The Psalmist

by James Lilliefors

  “Really.”

  “Yeah, way out in the country. Passed right by me in a silver pickup.”

  Charlotte tilted her head, interested. “Are you sure it was him?”

  “Not entirely. Except we looked at each other as he passed and there seemed to be a moment of recognition.”

  “You should tell the inspector.”

  “Yeah, I know.” He smiled, not sure if her word choice was making fun of Amy Hunter or not. “I will.”

  Her eyes stayed with him as she went back to her soup. “He used to really think the world of you, you know.”

  “Jackson did?”

  “Of course. He thought you could fix his life.”

  ­“People overestimate me sometimes.”

  “I don’t.” She gave him a smart, mischievous look. “And you don’t. That’s what matters.”

  Sneakers suddenly raised his head as if remembering something he needed from the store. After a moment he settled back to sleep.

  “Darlene from the college called,” Charlotte said.

  “Your occasional friend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This must qualify as an occasion.”

  “She heard that the killing had to do with the vote on the new church. And with the Nayaks. Someone in the office told her that. She wanted to know if it was true.”

  “To which you replied . . .”

  “I laughed. I couldn’t help it.”

  “Good. An appropriate response,” Luke said.

  Amy Hunter had asked about this, too: if the debate over church growth might’ve had anything to do with the killing. The congregation was split on whether to build a new church on the existing site or sell the land and relocate. Frank Nayak, Jr., or Little Frank, as the old-­timers called him, had offered to purchase the church and donate a large parcel of inland property for the relocation. The church, Little Frank liked to say, was “a nonrevenue producer, not the proper use of that land.”

  “You know how when the mafia wants to deliver a warning, they leave a dead fish on the front porch?” Charlotte said. “Maybe this was a variation of that.”

  “Leaving a dead woman?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Who would they be warning?”

  She widened her eyes, giving him her Who do you think? look.

  “It’s not like I own the church.”

  “No. But you have an opinion. And you’re the face of the church, aren’t you?”

  “Only the mouth.”

  “So to speak.”

  “But my opinion is in line with what the majority of the congregation thinks—­that we keep the property. Though, of course, it isn’t up to me. The district superintendent, the bishop, and the staff/parish committee make those decisions.”

  “You don’t have to convince me, counselor.”

  Luke smiled. He let his thoughts roam a little as he finished the soup. Back to the dream. Back to Millie at the hospice with her child’s smile. Back to the meeting with Hunter. We’re going to solve this thing.

  When he finished, Luke was surprised to see Charlotte studying him.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “You’re not thinking about those numbers again.”

  “I was, yeah.”

  More than that, he suddenly had a pretty good idea what the numbers in Jane Doe’s right hand meant.

  Chapter 9

  BEN SHIPMAN PARKED in one of the nine spaces assigned for state police alongside the Public Safety Complex, where Hunter, Fisch, and Ship worked in small adjoining offices.

  They dropped their bags on Hunter’s desk.

  “Ready?” she asked, outside Shipman’s door.

  He was rubbing his hands together.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Ship went first, with his distinctive, somewhat clunky walk, as if his shoes were an inch too long, wiping his hands again on his red lumberjack coat.

  Fisch was in the office, seated in front of twin monitors, perfectly postured in a black T-­shirt and dark pressed jeans. He turned and his nose immediately wrinkled; the fast food aroma evidently still clung to the two of them.

  “Sorry,” Hunter said, looking self-­consciously at her hands. Shipman, she saw, had hidden his behind his back.

  Fischer was a tall, elegant-­looking man, half Cuban, half African-­American, originally from Miami. He ate no processed food and kept vitamins, fruit, and protein bars on his desk. He was an anomaly among cops, certainly among homicide investigators. But he was also one of the most disciplined and diligent detectives Hunter had ever worked with. She liked him a great deal even though he seemed unknowable in some ways. Ship had told her more than once that Fischer was gay, but she sensed he was just speculating.

  “What’ve you got?” Hunter asked.

  “Pickup. Matches ID.”

  Fischer called up the digital file on his screen and tapped some keys, Hunter watching how the sinewy muscles in his arms worked.

  “Low res,” he said. “Texaco, Highway 50. 8:37 A.M., Tuesday.”

  About an hour after Pastor Bowers found the body.

  Hunter and Shipman watched the brief sequence, keeping a respectable distance. A silver double-­cab Dodge Ram pickup stopping beside a gas pump. The driver’s door opening. A tall man in an overcoat and baseball cap getting out, reaching for the gas nozzle. Seeming to duck his head away, as if to avoid standing in range of the camera.

  “May be something, maybe not,” Fischer said. They all watched again. This time Hunter noticed the top of the license tag.

  “Can you freeze that? Is it Delaware?”

  “Already have. Blown it up several ways. Last number’s cut off. It’s Delaware.”

  “What did our witness say?”

  “Mr. Charles? Thinks so, can’t be sure.”

  “We ought to release it, then,” Hunter said. “Did you e-­mail it to me?”

  “You have it.”

  “Good. Good work.”

