Rough Country: A gripping crime thriller

by T. J. Brearton

  Just seeing if you wanted to hang.

  Bullshit. Now Aaron was feeling a cold sweat. The problem with Lloyd “Minnie” Cox was the people he was connected with. As the kind of village idiot, he’d endeared himself to Ida Stevens and her whole gang. All these freaks and their weird kinky sex shit… coming in for tattoos, some of them, acting like they were twenty-one again. Some of them, though, were some real hard characters.

  Minnie – all he ever talked about were his years touring with the Dead, and Phish, and how one time way the hell up in Northern Maine and on half a cap of mushrooms, he’d seen God. He didn’t mean harm, not really, but he was like a dumb animal in that way. The kind that ended up running you off the road.

  And at this point, after all the acid he’d eaten, Minnie was probably legitimately insane. In fact, Aaron was sure he’d heard that once – if you tripped like nine or ten times, the government considered you officially a mental health case. Maybe that was an urban legend, but it made sense. The guy didn’t drive, drifted from job to job, lived alone with that poor dog, doing who-knew-what with it, and still ate mushrooms like he was touring with the Dead. Gathered them up at the farm down in Hume, where they grew in old cow shit.

  Aaron started tapping out a response – Minnie, you’ve got to stop texting me – but erased it.

  I can’t tonight, was what he ended up responding. My back is bad.

  He watched the three dots dance, feeling heavy.

  You find your key yet?

  Like a punch to the gut. There it was. Tingling, skin crawling with amoeba shapes, Aaron typed back, What do you mean?

  He waited, seeing no dots. He held his phone in one hand and rubbed his head with the other. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  Twice tonight, a trooper rolled by on the street out front. And it was a residential street, a dead end, no reason for troopers to be patrolling. He was being watched. It was that cop, Raleigh – Aaron was sure of it.

  Or maybe Minnie was fucking with him because he thought Aaron had talked to the cops.

  Which he had. Raleigh had gone to Minnie’s house right after picking up Aaron. Minnie was stupid, but not that stupid.

  Still no response. Which was worse.

  Aaron stood, paced to the other side of his bedroom. He could tell his father. That would be all it took to release himself from this terrible spell. He could say, Dad, you’re in trouble. One of the people in your twisted sex club killed Kasey Stevens. With my tool.

  His phone vibrated.

  Minnie: Never mind.

  Aaron let out a nervous breath. It wasn’t the best possible response from Minnie, it was ambiguous and kept Aaron on the line, but it would have to do. Slowly, he went back to his bed and lay down and stared up at the ceiling.

  He liked to think Kasey Stevens had escaped a worse fate. What happened to her was bad, man, it was sickening, but at least she wasn’t in this position. The one he was in now.

  All he wanted was out. To leave this place and never look back. And he was so close.

  Dammit! He could’ve left the week before. He’d gotten greedy. Thought he needed another grand when he should’ve been on the road with this place in his rearview mirror. His father, that psycho Logan Terrio with his death fetishes – all of it.

  If only he hadn’t agreed to come home. He’d been weak. But he hadn’t been free at college. He’d still felt it, the connection to his father and to Freedom Mission. Still tethered by an invisible string. He’d needed his own money.

  Now, if he said anything, not only would his father beat the shit out of him – no one would believe him anyway. Jeremiah Mosier would see to that. He’d say that Aaron was a mental case – and he’d have the records to prove it. School records. Seeing counselors. Going on Effexor. Mixing that with Ecstasy. No one would believe a word he said, and his father knew it.

  No one would believe he knew who killed Kasey Stevens – or strongly suspected. He was pretty sure when the blade with the number 3 handle had gone missing. For one thing, the guy he suspected had come in for the start of a tattoo the day before Kasey was murdered. And then the day after, he’d returned to get it finished, like he was putting the scalpel back.

  It wasn’t uncommon for people to come in a few times in a row when they were getting a substantial piece done. But considering who this guy was? And what he was having inked into his skin?

