by Lowe, Tom
I was about to remove the battery from my phone when I recognized the incoming number. It was Detective Dan Grant’s cell phone. I answered and he said, “Sean, since all hell is breaking loose on a number of fronts related to Courtney Burke, I thought you’d like to know we hit pay dirt on the partial print found on the ice pick.”
“What’d you find?”
“Down in your old neck of the woods, Miami-Dade PD. A guy was picked up for a B&E, assault and sexual battery. He’s a carny worker with one of Bandini’s franchises on a seven-day run South Florida gig. Rides motorcycles in the Cage of Death. Anyway, the detective was thinking out of the box, ran the prints on the suspect, one thumbprint matched what we retrieved from the print on the ice pick.”
“Dan, tell me the guy admitted he killed Lonnie Ebert.”
“Wish I could. What he did say is he doesn’t remember not doing it. He was working at the carnival the same time Courtney Burke was there.”
“Did he work at the two other carnivals … where the first two murders happened?”
“Thought you’d ask that. And the answer is yes. He’s lawyering up. But he did say he went through hypnosis to get up the nerve to ride a motorcycle in a cage with two other guys on bikes all going different directions. And he said he remembered holding the ice pick, but swears he doesn’t remember stabbing Lonnie or the other two guys.”
“Who hypnotized him?”
“Don’t know. Thought I’d take a ride down to Miami and question the guy.”
“Who’s working the case from Miami PD?”
“Hold on … a Detective Mike Roberts. You know him?”
“Yeah, I do. Thanks, Dan.”
Driving back into North Augusta, I thought about what Dan just told me. I knew Detective Mike Roberts in Miami. We’d worked together on a homicide case a two years before I quit the department. He was tenacious, a bulldog. And now I needed to call him.
I thought about Andrea, how much she’d changed since we were in college. If the dead girl in the swamps outside of New Orleans was Courtney, what did it mean to Andrea, believing Courtney was our daughter? Did she give a damn? Or was she intoxicated with the fringes of power she’d ride on her husband’s coattails? I could leave a message on her phone and say the young woman your husband just had murdered was not our daughter, she was my niece. Would Andrea even believe me? Doubtful. All they consider is what the polls are saying. And right now they weren’t saying much for Senator Lloyd Logan.
I would keep the battery out of my phone for a few hours, my mind now on Kim. I hoped she was recuperating well, hoped she and her sister could share a few laughs through this. Then, as I crossed a bridge over a wetlands, I could see the sun setting beyond the marshlands, the water drenched in ruby merlots and pinks, the cattails quivering under the nestling of the red winged blackbirds.
I glanced at the sun going down and thought about my short time with my mother. Played back in my mind her request for me to find Courtney, and the warning she’d left me about my brother, Dillon. I glanced down at the letter, my dried blood splattered across her handwriting. She’d said that Dillon carried the blood of Cain in his veins. And I remembered what she told me about his father: “Through the years, I discovered he stays in touch with only one person.”
“Who?”
“His father, the man who raped me … Father Thomas Garvey.”
In the next forty-eight hours I would bury my mother, and then I’d find a way to deliver a strong message to my brother, Dillon Flanagan. If Courtney was still alive, I’d hunt for Dillon.
And I would find him.
79
I wasn’t sure if my brother would show up for the funeral. I didn’t know his adult face. Wouldn’t recognize him in the crowd. More than thirty-five people came to pay their respects to my mother. We left Saint Francis Catholic Church and drove four miles to Hillcrest Cemetery through a light rain, skies dark and sinister.
At the gravesite, the rain tapered off and each of the neighbors who I’d met in my mother’s home, two days earlier, stood with me and the others as she was laid to rest. Beneath the black umbrellas, and hidden in the murkiness, I looked at faces. Trying to see if any of the men, all strangers, had a genetic resemblance to me, Courtney, or some of the pictures I’d seen of my mother in her youth.
If Dillon had showed, I wanted no surprises.
