The image of Rose Sharon sparked in my mind. Then I heard her singing, “You Took What Wasn’t Yours.”
* * * *
Uncle Orson’s truck idled at the curb. I waited for heat to begin flowing from the vents and stared at my phone. A first breath of warmth crawled from the dash. I dialed E. Lawson.
The phone on the other end rang twice before connecting. Nothing was said. The other phone waited. I had the feeling he knew who was calling.
“Did she hurt your feelings?” I asked.
The only response was a quiet huff of air.
I laughed. “You’re a broken little bitch. Preying on small women and girls. You think you’re a big, bad wolf. You’re not. You’re just another pathetic loser who thinks his big fist makes up for every other small thing in his life. Everything in your world is on fire, Lawson. And I’m the one holding the matches.”
He said something. There was a wild, strangled sound on the line like a Pentecostal preacher channeling the holy spirit. No telling what it was, only that it was nothing I needed to hear. I broke the connection. Then I went into my settings and blocked his number. There is nothing a man like him hates more than a woman who refuses to listen.
I buckled in and put the truck in drive. The street that had been high and white was worn into a dirty slush by so much police traffic. My exit was much faster than my entrance. At Fort I turned north, heading to Sunshine Street. At the light I called the therapist’s office. Dr. Kurtz herself answered. I told her what had happened.
“That’s great news,” she said.
I hesitated a moment as the confusion boiled in my head. “I think you and I are talking about two different things,” I said.
“Yes and no,” she answered. She had a way of being infuriatingly indirect sometimes.
“I don’t—”
“You’re handling it,” she explained. “It wasn’t that long ago you were in my office in a panic after your investigation led to a twenty-year-old sexual assault.”
“That was a different situation,” I said.
“It was a different woman,” she hit back.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
Even though I was driving and on the phone, I shrugged. “For saying it.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Now tell me why you needed to come in so urgently today.”
“It’s a long story,” I said, trying to dismiss it.
“You’ve been in the news.”
“That’s part of it.”
“What are the other parts?”
“A girl is dead. Her family is standing in the way of finding out the truth.” Even as I said it, I heard the weakness in the statements.
“You don’t come to me to talk about the job, Katrina.”
It sounds silly, but one reason I allowed myself to trust Dr. Kurtz was the fact she never called me Hurricane. At the same time, trust was one of those issues I needed work on. “My therapy is a mandated condition of keeping my job.”
“Screw your job,” she said. “What happened?”
I didn’t have the courage to hang up. I tried to wait her out in silence. It didn’t work. After two minutes of letting her listen to me drive and breathe I finally confessed. “I’m going to kill a man.”
Dr. Kurtz simply asked, “Who?”
I told her what had happened with E. Lawson at the mill and what he had done to Jenifer Perry.
“Sounds justified,” she said.
“I hate my job.”
“You’ve never said that before. The job was always the one thing you believed in.”
“I still believe in it. I just hate it.”
“What are you going to do about that?”
That was a question I didn’t want to think about. I tried silence again. I believe what came next surprised me more than her. I broke the dead air by saying, “Billy is choosing his job over me.”
She didn’t miss a beat. Dr. Kurtz immediately asked, “Was it an honest choice or the only one he had?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Sometimes we are hurt most when people in our lives make the only choice we leave them with.”
“You’re saying it’s my fault?”
“I’m asking if you gave enough of yourself for him to keep holding on to.”
More silence.
“I don’t know why I keep talking to you,” I said.
“Sure you do.” It was hard to argue with her confidence. “When your husband died, he left you wealthy. You kept the estate growing by letting lawyers handle everything.”
“What’s your point?”
“How much are you worth now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Tell me.”
I felt foolish and caught in a trap. “Close to five million,” I admitted.
“And yet you hate your day job.”
“You’re the only one I hate right now.”
“I get that.” She actually chuckled. “You’re a woman who likes strong men, military, police, but you hate bullies. You found one who was strong without being cruel.”
“I married him.”
“You married Nelson Solomon knowing that he was sick and dying.”
“That’s a hard way of putting it,” I said.
“Truth is always hard, Katrina.” It was her turn to use quiet. She didn’t have the patience I did. “What kind of man is Billy Blevins?” she asked.
“Kind,” I answered, angered by the admission.
“You told him you didn’t think he was strong enough for the job of sheriff.”
“Not in so many words.”
“Copping out?” she asked. “That’s not like you.”
“Just get it out there,” I said. “I’m tired of this dance.”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “You’re already the toughest woman I know. If you turn some of that courage inward, you’ll turn some of the anger out.”
“That easy?”
“Nothing is easy. But it’s not impossible to have what you want. You just have to decide what it is and get out of your own way.”
“I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore.”
“You can’t get angry at people for not making the choices you want them to make when you don’t even make the choices you want.”
She got off the phone after that and I got on the highway. I hated therapy.
