by Scott Pratt
Jack and I were just walking back to the waiting room from a trip to the cafeteria when my cell phone rang. It was Fraley.
“You need to come out here,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“To the park. The girl in the picture. She’s here. She wants to talk to you.”
I’d called Fraley and taken the picture to him Sunday afternoon after I found it on my windshield. Both of us were skeptical, but he said he’d follow up.
“What?” I said. “Now?”
“As soon as you can.”
“Caroline’s in surgery. Can’t it wait a few hours?”
“I guess it could, but we take a chance on her changing her mind or leaving.”
“Where exactly is she?” I said.
“Near the pavilion. Right where you said she’d be. I’m holding the drawing in my hand and it looks exactly like it. It’s weird.”
I hung up the phone and looked at Jack. “I have to go,” I said. He gave me a bewildered look. “We may have a witness in the murders. She wants to talk to me. Your mother will be in surgery for at least another hour; then she’ll be in recovery for a while. As soon as the surgeon comes out, call me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Winged Deer is a two-hundred-acre park located on the eastern outskirts of Johnson City. The upper half of the park contains baseball and softball fields and a hiking trail that winds through a five-acre patch of dense forest. The lower half skirts the Watauga River. Along the river are more walking trails, a boat ramp, a board-walk, and a large, covered pavilion that people rent for outdoor gatherings and picnics. There are also a few benches scattered around beneath the oak and maple trees that dot the riverbank. I spotted Fraley’s car in the lot and parked next to it. I found him pacing back and forth near the pavilion, nervously sucking on a cigarette.
“Sorry about this,” Fraley said as soon as I walked up. “How’s the wife?”
“Don’t know yet. She’s still in surgery, but thanks for asking.”
“This one’s strange,” he said.
“How so?”
“You’ll see.” He nodded towards the river.
I started walking down the hill in the direction of the nod. My view of the bench was obscured by the tree at first, but then I saw her. It was as though the drawing I’d held in my hand the day before had come to life. I approached slowly. The dress she was wearing was antique white and ankle length. Her feet were covered by sandals, her head by a finely woven straw hat that fluttered gently in the light breeze. A white crocheted shawl was draped over her shoulders. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she appeared to be looking out over the river, serenely contemplating the universe. I could see dark red hair curling softly down her back and shoulders all the way to her waist. As I approached, she turned towards me and lifted her chin. Beneath the brim of the hat was a young, smooth face with high cheekbones and a jawline that melted into a slightly dimpled chin. Full lips were curved into a pleasant smile. Her nose was small and delicate. A flesh-colored patch, which was secured by a length of what appeared to be nylon, covered her right eye. Her left eye was the most brilliant, clear blue I’d ever seen.
“I’m Joe Dillard,” I said as I stood uncomfortably over her. The eye was beautiful, but at the same time, it was unnerving.
“Someone you love deeply is very ill,” she said in an even tone. Her voice was calm and appealing, like that of a well-trained stage actress.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“I see pain in your eyes. I sense regret. You’ve done things you’d like to forget.”
“Who hasn’t? I was told you have some information for me, Miss … What did you say your name was?”
“You’re skeptical of me.”
“Comes with the territory. Do you mind if I sit down?”
She nodded, and I sat down at the other end of the bench. I looked out over the river. It was placid, a vivid green. Some of the trees on the opposite bank were beginning to change to their fall colors of orange, yellow, and red. The sky was azure, the temperature warm.
“You did the drawing?”
She nodded again.
“You put it on my car?”
“You needed it. It was there.”
“Why a drawing? Why not a phone call?”
“I thought the drawing was more likely to get your attention.”
“Who are you? What’s your name?”
There was an aura of calmness about her, a sense that she was perfectly at peace with herself and everything around her. She looked back out over the river.
“It’s cancer,” she said, “your wife.”
Lucky guess. Coincidence. She knows someone who knows me and she’s heard about it from them.
“No,” I said. “My wife doesn’t have cancer.”
“You lie poorly. She’s very strong, isn’t she?”
“I don’t have time for—”
“And so are you, but you draw much of your strength from her.”
“I’m sorry, but you still haven’t told me your name. You know, I could probably have you arrested just because of what was in the drawing. Would you like to continue this conversation at the police station?”
“You don’t want to arrest me,” she said.
“I don’t want to sit here all morning and listen to you talk in circles, either.” I was becoming impatient. “Now, what’s your name?”
She looked back out over the river. “Alisha. Alisha Elizabeth Davis.”
“Are you some kind of psychic?”
“I see things that others can’t see. I hear and feel things that others can’t.”
“I don’t have a lot of time this morning, Alisha. If you know something about the murders, I’d appreciate it if you’d just tell me.”
“They thirst for revenge, and they won’t stop.”
