The Psalmist

by James Lilliefors

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking up. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “No, keep working.” She turned down the music. “Anything new?”

  “Not really.”

  But she could see that there was, so she got up and walked to him and they embraced. Even in the saddest times, Charlotte was able to summon the good things. They held each other for a long time, as Sneakers settled by their feet. There was really nothing to say.

  Chapter 57

  TUESDAY, APRIL 4

  AFTER LUNCHING ALONE on oysters Rockefeller and a glass of Riesling in the dining room at the Harbor View restaurant, August Trumble stepped out into the crisp Maine afternoon. He was a thin, medium-­sized man in his early sixties with silver hair, dark, piercing eyes, and otherwise unremarkable features.

  The sun caught him full on the face as he stood in the doorway zipping his jacket, looking at the sky as anyone would coming outside from inside. But what he did next surprised Amy Hunter. His eyes seemed to pick her out and stay with her. Then he twisted his lips into a thin smile, as if he knew exactly why she was there and what was about to happen.

  Six FBI agents surrounded August Trumble, guns drawn. The show of force, for such an unassuming-­looking man, would have seemed incongruous to anyone who didn’t know Trumble’s story, a tale that had played out away from public view. But for more than a decade Trumble had been a maddeningly elusive target, according to Crowe. A man with insidiously powerful control over other ­people, particularly those who worked for him.

  Trumble hid in the lives of “ordinary” ­people. It was Luke Bowers who figured out that one of those identities—­which Trumble had invented, and inhabited—­was George Palmer, proprietor of a modest florist shop in Tidewater County, Maryland. From that speculation the FBI had managed to follow Trumble here to this tiny island off the coast of Maine, and to one of his other identities. He lived in coastal Maine as Roy Hinders, a likable but very private man who owned only a bicycle for transportation, enjoyed good wines, and ran a very small, part-­time tax preparation business out of his home.

  As agents cuffed his hands behind his back, Trumble struck Hunter as preternaturally calm and courteous, even while informing them that they had the wrong man.

  He was smiling faintly as troopers pushed him into the back of a patrol car. But there was an unsettling afterimage that he left with her. His eyes. Dark, probing, as if they could see her fears and motivations.

  Hunter rode in the front seat of the car transporting Trumble to a helicopter that would take him to the mainland. Crowe had made a point of making this happen, Hunter riding with him as if it were some sort of prize for her role in the apprehension. Crowe and the Bureau agents followed in three police cars, a state trooper on motorcycle leading the procession. The FBI would place Trumble on a plane to Baltimore, where he would be interrogated and charged. There was enough certainty now and enough ­people involved that Hunter wasn’t worried about him slipping away.

  She thought of Ben Shipman again as they rode down the winding two-­lane through the Maine pinewoods. Several times a day she still felt the itch to press Ship’s number on her cell phone, to ask his opinion on something, knowing it would please him to hear from her. Two days ago dozens of uniformed law enforcement officers from throughout the mid-­Atlantic region had turned out for Shipman’s funeral, forming a mile-­long procession of official vehicles to Ship’s final resting spot at the tiny Tidewater cemetery. The moving tributes to Ben Shipman that day, and the military band playing “Going Home” by Dvorak, had reduced many in attendance to tears and raw emotion, including Hunter.

  After the funeral ceremony she had spent time with Ship’s ex-­wife Donna and sixteen-­year-­old daughter Rebecca, who’d driven up from North Carolina for the ser­vice. She’d bonded with Becca in particular, who had Ship’s earnest blue eyes, auburn hair, and stocky build. In their car, Hunter noticed the Beatles 1967-­70 CD, which Becca said her father had given her for her fourteenth birthday. Then she and Becca had gone through Ship’s apartment together and cleared out his office, filling the trunk and back seat of the car with boxes of his stuff. Before leaving, Donna, who was far less outgoing than Becca, had invited Hunter to visit them in North Carolina. “Any time,” she’d said. It saddened Hunter to think about that now. It was the sort of invitation ­people extended and then forgot about. Visiting would be too sad, she imagined, for all of them.

