by Brant, Kylie
He saw the boy glance at his watch and, taking the hint, switched off the tape recorder. “I’m guessin’ you need to be getting’ back to work soon.”
Tilting the soda to his lips, the kid guzzled from it like a fraternity pledge on hell night. Once he’d lowered it, he said, “Yeah. And my daddy will check up on me to be sure I’m here all night.” His voice held a dejected note. “I got grounded on account of going to Ashton’s Pond after dark, which is bogus. Hardly none of my other friends did.”
Here was a topic which Dev could fully appreciate. He’d experienced that particular parental punishment frequently himself as a teenager. “It’ll pass. You’ve still got most of the summer ahead of you.”
“Yeah.” Clearly unconvinced, Robbie Joe stuffed the remaining candy bar and bag of sunflower seeds in his pants pockets and rose. Dev hoped it would be enough to sustain the boy until he got off work. From what he’d witnessed, he had his doubts.
“Good talkin’ to you.” Giving the boy a clap on the shoulder, Dev left him as Robbie crumpled his trash and two-pointed it into the nearby waste can.
“Nice meetin’ you, Mr. Stryker.”
Barely restraining a wince, Dev headed home. Having a kid address him like that was a none-too-gentle reminder of the passage of time.
There were other reminders, of course. He considered them as he strolled back to Benjamin Gorder’s house. There had actually been a few unfamiliar faces in town since he’d arrived five days ago, despite the fact that he made it back here three or four times a year to see his granddaddy.
And there had been others missing. Mike and Mona Reed had retired and moved to Chattanooga. Crystal Meinders had married—for the third time—and gone to live in Clayton with her truck driver husband. Since Crystal had given him his first French kiss in seventh grade and an eye-popping lesson on the female anatomy, he regarded her kindly enough to wish her luck this time around.
He passed a familiar picket fence and felt his heart grow a little heavier. Time was when he used to take a stick and run it the length of that fence, just to hear the racket. Got chewed out regular for it, too, and one summer had to give it a coat of paint because his granddaddy had agreed with Ida Trivett that he’d probably worn the paint clear off just with his antics.
Ida had died the past winter at the age of eighty-four, and her death made him all too aware that his time with his granddaddy was running out. Of course, Benjamin was five years younger than his neighbor. But his last stroke had left him weak enough that moving him into the assisted living facility had been the only solution.
The time would come when his closest family in this town would be gone. He gave a stone on the sidewalk a kick, just to see it bounce and roll, and considered that future. He’d been born in Buffalo Springs. Had spent most of his summers here. Had even attended the local high school. Would the connection weaken with Benjamin’s death?
Not likely. He turned up the narrow walk to the neatly kept story-and-a-half home with its wide front porch. This town had a grip on him. It always would.
At least until he could put the past to rest once and for all.
He went inside and booted the computer, bringing up the voice-recognition software that would surely go down in history as one of the most useful inventions known to mankind.
Removing the recorder from his pocket, he rewound it, then pressed play. The computer would type up the notes of Robbie’s interview, and all Dev would have to do was clean up and edit the passage when it was finished.
He hooked a nearby stool with his foot and dragged it over. Settling back in the computer chair and putting his feet up, Dev listened to the interview with a critical ear. No new information had been garnered, but he’d talk to every teenager who’d been in those woods before he was done, and interview any other person in the area who claimed to have seen the red mist.
He’d already decided Silas Parker was fabricating. His accounts didn’t match any of the others and was spare on details altogether. Dev was used to separating fact from fiction as he traveled around investigating reports of paranormal phenomena. It wasn’t unusual for people to claim they’d experienced something they hadn’t. Dev almost preferred it to the ones who were purely convinced they had, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Toeing off his shoes, he crossed one foot over the other and idly watched Robbie’s words dance across the computer screen.
According to Mark, the sheriff’s department had determined that none of the other teenagers had been behind Robbie Joe and Becky in those woods. None had shown up on the scene for at least several minutes after the two had found the body, and they’d come from a different direction altogether.
As for the firefly theory . . . Dev listened again as the boy verbally tried to persuade them both that insects could have made the lights the kids had seen. Although he hadn’t tried to convince the boy differently, Dev discounted that idea as well.
A more reasonable explanation, he thought, folding his arms behind his head and contemplating the familiar hairline crack in the dining room ceiling, was that the lights had been reflections of some sort. Or that they’d come from someone else with flashlights behind them, as Robbie had suspected, not wielded by his friends, but by someone who hadn’t yet come forward. Maybe even the killer himself.
Dev had suggested as much to his cousin, and to his credit, Mark had seemed to take it under consideration. But it had been easy to see that the sheriff hadn’t put much stock in the theory.
Of course, he could wonder about a whole different direction altogether and contemplate whether the lights were in fact spiritual orbs.
