She certainly had a gift for summarizing things, he thought, amused. “That’s it in a nutshell,” he told her. “The whole thing came to light when people kept mistaking Dad for the former chief of police.”
“At least you always had a family around you, no matter what their name was,” she concluded.
Shane wondered if she knew that she sounded wistful. He didn’t need to be told how lucky he was; he knew. “Look, I didn’t mean to sound like I was bragging—”
“You weren’t,” she told him, cutting short any apology he thought he owed her. “You were just answering questions I was asking. Guess I’m just trying to sharpen some of my investigative skills,” Ashley quipped. Getting into the vehicle, she buckled up. “This is a change from my usual day. There’s no one to talk to in the van when I’m driving around. I spend most of my time looking for strays and skittish animals that darted into the street at the wrong time.” She flashed a half smile at him, summarizing the difference in their work for the department. “You keep the streets safe, I keep them clean—someone’s got to pick up the roadkill,” she pointed out when he looked at her quizzically.
He raised a shoulder, executing a half shrug. “Never thought about it that way,” he admitted.
“Most people don’t.”
There was no belligerence in her voice.
* * *
The trip to Lake Ellsinore was hypnotically tedious. Part of the trip was on a winding, two-lane road.
While Shane drove, she continued researching the Reverend Horace Phillips on the tablet she had unofficially “borrowed” for the road trip. Among other things, she found out that the Church of the Sacred Way was a weathered-looking building still standing on the spot where it had originally been constructed close to eighty years ago. Its congregation was small but fiercely devoted, and Monica’s father had been its only shepherd for the past thirty-one years.
Ashley relayed each find to the man in the driver’s seat as it came up.
“Amazing what you can get off the internet these days,” she commented.
“Especially since the homes in the area look as if they’re lucky to have running water,” Shane observed. He was surprised she was getting a signal on the electronic device. The houses they’d passed in the past four miles looked like they belonged to a farming community—without the farms. He glanced in her direction, nodding his head at the houses they were passing. “I get an eerie vibe. How about you?”
She looked up from the tablet and focused on the immediate area they were traveling through. She doubted that the town where the victim’s parents lived had more than three hundred people.
“All I can say is that it’s lucky for me I’m not into this zombie craze that’s going around lately, but yes, this place gives me the creeps,” she said succinctly. There was a woman standing in the doorway of a house as they passed, just staring as they drove by. “It’s the kind of place they must have used to film The Children of the Corn.”
The reference took him completely by surprise. “You an old movie buff?” he asked.
“Not so much of a buff,” she countered—she couldn’t quote lines or anything like that, “but I watched a lot of old movies when I was growing up. Not much to do when you have no friends,” she said offhandedly.
Did she have any idea how isolated that sounded? “Why didn’t you have any friends?”
She stared straight ahead, trying to focus on the terrain around them and not on the past. But it felt as if the past was always hovering over her, like a slick mist she couldn’t escape.
“Hard to make friends when you don’t know if you’re going to be someplace a week from now,” she told him. “Easier all around if you just keep to yourself.”
“Must have made having a birthday party hard,” he commented, thinking back to the friends he’d had as a kid, the parties he’d attended.
The shrug was careless, the tone deliberately distant. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You never had a birthday party?” he asked, surprised. A birthday party, no matter how small, was something he’d taken for granted as being a right for every kid, no matter how poor. One of his favorite gifts had been a sweater his mother had made for him. He’d worn it until it completely came apart at the seams. It was the love behind the parties and the gifts that counted, not the actual presents themselves.
Open mouth, insert foot, he upbraided himself.
“I never had a birthday,” she told him in the same distant voice.
Okay, now she was exaggerating. “Everyone has a birthday—unless you’re an immortal,” Shane said with a laugh.
She turned toward him then, her eyes meeting his. “If you have no identity, you can’t have a birthday,” Ashley said simply. “And social services never found out who I was.”
That didn’t make any sense. “But they had to have. You’ve got a last name,” he pointed out.
The corners of her mouth curved in an ironic smile. “St. James? Like it?” she asked. Then, not waiting for a response, she told him, “I made it up. James was inscribed on the back of this watch they found on me. I figured it belonged to my father and that James was his name. Anyway, St. James sounded kind of special, and there was nobody to say that it wasn’t my name, so I kept it. I made it legal when I turned eighteen.”
