by Layton Green
“You’ve lost me,” Ari said. She was looking at him strangely. “I don’t disagree with the analysis, but how do you think it might apply to the mindset of the murderer?”
“I said I became convinced the crosses—the reference to Crime and Punishment—had nothing to do with Farley. But I’ve rethought that. I still don’t think it was a direct reference, meaning I don’t think Farley stole someone’s favorite first edition copy. But neither do I think some random nihilistic killer decided to pull a Raskolnikov in Creekville, North Carolina. Not that this wouldn’t be the place for someone to implement a radical philosophical theory.”
She chuckled in agreement. He rubbed at his two-day’s growth of stubble and said, “What I do think is that something in the novel, maybe one of the themes, is the reason Farley was murdered.”
She took a moment to absorb his words. “So maybe it’s even simpler than it appears. Maybe Farley did something awful, and the killer felt like he needed to pay for it. Crime and punishment.”
“Yeah, maybe.” He glanced out the window, at the murky shadows of the pines looming over the parking lot. “If the clue is simply the title, then I could have saved a lot of hours over the last few days. I feel as if I’ve run a marathon in my mind.”
“But your life wouldn’t have been forever enriched by the wisdom of a timeless work of genius. What did you think of it, by the way? I am, of course, now going to assume that you’re widely read.”
“Why make assumptions at all?” he asked.
“Why don’t you just answer my question? You’re worse than my law professors.”
He gave a faint smile and finished the last of his wine.
“Care for another?” she asked.
“Not tonight.”
She sank deeper into her chair and wrapped her fingers around the stem of her glass. “You liked the book, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“So you enjoyed the story of a quasi-sociopath who commits murder and spends the rest of the book whining and trying to justify his actions?”
Preach started to say he didn’t see it that way, that he had a very different view of the main character and his motivations, a view he hadn’t seen mentioned in any of the commentaries. But he stopped himself.
“I know it’s heresy,” she continued, “but that’s the beauty of literature. It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I don’t have to love the voice that speaks to you, just the one that speaks to me.”
They shared a moment of silence Preach thought would be awkward but wasn’t, as if they had dozens of silent pauses under their belts.
The room felt warm, too warm, and Preach pushed to his feet. “Thanks for the drink.”
“You can’t leave yet.” The ends of Ari’s mouth curled upward, like the stretch of a jungle cat. “I haven’t heard your assumptions about me.”
“I find that actions are the best judge of character.”
“C’mon, I’ve already made a fool of myself. And you have to promise to be completely honest.”
Preach had already glanced around the apartment. The living room walls were unadorned and painted a soft blue. On a mantle above the gas fireplace, a line of framed photos depicted street scenes from foreign cities, never with Ari in them. More photographs graced the hallway, none of them family except for one that Preach guessed was Ari as a little girl. She was sitting on a low, snow-topped stone wall, her parents standing beside her. A smiling older man with Ari’s eyes hugged her from behind, their rosy cheeks touching.
Through the half-open bedroom door, Preach glimpsed candles, cheap shelving overflowing with books, a jewelry box, and more books atop an Indonesian-style trunk. A pair of concert posters from bands Preach didn’t recognize was pinned to the far wall.
“I’ll give you a little help,” she said. “Privileged rich girl from the suburbs goes to high school in Charlotte and then a private liberal arts college. She joins a sorority and goes straight to law school after graduation, and that’s about the sum of her life experience. Her grand plan is to marry rich in law school, move back to the suburbs, and repeat the cycle.”
Preach gave a soft chuckle and moved for the door. As he reached for his coat, she called out to him.
“Play fair,” she said. “Impress me with your powers of observation.”
He gave a rueful smile, realizing she had thrown his words back at him. A useful skill for the courtroom.
He was going to leave anyway, but he saw something in her eyes that told him she was yearning for someone to tell her something about herself. Something that hadn’t been said a hundred times already from a bar stool or on a stilted first date, something that spoke to her and not a shallow image of her passed around in the minds of hopeful suitors, like a baton in some never-ending, Darwinian relay race.
Preach held her gaze as he shrugged on his coat. “Okay, then, Ms. Hale. I think you’re an only child, and I don’t think you grew up anywhere near a suburb. You didn’t stay put in the same state or even the same country. Maybe your parents were military or worked for an NGO, but you were always on the outside looking in, and you never had a place to call home. In high school you were at the top of your class, far more worldly than the other girls your age—not to mention the boys. That might have made you cool, except you hadn’t grown into your looks and didn’t speak or think like anyone else. Your precociousness made you even more of a misfit, so you rebelled, I’m guessing as a Goth or a punk. And instead of protecting you from the world, your parents left you to drown in it.”
Ari’s face had drained of color, giving her white skin and red lips an ethereal pallor, like a wounded ghost. Something inside him was drawn not just to her intelligence but to her chaotic hair and restless slouch, her lack of focus on herself.
“Go on,” she said from the couch, her voice so low he could barely hear her.
