The Psalmist

by James Lilliefors

  “Did Jackson Pynne die?” she asked as Crowe sped through the dark farmland.

  “Critical. They’re operating on him.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “One of the guards was hit. In the arm. He’ll survive.”

  “Will Jackson?”

  “They don’t know yet.”

  Hunter leaned back and watched the clear sky, the round bright moon, comfortable not speaking, following the turns in the road as if they were leading them toward some great truth at the heart of a larger mystery. She thought about Jackson Pynne, basking in the attention of the journalists moments before he was shot, and the look of sweetness on the pastor’s face as he watched. How innocent that all seems now.

  At her apartment, Hunter ate a Swiss cheese sandwich and drank a glass of red wine. Afterward, she held Winston tightly to her chest. His protests were minimal tonight, as if he knew that she needed a good hug, even if it wasn’t reciprocal. Finally, she changed to pajamas, brushed her teeth, and got into bed. She fell asleep quickly, and slept straight through until morning.

  When the sunlight woke her, she was surprised to see that it was past eight o’clock.

  She lay in bed for several minutes, blinking at the light through the blinds, remembering all of the details from the night before. Winston was sitting on her desk, his normal morning spot, staring at her sternly, anticipating his tuna snack, as if it were any other day.

  Even then, though, Hunter knew.

  The car that Rankin had been driving was a dark-­colored Mazda. She knew that car. She’d recognized the winglike logo design on the back as he rose over the berm into the parking lot at Gracie’s Crab House.

  That’s why’d he’d gotten stuck in the mud.

  She rose from bed at last and fixed coffee and toast. After a while her phone rang.

  “How are you feeling?” Crowe asked.

  “All right, I guess. You?”

  “Good. You sleep at all?”

  “I slept well. I guess everything caught up with me. Where are you?”

  “Down the road. Coming to get you.”

  “Okay. How’s Jackson Pynne this morning?”

  “Still in the hospital. We don’t know yet.”

  She could hear it in his voice, too. In the way he paused after saying that. ­People saying more in their silences than with their words.

  “They just now found something out at the house,” Crowe said.

  “The house.”

  “Yeah, out at Jimmy Creek. Where Rankin was staying. State police CSI is out there.”

  Hunter didn’t say anything else. She showered quickly, feeling a terrible dread, hoping she was wrong. Then she dressed and went online, just to see the AP’s headline: PRAYING WOMAN SUSPECT GUNNED DOWN. About what she’d expected. She signed off and hugged Winston again. “ ’Bye, sweet Winnie,” she said.

  The sky was perfect that morning, a luminous blue that reminded her of precious china. A cool breeze pulled through the shadows, but with currents of the warmer air that was coming, that would transform Tidewater County, as it did every summer.

  Crowe’s car rounded a corner of the marina and pulled beside her. Hunter got in.

  They traveled in silence, southeast, into the low-­lying maze of creeks and tributaries. Finally, she said, “Go ahead and tell me about it.”

  Crowe sighed. Hunter watched the fields and the creek paths.

  “It’s Ship,” she said, making it easier. “Right?”

  “I’m sorry . . .” he began.

  Hunter watched the scenery as he explained, too angry to respond. A chevron of geese flapped lazily overhead, above the breezy tide flats and creeks and narrows, out over a blue bay inlet where the troughs of the waves looked like broken glass reflecting the sky. Her eyes smarted with tears, one of which spilled over and ran down her cheek.

  Crowe parked on the gravel drive that ran along the side of the house. A soft wind blew over the sunlit lawn. For a few moments it seemed as if each blade was glowing.

  She felt herself tearing up again as she rounded the side of the house, seeing the evidence markers on the ground. State police commander Gary Martin turned to greet her, keeping his head down as he made his way up the lawn with his lumbering walk.

  “Hunter.”

  “ ’Morning.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “They found your partner.”

  “I know.”

