stay home with one of his sisters.”
“Which one?”
“Hell if I know,” Frank said, obviously over the experience of interviewing the great unwashed. “Said she had diabetes or something like that.”
“Shit,” Jeffrey cursed, thinking Ward really was jerking his chain. Not only was his absence wasting time, but it meant Mark McCallum, the polygraph expert the GBI had sent, would be spending another night in town courtesy of the Grant County Police Department.
Jeffrey took out his notepad and wrote down Rebecca Bennett’s name and description. He slid a photograph out of his pocket, handing it to Frank. “Abby’s sister,” he said. “Put her details on the wire. She’s been missing since ten o’clock last night.”
“Shit.”
“She’s run away before,” Jeffrey qualified, “but I don’t like this coming so close to her sister’s death.”
“You think she knows something?”
“I think she’s running away for a reason.”
“Did you call Two-Bit?”
Jeffrey scowled. He had called Ed Pelham on his way back to the station. As predicted, the neighboring sheriff had pretty much laughed in his face. Jeffrey couldn’t blame the man— the girl had a history of running away— but he had thought that Ed would take it more seriously, considering what had happened to Abigail Bennett.
He asked Frank, “Is Brad still searching the area around the lake?” Frank nodded. “Tell him to go home and get his backpack or camping gear or whatever. Get him and Hemming to go into the Catoogah state forest and start looking around. If anyone stops them, for God’s sake, tell him to say they’re out camping.”
“All right.”
Frank turned to leave but Jeffrey stopped him. “Update the APB on Donner to include the possibility he might be with a girl.” Anticipating Frank’s next question, he shrugged, saying, “Throw it at the wall and see what sticks.”
“Will do,” he said. “I put Connolly in interrogation one. You gonna get to him next?”
“I want him to stew,” Jeffrey answered. “How long do you think it’ll take to get through the rest of these interviews?”
“Five, maybe six hours.”
“Anything interesting so far?”
“Not unless you count Lena threatening to backhand one of them if he didn’t shut up about Jesus being Lord.” He added, “I think this is wasting our fucking time.”
“Have to agree with you,” Jeffrey said. “I want you to go ahead and talk to the people on your list who bought cyanide salts from the dealer in Atlanta.”
“I’ll leave right after I talk to Brad and update the APB.”
Jeffrey went to his office and picked up the phone before he even sat down. He called Lev Ward’s number at Holy Grown and navigated his way through the switchboard. As he was on hold, Marla walked in and put a stack of messages on his desk. He thanked her just as Lev Ward’s voice mail picked up.
“This is Chief Tolliver,” he said. “I need you to call me as soon as possible.” Jeffrey left his cell phone number, not wanting to give Lev the easy out of leaving a message. He rang off and picked up his notes from last night, unable to make any sense of the long lists he had made. There were questions for each family member, but in the cold light of day he realized that asking any one of them would get Paul Ward in the room so fast that his head would spin.
Legally, none of them had to talk to the police. He had no cause to force them to come in and he doubted very seriously if Lev Ward would deliver on his promise to take the lie detector test. Running their names through the computer hadn’t brought up much information. Jeffrey had tried Cole Connolly’s name, but without a middle initial or something more specific like a birth date or previous address, the search had returned about six hundred Cole Connollys in the southern United States. Opening it up to Coleman Connolly had added another three hundred.
Jeffrey looked at his hand, where the bandage had started to come off. Esther had gripped his hand before she left this morning, begging him again to find her daughter. He was convinced that if she knew anything, she’d be spilling her guts right now, doing whatever she could to get her only living child back in her home. She had defied her brothers and her husband by even talking to him, and when he had asked her if she was going to tell them whether or not they had spoken, she had cryptically answered, “If they ask me, I will tell them the truth.” Jeffrey wondered if the men would even consider the possibility that Esther had done something on her own without their permission. The risk she had taken was indication enough that she was desperate for the truth. The problem was, Jeffrey didn’t know where to begin to find it. The case was like a huge circle, and all he could do was keep going round and round until somebody made a mistake.
