Written in Blood

by Layton Green

  Preach let his eyes roam the office. His gaze alighted on a bookshelf by the window. Legal tomes took up most of the space, but the top shelf was given over to Faulkner, Styron, Pat Conroy, and John Hart. The coffee table held stacks of literary journals and National Geographic, as well as the Triangle Business News.

  “You’re a fan of literature?” Preach asked.

  “The law is a harsh mistress. I don’t have much time for anything else. But yes, I pick up a novel from time to time.”

  “And a literary journal.”

  The attorney opened his palms. “This is starting to feel like an interrogation.” He checked his watch again. “I’ll give you five more minutes.”

  Preach paused long enough to convey the fact that should he need more time, he would take it. “Did you know about Damian’s involvement with Mac Dobbins?”

  “His involvement?”

  Preach didn’t respond; the question had been self-evident.

  “Mr. Dobbins is a present client, so I won’t be able to join you in your far-reaching speculations.”

  “Did you see or hear anything unusual at Mr. Black’s house that night?”

  “No.”

  “What time did you leave?”

  “Right before nine.”

  “His dogs were present?” Preach asked.

  “As always.”

  “Do you know if the door was locked behind you?”

  “I assume so,” Elliott said. “I’ve no idea.”

  “What about potential suspects—you knew the deceased well, were there any recent arguments?”

  “Damian was very well-liked in the community,” Elliott said. “I don’t know of a single person with whom he was at odds.”

  “Are you familiar with a writer named J. T. Belker?”

  The attorney leveled his gaze on Preach. “I know Damian felt bad about not publishing him. Is there something else I should know?”

  “Did Damian ever mention that he might be afraid of Belker?”

  The attorney’s eyes narrowed even further, a look Preach took for interest in the topic. “No.”

  Preached considered his next question as a train whistled in the distance. “Was Damian a happy man?”

  Elliott looked surprised at the question, then pensive. “We’ve all thought about it, haven’t we? Being a writer, an artist. There’s a certain romanticism involved. But it takes a toll on you. My friend was like a new pack of baseball cards, Detective: you never knew what you’d get. He was complicated, both the saddest and the happiest man I ever knew.”

  “Thank you for your candor,” Preach said. “I always find it helpful to understand the victim.” He pressed his lips together. “I apologize, but I’ve got to ask, since your fingerprints were found at the scene. Do you have an alibi for the rest of that evening, after you left Mr. Black’s house?”

  “I thought I wasn’t a suspect?”

  “We’re just ruling out possibilities.”

  “Of course you are. We wouldn’t want this case to become any more of a fiasco than it already is, would we? How about you let me know when I’m officially a suspect, and then we’ll talk about an alibi.”

  Preach locked eyes with Kirby, a signal meant for Elliott, and then stood. “That’s all for now,” he said. “We appreciate your time.”

  The attorney saw them to the door, his tone obliging once again. “I knew both men. Let me know if anything comes to light; maybe I can be of assistance.”

  Preach turned. “Let me know, too, please. If anything comes to light.”

  “What was that about?” Kirby asked as they returned to their car. “You think he might know something?”

  “I don’t know what I think about this case,” Preach said. He ran a hand through his hair and unlocked the car. “But I can’t shake the feeling we’re on the outside looking in.”

  27

  “Tell me about being a prison chaplain,” his aunt said. Her office was wood-paneled and hushed, a chapel of manufactured calm.

  After the interview with Elliot Fenton, Preach had dropped Kirby off at the station and driven straight to his aunt’s office. It was a difficult transition. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why did you stop preaching after only one year?”

  Preach made eye contact with his aunt. She knew this already. She was the one who had helped him realize that becoming a preacher had been a kneejerk reaction, an attempt to make himself into something he was not. “I had a crisis of faith.”

  “Of belief in God?”

  “Of my place in the church. I just didn’t feel like I was helping anyone.”

  “Did you have any breakdowns during this year?”

  “No.”

  She waited, and he waved a hand. “There were plenty of moments when I felt saddened beyond belief, almost to the point of paralysis, at the amount of pain in the world. But nothing like what happened earlier.”

  “So the other incidents happened during your time as a chaplain? You mentioned there were others, just ‘not like Ricky.’”

  Preach’s hand twitched. He knew letting that slip had been a mistake. “It was just one, and it was minor.” He waved a hand. “Nothing I couldn’t deal with.”

  She wrote something down. It made him uncomfortable. “So you left the church and signed up to be a prison chaplain?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “I’d like you to talk about it. Your state of mind during this time.”

  Preach’s eyes roamed the room, seeking a reprieve. Besides the desk and the loveseat, the only other furniture was a grand piano.

  Nothing hung on the walls except two framed prints, one of which depicted a pair of lotus flowers. It looked like a Monet. The other was also Impressionist and showcased a dark-haired young woman in a white-washed Middle Eastern city. Her head was tilted to the side, regarding the onlooker with an introspective gaze. Two bright red ibises, one standing on her hand and one perched on a wall, seemed both integral and strangely alien to the scene. He wondered why his aunt had chosen it. Knowing her, there was a therapeutic reason.