From the little he’d learned about her, not searching for her roots seemed against type. “Weren’t you ever curious about your background?”
“Sure.”
That was more like it. “And?” he prompted.
“And nothing,” she said flatly. “I gave it a shot, went to the local newspapers, asked to look into their archives, went on the internet, all that good stuff.” There was a mocking note in her voice as she recalled the enormous frustration she’d dealt with. “Had a few false leads that took me nowhere and finally decided I could spend my time better. So I stopped beating my head against dead ends and put my energy toward improving my marketable skills.”
“What sort of ‘marketable skills’?” He wanted to know, finding himself more and more curious about the woman fate had had cross his path. More and more attracted to her, as well, and not just her looks, but also the character that was emerging out of these ashes he kept encountering.
“I can tie a knot in a cherry stem with my tongue,” she said, a deadpan expression on her face. Then, when she saw the incredulous look on his face, she had to laugh. “God, you should see your face.”
She was having fun at his expense, Shane realized. He shrugged, supposing that maybe he deserved that. “I take it you’re kidding.”
“Oh no, I can do it,” she assured him with a toss of her head. “But I’d have to be really simple-minded to count that as a skill. I made myself more marketable by taking a few criminology courses at the local two-year college. Thought maybe someday, when I moved on from Animal Control, those courses might come in handy.
“This must be the place,” she commented as they pulled up to the church. It looked even worse for wear in reality than it did on the internet. “According to the address from the DMV, it looks like Monica’s parents live behind it.”
She said parents, but in actuality, all she’d found so far was information about the victim’s father. Not a single word about her mother. Could the woman be gone? Dead, perhaps? If she was, that would have given her something in common with the victim, Ashley thought grimly. They’d both been motherless.
He and Ashley got out of his sedan practically at the same time. Shane went ahead and knocked on the door. The house looked as if it was just a few years younger than the church whose shadow it stood in.
Getting no response, Shane knocked again. He knocked a total of three times before the door to the narrow, two-story wood-framed building finally opened.
A somewhat heavyset man with a cloud of pure white hair came out
. He had on the traditional minister’s collar and an untraditional frown as he looked them over critically. The minister pointed to something in the distance just before he began to speak. “The main road is three miles due east. Follow it, and it’ll take you to the freeway—eventually.”
The man obviously thought they were looking for directions. “We’re not lost, Reverend,” he told the man gently, working his way up to what he had to say. And the questions he wanted to ask.
Impatience creased the overly high forehead. “Then who are you, and what are you doing here?” the minister asked.
He and Ashley took out their badges and IDs at the same time, holding them up as he told the minister their names.
“As to what we’re doing here,” Shane continued, “I’m sorry to have to be the one to have to tell you this, but your daughter Monica is dead.”
“Yes, she is,” the minister said flatly with no emotion.
Stunned, Ashley stared at the man. “Wait, you know she’s dead?” There was no way he could have found out. The story was being kept from the local news media pending the next-of-kin notification. All details had been concealed.
Had the story leaked? All the way up here?
Rather than appearing stunned or deliberately controlled, the minister looked angry. “I said so, didn’t I?” he snapped.
“Would you mind telling us how you happen to know that, Reverend?” Shane asked.
It was obvious that the man was struggling to keep his temper under wraps, but he looked on the verge of lashing out.
“She is disobedient, she is a fornicator and she is with child,” he stormed, enumerating each point harshly. “That makes her dead to me, to the community and most of all, dead to the Giver of Life to us all.”
“She is also dead to everyone else, sir,” Shane told the minister. He was doing his best to keep his contempt in check. Not for the daughter, but for the father who seemed so indifferent to the daughter he was being told he’d lost. “As in, without any vital signs. Someone killed your daughter, Reverend.” He watched the man’s face as he spoke. “She was found butchered on her kitchen floor.” With each word he added, Shane intently studied the minister’s expression. It only seemed to harden more.
How could a man call himself a father and listen to something that should be heartbreaking without displaying an inkling of any real emotion?
“As is to be expected from a fornicator,” the minister declared. “The Lord’s justice is swift.”
