The Thin Edge

by Peggy Townsend

  “Have you ever heard of something called the Church of the Sacrificial Lamb?” Aloa asked.

  “Don’t sound too friendly.”

  “I don’t think it is.”

  From outside the tent came a loud whistle, which caused Elvis to stab out his cigarette and set the cocoa aside.

  “Sorry, I got me some business,” he said, suddenly gruff. “Best you get out of here.”

  “Go on,” he said when Aloa hesitated.

  As Aloa crawled from the tent, she noticed a dark-haired man with sunken cheeks and black eyes standing across the path from her. He wore faded jeans, a black jacket, and a pair of run-down cowboy boots embossed with an image of a coiled snake.

  She could feel his eyes on her as she left.

  Another dead body, a missing felon, and a weird church? She didn’t know yet if there was any connection to Corrine Davenport’s killing, but Ruiz was the only lead she had. Her gut told her that Burns Hamlin had told the truth about being with his son on the night of the murder, but gut feelings weren’t a defense you could use in court. Finding the real killer was.

  She rode the Honda to Pacific, parked the bike, and began to walk. She came to a place where a row of trees punctuated the sidewalk and stopped. She didn’t know if this was the exact spot where Star’s body had been found, but she hunkered down, her back against the wall of an apartment building, and studied the area.

  The street was fairly quiet. A handful of pedestrians hurried past. They wore down jackets and expensive shoes and walked with the kind of purpose that signaled they had somewhere important to go. Either that or they wandered like sleepwalkers, staring at their phones. She wondered if that was the reason the duffel with Star’s body had been stuffed in the crook of a tree. Did the killer know that Star’s body would remain there for a while because most people didn’t bother to look up anymore?

  She considered calling Quinn to ask the exact location of the body dump, but knew he would only tell her how insane she was for going back to the homeless camp—and maybe she was. But when a story led you someplace, you followed.

  She saw a man in coveralls painting the outside of a building down the block and pushed herself away from the wall. She walked down the slight slope of the street, told him she was a reporter, and asked if he knew about a body being found nearby.

  “Sure,” he said and pointed. “Right near that intersection there. I couldn’t believe it when the boss told me. Now I’m always looking up. You just don’t think about stuff like that.”

  Aloa thanked the man and went to the spot.

  She looked up into the row of trees, their branches low and welcoming, then examined the ground beneath them. A trio of rust-red drops dotted the sidewalk under one of them. Blood. She studied the Y-shaped branches.

  Unlike the place where Billy had been found, it seemed like the killer or killers had wanted to put a little time between them and the body being discovered. She leaned against the wall of a nearby house and contemplated the area. Why here? Was there a connection between this place and the location of Billy’s body?

  She closed her eyes, letting her mind run free. Nothing.

  She shoved away from the building just as a text alert chimed from her phone.

  Back in SF. Buy U lunch?

  It was Michael.

  Working. Next time, she thumbed.

  The dots pulsed.

  I get the feeling you’re avoiding me.

  Just busy.

  Dinner, then? Your favorite spot in the Tenderloin?

  Aloa knew she should meet Michael and lay everything out for him, but what good would it do? It would only stir up the past and make her feel worse about what she’d lost so many years ago; what he’d lost without even knowing it.

  Maybe another time, she typed. Hot into Tick’s story. Will keep you posted.

  No pulsing dots.

  She watched the screen for a long moment and shoved her phone into the pocket of her jacket. One of these days, she would have to tell him.

  DAY 8

  She was at Justus and knocking on the front door at 10:00 a.m. She saw Gully’s head pop up in the pass-through behind the bar and a few seconds later, Erik was opening the front door.

  “Hair of the dog, sweetie?” Erik said.

  “Do I look that bad?”

  “Besides the uncombed hair and lack of makeup, no. But that sweater looks like something the cat coughed up.”

  Aloa tugged the old sweater tighter over her chest. “I need to ask a favor.”

  “At your service, darling. Come on in.” He locked the door behind her. “Gully, we’ve got company.”