  In Maine, the cars came to a stop in a grass field by the harbor. The driver, a Bureau agent with close-­cropped hair and small, hard eyes, stepped out. Hunter opened her door and looked at the dull light over the harbor. There was something about the breeze here, the raw wet smell, that made her feel hopeful. I know the story now, she thought. I just have to make sure that it gets told properly.

  Then she realized that Trumble, his hands manacled behind him in the backseat, was saying something to her. They were momentarily alone in the car together and he was asking her a question. “Do you have the time?”

  He asked again, leaning forward.

  Hunter glanced back. His eyes trying to lock onto hers.

  “Time? Twelve forty-­seven.”

  Trumble kept staring at her as he tried to engage her in conversation. Hunter didn’t respond, got out of the car and stood beside it. There was something off about the man, something too vibrant and too strange. The smile and the eyes . . . he didn’t seem quite human. You could get sucked into those eyes, she thought.

  She took a deep breath of the briny air, waiting for Crowe, her primal instincts telling her to keep away from August Trumble. To never even look at him again if she didn’t have to.

  Chapter 58

  UNSEASONABLY WARM WEATHER came to Tidewater County the second week of April, leading many locals to believe—­prematurely—­that the long cold winter had finally lifted. The weekend streets and seafood eateries were busy again with tourists. Sounds of motorboats, morning lawn mowers, and afternoon baseball carried through the county air. The drugstore aisles smelled pleasantly of garden hoses, rubber rafts, and flip-­flops. Everything felt new again.

  The shift in mood was a source of apprehension, though, for Amy Hunter—­a feeling that the season was passing and the ­people of Tidewater would soon be occupied with the business of summer, with new, more pressing concerns. Her boss, Henry Moore, had allowed the Kwan Park case to remain open, but local officials were pressuring the state police to close it. Sheriff Calvert, citing the fact that both murderers—­Gil Rankin and Kirby Moss—­“are as dead as they’re ever going to be,” told the Tidewater Times that it was “a rookie mistake” not to close the case. “I don’t know what the girl’s thinking,” he said in a front-­page story.

  Dave Crowe, who had become worse about returning calls, seemed uninterested in bringing charges against Trumble for the “Psalmist” killings. And Hunter was beginning to think there might be problems with the federal fraud and racketeering case against Trumble as well. The search of the “Roy Hinders”‘ house in Maine had turned up virtually nothing, other than his fingerprints. And one of the key witnesses against Trumble was wavering about whether she would testify.

  Ownership of the house at Jimmy Creek was traced through property records to George Palmer. On the adjacent land, across a gravel drive, was the house where Palmer himself had resided. It had been strange going in, finding the place filled with flowers—­plastic and cloth flowers crowding every room, roses, tulips, orchids, hydrangeas, sunflowers, lilacs—­along with paintings and photographs of flowers on every wall. A House of Flowers. But nothing to incriminate August Trumble for murder.

  To Hunter, the worst part of the case was what the media had made of it—­referring now to Gil Rankin as the “Psalmist,” portraying him as a conscienceless monster who had betrayed his boss, the reclusive philanthropist August Trumble, then brutally murdered four coworkers who he thought were double-­crossing him.<
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  Weighed down by all of these developments, she decided to turn in at the church to see what Pastor Luke had to say. It’d been more than a week since they talked.

  THIS WAS TUESDAY, a metallic blue afternoon, the dockside restaurants and oyster bars all doing brisk business, the bay dotted with sailboats. But at the Methodist church there were only two cars—­Luke’s Ford Fusion and, beside it, Aggie Collins’s Lexus.

  Hunter was surprised when Luke’s dog came bounding through Aggie’s office, barking at her as soon as she opened the door.

  Aggie immediately stood up behind her desk, as if an alarm had sounded.

  “Come here, Sneakers!” Luke called, clapping his hands. “Sneakers! Down. Please!”