He skimmed through his messages, trying to focus his eyes long enough to read. He was exhausted and his hand was throbbing. Two calls from the mayor and a note that the Dew Drop Inn had called to discuss the bill for Mark McCallum, the polygraph expert he had ordered for Lev Ward, didn’t help matters. Apparently, the young man liked room service.
Jeffrey rubbed his eyes, focusing on Buddy Conford’s name. The lawyer had been called into court but would come to the station as soon as he could for the talk with his stepdaughter. Jeffrey had forgotten for a moment about Patty O’Ryan. He set the note aside and continued sorting through the stack.
His heart stopped in his chest when he recognized the name at the top of the next-to-last message. Sara’s cousin, Dr. Hareton Earnshaw, had called. In the note section, Marla had written, “He says everything is fine,” then added her own question: “You okay?”
He picked up the phone, dialing Sara’s number at the clinic. After listening to several minutes of the Chipmunks singing classic rock while on hold, she came on the line.
“Hare called,” he told her. “Everything’s fine.”
She let out a soft sigh. “That’s good news.”
“Yeah.” He thought about the other night, the risk she took putting her mouth on him. A cold sweat came, followed by more relief than he had felt when he had first read Hare’s message. He had sort of reconciled himself to dealing with bad news, but thinking about the possibility of taking Sara down with him was too painful to even fathom. He had caused enough hurt in her life already.
She asked, “What did Esther say?”
He caught her up on the missing child and Esther’s fears. Sara was obviously skeptical. She asked, “She’s always come back?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know that I would’ve even taken a report if not for the fact of Abby. I keep going back and forth between thinking she’s just hiding somewhere for the attention and thinking she’s hiding for a reason.”
“The reason being Rebecca knows what happened to Abby?” Sara asked.
“Or something else,” he said, still not sure what he believed. He voiced the thought he’d been trying to suppress since Esther’s call this morning. “She could be somewhere, Sara. Somewhere like Abby.”
Sara was quiet.
“I’ve got a team searching the forest. I’ve got Frank checking out jewelry stores. We’ve got a station full of ex-addicts and alcoholics from the farm, most of them smelling pretty ripe.” He stopped, thinking he’d be talking for another hour or two if he kept listing dead leads.
Out of the blue, she said, “I told Tess I’d go to church with her tonight.”
Jeffrey felt something in his gut squeeze. “I really wish you wouldn’t.”
“But you can’t tell me why.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s a gut instinct, but I’ve got a pretty smart gut.”
“I need to do this for Tess,” she said. “And myself.”
“You turning religious on me?”
“There’s something I need to see for myself,” she told him. “I can’t talk about it now, but I’ll tell you later.”
He wondered if she was still mad at him for sleeping on the couch. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong— really. I just need to think some more before I can talk about it,” she said. “Listen, I’ve got a patient waiting.”
“All right.”
“I love you.”
Jeffrey felt his smile come back. “I’ll see you later.”
He slid the phone back on the hook, staring at the blinking lights. Somehow, he felt like he had gotten his second wind, and he thought now was as good a time as any to talk to Cole Connolly.
He found Lena in the hallway outside the bathroom. She was leaning against the wall, drinking a Coke, and she startled when he walked up, spilling soda down the front of her shirt.
“Shit,” she muttered, brushing the liquid from her blouse.
“Sorry,” he told her. “What’s going on?”
“I needed to get some air,” she said, and Jeffrey nodded. The Holy Grown workers had obviously spent the early hours of the morning toiling in the fields and had the body odor to prove it.
“Any progress?”
“Basically, all we’ve got is more of the same. She was a nice girl, praise the Lord. She did her best, Jesus loves you.”
Jeffrey didn’t acknowledge her sarcasm, though he wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment. He was beginning to see that Lena’s calling them a cult hadn’t been that far off. They certainly acted as if they were brainwashed.
Lena sighed. “You know, actually, looking past all their bullshit, she seemed like a really nice girl.” She pressed her lips together, and he was surprised to see this side of her. As quickly as it had appeared, it passed, though, and Lena said, “Oh, well. She must have had something to hide. Everybody does.”
