A Prayer for the Night

by P. L. Gaus

  “Others weren’t?” Robertson asked.

  “There were a couple of cool ones,” Branden said. “They sat in the chair at the far end of the table. Didn’t really open up. But, we did get that John and Abe made a big buy from an outfit down by Columbus. And Henry Erb said that Sara and Jeremiah Miller had some of that action, too. Or words to that effect.”

  “You notice who was absent, Mike?” Robertson said.

  “Jeremiah Miller.”

  “Don’t you think that means something?”

  Branden nodded pensively. “I’ll go out to see him,” he said. “Bring him back so you can have a talk with him.”

  “You’ve kept in touch with the Millers?”

  “Caroline and I go out there for dinner once or twice a year. Jeremiah has always been shy around us.”

  “Is his granddaddy still the bishop?” Robertson asked.

  “No,” Branden said. “He died a few months back. Cal says Jeremiah wants to marry Sara Yoder.”

  Robertson said, “Then I’d expect him to be more forthcoming. Unless this Erb is right, and Jeremiah and Sara are part of the whole deal.”

  Ellie came in and said, “Here’s that tape, Sheriff.” She slid it into a video deck on the shelves behind Robertson’s desk and punched Play.

  On the screen, there was a long zoom shot across a parking lot with cars and pickup trucks. It was late afternoon or early evening, judging by the shadows. Over beside a brick wall, John Schlabaugh talked with a big redheaded man in jeans and a black leather vest. There was only faint audio, the rapid breathing of the person shooting the video. The man handed Schlabaugh a leather briefcase, looked around briefly at the parked cars, and turned and walked around the corner of the building. The video camera shook and then shut off as a soft voice whispered something celebratory in Dutch dialect.

  Ellie switched the player off, and Branden said, “That’s the briefcase we found at the cabin with Abe Yoder.”

  “I didn’t see any money change hands,” Ricky said.

  “Maybe they’d paid for the drugs earlier,” Branden said.

  “More likely, they took the drugs on credit,” Robertson said. “Dealers work it that way to get their hooks into you.”

  “Would those kids be that naive?” Ricky asked.

  “And who shot the video?” Robertson asked.

  “I’m guessing it was Abe Yoder,” Branden said.

  “If you take this Erb seriously,” Robertson said, “it could equally have been Sara or Jeremiah.”

  Ellie said, “Stan Armbruster called with the location of those GPS coordinates from Yoder’s cell phone.”

  “Where’s he at?” Robertson asked.

  “Says he’s at a country bar in Gahanna, east of Columbus. I took the radio call about ten minutes ago. He’s waiting there now.”

  “Come on,” Robertson said, and marched out to her radio consoles, the others following.

  Ellie keyed her microphone and got Armbruster.

  Robertson said, “Can you describe the building, Stan?”

  “One-story, yellow brick building with a large gravel parking lot. It’s a bar a little north of Gahanna, on U.S. Route 62.”

  “That matches our video,” Branden said.

  Robertson said, “Pull out, Stan. I don’t want a cruiser sitting there very long.”

  “Leaving now,” Armbruster reported.

  Back in the sheriff’s office, Branden said, “The DEA people will have it under surveillance if it’s a hot spot.”

  Niell said, “Seems like we’re counting on the DEA for a lot.”

  “We’re doing everything we can do to find Sara,” Robertson said. “I just like the idea that DEA might turn her up at one of their drug locations in Columbus. At the very least, I can’t discount the possibility.”

  Branden nodded, thinking.

  Ellie punched the intercom button and said, obviously shaken, “Bruce, Spits Wallace is dead.”

  14

  Friday, July 23

  5:30 P.M.

  ARMS flung over his head, Spits Wallace lay on his back, bloody from wounds on his knee, abdomen, chest, and shoulder. His shotgun had dropped to the ground beside him. Nine-millimeter brass shell casings were strewn about on the driveway some eight or ten paces back. A neighbor, Bill Edger, scratched at his scruffy gray beard and said to Robertson, “It was a rapid tat, tat, tat kind of shooting. What I always thought a machine gun would sound like.”