  “Ship.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, an edge in her voice; for some reason, she hadn’t wanted him to say his name out loud. Crime scene techs were down by the marsh, combing the grass for evidence. “I’d like to see.”

  They walked side by side, silently, down to the marsh, and then he led her into the waist-­tall grasses at the edge of the narrow creek.

  Ben Shipman lay facedown in the shallow water, wearing his lumberjack coat, curls of red hair floating on the surface. He must’ve found Rankin’s hideout shortly before Jackson Pynne was released, she thought. He might’ve stopped him. He was that close. But Kirby Moss must’ve cut him down from a distance with his sniper’s rifle—­the way he’d cut down Jackson Pynne.

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “There’re two sets of shoe prints. He must’ve been carried. Looks like there’s some blood at the end of the drive. He was probably shot as soon as he stepped out of his car.”

  Why hadn’t he called in to the command post? Hunter wondered. A question with no answer. Who knows? Sometimes ­people go on strange private pursuits, their own hero’s quests, and don’t come back. Gil Rankin had taken Shipman’s Mazda last night and driven it across the soybean and cornfields after killing Kirby Moss, and it was Shipman’s car and the waterlogged soil of Tidewater County that had prevented his escape. There was some small satisfaction in knowing that. For just a moment it caused her to smile. Poetic justice.

  She thanked the police commander and walked by herself toward the house, her eyes tearing up again. Everything felt different, a way it had never felt before—­the sunlight on the grass, the weight of the air, the rhythms of the wind and the motion of the water. None of it quite real. Or maybe the opposite. Maybe she was really paying attention at last—­seeing and hearing clearly. Hunter stopped. That’s when she realized that she needed to talk with the pastor.

  Chapter 55

  LUKE BOWERS SAT in the ICU waiting room at Tidewater Memorial Hospital paging absently through a well-­thumbed copy of Esquire magazine. He was still hoping to hear from Jackson Pynne’s sister and daughter. State police investigators had found a phone number for the daughter and he’d left messages, but so far she hadn’t returned his calls. He was the only one in the waiting room now. Earlier, he’d consoled a woman in her forties whose husband’s appendix had ruptured early that morning.

  Remarkably, Jackson Pynne was going to live, the surgeon had told him. The bullet had cut a path through the side of Jackson’s head, just grazing his brain. He was on a ventilator. Doctors had removed part of his skull to allow room for the swelling in his brain. He was unable to speak, but was responding to doctors by squeezing with his hand and holding up his pinkie finger. The nature of his permanent injuries—­if there were any—­wasn’t yet known. The fact that he was going to survive seemed to Luke somehow in keeping with Jackson’s peculiar luck, and his uncanny resilience. If his head had been tilted an inch in any other direction, he’d be dead, the doctor told him.

  Charlotte had sat with Luke for much of the night. She’d gone out to buy them egg sandwiches and sat with him a while longer, before leaving to take care of Sneakers. Several of the Buntings had found him here and pressed him for an on-­the-­record statement. Luke had politely declined.

  As he got up now to stretch his legs, his cell phone rang: Amy Hunter. Luke hadn’t spoken to her since before the shooting. He wondered if she was all right.


  “Ben Shipman was killed last night,” Hunter told him. “They discovered him this morning. He’s just lying in the marsh creek. We’re waiting for EMS. No one’s said a prayer for him. No one’s done anything—­”

  “Tell me where you are,” Luke said. “I’ll come right over.”

  HUNTER WATCHED THE moist shadows along the empty two-­lane road at the top of the drive. She couldn’t stop thinking about the final moments of Ben Shipman’s life—­or the last, seemingly inconsequential time she had spoken to him. See you later, she’d said. His last words to her were Ten-­four. He’d walked away from her with his distinctive Ben Shipman walk and hadn’t looked back. Why should he have? Something was bothering him, but of course she had no way of knowing that would be the last time they’d ever see each other alive. He must’ve died instantly, at least, unable to process what had happened.

  She waved as Luke arrived. He slid the driver’s window down and looked at her with his steady blue eyes.

