“Yeah. We know that three of the kidnappers worked for the Calb auto-body place, and the whole Cash family down in Kansas City is supposedly heavy into car theft. So . . . there’s a thing here.”
“A nub,” Del suggested.
“A nexus,” said the guy from Hollywood.
“Whatever. I think it’s about fifty-fifty that the killer’s not more than two or three hundred yards away from us. Somebody from here, connected to Calb’s.”
“You wanna jack the guy up? I could come along, add a little federal heat.”
“Probably. But I’m going down to the sheriff’s office first. We need to talk to the deputies, to everybody that knows anybody up here. There’s gotta be some kind of edge we can get our fingernails under.”
Before they left, they walked Jaffe around the place, and pointed out spots along the creek, behind the house, where bodies could have been buried. “That’s a sizable chunk of ground. Gonna take a while,” Jaffe said.
THEY LEFT THE FBI men, stopped at Wolf’s Cafe, found it empty except for Wolf, ordered pancakes, and asked her to name everybody she knew in every building in the town. “Please God, don’t tell anybody I helped. That poor goddamned Martha West, getting roasted.”
“Nobody’ll hear it from us,” Lucas said.
She started reciting names, and Lucas got a piece of paper from his notebook and drew an outline map of the town and slotted the names in cartoon houses. They took the map south, to the sheriff’s office, and found twenty or so deputies milling around. The sheriff came out and said, “I got a courtroom upstairs. Already some people up there, I’ll send the rest of them up now. Only got two or three who can’t make it.”
Thirty people, half of them in uniform, had gathered in the courtroom. Two or three people who looked like courthouse loafers had squeezed in, curious, and Lucas ordered everybody who wasn’t a sworn deputy to leave. The loafers squeezed back out, and one of the deputies closed the doors.
“I don’t want anybody to talk about what goes on here,” he said. “If you gotta talk to your wives, tell them to keep their mouths shut. I know it’s hard, but it’s only for a couple of days. What I have is a list of everybody who lives in Broderick.” He waved Del’s yellow legal pad. “I think I have the name of everybody. And we need to have a real gossipy talk about who does what up there. Who’s been busted, who’s been warned, what kind of trouble they’ve gotten themselves in, if they have—we need anything you’ve got. I’m telling you fellas, after last night . . . we need to nail this sucker. And we don’t have a hell of a lot to go on.”
“No DNA at all?” one of the deputies asked. Lucas recognized him as one of the guys who’d been at the fire.
“We’re not too hopeful,” Lucas said. “Mrs. West was burned beyond recognition, and those of you who’ve been up at the house know what that looks like. It’s a big pile of charcoal.”
“Cash and Kelly worked for Gene Calb; have you talked to Gene?”
“Yeah, but he says he doesn’t know nothin’ about nothin’. So what I need to know from you is, What about Gene Calb? Does he really not know nothin’ about nothin’?”
“He’s always been a pretty good guy,” one of the deputies said. “Can’t see him killing anybody.”
“Ever been in trouble?”
“Traffic tickets, I guess. Maybe a DWI when he was a kid.” The deputy looked around, picked out a man in gray coveralls. “What do you think, Loren? You go up there.”
The man named Loren cleared his throat and said, “I rent a paint booth from him for a couple days, every year or so—I refinish cars as a hobby. The thing is . . . there are some pretty tough hombres up there. Mike Bannister or Kiley Anderson or Dexter Barnes, everybody knows them. Gene handles them, though.”
“So what about these guys, Bannister and Anderson and Barnes?” Lucas asked.
The deputy said, “They’re mostly just hell-raisers, but they’ve been known to steal a car occasionally. There’s one guy out there, Durrell Schmidt, will steal a calf every once in a while. That’s what we think, anyway.”
“Had some marijuana around there,” another man said.
“Had some everywhere, it’s mostly just ditch weed,” a third deputy said.
They went around for a while, told Lucas a story or two, and laughed at them. Lucas finally asked, “So who up there could kill somebody? Who up there, if he really got his back to the wall, could do that?”
