Dark Path

by Melissa F. Miller

  “Pastor Scott, Detective Williams, what’s going on?” Cleo asked.

  “Well, Cleo, it seems the detective takes issue with my—”

  Detective Williams spoke right over him. “The good pastor here is engaged in witness coaching—no, witness tampering—in his efforts to railroad Eduardo Martinez.”

  Bryce eyed her cautiously. She was still shaking with fury.

  “I did no such thing. Clearly, there’s been some sort of misunderstanding by the—”

  “You might as well have put your hand up her butt and used her as a puppet!” Detective Williams shouted.

  She pointed an accusatory finger at Philomena Pearl, who sat hunched over in her seat as if willing herself to disappear. The aide was holding back tears.

  “Detective Williams, a word?” the man said in a cool voice, as if the detective were perfectly rational and not a red-faced, spittle-producing, shrieking maniac.

  “I take it you’re Dr. King?” Bryce asked.

  The man nodded but kept his focus on Detective Williams. She let out a great whoosh of breath then followed him to the door.

  She paused on the threshold to turn back and glare at Bryce. “This isn’t over,” she warned.

  As soon as they’d left, Cleo closed the door softly behind them. Then she turned to face him.

  “Pastor Scott, what happened?”

  He spread his arms wide and lifted his palms toward the ceiling. “I’m sure the detective’s under a great deal of pressure to get to the bottom of these unfortunate deaths, but her outburst was completely unacceptable. In fact, as a citizen, I very well may file a complaint with the police department.”

  He leaned into his outrage, expecting some measure of sympathy, but Cleo didn’t react.

  Instead, she turned away from him and crouched beside Philomena’s chair. “Can you tell me what happened, Mrs. Pearl?” she asked in a gentle voice.

  Philomena took a shuddering breath. “I’ll try, Ms. Clarkson. The detective was already angry with Pastor Bryce when I came. After Charlene’s interview, she said she needed to speak to him privately before I came in.”

  Philomena paused and dabbed the corners of her eyes with the tissue she’d been twisting between her hands.

  She exhaled then continued, “Now, I don’t know what they talked about, but Charlene told me Detective Williams got really hot at the end of her interview when she explained about Nurse Martinez.”

  Cleo tilted her head. “Do you know what she meant by that? What did Mrs. Rivers explain about him?”

  Philomena shot Bryce a worried look. “Um …”

  “Cleo, I encouraged Charlene to be completely open and honest with the detective. Apparently, she’s been harboring concerns about Eduardo Martinez,” he explained.

  “What types of concerns?” She directed the question to Philomena.

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. But I know Pastor Bryce spoke to both of us about the fact that, aside from Charlene and me, he was the only person who was working all five times someone died. It seemed like the police might be trying to put the blame on one of the three of us. And, well, Char and I both know we didn’t do anything wrong. So …”

  “So Pastor Scott told you to speculate that Nurse Martinez did?” Cleo suggested.

  “That’s unfair,” he protested. “I shared with them a fact I learned from Nurse Mumma. That he was originally not scheduled to work two of those nights, but he requested extra hours. That seemed like pertinent information.”

  Cleo stood and placed a reassuring hand on Philomena’s shoulder. She fixed her emerald eyes on his face.

  “If you thought it was worth sharing with the authorities, surely you could have talked to Detective Williams. Don’t you see how this looks? Feeding answers to witnesses? This is exactly the impression I wanted to avoid.” Her voice was laced with recrimination.

  He stiffened his shoulders. “I did nothing inappropriate.”

  One eyebrow danced up to her hairline. “What did Detective Williams say to you between the interviews?” she asked in an innocent tone.

  He clamped his lips together like a child who was being reprimanded and refused to answer.

  Felicia whirled around, knocking Bodhi’s hand off her elbow. “I warned him, Bodhi. I freaking told him after the Rivers interview not to interfere and not to coach the witnesses. I told him I’d throw his ass in jail if he did it again. And he did it again.”