  “For starters,” he said, with the sudden desire to meet the mysterious woman who had inspired the painting, “there’s the crimes these prisoners committed. The worst of humanity. I had to listen to confessions that . . . let’s just say that if I hadn’t believed in the existence of evil before I heard them, I did after.”

  She gave a gentle, encouraging nod. “What else?”

  He blew out a long breath. “The questions raised, I suppose. Concerning the ultimate nature of man and God. How did humanity come to this? Why did God let us? If free will is the answer, but God created everything, then what does that say about God? I struggled daily with these questions.”

  “What triggered the incident?”

  “I wouldn’t call it an incident. Just a . . . tragedy.”

  “Okay.”

  She waited for him to continue. He felt himself start to disassociate, his mind working to stuff the memory in a tidy, out-of-sight corner of his psyche.

  “I think it would be helpful to talk about it,” she said.

  He refrained from looking at the paintings again, tried to appear as detached and in control as possible. “There was an inmate who got pregnant. Raped by a guard. She managed to hide the pregnancy by staying in isolation until she started to show.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Just listen. It seems impossible, but she delivered the baby herself, in isolation. The first mealtime after the birth, somehow keeping the baby quiet, she asked for a guard when food was shoved through the slit in the door. Not just any guard, but the man who had raped her, the father of the child. She knew he would come, expecting to trade sex in exchange for release from isolation. And he did come. He opened the door and saw the floor soaked in blood, a tiny baby cradled in the prisoner’s arms. She told him about his son. And then, before the guard could react,” Preach’s voice grew barren and distant, like a sliver of cracked gray
asphalt running through the desert, “the mother stabbed the baby to death with a pen.”

  Whatever words his aunt had been about to utter were cut off as if bitten in half by a shark. He could see her jaw working back and forth in minute increments, controlling her reaction in front of her patient.

  “I lost my voice and couldn’t finish the session,” Preach said. “I went home and didn’t leave my couch for two days. It felt as if anchors were holding down my limbs.”

  “Did you recover on your own?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened after you did?”

  “I had another crisis of faith, which led to my resignation.”

  “In God this time?”

  “In my ability to objectively serve the prisoners.”

  “You felt you had done that prisoner harm? Shaken her faith in someone she looked to for redemption after committing such an abominable act?”

  He felt his hands clenching at his sides. He had been hoping his aunt wouldn’t go there. “Not her. Him. The father. As soon as I went back, I visited with the guard. He had killed the mother with his bare hands in that cell. He was in custody now, of course.” Preach swallowed. His throat felt coated with glue. “After he killed her, another guard found him in the cell, rocking the dead baby in his arms. When I went to see him, I assumed he wanted to talk about what he had done and God’s forgiveness. But all he wanted to know was why they had taken his son away and when he could see him.”

  Preach drove away from his aunt’s office in silence. It did not help to talk about such things. It only hurt.

  Though she didn’t show it, he knew it was hard for her as well, and that pained him. He should have gone to a stranger.

  Or to no one at all. He could tell Aunt Janice thought something was wrong with him and was going to send him to someone else for further evaluation. He had no idea what he would do if he couldn’t be a cop.

  The streets were quiet, damp from a light rain. Moonlight glossed the sides of the buildings as he passed through downtown Creekville and continued into Chapel Hill. Before he met with Ari, there was a stop he had to make. Questions about the past he needed to ask, from someone who had been there.

  Preach’s mother opened the door with a glass of white wine in her hand. “It’s good to see you, son.”

  “You, too.”

  As Preach watched the delicate way she held the glass, he had a flashback to his twelfth birthday, when his mother had reached up to hang a piñata for him and his friends, colored bangles slipping down her wrists, the smell of reefer and coconut shampoo mingling in her hair.

  Back then she never drank wine. She drank beer straight from the bottle.

  She led him to a low gray sofa in the living room. A gas fire flickered inside a brick column. “What an unexpected pleasure. Can you stay for dinner?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. I have to meet someone.”

  “Will you at least have some tea? A beer?”

  “Water’s fine. I can get it.”

  When he returned to the sofa, her hands were in her lap, cradling the wine. “I can’t . . . I can’t believe there was another murder.”

  “It’s why I’m here. I mean it’s always good to see you, but I have a few questions.”

  “For me?” she asked in surprise.

  “About Farley Robertson and Damian Black. I’m trying to get a better understanding of their relationship. I thought I’d start with you.”

  “What could high school possibly have to do with why they were murdered?”

  “I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

  She sat back. “We were never close. And don’t you think they might have changed over the years?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. You’ve told me about Farley. What was Damian like?”

  She was quiet, as if reflecting on the gravity of his murder. “Shy, polite, almost demure. Silver-tongued with the girls, though. One of those guys who doesn’t stand out in a crowd, but when they get you alone, they whisper sweet nothings in your ear. A friend of a friend dated him.”

  “How did that end?”

  “I can’t remember, honestly.” Her gaze went distant, searching for memories. “Oh, honey, this was all so long ago!”

