Written in Blood

by Layton Green

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Why are kids cruel the world over?”

  Preach thought about his own days as a teenager, the ugly and callous behavior that had plagued his past. “Good question. Was there ever a note attached to the gifts?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I don’t suppose you still have any of them?” he asked, thinking of a potential DNA sample.

  She chuckled. “Goodness, no.”

  “Did you tell the police about the gifts when she died?” He had seen no mention of any of this in the file.

  “Probably not. They had stopped months earlier.”

  “Which is why you think they were unrelated?”

  “That, and because they were just harmless gifts.”

  Preach gave Carrie his card and thanked her for her time. Nothing about this case was harmless, he thought, as he walked to his car under a hazy, whitewashed sky that resembled an overcooked fried egg.

  Nothing at all.

  He swung over to Ray’s to get Ari, avoiding the police station and the chief’s texts while he tried to get a handle on what was going on. The streets were a blur of sound and movement, amorphous forms in the forest of madness his hometown had become.

  Somehow Deirdre Hollings’s decades-old suicide was connected to the murders. More than connected: it was the star attraction.

  Deirdre had been obsessed with joining the Byronic Wilderness Society. An unidentified person had sent a string of gifts to Deirdre a few months before her death.

  Ari was almost Deirdre’s doppelganger, and they both loved Jane Austen. Ari’s stalker had purchased all of Deirdre’s belongings at a garage sale. Ari’s stalker was a woman.

  He had to recalibrate.

  “Have you read Lolita?” Preach asked.

  Ari was staring out of the dash and furiously twisting her thumb ring. He knew she wanted to ask what he had found. “It’s been a few years, but it’s not a book you forget.”

  “I imagine not.”

  “It’s the story of an aging child molester’s doomed love affair with a nymphet. The book that launched his career. Apparently no one cared about Nabokov’s transcendent prose until he wrote about a monster.”

  Preach gripped the wheel. He had always had a hard time with the fact that God allowed pedophilia to exist. After seeing the dying light in that child’s eyes in the treehouse, two glass trinkets ground to dust, he could barely hear the word without an uncontrollable rage blurring his vision. “What do I need to know?”

  “At the end of the book, Humbert Humbert—the protagonist—murdered Clare Quilty, the man who stole Lolita from him. Quilty was also a pedophile, though unlike Humbert, who truly loved Lolita, Quilty just wanted her to star in his pornographic films. Good stuff, huh? But Lolita worshipped Clare Quilty and chose to run away with him. Her portrayal as an instigator is my main beef with the novel—I mean, c’mon. Then again, it was Humbert’s story, and he’s an unreliable narrator.”

  “How did the murder go down?”

  “Humbert tracked Quilty to his house and shot him to death. It was messy.”

  “Were there any other distinctive characteristics or physical clues?”

  “I’d have to read it again. Swing by the bookstore and I’ll pick up a copy. I can point you to the right pages.”

  Preach turned left at the next intersection, toward town. “Anything else that strikes you about the novel?”

  Ari pressed her lips together and propped one of her sleek black boots on the dash. “The book’s a no-holds-barred description of Humbert’s obsession with a young girl, but it’s also a book about the overwhelming power of love to transform, save, and destroy. Humbert is a man who can’t control his passions but who is more alive because of them.”

  Preach’s cell phone buzzed again. Another message from Chief Higgins. She was getting angry. He texted back that he was with a witness.

  They picked up a copy of Lolita at the Wandering Muse, then swung by a food truck for dinner. Trios of carnitas tacos to go.

  “I don’t know if your stalker and the murderer are the same person,” Preach said, as they ate out of disposable containers in his living room, “though it’s looking likely. But if the stalker is obsessed with you because you look like Deirdre, doesn’t your current age ring false? If Lolita is the model?”