  She was spiraling out of control, and she knew it. But her red-hot anger was driving her to lash out.

  “Detective,” he said in a low voice.

  She didn’t answer or raise her eyes from the floor.

  “Felicia—”

  His use of her first name startled her. She looked up.

  “Listen, I’m not in the mood to focus on my breath or acknowledge my anger, okay?”

  “I think your anger’s not really in question. No need to note it,” he said with a smile. “But tell me this, what do you think Pastor Scott’s goal in coaching those women might be?”

  “I already told you, he’s trying to throw Ed under the bus.”

  “He may be. Or he may simply be trying to protect Mrs. Pearl and Mrs. Rivers. They’re his congregants, right? He may feel responsible for them.”

  “So what? Whether his goal is to shield them or screw Ed, the end result’s the same,” she growled. “And Ed is screwed now. I can’t interview him without leaning hard on him. Not after the picture they painted.”

  “Okay. What’s your goal?”

  His incessant reasonable tone was really starting to piss her off.

  “What do you mean, what’s my goal? To stop these people from framing Ed.”

  He blinked at her. Then he said slowly, “Or you could choose to make protecting Eduardo Martinez your goal.”

  “What difference does it make, Bodhi? Stop them or protect him—they’re the same thing.” She hissed the words through clenched teeth.

  “But, they’re not. You’re gravitating to a somewhat violent or confrontational response—to punish Pastor Scott and those two women for their efforts. That’s not your only choice.”

  “Well, I can’t do nothing. I have to do something about it.”

  “You could do something by doing nothing.”

  She huffed out a breath. “Bodhi, so help me, if you don’t drop the magical, mystical bullcrap and just say what you mean, I’m going to lose it for real.”

  “Do nothing. Don’t interview Eduardo when he gets here. Tell Cleo something more urgent came up and you’ll need to reschedule.”

  She was stunned into silence. It seemed entirely too easy. But, she realized, postponing the interview solved her primary problem without any danger of her throttling that smarmy preacher and being brought up on police brutality charges.

  “That’ll work,” she said in amazement.

  “And, as a bonus, it happens to be true.”

  “Wait. What?”

  “Something more urgent has come up. I need you to go to the medical examiner’s office and bring back Dr. Ashland and a whole bunch of equipment. More than he could transport alone on the ferry. I’ll write out a list.”

  She felt the rage that had consumed her ease its grip. “Sure thing. You write out your list. I’m going to sweet talk Cleo into lending me the yacht.”

  “Detective—” he warned.

  She laughed lightly. “Don’t worry, I said ‘sweet talk,’ not ‘beat.’”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Bodhi stepped into the doorway of Cleo’s office. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Oh, good gravy, now what?” She looked up from her memo with mild alarm. She thought she’d managed to smooth everything over.

  She’d mollified Pastor Scott and Philomena and had seen them off—first him on the helicopter, and then her on the yacht. She’d made arrangements for Felicia Williams to borrow the speedboat for her emergency errand. And she’d apologized profusely to Eduardo Martinez for dragging him out to the isla
nd for no reason.

  Was it too much to hope for a few uninterrupted minutes to actually do some work?

  He laughed easily. “No fires to put out, I promise. Just a quick question.”

  She felt her mouth curve into a smile. “That’s the best news I’ve had all day. What can I do for you?”

  “I can’t seem to find Lynette. I’ve looked everywhere. I checked with Mrs. Martin and your grand … er, Mr. Santiago. They haven’t seen her, and she didn’t show up for lunch. Her meal is still in the refrigerator.” A worry line creased his forehead.

  “Oh! I’ve been so busy, I forgot.”

  She opened the long, shallow desk drawer where she kept her pens and pulled out a cream-colored envelope addressed to him. “Her niece showed up this morning. A surprise visit. She was in Miami for a legal conference, so she came down to take Lynette out to lunch. Lynette asked me to give this to you.”

  He pocketed the envelope. “Any idea when she’ll be back?”

