by Allen Kent
“Are they sending Joseph down?” Grace asked.
I tried to shrug in a way that said, “Don’t know and don’t care.” Even though Grace lives off and on with Sal, when Mara Joseph helped with my first murder case as sheriff, there had been some visible tension around the office. I first attributed it to Grace resenting another strong-willed woman sticking her nose into our jurisdictional business. Marti hinted that maybe it was because Joseph is a pretty nice looking woman in her own right and the first I’d paid attention to since losing Adeena. When I’d asked Marti why that should make any difference to Grace, she just gave me one of her “sometimes you can be such a knucklehead” looks.
“I’ll take that ‘don’t know’ as a ‘yes,’” Grace muttered.
“Take it as an ‘I don’t have any idea,’” I corrected, which was true. “But we’ve got to have some state help. I seriously doubt that whoever buried our John Doe in the dam blew the thing up. They planted him there to keep the body from ever being discovered. So we’ve got two pretty heavy crimes on our hands. A major destruction of property case and a murder. I’m thinking of completely turning the dam explosion over to the state since it involves a public works project. We’ll focus our attention on finding out who our victim is and who shot the man in the head.”
“What was that evil eye thing all about?” Frankie asked, lifting his cap and scratching nervously at his thinning forehead.
“Common all over the Middle East and Asia,” I said. “But I think that one was Mideastern. They call them the evil eye, but really carry them to ward off bad luck.”
“Didn’t seem to work for that guy,” Rocky chuckled. “So you think he was probably from over there somewhere?”
The amulet was in a plastic evidence bag in the middle of the desk. I lifted it by the corner. “I don’t think we can count on that. I used to carry one when I was in Iraq. I don’t think I’m superstitious, but I figured every bit of luck would help.”
“He wasn’t from around here,” Frankie insisted. “Even with the dirt all over him, I could tell he was someone I hadn’t seen before.”
Grace and I both nodded our agreement and I lowered the nazar back onto the desk. “We’ll get some pictures from the crime lab when they get the body cleaned up and show them around. See if anyone recognizes the man.”
In the outer office, we heard Bobby greet Marti and ask if we were holed away behind the shades. I waved to Frankie to invite him in. Bobby entered, took a quick look around to see who was present, then deposited a brown shoe beside the bagged charm.
“Found the other one,” he said, stepping back to give the others a clear view of the evidence. “It was on the other side of the creek, about half the distance the body was from the crater. I figure the explosion blew the guy upward and maybe into a spin, throwing the shoe off in that direction.”
Frankie shuffled nervously against the doorframe. “I didn’t get to the other side of the creek with my searching,” he muttered defensively. “Or I’d have found it.”
I raised a hand to show it wasn’t a big deal. “Someone found it, so that’s good. Did you come up with anything else?” I asked Bobby.
“Not really. There was a lot of stream trash, and I flagged and recorded it all like Frankie was doing.” Acknowledging Ritter’s work took a little of the fidgeting out of the man. “But you might want to take a good look at that shoe, Tate. The inside of the tongue. It looks like it’s got some writing on it you might be able to figure out.”
I leaned forward, grasped the shoe’s heel, and forced the tongue forward with a pen. A one-inch tag in tan cloth was stitched across the inside of the leather flap. For the first time in the year and a half I’d served as sheriff, my time as a Marine and government interpreter was about to pay off.
Bobby leaned forward over the desk. “I-raqi writing, isn’t it?” He’d seen enough signs and graffiti in Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish while tromping through Iraqi villages to tie the squiggles and dots to the country.
“Close,” I agreed. “But this is Syrian Arabic. It says, ‘Made in Idlib.’ That mean anything to anybody?” I glanced quickly around the room into three blank faces.
“Idlib’s in northwest Syria. Both a town and a province. It’s been one of the last rebel strongholds. How about Khan Shaykhun? Does that ring a bell?”
More blank stares.