Chapter 14
Passing semis, pushing hard to make up time lost to weather, splashed my windshield with filthy ice. I was alone and disconnected in the silent cab of my truck. My thoughts make for poor company at the best of times so I called the SO and asked for Billy. I expected to go to voice mail.
He picked up saying, “I got a call from Springfield.”
“I didn’t think you would be in.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’ve been out of touch lately.”
“Just because I’m out of touch to you does not mean I’m not on the job.”
I didn’t want to argue. At the same time, I did. I wasn’t sure about what, though.
Before I could think of what to say, Billy said, “Tell me about Springfield.”
I did.
When I was finished Billy said, “Don’t do that again.”
“What?”
“Call a suspect to taunt him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I heard a thump over the phone then a creak. It was easy to picture Billy dropping his feet off his desk and leaning forward. “What?” He sounded a little more stunned than he needed to. “For what?”
“I’ve made your job harder than it needs to be.”
“No,” he said. The smile in his voice was obvious. “You make everything more difficult
.”
I laughed, knowing it wasn’t exactly a joke.
“You were on the news again today,” Billy said. “We’re a triangle, it seems.”
“I’m sorry about that, too.”
“Don’t worry about it. I think things are blowing over.”
“Wishful thinking,” I said.
“Speaking of that. Stay away from Sissy Fisher. Stay away from the family altogether. Landis Tau was raising a stink about you talking to Donny without his lawyer present.”
“There’s something bigger going on here.”
“Bigger than the murder of a girl?”
“Why did you rush to arrest Donny Fisher when you knew he wasn’t the killer?”
“How do you know what I knew?” We played the silence game. Billy didn’t last long at all. After a few seconds he said, “Yeah. I didn’t think that one through very well, did I?”
“Probably not.”
“I knew he was gay. And I knew he was close to Rose. I never suspected him. I was afraid he would become a target. Either for Levi, who has self-control issues and was always jealous, or for whoever killed her.”
“Why didn’t you try to bring him into protective custody?”
“That was the idea at first, but things have a way of escalating quickly around Sissy.”
“I think there were two people with a history of stalking and abuse of women somehow entangled in Rose Sharon’s life.”
“Two?” I could almost feel Billy shaking his head. “You think E. Lawson is involved?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But I’m going back to his sawmill to have a look at something. Would you meet me there?”
“You said two.”
“Rose asked you to hire Tom Dugan, didn’t she?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question.
“That’s why the paper under the door.”
“That, and he’s been stalking Bobbi Rantz.”
“Why am I hearing it from you?” There was hurt under the anger in his voice.
“Why did Rose ask you to hire him?”
“She said she would be leaving soon for Nashville. She wanted him to have something when she left.”
“Or a reason not to follow?” I asked.
“You go to the sawmill. Call Chuck to come out if you want help. I have something to do.”
“If you have trouble finding Dugan, look for him at Rose’s murder scene.”
“Got it,” Billy said. That time there was resolve in his voice. It was a good sound.
* * * *
It was night and full dark when I pushed Uncle Orson’s truck into 4x4 low. The path was visible only through the absence of trees. There were no tracks in the fresh and frozen-over snow. Even out there, ten crow miles, twenty road miles from Branson, the ground and clouds each glowed with trapped luminescence. Nelson would have loved the scene, darkness and light all in a black velvet texture.
I pushed through a door-high drift that filled the last bend. On the other side was the cleared valley with E. Lawson’s sawmill in the middle. It had changed since I left it two days before. Even before my headlights hit it I could tell the mill had been burned. The bones of the shack were there. Thick oak posts that were probably old when my father and uncle went to Vietnam still stood. They were charred, but too massive to burn through before all the other fuel was exhausted. The result was a grim black skeleton with rusty iron organs draped in an ill-fitting shroud of white.
Around the burned building were rutted truck tracks too deep for the snow to hide. I followed them around and found the trailer and logs I had tried to burn. Like the timbers of the shack, the walnut was only scorched on the surface. The gas-oil mix I had doused them with never got the green wood hot enough to sustain a long blaze. The really interesting thing was that the trailer was not where I had left it.
Someone had hitched it up to a truck and dragged it about thirty feet. It appeared they were trying to add it to the bonfire of the mill. The plan was confounded by the only real damage my rage had done. All the tires on the trailer were burned away. The trailer was too heavy to pull with the wheel rims digging into the partially frozen ground. Mud and snow had been slung from four spinning wheels as a 4x4 truck had worked to get the load moving. That truck was the same one I was sitting in, there was no doubt.
Uncle Orson and, I was willing to bet, Clare Bolin had been out here last night. They had felt compelled to take revenge against Lawson. I tried to be angry about it. I couldn’t. The only thing I did feel was the sense that my actions had put the choice in their hands. My anger was directed at myself.