  “Well, she said late afternoon. But the last time this attorney niece of hers took her out, they ended up in a lawyer bar in Little Havana, trading war stories and doing shots. We didn’t see her for two days.” She laughed at the memory.

  He seemed less amused. “Okay, thanks.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “It seemed like she had something important to tell me. I wish I’d had a chance to talk to her before she left.”

  “Oh. Well, you were sort of busy doing God’s work. If you hadn’t calmed Detective Williams down, we might have had a real problem on our hands.”

  As far as she could tell, the possibilities had ranged from mayhem and bloodshed to Pastor Scott being hauled off in handcuffs. But somehow, no violence between law enforcement and the clergy had erupted in her facility. Yet.

  “She’s not going to forget what happened,” he warned. “I can direct her energy to more productive matters for a while, but …”

  Cleo shrugged. “Pastor Scott’s an adult. He’ll have to deal with the consequences of his actions.” As the words left her mouth, she wished she could grab them back. Despite her feelings about his behavior in the interview, it wasn’t appropriate to exhibit such disloyalty.

  “Speaking of consequences, do you have any plans to tell Mr. Santiago about your relationship?”

  “Shhh.” She jerked her head toward the hallway.

  He got the hint and pulled the door closed behind him. “Sorry.”

  She felt self-conscious talking about her deepest secret with him, but, at the same time, she was desperate for someone to share her thinking with.

  “I’m not sure yet whether or how to tell him. But I certainly don’t want him to find out through the well-oiled Golden Shores gossip machine. And I’d like to wait until this SUD cluster mess gets resolved. So get busy, would you?” She smiled to let him know she was mainly kidding.

  “Fair enough. Hey, has that gossip machine spread anything about why Nurse Martinez was asking for extra shifts?”

  She shook her head. “Nope. Nurse Mumma said she doesn’t look gift horses in the mouth. He asked for extra nights, and she signed him up. End of story. I guess Detective Williams can ask him when she gets around to interviewing him.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, I suppose. Thanks for the note. I’ll be in the storage closet with Mr. Gonzales’s belongings if anyone’s looking for me.”

  He turned to leave.

  “Wait. Do you want me to find an orderly to help you take all that stuff to a reading room in the library? You’ll be more comfortable.”

  “No, thanks. I want to disturb it as little as possible. But when you get a chance, can I look through Ms. Morales’s things?”

  “Oh, right.” She removed a key from the ring on her desk. “This same key opens the closet we were in earlier and the one between the library and the reception area. Her belongings are in there.”

  She tossed the key in his direction, and he plucked it out of the air with two fingers.

  “I’m not sure how long this will take …”

  “Keep it until you’re done with it. I don’t need access to either closet for anything.”

  “Thanks again. Don’t work too hard.”

  She laughed helplessly and gestured at the paperwork piled up on her desk. “Right.”

  “And, Cleo, if you’re waiting for the perfect time to talk to Mr. Santiago, remember this, ‘What is past is left behind. The future is as yet unreached.’”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Is that a fancy way of saying there’s no time like the present?’

  He ducked his head and grinned. “Well, yeah, I guess it is.”

  “Noted. Have fun playing in the dirt.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Digging through Mr. Gonzales’s dirt was decidedly not fun. Bodhi had scrounged up a metal chair from a stack in the library and had brought it into the closet. He’d cleared a spot on a shelf to use as a desk. Then he powered up his laptop and set his notepad and pencil beside it. With his temporary workspace arranged for maximum productivity, he got to work.

  He found a package of blue exam gloves tucked into a pocket of his laptop bag and snapped them on. He dragged the cauldrons, heavy with dirt, from the center of the room to a spot on the side and moved the boxes to the space they’d occupied.

  There were two stacks of four boxes each. Assuming they were all full, they held a considerable amount of stuff for a man living in a single room.

  One by one, he removed the lid from each box and performed a visual survey of its contents. As Cleo had said, several of them contained dirt and assorted stuff—shards of glass and pottery, beads, branches, and coins. Odds and ends that he’d need to sort, categorize, and catalogue.

