Royce’s smile drooped a little at the corners. He leaned back in the chair and laced his fingers atop an ample belly.
Trooper Matson told him, “We’re investigating the incident at the former Aberdeen Baptist Church.”
“Still?” he said. “You mean to tell me that a state full of law enforcement personnel hasn’t closed that case yet?”
“You probably would have heard if they did,” DeMarco said.
“Of course it is Kentucky,” Royce said, which caused his five associates to chuckle.
“Where you still own several businesses,” DeMarco said.
Royce waved a hand through the air. “I scarcely know what I own anymore. My accountants handle all that.”
“In any case,” Matson told him, “we would like to fill ourselves in on the details of the discovery at the church. Your recollection of exactly when and how you learned about the bodies behind the false wall.”
“Skeletons are hardly bodies, Trooper.”
“You learned about them how?” DeMarco said.
Now there was no smile on Royce’s lips. His eyes narrowed. “An unofficial capacity, you said? Did David Vicente send you here to harass me again?”
DeMarco said, “I understand there’s some relationship between you two?”
Royce slowly pushed his chair away from the desk. Then he leaned back nonchalantly, thick hands hanging limp over the ends of the armrests. “I have already been questioned ad nauseam on this matter, Sergeant. So unless you are carrying a subpoena, you should refer to all extant documentation. Have a nice drive back to Kentucky.”
With that he pulled his reading glasses back into place and leaned over a sheet of paper on his desk. One of the plum-suited triplets came up silently behind DeMarco and gripped his arm, turning him toward the door.
DeMarco turned more briskly than the man expected. Nose to nose with him, DeMarco said, “Right now you have committed simple assault. Would you care to try for aggravated?”
Jayme’s hand went to her pocket holster.
Royce stood behind his desk. “Whoa now,” he said.
DeMarco never blinked. He stepped closer, bumping chests with the man still holding his arm. “You have two seconds to get your hand off me,” DeMarco told him.
The man looked at Royce, then withdrew his hand, and stepped out of the way.
DeMarco turned, smiling, to face the desk again. “I can’t say you make a good first impression, Pastor.”
Then he looked at Jayme. “Trooper,” he said, “what say we go have another look at those police reports. My gut tells me we might have overlooked something.”
DeMarco and Jayme headed for the door. Royce came around his desk to follow them. “You can tell Vicente I hope he’s enjoying his retirement! Tell him we’ve got some fine lakes up here for fishing if he needs to put his time to something useful for a change!”
Both DeMarco and Jayme smiled all the way out to the parking lot. When the door fell shut behind them, she said, “How about the arm candy? What’s their job, you think?”
“Choir,” he said.
“Really? They looked more like organ players to me.”
Grinning to each other, they climbed inside the car, DeMarco behind the wheel. He started the engine, turned on the air conditioner, but made no attempt to move the car. He was no longer smiling.
Jayme pushed her hair behind her ears. “What do you think he’s hiding?” she asked.
“Maybe nothing,” DeMarco answered.
“So this was a wasted trip?”
He turned to her, leaned back against the door. “Think about it,” he told her. “What do you know now that you didn’t know when you woke up this morning?”
She ran her memory through the day’s events. “I know that Chad McGintey is still messing around with underage girls.”
“Check,” DeMarco said.
“I know that Aaron Henry is a pathetic, self-loathing man full of emasculating chemicals, and probably not worth any more of our time.”
“Agreed. And check.”
“And…I guess I know that Eli Royce is a self-important narcissist with a wild hair up his ass for David Vicente. Who, by the way, just might be exploiting us in some personal vendetta against Royce, whether it has anything to do with those unfortunate girls or not.”
“Check and check again,” DeMarco said. “Question is, what’s our next move?”
She thought for a moment, studied his eyes. Then she answered, “A couple more burgers for the long ride home?”
“You are so freaking brilliant,” he told her, and patted her cheek, “I just can’t stand it.”
FIFTY-TWO
There were two people supposed to be his grandparents living somewhere outside of Youngstown, too far away for a boy to walk. Ryan saw them only twice, both times when his mother talked their neighbor Paul into driving them there. Ryan was so small the first time that he had to get onto his knees on the backseat to watch the factories and warehouses going by, the huge metal walls and rusted roofs, then the big, pillared brick houses and then the row houses and a couple of playgrounds, and then small, dirty-white houses and the houses with buckled siding, and finally the fields and trees and then his grandparents’ place.
It was an ugly, unpainted house but three times bigger than the trailer and with a small, unevenly mowed yard enclosed inside a huge unmowed yard where the chickens nested and hid their eggs. Inside the house the linoleum floors bulged in several places as if a family of monster rats had tunneled underneath, and half of the living room ceiling sagged like a balloon full of water.
While his grandparents talked to his mother, Ryan explored the upstairs with his uncle Nip who had one leg shorter than the other from polio or something and who had a whiny way of talking as if the words were coming out his nose like air squealing out of a balloon. He seemed to Ryan more like an older boy than a full-grown man. He showed Ryan the magazines full of naked women he kept under his bed, and then he asked, You want to see something funny?
