by James Carver
“Uh…well, we have this guy booked in, name’s Devlin. We were called out to the corner of Thirty-Sixth and Franklin due to a neighbor’s report of a disturbance and found him all beaten up, and damage to a Mr. Edward James’s property. There was a smashed window, signs of forced entry. This guy says James is a friend of his and he discovered an intruder inside the property who attacked him and ran off…”
“Right...”
“I made an arrest ’cause I think he’s playing us and spinning a story. I think there’s more to this…”
“Thing is, Todd, we’re stretched like a rubber band here.”
“Yeah, but I really think—” Deputy Stevens’s cell phone started buzzing, causing him to almost jump out of his uniform.
“Hold on, Todd, it’s the chief.” Stevens answered his cell. “Chief…yes, that’s right…I’ve got them going out there to meet with the crime technician…That’s right…I’m about to head up there myself to get a handover…Okay, I’ll meet you there. Oh, also, we’ve had an incident at a property up on Franklin. At an Edward James’s property. Someone claiming to be the occupier’s friend was found at the scene of a break-in…Right.” Stevens broke off and addressed Miller. “Any evidence of intent?”
“Uh…well…not really.”
“No, Chief,” said Stevens back on the cell. Miller watched his boss nodding to a string of instructions coming down the other end of the line. “Okay…Sure…Okay…Will do...” Stevens got off the phone. “Chief Walker says we’re unlikely to be able to make the charges stick, and we’ve got a suspected homicide to deal with. He knows Ed James and is of the opinion that he’s a drunk with nothing to steal. Maybe hold him over till the morning in case Ed James turns up. But otherwise, let’s not resource it any further. Okay, Todd? Sorry.”
Todd was unable to hide what he thought of the deputy’s decision. He turned without a word to Stevens and headed back to Gray and Devlin muttering to himself, “‘Let’s not resource it.’ Prick.”
Deputy Stevens didn’t hear Miller’s aside, but as he watched Miller walk off, he cringed. He could see exactly what Miller thought of him: a weak yes man who was paying off the mortgage and the kids’ school fees. A man sailing toward a guaranteed pension who would avoid any decision that required a spine or that would compromise his middle-class comfort.
Miller stood over Devlin and said flatly, “We’re keeping you overnight to check out your story. I tell you, if I were running this place I’d make sure we got you to court and made you explain yourself to a judge.”
Devlin got out of the chair, stood to full height, and peered down at Miller. “And that’s why you’ll never run this place.”
Gray was finally jolted out of her silence. “Wow. It’s no wonder you had the shit kicked out of you.”
“Yeah. For someone so smart, you didn’t see that coming.” Miller snorted. “Take him to holding cell four. The one by the broken heater.”
“First I want to fill in a missing person’s report for Ed,” demanded Devlin.
“Who the hell says he’s missing for Christ’s sake?” exclaimed Gray.
“He ain’t missing! The chief says he’s a drunk—more than likely he’s sitting in a bar or sleeping it off in a ditch somewhere,” added Miller.
“I want to file a report,” insisted Devlin. “At least then I know he’ll be on the NCIC database, even if you do nothing about it.” Miller and Gray looked at each other and rolled their eyes.
“You take the details, Gray. I gotta file his arrest report,” said Miller.
“Shit! C’mon, Miller,” Gray protested. “I got to go home, get a couple of hours’ sleep, and then drive up to Mount Carmel Hospital to pick up my mother.”
“Look around you,” said Miller. “It’s just us two here, so if we split the work it gets done quicker.”
Gray gave a sigh and said to Devlin, “Come with me, will you?”
Devlin followed Gray out of the interview room to her desk where she logged into her PC, all the while sighing and huffing about it.
Devlin had already been booked in and searched, so after Gray had filed the missing person’s report, she took him straight to the holding cells.
Devlin was still curious to know why the station was so busy and, finding himself alone with Gray without Miller looking to butt in, he saw a chance to get some inside information. However, when he asked Gray about it, he just got silence and a stony-eyed stare.
