by Alex Grecian
Which Skottie could see for herself. The second page in the file was a list of names culled from a newsletter subscription pool. The sixth name on the list was circled: Winnie Shrimplin.
“Armed with Ruth Elder’s information, Rudolph Bormann’s name, and the camp he was assigned to in the war, my mother went looking for other survivors who might remember him. We try to keep track of everyone who came out of the camps, everyone who might be willing to help us. Winnie Shrimplin was briefly in Ravensbrück but was shipped out to Mauthausen-Gusen, probably on the same train that took Ruth Elder.”
“Where is she now?”
“Living in Spain. She is not well enough to travel. But we do not really need her here. Earlier this evening, I sent photos of two men to my mother and she passed them along to Mrs. Shrimplin. We are waiting to hear back from her. It has been a long time, of course, but it is possible she will be able to make a positive ID from one of those pictures.”
“You said Sheriff Goodman’s dad is holding your dad,” Skottie said. “So that’s the Nazi, right?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“But you still need another witness?”
“To connect him to the war crimes, yes.”
“Where’d you get the pictures?”
“From the church,” Goodman said. “My brother, Heinrich, hangs this stuff in the hallway. He’s in charge of the church now. The guy with the glasses is my dad. The other guy’s my uncle Jacob. Not my real uncle, but he was my dad’s best friend for as long as I can remember. He died a few years back, and Dad doesn’t leave the house or church grounds much since that happened. If what the doc says is true, my dad pretty much has to be this Bormann guy you all are looking for.”
Skottie turned the page and looked at printouts of the photos Travis had taken. They were pictures of pictures, blown up and grainy with a smeared reflection of overhead lights across them, but the men’s features were clear. Neither of them looked familiar to her, but she stared hard at them anyway, trying to see something evil in their eyes or in the set of their jaws. She paid special attention to the man with glasses, wondered what Goodman was feeling, knowing what his father must have been. Finally she turned them over and moved on.
“I thought you said there were two pictures,” she said. “Who’s this?” She held up a third printout of a man slightly younger than the first two. He looked vaguely familiar to her, but she couldn’t place him.
“That,” Travis said, “is Dr. Joseph Odek.”
“I know that name.”
“He is definitely not Bormann, but he is . . . Well, he is a very bad man just the same, and if the church is somehow tied to him . . .”
“He’s from South Africa,” Skottie said.
“Yes,” Travis said. “He has been arrested twice for human trafficking and poaching, but he managed to skate away both times.”
“He was on the news.”
“He has been on our radar for a very long time.” Travis’s voice was even lower than usual, and he seemed to be forcing his words out through clenched teeth. “I even met him once.”
Skottie’s eyes opened wide. “Is that who cut you? Your throat?”
“Odek is a problem for another day,” Travis said. “But I would very much like to find out how Bormann knows him.”
“What kind of doctor is he?”
“Why?”
“If Odek’s a doctor, maybe he did something at the camps,” Skottie said.
“He is too young,” Travis said. “I believe he was a medical doctor at one time, but he found better ways to make money. Better for him.”
“Does that . . . I mean, what kind of—”
A familiar tune started playing in the dining room. Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River,” her ringtone for Brandon. The phone had slipped down onto a chair and it took Skottie a minute to find it, but just as she picked it up, it stopped ringing. She opened her recent history and saw that the call had indeed come from Brandon. She decided he could wait. She returned to the living room, sat back down, and kept the phone in her lap on top of the file folder.
“Sorry,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”
“What is it?” Travis said.
“I asked you before what kind of doctor you were and you changed the subject.”
“Does it really matter?”
“Not really. But I’m curious.”
“I am a doctor of theology.” Travis waved a hand in the air, and something about the gesture made Skottie think he wanted a cigarette. “God and morality and that sort of thing.”
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
“My views have evolved over time and are complicated. I do not share them lightly.”
Skottie looked at him a moment longer, then turned her eyes down, back to the file. “Anyway, there’s not a lot of new information in here.”
Travis narrowed his eyes. “It is a pending investigation,” he said.
“I didn’t mean anything by that,” Skottie said.
“No, you are right. I am tired and I am worried. When the file was put together, we were waiting for more information from my father.”
His eyes held a brittle sheen, and Skottie almost reached out to pat his hand. She stopped herself and shook her head again.
“I only meant I think I can add to this,” she said. “I did some digging of my own. You know Ruth Elder was with someone at the café when she saw Rudolph Bormann.”
“Yes,” Travis said. “Her friend Peggy.”
“And Peggy’s a nickname for Margaret. One of Maddy’s books has characters in it who are twins, but they turn out to be the same person: Peggy and Margaret.”
“Margaret Weber was Ruth’s friend Peggy?”
“I think so.”
“Then we must assume Bormann killed Mrs. Weber because Ruth told her something.”
“Which gives us a motive.”
“I’m still having trouble with this,” Goodman said. “If you told me somebody in my family was a Nazi, I’d guess it was Heinrich, not my dad.”
