by Debra Webb
“As long as the evil is broken, it is weak, but when it becomes whole, it gains strength. The pieces of evil have been shattered and scattered. They can never be pieced back together.” Her gaze lifted to Rowan’s. “But there is more. This is the reason you cannot falter.”
Rowan held her gaze a moment. “Me?”
“You are the undertaker now. You help the dead make the transition from this life to the next. You are her daughter. Only you have the power to stop this.”
“Do you mean him? Stop him? Dr. Julian Addington?”
“See,” she mused. “You do have the answers. What you do with those answers is up to you.”
Rowan thanked her and stood to go. She wanted to turn back to the woman and demand that she tell her more. What she had was nothing more than new riddles. So much talk but no explanations. No understanding of what any of this meant other than Julian was the enemy. Julian had to be stopped. She was the only one who could stop him. These things she knew.
Perhaps she did have the answers.
At the door she hesitated. She didn’t believe in any of this. Not the tarot cards, not the fortune-telling, none of it. She believed in what was real. Actions, reactions. What she could see and touch.
Despite this knowledge, she hesitated, her hand on the door, and turned back to the woman. “I don’t want to be the reason anyone else dies.”
“Then look for the one who can help you stop him. No one else can do it. Only you, but she can point you in the right direction.”
“The one?”
“She’s here already. She came a very long way to find you. You’ll see.”
Once again, the lady said plenty and yet nothing at all.
Charlotte waited in Rowan’s SUV. She had gone to the door with Rowan, but Alcott hadn’t wanted to see anyone but Rowan. Since there was a cop and an FBI agent parked in separate vehicles right behind Charlotte, Rowan hadn’t worried about her safety. To some degree she might have been safer out here than inside.
“Did you learn anything helpful?”
Rowan gave her a look that she hoped relayed the depth of her confusion. “I really have no idea.” She started the engine and shifted into Reverse. The vehicles behind her were already backing up. “She said a lot but not much that told me anything.”
“What now?”
Charlotte looked to Rowan. Rowan felt a weary smile nudge at her lips, but this was far from an uplifting moment. “You’re sure you want to keep getting deeper into this? This is not a game, Charlotte. A lot of people have died. I’m worried there will be more before this is over.”
She’d already warned her assistant and friend but the woman just wouldn’t listen. Rowan supposed how she felt about Charlotte refusing to bow out was the same way Billy was feeling about her insistence on seeing this through. The difference was that Rowan didn’t really have a choice. Charlotte could walk away without looking back.
Charlotte patted her thigh. “I’m not backing down, Ro. Besides, we’ve got our own private security parade.”
Rowan glanced in the rearview mirror as she turned back onto the road. The WPD cruiser followed right behind her, the unmarked sedan next. “This is true.”
“What’s the deal with this FBI guy who’s missing? Is he a friend of yours?”
Charlotte sat in the seat, her body angled slightly toward Rowan. From time to time she glanced behind them and then forward. Rowan had a feeling Charlotte was a little more anxious than she wanted to admit. Good. She should be afraid. This was a very dangerous situation.
“Josh Dressler.” Rowan braked for the stop sign where this side road intersected with the main highway. Another left and they would be headed back toward Winchester. “I’ve known him a long time. We’ve worked together on several cases but nothing more.”
“Oh.”
With no oncoming traffic, Rowan pulled out onto the highway. “Oh?”
“I just meant that Billy sort of looked a little, I don’t know, out of sorts about him.”
“Josh may have asked me out a few times,” Rowan said with all the nonchalance she could muster. “I always said no, but that didn’t stop him from asking again.”
“Josh.” Charlotte nodded. “I see.”
“No,” Rowan assured her. “You don’t see. There was no mutual attraction.”
“So what now?” Charlotte said, repeating her earlier question.
“Since you mentioned Josh, I think we’ll stop by the cemetery where he was allegedly last seen.”
Charlotte faced forward. “You think all those cops and feds investigating the scene at the cemetery might have missed something?”
Rowan shook her head. “I think that’s doubtful, but the lady who saw him may have left something out.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know it. I’m following up on a long shot.”
“This is what you did in Nashville. You worked with the detectives and offered suggestions on what they might have missed or where they might need to look next.”
“Basically.” Rowan glanced at her passenger again. “Did Billy tell you that?”
“No. Your dad. He was always bragging about you.”
Rowan smiled. “Thank you for telling me.”
No matter what secrets her father kept or what darkness he may have hidden, Rowan knew without doubt that he had loved her, that he was a good man.
Her mother was the questionable one.
Rowan parked on the street outside the main entrance to the cemetery. The DuPont family plot was still marked off as a crime scene. Didn’t matter. There was nothing there that Rowan needed to see this morning. With Charlotte at her side, Rowan knocked on the shop entrance of the witness who had seen Josh.
When the young woman opened the door, Rowan asked, “Delilah Dixon?”
