Murder on the Horizon

by M. L. Rowland

  “It’s just a tattoo.”

  “No. Those are bruises.”

  “Oh,” Baxter said, turning around again and donning his T-shirt. “That was Jordan. He got mad and hit me.”

  He slid back onto his chair, hands in his lap, eyes lowered.

  Gracie sank down into the chair opposite, staring at the bent head. She reached out to smooth the blond hair, but stopped and withdrew her hand. “Bax?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you told anyone about this, shown anyone this . . . what he did?”

  The slightest shake of the blond head.

  “Not even Grandma Sharon?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Baxter, I have to report this,” she said in a gentle voice. “I have to call Child and Family Services.”

  The boy’s head snapped up, his eyes as round as full moons behind the heavy-rimmed glasses. “No!” he yelled. He jumped to his feet, shoving the chair back so hard it tipped backward, banged against the wall, and stayed there. “You can’t tell! He’ll do things! He’ll hurt her!”

  Gracie managed to find her voice. “Who will he hurt?”

  “Swear you won’t tell anybody! You have to swear!”

  “Sit down, Bax.”

  The boy stayed where he was, fists clenched, body trembling. “Swear!”

  “Okay. Okay, I swear I won’t tell anybody. For now at least. Sit down, Bax.”

  The boy righted his chair and sat back down, hands hanging on either side of the chair, head bent.

  “Why don’t you want me to tell anyone?”

  “Jordan said he’ll hurt Grandma Sharon.” His eyes flicked up to hers, then back down again. “He likes to burn things. He said he would burn her house down.” He stopped, motionless in his chair. Then he looked up at Gracie and said, “I think he might have burned down ’Cacia’s house.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  “HE likes to burn things,” Baxter had said about his fifteen-year-old cousin.

  Gracie sat in one of the ladder-backed chairs, elbows on the kitchen table, head in her hands, stomach roiling like a witch’s brew.

  It was late, almost eleven o’clock. She should be in bed and asleep. Not only did she need to be at the SO at eight o’clock the next morning, she needed to be something resembling coherent.

  But she knew she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.

  At least not yet.

  She pushed herself to her feet, poured herself a tumbler of skim milk, stirred in a tablespoon of baking soda, downed the concoction in three gulps, set the glass in the sink, and sat back down at the table to think about the boy/man with the angry eyes who, with the cool aplomb of a trained killer, had pointed a semiautomatic weapon at her.

  Who had beaten his younger cousin black-and-blue.

  Who had threatened to burn down his own grandmother’s house.

  What else was Jordan capable of?

  Burning down the Robinsons’ home?

  Somehow—somehow—she had to find out.

  First though, infinitely more important, she needed to facilitate the removal of Baxter from his abusive family.

  Calling the county’s Child and Family Services was the most obvious solution to that problem.

  But she had sworn to Baxter, for the time being at least, that she wouldn’t tell anyone.

  Plus, the last time she had contacted the social services agency, she had almost lost her beloved dog.

  She looked over to where Minnie was curled up and sleeping peacefully on her little round bed in the corner of the kitchen.

  Was she willing to risk Minnie’s life again? Or Sharon’s? Possibly even Baxter’s?

  She couldn’t not risk it. She wouldn’t . . . couldn’t . . . honor her promise to the boy. She had a moral obligation to report the physical abuse of a child.

  No, she decided. Instead of calling social services, she would tell Sharon Edwards. Let her handle it. The woman was the boy’s grandmother. Gracie was no one in particular to Baxter. She was just . . . Gracie.

  That decision made, she closed her eyes and mentally sifted back through the events of that horrific day in June. The day all hell had broken loose at camp, the day she had almost lost her life, until she remembered exactly what she had done with the little flash drive containing the journal her friend Jett had left for her.

  She stood up again, walked into the living room to where her day pack lay on the couch, unzipped a tiny outside pocket, and fished out the flash drive with two fingers.

