A Thorn Among the Lilies

by Michael Hiebert

  “I don’t know what you’re using the information for, so I don’t know what sort of details you need.”

  “I’m working a case regarding a serial killer.”

  “And you think Mr. Robertson’s involved?” the nurse asked. “That’s impossible.”

  “No, no,” Leah said. “I think he could be a target. This is why I want to solve the case as soon as possible.”

  “Hmmm,” the nurse said.

  “That sounds like you thought of something,” Leah said.

  “No, it’s nothing really.”

  “Please? Anything might help.”

  “Just . . . his wife had a sister.”

  “And?”

  “Well . . . you know.”

  “Pretend I don’t.”

  “She was just a bit . . . quirky. Sort of rubbed me a little strange. I shouldn’t even be saying anything. It was my issue, not hers.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, thank you for bringing back those old memories. They are happy in a sad sort of way. And if you see Mr. Robertson, tell him Nurse Sandra says ‘hi!’”

  “I’ll make sure that I do,” Leah said. “Thank you for all your help.”

  She hung up the phone, now more interested in the mayor’s sister-in-law.

  Later that afternoon, Chris returned with a photocopy of Anna Marsh’s picture. Frustratingly, it was in black and white, but that was clear enough to see what Leah needed to see. She could tell the woman was in her late twenties, had light-colored (probably blond) hair that hung thickly to her shoulders.

  Surprisingly, the shot wasn’t from seven years ago, but from near on three months ago, when Anna’s sentence got changed from simply a drinking and driving charge to vehicular manslaughter.

  “I originally looked for her picture in the paper at the time of the accident, but they only ran a picture of Susan Lee’s body lying in the street.”

  “Figures,” said Leah.

  “But Anna Marsh’s resentencing was enough to get her own photo.”

  Leah held the picture away from her to give it her full attention. “What do you think?” she asked Chris. “Think she looks like our victims?”

  “I’d say she’s an awfully good match.”

  CHAPTER 57

  Leah brought the videotape to the station and knocked on Chief Montgomery’s door. He waved her in.

  “I got something here I want you to watch. Tell me if it’s just me, or is there something quirky ’bout it?”

  “What is it?”

  “Videotape. That VCR hanging below your TV still work?”

  “Dunno, haven’t used it for at least a year.”

  “Well, let’s give it a shot.”

  Leah could barely reach up to slide the tape into the machine. A sparrow was sitting on the branch of the fig tree outside. It squawked, almost mocking her. Finally, the tape slid into the machine and Leah pressed PLAY. Nothing appeared on the screen except the sports channel that was already playing. “You have to turn the TV to channel three, I reckon,” she said to Ethan.

  Ethan did. It worked and the video started. She knew it by heart now. First the shot of the body, lying in the darkened mine shaft with the EMT and police investigators working all around it. Then we come up to Detective Truitt—who she’d been meaning to call—standing off to the side, talking to some of the officers, probably one of which was the first officer on the scene. Then everything gets brighter as the camera pans out of the mine and across the crowd and here is where the feeling comes, only this time she thinks she knows why. Her hand quickly goes up and presses the PAUSE button when the image shows nearly the whole crowd of onlookers.

  “Looked fine to me,” Ethan said. “Nothing abnormal.”

  “No, it would look fine to you. I think I just figured it out.”

  “Figured what out?”

  “This woman”—she pointed to a woman in a hoodie with the hood up over her head concealing the spiked orange hair underneath—”I believe she’s the same girl who called in our crime scene for Mercy Jo Carpenter. That would put her at both scenes.” She looked back at Ethan.

  “Way too much of a coincidence.”

  “Right. I think that makes her a suspect. Probably top of my list.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Luanne Cooper,” Leah said. “She lives in Alvin.”

  “What would be her motive?”

  “Not a clue.” Killers without known motives were the scariest kind.

  “How long has Scarlett Graham been gone?”

  “Six days, today,” Leah said.

  “Then we need to act fast,” the chief said.

  Leah left Ethan’s office and grabbed the phone at her desk and called the number she had for Luanne Cooper. There was no answer. “Damn it!” She pounded the phone back on the cradle, startling Chris more than anything else.

  “What’s goin’ on?” Chris asked.

  “I think I know who’s got our girl, but I think we might be too late.”

  “Who?”

  “There’s no time to explain right now.”

  Then Leah Teal thought of something else.

  She went and checked the background they ran on the mayor again. Sure enough, Leah’s instincts were right. She had seen Luanne Cooper before, in a photograph on the mayor’s wall. She was the sister of his dead wife. Only, she had dark, shoulder-length hair and blue eyes instead of spiky red hair and green eyes (the miracles contact lenses could do these days).

  Leah opened the door to the main room, and asked Chris, “What did it say on the background report for the mayor’s wife? Who were the surviving members of her family again?”

  He shuffled through the pages until he found the right one. “She’s survived by her husband, Hubert James Robertson, daughter, Ginger Robertson, son, Paul Robertson, her sister, Luanne May Williams, her mother, Gina Williams, and her father, Alistair Joe Williams.”

  “Luanne gave me a pseudonym for a surname. We need a search warrant for her house and we need it pronto,” she said.

