by C. J. Lyons
“I don’t need you playing Dr. Freud and analyzing my neuroses to tell me that.” Lucy couldn’t help it. She always saw Megan in all of her victims—it’s what gave her the strength and passion to fight for them. As if by saving them, she could build up enough good karma to protect her own family. Magical thinking, Nick called it. “It’s not that I’d like Cherish to be innocent—in fact, it might be worse if she is. Because then if I do my job and find her, it’s to tell her that even though she can go back to her old life, she’ll probably still be arrested and face a new trial for Hank Kutler’s murder.”
“They can do that?”
“Sure, if the DA is feeling aggressive and wants an easy win or to score some PR points with the voters. With the little evidence there is, we have absolutely no idea what really happened that night, so the DA could spin it anyway he wanted. Good chance even if she is innocent, she’d be convicted and spend the rest of her life in prison.”
“And if she’s guilty?”
“If she’s guilty, and I find her, she’ll probably use the news to run farther, go so far underground no one will be able to bring her to justice.”
“You’re the one who always tells me that there isn’t always a happy ending.”
“No, but at least by doing my job, I wasn’t making things worse. This time I feel like either way, I’ll be the instrument of destruction, ruining a girl’s life.” She realized she definitely did not sound like the unbiased investigator McCabe was paying her to be. “Maybe I’ll beg off. Tell Valencia that Megan needs me here.”
“As if ignoring the problem is going to solve it?”
“It’d be someone else’s problem.” God, she sounded as whiny and petulant as Megan. “Forget I said anything. I’m just tired and frustrated.”
“Frustrated?” he said, in a fake Freudian Viennese accent that somehow managed to sound sexy. “I see. Well, perhaps I can help with that, Madam. Tell me about your fantasies…”
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning Lucy dropped Megan off early at Beacon Falls, picked up TK, and drove to the airport where Wash had booked them on the first shuttle to Atlanta. TK traveled light—her old Marine’s rucksack her only luggage—and the car rental was prebooked and ready to go thanks to Wash, but once they arrived in Atlanta they still had to wait for Lucy’s checked bag.
“Better than traveling naked,” TK said, once they finally reached their rental, a silver Tahoe. She tossed her ruck into the rear compartment, lifted Lucy’s bag beside it, and opened the hard-sided rollerboard. Lucy shook her head at the way TK visibly relaxed when she saw the secured firearms box and the two Beretta 9mm semiautomatic pistols nestled in their foam housing. One of the few perks of being a retired federal agent—Lucy could carry her weapons across state lines.
“I thought we agreed to divide and conquer,” Lucy said, before TK could reach for her Beretta. “If you’re starting with Warren, he won’t like you carrying.”
“I’m legal in Tennessee,” she protested.
“He’s now a lieutenant in charge of their SWAT team. I sincerely doubt he’ll want a civilian he never met before riding with him with a weapon.”
“And you say I’m paranoid.” TK looked on with envy as Lucy holstered her own weapon before shutting the case, locking TK’s in place.
“Don’t worry,” Lucy assured her, once they were in the SUV and headed toward the interstate. “As soon as you’re done with the sheriff’s department, you can have it back.”
“Maybe I should go with you? The info Wash dug up on the trailer park guy made him sound kinda sketchy.” Arrests for drug possession and facilitating prostitution definitely qualified as “sketchy” in Lucy’s mind—one of the reasons Yates was on her list, not TK’s.
“I’ll be fine.” They settled in for the two-hour drive north to Craven County. McCabe called twice, asking for updates, and TK entertained Lucy with fun facts about the area. Craven was the only county in Tennessee that bordered both North Carolina and Georgia. It was almost five hundred square miles but had less than ten thousand people. The Nantahala National Forest occupied more than half of its acreage.
“Imagine being a deputy patrolling that kind of territory,” TK said. “I mean, you get called to a domestic out in the middle of the woods, where’s your back up? Could be fifty miles away or more.”