  Gully’s voice came from the kitchen. “Have you eat your breakfast because Erik say I must make a something for the sad man above. I could make for you also. I am thinking a beautiful poached egg with salad greens. A mustard shallot vinaigrette to give it the bite of an angel.”

  “No thanks, but it sounds wonderful,” Aloa said.

  “One of our tenants, he’s having a hard time,” Erik explained. “You know me. I see a little chick in need and I have to take it under my wing. I’m just an old mother hen.”

  “With a handsome set of feathers,” Aloa said and touched his arm.

  Erik smiled. “Thanks, but I would say yes to your favor even if you didn’t tell me how good-looking I am.”

  “I was wondering if you might have time to sew something for me.”

  “Oh sweetie, of course. I thought you’d never ask.” Erik took a step back from her. “I’m picturing a wool cape. Maybe a plaid mini underneath. Black tights. Your boots. Fabulous.”

  “Actually, I need a hood.” It was item No. 4 on her to-do list for the day.

  “A hood? Is there a kinky Big Bad Wolf in your life I don’t know about?” He winked.

  She hated to lie to Erik, but she knew if she told him the truth, he’d worry himself sick. “It’s for a party. The theme is comic book villains.”

  Erik lifted an eyebrow. “That’s not much of a costume.”

  “I’m going low-rent,” Aloa said.

  “At least let me make you a cape.”

  “It’s fine. Really.”

  He grabbed a napkin and pen from the bar and shoved it in her direction. “Well, show me this hood you’re talking about.”

  Aloa sketched the design. “It’s not exactly red, but more crimson.”

  “Fabric?”

  “I think it was cotton.”

  “You think it was cotton?”

  “I mean that’s what I want. Cotton. A heavy cotton.” She’d almost blown it.

  “And who do you know that throws a comic book party?” Erik asked.

  “An old reporter friend. It’s her birthday. She got in touch after the runner story.”

  He studied her. “You’re not in trouble, are you?”

  “No.” At least she could be honest about that.

  “And you just want a hood?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Well, I’ll do what you want,” he said, “but I’m still going to make you that minidress. You’d look fabulous in it.”

  “I haven’t worn a dress in years,” Aloa said.

  “Well, it’s time you start, hon,” Erik said. “Legs are the show horses of the body. You’ve got to let them run free.”

  “Mi amor,” Gully interrupted from the kitchen. “Will you tell the sad friend above that it is time to break his fast?”

  “I’ll go up as soon as I let our friend out.”

  “Until later, chica,” Gully called.

  Erik walked Aloa to the door. “I’ll have your so-called costume ready in a few hours.” He put a beefy hand on her shoulder. “And, whatever it is that you’re really doing, I hope you’ll be careful, sweetie.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Aloa said.

  Back at her house, she put a line through item No. 4 on her to-do list and concentrated on No. 1: Kyle Williams.

  Yesterday’s meeting had made her wonder about his connection to
his boss. He seemed a little too protective, a little too defensive. Like the way an anxious dog growls and barks when they’re afraid their territory is being invaded. Then there was Corrine’s text, which made it seem as if she wasn’t exactly fond of him. Not that Kyle was especially likable. Aloa went to her computer with a mug of coffee and soon found a 2006 story about Kyle Williams on the archive of a true-crime website.

  Kyle had been twelve years old and living outside Hood River, Oregon, when his mother, a drunk, decided to run off with a truck driver she’d met at a local bar. According to the writer, she’d left the boy a pair of twenties and said she would be gone for the weekend, but ten days later, she was still MIA and Kyle had run out of money and food. A teacher had become concerned when Kyle stopped coming to school and went to his house, where she found dishes still on the table and a book open on his bed as if he had left midsentence. A neighbor said she’d seen the boy walking to the school bus stop three days earlier, but the driver didn’t remember picking him up.

  It was as if the boy had vanished.

