Then Rankin would have to make a decision about the man at the church. The pastor. It was too bad Pynne had decided he was going to involve a pastor in this deal.
Chapter 32
“IT BECOMES EASIER, then, doesn’t it?” Charlotte watched Luke across the sofa, as snow continued to settle on the lawn and trees around their cottage. “I mean, there’s a pretty clear line beyond which you can’t protect him. Right?”
Luke nodded, although it didn’t seem quite so simple to him. Coming up the drive, his tires losing traction on the snow, he’d seen the pastel-orange glows of lampshades inside and felt a deep sorrow for Jackson Pynne again, who had no such rooms or people—or even pets, as far as he knew—to return to. Did Jackson commit this crime? He didn’t think so. But he seemed guilty of something, something that was persecuting him.
“It’s just that he asked me not to mention him. In any way, shape, or form.”
“Which is asking a lot.”
“Yes.”
“If he had insisted you not identify him in any way or shape that would’ve been bad enough,” Charlotte said.
“I know.”
“But adding form in there.”
“Pretty cruel.”
They shared a smile, Charlotte trying to draw him out, a skill she’d honed pretty well over the years.
“On the other hand, he told you those names for a reason,” she said.
“He wants them known.”
“Yes.”
“So. Maybe I’ll send them to her anonymously, by e-mail.” He had tried calling Amy Hunter as soon as Jackson left, but only got her voice mail. Which struck him as odd.
“ ‘Her’ being the sergeant? Nancy Drew?”
“Yes.” Luke turned to his wife. “You’re quite the comedian, have I ever told you that?”
“Sorry, I misspoke. I meant Amy Hunter. She likes you, you know,” she added, batting her lashes provocatively. “You do know that, don’t you?”
Luke laughed incredulously.
“I just hope you don’t think of her the same way,” she said.
“She doesn’t ‘like’ me. And I’m interested in no one but you. I’d be the world’s biggest fool if I was.”
“Good. Because you know I’ll scratch her eyes out if she tries anything.”
“A very Christian sentiment.”
“Well, no, more Old Testament.” Charlotte smiled, irresistibly. Normally self-assured, she was capable of surprising insecurities. “She does have chutzpah, I give her that,” she said. “Going up against the sheriff and the state’s attorney the way she has.”
“She has moxie, too,” Luke said.
“Yes, that, too. Not to mention pluck.”
He set up an e-mail account in several minutes using the name Anonymous777. Charlotte looked on while he typed in a message. These three people are somehow involved in the killings you are investigating, he wrote, followed by the names that Jackson had given him: Mark Chandler, Sheila Patterson, Katrina Menken.
“Think they might be the three victims?” she asked after he’d sent it.
“Could be.”
“But Jackson Pynne isn’t responsible. Is he?”
“I don’t think so. He’s involved in some way, because of Kwan Park. I think he loved her very much. But for whatever reason, he isn’t ready to talk about it. I don’t understand that yet.”
Luke was flashing again through the images Hunter had shown him of the victims. “It’s peculiar, though,” he added. “Something about these crimes seems wrong to me.”
Charlotte filled their wineglasses and returned to the sofa. The wind gusted against the cottage, rattling shutters and the side door latch. Sneakers, lying on his rug by the heat vent, his favorite toy—a tiny, slobber-stained reindeer—beside his nose, growled as he slept, but didn’t raise his head. He was still in postsupper siesta mode.
“Okay,” she said, “so what is it that seems wrong?”
“This isn’t how serial killers operate.”
“There’s a rulebook?” Charlotte sipped, sliding her eyes to the snow for a moment. “You’re talking about the victims.”
“Uh-huh. Serial killers usually target a certain type of victim, don’t they? To take some of the better-known ones: the Atlanta killer went after little boys, the Hillside Strangler guy killed prostitutes, Ted Bundy young women and college girls, Jeffrey Dahmer gay men.”
“The Hillside Strangler guy was actually two guys.”
“Okay. You’re right.”
“But anyway, so there’s no pattern like that here, you’re saying.”
“There doesn’t seem to be. One’s a well-dressed Asian woman, early thirties, who worked in a convenience store. Another is a woman in her late thirties, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with drugs in her pocket. One’s a man in a business suit, about fifty. And the other is a woman, mid-forties. The methods and locations are all different, too.”
“Okay, professor,” she said. “So are you saying he’s created a pattern to make them appear to be serial killings? That’s what the Psalms verses are?”
“Maybe,” Luke said. “Or maybe the Psalms obscure a different pattern that’s not as obvious.”
Charlotte held his gaze, tracking with him. “Like maybe the killer knew these four people.”
“Mmm hmm.” Charlotte nodded with just her eyes. “That’s what I’m wondering. It’s an idea, anyway. Jackson said police might look into where they worked. So, what if they worked for the same person, or the same organization?”
Luke stood, setting his wine on the side table.
“Where are you going?”
“I just thought of something else. I’ll be right back.”
Charlotte tilted her head expectantly when he returned. Sneakers continued to snore, the vent air ruffling the fur around his neck.
“Yes?” she said.
