A Shattered Lens

by Layton Green

Tenacity, drive, and cunning helped shape a good detective as well, but like the best poker players, the most successful sleuths of all were masters of observation.

  He parked in the gravel lot beside Jimmy’s Corner Store. On his way inside, a violent wind whipped a flurry of leaves into the air. Two obese men were sitting on the lawn in Adirondack chairs, one in a suit, the other with greasy hair and a beard and overalls. They were drinking root beer and smoking cigars, hands waving as they engaged in a vigorous debate.

  When he had first moved back home, Preach had experienced mixed emotions. Despite the depression from his failure in Atlanta, the nostalgia of his childhood home had almost overwhelmed him, fluttering like a rare tropical bird in his chest, hard to pin down but shimmering with vitality. It was so beautiful here, so warm and lush, so peaceful at night. There was a sweet melancholy woven into the fabric of the place, an intimacy with nature and the community, tempered by the daily struggle to survive and the troubled history of the South.

  He felt a duty to protect his hometown, preserve its innocence and its people, yet he knew he no longer quite belonged. Like all those characters in his favorite novels, he struggled with his choices, his sense of belonging, his definition of self, and the feeling of being lost in time.

  Welcome to the human race, he thought.

  Inside the café, he purchased a bottle of brown ale from the refrigerated goods section, had the counter clerk pop the cap, and found a seat by the window. Scuffed wood floors, clapboard walls, cheap aluminum tables that hadn’t changed in fifty years. Jars of elderberry preserves and barbecue sauce on the shelves. He noticed a woman in camel print leggings and colored jewelry breastfeeding her child, a table of college boys with T-shirts and ball caps pulled low and faux worn jeans, a man dressed all in black with a scraggly beard and large hoop earrings, and a pair of old ladies conversing with graceful hand movements and careful nods.

  His father used to bring him to Jimmy’s for quarter ice cream cones while he strummed on his guitar in the corner and young Joey played with the wooden toys and board games. A few hours later, they would go home with local meat and milk and cage-free eggs, not because they were trendy or sustainable, but because they were cheap and delicious.

  What could Preach’s collective observations about Jimmy’s and his hometown tell him about the case ?

  Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. That was how it went.

  What did he know for sure? Claire and David had argued that night, loud enough for a neighbor to notice. David had left in a huff. He had gone somewhere unknown and returned sometime after midnight. He had talked to someone in Claire’s study and turned up dead soon after. He likely had been killed in the woods, stuffed in a canvas sack, and dragged off, probably to the trunk of a car. Preach wondered if Claire was strong enough to drag someone of David’s size that far. Probably not. In the morning, the evidence team was going to search for a trail of hemp fibers in the woods behind the mill. He made a mental note to add the car trunks of all the suspects to the list.

  During his search of the house, Preach had stood in the study, a small room with leopard-print carpet and a custom-made liquor cabinet. For some reason, Claire had moved the family computer, a MacBook Pro, from the spare bedroom to the built-in mahogany desk in the study. Still an aspiring fashion designer, she used the Mac for her clothing blueprints and kept her works in progress on display in the sewing room.

  Maybe Claire and David had argued again that night, about something on the computer. Maybe David had gone inside to get booze. Half of all homicides involved alcohol. The initial toxicology had revealed a limited blood alcohol content, but that was a nonstarter. Alcohol production in the body after death, due to microbial contamination and fermentation, was chemically analogous to a BAC resulting from drinking. Corpses recovered from water were especially problematic, due to decomposition and dilution of bodily fluids.

  In the house he had kept an eye out for signs of a missing lighter, though he didn’t know what that might be. A matching purse or cigarette holder ? He could see Claire using a lighter like that, and after he had found a pack of Benson & Hedges in a bedside drawer, she had admitted she still smoked on occasion.

  Nothing else in the house raised an eyebrow. An initial search of the computer uncovered nothing new. Claire rarely used email.

  He sorted through the other suspects in his mind. Brett he simply disliked. Was the man capable ofmurder ? He exhibited signs of a violent temper, had easy access to firearms, and was one of two people with a motive. On the other hand, he was larger than David, and Sharon had seen a smaller person in the house that night.

  A sudden thought struck him. What if Sharon had mistaken Brett for David? Meaning David was the smaller person she had seen?

  It was possible, but unlikely. It would be hard to mistake either of them for a slender woman. On the other hand, and he was starting to hate the sound of his own logic, anything could have happened. Sharon could have seen David with a woman, and then someone else could have stopped by later and murdered him. Or Brett could have been in the house at the same time, but in a different room. A collaboration?

  Yet the elephant still remained, the key to the entire puzzle.

  Why?

  So far, the other person with a motive was Lisa Waverly. Preach didn’t know what was behind that Facebook post, and the English teacher didn’t scream murderess to him, but she was about Claire’s size. The Facebook post itself was sinister, and he didn’t believe anyone’s story about the origin.

  He took a long swig of beer, glanced around the café again, and tapped his fingers on the table. More nervous energy. More avoidance.

  Another angle: After hearing someone else had been in the house with David that night, Preach had started to look at Claire with new eyes.

