“Yes, Lindsay’s dangerous,” she said. To both of us.
***
Long past dinnertime, Tom made a cold ham and cheese sandwich and ate it standing in his kitchen. The relentless pain around his nose and eyes had spread, and now his head felt like an over-inflated balloon ready to explode. He wanted to toss down a pain pill and collapse into bed, but first he intended to read more of Meredith’s manuscript. Something was going on in this case that he either didn’t know about yet or didn’t understand. If the answer lay in the past, he hoped Meredith had included it in her fictionalized account. Whether he would recognize it when he came across it was another question.
Billy Bob scarfed down his own meal and topped it with a long slurpy drink that nearly emptied his water bowl. After refilling the bowl, Tom grabbed the case containing the CD from the kitchen table. “Come on, boy,” he said to his dog. “Let’s go read a novel.”
Billy Bob trotted alongside him down the hall to the home office that had once belonged to John Bridger, Tom’s father. The only sound in the house was the click of the bulldog’s nails on the floor.
When Tom’s relationship with Rachel had begun back in January, he’d been pathetically optimistic, imagining a wedding within a few months. Rachel’s presence would bring this quiet house to life again, and before long they’d have a couple of kids running around the place. The problem with that dream was that Rachel didn’t share it. They’d become intimate physically, but she kept her heart and mind locked away, out of his reach.
Lindsay, he knew, imagined herself living here as his wife, the mother of his children. She apparently still clung to the hope that Tom would come back to her if Rachel were out of the picture. But even if he’d lost Rachel, he wouldn’t make the mistake of getting involved with Lindsay again.
He sat at the desk in the office and booted up his computer. Dwelling on what had happened with Rachel was pointless. A waste of emotional and mental energy when he needed to be sharp and get this damned case closed before anybody else ended up dead. But the realization that his relationship with Rachel was probably over sat in his mind like a boulder that he would have to work around.
Billy Bob settled on the floor with a deep sigh and closed his eyes. Tom opened Meredith’s file and clicked through to the spot where he’d stopped reading the day before. The narrator, the young Meredith, had just caught Chad—Cam—kissing Celia, who was apparently meant to be Karen Richardson, now Hernandez. Tom expected to read about consequences, turmoil in the VISTA ranks, escalating hostility between Meredith and Karen. Instead, the story focused for several chapters on Cam’s pet project, an outdoor drama about the history of the Melungeons in Appalachia. Charged with writing the play script, Meredith had interviewed Melungeon residents of the county, some of whom Tom recognized from her descriptions. Cam was busy with production and recruiting local people for the project.
Karen/Celia was still around, still making Meredith uneasy. But the local girl named Donna had quickly become a bigger problem. Although she wasn’t Melungeon, Chad/Cam chose her for a starring role in the play.
Meredith had written:
Donna was shameless—brazen. She placed herself in Chad’s path at every opportunity, and she was always taking him off to a corner to have a private talk. When she looked at him, anybody could see that she wanted him. She was his to take anytime he liked.
Interesting, Tom thought. He was sure that Donna was Scotty Ragsdale’s older sister, Denise. Meredith hadn’t bothered to alter the fact that her parents owned the county’s only hardware and lumber store. Tom hadn’t heard of any friction between Meredith and Denise, though. Scotty said they were friends. Maybe this conflict over Chad/Cam was something Meredith invented to give her story more tension. Tom reminded himself that he was reading a novel, not an autobiography, despite the similarities to Meredith’s real life.
Leaning back in his chair, he pressed a hand to his aching forehead. He’d hoped to get all the way through the manuscript tonight, but he could see that wasn’t going to happen. Pain pills and sleep were all he wanted. A night of rest and recuperation would help him see the evidence more clearly.
Chapter Thirty-three
Tom leaned against the wall opposite the cell and watched Scotty Ragsdale pick at the lavish breakfast his mother had brought in. Pancakes doused with syrup, half a dozen slices of bacon, scrambled eggs, two biscuits, a thermos of homemade coffee. The aromas made Tom’s mouth water—his breakfast had consisted of a bowl of cold cereal and a cup of coffee that he’d brewed too weak—but Ragsdale seemed unmoved by the bounty on his plate. After a few bites of the eggs he set the tray aside on his bunk.
