Dinner came, and they ate over small talk of Mitchell’s legal cases, local politics, how Julia should re-invest the small inheritance that her adoptive parents had left. It was easy for her to fall into the role of sympathetic listener, nodding and affirming Mitchell’s rightness in all matters.
Mitchell walked her to a downtown hotel and rode the elevator with her. “Your skin smells sweet,” he said at her door, his breath on the soft nape of her neck.
“You feel good,” she said, her arms embracing his familiar and comforting form. He took that as an invitation and dug his fingers into her shoulders. She dodged his next maneuver, a nuzzle under the ear. He hadn’t changed his repertoire in her absence.
He would follow his instructional manual by rote until Tab A was inserted into Slot B. Part of her wanted to surrender, through the genetic instinct that needed a mate and provider, but her head was swirling so much she wouldn’t have been able to derive any pleasure. And though Mitchell was certainly not afraid to indulge himself irrespective of her response, she wasn’t up for a game of false enthusiasm.
She kissed his cheek and danced away from his grasp. “Not tonight, honey. But soon.”
His face darkened. “As soon as you’re better?”
“You’ve always said you don’t want half a woman.”
“I don’t want half, but I could at least get a piece.”
“Mitchell.”
“If I didn’t have so much invested in you . . . “
“If you really love me, it’s worth the wait.”
“I can’t wait forever,” he said, anger flushing his cheeks red, portraying emotion he would never let loose in a court of law. “I’m under a lot of pressure. I’m out on the gangplank with some creditors, and these people play for keeps. Once we’re legal, I can get your money for you. For us.”
“My inheritance wouldn’t even cover the down payment on a house, much less bail you out of big trouble. And I’d give that to you right now if you ask.”
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ve got people to see.”
He gave her a kiss and pressed a slip of paper in her hand. He hurried down the hall, giving her a terse wave as the elevator swallowed him. She put her fingers to her lips, about to blow him a kiss, but he was gone before she could float the gesture his way.
She looked down at the paper. It was James Whitmore’s phone number. Beneath it, in Mitchell’s neat, obsessive-compulsive writing, was written: “Sweet dreams, Jooolia.”
CHAPTER TEN
Julia met James Whitmore at the hotel bar. She picked him out immediately. He’d told her to look for the man who didn’t belong, and that would be him. Whitmore sat on a stool, three hundred pounds, his bald head reflecting the neon beer signs. His face was wrinkled with great folds of ebony skin, but his eyes were clear. He was drinking milk, and a milk mustache contrasted with his broad lips. He nodded at her in the bar mirror as she sat beside him.
“Mr. Whitmore?”
“My, haven’t you grown up,” he said.
She realized he must be comparing her to the four-year-old Julia, the one whose father disappeared one autumn night long ago.
“Thank you for coming down. I know you don’t owe me anything, and you probably had plans for the evening.”
“A drink with a pretty lady? Sounds like a plan to me.”
The bartender came, and she ordered a gin gimlet. The strong bite of the alcohol kicked away some of the day’s accumulated weariness. “I know Mitchell Austin talked to you about my father’s case, but I was hoping you might remember something he overlooked.”
“Doubtful,” Whitmore said. “Lots of people owe him favors. If he asks for something, he usually gets it. You with him?”
“Excuse me?”
“You his girlfriend? Wife? Or, what do they call it now, significant other?”
“We’re engaged,” she said, taking a second, larger swallow of the gimlet. “Could you please go over the case for me? Just one more time, and I promise I’ll leave you alone.”
“Not much to add. I wasn’t the lead, that was Lieutenant Snead. I was just part of the investigating team. You’ve seen the case files and the incident report. We put out an APB, sent photos to the FBI and the state agencies, dug into his background to see if anybody had a grudge.”
He looked down at her. “We talked to you, too, of course. But you were so confused, you didn’t know what happened. My, you were cute. We felt so sorry for you, losing your Dad like that. And the deep cuts on your belly, from the broken window in your room. You must have tried to crawl out.”
