“Where’s he live?” Del asked.
“With his momma, my cousin Edith Mae Whittle,” the pastor said. “You don’t seriously think Beau’s involved, do you?”
“Let’s bring him in here,” I suggested. “Maybe we can ask him a few questions and clear this up.”
“Well, all right. But I think you’re barking up the wrong tree thinking Beau’s involved. He’s a good kid. Never even saw him mad at anyone. Not bright, sure, but never any trouble.”
The pastor waddled over to the door, opened it and hung his head out. He looked around, didn’t say anything at first, but then called out to someone outside. “Hey, either of you two know where Beau is. He was in here a minute ago. I got some folks who’d like to talk to him.”
I couldn’t hear what the men outside answered, but then, the pastor shouted, “Okay, well find him and send him in, will you? Just tell him I need him.”
Turning back into the room, the pastor said, “Shouldn’t take long. He must’ve gone back to the garage.”
Del looked at me, and we both stood and headed toward the door. Del swung it open, just as one of the ranch hands clomped up the steps and reached for the doorknob. He looked surprised to see us.
“Did you find Beau?” I asked.
The man appeared confused. “Who’re you?”
“Just tell the people if you found him,” the pastor bellowed.
“Beau? No. I was just coming to say that it looks like he’s gone. His pickup’s not here, and I can’t find him anywhere.”
“Show me where he was working,” I asked.
Minutes later, we were in a large four-bay garage, a tractor on one side with mechanic’s tools scattered around it. I scouted around, the others looking at me as if they wondered what I was up to. Only Del understood.
“Beau smokes a lot?” I asked.
“Pretty much. Not a chain smoker, but close to it,” the pastor said. “Bad habit. I’ve been telling that boy to quit.”
“Where does he throw the butts?” Del asked.
“The butts?” The pastor shook his head. “Heck if I know. Not out here. I ordered him not to smoke on the ranch. Even he’s smart enough to know not to smoke around the gas and oil.”
Meanwhile the ranch hand sauntered over to the workbench and looked around behind a coffee can of bolts and gears, small engine parts. He pulled out an overflowing ashtray.
“Will this help?”
Fifteen
Edith Mae Whittle lived in a neat, gray-and-white, wood-sided house not far from the convenience store in Stove Pipe, eight miles from Lord’s Acre Baptist. Her silver hair pulled back in a hairband, wearing a pair of baggy black leggings and an oversized T-shirt, she answered the door and invited us in. When I saw the look on her face, I realized she was expecting us.
“Pastor Chet called to let you know the sheriff and I would be coming, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, my cousin called me,” she said, somewhat defiant. Her upper lip curled up, as if judging us as somehow unfit. “I can’t believe you’d think that my Beau would… Why he loved Pastor Wilson. We both did. He was a good –”
“We’re not saying that Beau is involved,” I cut in. “We just want to talk with him.”
With that, Edith Mae’s eyes dropped and her expression turned rueful. “Well, you’re out of luck. Beau’s not here. Hasn’t lived here in nearly a year. I was telling Pastor Wilson about that the evening of the fire, how my boy moved out.”
“You sure about that? Chet said he lives with you?” Del warned, “You need to be honest here, Edith Mae.”
“I never told Chet about Beau’s living arrangements. Pastor Wilson always understood when I went to him. But my cousin’s a judgy-kind of person. He’s always ordering me around, telling me what to do. If he knew, he’d say Beau’s goin’ to hell. I wasn’t giving Chet any ammunition to use. He’s my cousin, but he’s constantly sayin’ my branch of the family is –”
“Edith Mae, please,” I begged. “Not now. Now we need to find Beau. If he doesn’t live here, where does he live? How do we find him?”
We got out of Del’s car covering our handguns in our holsters and worked our way to the trailer while watching for a fluttering curtain or any indication that someone inside watched. We saw nothing to indicate anyone was home.
