“Official business?” he asked helpfully.
“Some,” I answered carefully. I looked around and we suddenly seemed to be alone. The techs working lights and audio were gone. The big cross was upright and motionless. No sound came from behind it. Most telling of all, the men with sunglasses and hard faces were gone too. “Some,” I added, “maybe not.”
“Let’s get the official out of the way, what do you say?”
I nodded, more to clear my head than to agree. “Dewey?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“I doubt that, Reverend.”
He nodded this time adding a slight, I wondered if smug, smile. “I told all I know back at the sheriff’s office.”
“Tell me about the fish.” It wasn’t planned. It was simply the first thing to come out of my mouth. My mind was so muddled by the day, I was lucky what I said was an actual sentence.
It had an effect though. The Reverend’s confident smile drooped. His eyes’ hard shine went soft. “Fish?” Confusion came out in the question.
“The fish Dewey’s brother Daniel was poaching. Is that what he was killed for?”
“I don’t”—he looked around for help but we were alone—“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Why are you upset?”
“I’m not upset. I just don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?”
“Daniel was poaching fish.”
“Are you asking me or telling me, Reverend?”
He shrugged and that made it clear. His confusion was real. I doubted that he knew much about the killing. But that shrug was false—a lie.
“How could I?”
“It was something he had a long history with,” I pressed. “He was catching paddlefish and harvesting their eggs for a kind of domestic caviar.”
“I don’t know anything about his fish egg business.”
That—I didn’t believe. First, he didn’t react at all to the idea of paddlefish producing caviar. That made me think he was completely familiar with, what I considered, an unfamiliar concept. And second, “Why did you say, business?”
“What are you talking about?” His head jerked sideways.
“You said, ‘his fish egg business.’ I said he was poaching, you said he had a business.”
“Is that what you wanted? In your official capacity? To talk to me about fish.”
“I think the fish are why he was killed. But not the Why. Do you know what I mean?”
There was no wind then. It had gone still and the tent filled with lights was getting hot.
“I don’t.” Roscoe said stepping back. When his legs touched the stage, he sat down once again in the light. “This is what I know.” With his hands spread he presented the stage and tent in his defense. “Everything else—out there”—he pointed hard, thick fingers outward, beyond the confines of canvas—“remains out there.”
“Even murder?”
“Justice is your job. Vengeance is the Lord’s. I’m, just a shepherd.”
I stared at him as hard as I could. It wasn’t easy. Looking into those eyes was like staring at the moon reflected in moving water; you knew there was something beautiful there, but didn’t know if it was too broken to ever really see.
For his part, the Reverend Roscoe Bolin didn’t seem bothered at all by my gaze. He’d changed a bit in my view though. The fire had dampened but not the heat. It was still banked behind the eyes. He smiled and I thought perhaps I was seeing what the little girl saw a few minutes before.
“So . . .” he opened. “Un-officially?”
I considered that. I didn’t know why I’d even suggested anything other than an investigatory reason for my being there.
He stared.
I did know. I didn’t want him to know. I’d been drawn to the idea of comfort and forgiveness. The idea was not the man. And that realization was footsteps over my grave—a cold, lonely passage that had no connection to the spirit hiding within.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing? I don’t believe that.”
“Belief . . .” I sighed the word out, then tried to look stronger than I felt. That’s not the truth. I tried to look stronger than my need for belief. “Well, that’s your job isn’t it?”
Roscoe nodded and smiled and that time I was sure I was seeing the same smile the girl had seen. I realized that the Reverend and Roscoe might be two different men.
“I’m duty bound to take the position that belief is the job of us all.”
“Now that’s the evangelical zeal I expected.”
He laughed and his hair shook, the silver lion at play. “I didn’t say what belief.”
“I thought you were duty bound?”
“Only to speak the truth. And when there is no truth to be had, I speak what I believe. And I’m not so sure telling others that their faith is wrong is what I believe anymore.”
“Are you confessing to me?”
“We’re just talking. That’s what you were looking for wasn’t it? Talk. It’s a long walk from official to what troubles you. I may not be the one to share it with you. But you need to take it.”
“Free advice?”
“Always worth what you pay.”
“What’s Dewey running away from?”
My change of direction didn’t surprise him at all. Or it didn’t seem to. “What are we all running from?” Roscoe asked right back.
“Not murder.”
“Are you so sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s running from his brother’s death.” He spread his hands out in front of him and held them like he was trying to hold on to truth itself. It was the kind of gesture that said this is it, the real thing, and it doesn’t get more real. “Everyone is running. To or from something—it doesn’t matter. Only we know what’s chasing us.” Roscoe put his hands down, and I was sure it was Roscoe not the Reverend. Then he said, “There’s a girl.”
* * *
It was full-on dark and the day’s accumulated heat was radiated into a sky that had become filled with stars by the time I returned to the office. Technically I was off duty. More accurately and less technically, I was on administrative leave for a cooling down. The technical part was that Sheriff Benson hadn’t taken my shield or weapon so it was more of a time-out. Still I shouldn’t have been pushing it or his patience, but things change when kids are involved.