  “You okay?”

  “I guess, thanks for coming.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  The car slow-­rocked down the gravel road to the house. Luke parked and they walked across the lawn to the marshlands.

  “I won’t ask you why this happened,” she said after they stopped by the water. “Because I know you’d say that’s the kind of question you can’t answer. Or you’d say that there’s no place that evil can’t find us.”

  “It’s true, unfortunately.”

  “But when it does, we have to meet evil with grace.”

  “Yes.”

  They lowered their heads and Luke prayed for Ben Shipman, for his family, for his soul, for his deliverance. He quoted the verse on tribulation from Romans that she’d told him Shipman’s father used to recite—­how “tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

  “In this dark time,” Luke said, “we embrace hope not as wishful thinking, but as evidence of our faith in God’s plan.”

  Afterward, Hunter clenched her eyes, feeling empty as she listened to the ephemeral play of the grasses in the breeze, recalling what Luke had said in a sermon about the soul’s evolution in silence. Have faith in silence. Let us empty our souls of distraction and really listen to what God has to tell us.

  She opened her eyes and was startled by how bright everything seemed. She looked at Luke and managed a smile.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for coming here.”

  Luke reached to take her hand. But Hunter opened her arms and pulled him against her, and she felt him hugging her back; holding tight, to something not there. She was pleased to see, after they stepped apart, that his eyes, too, had moistened.

  “Thank you,” she said again.

  DAVE CROWE WAS watching from the porch as Luke crossed the lawn to his car. He stepped out, signaling Hunter.

  “Come on inside,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  FBI techs had gone into Rankin’s computer overnight and also pulled evidence from suitcases, briefcases and the Jeep parked by Whistling Swan Drive. They’d already found several electronic records, he said, of elaborate wire transfers from Trumble’s charities and businesses into private accounts.

  “It’s a spiderweb,” Crowe said, in officious mode again for the first time since the shooting. They were standing in the living room, furnished expensively with dark wood and leather. “Some of the numbers are lining up with what we found earlier.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It’s starting to look like Gil Rankin may’ve set up this whole thing,” he went on. “Chandler transferred the money, but Rankin was drawing it from the fourth account, the primary account. It’ll take a while to sort it all out, of course.”

  “Wait—­you’re saying Rankin was the ringleader of the embezzlement operation?”

  He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows affirmatively.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Okay. I’m just telling you what we’ve found. Between us. Don’t pass final judgment until you’ve seen all the evidence.”

  Hunter turned away. She didn’t believe it. Not for a minute. She believed her instincts. Gil Rankin may have been at all of the murder scenes; he’d probably been responsible for leaving behind the calling cards. But he wasn’t the Psalmist. He hadn’t ordered the killings. And he hadn’t embezzled the money.

  She felt angry that she might not be able to prove that. Angrier still at the possibility that the real crimes might become unprovable. And that Trumble might have even planned it that way.

  “Have a look at this,” Crowe said.

  In a drawer of the nightstand by the bed where Rankin had slept was an open Bible.

  Hunter leaned closer and saw that it was opened to the Book of Psalms.

  “It was there when we entered overnight. We’ve pulled fingerprints from the cover.”

  How convenient, Hunter thought.

  “August Trumble did this,” she said. “Right?”

  “I don’t know.” Hunter could see that, for whatever reason, Crowe wasn’t with her anymore. “It’s starting to look like maybe Gil Rankin did this. On his own.”

  No. Hunter walked back up the drive to wait for EMS, her thoughts with Ship again. It still didn’t seem real. Not at all. It seemed there must be some way of pulling him back, of rewinding events. She wanted more than anything to call him now, meet him at McDonald’s and tell him what Crowe had just said to her. Couldn’t she have said something that would have stopped him from coming here? She felt herself beginning to cry. That’s our life, she thought; it unwinds and there’s no more. At the top of the drive, she turned into the breeze and closed her eyes, losing herself for a few moments in the sweet silence.