Loren said, reluctantly, “You could see three or four of those guys getting drunk and maybe something happens and they get crazy with a gun and shoot somebody, almost like an accident—but if it came down to sitting around and thinking about it, and then doing it . . . I gotta say Gene Calb. Maybe Dexter Barnes. I mean, if it came right down to having to do something really tough, and then doing it, one of those two guys. I don’t think they did, but I don’t know anybody else up there who . . . who . . . ” He scratched his chest as he looked for a word. “Who is really organized enough to do this. Organized isn’t the right word, maybe . . . ”
There was some nodding of heads, but then another deputy said, “Do we know for sure that the guy who killed the Sorrells and West had anything to do with the kidnappers? Or that the guy who killed the Sorrells is the same guy who killed West?”
Lucas smiled. That was a new thought, that everything was unconnected. “We believe there’s gotta be some connection—if there isn’t, we’re really out in the dark.”
Another deputy said, “I talked to the doc this morning, the medical examiner, and they X-rayed Martha West and she’s got a slug in her head. You know about this?”
“I haven’t talked to the ME today,” Lucas said. “Good slug?”
“Most of it’s there. So if it’s the same guy who did the Sorrells, you could get a match.”
“All right. Listen guys, I want you all to go out and question everybody you know. I don’t mean interrogations, just ask around. Was there anything weird going on up in Broderick? Anything that’s sort of undercover around Calb’s place? If you hear anything, from anyone, that seems like it might be real, give me a call. The comm center here has my number.”
“So what’re you gonna do?” somebody asked. “Wait for us to call?”
“We’re gonna go back up and walk the town again. The FBI is up there now—there are rumors about a second kidnap victim, I’m sure, and I can tell you that it seems likely that there were at least two girls, not just one. So . . . ask around. Let me know.”
BEFORE THEY LEFT, Lucas asked a woman in the comm center if there was any place that they might eat a late lunch that didn’t involve the Bird. She suggested they try Logan’s Fancy Meats, which was down two streets and around the corner, on the right. They tried it, and found a slow-talking thin man standing behind a meat counter. He was wearing hawkish black-plastic-framed glasses, the kind that New York authors wear, and was reading a copy of The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He sighed when he put the book down, and said, “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
Lucas asked, “Those pretty good poems?”
The thin man’s eyebrows went up; he was skeptical. “You read poetry?”
“I do,” Lucas said. “I’ve seen the book, but haven’t had a chance to look through it.”
“It’s very good,” the thin man said. “Do you know Kubla Khan?”
“Of course,” Lucas said. “Maybe the best beginning of a poem ever written. It’s wonderful.”
Without prompting, the thin man lifted the book, and read, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree, where Alph the sacred river ran . . . ”
When he finished, his eyes gone dreamy behind the black glasses, Lucas and Del shuffled their feet, as cops will do when caught listening to poetry, and then Del cleared his throat and said, “Could I have a cold chuck roast sandwich?”
THEY LEFT WITH heavy sandwiches on thick rye bread, chuck roast for Del and hot sliced chicken for Lucas, along with bottles of cream soda, and ate in
the car on the way back to Broderick.
“Gonna walk the place again?” Del asked.
“No choice—things have changed since the fire. This time, we try to scare them into talking . . . if there’s anything worth talking about.”
WITHOUT THINKING MUCH about it, Lucas headed for the Cash house, where they could at least be inside. When they pulled up, Cole, the lead FBI agent, coatless, was walking out of the house. A black Lexus sedan was parked in the yard behind the federal cars. A fiftyish couple had apparently just gotten out and were standing passively next to a sheriff’s deputy.
“Aw, man,” Del said, as they pulled into the yard. “Must be that Burke kid’s folks.”
“Worst goddamn thing I can think of, having your kid snatched and killed,” Lucas said. “You want to talk to them?”
“Maybe to see what they have to say,” Del said.
