Barrons took a Smith & Wesson M&P45 out from his desk drawer and set it on the desk. He set a police ID filled out with Rath’s name and information, the place for his picture blank. “Just get a photo taken,” he said. “And”—he took out a cache of papers—“sign your John Hancock.”
“Your best detective is going to be rip shit.”
“You’re my best detective now.”
“We’ll see about that.”
34
“What bullshit.”
Detective Test contained her fury better than Rath would have if passed over for a deserved position, especially by a buddy of the chief. A man.
She sat in the chair beside Rath’s, facing Barrons as she absorbed the news, her hands flat on the arms of her chair, but their tendons raised.
“It’s temporary; I don’t even want the position,” Rath said to relieve the tension, realizing too late his apathy was salt in the wound.
“Then don’t take it.” Test trained her glare on Barrons. “And why offer it? You gave me a line about a process that needed to be followed, a national search.”
“This possible reopening of the CRVK case takes precedent,” Barrons said. “Rath is interim. Don’t think I want to see his mug around here more than necessary. And you can be the lead. Or colead. Despite titles.”
“Then why bother with titles?” Test said.
“This is it. For now.” Barrons nodded at Rath. “He fought for you. I need to put the person with the most knowledge of the old case at the lead. Officially. Publicly.”
“Someone who couldn’t solve it the first go-round,” Test said. “You still dig into the old CRVK files. And when I proposed that the recent missing girls who led to Langevine might be the CRVK’s work, it chafed you.”
Rath had expected Test to take umbrage, but not a pointed shot at her chief’s failure. It was a mistake.
“A necktie chafes me,” Barrons said. “The idea that you proposed the CRVK might not be dead hit a nerve because, frankly, that’s a worry Rath and I have shared for sixteen years. That the CRVK had moved to new turf or stopped because something happened. Jail. Illness. Death. Most cops thought the CRVK was Vern Johnson. Rath and I thought Preacher was good for it. He damn well could be. Look. Rath is senior by title alone. On the ground, you two work it out however you want; the sandbox is yours. But if a tough call comes, it is Rath’s to make, in the end.”
“The Dana Clark case only?” Test said.
“Fill him in on the body found yesterday. If they’re not connected, it’s your job to find out. It might be wise to suspect they are. And suspect Preacher.”
“It might,” Test said.
35
Test’s office had been Harland Grout’s originally, but Grout’s scuffed desk with mismatched drawer handles had been swapped for a streamlined table with stainless steel legs and a brushed metal top. Behind the desk, an ancient steam radiator hissed though it had never seemed to heat the embarrassingly cramped quarters whenever Rath had paid Grout a visit.
Grout’s books on home brewing, and his son’s and daughter’s grade-school sports trophies were swapped out for tomes on criminal investigatory procedure, interrogation techniques, forensic science, police codes and conduct, and abnormal psychology. One shelf dedicated itself to photos of Test’s young daughter and son and her husband.
“I obviously take exception with this move,” Test said, “but not with you, if we work together. You don’t want this job permanently any more than I wanted to keep Grout’s ugly furniture.”
“I don’t even want it temporarily.”
“Yet you took it.”
Rath did not want to get into the details about Langevine, so he told a simpler truth. “It gives me access to investigate Preacher.”
“Personal reasons. Dangerous in this work.”
“I want him back inside. If this position gets him there faster, so be it. I can’t have him near my daughter, I can’t have him—” He collected himself. “Tell me about the body you found.”
“Jamie Drake. I visited her parents before I got here,” Test said. “She had a friend.”
“Who?”
“Abby Land.”
“Mandy Wilks’s killer? That’s a fuck of a coincidence.”
“If that’s all it is.”
Here it is again, Rath thought, coincidence versus connection.
“Wilks’s case is open and shut,” Rath said. “We found her body and the tire iron used to kill her in the trunk of Abby Land’s Neon. Land’s prints are all over the tire iron, in Wilks’s blood. Land confessed. Whatever troubles you about this girl and Abby being friends, it can’t change your thinking that Land killed Wilks.”
