The Obituary (Jefferson Morgan Mysteries Book 2)

by Ron Franscell

  Like Morgan, he’d grown up in Winchester, the son of a bartender. And like Morgan, he ventured beyond the town limits after high school, eventually graduating near the top of his class at Pepperdine, the swank Malibu law school on the edge of the known world to most Wyomingites. He joined a silk-stocking Los Angeles firm, but Southern California wasn’t his country, and he came home after a few years with more than enough money to rent a small space over a small-town bank, hire a secretary, join the Rotary Club, and hang his shingle.

  Now in his late forties, he’d happily lost his shiny California plating, and the Wyoming boy underneath had emerged again. His close-cropped red hair was beginning to gray, making him look balder than he was. He’d thickened around the middle and had long ago forsaken four hundred dollar suits for golf shirts and rumpled khaki pants. But he kept an Italian suit pressed on the coat hook behind his office door for those days when court appearances really required court appearances.

  He’d already agreed to represent Morgan and Cowper in a cursory telephone call that morning, but wanted to meet face-to-face before the arraignment. Now he sat at his unvarnished, scarred wooden desk, his back to the arched window that, if it hadn’t been painted shut long ago, would have opened to the unhurried Main Street.

  Blades of sunlight slashed across the hash of papers on top, reflecting off the screen of a dusty desktop computer in a roll top desk on the other side of the room.

  “Okay, Jeff, you know the drill as well as I do,” Dode said, leaning back in his squawking leather chair. “We go listen to that crusty old fart Rayfield rant for a couple minutes, hear the charges, set a date for the prelim, and go home. You’ve already got bond and I doubt you’re a flight risk. So ten minutes and we’re out. Painless … well, for me.”

  Morgan smiled and said nothing.

  “Your buddy Trey did you a big favor,” the lawyer said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He only charged you with trespass. He could have held you on the felony counts and you’d have still been in jail until the arraignment. The misdemeanor let you make bail. They say the truth shall set you free, but sometimes truth isn’t enough.”

  The lawyer’s gentle attempt at humor wasn’t lost on Morgan, just blunted by his exhaustion.

  “Well, I could have used the sleep,” Morgan said.

  “Yeah, well, anything I need to know right off the bat?” his lawyer asked.

  Hicks didn’t care if his client was guilty or innocent, and Morgan knew it, but Morgan wanted to say something to somebody anyway.

  “We were inside the mortuary. We shouldn’t have been there, but we were. We didn’t take anything, and we didn’t start the fire. We think there is — was — a meth lab inside there. Somebody else was in there and I think he was trying to kill us. And I think whoever it was might want to finish the job.”

  Dode Hicks took some notes, nodding, but not smiling.

  “Why didn’t you just tell the cops your concerns?”

  Morgan looked down at his shoes, blackened by dried soot and ash.

  “I wish I knew. Honest to God, I wish I had.”

  Morgan tried to imagine how that answer would sound in court. It wasn’t good.

  “Well, we don’t need to get our panties in a bunch quite yet,” Hicks reassured Morgan. “Today is just a formality. No evidence. No testimony. No handcuffs. We’ll know more if and when we get to the preliminary hearing.”

  “If?”

  “You know a lot can slip between cup and lip. Charges get dropped as the investigation unfolds. We’re still very early. Too early to start planning your prison wardrobe, my friend.”

  Morgan’s blood went cold at the mention of the word “prison.”

  “Can we avoid the Big House?”

  “Relax, Jeff,” Dode said. His brown eyes were direct and heartening. “I think we can keep you out of prison. I’m more worried about the real arsonist. If you’re right, if he was trying to get you, then that’s a bigger problem for you. I think we should ask Trey Kerrigan to assign a patrol around your house, just to be safe.”

  “That’d be great, Dode. Just to watch the house, if nothing else. I thought about taking my family out of town for a while.”

  Hicks wrinkled his freckled nose.

  “They can go,” he said, “but you might have to stick around. The judge isn’t going to let you go too far on these charges. I can ask, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  One more thing to worry about, Morgan thought. Claire wouldn’t go if Jeff didn’t go with her, not after what happened five years before in the Gilmartin case. She’d left town then, for her own protection, and never forgave herself for abandoning her husband just at the time she might never seem him alive again. No, she wouldn’t leave alone. Even if she still wasn’t speaking to him.

