by Dudley Lynch
Angie hadn’t taken her eyes off him. “Is the author’s name on the title page?”
“All it says is ‘By the Prairie Canary.’ The library doesn’t know the author’s name, either. They said the manuscript was mailed to them anonymously years ago.”
I had a question for him. “You compared it to the two memoirs by women authors. So this is a non-fiction work by a woman too?”
He confirmed that it was. “The book is called The Expiator’s Curse: A Memoir about the Pain of Caring Too Much. But you’re the one who keeps referring to the author as a woman. Why are you thinking that?”
At this point, I’d have understood if Angie had considered her cover blown. Said, “Whoops!” and started telling Drasher what we knew about the Prairie Canary.
Instead, she turned into an instant literary critic. “Her choice of a nom de plume, Garrick. Usually, men wouldn’t call themselves canaries. If you or Luke had written this using a pseudonym styled after an animal, it would have been something like the Vigilant Eagle or the Wolf That Never Blinks. Something manly, you know.”
She was out of the trap. But she wasn’t finished.
“The title also hints at that. It positively radiates a woman’s perspective. We females are sensitive to being left with the guilt of a relationship that falls apart, no matter whose fault it was.”
“Human Relations 101.” The words popped out of my mouth.
Another smart-ass wisecrack wasn’t the way I’d planned to return to the dialogue. But now that I was back, I wanted to get clarity on one issue. Drasher’s answer was going to determine whether our discussion about the Prairie Canary and The Expiator’s Curse continued in my interrogation room. “I asked if the book was non-fiction, and you didn’t answer.”
He flicked his eyes to the corner of the room before sweeping them across each of our faces.
“My guess is that it’s mostly the truth, at least as the author saw it. But true or not, it’s still stranger than fiction.”
Drasher said he would never forget the book’s opening sentence. Six short words.
They are going to kill me.
After reading that, he said he’d turned to the last page and read the book’s closing paragraphs.
The Prairie Canary had written she wanted to get the manuscript to the post office while she could, so she could be sure it would reach the library.
She was going to ask the library to respect her privacy until Professor Huntgardner’s death or for twenty years, whichever came first. Even then, she would ask that any mention of the book’s existence be kept low-key. They could list it in their card catalog but without any publicity.
I’d thought he was finished telling us about the manuscript, but he wasn’t. “There’s one more paragraph. One that seems to be trying to shoehorn the previous three hundred pages into a few sentences.”
As best he could remember, the closing paragraph said something like this:
“The professor no longer knows what is a lie and what is the truth. Or maybe it’s all lies. The one thing I know for certain is that he made me love him. For that, I gave him a son. Then he threw us both away. His fabulous fragment may have suffered the same fate. You can decide for yourself, now that you’ve read my book. Or not. But this is all I know.”
Chapter 65
To say I was irritated with Garrick Drasher would have been one of the millennium’s ranking understatements.
I was betting he’d spent several hours immersed in the manuscript. Maybe several days. All the while, leaving life-and-death-influencing events and the people who controlled them to make their own way. Meander in the meadow of real life like pixie fairies chasing butterflies. At their own risk. Flying blind.
What an idiot!
I wasn’t sure my face was prepared to shield my anger. I extracted my flip-over-the-top notebook from my shirt pocket. Flipped over a page. Then another one. And pretended to study the next one until I felt like I could wing it.
Decided to risk saying something. “Does the manuscript tell us anything about who else might be a target?”
Didn’t work. My voice broke. Drasher noticed. “You’re pissed about something, aren’t you?”
It was a relief to realize I was going to be able to answer like an adult. “Feeling the stress, Garrick. Feeling the stress.”
He seemed relieved. “Targets? Could be. The author herself said she had become a target. She thought she knew too much about a lot of things going on in Flagler. But especially about Huntgardner. And his fragment. If she’s still around, she could be a target, but for all we know, she’s long since dead. Let’s talk about that guy you dug up west of town the other day. What was his name?”
“Carmichael.”
“She says Carmichael was a part of Professor Huntgardner’s secret group. Or clique, or cult — whatever you want to call it.”
I helped his narrative along. “The Unus Mundus Masters. Or just the Masters.”
He continued with his story. “She says by the time she got involved, they’d become a bunch of obsessed, self-righteous killers. Says Carmichael wasn’t really a part of it. Just a hanger-on — one who got too nosy. And careless. Left one evening for the Dairy Queen to get burgers for everybody and was never seen again.”
“Why did the Prairie Canary come to Flagler?”
“Like I say, she was a writer. She wanted to do a book about a community where the UFO alien buzz was creating a stir. Starting about 1990, people began to write book after book about the so-called Roswell incident. She wanted to write about a place with UFO excitement not named Roswell.”
“She knew about Flagler how?”
“All Professor Huntgardner’s tongue-wagging about his precious fragment. Newspapers loved the story. Especially the British tabloids.”
“So the Prairie Canary was British?”
He gave a quick head shake. “Came from the Midwest, I think. Ohio maybe.”