  “Toward the end of Lolita, Humbert realized he was truly in love with his muse, even after she was no longer a nymphet. Maybe the same thing happened to our killer. She never got over Deirdre, and for some reason, I”—she looked uncomfortable saying the words—“spark her killer’s memory.”

  Preach loaded his tacos with hot sauce, then shoved them down as he skimmed the part of the novel describing the murder. Besides the location—the victim’s house—nothing else caught his eye.

  But for the first time, he might be a step ahead of the murderer. He was excited until an uncomfortable thought hit him. What if the murderer had been watching Deirdre’s house? What if she had seen him leave?

  Even if she had, she wouldn’t have known about the photo.

  So the question remained: What had happened to Deirdre Hollings?

  Something had been done to her, he felt sure of it. Something terrible. And he guessed Ari’s stalker, whether the murderer or not, knew about it.

  He didn’t know yet why retribution was being exacted after so much time, but he thought he had a very good idea as to the identity of the fourth victim. Ever since the conversation with Elvis Klein, he’d harbored a suspicion that one of the members of the Byronic Wilderness Society had started murdering the others. But now he saw a different angle: the members of the Society might have conspired to commit some awful crime against Deirdre. And someone else, an unknown member or an outsider, was taking matters into her own hands.

  He turned to Ari, sitting on the couch with her feet tucked under her legs. “I don’t think the mayor is the murderer,” he said. “I think she’s the fourth target.”

  Ari glanced outside, at the rising moon, then met Preach’s gaze. “Tomorrow’s the anniversary of Deirdre’s death. Didn’t the other murders take place during the night, early in the a.m.?”

  In response, he grabbed his keys and shrugged into his coat, then tossed Ari’s leather jacket to her as she jumped off the couch.

  Preach raced through his hometown. Memories of his own childhood collided with the secrets that lurked beneath Creekville like debris on the bottom of an algae-choked lake.

  Youth possessed no perspective, he thought, the fatal flaw to all of its extraordinary advantages. The young are able to take bold action because they don’t fully grasp the consequences a wrong choice can entail. The late teen years were a mad dash up the mountain of knowledge, dodging bullets of self-doubt with thousand-foot drops looming on either side.

  And at some point everyone stumbles. Enters the world by plunging off the cliff, like Icarus falling from the sky.

  After Ricky was burned, Preach had felt as if he would never regain his equilibrium. He had once been so arrogant, so sure, but then he had learned about suffering, about God, and then he had descended into hell on earth in the prisons and returned with a soul blistered from the lake of fire.

  He didn’t understand the world. He couldn’t reconcile.

  He could only try to help.

  They parked at the station. Reporters flowed into his wake as he swept into the station with Ari.

  “Wait here,” he said, grabbing a manila folder when they reached his cubicle. “I need to talk to the chief.”

  Ari gripped his arm and then sank into his chair. Again he admired her coolness under fire.

  Preach noticed Kirby’s head above the line of cubicles, walking down the hall toward them. Preach took a firm grip on the folder containing the photos of Kirby’s sister. He still hadn’t figured out how to tell him. The chief should probably decide.

  “Chief’s been looking for you all day. I did my best, but . . .”

  Kirb
y’s shrug implied that he could only do so much to hold off Chief Higgins, since partners on such a high-profile case should be accountable and know where each other were when needed.

  “I’ll catch you up later,” Preach said, cordial but firm. Not only because of Jalene, but because a leak at this stage could ruin everything. The chief was the only person he could trust with the dynamite he had.

  “The mayor stopped by again, too,” Kirby said. “She looked like she wanted to chew on some iron.”

  “Gotcha,” Preach said, then dismissed him with a nod.

  Just before he reached the chief’s office, the station’s administrative assistant, Sandy McCorkle, called his name. Her cubicle was right next to Chief Higgins’s office.

  “Fax came in for you from Chapel Hill,” Sandy said, holding out a sheet of paper. “Looks like a sketch.”