  Hunter and Shipman walked back to her office next door. They ate their lunches together, mostly in silence, Hunter at her desk, Shipman at her worktable. Ship ate fast, as if racing to finish first, talking inconsequentially about the case. Hunter savored her food, particularly the fries.

  “You know, you shouldn’t eat so fast,” she said.

  “Uh-­huh.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Yeah. You’re probably right.” Which came out as “Pwafly wut.”

  He ate the rest the same way, though; there was no slowing Ship down once he got going. After he returned to his office, Hunter ran the gas pump sequence again on her own computer screen, this time in slow motion as she poked at the rest of her salad. There was something familiar about how this man carried himself. He reminded her of an actor, someone well known. But she couldn’t quite place who. She ran it again.

  Hunter caught a whiff of Polo cologne then and looked up.

  STATE’S ATTORNEY WENDELL Stamps was in her doorway, looking on with his wide, expressionless face. Dressed, as always, in a tailored suit, this one navy with pinstripes.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Oriental salad,” Hunter said. “Want a fry?”

  He flattened his lips as if she were asking him to play dolls.

  “What’ve you got on the case? Anything?”

  “Not much.” Hunter nodded at the screen. “Image of a pickup that matches description of a vehicle seen parked outside the church yesterday, about an hour before the pastor showed up.”

  She wiped the grease off her hands and turned the monitor screen, showing him the digital footage. The state’s attorney temporarily parked himself on a corner of her work station, breathing audibly as he looked on impassively. Stamps was a large, square-­shouldered man with pale skin. The whole Stamps family was tall and fair. His tw
o girls were sports stars at Tidewater High.

  “Huh,” he said afterward. He stood. “Kind of weak, isn’t it?”

  “Well, we don’t know yet.”

  “Tell me about it again.”

  “Which part?”

  He nodded once at her computer monitor. Often, Stamps’s eyes glazed over as ­people explained things, but he registered the general topic so he could circle back if necessary and ask them to tell him “again.”

  Together, they watched the man pulling out the nozzle and ducking his head away.

  “He looks familiar, somehow,” Hunter said.

  “He does.” Stamps sighed ambiguously. At the door, he turned. “Oh, and say, have you done anything with those numbers yet? The numbers on her hand?”

  “Not yet.” She raised her eyes to his. The sheriff, no doubt, had briefed him on it. “We may send them to other agencies this afternoon or tomorrow.”

  “Think it could wait another day or two?” He moved a step closer and assumed a hushed tone: “The only reason I mention it, there’s something brewing that the sheriff wanted to talk with us about. He’s the one requesting it.”

  “He hasn’t requested it to me.”

  “No, I know.”

  Hunter felt the back of her neck bristle. She’d left four messages now for Sheriff Calvert and twice driven to his office downtown, only to be told he wasn’t in. But she didn’t want to show her anger or frustration to the state’s attorney, so she pretended to smile.

  “I don’t know the details,” Stamps said. “Apparently, someone saw something, but won’t talk to anyone other than the sheriff.” His sentence ended with the inflection of a question mark.

  “Having to do with Robby Fallow, by any chance?”

  “It may be. I really don’t know.”

  “I’ll talk with the sheriff,” Hunter said. “If there’s some new information he has, it would need to come through this office, of course.”

  The state’s attorney held up his hands in a surrender position.

  Hunter’s phone began to ring.

  “We’ll talk,” Stamps said.

  She nodded, took a deliberate breath and answered the phone: “Hunter.”

  “This is Luke Bowers.”

  “Oh. Yes, hello.”

  “I think I’ve figured it out.”

  “Sir?”

  “The numbers. I think I know what those numbers mean.”

  “Oh,” she said, looking at where the state’s attorney had just been standing. “Excellent.”

  Chapter 10

  AMY HUNTER’S OFFICE was near the end of a long, wide, shiny-­floored corridor. Night and day from the dingy brick police building on Main Street, now set for demolition, where anyone could walk in and wander the halls: citizens, criminals, crazies; all had done so at one time or another. Here, you entered through an X-­ray scanner into a glass atrium with four security cameras; a guard called ahead for authorization, issued a visitor badge, and you waited for your escort. Everything smelled of plastic and plaster and new construction.

  Hunter welcomed Luke with her professional handshake and led him down the long hallway. In her office, she motioned for him to sit. Luke set his old Bible on her desk. The room had an odd smell, he thought, like french fries.

  He took a quick inventory: charts and laser print photos on a corkboard, a timeline with tiny print handwriting. Three computer terminals set up on the desk. He liked the austere aura of efficiency here, which seemed to fit with the directness of her eyes. The only personal photos were of a black and white tuxedo cat and one that seemed to be her parents, standing stiffly beside a waterfall, taken some years earlier. Luke wondered if they were still alive, and if she had time for much of a personal life; probably not, he guessed.

  A typed quote, maybe twenty point, was tacked to the bottom of the corkboard: If you do what you’ve always done, You’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

  “I like that quote.” He nodded at it. “Sophocles?”

