by Nene Adams
A sudden, savage fury bubbled inside her. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood. Restraining herself from throwing a punch at a nearby tree, she stomped down the trail, every footstep taking her further away from what she wanted.
Taking her away from Lunella.
Chapter Three
The following morning in her office, Annalee stared at her computer, waiting for the search she had initiated on John Delano Lassiter aka Shadrach Rafferty to complete.
After what felt like years—during which time she drank half a cup of coffee that scalded her tongue and ate a stale cheese Danish from the vending machine—the printer started spewing pages. She squinted at the printout, thinking she would need reading glasses soon or to get herself a pair of longer arms.
Noah came into her office after a perfunctory rap on the door frame. “Good morning,” he said. “How’d it go at Uncle Ezra’s?”
Annalee glanced up. Noah’s relieved expression irritated her. What had he expected, that she would end up lost in the woods and eaten by bears? Damn it, she didn’t need a babysitter. “Everything’s fine,” she replied curtly. “Got a possible lead.”
“Surprise, surprise—Aunt Rachael called me last night,” Noah offered. “She didn’t want to bother you at home. She said to thank you for helping Bear.”
“That’s mighty kind of her, I’m sure.” Annalee finished her coffee and shuffled the printer pages into the correct order. She tried to avoid thinking about the Skinners. Anything that reminded her of Lunella was unwelcome unless it pertained to the case.
Her lips still tingled with the sense memory of being kissed. The surface of her skin was tender, as if she had been bruised without showing a mark. If she dwelled on the exhilarating moments she had spent in Lunella’s arms, if she allowed herself to regret her decision…
But she wouldn’t let that happen.
“Yeah, listen, Deputy, it’s about Shadrach Rafferty—” she began, focusing on business to stave off an impending funk.
“Who?” Noah shifted his weight from foot to foot. After she glared at him, he finally flopped down in the chair opposite her desk.
“Shadrach Rafferty is the man John Delano Lassiter used to be.” Annalee scanned the printer pages, taking in the details of Lassiter’s past. “After his parents divorced, he and his mother went to live with her family, meaning the Skinners. He was raised as Ezra’s brother.”
Noah nodded. “Skinners stick together, thick and thin.”
“Well, there was a falling out of some kind between him and your uncle Ezra,” Annalee told him. “You know anything about that?”
“Way before my time.”
“Ezra told me there was an accident and Lassiter almost died, and after that there was bad blood between them. Don’t know exactly what happened, and Ezra ain’t talking. As for Lassiter, he disappeared from the county records in ’68, when he was sixteen, and doesn’t turn up again until ’72, when he was arrested in Atlanta on felony theft and fraud charges. Seems Lassiter turned into a con artist, running scams from New York to Miami. Got a history of fraud, theft, occasional assault—a genuine revolving-door inmate.
“Then in ’98, Lassiter was serving a nickel term for fraud and firearms possession, mostly at the prison farm over in Baldwin. He got religion while he was inside, and I guess later he hooked up with Alexander Dempsey.”
“Who’s Dempsey?”
“Some doctor, used to work at a company called Transgenic. We need to find out if Augusta PD has any information on Dempsey. By the way, Lassiter legally changed his name after he got out of Baldwin.” Annalee put the papers into a file marked HOMICIDE: RAFFERTY, SHADRACH aka LASSITER, JOHN DELANO.
“You got anything else?” Noah asked.
“Plenty of questions.” She tossed the file into the PENDING box. “You’d best put in that call to Augusta today. Know anybody over there?”
Noah nodded. “Couple of guys. I’ll put in the request, see if I can get any info on Dempsey expedited.”
“Sounds like a plan to me.”
Without preamble, Minnie Hawkins sailed into the office. The heavyset, middle-aged woman was clad in a leopard print blouse with a deep décolletage, paired with a knee-length, hot pink skirt and matching pumps. Her backcombed hair was high and bubble shaped, almost a beehive, dyed henna red and sporting a few spit curls at her temples.
“Hey, Sheriff, you forgot your messages when you came in this morning,” Minnie drawled, fanning a handful of flimsy yellow sticky notes. Her fingernails were long and painted glossy scarlet, the same color as her lipstick.