  The chief had already spotted him. Preach grabbed the piece of paper, flipping it over to view the artist’s rendering of the woman who had purchased Deirdre Hollings’s possessions.

  The sketch was far from definitive, which only made sense. Unless Carrie Hollings had a photographic memory, she wouldn’t have been able to provide perfect recall on someone she had briefly met a few months earlier. Especially since she had barely seen her face.

  But there was some detail, more than he expected, and the longer Preach stared down at the image, the faster his heart started to beat.

  The woman in the photo had a midsection like an apple, rounded but firm. The height was estimated at 5'8'' or 5'9''. A large, powerful woman. A woman with enough strength to crush Farley Robertson’s skull with a hatchet and stuff Damian Black upside down in a fireplace.

  Her face was middle-aged, vigorous, rawboned. Wide flat cheeks and a hat pulled low. Small eyes of an indeterminate color. A thick neck, and a jaw whose rigidity suggested an almost military force of will.

  Certainly a woman who could pass for a male from a distance.

  It was also, judging by the sketch, a woman he thought he knew.

  There was a stocky, middle-aged woman with a strong jaw sitting not ten feet from that very spot, waiting to speak with him in her office—and just like the woman in the sketch, where a single strand of curls was poking out from underneath the bowler hat, Chief Higgins had blazing red hair.

  51

  Preach stood in the hallway, reeling, working to conceal his shock.

  Who had easy access to an illegal substance like Rohypnol?

  A police chief in charge of an evidence room.

  Who would know how to use a variety of weapons with deadly precision, stage a crime scene and leave no clues?

  Who was the only other person who knew about Preach’s psychiatric visits and could have leaked the details to the media? Who had asked him to consider stepping down from the case and leave a void at the station?

  Was it all an act, he wondered, or did Chief Higgins calm herself with yoga and peace bracelets and herbal teas to try to stave off the darkness, keep the demons at bay?

  The only thing missing was the connection to Deirdre. Chief Higgins was around the same age as the players involved, and she might have lived in Creekville at some point during her youth. Because of her seeming obsession with Ari, Preach had to assume the chief had had some kind of relationship or similar obsession with Deirdre. Chief Higgins had never mentioned her sexual orientation, but she had also never mentioned seeing another man after her husband had died. Or maybe there was another angle that Preach was missing.

  The chief waved impatiently for him to enter. He scrambled for something to say. He had been about to tell her everything.

  Forcing himself to appear calm, he eased the door open and managed a sheepish expression. He couldn’t go over her head without harder evidence. He had to throw her off her guard.

  “Well?” she said, when he entered. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Following up on a few leads.”

  The chief glanced in Ari’s direction. Preach wondered what was going through her head, with the object of her fixation sitting twenty feet away.

  “And her?”

  “I’m keeping her in sight until I figure something out.”

  “What was so important you couldn’t call me back?”

  A note of commiseration softened the anger in her voice. She was such a good liar. She had fooled him from the start, fooled them all.

  “The pest control company finally got back to us,” he said. “One of their workers thought he saw someone lurking around the parking lot the day before Farley died. I tracked him down and got a description.”

  She leaned forward, eyes intense. “And?”

  “It was just Wade Fee.”

  She eased into her seat and reached for the stress ball. He smacked a hand against the desk. “I’m sick and tired of being in the dark. If someone else dies . . .”

  “We have other worries. The mayor is incensed with you. Claims you paid her an after-hours visit.”

  “I did.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  To keep the chief’s attention diverted, he gave her the manila folder with the photos he had found at the marina. He had copies hidden safely at his house.

  Her eyes grew wider and wider as she flipped through the photos, and she put a fist to her mouth. “Good God. Does Kirby know?”

  “Not yet. I’m waiting for the right time.”

  “There’ll never be a right time for that,” she said.

  “I know.”

  He could see genuine empathy tightening the chief’s features. She exhaled a weary sigh and reached for her tea. “The mayor said she’d fire us both if you go anywhere near her again.”