He caught a glint of guilt in her eye, but instead of asking about Terri Stanley and the police picnic, he told her, “Rebecca Bennett’s missing.”
Shock registered on her face. “Since when?”
“Last night.” Jeffrey handed her the note Esther had pressed into his hand outside the diner. “She left this.”
Lena read it, saying, “Something’s not right,” and he was glad that someone was taking this seriously. She asked, “Why would she run away this close to her sister dying? Even I wasn’t that selfish when I was fourteen. Her mother must be going nuts.”
“Her mother’s the one who told me,” Jeffrey said. “She called me at Sara’s this morning. Her brothers didn’t want her to report it.”
“Why?” Lena asked, handing back the note. “What harm could it do?”
“They don’t like the police involved.”
“Yeah,” Lena said. “Well, we’ll see how they don’t like the police involved when she doesn’t come back.” She asked, “Do you think she’s been taken?”
“Abby didn’t leave a note.”
“No,” she said, then, “I don’t like this. I don’t feel good about it.”
“I don’t either,” he agreed, tucking the note back into his pocket. “I want you to take the lead with Connolly. I don’t think he’ll like his questions coming from a woman.”
The smile on her face was brief, like a cat spotting a mouse. “You want me to piss him off?”
“Not on purpose.”
“What are we looking for?”
“I just want a sense of him,” he said. “Find out about his dealings with Abby. Float out Rebecca’s name. See if he bites.”
“All right.”
“I want to talk to Patty O’Ryan again, too. We need to find out if Chip was seeing anybody.”
“Anybody like Rebecca Bennett?”
Sometimes the way Lena’s mind worked scared him. He just shrugged. “Buddy said he’d be here in a couple of hours.”
She tossed her Coke into the garbage as she headed toward the interrogation room. “Looking forward to that.”
Jeffrey opened the door for her and watched Lena transform into the cop he knew she could be. Her gait was heavy, like she had brass balls hanging between her legs. She pulled out a chair and sat across from Cole Connolly without a word, legs parted, her chair a few feet back from the table. She rested her arm along the back of the empty chair beside her.
She said, “Hey.”
Cole’s eyes flashed to Jeffrey, then back to Lena. “Hey.”
She reached into her back pocket, took out her notebook and slapped it on the table. “I’m detective Lena Adams. This is Chief Jeffrey Tolliver. Could you give us your full name?”
“Cletus Lester Connolly, ma’am.” There was a pen and a few pieces of paper in front of him alongside a well-worn Bible. Connolly straightened the papers as Jeffrey leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest. He was at least sixty-five if he was a day, but Connolly was still a fastidious man, his white T-shirt crisp and clean, sharp creases ironed into his jeans. His time in the fields had kept his body trim, his chest well developed, his biceps bulging from his sleeves. Wiry white hair jutted up all over his body, sticking out from the collar of his T-shirt, sprouting from his ears, carpeting his arms. He was pretty much covered in it on every place but for his bald head.
Lena asked, “Why do they call you Cole?”
“That was my father’s name,” he explained, his eyes wandering back to Jeffrey. “Got tired of being beat up for being named Cletus. Lester’s not much better, so I took my daddy’s name when I was fifteen.”
Jeffrey thought that at the very least this explained why the man hadn’t come up on any computer checks. There was no doubt that he had been in the system for a while, though. He had that alertness about him that came from being in prison. He was always on guard, always looking for his escape.
“What happened to your hand?” Lena asked, and Jeffrey noticed that there was a thin, one-inch cut on the back of Connolly’s right index finger. It wasn’t anything significant— certainly not a fingernail scratch or defensive wound. It looked more like the kind of injury that happened when you were working with your hands and stopped paying attention for a split second.
“Working in the fields,” Connolly admitted, looking at the cut. “Guess I should put a Band-Aid on it.”
Lena asked, “How long were you in the service?”