“So she spent a lot of time in Professor Huntgardner’s company?”
“Not only his company but his bed as well.”
“Let me guess — a lot of her narrative involves pillow talk.”
“Well, remember, they did other things too.”
“Oh, that’s right. Does she indicate what happened to the child?”
“Said he wouldn’t let her keep it. Said if their relationship was to continue, she’d have to make it disappear. Seems to have been profoundly relieved that he didn’t kill it.”
“So what’d she do with the child?”
“Local adoption agency took it. One of the real tearjerker moments in her book is where she describes holding her newborn for the only time. The child had a large strawberry-shaped birthmark, right in the middle of its back. Huge mark. She tells how she massaged it for long minutes before surrendering him to a nurse. And then for years, dreamed about running her fingers over the mark on the new infant’s back.”
I glanced at Angie. “So what happened to her relationship with the professor?”
Her look at Drasher told him she expected him to answer.
He thought about it for a moment. “The woman came to see what a monster he was. More than that, she learned too many of his darkest secrets.”
“Such as?”
He thought for a moment. “What he’d done to people because of his obsession with the fragment and his belief that aliens were coming to Flagler to retrieve it. She said he was paranoid about what Malachi Rawls and his Society of Ezekiel’s Wheel might do to extraterrestrials if they actually descended on the town. Said Huntgardner and Rawls often acted like opposing Mafia chiefs in a turf war with each other.”
Now that he’d mentioned it, I wanted one more piece of information. “What about the fragment? Did she think it was real? Or have any idea where it might be?”
“You really need to read the manuscr
ipt for yourself.”
I intended to do that at the earliest opportunity. Drasher wasn’t giving me the kind of revelatory insights I’d been hoping for. And because I still had too many questions. For one thing, I wanted to know if the Prairie Canary’s book ever mentioned my father. And whether it offered the slightest clue as to why and how Sheriff John’s beloved belt had ended up around Professor Carmichael’s neck.
I wondered if, during all their pillow talk, Huntgardner had mentioned dreaming about being visited by aliens himself. Or had had such a dream while lying asleep next to her.
I was eager to know if the manuscript pointed to other places in the county I should invite Reverend to come perform his sniffing magic.
And I had one other expectation, or I would have never have allowed this discussion to stretch this long on a day like today. I was desperate for clues to who was killing or trying to kill my county’s residents.
Once again, it was Angie who moved us ahead. She suggested we’d all be derelict if we didn’t soon look at the images captured by the spy camera in my department locker room clock. Drasher reached into his satchel and removed a small coin envelope. Shook the SD cards it contained into his palm. Looked at the ultra-fine felt-tip markings on them. Selected one. And handed it to Angie.
Chapter 66
There was only one reason I was willing to spend a few minutes watching the video. I needed to find out who had poisoned Cassandrea Caraballo. I would be a fool if I ignored the possibility that Flagler’s mass murderer had been operating under my nose all along.
I watched as Angie took the SD card and inserted it in the adapter on her laptop. The picture show began. No popcorn. Or small talk. No talk in the room at all for a while. But there wasn’t much to see. Our department’s locker room was a far duller place than I’d realized.
In most instances, our people used it for storage. Uniforms or street clothes. Their duty belts. Their duty guns if they had a smaller off-duty gun to take home. And anything else they desired to lock away. It was not meant to be a dressing or changing room, so we weren’t viewing my employees in dishabille. We had changing rooms.
We were treated to a scenario where two of my deputies stayed in front of their locker door mirrors so long it looked like they were homesteading.
Both kept drawing their lips back, engrossed with their teeth. One actually took time to floss. Drasher took note. “And this year’s Emmy for Best Preening Before Appearing in the Ready Room goes to . . .”
My chief deputy, Sawyers Tanner, was the next person to come into view. As he deposited his backpack on a nearby bench, I felt discomfort at what we were doing for the first time. Observing my employees and their personal storage spaces without them knowing it does not generally leave me feeling like a voyeur. I had a right to this kind of surveillance. It said so, in so many words, in their employment contracts. And how was this any different from walking through my department’s work spaces with an observant eye, on the lookout for anything I should be concerned about? But watching Sawyers Tanner open his locker door without his knowledge wasn’t the same.
It felt like what it was. Spying.
It felt disloyal.
Other than Angie, there was no one in Flagler I trusted more. Even though we’d only worked together for five years. Numerous times, I’d asked him to ride shotgun with me for one reason only: respect. My respect for his judgment, his policing skills, and his character. It was a way of saying that I trusted him with my life. Watching him shelve and unshelve items in his open locker, I still felt that. I was still feeling it when Drasher spoke up again. “I know him.”
“What about him?”
“He delivers stuff for Pecan Mountain’s caterers when our vans are tied up.”
I recalled Tanner telling me about his part-time gig as a delivery guy. We watched as Sawyers removed his dress shirt. Like me, he preferred dressing in mufti — wearing civvies seemed less threatening to people. And we both felt that it kept the laundry bill a little lower.