I didn’t see the Murphy Village resident in the white pickup with the wide off-road tires. But because he wasn’t at the graveyard didn’t mean he wasn’t prowling in the shadows. Along the fringes of the cemetery, a willowy mist hung around the base of the pine trees like white socks that had fallen below knotty ankles. I heard gentle sobbing amid the dark clothes and umbrellas.
A fiddle player stepped forward and began playing Amazing Grace, a song, I was told, my mother loved. When he stopped playing, a Catholic priest, Father Joseph Duffy, early sixties, flushed face, cotton-white hair, delivered a graveside mass and that was more of a eulogy than a sermon. He’d known my mother, and his affection for her was genuine.
Within forty minutes, they were all gone. Gone back to their trailers and mansions, a dichotomy as unique as their nomadic history. Although, at home, they were known to be as insular and unreceptive as the Amish, these Irish Travelers were there when my mother needed them and they were there, today, when she did not.
I waited for the backhoe operator to scoop the dirt into the grave. Her headstone was set in place, and in a few minutes the backhoe was loaded on a flatbed truck and hauled away, the sound of the diesels fading in the drizzle. Silence revisited the cemetery. I stood there and looked at her grave. It was adjacent to the burial site of Sarah Burke, her daughter, my sister, and Courtney’s mother.
I set flowers on my sister’s grave, and then stepped close to my mother’s headstone. I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a hand-carved piece of wood about the size of a plum. It was the figure of a little puffin, painted black, white, red beak, and matching webbed feet. The figurine was shellacked. Its wings were outstretched. “I want you to roost here for a while,” I whispered, setting the little bird down on the edge of the gravestone.
I stood as the rain began to gently fall. I opened the umbrella, the sound of the raindrops popping, the smell of fresh earth and pine needles in the still air. The desolate call of a mourning dove came from the fog-shrouded trees. I looked up and thought I saw someone standing in the mist, at the edge of the woods, a man standing, looking at me. Was it my brother, Dillon? I felt for my Glock in the small of my back. I just touched the butt of the pistol, ready. But I didn’t sense an immediate threat.
The image seemed to dissolve in the haze, not back off or even walk away—but rather melt away. Maybe the vision was from my lack of sleep, living on the extreme edge, stress and fatigue causing hallucinations. I blew out a breath, took my hand off the gun, and lowered my eyes to the headstone. It read:
Katherine O’Sullivan
1943 – 2013
A mother, a wife, an artist
I turned away from my mother’s grave and walked in the rain back to my Jeep. As I was unlocking the door, my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID: UNKNOWN. Maybe it was Andrea calling from an undisclosed number. I answered. The voice was deep, smooth as silk, exuding coolness. He said, “Hello, little brother. This is Dillon. You left your number at our mother’s house. On the kitchen table, I was told. So, I assumed you wouldn’t mind if I called it. Did you bury our sweet mother today?”
“Where were you?”
“I was rather indisposed. Couldn’t make travel arrangements. Sean O’Brien—what a fine Irish name, although I like Sean Flanagan better. You’re somewhat late to the clan, little brother. So, let me make myself very clear. You have no claim to mother’s estate and property, including the land in Ireland. So, just turn around and go back to whatever world you came from.”
“Where’s Courtney?”
“She’s none of your business as well. And she, too, has no rightful cla
im to mother’s property. You probably didn’t know Courtney was diagnosed with acute paranoid-schizophrenia. Mother tried to hide it. Unfortunately, it seems to run in the family. How’s your head, Sean?”
I said nothing.
“Give me time, I will get in your head if you get in my way. Head trips are my specialty. If you’re in contact with our delusional little niece, tell her to relinquish any claims on mother’s property, and her allegations against me are a sad by-product of her pathetic mental state. My attorney will handle all probate proceedings. Poor thing, Courtney, when off her medication, believes I did an injustice to her and her parents. So now she has this vendetta for me. It’s one that will be quite dangerous for her.”
“The injustice you did to Courtney’s parents—our sister and her husband, is called murder. And you raped Courtney when she was a child. In my book, there’s a special place in hell for men like you. You touch Courtney, and you’ve just bought yourself a one-way ticket to that special place. Now, big brother, do I make myself clear?”