Devlin walked into the narrow concrete twelve-by-six cell, and Gray threw him a blanket.
“I’m sorry I’ve kept you from getting away to see your mother,” he said.
Gray looked at Devlin wearily. “Breakfast’s at seven. Right now it’s lockup time, Father.” And she closed the cell door and turned the key.
Although it was the early hours of the morning, there was still a low-level light on. The painkillers were wearing off, and Devlin’s face and the right side of his body were pulsing with pain. He was damn hungry too as he hadn’t eaten since nine o’clock when he’d made a halfway stop just south of Pittsburgh. The mattress was a thin blue plastic affair covered in a rough single sheet which sat on a concrete ledge. He said a night prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours followed by a prayer for Ed and lay down as carefully as he could, covering himself in the blanket that Gray had tossed him. Then, despite the pain and the stabs of hunger, sleep descended like a heavy cloak, a powerful drug overwhelming his weakened body.
It took minutes for Devlin to drop to the lowest level of consciousness, to begin dreaming. He was walking along a crowded street, a street he knew in downtown Baltimore. Limping toward him came a pathetic figure holding a dirty rucksack that no longer had any working straps. He wore a wool hat and an army surplus jacket. His jeans were dark with filth, and his sneakers just battered bits of canvas without laces. And, as he approached, just like every other night, he asked Devlin the one question that Devlin feared the most:
“Father Devlin, are you ready to repent?”
5
The rain had begun to fall at around one o’clock in the morning, a sudden solid downpour making work slow, difficult, and not particularly rewarding. The team of Halton officers along with a crime scene technician called in from Miami Valley crime lab had managed to secure the area. Although hidden within a copse, there had been enough of a clearing around the body to erect a white forensic tent. In spite of the rain and the waterlogged earth, the crime scene technician had evaluated the physical evidence, established a basic narrative of the scene, and walked it through with Deputy Stevens. Then she started taking photographs. Her camera flashes lit up the hillside along with the white bars of the flashlights held by the police officers brought on-site to comb through the wider crime scene.
Stevens stepped out into the open to get a moment away from the body. So much death so close that he could reach out and touch it. It surrounded him now, and he could not tell where his own death began and the victim’s ended. He looked up, and even though the night sky had become veiled in a thick layer of cloud and the rain beat on his face, here and there he could make out patches of stars, objects so far away it made his head swim and his heart palpitate at the thought of infinity and the loss of self.
His out-of-body experience was cut short by a voice barking from a little way off.
“Greg!” It was Chief Walker staggering up the grassy incline. In his haste to get out of bed and over to the site of the homicide, he had thrown on jeans, a shirt, boots, and an old high-vis jacket. Stevens could see Walker’s Lexus parked up on the highway below, tucked in behind the police cruisers.
“Greg! What’s the situation?” Walker shouted up to his deputy. “I want a full update, everything we know.”
“Evening, Chief—or morning I guess. We got the body of a male, late teens or early twenties probably.”
“Ethnicity?”
“From what we have left of the vic, Caucasian. But I don’t think we could be specific.”
“I know what I’d
bet on,” said Walker as he stopped to get his breath back. His small eyes drifted across to the piles of garbage and debris left by the recent camp which dotted the open ground only a hundred meters away.
“This happened right under the nose of those damn Gypsies. Coincidence? Highly unlikely I’d say.”
“Chief, it’s impossible to say for sure what happened. Thing is, it’s nasty, Chief. Real nasty. The body has been decapitated and hands and feet also severed off and taken from the crime scene.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“It looks like there’s been a concerted effort to prevent any identification of the victim.”
Walker had now climbed the grassy bank and was standing beside Stevens, breathless and rasping. Stevens caught a faint whiff of liquor and gathered Walker must have had a tolerably good time at Congressman Logan’s dinner up at the ranch.
“Do we know the time and cause of death, Greg?”
