Leah shook her head and did another look around the restaurant. Finally, a waitress wearing a custom-made Vera’s Burgers cowboy hat and the restaurant’s uniform—a denim shirt with tassels, worn dungarees, and brown cowboy boots—came sauntering toward their table. Leah was glad. She really didn’t want to hear the “pig story.”
The waitress had long black hair, blue eyes, and wore a white apron from her waist to halfway down her thighs. It had three pockets. From one, she pulled a pen and a pad.
“Hi,” she said to Leah, and Leah assumed she’d already given the spiel to Strident. “My name’s Becky. I’m your waitress today. Have you had a chance to look over the menu?” Her name tag actually said REBECCA, but she suited “Becky” much better.
Strident looked at Leah. “Are their Billy Bob Bacon Burgers as good as they used to be?” he asked.
Leah smiled. “You’d have to ask my son, but he seems to like ’em.”
“I’ll have one of those, then,” Strident said.
“And what would you like to drink?”
He stared at her, and Leah compared the eyes of the two. Both were blue, although Becky’s had black flecks, but there was no contest over whose were more captivating. Somehow, when God was giving out eye color, Strident hit the jackpot. “You’ll probably laugh at me, but please bring me a Shirley Temple?”
Becky just smiled. “Of course.” She turned to Leah. “And for you?”
Leah hadn’t even opened her menu. Not that it mattered; she knew most of the choices by heart. “I’ll just have one of your Springin’ Sportin’ whateveryoucallit salads.”
“The Springin’ Sportin’ Rootie Tootie Fabulous Fruit and Gun-swallow Greens?” Becky said with a laugh, managing the whole thing without tripping once.
“That’s it. And I’m fine with water, thanks.”
“All right.” Becky finished writing their orders on her pad and tucked it back in the pocket of her waist apron. After taking their menus, she headed back to the kitchen.
“Your pa and I used to come here all the time,” Strident said. “Don’t think either of us ordered anything close to sounding like the thing you just did.”
“They didn’t start makin’ it until a couple years back. So, I have to ask. A Shirley Temple?” From what pieces and fragments concerning Peter Strident that her brain managed to collate, one was that the man had a penchant for Scotch.
“Yeah,” he said, his attention once again going to the view outside. “Age forces you to grow up sometimes. I had a real battle with the bottle for a while. Even while I worked here. But my liver finally began givin’ out, and my doctor told me I had to make a choice. Keep drinkin’ or wind up dead in a few years. This was just before I went into retirement, and all I could think was, if I die in three years, I worked all that time and got short-changed in the second half where I’m s’posed to start enjoying life.”
Leah mulled this over, thinking about Dan. She wondered what his decision would be if faced with a similar fate. The difference between the two was that she doubted Dan even considered retirement at all. He loved being a cop. And he loved drinking, almost as much as he loved being a cop. Again, the thought pinged in her mind that, sooner or later, she’d have to face his habits head-on. At least, seeing Strident ordering a Shirley Temple gave her some bastion of hope for Dan.
Leah tried to remember the last time she’d seen Strident. It would’ve likely been around the time of the Stickman murders in 1974. Back then, she remembered him having a thin and badly coiffed comb-over. Now the man had little chance of sporting even that. The only hair on his head was at the sides, which curved around his ears, forming sideburns that ran to his lobes. The rest of his head was as shiny as a bowling ball.
She noticed he was staring at her, a rather disconcerting thing on account of those eyes.
“You look good,” he said. “Still have that life-light in your eyes. As you go on, and the cases get nastier, sometimes that light goes out. I hope in your case it doesn’t. I don’t think it ever did for your pa, but then he retired young. But you do, you honestly look really good all grown-up.” He smiled and took another drink of ice water.
Leah felt the heat rise to her cheeks. “Thanks. You too.”
“No, I don’t,” he said, smiling. “I look old and bald. But I’m okay with that. My wife hasn’t left me yet, so I must be doing something right. Anyway, let’s talk about what we came here to discuss. You have some concerns with your pa’s old task force?”
The question caught her off guard. She wasn’t really sure what Strident had planned to discuss over lunch. She had hoped he’d be taking the reins, but now the horses had been handed to her to control.
“I’m just . . . I need to follow every possible lead,” she said. “Whoever’s doing these new murders knows about the letters. We’ve gotten two already. One for each victim. I’ve found one other person so far on the planet who knows about them, and he’s under active investigation, but I really need to question everyone with access to that information. How many people are we talkin’ about, anyway?”
Strident’s gaze seemed to lose its focus as his mind went to work. Leah couldn’t tell if he was counting or trying to decide whether or not to even answer.
“Does it matter?” he eventually asked.
“Yeah, I think it does. Remember, somebody on your precious ‘task force’ leaked the stakes and the stickman drawings to the press. Everyone’s fallible. It could’ve been just a spur-of-the-moment thing, or even an accident. I just need to know if, in the fifteen years since being told the secret, any of your ‘trusted’ team happened to say something about the letters to anyone, even if it was in a completely benign and offhand way.”