He seemed surprised, but she indicated the tattoo on his arm. Jeffrey recognized it as a military insignia, but he wasn’t sure which branch. He also recognized the crude tattoo below it as of the prison variety. At some point, Connolly had pricked his skin with a needle, using the ink from a ballpoint pen to stain the words “Jesus Saves” indelibly into his flesh.
“I was in twelve years before they kicked me out,” Connolly answered. Then, as if he knew where this was going, he added, “They told me I could either go into treatment or get booted.” He smacked his palms together, a plane leaving the ground. “Dishonorable discharge.”
“That must’ve been hard.”
“Sure was,” he agreed, placing his hand on the Bible. Jeffrey doubted this meant the man was going to tell the truth, but it painted a pretty picture. Cole obviously knew how to answer a question without giving away too much. He was a textbook study in evasion, maintaining eye contact, keeping his shoulders back and adding in a non sequitur to the equation. “But not as hard as living life on the outside.”
Lena gave him a little rope. “How’s that?”
He kept his hand on the Bible as he explained, “I got banged up for boosting a car when I was seventeen. Judge told me I could go into the army or go to jail. I went right from my mama’s tit to Uncle Sam’s, excuse the language.” He had a sparkle in his eye as he said this. It took a few minutes for a man to let down his guard with Lena, then he started to treat her as one of the boys. Right before their eyes, Cole Connolly had turned into a helpful old man, eager to answer their questions— at least the ones he deemed safe.
Connolly continued, “I didn’t know how to fend for myself in the real world. Once I got out, I met up with some buddies who thought it’d be easy to rip off the local convenience store.”
Jeffrey wished he had a dollar for every man on death row who had gotten his start robbing convenience stores.
“One of ’em ratted us out before we got there— cut a deal for a reduction on a drug charge. I was cuffed before I even walked through the front door.” Connolly laughed, a sparkle in his eyes. If he regretted being ratted out, there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of bitterness left in him. “Prison was great, just like being in the army. Three squares a day, people telling me when to eat, when to sleep, when to take a crap. Got so when parole came around, I didn’t want to leave it.”
“You served your full term?”
“That’s right,” he said, his chest puffing out. “Ticked off the judge with my attitude. Had me quite a temper once I was inside and the guards didn’t like that, either.”
“I don’t imagine they did.”
“Had my fair share of those”—he indicated Jeffrey’s bruised eye, probably more to let him know he was aware that the other man was in the room.
“You fight a lot inside?”
“About as much as you’d expect,” he admitted. He was watching Lena carefully, sizing her up. Jeffrey knew she was aware of this, just like he knew that Cole Connolly was going to be a very difficult interview.
“So,” she said, “you found Jesus inside? Funny how he hangs around prisons like that.”
Connolly visibly struggled with her words, his fists clenching, his upper body tightening into a solid brick wall. Her tone had been just right, and Jeffrey got a fleeting glimpse of the man from the field, the man who didn’t tolerate weakness.
Lena pressed a little more gently. “Jail gives a man a lot of time to think about himself.”
Connolly gave a tight nod, coiled like a snake ready to strike. For her part, Lena was still casually laid back in the chair, her arm hanging over the back. Jeffrey saw under the table that she had moved her other hand closer to her weapon, and he knew that she had sensed the danger as well as he had.
She kept her tone light, though, trying some of Connolly’s own rhetoric. “Being in prison is a trying time for a man. It can either make you strong or make you weak.”
“True enough.”
“Some men succumb to it. There’s a lot of drugs inside.”
“Yes, ma’am. Easier to get ’em there than it is on the outside.”
“Lots of time to sit around getting stoned.”
His jaw was still tight. Jeffrey wondered if she had pushed him too far, but knew better than to interfere.
“I did my share of drugs.” Connolly spoke in a clipped tone. “I’ve never denied it. Evil things. They get inside you, make you do things you shouldn’t. You have to be strong to fight it.” He looked up at Lena, his passion replacing his anger as quickly as oil displaces water. “I was a weak man, but I saw the light. I prayed to the Lord for salvation and He reached down and held out His hand.” He held up his own hand as if in illustration. “I took it and I said, ‘Yes, Lord. Help me rise up. Help me be born again.’ ”
“That’s quite a transformation,” she pointed out. “What made you decide to change your ways?”
