“So what now, Hopalong?” she asked. “What’s our next move?”
“Next move is to find McGintey’s former partner, the one Cat told me about. Thing is, none of the suspects fits the description.”
“Tell me again how she described him.”
“A short, bug-eyed fella. I know a few guys like that back home, but nobody here.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Yes you do.”
He rolled onto his side, facing her.
“That guy you talked to at the park last Friday night. You called him a pygmy Neanderthal.”
“Caramba,” DeMarco said. He blinked, and slowly inhaled. “Did you happen to get a name from his wife?”
“I barely got a nod out of her.”
He inhaled deeply again, then let a low whistle slip through his lips, the sound of a distant bomb falling. “Okay, who would know? Who in this town would know just about everybody in it?”
“Bartender,” Jayme said. “Hair stylist slash barber. Postmaster and/or mail carrier.”
“And/or librarian?” DeMarco asked.
Jayme grinned. “Our tarot-card-reading librarian slash Da Vinci Cave Irregular. Of course! Do you want to call her or should I?”
“You, please.”
And now she rolled onto her side too. “But first,” she said, and laid her hand atop his belt. “If you’re interested, that is.”
He said, “I have four full days’ worth of interest ready and waiting. So you best proceed with caution.”
She unbuckled his belt, worked his zipper down, slipped her hand into his underwear. “How does this work with just one leg?” she asked.
“I lie perfectly still and you have your way with me.”
“Hmm. I have to admit I found it more than a bit arousing when you talked about how Cat tied your hands together.”
Her touch was alchemical, the magic of endorphins, the happy, sleepy dopiness of desire. “I am in no condition to resist,” he said.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-SEVEN
“No, just trying to connect the dots,” Jayme said into her phone. “I’ll let you know. Thanks again, Rosemary.”
She ended the call, turned from her seat on the edge of the bed, went prone again beside DeMarco. “Todd Burl,” she told him. “People call him Toad behind his back.”
“I can see that,” DeMarco said.
“Now here’s the interesting part. Guess who he worked for back in the late eighties, early nineties.”
“It’s got to be the good reverend himself.”
“You know how Royce owns a lot of rentals around the area? Well, Mr. Toad was his full-time maintenance guy. Did repairs, collections, mowing, whatever needed done.”
DeMarco sat up. A tree peeper chirped outside the window. The room was dark now, the only illumination from the occasional headlights and a softly shrouded half-moon. “So he preceded McGintey? And, according to Emery, was McGintey’s partner somehow. Involving drugs.”
“I wonder if Burl was ever questioned.”
“We need to find that out. And if not, why not. What’s he do now?”
“Remember our drive along the river when we first came into town—that mansion up on the bluff? He’s the foreman.”
“We need to write this down,” DeMarco told her. “Make some kind of chart. This is getting too convoluted for me.”
“You’re just tired is all. Let’s get some sleep and start fresh in the morning.”
They lay there quietly then, holding hands, Jayme on her side against him, DeMarco on his back. The air through the screen smelled clean and sweet, scented by the bushes below the window and by DeMarco’s gratitude for being forgiven and granted another chance. He smiled, remembering his dream, and hoped he would dream of Ryan again or not dream at all. The ordeal in the woods and the cage seemed a dream already, though he could call up the pain and foul pungency if he wished. He could call up the image he had drawn in his imagination of the seven skeletal girls, their seven fully fleshed and plaintive faces, the way their arms reached out for him, took his hands, walked with him through the hardest parts of the trek. His mind, he realized, was, like life itself, filled with both terrible darkness and hallucinatory light, both useful if employed effectively and in the proper dosage.
He looked at Jayme’s face in the meager light and listened to her breathe, smelled the summersweet flowers, and heard the night’s hushed song, the peeper’s chirp, the warbler’s trill, the mourning doves’ lament.
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-EIGHT
In a conference room in the county jail, DeMarco faced a shackled Chad McGintey across a metal table scarred with cigarette burns, coffee stains, and a thousand desperate scratches. Jayme leaned against the wall, unsmiling. McGintey’s fists, and the handcuffs holding them together, scraped back and forth atop the table, forward and back as he talked.
“I don’t know what you mean by partner. Only partner I ever had is my brother.”
“That’s not what I’ve been told,” said DeMarco.
“And who told you that?”
“God whispered in my ear.”
“Ha,” McGintey said. “You got any ’shrooms left? I could use a couple right now.”
“You’re in deep shit here, Chad. You know that, right?”
“If you and God say so.”
DeMarco half turned toward Jayme. “What’s he looking at again?”
“Deviant sexual contact, second offense. Three to five years if he’s lucky. More if he draws a female judge. Of course, he could always opt for chemical castration.”
McGintey squirmed in his seat. “That ain’t never gonna happen.”
“Probably not,” she said. “Some of your new pals in Little Sandy will take care of you first.”
His eyes went back to DeMarco. He leaned forward over his fists. “This is bullshit,” he said. “Nobody did nothing they didn’t want to do.”
“Well,” DeMarco told him, “you know how well that argument’s going to fly. Look, I’m giving you a chance to make a friend here. A chance to maybe help yourself out.”
