Devil Sent the Rain

by Lisa Turner

  Investigator: I understand you and Finn were close while attending Rhodes College.

  CL: Oh, sure. We had a great time until I left for Vanderbilt Law. Finn was in his last semester when he disappeared. I was first year law, so we were both busy. God, I wish we’d stayed in touch.

  Investigator: Do you know anyone who had reason to harm him?

  CL: Not Finn. He had strong opinions, but he’d back off before he made someone too mad. He had these high standards, especially for himself. He would’ve made a great prosecuting attorney. Or a priest. (laughter) But he was determined to join the Lee Law Firm. He was old school when it came to family and tradition.

  Investigator: What do you know about Clive Atwood?

  CL: Clive? He’s great. The three of us hung out together. Clive flew in from Miami when Finn disappeared. He helped with the search.

  Investigator: We’ve been looking into Atwood’s background. I’m sorry to tell you, he’s not who he claimed to be.

  CL: (long silence) That’s crazy. Clive graduated from Princeton and completed the Stanford Journalism Program. He was the one who convinced Finn to apply to Harvard Law. I don’t understand. Judd told me you people were good investigators.

  Investigator: Atwood was kicked out of Princeton, and he never attended Stanford. He’s a con artist and a drug dealer.

  CL: For God’s sake. He smoked pot and sold a little on the side. That doesn’t make him a dealer.

  Investigator: What do you know about his sexual relationship with Adams?

  CL: That’s disgusting. Finn wasn’t gay. Neither is Clive. Where are you getting this crap?

  Investigator: Judd Phillips, your cousin. He claims Finn and Clive were lovers. Finn’s roommate verified it.

  CL: You should call Clive. He’ll straighten this out.

  Investigator: We tried. His number’s been deactivated.

  CL: That can’t be. I’ll call him.

  Investigator: You two stay in touch?

  CL: We talk sometimes.

  Investigator: It’s my understanding he’s left the state.

  CL: Judd’s behind this. You tell him to call me immediately.

  Interview terminated by CL.

  Frankie walked into the squad room at 7:05 am. Billy was at his desk with a coffee in front of him, his head down, frowning over a file. After several minutes, he looked up from the pages and gestured at Judd’s files she was unpacking from the satchel.

  “Come up with anything useful?” he asked.

  “Interesting reading. I spoke with the producer of Nighttime Poker last night. He confirmed Judd was taping a show on Monday.”

  “Good to know.” He leaned back and locked his hands behind his head. “I left a message for Vanderman. He’ll call back, but I’m sure he won’t budge on Sharma giving a statement. I’d love to see the doc drag Vanderman in here and try to clear himself. Defendants like Sharma won’t listen to their attorneys. Their egos usually take them down.”

  “What’s our plan for the doctor?”

  “We’ll talk to the hospital staff and other doctors Sharma works with. I’m sure he’s crossed swords with a number of them. Maybe one will rat him out.”

  “I’ll give Martin Lee’s girlfriend a call and check his alibi,” she said.

  “Good. I’ll have another conversation with Zelda Taylor.”

  She wondered if this was the time to jump into the Adams case. Actually, she felt like an idiot for hesitating. “I have something else.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A transcript of a conversation between Caroline and Walker’s investigators.” She gave him a pared down version, emphasizing Caroline’s emotional responses to the investigator’s questions about Clive Atwood. “It’s nothing we can take to court, but in my mind it creates reasonable suspicion,” she said.

  He dropped his hands from behind his head and got this serious look. “Director Davis called this morning. He’s catching hell from every quarter. That means you need to focus on what we have in front of us, not a cold case out of our jurisdiction.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  He gave her a hard look. “Fair? What are you, in third grade?” He picked up the phone as a backhanded way of ending their conversation.

  Her cheeks burned at being dismissed. She was the skeptical one. She relied on analysis and logic. Billy was the one who lived off hunches. Now she had a hunch that the cases were connected. She just didn’t know how.