  “You’re doing great. It’s helpful. What about Elliott Fenton? Wasn’t he in their class as well?”

  “The attorney? I believe he was.”

  “What do you remember about him?”

  The question prompted a strangely superior smile from his mother. It was a smile sparked by memories, one he knew she must have unleashed on unlucky suitors, dazzling the boys—his father—with her distant blue eyes and striking good looks.

  “He was about the same as he is now,” she said. “Arrogant, privileged, Southern. He was everything your father and I resented about the Old South.”

  “He said his dad was a tobacco farmer.”

  “That he was. He farmed about half the county.”

  “Anything else you remember about them? Unusual stories, rumors?”

  She curled her hands around her wine glass. “I . . . not offhand, no.”

  “What about common interests or hobbies?”

  “Evan and Lee were involved in the school paper. Maybe Elliott, too.”

  “I don’t suppose you have any old issues?”

  “Hardly.”

  Preach tapped the edge of the couch. “Were there any tragedies that happened around that time? At school or in town?”

  Another pause. “Not involving them. There was a suicide our senior year, a girl named Deirdre Hollings. And one of the teachers died of a heart attack.”

  A suicide and a heart attack were not uncommon occurrences, but he made a note to check them out. See if there was some bizarre connection to Belker or Mac Dobbins. “Anything else?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  Preach checked his watch and rose. Time to meet Ari. “I’ve got to run. Thanks for the chat.”

  “You know,” his mother said, as he was moving toward the door, “there was something . . . God, it’s just been so long . . . some kind of secret club that posted anonymous love poems and stories in the school paper. Innocuous on the surface, but the students all knew they were code for the social scene.”

  He stopped moving. “This secret club—do you remember the name?”

  Her trill of laughter was sharp, judging. “Something incredibly pretentious. What was it . . . the Byron, the Byronic forest—” She snapped her fingers. “The Byronic Wilderness Society. That was it. I can’t believe I actually remembered.”

  “And Damian, Lee—they were part of this?”

  She swatted a tendril of hair out of her face. “I don’t think anyone ever knew for sure who was behind it. But those two were probably good candidates.”

  “What about Elliott?”

  “I just don’t know. Why don’t you ask my sister about the past?” she asked, failing to conceal her bitterness. “I assume you’ve seen her?”

  “Aunt Janice was six years ahead of you,” Preach said. “Why would she know anything?”

  “During grad school she interned as a guidance counselor at the high school. I resented it greatly. But maybe she heard something.”

  “Even if she did, it was confidential,” Preach said. “But I’ll ask her. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “She knows where to find me.”

  “And you know where to find her.”

  She rolled her eyes. “My sister isn’t the saint you think she is.” She looked as if she were going to say something else, something cruel, then buried her face in her wine.

  “I don’t think she’d claim to be.”

  Preach was so tired of their feud. He got nothing else useful from his mother, but as he drove away he couldn’t stop thinking about the Byronic Wilderness Society.

  28

  Ari loved fall in the South. The clarity of the sky, the wind whipping piles of leaves into a colorful flurry of miniature whirling dervishes, the delicious s
pookiness of grasping oaks and moss-covered cemeteries and shriveled cornfields. Fall was brisk walks in the Carolina woods, patio nights with an old sweater and a bottle of wine, curling up at her favorite haunts with a cappuccino and a good book.

  She was studying at Caffè Driade, an eclectic little coffee shop nestled in the forest. The interior was warm and cozy, a jazz note trapped in amber walls and a low wood ceiling. French doors led to pebbled paths and a terraced patio where Ari was sitting. Metal folk art was sprinkled among the trees.

  Despite the sublime setting, she felt jittery. She was falling behind in her classes. Finances were tight. Two employees of the Wandering Muse had just quit, anticipating bankruptcy or a fire sale, despite the fact that business was booming. Especially sale of Damian’s novels.

  Most of all, she couldn’t shake her dread stemming from the two murders that had poked a hole into the cocoon of her quirky little town.

  At dusk, a reminder bubble floated onto her refurbished MacBook Air. It was almost time to meet with Detective Everson.

  Joe. Preach.

  Which name did she prefer? He seemed to be all and none of the things his different monikers implied.

  A complicated man, for sure. An exciting change from Trevor, who wore his rebellious personality like a billboard.

  She didn’t understand the detective’s interest. She got that some men were drawn to her, but Preach was very good-looking, and, in her mind, Ari would always be the frighteningly skinny girl in the dark makeup and cool-but-not-sexy clothes. The one who watched other lives unfold.

  Unable to read another word about jurisdictional authority or motions for summary judgment, she stuffed her laptop into her backpack next to a steampunk novel she couldn’t find the time to finish.

  When she looked up, a man with greasy hair spilling out of an old Texaco cap was walking toward her. Her table was halfway down a wooded slope, in an isolated corner of the terrace.

  Before she had time to react, he sat across from her and slammed his elbows on the table. He leaned in, a cruel grin drawing attention to a scar that made the top of his lip look caught in a fishhook.