“You’re from West Virginia. Same situation there. Just like parts of Pennsylvania.” Including where Lucy had grown up.
“I’m from a city in West Virginia. Weirton has twice as many people as the entire Craven County.”
“Not sure twenty thousand makes a city.”
“Still, it’s a proper town with a government and law enforcement and everything. From what McCabe said, sounds like Craven is more like the wild west. Judges making up their own rules, kids getting locked up without a lawyer. Did you read the article Wash found about the feds stepping in after kids were being held for indefinite lengths of time and then had to pay for it, even if no charges were brought?”
“That was a different county.”
“Just saying, sounds like Craven is even worse.”
Lucy set the cruise control and leaned back. “You don’t just want to find Cherish. You want to prove her innocent.”
“Don’t you? I mean, not necessarily find her innocent, but find the truth? She’s the same age as Megan. How would you feel if Megan got locked up like that, practically tried and convicted without even having the chance to talk to you or a lawyer?”
“But Cherish did talk. She confessed, remember?”
“C’mon. You read those transcripts. She was interviewed how many times? And her story kept changing. It was never the same twice.”
“Jack Kutler’s story never changed.” Lucy wasn’t even sure why they were having this argument. She was just as suspicious as TK was about what had really happened eleven years ago. But that wasn’t the point. “It’s not our job to re-open the case. It’s our job to learn enough about Cherish to find her now.”
TK propped her feet up on the dash, chin down, assuming the same posture Megan did when she disagreed with Lucy. “Yeah. Great job. Find her so they can arrest her all over again.”
“We don’t know that. The DA might decline to bring charges again.”
“In a high profile murder case? I doubt it.”
Lucy knew she was probably right. “If we happen to stumble across something that helps clarify Cherish’s innocence or guilt, then of course we’ll pass it on to McCabe to help her defense. But our main focus is learning about her. Is she tech-savvy enough that she could build a whole new life? Get a fake ID? If so, what kind of job skills does she have? Or would she stay under the radar, maybe live on the street, go dark, no ID, no documented job, no online profile? Is there anyone she might have remained in contact with or who might have helped her?”
“I know the drill. So did the US Marshals and State Police,” TK reminded her.
“Which is why we’ll focus on talking to the people they ignored in the heat of a manhunt.” They’d already decided that TK would concentrate on the people Cherish came in contact with after the shooting—the deputy who arrested her and was first on scene, the detention center staff, and the lawyers who’d played hot potato with Cherish’s case, constantly handing it off as proceedings dragged on. Lucy would work the fringes of Cherish’s family life—people at the trailer park where she and her grandmother had lived, anyone who’d gone to school or church with her, friends of her mother and grandmother.
She’d been surprised by how many were still living in Craven County—apparently it was the kind of place that was hard to escape from even if you were a fugitive on the run.
Chapter Fourteen
They left the Interstate and drove east into the foothills, past the last town large enough to earn a mark on the map, a place named Cleveland, and then kept going into more rugged mountain territory, punctuated by picturesque river valleys and the occasional plateau. It reminded TK a lot
of her home in West Virginia.
Finally they reached the outer boundary of Craven County and then Hartfield, the small town that was its county seat. Hartfield sat in a river valley, its buildings hugging the side of a mountain on one side of the water and extending up a series of more gradual hills on the other. The sheriff’s station was comparatively newer than the buildings clustered on the other side of the river, with a utilitarian stucco construction that had a seventies sensibility clinging to it. Along with the other government offices it sat midway up the hillside, giving TK a nice view back to downtown. Across the river, the domed courthouse rose still higher, positioned above the rest of Hartfield, higher than even the church steeples.
Lucy dropped her off, but before TK could enter the building, a middle-aged man wearing a khaki lieutenant’s uniform came barreling out. Had to be Warren.
“You O’Connor?” he barked, striding toward a patrol car without waiting for her answer.
TK followed but almost ran into him when he abruptly stopped and whirled to face her, one hand jiggling a set of keys, the other resting on the butt of his service weapon. She was close enough to read his nametag. Yep, it was Warren.
