Devotion Apart

by Davin Bradley

  I squatted down, studying the area as if I were back in the rainforest, tracking a wounded tapir and reading sign.

  "Brazil has its share of crimes, but mostly, they're crimes of passion among the natives. Revenge and pride. The tribespeople get pretty violent, but this kind of killing here is something else. Do you know why I'm here, Fletcher?"

  "Yeah, you have an uncanny way of solving crimes. Maybe it's the Umbrella Killer's turn to be next, huh?"

  "I came to ask you if there are any similarities in this murder and Cora's."

  "Well, Cora and this victim were both women, and a knife was used in both, but that's where the similarities end. Why do you ask?"

  "Did the cameras catch anything?" I nodded at the tinted orbs on the light post nearby.

  "They're about the only thing that's regularly maintained in the Ruins. But, no. Our tech said they were functioning just fine, but they recorded only darkness, like they were digitally wiped before we could get to them. I don't see how that's possible, since we were here before the blood even cooled. But nobody in this neighborhood will talk, even if they saw something. What're you looking at?"

  From several angles, I studied the blood stain.

  "Blood doesn't pool that way. That's a design. The Umbrella Killer leaves this design all the time? What is that?"

  "A shape. A picture." Fletcher shrugged. "Keep it to yourself, but it's the same in all the photos of other slayings. We withhold some details, like this, just in case there are copycats out there, and there usually is. What else?"

  "No footprints or tracks." I frowned. "Do you know how careful you have to be not to leave prints with this much blood?"

  "Same as other scenes. No prints. The guy is extremely careful. Anything else?"

  "I don't know." I stood upright. "Figure out what that design is in the blood, and why he leaves an umbrella at every scene, and maybe you'll find your killer."

  "Yeah." Fletcher snapped off his gloves. "I thought the man who took down McMaster and Nichols would have a little more to offer."

  "Sorry, but I'll keep an eye out."

  "Why? So you can give it to Grahm?" He shook his head. "Don't you realize you'll get him a promotion if you keep working with him, giving him these open and shut cases? Why would you do that? I told you he's dirty."

  "He's a dirty cop doing the right thing." I held out my hands. "Why is that bothering you?"

  "I don't know. I guess it's because he likes rubbing my face in it, since he knows you and I are friends. He knows that I know he's dirty, Cord, and now you've put him on the fast-track for all kinds of positive attention."

  "So, you're saying I put his life in the spotlight? And everyone in the city will be watching him a lot closer? So he won't be able to do anything wrong, or he'll lose all his recent achievements?"

  "Oh." He stopped next to his vehicle and opened the door. "I hadn't thought of it like that. You're burying him with kindness, and exposing him by doing the right thing."

  "He'll have to clean up his act."

  "I like the way you think." He climbed into his car. "Remind me never to play chess with you."

  "Don't worry," I said. "With a killer out there, we won't have much time for games."

  He closed his door and rolled down his window. The other officials had left, and locals had begun to walk over the crime scene.

  "I should probably get you cleared with the chief so you can be an official police consultant. If you want."

  "Let me pray on it. It sounds like a good idea, but let me get back to you."

  "And if you're a police consultant, it might help you find Cora's killer." He smiled knowingly. "Stay in touch, Cord,"

  As he drove away, I was left thinking about his remark. He was right. I could be more proactive at finding Cora's killer, but was that really why God had brought me back to Devotion?

  Minutes later, I sat in the Jeep, watching dealers and prostitutes mingle where kids on bikes and skateboards played. Just one hundred yards away, someone had been murdered. In the Ruins, it was just business as usual. Naul and his family ran the action around the towers, but Shay owned the buildings. I wondered if it was time for me to finally meet the billionaire. Maybe by poking my nose into business that was connected to him, I could get Shay to react and show his hand, if not about my sister then maybe about something else.