  Five years later, a hiker had stumbled upon a remote cabin in Oregon’s coastal range and saw a stick-thin teenager in ragged clothes chopping wood while a bearded older man sat on a stump with a shotgun in his hands. The hiker said he thought he’d heard the man call the boy Kyle, or maybe it was Kevin, but the name sparked the memory of a story about a missing boy. He called the FBI, and Davenport and a partner had gone out to investigate.

  Creeping through the woods, Davenport came upon the man beating the half-starved boy with his fists and had wrestled the suspect to the ground. It turned out the older man had kidnapped the boy from the bus stop, then chained, starved, and abused him for nearly half a decade.

  It was as if the boy had been the prisoner in some horrific, secret war, Aloa thought.

  There was a footnote to the article, which said Davenport had kept tabs on the boy, mentoring him and setting up a college fund, and that Kyle Williams was now working at an unnamed software company. Aloa guessed the wounded Kyle had latched on to Davenport as both savior and father figure. It would explain why he quit a good-paying job to take care of Davenport, and also why he seemed so protective. An experience like the one he’d been through would leave anyone with scars.

  She added more questions to her research list—why did the list always get longer instead of shorter?—before dialing Quinn, the No. 2 chore. She asked if she could buy him a cup of coffee and he said he had questions for her too. They agreed to meet in one hour at a café near his office, and she found him just sitting down with a cup of black coffee when she walked in.

  She appreciated people who were not only on time, but a little early. Years of newspaper deadlines did that to you.

  “You first,” she said after she’d settled across from him with a sixteen-ounce Americano. He wore slacks and a white dress shirt with a bomber jacket that should have been thrown away sometime around 1995. Who was dressing him these days?

  “Tell me about Pablo Ruiz.” He looked at her over the rim of his coffee cup.

  “You know about him?”

  “I may be a cop, but I know how to do a Google search.”

  “Sorry,” Aloa said.

  “You said you were at the Jungle looking for a drug dealer Corrine Davenport put away, then you asked me about William Lisowski, the guy in the duffel bag. I figured you’d made some connection.”

  “I may have,” Aloa said. “From what I heard, Ruiz was a bad dude. Crazy-violent is basically what people described. One of the guys I met said people in the Jungle have been disappearing. It was around the time Ruiz arrived.” She let him reach his own conclusion.

  Quinn rubbed a hand over his chin. “We found another one this morning. Duffel bag, bolt gun, throat slit, barbed wire. One of the cops thinks he lived in the Jungle.”

  Aloa set down her coffee. “He?”

  Quinn pulled a notepad from his jacket pocket. “Elvis Nash. Fifty-six years old. Arrests for public intoxication, disturbing the peace, drunken driving, possession of drugs, possession of drugs for sale, among other things. Lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, then drifted around before he landed here.”

  Sorrow lapped at Aloa’s heart. Elvis had been no match for the pain that had followed him—and his death was even worse.

  “He worked at the post office,” Aloa murmured. “A hundred and thirty-four houses on his route.”

  “What?” Quinn asked.

  “Elvis used to work at the post office. I met him when I went to the Jungle. He lived in a lean-to next to Ruiz. He said it was OK to look in Ruiz’s tent.”

  “Christ, Aloa,” Quinn swore.

  “Relax. Ruiz wasn’t around,” she told him. “But I did find this.” Aloa pulled out her phone and showed Quinn the images of the box with Ruiz’s court papers and the photo with Corrine Davenport’s face circled in red. “Elvis moved into Ruiz’s place.”

  “He jacked Ruiz’s tent?”

  “Elvis said there are rules in the Jungle. If someone is gone for a week, then their stuff is fair game for everybody else. Ruiz had been gone for six days, according to him.”

  Quinn met Aloa’s eyes.

  “You think Ruiz came back, found Elvis in his tent, and killed him? Like he killed the others?”

  “It’s possible,” Aloa said.

  “And that he stabbed Corrine Davenport too?”

  “Maybe he found a taste for killing after he murdered her.”

  They were both silent as they considered the possibility of a serial killer on the loose.