“Good. Go talk to them. I don’t want to. I’m gonna start hitting all the houses again. Find me when you’re done with them.”
“All right. We going after Calb? Looks like there are people over at his shop.”
Lucas looked down the highway. There was smoke coming out of the shop chimney, and a half dozen cars were parked around the lot outside.
“Maybe wait one day,” Lucas said. “Do the whole town today, and jack him up tomorrow.”
18
LOREN SINGLETON HURT. The pills helped, but they wouldn’t last. The bleeding, at least, had stopped, but a bruise was growing across his chest, from his breastbone to his armpit. The bullet hole looked like a black mole, clogged with hardening blood. He had a fantasy: drive to Fargo, buy some women’s makeup at a Wal-Mart, paint his chest so it looked okay, then go bare-chested for a minute or so in the deputies’ locker room.
Then he thought, Why? If they wanted to look at his chest, they’d look at it, whether or not somebody had seen it in the locker room. If they looked at it deliberately, body paint wouldn’t help.
He thought about calling Katina Lewis, but dismissed that after a moment. They were falling in love, but there was no way that she’d go for the killing of Martha West, no matter how necessary it may have been. He might, in fact, have to break it off with Katina—he could fake the flu for a few days, but if they stayed together, she’d have his shirt off soon enough. He couldn’t bear the idea, couldn’t stand it.
He had to do something. Something to fix it all. Something that would fix the whole deal.
That guy Davenport, at the deputies’ meeting, asked everybody to nose around. If everybody did talk to everybody else, they might finally figure out that Loren Singleton had been closer to the Kansas City people than anybody had really appreciated. If somebody had seen them here, and somebody else had seen them there, and if they put it with what Katina knew, and what Gene Calb knew . . .
That was the trouble with a small town: too many people knew your business, knew your life.
In the end he called Mom.
MARGERY SAT AT the kitchen table with her head in her hands. “You dumb shit. You dumb shit. What were you thinking about? Now they’ve got to look up here. When the Sorrells were killed, it could have come from anywhere. From Kansas City. Now . . . you’re sure the kid didn’t recognize you?”
“I’m still here,” Singleton said. He added, after a moment, “So are you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” She didn’t yell it at him—she growled it.
“It means, we need a way out.”
She looked at him for a few seconds, then said, “There’s only one way out. We’ve got to give them somebody else who did it.”
“What?”
“If they look at you, with that hole in you . . . if they even suspect, all they have to say is, ‘Take off your shirt.’ That’s it. Then you’re done.”
“I know it,” he said, miserably. He touched his chest and tears came to his eyes. “Jeez, I hurt.”
“I don’t know why I help you,” she said. “I just oughta go to work and forget about it.”
“They’d find out what happened. You’d go to jail right along with me.”
“Who’s gonna tell them?”
Silence. Then: “I would. You got me into this, you . . . witch. You’re the one who thought Jane was so fuckin’ wonderful, you’re the one who thought Deon was so fuckin’ smart, you’re the one who thought of stealin’ the little girls, for Christ’s sake. I ain’t hanging for that. I ain’t hanging for the little girls. I’ll take them out where the bodies are, they’ll dig them up, and you know what they’ll find? They’ll find all that shit from the nursing home that you pumped into them, that’s what they’ll find.”
More silence. A full minute of it, the locks closing down again, just like when they lived together years ago, locks on all the doors.
“You gotta do what I tell you.”
“If it makes any goddamn sense.” More tears. “Goddamn, I hurt.”
SHE TOLD HIM what to do, and Singleton staggered off to bed, pulling at the hair on the sides of his head. His head was burning, not from the wound, but from what his mother had said. Once facedown, he blacked out. He woke from time to time, to find Margery in the living room, watching TV, watching him.
Mom.
Finally, late in the afternoon, he pushed himself to his feet, brushed his teeth, washed his hands, went to the bedroom, opened the bottom drawer, and found the little .380 semi-auto. He checked it, put the gun in his pocket. And now a pipe.