  Robertson knelt in the gravel, hooked up a brass shell casing on the point of his gold pen, and studied it closely. “It’s got a deep ejector mark,” he said to Niell, and dropped it into a small plastic bag that Niell held open. “That’s an automatic weapon, all right.”

  Back down the long gravel driveway, where five cruisers and Robertson’s blue sedan were parked, deputies were walking the ground, eyes down, looking for evidence. A footprint in the driveway mud, in among the shell casings, had been marked for a plaster impression. The same prints walked up to Wallace, then proceeded to the kitchen door at the back of the house. Professor Branden was talking to Dan Wilsher at the back screen door, describing what he remembered about the booby traps inside the house.

  “You have to know how to deactivate them,” Branden said and reached into the doorway. “His daddy showed me all this when I was home one summer from college.”

  At head height, he felt for a string hooked to an eyelet. He pulled his hand back and said, “The first one is clear. We’re OK in the kitchen.”

  Wilsher cleared men from around the door and slowly pushed the screen door open with an old hoe handle. Then he held the screen door back and pushed slowly with the hoe handle to open the inner door. Nothing happened, and the men with Wilsher relaxed noticeably.

  Branden went into the kitchen, studied the room, and said, “We’re all clear this far.”

  Wilsher went in next. Branden said, “Stay away from the doorway,” and pointed to the entrance to the living room.

  The two men searched the kitchen briefly. A fresh pot of coffee stood on the white metal kitchen counter. A half-eaten meal of fried chicken was left on the metal kitchen table. Muddy footprints marked the kitchen floor and led into the living room. Branden pointed out hooks on the far wall and said, “No shotgun on the hooks. Like I said, he didn’t have the kitchen door rigged.”

  At the doorway into the living room, Branden knelt on the red linoleum and said, “Pressure plate here.”

  He eased the blade of his knife into a seam that defined a rectangle of loose tile, and pried the piece gently away from the floor. “If you step on this, you’re gone,” he said up to Wilsher.

  With the linoleum tile removed, Branden studied the mechanism of a battery-powered switch. “This is bad,” he said.

  Carefully, so as not to disturb the electrical contacts on the switch, Branden pried one battery loose, and then the other. He slipped both batteries into his pocket, and stood up next to the doorway. “Have you got a mirror?” he asked Wilsher.

  The lieutenant went to the kitchen door and called a deputy over. “There’s a hand mirror in my trunk,” he said. “In the toolbox.”

  The deputy nodded, trotted off, and returned shortly with a round mirror with a shiny metal back.

  Wilsher delivered the mirror to the professor, and Branden held it to give a view around the doorway, at about head level. He groaned and then gave the mirror to Wilsher.

  Wilsher had a look, stepped back, and whistled. “That’s a real problem,” he said.

  “As far as I know, the only way to set it off,” Branden said, “is the electronic switch.”

  “Provided Spits Wallace hasn’t made any improvements since his dad put this in,” Wilsher said.

  Robertson appeared at the screen door to the kitchen and asked, “Any progress?”

  Wilsher said, “We’ve got a double-barreled shotgun mounted on the other side of this wall. It’s supposed to be on an electronic switch, and we’ve got the batteries out of that.”

/>   Branden said, “Trouble is, Spits Wallace could have a second trip mechanism.”

  Robertson said, “Spits Wallace wasn’t that smart.”

  “Then you can lead us through this door,” Branden said sarcastically.

  Robertson said, “What’s our best play, then?”

  “Bring me a vest and a helmet,” Branden said.

  Robertson nodded and disappeared from in front of the screen door.

  When the sheriff came back with the equipment, Branden suited up, dropped the faceplate on the helmet into position, lay flat on his back on the kitchen floor, and inched his way backward through the doorway, into the living room. He got his head through the doorway, looked up, and said, “There’s a shotgun mounted along the wall, but there’s no wire to the trigger.”

  Upright again in the kitchen, he added, “It can’t be active. There are muddy footprints on the living room carpet. Someone has been in there. I’m betting the trap isn’t active.”

