by Jeff Gunhus
Allison grabbed her by the arm. “The reason I’m here is that I think you can do something about what happened to your sister. I think you can help me find the killer.”
Sheriff Frank dragged Natalie toward the door. “You two can talk down in the jail. I’m getting her out of here. Right now.” He called out to Carl. “Boy, I’ll be talking to you tomorrow, so don’t you dare leave town. You got that?”
Allison thought about trying to stop him, but decided against it. With Carl still in the bar, it was probably for the best. Besides, if the killer was on the same trail she was, then having her in protective custody wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
Mike walked up and stood next to her. “Are things always like this for you?”
Allison nodded. “Pretty much.”
“Good work with her,” he said. “She was teetering on the edge.”
“She still took a shot at him. And at a cop.”
“You heard her, those were just warning shots,” Mike said. “Before that, she was thinking of doing the deed. You could see it in her eyes. She could feel the raw animal power of it and it almost dragged her in. Without you, ol’ Ned would be mopping red off his floor tonight.”
Allison wasn’t sure what to think. Playing the events back in her head, she figured she could have played it differently at some point. Taken the weapon away more quickly was the obvious one. But, ultimately, she sensed the sheriff was the kind of guy to give her a break, especially since it seemed that he had a personal reaction on hearing about Tracy Bain’s death. At least this way, she had a captive audience for questioning. As long as the sheriff played ball and gave her access.
“Come on,” she said to Mike. “We’re going to jail.”
33
In a booth against the wall of Billy Ray’s, over by the broken jukebox, Harris tipped back the last of his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Doyle had been spot-on with his intel, even if he’d been reluctant to hand it out. Luckily, or unluckily for Doyle, Harris had a particular expertise in helping prisoners overcome their reluctance to talk. His time in beautiful vacation destinations like Syria, Afghanistan, Qatar and other “allies” of the United States intelligence apparatus had paid off. In black locations, CIA parlance for doesn’t-exist, Harris had learned from some of the best in the business. And despite what the namby-pamby liberals thought, they did their jobs with more restraint than the enemy deserved. Waterboarding and stress positions were a hell of a lot better treatment than American captors could expect if they were captured. Did they get a little carried away sometimes? Sure. But it was for a greater good. And, if he was being honest, it was kind of fun.
His conversations with first Maurice back at the morgue and then Doyle in the field off the main road didn’t carry any of the restrictions from those old days. That made things go a little quicker. Threatening to cut off someone’s dick unless he talked was one thing, actually doing it made more of a statement.
Doyle had recognized the picture of Catherine Fews immediately. Harris could tell by the kid’s reaction, but then he’d clammed up as tight as a dehydrated asshole. Still, it took all of five minutes to transform Doyle from a hard ass ex-Marine into a quivering mass willing to tell him everything he knew, not about Catherine Fews, but about Tracy Bain, once the beauty queen of Harlow, West Virginia. The old adage that there were no secrets in a small town proved true and he got more information than he expected. One piece of intel was the location of Tracy’s father, Doug, a small-time drug dealer who grew his own mushrooms and had a habit of sampling his own wares a little too often. Once he’d gotten everything he could out of the guy, Harris made sure to thank Doyle properly and end things for him in a timely fashion. He wasn’t without compassion in such situations. He didn’t hate Doyle the way he’d hated the al-Qaeda bastards he’d dealt with back in the day. The kid was just in the wrong place at the exact time Harris needed information. Besides, the kid was a veteran, and that counted for something. He gave him a quick death, one right between the eyes.
Harris drove out to the middle of nowhere to the broken down, rusted out trailer where Doug Bain lived and found nothing, including Doug Bain. Based on the man’s set-up, there was no way any kind of Internet connection was streaming data into a hard drive. Shit, the man got TV reception with a wire snaked up through a hole in the roof of his trailer attached to an old-school antenna that was tied to a tree with a rope. Still, he rifled through the place looking for anything interesting. It was a dead end, so he drove to the bar where his buddy Doyle had thought the sister, Natalie, worked some nights. Since Doyle had no idea where she lived and there was no record of an address online, Harris had resigned himself to waiting to see if she showed. The drinks were just an extra bonus.
He’d been there for an hour when the FBI walked in. Maurice had told him all about Allison McNeil and, with the help of his contacts at the FBI, he had a good read on what she was all about. Her personnel file didn’t do her justice though. She was a hot piece of ass just as Maurice had insisted, but he wasn’t about to let that cloud his judgment. The rumor was that she’d shot Garret Morrison in the leg to take out Sam Kraw. A woman with that kind of balls deserved his professional respect and he intended to remember that.
He also knew about the man with her although he was surprised to see him there. Maurice’s low pain threshold meant it hadn’t taken much to get the kid to spill every secret he had. Just like Harris, Mike Carrel had paid Maurice good money for intel on who came to check on Catherine Fews, now Tracy Bain’s, body. That a reporter who specialized in serial killers would be aggressively tracking the case wasn’t surprising at all. He knew Carrel had contacts in the FBI the same as he did, so he felt a grudging sense of respect for the man’s thoroughness in paying off the morgue tech instead of just relying on his regular sources. Hell, he might have paid off the night staff too for all he knew. All on a hunch that paid off. But what was really impressive, so much so that it bordered on the bizarre, was that he’d somehow convinced an FBI agent to let him tag along on the investigation. Now that was ballsy.