“Thanks,” Annalee said, taking the small pile. A thought struck her when Minnie turned to go. She asked on impulse, “You’ve lived here all your life, right?”
“Born and raised,” Minnie replied, swiveling around to face the desk.
Annalee could have sworn the woman’s vast bosom lagged a split-second behind the rest of her body. “You ever hear of a Shadrach Rafferty?” she asked.
Minnie pursed her lips. “Shadrach Rafferty…Yeah, sure, one of the Skinners’ cousins. That sure brings back some memories.”
Annalee made a shooing motion at Noah, who understood and quickly scrambled out of the chair. “Please sit down, Minnie, and tell me all about it,” she said, a thread of elation buoying her mood. If there was any scandal in Daredevil County in the past fifty-odd years that Minnie Hawkins didn’t know about, it wasn’t worth knowing.
“All right, let me see.” Minnie frowned in thought as she took a seat. “I’d just had my daughter, Chloe. Lord, that was a labor of love, let me tell you! Thirty-two hours worth. My regular doctor was on vacation in Hawaii, and I had this young intern who didn’t even look old enough to shave regular. That boy was the spitting image of my sister’s boy, you know, the Joshua who went to Duke on scholarship and married the Marshall girl. So can you imagine me laying there, everything below the waist on display to God and the curious, with a doctor who looked like my nephew crouched between my legs! Like to have put a quiver in my liver, I tell you, and I don’t have to say it twice. Anyhow, my sister-in-law came over from Murfreesboro to help, and she got bit by a king snake. Good heavens! She lost her nerve and went completely to pieces, bless her heart. Had to have a knock-out shot.”
“Shadrach Rafferty?” Annalee prompted, hoping to get the woman back on track.
“I was getting to that,” Minnie admonished, shooting her a disapproving glance from behind the cat’s-eye glasses perched on her nose.
“Sorry, sorry,” Annalee said, holding up her hands in a conciliatory gesture.
Minnie made a moué and went on, settling into the chair like a plump hen on her nest. “As I was saying, after my brother Jimmy finally showed his face at the hospital with a bucket of fried chicken, but without the biscuits, and I gave him what-for, though he really can’t be blamed since his elevator don’t always stop on every floor, bless his heart, for which I blame our cousin Jeanette for hitting him with a whiffle ball when he was five years old…”
Annalee blinked. She was accustomed to Minnie’s seemingly unstoppable floods of information, but that didn’t mean she was able to assimilate everything in one gulp. A look at Noah’s glazed expression told her there would be little help from that quarter. She’d have to try and pick out the relevant facts on the fly. Asking Minnie to confine herself to the single subject of Lassiter aka Rafferty would be futile.
“Anyhow, I remember the ambulance brought in a boy who’d been attacked by a dog,” Minnie said, lacing her fingers over the rounded bulge of her belly. The color of her fingernail polish clashed horribly with the skirt’s hot pink hue. “Shadrach Rafferty, his name was at the time, though I do hear tell he changed it to Reverend Lassiter. I will never forget that day at the hospital. The boy must’ve been about sixteen. Had some pretty bad bites, poor kid. Bleeding like a stuck pig. I figured it was somebody’s hunting dog what done it, you know, ’cause they can be vicious. Good Lord, my second cousin-by-marria
ge, Zeke—he’s a devoted deer hunter, you know—his little girl just missed being mauled by one of his pit bulls and would have been hurt bad or maybe even killed ’cept she was saved by the grace of God and his wife Susan, who swings a mean five-iron.
“So back to what I was sayin’…at the hospital, Shadrach kept claiming it was his cousin Ezra what done it. He said that they’d had a fight over a girl and Ezra’d bit him. Well, everybody knows Shadrach’s cousins are the Skinners, and while they may not be the handsomest folks in the county, they ain’t exactly dogs!” Minnie chuckled.
“What happened?” Annalee asked.
“Far as I can recall, Shadrach got about fifty stitches and a course of rabies shots.”
“Anything else?”
“Shadrach quit school right before graduation and hightailed it out of here, away from Daredevil County. Don’t know where he went or what he did after that.”
“Okay, Minnie, thanks. I appreciate it.” Another piece to add to the puzzle. Annalee was about to update her notes on the computer when Minnie cleared her throat.