As our spy camera trained its prying eye on him, hygiene seemed to be what was on Sawyers’s mind.
He’d reached for a deodorant stick on one of his locker shelves. Unscrewed the cap. Lifted the bottom of his T-shirt enough that he could roll the deodorant under his armpit. Raised his arm to sniff the results. Appeared to get a whiff from his T-shirt that he didn’t like. Reached inside his backpack. Found a replacement. And tugged the T-shirt he was wearing over his head with his back to the camera.
We all saw it at the same time.
Gasped.
And stared.
No, gaped. At the huge birthmark in the center of his back.
Still shaped like a rose-port-wine strawberry, just as the Prairie Canary had described.
I issued an order. “Freeze that.” It occurred to me, regardless of any deceptions that had been between us, suddenly we were all on the same team. “Can we enlarge it?”
She didn’t need me to identify the “it.” She maneuvered the birthmark into the center of the screen. Then magnified it until the mass of abnormal blood vessels filled most of the picture.
I think we all felt the urge to touch it, but Angie was closest to the screen. She reached out and began to trace the edges of the birthmark with her fingers. I knew we were all thinking about the grief of a new mother. The one who had again and again traced the birthmark on the back of the infant she’d just given birth to. A newborn baby who was about to be lost to her forever.
I looked at Drasher. “Does your company ever deliver food to the Huntgardner house?”
He met my eyes and nodded slowly.
The spy camera in my department locker room had found him. My chief deputy had to be Professor Huntgardner’s illegitimate son. And my instincts, and the growing ball of nerves in the pit of my stomach, told me he was probably something else. Abbot County’s mass murderer.
Chapter 67
I should be able to call Tanner on his walkie. Talk to him directly. Ask him to return to the courthouse. And reassure me that my growing concerns about where he’d been and what he’d been doing were baseless.
I tried.
No answer.
For the first time, I realized I didn’t know when the spy camera video we’d been watching had been recorded. I asked Garrick. He said it was a replay from a few weeks ago. He reminded us that today’s memory card was still in the clock. I’d overlooked that. Had assumed that we’d been watching Sawyers getting ready for work this morning.
I asked Angie to restart the video and return the view to normal size. It showed my chief deputy leaving the screen, toting his fresh T-shirt, his long-sleeved work shirt, and his backpack. He headed for the men’s change room.
I asked Angie to rewind and focus on Sawyers’s locker again — in particular, the two shelves near the top. I was interested in a closer look at what else was there.
Stuff.
Not everything was visible. But I could see his deodorant stick. A couple of cologne bottles. A box of bullets — or at least the kind of box bullets came in. A heavy-duty flashlight. A small bound-at-the-side coil notebook. Two balled-up pairs of socks. And some small doodads I couldn’t identify.
I turned to suggest that we all head for the locker room, but Angie was already on her way. I became number two in the entourage. Drasher followed in our footsteps.
My accomplices yielded to protocol when we reached the door to the department’s locker room. Actually, they didn’t have any choice. I was the only one in the group who had a key. When Tanner’s locker door didn’t yield to a tug on its handle, my mind engaged in a bit of wordplay: The locker, dear diary, dear diary, was locked. As it should have been. Fortunately, I had a key to our janitor’s supply room. Somewhere.
It took four tries before I found the right key, fit it in the storage room door, and gave it a turn. Next, I needed a tool. A large screwdr
iver would suffice. I located one and rejoined Angie and Drasher, who were waiting expectantly in front of Tanner’s locker. This wasn’t Fort Knox, and the door yielded easily. I swung it open. Both my colleagues waited politely for me to take charge, but they were crowding close to see over my shoulder.
The gaping open space beneath the locker shelving contained a couple of items. One was a shipping box with the U.S. postal service’s red-over-white international markings. It wasn’t a small box. You could have lowered a six-pack into the carton with room left over. The sealing tape was broken, and the lid was partially open, but this didn’t afford a view of what was inside. We’d have to bend the lid back to see what the box contained.
Another container was leaning against one of the locker’s back corners. An odd-sized mailing tube? Maybe. The object was white, about two feet long and three inches in diameter. A plastic cap was inserted in the one end that was visible. The tube had no markings that I could see. Once again, we were going to have to remove the lid to examine the contents.
But none of this interested me as much as what I found folded up on the top shelf of Sawyers’s locker.
It was a map. But not a printed map like those we receive from tourist bureaus. Or from the state’s transportation people showing construction projects. Or a highway map — not as such. And not an official one.
It appeared to be a map that Chief Deputy Tanner had made himself: a hand-drawn map of the location of the region’s twelve abandoned missile silos. The ones controlled during the Cold War from the air base north of Flagler.
My colleagues made the mental leap at the same time I did.
Dasher cursed. Stood straighter. Parked his hands on his hips. And bent forward to take another look. “You wanted to know about targets. I’d bet somebody’s told him about how the Rawls group plans to deal with any alien visitors. I’d move Professor Rawls to target number one.”