  I drove downtown to the jail and considered how the killer was using RASH against the city to kill and who knew what else? It meant that I could be monitored by this unknown assailant if he happened to come upon me. Or he could look into the things I was doing if I drew unnecessary attention to myself. Before I did anything else, I needed to revisit the Amazonia Biodome, and pick up the xylon ashes I'd arranged with Elizabeth Ardent. My knowledge of Matamata tribal stealth, to move in the shadows of Devotion, was the edge I needed against an enemy that could use RASH as effectively as I could.

  There was a crowd outside the jail, but this crowd wasn't protesting. Lovers and families of the incarcerated awaiting trial or sentencing stood in the heat outside the front entrance. I joined them only to find out that inmate visiting that day had been postponed due to a riot in one of the housing units. Eighty people milled around outside, complaining, cursing, and sweating through their discontentment. My appointment wasn't until noon, and most everyone outside expected the jail administrators to somehow make up that morning's missed appointments with their incarcerated loved ones.

  Toddlers and young children whined in the heat while an ice cream cart targeted their misery, but most of the crowd appeared to be less fortunate. No one was making any purchases.

  "Would it be all right to give him a cone and one scoop?" I asked a single mother with a three-year-old on her hip.

  She nodded when I gestured to the ice cream cart. The hint of a smile peeked through her caked-on makeup and nose piercings.

  At the cart, I held up my phone to pay. The server's face brightened.

  "How much for all the ice cream on your cart?"

  "All of it?" The man frowned. "For who?"

  "For all these people."

  "I don't know. Two hundred, maybe? After that, I'll be out of cones."

  "Start scooping," I told him, and handed the first cone to the toddler. "Hey, everyone! Make a line. We may not get our visits today, but we can have a little ice cream while we wait!"

  I joined the server to help scoop, and the disgruntled crowd quickly became a buzzing crowd of smiling and laughing neighbors. Since I planned on visiting Nichols while he was housed there, I'd get to know the other visitors in time.

  "No one's ever done anything like this before!" The server frantically passed out the cones.

  Some people thanked me, but most didn't, which was fine. I chatted casually with a middle-aged couple who were visiting their son who'd been accused of murdering a boy while arguing over a video game. It was hard to know how to encourage them at that moment, but as they shared their story, I privately decided ice cream cones weren't enough to give to these hurting families. They needed to know God.

  Finally, a sergeant and eight deputies with drawn batons came out of the front doors, and braced themselves elbow to elbow, as if they expected a riot.

  "Visits will resume!" the sergeant announced. "We will begin with the appointments made for twelve o'clock, and all attorney visits. The rest of you, go home, and reschedule for next weekend!"

  "Well at least we got some free ice cream," someone joked from the front of the crowd, drawing a few chuckles.

  The sergeant seemed disappointed when the people slowly dispersed. Finally, only a dozen people including myself remained. We were permitted to enter for our appointments.

  Chapter Twelve

  I'd never visited anyone in jail before, so I was unprepared for the forms I needed to fill out and the mistreatment I was forced to endure. The steel doors that we passed through were operated by men and women behind thick plastic windows who were too busy talking to allow us promptly into the visiting bo
oths. It seemed that by making visitors wait in the tight, humid spaces, they were discouraging us from visiting at all, or ever coming back.

  By the time the last door finally opened to the visitation booths behind glass, our hour visit had been reduced to twenty minutes.

  "Get used to it," a man in a leather jacket said to me. He must've read the frustration on my face. "They do this every weekend. It's always something."

  My booth was the third one, and I realized that Nichols had been waiting the whole time. I sat down on the steel stool and picked up the phone. Through the Plexiglas, his cool eyes seemed to frown at the same time that he forced a smile. His lip was cut and swollen, and he had a black eye.

  "Hi, Nichlos." I sighed away my frustrations. "I'm glad you accepted the visit."

  "You kidding?" He scoffed. "It's safer down here than in the block."

  "I suppose so." I nodded and leaned against the short desk in front of the glass. "You hurt a lot of people. Not many get arrested for this kind of crime."

