Murder on the Lunatic Fringe (Jubilant Falls Series Book 4)

by Debra Gaskill

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” Benny turned to me and brushed the dirt from my shoulders, smiling sardonically. “Now get the hell out of here. I mean it.”

  He shoved me toward the road.

  “Don’t come back. I told you why.”

  As I walked away, McMaster spoke.

  “You know that guy?”

  “Nope,” Benny answered.

  “I think I’ve seen him before. He looks like that prick from the paper.”

  “A reporter?” Benny asked. “Nah—he’s not smart enough to be a reporter.”

  I hung my head, walking briskly across the rocky motel parking lot to the busy road, hoping McMaster or Benny wouldn’t follow. The words stung, worse than I thought they would. I fought the urge to go back and punch them both. There was a diner at the corner. I could sit there for a few minutes, recover my composure and have a cup of coffee, while waiting until it was safe for me to go back to get my car.

  I waited until I hit the sidewalk to pull out my cell phone and called Judson Roarke on his cell phone as I walked toward the diner.

  He picked up on the second ring.

  “What’s up? You OK?” he asked.

  I explained what I’d heard about the meeting and the heroin and that I had the whole thing recorded on my phone.

  “That changes the whole situation,” Judson said, thoughtfully. “You’re sure they said heroin? Did you see anything?”

  “All I saw was the barrel of a gun in the window.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “I think it’s time we bring in some of our undercover guys. This could get really dangerous really fast and I can’t put a civilian like you at risk.”

  “But—”

  “Listen, we appreciate all you’ve done for us.”

  “There’s a meeting tonight—“

  “No.” Roarke’s tone was sharp and commanding. “You don’t go there—that’s an order. It’s too dangerous. I want you to bring in that recording and let us take it from there.”

  “Yes, sir,” I sighed.

  Roarke disconnected the call, just as I reached the diner and stepped inside. I took a seat in a booth where I had the best view of the front of the Travel Inn. I ordered a cup of coffee. It would be a little bit before I could walk back over there to get my car. In the meantime, I’d have to figure out what my next step would be.

  Chapter 30 Addison

  I don’t know what to tell you.” Duncan shook his head as we made one more pass through the ransacked house. “It looks like someone was searching for something, but it doesn’t look like any body was hurt or killed here.”

  “Let’s look in the cottage. Maybe there’s something there.”

  Like the farmhouse, the cottage door was unlocked, so we walked in. Here, too, the furniture was cheap, upended and slashed, as if the search that began in the farmhouse continued. In the bedroom, sheets were torn from the double bed and a single vicious slash exposed the stuffing and springs within. Men’s clothing hung from the sides of the open dresser drawers; dirty boot prints marked the clothing on the floor.

  Again, it looked more like a burglary than a murder.

  Duncan scratched his head. “Have you checked the barn?” he asked.

  “No, I haven’t. Come to think of it, I didn’t see any animals in the pasture,” I answered.

  “Jerome, or whatever his name really was, told me they don’t do well with the heat, so he had cooling units and fans installed,” Duncan said. “The llamas and alpacas might be in the barn. Let’s go see.”

  “But if she’s not here and the animals are, that might mean those mobsters came after her,” I said. “We need to call the sheriff.”

  “And if they’re not there, she’s been relocated in witness protection and she’s just plain gone. You can’t do anything about it.”

  “But it doesn’t explain why the place has been tossed like this. Katya never would have left those pictures of her sister.”

  “In her situation, it might be best not to ask.”

  I sighed. He might be right.

  “Well, let’s go look in the barn at least,” I said.

  A few steps from the cottage and we were in the barn. Huge livestock fans hummed in a wide aisle between the two rows of box stalls, pushing the heat from the late August sun back outside. Walking up and down the aisle, Duncan and I saw the stall’s dirt floors dotted with small piles of manure. Flakes of fresh hay stood in feeders, but there were no animals to be found.