  As she wiped the tears away, she noticed something weird—­the number on the side of the mail box: 1848. Written across the rusty metal with black marker. A very strange detail, particularly since the mailbox right next to it was numbered 134.

  Chapter 56

  LUKE DROVE TOWARD the bay, feeling sickened by the image of Ben Shipman’s half-­submerged body untended in the creek. And by Amy Hunter’s raw hurt. It was his job to help ­people through difficult crossings, when faith and grace seemed to abandon them, to walk with his congregants from shattering events that appeared to defy all they’d learned from Scripture. Tomorrow, Sunday, the good ­people of Tidewater County would again gather in his sanctuary, expecting him to make some sense of a senseless tragedy and to answer questions that he, too, was asking this morning. What could he tell them that would explain it? How could he conjure light from such dark passages? He didn’t know, he didn’t have a clue. He only knew that somehow, by faith and prayer and divine inspiration, he would do it, that was his job. Somehow, he would tell them about faith and trust, good and evil; together they would pray, and in doing so, would prevent evil from claiming a victory.

  On Main Street he stopped at Palmer’s Florist to buy a rose for Charlotte.

  He smiled at the pretty young woman behind the counter, whose hair was bundled up in a bouffant. She seemed like someone from an earlier time, long before tragedy had come to Tidewater County.

  To make conversation, he asked if the owner was around.

  “You mean Mr. Palmer?”

  “Yes, George.”

  “No, he’s not. He doesn’t live here. We never see Mr. Palmer.”

  “Oh,” Luke said. He peered through the plate glass at the street, struck by the absence of traffic or pedestrians. “But he was here last week, right? Last Wednesday?”

  “Mr. Palmer? No, I don’t believe so. We never see him.”

  “Oh.” Luke had a funny feeling then. A strange intuition. He smiled a goodbye, took the rose and walked to his car, struck once more by the emptiness. Even at the Blue Crab D
iner, where there were only two cars out front.

  Driving to the bluff above the Chesapeake, he thought, as he often did, about his blessings—­Charlotte, Sneakers, his ministry, his friends, his health, his life in Tidewater County.

  The sun was higher now, glittering out across the bay. He sat in his car and thought a little more about tomorrow’s sermon. Tribulation. Good and evil. ­People had their ideas about that. Gil Rankin would be portrayed as “pure” evil by some, Luke supposed; but evil was usually more complicated than that. It wasn’t pure, that was the problem. Thinking of a verse from Romans—­about striving to walk in wisdom—­he opened his Bible. But instead he turned to the Book of Psalms. Recalling the marker-­scrawled number he’d seen on the mailbox as he’d left Hunter and the property on Jimmy Creek, where Gil Rankin had stayed; the number on the box at the top of the gravel lane: 1848.

  He flipped pages to Psalm 18, scanned down to verse 48, and read:

  He delivers me from my enemies. You also lift me up above those who rise against me; You have delivered me from the violent man.

  After a moment, Luke got out. He stood on the edge of the bluff, taking the breeze, looking up the coastline at the docks and marinas and jetties and expensive homes, the restless ebb and flow of the waves, imagining the dark thoughts Hunter was dealing with right now.

  He’s a violent man. That’s what Kwan Park called Gil Rankin, according to Jackson.

  So was this Trumble’s last message? If so, where was August Trumble now?

  SNEAKERS’S PAWS SCRAMBLED on the hardwood floor as Luke came in the house. “How’s my boy,” he said. The dog galloped clumsily, nudging frantically against him. Luke took him into the sitting room and indulged Sneakers’s desire for a vigorous neck and chin rub.

  “Where’s your mom?” he said after a few minutes of it. “Let’s go find your mom.”

  There was a strange quiet in the house, which seemed to match the quiet outside. Sneakers led him down the wooden hallway into the kitchen, where a seafood stew was cooking. Charlotte was in her study, working, her music playing loudly.