“No appetite?” Tom asked.
Ragsdale shook his head. “My mouth tastes like a toilet bowl.” He glanced at Tom and winced. “Holy shit. Did I do that to you?”
“Oh, yeah. And you socked Brandon Connelly in the jaw. With your head. Remember any of that?”
“A little. It’s pretty vague.”
“Do you remember going to Lloyd Wilson’s place yesterday morning?”
“Wilson?” Ragsdale’s gaze connected with Tom’s for a second, then flicked away, as an expression of pure horror came over his face. He sounded breathless when he spoke again. “What happened at his place?”
“He’s dead. Shot at close range.”
Ragsdale hung his head, gripping it with both hands. “And you think I did it.”
“Did you?”
“I don’t remem—No. No.” He shook his head vigorously.
“Maybe your memory will improve after you’ve been here a while longer.”
Ragsdale shoved himself to his feet and stepped over to the bars. “Listen, Tom, I need to get out of here. It’s important. I’ve got—” He paused and seemed to search for a word. “Commitments.”
“When you get out is up to the judge. I can tell you the prosecutor’s going to ask for a high bail when you’re arraigned, and I think the judge will go along.”
Ragsdale was nodding impatiently. “When’s my arraignment?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I can’t stay here another night!”
“You don’t have a choice, Scotty. If you’ve got work lined up, it’ll have to wait.”
Grasping two of the bars, Ragsdale leaned his forehead against them and closed his eyes. He whispered, speaking to himself, “It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.”
Tom was about to press on with more questions when Dennis Murray flung open the door into the cell block. “Hey, Tom, come here,” the sergeant said, with a wave of his hand. “Something’s come up.”
A cold dread descended on Tom. What now? Please, God, not another killing.
They moved into the jailer’s office before Dennis spoke. “We got a call from Matt Dolan.” Dolan was sheriff in a neighboring county. “They found Karen Hernandez’s car.”
***
Ninety minutes later, Tom followed Sheriff Matt Dolan along a narrow trail into the pine woods, with Dennis and Brandon bringing up the rear. The forest birds had fallen silent, but cicadas kept up a steady drone.
Dolan, a burly ex-Marine with a gray crewcut, said over his shoulder, “It’s just lucky those two hikers felt like they had to report it. Most people wouldn’t have bothered.” He chuckled. “I could name a few that would’ve tried to salvage it. We don’t see many Jaguars free for the taking. But they’d need a crane to lift it out of that ravine.”
Tom swatted away a cloud of gnats. “Have your people found any evidence on the scene since you called us?”
“Naw, I didn’t let my deputies go down there tramping around. All I did was check to make sure nobody was in the vehicle. I didn’t even open a door. If there’s anything to find, the State Police techs’ll spot it. They oughta be here any time now.”
Driving a car into the woods along this path couldn’t have been easy, Tom thought as he pushed aside a low-hanging branch. About two hundre
d yards in, they came to the lip of a ravine. “There it is,” Dolan said.
They stood in a splash of sunlight, looking down the slope on the Jaguar that had come to rest at the bottom. The vehicle had landed upright, its nose shoved into a scraggly holly bush. Most of the car was covered with pine branches in an obvious attempt to hide it. The sight stirred a deep sense of foreboding in Tom. He could have been moving in the wrong direction on this case since day one.
Dolan lunged and stumbled down the slope like a drunken bear. Tom descended more slowly, letting his feet slide when they wanted to but somehow staying upright. Brandon and Dennis edged down the embankment after him.
While Dennis moved around the Jaguar with the camera, Tom and Brandon remained in place but scanned the ground for evidence. A hundred feet away, a jostling horde of turkey vultures tore at a deer carcass. Grunting and hissing, they seemed too occupied with their meal to mind the humans nearby. A dozen crows, denied places at the feast, protested from the skeleton of a dead tree.
“I don’t see a damned thing,” Tom muttered.