  Back at the table in the kitchen, she inserted the flash drive into the port on her laptop.

  There was only one file—Camp.

  Gracie clicked on it.

  Her friend’s diary began almost three years earlier. There were over six hundred files, one folder for every month, one file for each entry.

  Months later, the pain of her friend’s death was still so keen, Gracie avoided the portions of the journal describing what had been happening at camp and the events that had led slowly and inexorably to her death, instead doing a search for Winston and concentrating solely on those portions pertaining to Jett’s relationship with him.

  The story read like a bad bodice ripper, but without the happily ever after.

  Jett had met Winston in the frozen pizza section at Stater Bros. and believed the man was the answer to her prayers. She had never been with a man who treated her as well—the perfect gentlemen, sweet, attentive, picking up the dinner tab, holding doors open for her, asking for permission to kiss her. She believed that she was in love with him and that he loved her back. He had resisted having sex with her until their fifth date, a first for Jett. And apparently what fabulous sex it was. Gracie skipped over long, graphic descriptions of contortions in various venues, face flushed with embarrassment at the intrusion into her late friend’s sex life.

  With the sensation of stepping off already shaky ground into a quagmire, Gracie read about Winston’s increasing insistence for Jett to go off the pill, to have a baby with him. Then, several weeks into the relationship came the single jaw-dropping pronouncement: “He’s married!” Jett’s words screamed off the page in forty-eight-point typeface. “He admitted it!” she raged. “To my face! He said he loves me. Wants to marry me! Wants my baby! For his army! WTF? I’m so outa there!!!”

  “Hell’s bells, Jett,” Gracie whispered. “No wonder you dropped him like a cast-iron skillet.” The journal went on to describe how, when Jett had tried to break up with the man, Dr. Winston Jekyll had become Mr. Winston Hyde. He had grabbed her, squeezing her jaw with his fingers, pressing the tip of a knife blade to the inner corner of her eye, whispering in her ear that he would cut it out if she left him, until finally she relented and promised to keep seeing him. For the months following, Jett had hidden out at camp like a frightened rabbit from a hunter, thankful for the camp’s remoteness and inaccessibility by telephone. Winston had written letters, at first enraged, threatening, then remorseful and pleading. Finally, they had trickled away to nothing.

  Gracie thought back to the reception following Jett’s memorial service at camp, where she had met Winston for the first time. Within the first minute, he had told her that he loved Jett, that he was her fiancé, and he had asked Gracie if she was married. What made the event stick in her mind was that he had been wearing a wedding band. Eventually Gracie had shrugged off her suspicions, choosing the less creepy, more logical explanations. Winston’s a widower and still carrying a torch for his dead wife. Or He’s divorced and still carrying a torch for his ex. Or He was asking for a lonely single friend.

  Gracie shivered. The answer had been none of the above. Her initial inclination that there was something not right with the man had been spot-on. Winston had been on the prowl for yet another wife with whom to have another baby for his so-called army.

  “Yeeesh,”
Gracie whispered. She exited the journal altogether and leaned back in her chair.

  There was nothing in what Jett had written to suggest that Winston was a white supremacist or to connect anyone from the Edwards/Ferguson clan, including Jordan, to the burning of Vivian and John’s home. Nothing to even suggest the fire was anything but an accident due to faulty wiring or an overturned candle.

  She couldn’t go to the Sheriff’s Department with what amounted to three fistfuls of mountain air, a bunch of tiny dots of information, none of which connected together in any coherent sense, much less amounting to anything criminal at all. Gardner would just use it as another notch in his anti-Gracie campaign belt.

  Gracie returned the flash drive to her day pack, zipping it into the same outer pocket. Then she reopened the Anti-Defamation League’s website and did a general search for teardrop tattoo. Nothing came up. She searched under General Hate Symbols, then more specifically Neo-Nazi and Hate Group Symbols. Still nothing. Frustrated and impatient, she exited the site altogether and did a general Internet search for teardrop tattoo meaning.

