McFall

by Scott Nicholson

  CHAPTER TEN

  “It’s Cole Buchanan, all right,” said Perry Hoyle.

  The medical examiner planned to ship the charred body to the state office for more tests, but the dental records were plenty enough evidence for positive identification. Two of Cole’s upper teeth had been knocked out in a prison fight, and he’d never bothered to replace them. The man’s only dental records were from the prison system, since he’d apparently never sat in a dentist’s chair before or after his incarceration, but the X-rays and impressions from his taxpayer-funded medical treatment confirmed Littlefield’s suspicions.

  They were in the morgue, an unadorned room in the basement of the county hospital. The walls were finished with light-green tiles, and the whole room was redolent of formaldehyde and the stench of decay. Hoyle’s desk was a battered metal relic, military surplus from the pre-Vietnam era. Buchanan’s body—what was left of it—lay on a stainless-steel table. The dead man looked like he was poised to punch someone or defend himself from attack, which suggested a struggle at the moment of death.

  Much of the water in his blood cells had been boiled away, and his organs were swollen and cooked. A yellowed rope of intestine bulged from a gap in his side. Littlefield was pretty sure he’d lost his taste for spare ribs.

  “I know you don’t have much to work with, but does your prelim suggest any sign of violence?” the sheriff asked.

  “He looks like he’s fighting, but that’s what they call ‘pugilistic attitude,’” Hoyle said. “It’s the natural result of intense heat on muscle protein. The tendons dry and shrink.”

  Unlike the MEs on television shows, Perry Hoyle didn’t eat while he worked nor did he have much gallows humor. Death seemed to annoy him, and his brusque manner suggested that it was downright rude of anyone to die suspiciously when he could have been fly fishing instead.

  “This stippling here,” Hoyle said, waving a latex-encased hand over a raw section of flaked skin. “That was made by the force of the fire hoses, peeling away—”

  “What else?” Littlefield asked, not wanting the gruesome details.

  “No sign of blunt trauma or any entrance or exit wounds made by a projectile,” Hoyle said. “No large foreign objects embedded in the flesh.”

  Littlefield glanced around the room, which only had eight refrigerated chambers. Two were occupied. Darnell Absher had already been buried, so the other current tenants must have died of natural causes. Littlefield wondered how long it would be before the morgue was at capacity. “Was he alive during the fire?”

  “The skin doesn’t have the red lividity you’d expect if he inhaled carbon monoxide before getting cooked. That would have suggested he died of smoke inhalation. There’s no soot in his windpipe, either, so he wasn’t breathing in a bunch of embers in his last moments.”

  “Any way to tell how long he’d been dead?”

  Hoyle peered at something in the seared skin around the dissected throat. “You say you saw him three days before the body was found?”

  “Yeah. And a couple of witnesses said he was driving around the day before the fire,” Littlefield said. “He was drinking, but that wasn’t unusual.”

  “Could be he got drunk and decided to make a statement by going down with the church. I know he didn’t like the McFalls much.”

  “Cole Buchanan wasn’t the type to martyr himself for a higher cause,” Littlefield said. “Maybe he just got drunk and broke into the church to sleep it off. Had a heart attack or something.”

  “But that still bugs me,” Hoyle said. “Why wouldn’t the firefighters have seen his body?”

  “Hell, maybe he was a zombie. Could be he hid from them and then crawled up to the altar to deliver a sermon to his brethren.”

  Hoyle cocked an eyebrow and didn’t smile. “That would be funny if it weren’t so close to being true.”

  Littlefield shucked his latex gloves and cloth mask, and then collected his hat from Hoyle’s barren metal desk. “How long until you hear anything on Darnell Absher?”

  “The state office is backed up, and they haven’t gotten to the samples yet. These damned budget cuts, I swear. I’m hearing at least three weeks, maybe four. Apparently they’re stacking bodies up like cordwood down in Chapel Hill.”

  “I hope we don’t start doing that here,” Littlefield said.