“Been so long since we had rain,” Dolan remarked, “the ground won’t even take a footprint.”
“What do you think?” Brandon asked Tom.
“I think we need to pop the trunk.” Tom asked Dolan, “You have any objection?”
“Not a one,” Dolan said. “I’ve got a crowbar in my truck. Be right back.”
As Dolan climbed back out of the ravine, Brandon said, “You think Mrs. Hernandez is in the trunk? Maybe she just abandoned the car because it’s too easy to spot.”
Tom shook his head. “First of all, how would she even know this ravine was here? And look at the size of some of these branches. It would have taken a lot of effort to haul them down here and throw them over the car. Then she’d have to get out of the area on foot. I think two people did this, and they left in a second vehicle.”
“Hey, Tom,” Dennis said, “come look at this.”
Tom joined him on the driver’s side of the car. The window was uncovered, the large branch that had hidden it pulled aside and dropped on the ground. Dennis pointed, and Tom leaned close to peer through the window. The glass had a skim of condensation on the inside, but Tom spotted what had caught Dennis’ attention. One section of the steering wheel bore a brownish-red stain—as if it had been gripped by a bloody hand.
“Let’s hope it’s not just dirt,” Tom said. “But either way, we might get prints.”
This situation was looking crazier by the minute. If the stain was blood, whose blood was it? Why would anybody be careless enough to leave a bloody hand print behind?
He moved around to the rear of the car, leaned close to the trunk, sniffed deeply. He picked up the odor of decomposition, but it was wafting over from the dead deer. The Jaguar was a luxury vehicle, and the trunk, like every other opening, would be well-sealed.
“Here we go,” Dolan called from the top of the slope, holding up a crowbar. They waited for him to descend. “Now then,” he said when he joined them, “let’s see what’s in there.”
Tom tried to keep his impatience in check as Dolan fussed with the crowbar, searching for the right angle to force the lock. When Dolan got the bar into position and pressed down on it, Tom held his breath, almost convinced by now that they would find Karen Hernandez’s decomposing body inside. The lid flew open.
The trunk was spotless, and empty except for an emergency jack and a set of jumper cables.
Chapter Thirty-four
“Oh, Rachel, please don’t.” Joanna emerged from the empty stall and faced Rachel in the stable’s wide center aisle. She held a bucket filled with fragrant grains she was distributing to all the stalls before the horses were brought in for the night. “What’s the point of listening to a bunch of ignorant people bitch about the police? They don’t understand what a murder investigation involves. All they’ll be doing is venting their frustration.”
“If anybody there believes I saw the killer,” Rachel said, “I want to set them straight.”
“Oh, dear lord, you’re going to stand up and speak?”
“Only if I have to. And I want to hear what they say about Ben.”
Joanna groaned. “Honey, you’re not Ben’s protector and defender. You don’t have to fight this battle for him. That’s his lawyer’s job.”
Rachel didn’t want to argue, so she let that pass. “I was hoping you’d come with me.”
“Oh no.” Joanna shook her head. “I couldn’t hold my temper in check. I’d probably start a riot. And I really do wish you wouldn’t go.”
“I’ll be okay.” Rachel paused. “Did you know that Lindsay is the one who talked her parents’ supporters into having this meeting?”
Joanna swung open the door to another stall. “I figured as much. She’s been on the phone a lot, and she’s been out and about, seeing people. Well, maybe it’ll backfire on her. Tom’s going to have a fit when he realizes she’s behind it.”
***
The sky was still bright when Rachel set off, but the sinking sun splashed streaks of purple and gold over the clouds above the hills. Within an hour full darkness would descend. If the meeting were being held deep in Rocky Branch District, Rachel would have skipped it rather than venture into that alien territory alone at night, but the consolidated middle school straddled the district’s boundary.
She had imagined, feared, a huge turnout, with hundreds of people screaming for Ben’s arrest, but she was relieved to find no more than three dozen vehicles in the school’s parking lot. Six Sheriff’s Department cruisers lined up nose to tail along one edge of the lot, and two cable TV trucks sat near the building’s entrance.
