Shadow Men

by Jonathon King

  She was still in her work clothes, a light gray suit and black heels. But she was disheveled in an uncharacteristic way. She said something to a man in a shirt and tie with a clipboard, then came down the steps to meet me. We walked together around the corner of the house by the driveway gate entrance. I wanted to step in to her and hold her, but held back.

  “McCrary,” she said, looking down at first, avoiding my eyes. “Kathy called me and asked if she could come over while I was still on duty. She was crying and said she needed a place to stay, so I told her where the key was and that I got off at six.”

  I bent my head down so that our foreheads were almost touching. We were having a discussion, quietly informational, not intimate.

  “Didn’t take McCrary long to figure out where she’d gone, and he shows up in uniform and starts banging on the front door. The neighbors see a cop and figure, hell, he’s got something going on.”

  She looked up and I could see the tears welling up, even though she was fighting them.

  “He put his shoulder into the door, splintered the lock and came at her.”

  “She shot him?”

  “Yeah,” she said, quickly wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket, hoping no one would catch the movement. “With her service weapon. The neighbors heard the shot, saw an officer lying in the yard and called in a 911 officer down.”

  “Cavalry time,” I said.

  Richards nodded, took a deep breath, and gathered herself.

  “She’s still inside, talking with homicide. Can you wait until they’re gone?”

  “Of course. Sure.”

  We went through the gate around back and Richards went inside through the French doors. I saw a knot of men huddled around the end of the couch where Harris had sat watching a movie with us just a few nights ago. Richards closed the doors behind her and I sat down heavily on the steps. The pool lights were on, but the aqua glow seemed to have gone cold.

  I listened to the murmur of low, male voices and tried to blank it out because I knew what they would be saying. Did he threaten you? Did you fear for your life? Had he crossed the threshold of the doorway? Was he backing away or coming forward when you fired? I had been through it all before. So had Richards. After another hour I heard the door close, and cars out front were started. It was several more minutes before Richards stepped out with a steaming mug of coffee in her hands. I thanked her without saying so.

  “She wanted to stay with me but IAD thought it was a bad idea, like we would stay up all night and concoct a story,” she said, sitting in a chair next to me and pulling her feet up beneath her.

  “She have a place to go?”

  “Her grandmother is up in Pompano Beach.”

  “You get here with everyone else?” I said.

  “Right along with the rescue squad and about thirty other cops coming in from every damn patrol sector in the city.”

  “He dead when you got here?”

  “Yeah. Right there on my front lawn. Bastard.”

  I let the quiet sit uninterrupted for a while. Richards had already been through the mill, and no doubt would have another session with IAD in the morning, when they would want her to take them through Harris’s relationship with the deceased. After a time I tried to offer some solace.

  “He deserved it,” I said.

  I had expected a quick agreement, but Richards was thinking, thinking in that way good detectives think, without letting emotion get in the way of seeing the scene.

  “She said he stumbled back out of the door and fell after she shot him.” Her tone was unconvincing. I let her think about it. If she wanted to share, she would.

  “One shot. In the mouth,” she said after a few seconds. “She would know enough to take a head shot. She’d know he was wearing a vest.”

  “He still deserved it,” I said, and then shut up. If Richards wanted to work through her question of premeditation versus an act of fear and self-defense, she was entitled, but I wasn’t going to join her there. I sat my cup down and reached out and put my warmed fingers on her wrist and listened to the night. She sighed and I thought I finally heard her give it up.

  “Billy tell you that the Highlands County sheriff was asking after you?” she finally said.

  “Yeah. What was that all about?”

  “A sergeant friend of his with the office called me, knowing that I knew you. He said the sheriff had met you and wanted to verify some background. I gave him the basics. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “I met the guy outside a café up in Placid City when I went up looking for the Reverend Jefferson. Seemed a bit inquisitive for a small-town sheriff.”