“Who are they?”
“One is Samuel, another Levi.”
“Do they have last names?”
“Boyer. Barnett.”
I reached into my back pocket for a notepad. I didn’t have one, so I pulled a pen from my shirt pocket and started writing on the palm of my left hand.
“Samuel Boyer?”
She nodded.
“Levi Barnett? You’re saying Samuel Boyer and Levi Barnett did these killings? Do you know where they’re from? Where can we find them?”
“They won’t be hard to find.”
“How do you know? And don’t say you know things. Don’t tell me it came to you in a vision.”
“There’s a third. One who commands. She believes she is the daughter of Satan.”
“How do you know?”
My cell phone rang. I looked down at the caller ID. It was Jack.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to take this. I’ll be right back.” I got up and walked twenty or thirty feet away from her, out of earshot.
“Tell me something good,” I said when I answered.
“Surgeon just left,” Jack said. His voice was hushed. “The tumor was stage three, whatever that means. He said it was almost four centimeters long. There was cancer in the skin above the tumor and in the lymph node. He said the type of cancer she has is very aggressive. He already closed her back up. He said he left the tumor so they could see how it responds to chemotherapy.”
“What did he say about the chemo?” It was the one part of the treatment Caroline had talked about the most. She was terrified of chemotherapy.
“Some other doctor is going to handle it, but he said most of the cases similar to Mom’s go through three months of chemo, then surgery to remove the breast and the rest of her lymph nodes, then three more months of chemo. After that she’ll have to go through radiation for a couple of months. He says she’s looking at about a year before she’s clear of it, and that’s if everything goes well.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m standing in the lobby.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“In recovery. The nurse told me
we can go back in about a half hour.”
“But she’s okay?”
“Outside of the fact that she has cancer.”
“How’s Lilly?”
“Not good.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Wait for me. I want to be in the recovery room when she wakes up.”
I hung up the phone and walked back over to the girl.
She looked up at me, and I noticed a tear running down her left cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I’d developed a keen intuition over more than a decade of practicing criminal defense law and listening to my own clients lie to me over and over again. Caroline jokingly referred to it as my “bullshit detector.” It wasn’t innate; it was something that I had developed through experience, but I’d learned to trust my ability to detect and sort through lies and to get to the heart of a matter very quickly. This girl gave me no indication that she was lying. Her voice was clear and steady, her manner calm and straightforward. The circumstances were certainly unusual, but I found myself believing her.
“Okay, Alisha,” I said, “if you really want to help me, this is what has to happen. I’m going to go up and talk to that officer for a few minutes. Then he’s going to come back down here and take a statement from you. He’s going to write down everything you say. In the statement, you’re going to tell him exactly what you know about the murders and the people you’ve mentioned. And more important, you’re going to tell him how you know these things. We need details. We need something concrete if we’re going to be able to get warrants and arrest these people. If what you say checks out, I’ll probably need you to testify in front of a grand jury. You may even end up testifying at trial. Do you understand?”
A feeling came over me that reminded me of the way I felt the night I went to the Beck murder scene, but it was different somehow. I felt as though I were experiencing something unnatural, perhaps even supernatural, but the sickening sense of being in the presence of evil was absent. I wanted to talk to this girl, to question her, and I could sense that she wanted to tell me what she knew, but I couldn’t stop envisioning Caroline lying in the recovery room, about to come out of the anesthesia-induced coma. Someone would have to break the news to her, and I wanted it to be me.
“I have to leave,” I said, “but I’m going to go talk to the agent, and he’ll be back down here in just a minute. Just sit tight. Won’t take but a second.”
I jogged back up the hill to where Fraley was standing.
“Well?” he said.
“Write these names down.” I opened my hand so he could see them.
“Who are they?”
“She says they’re the killers.”
“You’re shitting me. You wrote them on your hand?”
“I didn’t bring a notepad. Didn’t know I’d need one.”
“And I took you for a Boy Scout. At least you had a pen.” Fraley began copying the names down. “One of those names is familiar,” he said.
“How so?”
“I put a list together of kids Norman Brockwell had serious problems with before he retired. One of them, Boyer, is on your hand. What’s her name?” He nodded towards the river.
“Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Take a statement from her. Get everything you can. Names, addresses, ages, shit, you know the drill. All we can do is check out everything she says. And let’s make sure we check her out at the same time. I have to get back to the hospital.”
“Bad news?”
“You could say that. Go ahead, before she changes her mind. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”
I jogged back to my truck and pulled out of the lot. My cell phone rang less than a minute later. It was Fraley.
“She’s gone,” he said.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I walked back down to the bench and she was gone. I don’t think she could have walked off without me seeing her, but she’s not here. She disappeared.”