“My last year there, Thomas started making the rounds. He is the Lord’s conduit. Working through him, the Lord showed me a better way.”
Lena clarified, “This is Lev’s father?”
“He was part of the prison outreach program,” Connolly explained. “Us old cons, we liked to keep things quiet. You go to church, you attend the Bible meetings, you’re less likely to find yourself in a position where your temper might be sparked by some young gun looking to make a name for himself.” He laughed at the situation, returning to the genial old man he had been before his outburst. “Never thought I’d end up being one of those Bible-toters myself. There are folks who are either for Jesus or against him, and I took against him. The wages of my sin would have surely been a horrible, lonely death.”
“But then you met Thomas Ward?”
“He’s been sick lately, had a stroke, but then he was like a lion, God bless him. Thomas saved my soul. Gave me a place to go to when I got out of prison.”
“Gave you three squares a day?” Lena suggested, referring to Connolly’s earlier statement about the military and then prison taking care of him.
“Ha!” the old man laughed, slapping his hand on the table, amused at the connection. The papers had ruffled and he smoothed them back down, making the edges neat. “I guess that’s as good a way of putting it as any. I’m still an old soldier at heart, but now I’m a soldier for the Lord.”
Lena asked, “You notice anything suspicious around the farm lately?”
“Not really.”
“No one acting strange?”
“I don’t mean to be flip,” he cautioned, “but you gotta think about the sort of people we’ve got in and out of that place. They’re all a little strange. They wouldn’t be there if they weren’t.”
“Point taken,” she allowed. “I mean to say, any of them acting suspicious? Like they might be involved in something bad?”
“They’ve all been in something bad, and some of them are still in it at the farm.”
“Meaning?”
“They’re sitting in a shelter up in Atlanta feeling all sorry for themselves, looking for a change of scenery, thinking that’ll be the final thing that makes them change.”
“But it’s not?”
“For some of them it is,” Connolly admitted, “but for a lot more of them, they get down here and realize that the thing that got them into the drugs and the alcohol and the bad ways is the thing that keeps them there.” He didn’t wait for Lena to prompt him. “Weakness, young lady. Weakness of soul, weakness of spirit. We do what we can to help them, but they first have to be strong enough to help themselves.”
Lena said, “We were told that some petty cash was stolen.”
“That’d be several months back,” he confirmed. “We never caught who did it.”
“Any suspects?”
“Around two hundred,” he laughed, and Jeffrey assumed that working with a bunch of alcoholics and junkies didn’t exactly foster a lot of trust in the workplace.
Lena asked, “No one more interested in Abby than they should be?”
“She was a real pretty girl,” he said. “Lots of the boys looked at her, but I made it clear she was off-limits.”
“Anyone in particular you had to tell this to?”
“Not that I can recall.” Jail habits were hard to break, and Connolly had the con’s inability to give a yes-or-no answer.
Lena asked, “You didn’t notice her hanging around anybody? Maybe spending time with someone she shouldn’t?”
He shook his head. “Believe you me, I have been racking my brain since this happened, trying to think of anybody who might mean that sweet little girl some harm. I can’t think of nobody, and this is going back some years.”
“She drove a lot by herself,” Lena recalled.
“I taught her to drive Mary’s old Buick when she was fifteen years old.”
“You were close?”
“Abigail was like my own granddaughter.” He blinked to clear his tears. “You get to be my age, you think nothing can shock you. Lots of your friends start getting sick. Threw me for a loop when Thomas had his stroke last year. I was the one what found him. I can tell you it came as a hard reckoning seeing that man humbled.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Jeffrey could see Lena nodding, like she understood.
Connolly continued, “But Thomas was an old man. You can’t expect it to happen, but you can’t be surprised, either. Abby was just a good little girl, missy. Just a good little girl. Had her whole life ahead of her. Ain’t nobody deserves to die that way, but her especially.”