“You think you’re going to find Cherish Walker after all these years?” Translation: when he and his buddies couldn’t. “What makes you think she’s even still alive? And if she is, how the hell is seeing an old slaughterhouse going to help find her?”
TK squared her posture, facing him, hands casually held above her waist, mirroring his own not-quite-fighting stance. With a guy like this, you didn’t back down or show any weakness. “What can you tell me about that night?”
His gaze lasered up and down her body. “You serve?”
“Marines. Iraq and Afghanistan.” Enough to satisfy his curiosity without distracting him with too many details he had no business knowing.
His lips twisted in consideration, and finally he nodded. “I can tell you a lot about that night. No idea what’s true or not, though.”
“So you don’t believe either Jack’s or Cherish’s account?”
“I believe the evidence. And the only evidence we had that was clear and irrefutable was one dead body and one shot boy.”
“Could you walk me through it? You were first on scene, right?”
“Kutler said it was all right, so yeah. You’ll have to ride in the back, though. County policy.” He dangled the keys to his police cruiser. TK nodded, and Warren opened the rear door and waited for her to slide inside. There were bars on the windows and the seat was a single molded piece of plastic, imbued with the reek of fear, piss, and vomit. She ignored the olfactory overload and sat down, fastening her shoulder harness. The car rocked as he slammed the door. A thick plastic barrier separated her from the driver’s compartment, but it had ventilation holes so she could hear Warren’s travelogue as he drove.
First, they eased up the road from the sheriff’s station and past a complex of three large brick buildings with a parking lot and cluster of bright yellow school buses in front of them. “Used to have another elementary school other side of the valley, but it closed a few years ago. Just about all the kids need bused, so makes more sense having all the schools together anyway.”
“Cherish was riding her bike home from school that day.”
“Her grandmother had high blood pressure. Didn’t take her medicine and had a stroke a few days before. Doctors thought she was doing better, might even get sent home, but then all this business with Cherish, she ended up dying two weeks later. For the best, I guess. She was a proud woman; this would have broken her for sure.”
Sounded like despite his earlier protests, he’d long ago made up his mind who was responsible for the shootings that night. “There was a storm that day?”
“Came in around noon.” He steered them up a steep set of switchbacks. “That time of year, they come up from the Gulf. Tropical storms and hurricanes. Outer bands and the winds are the hammer while the mountains act like an anvil with us caught between. Say another one’s headed this way in a day or two—Delilah’s her name. But the one back then didn’t have a name, not that I can recall.”
He slowed down for a sharp curve, mottled sunlight streaming through the thick trees the only sign of the sky above. “Right about here is where Cherish said her bike went off the road. Who knows for sure? After the storm we couldn’t find any evidence.”
“She said the Kutler boys ran her off the road in their truck.”
“Said a lot of things. Never the same thing twice. She skidded on the wet pavement, lost control. Hank stopped to help. She was riding and the boys and their truck came up behind her, scared her, and she crashed. She didn’t see them at all until it was too late, and when she tried to get out of their way, she ran off the road. They saw her and aimed right for her, forcing her off the road. Take your pick.”
“Jack said she’d already wrecked when they drove past, saw her, and stopped to help.”
“Makes more sense than anything she told us. Because why would she get in that truck with two boys and let them take her anywhere if they’d forced her off the road?”
The trees were old and tall, crowding the narrow road. TK imagined riding a bike up the steep grade, wind slamming into you, rain blinding you, unable to hear or see anything, wet and miserable and cold, just wanting to get home. “She might not have realized at first that they ran her off the road. And she’d known them all her life—”
“Everyone knew the Kutlers. They was good boys. Were going to make it out of here, make something of themselves. Even after everything, Jack still did. Works for his stepdad’s investment firm up in Nashville.”
“So Cherish would have trusted them. At least at first.”
“No reason not to trust them boys. Good church-going family, the Kutlers.” Unlike the Walkers, his tone implied.