  Day shift detectives drifted in around eight. They picked up the natural deaths cases, suicides, and accidental deaths like the one last week where an old man shot his grandson out of a tree because he mistook the kid’s red ball cap for a cardinal. Ten detectives handled the whodunit murders. She and Able were two of them, and they were the best.

  Nationwide, cities were competing for the highest murder clearance rates. The top-ranked squads saw promotions for management and detectives. That was Frankie’s objective. Advancement. Coming to Memphis, her goal had been a spot on the homicide squad. Now she was quietly enrolled in Boston University’s online Masters of Criminal Justice degree program. With the squad’s clearance rate keeping them in the top ten in the country, she hoped to move up in rank. If that didn’t happen, she would see what TBI or the FBI had to offer.

  Was she being disloyal to the department? No. To Billy? She considered that. She was being loyal to herself by focusing on goals instead of dwelling on mistakes, like what had happened with Vanderman. She would never allow another lawyer to use her that way again.

  The computer techs had worked through the night to hack Caroline’s FileVault encryption. They sent two thumb drives to the squad room. Frankie handed off the drive with Caroline’s banking and credit card information to the economic crimes division. She took the personal documents, her e-mails and iCalendar. Scanning subject lines, she found the majority of e-mails, five hundred of them, dealt with the wedding.

  The guest list had run over two hundred, many of them living overseas. After the cancellation, Caroline had to unwind contracts with caterers, hotels, dressmakers, florists, and reservations at restaurants for pre-wedding parties. After the breakup, e-mails from the groom’s side had admonished her, one calling her a self-involved American bitch. Frankie was beginning to understand how Caroline had ended up on anti-depressants and watering her roses at night.

  Not much evidence of a social life—no book club dates or meeting friends for cocktails and dinner. Wedding plans and physician appointments for her father and herself had dominated the last six months of her life.

  Frankie had fifty emails to go when she stopped to make the call to Martin Lee’s girlfriend. She hung up from the conversation to see Billy on the phone, his back turned to the room. He finished the call and turned around.

  “That was Vanderman,” he said. “No contact with Sharma unless we bring charges. No statement and no alibi.” He scribbled something then slammed his hand on the desk.

  “Vanderman knows how to play the game,” she said. “We’ll crack Sharma some other way. The techs sent up thumb drives from Caroline’s laptop. Other than the wedding eruption, she led a boring life. Of course she could have a secret account on her mobile for the racy stuff.”

  Billy huffed. “That son of a bitch Sharma. The attorney’s assistant sent over Caroline’s file on the harassment. She recorded some of Sharma’s calls, very manipulative stuff trying to break her down. She saved his texts. He sent up to twenty a day. She has photos of his car in front of her house at 2:00 am. The file confirmed Zelda’s story that he tossed her place looking for evidence of a rival.”

  “Any physical abuse or threats?”

  “Intimidation and emotional abuse. The attorney believed Sharma was escalating toward violence. Caroline was dragging her feet on the protective order. I’d like to talk to this attorney, Robert Highsmith. His assistant needs to get him in touch with me.”

  “While you were talking with Vanderman, I spoke with Martin’s girlfriend. She’s Itali
an, here on a visitor visa. She insists Martin was home with her on Monday night.”

  “Did you press her on it?”

  “Sure. The lady didn’t budge,” she said.

  “That’s too bad. I would love to break that punk’s ass, but Sharma is a better bet.”

  She stood. “The fibers recovered from the car’s seat protector were wool off of some type of clothing or a blanket. I’ll go by Caroline’s house to look for a match. And I’ll try to find the cat. After that, I’ll do a search of Caroline’s law office. While I’m there, I’ll ask Highsmith’s assistant to have him contact us.”

  Chapter 17

  By 2:00 pm Billy had spoken with the three clients who’d met with Caroline on Monday. He was hoping to hear comments she’d made about taking a trip or if she’d mentioned someone’s name. One client said she seemed less engaged than usual. The others said she seemed happier than usual. Both behaviors were reasonable for a woman planning to be married later that evening.

  The governor’s campaign manager called to verify that Rosalyn Lee had been present at a fundraiser on Monday night. Rosalyn wasn’t a suspect, but it was good to know.

