“Shit, man, don’t be fucking around,” he said, nervous, and I made out the silhouette of him below me. “Gimme the order. I got the cash.”
“Sorry, I’m new,” I said, improvising. “How big’s that order again?”
“It’s on your sheet, man,” he said, irritated. “Just open the hatch, get it, and we do business.”
I looked around. The wheel the rider had held on to. It controlled a hatch.
I walked to it, knelt, and got hold of the wheel. Turning counterclockwise didn’t work. Neither did turning it clockwise. Then I considered that the hatch might be under spring tension. I put my weight on it, felt something depress, and twisted. The wheel turned clockwise.
When I heard a noise like unbuckling, I lifted. Up came the hatch lid, and the air was filled with a pleasant vanilla scent. I cupped the mini-Maglite I always carry, turned it on. Suspended beneath the hatch was an aluminum basket of sorts, about three feet deep and two feet in diameter. The flashlight beam shone through large holes in the walls of the basket, revealing dozens of yellow-paper packages each about the size of a large bar of soap. Some were banded together. Others were single.
“C’mon, man,” the guy said. “Train’s gonna leave ’fore—”
The train wheels squealed. The tanker lurched. I almost fell. I almost let go of the hatch lid, the basket, and whatever was in it.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Hey, shit, man!”
“Couldn’t be helped,” I called down. “Something wrong with the mechanism. I’ll put your order in for a ten-twenty delivery tomorrow night. You’ll get a discount.”
A pause. “How much?”
“Ten percent,” I yelled as we pulled away.
“Deal, man, that’ll work.”
I waited until he was far behind me, then sat with my legs spread against the walls of the hatch. I moved around the basket, inspecting it with the flashlight, and found a hinged door. I opened it, removed three of those yellow-paper packages. Each of them weighed about a pound.
My phone rang then. It was Bree.
“Where are you?” she asked anxiously. “I’ve been calling you.”
“We went off the plateau and there were tunnels, and I have no idea where I am.”
“You talk to the rider?”
I told her all that had happened.
“Jesus, he jumped?”
“I couldn’t believe it, like it was better to die than talk to me and face this Grandfather’s wrath.”
“You think Marvin Bell is Grandfather?”
“It seems likely.”
“So, drugs in the yellow packages?”
“I’m assuming so,” I said. “Ingenious, if you think about it. Using the trains.”
“It is. You going to stay on the train and see where it takes you?”
“No, I’m putting the basket back, sealing the hatch, and then getting off at the next stop. We’ll let Bell or whoever is behind this think their man bailed with some of their product.”
“Makes sense,” she said.
“I’ll call back soon, give you my location.”
Well down the track, I could see streetlights. I’d replaced the basket and hatch cover by the time the train stopped for the second time. On my right, from the brush by the track, I heard a sharp whistle.
Instead of answering it, I crept down a ladder on the opposite side of the tanker and slipped away as the whistle became louder and more insistent.
Chapter
80
The sweet little girl with sleepy eyes carried a piece of sheepskin about the size and shape of a face towel. Lizzie rubbed it against her porcelain cheek and sucked her thumb as she ambled across the room to her grandfather.
He had terrible things twisting and knotting his mind, but seeing her so precious, so innocent, they all unraveled. He scooped Lizzie up, said, “Time for bed, young lady?”
She nodded, snuggled into his arms, made him feel perfect. She was hardly a weight at all, not a burden, never a burden. Lizzie’s grandfather carried her from his office down the hall to her bedroom.
He got her safe and warm under her sheets and blanket. Her eyes fluttered toward sleep, but she said, “Tell me the story. What happens next to the fairy princess? To Guinevere?”
Her grandfather hesitated, and then said, “One day, a dragon came into Princess Guinevere’s kingdom.”
Lizzie became more alert. “Did the dragon hurt Guinevere?”
“He tried, but Guinevere’s grandfather, the fairy king, sent out his best warriors to slay the dragon. Guinevere’s older brother tried first but failed to kill the beast that threatened the fairy kingdom. A girl warrior went next.”