His basement was small, dark, damp; a hole, really, for the water heater and the furnace and for a few thousand spiders and crickets and ants and mice. Singleton walked carefully down the wooden steps, pulled the string on the bare overhead bulb, dug around in an old trash rack, and eventually came up with what he’d been looking for.
A lead pipe. Lead pipes were hard to find. They’d been outlawed for decades and when a guy really needed a lead pipe, you could hardly find one. If you wanted to hit somebody over the head, you were usually stuck with a copper or iron pipe, which were really too hard to do the job right. With copper or iron, you’d break the skin, while, with a properly deployed lead pipe, you got a nice deadly rap, and no blood.
He was just lucky, Singleton thought, to have one. He carried it upstairs, walked around the kitchen a few times, whacking the palm of his hand with the pipe, then stepped down the hall to the living room. “Let’s go,” he said.
Margery pushed herself out of the La-Z-Boy. “You better do this right, dumb shit. This is it. If this ain’t right, we’re gonna die.”
“I know.”
“So get some different shit on. You’re supposed to know how all this works—but you gotta get some different shit on.”
Singleton pulled out his oldest parka, a dark blue nylon job that he hadn’t worn in years. He got his heaviest gloves and a pair of boots. When he bent forward to tie his shoes, the pain in his chest suddenly flared and he gasped, a high-pitched “Yiiii . . . ”
“You goddamn baby,” Margery said.
KATINA HAD SAID good-bye to Ruth, and then had gone out as usual to check on a dozen elderly women living in the small towns across the countryside—women who needed food or medicine or company. Katina did it three days a week, when she wasn’t scheduled to make a run. Not only did that help build a better cover for the group, she enjoyed it, and did some good, she thought.
She was south of Armstrong by the end of the day, coming back into town a half-hour after dark. She decided to check Loren’s house, on the chance that he was home and awake. She swung by, found the house dark, went to the garage and looked inside. His cars were there, and she went and knocked on the door, waited, knocked again. No answer. Huh. When he went somewhere, he usually drove—Loren was not a walker.
But he wasn’t answering the door. For a moment, that felt sinister. What if this killer . . .
No. There were much better answers than that. She stood on her tiptoes and tried to see inside, but there was nothing to see. After a minute or so, she went back to her car. She
’d call him later, she thought, as she headed back to the church.
Only two women were left at the church, in addition to Ruth and herself, and those two had apparently gone out. There were no runs scheduled, and the other two had been making country checks like she had. She turned on the lights and found a note on the kitchen table: “5:20. Gone down to the Red Red Robin for dinner. Lucy’s buying. If you make it back before six, come down.”
She looked at her watch. Only five-thirty. She’d missed them by ten minutes. She could use some restaurant food, she thought. She went back out to her car, noticed that Calb’s had gone dark, and headed back to Armstrong.
THE LIGHTS WERE on at Calb’s house, on in most of the houses up and down the short street. Singleton and his mother stayed in the dark as much as they could, without looking furtive. A couple of cars had gone by, and they’d leaned behind sidewalk trees as they passed. Singleton dug at the sole of his boot, trying to look as if he were doing something, if somebody looked out the window of one of the houses—though with the parkas pulled around their faces, there was no possibility that they’d be recognized.
The walk to Calb’s house had taken ten minutes, and by the time they got there, the pain was fading again, as it had after he’d taken the first pill. On the other hand, his mind still felt a little disconnected, a little cloudy. That might be okay with Gloria Calb, but he’d have to be sharp for Gene.
As they came up to Calb’s, Margery said, “Let’s go around to the back door. Won’t be in the porch light.”
“Okay.”
He was like a robot, taking directions. He couldn’t imagine Gloria being suspicious of him—she knew what he did for Gene. They walked up the driveway, through the fence gate between the house and the detached garage, and around to the door. Knocked on it quietly. Knocked on it again, heard somebody walking around inside. Knocked on it a third time.
Gloria Calb came to the door and looked out the window, and he dropped the hood of the parka. When she saw his face, she pushed the door open.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 128