“Right before he left, I asked Jackson who those three people were. He said something like, ‘Now? Now, they’re nothing. Lighter than vapor.’ ”
“Okay. And?”
“It’s from the Book of Psalms.” Charlotte’s eyes deepened with interest. “ ‘Lighter than vapor’ is Psalm 62:9. Well-known Psalm.” He read aloud:
“Surely men of low degree are a vapor,
Men of high degree are a lie,
If they are weighed on the scales,
They are altogether lighter than vapor.”
She held her wineglass thoughtfully. “Okay, and high degree means something like highborn? Rich?”
“Yes.”
“But why would Jackson Pynne be quoting from the Book of Psalms? He never struck me as someone interested in the Bible.”
“I don’t know that he was consciously quoting from Psalms. I had the feeling it was a phrase he’d heard someone else use and maybe liked the sound of it.”
“Huh.” Just then a loud thumping sound startled them—twice, then three times, against the front of the cottage.
Sneakers lifted his head and went into his slow, sinister growl—a sound known at times to intimidate the wind. All three of them waited and it came again, the sound resembling Jackson Pynne’s urgent knocking on the church door. Luke felt his heart racing. Then he recognized it: the shutter had come loose again at the front of the cottage. “I’ll go fix that,” he said.
Chapter 33
AMY HUNTER WAS at that moment sitting across a small white-clothed table from FBI special agent Dave Crowe at the Old Shore Inn, an elegant hotel/restaurant on a tongue of land jutting into the Chesapeake. The room was lit only by candles and a fire in the fireplace across from the dining area. They were the only people in the restaurant. Having ordered drinks and dinners, Hunter still waiting for Crowe to “lay the groundwork,” as he’d promised. But she could tell he wan
ted the food to arrive before he got down to business. He drank a seven and seven, she a pinot grigio.
Dave Crowe reminded Hunter of her past. Of a version of herself she’d long since grown out of. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant reminder, although some of it was. Crowe was still a persuasive and attractive man, but he seemed a little too sure of himself around her.
“So you’re liking Tidewater County?” he asked again, his dark eyes dancing in the dim light.. Crowe had always reminded her a little of early Tom Selleck—a smaller, less charismatic version.
She cupped her glass, nursing the wine. “As I say, it’s a great place in the fall and spring. Particularly if you like sailing and crabs. Busy in summer. Politically, there’s something a little disturbing about it. Something that feels kind of upside down. From another time. And maybe a little corrupt.”
“For example?”
“This case,” she said. “Kwan Park.”
“How so?”
Hunter looked out, marveling at how heavy the snow was coming down, and that it seemed to have turned a shade of blue. She wondered if the roads were still drivable. “The sheriff and the state’s attorney have been pushing for a local solution from the moment the body was found,” she said. “Half of the county seemed ready to buy into it. A ‘necessary outcome,’ the sheriff called it.”
Crowe nodded slightly—the psychology of small-town justice still interested him , Amy sensed, the quiet conspiracies and intrigues that seemed to go on everywhere.
The food arrived before she had a chance to explain—grilled steak for Crowe, salmon salad for Hunter, and then a second basket of hot rolls.
“So, how were they going to do that?” he asked.
Hunter followed his eyes, saw that he was studying the waitress’s derriere as she walked away.
“They had some evidence. Alleged evidence. A .22 caliber shell, supposedly. A strange local man named Robby Fallow and his son were the prime suspects. They were trying to hurry it along to the grand jury, even though it was a weak case.”
Crowe cut a piece of steak, his eyes on hers. “And what changed their minds?”
“We did.”
“How so?”
Hunter broke apart the salmon filet on top of the greens. “We found evidence that poked a hole in their theories,” she said. “Although I’m not sure I should be talking about that. You were going to tell me about your case first.”
Crowe laughed robustly.
“What, is this going to be a bartering session? I show you mine?”
“Could be.”
He laughed through his nose, then concentrated for a while on eating, chewing with what seemed like exaggerated bites. Hunter reached for a roll and tore it in half.
“It’s okay by me if it is,” he said. “I mean, I’m sure we can help each other.” He looked up just long enough to seem suggestive.
“How’s married life treating you, by the way?”
“Not so great, actually.” Before Hunter could come up with a suitable reply, he added, “I’ve got a little girl now.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. Congratulations.”
“Yeah, she’s my pride and joy. Makes everything worthwhile.”
Hunter went back to her salad, deciding it wasn’t such a good idea to have broached this subject. The topic of marriage made her feel funny. Her own love life had been disastrous at times and she was fine not worrying about it.
Something about Dave Crowe made her feel vulnerable, though, even all these years later.
“What kind of evidence did you find?” he asked.
“Oh. Evidence linking this case to three others.”
Now he looked up in earnest, holding his fork above his food. “Three others? What are you talking about? Murder cases?”
“Homicides, uh-huh.” The appearance of crinkles around his eyes surprised her. “You don’t know that?”
He had stopped chewing, the corners of his mouth drawn down. “No,” he said.
Hunter didn’t get it. “What’s going on?” she said. “Isn’t that why you came out here?”