  The light through the window dimmed as a cloud passed in front of the sun. A long gray silence enveloped the dowdy little office.

  Dode Hicks tossed a pencil on the desk and spoke first.

  “Don’t sweat this, Jeff,” he said. “It’ll work out slick, you’ll see.”

  Easy for him to say, Morgan thought. He’s not the one going to jail if he’s wrong.

  “For once, and maybe the only time in my memory, I’m happy to see you in my court, Mr. Morgan,” the wizened Judge Rayfield O’Brien bubbled from his perch.

  His bald head, fringed by unruly white hair that looked like ruffled feathers and road-mapped with tiny blue veins, reflected the humming fluorescent tubes overhead, but his eyes were little black holes that sucked in all available light.

  His windowless Perry County courtroom had no oak panels, no polished wood bar, no lofty ceilings, no official seal hovering over the proceedings, Instead, it was no more imposing than a Sunday school classroom in a cheap church, with the teacher’s desk at the front, a couple flags on cheap wooden poles, a small microphone stand between two laminate tables, and some folding chairs for whatever flock might be nosey enough to actually sit down.

  Claire sat in the front row, just behind the defense table. So did The Bullet’s star reporter and butter thief, Josh.

  Deputy Prosecutor Wallace Nixon fidgeted in his chair, but Morgan couldn’t tell if it was because his polyester slacks were too tight around his plump mid-section, or because the judge’s scattershot rancor might, at any moment, be aimed his direction.

  For the moment, it was aimed straight at Morgan.

  “Now, some folks might say the press is superficial, biased, inadequate, sensational, inaccurate, unfair, misleading, irresponsible, and damned damaging to the public interest, but not me,” Judge O’Brien lectured. “While I might admit to, oh, a certain disdain for the typical newspaperman’s ignorance and insensitivity for the process of law, I ardently defend the freedom of speech, which has served me well. But in this court, Mr. Morgan, you will have no such freedom, and you’ll keep your trap shut until I tell you. Understood?”

  Dode Hicks rose to his feet. “Your Honor, I …”

  “Stuff a sock in it, Dode,” the judge growled. “You’re just gonna have to sit down and shut up, too. Damn lawyers.”

  Hicks’ jaw muscles pulsed a few times and he looked at some papers on the table in front of him while he formed his words.

  “Your Honor, as to the charges against my clients …”

  “You don’t hear so good, do you, boy? I said sit down.”

  Hicks sat as the judge continued.

  “Both your clients are being charged with breaking and entering, and as of a few minutes ago, first-degree arson. I’m fair certain they’re gonna say they didn’t do it, and we’re gonna have to waste some taxpayer money to get to the bottom of it. That should make for a very eloquent editorial in next week’s paper, eh, Mr. Morgan? I’ll keep the bail at the current amount unless something more comes up, then I’ll make sure Mr. Morgan awaits trial as a county guest. You got it?”

  Hicks popped to his feet. “This is highly irregular, your Honor …”

 
The judge leveled his gavel at the lawyer, as if it were a gun.

  “Another word, Dode, and you’re in contempt. If anything is irregular here, it’s the burning of a mortuary and a family’s livelihood. But we’re not here to hang Mr. Morgan just yet. I’m setting the preliminary hearing for September 15. Any objections?”

  Both lawyers reached for calendars, but Judge Rayfield O’Brien rapped his gavel and disappeared from the bench in a flourish of black robes.

  Claire reached forward and touched her husband on the shoulder. He bent his head back and sideways to kiss her hand.

  The entire arraignment — an important step in a felony prosecution of a major crime against a well-known and solid local citizen — lasted four minutes, and the prosecutor never uttered a single word.

  Morgan was running on fumes. He needed sleep and sanctuary, even if only for a few hours. His clothes still reeked, and the burns on his arms felt as if they were smoldering beneath the bandages, ready to catch fire again with the slightest breath of air.

  But before he escaped his disgrace and the daylight altogether for a few hours, maybe the rest of the night, he wanted to see Cowper again.