  "Yeah." He swore into the phone. "I don't know whether to hate you for making me turn myself in, or thank you for bringing it all to an end. The God stuff you talked about—it's sort of making sense."

  "Sometimes we need help to do the right thing." I drew my Portuguese Bible from my satchel and set it on the table. "Never doubt you did the right thing by turning yourself in and being honest. God uses people who are willing to humble themselves for His sake."

  "It wasn't for His sake. You were going to kill me and leave me in that grave you dug."

  "I just helped you visualize your mortality. I wasn't going to kill you, Nichols. I knew your weakness, and I exploited it."

  "My weakness?"

  "The Bible says that people who are running from God or rejecting Him—have a fear of death. It's that fear of death that brings people to their sinful bondage. They want to live all they can while they're alive, because they know deep down that they're guilty, and there's nothing pleasant waiting for them in the next life."

  "Oh, and there's something pleasant waiting for you?" He rolled his eyes. "This is your idea of brightening my day? I'm already in hell. And you want to talk to me about eternal unpleasantness? That grave doesn't sound too bad right now."

  "No, Nichols." I took a deep breath. "God is allowing all this discomfort to happen because He's got much more to communicate to you than what you're feeling right now. Eternity needs to be in your focus. You'll die soon enough. You don't need to rush what you know nothing about. Sin has ravaged your life. It's time to— Hello?"

  On the other side of the glass, Nichols shook his phone, then he spoke into the receiver, but I heard nothing. With sickness rising in my stomach, I realized I'd just placed the heavy weight of truth about sin's curse on Nichols, but the phones had cut off before I could explain to him how to be born again.

  I mouthed the word "sorry," but it didn't erase the disappointment on his face.

  After allowing us in so late, they'd cut short our visit to less than five minutes.

  With a heavy heart, I hung up the phone, collected my Bible, and stuck it in my satchel. As I left my booth, the other visitors and prisoners wept through their goodbyes. One of the booths on the end was labeled, "Attorney Contact Visiting," where a man in a cheap brown suit was emerging from the room. He'd visited with a dark-eyed female inmate with straight blond hair.

  "Cord!" the blond woman yelled at me. The attorney's door was still open.

  I was so shocked to hear my name that I caught the door before it could close, and stared at a face I barely recognized.

  "May?" I blinked. "Is that you?"

  "Hey!" a man's voice shouted from up the corridor. "Close that door!"

  Instantly, I released the door, realizing immediately how my action to hold the door open must've appeared in such a tightly-controlled environment.

  From behind a metal door, two deputies emerged. Other visitors scrambled for the next steel door to make their exit, and panic surfaced in my brain. Two sheriff deputies much larger than I marched toward me.

  Though I backed away and raised my hands, their momentum wasn't checked until they pressed up against me and spun me around. They slammed me against the cinder block wall and twisted my arms behind my back.

  "What did you pass?" one deputy hissed into my ear. "I saw you pass her something!"

  "You think you're slick?" The other deputy punctuated his words with a hard jab to my left kidney. "Search her! And search him!"

  My legs weakened from the kidney blow. The officer who held my arms cuffed my wrists and pinned me upright against the wall.

  I heard May Boyle scream and fight with other deputies as they searched her in the adjacent attorney visiting room.

  "We got it!" a female deputy shouted. "A balloon of heroin. "Who knows how many others she swallowed."

  "Let's go, punk!" The deputy turned me to face him and stepped on both of my feet as he searched my pockets and my satchel. "Bringing your junk in my jail? Don't you see we got cameras in here?"

  I glanced up and saw two different cameras along the ceiling. Craig had to be watching. But more importantly, God was watching.

  "I didn't pass her anything."

  "Is that right? You were talking to her." He drew my bush knife out of the satchel and held it up in its sheath. "We've got a weapon here!"

  More deputies funneled into the visiting area. At the announcement of a weapon, a stampede occurred, as if I were holding a gun, and they were playing tackle the man in handcuffs. I hit the floor on my side with three deputies on top of me.