  Her eyes turned and her face colored slightly.

  “Tony Robbins.”

  “That would have been my second guess. Sorry.” He was, actually, and summoned his best contrite expression. It was, in fact, the sort of quote Luke liked to slip into his sermons occasionally; unfortunately, ­people tended to respond more to inspirational wordplay than they did to scriptural passages.

  “So.” She frowned, getting to it. “You think you know what the numbers mean.”

  “I have an idea, yeah. The details about her arms and legs helped. Being broken, I mean.”

  “Although that was on the QT.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay.” She leaned forward and clasped her hands on the desk. “So what is five one eight?”

  “A Bible verse.”

  She glanced at the old Bible he’d set on her desk.

  “In the Old Testament, there are only three books with fifty-­one chapters. Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. None of the books of the New Testament would qualify, the longest being Matthew and Acts, which each have twenty-­eight.”

  “Okay.” Her eyes shone with interest.

  “So, that narrowed it down. I looked up each, and one seemed to fit—­Psalm 51, verse 8. If we assume the i was actually a colon, that is.”

  He opened the Bible to the page he had bookmarked, rotated it and slid it across the desk to her. Hunter leaned forward, setting her elbows on either side of the Bible. Her eyes found Psalm 51, then the eighth line.

  She read silently at first, then aloud.

  “Make me hear joy and gladness

  That the bones you have broken may rejoice.”

  She looked up. “Okay,” she said, her tone neutral. “Tell me about that. What’s Psalm 51?”

  “It’s a prayer of repentance,” Luke said. “One of the better-­known Psalms, actually. It was King David’s expression of remorse over his affair with Bathsheba and the fate of her husband, Uriah, whom he sent to war to be killed. He’s saying, basically, I was wrong, I sinned, forgive me.”

  “King David.”

  “Yeah.”

  Hunter’s eyes went back to the Bible. “This is the same David from David and Goliath, right?”

  “Same fellow. Goliath was back in his teen years. Before he went off into the wilderness. More than half of the hundred fifty Psalms were supposedly written by David. Although some scholars question that.”

  “Okay.” Her eyes stayed with his. “So, if this was a message, or a calling card of some kind, the message would have to do with repentance, you’re saying?”

  “Well, that’s one interpretation. Of course, it might be something else entirely.”

  She read it again, and finally pushed the book back to him. Not quite convinced, Luke could see. “Any idea why someone might’ve carved the number of a Psalm verse into this woman’s hand?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” she said. Clasping her hands again. “Well. Thank you for that information, then, Pastor. I’ll certainly let you know if we have further questions.”

  Luke was mindful not to smile at her sudden formality. “Sure,” he said. “And if I could change the subject for a second?” Hunter nodded. “I do have one other bit of information that I wanted to share. It probably doesn’t mean anything, but I assured my wife I’d mention it.”

  “Please.”

  “I was driving out in the country around lunchtime today, coming back from hospice. And when I got to the stop sign at Goose Creek Crossing, I happened to see someone from my past, driving south. The county’s past, actually. Jackson Pynne. Do you know who he is?”

  Her eyes filled with a sudden interest. “Yes. He was the developer behind a ­couple of big projects that were never built. Tidewater Landing? Jackson’s restaurant?”

  “That’s right.”

>   “And why would that be of interest to us?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. I just remember there was a saying ­people used to have around here: ‘Something strange happens every time Jackson Pynne comes to town.’ And, of course, something strange did happen this week.”

  Hunter held her frown.

  “It just seemed odd. As far as I know, he hasn’t been here for several years. I think he may still have a few enemies in the county, I don’t know.” Luke could see things clicking and whirring behind her eyes. This, for some reason, interested her more than Psalms. More than he’d imagined.

  “What kind of vehicle was he driving?”

  “Pickup. A Dodge Ram, I believe.”

  “Silver?”

  “Silver, yes. How do you know?”

  She reached for a manila folder, and handed him a computer printout image of a pickup parked by a gas pump. “This look like it?”

  “Yeah, actually,” Luke said. “I think so. Where is this from?”

  She showed him another, of a man wearing a dark overcoat, pumping gas, a baseball cap jammed down over his face.

  “Is that Jackson Pynne?”

  “Actually, I think—­ It’s hard to tell, but, yeah, it looks like him.”

  “Any idea why he might’ve been here? Or how we might reach him?”

  “No, not really. To both questions.” Thinking about it some more. “Why? Where did this come from?”

  “Between us? This matches the description of a pickup truck that was seen idling on the church road early Tuesday morning. About an hour before you found Jane Doe.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  She called up a map on one of her monitors and asked Luke to pinpoint where he’d been driving and which direction in which Jackson Pynne was going when they intersected. Luke felt numb, knowing where this was heading. His instincts told him Pynne couldn’t have been involved in the church killing, although Jackson’s life had a been a mystery for the past several years.

  Afterward, they walked in silence to the lobby, as if traveling in separate dimensions. Standing in the atrium, realizing it was time to say goodbye, Luke said, “Still no lead on who the woman is, I guess.”