Monday, October 6
As soon as I got back to the hospital, I ran down Caroline’s surgeon and talked to him for about ten minutes. One thing he said stuck in my mind: “The only way to deal with cancer is to kill it.” From there, I headed straight back to the recovery room.
Her eyes fluttered open when I rubbed my fingers across her forehead. Caroline was lying on a gurney behind a flimsy curtain in a gray room that smelled of anesthetic and floor cleaner. A monitor loomed above her, its digital display reflecting her blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature. A plastic tube carried antinausea medicine from a bag on a hook into a vein in her forearm. The skin on her face was dry and splotched with red, and when I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek, I noticed a bitter smell coming from her mouth.
“Hey, sugar,” I said. “How do you feel?”
She looked up at me, and her eyes lit with a glint of recognition.
“My mouth tastes like a thousand elephants took a dump in it,” she said.
“Smells like it, too.”
She covered her mouth with the back of her hand self-consciously.
“Just kidding, baby,” I said. “Your breath smells fine.”
“Liar. Would you get me some water?”
I poured some water from a pitcher that was sitting on a table near the bed into a plastic cup and helped her drink. Her lips were dry and scaly.
“I’m freezing,” she whispered.
“Be right back,” I said. I went and found a nurse, who directed me to a large cabinet just down the hall. I grabbed a couple of thin blankets and went back to Caroline’s cubicle. I laid the blankets over her and tucked the sides snugly beneath her.
“Is it that bad?” she said after I moved back to the head of the bed.
“What do you mean?”
“I can tell by the look on your face. And the kids aren’t in here. If the news was good, they’d be here, too.”
“I just wanted to be alone with you for a minute,” I said.
“So you could break the bad news to me?”
“It could be worse. I think you’re going to make it.”
She grimaced and adjusted herself on the gurney. “Was there cancer in the node?”
“Yeah, baby. I’m sorry.”
“Did it spread to the skin above the tumor?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.”
I squeezed her hand gently.
“So I’m going to lose my breast?”
“I don’t think you have much choice.”
“What do I need a breast for, right? We’re not going to have any more kids.”
“They’ll make you another one if you want them to. They do it all the time now.”
“When do I have to start the chemotherapy?”
“A couple of weeks. They want you to heal up from this for a little while first.”
“Will you love me when I’m bald?”
Caroline wasn’t particularly vain, but she loved her hair, and so did I. It was a reflection of her personality, beautiful but occasionally a bit on the unruly side. It was auburn and thick and curly and fell to the middle of her back. It turned a few shades lighter in the summer when she spent more time in the sun. Losing it was the side effect of chemotherapy that she dreaded the most.
“I’ll shave my head if you want,” I said. “We can be bald together.”
Two hours later, after I’d rolled my wife out of the surgery center in a wheelchair, helped her into the car and taken her home, gotten her settled into bed, and made sure Lilly and Jack knew what to do in case something went wrong, I drove back up to the TBI headquarters in Johnson City. Fraley’s office was buzzing. People were running in and out while Fraley alternately barked commands like a general and talked into the telephone. As I sat down across from him, he hung up the phone. He got up from behind the desk and walked over and closed the door.
“How’s the wife?” he said as he returned to his seat.
“In bed. Resting.”
“She okay?”
“Yeah, she’s all right. What’s going on here?”
“I can appreciate what you’re going through,” Fraley said. “I lost my wife to breast cancer.”
The comment shocked me. It was the first time Fraley had given me any indication that he had a life outside of his job.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m truly sorry. What was her name?”
“Robin,” he said, unconsciously smiling at the thought of her. He reached to his left and picked up a small, framed photograph. “Beautiful woman. It was thirty years ago. The treatment has come a long way since then, but at the time, there wasn’t much they could do. It was too far along by the time it was diagnosed. Took her in a hurry. We’d only been married five years.”
“Can I see?” He handed me the photo. It was a studio portrait of a pretty young brunette, maybe twenty-five years old, sitting in front of a fireplace. She was holding an infant wrapped in a blanket, and beside her was a handsome young man smiling the smile of a proud husband and father. I looked back up at Fraley and could see that the young man in the photo was him many years, many heartaches, and many miles ago.
“That’s my daughter,” he said. “She was three months old that day.”
“Where is she now?”
“Nashville. Married to a banker. He’s a good guy. She has a couple of kids of her own.”
“You raise her by yourself?”
“Yeah. Did the best I could. I don’t think I fucked it up too bad.”
“Nice little family.” I handed the photo back to him.
“She’ll be okay,” he said. “Your wife. She’ll be okay.”
“Thanks,” I said. I briefly imagined Caroline lying in a casket covered in flowers, eyes closed, the serene look of the dead on her face. Fraley must have sensed what I was thinking.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to … I mean, I wasn’t trying to make you think about—”