  “My friend says the guy is as thorough as any cop he knows but a little obsessed. He says Wilson’s on the hook for four homicides in the last fifteen years. All similar. All unsolved.”

  We were talking shop again, but I let her go on, hoping it would keep her mind off the possibility that her friend Harris had committed a justified but illegal assassination in her own home.

  “He says they were all killed by the same big round. A heavy caliber. Possibly all from the same gun.”

  I stopped drinking the coffee and the look in my face must have confused her.

  “What?” she said. “Max? What?”

  “He tell you the exact caliber?” I said while digging the cell phone out of my pocket.

  “No. I’m not sure the sheriff told him, exactly.”

  I speed-dialed Billy’s home number and got the machine. I tried his office. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Hi, Max. Any luck getting Richards?”

  “Yeah, I’m at her place now.”

  “Good. I’ve been able to contact the prosecutor in Collier I told you about. He’s willing to get a forensics team together, but he’d like to get some interagency cooperation. Maybe Sherry can help us with that.”

  “That’s great, Billy, but we might have a more urgent problem,” I said, trying to hold back my speculation. “Did Lott get back to you with anything on that old rifle?”

  “No. My guess is he just stored it away. We didn’t put any priority on it. What’s up?”

  “We need him to check it, Billy. We need to find out how recently it’s been fired. Now.”

  The attorney went quiet for a second while he did his logic thing.

  “Max, what’s up?”

  I told him about my encounter with Sheriff O. J. Wilson up in Placid City. The way the little bulldog had charmed me into letting him look for a weapon in my truck. Then I filled him in on how Wilson had tried to check me out, through Richards’s friend and the string of homicides that had made him so paranoid.

  “All large caliber. That could be anything, Max,” Billy said. But he was too good a lawyer to dismiss it as coincidence that easily. “Did you call this Wilson and let him know about the gun in Jefferson’s barn and its history?”

  “It’s my next call, Billy. If I can get the guy this late at night.”

  “Try hard, Max,” he said. “Earlier this evening I had a conversation with Mark Mayes. I filled him in on what we found and told him you’d discovered his great-grandfather’s watch. He seemed quite dumbstruck by the whole thing.”

  “You told him about Jefferson?”

  “I told him about the grandfather and the son. He was quite intrigued about the grandson having become a minister.”

  “He thinks its his destiny,” I said, thinking out loud. “The letters with his grandfather’s deep beliefs, the whole search for what happened and that thing about forgiveness.”

  Billy was reading me from the other end of the line.

  “You think Mayes will try to contact Jefferson? To somehow bring the thing full circle?”

  “Yeah, I do. But I’m not so sure that William Jefferson is so forgiving. You know where Mayes is now?”

  “I’ll try his number.”

  “Let me know,” I said.

  The next call I made was to information, looking for the number to the Highla
nds County Sheriff’s Office. When I dialed it I got a computerized answering service giving me the office hours and instructions to call 911 if this was an emergency, or to press one for the county dispatcher.

  “Highlands County dispatch,” answered a woman with a tired and bored voice. When I asked for a way to speak to Sheriff Wilson, she repeated the office hours and asked me to call back in the morning. That’s when I identified myself as Detective Richards of the Broward Sheriff’s Office and told her it was a matter of importance. She was much more agreeable, asked for a callback number, and said she would page the sheriff. I did not like to lie often, but I was very good at it when I did. Richards was staring at me when I put the phone down. Her night had been bizarre enough. I started to explain when O. J. Wilson called me back.

  “Detective Richards, please,” he said when I answered.

  “Sheriff Wilson, this is Max Freeman,” I said. I gave him a couple of empty seconds, figuring if he didn’t hang up right away, I might have a chance to hold him.

  “I’m sorry to have deceived you, sir, but I really need to speak with you on a matter that I think may be of concern to you.”

  “Must be important, Mr. Freeman, for you to have misrepresented yourself as a working law enforcement officer.”