  Pages of listings came up.

  She clicked on the first site, Wikipedia, and read that the tattoo could have several meanings, including that the wearer had killed someone.

  That the wearer has killed someone.

  Gracie felt herself being sucked further into the mire.

  Was it possible that the boy’s tattoo, his “badge of honor,” indicated that he, in some way, had participated in a killing? Was he a murderer?

  Gracie exited Wikipedia and clicked on the next site on the list. There she read that a teardrop tattoo completely colored in by ink, as Jordan’s was, represented a murder committed by the wearer. A third and fourth website turned up similar results.

  Gracie wiped her hands down her face.

  She looked down at her watch. Eleven twenty-seven.

  “So much for sleeping tonight,” she said. “I’m wide awake.”

  * * *

  “WHERE IS IT?” Gracie leaned over the back of the driver’s seat of her truck, throwing aside blankets, digging past storage bins and gear all the way down to the floor. “Where the hell’s my ID?”

  The lanyard holding her Sheriff’s Department picture ID was always draped around the hanger from which her Search and Rescue uniform shirt and field pants hung behind the driver’s seat of the Ranger, ready for a callout.

  Now, suddenly, her ID wasn’t there.

  She had already scoured every inch of ground between the cabin and the truck. Had it fallen out somehow at camp? There was no time now to drive all the way up there to look. The pre-evacuation briefing was slated to begin in twenty minutes, barely enough time to drive from her cabin to the SO.

  “It’s supposed to be right here!”

  But it wasn’t. She sat back on her heels and tipped her head back, closing her eyes. “Oh, God! Gardner!”

  * * *

  “YOU’VE PUT THE lives of every law enforcement officer on the Department at risk,” Sergeant Gardner said in a voice much louder than necessary in the tiny office.

  Hands clasped behind her, Gracie shifted her weight from one long leg to the other, then back again.

  During the drive from her cabin to the SO, she had called Allen on her cell phone, asking him to double-check the Serrano Lodge and Gatehouse parking lots for her ID. A return call twenty minutes later had reported negative results.

  Gracie slipped into the Sheriff’s Office building along with Jon and Lenny. Sitting among the field of orange shirts, she could barely stand to look at Gardner standing pompously at the front of the room, giving the pre-evacuation briefing in a condescending tone, issuing instructions, explaining maps and procedures. She craned her neck, looking for Ralph’s familiar silver crew cut, but he wasn’t there. Surreptitiously she texted him: WHERE ARE YOU? AT SO FOR FIRE MEETING. But she received no response. Throughout the briefing she sat on pins and needles, expecting someone to tap her on the shoulder and ask to see her Sheriff’s ID.

  Without an ID, she couldn’t work the mandatory evacuation if it was issued, couldn’t respond to any searches, couldn’t participate in anything SAR-related. As the meeting broke up, deciding to just get it over with, she walked down the hallway of the SO to the Watch Commander’s office, feeling as if she were riding in a tumbrel to the guillotine.

  “Get down to the HQ,” Gardner ordered. “Get another ID. Today. Capiche?”

  “Yes.” Resisting the inane impulse to follow up with a thank-you, Gracie turned to leave.

  “I got a report that you were brawling in public.”

  Gracie turned back. “What?”

  “In uniform.”

  “Ah,” she said. Her altercation with Mrs. Lucas in the Stater Bros. parking lot. “I wasn’t brawling. I—”

  “Those are Department patches on your shirt.”

  “I know. She—”

  “As part of this department, you’re an official representative of the Sheriff himself.”

  Gracie had reached her Sergeant Gardner daily tolerance quota. “I’m aware of that,” she said, her voice sharp. “I wasn’t brawling. I was attacked. Blindsided. Head-butted. I was defending myself. I can’t really afford to replace all my front teeth.”