  To our right, the door to an office stood open. Duncan stepped inside and flipped on the light. A metal desk sat in front of a window, which looked down the driveway, toward the road.

  On the wall by the door, I recognized several racks of halters and leads. There was a stack of buckets and black rubber feed bowls beneath them.

  Kitchen cabinets, possibly reused from someone’s kitchen, hung on the walls above a small sink, and contained familiar medications for parasites and other home veterinary supplies.

  That didn’t surprise us—Duncan and I, like most farmers, did a lot of the routine vet work ourselves. Annual vaccinations or treatment for worms or scours were things we often handled at the farm. It looked like Jerome and Katya did the same thing for the llamas and alpacas.

  Duncan pointed to the corner where a split-open bag of feed lay on the floor, grain strewn across the floor. A few other bags of feed lay haphazardly on wooden pallets against the wall.

  “Who ever dropped this was in a hurry, Penny.”

  Sighing, I knelt and scooped up a handful of sweet-smelling grain.

  “We need to call the sheriff. Something has happened here.”

  “I don’t think so. She’s gone, Penny, and she’s taken the animals with her. Witness protection relocated her again.”

  “But we don’t know that for sure!” I cried. “This place has been trashed. She could be in danger.”

  “And she could just be gone. If the Russian mafia knows she’s here, she’d have to leave real damn fast.”

  “I suppose.” I let the grain fall from my hand back onto the floor. “Still, I’m going to call Jud Roarke and Gary McGinnis to see if they know anything. God knows I won’t get anything out of Agent Peppin.”

  Duncan extended his hand to help me stand. “You just need to let her go, Penny. It’s over.”

  ***

  After dinner, Duncan, Isabella and I were settling down in front of the television to watch a movie when Gary McGinnis called me back. I quickly explained what I’d seen at the Lunatic Fringe.

  “I can’t tell you anything, either,” he said. “I know the sheriff’s office turned the murder case over to the feds for investigation. Jud Roarke and his folks are completely off of it.”

  “But why would the place be trashed like that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they did it themselves, to send folks like you or those mobsters down the wrong trail.”

  “But she would have taken her sister’s pictures with her,” I argued. “Those were her most precious possessions. They were laying on the floor, with the glass broken.”

  “Then go ahead and call Jud Roarke or Bob Peppin, but I doubt if you’ll get anything out of them.”

  Phone calls to the sheriff just repeated what Gary told me.

  “I’m off the case,” Sheriff Roarke said. “I can’t tell you anything, even if I knew it.”

  Peppin didn’t even answer his cell phone. I groaned in frustration as I disconnected, not bothering to leave a voice mail.

  “Let it go, honey,” Duncan said, patting my knee. “Why don’t you just call it a night? You’ve been up an awful long time—you’re exhausted. And turn that stupid police scanner off. Odds are, nothing is going to happen tonight that you can’t pick up first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “I guess so.”

  Kissing him and Isabella on the cheek, I went upstairs to bed, unsure about what happened to Ekaterina Bolodenka, whether she was safe—or wh
ether she was still alive.

  Chapter 31 Graham

  Two cups of coffee and one greasy burger later, the sun was still taking its time going down and yet no one had ventured from Benny’s motel room. If there was a meeting, it wasn’t going to be until after dark.

  The lull was giving me too much time to think—and not just about Benny.

  I pulled out my phone and with my thumb, flipped through the photos there. Most of the pictures were of Elizabeth and me, with our destination in the background, stupid cell phone selfies of us together, taken at arm’s length. We were grinning then: there were pictures of a Saturday at the Cincinnati zoo, Elizabeth holding a pair of concert tickets outside a theater, another selfie of a kiss as a rainbow arched above us in a field of green grass.

  My thumb hovered above the delete button, but I couldn’t take the next step.

  Why did she want to keep her pregnancy secret from me? Did she feel that trapped here in Jubilant Falls? Did she think I’d be a bad father? Just because of my job?