A few people stood talking in small groups outside the door, but Rachel didn’t know any of them and she didn’t acknowledge their stares on her way in.
When she reached the auditorium, she immediately spotted Lindsay in the first row, shaking hands and speaking with the people who formed a small crowd before her. One woman after another leaned to kiss Lindsay’s cheek. Playing the role of the grieving daughter to the hilt, Rachel thought. She had no idea how much sadness Lindsay actually felt over the deaths of her parents. It was possible that she viewed it as an opportunity for gain rather than as a loss.
About fifty adults and a handful of adolescents had gathered in the auditorium. Several teenage boys talked and laughed at the back of the room. Half a dozen deputies, including Brandon and the Blackwood twins, stood along the side walls. The press swarmed the area between seats and stage with their notebooks and cameras at the ready, probably excited that something they could tape for TV was finally about to happen.
Rachel took a seat several rows behind Lindsay. On the stage, Tom inclined his head to listen to Sheriff Willingham. They weren’t looking at the audience, and Rachel doubted Tom had seen her come in. Even from a distance, his swollen, discolored eye and nose looked awful. Brandon had come to the cottage the night before with a black and blue jaw, and he’d told Rachel and Holly the story of Scotty Ragsdale’s arrest. Tom should be at home, taking time to heal, but he’d probably been working with little rest since—Stop it, Rachel told herself. He doesn’t want your concern.
Tom stood stiff and grim-faced beside the sheriff while the last of the arrivals trickled in and the crowd settled down. For a second Rachel thought Tom’s eyes connected with hers, and she quickly looked away.
A plump, white-haired man in a short-sleeved shirt opened the meeting with a prayer. “Dear Lord,” he intoned in a deep, resonant voice that was made for preaching, “we beseech thee to welcome our friends Cameron and Meredith into your loving presence and grant them eternal peace. We beg you to extend your loving hand to their daughter and bless her in her time of loss.”
Cameras whirred, focused on the speaker from the floor in front of the stage. At the mention of Lindsay, all of them swung around and trained their lenses on her. She kept her head bowed, her pale hair falling forward over
her cheeks. Murmurs of “amen” rose from the crowd.
The man at the podium concluded his prayer and launched into a speech. “Many years ago, two young people came to our community with the intention of giving one year of their lives in service to the poorest, the most needy, among us.” His voice swelled with emotion. “Little did any of us know that they would devote the rest of their lives to that service, and they would give of themselves without regret or expectation of repayment. Many of us can point to the ways our own lives are better because of Cameron and Meredith. They were our champions. They stood by our sides through many battles, and when we wearied they fought on alone.”
One person’s pest is another’s hero, Rachel thought. She was willing to believe the Taylors had done some good, although Cam’s methods also made enemies. What had the Taylors’ home life been like? What had they done to produce such a scheming, ruthless daughter?
“Now a monster has come among us,” the speaker went on, “and taken these dear friends from us. That monster remains right here in our peaceful community. We must not relax our vigilance. We must hold our families and neighbors close and let our love form a barrier against the darkest side of humanity. With God’s help we will crush the invader.”
“Amen!” the crowd answered.
Rachel cringed at this outrageous attempt to whip up fear and suspicion, although she had to concede the truth behind the overwrought warning. She was as frightened by the murders as anyone in the room, and she wouldn’t feel safe until the killer was caught. But these people were looking for an easy answer, and she wasn’t sure any of them had the patience to wait for the truth to emerge.
Some of the women present were weeping by the time the white-haired man called on Sheriff Willingham for an update on the investigation. Willingham fiddled with the microphone, loosing a screech of feedback, while cameras pointed at him. He cleared his throat and said, “I want to assure the community that we’re working on this twenty-four hours a day, and we won’t rest until we’ve got the killer in custody. My chief deputy is with me tonight, Captain Tom Bridger. A lot of you know Tom, and you knew his dad, John Bridger, a fine man who grew up in this part of the county. Tom’s heading up the day-to-day operations in this investigation, so I’m going to let him take your questions.”
Broken Places Page 20