  Sneakers lowered his head and began to sniff eagerly at Hunter’s shoes and jeans, his tail clipping like a metronome. She reached down to rub his neck.

  “Sorry, I think he was just startled for a moment,” Luke said. “My wife’s out of town today, doing some research in Washington. She left me with babysitting chores. I thought it’d do him some good to spend a little time at the church. Come on back.”

  Luke closed the door to his office behind them, and Hunter took a seat in front of his desk. Sneakers, already tired of her, trotted to the oval throw rug in a corner and settled on his side.

  “Hope you don’t mind me coming in unannounced,” she said. “I just wanted to get your feedback on a ­couple of things.”

  “Sure. Which things?” Luke asked.

  “The Kwan Park case.”

  “Oh,” he said, “those things.”

  “Yeah.” Hunter sighed. She was reminded of the first time she had talked with Luke, sitting in this same chair, on a cold, windy morning the day after he’d discovered Kwan Park’s body in the sanctuary. “Unfortunately, the case has kind of reached a dead end. I have to admit, it’s a little disconcerting the way the media’s been covering it.”

  “They’ve started calling Gil Rankin the ‘Psalmist,’ I noticed.” Luke folded his hands on his desk.

  “Yeah, which is just what August Trumble wants, I would imagine,” Hunter said. “We’re getting a little pressure to close the case. Fortunately, I have a boss who has faith in me. But I sense it has a shelf life. The problem is, there are these two stories out there.”

  “The one that’s being told in the papers and the real one?”

  “Yeah, exactly.” She liked the knowing look in his eyes; he was right with her, same as before, making this easy. “Unfortunately,” she said, “the one that’s being told in the papers is stealing all the oxygen from the real story.”

  “The one that’s being told in the papers makes August Trumble seem like the victim.”

  “Right,” Hunter said, “and Rankin the bad guy. Rankin took advantage of Trumble, that’s the story. He embezzled millions of dollars from the companies he was supposed to be protecting. He enlisted these four ­people to help him. Then he became greedy, or mistrustful, or paranoid, and killed them.”

  “But of course that’s not the real story.”

  “No. Although all of those ­people are dead now, so none of them can refute it.” Hunter’s eyes misted for a moment. “The real story starts with what Crowe told me several weeks ago—­how August Trumble operates a large, sophisticated criminal organization with a number of untraceable shell companies and banking havens, which has been stealing money from state and federal governments for years, through lotteries and income tax fraud, then pumping some of it into charities.”

  “Helping the poor and downtrodden, supposedly.”

  “Supposedly,” Hunter said. “Then, at some point, Trumble found out that the FBI had inside information about these operations and was beginning to close in on him. Trumble’s plan was to disband the organization before that happened. And to disappear into one of these four or five—­or who knows how many—­identities he created for himself. Hiding in the lives of ordinary ­people. In small towns around the country.”

  “Like George Palmer.”

  “Or Roy Hinders, yes. And there he could quietly write his story, telling the world who he really is and what his organization has done.”

  “And in the process, become an outlaw hero of sorts,” Luke said.

  “Or a modern-­day David, as Detective Crowe said. But Trumble must have figured that his only chance to get away safely was to eliminate the handful of ­people in the organization who knew what he was really doing—­who knew his secrets and could hurt him. Maybe he was being paranoid, but it was all very calculated.

  “Trumble offered Rankin millions of dollars, presumably, to carry out that operation. Trumble’s only stipulation being that Rankin must leave a calling card from the Book of Psalms with each victim. The Psalmist killings were punishments, in Trumble’s mind, for what he perceived as acts of betrayal—­acts that he saw as sabotaging his worthy enterprise. To cover himself, they then needed to frame someone else.”

  “Jackson Pynne.”

  “Yes—­who had been Kwan Park’s lover and an accomplice to her betrayal. So a very appropriate fall guy, in Trumble’s mind. Rankin framed him with the cigarette butts and the shoe prints. He probably collected the butts before Jackson came back to Tidewater. The boots, he or Kirby Moss wore and then placed in Jackson’s garage on Monday or early Tuesday.