“How about sarin gas?” All four heads nodded.
“Well, the town of Khan Shaykhun is just south of the city of Idlib in the same province. That’s where the biggest gas attack happened that you all heard about.”
“The guy did look kind of like he might be an A-rab,” Frankie muttered. “But what would a man from Syria be doing in our county—and buried out at the dam?”
“Maybe more than we’d like to know,” I muttered. “You know the three refugee families that were taken in by the First Christian Church? The ones I help with teacher conferences?”
Again, all four heads nodded, a glimmer of understanding starting to show in Grace’s dark eyes.
“Well,” I said, pushing back from the desk. “All three of those families come from Ariha. That’s in the province of Idlib.”
5
My phone buzzed as Grace and I were leaving the office for the Haddad home. The number was still in my directory from six months ago.
“Well, Officer Joseph,” I answered, glancing over at Grace whose jaw tightened visibly. “Have you been assigned to our bombing?”
“That, and to help you with your murder. In fact, I have some morgue photos with me that will give you a clearer image of your victim.”
It was mid-afternoon. We’d spent the day filing reports, cataloging what evidence we’d been able to gather from the bomb site, and cleaning up a couple of minor complaints that still deserved attention. I’d been about to open the street door for Grace but waved her back into the office.
“How far out are you?” I asked Joseph. “We’re on our way to see a family who might be able to connect some of the dots for us on this. But the photos will be helpful.”
“About ten minutes. Can I meet you somewhere?”
I shook my head, more for Grace’s benefit than for the voice that couldn’t see me. “These are recent immigrant families that still aren’t too trusting of authority, especially police. I do some interpreting for them and know them well. We need to make this a local visit.”
“Whatever you say. I’ll bring the photos by the office, then drive on out to the dam.”
I glanced at the wall clock behind Marti’s desk. It was just after 4:00. The Haddad men wouldn’t be off work for half an hour, and a visit to the families without the men present would be both inappropriate and resented. And it probably wouldn’t tell us what we needed to know.
“Great. We’ll wait until you get here.” I hit the disconnect and steered Grace back toward the fishbowl.
“Was that your friend, Officer Joseph?” Marti asked from her desk, keeping her eyes mainly on Grace.
I stopped in the middle of the outer office, looking from one to the other. “What’s with this ‘Your friend Joseph?’ Yes. She’s been sent down by the Patrol and will be helping with the investigation. But I haven’t seen her in six months.” Which was true—but not because I hadn’t tried.
I’d once commented that when on the job, Mara Joseph was like a hunting bobcat: sleek, compact, intense, and fearless. But while we had worked together to investigate the death of Nettie Suskey, my first murder as the new sheriff, I’d come to know the warmer, more sensitive side of this pretty, petite St. Louis transplant. We’d sparred a little about her being from an established Jewish family while I’d spent all of my adult life studying Arabic and Farsi and had been engaged to a Palestinian. But she understood the indiscriminate tragedy of the Middle East conflict that had taken Adeena’s life when a hotel in Baghdad where she was interpreting was bombed by Al Qaeda. Joseph had also experienced some of the fragility created by deep personal loss, and we had found solace
in each other’s company. One of those times of solace, known only to me and Joseph as far as I knew, had ended in an exhausting, but completely sensational night together—at least for me. I’d tried to encourage a relationship after the case ended, but she hadn’t been ready to jump back into the fire. We honestly hadn’t spoken or seen each other in six months.
“My recollection,” Marti said, refreshing our memories, “is that when she was here last, we didn’t see much of you around the office—or get a lot of help with the routine little problems that all the rest of us were having to take care of.”
I didn’t try to argue the point. “That was then. This is now. She’ll be working on the dam explosion. We’ll concentrate on who put the body out there and why.”
Marti lifted her nose with a dismissive sniff. “We’ll see how that goes.”