“The reports said that, besides the broken window, there was no evidence of forced entry and nothing was taken.”
“As far as we can tell. Of course, he might have had a million dollars in a paper sack, for all we know.”
“He was a high school teacher.”
Whitmore looked at her over his glass of milk. “Some people don’t like to hear bad stuff about people they thought they knew. What about you?”
“Try me,” she said. “I’ve probably imagined worse things than you can come up with.”
He smiled, eliminating the fierceness that would otherwise show in his bold features. “I suppose you have. Well, he could have been into drugs, maybe he was dealing. Couldn’t find anybody who dealt with him, but it’s not exactly the kind of information you volunteer to the police just to be a good citizen.”
The night’s band was setting up on the stage at one end of the room. A stringy-haired teenager plugged in a guitar, one of the legion of fast-fingered guitarists that wandered through Memphis on their way to nowhere. Julia had watched them all her life, marveled at the endless power that dreams held on people, dreams that let them lie to themselves about the odds of making it. Or of being happy.
Whitmore’s bulbous eyes took in the scene. “Your father was pretty white-bread plain, as far as we could tell. Could be that he tried real hard to make it look that way. Wouldn’t be the first.”
“No plane tickets, no cab calls, car sitting in the driveway. Anything turn up on his driver’s license or credit cards?”
“Nothing. In a missing person case, you retrace the victim’s steps over and over, trying to find the point where the trail veers off. The day he disappeared, Douglas Stone taught class, dropped you off and picked you up at daycare, took you to the library and the park, fed you at McDonald’s. Apparently tucked you in that night. Then just up and walked off the face of the earth.”
The teen played a blues lick, not bad but nothing special, and began helping the drummer put her kit together. A tall man with a bass guitar strapped across his shoulder began running cables. It would probably take another half-hour before sound check, and Julia wanted to be far away before the first out-of-tune chord screamed.
Julia finished her drink, closed her eyes, and tried to summon details from her dreams and hypnotism sessions. What would Dr. Forrest ask her to look for? “What happened to his personal effects?”
“They were held in the evidence locker for two years then sold at public auction. The money went to the foster home where you were staying.”
“Any valuables or personal effects?”
“Men didn’t wear much jewelry back then, not like they do now. But I remember something that I thought was strange. Didn’t Mitchell tell you about the ring?”
“The ring?”
“Yeah. Big silver thing, shaped like a skull. Had two tiny rubies set in the eye sockets.”
The ring. The one on the hand that held the knife. Julia’s stomach tensed, and a shiver of remembered pain ran up the twin scars on her abdomen.
“That’s kind of how we figured the disappearance wasn’t in connection with a larceny,” Whitmore continued, studying her face. “That ring was probably worth a few grand.”
“Did that get auctioned off, too?”
“Yeah, as far as I know.”
“Any records of sale from the auction?”
“Probably someplace, yeah. T
hat was more than twenty years ago, before computer databases, and paper records have a way of falling through the cracks sometimes. But you might go down to the Records Division and take a look. They’ll probably put up with you for fifteen minutes before they run you off.”
He finished his milk. A man at the end of the bar lit a cigarette. Whitmore glared at the smoker, who promptly picked up his drink and ashtray and went to find a booth.
The bartender came by, Julia ordered a second gimlet, Whitmore passed on more milk. “Can I ask you something, Mr. Whitmore? And you don’t have to answer, because you don’t owe me anything and, as you said, some people don’t want to hear bad stuff about people they thought they knew.”
“Ask away,” he said, glancing at his watch, and then at the band in the corner.
“Were there any reports of Satanic activity in Memphis around that time?”
The corners of Whitmore’s lips lifted a little as if he were about to laugh, but realized she was serious. He must have seen his reflection in the bar mirror. He covered his mouth, wiping away the milk mustache. “There’s always talk of that kind of thing,” he said. “And, no, I don’t believe the devil popped up and dragged your daddy down to hell through the bathtub drain.”