  Wilsher said, “It’s your call, Professor.”

  Branden frowned, lifted the faceplate on his helmet, and wiped sweat off his face with a paper towel from the kitchen counter. “I’ll want to lift the muzzle off the peg, anyway, and step under it.”

  “How about if I reach around and push the muzzle up, while you scoot in on your back? You’ll be out of range of the gun,” Wilsher said.

  “You’re positive on that, are you, Dan?” Branden scoffed.

  Wilsher shrugged.

  From the screened door, Robertson said, “You do it, Dan. Crawl in under the muzzle, and take the shotgun off the wall.”

  “I know the mechanism,” Branden said. “I’ll do it.”

  “No,” Robertson said through the screen. “It’s going to be just like you said. No wire, no blast. Give Dan the vest and helmet, Mike.”

  Branden slipped out of the vest and helmet and helped Wilsher suit up and adjust the vest to his wider girth.

  On his stomach, Wilsher slid into the living room, crouched against the wall under the shotgun, and gently lifted the weapon off its wall pegs. He cracked the chambers open and said, relieved, “Not loaded.”

  Branden stepped into the living room and Wilsher said, “It’d take your head off.”

  Branden smiled nervously.

  Wilsher asked, “There’s another one?”

  “In the bedroom. Even if the first two traps weren’t set,” Branden said, “the third trap still might be loaded. There used to be only three. The last one’s a spring-up switch plate weighted down with sacks of gold coins. If you move the coins, a shotgun rigged in the basement shoots you through the floor.”

  In the bedroom, they found the spring plate sprung up from the floor, no bags of gold coins weighing it down. In the basement, there was no shotgun mounted to shoot up through a hole in the ceiling. Branden climbed the steps back to the first floor and called “All clear” through the back screened door.

  The search of the Spits Wallace property inside and out revealed nothing beyond the murder scene they had discovered when they had first come up the driveway. Robertson sent Wilsher out to release the deputy teams as the search wound down, and Niell, Robertson, and Branden stood in the kitchen to talk.

  “There’s no gold,” Robertson said.

  “No live booby traps,” Branden said.

  Wilsher came back into the kitchen and said, “One of my men took a radio call from Ellie. There’s a DEA agent who was going to brief us at six o’clock.”

  “It’s about time,” Branden said. “Sara’s been gone almost nine hours now.”

  Robertson walked out to the body, which had been maneuvered partway into a black body bag. The other men joined him. Missy Taggert was zipping him up.

  “Let’s have another look, Missy,” Robertson said.

  Missy unzipped the body bag, and the men crowded around. Spits Wallace was in the same dirty clothes he had been wearing that morning when Robertson and Branden had talked to him. Wallace’s knees were caked with dried mud. His hands were black with coal, his nails chipped and stained yellow. A plug of tobacco was pushed out onto his beard by a protruding tongue. In his eyes, there was the startled look of a man who had been surprised by his own mortality.

  15

  Friday, July 23

  6:50 P.M.

  AGENT Tony Arnetto of the Drug Enforcement Administration stood with his back to the north-facing windows in Bruce Robertson’s office at the jail and struggled vainly to bring a measure of calm back into his voice after the shouting match with Robertson had played to a draw. He was short, wiry, and dressed in a thousand-dollar suit more appropriate for the halls of Washington, D.C., than for the hills of east-central Ohio. The big sheriff’s belligerence had brought his blood to a boil in record time.

  His intransigence marked by the set of his jaw, Robertson stood behind his desk, as angry with Arnetto as he had ever been with anyone. Branden sat between them, in a chair in front of the sheriff’s desk, surprised, despite long experience, by how quickly Robertson had been able to provoke the DEA agent into an outburst.

  After a labored breath to calm himself, Arnetto said, “We can’t take them down now. There’s the bar, the house in Gahanna, and a score of dealers out on the street in Columbus alone. We’re just not ready.”

  “You’ll never be as ready as you want to be,” Robertson argued, still heated.

  “Look,” Arnetto said, “it’s complicated.”