  "Stop resisting!" they yelled repeatedly.

  While holding me in place, they went to work on me with their knees. My head, ribs, and thigh were pounded, then they rolled me over for balanced tenderizing on my other side. Breathless, limp, and struggling to remain conscious, I was yanked by my cuffed arms through a doorway, up a corridor, and through another doorway. Then I was deposited into a familiar room, one I had sat in days earlier when I had visited with Talia Huella interpreting Portuguese for Fletcher's investigation against Roger McMaster.

  On the floor of the interrogation room, I was left alone to catch my breath and stare at the wall. Another camera orb stared back at me, as dark and emotionless as the deputies had been while attacking me.

  For a moment, I fought all kinds of sinful responses to what had just happened. Despair and self-pity made me want to lie there until the paramedics came and found me in my bruised and bleeding state. Anger made me want to retaliate because I was innocent! I thought about revenge.

  But the Spirit of God emerged through my shaken senses. I took a deep breath, then with my hands still cuffed tightly behind me, I wiggled over to lean against the wall next to the door.

  Slowly, I took account and recognized the truths which could be applied in any situation, even when circumstances are terrible. Was God still fair and just, even when the world wasn't? Was God still loving even in the midst of the world's horrors and tragedies? Yes. And He was still in control, still righteous, still omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

  Somehow, I found the humor in the moment, and I chuckled as I tempered my emotions. Physically, I felt battered, but I'd received beatings before, and God had used those situations to work amazing things.

  As I sat there, my arms cramping and my brow bleeding, my thoughts of revenge turned to righteous anger. I was angry about evil. My purpose for being in the jail was to share the gospel with a lost soul, but here I was accused of. . .what?

  May Boyle had been in the visiting booth. She had been a cute and sassy teenager, and my off and on girlfriend through high school. As reckless youths and lovers, we'd committed a few crimes together. I hadn't recognized her immediately. She'd lost so much weight, had sores on her face, and her hair was a lot thinner. She looked like hundreds of other transients across the city, although she had come from a wealthy family. So much could happen in twenty years.

  Without warning, the door to the
interrogation room opened and banged into my leg. Two men in ties and blazers picked me up by the arms and roughly dropped me into the metal chair bolted to the floor on the far side of the table. I faced the one-way glass and studied the two men in front of me. One of them looked familiar, like one of the officers who had rushed me, but he was now in plain clothes.

  "You're not detectives." I cleared my throat. "Look at the camera footage. I didn't pass anything in the visiting room."

  A bald-headed man sat across from me and smirked. He folded his hands and weaved from left to right, as if he was sizing me up to hit me.

  "You're right. We're not detectives."

  "We know who you are, Mr. Dalton," the other officer said. He was a muscled Mexican, tall, with dimples.

  "Or maybe that's an alias. Your identification looks doctored, and you have no social history online. Very suspicious."

  "You were visiting Kirby Nichlos," the bald one added. "A human trafficker? Don't you think we pay attention to who comes and visits these dirt bags?"

  I looked from one to the other, then up at the cameras. Craig would know to contact Fletcher or Grahm. To help me out of this situation, I'd prefer Grahm's aggressiveness.

  "I see you looking at that camera." He shot a thumb over his shoulder. "It's off."

  "There's always someone watching." I narrowed my eyes. "I was just wondering how far you want to take this, before I shut it down."

  "Shut it down?" The one with dimples scoffed from against the wall. "Listen, pal, I don't know who you think you are, but you're in the belly of the beast. Trafficking heroin in here? Resisting peace officers? You'll be lucky to get bail."

  "Well?" I tried to shrug my shoulders, but all I did was feel my aches. "What are your plans? I didn't do what you're saying, so you'll have to tell me what's next. This is all new to me."

  I licked my upper lip. It was swollen.

  "You're under arrest." Baldy glanced at his partner. "You're in our house now. You're not going anywhere until you give us your supplier."