They went outside into the big part of the yard where a dozen or so chickens were sitting down resting or else pecking at bugs in the weeds, and Nip said, You ever seen a chicken fly? Ryan said Sure even though he had only seen them on the television, and then Nip said, You ever seen one fly without its head? Ryan said, It couldn’t see where it was going, and Nip said, That don’t matter, and went running awkwardly after a chicken and finally caught one by its leg.
He carried it back into the mowed part of the yard where there was an old stump with a rusty hatchet stuck in it. Hold this thing down for me, Nip said, and showed Ryan how to pin the chicken down with one hand behind its neck and one on its head with its wings flapping and legs digging air like crazy. And then before Ryan had a clear idea of what was coming, Nip whacked off the chicken’s head, narrowly missing Ryan’s fingers, and grabbed the still-twitching body and heaved it up into the air with a spraying stream of blood spurting out of it. The headless bird flew straight into the nearest tree and bang into a branch some twenty feet up, and then it fell tumbling and bouncing down through the branches all the way to the ground where it lay convulsing and flapping for another couple of minutes.
When it was still, Nip put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder and said, Now don’t say you never seen a headless chicken fly, and Ryan looked up at him grinning and said, I guess I won’t.
FIFTY-THREE
Exhausted from their day of interviewing the suspects in the Aberdeen Church case, DeMarco and Jayme agreed to save their visit to Chad McGintey in the county jail until morning. Also on the next day’s agenda was a conversation with the minor girl, and a visit to David Vicente.
“Maybe we should talk to Rosemary and Hoyle before Vicente,” Jayme suggested. “Forewarned is forearmed.”
“You have nice forearms,” DeMarco told her.
“And you’
re so tired you’re getting goofy.”
After that they lapsed into silence for the final hour of the drive. When DeMarco parked the car behind the RV in Grandma’s driveway, Jayme laid her hand atop his. “You’ve been quiet a long time,” she said. “What have you been thinking about?”
“Old stuff,” he told her, and smiled wearily.
“Anything you’d care to share?”
“I’ll tell you what I’d rather share,” he said, and gave her a look she recognized.
She said, “You sure you have the energy for it?”
“I will after a quick shower.”
She leaned closer, rested her head on his shoulder. “We don’t have to have sex every night, you know. Just in case you’re trying to prove something to me.”
“It isn’t that,” he said.
“Good. Because you don’t have anything to prove.”
“I know.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I like that you like me so much.”
He kissed her hair. “To me it’s not just sex,” he told her. “I mean it is sex. But it’s a lot more than that too.”
She laid a hand to his cheek. “You’re not going to lose me, if that’s what you’re afraid of. You’re never going to lose me, baby.”
He turned his head a few degrees and whispered into her palm. “Famous last words.”
FIFTY-FOUR
By eight the next morning they were at the county jail in Bardwell. The deputy on duty, with whom Jayme had spoken by phone earlier that morning, brought Chad McGintey into the interrogation room where DeMarco and Jayme were seated side by side at a metal table, a large cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and a folder thick with paper in front of Jayme, two cups of coffee in front of DeMarco. As McGintey sat across from them, DeMarco slid the third cup his way.
DeMarco waited to speak until the deputy exited the room. By then McGintey had downed half of his cup. “Looks like you had a rough night,” DeMarco said.
“This is bullshit,” McGintey said. “I never touched Charlene. Ask her yourself if you don’t believe me. She’ll tell ya.”
Trooper Matson said, “That’s not our concern, Mr. McGintey. We’re here to talk with you about another matter.”
He took another long sip of coffee. Leaned back in his metal chair. “I don’t own none of the property,” he said. “It’s all in my brother’s name.”
“Again,” Matson said, and smiled, “not our concern.”
McGintey waited, but they said nothing more. “Then what the hell?” he said. “You drag me out here just for the coffee? Where’s the doughnuts?”
DeMarco leaned toward him, elbows on the table. “Aberdeen Baptist Church,” he said. “July 2014.”
“Great,” McGintey said. “That shit again.”
“According to our information,” Matson said, and opened the folder, “you were employed to maintain the church property until…some time the previous year.”
“I mowed the grass,” McGintey said. “You going to arrest me for that too?”
“And why did you leave that position?”
“Because I got sick of mowing the freaking grass,” he said.
Again Matson and DeMarco waited. They smiled and sipped their coffee, but said nothing.
“My brother came home,” he told them. “Bought that property up near the state line, asked me to give him a hand with it.”
“A hand doing what?” Jayme asked.
“Whatever he asked me to do,” McGintey said. “I’d rather take orders from him than from some fat asshole preacher.”
“You didn’t get along well with Pastor Royce?” DeMarco asked.
“Get along?” McGintey said. “How do you get along with somebody’s never satisfied? Somebody hates you for how you look?”
“Because you’re a Caucasian?” DeMarco said.
“Because I’m a white man and proud of it,” McGintey said.
“In other words,” Matson said, “he’s the racist, not you.”
