“Fred, I could use your advice,” Bobby said approaching the preacher. “Nora’s ranch hand, Frieda, has moved to New Mexico, to be closer to her family. And I’d like to find a ranch hand to take over and care for the stock. Maybe you have some suggestions?”
Ignoring Bobby and the others, Reverend Fred stormed directly toward me. A wiry man with a prominent jaw, he usually had a slight twinkle in his eyes. For some reason, that bit of mischief was missing. Strings’ dad looked dead serious. Breathing as hard as if he’d run to the ranch, he looked square at me and said, “Sarah, I need to have a word.”
Four
“I’d consider it a personal favor if you’d talk to them about this and see if you can help,” Reverend Fred said.
He’d suggested we talk in the house, but the whole place smelled like vanilla, and I’d come to believe I absorbed calories through my skin. Turning on the oven and pulling out flour and sugar was Mom’s favorite outlet for stress. She used to do it professionally, but closed up shop as Mrs. Adams’ Cheesecakes not long after Bobby proposed. As nervous as Mom felt about the wedding, she might as well have kept taking orders. For months, the kitchen counter disappeared under cakes, cookies, and pies. She baked so many that Bobby brought boxfuls to the office in the mornings.
At a picnic table, Reverend Fred and I sipped canning-jar glasses of Mom’s peach tea. We turned down the cobbler, but he munched on a handful of her peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies.
A few feet away in the corral, Warrior roamed with his momma, Emma Lou. The two horses lumbered about, eating the few springs of grass growing around the edge, drinking out of the water trough. The drought had been hard on the ranch, everything turning a dusty brown. Last year’s hurricane uprooted the big elm tree in the corral’s center. I’d planted a new one this past spring, a quarter the size, and it looked wilted, thirsty for rain.
In the heat, I’d ditched my navy blazer, but I wore my white shirt with my silver wagon wheel badge pinned above the pocket and khaki pants. My rig with my gun still hung heavy around my waist. The temperature withering, I used a paper napkin to wipe sweat collecting on my forehead and upper lip.
“Reverend Fred, I’d like to help you, but this isn’t the way we do things,” I explained.
Folks look at the badge and assume a Texas Ranger can go wherever she wants, that she can work any case. In theory that’s true. Rangers report to the governor, and the entire state is in our jurisdiction. But without sufficient cause, we don’t force our way into investigations. “Before I enter a case, local law enforcement has to request my help.”
“There’s no local law enforcement out there in the boonies. Well, the county sheriff’s office, but they aren’t doing anything,” he said. Usually a deliberate man, unemotional except behind the pulpit when he railed against the devil and those who followed him, the pastor’s eyes reflected his anger. “Sarah, this isn’t right. This is the third church fire in the past two months, all just north of here. Itty bitty churches. Country folk. Different denominations. Out in the woods, where no one sees anything.”
“Are you sure these are arson?” I asked. “The buildings are old. Places burn down. Maybe accidents?”
“I don’t believe it,” he said. “Not three. Not in two months.”
“But the drought. Everything’s so dry.”
“Drought, sure, but why just churches burning then?”
He could be right. Three in two months did seem like a stretch. “But the sheriff’s department is investigating. I bet they’re looking at all the fires.”
“No!” he said, indignant. Then he lowered his voice and leaned forward, as if someone might be listening. “The sheriff doesn’t believe the fires are connected. But he’s wrong. Some whacko is out burning churches. It’s happened before, and it’s happening again.”
He rubbed on his knuckles, swollen from throwing hay and plowing fields between church services. In his work clothes, he resembled a rancher more than a holy man. His hair speckled with gray, deep lines etched his forehead and traced the contours of his face. Worry lines, folks called them. I considered what to say, how to explain gently that this wasn’t something I was supposed to do. Then I recalled how much I owe him. He’s a neighbor, a dear friend. Above and beyond that, I trusted his instincts. Last year when I didn’t know which direction to turn, he pointed at a map and showed me the way.