  Billy’s interviews with the hospital staff were more fruitful. One nurse commented that Sharma had been losing his temper over nothing. Another pulled Billy aside and said that three weeks ago a female intern assisting Sharma during surgery had made a minor error. Sharma got in the intern’s face and began cursing while waving a scalpel around. The incident had shaken everyone in the OR.

  An anesthesiologist who worked with Sharma on a regular basis was evasive at first, but then confided that Sharma, who had conducted himself professionally in the past, had become volatile. He’d bragged about his gun collection and said that everyone in Memphis should be carrying one for protection. He told the anesthesiologist he carried a revolver under his car seat and suggested the anesthesiologist do the same.

  Back at his desk, Billy was reaching for the phone to call the ME’s office when it rang, the call coming in with a Mississippi area code.

  After years of investigative work, he could pinpoint in each case when interviews, evidence, and chance had intersected like lines on a graph, and the case jumped forward. This time the lines crossed at a call made by an old friend.

  He picked up the receiver.

  “Billy, it’s Blue Hopkins. I’m at Airlee Plantation. I heard on the news about Caroline. I can’t believe it.”

  He’d known Blue Hopkins forever. They played on the same high school baseball team, sang in the church choir together. The last time they’d spoken Blue had been working as head of operations at his brother’s security firm in Jackson, Mississippi.

  “I’m afraid it’s true. What are you doing at Airlee?”

  “I manage the property for Mr. Lee and work his bird dogs. He lives here now.” A sob came over the line. “Sorry, man. Caroline comes down almost every weekend to see her dad. I’ve gotten to know her. The news hit me hard.”

  “Take your time.”

  Blue cleared his throat. “Caroline called on Monday around noon. She knew I’d been reverenized. She asked if I would officiate at her wedding that night.”

  “Where?”

  “The chapel on the property. I was to meet her there at nine. She asked me to open up the guesthouse and get it ready for her honeymoon night.”

  “Married to whom? Did she say?”

  “No, I figured it was Dr. Sharma she was talking about. She called back later and moved the time to ten o’clock. I waited in the chapel till midnight.” His voice broke. “Lord. What happened to that girl?”

  Blue’s pain triggered his own stab of grief. “I’m coming down. I want to talk to you and Mr. Lee.”

  “He’s sick, Billy. Parkinson’s disease. The nurse told me Mz. Rosalyn wants to come tell Mr. Lee herself, so we’re supposed to say the phones and cable TV are shut down. Mr. Lee doesn’t know his Sparrow is gone.”

  “How did you hear about it?”

  “On the radio driving home from Georgia. I left here early yesterday hauling bird dogs and horses to the Westmoreland Plantation field trials. Mr. Lee still wants his name out there on the bird dog circuit. I just got in.”

  “All right. You take it easy. I’m heading your way.”

  Billy decided to drive down in his personal car, a matte black 1986 Turismo that he’d resurrected from a barn during summer break from Ole Miss. He had no money back then, so he and Blue rebuilt the engine themselves and added serious power with a nitrous oxide kit that gave it a boost for short durations. He could blow the wheels off any muscle car on the road, but knew when to back off so he wouldn’t throw a rod from going too fast. He loved the speed, but his favorite thing about the car was the back seat that folded down, making the trunk big enough for him to camp under the stars while looking through the massive rear window.

  Plus, the car reminded him of where he came from.

  He took Third Street to Highway 61 South, following the legendary road bluesmen had traveled for decades from New Orleans to Vicksburg to Memphis. On the way he passed the Crystal Palace Skating Rink, and the old Malco Drive-In Theatre with double screens that was now a flea market. At the Mississippi–Tennessee state line, the bluff dropped off seventy feet. The temperature cooled ten degrees, and the land began to flatten to miles of pancake fields punctuated only by telephone poles and tarpaper shacks. This had been the landscape of his childhood—land flat as the bottom of the ocean, hot green fields where kudzu grew six inches in a day, and poverty and racism that exhausted all hope.