“It ain’t being a racist when you’re right,” McGintey answered.
DeMarco sipped his coffee.
Jayme smiled, then leafed through the papers. “It says here you recommended Mr. Virgil Helm as your replacement at the church.”
“If that means I told him there was a job open and he was welcome to it, yeah, I guess I did.”
DeMarco asked, “You were well acquainted with Mr. Helm?”
“What’s it say in those papers you got?”
“I’d rather hear it from you,” Jayme said.
“Yeah, well,” McGintey said, and turned his empty cup upside down atop the table. “I’m all out of coffee, so we’re all out of time.”
DeMarco said, “Any idea where Mr. Helm is now?”
McGintey stood up, leaning forward with one hand braced against the edge of the table, his other arm extended, hand fluttering through the air. “Gone with the wind,” he said.
He crossed to the door and pounded on the metal frame. “Next time bring doughnuts,” he said.
The guard opened the door, and McGintey exited.
DeMarco blew out a breath. “Remember the good old days when people were afraid of the police and didn’t talk back? Didn’t jerk us around and ask for favors? Didn’t have a lawyer on speed dial?”
“No,” she said. “Do you?”
“Not really,” he said.
FIFTY-FIVE
On their return to the front of the county jail, DeMarco and Jayme found the sheriff seated on the edge of a deputy’s desk, watching their approach. “Learn anything?” he asked.
They paused a full stride from the sheriff. DeMarco told him, “He has no fondness for Eli Royce, that much is clear.”
“That’s a fairly common sentiment among white supremacists.”
“Which doesn’t explain why David Vicente seems to feel that way.”
The sheriff gave a little shrug and looked away briefly. Then he said, “Vicente’s a good man. He’s not shy about the truth no matter what color its skin is.”
Trooper Matson asked, “So just what is the truth in this case?”
The sheriff smiled. He helped himself to another look up and down her body. “Well,” he said, “Vicente has the freedom to say what he likes about Royce. Folks like us, if we condemn a black man for being a liar and an exploiter of his own people, we get tarred with the same brush as somebody like McGintey back there.”
“You wouldn’t care to elucidate on that characterization, would you?” DeMarco asked. “I don’t remember reading any of that in Vicente’s debrief.”
“I suspect he’s probably hoping you’ll come across the information on your own.”
“All I know is it would sure save the trooper and me a lot of gasoline and perspiration if somebody would just be up front with us. I’m beginning to feel a bit manipulated here. It’s not a feeling I tend to appreciate first thing in the morning.”
The sheriff held his gaze on DeMarco a moment longer, then moved it to Jayme. She met his gaze and kept her own face emotionless. He looked to the floor, then rubbed the stubble on his cheek.
He said, “Royce held the maintenance contract on the church back in those days. Part of his deal as the pastor. Of course the job of mowing his own grass was beneath him. So he’d take up a special collection every Sunday. And used that to pay McGintey. Same with his replacement.”
“Virgil Helm,” Matson said. “The disappearing handyman.”
The sheriff nodded.
DeMarco said, “What about this lawsuit Royce brought against Vicente? This happened when—before or after the girls’ remains were found?”
“Most of a year before,” the sheriff said. “It had something to do with a claim against Royce of statutory rape. One of his parishioners.”
“Royce was charged wit
h rape?” Matson asked.
The sheriff shook his head. “No official charges were brought. Aberdeen had its own municipal force back then. Town police chief and a couple of part-time deputies. The chief had a private little conversation with all the parties involved, including the girl’s parents, who just happened to be tenants in one of Royce’s rental properties. Next thing you know, the family decides it’s all been a misunderstanding. Turns out the girl’s not pregnant at all, just trying to get some attention.”
“So was she or wasn’t she?” Matson asked.
“Belly bump suggested she was. That’s what got the mother to start demanding answers from the girl in the first place.”
DeMarco said, “And she named Royce. And that led to the confab with the chief.”
“Couple days later,” the sheriff said, “somebody spots the family driving out of town in a brand-new Buick. Pulling a little U-Haul trailer behind them.”
“This is all in a police report?” DeMarco said.
Again the sheriff shook his head. “Nobody wrote it up. As far as I know, the only mention of it in print was Vicente’s letter to the editor calling for Royce to resign his position. Royce refused. Sued Vicente for libel and defamation of character, challenged the entire town to prove he’d done anything wrong.”
“But they couldn’t,” DeMarco said, “because the family was gone, and the police chief never filed any paperwork on the incident.”
“There you go,” the sheriff said.
Matson asked, “The family couldn’t be tracked down?”
“Who’s going to pay for it?” the sheriff said. “Aberdeen Town Council? There’s no charges pending, no outstanding complaints. People want to move on, they can move on. And move on they did.”
“Vicente’s a lawyer,” DeMarco said. “And apparently a good one. Why would he write an editorial that could get him sued?”
The sheriff shrugged. “There’s no merit to the suit,” he said. “Even Royce knows that. But his pockets are a lot deeper than Vicente’s. And they keep getting deeper month after month, year after year.”
Walking the Bones Page 15