  He estimated she pulled in fifty or sixty thousand a year, at best, from the boutique. She belonged to a country club, had a wardrobe full of designer shoes and clothing, took trips to Hawaii, and leased a BMW X-5. How could she afford all of that ?

  Did Brett foot the bill?

  If so, that changed the dynamic.

  For a moment, he wondered if he wasn’t overreacting to his own flaws, his unwanted attraction to her. Pushing too hard to be evenhanded.

  Stop thinking so much about it. About her. Observe, follow the evidence, and don’t assume. Treat it like every other case.

  He finished his beer and sat twirling the bottle between his palms.

  The problem was, as much as the evidentiary process was the same, it was nothing like his other cases. There was an inherent bias he couldn’t avoid.

  It was his own past he was dissecting.

  Ari came over at 10 p.m. that night. Preach was surprised she didn’t just stay at her apartment in Durham. After Preach heated up some leftover pasta for her, she sat on the couch with a glass of wine, looking preoccupied.

  Preach joined her. “I can make a fire on the porch. It’s a nice night.” She flashed a tired smile. “Thanks, but I need to read through a few files.”

  “Want to take me there ?”

  “What? Where?”

  “Wherever it is your mind is.”

  He thought he might get a chuckle, but instead she took her bottom lip between her teeth, held it for a moment, and said, “Not tonight, okay? It’s just this case I’ve got.”

  “Okay,” he said, after gazing at her long enough to know that, while it might be work that was bothering her, it certainly wasn’t just another case.

  The next day brought no new developments. Just before noon on Wednesday, Preach and Ari stepped into a church on Highline Avenue, less than a mile from Wild Oaks. The carpeted foyer of Arrowhead United Methodist spilled into a modest chapel divided into three sections of pews, each twenty rows long.

  “I’ve never been to a funeral in a church,” Ari whispered, as they slid into the last row. “Is it a Southern thing?”

  “Not that I know of” he said, bemused. “Lots of people choose to have
funeral services in a church rather than a mortuary. Especially with cremations.”

  “Poor Claire,” she whispered.

  Not many seats remained. He noticed Brett up front next to Claire, and an older woman covered in gold jewelry who shared her high cheekbones and creamy skin tone. Her mother. The jewelry seemed odd, as Claire’s family had grown up with very modest means.

  Brett turned and caught Preach’s eye, frowned, and looked away. People murmured throughout the chapel, a few women wept in the front row, and a harpist strummed soft notes by the pulpit.

  “If it were my son,” Ari said quietly, as she looked straight ahead, “I’d want the funeral in a church too.”

  “You would?”

  Ari, he knew, had not been to church since she was a child. Her parents had never attended, but her grandfather took her whenever she stayed with him on the weekends.

  “If I have a child who dies before I do, I’ll believe in heaven.”

  Preach kept canvassing the crowd, searching for familiar faces. Not just for their reactions to the service, but to his presence. Statistics showed that a shocking number of murderers attended the funerals of their victims. With a case like David’s, in a town as small as Creekville, there was a good possibility the killer was in the room with them.

  The high school principal was there, along with a slew of students and most of the teachers Preach had met. No sign of Ms. Waverly.

  “Is it strange that you’re here ?” Ari whispered. “Even though you know the family?”

  “I don’t know. It’s never happened to me before.”

  “Better question: Do you feel strange ?”

  “Why would I ?”

  “I don’t know, because you’re investigating?”

  After a moment, he said, “A little.” He hadn’t even admitted it to himself, and more than ever, the case brought home the fact that he was probing the lives of his friends and neighbors. In a city like Atlanta, a metropolitan area pushing seven million, that had never been an issue.

  “How well do you know Claire ?” she asked.

  “Now? Not at all.”

  “Did you . . . date her ?”

  As he mouthed “No,” an organ started to play, and a white-haired preacher stepped through the choir entrance and strode to the pulpit. While everyone settled into their seats, Claire turned to arrange her shawl on the back of the pew.

  “Is that her?” Ari asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “The woman in the front who just turned. Long brown hair and black dress. Is that Claire ?”

  “Yeah. That’s her.”

  Ari looked at him askance. “She’s gorgeous.” When Preach didn’t respond, Ari held his gaze for a moment, then hid her iPhone in her lap and checked her texts.

  During the service, it was obvious that the pastor, who kept referring back to his notes and never once used a personal pronoun when speaking about David, had not spent much time with the deceased. After the service ended, Preach debated leaving but thought that would look rude, as if he had attended just to scope out suspects. He told Ari he wanted to quickly pay his respects before he left.

  “I don’t mind if you skip” he said. “I know you have work.”

  Maybe he imagined it, but he thought her smile was a bit forced. “I’ll stay with you,” she said.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  They milled about in a large common room in the basement, drinking fruit punch and nibbling on sugar cookies. As soon as Claire entered, flanked by Brett and her mother, Preach and Ari joined the receiving line. Before they reached Claire, they shook hands with a few more relatives, including a tall and handsome man Preach recognized as Claire’s ex-husband, Dylan Freeman. Though a few years older, Dylan had starred on the high school basketball team, and Preach remembered seeing him at games and around town. He was now an attorney in Virginia, with a successful employment law practice.