He’d encountered countless “evidence” over his career that reputed to be exactly that—balls of light that were physical manifestations of a spirit’s energy. Of course he’d mostly debunked such happenings. Those showing up on photographs could too often be attributed to poor lighting, reflections, or camera malfunction.
But he wasn’t a total disbeliever. Not by a long shot. During the course of his career he’d seen things, heard things, that couldn’t be explained away by facts or the physical world. Been scared out of his long pants a time or two, he admitted without embarrassment. And had learned along the way that most so-called paranormal events could be explained by science.
Others had to be accepted as something else.
The pounding on his front door put an abrupt end to his ruminating. Dev’s feet hit the floor, and he rose as the first shout was heard.
“Stryker! Get on out here so I can speak at ya!”
The voice was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put a face to it before swinging the front door open.
He recognized the man standing on the porch with little enough effort, though. Banty Whipple—nicknamed for the banty rooster he resembled—was red-faced and looked ready to chew a strip off someone.
Dev propped one hand on the doorjamb and rested the other on the doorknob. “Afternoon, Banty.”
The other man looked like he’d sucked a bag of lemons. “My name’s Robert.”
“ ’Course it is,” Dev said agreeably, although if he’d ever known the man’s given name, he’d long since forgotten it.
“Heard you was talkin’ to my son over to Easley’s Supermarket. Clem over to the Gas ’n’ Go saw ya. Said it looked like you two had yourselves a nice long conversation.”
“We did,” Dev said, growing more mystified. He crossed one stockinged foot over the other. “Nice kid. Favors his mama.” Which was plain good luck any way you looked at it.
“Stay ’way from him, you hear me?” Banty slammed his palm against the screen door for emphasis. “We needed to give permission to the sheriff and those state guys to talk to him. Even had to sign somethin’ before the media folks could get near him. So who the hell do you think you are to waltz up and sit him down pretty as you please and fill his head with nonsense?”
“Well, the fact is, Ba—Robert,” he corrected himself, “I’m not the law and I’m not the pr
ess. So technically I don’t need your permission to pass a few minutes shootin’ the breeze with your son.”
“The hell you don’t!” The second assault on the screen door came from Banty’s fist. “My kid’s not gonna be one of them weirdos you write about spoutin’ crazy talk about haints and zombies and whatnot.”
He was about to point out that he’d never written about zombies—although he would if he found an interesting case—but the man’s next words had the statement drying in his mouth.
“Don’t know as I’d want him talkin’ to you under any circumstances.” Banty spit his chew on the porch in disgust. “Hell, ever’body in these parts know what you come from, what your daddy was. Maybe some folks can ferget that sorta thing, but I ain’t one of ’em.”
Dev slapped his palm on the screen door and pushed it open so abruptly that Banty had to back up a few steps to avoid being struck by it. “Care to expand on that?” he said in a deadly controlled tone.
The shorter man thrust out his jaw. “Yer daddy’s a killer. Can’t deny that even if you want to. And now we got us another murder ’round here and who shows up? In Buffalo Springs, havin’ your family ’round is plain unlucky for some folks. I ain’t the only one thinks that way, neither.”
“Thinkin’s not your strong suit, Banty.” Dev took another step toward the man. Felt his fingers curl into fists. “Never was. Now you’ve had your say. Better leave before I kick your ass.” Although he saw the car roll in front of his house, he didn’t take his eyes off the man in front of him.
“Shee-it.” Banty spat again and rolled his shoulders. “You couldn’t kick the ass end of a fly. You always was a . . .” His fist swung out, nearly connected, its speed surprising. But Dev was ready for him.
His foot hooked around Banty’s ankle at the same moment he sent a vicious right jab to the man’s jaw. Banty’s head snapped back and the momentum had him tumbling backward off the porch, landing on his backside in Benjamin Gorder’s azalea bushes.
“What seems to be the problem, fellas?” Mark Rollins strolled up the walk, looking sternly from one man to the other.
Whipple scrambled to his feet, wiggling his jaw gingerly. “I come here to tell Stryker to stay the hell away from my kid, and he went crazy and started swingin’.”
“Now, Banty, I stood right here and watched you throw the first punch,” the sheriff said reasonably. “You really want to stick to that story?”
The man’s face flushed an ugly shade of red. “I want him to keep away from my kid. A man’s got a right to protect his own son from Stryker’s type. He’s got bad blood. That’s probably what made him some weirded out haint chaser.” He scrambled to his feet and took a step in Dev’s direction.
“You said your piece. Now it’s time to move on.” Rollins inserted himself between Banty and Dev. “Go on with you now,” he said, when Banty showed no signs of obeying. “I’ve already run you in once this year on assault charges. The judge won’t be so lenient second time ’round.”