  “I’ll make the call,” Police Chief Montgomery said, picking up the receiver from the phone on his desk.

  Meanwhile, Leah called Detective Truitt up in Birmingham. “Truitt,” he said, answering.

  “Dan, it’s Leah. I think we got her.”

  “Her? Her who?”

  “Our serial killer.”

  “It’s a her? Didn’t see that comin’. I had this one profiled to a guy.”

  “It’s the mayor’s sister-in-law. They pulled his wife off life support around three months or so ago and pronounced her dead. Because the case took place in Alabama, the drunk driver responsible for her death only got five years in prison, which happens to be the maximum.”

  “Seriously? Wow. I can see why she might be a little pissed.”

  “All the women she’s targeted? They’re all lookalikes to the drunk driver, Anna Marsh. They’re also all basically hookers or loners, so they’re people who won’t be noticed missing right away, giving her an element of time. She’s basically getting revenge in her own way. And, at the same time, taunting us with the messages.”

  “I’m coming down.”

  “We’re getting a warrant to search her house right now. This’ll all be over before you make it.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot. You’ve never driven with me.”

  Leah sighed.

  “Yet,” Detective Truitt added.

  CHAPTER 58

  “I must say this could be one of the most stupid ideas you’ve ever had, and that’s sayin’ somethin’,” I told Dewey when I got to his house and he had all these pine boards laid out in his front yard on the grass.

  “Why? When we was little we used to do it with lemonade. Fifteen cents a cup, remember?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I also remember the only people who bought it were our folks and neighbors. Those were mercy buys, Dewey. Nobody really wanted any of our lemonade. But this is different. You’re thirteen.”

  “Twel
ve. I won’t be thirteen for another three months. And I ain’t sellin’ lemonade.”

  “No, what you’re sellin’s almost worse.”

  “I’m sellin’ them their future. Here. Hold this board up while I nail it to this one.”

  I held the board even though I was seriously against this idea. Nobody was gonna pay—I didn’t even know how much he planned on chargin’—but nobody was gonna pay a twelve-year-old kid to read their future at a lemonade stand on the side of the road. I doubt even our folks and neighbors would show up for this one.

  “How much you plan on chargin’ for this?”

  “A dollar.”

  “A dollar? Have you gone crazy?” I figured he’d gone crazy.

  “You just wait and see. Folks wanna know ’bout their future. Okay, now hold this board here. Thanks.”

  I kept holding up boards while he nailed them. In the end we had the weirdest looking lemonade stand. Well, it was only weird because the shelf was about three times as big as normal lemonade stands—Dewey needed it that big to lay his cards out. Then he threw a dark red cloth over the shelf so it looked like a table and, on the top of the stand, we nailed a board facing outward like a sign. On that sign, with purple paint, Dewey wrote: FIND OUT YOUR FUTURE. I noticed he didn’t post his price anywhere. He put three lawn chairs around the stand, one behind it for him to sit in and two in front. I guess he expected people to be coming in pairs.

  About twenty minutes went by while I stood leaning against the stand and Dewey sat in the chair shuffling his tarot cards overhand. It was a quiet twenty minutes.

  “Nobody’s comin’, you know,” I said.

  “Give it a chance,” he replied.

  Finally, Melissa Delwood and her little sister from down the road happened to walk up the sidewalk toward Hunter Road, probably on their way to Main Street. They stopped at the stand. “What you boys doin’?” Melissa asked. “Awfully cold for lemonade.”

  Melissa was in the twelfth grade. I wasn’t sure what grade her little sister was in, but she still went to school here in Alvin.

  “We ain’t sellin’ lemonade,” said Dewey. “We’re sellin’ your future.”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “I mean I can tell you what’s gonna happen in your life with these tarot cards. And I’m real good at it, too.”

  She looked to me. “Is he pullin’ my leg?”

  I shook my head, remaining stone-faced. “I wish he was.”

  Melissa sat in one of the chairs on the other side of the stand. “How much does it cost?”

  “A dollar,” Dewey said without missing a beat.

  I thought for sure that would end the conversation there and then, but without even trying to negotiate a better price, Melissa reached into her purse, pulled out a dollar bill, and handed it to Dewey. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me my fortune.”

  Dewey went through the cards and pulled out the Queen of Wands and laid it in the center of the table. I still had no idea how he was choosing these cards to represent everybody, and he wouldn’t really tell me. He just made passing mention that there was a certain way to do it and that was it. I felt like buying a book on tarot card reading just so I didn’t feel stupid while he did this stuff.

  Dewey took the cards from Melissa after she shuffled them and laid them out on the table. Then he began reading Melissa’s future.

  “Melissa, you are very balanced. This is good,” Dewey said, and I knew he just said it because it sounded like something Madame Crystalle would say. “Throughout your entire life, however, you feel like you have been judged.”

  “Hmm,” she said, like she was taking this all seriously.

  “The biggest obstacle in your life is money and you have a boyfriend who is starting a business. You’re hopeful that will work out, but really, deep inside, you don’t think it will.”

  A smile burst across her face. “Wow! You really know what you’re doing,” she said. “Wait till I tell my friends!”

