by Harvey Click
“So you didn’t report it until months later, here in New Mexico far away from the scene of the crime?”
“That’s correct.”
“But somehow your missing brother must’ve turned up, since he was living here with you?”
“Yes, when I got back to Blackwood Shane and I drove out to Billy’s house for one last look, and we found him there.”
“Where’d he been?”
“He didn’t know. He was acting funny and couldn’t remember anything. We thought maybe he’d been in a fight or something and had bumped his head.”
“Did you take him to a hospital?”
“We did after we got to New Mexico. He had an MRI in Albuquerque.”
“And?”
“There was brain damage.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you didn’t have him looked at before you drove all the way out here?”
Shane butted in and said, “I’d just sold my house in Blackwood. My furniture was all loaded up, and Billy seemed healthy except for a bad memory, so we waited till we got here.”
“I see. And why did you bring him with you?”
“He seemed to need help,” Amy said. “We didn’t want to leave him living alone.”
“He needed help, but it could wait until he got here? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me the exact day you left Blackwood?”
Amy didn’t remember so Shane told him.
“Are you aware that on that very same day a serious crime was committed in Blackwood?” Bradford said. “Several people were killed and the mayor’s house was burned down.”
“Yeah, we heard about it,” Shane said. “But we were gone before any of this happened. According to what I read the fire started sometime rather late at night, and we were already out of the state by then.”
“I see,” Bradford said. “A kidnapping followed by a serious crime in West Virginia, and now just two years later two more kidnappings and some other serious crimes. Do you believe these are somehow related?”
“I don’t know how,” Amy said.
Bradford had been making notes in his yellow tablet, but now he put his ballpoint pen on the table and stared at her.
“Do you expect me to believe this bullcrap?” he asked.
Neither of them said anything.
“Have you ever heard of an organization called the Lost Society?” Bradford asked.
Shane and Amy looked at each other.
“Well just in case you haven’t, it’s a criminal organization that works with drug cartels in a lot of different countries. In the last few years they’ve established cells in this country, where they make and distribute illicit drugs and pay off a lot of people in power. Does that ring a bell?”
“Go on,” Amy said.
“The reason I’m on this case is because I requested it,” Bradford said. “For some years now I’ve been investigating the Lost Society, and I was aware of both of you long before your daughter disappeared. I was in charge of the investigation in Blackwood, and though I haven’t been able to prove anything I believe that Miguel Sandoval, the mayor whose house burned down, was involved with this organization, and I believe that certain unknown parties went after him and burned down his house. Your names came up in my investigation, and I knew you left town and moved here immediately after the incident. So when I saw your daughter had been kidnapped I asked for the case and flew in the same day. Now then, I’ve been honest with you and I’m hoping you’ll do the same with me.”
“We didn’t have any involvement in whatever happened in Blackwood,” Shane said. “But I owned a bar there, and I heard a lot of talk about Sandoval, and that’s why I decided to move.”
“And what kind of talk did you hear?”
“I heard that he and his men were involved with the occult,” Shane said. “Some said they performed human sacrifices on a farmer’s property that abutted Billy’s—Amy’s brother. Some said Billy had seen one of these sacrifices, so they captured him and made sure he’d never tell anyone what he’d seen.”
“And how did they do that?”
“According to the MRI he’s been lobotomized.”
“I see.”
“That’s why we were in such a hurry to get out of town,” Shane said. “I figured they might feel threatened by Amy snooping around trying to find out what had happened to her brother, so when she returned to Blackwood we hit the road.”
“And the same day you left, Sandoval’s house burned down,” Bradford said. “There seem to be a lot of coincidences here. And do you believe this same bunch, the Lost Society, had something to do with your daughter’s disappearance?”
“Yes,” Amy said.
“Why do you think that?”
“You’ve been asking a lot of questions,” Amy said. “I’m going to ask you a couple. When you found Candy’s deputy dead in the kitchen, had she been shot?”
“No,” Bradford said. “She’d been half eaten.”
“Did you find any strange footprints, like paw prints?”
“I’m not at liberty to say what we found.”
“Well, just in case you did find some strange footprints, then maybe you ought to look behind Floyd and Butch’s house, and maybe you’ll find the same footprints.”
“What are you getting at?”
“If your investigation into the Lost Society amounts to anything, then you already know they’re involved with the occult, and maybe you already know they’re able to call up demons. There were demons in Blackwood, and anybody you talked to there probably told you so. There were at least two demons at my house yesterday, and there were two others last night chasing me through the wilderness.”
She stopped talking and looked at Shane. “She’s right,” he said. “There were also two of them at Candy’s house last night.”
“Is there anything else you want to add?” Bradford asked.
“No,” Amy said, “except that we’re not crazy.”
“You want us to tell you everything, but you tell us nothing,” Shane said. “Either you’ve heard talk about demons in your investigations or you haven’t.”
“What Mrs. Malone said is not entirely inconsistent with what some other informants have told me,” Bradford said.
