Dead Center ac-5

by David Rosenfelt

  It’s clear to me that this is a woman here to tell a story and that probing questions by me are not necessary, at least not at this point. So I just nod and let her continue.

  “He told me that it was an ‘arranged’ marriage and that he never loved her. He said he was planning to divorce his wife even before we met, but that I made him realize he had to do it right away.”

  The idea of an arranged marriage is completely consistent with what I already know about the Centurions, but divorce certainly is not. “But you would not have been welcome there,” I say.

  “That’s for sure, but it was his wanting a divorce that made him leave. He asked the creep they call the Keeper for permission, but there was no chance. So he left, and as far as I know, he’s the only one ever to do so.”

  “Why is that?” I ask. “What keeps people there?”

  Her grin reflects the irony of what she is about to say. “Faith. They really believe in that wheel and in the Keeper. Hell, even Henry believed it. He never really forgave himself for leaving.”

  “Tell me about the wheel.”

  “Well,” she says, “I’ve never seen it, so I can only go by what Henry told me. It’s like this huge carnival wheel, the kind you try and guess what it will land on when you spin it. And it’s got all kinds of strange symbols on it that supposedly only the Keeper can read.”

  “And that’s how everything is decided?”

  “That’s right. There’s some kind of ceremony that each person goes through when they’re six years old. That’s when the wheel tells them what their occupation will be, who they will marry, where they will live, everything.”

  She continues describing what she knows about the town and its religion, and her bitterness comes through loud and clear. “So why did Henry write those articles?”

  “I suggested it; I thought it might help him deal with his guilt by getting things out in the open.” She can see me react in surprise, and she nods. “Yes, he felt guilty every day of his life for leaving, and the articles only made it worse.”

  “What makes them listen to the wheel, no matter what it says?” I ask. I already know the answer, I just want her to confirm it for me.

  She does. “They’re not listening to the wheel, and they’re not listening to the Keeper. Those people have no doubt they are listening to God.”

  The rest of our time at lunch is more of the same, with her remembering other stories that her husband told her about life in Center City. She keeps going back to his hunting accident, and how positive she is that the Centurions murdered Henry to keep him quiet. It makes little sense to me that they would kill him after he had told all in the articles, but I don’t feel like I should point that out.

  As we’re ready to leave, she says, “The ironic thing is that the articles had pretty much no effect. People read about the Centurions, and if they gave it a second thought, they just dismissed it as a kook writing about other kooks. It changed nothing.”

  Catherine Gerard wants this lunch to do what her husband and those articles did not do. She wants it to change life in Center City and to make the leaders there suffer like Henry suffered.

  I’m afraid she might well be in for another disappointment.

  I spend the drive back being surprised by my reaction to what Catherine had to say. In the Centurions she painted a picture of a group of people who are eccentrics at best and intolerant lunatics at worst. Yet there is a certain logic to their life.

  We are a country that reveres faith, and to be a person of faith is to occupy a position of respect. The Centurions are people who take ordinary, run-of-the-mill faith and quadruple it. They turn their lives over to it.

  Yet who’s to say they are wrong? I certainly think they are, but what the hell do I know? They believe what they believe; and the fact that the world may disagree with them has little significance. Don’t most religious people who have a particular faith believe that believers of other faiths are wrong? For example, can Christians and Buddhists both have it one hundred percent right?

  Over dinner with Laurie I relate my conversation with Catherine Gerard. Laurie is less interested in the religious aspect of it than I am; she dismisses them as misguided wackos. What she focuses on is the wheel and the fact that these people can completely give up their freedom of choice to it.

  I assume my normal role, that of devil’s advocate. “Are they really giving up their freedom of choice if that’s what they choose to do?”

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “I mean that, as stupid as it may sound to us, they believe in this wheel. They think that God talks to them through it. So because of that belief, they choose to follow it.”

  She’s not buying it. “No, they’re brainwashed from birth into following it. You think it’s a coincidence that everybody born in that town just happens to believe in the wheel? It’s pounded into their heads from the day they’re born.”

  “Of course,” I say, “but isn’t that true everywhere? Don’t all parents naturally instill their belief system in their offspring?”

  “Not to that degree,” she says. “And what kind of life is that? Everything is dictated to you. Can you imagine how horrible it would be to learn who you’re going to marry, how you’re going to earn a living, at six years old?”

  “It certainly wouldn’t be my first choice, I’ll tell you that.”

  “It would be stifling,” she says.

  I shake my head. “For you and me, but apparently not for them. Name a tough decision you’ve had to make, one you’ve agonized over.”

  She answers immediately. “Whether or not to leave you and return to Findlay. It was torture, but it was a decision that I knew I had to make myself, and I finally made it.”

  “Okay, but what if you had turned it over to someone else and gave that someone full power to tell you what to do? The torture is gone, isn’t it?”

  She shakes her head adamantly. “Absolutely not; it would be replaced by a different kind of torture. I would feel helpless… childlike.”

