Innocent Blood; Blood Money; Blood Moon

by Michael Lister

  “He may not be the next family member to go,” I said.

  “Did I tell you I had a meeting in the World Trade Center the morning of nine-eleven?” I shook my head.

  She hadn’t told me anything in a very, very long time. “I should be dead. Really just a comedy of errors that I’m not.”

  “I’m so glad you’re still here,” I said. “And here.

  How long you staying?”

  “Fly out this afternoon,” she said.

  “You’re an amazing man,” Anna said.

  It was late. We were finally alone for the first time since we had woken up together the morning before.

  We were lying in our bed in the dark, her head on my chest, her thick, beautiful brown hair draped over me.

  “I don’t know anyone who could’ve done what you did,” she said. “You were so graceful and elegant, yet honest and elegiac.”

  I was exhausted, emotionally spent, spiritually depleted. Her kind, overly complimentary words were a soothing salve for my soul, her warm bare skin on mine, healing and whole-making.

  “Thank you,” I said. “You can’t know what that means to me.”

  “I’m showing great restraint in what I’m saying,” she said. “Holding back. Choosing every word carefully. Could easily add a hundred for each.”

  “So sweet.”

  “I’m not being sweet. I’m in awe of you. More now than ever. There’s no way what you did could’ve been easy or effortless, but that’s the way you made it look.”

  “You know what I kept thinking today? It was no different than any other day these days. I kept thinking, I get to go home with Anna. I’m the lucky man who gets to lie next to her tonight.”

  “Every night,” she said. “I kept thinkin’ the same thing. That amazing man, saying such beautiful and insightful things, that man who I respect and admire more than any other I’ve ever known, is mine. I get to go home with him tonight. Wake with him tomorrow.”

  She may have said more, but those were the last words I heard before I succumbed to the heavy-handed demands of the sandman.

  Good night, moon. Good night, Mom. Good night, sweet, beautiful Anna. Good night, world for a while.

  40

  I was headed to a crime scene when Hahn called.

  “I pulled Bailey’s file from Personnel,” she said.

  “What?” I asked in shock. “I really wish you hadn’t done that.”

  “Not when you hear what I found out.”

  I was on the mostly desolate highway that connected Pottersville and Panama City, the early morning light filtering down through the slash pines, shining through the rows onto the road in shafts of bright yellow and orange.

  “She’s not licensed by the state.”

  “What?” I said.

  Up ahead on my right I could see an enormous clear-cut field where just days before there had been a thirty-year-old flatlands pinewood forest.

  It looked as if a massive super storm had blown through and leveled the land, leaving a gaping swath of baldness where once had been life and beauty. The devastation of deforestation.

  Skidders were crawling through the fallen forest, twisting and turning like mechanical animals as they pinched and pulled the felled trees toward waiting log trucks.

  Pulling off the highway, I turned down a dirt road, where on each side slash pines were being harvested. “She was appointed with the provision she would obtain her license within a year, which ends next month. Somebody had to want her to have this job very badly.”

  I thought about who that might be.

  “And she doesn’t have a legitimate degree. Her PhD is mail-order. Unaccredited. Which is why she’s having trouble getting licensed. And she told me she could supervise me for the hours I need for licensure. Now I’ve got to start over.”

  “Better to know now,” I said.

  Very little was left standing for hundreds of acres—the occasional oak tree, a small stand of cypress trees rimming a small patch of wetland, a handful of homemade tree stands, and a small, one-room mobile home cut in half, the two pieces separated by a narrow debris field about ten feet long.

  “She’s had problems at her last two places of employment. Left in a hurry both times. She claims she’s been the victim of sexual harassment, but has never so much as filed a complaint.”

  “Where’d she work?”

  “Medical clinic in Pensacola. And get this. It’s the same one Alvarez was fired from.”

  I pulled up not far from the last in a line of emergency vehicles and turned off the car.

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s very helpful, but please don’t ever do anything like that again.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “The hypnotherapy demonstration you did for me—was that a pretty normal session?” I asked.

  “I haven’t done that many. But it’s pretty standard from what I’ve experienced. He’s easier to induct than most people. Why I chose him.”

  “Raising his arm, his hand going numb––what all can you get him to do?”

  “Well, they’re just suggestions. You can suggest anything, but his subconscious has to be willing to do it. Hypnosis puts him in a state of less resistance, but he can still resist anything that he normally would be uncomfortable with consciously. I only use it after several sessions of therapy, and then only to deal with what comes up during therapy. If he can’t remember anything before he was eight . . . I’ll regress him back and see what happened.”

  “His subconscious will remember?”

  “Every detail. It’s amazing. You’ve never heard detail like this. Our subconscious minds record everything. We take him back, let him remember it, relive it, then help him bring it up into the conscious so we can deal with it. But I do very little regression therapy. It takes enormous skill. You can do so much damage. Some patients remember things that they and the therapist aren’t prepared for, and it devastates them to such an extent they never recover.”

  “So the patient remembers when they come out of it? I mean, what was said or remembered while they were under.”