The items they’d bought at the drugstore were in bags on the bed. Shane got up and returned to the table with one of them. He used the compass to draw circles with a thirty mile radius around the locations of their property, Candy’s house, and the wilderness where the demons had been last night. The three circles intersected in an empty area on the map, no towns and just two county roads.
He jabbed his index finger at the intersection and said, “Look there and I think you’ll find the Lost Society.”
Bradford barely glanced at the map. He put his yellow tablet in his briefcase and latched it.
“Well then,” he said. “Like Candy told you, your car was found parked beside the Rio Grande. What he didn’t tell you is that the man who drove it there was also found. His name is Douglas Dipson, and he was arrested about two miles away from your vehicle while allegedly holding up a woman at gunpoint in an attempt to steal her car. He claims Candy’s deputy told him to drive your car out there but didn’t make any arrangements to pick him up, so Dipson was attempting to steal a car to drive home in. His fingerprints are all over your car, and for some stupid reason he still had your car keys in his pocket.
“He wants to cut a deal, so he’s been talking about Floyd Boggs, Butch Barrett, Deputy Hodges and Sheriff Candy, and what he says seems to bear out your story. But he doesn’t seem to know who kidnapped your daughter or who Candy was trying to sell you to, and since Candy and Hodges are dead they’re not talking. We’re still looking for Butch Barrett, and when we find him we’re hoping he’ll know something about your daughter.”
“Are you going to arrest me for shooting one of the kidnappers?” Amy asked.
Bradford stood and smiled grimly. “But I suspect you’d be a lot safer if I did arrest you,” he said. “I’m pretty sure you’d both be a lot safer in a nice secure jail somewhere.”
Chapter 8
Jack Roamer found the combination to the wall safe taped on the underside of the top left drawer of Sheriff Candy’s desk. It took two tries to open the safe because Candy had switched the positions of the first number and the last number, leaving the middle number in its proper place, a ruse guaranteed to foil anyone with an IQ lower than fifty. There were two items inside it, a small ring-bound notebook and a zippered leather pouch containing a stack of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills.
Roamer sat at Candy’s desk, which was now his desk again after a hiatus of seven years, and counted the money: seven thousand and nine hundred dollars. In the notebook he found a list of dates followed by letters and numbers. The earliest date was six years ago, April twelve, just about one month after the church had moved into its newly built facility in the desert, and the most recent date was ten days ago.
The letters and numbers following the dates had a monotonous simplicity: X+30, H-15, F-1.2, J-1.2, D-.7 for one month and X+25, H-12.5, F-1, J-1.1, D-.6 for another month. Like the reversed combination numbers, Candy’s shorthand code was guaranteed to foil anyone with an IQ lower than fifty, or possibly in this case forty. Candy had employed four deputies, one of them now dead: Hodges, Forester, Jones, and Dane. Assuming that one meant one thousand, the first five entries, covering a one-month period, suggested that the church had given a payment of $30,000 to Candy, who immediately gave Hodges $15,000. Two weeks later he had given Forester and Jones $1,200 apiece, presumably in return for a favor, while poor Dane, clearly the dumbest of the lot, had been given a paltry $700.
A pattern emerged as Roamer leafed through the pages. At the beginning of each month the church gave Candy a sizable pile of money, generally ranging from $20,000 to $30,000, though one payment was $40,000, maybe because there’d been more mischief for Candy to keep quiet about that month, and one month there was no payment, maybe because Candy hadn’t kept quiet enough. Immediately Candy would give half of it to Hodges and would dole out much smaller payments to Forester, Jones and Dane on an irregular basis, while poor dumb Dane always received considerably less than the other two.
Since Candy always gave Hodges half and then presumably used his own half to pay the smaller bribes to his other three deputies, Hodges must have been keeping more of the loot than Candy, and Roamer wondered what sort of power Hodges had been holding over her boss. Clearly it wasn’t sex—even Candy couldn’t be depraved enough to want to have sex with a thing like that.
There’d been some talk three years ago when Candy’s wife had disappeared, so maybe Hodges had been blackmailing him. Roamer leafed back through the notebook and saw that in fact the extra money to Hodges had started three years ago, exactly at the time Candy’s wife had vanished. Before that she’d been receiving the same piddly payments as Forester and Jones.
Getting rid of a wife was often expensive.
He stuck the money back in the pouch and locked it in the safe but kept the notebook on his desk. Since Dane was the dumbest of the three, Roamer called him into his office and told him to sit down.
Dane sat in the uncomfortable chair facing Roamer’s desk and gazed at him nervously. He was a scrawny guy with a big Adam’s apple who still had bad acne at age thirty.
Roamer smiled and said, “Dane, we haven’t had much of a chance to get acquainted, and since we’re gonna be workin’ together…”
“Yes, sir.”