Dewey was seventeen, just as I had guessed. The girl he was with, Sartaña, an indigenous Aymara girl from Peru, was fifteen. It turned out that the Starry Night Traveling Salvation Show was smuggling refugees out of the Peruvian conflict zones under the cover of mission trips. It was a situation that raised more questions than it answered but my concern was finding the pair of runaways before anything happened. After that, I’d sort out Dewey’s involvement with his brother.
I didn’t believe Dewey participated in what happened but I was absolutely certain he knew more than he was letting on. Then there was the split personality of the Reverend’s entire enterprise. Refugees and ex-military? It was not a very comfortable mix and definitely not one designed to ensure salvation. There was one other concerning aspect to that. When I asked Reverend Bolin about that charity that relocated the girls, he said only, “Massoud handles that.”
The feeling of spiders creeping down my spine was the only evidence I had for thinking it was a problem. One thing I’ve learned, usually too late, is to listen when my nerves tell me something is wrong.
We’re a large department for a rural sheriff’s office but a small force by any other standards. Branson, the largest, and best-known city in the county has its own police department. Over twenty percent of the county is within the Mark Twain National Forest—federal land and federal jurisdiction. So after dark we’re pretty quiet. The deputies patrol. They respond to calls mostly from the road. That means the office is quiet except for dispatch and the cleaning crew.
I dug into routine paperwork. Havin
g it done would make the official return to duty less daunting. After filling out my logs, and putting my case notes in the file, I found the inventory from Damon’s boat. Fishing tackle and canned food, blankets, and toothpaste—nothing but his pistol was of interest. I wrote a note releasing everything but the .22 revolver and cell phone from evidence. I needed to pull the logs from the cell number. Something else to add to the to-do list. On the inventory, along with CONTENTS OF TACKLE BOX—VARIOUS, was a notation, PHOTOS AND LETTERS—PERSONAL. I remembered the bundle. His pictures were all from deployment and the letters were probably the same. Still they needed to be checked. I revised the release to keep the gun, the cell phone and his letters in evidence. I didn’t see any reason to keep a veteran’s pictures of his buddies. All of it was a just-in-case hold back. Damon wasn’t high on my list for suspects.
While I worked, I called the sheriff to tell him what I was doing. I didn’t want to create any more of a problem than I already had. He was in a better mood. Or at least a calmer one. He took the information and got off the phone without any advice or gripes. Maybe he was running out of steam.
I thought of his talk about retiring and the suggestion that Billy run for the office. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Billy was a complicated subject for me. That made me think of Mike. Mike was not complicated. He was easy and undemanding, and I was pretty sure, interested.
Was I? I was afraid to even consider it, but the idea had become background noise in my mind—relationship elevator music. It was like when you have something to remember or figure out but your mind just won’t find the right path. If you get busy, your brain will puzzle it out for you and the answer will pop into your head when you least expect it.
What popped into my head was terrifying.
I’d been a widow for a year. I was just settling into that and managing to not melt down on a daily basis. The last thing I needed was to have romance rear its ugly head into my life.
Wasn’t it?
I was sure giving a lot of thought to something I didn’t want.
My computer finished its boot-up and I bent to work, instantly feeling more relaxed.
I issued a BOLO, be-on-the-look-out, for the two kids with what information I had. I did a records search and found Dewey had a juvenile record. No surprise. It was actually not as bad as I thought. Most of his defensiveness and mistrust of authority probably came from his brother and cousin. There was no father listed. The surprise came when I tried to contact his mother.
I called the listed phone number to find someone genuinely surprised by the call. They claimed not to be or to have ever heard of Cheryl Boone. When I asked, the woman said she’d had that number for over a year.
More digging told a story between the records. Cheryl Boone was gone. She wasn’t in jail. She wasn’t listed as missing or dead. Her appearance in her own legal life simply stopped. If she had gone missing, someone would have filed a report. I checked family services and found Dewey again. His jacket listed his parents as Whereabouts unknown. He was presumed abandoned.
From there I returned to military records and was not very surprised to find the same kinds of redactions in Daniel Boone’s file as I’d discovered in Silas Boone’s. There was one detail that fit neatly into place. A year and a half earlier, Daniel had been granted a family hardship discharge. I learned two things. He’d come home to take responsibility for his brother. And he was connected to Silas by more than blood.
I did another search. Sometimes coincidences are just that. The 101st Airborne Division is a formation of over twenty thousand men in a number of combined brigades and regiments. The possibility of encountering Screaming Eagle veterans anywhere in the country was pretty high. My own military police unit was attached to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st when I was in Iraq. But the chances of finding connected soldiers and connected crimes in one place stretches coincidence pretty thin, and it got a lot thinner when I pulled up the records of Staff Sergeant Damon Tarique.
Redacted.