  As painful as it was, it didn’t matter now. She was going to move on with her life and I was going to move on with mine. I just had to ensure that I was a part of that kid’s life, no matter what.

  I felt a twinge as I rubbed the goose egg at the back of my head, my gift from Benny. At least I wasn’t going to be that kind of father.

  “Sir, we’re closing.” Smacking her gum, the waitress laid my bill on the table. She pointed at the clock above the door with her pencil. “It’s eight o’clock.”

  I pulled a couple bucks out of my wallet and walked from the diner as she locked the door behind me and the diner’s fluorescent lights went dark.

  I walked across the Travel Inn’s broken parking lot, looking at the curtains in Benny’s room, hoping he, or the gun barrel I’d seen wouldn’t appear until I got in my car.

  I slid into my front seat and slipped the key into the ignition. After a few attempts, the engine turned over. I looked over to my left as engines from two pick up trucks in front of Benny’s room also came to life. Dusk was falling, obscuring the driver’s faces as the men pulled away from the front door, leaving Benny’s junker truck and Doyle McMaster’s Impala behind.

  What was going on inside? Was Doyle McMaster convincing Benny of my identity? Was Benny still blowing him off, convinced I wasn’t smart enough to be a reporter? Or was he enraged that now that I had other motivations for contacting him?

  I had to smirk at my earlier reaction to his words. Why did I let that hurt me? Why did the opinion of the man who sold my mother drugs, then used her for sex and beat her up, matter to me? Why had it been so important to me to track him down and ask him stupid questions about my past?

  As crude as he was, he got one thing right: We never get the parents that we want. They all have faults, say or do things someone in their right mind wouldn’t do. Sometimes, they’re driven by fear or the belief that they’re just plain right. Some of them make incredible mistakes that change the lives of everyone around them—and sometimes they even learn from those mistakes.

  Benny was not one of those who would learn from his mistakes. He would bounce from crime to court to prison and back, convinced the world around him wasn’t nearly as intelligent as he was, but still not smart enough to realize that it took true guts to keep a job, raise a child and be a man.

  My mother was one of those who learned from her mistakes and who tried to show she loved me, however imperfectly it may have played out. Sometimes her love showed itself through Bill’s checkbook parenting, but as a result, I can’t say I was neglected in any way. She worked hard to change her life.

  My mother made sure that I had everything, as she herself worked hard to bury her own sordid past by having her past court records sealed and building a new persona as the wife of an Indianapolis manufacturing mogul. Maybe she hoped that I was young enough to forget those early bad years and remember only the good times after we were reunited.

  It wasn’t like she’d kept a secret from me; I knew where I came from. We just didn’t talk about it. She’d even said she was surprised I waited this long to ask her the particulars. I had food, clothing, a good education and a roof over my head, thanks to Mother and Bill—and a moral grounding from the Jesuit brothers who educated me. Why bring up the past? I saw that clearly now.

  And this child of mine, the one Beth was carrying, would wonder about his situation some day, in the same way I wondered about mine. He—somehow, I’d begun to personify this baby as a son—he’d come to me with all his questions, just the way I’d gone to Benny.

  I could hear the question already. Why don’t you and Mommy live together?

  What Elizabeth decided to do was her choice. I’d asked her to marry me—and likely would again if I even saw her—but she was the one to make the decisions at this point. I’d have to live with her ambivalence and react accordingly. She would be a good mom, in her way, and yes, she would be living close to her parents, so there would be family there when she needed them. All I could do was tell the truth, and be a part of the kid’s life to the best of my ability. My kid, my son, wouldn’t be a twenty-seven-year-old man, wondering why I’d disappeared or why I’d never called.

  Four motel doors down, Benny and Doyle stepped outside and into their vehicles. I slid down in my seat, hoping they wouldn’t see me. Neither did. They waved at each other as the vehicles backed away from the door.