Travis nodded. “I am sorry.”
“Besides, my dad’s not exactly a young guy. Hard to see him running around killing people.”
“Look, it was Margaret Weber’s son who burned up in that tractor fire. He was just identified a few hours ago.”
“He was murdered,” Travis said. It wasn’t a question.
“The coroner hasn’t officially determined that,” Skottie said. “But yeah.”
“So are we thinking the Nazi killed our witness? Then killed the witness’s friend, and then killed the friend’s son? Why the son?”
“Maybe Margaret told her son about Bormann, or maybe he didn’t have any idea what was going on, but he tried to protect her or went looking for her and stumbled on something. When was the last time you heard from your dad?”
“Two days after he arrived in Kansas,” Travis said. “He talked to Ruth Elder, and she had described Rudolph Bormann. She told my father her story, or parts of it. Enough that we were able to go to work at our end, my mother was, and find our second witness in Spain. My father was supposed to call again after he had scouted this area a bit.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No,” Travis said. “Which is unusual for him.”
“He was supposed to check in with Ruth Elder again, too. When she didn’t hear anything from him, she wrote everything down in a diary and hid it among her things for her daughter to find.”
“Why go to so much trouble? If she wanted my father to have the information, why hide it?”
“In case Bormann got to her first,” Skottie said. “Remember, she was trained in shorthand so she could help in the war effort, but German officers couldn’t necessarily read it. Then for years after, it became a secret language between her and her daughter. She was trying to make su
re her account of things would outlast her. She must have been terrified.”
“And rightly so.”
Skottie nodded. “But could a ninety-year-old man do all this?”
“How old was Wes Weber?”
“Had to be a lot younger than ninety. Unless Bormann snuck up on him and pushed him off a cliff, then dragged his body into a tractor to burn it . . . Well, I don’t buy it.”
“So he has some help,” Goodman said. “My brother?”
“I think he has a whole army of helpers.”
“The church?”
Her phone rang. Brandon’s number again. She swiped the green button to answer.
“Brandon? Maddy okay?”
There was a hesitation before the person at the other end responded. “Was Brandon the fat guy?”
Skottie stopped breathing. “Who is this?”
“You need to listen real careful now.”
“No, you listen to me—”
The connection ended. Skottie stared at the phone, then looked up at the room. Travis and Sheriff Goodman were watching her.
3
“What has happened?”
“Somebody just . . .” Skottie left off and shook her head. She could barely breathe. She pulled the last call up and dialed the number back. The phone rang once and a different male voice answered.
“Is this Skottie Foster?”
“What is this?” she said.
“I apologize for my friend, ma’am. He gets excited.”
“Who are you?” Skottie held a finger up at Travis, who had stood and was hovering over her, trying to hear the other end of the conversation.
“Well, ma’am, I’d rather not say.”
“What do you want?”
“You didn’t call the police,” said the man on the other end of the call. “Or they’d be here by now.”
“No,” Skottie said. The man had used the word here, which meant he was nearby, watching the house. She looked at the front door, then walked to the window and used her free hand to peel a strip of duct tape from the corner of the garbage bags that covered it. Travis saw what she was doing and went to the other side of the window. He cut a small slit in the plastic with a sharp knife that seemed to have appeared from nowhere. He put an eye up to the slit and peered out at the street.
The man on the phone kept talking. “He still there in your house? Our friend?”
“You mean Deputy Puckett?”
“He still alive?”
“Well, I didn’t kill him yet, if that’s what you’re asking. But if you’ve done something to my daughter, I swear to God—”
“All right, ma’am. We haven’t killed anybody, either. So let’s say we arrange a trade. Your girl for our friend.”
Travis took his eye away from the window and nodded to her. He moved quickly across the living room and into the kitchen. Goodman followed him, grabbing his hat from the back of the couch. Skottie felt a cold breeze as the back door opened and then heard the soft click of the latch as it shut behind them.
“You there?” The guy on the phone sounded nervous.
“Give me a second,” Skottie said. “I don’t understand what you want.”
She heard the sound of muffled talking, the phone being dragged across cloth. Then the first guy was back on. “What’s to understand, bitch? Give us Christian back and maybe you get to see your baby girl again, right? You get that?”
Faintly in the background, Skottie could hear the second guy. “Give me that back.”
“You’re not doing it right, Donnie. You gotta—”
“You just told her my name!”
Skottie felt the room spinning around her and she struggled to stay calm. They were obviously amateurs, and one of them was a little smarter than the other. The dumb guy needed to prove himself, a situation that could easily lead to violence. Brandon would no more lose his phone than he would lose his gun or his badge. Had they killed him to get it?
She interrupted the argument on the other end of the phone. “Let me talk to my husband.” She hated herself for choosing Brandon. If she asked to talk to Maddy, the men would assume Maddy was most important to her and they might hurt her to get Skottie’s cooperation. She was throwing Brandon under the bus, making him the bigger target, but he would do the same if it meant protecting their daughter.