His voice changed. It dropped into a throaty whisper, his threat coming from someplace deep and dark where absolute evil dwelled. “Our sweet mother, the whore, might have told you she thought of me as a distant cousin to Cain. Well, the neurotic bitch was right. Like Cain, I’m a wanderer. Like Cain, who committed the first murder on earth, slaying his brother, I will do the same to you. You don’t want me getting into your head, little brother. Because once I move in … I never leave.”
He disconnected. I looked across the cemetery, the fog rising above the tombstones, the puffin barely visible, like a bird surfing the crest of a cloud, catching a holy wave to a better place.
80
The thunderstorm followed me on the drive back from South Carolina to Florida and Ponce Marina. Once in Florida, I made a call to Miami-Dade PD. When I got Detective Mike Roberts on the line he said, “Sean O’Brien, it’s been a long time. I’d ask how the hell you are, but I know your ass is in deep shit. You’re a household name. What’s all this stuff about you and Senator Logan’s wife and a daughter? Is that suspect, Courtney Burke, really your daughter?”
“No, Mike, and I wish I had more time to explain. I spoke with Dan Grant, Volusia County S.O., and he told me how you ran the prints on the carny worker and you found one that matched the latent pulled from the ice pick on the carnival homicide in Volusia.”
“Yeah, the homicide that’s causing this political train to become a run-away-train. You don’t think the girl did it, huh?”
“No, the question is do you believe the perp you’re holding did the killing and maybe the other two?”
“Could be. He says he can’t remember doing it, although he was working at that carnival when the homicide happened. I can’t sniff out bullshit from him. My deception meter isn’t reading crap coming outta the perp’s mouth. It’s damn weird, Sean. This guy is telling me he doesn’t remember doing it … but he sort of remembers some guy telling him to do it.”
“Dan Grant said the perp admitted he’d been hypnotized to deal with his fear of riding a motorcycle in the Cage of Death.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said.”
“Did he say who hypnotized him?”
“Says he can’t really remember. He said it was someone who’d worked the carny circuit. A guy who supposedly could mass hypnotize an entire audience. The perp said the rest of it is like bits and pieces of a dream that he can’t remember the whole picture. It might not be enough to get your girl off the meat hook, but it does establish that at some time and some place the perp had his hands on that ice pick. Right now we can’t prove when and where.”
“How long can you hold him?”
“Bond’s been set at a half mill. The guy’s a habitual criminal, flight risk, plus we got him on enough stuff to send his ass to Raiford for a long damn time. Gotta go, Sean. Late for a depo.”
***
Two hours later I arrived back at Ponce Marina, skirted around the news media in the parking lot, and made my way down L-dock. I sat in the cool salon on Dave’s trawler, Gibraltar, the air-condition humming, Max half asleep on my lap, Dave in his canvas director’s chair nursing a cocktail, and Nick sitting at the three-stool bar. They listened intently as I shared with them the events I’d gone through the last four days.
When I finished, Nick looked at me, his black eyes wet, absorbed in the story. He was speechless, which was saying a lot for Nick. Then, like coming out of a trace, he sipped from his bottle of Corona and said, “Man, I’m so damned sorry to hear about your mother.”
Dave said, “That goes for all of us, your marina family.”
Nick blew air out of his cheeks, his face flush. “Sean, what happened to you is so unfair. You met your mother, and you had to bury her. You find out you have or had a sister who was murdered, and the guy who did it is your freakin’ brother, the brother you never even knew you had. Heavy shit, my friend. A heavy load to tote.”
Dave said, “Based on what you told us your brother said, it’s apparent he’s as mercenary as the guy who shot through the window of your Jeep … maybe even more so because an assassin-for-hire is playing by his employer’s rules. If your brother has some God complex, and he’s a full blown sociopath, he believes the rules, the laws of a civil society, don’t apply to him. A man like that shares many of the same mental traits associated with Hitler, and, in his own sphere of influence, can be just as deadly. The allusion to Cain and Abel isn’t a stretch.”