The double-wide hidden off the road in the woods had a dirt driveway and a satellite dish on the roof, a shed off to the side. We advanced toward it with caution, warily watching the woods, wondering if instead of us approaching them, they were silently encircling us. The underbrush dense, there’d be no way to see if they were out there, crouching with guns raised.
I climbed up the rickety steps. Behind me, Del scanned the woods and covered my back. I knocked on the door, hard, shouting, “Jimi Jo Jaspers, police! Open up!”
I knocked again and waited. Nothing until we heard something at the rear of the trailer, someone hitting the metal side with something soft, like the sole of a shoe.
Del got there first and found a scruffy looking woman, a dirty, thin brown ponytail hanging limply down her back.
“Jimi Jo?” I asked. She nodded, and I smiled at her. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Once we convinced her to invite us inside, Del looked around the trailer while I asked a few questions. If she’d refused, we would have had to wait outside while we got a warrant. That could have been a problem. It would be hard to argue that we had probable cause. All we knew was that Beau fit the profile and that he smoked filterless cigarettes. You can’t use gut instinct as justification for a search warrant.
Judges frown on that.
Jimi Jo’s strange behavior? Climbing out a back window? For all we knew, the woman had parking tickets.
The inside of the trailer a mess, she apparently was something of a hoarder. Old clothes, battered toys, what appeared to be things hauled home from the dump were piled high around us. The only place we could sit was at the kitchen table, and I noticed a brown, nearly transparent husk of a dried out cockroach hanging from a plastic flower arrangement just across from me.
“So what’d’ya want with my husband?”
“You and Beau married?” I asked. “We didn’t know that.”
“Common law,” she said, cutting off the words. “We’re common law married. Why? Does it matter?”
“No, absolutely not,” I said. “We just want to talk to you about the church fires, that’s all. We’re wondering if –”
“I don’t know nothin’, and I didn’t do nothin’,” she said, pulling her chin back and giving me a tough look. “Beau ain’t involved either. That’s for sure. Those times when the fires happened, he was with me.”
I smiled at her. My friendliness seemed to shake her a bit, leaving her not sure what to think. “I bet you love living out here in the woods,” I said, ever so sweetly. “I bet you and Beau really enjoy it.”
“Yeah. We do. The trailer’s kind of a shithole, but we’re happy.”
“Then, why’s he so upset with churches?” I asked, as if it were the most natural follow-up question. “I mean, if you two are happily married, have this great place in the woods, why’s he so upset with churches that he’s out burning them down.”
At that, she squirmed in the chair, looked as pained as if I’d just said that her beloved husband had a sexually transmitted disease.
“Beau didn’t do nothin’, I told you.”
“Del, you want to show her what we’ve got?” I asked, glancing over at the sheriff who inspected the towers of rubbish in the house suspiciously, like he expected a rat or snake to jump out at any minute. From the look of them, that was a possibility.
“You sure you want to do that, Sarah?” he asked, playing along. He knew I was poking her, and he was just as eager as I was to prod her until she popped open and let us see what was inside.
“Yeah, let’s do it.”
With that, Del’s friendly demeanor melted away, and he stared at Jimi Jo as he pulled a plastic b
ag out of his pocket, one with four cigarette butts inside. “Now, look here, Jimi Jo. These look familiar? Maybe like Beau’s favorite brand?”
The woman said nothing, just curled her lower lip in until it disappeared inside her mouth. I could see her clamping down on it, maybe to keep from saying the wrong thing. We were at something of a stalemate.
“Well,” I said. “It’s probably not a big deal. That is, not unless you think that when we send these to the crime lab and they pull DNA off them…. Jimi Jo, you’ve heard of DNA, right?”
She didn’t answer, still biting on that lower lip, still determined to keep quiet.
“Well, these are Beau’s. You can take my word for that. It’s true. Later today we’re sending them to the lab. We’re going to get a sample of his DNA.”
I said nothing more, and at that she had to unclench her mouth to finally ask a question, a more intelligent one than I’d expected.
“So what if it’s Beau’s DNA? That don’t matter. Nothin’ illegal about smoking a cigarette.”
