The Prophet

by Michael Koryta

  Kent read it three times, a chill spreading through his chest and out to the rest of him, until his temples and fingertips felt tight and tingling. The other two items were cards: a business card for AA Bail Bonds and a weathered sports card with perforated edges, Adam Austin kneeling in full pads, helmet resting beside him, staring into the camera with a loose, easy grin.

  Gideon Pearce’s wallet. The random traffic stop, the first clue. This was the football card that started him on his way to prison, the football card that brought Kent to him all those years later, saying he forgave him, telling him he’d like to say a prayer together, Pearce laughing—a wild, mocking laugh—as Kent got through it, head bowed and eyes shut, his voice shaking and his hands folded together so tightly the nails left half-moons of blood.

  He shifted his eyes back to the business card. It was nondescript—cheap stock, gray, the name and address and two phone numbers. He used the letter opener to turn the business card over. Blank. He turned the football card over next and then, for a long time, a very long time, sat in frozen silence at his desk. When the door banged open, he rose to his feet and rushed into the locker room. Steve Haskins, playbook in one hand and cup of coffee in the other, nodded at him.

  “If you’re ready, I was hoping we could go over—”

  “I’m going to need you out of here for a while,” Kent said. “Kids, too. Everyone. Make sure nobody comes in here. Practice is yours.”

  “Coach?”

  “Practice is yours,” Kent repeated. “And keep people away from that door until the police are here.”

  He went back to his office then and called Stan Salter to tell him that he knew who had killed Rachel Bond.

  Part Two

  LAST WEEK’S AUTUMN

  23

  ADAM WAS ON HIS WAY to Mansfield Correctional to interview Jason Bond when the phone began to ring. Chelsea, calling from the office, so he expected she would be calling about business. He did not care about business, and let her calls roll to voicemail three times. It wasn’t until the fourth that he finally gave in with a sigh.

  “Yeah?”

  “Where in the hell have you been?”

  “Working. What’s up?”

  “Police are searching your property, Adam.”

  “Not surprised. Salter’s unhappy. Let them do their thing.”

  “They aren’t here. They’re at your house.”

  A tenth of a mile rolled by, two tenths, three, and Chelsea said, “Adam? You hear me?”

  “They’re searching my house?”

  “That’s what I’ve been told. Based on new evidence.”

  “What new evidence?”

  “They don’t volunteer that, Adam. They just show the warrants. We got one here, too.”

  “They broke down my door?”

  “No. Your brother gave them a key.”

  “Gave them a key.”

  “Yes. The deed’s in both of your names. He’s allowed to grant them access, legally.”

  Chelsea was still talking, but his mind was empty, the world empty, consisting of nothing but gray pavement and the far-off sound of Chelsea’s voice.

  “Adam? Do you want me to go there? Or call a lawyer?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I’ll handle that myself.”

  He hung up. He was thinking of the closed door with the handwritten sign, thinking of police entering the room, and ahead of him the highway seemed to narrow like a tunnel and pull him underwater, swift and silent.

  In his entire coaching career, Kent Austin had missed one practice. That was the day his son was born, and he was back the next morning.

  Today he missed his second, spent it with a sergeant from the Chambers Police Department and an FBI agent named Robert Dean. Kent wondered why the FBI was here already, recalling how long it had taken for them to get involved in Marie’s disappearance. His father had shouted for them, screamed for them, as if they were mythical problem solvers, would walk in and listen to the situation and produce his missing daughter immediately, tip their caps, and go on their way. By the time the FBI actually got involved, though, most of the heart had gone out of Hank Austin, the shouts turning to numb musings, as if he’d already checked out of his life and was studying it sadly from afar.

  He kept up those musings for the rest of his life, but only Adam was allowed in. Not Kent. That was his brother’s rule, though, not his father’s. The two of them would sit in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of Scotch and an ashtray, and his father would tell tales of revenge. Never mentioning Marie’s name. They were always historical, or anecdotal, or flat-out apocryphal. He’d talk about how the Apaches would bury enemies up to their necks in the sand, coat their eyes with sweet sap from cactus, and wait for the ants to come. Talk about spies who’d had their tongues cut out, soldiers who had been left impaled on stakes in Vietnam.

  There was a time when Kent felt that he should sit with them. Adam wouldn’t allow it.

  “Get your ass down to the weight room,” he’d say when their father began to get warm, began to tip the bottle a little more frequently, glass clinking off glass. “Go see Coach Ward.”

  Kent would go. Always with a shard of guilt, a sense that he belonged there, three men sharing their alcohol and their pain, and that he was slinking away from it like a coward. Once, and only once, his father tried to get him to stay. Poured a third glass and slid it across the table and told him to have a seat. Adam caught the glass, and told Kent to go see Coach Ward.

  “Ah, he can stay,” Hank Austin had said. “It doesn’t always need to be football.”