Sometimes, when you hit an obstacle, the best thing is to trust that other roads lead to where you need to be. I put away my growing pile of notes on the men involved and concentrated instead on the girls. It was my thinking that anytime people come into the country as refugees, there have to be hurdles. In most cases, hurdles are paperwork, and paper trails are the friend of any investigation. I started by writing a long e-mail to a friend. Marion Combs was a social worker for the Division of Family Services. We’d met when I worked on an earlier case involving one of the kids she worked to protect. It was a failure that changed us both.
In my note, I gave her everything I had on Massoud and the girls from Peru. It wasn’t a long note. Long enough for her to start looking, I hoped. Since Marion had a history with Sheriff Benson, she always called him Chuck, I told her about his despair and plans to retire. I felt a bit like sharing was gossiping. Marion wouldn’t take it that way. It was my issue. I can’t say my intentions were entirely pure though. The history the two of them shared was a youthful romance. If anyone could inject a little life into the sheriff it was Marion.
When my note finished, I paused before sending. The part about charities and kids was fine. Marion would jump on that and find roads I didn’t even know existed. The other part—the meddling in the sheriff’s life—that worried me a little. What is it they say about good intentions and the road to hell? I shook off the thought. If I was going to hell it wouldn’t be for trying to spark up a couple of sexagenarians. I hit Send. I felt pretty good about it too.
I was about to kill the computer and go out the door to find Damon for a little talk when the e-mail program refreshed. I had a new message. It was a preliminary report from the forensics contractor who was doing the autopsy on Daniel Boone. After all the usual caveats and disclaimers noting the tests yet to be performed and lab results to return, it said death was probably the result of drowning. It also indicated wounds that suggested violence. There was a laceration and impact wound on the skull. In addition, there were a series of puncture wounds in the abdomen. They were small in diameter but ragged. The included photo showed three holes in a perfect line spread about two inches apart. The last notation was the most chilling. Cuts and abrasions in the skin from the nylon net were perimortem —at the time of death. He was wrapped in the net and put under to drown.
Chapter 7
The sheriff’s office was in Forsyth and my uncle’s dock was in Rockaway Beach. It wasn’t a great distance but even with recent improvements the roads were twisting and dark. It was a twenty-minute drive in daylight. It took me less than fifteen. I was wishing the entire way that it was summer so I could have had the windows down to feel the air.
I pulled up to park at the head of the dock’s ramp. In summer the lot would be full of vehicles. That time of year, and that time of night, I expected to be the only visitor. Expectations are kind of like worries, almost always there and pretty much always useless. There was a big Dodge Ram with a boat and trailer parked sideways. The logo of the State of Missouri Conservation Department glowed with reflected light on the driver’s side door.
Mike was at the dock again.
I was glad.
It hit me hard. The sensation of desire rolled over me like the blush I’d felt the first time I saw a man naked. It was an almost mirror-image sensation too. I experienced a wave of want, and shame, fear and arousal, and guilt, all of it accompanied by images in my head that really would have made me blush.
I sat in the truck without shutting it off. I looked at the world through the windows, the strings of clear bulbs around the dock, their reflections in the water and the millions of tiny bursts of starlight in the undulating blackness at the center of the lake. Above, there was the spray of the Milky Way and a single line of dark clouds way south. All around were shades of black with crystals of white. The only colors were the mismatched green and red trim on the dock and the bold stripes on the boats bobbing in their slips.
I wan
ted more color.
My mind unlatched with an almost audible click.
I wanted more color.
Not in the night around me, but in my life. For a very long time the spectrum of my life had been defined by shades of brown. The dust of a violent country and the mud made from my blood and horror. Nelson had come into my life and shown me the other colors were still there. But he’d passed without my blooming back into the world. I’d traded my grave for his and wrapped myself up again.
I wanted more color. It was the same as saying I wanted to live. And for the first time in a long while, that didn’t seem like a betrayal to anyone.
“What’s happened to you?” Uncle Orson hit me with the question as soon as I walked into the shop. Then he handed over a root beer still crusted with ice. He’d seen me coming.
“What do you mean?” I smelled the mist coming from the open mouth of the bottle. The carbon dioxide burned my nose and the rich scent soothed it. “I’m smiling.” I said. “I’m in a good mood. Why do you think something’s happened?”
“That’s why. I haven’t see in you in a good mood since . . .”
“I know.” I smiled to let him off the hook before putting the bottle to my lips and taking a long pull of the fizzing liquid. When I lowered it, the bottle spit at me a little and I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “I haven’t been in a good mood since . . .” I let the thought and the words fade but I looked over to the wall behind Orson. There was a calendar there. Each month was one of Nelson’s paintings. It always displayed April from two years before. The image was of a deep river valley from the unseen mountain peak. Flowers in a riot of yellows over green defined one side of the river. On the other were furrowed fields in muted golds bordered by aspen and pine. Through the middle, meandered the river washed in too many colors to count.
Nelson had tried to give him an original painting but Uncle Orson said a bait shop was no place for that. I think he just loved that one too much. Nelson had signed it for him though and the page hasn’t been turned since.
A Particular Darkness Page 10