  And his mother.

  They left Dode Hicks on the courthouse steps. Claire drove her husband back to the hospital, not because he couldn’t drive, but because she wanted to be of aid in some way. On the way, she had reached across the seat and put her hand on his leg.

  “I’m behind you, honey. Only you,” she’d said. “I love you, and we’ll get through this just fine.”

  For the first time in a day, since long before the fire, he felt comforted. She’d pierced the carapace of shit and shame that weighted him down.

  Cowper’s condition hadn’t changed. He was paler. Some infection had erupted in a border of pus around some of his burns, and he continued to hack gray goo from his anguished lungs. He had regained consciousness, briefly, a few times, but he was still hovering on the razor’s edge between living and dying.

  They left their number at the nurses’ station and walked two blocks to Laurel Gardens. The afternoon heat rippled off the blacktop, but the shady sidewalk was cool. The fresh air was windless, and he hurt when he breathed deeply, but the short walk revived Morgan in a small way. A longer walk might have been a problem.

  The same teen-ager Morgan had seen mopping the floors at Laurel Gardens was now mowing the modest lawn in front of the nursing home. And he wore the same headphones as he bopped to some unheard beat, with a relentless bass line provided by Toro.

  After the previous night’s smells, Morgan now thought the air inside the home was refreshing, clean. Its artificial coolness soothed his scorched face, too.

  A few residents sat in the hallway in wheelchairs, some played cards or watched the soundless CNN picture on the lounge TV as he and Claire passed through the main wing, where the elderly residents who had comparatively complete control of their senses lived. They could come and go as they pleased because they knew the way home, they could count their own money, could recognize their friends and family, and knew the time and the day — unlike his mother and most of the other confused residents in her locked wing.

  A frail old couple, easily in their eighties, sat at one of the tables in the day room, sharing a cup of coffee and holding hands. Morgan hoped wherever he might be near the end of his life, Claire would be there, holding his hand.

  He pecked out the security code and they entered the secure area. An aide in a blue smock, a young girl he didn’t recognize, passed with a cart of empty lunch plates and smiled. They walked down the long, polished hall to his mother’s room, but she wasn’t there.

  She wasn’t in the day room at the other end of the wing, either. Claire checked the bathrooms while Morgan wandered the halls, peeking into each room as he went. Rachel Morgan had once fallen asleep on the floor in another room, and it was possible she’d simply strayed in her confusion.

  But they didn’t find her.

  “Have you seen my mother, Rachel Morgan?” he asked a passing aide who was carrying soiled towels to the laundry room.

  “This morning,” she said, “before the doctor came.”

  “What doctor?”

  “I dunno,” the girl shrugged. “I’m kinda new here. He signed her out before lunch.”

  “She’s gone?”

  “Yeah, I guess. He said he needed to take her for tests.”

  Morgan double-timed to the nurses’ station, across from the day room. A dumpy nurse with thin glasses perched on her nose played solitaire on the computer. Morgan didn’t know her, but her name tag said “Peggy.”

  “I’m looking for Rachel Morgan. I’m her son,” he said, a little out of breath.

  A little embarrassed to be caught playing instead of working, Peggy quickly closed the game screen. She spun around in her chair and flipped through some pages on a clipboard.

  “Checked out for medical tests,” she said, without any hint of urgency. “Eleven-oh-nine. Wasn’t one of the local docs.”

  “You let her go without my approval?”

  “He said he was a specialist from out of town. Dressed like a doctor. And everybody knew you were … well, in jail or something. Let’s see, his name is Doctor … I can’t make out the signature … Comeaux?”

  Morgan’s blood turned to ice. The mere mention of the name forced cold blood into hidden places inside him.

  But P.D. Comeaux, the serial killer, cannibal and patron saint of every delusional, disaffected domestic terrorist who ever ventured beyond the lunatic fringe, was a dead man walking.

  While still on the crime beat at the Chicago Tribune, Morgan had used a small laptop computer and thousands of public records to help the FBI identify Comeaux, the long-haul trucker and radical militiaman who was killing women along the slender blue highways between Illinois and Washington State.

