“You can’t trust the government any more than the cops,” Samba said.
“Ah, Samba. You better watch yourself, old boy. You’re gonna end up wearing a tin foil hat and getting messages from the TV,” Josh joked.
Aurora interrupted Samba’s retort.
“What does it say about the wife?”
Josh’s face grew serious, and he turned back to the computer screen. “Ex-wife. Ash Gentry. Married forty years.”
“You don’t last that long without knowing a few secrets,” Samba said.
“And Davis has got a few,” Josh agreed. He turned the laptop to face them. “Lots of rumors of infidelity, and one love child, up in South Carolina. Born during a difficult time in his marriage. Since then, the Lord Jesus has made his crooked paths straight.”
“Not fucking likely,” Samba chortled. “Maybe we could talk to the love child?”
Josh shook his head. “Are you kidding me? She’s probably cashed up to the gills and signed an airtight confidentiality agreement. She’s not going to give us shit.”
“Tell me more about the wife,” Aurora pressed.
“Looks like Ash is from Kervick County. Daughter of the Confederacy.”
“That’s a thing?” Aurora was incredulous. “Seriously?”
“Oh, yes,” Samba told her. “People here remember the War of Northern Aggression pretty differently than your friends up in New York.”
“Daughter of the Confederacy,” Josh repeated, “Garden Club. Gun Club. Welcome Wagon. Event planning and charity. Her favorite thing to do is embroidering.”
“She’s probably got an embroidered set of her ex-husband’s balls,” Samba observed. “Gun Club! I would say we should try and talk to her, but she’s probably a better shot than me.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Samba,” Aurora said. “I heard you almost put down Josh when he came in here after hours.”
“Now, that’s the truth,” Samba agreed. “So where’s Ash Gentry now?”
“Hang on, guys.” Josh held up a hand. “It looks like she’s still local. Got a family estate just north of Hambone, right on the water.”
Samba whistled. “That’s a nice area.”
“Did you say Welcome Wagon, Josh?”
Josh checked the article. “Yep.”
“Well I just happen to be new in town,” she told them. “I can pay Ash a visit.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Josh sat in Rush’s office. It felt like it was years ago since he had last been here, the day he was given his assignment in the evidence room. Now that place felt like home, and being here felt wrong somehow, as if he were going backwards. He wanted to go with Aurora to see Ash Gentry, to keep her safe, but at the same time, he knew that it was something she wanted to do herself. There was still danger out there, there was no doubt about it.
The train that’s comin’ for you, boy? You got no idea.
He tugged one of the vertical blinds aside and peeked into the main room. Boone was nowhere to be seen. If he’d known something, he would have given Josh a heads-up about the visit. There were any number of activities that Josh had undertaken in the last month that would merit taking away his badge forever. The things he had done in pursuit of Raylene Atchison’s killer were at worst illegal and at best colossally stupid.
And he didn’t regret a single one.
Photographs of Rush’s family covered the desk, piled high with uneven mounds of paperwork. From inside a clay frame that looked like it was melting, Rush’s seven-year-old, Drew, grinned from a perch high atop a bright yellow slide. Josh recognized Baboon Jack’s. He had been at that birthday party. The other adults had lounged in the snack food area, drinking the cardboard-tasting beer, while Josh had spent the entire time on the lookout for predators, scribbling down the plates of every guy who looked like he didn’t belong. Not exactly the life of the party.
“Hey, Josh!” Rush entered the room, as always, a little out of breath. He extended a hand, and Josh shook it. A plastic bracelet that read BREATHE clung to Rush’s wrist.
Josh pointed to it. “Nice,” he said.
“Oh, yeah. I’m supposed to snap it every time I’m thinking about Emily Jo, or the divorce, or blowing my brains out,” he explained.
“And how’s it going?”
“Surprised I still have a goddamn wrist left.”
Josh smiled. “It’s good to see you, man.”
And then Rush took out the folder.