  Aaron rolled over, his heart knocking against his rib cage.

  Probably worst of all though, he knew that if he went to the cops, even if they did believe him, and he was right, that wouldn’t be the end for him. Because once you started down that road, everything came out. They’d get his DNA, and who knows – with today’s technology, they’d know he used to mess around with Kasey, too. That his father had encouraged it.

  Yeah. He’d go to prison, where men twice his size would beat and rape him.

  He put his hand over his face and cried into his palm.

  Maybe it was what he deserved.

  Reed was crawling into bed when Kruse called. “We got the phones.”

  “And? Don’t tease me. I’ve been let down too many times.”

  “No texts,” Kruse said. “Nothing the five days prior to her death. It’s like she was planning on dying and frustrating us.”

  “Or leaving,” Reed said, and laid out the theory of Daryl Snow picking up Kasey from Aimee Hetfield’s as part of her escape. Sending her off by tractor-trailer.

  “That could be it,” Kruse said. “But I found something else. In Snow’s paperwork, office receipts – he bought a TracFone. A prepaid.”

  Reed paused. “You held that back for dramatic effect, or what?”

  “A little,” Kruse admitted. “Could be he bought it for her. Just so they could have a little hidden communication, lending to our theory.”

  “I bet so.”

  “Okay, so, but if he picks her up, then what happened?”

  “Someone stopped them. At the park. Maybe Daryl put up a fight, and that’s how he got the black eye. Then whoever it was chased Kasey down.”

  “That kind of rules out Julia Hetfield?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think we can be sexist in this case.”

  “Julia,” Kruse agreed, “or Ida – she’s scrappy – and they both have motives?”

  “Ida much more so. Be tough to convince a jury that Julia wanted to keep Kasey quiet so badly that she killed her, strangled her hard enough to crack bones, and carved her up. Plus, I don’t get the sense that Julia is ideologically driven.”

  “She just likes to get ridden by the biker guy,” Kruse said.

  Reed ignored the crassness.

  Then: “So how’s our friend Minnie?”

  “He’s good. Cooperative. Says he would’ve made a great cop.”

  “I bet he did,” Reed said. “Did Aaron Mosier respond to his text?”

  “Yeah. Just like you said, though, he seemed onto it. Standoffish.”

  Reed scratched around the stitches in his leg and thought about it. “We’re holding a lot over Cox. Giving those kids mushrooms…”

  “He’s done everything but admit it. He wants to. He wants to tell us where he gets them, too. It’s just got to be a sweet deal for him.”

  “What else about the phones? Anything?”

  “Nothing else about the phones,” Kruse said.

  “Except a question: Why does a girl, sixteen, not have any texts for five days? Because she’s up to something. She’s lying low. And the last phone call on there is to Aimee, and it’s the day before Kasey is killed. A two-minute call. We can ask Aimee, but my guess is, it’s about arranging the study date. I mean, they knew what they were doing. This was a plan to get her out.”

  “And then, like you say, someone stopped them.”

  Reed remembered the vomit on the side of the road.

  Mushrooms made you throw up…

  “Maybe they were already stopped,” he said.

  He envisioned Daryl Snow driving her, taking those
same roads he did on that first morning, to get to the diner. But Kasey, sick, asks him to pull over. He does – but so does someone else. Someone who’s been following them…

  A vehicle pulling off behind Daryl and Kasey, just a shadow behind the wheel. Does he or she have an intent to kill Kasey then and there? Or do things escalate?

  Well, if the killer has a lancet in his or her back pocket…

  Daryl and the killer struggle; Kasey runs off into the woods…

  Kruse said, “Anyway, I sent it all to your email – what little there is.”

  “Thank you, David.”

  “I still feel like a mosquito at a nudist colony,” Kruse said a moment later.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “So much work to do.”

  Reed said, “I’m aware of what I’m up against, trust me. I don’t want to put beliefs in jail. I want to put people in jail. But the way I see it, we’re looking for a true believer. Someone who couldn’t get what he or she wanted from Kasey Stevens. And they branded her. When she wouldn’t go along, they killed her and branded her with that thing. Either declaring what they thought was her selfishness, or their own. Like a confession. We need to find that TracFone.”

