by John Hart
“We don’t know how long these remains have been under the ground. What if they’re only five years old or ten? Adrian’s been locked up longer than that.”
“If he murdered one, he could murder another nine or another fifty. Maybe Julia Strange wasn’t the first.”
“Or maybe we have another killer on our hands.”
“They could just as easily be old,” Dyer said. “Maybe those bodies have been there for a hundred years or two hundred. Maybe the church was built above them for some reason we don’t understand.”
“The graves aren’t that old.”
“How can you know that?”
Beckett snapped his fingers and waited for a tech to bring a set of disposable coveralls. “Put these on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
* * *
Under the church, Beckett pointed. “Stay clear of the drag marks.”
“There’re two sets.”
“One of them is mine.”
“The other looks fresh.”
“It was here before me.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“That’s only part of it. This way.”
Beckett went in front. He looked back twice, but Dyer was sliding easily beneath the joists. When they reached the graves, Beckett stopped and let Dyer move up beside him. Shadows danced, and bones flashed gray. Dyer froze when he saw the graves.
“We’re directly beneath the altar. Here.” Beckett handed Dyer a pair of latex gloves and put on a pair himself. “I count nine graves, laid out in a two-hundred-degree arc.” Beckett pointed his flashlight at the bones, the bit of skull. “You see the hollow place in the center?”
“It looks fresh, too.”
“Recently disturbed.” Beckett shifted so he could see Dyer’s face. “Someone comes here.”
Dyer frowned. He slid a few more inches in the dry, red earth and put his light on each grave in turn. “They could still be old.”
“Look at this.” Beckett shone his light on the photograph wedged above the joist. “I found it twenty minutes ago.”
“What do you mean you found it? Like that?”
“I wanted you to see it the way it was, so I put it back.” Beckett snapped open an evidence bag and reached for the photo, gentling it out and sealing it in the bag. “Do you know who that is?”
Dyer took the photograph and studied it for long seconds, tilting it, smoothing a thumb across the slick plastic. He looked once more at the hollow place, the gray bones, and the mounded earth. “Liz can’t know about this,” he said. “Not yet.”
23
Elizabeth couldn’t sleep. She came close more than once, but every time she drifted, she jerked awake thinking she’d heard Channing’s voice, or Gideon’s. Once that happened, her imagination kicked in, and she saw them as they probably were: Channing in general population, Gideon in a narrow bed. They were still her responsibility, so it seemed wrong to be tucked under a soft blanket with long views of purple water. So instead of sleeping, Elizabeth prowled the house. She walked long halls beneath carved beams. She fixed another drink, then stepped onto the deck and thought of other times and other waters.
The car, when it came, was like a voice in the woods.
Elizabeth walked back through the house and onto the rear porch in time to see the limousine roll to a stop.
“Where’s Mr. Jones?” She met the driver, a big man with large features, beside the car. Seen up close, she thought he seemed afraid. How long since they’d left? Twenty minutes? Less?
“You’re the cop, right? The one that’s in the papers?”
“Elizabeth Black, yes. Where’s Faircloth?”
“He told me to have some dinner.”
“Yet, you’re here.”
“Truth be told, ma’am, I’m worried. I’ve been driving Mr. Jones these past days. He’s a nice man, and gentle. Always the kind word, the bit of advice. He’s an easy man to care for, and—well—that’s the problem.”
“Where is he?”
“See, he wanted me to leave him there.”
“At the old farm?”
“I didn’t want to do it. I told him the man there was not his sort, not with the scars and hard looks and darkness coming down.”
“He’s at the farm, now?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you came to me, why?”
“Because after twenty years driving all kinds of people into all kinds of situations, I’ve learned to trust my feelings, and those feelings tell me that was a bad place, ma’am, a dangerous, bad place and not right at all for a gentleman like Mr. Jones.”
“It’s good of you to worry. I mean that. But, Adrian Wall’s no danger.”
“The old man thought that, too, so I figured it might be the case.” The big head tilted, the thick hands twisted white. “But, then there was the car.”
* * *
The car.
Elizabeth turned out of the drive.
Gray, he’d said. Two men.
That was bad enough: a gray car with two men, parked at the end of Adrian’s drive. It had to be the same, first at Crybaby’s house, now at Adrian’s. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
They left before I dropped the old man, but I think I passed them later.
Later?
Like they were going back.
How far?
Three miles, maybe. Edge of town, and driving fast. That’s why I asked if you were police. ’Cause it wasn’t right, is all. The car. The way they looked at us. ’Cause they were fast moving at the old man, and ’cause something about ’em just scared me.
They worried Elizabeth, too. William Preston had a dark streak. She’d sensed it at the prison, and on the road above Crybaby’s estate. He had the wrong kind of interest in Adrian Wall. Prison guard. Ex-prisoner. It wasn’t right. There was an arrogance there, not just complacency but the unmistakable sense of easy violence. That’s what thirteen years of cop told her, that someone like Preston had no business anywhere near a man as fragile as Faircloth Jones.
Not after dark.
Not on an ex-con’s burned-out farm.