  There was no redemption in Benny, not as a father and not as a man.

  Maybe that was what I was looking for when I first agreed to help hunt him down. Maybe I was looking for someone who, like my mother, had done his time, cleaned up his life and made a contribution to society. I saw clearly that now that this wasn’t the case—and never would be.

  Tonight he would preach hate and, somewhere, sometime, sell death to fund his gospel.

  Tonight, that would come to an end.

  My car’s transmission clunked ominously as I threw it into reverse and, at a distance, followed the truck and the sedan down the street.

  ***

  The county roads were lush and green, over-hung with trees. Stars were beginning to come out in what would be a clear summer night. We were deep in the bowels of Plummer County, on roads that were barely wide enough to accommodate any oncoming traffic, had there been any, surrounded on all sides by fields of corn, soybeans and alfalfa.

  On the right was a yellow bungalow, its paint peeling, the yard seemingly cut from the surrounding field of grass. It had been someone’s American dream once: in the dark, I could just make out a chain link fence enclosing a back yard with a swing set and dog house, both considerably younger than the home itself. It wasn’t any more. Foreclosure notices hung on the front door and window.

  One driveway led directly to the house and a narrow one-car garage. Another shot off from the main drive through the grass field toward an old bank barn and back toward the road.

  Sitting nearby was the stone foundation of another building, probably an older, original farmhouse, filled with weeds and saplings.

  McMaster and Benny pulled into the drive and parked outside the barn. I kept going, about a quarter of a mile to the next driveway. I pulled in and parked beside another old farmhouse, shielded from the barn by a patch of old-growth trees.

  “If you’re looking for the damned party, it’s next door.” An elderly man, small and wiry, sat on the front porch in a worn bathrobe, his birdlike arms crossed across his chest. The front windows were open; I heard a parrot caw and cackle inside. “And you can tell all your buddies, this time, if it’s still loud after ten o’clock, I’m calling the police.”

  I stepped up onto the porch, extending my hand. “I’m not here for any party. I’m Graham Kinnon, with the Journal-Gazette.”

  “Thank God! Somebody down at that stupid paper finally listened to me!”

  “Listened to you?”

  “I met today with that new lady publisher you’ve got. She seems real nice, a hell of a lot more sympa
thetic than that editor you’ve got. What’s her name, Addison something? She’s a cold one, she is. Anyway, your new publisher actually listens to what people have to say! I told her that somebody ought to be looking into these loud parties that go on over here.” Spotts gestured with his sharp chin toward the neighboring barn. “She told me somebody would be out to talk to me about it. I just didn’t think it was gonna be today.”

  This must have been the meeting Addison was attending that Elizabeth told me about when she came to my apartment. I tried not to smirk, realizing whose porch I was standing on.

  It belonged to Melvin Spotts, whose voicemails into the newsroom were filled with absurd conspiracy theories and right-wing cant. After Addison went home at night, Dennis would play them on the speakerphone so we could all get a laugh.

  A few of them were actually crazy enough to make sense.

  When that happened, Addison had city reporter Marcus Henning chase it down, but Spotts’ messages were never anything other than the paranoid ravings of someone convinced Watergate lurked behind every government office door.

  “You know, I went to school with that new publisher’s daddy. I swear that family always thought they was better than anyone else,” Spotts continued. “Just because they owned that newspaper, they all held their noses in the air.”

  “So what kind of parties are going on there?” I asked.

  “You gonna write this down? You ain’t got no notebook.”

  “You’re right.” I walked back to my car and pulled a notebook from my glove box and a pen from the cup holder, rejoining Spotts on his porch. Even though I knew who he was, I had Spotts spell out his name for me before I began. “So tell me what’s going on.”

  “Like I told your publisher, ‘bout once a week, they come down here with their pick-up trucks and their loud music. There’s a bunch of them and when I call the sheriff, I don’t get any response.”