  “Any ideas where Ruiz might be now?” Quinn asked.

  Aloa thought of the hooded worshippers and of the reputation she’d once had as a reporter who didn’t cut corners. She only had one source linking Ruiz to the church, and if Quinn raided the service and it turned out Ruiz was nowhere around, there could be all kinds of First Amendment blowback. Cops storming a group that could claim it was simply exercising its right to religious freedom would ignite the internet and Quinn would forever blame her for it. She decided she would tell Quinn only after she checked it out more fully.

  “I’m still looking,” she said.

  Thirty minutes later, she stood on the street corner and rechecked her notebook. The address Quinn had given her for the spot where Elvis’s body had been found was just to her left.

  Why bring his body here? What was she missing?

  She turned in a slow circle.

  Once home to factories filled with sweat-stained laborers, the area was now populated by artisanal businesses and well-heeled office workers. She walked over to the stairwell where Elvis’s body had been dumped and examined a small pile of trash that had been blown into the corner of the damp landing and a coffee can that saw double duty as an ashtray. Above her was a windowed office building, across was an interior design shop and a coffee importer. Nothing seemed to connect the location of the dead bodies to the weird church or to Ruiz. Poor Elvis, she thought. He didn’t deserve to die the way he had.

  Her stomach grumbled and she realized she’d missed lunch. With a frustrated exhale, she pulled out her phone and snapped photos of the area before climbing onto her bike and heading for home.

  People whose only sin was addiction and poverty were dying, and if it was Ruiz who was killing them, he needed to be stopped.

  Aloa waited until she’d seen twenty dark shadows slip into the abandoned factory before she stood up from the concrete barrier where she’d hidden herself.

  She’d gone to a secondhand store that afternoon and bought a red flannel shirt and a pair of men’s jeans. With only three women among the worshippers, she’d decided it was better to try to pass as a man and thanked her DNA for her height and, maybe for the first time, for her small breasts.

  Her plan was to wait each evening to see if there would be a ceremony, sneak as close as she could, and watch the comings and goings to see if she could spot Ruiz. Her own hood and outfit would not only make her seem like one of the worsh
ippers if she were spotted, but also permit her to trail anybody who fit Ruiz’s height and weight in hopes they would pull off their own hood and reveal themselves. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was the best she could come up with.

  At home, she had removed her eye makeup and nail polish, put on the secondhand clothes, and the hood Erik had made. Her heart had given a nervous thump when she saw herself in the mirror, but now that she was here, she felt calm. That was the thing about being a journalist. Stuff you’d never do in regular life became OK when it was the only way to find the truth. It was why war correspondents put themselves in harm’s way again and again, why journalists kept going to dangerous places.

  She grabbed the tall walking stick she’d bought at a fancy hiking store and stripped of its colorful strings and charms and slipped on the hood. Ducking quickly through the hole in the fence, she strode toward the building through the hazy illumination cast by the lone spotlight and stepped inside.

  Following the path through the junk-filled space, she could see a column of light from the half-open door where she’d witnessed the ceremony before. She made her footsteps quiet and, thinking she would creep closer when the ceremony actually started, she stepped off to the side by the hallway opening to wait.

  “Ceremony’s about to start,” said a male voice so close it made Aloa jump.

  She whirled to see a squat man in a hood, hoisting the zipper on a pair of camouflage pants as he came from behind a tumble of metal drums. “You’re too late for a piss.”

  Aloa thought quickly. Even if she pretended she needed to pee, the guy might get suspicious if she didn’t show up inside and come looking for her—or worse, he might wait for her to empty her bladder, which would put her female anatomy to a test it couldn’t pass.

  Aloa cleared her throat. “Oh yeah, sure,” she mumbled in her huskiest voice and followed the man inside, praying there would be no head count or roll call.

  The room was lit with candles as before, the inverted cross in its place in the center of the space. A few congregants gathered in clumps, but most stood off by themselves. One guy in particular drew Aloa’s attention and she drifted toward him.