“Reverend Fred –” I started, but he raised a meaty hand and shook his finger at me, not something he’d usually do. He rarely pushed hard, more likely to reason with someone to get what he wanted. But this time around, he clearly worried. His dark eyebrows arched angrily, or did I see fear?
“Sarah, don’t tell me those country cops have any idea what’s going on. I talked to them, called this morning, and that Sheriff Delgado told me the church fires aren’t related,” the pastor said, his frustration percolating hotter than mom’s coffeepot with each passing minute.
“Del Delgado?” I asked. He nodded, and I took a deep breath.
“That’s the man! He wouldn’t listen to me, but he’ll listen to you. I told him. Pretty soon, it’ll be another church, and another, just like 2010.”
Back in 2010, locals initially thought the church fires weren’t arson. But then they kept coming, ten churches in a little more than a month. It shook folks so bad, they guarded their churches at night, rifles ready, waiting for the arsonists to show their faces. Law enforcement poured in, including the rangers. Two men finally pleaded guilty and ended up in prison.
Bringing up the 2010 fires made a convincing argument. “Okay. I’ll drive over and talk to Sheriff Delgado. See what I can find out.”
A grin split Reverend Fred’s face, and he jerked back in his seat, pounded the table with his fist. Bam! “Thank you, Sarah. Thank you!”
“I can’t promise anything,” I cautioned.
“I know that,” he said. “But just that you’re going, that’ll get their attention.”
“But you need to remember…” He had to understand the reality of the situation. “If Sheriff Delgado doesn’t want my help, I can’t force it on him. I can’t stay where I’m not wanted.”
Five
It took a while to find Stove Pipe, the setting of the most recent church fire. A computer search came up dry. At first I figured that Google doesn’t worry about photographing communities where the population hovers below one hundred. With that few folks, Stove Pipe probably still waited for enough traffic to warrant a stop sign. It turned out that it was difficult to locate Stove Pipe for another reason; it wasn’t a real town.
Cut out of piney woods northeast of Houston, the settlement sat on a river and flooded every few years, feet not inches. Perhaps that was why folks didn’t move there. Rather than a town, it consisted of a few dozen scattered houses clustered behind a highway convenience store. The first full-fledged grocery store twenty minutes away, residents had a forty-minute drive to a Walmart. The kids bused to a nearby town for school, and few of the inhabitants worked in Stove Pipe proper. Most of those who lived in the area commuted to neighboring towns. The lucky ones owned enough land to raise cattle.
Never officially incorporated, the only sign announcing its name was a hand-painted one on an ice house along the road: STOVE PIPE – HOME OF THE ANNUAL ARMADILLO ROUND-UP.
I’d heard of rattlesnake round-ups. There’s a famous one in March in Sweetwater, Texas, where they put on a parade and a carnival. It’s not everyone’s favorite pastime, rounding up rattlers, throwing them in a pit, milking and measuring them, then skinning and butchering. At the festival, townsfolk kill tens of thousands of the slithering creatures. Some locals hunt them down and compete to score the longest specimen, but most of the snakes are supplied by the state. Every spring Texas sends crews out to capture rattlers to keep the population down. The folks in Sweetwater claim them as a reason to party. They fry the meat and use the skins to make belts, purses, hatbands and the like.
“An armadillo roundup?” I ask
ed the guy behind the counter in the convenience store. The place looked tired with its worn linoleum floor and hazy windows. It stocked the essentials, bread and milk, sliced American cheese, 24-packs of beer and pint bottles of whisky. Blister packs of jerky and dried sausage hung from pegs behind the counter. Cartons of cigarettes in cubbyholes lined the wall behind the owner as he glanced at me out of the corners of bloodshot eyes. I grabbed a Big Red from the cooler and plunked down some coins. “You round armadillos up and kill them?”
“Nah,” the guy said, drawing it out like the word had a string of As. “Mostly the folks in the area just catch them and show them off in pens in the field in back of the store, try to bring in some tourists. Then we let them go.”