“How’s everything going out there at the evidence room? Do you feel like it’s clearing your mind out a little bit?” The words sounded far away, as though Rush were shouting them down an empty hallway. All Josh could focus on was the folder on his desk.
Hudson, J.
“It was Jesse,” Josh said in a low voice.
Captain Rush stopped midsentence, his silence saying everything Josh needed to know.
“The bones,” Josh managed. “They were Jesse. Is that what you wanted to tell me?
“I’m so sorry. The report came in this morning. I hoped—we hoped it might bring you some measure of peace.”
“Peace,” Josh repeated. It was a bullshit concept, just like closure, something people said. People like Rush, who didn’t understand. His little brother, who mailed coupons to Santa and wanted to be a tollbooth operator because he liked quarters and thought they got to keep the money, was dead. Josh remembered the days after the funeral, the shock of starting a new year at school a few weeks later, with new socks and binders and sharpened pencils. It seemed unbelievable to him then that his brother was really gone, that there was a Jesse-shaped void in the universe. It’s like going blind, he remembered their pastor telling his mother at their kitchen table. You find a new way of living, but nothing is ever the same again. He had been right about that.
They’d had a memorial service for Jesse. There was a tree for him, back at the elementary school, with a plaque that was now faded. Jesse was dead; the Shadow Man had told them that much. But hope was a resilient thing, treacherous and comforting, and it had burned in the back of Josh’s mind without him even knowing it.
And now here was the truth. The Shadow Man had carried his unconscious brother out of Fun World to his trailer two counties away; when he was finished with him, he had killed him, shoved him into a duffel bag, and thrown it in a river. The Shadow Man had smirked and laughed when the cops had asked him to lead them to Jesse’s body, as though there might be some undiscovered spark of compassion inside a person who was pure evil. Give the family peace, they’d pleaded, and he’d laughed. And now the case was finally closed. Another box in the evidence room. Peace.
“I’m so incredibly sorry for your loss, Josh,” Rush said. “And there’s actually another reason why I called you here today. A good one.”
He palmed his sweat-stained breast pocket and then extracted a key, which he used to open his top desk drawer. He removed an object and slid it across the desk to Josh.
Josh’s gun.
Josh could not believe what he was seeing.
“Sir?”
Rush grinned. “Your old friend Pernaria Vincent came back in here for a chat yesterday. It seems that she had a visitation from an angel, who advised her to start talking. She told us that you weren’t involved with any of her and Doyle’s criminal activities, and that confirmed what our internal investigation already found. You’re clear, Josh. Welcome back to work.”
A few weeks ago, he would have been leaping out of the chair with joy, but today Josh was rooted to his seat. Jesse was dead, and Liana was missing, and Aurora’s case was still unsolved.
“Did Pea—did Miss Vincent say anything about Liana?”
Rush shook his head. “I’m sorry, Josh. You have to understand, Pernaria Vincent is a con artist. She’ll say whatever a man wants to hear as long as he’s got money in his pocket.”
“But the picture. She had a picture of my sister.”
“I’m sorry, Josh.”
“I saw it, Cap. It was a
uthentic. My sister’s alive.”
In his mind, Liana loomed larger than anything alive, seventeen and shoving clothes into a roller suitcase in her bedroom in Tennessee. Come and find me, she’d said to him that day, and he’d looked away, down at the whites of her forearms that framed him, the right one embroidered with a smudged Magic Marker tattoo, a single word over and over in her old-fashioned curly handwriting.
Courage.
She was still out there—he knew it. He had tried to put the thoughts aside, focus on Aurora’s case.
“I know you’ll still work on your sister’s case, Josh. I respect that. I do. But can we agree that Pernaria Vincent and people like her are not the way? You know better, Josh. I know you do.”
Josh slid the gun across the desk.
“I appreciate the gesture, Cap,” he said, “but there’s a case I need to close out in the evidence room. I’m not ready to come back. Not just yet.”