  Eons ago swamps and lush vegetation had choked the Mississippi and Yazoo River floodplains. Over thousands of years, the vegetation broke down. Silt spilled over the banks of the two rivers during winter runoffs and filled in the basin. The soil of the Mississippi Delta grew broad, rich, and deep. Billy read about a farmer who’d claimed he was drilling a well when his bit brought up chunks of tree trunk buried a hundred feet down in silt.

  The delta between the rivers had remained untouched until wealthy planters, including Saunders Lee’s ancestors, moved from their spent plantations in South Carolina and Virginia to vast tracts of land in the Mississippi Delta. They forced slaves to drain the fetid swamps and clear the forests despite floods, raging malaria, and yellow fever. The plantations spawned the South’s feudal system, which in some rural pockets has barely changed.

  Growing up in Mississippi it had all seemed normal to Billy. Not until he’d moved to Memphis did he realize how much the people in the Delta feared change. Memphis was only a rung or two better.

  In an hour, he left Highway 61 for a two-lane state road that served sharecroppers, juke joints, and plantation owners alike. Twenty more minutes and he pulled into the gravel parking lot of the diner, his first time back in sixteen years. The for sale sign that had been posted for years was gone. The Kane’s Kanteen hand-lettered sign his uncle had been so proud of lay facedown in the weeds beside the steps.

  For twenty-seven years the diner had done a solid business serving breakfast and plate lunches. He’d grown up working there, his uncle having given him a home in the shotgun house set far back from the road. He wondered if the new owner would try to bring the neglected diner up to code, or if the place would be bulldozed for a gas station or cable TV satellite office. A part of him regretted not having bought the property and reopened the business, but he would’ve burned up the Mississippi highways trying to work his job and keep his eye on the place.

  Before going to college, his uncle Kane had pushed him to become a lawyer like Saunders Lee, expecting him to raise up the Able name in the eyes of the community. He’d graduated from Ole Miss and entered law school. He was finishing his first year when Blue’s two little sisters disappeared. The county Sherriff ignored leads that would have taken deputies into the basement of a Baptist deacon where the girls’ bodies lay.

  The murders had shocked him into realizing that his uncle’s expectations for his future weren’t going to be enough
for him. He wanted to work in law enforcement instead of writing legal contracts or litigating divorces. He’d driven to the diner and told his uncle that he’d quit law school and signed up for the Memphis Police Academy. They went out back of the diner to argue so the customers wouldn’t hear. His uncle had taken a draw on his cigarette, thrown it in the dirt, and crushed it then ordered Billy to leave, saying, “You’re just like your father. Don’t come back.”

  He’d driven to Memphis, uprooted by the hot wind of his uncle’s anger. Over time the homicide squad had become his proving ground. The diner and tiny house had once been his home, but now all he felt was a hollowness where sadness used to live.

  He pulled out of the diner’s parking lot and drove through what was once the old forest. Now a pine forest grew in its place as a cash crop. The pines opened up to fields along the highway and rows of abandoned sharecropper shacks, then mammoth grain elevators, then metal sheds that housed the combines used to harvest grain crops. One more turn and he reached Airlee Plantation’s long driveway with cedars crowding in on either side.

  The Lees’ two-story ancestral home had been built in 1857 in the Greek Revival style with heavy cornices, gables with pediments, and columns. It survived being plundered during the Civil War but a lightning strike in 1911 burned out the front parlor. Timber on the property was cut and milled for the repair. They added an upper balcony with balustrades and replaced the four Ionic columns.

  Blue was at the front of the house in the circular gravel driveway hosing down the flaps of a Ram HD pickup when Billy pulled in. He shut off the water, wiped his hands on a towel, and came over to Billy to shake hands.

  “You still driving that heap?” Blue grinned and pointed at the Turismo.

  “It can outrun anything in this county. What about you? You’re back home from Jackson.”

  “My dad has congestive heart failure and dementia is setting in. Mom needs one of us close by.”

  “I’m so sorry. Your folks have been through a lot.”

  Blue nodded, furrows cutting across his brow. Premature gray curled in his sideburns. The murder of his sisters had taken its toll.