“Maybe not, but –”
She didn’t wait for me to finish, instead scoffing, “That don’t tie him to any criminal activities.”
“Oh, but it could,” Del said, and I smiled at him, then at Jimi Jo.
“The sheriff is right. There’s no problem for Beau unless you think the DNA on these cigarette butts will match the DNA the lab already has. They pulled it off a cigarette butt we found the day after Lord’s Acre went up in smoke. The day after Pastor Wilson was murdered.”
“What cigarette butt?” she asked. “My guess is you’re both foolin’ with me. You ain’t got nothin’. Like I said, Beau was with me that night.”
“The cigarette butt we’re going to compare it to was found on the ground near an oak tree Beau hid behind the night of the fire,” I said, and I saw a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. She knew, I realized. She was there. “You remember it. The one so big and round, two people can stand behind the trunk and not be seen.”
Jimi Jo thought about that. “You’re not so smart. You got stuff wrong.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Like what?”
“Like what we was doin’ there. That wasn’t murder.”
“No, huh?” and out of the corner of my eye I saw a smile trace its way from one side of Del’s face to the other.
“No, that weren’t no murder. That’s what you’d call an unfortunate accident.”
Sixteen
“I don’t know where Beau Whittle is. I done told you that,” Jimi Jo Jaspers insisted.
We’d read her the Miranda warning and driven her to Del’s offices, but she didn’t seem worried. When we mentioned she could ask for a lawyer, she jeered. “I had lawyers before. A pot bust and some shoplifting. Those damn lawyers never do no one no good!”
We had her in the same interview room where, the day before, I consoled Rebecca Wilson, the dead pastor’s daughter. Now I had this insolent woman, Jimi Jo, staring at me as if she’d done absolutely nothing wrong.
“Tell me again how you weren’t really involved,” I said. “So we get it on the record.”
“First off, it wasn’t my plan. I just went along and helped a little,” she said. “Second, like I said, the deal wasn’t supposed to be that anyone got killed. That was an accident. You can’t throw me in jail for an accident.”
Every time this woman opened her mouth, she added another lock to the door we’d put on her cell, the one she’d spend the rest of her life in. Some folks, well, they’ve got more ego than intelligence. But for our purposes, that worked well. Jimi Jo turned out to be the perfect suspect, one with a big mouth and not a modicum of sense.
“So Beau called you, warned you that we were coming just before we showed up,” I repeated, wanting to make sure the video camera got it all. “That’s right?”
“Yeah, ’cause we take care of each other. We’re a couple, Beau and me. We’re in love.”
“You know, that is special,” I said. No reason to get nasty with her, not when she was being so cooperative. I’d already had her explain how they carried it out, using two gas cans and two Molotov cocktails at Lord’s Acre. Jimi Jo helped Beau set fire to all three churches. “So that Wednesday night, it was all Beau’s plan, setting the fire at Lord’s Acre. You were only there to help, because he asked you to.”
“Yeah, like I said, I had nothin’ to do with any of the putting it together.” She looked around the room, over at Del who sat back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest.
Since Jimi Jo and I had made such a great connection, two women talking about love and marriage, he’d offered to let me take the lead.
“Why Lord’s Acre?”
“Because his momma goes there sometimes, and that old woman was always talkin’ to preachers about him, trying to get them to help change him. Beau and me had that in common, the way I don’t like churches and such. We had a list, all of the churches he was gonna burn, ones we had no use for.”
“Why don’t you like churches?”
“I done told you that.”
I smiled, my friendliest smile. “You know, we’ve talked about so much. I guess I forgot. Tell it to me again.”
Jimi Jo cocked her head at me, and then shook it with impatience. She raised her voice as if I were hard of hearing. “Because of my momma, Myrna Beth. She got bad sick and asked the preachers to pray for her. She got worse and worse. Momma was mad. She told me, ‘Girl, don’t you ever trust a holy man. They promise you the world, and when you need them, they don’t give a damn. Just let you roll in a ball in a corner and die!’”