Strident’s expression didn’t change. “They haven’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know. Trust me, they haven’t.” He tapped his fingers on the table. “There, you got your interview with all of them.”
“No, I got a response from you.”
“And I represent all of them.”
“Did you ask them? Recently? What if they just don’t want to admit making a slight mistake?”
Something flashed in those strange blue eyes, and Leah thought she might have just offended him. “Nobody has made a mistake,” he said slowly, his voice rising to an almost-commanding tone. “The secret is a secret. I wish Ethan hadn’t let you or Chris in on it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know the two of you at all. I mean, I know you from when you were a child, but that was years ago. People change over time.”
“Not usually, when it comes to their integrity.”
Strident’s eyes captured hers once more. After a brief silence he responded with one word: “Bingo.”
Leah thought about this. “Ethan told me the members of the task force in on the holdback were handpicked by my pa, is that correct?”
Again, Strident seemed to consider this longer than it warranted. “All except for one.”
“Well, then, I would say suspicion at least has to fall to that one.”
“No,” Strident said, his voice remaining matter-of-fact. “I picked that one, and I did it for Ethan after your vic turned up three and a half weeks ago. He needed someone down in Mobile to analyze the handwriting to see if the new letter matched the old, and the person we used to have no longer works in Mobile.” Leah already knew about Chuck being in what Ethan called his “secret circle.” She decided not to let Strident know she knew. Besides, she’d promised Ethan she would tell nobody. In her mind, that even went for people who already knew.
“You mean, he’s retired? Have most of them retired? What if one of them developed dementia or something?”
“Leah, you’re not listening to me. Nobody’s leaked about the letters. If you have someone on your radar who knows all ’bout ’em, well, then, I suggest you take a good long look at him, because he’s in a very small classroom and all the students sitting around him are honor stude
nts.”
With a sigh, Leah thought about Duck and all the coincidences that had lately turned up around him. The biggest hurdle there, though, was the fact that the man couldn’t possibly be responsible for these new killings. And, according to Lieutenant Stone from the Talladega Correctional Institution, Duck hadn’t had many guests in the last six months. So that left him potentially talking to other inmates; however, the first thing Leah had done was check all the surrounding institutions to see if anybody of interest had been released.
None had.
“Why didn’t you just tell me all of this on the phone?” Leah asked Strident. “You surely didn’t have to drive all the way from Selma and back to let me know you weren’t goin’ to tell me anythin’.”
“Honestly? I felt you deserved to hear it face-to-face. I knew you wouldn’t be happy, and if I just told you over the phone it would seem like a blow-off. This way, I’m hopin’ you’ll take me seriously. There has been no leak, Leah. I give you my word on that.”
“You’re willin’ to give me your word that other people didn’t let it slip? That’s goin’ out on a limb.”
He nodded. “It is. But I know these people. I worked with them for years. You have to understand, this Stickman thing? It’s by far not the most damning secrets these folk have been trusted with. These are folk who, if word got out they knew what they knew, their lives could very possibly be in danger, or at least the lives of the people they loved.”
That got Leah’s mind whirling. Was that what Ethan had tried to tell her in that nonsensical conversation she’d had in his office when Chuck called? What could be more secretive than this? Suddenly, scenarios—very dark scenarios—began culminating in her mind. They swarmed around in a miasma of shadow, and she closed her eyes while pushing them away.
Becky returned to their table with their orders. She put Dan’s Shirley Temple down beside his plate and, grabbing a jug from one of the clean tables, refilled Leah’s water goblet.
“I’d already guessed the handwriting expert had to be in on it,” she said, trying to sound somewhat less left out of everything. “And I don’t appreciate you implying that I can’t be trusted.”
“I never said anything of the sort.”
“Yes, you did. You said you wished Chris and I didn’t know.”
Strident took a bite of burger and waited until he’d swallowed it to answer. “It’s just a case of there bein’ too many witches around the cauldron, Leah. As you continue on in your career—especially if you get out of Alvin and become a detective in one of the bigger cities—you’re goin’ to soon realize there are dirty cops and there are clean cops, and then there’s a whole bunch of in-between cops. Unfortunately, the dirty cops far outnumber the squeaky-clean ones. But let me tell you this: When you meet enough of each type, you’ll soon be able to know right away where in the spectrum any one of them lies. Your father was born with the knack; I developed it. There’s a good chance you inherited it. If not, at least attempt to cultivate it. Because that ability alone will make you stand out from everyone else as bein’ an extraordinary police officer, no matter what your ‘official’ ranking.”
After a hesitation while she absorbed all of this, Leah responded, “Wow, that was some speech.”
“It wasn’t a speech, it was an oration on the current state of law enforcement in America today. I wasn’t implying any call to action. Sooner or later, you will figure this out for yourself. If I’ve saved you a few years by giving you a heads-up, then this trip I made down was by far worth taking.”
Leah paused again, seeing the passion in this man’s eyes sparkle. The thing he said about the light eventually going out wasn’t true of everyone, Leah knew this now. Because it hadn’t gone out for him. Somehow he’d made it through the wickedness and kept that glimmer of truth and honesty intact.