CHAPTER FORTY
James ignored the flashing light that indicated the presence of a voice mail. It was the State Board again, he was sure of it, but he didn’t care. Ruby could stave them off for a while longer.
There was something he could have done.
The words thrashed at his consciousness, unforgiving in their truth. He had worked here alongside Davis Gentry, in this very autopsy suite, written reports with the man, attended conferences, even a few mandatory social events, and he had seen nothing. Perhaps there had been some sign, some clue that he could have seized on. Perhaps some action could have unraveled the series of events that led to Raylene Atchison ending up on this table. He had failed her somehow, and this knowledge bore into his chest and caught his breath. He had always imagined that this job had made him a better judge of people, that in all their infinite wisdom, the dead had taught him something about the living. They had not.
James turned the pages of his work diary back in time until he reached the night of the Atchison murder. He’d told Ruby it was for ethical and legal reasons that he recorded the things he did each day in minute detail, but the real reason was some visceral need to commemorate each of his patients. All of the details he had shared with Josh Hudson were there; the teenagers in the accident on the causeway in the pickup truck, the waiting as the jaws of life separated the cars, the appearance of Detective Rossi at his doorstep, hand in hand with Aurora Atchison. He had seen so much death since then, but somehow that night had always stayed with him, because of Raylene and because of Aurora.
He’d made notations about Gentry too; there they were, at the bottom of the second page. Gentry receiving Community Award for Excellence in Service Tonight. Bullshit, he’d added unceremoniously beneath the words, underlining them three times to drive the point home. James scoffed at the title—it wasn’t as though Gentry was feeding the hungry or clothing the poor, he was doing a job, same as James, only with the least effort and the most complaining possible. Gentry’s reports were indecipherable, his medical knowledge shoddy, and he had the horrifying habit of making jokes over the dead and then writing them off as the only way to cope, as though the patients had ever stirred any type of emotion in him. So he had skipped out on work that night to attend a fund-raiser—did that mean he could not have been out on the bayou with Wade and Raylene?
A few pages later, James had his answer—there was the Bayou Bumblebee story about the event, a Casino Night at the Shrimp Shack. James frowned at the photograph. The Shrimp Shack had been a terrible restaurant, with a floor that was sticky underfoot and drinks served in plastic buckets with shovels sticking out of them. The place had burned down in a suspicious fire with nobody inside, its charred entrails remaining until some featureless chain restaurant had taken its place.
James peered at the photograph that accompanied the article. There were all the local politicos, Royce Beaumont, and there was Gentry, front and center in a cowboy hat and a silk shirt unbuttoned almost to the navel. James skimmed the article. The Casino Night had been a rousing success, and at the end of the evening, the award had been presented. It was as airtight an alibi as you could get. Gentry could not have done this.
But he must have known who did.
The personnel file on Davis Gentry was relatively slender; pay stubs, copies of the autopsy reports he’d done. James paged through them. Davis was the one who had insisted on a seal for the medical examiner’s office. The office didn’t have enough prestige for him, that was for sure. James read each report. They were woefully brief and incomplete, just like Raylene Atchison’s had been. There was no indication that her case had been special. It hadn’t set off alarm bells when he’d insisted on doing her autopsy; James had been relieved, scared of what the sight of Raylene on the autopsy table would have done to him. Now he wished he could have been with her on her last day on earth. He would have put aside his feelings and made sure to annotate every detail, anything and everything that would catch her killer.
James opened the locked drawer, where he’d tucked Malachi’s printouts and Wade’s samples into a Java Jive reusable lunch bag. That was the puzzle of it all; how had Wade’s path crossed with Gentry’s? Gentry had lived up the bayou in some decaying wreck of a plantation house that he was rebuilding into a modern monstrosity, digging up a grove of magnolia trees to put in a swimming pool. Those from down the bayou—including James—were of no use to him, and he made no secret of it. So what did he want with Wade Atchison, a small-time criminal?
