Fractured Truth

by Susan Furlong

  I spiraled down through the darkness, surrendering myself, welcoming the final escape.

  At the last second, I heard something that clouded me with regret and shrouded me in loss—Wilco’s distant bark.

  * * *

  For the second time that week, I woke up in a hospital room. This time, it was Pusser standing over me. “Your grandmother’s outside, waiting to come in, but I need to talk to you first. Can you talk?” He pushed the button on the bed rail until I was semiupright.

  “Yes.” Pain scraped my throat as I squeaked out a barely audible reply.

  “You’re lucky. Riana Meath tried to squeeze the life out of you.”

  “But how? . . . I should be dead.”

  “That dog of yours.” Pusser swiped at his face. “She claims he went crazy. He tore her up, half her face is gone. A neighbor heard her screams and called 911. She’s a couple rooms down. Alive still. But pretty messed up.”

  Wilco? I searched the room.

  “He’s not here. They’ve impounded him.”

  “What!” I started to get up. Pusser pushed me back down. “Take it easy. Had he actually killed her, we’d be in trouble. As it is, it was an act of self-defense. I’m doing everything I can. I promise.”

  “But impound—”

  “Parks is seeing to him. Don’t worry.”

  I tried to swallow, felt the cutting of raw edges in my throat. Finally got out, “Jacob didn’t kill Maura.”

  Pusser frowned, confused. “He confessed. Harris picked him up at the farm, made the arrest. The kid confessed to the murder before Harris even got him in for booking.”

  “I think Harris coerced the confession.”

  Pusser shook his head. “I don’t know, Callahan. That’s a big accusation.”

  Not really. Harris loved credit for anything—especially solving a case, regardless of whether he was right or not. But I let it drop. I didn’t have the energy to argue.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Pusser said. “The confession is just icing on the cake. We found the murder weapon in his barn and some devil stuff in the house.”

  “Like what?”

  “Video games mostly. He played some sick video games.”

  “A lot of kids do.”

  We looked up as Grabowski stepped inside. He regarded me with concerned eyes, then spoke to Pusser. “The grandmother’s out there and she’s spitting mad. Wants in here now.”

  Gran? “Let her in. Oh, wait. Eddie and Nevan?”

  Pusser shrugged. “We don’t know where they are, but it doesn’t look like anyone was there but Riana and her sleeping mother. We found Ona. She’s in Nashville.” Pusser pulled up a chair. “I need to get a statement from you.”

  So I told him everything, the best I could. The words spurted out slowly through my raw throat. I struggled to swallow, and spit kept pooling at the corners of my mouth. Pusser dabbed at it with a tissue. Gently. Caringly. I kept talking, and he nodded, encouraging me to continue. I explained about the journal, the handwriting, Eddie, Riana . . . and ended with, “They’re lovers. Eddie and Nevan are lovers.”

  Pusser and Grabowski exchanged a look. Grabowski shrugged. “So? I get what that has to do with Maura, she was Nevan’s beard, his cover. But what’s it have to do with Addy Barton?”

  “I don’t know.”

  CHAPTER 39

  The walls of the McCreary County Detention Center loomed dark against the gray sky. A spike in the temperature had melted off the remaining snow, leaving dirty puddles in the asphalt parking lot. I stepped in one and water seeped through my sneakers and into my wool socks, making my toes stick together.

  The jail captain met us at the employees’ back entrance and escorted us to a private interrogation room. I was still suspended, but Grabowski got permission to bring me along. He thought Riana might open up to another Pavee. We still hadn’t been able to locate Eddie and Nevan to substantiate the case against Jacob and fill in the blanks about the illegal husbandry for fighting cocks. So no more progress had been made on the case.

  Grabowski sat next to me, nervously adjusting his tie, a black string bolo with a turquoise-claw centerpiece. Up and down it slid, over and over, until Riana appeared, pasty pale in her orange jumpsuit.

  Riana ignored Grabowski, locking eyes with me instead. A jagged gash ran from her eyebrow down to the base of her jawline, puffy pink and red raw with dark, slanted stitches. “Look what your dog did to my face. I’m going to make sure he’s put down for this.”