  “Unless it’s gone,” Kruse said.

  “Yeah. Unless it’s gone.”

  25

  Day Five

  Burning in hell

  While in the shower, getting cleaned up to return upstate – and it was a pain to work around the big plastic wrap on his leg – he missed a call from Chuck Dearing, the arson investigator.

  Still toweling off, Reed called back. “Hey, Chuck. What do we got?”

  “Well, we got certitude on the cause of the fire and the use of accelerant – nothing we didn’t talk about already, but that’s all formal in the paperwork I sent to your office this morning.”

  “Great.” Reed dropped the towel and pulled on some jeans.

  “And I got all the pictures up online for you. I’ll send along the link.”

  “Thanks. Hey – can you send everything along to my partner?” He gave Dearing Virginia’s email.

  “Sure,” Dearing said. “And I’ve got the inventory log – most everything we found that wasn’t burned beyond recognition. Over two hundred items.”

  “Perfect. And the deed on the house?”

  “Just have to stop at the county clerk.”

  “Thanks, Chuck.”

  After Reed hung up, he sat on the bed and pulled on socks and shoes, still dripping from his too-long hair. The socks were a present from Jess, years before. He picked up the phone again and called her, impulsively.

  She sounded worried. “Reed?”

  “Everything’s fine. Hoping I could say hi to Mike. He around? Or has he gone to school already?”

  “It’s Memorial Day weekend.”

  Reed whipped his head around, looking for a calendar, forgetting he didn’t own one. “Is it? Okay, yeah. But it’s Friday.”

  “The school had some snow days they didn’t use.” Jessica paused. Her voice flattened: “You saw him on Tuesday this week.”

  Reed’s attention sharpened. “I know when I saw him, Jess. I saw him on day two of a murder case.” Feeling the rise in blood, he willed himself calm. “How did he do the rest of the week?”

  “He’s fine. I’m sorry you had to… I’m sorry how it happened in the middle of things for you.”

  “I’m sorry I left that message. I was riled up. And we’ve got Principal Gleason saying Mike’s got ADD–”

  “He doesn’t have ADD,” Jessica said. “He’s just unmotivated.”

  “Well, he’s a teenager, I mean…”

  “Reed, I don’t want to argue with you.”

  “Who’s arguing? Just because he’s not a little kid anymore doesn’t mean I don’t have input.”

  “Reed, we’ve talked about this. And I’m on my way out the door. But we do need to go over it, yes. When you can.”

  Reed took a cleansing breath. “Fine. Yeah. Can I talk to him, though? He’s probably sleeping…”

  “He’s with Eric.”

  “Oh. Don’t know Eric.”

  “Eric is my boyfriend.” A pause. The fish tank bubbled. Jessica said, “They’re just running a few errands together.”

  Reed let it roll through his brain like a boulder.

  She asked, “How long are you around?”

  “Just this morning. I’ve gotta head into the office for a minute, then go back up there to Elliston.”

  “Are you close? I read about it.” There was real concern in her voice. “That poor girl.”

  There was a long pause, and Reed knew Jess was thinking about their daughter, because he was. When you lost a child – literally had one go missing – you became part of a group. People who had lost their children similarly to you, but also anyone who had ever had something tragic happen in their family. Something you never got over. Ever. Something for which there was no closure. Not for anyone. Not the parent of a dead child, not the victim of rape. There was only the yearning to go back in time and change the outcome. And that yearning, maybe, you learned to live with.

  “I’m close,” he said to her, feeling an unexpected surge of emotion. His lip twitched a little, as if with extra electricity. “Yeah. I’m close.”

  “Good,” she said quietly.

