Every Dark Place

by Craig Smith

  Also by Craig Smith

  The Whisper of Leaves

  Cold Rain

  The Painted Messiah

  The Blood Lance

  EVERY DARK PLACE

  CRAIG SMITH

  Copyright

  Myrmidon Books Ltd

  Rotterdam House

  116 Quayside

  Newcastle upon Tyne

  NE1 3DY

  www.myrmidonbooks.com

  Published by Myrmidon 2012

  Copyright © Craig Smith 2012

  Craig Smith has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-905802-746

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  In loving Memory of my father, Stanley Smith, and my nephew, David Smith.

  Too soon gone.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I Legends

  Chapters 1 - 9

  Part II Whispers

  Chapters 10 - 18

  Part III Judgement

  Chapters 19 - 30

  Part IV The Devil's Waersger

  Chapters 31 - 37

  Part V Treasures of Darkness

  Chapters 38 - 50

  Part VI Comes an Old Man

  Chapters 51 - 77

  Part VII Treasures of the Snow

  Chapters 78 - 95

  Part VIII The Daughters of Job

  Chapter 96 - 104

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Night.

  MISSY WORTH WEPT AS SHE STOOD in the trough of earth that was to be her grave. She wore only the rags that had once been her underwear. She was a tall, willowy girl of seventeen, never beautiful like her sister Mary but pretty and fun. Not made for something like this.

  She could not remember the last time she had slept or think back to a time when her bones did not ache. They were standing in a field… somewhere. Trees stood between them and the river. It was raining and dark and cold. She had not seen sunlight from the start.

  Will stood outside the grave and watched her dig. His face in shadow, he was dressed in jeans and an army fatigue jacket. His hands were plunged deep in his jacket pockets. A baseball bat lay at his feet. It was filthy with the blood of the others.

  ‘That’s good enough,’ he said. His voice was hardly more than a whisper. ‘Now put the shovel here.’ He pointed his toe to a place next to the bat.

  ‘Don’t do this to me, Will!’ Missy Worth’s cry echoed back from the trees.

  ‘I want you to lie down, Missy.’

  Missy’s body shuddered. She wrapped her arms around her chest, twisting nervously.

  ‘Will, you promised!’

  ‘Missy, lie down in your grave.’ When she still hesitated he touched the bat with his toe purposefully. ‘You heard me.’

  Missy tumbled back into the mud unable to keep from bawling. ‘Not the bat! Please, Will, not that!’

  ‘Lie down like you’re going to sleep, and I won’t use it on you.’ His voice was soft, insistent.

  Missy’s teeth chattered. Her throat and mouth made sounds she no longer controlled.

  Will picked up the shovel. Starting at her feet he began dropping the heavy earth on her. Missy pleaded softly as he covered her feet and legs. Her body trembled as she struggled for control.

  A heavy shovelful of mud dropped on her belly, and Missy could not help herself. She began to cry loudly. It was a sound of another’s voice. It was another’s death she watched. Will placed several scoops almost delicately over Missy’s chest. He continued heaping it up until clods began to run over her neck. The whole dark mountain of it began shaking as she convulsed in terror.

  She was certain he meant here meant to cover her face, but he stopped at this point. When he knelt down, leaning his face toward her own, Missy stopped her prayers and pleadings. She listened with the attentiveness of an errant lover hoping to be forgiven.

  ‘If I could only trust you, Missy...’

  A breath of hope stirred. ‘You can, Will! I swear to God you can!’

  ‘You say that now, but they’ll ask you… and they’ll keep on asking you. Finally, you’re going to think you have to tell them something.’

  ‘No!’ Missy rocked her head back and forth. Tears ran wildly across her cheeks. The weight of the earth made it hard to breathe, but she nearly shouted the words. ‘I won’t! I won’t say anything, Will!’

  ‘You’ll think I can’t hurt you anymore. That’s what they’ll tell you, too. They’ll promise to protect you…’

  ‘I know you can hurt me.’

  ‘I’ll come back for you if you’re lying, Missy. I’ll come back from the dead, if I have to.’

  ‘I won’t talk, Will. I swear to God I won’t!’

  After a moment of consideration Will said, ‘What are you going to tell them when they ask?’

  Missy felt a spasm of joy tearing through her. She did not want to die. Not tonight. Not like this. ‘I’ll say it was always dark. I never saw your face!’

  ‘Is that a promise? Are you going to keep your word, if I trust you?’