  “Let’s call it coincidence,” Hoyle said. “Just because there’s a McFall in town, and that family’s been linked to mysterious deaths for a century and half—well, no need to run with rumors and conspiracy theories.”

  “It’s only a theory until it becomes a fact,” Littlefield said, and with that final word, he left the sterile room and headed out into the welcoming afternoon sunshine.

  After checking with Sherry for any calls, he drove to the Times office, located in an industrial park just beyond the Titusville city limits. The newspaper had once been headquartered in the heart of downtown, back when the paper was the primary form of local information, along with an AM radio station that had since been replaced by syndicated talk shows scheduled by computer. The Times had been bought by a regional corporation, and its offices had been moved to save on rent. The newspaper was now produced in a corrugated metal building that more closely resembled a welding shop than it did a bustling center of intellectual enterprise.

  Littlefield parked behind the building, where empty ink barrels and cardboard spools were piled around mangled newspaper racks. The front entrance was nicely landscaped to welcome the customers who came in to place classified ads, but in the Internet Age, the newspaper’s audience skewed ever older and more conservative. Cindy Baumhower predicted the newspaper would limp along for another decade, giving her time to retire before she had to look for another occupation.

  She hopes to be married before then, pardner.

  Littlefield pushed that thought aside. He entered through the back door, walking past the clanging presses that rolled out huge sheets of paper. Dwayne Potter, a swarthy man with a mullet who kept the machinery running with duct tape, baling wire, and alternating prayers or curses, depending on the situation, waved a greasy rag at him. Littlefield saluted back, wondering how much of the man’s hearing had been sacrificed to the constant cacophony.

  Cindy’s office was the closest to the back door. As she liked to say, if a disgruntled story subject kicked in the front door with guns blazing, she wanted plenty of targets between her and the maniac. But Littlefield suspected that should such a scenario unfold, Cindy would go down typing, writing about the event as it unfolded, even if it ended in her obituary.

  He tapped on the glass that separated her office from the series of cubicles where the reporters and ad staff toiled. She looked up from her monitor and waved him in. The office was cluttered with stacks of newspapers on the floor, a bookshelf packed with reference guides, and a dry-erase board mounted on the wall and covered with uneven squiggles of Cindy’s handwriting. A recycling bin full of dented Dr. Pepper cans served as a testament to her deadline addiction.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” he said. He didn’t know a darn thing about flowers, but he believed she smelled like lilacs—a heady, haunting fragrance that was a subtle reprieve after the horror of the morgue.

  “Nothing too serious,” Cindy said. “Just exposing the Illuminati and transposing an exclusive interview with Bigfoot.”

  “I wanted to thank you for being discreet about the fire victim.”

  The Times had duly reported the death, running twenty column inches along with a photograph of a firefighter spraying a hose into the flaming church. Cindy had not speculated on the cause of death, ending with the standard “Sheriff Frank Littlefield said no other information will be released until the victim is identified and the next of kin are notified. The incident remains under investigation.”

  “Oh, it’s not buried. I’m just waiting on more information,” she said. “I can’t let the Charlotte Observer or television news scoop me on this one. Especially since I’m sl
eeping with my primary source. People would lose all respect for me. So, tell me, was it Cole?”

  “It was him, all right. But I need to notify the family before you run with it. Don’t worry—I’ll put off the other reporters for a little while. How about this? ‘I can’t comment at this time because the investigation is ongoing.’”

  “Great way to say nothing,” Cindy said. “I still think you ought to run for higher office after your term’s up.”

  “Sure, except I might accidentally get elected, and then I’d have to spend half the year in Raleigh with a bunch of idiots who think they can solve the very problems they created in the first place.”

  “A wise man. Must be why I love you.”

  “I thought it was the scoops. Or the monkey sex.”

  “Whatever. Anything new on Larkin McFall?”

  “I’m not willing to link McFall to either of these deaths. Even off the record.”