“You bought yourself a real nice house a couple years back, didn’t ya? You and your wife like the place all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. And let’s see, she’s got a second kid on the way, don’t she?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s good. And she’s doing okay I hope.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, with that new house and a new kid on the way, I expect you’d be partial to havin’ a little extra cash, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I expect you know I’m not in any position to raise your salary, don’t you? You know that’s all set by the city poohbahs.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Course there might be some other ways I can help you out. I don’t mind doin’ that, but the thing is I need to know what I’m getting’ for my money, understand what I mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yep, I’m always willin’ to help a fellow out, but I like good solid value for my money. Now let’s see here.” Roamer opened Candy’s notebook and pretended to read from it. “February seventeen, paid Jimmy Dane six hundred dollars. March twenty-two, paid Jimmy Dane seven hundred dollars. Do them figures ring a bell?”
Dane squirmed and didn’t reply.
“Well, I got it all down here in black and white in Candy’s handwriting. March eleven, seven hundred dollars. April nineteen, six hundred dollars. Like I said, I’m always willin’ to help a man out, but I need to know what my money’s buyin’. What exactly will six hundred dollars generally buy me?”
Dane squirmed some more, and Roamer noticed that a big purple pimple on his right cheek was oozing some pus.
“I keep my mouth shut,” Dane said at last.
“I see. Well, that sounds like real easy work, but I guess sometimes it’s worth six hundred dollars. But what’s the difference between six hundred dollars’ worth of keepin’ your mouth shut and seven hundred dollars? What’s that extra hundred gonna buy me?”
Dane squirmed and said, “Well, you know. Some months…”
“Yes, yes, I see. Some months… Let’s see here, May twelve, one thousand two hundred dollars. That musta been one hell of a month. So let’s say next month I give you one thousand two hundred dollars, what can I expect in return? Do you remember what was goin’ on that particular month?”
“Well, you know, they were afraid to make a delivery that week for some reason.”
“I see. So you had to make it for ‘em?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was that all the way up to Albuquerque?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yep, that’s long drive, definitely deserves a little extra cash. And then there’s some risk involved too. I mean, no one’s likely to pull over a deputy’s car and search it, but if there was some sort of mishap on the road and the highway patrol happened to look in your trunk… What would they find there, was it meth or something else?”
“I don’t know, sir. Just a big box all sealed up.”
“Who’d you deliver it to?”
“I don’t know, sir. A car met me in a parking lot.”
“How’d you know it was the right people? I mean, if you delivered it to the wrong people you’d be in some deep shit, wouldn’t you?”
“There’s always a password.”
“You ever get nervous they’re gonna shoot you instead of handin’ over the money?”
“No, sir, they don’t work that way. It’s just business.”
“Well then, I’m gonna call in the other boys and see if we can work out some pay schedules. I don’t mind being generous, but I want value for my money. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Roamer called Jones and Forester, who were both off somewhere, and he pretended to do some paperwork while he waited for them. Every few minutes he’d look up from his papers and smile at Dane, who was squirming even more than he had before, no doubt wishing he’d been less free with his tongue and now thinking too late of cagier replies he could have made.
Jones was the first to arrive. He sat in the other chair with his legs wide apart and an insolent look on his wide, rough face. Ro
amer smiled and asked how he was doing and how his wife was, but Jones answered with sullen one-word replies. Finally Forester arrived, looking more than a little bit drunk, and since there was no place to sit he leaned back against the wall to keep from reeling.
“Put your guns, your badges, and the keys to your cars on my desk,” Roamer said. “You’re all fired. You’ll get your last check in the mail just as soon as the city poohbahs make ‘em out.”
“Fuck you, old man,” Jones said. “You can’t fire us. You’re just the interim rent-a-cop. You’ll be outta here as soon as the election’s held.”
“Maybe so, but in the meantime I can get Judge Hawkins to write me up some warrants,” Roamer said. “None of you boys look smart enough to know how to hide your bribe money, so I don’t think I’ll have much trouble referrin’ charges on that. And then there’s the matter of runnin’ drugs up to Albuquerque, I think I can scare up some good evidence on that too. So the question is, do you want to go quietly or do you want to deal with a prosecutor on your way out?”
“Fuck you,” Jones said. “You don’t have any idea what you’re up against, old man. You try to cause any trouble, you’re gonna end up dead before you have time to take another shit.”
“Well, to be honest you boys don’t scare me very much,” Roamer said.
“It ain’t us you need to worry about, asshole,” Jones said with a hard smirk.
Roamer smiled and said, “Guns, badges, and keys.”
“This here’s my own gun,” Forester said. “My wife give it to me for Christmas.”
As soon as they were gone, Roamer got on the phone. Seven years ago, when he’d been sheriff, he’d had four fine deputies. Two of them were making good enough money now that they’d probably not want to come back, and if the other two had any sense they probably wouldn’t want to either.
But he knew they were as fed up with things as he was, because when they met for their weekly poker games they talked about it. They talked about what the Church of Love and Serenity was doing not just to their town but to the whole damn county, and he was hoping they’d be willing to help him clean out the corruption before it destroyed everything they cared about.