He looked her in the eye. “You chose to go to college in a big city, studied literature, and explored everything you could. You found that adult life, as you suspected, was incredibly multifaceted—but none of those facets made the world make any more sense. You grew into your looks and started to receive a lot of attention from guys, which you weren’t sure what to do with. You would rather have eaten a bag full of spiders than join a sorority. After graduation, you missed traveling, so you backpacked for a year around the world, all by yourself. Because you’re smart and realized you had to do something with your life, you decided to go to law school. You traveled enough to witness the terrible injustices of the world, so you’re studying to be a human rights lawyer. Your parents don’t give you much, if any, financial support, but you have a beloved grandfather from North Carolina who allowed you to establish residency, and you chose UNC Law. You work in a bookstore and live in Creekville because you need the money and because the people in Chapel Hill remind you too much of high school. You still don’t have a city, a state, a tribe, a home—books are your country.”
He stopped to take a drink. Her face had grown as still as a cave pool. “My parents were teachers at international schools,” she said softly. “We moved every two years my entire childhood, which is a social death sentence for a kid. They were far more into traveling and each other than to me.” Her smirk looked forced. “I guess you’re better at this than I am. And my love life? Would you care to expound on that eternal mystery?”
He heard the resentment in her voice and remembered the long T-shirt hanging by the door, like a lost relic from summer vacation. He answered not to be cruel, but because, again, he thought she wanted someone to tell her the truth.
“You had a breakup recently,” he said. “The guy is tall and aloof, good-looking, maybe an artist or a musician. But even though he liked what he saw, he doesn’t yet know how to love anyone besides himself. So you let him go, and he didn’t protest very hard.”
She gave a bitter laugh and said, “Strike one, Detective. He broke it off. And since we’re being honest, you’re not talking to me about Dostoevsky just beca
use I work at the bookstore and knew the victim, are you?”
His lips parted in a faint smile as he opened the door. “You called in an incident tonight, ma’am. I just responded.”
11
When Preach arrived at the station the next morning, Officer Haskins told him he had finally heard from Farley’s sister, a dentist in Los Angeles. She had helped finance the bookstore and still owned a stake. Though she had no interest in keeping it, she promoted Nate, the dreadlocked fulltime employee, to manager until a buyer was found.
Preach talked to the sister himself but gained no useful insight. She and Farley had not been close in years, and a quick check confirmed her claim that she was in LA the night of the murder.
Soon after, he got an email from Evidence. Farley’s laptop and phone had been unlocked.
He had sent the two items to Durham PD, which was large enough to employ Rance Crowley, a full time IT guy who also helped with cybercrime. Rance was a Silicon Valley transplant, smart but glib, an avid computer gamer and trail running enthusiast who fit in with the cops in rough-and-tumble Durham about as well as a rye whiskey drinker in Napa Valley.
In the evidence room, atop Farley’s laptop, Preach found a handwritten note:
Easy-Peasy. Standard four-digit pin on the phone, and un-encrypted installation of Windows.
Preach had Kirby check Farley’s texts and phone messages. Preach worked the laptop, starting with a Gmail account that opened with a stored password. He found a slew of work-related emails from book distributors, authors, publicists, and Farley’s accountant. Preach noted with interest that the bookstore was losing money.
The browsing history was personal. Website after website of gay porn. Preach clicked on the first dozen, saw nothing underage or criminal, and made a mental note to have a PO dig deeper, check for an escort service that might have sent someone to the townhouse. He had seen no evidence of a jilted lover, but he had learned never to discount jealousy as a motive.
The first keyword search he tried was “Belker.” He got dozens of hits, most sequestered in a Pen Oak Press folder. The emails pertained largely to the publication of Belker’s first novel. The final correspondence was the rejection: a rote email informing the author that, regrettably, Pen Oak Press would not be publishing Refractions of a Murder.
He searched for Damian’s name next, and got another slew of hits. Curiously, the last entry was six weeks old. Before that, the two men had corresponded on a daily basis, everything from political rants to book tips to plans to get together on the weekend.
Why had the two men, close friends since high school, stopped writing?
“Yo, Preach!” Kirby called out from his cubicle. “You need to see this.”
“See what, a new body lotion?” another officer yelled, followed by hoots of laughter. “Is it mango-beet-papaya?”
“Give us a pose, Scotty the Body!”
Kirby stood on a stool with his hands behind his head, flexing his biceps. The troops cheered. He jumped down and walked over to show Preach a text on Farley’s cellphone that Wade Fee, the Rabbit Hole Café barista, had sent to Farley at 11:45 p.m. the night of the murder.
-Will b there in 30-
Below that was the initial text from Farley, sent at 11:37 p.m.:
-Up late tonight, can you swing by with some groceries?-
Preach ran a hand through his hair and released a deep sigh.
“I don’t think your boy was swinging by with a lasagna,” Kirby said.
“No.”
“So he shows up fifteen minutes after the neighbor goes to sleep, sells Farley some crib, and the drop goes bad. But what about all the other stuff, the crosses?”