  “Yes, sir. I am told by sources, sir, that you have been trying to solve a number of homicides that you think are related. And my understanding is that the link you have is the use of a large-caliber rifle.”

  Again the line was silent, and I could picture the man’s small eyes working beneath that furrowed brow.

  “Four of them to be exact, Mr. Freeman,” he said.

  “Have you determined the caliber of the weapon used, sir?”

  “We think so. The sheriff at the time of the first shooting found a shell casing in the area. It’s pretty distinctive. But we haven’t been so lucky in the other three, and in two cases we weren’t even able to find bullets. The wounds were through and through and the rounds were never discovered.”

  “Was the shell casing an old .405?” I said.

  This time I had turned the sheriff in a direction I had not meant him to go.

  “Mr. Freeman, if there is something you would like to tell me, or talk to me about, I would much rather do this in person. I could come down and meet you first thing in the morning. Maybe you would like to arrange something at the Broward Sheriff’s Office down there?”

  “Well, sir, I’m headed in your direction momentarily. In fact, I can be there in a little more than two hours.”

  Before letting him jump to any more conclusions, I gave him a truncated version of the Mayes case, how the great-grandson had come to us, how I had tracked down the name of John William Jefferson and then Placid City’s own Reverend Jefferson. I then told him the secret that the reverend had been keeping in his barn, and that the rifle he turned over to me was indeed a .405-caliber weapon meant to take down large animals, including people.

  “You said the first shooting was fifteen years ago?” I said, working the long conversation I had with the reverend around in my head.

  “Yes. Before I got here,” Wilson answered.

  “You might check with the morgue and get the date of the reverend’s father’s suicide. He told me it was fifteen years ago. I’d be interested in seeing how close the days match.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “I think the great-grandson, Mark Mayes, is coming to visit the reverend. I’m not sure I’d trust the pastor’s reaction,” I said.

  It was this bare accusation that pushed the old sheriff over the edge.

  “Freeman, you got some set of brass ones on you, fella,” he said, his tone, even over the cell phone, turning icy. “The reverend Jefferson has been a blessed and solid citizen in these parts for more than a decade. Why, that man even presided over my own daughter’s wedding.

  “Son, I have checked out your record, and according to my own damn sources, you might have gone off the deep end yourself up north in Philadelphia when you shot a young boy in the back. Then I understand that you came down here to Florida and got yourself twisted up with a child abductor and ended up killing him, and that some innocent park ranger went down at the same time. Then not too long ago you were apparently found beating a suspect nearly to death, and another cop was forced to shoot and kill another suspect before that one was over.

  “You’ve got a bloodlust or something, Freeman, and I’m not sure I even want you in my jurisdiction unless I’ve got you up here as a suspect.”

  I had not had my recent past raked into a pile with such an efficient stroke before. And Wilson didn’t even know about my most recent wounding of PalmCo’s hired man, nor could he have been aware of my subway encounter with an evil that I obviously held in my memory. The list made me wonder if I truly knew the man reflected in Richards’s kitchen window as I looked out on the light of the pool.

  “Do you have a fingerprint on the shell casing found in the first shooting?” I asked him.

  He waited to answer.

  “Damn right I do.”

  “Do you have a sample of the reverend’s prints?”

  Again he waited a couple of beats.

  “No. He has no criminal record that I know of.”

  “No, he wouldn’t,” I said, then added, “I’ll be in town as soon as I can get there, Sheriff.”

  When I punched off the cell, Richards had her head down, staring at the large stone tile on her kitchen floor.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  22

  I drove the first half of the trip at seventy-five miles-an-hour. After Billy called me on the cell phone, I did the rest at eighty-five. He had been unable to find Mayes. He was not answering the cell number Billy had for him. His room at the small mom-and-pop motel he had been staying in was empty. The manager said he’d last seen Mayes’s small, two-door sedan sometime this morning. He had said something about going to church.