I again chose not to argue. Marti Bleasdale has been with the department since Christ was a baby and has more institutional memory than all of our bank of files combined. She has an irritating inclination to offer unsolicited advice and is overly protective of Grace, but that memory and uncanny intuition make it well worth keeping her around. The fact that she’s discreet, completely loyal if you do your job, and knows more about what’s going on in town than anyone but Jerry at Family Market makes her damn near indispensable. But she has a pain-in-the-ass habit of speaking truth when it’s not wanted. As if to prove her point, as Marti returned to her typing, Mara Joseph pushed through the front door, nodded to the two women, and gave me a more than friendly smile.
“How you been, Tate? You’re looking good.”
She was dressed as she always does on the job: pressed jeans and a khaki shirt under an official patrol jacket. She looked every bit as good as I remembered.
“And you as well,” I said, trying to sound welcoming rather than approving. I could tell from Marti’s tight-lipped glance that it hadn’t worked. I nodded toward Grace. “Why don’t the three of us go into the office? Let’s see what you have for us.”
As had become the custom when Joseph helped with the Suskey case, she took Grace’s favorite chair in the corner. The chief deputy propped herself beside the door. Joseph pulled a legal-sized envelope from an inside pocket of her jacket, drew out a photograph and card with two sets of prints, and tossed them on the desk. Grace stepped over to study them and Joseph scooted her chair closer to the desk. She tapped on the photo.
“Here’s a shot of the man’s face after the morgue got him cleaned up. And here are his prints. Both hands. We ran them through both state and federal databanks and came up empty. The lab’s processing a DNA sample to see if he has one on file somewhere or if it links him to someone else we know of—and to try to get some kind of national or ethnic profile.”
“He’s Syrian,” I told her. “From around the city of Idlib.”
She arched a neatly shaped brow. “And you know this because—?”
I told her about the label in the stray shoe.
Joseph grinned. “I have a label in my shirt that says it’s made in Vietnam. That doesn’t mean I’m from Hanoi.”
The plastic bag with the nazar still sat in the middle of the desk. I slid it over beside the photo. “Grace found this on the ground close to the body. It’s a common Middle Eastern amulet that’s supposed to ward off the evil eye. And Idlib isn’t exactly a major exporter of shoes. I’d guess there are only one or two shoemakers in Idlib. And they probably have all the work they can do to keep up with local demand. Pretty sure this man bought his shoes in northwest Syria.”
Joseph stood beside Grace, picking up the nazar and turning the bag in her hands. “I’ve seen these things. Usually as a necklace. Do you think the man was carrying it? If there was nothing in his pockets, I can’t see a killer leaving that kind of evidence on a body.”
“I suspect whoever killed the man didn’t think the body would be found,” Grace observed.
“Then why remove other identifying information?” Joseph argued. “No wallet or cards. No keys.”
“Maybe the man wasn’t carrying anything else for just that reason,” Grace countered. “If he was picked up or killed, he didn’t want to be identified. You said he didn’t have prints on record. That’s getting to be pretty unusual.” The women had been in the same room for less than ten minutes and the air was already beginning to crackle.
Looking at the two standing beside each other across the desk, I couldn’t help but be struck by the contrast: the lithe, gymnast-sized investigator with short, chestnut hair and a pixie-pretty face; Grace, a head taller with dark, expressive eyes and ebony hair that hung in a ponytail through the back of her cap to the middle of her back. I was tempted to let the debate continue, just to see how this would play out. But we didn’t need tension on the team this early in the investigation.
“We’ll run prints on the amulet and see what shows up,” I interrupted. “If it belongs to the victim, my guess is that his will be all over it. If it’s clean, it was probably planted. Or it could have just been dropped by somebody hiking along the creek. Since you’re headed out to the bomb site, Joseph, you can help us by asking the construction people how someone was able to bury a body in the dam without being discovered. If whoever did it used earthmoving equipment, I’d think they would have been heard. And the soil around here is so rocky, you couldn’t dig in it without using a pick or bar of some kind.”