  “Joe Everson,” Preach said, introducing himself.

  Dylan gripped his hand. “Ah, Joe. That’s right. I heard you were working the case.”

  Still lean and youthful, Dylan had the easy charm, as well as the deep and earnest voice, of a trial attorney. If Preach remembered correctly, he had been a junior at Duke when Claire had gotten pregnant her senior year.

  “Nice to meet you,” Preach said. “I’m sorry about the circumstances.”

  Dylan looked down for a moment, and Preach saw a spasm of regret contort his face, a man who knew he had not done right by his boy.

  And now he could never change it.

  When he looked back up, the expression had morphed into a charismatic smile. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Sure.”

  With his grin fixed in place, still gripping Preach’s hand, Dylan leaned in close and whispered, “You get the motherfucker who did this.”

  Preach locked eyes with him, gave a curt nod, and moved on. Dylan turned to Ari and smiled.

  After a wordless handshake with Brett, Preach was standing in front of Claire, worried she would reject his presence. Instead she pulled him into a hug. “Thank you for coming” she said, leaning back but still holding onto his arms. Dark circles tugged at her eyes, and her face was drawn and pale.

  “Of course.” He introduced Ari, and the two women shook hands.

  “It was a nice service,” Preach said.

  Claire nodded absently at the comment. Preach and Ari moved on. He knew it had been a trite thing to say, but all of a sudden he had felt—just as Ari had intimated—self-conscious of his own presence, of standing before Claire in her time of grief while knowing she was a person of interest in the case.

  Outside the church, Preach walked Ari to her car, the same Toyota Corolla with frayed seat belts she had driven in law school. First-year prosecutors barely made enough money to cover the rent, groceries, and their law school loans. Some took the job as a stepping stone to a political career or a white-shoe defense firm down the road, some took it because it was available, and some took it because they wanted to put bad guys behind bars.

  He knew Ari had taken all of those considerations into account, especially the last one. He also knew that prosecutors and defense attorneys swam in far murkier waters than simple wrong and right— but that was something she would have to experience for herself.

  When he hugged her goodbye, she felt stiff. “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Just a lot of work.”

  He opened the car door for her. “Thanks again for coming. How’s the new case?”

  She slid inside and started the car. “Unsettling.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you ever heard of someone named Bentley Washington?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “I’ll fill you in later. I’ve really got to run.”

  As he shut the door and watched her reverse out of the parking space and pull away, he noticed that, for the first time he could remember, she never once looked back at him.

  Part of him wanted to chase after her, and part of him, a very small part that he didn’t want to admit to, wanted to go back inside the church and comfort Claire. With a sharp pang of guilt, he stood and watched Ari’s car disappear in traffic, thinking of the good times they had enjoyed but also the way she had looked at him over the last few months, almost as a consolation prize to her work. He wondered if she was pulling away both literally and figuratively, and whether that had cracked a door with Claire he didn’t want to open, and whether that entire line of reasoning was one giant, pathetic excuse.

  A buzz in his pocket interrupted his thoughts. After reading the text on his cell phone, he strode quickly to his car, reversing and pulling away before the transmission had fully engaged.

  the message from Chief Higgins read.

  13

  As she drove away from the funeral home, Ari couldn’t help thinking about how strikingly beautiful Claire Lourdes was. Most of her friends thought Joe Everso
n’s golden boy good looks had drawn her to him. In reality, it had almost kept them apart.

  Ari had never wanted the popular guy, the confident Romeo, the flavor of the day. She didn’t want someone who skated by on charm and good looks, and who didn’t see, really see, the rest of the world. A month or so after she had started dating the detective, they had a light email exchange that had turned serious, ending with her asking what he believed in. Despite his past, she had not quite figured out where he stood with the question of religion.

  What do I believe in? I believe in sunsets over still waters, Ari, and the way the breeze ruffles through the long grass in summer. I believe in little girls reaching for their daddies’ hands in public parks, the mystery of the night sky, the irrational desire human beings have to create art, the taste of a cold beer after work, the callouses on my hands after the gym. I believe in the power of a good story, the sound of crickets when I fall asleep, standing shoeless in a mountain stream, and holding a mug of fresh coffee in the mornings. I believe in the way your hands wave too much when you talk, the smell of your skin after the beach, the way you gasp when we make love, the way youfight for your beliefs. I believe in your zealous devotion to your favorite authors, the way you dress like no one else and dance whenever you can and think too hard about everything. I believe in your inability to conform, the curve of your lips around mine, and the way you take a knee to talk to children. Does that answer your question?

  Yeah. That.

  She had printed out his response, folded it, and kept it tucked in a diary. He had won her heart that day, and everything since had only made her feelings stronger for the soulful detective with the troubled past and the deceptively pretty blond hair.

  Yet if that was the true Joe Everson, why had she caught him staring at Claire at the funeral when he thought she wasn’t looking?

  Why had Claire hugged him so easily in the receiving line, as if his strong arms were hers to fall into?

  Ari didn’t want to be that kind of woman.