“There are two bullet wound entry points, one to the stomach and one to the chest. No exit wounds. CSI seems to think the time of death was about twenty-four hours ago from the body temperature and taking into account it’s been outside. Dismemberment occurred after death. Apparently, there’d be a lot more blood if it took place antemortem, even accounting for the rain. So he was probably dead before they started cutting him up.”
“That must be the definition of small mercies.”
“We got a bad break with the weather last night and tonight. The forest floor has been swept clean by the downpour.”
Walker sniffed and wiped raindrops away from his eyes. “And no witnesses either.”
“No. No witnesses. Body was found by a trucker who stopped for a comfort break.”
“A comfort break? He came all the way up here in the rain for a leak?”
“It wasn’t a leak he needed, Chief.”
“Oh, right…I see…well, when you gotta shit, you gotta shit.”
“Looking for a tree to crouch under. Got more than he expected.”
“I’ll say.”
“He’s being questioned down at the station, but his truck’s clean, his log sheet checks out, and his employer says he only left Cincinnati an hour and a half before he called 911. He found the body in the crop of trees.” Both men glanced over to the dark tangle of trees and the forensic tent nestled within it. “Looks like the head was sawn off, and the hands and feet.”
“Sawn?”
“It’s a very clean cut. To be frank, Chief, the crime scene isn’t telling us a hell of a lot at the moment. We don’t know for definite if the homicide took place here. We don’t even know if the dismemberment happened here. We can just hope the coroner gives us something to go on.”
“Pah! They won’t. They never do. They never stick their necks out on anything up at Miami Valley. They’ll produce the safest, most open, and unhelpful conclusions they can.”
Chief Walker thought for a moment, and his eyes darted over to Stevens and away to the forensic tent and back again. He rested a hand on his hip and brushed down his drenched mustache with his thumb and forefinger a couple of times.
“Greg, I think it’s clear we’re dealing with Gypsy business here.”
“Are we really sure...? Because there could be other explanations we need to rule out.”
“Greg, the camp uprooted today, the last of them left only hours ago. We had trouble with them fighting down in the town only last week for God’s sake, had to pull a bunch of ’em in and dry ’em out. They were out of control. This is a Gypsy feud gone bad. I’d bet my badge on it. You know the score—someone’s brother slept with someone’s sister, or something like. I don’t want anyone getting all Sherlock Holmes over this. Greg? Do you hear me? I’m not gonna get the Bureau of Criminal Investigation pulled in to go over this when it’s plain who’s responsible.”
“But is it plain, Chief? I mean, it’s tidy—”
“Greg, there hasn’t been a homicide in Halton in over five years. Hell, the last one wasn’t even a proper homicide; it was a firearms accident up on Kip McGrath’s farm. A community of Gypsies turn up, to use the politically correct parlance we all have tug our forelocks to these days, and bang! What do you know? We’ve got a decapitated body on our hands. When you do the crime scene debrief, let’s make it clear that this is our main and only lead and we do not expect there to be others. With a bit of luck and a following wind, we can turn this over to whatever police department has the dubious pleasure of seeing this motley crew roll up into their municipality.”
“But the homicide is in our jurisdiction. Nothing can change that, Chief.”
“Sure, sure. We’ll have to process the forensics. But the manhunt and investigation will be wherever the Gypsy camp ends up next. That’s where the resources will go. Halton PD’s a small operation, and we cannot lend any help on that account. I see this one slipping very easily into some other PD’s in-tray.” Walker gave Stevens a challenging glare. “Do you understand me, Greg?”
“Fully, Chief. Do truckers shit in woods?”
“Ha! Very funny! Good man. Greg, I’ve got a meeting with the mayor first thing in the morning to brief him, so if you’re okay to carry on here…?”
“Absolutely.”
“I know I can depend on you.”
Walker gave Stevens a solid pat on the shoulder. As he slipped and sidled off back down to his Lexus, he muttered, “Do truckers shit in woods?” to himself a couple of times and chuckled. But Stevens cursed his good nature and his geniality and remembered with a chill the look Officer Miller had given him earlier that night.