Harris had remained content to watch them from his vantage point in the bar. The fact that he was there first made it nearly impossible for them to make him as a stranger. His car was parked around back so his out of state plate wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. His clothes fit in with the locals and he’d adopted a slumped over, my-life-sucks posture so he wouldn’t attract attention, not that the local sheriff appeared to have any Sherlock Holmes powers of observation in his DNA. Harris looked the part and simply held his position, waiting to see what would happen.
Then the whole thing with Natalie Bain went down. The events with the gun had been brilliant, better than any Broadway stage play or Hollywood blockbuster. It was exactly his kind of entertainment. A little bit of blood would have paid the whole thing off better, but nothing was perfect. He put a ten-dollar bill on the table and slid on his coat.
The girl’s arrest complicated things, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. The FBI woman was a little tricky too, but she had to play by different rules than he did. In fact, he didn’t have to play by any rules at all. And, in the race to get the video cache filmed and transmitted by Tracy Bain, he intended to take every advantage he could get.
Still, time wasn’t on his side. He figured he had twenty-four hours, maybe less, before people started looking for Doyle. Worse than that, once word spread in Harlow that the FBI thought a killer might be making a visit to their town, it was going to be impossible to walk down a street without a dozen eyes flagging him as a stranger. He had to work fast. Fortunately, that was what he was good at. All he needed was a few minutes alone with Natalie Bain. She would tell him everything fast enough. That he knew for sure.
He walked outside and breathed in the cold, mountain air, stretching a little as a gentle reminder that rushing too fast led to mistakes. He still had to be careful. Patience was a virtue. Perhaps the only virtue he still possessed.
34
Allison and Mike sat in the front room of the Harlow sheriff’s office. It was in an old building that had an open area large enough for two file-covered desks, a set-up which reminded Allison of the set for the Andy Griffith show, one of her dad’s favorites. She pictured Andy and Barney standing vigil over the good folks of Harlow. Only Andy and Barney didn’t have calendars on the wall with a large-breasted woman sprawled over the hood of a police cruiser or straddling a police motorcycle while dressed in a bikini and looking over her shoulder, biting her lower lip. Classy.
The holding cell was back behind a door and down a hallway. Allison had tried to go down there to talk to Natalie when they first got there, but Sheriff Frank didn’t much care for that idea. He’d sent her to wait in the front room until he and his deputy, a pudgy man with a bad comb-over named Cal Swanson, got their prisoner settled in.
“You think ol’ Frank is going to let us talk to her tonight?” Mike asked.
Allison nodded. “The only question is how much information I have to give him to make that happen. If I can get him to believe Tracy’s killer might be on his way up here to look for the same information we’re looking for, then he might be more willing to cooperate.”
“But you don’t really want to tell him all that, do you?”
Allison shook her head. “Kind of like I wasn’t planning on telling you Natalie’s last name until I was ready. What was the deal with forcing my hand?”
“What are you talking about?”
“At the bar. You asked me the girl’s last name in front of the bartender. You knew it wasn’t necessary. How many Natalies could work there? That was just so you could get the name. It wasn’t even sly.”
“Sorry,” Mike said. “But sitting around watching is driving me nuts.”
“You’re a reporter,” Allison countered. “I thought that was your deal. To observe and not make yourself part of the story.”
“That’s journalism class, not the real world. Could you imagine a lifetime of only watching and reporting? Of being a spectator and never playing in the game?”
Allison noticed a rough edge to his voice. She’d hit a sore spot. “Isn’t that what you signed up for?”
“The writer in me agrees with you,” Mike replied, shifting his weight in his chair. “But the other part of me, the part that wants to live and experience and feel, that part is never content to just watch.”
“I suppose everyone feels that way on some level,” Allison offered. She stood and crossed over to the door that led to the cell block, looking through the small square window in its center. The sheriff and his deputy were at the far end of the hall speaking to Natalie in her cell. “Most people want to get in on the act,” she said to Mike without turning.
“You really think so?” Mike asked. “All I see when I look at the world are these fat-asses sitting on their couches watching TV. Kids with their faces buried in their electronic devices, hardly looking up when they walk down the street. Suits scurrying to their cubicles to hide and manage their fantasy football teams when their bosses aren’t watching. Blue-collar guys digging holes for fifty hours a week so they can wash down painkillers with cheap beer on the weekends. They’re not living. They’re not experiencing. They’re just passing through time and waiting out the clock.”
Allison turned from the door and wandered over to Deputy Cal’s desk, looking over his personal photos. Mostly pictures of a young boy spanning a lifetime from infancy to high school graduation. Allison held up a framed photo of the deputy and the teenage boy holding up a giant catfish together. “Is that so bad?” Allison asked. “Think about it. We’re surrounded by death. By the worst kinds of depravity. And we do it by choice.”