  My fingers traced the puckered edges of my own scar and around to the front of my neck, still swollen and tender where her fingers had gripped my throat. She deserved what she’d gotten. No doubt about it. But I didn’t go there. Instead, I took the discussion in another direction. “We compared the handwriting in the journal to Eddie’s handwriting. It’s a match. Eddie wrote the journal. He and your brother are lovers.”

  “Don’t believe nothing that lying faggot writes.”

  The hatred in her voice unsettled me.

  Grabowski shifted uncomfortably.

  I switched tactics. “The kids must’ve gotten pretty tight after the accident that took both their fathers. Maura and Nevan, two kids, the same age with dead fathers. If I remember, they became engaged around that time. Arranged by their mothers?”

  She didn’t respond.

  I continued talking. “Were they chaperoned when they dated?” Pavees were protective over their young girl’s chastity. Couples didn’t date without supervision.

  “Of course.”

  “By you?”

  “Sometimes. But I was busy with my own family. Eddie chaperoned. . . .” She pressed her lips together, her gaze turning cold.

  That’s when the two boys fell for each other. Both adolescents. It must have been torturous for them to realize their feelings. Especially as Pavees. “Did you know Maura was pregnant?”

  “Yes. A settled boy’s baby. If I’d known she’d turn out to be such a whore, I never would have agreed to their engagement. At least he found out before he actually went through with the marriage.”

  “Yes. And how convenient that she turned up dead. He didn’t even have to break off the engagement.” Which would have been another strike against our culture—arranged marriages were sacrosanct.

  “Nevan had nothing to do with Maura’s death. Neither did I. It was that Fisher kid. That weirdo. He’s into some pretty sick stuff, I hear.”

  “A lot of Pavees, maybe even you, his family, might say that what Eddie and Nevan are into is sick.” I needed to get under her skin, say whatever it took to open her up.

  Her eyes blazed with anger. “Shut up, Brynn. You don’t know what you’re saying!”

  My heart went out to those two boys. “Did Nevan know as a boy, or maybe he didn’t realize it until he met Eddie? Is that how it happened? Did Eddie influence him? Seduce him?”

  She shook her head.

  “How long did it take Maura to figure it out?”

  “There was nothing to figure out. Nevan was in love with her. He wanted to marry her. At least until he found out that she’d been cheating on him.”

  An arranged marriage can be bad enough for any man and woman. But it must have felt like torture to Nevan, being forced to marry any woman, to live a lifestyle unnatural to him. “I doubt it. I think he probably told her how he felt. She must have been devastated. A young Pavee girl, matched to a gay man. No wonder she fled to Hatch Anderson’s arms.”

  I’d struck a nerve. Riana became unglued. “Shutupshutup-shutup. . .”

  “How embarrassing for your family. What was it your mother said to me the other day? Something about our strict code of conduct. Being gay doesn’t quite fit into the Pavee code, does it?”

  She slammed her hand on the table, her voice venomous. “You Callahans are a piece of work. Who are you to come over here and point fingers at us? We’re a good family. Respected. My husband’s—”

  “Your husband’s a wimp-ass bully. Smashing car windows, throwing
bricks at night, threatening old women . . . You must be so proud.”

  “Screw you.”

  I sat back, about worn down. I had no idea how to get to Riana.

  Grabowski took up the slack. “We have you for attempted murder, Riana. Cooperate with us and we’ll work to get you a deal. Maybe time off your sentence.”

  Riana looked bored.

  I tried again. “Babies are expensive. That’s why Maura got involved in the cockfights, isn’t it? She saw the writing on the wall. Hatch wasn’t going to be there for her, the clan would shun her, and Nevan was too in love with Eddie to be bothered with her and the baby.”

  Nothing.

  “It’s in the journal,” I added. “Eddie named all the participants. We have a ledger from the Barton girl’s barn to back it up.”

  Something flashed on Riana’s face. Panic? Hatred? She was a difficult one to read.

  “And then there’s the Barton girl. Addy Barton. You killed her, too. Why? Was she a witness? Did she know too much?”

  “I’m done with this.” She walked over and banged on the door. “Guard, guard! Get over here. I want to go back to my cell.”

  Get over here. Her words jarred something in my mind.