  “For him it does,” Adam said, and he looked their father in the eye and his voice was hard. There was a long pause, a frown but no argument, and then Adam spoke again, not looking at Kent. “He’s not worth a shit right now, anyhow. Dances in the pocket, throws high on the first pass after anybody gives him a good hit, and if he’s checked down to a third read in his whole damned career I’ve never seen it.”

  That had been the end, the cue to leave, and Kent popped open the door and slipped out into the night and walked to the Wards’ house, where he was eating dinner more nights than not, where he listened to the family say grace before each meal, where he watched game tapes and talked to the coach and tried to pretend he was oblivious to Beth, that he didn’t live for a moment of eye contact with her.

  Right up until the end, his father remained entranced by revenge stories. They weren’t always so dark, but he had an unerring ability to return to the concept. Talk about a baseball game, he’d segue over into the memory of a pitcher who’d thrown a beanball at someone who slid into a base with spikes up. Mention football, and it was a savage late hit delivered in retaliation for the way a teammate had been treated. His daily scans of the newspaper became a quest, a search for reminders of balance in a world that had ceased to offer it to him.

  It always comes back around, he’d say, whether the topic be sports or war or an embezzling business partner. You always pay your dues. There was a tragic hopefulness to the assertion. He needed to believe that pain circled. If you caused it, you caught it.

  Today, Kent believed that pain circled. The only problem was that all he did was catch it. He found himself thinking, as he answered questions, that he was relieved his father was dead.

  “Clayton Sipes?” Robert Dean said.

  “Yes. I believe that letter is from him.”

  “And you know this man how?”

  “I met him in prison. This summer. I was there on a speaking visit.”

  “Tell us about that interaction, please.”

  Something in the question caught Kent’s attention; it reeked of preparation. He appreciated a prepared man. But Dean shouldn’t be prepared for this.

  “You’re already aware of this name, aren’t you?” Kent said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It doesn’t seem to have caught you by surprise.”

  “We have a list of everyone who was paroled from Mansfield around the time th
ose letters started. Everyone who might have had access to Jason Bond or awareness of the contact with his daughter. Sipes is on that list. He is not alone on it, but he’s on it.”

  “Have you interviewed him?”

  Dean tapped his pencil, eyes down, and shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “He’s made none of the required contact. There’s an active warrant for parole violation.”

  Kent closed his eyes. “When was he paroled?”

  “In August.”

  “When the letters resumed with Rachel. The false letters.”

  “Yes.”

  Kent rubbed a hand over his face and said, “He was in for assault, wasn’t he?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I asked the director of our outreach program to find out for me. His name is Dan Grissom. He said it was assault. Is that correct?”

  “It is. Sexual assault, stalking, violating a restraining order. Why are you so sure he wrote this letter?”

  “Because it’s a repeat conversation.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve done a lot of prison visits,” Kent said. “There are men who listen, and men who don’t. Men who mock, men who get on their knees and pray with you. I’ve seen them all by now. Or I thought I had. I’d never seen anything quite like him, though. He was… combative, I guess that would be the word. But not in an angry way. The best way I can describe it is… intensely interested.”

  Focused attention was the phrase that first came to mind, but that was his coaching mantra, and he could not transfer it to Clayton Sipes, refused to do so.

  “Interested in your message?” Dean said.

  “Interested in challenging my message. Interested in challenging the very idea that I believed in a God, but he wasn’t content to keep that debate theological.”

  “Explain that.”

  “It was personal,” Kent said. “Immediately. When I go to a prison, I tell a personal story, of course. I talk about my sister, the way I had to learn to bear that grief. I talk about my own journey. But his reaction…” Kent paused and shook his head, remembering the man so vividly, shaved head, wiry muscle, neck and left arm covered in brightly colored tattoos. “His reaction was disturbing. It was as if… as if I woke something up in him. He was all dull eyes and boredom and then he just kept… intensifying. I don’t know the best way to describe it. The way his interest grew as I talked was unsettling. Like it was this dim light when I walked in the room and with every detail I shared it got brighter and brighter, right? Not in a healthy way.”

  “You simply observed this? Or was there direct interaction?”

  “Oh, there was direct interaction. He asked to speak with me alone when my talk was done. What he wanted from that conversation was specific. It was very important for him to hear me say that my faith couldn’t be broken.”

  “But you didn’t think he was taking reassurance from that?”

  “No. I thought he was taking a challenge from it. I know that he was.”

  “Did you mention Rachel Bond?”

  “No. I’d never have done that. She was a child.”

  Dean frowned. “The letter seems to indicate otherwise.”

  “Well, I mean, I didn’t use her name. I didn’t identify her.”

  “But you discussed the situation?”

  “To an extent.”

  “What extent?”

  “Minimal.” Kent realized how defensive he was becoming, realized that he was acting as if he were being accused of a crime, and for the first time understood exactly why. He felt guilty. What Dean was asking about wasn’t speculation, it was the truth. Clayton Sipes had found his way to Rachel Bond through Kent.