What anger there was didn’t last long. I was smiling, a little proud of the old men in my life, as I left the truck idling in the snow. Outside of the cab I felt exposed. I checked the seat of my weapon in the holster, then kept my right hand poised. With my left I pulled out my flashlight.
I worked my way through the snow. It was hard and fragile on the surface. Each step hesitated, then broke the cold skin. It took a careful minute to reach the open-front shed where the International Harvester was still sitting under its tarp. The old fabric was frozen to the contours of the ancient truck. I pulled. It cracked away like an insect’s shed skin.
Underneath was exactly what I had believed I would find. The left fender of the faded green truck was crumpled. Jagged edges were mostly gone to rust, but in the edges where oxidized green remained were flaking streaks of black. On top of the fender was a mounting hole. One look at the right side told me it was for a round amber signal light.
I released my pistol butt to pull out my notebook. Two sheets of folded-over paper made improvised envelopes. I used the edge of one to tease off curls of black paint. I did the same with some flakes of green.
Once the paint evidence was tucked away I checked both ends of the truck for plates. There were none. I opened the driver’s-side door of the cab. The air inside smelled of rot and age mixed with the urine and droppings of generations of field mice.
I was looking for anything that might give proof of ownership. I checked the dash. There was nothing. In the early 1950s, vehicle identification numbers were required on vehicles in the US. Placement wasn’t mandated until later. I checked the door post and again, nothing. After that I moved around to the passenger side to check the glove box for registration papers or an inspection slip. There was only a rodent nest and a 1943 steel penny. I tucked the penny in my pocket for luck.
It worked. After about fifteen minutes of searching, I finally found a VIN plate. It was on the driver’s side, riveted to the deck riser that holds the seat. I pulled out my notebook and copied the information.
A penny’s worth of luck didn’t last long. When I pushed the old door closed, a fading light caught my eye. It was coming from the cab of my idling truck.
My first thought was the dome light—someone had climbed in the truck and was waiting. I pulled my weapon and eased back deeper into the shadows to watch. Nothing happened and I didn’t move for a few minutes. It was as if the world had gotten so cold that time froze.
The light came again. It was a rising glow that showed an empty cab. After another moment of confusion, I realized the phone I left sitting on the truck seat must be ringing.
* * * *
In the time I had been examining the dead green truck, I had missed eight calls. They were all from Clare.
“It’s the sheriff,” he said as soon as I called back.
“What happened to Billy?”
“No. Not Billy.” Clare stopped.
As he was shifting mental gears I got there ahead of him. “You mean Chuck?”
“Yes. I keep forgetting he’s not sheriff anymore.”
“What about him, Clare?”
“It’s bad,” he said.
I felt the simple expression like a nail in
my spine.
“Lawson was here,” Clare went on. “He showed up at Moonshines looking for me.”
“Because of the sawmill,” I finished.
“He thought you did it. I don’t think he believed that it was me and Orson. I didn’t tell him about Orson anyway. I didn’t get to say much of anything. He was on me like stink on a tumblebug.”
“Are you okay?”
“Chuck was here. He never had a chance. He left his gun locked away because he was drinking. He got one good lick in then Lawson tore him up.”
“Tore him up?”
“The ambulance left a bit ago. You should get to the hospital.”
No details from Clare and no reassurance. It had to be bad for Chuck.
* * * *
Almost the entire Taney County Sheriff’s Department was there when I arrived at the hospital. The parking lot was jammed. There were cars from Stone and Christian counties, as well as Branson PD. The news stations had also renewed their interest in us. Their vans and production trucks formed a perimeter through which everyone had to pass. There was so much activity that several officers had to be pressed into traffic duty. When I got inside, the lobby was packed. It smelled like old coffee and wet boots.
Calvin came out of the restricted doors that led to trauma treatment. He looked shaken. On his coat and disheveled shirt were blood. I caught his eye and he looked relieved. He tried to straighten his clothes then waved me over.
“He’s in surgery,” he said. Then he spoke up to the entire lobby. “He’s got a broken sternum. His heart went into arrhythmia. They won’t know until they get in if his heart is damaged.”
“What exactly happened, Calvin?” I asked, keeping my voice low.
“I wasn’t there.”
I pointed to the blood staining his uniform shirt. “But?”
“I was the first deputy responding. That Lawson guy was already gone. Clarence Bolin said he was looking for you or someone to take your weight.”
“I know. But what about Chuck?”
“The big guy, Lawson, I guess he walked into the bar at Moonshines and took hold of Mr. Bolin. One hit put him across the room. Bolin was on the floor and he wasn’t getting up. Lawson lifted his foot up like he was aiming to stomp Bolin’s throat. That’s when ol’ Chuck put his own boot in the back of Lawson’s knee. The big guy went right down and Chuck Benson was waiting with a beer mug in his hand. He broke that thing right across the side of Lawson’s head. It didn’t do squat.”
A Killing Secret Page 15