“Ah, that makes sense,” I said, taking a swig of the soda, warmer than I’d hoped. “You get much of a turnout?”
“Nah,” he said again. “But we smoke ribs and brisket, roast some corn. It’s a good excuse to sit outside and visit.”
That nailed down, I moved on. “I hear you had a church fire.”
I’d noticed him inspecting my badge, so he wasn’t taken aback by the question. “Yeah, last night. The sheriff’s out there now, looking things over,” he said. “Stopped in a while ago to pick up some bottled water and ice. The heat was getting to him out there. He didn’t mention calling the rangers for help.”
Cutting the conversation short, I asked for directions.
“Well, I better draw you a map,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of landmarks to follow in these parts.”
Even with the hand-drawn map to guide me, I drove past the church the first time, missing the driveway. On my second swipe, I noticed a narrow sign that read LORD’S ACRE BAPTIST hidden behind a thick stand of half-dead swamp ferns. I parked the Suburban at the end of the driveway and walked on the gravel toward the church, my boots crunching the loose rock.
A dozen feet ahead, Del Delgado stared at me as if I’d just arrived from a faraway planet. Taller and more rawboned than I remembered, in his early fifties, grey streaked his black hair and abundant mustache. Wearing a sweat-stained uniform, his badge, and his holstered gun, he had his arms folded across his chest.
Behind him, I saw the remnants of the church, a patch of ground littered with charred wood still smoldering in places. Faint trails of pale gray smoke curled up then dissipated into the breeze. The air smelled of the fire and the trunks of the trees ringing the parking lot were covered in powdery soot. Large sections of the exterior walls had fallen, and the roof had caved in. Stained ceiling tiles, probably asbestos, lay unburned but scattered among the debris. A square steeple had collapsed with the roof into the center of the ruins. Although not quite upright, it still stood, the cross at the top spared by the fire. Something else survived, toward the back of the nearly gutted building. It was about five feet high and covered by ash.
A stone pulpit.
“You know,” the sheriff said, the words unmistakably perturbed. “If I’d called Austin and requested your services, I wouldn’t be surprised to see you. But I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen.”
Holding out my hand, I smiled. His lips curled in response, but he kept staring as he ignored my offered handshake. “It’s good to see you Sheriff Delgado. I thought maybe you’d appreciate a bit of help with this. A rural county, I’m guessing your staff isn’t particularly large.”
Delgado raised both brows, questioning. Underneath his tan straw cowboy hat, his denim blue eyes honed in on me and didn’t let go. He wasn’t at all pleased by my arrival. “You’re a Texas Ranger assigned to Houston. Explain how you just happen to show up at my backwoods crime scene?”
“So it is a crime scene? Not just a fire?”
“Most likely,” Delgado said, still glaring at me. “Sarah, I’m not necessarily sorry to see you. But this is my jurisdiction. If I need help, I know the phone number.”
Of course, he was right. An interloper, I had no real reason to be there. “I heard about the church and wanted to help. I thought, perhaps, you wouldn’t mind, since we’re old friends, Del.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke. What I didn’t explain to Strings’ dad is that I, in particular, might not be welcomed in this county. For Sheriff Del Delgado, it was all very personal.
Del used to be the police chief in a good-sized city farther north, and my husband’s friend. They had a falling out a few years before Bill died, a bitter feud over a case. Del accused Bill of meddling where he wasn’t wanted. Bill argued that Del couldn’t do the job without his objectivity being questioned. Half that county’s officials, many Del’s good friends, were under investigation for taking bribes. In the end, the state attorney general’s office indicted two county commissioners and a justice of the peace for corruption and sent them off to prison.
I’d heard that Del left that job and moved on. I didn’t know until Reverend Fred told me that Del had settled in a rural county less than an hour’s drive from my home.
“Old friends?” Del questioned.
I refused to take the bait.
“Sarah, no one just happens upon Stove Pipe. I haven’t reported this fire to anyone in Austin. So how did you get here?”
At that, I described my meeting with Reverend Fred Jacobs.