  Out in the parking lot, I turned to Grabowski. “You need to check Riana’s cell phone records. Right before she choked me, she made a call. We need to know who she called.”

  CHAPTER 40

  The next day, I was in Pusser’s office. I’d stopped in, hoping to talk to Pusser in private about getting back to work full-time, but Grabowski was there. They were discussing the case. Pusser invited me to sit with them, and I did. The scent of cinnamon wafted among us, along with thick apprehension. Would I ever earn back Pusser’s trust? The photograph of his daughter was turned slightly my way. I remembered Pusser dabbing at my mouth in the hospital, the look of concern in his eyes and the gentleness of his touch. I imagined what he must have been like as a young father, loving and doting and caring.

  “I got Riana Meath’s phone records,” he said. “The call she made was to her husband, Pete.”

  The case file was open on Pusser’s desk with pictures of Maura and Addy from the autopsies.

  I tore my eyes from the report, but they landed on another document: the murder note from the scene of Maura’s death. I stared hard at it. The words blurred in and out, like an out-of-focus picture. There was a dark stain that showed black in the photocopy—blood, I knew. Maura’s blood, dripping from her wound, dripping from the symbols on the wall, dripping onto the ground and mixing with the dirt floor of the cave. The ground, be so careful; don’t destroy the evidence; don’t disturb the footprints. “Footprints.” I spoke my thought out loud. “There was more than one set of footprints. They were both there, both Riana and Pete killed Maura.” No wonder Pete had come after me, telling me that he and his boys didn’t want us coppers to handle the case.

  “Looks like it. We brought him in yesterday. We struck a deal with the husband, a shortened sentence and a chance to see his kids grow up if he talked. He did.” Pusser turned my way. “Harris may have worked the Fisher kid too hard for a confession. Or maybe the Fisher kid just wanted three squares a day, so he confessed. He and his brothers live in squalor out there at that farm. Must be hard on the boy. Anyway, he’s got an appointed advocate working to get him out.”

  Too late. The brothers will end up as wards of the state. The family separated. I thought of his mother, so carefully and tenderly laid out in the slaughterhouse. Everything Jacob had worked for . . .

  “Anyway,” Pusser said, “Pete claimed his wife killed Addy, not him, but he helped her dispose of the body.”

  “Addy and Maura?”

  Pusser frowned. “Just Addy, so far. But we’ll get him to confess to Maura’s murder. Eventually. He’s got a high-priced lawyer doing most of his talking. You know how it is. Pete’s famous—he’s got sponsors and everything. There’s a lot of money at stake here. He’s being portrayed as an accomplice in Addy’s murder. His people will spin it as he simply got caught up in his wife’s rampage, pretty much an innocent participant. You know, like the getaway driver for an armed robbery. People might be willing to forgive that. But two killings? And both young girls. That makes him look like a psychopath.”

  “The female shoe prints in the cave . . .”

  “Size seven. Same size as Riana’s.”

  “Treads?”

  “We’re still searching for the actual shoes. She must have gotten rid of them.” Pusser tossed his toothpick and reached for another. “Frustrating as hell. Those shoe treads are about all we got from that scene. No fingerprints, not much on DNA, actually we don’t have jack. Nothing’s ever easy, you know.”

  “So . . . you said Pete confessed. But just to Addy’s murder. Why Addy? What was their motive?”

  “It’s complicated,” Pusser said. “Apparently, Riana and Pete discovered Eddie and Nevan together one day. They feared Nevan would come out, once he’d broken the arranged-marriage plan. It’s hard to tell which one of them was more disgusted by Nevan’s sexual orientation, Riana or Pete. Pete decided that all the boy needed was a little toughing up.”

  “He beat him.”

  “Regularly. Here’s the sick part. Riana encouraged it. She thought it was for Nevan’s own good.”

  Grabowski spoke up, his voice low and strained. “I don’t understand you people. You claim that you’re marginalized, prejudiced against because you chose to live differently, yet you persecute people like Eddie and Nevan.”

  I didn’t respond. What could I say?