Unless it wasn’t Wade he was after.
Raylene. He recalled the image of her approaching him on the skiff out on the bayou that day; something startling and unearthly in her beauty, something childlike in her manner that told him she was not aware of this beauty, a quality that only deepened her loveliness. James had seen it. Wade Atchison had seen it. It was not a stretch to think that Gentry had seen it too.
Town gossip. It wasn’t something he had ever been plugged into, but lucky for James, he knew someone who was.
“Ruby, can you come in here for a moment please?”
“Sure, Doc.”
He glanced up at the clock. Four forty—she would have already begun her preparations to end the day, an elaborate process that started with shutting down her computer and ended with the application of makeup.
She opened the door and leaned in, the scent of her perfume overwhelming the antiseptic smell of his suite. She smelled of vanilla, of warm baking smells and safe, sweet things.
“I have a question that you might be able to help me with. It involves some—well, some unsavory matters.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“I want to know about a rumor that may have been around town a number of years ago—1989, to be specific.”
Ruby frowned.
“Of course,” James continued, “you would have been young then.”
“Very young.”
“Very young,” he echoed. “But you know, I know how social you are, and I thought you might—oh, forget it.”
“No,” she said. “Who is it about?”
“Davis Gentry,” James said. “I want to know if you ever heard any rumors about him being a philanderer.”
“A what?”
“A cheater. A louse.” He did not understand why she was smiling.
“Well, I did hear a few things. My friend Adrian did some construction work for his wife on their house. Ashley, Ashford, some rich white-girl name. He said she was like Hitler in a bra.”
“So he might have been—um, stepping out on her?”
“I can’t say I’ve heard that. But I did hear it about her.”
“The wife?”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” she said. “Out there in her lonely house on the bayou. She keeps to herself. Nobody in town’s seen her in years. I heard she had workers out there all the time, doing construction jobs and all other kinds of nonsense. You ask me, she was scouting the local talent.”
“I see. Well, um, thanks, Ruby.” He averted his eyes, sure that this conversation viol
ated some sort of employer-employee code of ethics. “I appreciate the information.”
“Anytime, Doc,” she said.
She palmed the light switch on her way out and called to him over her shoulder. “Don’t be sitting here in the dark for too long,” she scolded. “You’re gonna hurt your eyes, you know.”
It was the little things like this that made James grateful for Ruby.
“Be safe out there. See you tomorrow.”
Alone in the office, he watched the sun slip beneath the surface of the bayou, Ruby’s words echoing in his ears.
He pinned Raylene’s X-rays to the light board. Someone had strangled her, an act that was both horrifyingly violent and extremely personal. They had watched the life leave her body. He had never considered the possibility that it could have been a woman.
Your other contributor is female.
Malachi had found another sample; what if it was Ash Gentry’s? Wade Atchison had nothing to offer Gentry, but he had something to offer Ash.
James removed one of the photographs of Wade from the file. He was grinning from the passenger seat of a pickup truck, one muscled arm draped out of the window. Even James knew he was the type of man that women found attractive. And Ash had an eye for the local talent, as Ruby had described it. Was it too much of a stretch to think that Ash had noticed Wade or stepped out with him? Maybe Raylene had found out about the two of them, had followed Wade and Ash out to the bayou that night, where they’d snuck out while her husband was away. Gentry would have helped her cover the murder after the fact; he would have had plenty of time after the casino night was over.
James reached for the phone and called the evidence room.
“We’re one step ahead of you,” Josh said, after James had explained his theory. “Aurora’s visiting Ash Gentry, see what she can find out.”
“Alone?”
“She can handle herself, Doc.”
Josh was right. Aurora was a grown woman, not the child that he had cared for all those years ago. He had known nothing about children then and knew even less about women now. But that didn’t mean that you packed someone off into a car and sent them driving straight into danger either, did it?
The Evidence Room: A Mystery Page 20