  “But,” Dewey said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is, the business will work out. The bad news is, your family and friends won’t believe it until they see it.”

  “That’s so true,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Your biggest influence is your mother and father, who have lots of money. You hope to one day be like them and not have to worry about it. You just want to find happiness and love, and not be brought down all the time by your lack of money.”

  “I can’t believe how good you are at this,” Melissa said.

  And I guess she did tell her friends because, over the next two days, twelve more people showed up at Dewey’s stand to get their fortune read. By all accounts, Dewey had managed to start an actual business. He made himself thirteen dollars that, to me and him, was near on a fortune.

  “You gonna do this every weekend?” I asked him as he was putting his stand away.

  “On the sunny days, I think. I doubt I’ll get many customers in the rain.”

  “This could be one of your best ideas of all time, you know,” I said, which was something I rarely did—actually compliment Dewey.

  “I know,” he said very matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly, in fact, that it made me want to slug him. “I knew it would work the minute I thought of it.”

  “No, you didn’t,” I said. “Ninety-nine percent of the stuff you think of never works.”

  “But this one was different. I just knew it would work. You know why?”

  “Why?” I realized too late I should never have asked this question.

  “Because, Abe,” he said. “I’m psychic. Remember?”

  And once again I wanted to slug him.

  CHAPTER 59

  After getting an emergency no-knock warrant from the courthouse, Leah and Chris hit Luanne Williams’s home. Leah took the front, Chris the back, both coming through their respective doors with battering rams. Quickly, Leah swept the living room with her Glock. “Living room clear!” she announced.

  “Kitchen clear!” Chris called from the other side of the wall.

  “Hallway clear!” Leah shouted.

  They went through the whole house making sure nobody was there. It was empty. No sign of Luanne, no sign of Scarlett. They did find something mighty disturbing, though: one of the three bedrooms had been converted into a shrine with pictures of the victims. They were all black and white, presumably made in the converted darkroom they found in one of the other bedrooms.

  The images filled the walls, pinned at different angles. Shots of the victims before their eyes were sewn shut, shots of them with just their feet and arms bound and the tape over their mouths, shots of them with one eye stitched and one eye not. Those may have been the worst, because you could see the fear in the single eye left open. It looked wild and confused, like a caged animal.

  Then there were the pictures of them dead, with the bullet hole in the right side of their head.

  Pictures of Faith Abilene, of Mercy Jo, and even pictures of Scarlett Graham. There were pictures of Scarlett with her eyes sewn, but none of her with bullet holes in her head. This left Leah with a little hope.

  “She’s not keepin’ the victims here,” Leah said. “It’s not the right environment anyway. We’re looking for mud, clay, and sawdust.”

  “That could be anywhere,” Chris said.

  “No, I have an idea.”

  They walked back out to the kitchen. Chris happened to notice something hanging on the wall of the dining room. “Holy cow. Come look at this, Leah.”

  It was a framed five-foot-tall white embroidered cross. The stitching was perfect.

  “Well, we can attest to her talents.”

  Leah picked up Luanne’s phone and had the operator put her through to Mayor Robertson. She quickly explained what she thought was going on. He wanted more details, but she was frustrated, running out of time.

  “Listen, Hubert, I’ll tell you more when I can. What I need to know right now is that cabin you have in the w
oods? The one you’re building the annex onto? Where exactly is it?”

  “Should I ask why?” he said, sounding like he wasn’t quite trusting her anymore.

  “Does Luanne know about that cabin?”

  “Of course she does.”

  “Do you know anything ’bout her owning an old handgun? An original model Beretta Model 950 Jetfire?”

  “I don’t, but that’s a pretty old gun. I know ’bout guns. I’m an avid collector myself. That gun would be worth quite a bit, especially if it still worked.”

  “I have reason to believe it still works.”

  “Her daddy collected guns. Just a few, mind you. Could’ve belonged to him.”

  “Where’s her daddy now?” Leah asked.

  “Old folks’ home,” the mayor said. “Got a case of Alzheimer’s.”

  “Does Luanne have a key to your cabin?” This was the big question.

  “No, but I keep the key hidden at the cabin. Nobody in Alvin is dishonest enough to break into a cabin, and if they did I have nothin’ up there worth takin’.”

  “Where is the key?”

  “It’s beneath a little ceramic frog that sits by the door,” he said.

  More frogs. What is it with frogs? “When was the last time you were up there?”

  “Oh.” He let out a big breath. “Let me see . . .” Leah was growing ever more frustrated. “I guess July?”

  “Okay, I need directions to your cabin and I need them now.”

  He told her how to get there. The cabin was about eighty miles north. Dan Truitt may be even closer to the cabin than she was. She quickly called the dispatcher at the Birmingham station and asked her to relay the address to Detective Truitt. “Tell him we’ll meet him there. No cowboy stuff.”

  The dispatcher just laughed. “Why don’t I ask him not to breathe while I’m at it?”

  Chris and Leah had arrived in the same squad car. “Let me drive,” Leah said as they hurried outside.

  “Why?” Chris asked. “I always drive the squad car.”

  “Because I drive faster than you.”