  “That was the plan as presented to Rankin: eliminate four disloyal employees and set up the killings so that Pynne takes the rap. But then something changed. Trumble must have told Rankin that Pynne knew too much and couldn’t be trusted. He didn’t just need to be framed, he needed to be taken out, too. This was presented to Rankin as a new development, although it was probably Trumble’s plan all along—­to set up Rankin as the real fall guy.”

  “So Rankin did all this without knowing that he was setting himself up,” Luke said. “That must’ve been kind of like working for the devil.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Hunter said. “To Rankin, leaving the Psalms verses behind seemed like some twisted message on Trumble’s part. But he didn’t realize that in the process of doing so, he was setting himself up. That he was making himself the Psalmist.

  “That was the truly brilliant part of Trumble’s plan,” she went on. “That he made sure there were key pieces of evidence left behind to implicate Rankin—­including the Bible in the bed stand at the house where Rankin was staying, opened to the Book of Psalms. And records of wire transfers on Rankin’s computers, making it appear that he had master-­minded an embezzling scheme against Trumble’s organization.”

  “Creating the appearance of a motive. And identifying Rankin as the Psalmist.”

  “Yes. And once the media picks a tag like that . . .”

  Luke turned his eyes out the window. Hunter looked, too, at the long shadow of the church, and beyond the bluff, sunlight glittering across the bay.

  “I can see how that would be a problem,” he said.

  “It is.” Hunter felt her eyes moisten with frustration. “Crowe knows what really happened, but he won’t move forward with it. He thinks it’s too hard to prove. He’s having enough trouble with the racketeering case against Trumble. I don’t know if it’s because of Sheila Patterson, who was a Bureau informant who got killed. Or troubles with evidence. But for whatever reason, he’s barely talking to me anymore.”

  Hunter looked at Sneakers, sleeping peacefully on the rug beside his tiny reindeer toy, facing the wall, his chest slowly lifting up and down, up and down.

  “And what about the prosecutors in these other jurisdictions?” Luke said. “The other murders?”

  “They seem to be buying into the story that Rankin and Moss were the killers. Virginia has closed its case now that Rankin’s dead. I’m afraid the other two will probably follow suit.”

  “So, another problem.”

  “Yeah. There’s this widespread feeling, with Rankin and Moss now
both dead, what’s the point of keeping the case open?”

  Luke winced. “Just a little matter of the truth?”

  “Yes,” Hunter said, “that little matter. My boss told me to do what I think is right. I’m now officially reinstated. So, in a sense, it’s up to me.” She watched a heron rising from the edge of the parking lot and flap through the shade toward the bay, and she felt the drag of all the forces working against her. “I just have this feeling that Trumble’s in jail waiting for me now. Maybe thinking that I’m the last impediment to his freedom. Waiting for me to finally let it go. To give up the case. To save him.”

  “Well,” Luke said. “You know what my response would be to that?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t do it. Ever.” He gave her an affirming look, and Hunter began to smile, realizing that was what she’d wanted to hear. Maybe it was why she’d come here. “I’m reminded of what someone else said once about the truth,” Luke added. “Someone rather famous.”

  Hunter watched his steady blue eyes. She took a guess. “You mean how it’ll set you free?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  She glanced out at the shade across the parking lot and the tall marsh grasses waving in the distance and felt something new guiding her, something she might not have recognized two or three months ago. She stood.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I think I just needed someone to tell me that.”

  LUKE AND SNEAKERS arrived at the cottage a few minutes past six-­thirty. Seeing Charlotte’s BMW parked in the drive made him feel like a little boy. “She’s home!” he said to Sneakers.

  It was still light out, but the air had turned cooler with evening shadows. Charlotte was at the stove, making dinner, listening to something modern-­sounding—­Holst, Luke guessed, or maybe Golijov, the composer she’d been telling him about. Sneakers immediately ran to greet her.