Nick drained what was left of his Corona and said, “From the day that the girl Courtney first walked on this dock … the girl we now know is your niece … I told you shit was gonna happen. I just didn’t know how deep it was gonna get.”
Dave grunted. “That’s not exactly what you said, Nick. The Forrest Gump suggestion is well-founded, though. Sean, to say how sorry we are for your loss doesn’t scratch the surface of what you just experienced—you find your mother and give her a funeral all in the same week.” He shook his head and sipped his drink, gesturing toward the book on the table, and he cut his eyes back up to me. “I’m reading Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. Joseph Campbell was influenced by some of what Mann had to say. Campbell, of course, distilled it down to the hero’s journey. And a lot of it is exactly what you went through—what you’re going through. But when that journey takes you into the bowels of a dysfunctional family you never knew existed, I’m not sure how you return from a quest so intimate, so personal, without experiencing profound change akin to surviving a war.”
“I haven’t returned. I’ve made a detour to regroup. A lot of my next direction depends on the ID of the girl they pulled out of the Louisiana swamp.”
Dave nodded. “Unfortunately, there are too many missing young women. Police say she’s a Jane Doe until a family comes forth to connect her to a missing persons report or some kind of DNA evidence. In the case of Courtney Burke, without DNA from Courtney, there’s nothing to match to the dead girl. One news commentator is calling for Andrea Logan to give a DNA sample to see if a dotted line can connect to the corpse. Hell, Sean, Logan’s Democratic opponents might be coming after you for a DNA sample. With the election coming very soon, it’s gone from mudslinging to throwing feces like hardballs.”
Nick got up from his barstool, stepped to the port side of Gibraltar, and stared out the window toward the marina office and the Tiki Bar. “Looks like a few more TV news trucks have set up camp. Maybe something’s breaking. Sean, maybe they’re linking you to blowin’ up the cigarette boat in South Carolina.”
“I don’t think so. The closest eyewitness was a train engineer, and he saw my back as I was running for my life.”
Dave said, “So you believe the sniper who shot your windows out, who came within an inch of taking your head off, was the same guy you got on camera saying Timothy Goldberg and presumably Senator Lloyd Logan had issued orders to take Courtney out?”
“I recognized the boot tread, down to a cut on the sole of his left boot.”
; “But yet somebody sends you a text message threat, saying that the rifle bullet through your Jeep windows was a warning shot, along with the demand about the video. Maybe the shooter just missed and they made it seem like a warning because you were still alive.”
Nick said, “Just from those glass cuts on your face, you’re damn lucky you didn’t lose an eye.”
Dave stirred the ice in his drink. “The irony is you pull this assassin out of the St. Johns River, literally, as a big gator is closing in, and then you take him out, or vaporize him, in the Savannah River. You’re going to release that video, aren’t you?”
“It was an insurance policy to keep Courtney safe. If they killed her … I’ll release it and let Logan’s handlers handle that.”
Nick glanced up at the TV screen behind Dave’s bar. The sound was muted, but the picture was on, images of a reporter near a wetland in New Orleans. “What’s this?” Nick asked, reaching for the remote control. He turned up the sound.
I wasn’t ready to hear it.
81
Max barked, her hound dog ears following movement on the dock. Nick looked out the starboard side of Gibraltar. “A news cameraman is walking toward your boat, Sean. The guy decided to go around the locked gate and the no trespassing signs. I see another one following him.”
Dave said, “It’s the tip of the iceberg, and right now Gibraltar is beginning to feel a bit like Titanic. As long as you stay sequestered aboard, Sean, we should avoid a collision with a media mob. I’ll call security and the sheriff’s office. Turn up the sound on the TV, Nick. Looks like they have reason to call what I’m seeing as breaking news.”
The scenes were of a Louisiana parish sheriff and two FBI agents holding a news conference in front of the sheriff’s headquarters. The voice-over came from a news anchorman who said, “That was the scene minutes ago when the results of forensics tests were announced by Sheriff Ralph Perry and special agents with the FBI. Let’s go to Peter Zimmer live at the crime scene where the girl’s body was found. Peter …”