6
Devlin was woken by the scrape of iron on concrete. He peeled the side of his face off the mattress and saw the holding clerk standing in the doorway of the cell swinging a bunch of keys.
“Get up, you can go. They’re not going to press charges.”
Devlin ran his hands through his black hair, sweeping stray curls back from his forehead. He swung his legs onto the floor, gripped his knees, and exhaled slowly and evenly in a bid to cope with his tiredness and body aches.
“Let’s go. We haven’t got all day,” said the clerk.
“I see you treat innocent people here the same way as suspects. I don’t even get breakfast?”
“I wouldn’t complain. The honey bun and juice aren’t that memorable.”
The clerk took him to the booking room, signed Devlin off on the system, and handed back his belongings in a plastic bag: wallet, watch, car keys, cell phone, cigars, cigar cutter, lighter, rosary, the cross he wore around his neck, and Ed’s GPS.
Devlin made his way out of the station and crossed the tree-lined parking lot. The next thing would be to get a cab out to Ed’s and retrieve his car. He’d already lost a night, and now it would be midday before he could resume any meaningful search. As he emerged onto the street, he almost ran flat into a bleary-eyed Greg Stevens. Devlin immediately recognized him as the deputy he’d seen the night before. In daylight and up close, he also noticed he’d lost some weight compared to the department photo hung up on the wall in the lobby. Stevens apologized and was about to move on when it clicked with him who Devlin was.
“Hey, you’re the guy we booked last night,” said Stevens.
“That’s right,” replied Devlin.
“They let you go?”
“They never should have kept me. I was just up visiting a friend when some goon jumped me.”
“What’s the name of your friend?” asked Stevens, trying to recall the conversation he’d had with Miller in the early hours of the morning.
“Ed James.” Devlin could see Stevens was curious about this stranger that had just rolled into town and was looking to make his mind up about him.
“How do you know him?” asked Stevens.
“I was in the Air Force with him. Investigations.”
“You still in investigations?”
“No. I’m a priest now.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding.”
; Stevens titled his head to the side, looked Devlin up and down, frowned, and asked, “Where’s your collar?”
“In my pocket.”
Beaten up and after a couple of hours’ sleep in a cell, Devlin didn’t exactly look like priest material. He pulled out his celebret card, his clerical ID, from his wallet and handed it to Stevens, who studied it, nodded approvingly a couple of times, and said, “You’re Roman Catholic?”
“Yep.”
“I’m Catholic too, Father…?”
“Devlin. Gabe Devlin.”
“Good to meet you, Father Devlin. Deputy Stevens.” He extended a hand and they shook.
“Good to meet you too, Deputy.”
“Where’s your parish?”
“Dover, Massachusetts. St. Jude’s Church.” Devlin left out the part about him having just quit. Best keep things simple.
“We go to Sacred Heart in Springfield, me and the family.”
“I’m very glad to hear it. Going today?”
“Well, actually… No, not today. See, I got to be back here later…for something quite serious. I know, you’re thinking it’s a mortal sin to skip mass.”
“From all the activity at the station last night, I trust you have a serious enough reason. Probably not even a venial sin I’d say.”
“Thanks, Father. I’ll take that as my official pardon.”
Stevens rubbed his chin and considered Devlin for a moment “Say, you’re beat up pretty bad… Listen, you want to come back to my house? You could use my bathroom to clean up.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Devlin replied, unsure whether he wanted to be hanging out with a cop right now.
“And I could fix you some breakfast.”
“It’s an imposition.”
“Not at all. Look at it as my way of making amends for skipping mass. And I hate to see a man of God going around looking like you do right now.”
After another moment of uncertainty, Devlin decided to accept. He couldn’t spend his life avoiding the law. And if he was going to find Ed, he needed a way into this strange new town, and the deputy was a good start. And, equally importantly, Devlin was nearly faint with hunger. So he accepted graciously.