  “I called Professor Martin up in Atlanta, and he talked to Mayes yesterday,” Billy said. “He said he told him about your discovery of the burial site and the watch. He said Mayes seemed resigned to the truth and glad that it was finally over, that he had some answers.”

  “Did he tell Martin about Jefferson—the reverend, the religious connection?”

  “Martin said he told him he thought he’d made up his mind about the seminary and would pray on it at church today, and that was it.”

  “What church?”

  I could tell Billy was putting it together faster than I was. There was an anxiety in his voice, and the sound of it was ratcheting up my own nerves.

  “I did get in touch with Lott,” Billy said with an even tighter tone. “I got him out of a late-night place where he was moderately intoxicated, but with the right promise of a bonus remuneration, I convinced him to open the lab.

  “He took a look at the rifle and said that there were several patterns of rusting going on in the barrel. One layer was very old from the samplings he took, but it had been disturbed at least a couple of times since forming. New rust had apparently started, and it too was marred. His quick conclusion was that it had been fired and then stored away for a long period of time and then fired again. He’ll have to do more extensive analysis to give any kind of timeline, though.”

  The reverend could have used his grandfather’s gun four times or even more. He would not have had to clean and oil it. Without any particular fondness for its past or maybe because of that past, it could have been a simple tool to him.

  Billy had also done some computer searching.

  “I found archived newspaper accounts of four homicides in and around Highlands County that were the result of gunshot wounds that fit your sheriff’s timeline. The victims in each case were not exactly upstanding members of the community,” Billy said.

  All four were convicted felons. A rapist. A child abuser. A domestic batterer. And a man with more convictions than the paper had space to go into.
His last crime was beating and choking a woman because he wanted her red sports car.

  “He was awaiting trial when he was shot in Sebring, only a few miles up the road from Placid City,” Billy said.

  “So the reverend is a man on a mission to rid the world of evil?” I said.

  “Maybe. But Mayes isn’t evil. He wouldn’t be a target.”

  “That’s your opinion, Billy—the opinion of a rational man,” I said.

  I swung north from the bottom of Lake Okeechobee and my headlights found the sign that read OUR SOIL IS OUR FUTURE. I pressed harder on the accelerator.

  When I got to Placid City the eastern sky was showing the soft gray glow of dawn, but it was still early, even for the rural farm folk. I passed Mel’s and could see that there was a light on deep in the building somewhere. Maybe it was for security. Maybe an early cook was dicing up breakfast ingredients. If Sheriff Wilson was somewhere awaiting my arrival, I saw no sign of him, and I doubted that it would be his style to hide himself. I continued through town and out to the Church of God.

  When I turned down the entry road, the sun’s first rays sheared over the horizon and the huge oaks caught the light in their upper branches. There was dew in the grass and it was disturbed by three sets of footprints, one going and coming back, the other leading from a van to the front steps. I remembered the van as Mrs. Jefferson’s. I got out and could tell from the moisture on the van’s hood that it had been here awhile. The windows were layered with a wet sheen, but I could see through the windshield. No one was inside. I took the precaution of rubbing a clear spot on the back window and checking the floorboards in the backseat. Nothing.

  I turned to the church. The high steeple was slightly afire with the early sun and all was silent, save for the ticking of my truck engine cooling after its hours of abuse. I followed the tracks in the grass and got to the porch before realizing that the front door of the church had been left open, not enough to peer inside, but enough to show that the bud of metal on the catch mechanism was not engaged. My right hand felt empty. I had left my Glock behind.

  I moved to the side of the building, looking for any other vehicles that might be parked in back. I checked the height of the windows and quickly gave up the idea of peeking inside. I went back to the front, stepped quietly across the porch boards, held my breath and eased the door open. The inside was dim but my eyes adjusted and I could see the shape of someone sitting in the first seat off the aisle in the front pew. The head was bowed as if praying and did not move. I swept the room as I moved down the center but noticed nothing out of place. I was halfway up the aisle when I said, “Mark?”