  ‘YES!’

  Will Booker stood up. ‘You know, I think I believe you, Missy. Just so you believe me.’

  The gunshot came as a surprise. Missy heard the echo crackling back from the trees as she was gasping at the incredible pain in her chest. She tasted earth, her scream strangling in her throat.

  The next bullet jolted her, hitting below the ribs. She heard the second echo from the trees. She saw the smoke rising oddly from Will’s jacket pocket. She searched the shadow of his face.

  Missy wanted to speak, but if she could say something, she was not sure what it would be.

  Perhaps only, ‘This is exactly what I deserve.’

  The last bullet came without echo, punching into the bone at the centre of her chest.

  Part I Legends

  Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool in his folly.

  Proverbs 17: 12

  Chapter ust

  Wednesday 9:32 a.m., March 17.

  ‘TRUEBLOOD,’ I SAID into my cell phone.

  ‘Rick?’

  I had known Pat Garrat’s secretary nearly four years. Even on the phone I knew she had bad news. I could even guess how bad it was. ‘Yeah, Sandy,’ I answered, my left hand on the steering wheel of my big county-issue sedan, the right up by my ear.

  ‘Garrat wants to see you as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ll be there in half-an-hour.’ I put my phone back in my pocket and pulled into a farmer’s driveway so I could turn around. I had been firming up a list of witnesses about a burglary spree the sheriff’s department had interrupted a few weeks earlier. We needed live bodies in the witness stand so a jury could understand the nature and extent of the damage these kids had done. Naturally folks were reluctant to help. About half of them wanted their stuff back without b
othering to take a day or two off to see justice done. The others worried about retribution.

  And why not? The thieves were juveniles; no matter what we did they were going to get another chance and sometimes second chances take the form of revenge. I was too old to marvel at such legal niceties, but for the past couple of days I had been telling people that when the prosecutor finished with these thieves, they weren’t going to remember who testified. All they would be thinking about was getting out of Shiloh County! It was a method that worked with a lot of people. Pat Garrat was new to office but as tough as tempered steel. Remind them who was running things, and they would get a smile and tell me I was probably right.

  Of course there were some of the older ones who told me Pat Garrat was not half the politician her daddy had been. I never disagreed with such sentiment, and I had been hearing it since Garrat had started campaigning for the prosecutor’s office over a year ago. I would answer instead that I had had the honour of working for Governor Pat Garrat and that in my opinion no one was ever going to be the equal of that Pat Garrat, but if anyone was going to get close to his sort of integrity his little girl had the best chance. More often than not people got a look of hope that comes when something grand is stirring to life.

  I took State Road 159 north into metropolitan Hegira, blinked, and hit the raw open countryside again. I passed through yellow fields in fallow, vast acreage of farmland ploughed and disked to a wet black and waiting seed, a smattering of woods, and small clumps of working class houses trying to be a suburb. The countryside was breaking out of wintertime, but a cold mist took away the pleasure of it.

  I GOT BACK TO the office close to forty-five minutes after Sandy’s call and left the parking lot whistling contentedly. At the north door I passed through the security checkpoint, then ambled on until I came to the county prosecutor’s suite of offices. Garrat had seven prosecutors, a couple of them looking to be very decent lawyer-types if you could forgive them their green, but they were all young. In a particularly morose period of my life – as I recall it was a week or so after Will Booker’s appeal case broke over us like a canker sore – I had tried to decide if all the lawyers together, including Pat Garrat, had as much work experience as I did. When I finished the tally, I still had room for the three paor he ralegals and Sandy Willis, who was huffing her way toward a reluctant early middle age. After that only my bartender could console me. She said if I was counting real work, there wasn’t a soul in Shiloh Springs with less experience than I had.

  There was a smoked glass window from floor to ceiling next to the entrance of Garrat’s outer office. I usually checked myself in its pale reflection just to make sure I was not going to be mistaken for a lawyer. This morning there was no chance. With more than a bit of the barn about me, I actually looked like a conservation officer. Country folks have an unusual hierarchy, with conservation officers standing several rungs above investigators for the prosecutor’s office.

  A little straw stuck in your pants cuff will get you through a farmhouse door a lot faster than a badge, so I had purposely dressed the part.

  I smiled at my reflection like an old friend, pretty much the only one I had – at least the only one I could trust. I stand an inch over six feet and weigh a few pounds beyond the two hundred ten mark. My chest is broader than my waist by a whisker, and I am as bald as a friar.