  “Unless the therapist tells them not to.”

  “That’s possible?”

  “They’re in a highly suggestible state. You can tell them not to remember and they won’t.”

  “You could suggest that they do something, and tell them not to remember you suggesting it?”

  “Yeah. Everyone’s different. But you can get some people to do almost anything—as long as they aren’t morally opposed to it. Some people believe with continuous suggestion you could get someone to even do something against their will, but I don’t know. You might get them to do some things, but nothing like . . .”

  “Kill?” I offered.

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t think you could most people, but there’s a hell of a lot we don’t know about the mind. Everybody’s different. There’s an exception to every rule. Plus, there’s a whole hell of a lot of guys in here who aren’t morally opposed to anything.”

  I clicked off the call and sat for a moment, breathing, thinking, enjoying the sun streaming in my windows.

  Eventually, Jake walked up and I got out. “Mornin’,” he said.

  “Morning,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Sad,” he said. “You?”

  “Same.”

  “Don’t feel like myself,” he said. “It’s weird.” I nodded and we were silent a moment.

  Finally he jerked his head back toward the crime scene and said, “Nothin’ like a little violent death to force us to let life go on.”

  “Whatcha got?”

  “Caucasian male. Early twenties. Shot in the head with a shogun. Looks self-inflicted but . . . ME is looking now. He was in that old trailer. It’d been dragged out here for hunters to use. Loggers didn’t even know it was there until the skidder backed through it. Guy’s naked. No clothes or shoes or identification anywhere in or around the trailer. He was just sitting in an old chair, the shotgun leaning aga
inst him.”

  I nodded and we started walking toward the trailer. “Oh,” Jake said, “I keep forgetting to tell you.

  Nobody seems to know anything about the cold-case card deck but Potter. He said they were already there from a previous game and we just pulled them out of the drawer when we needed them. Says there’s more in the drawer.”

  I nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Is that something?”

  “I thought it might be,” I said, “but I don’t think it is. Just a coincidence. Thanks for checking.”

  “Sure. I can look further if I need to.”

  As we neared the crime scene, I could see that everything was pretty much as Jake had described except for one crucial thing. The guy had not shot himself. He hadn’t even been alive when it happened.

  I looked closer.

  The small, nude young man, a boy really, his decaying corpse on display for everyone to gawk at, was pale and pathetic, his hairless body narrow and soft.

  He was splayed out in an old, large cloth chair, his head flopped back on the top, his arms dangling down beside him, his legs extending out on the partial floor of the torn-asunder trailer.

  Dad walked over to us. “How are you, son?”

  “Okay,” I said. “You?”

  “You did a damn fine job on your mom’s funeral,”

  he said. “I was very proud of you.”

  I nodded the thanks I was unable to utter at the moment.

  He turned back to look at the ME examining the body.

  “Sure was hoping this was going to be a hunting accident or even a suicide,” he said. “It’s not?” Jake said.

  I shook my head.

  “See how there’s no blood or bruising around the gunshot wound,” I said. “He was already dead when it happened, and dead men don’t bleed.”

  “That’s exactly what the ME said,” Dad added. “But he’s got some dried blood on him,” Jake said.

  “And some bruising.”

  I nodded. “Happened before he was shot.”

  “A few more miles that way and this would’ve been in Bay County,” Dad said.

  “Yeah,” Jake said.

  “Doesn’t look like it’s going to be quick and easy,” Dad added. “Could very well turn into another open unsolved by the time the election gets here.”

  I started to say something but my phone rang. It was the prison.

  I stepped a few feet away to take the call and was informed that Brent Allen had been found dead, hanging from his bunk in the exact same manner as Danny Jacobs.

  41

  Déjà vu.

  The inmate hanging from the top bunk could’ve been Danny Jacobs. The body fell forward against the rope the same way, the head leaning over the noose at an unnatural angle. The dry, swollen tongue protruded the same way. The lifeless arms dangled like Danny’s had.

  But it wasn’t Danny Jacobs.

  The latest victim of an apparent suicide at Potter Correctional Institution was the Suicide King himself, Brent Allen.

  The same type of small cord looked to have been used on or by Allen. He was in the exact same location and position where Jacobs had been found, a suicide king playing card sticking out of his waistband.

  It was all so similar, but from the moment I walked up to the body, I knew this death was different.

  The fixed lividity, which was wrong for the position of the body, and the marks made by the rope were inconsistent with the way his neck hung in the noose.

  “Maybe we been watching the wrong convict,” Merrill said.

  He was standing near me, looking at the body. I frowned and shook my head. “Maybe so.”

  “Maybe not,” Officer Wilder said, edging over toward us. “He was sleeping in Phillips’s bunk.”

  Derek Wilder, an evening shift officer who had no reason to be in here, had been listening in on our conversation since it started—something I found annoying until he stepped up with useful information.

  I called Lance over from where the dorm officers had the inmates lined up preparing to relocate them to one of the empty T-cell dorm quads.

  “Brent was in your bunk last night?”