  “But if you believed, if in your heart you knew, that it was God making the decision? Wouldn’t that be incredibly freeing, if you could talk to God and let him tell you what is right?”

  “No one can do that. Not like that,” she says. “And certainly not the Centurions.”

  “It doesn’t matter if they can. It matters if they believe they can. That’s why they’ll do whatever the wheel tells them to do.”

  “Including murder?” she asks.

  I smile my holiest smile. “That, my child, is still to be determined.”

  • • • • •

  AS PATHETIC AS it sounds, this is my first time in a girl’s dorm room. It’s not for lack of trying… back in college there’s no place I would have rather been. It was off-limits back then, even if a girl wanted to invite you in, or at least that’s what the girls told me. Which is just as well, since none of them ever expressed anguish that they were so constrained.

  It only took Jeremy one day to set this up. According to him, Madeline jumped at the opportunity to come here and get Liz’s things when one of Liz’s friends made the phone call. Even better, she said that her mother was going to be working, so she would never realize that Madeline was gone.

  Liz’s friend Emily checked me in at the downstairs desk as her father. She’s twenty and I’m thirty-seven, so it’s slightly annoying to me that the person at the desk had no trouble believing the relationship. She’s left me alone in her room as we wait for Madeline to show, and I’m sitting on the bed feeling like a pervert, Peeping Tom, dirty old man, or something.

  I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to say to Madeline. I’ll probably act as if I know she’s the one who was in contact with Eddie, even though I don’t. I hope she’s a typically transparent seventeen-year-old and that I’ll therefore know from her reaction whether I’m right or wrong.

  Madeline said she would be here by one o’clock, and at ten of one I hear people coming down the h
all. The doorknob turns, and I move slightly to the side so that I won’t be in her line of sight when she enters.

  The door opens, and Emily says, “Come on in. There’s somebody I want you to see.” Madeline walks into the room and Emily backs out, closing the door behind her and leaving Madeline alone with me.

  Madeline sees me, and her reactions are astonishing and completely easy to read. First there is a look of surprise, then one of recognition, and finally, a pain like I haven’t seen in a very long time. I don’t say a word as she starts to sob, sinking to her knees in the process.

  I walk over and place my hand on her shoulder as she continues to cry. Finally, it starts to slow down, and she gets up and goes over to the bed. She sits down on it, puts her head in her hands, and gets the remaining sobs out of her system.

  “They killed him,” are the first words out of her mouth. “They killed Eddie. Just like they killed Liz and Sheryl.”

  This starts her crying again, so I wait the minute or so that this lasts before responding. “I need you to tell me all about it, Madeline.”

  She nods her understanding but composes herself a little more before speaking again. “I wanted to call you, to talk to you… but I was scared. I am so scared.”

  “It’s okay… I understand. I would be scared in your position as well. But we’ll make sure you’re completely protected. Nothing will happen to you.”

  She nods again. “I don’t know that much,” she says.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what you do know?”

  Another nod. “The night Liz died, she was really afraid of something. She was with Sheryl and Eddie, and I never saw them like that. They were like frightened out of their minds.”

  “What scared them so much?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure… they wouldn’t tell me. They said it was better if I didn’t know.”

  “Was this before or after Liz went to see Jeremy at the bar?” I ask.

  “Before. She went there to tell him she wasn’t going to see him anymore. She was running away with Sheryl and Eddie. Sheryl went with her, and Eddie stayed behind to get some things together.”

  That explains why Liz and Sheryl were killed and Eddie ran away. His staying behind to get some things saved his life, at least for a couple of months, until I set him up to be killed.

  “Were you in touch with Eddie after he ran away?” I ask.

  “Yes. He called me a few times. The last time he asked me to send him some money.”

  “So he told you where he was,” I say.

  She nods. “But I didn’t have the money; I was trying to get it. Then that police lady told my mom you had been looking for Eddie, so when he called back, I told him that. I said he should call you… that you could help.”

  “Why didn’t he just call the police?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  It’s possible that Eddie was distrustful of the police because Stephen Drummond represented authority to him. Maybe he thought that contacting the police was the same as contacting Drummond. He told me that he had run that day because he thought I might have been sent by Drummond. Whatever was scaring him, Drummond was behind it.

  “You’ve got to think, Madeline. What could have scared Liz and Sheryl and Eddie like that? Maybe they said something, some little thing, thinking you wouldn’t understand.”

  She thinks for a moment. “All I know is it had something to do with Sheryl’s boyfriend.”

  I was so focused on finding Eddie, Liz’s boyfriend, that I spent almost no time thinking about Sheryl, and whether she might have had one as well. Yet Catherine Gerard told me that boys and girls are matched up at six years old. There’s no reason to think Sheryl would have been an exception.

  “What about him?” I asked. “Was it something he did? Something he said?” I’m probing for information that she unfortunately does not seem to have.

  “I just don’t know… I’m sorry,” she says, getting upset at her inability to give me what I want. “They wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Do you know her boyfriend’s name?” I ask.

  She nods. “Alan.”