Mike shook his head. “Not really by choice. We can’t help ourselves. It calls to us. We have to be part of it because we know the truth.”
She put the photo back in its place. She didn’t really care for the direction of the conversation. “Really? And what’s the truth?”
“That only death can make you truly value life,” Mike said. “It’s why people leave funerals and change the way they act for a few days. Take better care of themselves. Reach out to family members. Take stock. But they’re no different than the millions of people who go to the gym after the New Year. Within a week or two they fall back into their old patterns.”
“And death becomes something they ignore,” she said softly.
“Exactly. But we see death every day. We know exactly how tenuous life really is. A car veers into your lane. Done. A blood clot reaches your brain. Game over. The wrong guy picks you out from the crowd and you’re his next victim. And you never know how or when it’s going to happen. And trying to understand why it happens? Forget about that. All you need to know is that when your number’s up all you have is what you’ve done up to that point. What you plan to do tomorrow means absolutely nothing.”
“And here I thought you were a sunny optimist this whole time,” Allison said.
Mike grinned. “I guess that’s saying something if a top FBI profiler can’t read me. I must be really complicated.”
“Or just really screwed up,” Allison said.
Mike faked a hurt look and held his hand over his heart. “Man, I see why you chase serial killers instead of doing therapy. Your bedside manner sucks.”
“Granted. But while you’re a master at changing the subject, it didn’t work. I’m still mad that you manipulated the situation at the bar to get Natalie’s last name out of me. We had a deal and I expect you to stick to it. ”
“I just thought I could help.”
The lock in the door leading back to the jail clanked open.
“Stop thinking that,” Allison said, standing up.
Sheriff Frank and Deputy Cal strode out looking like pallbearers at a friend’s funeral. The deputy dragged a tear from his eye and looked miserably at the floor. Sheriff Frank patted him on the back and sent him over to his desk before turning to Allison. “Against my advice, she wants to talk to you,” he said. “Empty your pockets before you go in there.”
Allison tried to disguise her annoyance with the sheriff but she dug in her jeans and pulled out her credentials, car keys and money clip and tossed them on the desk. The sheriff nodded toward her and she removed her gun from her shoulder holster and placed it on the table. “Good?”
“Fine,” the sheriff said.
“My associate will stay here,” Allison said, pointing to Mike.
Mike started to object but Allison glared at him and he slumped in his chair.
Allison followed Sheriff Frank through the door and into a narrow hallway. “Is your deputy OK?”
The sheriff stopped and turned to her. Standing next to one another, they blocked the entire hallway. He was an imposing man, but his expression softened as he glanced back toward the room. “The thing about small towns is everyone knows everyone, see?” He spoke in a low voice, probably so it wouldn’t carry back to Natalie’s cell. “Cal back there, his son was a couple years behind Tracy in school. His boy never dated her or nothing like that, but he’d had a crush on her same as pretty much every boy in Hereford County. We all watched her grow up from a little kid.”
“Including you,” Allison said softly.
Sheriff Frank scowled and his right eye twitched. “Yeah, me too. So, this isn’t some FBI case, where you can just roll in and call the shots. This is personal for us. Got that?”
“If I did anything to make it seem like it wasn’t personal for me, then I apologize,” Allison said. “I’m here in the middle of the night because I think I have a chance to find Tracy’s killer. I’m damn good at my job. All I’m asking is that you let me do it so I can make the son of a bitch who did this to her pay.”
Sheriff Frank looked her over as if resizing her up, this time not her physical measurements, but by the type of lawman she was. She stared up at him.
“Now are we going to stand here and measure our cocks,” Allison said, “or can I get to
work?”
Sheriff Frank snorted and gave a nod that she assumed was one of approval. He pointed down the hall. “Down there.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
As she walked away, Sheriff Frank called out, “Tracy was a good girl,” he said. “Everyone knew it. Damn shame.”
Allison had no response for the man. The image of the crime scene came to her, the one where all four limbs of Tracy Bain’s body were clearly visible, each hanging like meat from the bondage straps tied to a bedpost. She wondered how much the sheriff might know about what caused a girl like Tracy Bain to become a woman like Catherine Fews.
She waited until the sheriff turned, walked down the hall and let himself out. If Natalie didn’t prove helpful, she had a suspicion that Sheriff Frank just might.
35
Allison walked the twenty feet to the last jail cell. Natalie sat on the bed, knees pulled up to her chest, eyes red from crying. Gone was the confident woman brandishing the gun and threatening Carl the wife-beater. She looked smaller now, as if the cell had compressed her and made her less somehow. If Allison had the keys, she would have let her out just to see that fire she’d seen at Billy Ray’s return.
“You OK?” Allison asked.
Natalie nodded. She rubbed her right wrist where Allison had grabbed her. It was already bruising up. “You have a strong grip.”
“Guns make me nervous,” Allison said, smiling. “Guns going off around me make me really nervous.”
“You think he got the point?”
Allison paused and looked away. She wanted to play this straight. The girl deserved it. “No,” she said. “Probably not.”
A flash of anger and then acceptance. “You’re probably right.” She stared at her hands. “What happened?”