“From what we’ve gathered, she was a remarkable young woman.”
“That’s the truth,” he agreed. “She was an angel. Pure and sweet as the driven snow. I would’ve laid down my life for her.”
“Do you know a young man named Chip Donner?”
Again, Connolly seemed to think about it. “I don’t recall. We get a lot in and out. Some of them stay a week, some a day. The lucky ones stay a lifetime.” He scratched his chin. “That last name sounds familiar, though I don’t know why.”
“How about Patty O’Ryan?”
“Nope.”
“I guess you know Rebecca Bennett.”
“Becca?” he asked. “Of course I do.”
“She’s been missing since last night.”
Connolly nodded; obviously this wasn’t news. “She’s a strong-headed one, that child. Runs off, gives her mama a scare, comes back and it’s all love and happiness.”
“We know she’s run away before.”
“At least she had the decency to leave word this time.”
“Do you know where she might have gone?”
He shrugged. “Usually camps in the woods. I used to take the kids out when I was younger. Show ’em how to get by using the tools God gave us. Teaches them a respect for His kindness.”
“Is there any particular spot you used to take them?”
He nodded as she spoke, anticipating the question. “I was out there first thing this morning. Campsite hasn’t been used in years. I’ve got no idea where that girl might’ve gone off to.” He added, “Wish I did— I’d take a switch to her bottom for doing this to her mother right now.”
Marla knocked on the door, opening it at the same time. “Sorry to bother you, Chief,” she said, handing Jeffrey a folded piece of paper.
Jeffrey took it as Lena asked Connolly, “How long have you been with the church?”
“Going on twenty-one years,” he answered. “I was there when Thomas inherited the land from his father. Looked like a wilderness to me, but Moses started out with a wilderness, too.”
Jeffrey kept studying the man, trying to see if there was a tell to his act. Most people had a bad habit that came out when they were lying. Some people scratched their noses, some fidgeted. Connolly was completely still, eyes straight ahead. He was either a born liar or an honest man. Jeffrey wasn’t about to lay down bets on either.
Connolly continued the story of the birth of Holy Grown. “We had about twenty folks with us at the time. Of course, Thomas’s children were pretty young then, not much help, especially Paul. He was always the lazy one. Wanted to sit back while everybody else did the work so he could reap the rewards. Just like a lawyer.” Lena nodded. “We started out with a hundred acres of soy. Never used any chemicals or pesticides. People thought we were crazy, but now this organic thing’s all the rage. Our time has really come. I just wish Thomas was able to recognize it. He was our Moses, literally our Moses. He led us out of slavery— slavery to drugs, to alcohol, to the wanton ways. He was our savior.”
Lena cut off the sermon. “He’s still not well?”
Connolly turned more solemn. “The Lord will take care of him.”
Jeffrey opened Marla’s note, glancing at it, then doing a double take. He suppressed a curse, asking Connolly, “Is there anything else you can add?”
He seemed surprised by Jeffrey’s abruptness. “Not that I can think of.”
Jeffrey didn’t need to motion Lena. She stood, and Connolly followed her. Jeffrey told him, “I’d like to follow up with you tomorrow if that’s possible. Say, in the morning?”
Connolly looked trapped for a second, but recovered. “Not a problem,” he said, his smile so forced Jeffrey thought his teeth might break. “Abby’s service is tomorrow. Maybe after that?”
“We should be talking to Lev first thing in the morning,” Jeffrey told him, hoping this information would get back to Lev Ward. “Why don’t you come in with him?”
“We’ll see,” Connolly said, not committing to anything.
Jeffrey opened the door. “I appreciate you coming in and bringing everybody.”
Connolly was still confused, and seemed more than a little nervous about the note in Jeffrey’s hand, as if he very much wanted to know what it said. Jeffrey couldn’t tell if this was habitual thinking from his criminal days or just natural curiosity.
Jeffrey said, “You can go ahead and take back everybody else. I’m sure there’s work to do. We don’t want to waste any more of your time.”