  She hadn’t thought it was possible for the man to narrow his eyes even further and still be able to see. “You think this is a joke?” he growled.

  She snorted. “No. I don’t think this is a joke.”

  “You’re a loose cannon, Kinkaid.”

  Gracie opened her mouth to protest, but didn’t get the chance.

  “You’re unpredictable and unreliable and that makes you unprofessional.”

  “Now wait a—”

  “Your judgment is questionable.”

  Gracie shut her mouth, realizing suddenly that Gardner was lashing out with everything he could think of, valid and invalid, true and untrue, baiting her into a reaction he might be able to use against her. She took in a breath and made a conscious effort to remain calm, unemotional, and to let the accusations slide off her armor of indifference. But Gardner’s verbal darts found the chinks in the steel, penetrated, stung, humiliated, diminished.

  “You’re an embarrassment to the Department,” the Sergeant continued. “That makes you a liability and a problem—the Sheriff’s problem. And that makes you my problem.” She heard him mumble what sounded like, “Goddam volunteers,” under his breath. Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he said, “I’m writing you up.”

  Gracie found her voice again. “What? Why? On what . . . ?”

  “You’re lucky I’m not booting you off the team, Kinkaid. But, with this fire thing, all incompetence aside, I need every man I can get. I’m writing up an official reprimand. It’ll go into your personnel file. Consider this your final warning. You won’t get another chance. You screw up again, you’re off the team.”

  Gardner had scored a direct hit. The threat to kick her off the team hit Gracie like a sucker punch to the gut. Without Search and Rescue, she had her job, but not much else. The team was her life, the guys on the team her family. Without them, except for Minnie, and maybe Allen, she had no one. A yawning emptiness opened up at her feet.

  Gracie spun on her heel and left the room. To her retreating back she heard the sergeant say, “ID. Today. Otherwise don’t bother.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  GRACIE stepped out of the elevator and let the doors glide closed behind her.

  For the second time in less than a week, she was inside a hospital. She didn’t like hospitals. She especially didn’t like elevators in hospitals. Within their slick, steel walls, she felt she already had two feet in the coffin.

  Having her picture retaken for her Sheriff’s Department ID had required that, after her face-to-face with Gardner, she race up to camp to help Allen prepare and serve lunch
, then, once again, feeling guilt-stricken for leaving Minnie behind, drive all the way down the mountain.

  Pulling away from the Sheriff’s Headquarters, newly minted Search and Rescue ID in the front pocket of her uniform shirt, she realized that the regional medical center with the burn center was only a few miles away. She had driven over, not really expecting to see Vivian, but wanting to try to check on her nonetheless, and maybe Acacia and John.

  Standing in front of the elevator, Gracie looked in both directions. Zeroing in on what looked like a nurse’s station down the hall on her right, she turned in that direction.

  Before she had taken two steps, John rounded the corner up ahead. Looking years older, like a man beaten, he shuffled down the corridor toward her, head bowed, back bent, leaning on a cane.

  Gracie stepped toward him. “John,” she said in a soft voice.

  The man looked up at her with red-rimmed eyes. “What are you doing here?” he snapped.

  Gracie stopped, stunned. “I—I came to see how Vivian was doing. How you were doing. And Acacia.”

  “They’ve got my wife stuck full of needles. Tubes running in and out.” His voice was gruff, sharp, bitter. He stopped to cough, the sound wet and deep in his lungs. His whole body shuddered.

  Gracie put a hand on his arm, but he slapped it away.

  “She can’t breathe but for a tube down her throat. She’s got machines everywhere keeping track of whether she’s alive or dead. How do you think she’s doing?”

  “I’m so sorry. But her prognosis is good? She’ll recover?”

  “No telling.” With sneering bitterness, he said, “’Sup to the Almighty in his infinite wisdom and mercy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gracie said again, feeling the words inadequate. “Have you learned anything about the fire? Have the police learned anything about how it started?”