  He found the loose bundle of bones in the sixth box. The skulls—some human, some not—were in the seventh box. But it was the eighth box that made his heart thump and his chest tighten. Several glass bottles of silver liquid lay in a nest of bubble wrap. More bottles, empty and uncorked, were scattered around the perimeter of the box. Shiny silver pools of liquid dotted the bottom of the box.

  Elemental mercury. Liquid at room temperature. Silver. Poisonous.

  He jammed the lid back onto the box and rocked back on his heels. What had Gonzales been doing with bottles full of highly toxic mercury?

  “Bodhi? Are you in there?” Doctor Ashland’s muffled voice came through the door followed by a knock.

  Bodhi grabbed his computer, notes, and bag and opened the door.

  “What are you doing in a closet? I thought Cleo was joking,” Detective Williams said.

  He pulled the door shut and locked it. Then he turned to face them.

  Dr. Ashland studied his face. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Not a ghost. But something unsettling, for sure,” Bodhi said as he regained control of his breath.

  Detective Williams gestured to the handcart she was pulling. “We brought the equipment you wanted. Now what?”

  Bodhi frowned. “I’m not sure. José Gonzales’s personal belongings are in there.”

  Dr. Ashland nodded. “Great. So you want to bring them back to the lab to analyze?” He said it as if he wasn’t quite sure.

  And with good reason. Most medical examiners focused mainly on the corpse and left the artifacts, such as they were, to the forensic anthropologists. Bodhi had a sneaking suspicion no such creature was on staff in Dr. Ashland’s shop.

  “Well, I did. But along with a bunch of bones, some skulls, an assortment of debris and detritus, and some swords, there’s a box full of elemental mercury in there.”

  “Oh.” Dr. Ashland’s eyes went round.

  “Right. Oh,” Bodhi agreed.

  “Mercury, as in the stuff in a thermometer?” Detective Williams asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that toxic?”

  “Yes,” Bodhi and Dr. Ashland answered together.

  “Oh.”

  They stared at one another in silence for a moment.
>
  Then Bodhi said, “We’ll leave it for now. The door’s locked, and I have the key. We can think about what to do with it while we gather Ms. Morales’s things. They’re in a closet down the hall.”

  “Let’s hope she doesn’t have a box of anthrax,” Detective Williams murmured.

  He headed for the second closet with Dr. Ashland at his side. Detective Williams trailed them by several steps, pulling the handcart along behind her.

  They reached the closet, and Bodhi dug the key out from his pants pocket. As he unlocked the door, he realized he was holding his breath.

  He exhaled and flipped the light switch on the wall. He immediately noted three things. One, Esmerelda Morales had left behind far fewer belongings than had José Gonzales. Two, most of her possessions were articles of clothing, which hung from two metal racks in folds of silk, cotton, and polyester. And, three, while there was no evidence she’d collected dirt, there was ample evidence that she’d collected statues. Elaborate, colorful statues of saints stood in a neat row lined up on the top of a long wooden trunk and two hard-sided suitcases.

  “Hmm.”

  “Hmm, what?” Detective Williams asked.

  Bodhi started. He hadn’t realized he’d made a noise.

  “Oh. I’m surprised to see all the saints. Ms. Morales’ friends were just telling me she hadn’t been a particularly devout Catholic. I guess they underestimated her.”

  Detective Williams shook her head. “Santería. That’s what it is—saint worship, literally.”

  He was getting the feeling he was in over his head. Then he remembered Lynette Johnson’s unread note.

  “Hang on.” He pulled the envelope from his pocket and slit it open with a fingernail.

  Bodhi,

  My niece showed up for a visit, which is handy. She wants to take me to lunch, and I need to pick up a bottle of wine or two. Stop by later. We can raise a glass and I will tell you what you need to know about the palero.

  Lyn

  He refolded the note card and slipped it back into the envelope.

  “Do either of you know what a palero is?”

  Dr. Ashland shrugged. “Not me.”