by Ninie Hammon
******
2011
Ever since the meeting with the agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Jack had been stifling an almost uncontrollable desire to do something violent—hit something or throw something or go beat the crap out of somebody with a pool cue. But Crock’s voice mail was almost as satisfying as beating the crap out of somebody.
So the guy who helped a demon kill the Cohens was also involved in the plot to frame Daniel.
“Booyah!” he said aloud.
When he got back to the station that evening after chasing down Bosko’s buddies—none of whom were even remotely helpful—Ramirez, Samuels and Peterson greeted him at the door as they were going out. Cool. Reserved. The sergeant who’d lead them on dozens of SWAT calls—not the least of which was to cap a school shooter—was not the man they’d believed him to be. Apparently, they’d drunk the Kool-Aid, believed the story that he’d helped burn down a nursing home with all the old people locked inside. And he couldn’t tell them it wasn’t true because maybe it was.
Crock was seated behind his desk, chewing on a cinnamon toothpick, rubbing his bloodshot eyes.
“I’ve been bird hunting,” Jack said, “chasing wild geese.”
“How’d it go with the agent from—”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Jack said, cutting him off. “What’d you find out?”
Crocker looked at him for a long moment, then let it drop.
“Did you hear there was a shooting at the residence of one Edgar Wallace Boskowitz this afternoon?” Crock asked. “Attempted murder of a police officer definitely violates his parole. Which makes him a fugitive. Which means we not only have the legal right but the responsibility to look under every rock in Webster County to find him—a task that will be assigned to Sergeant Jack Carpenter…at my discretion, of course.”
“Shooting? Were you—?”
“A search of his apartment turned up an envelope full of money, twenty crisp one-thousand-dollar bills, stuffed under his mattress.”
“Clever hiding place.”
“There’s more. How about I hit the high points? After four hours of staring at security camera footage, a couple of critical synapses are about to misfire and leave me in a coma.”
Crock said he’d gone from Bosko’s apartment to the Centurion Hotel.
“We’re assuming Bosko erased Monday’s footage in that elevator and hallway because he and Lily practiced her little dance in it that day—right? But would he bother to erase Monday’s film on all the other cameras in the building, too?”
He hadn’t. Crock found several cameras with shots of Lily or Bosko—separately. But only the parking garage camera showed the two of them together, and the lighting was bad, the picture particularly grainy. They stepped out of the building, looked around the area by the door as if they were searching for something and then exited in different directions.
“So I figured—if Bosko’s in this with Lily, doesn’t it make sense he was the one who provided the necessary black eye, split lip and broken nose? And where better to provide it than in a dark parking garage?”
Sure enough, only minutes after the seven forty-eight time stamp on the elevator camera, Lily emerged from the building into the parking garage. She looked around, then stepped into the shadows behind a concrete piling by the door. A couple of minutes later, she reappeared, staggering, her hands on her face. After she went back into the building, Bosko came out from behind the piling and hurried away. A few minutes after that, a black car with Bosko at the wheel pulled in range of the camera and then drove out of the garage.
“I know what a fan you are of still frames from a surveillance camera,” Crock said, and Jack scowled at him. “So I had these made especially for you.” He picked up a folder off his desk. “First, let me tell you what I didn’t get.” He pulled a picture from the folder showing a woman coming out of the building. But her head was down and turned so her long hair covered her face. “You can’t tell that Lily’s face is unmarked when she came out of the building, though it’s pretty clear she was a hurtin’ turkey when she went back in. So none of this clears Daniel.”
Jack again felt the desire to hit somebody with a pool cue.
“There’s more, though. I started doing the math. Theresa got to the Cohen’s between six-thirty and seven. Bosko had to be in that parking garage to rearrange Lily’s face after she ambushed Daniel—who was scheduled to speak at eight. So Bosko was cutting it close.”
Jack began to connect the dots, and his heart kicked into a gallop.
“And you figure he might not have had time—”
“To drop off his passenger.” Crock dealt the final picture. It was a blow-up of the black car exiting the garage. A shadowy shot of the person in the backseat of the vehicle. Might not have been conclusive on anybody less distinctive, but the scar was clearly visible. It was Chapman Whitworth.
“Before you start throwing confetti and making a mess everywhere, you need to know I saved the best for last. That envelope full of money they found under Bosko’s mattress—I got the FBI to do a quick run on it for prints. And, by the way, I’ve leveraged every relationship I have in the whole federal building. If you want me to work any more magic with them, we’re going to have to sacrifice a chicken.
“They found two clear set of prints. Ran them both through NCIC, and it only coughed out Bosko, nobody else. Then I told them to run the not-Bosko prints through the military database.” Crock sat back and sucked on his cinnamon toothpick. “Two people touched the envelope I dug out of R2D2’s gullet this afternoon. One was Bosko. The other was former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel—and you’ll-have-to-go-through-me hero—Chapman Wainwright Whitworth.”