“It hasn’t. But Mandy Wilks’s murder and Jamie Drake’s murder are linked by Abby Land. Land is the common denominator. Maybe it’s the bizarre circumstances that have my gears grinding,” Test said. “The boy and the father who found Jamie Drake found her on the ground. But when we got to her corpse, it was hanging from a tree.”
“They sure?”
“I saw a photo on the father’s phone. She was on the ground.”
“I mean are they sure she was dead when she was on the ground.”
“It’s to be determined by autopsy. All I know is Abby Land murdered Mandy Wilks, and now Abby’s closest friend has been murdered. I don’t know how Land ties them together. But she does. What’s oddest is that Abby and Jamie know each other at all, let alone are friends. The two could not be more different. They had no overlap of social circles. But were best buds.”
“I’d have thought our hanged girl was of a similar rough background as Land. Abuse, alcoholism. Neglect.”
“Nope. Drake’s parents have it together. Professionals, a comfortable income, lovely home.”
“Or appears that way,” Rath said.
“I bought it. Not a perfect household. Whose is? But compared to Abby Land’s situation it’s the UFC versus ballet. If not for being in theater together, they wouldn’t be friends,” Test said.
“A lot of kids with dissimilar homes become friends through music, sports, or arts. Doesn’t mean there’s a connection to the murder of our hanged girl.”
“Something’s there. Maybe a love triangle.”
“Among our three girls?”
“They have names, you know. Dead girls.”
“I don’t use names,” Rath said. “That’s how I was trained. You too. To remain emotionally detached so we can focus on the case.”
“I focus better when I remember the girls had names. Lives.”
Rath understood the logic, but disagreed professionally.
“So. This love triangle?” he said.
“Not among the three girls. But among Abby, Jamie, and Luke Montgomery.”
“Montgomery. Abby Land killed Wilks in a jealous rage over him. But he didn’t know either girl.”
“So Abby says. But Abby killed Mandy. And now Abby’s friend is hanged while Abby’s in prison awaiting trial. Maybe Montgomery knows Abby better than he’s claimed. Maybe he and Abby had a thing and he was part of Mandy Wilks’s killing, and now this hanging.”
“He doesn’t know the girls. I interviewed him myself afterward. He’s a dead end.”
“I want to speak with him and look him in the eye to determine that myself. Exclude him myself.”
“Fine. But I interview Land first. Before you go to Montgomery. She’s facing twenty-five years, so she’s more likely to break than him if she’s covering for him or there’s something there between them. And if anyone knows whether or not Jamie was involved in drugs, or sex, or any behavior that might put her in jeopardy, it’s Land. Tell me more about your hanged girl.”
Test told him.
Rath leaned back in the chair. “So he hanged her corpse, if she was dead, out of what? Ritual?”
“There’s only one person alive who knows.”
“It takes a lot of strength to lift and hang a person, dead or alive. Preacher’s in shape,” Rath
said. He needed to tell Test he’d watched Preacher’s house. He’d fallen asleep and couldn’t account for a few hours; but other than that Rath was Preacher’s alibi. Instead, he said: “Pay Preacher a visit. See if he has an alibi.”
“I know you want him locked up. But we have no evidence.” Test sounded like Barrons as she played with the zipper of her Canaan Police parka, its zipper adorned with a ski tag from Catamount X Country Trails.
“We have no evidence pointing to anyone. With Preacher just out for similar crimes, he needs a visit,” Rath said.
“Preacher never committed a crime similar to this. Hanging?”
“He’d never used a knife until he killed my sister, either. Pay him a visit.” Rath disliked telling someone to do what he could do himself, but he did not trust himself to be face-to-face with Preacher, not yet.
The phone on Test’s desk rang.
She answered it, turned her chair to face the window, though there was nothing to see outside the window except fog. “Repeat that. I don’t, either. Right. I’ll look for it.”
Test hung up the phone. She looked as if she’d just been told a loved one was dead. “You were right. Jamie Drake wasn’t dead when the father and son found her. Her death was due to asphyxiation by hanging. A very slow, very meticulous, very excruciating and incremental hanging. He held her up and then would let her down again, let her be choked, then lifted her up again.”