“I’m Delilah Dixon,” she said, her voice steady but her expression wary.
“I wanted to ask you a few more questions about the man you saw in the cemetery night before last.”
Dixon rolled her eyes. “Seriously? How many more people am I going to have to talk to?”
Rowan purposely hadn’t identified herself in hopes the woman would assume she was another detective. “I assure you this is the only time you’ll have to worry about questions from me.”
“Fine. What is it you want to ask?”
Since she made no invitation to go inside but didn’t refuse to talk, Rowan proceeded. “Did you see a vehicle you didn’t recognize on the street or in the cemetery?”
Cars weren’t supposed to enter at this entrance, particularly after dark, but people didn’t always follow the rules.
“Like I told the others, I did not see any cars that don’t belong in this neighborhood. Lots of times people park along this block to carry flowers into the cemetery or just to visit their folks buried there, but it doesn’t usually happen so late in the evening. I guess that’s another reason I was so surprised to see someone in there. There was no car.”
“But he could have parked on another street and walked over.”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“Did you notice anything odd about him?” Rowan asked next. “Did he appear nervous or shaken or scared? Anything like that?”
“He seemed surprised to see me walk up.” She turned her hands up. She wore lots of rings, some on every finger as well as her thumbs. “Like he’d been lost in thought and I came upon him before he realized anyone was around.”
“Do you remember what he was wearing?”
“It was kind of dark.” Her face creased into a frown. “I think maybe he was wearing a suit.” She tugged at the lapels of her sweater. “You know, a jacket and trousers. Dark. Maybe navy or dark gray. It was just too dark to say for sure. I didn’t notice the color of his shirt.”
Which meant it was dark as well.
“You stated previously that he didn’t say anything to you—have you recalled differently since you were interviewed?”
She wagged her head side to side. “He just walked away when he saw me.”
“Which way did he go? Back toward the entrance or another way?”
She pointed to the entrance gate that faced her street. “He walked out that entrance.”
“So you watched him for a moment when he walked away?”
Her frown reappeared. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
“Which way did he go once he was outside the gate?”
“That way.” She pointed south. “Toward the funeral home.” Her gaze widened with recognition. “I know you. You’re the undertaker. Rowan DuPont.”
“Thank you, Ms. Dixon. We appreciate your help.”
Rowan hurried away before the lady could think of anything else to ask.
“He was at your family plot and walked toward the funeral home,” Charlotte said, quickening her stride to keep up with Rowan. “Sounds like he came here looking for you.”
If he had come to see Rowan, he would have shown up at her door or at Billy’s office. He hadn’t been looking for Rowan. He was watching her.
But why drop off the grid to do that?
* * *
A man sat on the bench near the entrance of the funeral home when Rowan and Charlotte pulled into the parking lot. From half a block away when Rowan first spotted someone on the bench, she had hoped it might be Josh. That perhaps he was ready to tell her whatever was going on.
But it wasn’t him.
Owen Utter.
The man who had lived next door to Antonio Santos. The Skin Man, as the FBI had dubbed him.
“Who’s he?”
“A witness in the Santos case.” Rowan shut off the engine. “You go on in and get started preparing for this evening’s viewing. I’ll see what Mr. Utter needs.”
Rowan glanced in the rearview mirror and noted the sedan on the street. She didn’t have to check to know that the WPD cruiser would be in his usual spot watching the back of the funeral home.
“You need to borrow Shorty?”
“No, thanks.” Rowan picked up her purse from the floorboard. “I have my own shorty.”
“Good for you.”
They climbed out at the same time. Charlotte unlocked the door and went inside. Rowan sat down on the bench next to Mr. Utter.
“I thought you moved away,” she said. He’d been MIA for months now. She’d tried to find him a couple of times to ask more questions about Santos—the neighbor he had known as Sanchez. No one seemed to have any idea what happened to the man. For such a small town, people seemed capable of disappearing quite easily.
“Nah, just found a new place to live. Too much excitement over there in Bell View. I needed someplace a little more quiet. I don’t like too much attention.”
Owen Utter was a short man, a little on the heavy side. Well into sixty. His gray hair was perpetually mussed. He’d led her and Billy into the woods to the place that turned out to be the burial grounds for all those remains. Twenty-six sets of human remains. More than two dozen murder victims right here in Franklin County they wouldn’t even have known about if they hadn’t found those faces and those books of skin in that low-budget little apartment rented by Antonio Santos, aka Carlos Sanchez.
“What brings you to see me?”
Rowan felt confident there was a reason Utter had shown his face again. He had to know the police had been looking for him. He was needed for further questioning related to Santos and all those dead people who had turned out to be serial killers. Not that he was really a suspect in their deaths but he had known the location of their remains.
“Someone gave me a message for you.” He looked directly at her now, his eyes wide as if the message was too much of a burden for him to continue carrying.
“Who?”
He shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know. He whispered it in my ear. I was sleeping but his voice woke me up.”
There was a strong possibility that this man suffered from some sort of mental health issue or was on some sort of drugs, prescription or otherwise. Any number of things could have caused him to have hallucinations, which was why she didn’t doubt that he believed someone had whispered a message to him. He assuredly would not have risked coming to see her otherwise. That said, whether there was any merit to his claim was a whole other story.
“All right, then. What did this unidentified person say to you?”
“It was a man.” He nodded adamantly. “The voice was a man’s. He whispered in my ear. Said I should give you a message.”
Rowan nodded, hoping he would spit it out.
“He said to tell you that he was here.”
Before she could stop the reaction, a shiver wiggled through her. Alcott had said someone was coming to see her but she’d said the person was a she. Maybe she’d only gotten half of her vision right.
Rowan barely resisted shaking her head at her own thoughts.
“Who is he, Mr. Utter? It doesn’t help if you don’t know who he is.”
“He said you would know.”
If anyone else told her she should already have the answer she was going to explode.
“Thank you, Mr. Utter. I appreciate you coming all this way to tell me. Can I take you home?”
If there was even a remote possibility that Julian had spoken to this man, Rowan needed to know where this happened. Julian could still be there. There was a very real possibility in Rowan’s opinion that he was in the Winchester area. Alcott had as same as said he was here. The card he’d sent Rowan had a Tullahoma postmark.
Utter shook his head fast enough to give himself whiplash and shot to his feet. “No thanks. Take care of yourself, Dr. DuPont.”
As he walked away it took every ounce of willpower Rowan possessed not to follow him. She watched him toddle along the sidewalk until he was out of sight. She needed to know where he lived. She needed to talk to people who lived around him. That would be just like Julian to hide out in plain sight among the least fortunate of people in the most unlikely of places.
Rowan walked back to her SUV and climbed in. The cop and the agent would follow her, but she didn’t care. She called Charlotte.
“You still outside?” her assistant asked.
“No. I have an errand to run. Are you okay with the rest of the preparations for this evening’s viewing? If you need me I can get back as quickly as possible.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got this. Just be careful. Are those guys following you?”
Rowan glanced in her rearview mirror. “Oh yeah. Make sure you lock the doors and arm the security system.”
“Already done.”
“See you in a bit.”
Rowan ended the call and surveyed the sidewalks as she drove block after block. Where the hell had he gone? Someone must have picked him up. He could not have disappeared that quickly.
She would find him. She knew just where to look.
Nine
Rowan started with the most likely places. The streets with the low-end rental houses and apartments. Bell View and neighborhoods like it. The few trailer parks scattered around town. She drove from Winchester to Decherd. No one she encountered admitted to knowing about a so-called tent city.
When she had driven every potential street in both Winchester and Decherd, she stopped for gas at a convenience store that also served as a sign-up location for homeless sponsors. A person in need could sign up for clothes or shoes, for example, and a customer shopping at the convenience store could “sponsor” that person and buy the needed items. The funeral home sponsored several people each fall to help with staying warm in the winter. Rowan’s father had also donated annually to a shelter in Decherd that was the largest in the county.
Though Winchester and Decherd wer
e different towns, it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
After filling her gas tank, she wandered inside for a bottle of water. The man behind the counter glanced at the two vehicles that had followed her into the lot and asked, “Friends of yours?”
Rowan placed the water on the counter. “I guess I’m what you would call a celebrity.”
The man grinned. “I know who you are.” He hit the total key on the register. “One-fifty.”
She handed him the cash. “See, I told you I was a celebrity.”
He chuckled. “I knew your daddy, too. A fine man.” He hitched his head toward the parking lot. “They following you around to protect you from that killer who murdered your daddy?”
Rowan nodded. “Sadly, yes.”
“I heard about that fella they found on your momma’s grave. That’s some creepy stuff.”
“It is.” She picked up the bottle of water and decided to see if the friendly gentleman would be so talkative when he learned why she had chosen his store over numerous others. “Are you familiar with a place called tent city?”
He nodded. “I am.”
“Do you know where it is?” Surely he did. The folks who lived there no doubt came to his store if for nothing more than to sign up for assistance.
“They move around a lot.” He glanced at the parking lot as he said the words.
“I’m not asking to help the police cause trouble for them,” she hastened to explain. “I’m looking for a man who lives there. I need his help and I can’t find him.”
He leaned on the counter, putting his face closer to hers. “DuPonts have always been generous to the homeless. That cause is close to my heart. I used to be homeless and someone helped me out and now I own this store.”
“That’s amazing. Congratulations. I’m certain you are an inspiration to all those in need.” Rowan wondered if he’d ever done an interview for Audrey Anderson over at the Gazette. “Thank you for sharing your story with me.”
“I tell you what, Dr. DuPont, you pledge to sponsor twice as many this year and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”