“Booyah,” Jack said softly. He was silent for a moment, adding it all up in his head. “So we can prove Bosko and Lily Saunders were in on something together. We can prove Whitworth paid Bosko for something and that they were together the night both crimes were committed. But right now we can’t prove Bosko has done anything except try to ventilate a police officer. Not a speck of evidence to put him at the Cohens’ house or link him to Lily’s murder.”
“Unless we can dangle immunity, get him to talk.”
“We have to find him first.”
CHAPTER 24
2011
Jack sat in the dark in his living room, staring out a curtain-less window at the cratered face of the moon, at stars as big as ice chips and twice as cold. He wanted a drink and that was scary. He could see himself becoming a hard drinker—defined as a man who drank to help himself cope—who slid down the slippery slope into alcoholism. A drunk was, after all, a man who drank because he couldn’t cope.
He’d dreamed of fire every night since he saw the surveillance video of a kid in a baseball shirt with “Carpenter” written on the back carry a can of gasoline up the front steps and into Twin Oaks Nursing Home. They weren’t narrative dreams, at least not that he could remember. Just images, flashes, and then he’d wake up panting, drenched in sweat.
He’d watched the video—what? A dozen times? Two dozen?—and the sight of his younger self walking up those steps had torn something loose inside him, some mooring of self-image that had held who he was snugly together. He could feel it there with every breath, flapping in the breeze, getting more and more tattered until eventually there’d be nothing left but rags.
Bottom line: he must have helped the Bad Kids burn down that nursing home. What other explanation was there?
Bottom-er line, if there was such a thing: he couldn’t prove to himself or to anybody else that he didn’t because he flat-out didn’t know.
ATF Agent McCarthy had not been satisfied with the I-can’t-remember answer to every question. A narrow-shouldered, bespectacled little man carrying a file as big as a Merriam-Webster Dictionary, he’d sneered when Jack said he’d forgotten that whole summer.
“That’s convenient,” he’d said, and it was clear he hadn't come to find out what had happene
d. He’d already made up his mind what had happened. He had come to see that “justice was done.”
He’d done most of the talking, much of it about the “thorny legal issues to resolve” because Jack had been a juvenile “at the time he committed the crime.” But his final words had been strangely devoid of the sarcasm that had slathered everything else he’d said.
“You do know, don’t you, that Kentucky is a death penalty state? Oh, nobody’s going to put a needle in your arm. You were twelve years old.”
He leaned closer.
“But you won’t skate on this one, either—not when more than a hundred helpless old people burned to death while their families watched. The wheels of justice grind slowly, Sergeant Carpenter, but they grind exceedingly fine. It will take a while, but eventually you will pay for what you did that day. With your career, your reputation—maybe even a wrongful death lawsuit that’ll take everything you own.”
A little smile had flirted with the corners of his mouth.
“And if we get reeeeal lucky, a jury in Caverna County, Kentucky, might just lock you up for the rest of your life.”
******
2011
United States Senator Richard Thomas LaHayne looked like he’d come late when body parts were distributed and had been constructed from whatever happened to be left over in the garage. Nothing seemed to match. Tall, with thin arms and legs that would have given him a terrific jump shot if lifting his body off the ground hadn’t required lifting his torso, which was roughly the size and shape of a propane tank. His head was disproportionately large, pumpkin-esque, balanced on a pencil neck in which an Adams apple bobbed up and down like a cork on a fishing line.
The man certainly didn’t have the most powerful office in the world within his grasp based on his looks. And you knew that wasn’t the case as soon as he fixed his eyes on you—charcoal gray, the color of ashes in ice, and there was a spark in them sometimes like the glint of sunlight on a gun barrel.
The eyes were nestled in a delicate spider web of smile wrinkles, in a face so oddly kind and wise that the good in his heart instantly called out to whatever was good in yours.
Five minutes in his presence and you understood how he’d won landslide victories three times to become the senior senator from the state of Ohio, how he had risen through the ranks of power in the power broker capital of the world, how he had bargained and compromised, stood firm and given in with a kind of life rhythm to it.
Ten minutes in his presence and you understood that behind that kindly exterior existed a brilliant mind, a man who was as tough as boot leather and utterly fearless. A man who could beat you up with his furrowed brow and bushy eyebrows. A man who did not suffer fools well and did not tolerate unscrupulous behavior in any form—an unheard-of trait for a politician.
Half an hour in his presence and you knew you would be wise indeed to shoot absolutely straight with this man because he would know instantly if you didn’t. And you would be foolish indeed to cross him because retribution would be swift and sure if you did.
Jack and Daniel spent more than half an hour with Senator LaHayne, and both would later say that they had come to the man to give something to him but had left with the sense that they’d gotten more than they gave, though they couldn’t have articulated what that was.
They had been outrageously lucky—”Luck don’t have nothin’ to do with it!” Theresa had said—to get time with the senator. His calendar was booked somewhere into the next decade, but he was from Cleveland and his daughter’s early labor had called him home and cleared his schedule. Somehow Jeff had tracked all that down and worked magic to wedge them in.
They met the senator in a small parlor off the maternity waiting room of St. Barnabas Hospital in Cleveland, where he was awaiting the birth of his first grandchild, a boy, he told them, who would be named after his grandfather.