“So, after hunting him down for a year and a half fifteen years ago, do you have any suggestions or tips on how I should proceed? I think you’ve managed to settle my concerns over the cops who know about the letters. But since I have you here for at least another four bites of burger, what do you think should be my number-one priority?”
“That’s easy,” Strident said, this time while chewing. He waited until he’d swallowed and chased the burger with a drink of his Shirley Temple before telling her the rest. “Your priority should be the same as ours was back then: Find the primary crime scene. Track down the abattoir this man is slaughtering his victims in. Find that, and I guarantee you’ll find him.”
Leah let out a breath. “But my pa searched for a year and couldn’t find it. How can I expect—”
Strident pointed his fork at her, pausing her sentence mid-speech. Leah watched as he swallowed again. “Just because people tell you you’re like your pa, don’t get the wrong idea. You’re not him. That doesn’t make you better and it doesn’t make you worse, it just makes you different. Just because he couldn’t find the slaughterhouse has no bearing on your ability to. In fact, that may just be your specialty. Who knows? But it’s vital you find it because, as we’ve seen, failure to leave a stone that big unturned can lead to the wrong person taking the fall.”
His words spiked through Leah like a bolt of lightning. “You mean, you think my pa shot the wrong guy?”
Strident shook his head. “No, I don’t think that at all. I know he did. So did he, afterward.”
“He told you that?”
“He didn’t have to. He spent the rest of his life trying to make reparations for what he’d done. You couldn’t have worked closely with the man and not have known how he felt about it. Trust me, it’s a road you don’t ever want to head down. And remember one last thing, and you’ll only hear this from me once, okay?”
Leah nodded, not sure she wanted to hear what he was about to say. Deep sorrow, bordering on melancholy, had begun filling her up like mushroom manure being tossed into an empty well.
“Your pa was less than twenty feet away from Harry Stork when he pulled that trigger. I know he had arthritis beginning to develop in his trigger hand, but he was still the best damn shot I knew anywhere. He didn’t overcompensate the target. He knew exactly what he was doin’.”
And with that, the two ate the rest of their meals in relative silence.
CHAPTER 47
After another weekend went by spent with Leah obsessing over how close she’d come to capturing the Stickman, she was ready to go back to work. She was beginning to loathe having time off. Any time spent by herself she spent spinning different stories about how things might’ve been. Shoulda, woulda, couldas. All meaningless, and all out of her control.
By the time Monday came around, her exhaustion overwhelmed her. With great anticipation she and Dan went in to the station together, someplace where she could find something else to do rather than wallow in her own misery.
“So, what’s on the agenda today?” Dan asked, sounding rather chipper. He was still staying up late and still drinking each night, but he seemed to be retiring to the couch a little earlier. From what she could tell based on the bottles the next day, his amount of consumption hadn’t really changed, though. Still, she was happy to have him at least somewhat intelligible in the mornings.
Looking at her watch, Leah realized she could only barely call it morning. In fifteen minutes, the bells at First Baptist would ring out noon, the way they always did each day other than Wednesdays and Sundays.
She’d allowed herself to sleep in on account of she knew Chris wasn’t coming in to work until at least one, maybe even as late as three. He’d called her just after she got home Friday night and asked if he could take the first half of the day off for “family” reasons. So Leah didn’t set her alarm last night and slept near on through to eleven. This probably also explained why Dan didn’t look like the ass end of a barrow-pulling donkey the way he did when she got him up out of bed at eight. She couldn’t even smell bourbon on him. But then, she wasn’t really trying hard to, and he had jumped in the shower for a quick scrub
down before they set out.
Chris never actually told Leah what his “family business” was that needed attending to, but she knew his momma was coming down from Arkansas Saturday to stay with him awhile. He went on to complain about how annoying the woman was, how she never stopped fussing about stuff the whole time they were together. “And, man,” he had said to Leah, “she can talk. You ain’t never seen a woman talk like my ma. I just have to keep nodding and saying uh-huh, oh yeah, I see, of course ... while she just keeps winding and wending sentences, weaving them like they’re some sort of tapestry. I never have any idea what she’s talking about. And then, there’s the fussin’.”
“You already told me about the fussin’,” Leah had responded.
So today, Leah didn’t expect to see his head poke in the door any earlier than two or three. He promised to work late to make up for the time, so Leah figured they all might as well work late. Well, except for Ethan, who might or might not already be in and, in all likelihood, would leave before the clock even made it close to quitting time.
“So, let me ask again. What actually is on today’s agenda?” Dan asked, opening the door to the station for her. It was unlocked. Ethan actually had beat her in.
“Mmm, there’s one thing I want to do ... something I think I should’ve done weeks ago.”
“What’s that?” Dan went over to the coffee machine while Leah sat at her desk, arranging the stack of file folders.
She started searching for something she knew was in the bottom portion. “Apparently,” she said, “at least as far as I can tell from my pa’s notes, what clinched Harry Stork’s guilt in his eyes came out of a statement given by two eyewitnesses claimin’ to have seen Harry’s truck at the final crime scene at near on exactly the time Crabtree calculated the body was dumped.”
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