  Cindy’s cheeks crinkled in a wry smile. “We’ve already gone down that road. So don’t get coy. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “Okay. I did a deeper background check, including Texas records. Division of Motor Vehicles, Department of Revenue, and Texas State Police. Nothing on McFall. So I drilled down to El Paso, the city he said he was from. No deeds, no business licenses, nothing on file with the city or county.”

  “So you think he made it all up?”

  “Or else he just walked out of a time machine a couple of weeks ago,” Littlefield said. “In my experience, people don’t lie unless they have something to hide.”

  “I agree. I searched the LexisNexis database of news articles for him and came up with nothing. If he’s really such a successful businessman, there’s no way he could have avoided dozens of Chamber of Commerce award ceremonies and ribbon-cutting events.”

  “Maybe we’re attacking this from the wrong angle. All we’re doing is searching for him by name. But what if he’s using an alias?”

  “That would be incredibly overdramatic. Posing as a distant relative in order to make an apparently legal purchase of a family property that no one really wants?”

  “Maybe he’s some kook,” Littlefield said, finally sitting in the uncomfortable little interview chair across from Cindy. Her cell phone rang to the tune of the David Bowie and Queen song “Under Pressure.” She looked at the screen, shook her head, and let the call go to voicemail.

  “A kook?”

  “Yeah,” Littlefield said. “Maybe he read about a haunted church in the mountains on some ghost-hunter website or something. Decided to play an extended practical joke on the locals.… ”

  Cindy gaped at him.

  “Yeah. Pretty farfetched.” Littlefield looked down at the scuffed floor for a moment. Then he asked, “Your ghost-hunting buddies didn’t post anything about the church, did they?”

  “Sheriff.”

  She only called him by his official title when she was exasperated. Littlefield knew the feeling. “Okay. So we need to drill deeper. That means fingerprints or DNA.”

  “Don’t you need a warrant for that? No judge in the land would grant you one based on supernatural legends and a hunch, not even your bowling buddy Erwin.”

  “He’s not my buddy. We’re just both Republicans.”

  “Anyway, nobody is going to take you seriously on this one.”

  “What I need is a legitimate reason to dig into his past without making it a formal criminal investigation. Maybe he’ll apply for a concealed-carry permit.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as the gun-owning type,” Cindy said.

  “If I can get his fingerprints, I can run it through as a background check.”

  “You’re planning to forge an application in his name?”

  Littlefield rubbed his palms on the sides of his trousers. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Just because you think it serves a higher purpose doesn’t make it right. And as the government wiretappers found out, a little bit illegal is still illegal.”

  “I’m not the type of officer who would ever contrive evidence to get a conviction,” Littlefield said. “But I’ve sworn to protect the public, and two of my constituents are dead.”

  “So, what’re you going to do? Are you planning to invite him down to the courthouse to get printed?”

  “What’s funny is that I think he’d voluntarily comply, smiling all the while. But then he’d know I’m checking up on him.”

  “I’m sure he knows that already,” Cindy said. “He retained Francisco to represent him, and there’s no way a lawyer will let him just walk into your clutches.”

  Littlefield stood and paced. “I just get a feeling he’s playing all of us. He looks at me like he can see right inside my skull, like he’s rooting around in all my memories and failures. I don’t know what his game is, but it’s pissing me off.”

  “What if he’s nothing more than what he appears to be? A well-off guy returning to his ancestral home to invest in the community.”

  Cindy’s occupation required her to give people the benefit of the doubt, but Littlefield’s had taught him to assume guilt until innocence was the final possible alternative. “He’s a McFall.”

  “Unless he’s lying. You said it.”

  “Fingerprints,” Littlefield said. “Will you help me? You can do it without arousing suspicion. Just get him to sign something, let him borrow a pen, anything.”

  “You’re asking me to break the law?”

  “We’re in this together.” Littlefield realized the statement conveyed a number of meanings, all of them frightening. He gave her a boyish grin that hid his anxiety, and she softened a little and sighed.

  “Okay. Now get out of here. Some of us have to work for a living.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At least the mountain was the same.