  Pounding his desk, Robertson said, “It’s not complicated! More likely than not, Sara Yoder is down there. She’s sure not in Holmes County anymore, or we’d have turned something up. We’re going after her. You can take these drug clowns down at the same time.”

  Frustrated, Arnetto snapped his hand through the air and said, “You’re not going to flush seven months of undercover work down the toilet on the off chance that she’ll be in that bar. I keep telling you, we haven’t seen her!”

  Robertson kicked back against his chair and knocked it into the bookshelves behind his desk. He scratched furiously at his stiff burr haircut and scowled into the middle distance. He pulled the chair back to rights and sat down heavily. Ellie Troyer-Niell came into the office and stood tapping a steno pad with her pen, her face passive. Robertson gave her a glance, calmed himself on her account, and said, less aggressively, “Then send your man back into the Gahanna house. Find out if she’s there.”

  “It’s too soon,” Arnetto said, responding in a measured way to Robertson’s moderated tone. “Look, there’s the bar on 62. You know about that from your videotape. Then there’s the house in Gahanna. I shouldn’t have told you about it, but there you are. If we take one or both of those places, we’re going to lose all the Holmes County people this guy is running. That’s five midlevel pushers and a dozen retailers out on your streets. We’re just not ready to move.”

  Branden turned in his chair to face Arnetto more squarely, and said, “It is likely going to be this redhead’s crew who took Sara away, Agent Arnetto. It’s more than likely that this same crew is tied into John Schlabaugh’s murder. Maybe Spits Wallace’s, too.”

  “Who?” Arnetto asked.

  “William Wallace,” Branden said evenly. “He was killed today with a machine gun. He had told us earlier that some city boys had made a run at his place a while back.”

  “Made a run for what?” Arnetto asked.

  “Gold coins,” Robertson said. “Look, it doesn’t matter what it was for. We know where the bar is.”

  Arnetto shook his head and slapped his palms against his thighs in frustration. He moved to a chair beside Branden and sat down. Ellie Troyer-Niell turned slowly and left quietly. Robertson planted his palms on his desk, trying to project less aggression.

  Arnetto scratched a sideburn and said, “His name is Samuel White. Samuel ‘Red Dog’ White. He cooks Ecstasy for a three-state enterprise, and every time we raid his lab, he sets up somewhere else. We’ve never caught him dirty. He’s too smart for that. And he’s got his lab up and ru
nning again, God knows where, and if we go in looking for Sara Yoder, he’ll spook, and that’ll be seven months of undercover work shot to pieces, and we’re just not going to do that, OK?”

  Arnetto had managed to control his tone, but his face and neck were flushed with the effort. He shifted unhappily in his chair and rubbed at a pain in the side of his neck. He looked from Robertson to Branden and back at Robertson before saying, “I’m sorry. We’re going to need at least three days to set up, before we let our guy go back to the Gahanna house. On what pretext, I don’t know. But, even then, he’s not going to be able to search the house for Sara Yoder. We could spoil the whole setup and still not find out if she’s there.”

  Robertson nodded appeasingly, thought for a moment, and said, “Then you’ve got to take them all down. You can coordinate with us in Holmes County. Take them all down, Tony. It’s the right thing to do, for Sara Yoder’s sake.”

  Arnetto rubbed again at the throbbing pain in his neck, and shook his head. “It’d take at least three days to set it up, and we’d still not get all the Holmes County people.”

  Robertson said, “We don’t have three days.”

  “You don’t know that,” Arnetto complained.

  “We can’t risk any delay,” Robertson countered.

  Arnetto hoisted his eyebrows in vexation, acknowledged the problem with a wave of his hand, and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Ellie came back through the door with her pen and steno pad, a blank expression on her face. She briefly caught Robertson’s eye.

  Branden stood and said, “I should be going.”

  Robertson said, “Hang back, Mike.” Turning to his dispatcher, he said, “Ellie, please set Agent Arnetto up with all of our contact information.”

  Arnetto stood. “It’ll be Monday, anyway, before we have something worked out.”