  Handsome as a sunrise, too, even if I do say so myself. Fifty-eight years can kill a lot of moral failings in a man but not his vanity. Vanity needs the grave to stop it cold.

  I RAISED MY EYEBROWS when I opened the door. ‘How is she doing?’ I asked in a whisper.

  Sandy was on the phone, but her saucer-sized eyes and wagging chin let me know things were not good. I went down a long hall to the last door on the left, my cubbyhole. There I dropped off my winter coat and slipped on a wrinkled wool sports jacket. It was a good cut of cloth but older than most of our lawyers. I got a tiny notebook that fit into my frayed jacket pocket, bummed a Bic pen from Sandy’s desk on the way back in exchange for a confidential wink, and then got some coffee.

  I went through Garrat’s door without knocking. Garrat, Steve Massey and Linda Sutherlin, the paralegal, were at Garrat’s conference table just to the left of the entryway.

  Massey was in a trial lawyer’s uniform, a three-piece wool blend in midnight blue with a scarlet tie hanging under his square chin. He had dark brown hair that had a few nice waves and a rambunctious curl or two to finish the effect. He wore old horn rim glasses for reading, and loved nothing better in the courtroom than to take them off with a flourish, imagining, I suppose, a startling transformation. In my opinion it was wasted effort. With or without them, Massey had an expression that looked like wildlife caught in the headlights.

  Linda Sutherlin sat between Massey and the chair I usually grabbed. Sutherlin wore a black slip and, as far as I could tell, nothing else but shoes. She was rail-thin and kept a spike through her nose and another at the bottom of her lower lip. It was my studied opinion that Sutherlin used the extra weight to keep from blowing away. She had a few miscellaneous rings on her fingers, a studded band about her neck, and one tattoo that I could see: the word MOM written in a shaky scrawl high up on her thigh.

  ‘You’re late, Rick,’ Garrat announced.

  It wasn’t a tone I especially took to, even from Pat Garrat, but I didn’gh t It answer it in kind.

  ‘Traffic,’ I lied. Knowing I had been down in Hegira, which doesn’t even make most maps,

  Garrat gave me a long, smouldering glare, and I braced myself for a weird ride.

  Chapter 2

  Wednesday 10:30 a.m., March 17.

  AS FAR AS BOSSES WENT, Pat Garrat was usually the stuff of dreams. She was honest, full of wit, and had more than her fair share of empathy for what other people were up against. But sometimes, backed into a corner and her political career in jeopardy, she could get as cranky as the best of them. My guess was cranky flew right by about an hour ago. Garrat was working on a full blown tear.

  All the same, she was a beautiful woman. She was thirty-one and possessed an athlete’s body. It was compact, muscular and so full of grace the photographers could not take a bad picture. Her hair was a simple wash and wear, a dirty stone-blonde that fit the image of a serious woman. In the wind, she looked positively philosophical. She had a square, forthright face and a quick, lively smile that did not look put on even when it was. Never hurried and never slowing down for distractions, Pat Garrat had always seemed a child of destiny.

  I had known her when she was still called Patty. After her father’s assassination, which I had watched in horror, we both left the Governor’s mansion and went our separate ways. She was in law school when I met up with her again. The occasion was not a happy one for either of us and nothing had come of that reunion but a lot of talk and another funeral.

  When Garrat had finished law school the following year, I saw in the local paper that she was joining an elite firm of attorneys over in the capital but that she had moved back to the family farm, just east of Shiloh Springs. I thought then she was setting roots even while she was off building bridges, and I was right. Just under three years later, the boys of the club offered her a partnership but Garrat resigned on friendly terms to open her shop ‘back home.’ It was a manoeuvre worthy of her daddy and undoubtedly a part of the grand scheme, though she had never admitted to anyone that she had ambition for political office.

  Garrat called me the moment she began contemplating the opening of her new office and asked me if I would be her full-time private investigator. It was pretty much what I had been doing for about six different law offices on a piecemeal basis anyway. But neither the ease of the job transition nor the relative security she was offering me meant very much. I joined up with Pat Garrat because I knew where she was going, and I wanted to be with her when she arrived.

  ‘Will Booker just got his conviction overturned,’ Garrat told me, though I had already guessed that much. I tried to act sur
prised, but the effort was wasted. Garrat was looking right through me. ‘That’s the bad news,’ she announced. ‘The really bad news is Judge Lynch has given us sixty days to bring him to trial or he walks.’