  After she was gone, he set the phone down on his desk and looked at it, thinking about what to text to his son. First, he got his laptop out and booted it up, opened his email and saw the link from Chuck Dearing. It took him to a page with over three hundred images. Reed whistled softly, then went and got a cup of coffee from the kitchen. Still shirtless, he sat down again and went through the images of the burned-down house. The photos were labeled. After looking through a few wide shots, he jumped to the group Tyson’s Room. There wasn’t much to look at, not even a structure. Just a pile of charred rubble.

  Dearing, though, had attached notes to a few of the images.

  One read, Carving in the wood?

  Reed leaned for a closer look. What was that? An overhead beam? Some houses had exposed beams as part of the style. He needed to see what the house had looked like before the fire had ruined it all.

  There were more pictures. The beam actually had several symbols across it, standing out against the dark stain. The section of timber had been untouched by the fire.

  After staring a little longer, Reed made another call. Virginia answered on the second ring.

  “Hey,” Reed said. “You get any sleep?”

  “A little.”

  “Had a chance to check your email yet?”

  “I just got on. What’s this… this is from the fire investigation?”

  “Yeah,” Reed said.

  “Lot of pictures.”

  “Check out image 133. Tyson was carving things into the house just before it burned? Or not as recent as that? Dearing’s note here says sometime in the recent past. That’s not so helpful.”

  “Hang on,” Virginia said. “I’m looking… Got a slow connection this morning for some reason. Okay – I’m there. The exposed beam?”

  “133 through 141. There’s a whole bunch of these things if you look right.”

  “A triangle with an eye in it,” Virginia observed. “How about that?”

  “And there’s a circle with another crescent circle on top of it.”

  “I can kind of make that out. Like a symbol for a horned god. If you’re into witchcraft, anyway. Okay. Wow, yeah. And that one right there, that one looks like Hecate’s wheel.”

  He was lost. “Which picture?”

  “Go to the next one. 139. Down at the bottom. It’s pretty burned up.”

  He saw it: a circle with some squiggly lines in the middle, almost like a maze. “Hecate’s what?”

  “If that’s what it is, um, if I remember Hecate’s wheel, it’s the symbol for womanhood. Or, what it is – the stages of womanhood. Maiden, mother, and crone. Something like that.”

  They were both qu
iet for a while. He could hear Virginia clicking keys as she scrolled through the images. “If anything, this is pretty standard witchcraft stuff. It’s not Iroquois.”

  He heard more clicking.

  Virginia said, “It says here, what I’m looking at in this witchcraft book, these symbols, Hecate’s wheel, the others, carved in like this, this is to ensure safe passage of the soul into the next realm. To avoid hell, basically.”

  “To avoid hell,” he repeated softly. “Huh.”

  “Hey listen, Reed – I need to go get a cup of coffee, put my face on. Can I get back to you in a bit?”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  “No. Not at all. Just – a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”

  “Talk to you soon.”

  He put on a clean shirt and picked up his phone again. Mike, hope you have a good day. I love you, buddy. He sent that before overthinking it and made some breakfast – eggs and bacon he’d bought the night before. He kept looking at the house photos while he ate, and then opened Dearing’s inventory on recovered household items.

  Damn, a lot of stuff. Mostly electronics, plastic, all of that turned to mush in a fire. Could some of that plastic goo have once been a prepaid phone?

  Furniture was toast; clothes, forget it. But metal things survived. Guns, jewelry, things like that.

  With something specific in mind, Reed scrolled down the alphabetized list to the Ks.

  There were eight entries for keys: house keys, car keys, gun cabinet keys, gun lock keys, toolshed lock keys, and three unidentified keys.

  Mimicking Kruse from the other day, he said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner.”

  Back in the damn van, getting a cup of coffee and a paper. The Albany Tribune. Reed sat in the front seat of the Ford and drank and read.

  Marrs wrote well. And the gist of it was:

  1971. Republic Steel closes, putting eighty miners out of work. They return to their families, their wives and children, with nothing. A few manage to move on, find other gainful employment. Most do not. Several succumb to drinking and depression. Others, such as Jim Paine, leave and are never heard from again.