  If not for Morgan’s work, Comeaux might still be cruising for victims out there. Since 1993, Comeaux had been on Death Row in South Dakota, where he’d raped and murdered and literally eaten Sandra Tarrant, a former high school homecoming queen who became a prostitute to maintain her $1,000-a-week cocaine habit.

  She was just one of Phineas Dwight Comeaux’s fourteen known victims. Nobody who knew him believed that was all.

  In the intervening years, he’d become the martyr, a symbol of the government’s malicious intent.

  At the time of P.D. Comeaux’s arrest in 1993, the Fourth Sign wasn’t even a blip on the government’s radical-right radar screen. Mostly, it was just a small, secret society of angry Bible-Belt farmers on the verge of bankruptcy, seeking conspiracies that weren’t there, rationalizing their plights irrationally, and peddling a poor man’s gospel. They believed the government was engaged in a global and domestic conspiracy to create a “New World Order” that would enslave ordinary citizens by taking away their means to revolt, namely their land and their guns. And when they searched their Bibles for answers, they came to believe even more fervently that one-world government was the last prophesied sign from God before Armageddon, the “fourth sign.”

  Nobody cared. The Christian Identity movement hadn’t yet bubbled to the surface of the national consciousness. Radicals hadn’t yet begun to call themselves “constitutionalists.”

  Its followers considered themselves soldiers in a war against the United States government, practicing an Aryan theology that saw racial minorities as sub-human “mud people,” Jews as Satan’s children, and a New World Order as a precursor to tyranny.

  At its core, the Fourth Sign was among scores of obscure and loosely organized Christian Identity bands mixing ultra-fundamentalist zealots and anti-government paranoiacs in a combustible, fuming frenzy that produced more smoke than fire.

  But Comeaux was the spark that ignited a wildfire.

  Before his arrest, he’d attended a few secret meetings at a small church near Dixon, Illinois, but he mostly kept to the back pews. He put his faith in violence and fear, not talk. His heart burned with a sava
gery far more advanced than anyone had dreamed.

  Once he was jailed, the word went out. To the Fourth Sign’s believers, he was no serial killer but a casualty of a government conspiracy designed to uproot true patriots. Even if Comeaux were truly guilty, some said, he should be sainted for exterminating the vermin whores that dragged America toward Hell by its private parts. Offshoots of the Fourth Sign sprung up all across the forgotten interior, its demented gospel spread via the Internet and rallied by the whispered name of P.D. Comeaux.

  On the day of closing arguments in Comeaux’s South Dakota trial, a sophisticated pipe-bomb filled with roofing tacks and packed in a shoebox between two plastic bags of human feces, was mailed to the county prosecutor’s office. When it exploded, it decapitated a legal secretary and badly mutilated a law-school intern, whose wounds became lethally infected by the excrement and dirty shrapnel blasted deep into him. The day before the student died in excruciating pain, an anonymous caller with a Western accent told a sheriff’s dispatcher that the bomb had been sent by the Fourth Sign.

  “And the shit inside came right out of the ass of Saint P.D. hisself. Consider yourself baptized,” he cackled, then hung up.

  Nobody was ever arrested, nor was it ever known if P.D. Comeaux had actually smuggled his own waste out of the county jail, but the Fourth Sign was quickly added to the feds’ short list of America’s most deadly domestic terror groups.

  The heart of the Fourth Sign beat somewhere in the Midwest, Morgan knew from his follow-up investigation in Comeaux, but its leadership was shadowy. It gathered money from its far-flung members through a series of drop-boxes rented by mysterious groups with names like The Millennium Institute and The Rapture Forum, most of the money going to an ever-expanding arsenal of legal and illegal weaponry. ATF intelligence suggested the organization’s more militant factions — radicals for whom the old-school Order and the Aryan Nations were not radical enough — financed themselves by declaring their own war on drugs, robbing and murdering dealers from Tulsa to Detroit.

  Sometime in the late Nineties, the Fourth Sign’s soldiers branched out into piracy. Not on the seas, but on American highways. Eighteen-wheelers were lumbering, easy targets, and they carried large amounts of goods — from guns to pharmaceuticals to vehicles — that could be quickly and quietly converted to cash.