“Ezra Skinner ended up marrying Rachael Dupres, you know,” Minnie said. It was clear that having started a cozy chat, she had no intention of being dismissed yet, not until she had dispensed every morsel of information at her command.
Noah’s soft groan was ignored.
“I heard it was a very nice wedding,” Minnie continued. “The reception was over to the Youth Center that used to be on Caldwell Street in Lingerville. You remember it? Sure you do. The Parsons owned the place. They used to have kiddie roller- skating disco parties before those Yankees opened the indoor ice rink in Fort Noble and stole their business.”
The first sentence finally registered. Annalee’s head whipped up so fast, her vertebrae cracked painfully. “What?” she asked, wincing and rubbing her sore neck. “I mean, who did Ezra Skinner marry?” she clarified.
Minnie looked smug. “Rachael Dupres, a transfer student from somewhere Up North…Canada, I think. Yeah, she was one of them foreign exchange students. Mind you, I wouldn’t blame Ezra and Shadrach for fighting over her. She was a real pretty girl back then. Real pretty. Her and Ezra got married right after graduation.”
“Thanks, Minnie, that helps a lot,” Annalee said. “Why don’t you take a half-day off tomorrow? I’ll get someone to cover.” After Minnie gave her a triumphant grin and walked out of the office, she turned to Noah and said, “Aunt Rachael’s from Canada.”
“I guess so.” Noah flushed under her steady regard. “Look, all this stuff is old news, I guess. Maybe my mama knows about it, but if she does, she never told any of it to me.”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” Annalee assured him. “So Lassiter got bit by a dog as a teenager and he got bit by another dog just before he died. Coincidence?”
“Could be.”
Annalee sighed. Making a coherent whole out of scattered bits of information wasn’t easy. “Okay, when they were young men, Ezra and Lassiter fought over a girl, Rachael. That must be the source of the bad blood. But what brought Lassiter back here?”
“Too bad we can’t ask him,” Noah commented. “I don’t think his widow would tell us, even if we could get past her lawyer.”
“That reminds me, how’d we do on Lassiter’s shotguns?”
“We got the report from Ballistics this morning. None of the shotguns are the murder weapon. They’re all clean.”
“Well, I don’t have enough evidence to get a search warrant for Ezra Skinner’s home, so that’s out.” Annalee rifled through the messages Minnie had given her. Nothing appeared urgent. “Call the people you know in Augusta. If we can find out more about Alexander Dempsey or Transgenic or both, maybe we’ll figure out why Lassiter came home.”
“Which may give us the killer’s motive. Gotcha.” Noah jerked his thumb at the door. “I’ll make that call, then I gotta run out to the Fullerton place.”
“Bailey Fullerton?”
“Yeah, the familiar nuisance call. Same old, same old.”
“Do tell.”
“One of his pigs got into Mrs. McInerney’s garden, and she’s raising cain on account of her prize-winning tomatoes got et. Says she’s gonna kill the pig, and Fullterton is threatening to fill her butt full of buckshot if she lays a pinkie on his porker.”
Annalee smirked. Eulalia McInerney and Bailey Fullerton were the two most stubborn, antisocial neighbors in the county. Settling the dispute would require the wisdom of Solomon, but she reckoned Noah was smart enough to handle it. “You settle that without either of them calling me to complain and I’ll buy you the best steak dinner in town.”
“You got yourself a deal.”
After he left, Annalee returned a few telephone calls.
Noah’s contact in the Augusta PD came through around eleven o’clock by sending a fax containing Alexander Dempsey’s criminal record, which amounted to a whole lot of nothing, not even a parking ticket. Just when she finished perusing the disappointingly dead-end file, Deputy Cynthia Starbuck rapped on the door and entered the office.
“I heard you needed some information on Transgenic,” Cynthia said, pushing stray locks of frizzy brown hair out of her eyes. “My sister’s husband’s brother-in-law worked over there a while, couple of years back.”
“What do they do over there?” Annalee asked, waving at Cynthia to take a seat.
“From what Elliot told me when I e-mailed him, Transgenic is a biological technology company. You know, them people messing around with DNA. Like the goats they put spider genes into, so the goats make spider silk in their milk.”