McGintey sucked on his tongue. “How good a friend?”
“You know that’s not up to me. But I’m fairly certain the DA would rank a multiple homicide case more important than yours. You and Charlene go to jail, nobody notices. Seven young victims finally get justice? The whole country notices.”
McGintey pursed his lips, chewed on the inside of his mouth. “So who’s this partner I’m supposed to have had?”
“You want me to jog your memory?” Again DeMarco looked back at Jayme. “How would you describe him, Trooper?”
“Take off his boots and he’s maybe five three on a good day,” she said. “Wears a bad hairpiece, graying around the ears. Eyes that sort of bulge out at you. Big, flat nose and fat lips.”
DeMarco added, “The kind of lips the word ‘blubbering’ was invented to describe. Like two giant wet grubs doing it ass to mouth.”
“With a skull like a mushroom,” Jayme said.
“A mushroom in a hairy condom,” DeMarco added.
McGintey laughed despite himself. “Toad Burl was never no partner to me. Doing what?”
“Okay,” DeMarco said. “For the sake of argument, let’s say for now I have that detail wrong. You weren’t partners. You never used that space behind the false wall to store anything like, I don’t know, methamphetamine, coke, weed, any of the local favorites. But he was the caretaker of the church property, a position you took over from him. How did that come about?”
McGintey shrugged and looked away. “Man, that was a long time back. I guess I heard about the job and applied for it, or whatever.”
“All right, you took the job. Who told you about the false wall?”
“That’s something I didn’t… I mean…I guess I heard about it from somebody or othe
r. But I never had the key for it. Never had no use for it.”
DeMarco leaned back. Scooted his chair away from the table a little. Prepared to stand. “Trooper,” he said, “looks like we’re not going to get any cooperation here. You want to go let the sheriff know so he can pass it on to the DA?”
Jayme nodded. “So all clear on adding obstruction of justice charges? Both him and Charlene?”
“Right. And find out when the search of the trailers and the rest of the property is happening. I’d like for us to be there for that.”
“Will do,” Jayme said, and reached for the door.
“Look,” McGintey said before she could turn the handle. Both Jayme and DeMarco held their positions, faced his way.
“Yeah,” McGintey said, “okay. So all I remember is that Toad got pissed at Royce about something and got himself fired. So he comes to me and says, you oughta take that job. Go see him before he hires somebody else. And that’s what happened.”
DeMarco stared at a water stain on the ceiling. “So you get yourself hired to a minimum wage job mowing grass. Even though you and your brother already have a fairly lucrative drug operation going. Then your brother gets busted, takes the fall for both of you, spends some time in jail. When he gets out, you pass the church job on to Virgil Helm so you can contribute more time to the family business.” He lowered his eyes to McGintey. “That about it?”
McGintey’s tongue wiped the front of his teeth, back and forth three times before he spoke. “I’m done answering your questions,” he said. “I need something in writing. I want Char cleared of everything, and my brother too. And none of that castration shit either. That’s not even an option.”
DeMarco smiled. Then stood. “We’ll see what we can do.”
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-NINE
The sheriff met them in his office with a box of pastries in hand, a dozen egg-sized balls of sugar-dusted, deep-fried dough. He said, “I was just about to take these to the break room. Grab a couple each before they all disappear.”
Jayme picked one up between a finger and thumb. “Cream puff?” she said.
“Poonchkey,” he told her. “Spelled p-a-c-z-k-i. Filled with jelly. I think it’s raspberry today. So be careful, they can be messy.”
DeMarco picked one out, as did the sheriff before setting the box aside. “Help yourself to more,” he said.
“I’m lucky she allowed me to have one,” DeMarco said with a nod toward Jayme.
“Yes you are,” she told him.
After wiping the powdered sugar from their fingertips and lips, they filled the sheriff in on their conversation with McGintey. “Interesting,” he said. “I guess I’ll have a chat with the DA.” He carried the box of pastries to his open door, called to the nearest deputy, handed him the box, then returned to sit on the edge of his desk.
“So who was it turned you on to Burl?” he asked.
“Rosemary Toomey,” Jayme said. “We were tracing back the history of Royce’s employees. Turns out Burl was McGintey’s predecessor. You must have been aware of that.”
“We were,” the sheriff said. “Checked him out right at the start. He came up clean.”
“We think he deserves another look,” DeMarco said.
“And what makes you think that?”
“There’s more to his and McGintey’s relationship than meets the eye. McGintey’s got something to bargain with. We mentioned Burl, he got a little worried.”
The sheriff nodded, squinted at the floor. When he looked up, he jerked his chin at DeMarco’s injured leg. “You spent all that time traipsing around in the woods and never got so much as a whiff of Helm?”
DeMarco smiled. “There’s a lot to smell in that forest, Sheriff, but not him.”
“But if we need to know,” the sheriff said, “you can tell us where all you searched in there?”
“I can tell you where I went into the woods, and more or less where I came out.” DeMarco rubbed a hand over his left thigh. “If you do conduct a search, there’s one particular gully I’d like to revisit with a couple sticks of dynamite.”