  Preach held up the manila folder in disbelief. “Even with these?”

  “What’s the crime?”

  He opened his mouth, then slowly closed it.

  “Maybe if Kirby’s sister comes forward and says she was paid by the mayor—but who’s going to ask her to do that? Do we ruin her life for a slap on the mayor’s wrist?”

  “Losing a political career is hardly a slap on the wrist,” Preach said. “Plus there’s far more to it. You know that.”

  “So show me. We need concrete evidence linking the mayor and Mac to the murders. Emails, phone calls, eyewitness testimony. Something.”

  Preach started to speak, then looked away, hands clenching at his sides. He could act, too.

  “I have faith in you,” she said. “But you’re under scrutiny, and she’s still the mayor. I don’t want you within a mile of her or her house.”

  Preach kept up the pretense of finishing the conversation, but Chief Higgins’s last words kept ringing inside his head.

  I don’t want you within a mile of her.

  The chief was clearing the path.

  Preach found Kirby at his cubicle. “Take a walk with me,” he said quietly. Then, more loudly, “Grab a slice across the street?”

  Kirby consented with a wary nod, and Preach grabbed Ari—he couldn’t leave her alone near the chief—and herded them both through the reporters, down the street to the Creekville Pizza Pub.

  Preach ordered takeout to make it look real. He led Kirby to a table in the corner, asked Ari to wait a few tables over, and told his partner about everything except the photos of his sister.

  “The chief?” Kirby said, his face slack with disbelief. He kept swallowing over and over, as if something were stuck in his throat. “Why?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I’ll get to the mayor and warn her. Then we catch Chief Higgins in the act.”

  “Should we get Chapel Hill involved?”

  Preach shook his head. “Even if I send you, they’re going to ask where you got all of this, and you’ll have to tell them. With what we’ve got, a few hours isn’t enough time to convince them to listen to a cop with issues who’s been warned to stay away. Maybe they’d send a car to watch her, maybe they wouldn’t, but they’d tie me up for the rest of the
night. We’d be hamstrung. The mayor would die.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Then I’m wrong.” Preach checked his watch. Eight-thirty p.m. “This is going down in a few hours. It might be our only shot. I need you to keep an eye on the chief for me.”

  Kirby’s hand was tapping against his leg. “At the station, you mean?”

  “Let me know when she leaves, then stay with her. Keep me posted on where she goes. Can you do that?”

  “She’ll make my car.”

  “Take an unmarked one and stay out of sight. Assume she’s going to her house and heading out sometime after midnight. I just need to know when she leaves.”

  Kirby balled and unballed his fists. He looked nervous, out of his depth. Preach put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got this.”

  Kirby looked up, slowly meeting his gaze. “Then what?”

  Preach wrote an address down on a napkin. “As soon as the chief leaves her house, let me know and get to the mayor’s house as fast as you can. Tell Terry and Bill to be on call tonight, but don’t tell them why.”

  As Preach rose to leave, he said, “I’m sorry for doubting you. I thought you might have been the leak.”

  Kirby clapped him on the shoulder, his eyes wounded but forgiving. “Don’t sweat it,” he said, after a moment.

  Preach looked over at Ari and shook his head in disgust; he didn’t like any of his choices when it came to her. But he had already made his decision.

  Kirby returned to the station, and Preach walked Ari to his car. “I’m taking you to Ray’s house again.”

  She bit her lip as he pulled into the street.

  Just one night, he thought, and this will all be over.

  Just one night.

  After Preach left the station with Ari, Kirby slunk back to his cubicle. He was lower than the lowest of life-forms, he knew. Lower than a maggot wriggling in the month-old corpse of a rat.

  You’ve got this, Preach had said.

  Something Kirby had always wanted to hear.

  Yet still he made the call.

  “What ya got for me?” Mac said, after he answered.

  “Preach is headed the mayor’s way tonight.”