“I guess I’m not surprised that the good holy men have their own network.” Del sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Your preacher friend did call me a few hours ago. I didn’t think at the time that we had a crime here. Late last night we had some freaky weather. We’ve been praying for rain to break this damn drought, but no such luck. Instead, we could see lightning to the north. My first theory was that Lord’s Acre might have gone up in a strike.”
“Now you don’t believe that caused the fire?”
“Well, I thought it was possible it was lightening. On the other hand, I had my doubts. Turns out that those doubts had merit,” he said. With that, he walked over to his squad car, reached into the trunk and pulled out an open cardboard box. “I found this.”
The box held shards of broken glass curved like pieces of a bottle or a jar, and I smelled something chemical. “An accelerant?”
“That’s my guess,” he said. “Probably the remains of a Molotov cocktail. We found the glass right near the front door.”
“Anyone inside the church when it went up?”
At this, Del sighed and gazed back at the pile of wreckage that was once a house of worship. “We’re not sure. One of my men is out looking for Pastor Wilson. No one’s seen him since last evening’s service. He’s not at home, and we can’t reach him by phone.”
Del’s face contorted some, twisting lips and narrowing eyes, pain and anger. I didn’t know the church’s pastor, but I would have bet Del did. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That doesn’t sound encouraging.”
“No. It’s not.” We stood there for a few moments, while Del appeared to ponder the possibilities. “His car’s at his house. Maybe someone picked him up and he’s off somewhere. That’s what we’re hoping. But he lives pretty close by, and folks said he often walked to the church, so we’re just not sure.”
“What about the other two church fires in the area. Is this one connected?”
“Until today I wasn’t considering that the first two were arson. The local folks had explanations for both. But now I’m afraid they must have been wrong and someone set them,” he said. Then he gave me a grudging half smile. “You jumped the gun to get here, but I’m glad you’ve arrived, Sarah. The truth is, I could use some help with this.”
“Okay,” I said, relieved.
“How’s Maggie?” he asked.
“Grown so tall, you wouldn’t recognize her. Just as stubborn as her old man.”
With that, Del chuckled. His throat sounded thick with regret when he said, “I’m sorry about Bill, and I’m sorry about the way we left it. I think of him a lot, about how I shouldn’t have, that he was right and I…”
The sheriff swallowed whatever words he’d planned to say next and pu
lled his lips in. This was hard for him, admitting he made a mistake.
“It’s okay, Del. Bill always considered you a friend.” He nodded but said nothing, and I suggested, “Let’s get to work.”
Minutes later, I had my boss, Captain Don Williams, on the phone explaining to him why I’d driven to Stove Pipe without orders to investigate a church fire. “I’ll fill you in later,” I finally said, cutting him off. Not angry, he sounded miffed that I didn’t follow protocol. Austin frowns on rogue rangers, something I’ve been accused of being off and on over the years. “We need a crime scene unit out here ASAP, Captain.”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll get right on it. I’ll send the Conroe unit. It’ll be an hour, maybe less.”
“That’s great. I need a fire investigator, too. I want Ernie.”
At that, Captain Williams sounded more than a little peeved. “Sarah, you know that Ernie runs the lab now. You know that he doesn’t go out on scenes. Not since Dallas.”
“Captain, we have three churches that burned in two months,” I said. “If this is like 2010, we need to solve it, quick.”
Silence, then, “Ernie’s not going to like this.”
Six
The helicopter hovered above the road, and then gradually descended, its blades whipping the hot, dry air, branches and brush thrashing wildly in response. Barely edging between the trees, it landed, the skids hitting the asphalt road. The engine cut and the rotor stopped churning.
I stood in the church driveway, next to Sheriff Delgado. The captain kept his word, and it was less than an hour since my call. The crime scene van had already arrived.
The door swung open, and Ernie Sanders disembarked followed by his German Shepherd, Smoke, a trained arson dog, heavy shouldered, his coat lovingly brushed to a burnished brown and gold sheen.
The Buried Page 4