They crested the top of the mountain. Or maybe foothill was a better term, TK thought, as she gazed past the plateau to the majesty of the Appalachians rising up to the east.
“Used to be some of the best farm land around. But look at it now.” Warren made a snorting noise. “Gated vacation communities where the houses cost more than anyone who actually lives here makes in ten years of working to the bone. Just stand empty most of the year—especially after the recession. A lot of them were foreclosed—we’d get transients stripping their wires and ransacking them, others just squatting. Million-dollar houses and junkies crashing there, calling them home. Some even tried to claim squatter’s rights.”
She noted how he made it sound as if all the problems came from the outside world, with the residents of Craven County playing the role of angelic host. He met her gaze in the rearview mirror and scowled as if he knew what she was thinking. “We got our own troubles, that’s for sure. But nothing like we seen once folks discovered Craven and began building their McMansions, bringing us false hope that folks here would have jobs again and a chance at their own dreams.”
They passed through a thickly wooded section and hit the far end of the small plateau, the mountains towering over them. “This used to all be Kutler land. Cattle grazing to the west, back the way we came, and they had their homestead over there,” he gestured at a drive leading into the woods, its pavement broken and littered with potholes, “and the slaughterhouse back here where it’s steep. Nowhere for a stray cow to run to, not the way the limestone shears up and the forest gets so thick.”
They emerged from the trees, and TK saw what he meant. In the clearing at the base of the mountain stood a building that had to be the slaughterhouse. It was constructed of cement block covered by a tin roof; its length was out of proportion to its height, making it seem weirdly off balance. Surrounding it was a rusted metal fence topped with barbed wire. Along one side, the fence created a path—the same way they corralled tourists at Disney—leading to a large sliding door. The oppressive atmosphere was compounded by the way the mountain jutted up as if it had been thrust out of the ground, so steep that the trees crowding
its lower slopes grew at an unnatural angle, not quite horizontal, barely hanging on by their roots.
“It happened in the office,” Warren said, pointing to a squat square addition at the near end of the building. He climbed out of the car and sauntered around to release TK from the backseat. Once free, she gulped in the mountain air, tasting pine.
“Why would they drive past their home to bring Cherish here?” TK asked. “This place was already shut down by then, right?”
“Jack said his parents didn’t approve of the Walkers, and he and Hank didn’t want to get in trouble. And they had tools to fix her bike here.”
She thought of the crime scene photos. “But they never even took the bike out of the truck. That makes no sense.”
“Whole thing makes no sense. All I know is by the end of the night, we have two boys shot and one girl, not a scratch on her, with her prints on the weapon.”
“The boys’ prints were on it as well.”
“Of course. It was their gun.” He led her through a gate to the office door, which he unlocked with a key dangling from a ring.
“I’m surprised they didn’t sell it,” TK said, as they crossed the threshold into a dank, dark, windowless room that was only about twelve feet deep, but because it ran the width of the barn it was attached to, was at least twice that in length. “Or tear it down.”
Warren clicked on the lights. “Mrs. Kutler wanted to, but the old man said it was Jack’s legacy, so it was up to him. Jack said he couldn’t bear to part with all the memories of the good times he and Hank had here.”
The rear wall of the room was lined with file cabinets, and there was a splintered desk pushed against the wall. A tumbled stack of CDs sat beside an old-style boom box. In the center of the floor was a battered coffee table with old bench car seats on either side. The cinderblock walls held the mildewed, curled up remnants of posters—scantily clad girls posing with guns, Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, more girls from the old Carl’s Jr. ads, licking hamburger grease from their fingers. Every wall was peppered with holes. Target practice, TK thought, as she ran her finger along the crumbled edge of one and uncovered a bullet buried inside the wall. She hoped the boys had been smart enough to wear ear protection—it would be deafening shooting in this enclosed environment. Some of the posters had been used as targets, but either wall at each end of the long room also had scattered holes roughly where a man’s head would stand.