“No problem,” Connolly repeated, jutting out his hand. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”
“Appreciate it,” Jeffrey said, feeling the bones in his hand crunch as Connolly shook it. “I’ll see you in the morning with Lev.”
Connolly got the threat behind his words. He had dropped the helpful-old-man act. “Right.”
Lena started to follow him out, but Jeffrey held her back. He showed her the note Marla had given him, making sure Connolly couldn’t see the secretary’s neat, grade-school teacher’s cursive: “Call from 25 Cromwell Road. Landlady reports ‘suspicious smell.’ ”
They had found Chip Donner.
Twenty-five Cromwell Road was a nice home for a well-to-do family living back in the thirties. Over the years, the large front parlors had been divided into rooms, the upper floors sectioned up for renters who didn’t mind sharing the one bathroom in the house. There were not many places an ex-con could go to when he got out of prison. If he was on parole, he had a finite amount of time to establish residency and get a job in order to keep his parole officer from throwing him back inside. The fifty bucks the state gave him on the way out the door didn’t stretch that far, and houses like the one on Cromwell catered to this particular need.
If anything, Jeffrey figured this case was opening up his olfactory sense to all different kinds of new experiences. The Cromwell house smelled like sweat and fried chicken, with a disturbing undertone of rotting meat courtesy of the room at the top of the stairs.
The landlady greeted him at the door with a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. She was a large woman with ample folds of skin hanging down from her arms. Jeffrey tried not to watch them sway back and forth as she talked.
“We never had no trouble from him at all,” she assured Jeffrey as she led him into the house. Deep green carpet on the floor had once been a nice shag but was now flattened down from years of wear and what looked like motor oil. The walls probably hadn’t been painted since Nixon was in the White House and there were black scuff marks on every baseboard and corner. The woodwork had been stunning at one time, but several coats of paint obscured the carvings on the molding. Incongruously, a beautiful cut-glass chandelier that was probably original to the house hung in the entranceway.
“Did you hear anything last night?” Jeffrey asked, trying to breathe through his mouth without looking like a panting dog.
“Not a peep,” she said, then added, “Except for the TV Mr. Harris keeps on next door to Chip.” She indicated the stairs. “He’s gone deaf over the last few years, but he’s been here longer than any of them. I always tell new boys if they can’t take the noise, then find somewhere else.”
Jeffrey glanced out the front door to the street, wondering what was keeping Lena. He had sent her to get Brad Stephens so that he could help process the scene. Along with half the rest of the force, he was still out in the woods, searching for anything suspicious.
He asked, “Is there a rear entrance?”
“Through the kitchen.” She pointed to the back of the house. “Chip parked his car under the carport,” she explained. “There’s an alley cuts through the backyard, takes you straight in from Sanders.”
“Sanders is the street that runs parallel to Cromwell?” Jeffrey verified, thinking that even if Marty Lam had been sitting on the front door like he was supposed to, he wouldn’t have seen Chip come in. Maybe Marty would think about that while he sat at home on his ass during his weeklong suspension.
The woman said, “Broderick turns into Sanders when it crosses McDougall.”
“He ever have any visitors?”
“Oh, no, he kept himself to himself.”
“Phone calls?”
“There’s a pay phone in the hall. They’re not allowed to use the house line. It doesn’t ring much.”
“No particular lady friends came by?”
She giggled as if he had embarrassed her. “We don’t allow female visitors in the house. I’m the only lady allowed.”
“Well,” Jeffrey said. He had been postponing the inevitable. He asked the woman, “Which room is his?”
“First on the left.” She pointed up the stairs, her arm wagging. “Hope you don’t mind if I stay here.”
“Have you looked in the room?”
“Goodness, no,” she said, shaking her head. “We’ve had a couple of these happen. I know what it looks like plain enough without the reminder.”
“A couple?” Jeffrey asked.