Lizzie was listening raptly now. She said, “Did she have a bow and arrow?”
He nodded, said, “She shot at the dragon as he flew by and missed him by an inch.”
A soft knock came behind him. Meeks stood there, dead serious.
“Someone downstairs needs to see you,” Meeks said.
He understood, nodded. “I’ll be a minute yet.”
“No, Grandfather,” Lizzie complained. “What about the dragon?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow night,” he said.
“Oooh,” she moaned. “I can’t wait. Does she get another shot at the dragon? The girl warrior? What’s her name?”
He thought, said, “Lace. And, yes, Lace gets another shot at the dragon, but I won’t tell you what happens until tomorrow.”
Lizzie yawned, said, “Lacey will get the dragon. She’ll save Princess Guinevere. I just know it.”
As her eyes started to flutter shut, he leaned over and kissed her cheek. He turned the light off but left the door to the hallway open a crack, just the way she liked it. He walked down the hall, thinking how many changes were under way and how many challenges they created.
Downstairs, he walked past oil paintings and sculptures into a library.
Finn Davis was standing there, looking unsure and uncomfortable.
“What is it?” Lizzie’s grandfather asked.
“We lost a company man,” Davis said. “His deliveries were never made.”
“Product?”
“All but three pounds intact.”
“Runner, then.”
“You want him tracked down?” Davis asked. “Dealt with?”
“Of course, but we have more pressing problems.”
“The Crosses?”
Lizzie’s grandfather nodded, said, “They survived the lace maker. She’ll try again. Meantime, I think you should take another stab at the big bad dragon.”
Chapter
81
At eight thirty on Monday morning, Pinkie drove me and Bree to the courthouse, where Stefan’s trial was about to resume. Nana Mama was coming later with Aunt Hattie and Aunt Connie. Jannie was taking care of Ali.
I felt raw and irritated. Bree and my cousin looked wrung out. We’d been at this for the past thirty-six hours with very little sleep. And the secrets of Starksville were as murky and shape-shifting as they’d ever been.
We’d cut open one of the yellow-paper packages and found heavy-gauge plastic vacuum-sealed around what looked like loose blocks of shattered topaz-colored glass. The taste and smell had been unremarkable, so I’d called in a few favors from friends at the FBI crime lab at Quantico. They’d be receiving the samples and analyzing them later in the afternoon.
We still had no idea who owned the tanker. The trail camera had taken a good picture of that tanker’s right side, revealing a code of fifteen letters and numbers stenciled in black. When we reviewed all the earlier pictures of riders, the majority were sitting one freight car back from similar tankers with similar codes. Pinkie had worked at the codes, trying to track them all Sunday afternoon and evening, but had gotten nowhere.
Bree and I had taken up position in those trees above the tracks in Starksville around nine the night before and stayed long past eleven. No riders passed us.
In short, we’d had no luck linking Marvin Bell
or Finn Davis or anyone else to the so-called Grandfather and the company. We had even begun to speculate that the riders and the drug ring had nothing to do with Starksville, that the operation was organized elsewhere and the shipments just passed through.
“I’m wondering if that rider disappearing triggered some kind of shutdown in the delivery system,” Pinkie said, taking a left into the town square.
“Could be,” I agreed.
“I think there’s a way to see if the riders are from Starksville,” Bree said.
“Okay…” I said.
“More trail cameras,” she said. “We set them at crossings to the north and south. If the riders are from elsewhere, they’ll already be aboard.”
Pinkie nodded as he pulled into the courthouse parking lot. “And if they’re not, we know this is their origination point.”
“And no one around here manufactures vanilla, right?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” Pinkie said, parking.
When we reached the courthouse lobby, reporters, spectators, and witnesses streaming toward the trial venue were abuzz with news of Sheriff Nathan Bean’s fatal heart attack at a local breakfast café not an hour before. Sheriff Bean had had a history of heart problems, but it seemed a shock nonetheless.