“He tortured her.”
“There was a stump under her. He may have used it to perch her on, so she was just on the tips of her toes. Struggling. For air. It’s unclear. But it went on for a spell. A good ten minutes. Which”—she exhaled deeply—“is a lifetime. And the end of the rope, it’s not a rope. It’s like wire cord encased in clear rubber, like a thinner version of those coiled bike locks.”
“Sounds like an animal snare.”
“It is. A snare used by trappers. It would be easier to slacken it, ease off, than it is to slacken a rope tied in a noose.”
“Premeditated torture.”
“It’s like holding someone under water, then letting them up for a sip of air. Then . . . I don’t understand such cruelty, wanting to cause such pain.”
“I don’t either,” Rath said, though that was only partly true. When it came to Preacher, Rath wasn’t so sure he had a ceiling, or a basement, on the type of pain he’d inflict upon him, if he had the chance to get away with it.
36
Test eased off the main road and onto Forgotten Gorge Road in the fog, inching past a massive rock outcrop that crowded the road, and on which a single wilted red rose had been left to mark a car crash.
The road was a quagmire of muck. Barrons had insisted Test and Larkin take Barrons’s Explorer instead of Test’s Peugeot or a cruiser. “You’ll get stuck in that death trap of yours,” he’d said. “You need a reliable vehicle in the winter, as a detective, and as a mother, I’d think.”
Barrons’s remark annoyed Test, partly because Barrons was right. Her attachment to her Peugeot was irrational and borderline irresponsible when it came to transporting her kids. She’d owned it since her third year at Dartmouth when a professor sold it to her for a song. She still used the archaic cassette deck to play R.E.M. and Violent Femmes tapes; she even appreciated the ripe leathery funk, which remained a mystery since the upholstery was fabric. Perhaps it was her spare running shoes she kept in the way back that smelled so pungent.
Larkin sat in the passenger seat, his posture so erect his buzz cut touched the vehicle’s roof. “You think Preacher did it?” He gripped the handle over his window, as if it might save him should the Explorer plunge into the abyss.
“No evidence points to him or anyone.”
Test wanted to look Preacher in the eye, read him. She had trepidation, too. She’d faced a brutish bull named Jed King a year earlier, during her first solo murder investigation. He’d goaded Test into drawing her weapon, and she’d nearly shot him. He’d also poisoned Test’s dog.
Test steered the Explorer carefully around a hairpin corner, feeling the vehicle, even with 4WD, wanting to slide toward the cliff. Ahead, a house lurked in a scrubby clearing in the woods, a muddy parking space serving as most of the yard. This was where men like Preacher ended up: five miles outside the remote town of Canaan, at the end of a ruined dirt road, in a 1970s raised ranch that—judging by the two front doors side by side at the top of the wooden steps—had been cobbled into a makeshift duplex decades ago.
On the wooden porch steps sat a sunken jack-o’-lantern, originally carved in a way likely meant to be macabre but now rotting and resembling a toothless old man. The porch rails had been shattered by snow falling from the roof, railing pieces strewn like bones.
Test parked beside an old Ford pickup. “Follow my lead,” she said to Larkin. “Assess our surroundings and situation, monitor the interviewee’s mood and reactions, and stop any threat he might pose. This is a smart man, in his animalistic way. A dangerous, violent man. He’s free because he played the system to earn early release. That’s patience and guile.” Test coughed, her throat scratchy and raw. A sore throat making the rounds in the kids’ school was coming her way. She plucked a pack of Esberitox from her coat pocket and chewed four tablets. “There is no telling what he might do.”
“I understand, ma’am.”
“Drop the ma’am.”
Test stepped out of the Explorer into the fog. All around her, water dripped from the trees, so at first she thought the rain had started again. She shivered, realizing how toasty the Explorer’s heated seat had kept her.
She walked through the dead muddy lawn, puddled with rainwater, to the porch, to Preacher’s door. Number 1.