  Pusser ended the silence. “Anyway, that night, Addy delivered a couple birds to Nevan’s place. Riana overheard Addy talking to Nevan about getting her mother, the social worker, to help him. We can only guess that either Nevan himself or Eddie or maybe Maura told Addy how Nevan was being treated. Riana knew that she and Pete would be investigated for child abuse. She couldn’t afford to have that happen. So Riana caught up to Addy and confronted her. It got heated. They mixed it up, the fight got out of hand, and Addy ended up dead. Then Riana called in Pete to help her dispose of the body.”

  “I can see why Pete would cop to that,” I said. “No premeditation, no direct involvement with the killing, the whole story makes it sound like it was all just one big misunderstanding.”

  Grabowski shook his head. “Doubt that he’ll do much time. Juries always go easy on guys like him.”

  “But they’ll make an argument for premeditation, right? Addy was stabbed, and Riana can’t explain away the fact that she had a knife when she confronted Addy. And think about it. Riana couldn’t afford to be reported. She’d lose her kids. Not to mention the money she’d give up. Her husband was negotiating a big boxing deal. So killing Addy became the only option. She confronted her with the intent to kill. For all we know, Pete was in on it from the beginning.”

  Pusser’s eyes fell to his daughter’s photo and glazed over with sadness. “We can probably make a criminal-intent case against Riana, but doubt we’ll be able to prove it for Pete. Maybe once we pin Maura’s death on them. There’s no getting around the fact that her murder was planned. But we’ll have to let the courts decide on the rest. All I know is that both these girls, Addy and Maura, were nothing more than a couple mixed-up teens, making stupid choices, like most teens do, but they didn’t deserve to die. They had so much life ahead of them. It’s all such a waste.”

  CHAPTER 41

  The racket of a couple dozen dogs barking shouldn’t have hit me so hard. It was an animal shelter, right? Caged animals bark. Still, I cringed to think of my dog there. Concrete, metal pens, utilitarian food bowls, nothing cushy or comfortable—some of our perps had it better than this in the county lockup. And most of them didn’t deserve better than my dog.

  The receptionist’s pack-a-day voice greeted me from behind the counter. This was my third visit since Wilco’s impoundment. Mel was her name and we’d become fast friends. “Moved him to a new cage.”


  “Why?”

  “Bigger pen. Better location. I arranged it. Dog’s a damn hero protecting you that way. As far as I’m concerned, he’s one of us.”

  Wilco had worked his charm on Mel. Good. I thanked her and headed for the back room. Wilco sensed me immediately, letting out a soulful bale as I worked my way down the kennel past several penned dogs: a cream-colored lab, whining and whimpering, his tongue slopping over his snout; a yappy little muttlike pooch, head bouncing like a bobble doll; and an unidentifiable mix, charging and snapping, ramming his snout through the metal cage. I knelt down by Wilco and reached between the bars. “Hey, boy, how’s the doggy slammer treating you?”

  Wilco rubbed his cheek against my hand, his eyes never leaving my face. My heart melted; then a wall, built of logic and caution, sprang up. I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for my dog, but I’d been surprised by the fierceness of Wilco’s attack on Riana. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it concerned me. I’d seen him defend me before by growling and snapping, but never an actual bite, let alone practically shredding someone’s face. Wilco had acted out of his own will. To most people—Mel, my colleagues at work, Pusser even—Wilco had acted heroically. I knew better. I was Wilco’s master, head of the pack. His only obedience should be to me. By acting on his own accord, even though it was to protect me, he bypassed the chain of command. He took the dominant role in our relationship. Left unchecked, he could eventually become a safety hazard, biting anyone he perceived to be a threat to me. Eventually he may have to be put down. I’d never forgive myself if that happened. As soon as he got sprung, we’d work on training and reestablishing our relationship roles, his and mine—with me as alpha.

  Alpha dog. Humans are no different than dogs when it comes to pack mentality. Except for people, it’s all about status and exclusivity. I’d learned that lesson early on in high school. I was part of a pack: Riana, Leena, Shannon, and me. Riana was the alpha dog back then. And she’d dominated us like the true alpha bitch she was. And when I dissented, she and the others held me down and shaved my head. Cruel, yes. But simplified, it could be seen as nothing more than a means to reestablish role dominance. A pecking order was reinstated, Riana on top, me—the half-breed Pavee—on bottom.