In the courtroom I heard a reporter ask Starksville police chief Randy Sherman who the likely replacement was.
“Sheriff’s voted in,” Chief Sherman replied. “But I’d bet Guy Pedelini would be a strong candidate.”
I flashed on Bree’s description of Finn Davis standing on Pedelini’s back porch a few nights before, and for the first time, I felt as if there might really be a puppet master pulling the strings behind the scenes in Starksville. Grandfather? Even without concrete evidence against him, I could plainly see Marvin Bell in that role, hanging back in the shadows, looking legitimate, and using Finn Davis to do his bidding. We figured Bell and Davis were bribing Pedelini. How else did a detective afford a nice house on a lake like that?
A side door opened. A deputy led Stefan into the courtroom. I winced and heard my aunt Hattie cry out. My cousin’s left eye was bruised closed, and his jaw was wired shut.
Naomi rushed forward, looking furious as she helped him to his seat.
“Serves him right,” I heard a woman whisper, and I looked across the aisle at Ann Lawrence, who was talking to a sober Cece Turnbull. Rashawn’s mother didn’t reply, but Cece’s parents, who were sitting two rows behind, bobbed their heads in agreement.
District attorney Delilah Strong, however, seemed genuinely concerned about my cousin’s condition. So did her assistant Matthew Brady, who walked over to say something to Naomi.
She waved him off angrily. Patty Converse came in and sat in the row behind us. It was the first time we’d seen her in five days. She didn’t look at any of us, just stared blankly as the clerk and the court reporter took their positions.
The bailiff called out, “All rise. This court is now in session, Judge Erasmus P. Varney presiding.”
Chapter
82
Judge Varney was weaker and sallower than the last time I’d seen him, when he’d been flushed and contorting against the pain of kidney stones as EMTs rolled him from the courtroom. But the judge still had a commanding presence as he took the bench, picked up his gavel, and called his court to order.
“I apologize for my illness,” he said. “Ukrainian blood on my mother’s side. And I’d like to say how tragic it is that Sheriff Bean passed so suddenly this morning. He was a man of great integrity and honor.”
Varney’s eyes stayed locked ahead during his introductory remarks, as if he were not addressing the courtroom as a whole but someone in particular sitting in the gallery. Who, I couldn’t tell. But maybe it was just my imagination.
Varney picked up a piece of paper on the bench, read it, said, “Ms. Cross, the court has been notified that your cross-examination witness Sharon Lawrence will be unavailable today, as she has taken ill and is in the hospital. Is that correct?”
Ann Lawrence, her mother, stood and said, “Yes, Your Honor. She’s on IVs with a hundred and three fever.”
“Then I expect you’ll want to be at her side,” Varney said.
“Yes, Judge, thank you,” she said.
The mother of the girl who’d accused my cousin of rape and tried to frame Jannie glanced hurriedly at us and then left.
“She’s hiding something,” Bree whispered in my ear.
“Big-time,” I said, wanting to get up and follow her, ask her more than a few pointed questions.
But then Judge Varney said, “Counselor, when Ms. Lawrence is recovered, you’ll be given the opportunity to continue your cross. In the meantime, I’d like to move forward. Unless you have questions or concerns?”
“I have concerns, Your Honor,” Naomi said. “With all due respect to the memory of Sheriff Bean, there has been a fundamental breakdown in my client’s protection. Sheriff’s deputies allowed inmates to beat and kick my client until—”
“Objection!” the prosecutor cried. “There’s no evidence that any deputy ‘allowed’ the altercation.”
“Judge, Mr. Tate appears before you with multiple contusions, swelling, a broken jaw, and a probable concussion,” Naomi shot back. “At the very least, you can allow a competent neurologist to examine him before we continue with trial.”
Strong said, “Mr. Tate was treated by jail doctors, who tell me that he shows no sign of concussion.”