Elizabeth’s lights split the gloom as she drove. Tarmac. Yellow paint. In the darkness beyond, houses ghosted past, flickers of gravel and light, cars in silent drives. She was alone on the road, just her and the wind and the last line of bruised sky as full night descended. She crossed a wide creek, then crested a final hill before the road flattened and the farm road snaked in from the right. She made the turn—tires drifting—and saw the fight from a distance, not sure exactly what it was: a car in the drive, figures moving in the slash of her lights. Two men were on the ground, Adrian fighting with a third. Fifty feet closer, she saw that fighting was the wrong word. Adrian swung again, and the man went down with Adrian on top, his fists rising and falling and slinging red. The ferocity of it was so extreme that even parked and close Elizabeth sat frozen. Adrian had no expression, the face beneath his fists so pulped and bloody, it barely looked human. She saw Crybaby, motionless, another man down and crawling. For a second more she sat transfixed, then spilled from the car, knowing only that someone would die if she didn’t do something.
“Adrian!” she yelled, but he didn’t react. “You’re killing him.” She caught an arm, but he ripped it free. “Adrian, stop!”
He didn’t, so she drew her weapon and struck his head hard enough to drop him in the dirt. “Stay down,” she said, then ran to Faircloth Jones and gently rolled him. “Oh, God.” He was unconscious and so white he looked bloodless. She found a pulse, but it was irregular and thin.
“What happened to him?”
Adrian dragged himself to his knees, head low as he stared at his hands, at the split knuckles and bits of teeth wedged under the skin.
“Adrian! What the hell happened?”
His gaze slid to the second guard, Olivet. He was on his belly, still crawling. Four feet away, Preston’s gun glinted in the dust. Adrian staggered to his feet and stepped on Olivet’s hand as it reach
ed for the gun.
“He happened.” Adrian picked up the gun and pointed it at Preston. “William Preston.”
“That’s Preston? Jesus, Adrian. Why?”
“He was torturing Crybaby.”
“Torture? How? Wait. Never mind. No time for that. We need a hospital, and we need it now.” Elizabeth cradled the old man’s head. “It’s bad.” She leaned into his breath; could barely feel it on her cheek. “We need to go now.”
“Take him.”
Elizabeth looked at Preston. The face was broken a dozen different ways. Blood bubbled at his lips. He was unrecognizable. “What about him?”
“Call an ambulance. Let him die. I don’t care. He’s not riding with Crybaby.”
“Help me, then.” They got the old man in the backseat of Elizabeth’s car. His head lolled. He weighed less than a child. “Come with me.”
Olivet moved again, so Adrian put a foot on his neck. “I’m not finished here.”
“Adrian, please.”
“Go.”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but Faircloth needs a hospital, and he needs it now.”
“Go on, then.”
“We need to talk.”
“Fine. You know the old Texaco east of town? The one on Brambleberry Road?”
“Yes.”
“Meet me there.”
Elizabeth took a final look at the scene, at beams of yellow light and the two guards, down and broken. “Are they going to die?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Elizabeth struggled with the answer. Adrian seemed cold and untouchable and every bit a killer. He pointed the gun at Preston, and she hesitated: lawyer in the back, half-dead prison guard bubbling in the dust. Would Adrian do it? Pull the trigger? She honestly didn’t know.
“Time’s wasting, Liz.”
Shit.
He was right. Only the lawyer mattered. “Brambleberry Road,” she said. “Thirty minutes.”
Elizabeth reversed down the drive and sensed Adrian’s stillness as he watched her go. She braked at the tarmac and in a swirl of dust saw him dragging Olivet by the collar, over the gravel and into the gloom, heading for the same gray car.
She waited for a shot that didn’t come.
Behind her, the lawyer was dying.
* * *
Adrian propped Olivet against the front tire, just behind the burning lights. He was hurt, but nothing like Preston. That meant a broken orbital and bloody nose. Maybe a cracked rib, based on the way air whistled past his teeth. Adrian had seen worse, experienced worse. He put the muzzle against the guard’s heart and used just enough pressure to keep him upright. The man was crying.
“Please, don’t kill me.”
The words put an unfeeling twist on Adrian’s face. How many times had he begged, only to be cut again, beaten again? He thumbed the hammer and thought about blowing Olivet’s heart through an exit wound the size of a grapefruit.
“I have a daughter.”
“What?”
“A daughter. She’s only twelve.”
“That’s supposed to save you?”
“I’m all she has.”
“You should have thought about that before.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t.”
“You don’t know the warden. You don’t understand.”
“You don’t think I know the warden?” The night darkened as Adrian loomed above the guard. “His face. The sound of his voice.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“Were other prisoners killed? Others besides Eli Lawrence?”
“I’m sorry about the old man. He wasn’t supposed to die. None of it was supposed to be like this.”
“Yet, it is. You tortured Eli. You tortured me.”
“I did it for my daughter. We needed money. Child care. Medical stuff. I was going to do it just the once, one time, and that was it. But they wouldn’t let me go. The warden. Preston. You don’t think I have nightmares? That I hate my life? Please. She’s everything. She’ll be all alone.”