“Maybe the drop didn’t go bad. Maybe there was another reason they wanted him killed, and they left the crosses to muddy the waters or to frame someone like Belker.”
“Seems a bit, I don’t know, weird for Wade and Big Mac Dobbins to use a famous novel at a crime scene.”
“Yeah. It does.” Preach handed the phone back to Kirby. “Do me a quick favor and run a DMV report, find out what kind of car Wade drives.”
He decided to go alone to pick up Wade, thinking his old friend might be more forthcoming in private. A squall had passed through, and Preach inhaled the loamy smell of rain-soaked pine needles as he strolled to the side door of the Rabbit Hole Café. He had seen Wade’s restored Chrysler in the parking lot, so he knew he was working.
Mac and his crew were shooting pool, and Mac gave him an ironic salute. “Afternoon, Detective,” the café owner bellowed. “You should try the butternut squash empanadas, wash them down with a pint of our new milk stout. If you need to do some detectin’ after that, we’ll set you up with a nice pour over, give those brain cells a jolt.”
Preach ignored him. When Wade saw him, the barista’s face soured like he’d bitten into a lemon. “What now, man? It’s the afternoon rush.”
“I hate to do this,” Preach said, “but you’ll need to come with me.”
“Huh? Why?”
Preach lowered his voice and said, “Because we found the texts you exchanged with Farley the night of the murder.”
Wade looked dazed. He asked the younger man working the espresso machine to take over.
“We’ll cover for ya,” Mac said to Wade as he left with Preach, but the café owner was looking at Preach when he spoke, his mouth fixed in a rictus above his beard, eyes hard and unblinking as they followed the two men out the door.
“It’s not what you think,” Wade said from the passenger seat. He was wearing his rimless glasses and brown beret, and the day’s T-shirt of choice read Rubik, The Amazing Cube. He had recovered his gruff tone, but his right knee pistoned silently in place as Preach drove.
“That’s good,” Preach said. “Because what I think is that we have a text suggesting you were at Farley Robertson’s condo at the time of the murder. And that’s what a grand jury will think, too.”
“Like I told you, I was playing poker with Mac and the others.”
In response, Preach made a sharp left, off Main Street and onto Goodson Drive, away from the station.
Wade straightened. “Where’re you going?”
Preach took a two-lane road that passed by the high school, a field of dead cornstalks, and then the dairy farm where, long before keg parties and cliques and angst-ridden crushes, their parents used to take them for ice cream, chatting on the rocking chair front porch while their kids chased each other through the meadow.
“How’s your life been, Wade?”
“Peachy.”
“Wife and kids?”
“Nope.”
They passed the park where Preach used to play Little League. His dad had attended all his ball games, despite the fact that he hated competitive sports.
“You gonna hit all our old spots?” Wade said. “We can stop the car and make out if you want.”
“I’m sorry I handled things like I did. We were just kids.”
Wade snorted. “You think I’ve been pining about it all these years?”
“I just wanted to say it.”
“Well, you have.”
Preach gripped the wheel. “You really want to go down for those guys? I know you ran drugs to Farley, but I don’t think you pulled the trigger. Which could be a whole different ball game in a court of law.”
Wade took a cigarette out of the pack he kept rolled inside his shirt cuff. It took him three swipes of his thumb to light it. “I wasn’t there.”
“If you never showed, how come you didn’t send a text to Farley telling him you weren’t coming?”
“I mean I wasn’t there for the murder, man.”
Preach gave Wade a tight-lipped glance. “So what, you made a delivery sometime after midnight, left, and someone else waltzed in and murdered him? What was it, a revolving door of vice? Tell me what you know, Wade. Did you leave the door unlocked? What do the crosses mean? How much was Lee into Mac for?”
“I’ve got no idea who killed
him,” he muttered. “That’s all I have to say.”
“We’re off the record here. I wanted to chat with you, man to man, before the interrogation room. Give you a chance to come clean.”
Wade sneered as they crossed the tracks next to a hardware store where Preach had stacked lumber for a summer. “Why? For old time’s sake? What happened to you, man? You just dropped us like . . . like you were better than we were.”
Wade had never been an athlete, or the cleverest kid in class, or the best-looking. His popularity had stemmed from his aloof attitude and his ability to befriend the cool kids. He always had his finger on the pulse of the scene, knew where to score the best weed, how to get into college parties.
When Preach flipped the switch during their senior year, Wade saw it as a betrayal of the highest order, an attack on their way of life.
“It wasn’t like that,” Preach said.
“Then what the hell was it? Your cousin? I know that was rough, but none of us believed the church stuff was real. And a cop? I know you, man. People don’t just change like that.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But people do conceal who they are.”
Wade shook his head.
“This isn’t about my life, it’s about yours. And you do not want to go to prison, Wade. Trust me on that one. You think you’re hard, but you’re not.”
Wade kept shaking his head and fiddling with the ends of his moustache, his knee bouncing faster.
Preach killed the engine as they pulled into the station. “Let me talk to the DA and get a wire on you. Maybe they’ll overlook the drug charges.”