“I don’t, either. But some people apparently take it deadly seriously.”
“We’ve had our share of mutilated animals,” he said. “Most of it was just high school kids with too much time on their hands and too many people to impress. As for an organized effort, we don’t have any Church of Satan branches here or anything. Who was that guy that started that mess out in San Francisco?”
“Anton LaVey? The guy who wrote the Satanic Bible?”
“You really did study up, didn’t you?”
“Even better. I work with a guy who did. He’s either the world’s leading expert on Satanic ritual or else he ought to be writing horror novels. But LaVey was nothing but a glorified carnival barker. I’m talking about the real thing, people who are into it so deeply that they’re willing to kill to protect their secrets.”
“Well, there was a lot of talk a few years back, claims of Black Masses and that sort of thing. Mostly came out of psychiatrist’s reports. You know, ritual child rape, child sacrifice, chronic abuse. Cops watch the news and read the papers, just like everybody else. Sometimes we’d see things that made us wonder, but there was one big problem with all those reports.”
“Let me guess.” Julia took a large gulp of her drink. “Same as with my father. No hard evidence.”
“If even a dozen kids were sacrificed every year, they would have been noticed. Sure, Memphis has a lot of runaways just like everywhere else, and probably more kids run to here than away from here.” Whitmore nodded his head toward the girl sitting beside the sound board, a pale, trembling fifteen-year-old blond. “It’s either music or go into the trade. Sometimes both.”
“So you don’t think it’s possible for a huge, organized, underground cult to exist without being discovered?”
Whitmore shrugged. “Hey, I was a cop for thirty-five years. I know anything’s possible. But, you’d think at least one or two of the cult members would eventually become . . . now, what’s that word I’m looking for? Disillusioned, maybe?”
“‘Disenchanted’ might be more appropriate.”
He laughed. “Maybe you ought to be a writer or something.”
“Or a reporter, maybe. So nobody ever came forward?”
“Not in my experience. But looking back, there’s maybe a handful of unsolved cases that still give me the Creeps. The Mississippi floats up something ugly once in a while.”
“Like an eviscerated corpse?” She told him about the Elkwood victim, and Whitmore’s eyes opened wider.
“We had a couple of cases like that,” Whitmore said, his voice soft. Julia had to lean forward to hear him over the noise of the gathering crowd and clinking glass. “Cut up just as you described,” he said. “Come to think of it, one of them turned up a month or so before your father disappeared. Of course, there was no connection between the two, and no reason to think there might be.”
“You’ve got a good memory.”
He looked down at the bar, at the streaks of light in the polished oak. “A detective never forgets the cases he doesn’t solve. Because, deep down inside, he never stops trying to solve them.”
The guitarist had cranked his amplifier and strummed an ominous minor chord. The audience hooted, whistled, and drank. The drummer played a fill, checking the angles of the drum heads and cymbals. Ten years ago, the anticipation would have Julia electrified and ready to dance all night. Now, she preferred a radio so she could control the volume.
Whitmore looked similarly pained. “That’s my cue,” he said, heaving himself from the stool.
Julia gathered her purse, finished the last sip of her drink, and paid her tab. She walked Whitmore to the sidewalk and thanked him again.
“Doubt if I helped you any,” he said. “Probably just made you more troubled than you already were.”
“Trouble is only what you make of it,” Julia said, reciting one of Mrs. Covington’s mountain sayings. It sounded alien in that world of concrete and steel.
“I won’t tell you that you’d be better off just letting the past alone, and getting on with your life,” he said. “I’ll bet you hear that enough already.”
She smiled. “A detective never stops trying to solve them, right?”
His teeth gleamed in the streetlights. “Keep my number and give me a call if anything turns up.”