A girl. Twelve years old. Did that make a difference? After all he’d suffered, Adrian had two of the five men responsible and could cut the number to three. Preston dead. Olivet, too. That would leave the warden and Jacks and Woods. If he moved fast enough, he could kill them, too. Tonight. Tomorrow. Temptation was a burn, and though Eli chose this time to be silent, Adrian knew what Eli would say if he decided to speak.
Let the hate go, boy.
Freedom. Fresh air.
That’s enough.
It’s everything.
Here was the brutal irony. Adrian had never killed anyone. Not as a cop, not in the yard or on the cellblock. He’d pulled thirteen hard years and had more reason than most to kill a whole host of men. But, he felt the old man out there, the yellowed eyes and patience, the simple kindness that had kept him alive when any other man would have lain down and quit.
Don’t do it, son.
But, the gun didn’t move. It pressed so hard against Olivet’s chest Adrian felt the man’s heart beat against the metal.
“Please…”
The trigger tightened under Adrian’s finger. It was too much, too many years. It had to happen, so the trigger had to move. Olivet must have seen the decision in Adrian’s eyes, for his mouth opened, and in the stillness of that final moment, of the long, hard second that would be his last, a noise rose in the darkness beyond the field.
“Sirens,” Olivet said. “Police.”
Adrian turned his head and saw lights far away. They were blue and thumping and moving fast; but he had time if he wanted it. A minute. Ninety seconds. He could pull the trigger; take the car.
Olivet knew it, same as him. “Her name is Sarah,” he said. “She’s only twelve.”
* * *
Elizabeth passed the cops two miles over the bridge, but didn’t slow. They blew past her in the other direction: two patrol cars and an unmarked unit she swore was Beckett’s. They were moving fast—maybe eighty on the narrow road—and she knew they were going for Adrian. At speed like that there had to be a reason, but stopping or turning was not an option. Nothing mattered but the lawyer.
Reaching back, she found his hand. “Hang on, Faircloth.”
But no answer came.
She flew through town and hit the hospital parking lot at speed, the slick tires squealing as she bumped over the curb and rocked to a stop at the emergency-room door. Suddenly, she was inside and yelling for help. A doctor materialized.
“Outside. I think he’s dying.”
The doctor called for a stretcher, and at the car they lifted him. “Tell me what happened.”
“Trauma of some kind. I’m not sure.”
“Name and age.”
“Faircloth Jones. Eighty-nine, I think.” Doors slid open. The gurney clattered as they rolled him inside. “I don’t know his next of kin or emergency contact.”
“Any allergies? Medications?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“I need to know more about what happened.”
The doctor was confident and sure, Elizabeth the opposite. “I think he was tortured.”
“Tortured? How?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
The physician scribbled a note as the stretcher rolled. “And, you are?”
“Nobody.” She stopped at a second set of sliding doors. “I’m nobody.”
He didn’t argue. There was too much to do, too many ways a man that age could die. “Room four!” he yelled.
Elizabeth watched them go.
When she returned to her car, she slipped behind the wheel and felt how the nurses stared after her. The doctor may not have recognized her, but others did. Would this make the papers, too? Angel of death. Tortured lawyer. For an instant she cared, but only for that instant. She got out of the car and walked back inside, approaching the first nurse at the first counter. “I need a phone.”
The nurse pointed, terrified.
Elizabeth crossed the gleaming floor and lifted the courtesy phone from its cradle. Her first instinct was to call Beckett, but he was at Adrian’s farm—she knew it. Instead, she called James Randolph.
“James, it’s Liz.” She eyed the nurse, the security guard, who looked just as nervous. “Tell me what’s happening. Tell me everything.”
* * *
James Randolph had never been shy or slow. The phone call took less than a minute, so that when Elizabeth left for Brambleberry Road, she knew everything Randolph did about the grim, dark underbelly of her father’s church. It turned the world upside down.
New victims linked in death.
More bodies in the place she’d learned to pray.
She saw it as if she were there, but Randolph’s final words haunted her more deeply.
The whole world’s looking for him, Liz.
Every fuckin’ body.
He was talking about Adrian, and why not? Fresh bodies on the altar. Nine more under the church. Elizabeth had to ask herself again how much she trusted him. She said it was an easy question—that he was still the same man and that nothing real had changed. But she saw Preston’s face when she closed her eyes and wondered if, even once, he’d begged for mercy.
Every fuckin’ body.
Elizabeth turned onto Brambleberry Road and checked the pistol on the seat beside her. It was not the Glock she preferred, but when she pulled behind the old gas station and got out of the car, the gun went with her. She told herself it was smart, and only reasonable; yet the safety moved under her thumb. It was the silence and the darkness, the still trees and the scrub and the gray car bleeding into night as it sat under a tree at the back of the lot. The place had been old when she was a kid and was ancient now, a dirty cube on an empty road, a scratch mark that stank of chemicals and rust and rotting wood. Elizabeth understood why Adrian chose it, but thought if it came to dying, the old gas station was as good as any place she’d ever seen. Maybe it would open in the morning, and maybe not. Maybe a body could lie beside it forever, seasons rolling one across the other until the old bones and concrete looked like a single patch of broken pavement. That’s exactly how the place felt. As if bad things could happen here. As if they probably would.