“Transgenic crosses goats with spiders?” Annalee shuddered. She hated spiders.
“Not necessarily, but stuff like that. Genetic engineering. That’s what they do.” Cynthia slouched down in the chair, nibbling her thumbnail. “Elliot said Dempsey was head of Transgenic’s Research & Development section till he screwed the pooch.”
“What’d he do?”
“He was working on a human longevity project. I guess he was trying to figure out how people could live pretty much forever, which is against God’s will as far as I’m concerned. Anyhow, I was told that Dempsey did some unauthorized drug trials using homeless people in Huntswell as experimental subjects. A couple of them died as a result. The company paid Dempsey off to keep his mouth shut and pressured him to confess to the deaths to avoid the publicity of a trial. Dempsey did time for manslaughter—reduced sentence, early parole for good behavior. He got out about six years ago.”
Annalee exhaled a frustrated breath. “Before my time. Why the hell isn’t Dempsey’s manslaughter conviction in his records? I couldn’t find so much as a parking violation.”
“According to Elliot, the records were sealed as part of Dempsey’s deal with the Huntswell DA’s office. Dempsey’s pretty much unemployable in the science sector. His line of work, your reputation is everything. No company would have him these days and he’d never get any funding. I reckon the DA figured the deal was safe to make.”
“Dumb ass district attorneys and their dumb ass deals,” Annalee muttered. “Do we know where Dempsey served his time?”
“Prison farm in Baldwin.”
An alarm bell began to ring inside Annalee’s mind. She double-checked Lassiter’s record. “Our victim did time in Baldwin. That must be where they met.”
“And you want to hear something else weird? I did an Internet search on Baldwin last night. That particular farm was used as a testing ground for a strain of new high-yield crops developed by Cutshall Agricultural. And Abner Cutshall was on the Parole Board. He’s the one who recommended Dempsey’s early release.”
Annalee closed the files and set them aside. “You know, I think it’s about time I went and had a little talk with Abner Cutshall.”
Cynthia stood. “Want some company?”
“Sure, why not? I call shotgun.”
The drive out to Cutshall’s mansion was made in silence. Cynthia wasn’t a chatterbox by
any means and saved her concentration for driving. Not that Annalee minded. She was busy mulling over Lunella.
The strength of her attraction remained unabated. She could still smell Lunella’s unique scent, still feel the powerful body pressed against hers. The ghost of Lunella’s caresses lingered on her skin. She ached for Lunella, a physical pain centered behind her breastbone, more acute with every breath she took. To enter into any kind of relationship with the woman would be impossible, for all the reasons she’d already stated, yet in spite of her resolve to put the matter out of her mind, she couldn’t help wishing things were otherwise.
Arriving at Cutshall’s antebellum-style mansion brought her focus back to the case. Cutshall owned thirty acres of prime real estate outside Huntswell. The property boasted a private fishing pond, stable, barns, golf course, tennis court and helicopter pad. A separate garage stored his collection of vintage automobiles.
When Cynthia brought the patrol car to a halt in the curving gravel drive, Annalee noted the colorful banners and bunches of balloons decorating the columned front porch. One banner proclaimed: HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMY! She groaned. “Shit, it’s Cutshall’s granddaughter’s birthday.”
Cynthia shut off the ignition. As soon as the engine stopped running, so did the air conditioning. The atmosphere in the car immediately became stuffy. “I’m sure the old man can spare us a couple of minutes. Maybe even a piece of cake, you ask nice enough,” she said.
Annalee gave Cynthia the stink-eye and opened the door, letting in a blast of hot air that smelled like recently cut grass with a hint of horse manure, the scent of a rich man’s country home. “Don’t make me regret bringing you along, Deputy. Behave.”
She and Cynthia went around the side of the house, following the sounds of shrieking children. The backyard had been turned into a little girl’s fantasy playground complete with a castle-shaped bounce house, beribboned ponies to ride, pastel ballerinas with fairy wings passing out candy and favors, strolling jugglers, a puppet show, more balloons and a buffet table covered with hamburgers, hot dogs, fried chicken legs, potato salad, cupcakes and ice cream. What appeared to be a horde of screaming, hyperactive children ran around the place. In the midst of the noisy chaos stood the Great Man himself, Abner Cutshall.