But he was just looking at her, his face blank.
“Then what the hell are you investigating?”
DAVE CROWE ORGANIZED the food on his plate with his fork, as if reconvening his thoughts, wanting to put things into some kind of proper order and context. Charm time was over.
“We’re here because of a convergence,” he said.
“Okay, I don’t know what that means. What convergence?”
“Kwan Park. Her body showing up in your church here. Which, unfortunately, we didn’t know about until the ID went public this afternoon.”
“Why would it interest you?”
He patted his mouth with the napkin. “Because.” He glanced out at the empty dining room as if to make sure no one was in listening range. “We’ve been looking at Kwan Park for the past several weeks. We thought she had left the country.”
“ ‘Looking at her.’ Meaning what?”
She waited, as he moved his tongue against his back teeth. “Look, here’s the deal,” he said. “I’m in the middle of a major fraud and racketeering case right now. I can’t go into a lot of details. But it’s a big case, involving several agencies.”
“Okay.” Hunter had stopped eating now, too.
“But, just in very general terms: We’ve identified a criminal enterprise, which, for a long time looked like a number of isolated, independent entities. We now know they aren’t. It’s all connected in a convoluted way, through untraceable shell companies and banking havens. We’re in the process of piecing it all into a whole.”
“Okay.” She took a minisip of her wine. “And where does Kwan Park come in?”
“Kwan Park worked for this organization. For the man running it.”
“Huh,” Hunter said, waiting for more. He enjoyed these circumlocutions, she knew, and dangling morsels of information while withholding the bigger pieces. Sometimes, when he’d had a few drinks, he used to say more than he should. “This is in Ohio?”
“In Ohio, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey. In Texas. Maybe elsewhere. It’s a small organization with a wide reach.”
“But the fact that she turned up here, dead, was a surprise.”
“Total. Not on any script we’d imagined. As I say, we thought she’d left the country.”
“Your case doesn’t involve Tidewater County, then.”
“It didn’t, no,” he said. “Now it does, sure.”
His eyes went to hers and stayed. Hunter wondered how much she should tell him.
“So this is what the media’s been following?” she asked. “The story about this organization.”
“Right.”
“And you can’t tell me how it involves Kwan Park?”
“Mm mmm.” He went back to eating, cutting his steak into small pieces, chewing them longer than seemed necessary. She continued eating too, but only picked at her salmon salad. When Crowe finished, he set down his knife and fork, one over the other, and surveyed the room again. They were still alone.
“I can tell you this, because it’s public record, anyway: do you know where Kwan Park worked?”
“Of course,” she said. “Quik Gas, in Sharonville, Ohio.”
“Yes. Wonder why the lady worked in a convenience store?”
“A little.”
“Dig deeper, you might find that her store was in the news a couple of times in recent months.”
Hunter nodded. “You mean, for selling two multi-million-dollar lottery tickets?”
He blinked at her, and looked back at his plate. “It wasn’t just the store, though. It was her. In January she sold a lottery ticket worth fourteen point four mil. Last month, same store, she sold a ticket worth eighteen point two. There were a few others, for smaller but still sub
stantial, amounts. Last week she quit and—we thought—left the country.”
“Okay.”
“Last year,” he said, “a store in Texas sold three multi-million-dollar tickets. One for twenty-one million. Same setup. Also a Quik Gas. Might’ve even been the same woman working there, using a different name, we don’t know.”
“What kind of setup? And who’s this man you’re looking at?”
He smiled, reaching for his drink.
“You’ve heard the standard arguments about the government getting involved in the lottery business, I assume.”
“Sure,” Hunter said. “The lotteries are a regressive tax on the poor. They peddle false hopes. Etcetera, etcetera.”
“Right. You don’t hear those arguments quite as much these days as you used to, of course, because gambling is more or less entrenched now across the country. The opposition softened in most places years ago. Funneling lottery revenues into education programs was pure PR genius. It’s made government-sanctioned gambling palatable just about everywhere in the country.”
“It is a regressive tax in a way, though, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. “In the sense that the poor spend a larger proportion of their incomes on the lottery than anyone else, sure. I mean, there are some who say that gambling has corrupted the idea of the America Dream—the old American Dream was about hard work; the new American Dream is about picking the right numbers or buying the right scratch-off.”
“So are you saying this enterprise involves a conspiracy to steal from state lotteries? I didn’t know that was possible.”
“I didn’t say that.” He caught the waitress’s eye and pointed a forefinger at his drink and then hers. “But, yeah, it’s possible. It’s been done. Of course, it’s possible. Without giving away any trade secrets: Most scratch-off lottery tickets are manufactured by a handful of companies. They create algorithms that determine the winning tickets. It’s not random, it couldn’t be. It has to be systematic, so at the end of the day the governments come out with a predetermined amount of payout and profits.
“Over the years, we’ve investigated several cases where individuals cracked the algorithms and funneled away hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s happened. Then things always tightened up. This one’s a little different. This is the first organized deal we know about where the same group’s been working it in five or six states, maybe more.”
The Psalmist Page 17