“Mr. Tate?” Judge Varney said. “Do you understand what’s going on around you? Where you are? What you’re doing here?”
Stefan nodded, spoke thickly through the wires on his teeth. “I do, Judge.”
Naomi looked exasperated.
The judge said, “Very well, then, the trial will continue, and I am ordering the sheriff’s office to double the guards with Mr. Tate at all times. Does that satisfy, Counselor?”
Naomi hesitated, then gave up and said, “It does, Judge.”
As far as the defense was concerned, that was the high point of the day. The district attorney called forensics experts who hammered home the damning evidence as it was introduced: Stefan’s semen on Rashawn’s body, Stefan’s semen in Sharon Lawrence’s panties, and Rashawn’s blood and body tissue on the foldable pruning saw found in my cousin’s basement.
Patty Converse turned ashen during this last testimony, especially when a fingerprint expert testified that the only clear prints on the saw were Stefan’s.
Naomi tried to damage the evidence of Stefan’s DNA in the teenage girl’s underwear, asking if, in the days between the time Lawrence claimed my cousin had raped her and Rashawn’s death, someone could have planted the semen. The people’s expert said it was possible but unlikely, given that Lawrence had thought to put the panties in a zip-lock bag.
“Unless Ms. Lawrence put the semen there herself,” Naomi said.
The expert said, “Correct, but we have no evidence of that.”
During the lunch recess, the service manager at the dealership where we’d left our Explorer called to tell me it looked like a rock had knocked an already loose hydraulic brake line free of its connection. The fluid ran out. We’d lost the brakes.
“You been driving many dirt roads?” he asked.
“A few, but I don’t remember something like a big rock hitting the undercarriage,” I said. “You’re not seeing signs of sabotage?”
“Like someone wanted your brakes to fail?” he said.
“Like that.”
“There’s easier ways to make brakes fail than banging a rock on the hydraulic line.”
“Unless you want it to look like an accident,” I said.
“I guess.”
I asked the manager to take pictures of the damage, and we agreed on a price to fix the car and a time for me to pick it up the following morning.
After lunch, the trial got even worse for Stefan and Naomi. Detective Carmichael took the stand and walked the jury through the evidence
that had been logged in the old limestone quarry, including Stefan’s bloody school ID card.
Naomi tried to get Carmichael to admit the ID could have been planted, but the detective wouldn’t bite, said, “Your client was so hopped up on booze and drugs and so deep into his sadistic ways that he wasn’t thinking straight.”
Detective Frost testified about photographs taken at the scene. I’d seen them all before, but blown up like that, the brutality of what had been done to Rashawn’s body was magnified. There were audible gasps in the room, several from the jurors.
“Monster!” Cece Turnbull screamed as she leaped to her feet and stabbed her finger at Stefan. “You butchered him! You butchered him like there was nothing human and good there at all!”
For several beats, Judge Varney hammered his gavel and called for order, and then he instructed the bailiffs to escort Rashawn’s mother from the court yet again.
Cece was having none of it and screeched and spit at Stefan before the bailiffs could get hold of her and muscle her out. Cece’s mother wept while her father held his wife and stared in loathing at my cousin.
After the session, Naomi emerged from the courthouse and tried to put a positive spin on the day for the reporters gathered out front.
She left them finally and came over to Bree, Pinkie, and me in the parking lot. My aunts and Nana Mama had gone home at lunch.
Naomi said, “I know the judge instructed the jury to ignore Cece’s rant, but they’ll remember it.”
“They couldn’t help but remember it,” Bree said. “She left me shaking.”
Naomi looked away, wiped at her watering eyes. “Me too. I know it’s unprofessional of me, but I’m beginning to wonder whether Stefan did those things to Rashawn.”
“I am too,” said Patty Converse, who walked up to us. “I’m asking myself how I could have missed so much.”
“I’m considering whether or not to ask for a plea bargain,” Naomi said. “I know Matt Brady. He’ll be fair.”
“Don’t throw in the towel just yet,” I said.
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