The sheriff looked to Jayme. “Is he always that clumsy?”
“Frequently,” she said.
The sheriff put a hand to his chin, rubbed his manicured scruff up and down. “You two are better than Martin and Lewis,” he said. “I’ll send a couple deputies out to talk to Burl again, see what we can squeeze out of him.”
“About that,” DeMarco said. “He strikes me as the skittish type.”
“Meaning what?”
Jayme said, “We’re thinking the next step should be a little more insight into Burl. First from Royce, then Burl’s current employer.”
“The millionaire?”
“Right,” she answered. “Retired chiropractor.”
“How’s a man get to be a millionaire from cracking backs?”
“Six clinics along the Gulf Coast. A lot of shrimpers and oil workers with bad backs, I guess.”
The sheriff shrugged. “You should know that my department’s been advised to take a hands-off approach when it comes to Pastor Royce.”
“Us too,” DeMarco said. “But we’re civilians here. Thinking about converting to Baptists. Looking for some spiritual advice, that’s all.”
The sheriff smiled. “He’d be the man for that, I hear.”
Jayme asked, “What’s the FBI’s interest in him anyway?”
The sheriff glanced past her to the open door of his office: no deputies lurking outside. “Rumor is—and it’s all just rumor—some of his foundation’s money might have found its way into the hands of a bunch of black radicals up in Chicago. The kind that like to collect heavy-duty weaponry.”
“I think I need to sit in on one of the pastor’s sermons,” DeMarco said.
“Oh, he’s slick,” the sheriff told him. “Always stays just a hair short of advocating sedition. Publicly anyway. What he advocates privately is a matter of conjecture.”
“Well,” DeMarco said, “I’ll leave the anarchists to the big boys. Investigating sedition is way above my pay grade.”
“I hear you,” said the sheriff. “Between domestic abuse, sexual abuse, animal abuse, meth labs, crack houses, and poaching deer and wild boar, plus a mountain of paperwork for all of it, we’ve got more than enough to do around here.”
“Thanks for the poonchkey,” DeMarco said. “We’ll stay in touch.”
“Do that,” said the sheriff.
Out on the sidewalk, which was simmering already at nine in the morning, bits of mica glinting like sparks, DeMarco slipped on his sunglasses and said to Jayme, “Do women really like that scruffy look on men?”
“Are you thinking of trying it?”
“Seems to me it would take longer to maintain than a nice close shave every day.”
“It’s okay on boys,” she told him. “I’m not completely sold on the gray scruff, though.”
“You know what turns me on these days?” he asked.
“It better be what I’m thinking it is. If you know what’s good for you.”
He grinned. Laid his hand against the small of her back.
“Who’s Martin and Lewis?” she asked.
ONE HUNDRED THIRTY
Reverend Royce came striding down the corridor toward the lobby where Jayme and DeMarco had been asked to wait. Two large black men in expensive suits followed a long stride behind him. His voice reverberated off the marble tile when he asked, as if from a stage, “Is Vicente paying you two just to vex me? What’s next—a plague of boils?”
“Nice acoustics,” DeMarco said. Behind him, seated at his desk, the security guard chuckled.
Royce stopped two feet short of barreling straight through DeMarco. “I am in the midst of a contract negotiation with a major television network. I have no time for interruptions. And I certainly have no ob
ligation to make myself available to individuals with no purview outside the borders of Pennsylvania.”
“Yet here we stand,” Jayme said with a beaming smile, “having another lovely chat.”
“Because I am a righteous man, with nothing to do with the unfortunate death of those girls, no matter how vehemently Vicente wishes it otherwise. I have spoken to a dozen law enforcement personnel thus far. I have signed an affidavit. I requested and passed a polygraph test. So now I am telling you to inform Esquire Vicente, I will have no more!”
“Todd Burl,” DeMarco said.
Royce’s head jerked as if somebody had chucked him under the chin. “What does that vermin have to do with anything?”
DeMarco said, “I understand he was your business partner for a while.”
“Partner? The man mowed my grass and fixed my toilets. In what way does that constitute a partnership?”
“Why did you fire him?” Jayme asked.
Royce glanced at the security guard. Then turned to one of his bodyguards. “Open the sanctuary.”
The guard unlocked the heavy wooden doors leading into the five-hundred-seat church. He pulled one door open, and stood there waiting.
To DeMarco and Jayme, Royce said, “If you don’t mind.”
He followed them into the sanctuary, then, as his bodyguard closed the door behind them, crossed to half sit against the back of a rear pew, with the sprawling sanctuary laid out behind him, the row upon row of pews padded in red velvet, the wide center aisle leading to the padded kneeling rail, and behind it the raised chancel, the pulpit, and four risers for the choir, the enormous golden cross high up on the rear wall, the cameras and lights suspended over the pews.
DeMarco said, “I don’t think we’re in Aberdeen anymore, Toto.”
“Praise God,” Royce said. “As for Todd Burl?” He twisted up his mouth as if he wanted to spit. “Even his name is loathsome to me.”
“And why is that?” Jayme asked.
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