“Well, they didn’t die here,” she clarified. “No, wait, one did. I think his name was Rutherford. Rather?” She waved her hand. “Anyway, the one the ambulance picked up, he was the last. This was about eight, ten years ago. Had a needle in his arm. I went up there because of the smell.” She lowered her voice. “He had defecated himself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought he was gone, but then the paramedics came and toted him off to the hospital, said he still had a chance.”
“What about the other one?”
“Oh, Mr. Schwartz,” she remembered. “Very sweet old man. I believe he was Jewish, bless him. Died in his sleep.”
“When was this?”
“Mother was still alive, so it must have been nineteen . . .” She thought about it. “. . . nineteen eighty-six, I’d guess.”
“You go to church?”
“Primitive Baptist,” she told him. “Have I seen you there?”
“Maybe,” he said, thinking the only time he’d been in a church in the last ten years was to catch a glimpse of Sara. Cathy’s culinary arts gave her great sway with her girls during Christmas and Easter, and Sara generally let herself get talked into going to church services on these days in order to reap the benefits of a big meal afterward.
Jeffrey glanced up the steep stairs, not relishing what was ahead of him. He told the woman, “My partner should be here soon. Tell her to come up when she gets here.”
“Of course.” She put her hand down the front of her dress and rooted around, seconds later producing a key.
Jeffrey forced himself to take the warm, somewhat moist key, then started up the stairs. The railing was wobbly, torn from the wall in several places, an oily sheen to the unpainted wood.
The smell got worse the closer he got to the top, and even without directions he could’ve found the room with his nose.
The door was locked from the outside with a padlock and hasp. He put on some latex gloves, wishing like hell he’d donned them before taking the key from the landlady. The lock was rusty, and he tried to hold it by the edges so he wouldn’t smudge any fingerprints. He forced the key, hoping it wouldn’t break in the lock. Several seconds of praying and sweating in the dank heat of the house yielded a satisfying click as the padlock opened. Touching only the edges of the metal, he opened the hasp, then turned the handle of the door.
The room was pretty much what you would expect after seeing the front hall of the house. The same filthy green carpet was on the floor. A cheap roller shade was in the window, the edges pinned down with blue masking tape to keep the sunlight from streaming in. There wasn’t a bed, but a sleeper couch was halfway open as if someone had been interrupted during the process of unfolding the mattress. All the drawers of the one dresser in the room were open, their contents spilling out onto the rug. A brush and comb along with a glass bowl that contained about a thousand pennies were in the corner, the bowl shattered in two, the pennies flooding out. Two table lamps without shades were on the floor, intact. There wasn’t a closet in the room, but someone had nailed a length of clothesline along the wall to hang shirts on. The shirts, still on hangers, littered the floor. One end of the clothesline was still nailed to the wall. Chip Donner held the other end in his lifeless hand.
Behind Jeffrey, Lena dropped her crime scene toolbox on the floor with a thud. “Guess it was the maid’s day off.”
Jeffrey had heard Lena’s tread on the stairs, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the body. Chip’s face looked like a raw piece of meat. His lower lip had been nearly ripped off and was resting on his left cheek as if someone had just brushed it aside. Several broken teeth dotted his chin, the pieces piercing the flesh. What was left of his lower jaw hung at a slant. One eye socket was completely concave, the other empty, the eyeball hanging down the side of his cheek by what looked like a couple of bloody threads. Donner’s shirt was off, his white skin almost glowing in the light from the hall. His upper body had about thirty thin red slashes crisscrossed all around it in a pattern that Jeffrey didn’t recognize. From this distance, it looked like somebody had taken a red Magic Marker and drawn perfectly straight lines all over Donner’s torso.
“Brass knuckles,” Lena guessed, pointing to the chest and belly. “There was a trainer at the police academy who had the same thing right here on his neck. Perp popped out from behind a trash can and laid into him before he could pull his piece.”
“I can’t even tell if he still has a neck.”
Lena asked, “What the hell is sticking out of his side?”
Jeffrey squatted down for a better view, still standing just shy of the doorway. He squinted, trying to figure out what he was seeing. “I think those are his ribs.”
“Christ,” Lena said. “Who the hell did he piss off?”
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