She shook his hand and went up to her room, slightly woozy from the drinks. She lay on the bed and listened to the steady throb of traffic, the city’s blood pumping through its monstrous asphalt veins.
Why hadn’t Mitchell told her about the ring? Surely he knew that James Whitmore would mention such an unusual item. But he could have easily withheld Whitmore’s number from her, he could have failed to mention the detective at all. She may or may not have found Whitmore through her own efforts.
By the time she fell asleep, fully clothed, she had convinced herself that Mitchell had only been trying to protect her. Mitchell didn’t want her bothered by the past because he wanted a perfect future for her. As she drifted into a haze of jumbled imagery, she tried to pray but no words came, and neither did a response to her seeking.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Julia hadn’t dreamed at all, at least as far as she remembered in the morning. She had a mild hangover, and she gave her reflection a hard time in the bathroom mirror.
“All it takes for you to avoid nightmares about bones is to slug down some eighty proof,” she said, looking into her own red eyes. “You could be onto something there, girl. Something that doesn’t sound like it leads to a happy ending. I believe I’d just as soon be crazy as turn into a lush.”
Then she realized that probably only crazy people talked to themselves in the mirror, so she showered away the muscle aches and then dove into the Memphis phone book. She got the answering machine of her friend Sue McAllister, who had been a fellow reporter with The Commercial Appeal. Julia left a message that she was in town and wondered if they could get together tomorrow.
Mitchell called, and they met downtown for lunch. Julia glossed over her meeting with James Whitmore and didn’t mention the skull ring. Mitchell had been a patient ally so far, and she didn’t want him to turn on her. She concentrated on being pleasant, the kind of woman she thought he craved. But her mind strayed back to Elkwood, and halfway through dessert of lime Italian ice, Julia found herself thinking of the baseball cards Walter had brought her.
Mitchell’s cellular phone interrupted his eating, and as he spoke into the mouthpiece, Julia studied his features. He was tan, with a strong jaw and cheeks that could raise a shadow by three o’clock. His hair was carefully trimmed, his sideburns cut even with his ears. Dark eyes, a nice mouth. Movie-star handsome, really. He could play the lawyer in a Grisham thriller.
She found herself compar
ing him to Walter, and she shuddered inwardly. She went after the dessert with renewed enthusiasm. Mitchell was her past, present, and future. Walter was the man who fixed her windows. End of reverie.
Mitchell closed his phone and gave that “tax-exempt status” grin that worked so well on civil-suit jurors.
“Will you drive me out to my father’s old place?” she asked.
“The old place? What do you want to go out there for?”
“I haven’t been there in seven years.” She thought up a quick lie. “Dr. Forrest said it would be good for me, help me gain a sense of closure.”
“What does this Dr. Forrest know? You’ve only been seeing her for a few months.”
“Dr. Forrest is helping me. She understands me.”
Mitchell pushed his plate away and looked out into the street. “And I don’t, is that it? I suppose I should be grateful that at least you aren’t seeing Lance Danner.” He said the name in a mocking, effeminate manner. “Or are you on his calendar for this afternoon?”
“Will you take me or not? I can afford a cab.”
Mitchell sighed, the exhalation of a tireless martyr. “Okay. Let’s go. We can talk about the wedding on the way.”
The house where Julia had lived was in Frayser, fifteen miles from downtown. The area was a bit run down, old industrial meeting up with the urban push of the outskirts, with working class families caught in between. They had a little difficulty finding the house because the area had changed so much, with new construction and the leveling of the giant maples that had once lined the road. The house still stood, its clapboard siding grayed by weather, a section of the gutter missing, grass high around the crumbled walk. A “For Sale” sign leaned in the front yard.
They walked around back, Mitchell carefully watching his step so his shoes didn’t get scuffed. The fence along the back yard was missing some of its pickets and looked like a retired boxer’s smile. The farm that had once stretched beyond the row of houses had been carved into lots, though a pasture and the warped barn remained.
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