Whipple finally brushed himself off and turned to go. “I’m leavin’. But don’t you ferget what I told you, neither, Stryker. Keep away from my kid.”
Both men watched as Banty climbed into his souped-up dually truck and roared away. When Mark looked back at Dev, a small smile was playing around his mouth. “You always did have a way of stirrin’ things up.”
Dev lifted a shoulder. “He was just blowin’ off. Beat up the screen door some, but no harm done.” Easy enough to see now why Robbie Joe had tried so hard to convince them both there was a rational explanation for the red mist and the lights he saw. Banty had seemed much more comfortable about his son finding a dead body than witnessing a possible psychic phenomena, but Dev was in no mood to appreciate the irony. “Hell, I talked to all the other kids with no problem.”
Mark pushed his hat back and wiped at his forehead. “Well there was never any love lost ’tween you and Banty, so you shoulda known he’d call you out if you gave him the least reason.”
No, there had never been any love lost between the two of them. And the man’s words about Dev’s daddy were the main reason. He’d heard them before, or others much like them, from the guy for two decades.
They weren’t any easier to hear now than they’d been when he was twelve.
“Kendra May’s been houndin’ me somethin’ fierce ’bout you comin’ over to dinner soon. Says she hasn’t seen near ’nough of you since you got to town.”
“Sure.” Dev strove for a lighter tone he was far from feeling. “Tell her to give me a call. We can sit ’round and talk over old times again. Bet she’s never heard the one ’bout you gettin’ caught top down and pecker up with Carolyn Grimes in your mama’s convertible near Tackett’s woods.”
The man looked pained. “Just remember, if I land in the doghouse with her, I might end up bunkin’ here with you.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
They parted on a friendly wave, and Dev went back into the house. But it failed to seem as welcoming as it usually did. The echoes of Banty’s words rang in its empty rooms. Rattled around in Dev’s mind even when he tried to shake them free.
Yer daddy’s a killer . . . I ain’t the only one thinks that way, neither.
No, Banty hadn’t been the only one to utter those words to him over the years, although he imagined they were whispered behind his back far more often. This town had passed judgment on his father nearly thirty years ago.
Dev swung the front door shut behind him with a decisive bang.
It was high time to figure out once and for all if the town had been right.
Chapter 5
“I faxed the vic’s picture to headquarters earlier today.” Not finding either of the agents back at the motel room, Ramsey was checking in with Powell by cell phone. “It shouldn’t take more than twenty-four hours to get an artist’s sketch back. We can make copies and have them distributed to law enforcement and nail salons in a fifty-mile area.”
“Good catch on the nails. If we can get the ID done quietly without havin’ to involve the media, I know Jeffries will be much happier.”
And the governor would be happier still, Ramsey thought cynically, but the comment remained unvoiced. “I talked to the sheriff and suggested he have the ME clip the victim’s fingernails and bag them as evidence. You never know, maybe we’ll get lucky enough to come up with a match on the polish. Has the TBI lab come up with anything yet on the footprints or fibers?”
“Nothin’ yet. I planned to call and give them another nudge today.”
“What about ViCAP? Has a report been submitted?” The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program’s national database would spit out any crimes with similar elements.
There was a moment of silence. “Check with Rollins on that. I thought he was goin’ to take care of it. If he hasn’t, you could submit the form from his office.”
“I’ll do that.” Hearing the crunch of gravel under tires, she lifted the shade and looked out. Felt a jolt of satisfaction. “The mobile forensics lab is here that Raiker promised. You’ve got evidence at the sheriff’s office, right?” Running the tests from the mobile lab would mean the results would be available in hours rather than days or weeks, moving the investigation into a much faster pace.
“Everythin’s there except the latents, casts of footprints, and fibers. Rollins will probably want to have a deputy deliver it all, but you can put the request in when you stop by his office.” Switching topics, Powell went on, “Matthews is out makin’ a second pass on the interviews of the kids. I’m door knockin’ on the properties fringin’ the woods to see if anyone claims to have seen anythin’ that night.”
From the disgust in his voice, his lack of progress was clear. But Ramsey asked anyway. “Getting anywhere?”
“Lot of nothin’ so far. People who don’t like talkin’ to law-enforcement types.” The phone crackled, as if he were traveling farther out of range. “Give me a call when you finish at the sheriff’s office. I could us
e a hand out here.”
After promising to do so, Ramsey disconnected and went outside, jogging across the parking lot to where two people were standing near the mobile lab and the midsized SUV that had followed it in.
“You two must have really pissed Raiker off to have drawn this duty,” she joked, joining Abbie Phillips and Ryne Robel next to the lab. “Where’s Jonesy?”
“Inside unpacking his baby.” Robel stretched then slipped one arm around his petite wife. “And Raiker sent us because we’re on our way to Lexington.”