  Heather Fowler had only lived in Barkersville a dozen years, nowhere near long enough to be considered a local, but in that time she had witnessed a number of unsettling changes. The Baptist Church bore a flashing neon sign out front that looked better suited to advertising Las Vegas showgirls than inviting people to salvation. At first the only chain business on the main commercial strip had been Wendy’s. Now Wal-Mart, Ruby Tuesday, Staples, three grocery stores, and a number of other national chains had sprung up in defiance of the area’s declining socioeconomic status. The chain businesses had siphoned vitality from downtown. Drugstores and clinics now clustered all around the county hospital, leading to its nickname, “Death Corner.”

  Heather had settled in the area for the whitewater rafting, the rock climbing, the hiking, and other activities that were best enjoyed far from a dense population. So she was less than pleased when the ugly sprawl spread through and around the town, driven by outside investors and fueled by local power brokers. Ironically, the horror she felt had brought her into the circle of power as well, although only at the very fringes.

  “Keep up,” said Susan Barinowski, her friend and hiking partner.

  The words broke Heather from her reverie. She’d been so introspective that she had fallen behind by a good fifty feet and was totally missing out on the natural beauty that was the reason they were out here. Well, that and the exercise.

  “Okay, okay,” Heather said. “When did you turn into Robojock, anyway?”

  She increased her pace on the leaf-covered trail, the surrounding forest glowing greenly in the sunlight filtering through the overhead canopy. The delicate, fleshy stalks of pennywort and trillium penetrated the dark loam, and the air was ripe with the twin odors of new growth and decay. Here and there, large, time-worn boulders protruded from the slopes, spotted with gray lichen and moss. The climb was exhilarating, both because of the untamed environment and the steepness of the trail.

  “At my age, you need to kick up the cardio,” Susan said, which was only half sarcasm. Like Heather, Susan was in her late thirties, and neither were the type to sit in front of a television parroting “Buns of Steel” videos. But Susan was doing pretty well with h
er shape, a trim one hundred and twenty pounds with firm thighs, high breasts, and strong shoulders.

  Heather was more into leisurely recreation than hardcore outdoor adventuring, but she always pushed her limits on outings with Susan. She wasn’t ready to surrender to middle-age sag. Although she considered herself a feminist, she was also aware of her ticking biological clock, and she didn’t have a life partner yet. Her life was full and rewarding at present, but she didn’t want to wake up one day thirty years from now to find only one pillow on her bed.

  “Race you to the top,” Heather said.

  “Ha,” Susan said. “I could take a nap and still win.”

  The incline was too demanding for Heather to break into a sprint, but she managed a steady jog. Mud flew from her sneakers, and she shucked her zippered sweatshirt, wrapping the sleeves around her waist. The sports bra dug into the skin beneath her armpits, but she was pleased with the fullness inside the fabric. While big boobs were inconvenient at times, she’d had enough men—and women—admire them that she accepted them as a blessing. As her mother had always said, “Life is tough, so use whatever you’ve got.”

  That didn’t help her win this race, though. Susan easily ascended the final stretch of the trail, scooting gracefully between a cleft of boulders to emerge on the peak of the ridge, where a stony, fern-covered glen opened into vast space. Huffing and puffing, Heather caught up, bending over and catching her breath before she took in the view.

  “Never gets old,” Susan said, barely panting despite the exertion.

  “To think this mountain has been here for half a billion years,” Heather said. “I guess we should just be glad we’re not on it during its volcanic period.”

  “I’m just glad I’m not on my period.”

  “You take all the fun out of science.” Heather squinted out across the valley. The view wasn’t fully panoramic; there were a number of taller ridges and peaks around them, including Grandfather Mountain to the northwest and Mulatto Mountain to the south, towering over the lines and squares that marked the town of Titusville at its base. But from this vantage point, Heather was simultaneously overwhelmed by a sense of insignificance and a soaring urgency to help protect and preserve the region’s natural resources.