  “Do you know his last name?”

  She nods again. “Drummond.”

  Alan Drummond.

  Son of Stephen.

  When Eddie told me he was afraid that Drummond was coming for him, he wasn’t talking about the father; he was talking about the son.

  “Is it possible that Eddie was afraid of Alan?” I ask.

  She says it simply, almost matter-of-factly, but it sends a chill through me. “Everybody’s afraid of Alan.”

  I continue to question Madeline, but she has little else to offer in the way of information. Finally, she tells me that she should be going so she can get back before her mother returns home.

  “If you’re worried, afraid for your safety, I can get you taken into protective custody. That way no one can get near you.”

  “You’re not going to tell anyone we talked, are you?” she asks.

  “Only Laurie Collins. She’s the chief of police in Findlay, and she won’t repeat it. I trust her with my life.”

  Madeline thinks for a moment, perhaps cognizant that it’s not my life we’re trusting Laurie with… it’s her own. Finally, she says, “Okay. How can I reach you if I hear anything important?”

  “I don’t want you to. I’ll take it from here.”

  “But I want to help if I can,” she says. This seventeen-year-old girl is easily the bravest person in this room.

  I write my phone number out for her. “Call me any time of the day or night. But not from your house; call from a pay phone.”

  “I will,” she says.

  She leaves to make the drive back to Center City, and I head back to Findlay. I’m not anywhere near knowing the “why” behind the murder of three young people, but I may have just learned the “who.”

  • • • • •

  WE WOULDN’T have anything on Al Capone if he lived in Center City.” This is Laurie’s way of telling me that my request to check if Alan Drummond has a criminal record is not going to be productive. I’m sure she’s right; they are not about to share any details about their citizens with the outside world, and especially not negative ones. And most especially not negative ones about the son of Stephen Drummond.

  We’re sitting on the couch drinking wine, and Laurie is gently and absentmindedly rubbing my thigh as we talk. If she continues doing that, I’m going to forget what the hell we’re talking about.

  So I’ve got to focus. “That’s a shame, because Madeline said that everyone was afraid of him,” I say. “He must have done some bad things; you don’t generate that kind of fear by not cleaning your plate at lunch.”

  “Have you ever seen him?” she asks.

  I nod. “Twice. Big, powerful kid. He was wearing one of those servants of the Keeper uniforms and driving Wallace around.”

  “So whatever he’s up to, there’s a good chance Wallace and his father are behind it.”

  “Probably, but not definitely,” I say. “You know, until now I’ve been thinking that this was all about the religion, about keeping everything secret. I figured these kids were going to run away, and the town leaders decided they couldn’t have that happening. But this is something else… something bigger.”

  “Why do you say that?” she asks.

  “Well, first of all, Henry Gerard already told the secrets, and nobody cared, remember? Why would anybody listen to these kids, when he wrote articles about it in the damn newspaper and nothing happened? But Madeline said the three kids knew something, probably about Alan Drummond, and it scared them so much they were leaving their town and their families.”

  “They had nobody to turn to,” she says. “Alan’s father is the number two guy in town, and his regular passenger is number one.”

  Something pops into my head. “Hey, I remember something else. The kid’s a pilot; I saw a picture of the family in his father’s office. They were standing
in front of a plane, and Stephen told me that his son was the pilot in the family.”

  “So maybe he does more than drive Wallace around in a car,” she says. “The question then is, where would Wallace be flying to?”

  I shrug. “Maybe the wheel sends him on trips. Probably to conventions with other wackos.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard to find out.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “If they’re flying around, they’ve got to declare flight plans with the FAA. I should be able to get the records.”

  “It’s worth a shot. When can you do it?”

  “Well,” she says, “I can spend a few hours on the phone now trying to find someone who can help, or we can go to bed now and I can make one phone call in the morning.”

  I think about this for a moment. “In which scenario are you likely to be naked faster?”

  “The ‘bed now, call in the morning’ one.”

  “Then that’s the one we go with.”

  It turns out to be a great choice, but like all good things, it comes to an end when the alarm goes off at six A.M. Laurie is showered, dressed, and out of the house in forty-five minutes, leaving me and Tara to reflect on just what the hell we think we’re doing here.

  I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made so far, and certainly not regretting deciding to stay, but I am feeling somewhat out of my element. I’m an attorney, not a detective, and I’m finding that this new role requires a different mind-set and strategic outlook.

  Generally on a case I view events and information through the prism of the legal system in general and its likely effect on a jury in particular. Even though a trial is often referred to as a search for the truth, that’s not my job. My job is to convince a jury to accept my truth, which is that my client is not guilty of the crime for which he or she is charged.

  This detective stuff comes with a different mandate. I’ve got to find the real truth, actually extract it from people who don’t want to give it up. By definition those people are dangerous, and by definition I am not. I have a natural inclination to avoid danger, an inclination often referred to as cowardice, which leaves me with a dilemma. It’s hard to avoid danger when the truth is hiding behind it and I’m after the truth.