“Unless you were part of the crew,” Joseph said. “I’ve got some people coming down to check for residue so we can identify the explosive. I’m going to begin by backgrounding everyone at the site. This strikes me as the kind of thing that might have been done by one of the workmen.”
Grace saw another opportunity to contradict. “More likely by your friends, the Greaves. They’re still holding out on selling their land and have a suit against Mid-Missouri Water.”
Joseph looked at me sharply. “This true, Tate? The Greaves may be in the middle of this?”
I couldn’t suppress a chuckle. “Might be. You’ll probably need to go back down into the holler and confront the two of them. But it may just be Verl. LJ’s still pretty stoved up from when you shot him.” I winked at Grace. “To be safe, I think I’d take a couple of patrolmen down there with you.”
“Not funny,” Joseph grumbled. “That SOB turned a shotgun on me.”
“You were on sovereign land,” I grinned. “Just like you will be this time.”
“We had reason to believe they were harvesting trees off Nettie’s property,” she insisted. “They looked like prime suspects.”
“And they do again. But you know the Greaves. Not a spit of human kindness between the two of them.” It was a description given by one of their neighbors that I knew Joseph would remember. “And you said you hoped you could nail them for something sometime. This might be your chance.”
Joseph dropped the amulet back on the desktop. “I think I’ll do the site investigation first. Maybe something will point in a different direction and I won’t have to deal with the Greaves. What are you two up to today?” She said it more to Grace than to me.
Grace turned back toward the door, leaving me to answer. “There’s a link here that has to be more than coincidental. We have three Syrian refugee families living in town, sponsored by the First Christian Church.”
“Let me guess,” Joseph said, smiling thinly and also turning toward the door. “They’re from Idlib.”
6
To give the Haddad men a little extra time to get home and settled in, I decided to start with the church pastor rather than the Syrian families. When we talked to the Haddads, we needed to have as much information as we could about how they ended up in Crayton, Missouri. Matt Frazee is a big man, about an inch shorter than I am at 6’2”, and a good thirty pounds heavier. He looks more the medieval friar than twenty-first century pastor, with a cropped fringe around a balding head and short tawny beard. He’s a bit of a free thinker theologically, and we have morning coffee together about once a month to argue the
finer points of religion. He classifies himself as Christian, mind you, but is open to the idea that there are a number of pathways to God. Since Adeena’s death, he’s been one of the few people I can talk to who’s willing to accept that her Muslim upbringing didn’t automatically consign her to one of Dante’s circles of hell. He’s also quite the banjo player and is willing to give a hack picker like me a free lesson every now and then. We found him troubling over a sermon in the parsonage study.
He stood and clasped one of my hands and an elbow with a ministerial grip. “Good timing, Tate,” he said, giving Grace a much more genteel handshake. “I’ve decided this Sunday I need to take on the problematic John 3:5. Frankly, I don’t know exactly where to go with it.”
One of the certainties of growing up in this part of the Bible Belt is that, as soon as a kid is old enough to listen to stories, he starts getting schooled in lessons from the Good Book. For me, that meant daily readings at home, weekly lessons at Sunday school, and scripture bees at church socials. Two of the ways I’d separated myself during childhood from the rest of the Tates of Huckleberry Ridge were by being generally law-abiding and an obsessive bookworm. The inclination toward words and language favored me in the scripture competitions, and I could still retrieve good sections of the Old and New Testaments from memory. It was a talent that both impressed and frustrated Matt Frazee. Mother was a King James Bible devotee, so my memory was laced with the “thees” and “thous” of the 1611 translation.
“Baptism,” I said. “‘Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, . . . ’ yadda, yadda.”
Matt chuckled. “Very good, Tate.” He glanced at Grace to see if she might tolerate a little theology before we got down to business. Her amused smile gave him what permission he needed. “So, given your concern about your friend Adeena, what do you make of that passage?”