  Lance reached up and rubbed his neck. “I was so sore and stove up from what happened in the chapel, he traded bunks with me. I’s having a hard time climbing up on the top bunk.”

  “Fucker really did want to die,” Merrill said. “He thought he was invincible, but honestly, we didn’t even think about it. I mean, I wouldn’t’ve been down here if I didn’t think it was safe. No one thought anyone would try something here again. And we figured the dorm officers would be watching us—this back corner—a lot more closely now.”

  I turned and looked across the dorm at Donnie Foster.

  “I just don’t get you dumb bastards,” Merrill said.

  Lance shrugged. “I don’t want to die. Never did. I’m not sure any of us did—but a few didn’t seem to care much either way. Brent was one of ’em. None of this should’ve ever happened. It was just something to do, a way to pass the time.”

  I shook my head.

  Merrill said, “Lawson and company gonna be here any minute. Anything else you need to—”

  As if on cue, the door opened and Mark Lawson walked in. Merrill and I began walking out. No reason to have him kick us out when we could leave voluntarily. We met him halfway between where we had been and the door.

  “Chaplain,” he said in a congenial voice. “Just the man I was looking for. I’ve been told to eat some humble pie and ask you to help us on this one.”

  I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say. I was also suspicious as hell.

  “Come on,” he said, beginning to move toward the back of the dorm and the body awaiting him there. “Let’s take a look and see what we got.”

  Merrill and I both followed him.

  I had guessed that Mark Lawson would be the kind of man to make jokes at a crime scene, and when he began I was disappointed I had been right about him.

  “Don’t understand why everybody’s killing themselves,” he said. “We doing something wrong? They not happy here?”

  We didn’t respond.

  “So’s this guy part of the suicide club?” I nodded. “The Suicide Kings.”

  “I’m thinkin’ we need to ship the rest of ’em off to a psych camp. Keep ’em from killing themselves.”

  “He was murdered,” I said.

  “How can you be so sure?” Lawson said. “They haven’t even done an autopsy on him.”

  “Lividity doesn’t match the position of the body.” He took a closer look at the body. “I’ll be damned.”

  Brent’s lividity was fixed. The entire front portion of his body was bruised, and his feet, which were the lowest points in his current position, weren’t any darker than any other part of him. The body had been moved after he was murdered.

  He had been lying facedown when he was killed.

  After he was dead, he had been left that way for a while—probably as the killer waited for the right time to string him up—and it was long enough for the lividity to become fixed. Later, when he was moved, tied up in the position he was in now, the discoloration of his skin from the facedown position he had been killed and left in didn’t change.

  “Look at the marks on his neck,” I said. “See how the bruise is in a straight line like a ring?”

  Lawson looked. “Yeah?”

  “If he’d really been hung, it wouldn’t be a circle, but a V. The pressure of the rope where it’s tied above the head causes it to pull up. Looks like he was strangled facedown on his bunk or on the floor, killed, left there for a while, then hung from the bunk.”

  Walking over to Donnie Foster in the far corner of the dorm, I said, “You’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Sure I ain’t the only one.”

  “Oh really?”

  “You jam people up.”

  “Actually, he help people out,” Merrill said. “Got nothin’ I need help with,” Foster said. “Got anyt
hing you could get jammed up for?” I asked.

  “No. Haven’t done anything. Haven’t seen anything.

  Don’t know anything. Don’t want any trouble. Won’t say anything else.”

  Merrill stepped toward him.

  “You can’t scare me or threaten me or coerce me into telling you something I don’t know. I ain’t gonna make shit up. And I won’t stand here and just keep saying the same thing over and over.”

  He then walked away and we let him.

  42

  Clarissa was crying.

  The small apartment was sad and dingy and smelled of years of cheap food, cigarette and pot smoke, dogs, cats, birds, people, paint, perms, bleach, air freshener, carpet cleaner, and a thousand other things in layer upon layer of lives lived in a cramped, inexpensive place.

  The apartment was right off Balboa in Panama City, just a couple of miles from the college.

  Clarissa King lived here now and was adding a new layer of her own.

  She was a short, round black girl in her early twenties, nearly as wide as she was tall.

  I was here because she had filed a missing person’s report recently of a young man I was pretty sure was the victim who had been found by the loggers in the hunting trailer.

  His name was Andy Bearden. He was her roommate.

  And the more she told me about him, the more I became convinced it was him.

  “But Andy didn’t hunt,” Clarissa said. “He wouldn’t’ve been out there hunting. He could never shoot anything. Couldn’t hurt a fly. One of the gentlest souls you’d ever want to meet.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you really think it could be him?” she asked, dotting tears from the corners of her eyes with the tips of her fat fingers.

  “That’s what I’m tryin’ to find out.”

  “But who would kill him? No one would kill him. He didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  She thought about it. “Can’t be sure exactly. Our schedules are so different and we stay so busy and I just got back from visiting my people in Louisiana. I’ve been gone a week and it was probably a few days before that. I’m just not sure.”