  “I’m going to need a little more than—”

  “I was talking about forgiveness,” Kent said. “And family. Those are regular points for me. Usually I keep it focused on my own experience. But this summer, the situation with Rachel and her father was fresh. She’d been so relieved to make contact. She’d replaced something that was missing, you know? So I used her”—he stuttered then, hating the word choice, used—“as a, uh, an anecdote. A lot of those men have lost ties with family. Maybe through their choice, maybe not. Many of them have isolated themselves from family because of guilt and shame. I wanted to talk about that, and… her situation was fresh. It was relevant.”

  Dean scribbled on his pad and said, “The two cards, the football card and the business card. Why would he have sent those?”

  “To make me suffer. He was fascinated by the idea that I said I’d found peace with my sister’s murder. He took issue with that.”

  “You don’t believe it was designed to make you feel doubt?”

  Kent paused. “Doubt in what?”

  “Gideon Pearce’s guilt.”

  The silence built and hung. Kent swallowed, leaned forward, and said, “I feel no doubt about the guilt of Gideon Pearce.”

  “I didn’t ask what you felt. I asked if it was possible that’s what he was going for.”

  “Perhaps.” The twenty-two-year-old football card was already haunting him, because it had come from one of two places: the evidence collection from Gideon Pearce’s case, or the inside of Kent’s childhood home. They’d printed a few thousand of those cards in 1989, but there were only two in the world with the number 18 inked on the back in his dead sister’s handwriting. It was Kent’s number. There had been no football card for him in 1989 because he was not all-state, was not even a starter, but she hadn’t wanted him to feel left out, so she kept two of Adam’s cards and wrote Kent’s number on both. One had been in her room when she went missing. The second had been found with Gideon Pearce after she was murdered.

  “So the recollections in the letter,” Dean said, “they’re accurate? This doesn’t strike you as a possible imitation?”

  “Absolutely not. They’re accurate. I talk about forgiveness, faith, all of the things that were mentioned in the letter. About Gideon Pearce. I invite them to contact me if I can help.”

  “What about your brother?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Do you talk about him during these visits? The cards are directly connected to him.”

  “I don’t know if I used his name. I talked about what my family went through. And the card, I talked about that. The way it felt when we learned about Pearce.”

  “Are you aware of any people you might consider enemies of your brother? Deep-seated problems, threats, things of that nature?”

  “I don’t know what that has to do with Clayton Sipes.”

  “Probably nothing. But we can’t just shut off all other possibilities. Clayton Sipes can be considered a suspect, but right now all we’ve got is your recollection of an odd conversation. So let’s look wider, please. Are you aware of anyone who has problems with your brother?”

  “No. I’m sure in his business there have been some.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He brings people back to jail. I would imagine many of them resent that.”

  “True. But that’s not a personal thing, is it?”

  “No. I’m just saying… listen, I am not qualified to talk about my brother’s life.”

  “You’re not close, I take it.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Kent felt his jaw clench. “Personal differences.”

  “Any particular incident? Something to do with Gideon Pearce?”

  The sound of the name put a chill through Kent. Always had, always would.

  “Gideon Pearce is dead.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Then why would you ask—”

  “Someone gave you a football card identical to the one found in his possession after your sister was murdered. He seems relevant.”

  “Okay. All right. Yeah, it had to do with Pearce. I went to see him, in prison, long after he had been convicted. My brother didn’t
approve. He came by my house to express that, and… we got into it pretty good.”

  A scar along the left side of Kent’s lip, which stood out more when he smiled, a stark white line, testified to just how well they’d gotten into it. Nine stitches had been required. Beth still recalled it uneasily. He could have killed you, Kent. I really thought he could have killed you.

  “So Sipes would have been aware of the football card, your brother’s feelings about your visit with Pearce, all of that? You speak about this in your visits?”

  “Yes. I describe how Pearce laughed it off.”

  Kent could see the son of a bitch so clearly, the gap-toothed smile. I forgive you, Kent had told him. I want you to understand what you have taken from me, and so many others, but before we begin with that, I need you to understand that I forgive you, and I would also like to say a prayer.

  The laughter had started then, and Kent remembered a drifting sensation, his anchors loosening and sliding free into a current of wild rage, and he’d bowed his head and prayed and waited for the anchors to catch again as Pearce laughed and laughed, a truly delighted sound.

  “Coach?” Robert Dean said. “Mr. Austin?”

  He lifted his head now, having bowed it again unaware, and nodded. “Yeah. I’m good.”

  24

  THERE WERE FOUR CARS— three cruisers and one unmarked detective’s car—parked on the street when Adam arrived. A photographer knelt on the sidewalk. He wasn’t in uniform, and he was keeping his distance from the cops. Media. As Adam exited the Jeep and went through the yard to the front door, one of the officers shouted at him, and a flash popped from the photographer and Adam ignored them both and went into the house. Stan Salter was waiting for him, warrant in hand.

  “We tried to call you first. Let’s talk it through.”

  “Talk it through? You’re in my house.”

  “With legal authority and sound reasoning. Let’s talk about the reasoning.”

  “You consider me a suspect?” Adam said. “You out of your mind?”