The men were silent for a moment. Another burst of static noise. Then the smarter of the two answered. “He’s, uh . . . They’re not here with us.”
“Where are they?”
“Don’t worry. They’re somewhere safe.”
“How do I know—”
The man hollered and it sounded like he dropped the phone. She could hear snippets of anxious conversation.
“Who are you?”
“Gun it! Drive!”
“Oh, shit, Donnie, shit, man!”
There was the sound of an engine, a car door slamming, and someone shouting, his voice growing fainter in the background. Another car roared to life on the street outside the house. Skottie ran to the front door and opened it in time to see two sets of taillights at the corner, red dots in the mist, diminishing to pinpricks and fading away.
Goodman walked out of the darkness pulling something heavy behind him. As he drew closer, Skottie could see that he was dragging a young man who was crab-walking along, trying to keep up as the sheriff hauled him backward by his shirt collar. Goodman stopped and picked the kid up by the front of his shirt and heaved him up on the porch.
“There were two of them,” Goodman said. “Watching your house from the street. The other one drove off, but the doc’s following him in my cruiser.”
“They have Maddy,” Skottie said. “And my husband, Brandon.”
“They weren’t in that car,” Goodman said. “None of ’em. There was just the two guys. I got the license number off their car. You wanna call it in, Trooper, or should I?”
The young man tore at his shirt, yanking it out of Goodman’s grasp, and tried to scramble away, but the sheriff stomped on him, held him down with his foot while he lit a cigarette. “See this gun on my hip, youngster? Yeah, you see it. So stay put and stay quiet.” Goodman put his lighter away and looked up at Skottie. “What do you say we ask this boy some hard questions?”
4
One of them was following him. Donnie had no idea what they’d done with Lance or Christian, but the trooper and her people were dangerous. The two big guys had come up on Donnie’s car without a sound, opened the passenger door, and pulled Lance out without any trouble at all. Donnie hadn’t wasted any time in getting away from there, but now they were right behind him.
He still had the phone he took from the trooper’s husband, and he pulled up the keypad with his left thumb, glancing at the screen when he could. He kept the accelerator depressed as far as he dared, zooming through residential streets, moving into a quiet industrial neighborhood, passing the hotel where they’d snatched the girl and her dad. It took him three times to dial the right number, and he felt a tremendous wave of relief when he heard Heinrich Goodman’s familiar voice.
“Who is this?”
“Deacon? This is Donnie. I’m in big trouble.”
“Where are you calling from?”
“Um, I stole a phone.”
“Good,” Heinrich said.
“That trooper, it’s her husband’s phone.”
“How did it go?”
“Things got complicated.”
“Are you with the police?”
“No. I’m driving, but they’re following me and I don’t know where to go.”
“Following you in a car? Tell me everything, but do it quickly, Donnie.”
“Yeah, I’m in my car. We went in, but the trooper got Christian. So we grabbed her daughter and her husband.”
“You have them?”
“I brought the girl in. You can ask the reverend.”
“And the husband?”
“I stopped the truck and put the husband on it. He’s gotta be halfway to Mexico by now.”
“I’m not sure you should have done that, Donnie. Why didn’t you call me before doing something so drastic?”
Donnie had wanted to handle things himself, to make the deacon proud. He had thought maybe Heinrich would promote him past the rank of acolyte. Maybe he would even get another audience with Reverend Rudy. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“And the trooper is following you now? Looking for her child?”
“No, it’s the other one, I think. The hunter. But there were two of them, maybe more. They have Christian and they have Lance, and I’m about out of gas.”
“You can’t lead them here, Donnie,” Heinrich said. “You need to slow them down, create a distraction while I prepare the church for their coming.”
Donnie’s stomach somersaulted, and he felt beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead. “Where am I supposed to go?”
The deacon spoke slowly. “It’s your time now. You’ve served your purpose and I commend you, but it’s time to join the lightning.”
“Are you sure?” Donnie could barely breathe.
“Do you have a weapon?”
“I got a gun I took off the trooper’s husband.”
“Good,” Heinrich said. “Use it. Use it on as many of them as you can before you turn it on yourself. It will unnerve them, give us a psychological advantage and give me time. Go, Donnie. Go in glory.”
Deacon Heinrich’s voice was replaced by a terrible silence, and when Donnie glanced down at the phone again, he saw that the connection had been broken.
5
“You don’t wanna talk,” Sheriff Goodman said. “I get it.”
Christian and Lance sat next to each other on the kitchen floor. Lance’s arm was bleeding, but the sheriff had handcuffed his wrists behind his back. Skottie had tried appealing to the two young men, begging them to tell her where Maddy was, even showing them photos of her daughter in hopes of humanizing her for them. But they had adopted identical defiant stares, neither of them volunteering a single word. At last Goodman had stepped in.