“I’m old school. I prefer the days when you didn’t know if a baby was a boy or a girl until you examined their body parts naked after they were born.” His voice had a pleasant, gravelly quality to it, and he peered at them over the top of rimless Ben Franklin glasses. “Anymore, that’s about the only surefire way to tell if somebody’s a boy or a girl. And sometimes even that doesn’t work. You didn’t hear that, by the way, because I didn’t say it.”
The senator looked at his watch. “You’ve got however long it takes that little boy to make it into the world—give or take a potty break or two. My son says I can trust Jeff that it really is important that I hear what you have to say. Still, I’m telling you that two words got you here today. Chapman Whitworth. And whatever it is you have to say, I would bet Aunt Josie’s bloomers he is not happy that you’re here saying it.”
“Chapman Whitworth doesn’t know we’re here,” Daniel said.
The senator chuckled mirthlessly.
“This is an election year, son. Everybody knows who talks to everybody—when, where and for how long. Maybe not what’s discussed, but that something was. Your something is about Chapman Whitworth. What is it?”
Then he settled back in a chair as if he were totally relaxed, chatting with old friends. Only the absolute fixed attention in his gray eyes gave away his concentration.
Jack and Daniel had talked on the drive to Cleveland about what they were going to say and had come up with a plausible, step-by-step explanation. But when Jack opened his mouth to begin that explanation, those words weren’t what came out of it.
“He’s evil,” Jack said simply. “Pure evil. But you already know that part, don’t you, senator.”
The man seemed to skip a breath. That and a blink were his only reactions. “I do.”
“And you’re fighting so hard to keep him from being confirmed because you know that.”
“I am.”
“But that’s all you know, which is why you’ve never been able to give any definitive reasons—to the committee or the press or anybody else—for opposing him.”
There was a beat of silence before the senator spoke slowly. “It is.”
The senator sat forward in the chair, the better to fix Jack and Daniel with the penetrating look for which he was so famous, the look opponents feared and friends respected. “You boys want to tell me why you believe he’s evil?”
“Does that matter?” Jack couldn’t believe he’d said that. Daniel was looking at him like he’d grown a third eye in the middle of his forehead. “In total honesty, senator—”
“Nobody’s totally honest, son. Don’t make a promise you can’t keep.”
“I may not be a totally honest man, but what I am about to tell you is the honest truth: you don’t want to how we know what kind of man Chapman Whitworth is. A very wise woman named Theresa Washington told me once, ‘You can’t unknow the truth. Once you know it, you’re responsible from then on for doing something about it.'’’
“Are you a spiritual man, son?”
The question caught Jack totally off guard and he dodged it. “Daniel here is a minister. He’s the pastor of—”
“I didn’t ask about Daniel. I asked about you. Are you a spiritual man?”
That was tough. He could bluff or blow smoke or… “Yes, I suppose I am, but not because I want to be. Not because I want to have anything to do with any of this.” He hadn’t meant to sound so angry, but it had come out that way, and it was honest. “I don’t have any choice. Given what I know, what I’ve seen…you can’t unknow the truth.”
“I respect that. I’m not sure I’d call myself a spiritual man, either.”
“Sir,” Daniel spoke then, winging it, just like Jack was. They hadn’t come within rock-throwing distance of what they’d intended to say since the first words out of Jack’s mouth. “You don’t have to know all that we do to understand what’s happening, to believe us. And it’s better for you if you don’t know.”
They were in a kind of dance, each of them saying much more than his actual words conveyed and each understanding far more than what he heard.
“Eli Pendleton was a missionary to the Aweti tribe in the Brazilian rainforest in the 1930s. Lived in their huts, loved them, served them, sacrificed for them, and one day they turned on him. They beat him until he was unrecognizable. They broke both arms and both legs. They cut off his fingers. And then his toes. And then his…After that, they dumped him naked into a canoe and shoved it out into the river. It was a miracle he survived.”
Jack couldn’t help gasping. From the look on Daniel’s face, he had known something about the man, but not that part.
“My grandfather was…I’ve always had trouble tacking words on to it. That man was…holy. Good in a way people just aren’t good. At least, not anymore. I was only around him a few times, maybe spent a total of a week of my life in his presence. But when he touched me, put his hand on my head to ruffle my hair”—the senator reached up and rubbed his bald head—“and I did have hair once! Or when he held me in his lap, I could see his goodness, a bright light that shone in his eyes. Like looking at the sun—the spots are still there even after you look away. It…changed me.”
Jack and Daniel said nothing. Didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. The intensity of the man’s words was mesmerizing. He had drawn the three of them into some special place, had wrapped a cloak of common understanding around them that bound them together and separated them from the rest of the world.
“Over the years, I have seen something like that light in other people. Not often. But sometimes. Only twice as bright as my grandfather’s—the day Billy Graham shook my hand and the day an old woman working in a soup kitchen reached up and touched my cheek. I can see its absence, too. Not often. I shake a man’s hand, and I can see when there is no light at all. Just empty, gray nothing. Fog and shifting shadows. A void.”