Despite shivering, Test felt too warm. She unzipped her jacket, her sidearm visible. She’d worn a hip holster instead of a chest holster. It permitted her easier access and confidence in drawing it swiftly.
Unlike the entrance for number 2, there was no storm door on Preacher’s entry. The solid, main door gave a dull thunk when Test pounded the side of her fist on it three times.
The door opened so quickly Test flinched, startled. He’s been watching, she thought.
The man before her startled her, too. For an instant, Test thought she had the wrong entrance or the wrong man.
Even with the photos fresh in her mind, she barely recognized him.
Except for the eyes.
Black. Deep, glassy, black, reflective and impenetrable as polished obsidian.
Preacher smiled. The mirrored quality of his eyes dulled. His smile was that of a schoolteacher or mail carrier. It did not overreach, it was not used in a manner to disarm or deflect or ingratiate. It was subtle, curious, yet not put out to find someone on his porch midweek. Neighborly.
It was a mask. A damned good mask.
He looked strangely younger than any of the photos Test had seen of him. And healthier. Fit and trim, with a physique more akin to that of a triathlete than the massive bulk many convicts achieved while serving hard time. He looked powerful. Yet agile. Powerful enough to hang and torture Jamie Drake with ease.
His face was pink and moist, freshly shaved; a pine scent of aftershave rippled off him, as if he were trying to mask an appalling odor. He did not look like a man who had raped and killed five young women. What did such a man look like? Like any other man on the street.
From his shirt pocket he took a pack of gum, tapped a stick free, peeled off the foil. He looked Test in the eye as he laid the gum on the flat of his pale tongue and folded it into his mouth, chewed it with his front teeth.
Test introduced herself and Larkin, whose eyes remained fixed on the interior of the home behind Preacher. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Of course you would. I’ve been expecting you. I knew this was how it was going to be.”
“How what was going to be, Mr. Preacher?” Test said.
Water trickled from the eave above onto Test’s boot. Test wanted to look up to assess if there were mor
e snow clinging to the roofline above her, about to fall, but she needed to keep eye contact.
Preacher chewed his gum. “I think we know. The harassment. I suppose you’d like to come in. I suppose you’d like to ask me questions about something that’s happened?”
Did he know what had happened? Test wondered. Did he know what had been discovered in the woods from hearing the brief, vague news item that had gone out this morning about a body found in the woods, or was he speaking in general, insinuating that with any crime remotely like those of his past he would be a suspect by default? As he ought to have been. Or did he know because he was the one responsible for Jamie Drake hanged in the trees?
Test nodded, indicated she’d like to come inside.
Preacher backed up against the door to open it wider, gesturing with his long slender fingers for Test to step past him inside.
“After you.” Test would not risk squeezing past Preacher, give him an opportunity to try to shove her inside and lock Larkin outside.
“Your wish—” Preacher snapped his gum and backed inside to permit Test room to enter.
Test stepped inside. Larkin followed.
The entry smacked of the 1970s with a floor of multicolored slate tiles set in a haphazard jigsaw puzzle design. Above her, a chintzy brass-and-etched-glass fixture scattered diamonds of light onto the scuffed, gray walls.
The house was divided vertically, so each tenant had access to both the upstairs and downstairs. A set of steps ascended to the main floor, four steps to the right descended to a closed door that surely opened to Preacher’s half of the basement.
Again, Preacher swept a hand to demonstrate he wished for Test and Larkin to go up the stairs first. If Preacher were a private citizen with no criminal background, his gesture would have been one of courtesy. Preacher could not be so naive as to think Test would put her back to him; yet he behaved as if he were any other citizen, offering his home to police officers who’d stopped by to inquire about Halloween vandalism. Is this how he saw himself? Free? Just another citizen? He’d paid his debt, and now he was just like the rest of us who had never raped girls, never broken the neck and mutilated the body of Frank Rath’s sister? Was he that delusional? No. He was playing a game, as if he wanted Test to call him out, make it clear they knew what he was. He wanted to hear all about himself and the damage he’d wrought, so he could bask in it.
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