“I’m sorry you lost your mother,” I said.
“Momma was a good woman,” Jimi Jo said, tearing up. “We never had much, but she always looked out for me.”
“Why the other two churches, those particular ones?”
It turned out that Jimi Jo’s mom had asked for help at St. Theresa’s and Pathway to Salvation. The parish priest and Pastor Chet both promised to pray for her, to no end as the cancer ate away inside Myrna Beth’s gut.
That pretty much wrapped things up when it came to what they’d done and why. We could get the particulars later, but we had a confession. What we needed was Beau Whittle.
“You two are such a devoted couple that I bet he told you where to meet him. So you can be together, right?”
At that, Jimi Jo again appeared peeved, and I thought, maybe not.
“He’s gonna call me, that’s for sure, once he gets settled,” she said. “He just hasn’t called yet, so I’m not sure.”
With that, Del leaned toward her, got a look on his face like he was about to wrestle a stubborn colt. “Now, Jimi Jo, if you do know, you need to tell the lieutenant. Right?”
The woman’s mouth twisted into a knot on the right, pulling her lips over so far they bulged her cheek. She had a look in her eyes like she wasn’t sure how to answer Del’s question. “Well, I, uh….”
“Oh, Jimi Jo!” I said. “Now, I thought we were getting friendly here, the two of us, talking about love and all.”
“Well, the truth is that I don’t know where Beau is,” she said. “But I wouldn’t tell you if I did, since he’s probably in a heap of trouble. But I don’t know, so there’s no sense in lying.”
Finished, it seemed, Jimi Jo stood, taking a little time to flex her left knee, which she’d mentioned earlier twinges her sometimes. “You know, I’m going back to the trailer. I got work to do this afternoon. I need to clean the place up. You may have noticed that it’s some messy. Needs a good spring cleaning.”
At that, Del unfolded his long body and stood beside her, looking down at her. “Well, Miss Jaspers, I know you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, but I’ve got three burned churches and a dead pastor, and you were there helping with all of it.”
“I explained it wasn’t me who planned any of it. I just went along with…” she started.
The sheriff frowned to let her know she’d crossed a very dangerous line. “Well, no
w it’s my turn to explain. And you listen carefully,” he said, his voice grave. “Jimi Jo Jaspers, you are under arrest for arson and for murder.”
Jimi Jo stared at Del as if he’d lost any lick of sense.
“I told y’all it wasn’t a murder. It was an accident!” she objected.
Half an hour later, we had Jimi Jo locked in a cell, after the justice of the peace read her rights to her again. This time she asked for a lawyer, and one was being assigned. I almost felt sorry for the lawyer. This woman was far from a model client.
“Where do we start looking for Beau?” I asked Del. “Any ideas?”
“I think we ought to head back over to his mom’s house, find out if Edith Mae has any suggestions.”
“Well, we could. But I’m pretty sure Edith Mae must have called Beau to warn him. Then he called Jimi Jo. We may not get a lot of cooperation from Beau’s mom.”
“True, but the situation has changed. Now that we have Miss Jaspers’ confession, we can use it to convince Edith Mae that unless she cooperates she’ll end up in jail alongside her son.”
Of course, Del was right. My senses just told me that Beau’s mom wasn’t going to be as easy to work with as Jimi Jo, but I offered to ride along and help him play good cop/bad cop with the woman. Then the tone on my cell phone interrupted our conversation.
“Sarah, I need you at the office,” the captain said. “ASAP.”
“I’m helping Sheriff Delgado. We made one arrest but –”
“I’m sorry, but you need to get here quick. We have a situation.”
Seventeen
Approaching five when I arrived, the office lot was nearly empty. Only a skeleton crew worked weekends. I wondered what situation could be important enough to bring the captain in on a Saturday afternoon. I’d left Sheriff Delgado reluctantly, hoping to see the case through, but he told me not to worry. Now that he had Jimi Jo’s confession and his sights set on Beau Whittle, he insisted it would be only a matter of time before he made a second arrest.
The Buried Page 10