Shane’s eyes narrowed. What a coldhearted bastard. No wonder your daughter ran off as soon as she could. “You mind us asking where you were Monday night through Tuesday morning?”
The reply came after several moments. It was obvious that the minister did not care to have to volunteer his whereabouts. “Tending my flock, as always.”
Yeah, right. “Can any of your ‘flock’ verify this, Reverend?” Ashley asked.
The minister turned on her, a look of pure anger in his eyes. “Are you accusing me?”
“Let’s just say we’re trying to rule you out,” Shane answered, deliberately moving his body between the minister and Ashley. The man didn’t look above striking out at someone weaker than he was.
“The Lord will punish you, too, for this,” the minister railed at them.
“No doubt,” Shane agreed glibly. “But in the meantime, I still need the name or names of any of your ‘flock’ who can vouch for your whereabouts.”
“This is outrageous!” the reverend shouted.
“No, this is procedure, sir,” Ashley countered, her tone as mild as his was loud. She sensed that it goaded the man. “The names?” she prompted, waiting.
Condemning their “godless souls to eternal damnation”—the reverend failed to see the irony in that—he wrote down the names of several people, then thrust the paper at Shane. He refused to even look at the woman with him. “They were all at the prayer meeting. The last one’s my wife.”
Shane glanced over the names. “We’ll be speaking to all of them,” he assured the minister.
“When?” the minister demanded.
“Now,” Shane replied. “Before anyone can talk to them.”
The man’s face turned an intriguing shade of red. “You’re questioning my word?”
“We’re the police. We question everything,” Ashley told him glibly. “By the way,” she added as they walked out of the building, “we’re very sorry for your loss.” She knew the words were useless in this case, but she said them, anyway. For the dead woman’s sake.
The next moment she regretted making the effort.
“It’s no loss,” the minister snapped.
“Whatever you say,” she replied, then pressed her lips together to keep from saying anything further—or telling the man what she thought of him.
“Don’t you even want to ask about the baby?” Shane inquired.
The minister shrugged. “I’m assuming it perished with her. Just as well,” he concluded, turning away. “It’s the devil’s spawn.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Shane said to Ashley. “The air smells pretty putrid in here.” Then he looked back at the minister. “We’ll let you know when you can come for your daughter’s body. The medical examiner hasn’t released it yet.”
The minister looked at him as if he couldn’t understand why he was being given this information. “Tell him to do whatever he wants with the body,” he ordered them. “I have no daughter.”
Shane knew he should just ignore the angry minister and walk away. But he couldn’t let the man’s words go without some sort of comment. “It’s easy to see that she certainly had no father.”
He walked away with the minister sputtering indignantly in the background. Being around someone like that made him appreciate his family even more. Out of the corner of his eye, Shane saw that Ashley was smiling. It softened her features, transforming her into a far more approachable, not to mention alluring, young woman.
“You know what?” Ashley said to him the moment they got away from the toxic minister.
“What?”
“At least the minister did one good deed,” she said as she stood beside the sedan.
He had no idea what she was talking about. “How do you figure that?”
“For the first time in my life, my childhood doesn’t seem so bad,” she said, punctuating her words with a dry laugh.
Chapter 13
“I’m beginning to think that Monica’s father is far more likely to have killed Monica than that worthless boyfriend of hers,” Shane commented as he opened his door.
Ashley had to agree with him. Of the two men, the minister struck her as the more heartless one. “Could be Reverend Phillips heard the words of God whispering in his ear, telling him to punish Monica for her transgressions.”
Shane nodded. “That sounds like something he would say. Let’s find out if the good reverend’s alibi holds up,” he said pragmatically.
“It might hold,” Ashley admitted. “But there is definitely nothing good about the reverend.”
“Amen to that.” And then he grinned when he saw the way Ashley rolled her eyes. “No pun intended.”
“Yeah, right.” Getting into the sedan, she buckled up and then waited for him to get in on his side and do the same. “There’s just one problem with all this,” she said once Shane was in the car.
“What?”
“What did he do with the baby? Given the way he feels about the fact that she got pregnant, why would he bother separating it from his daughter’s body?” That bothered her. She would have thought that if the reverend had killed his daughter, he would have left them together, not being able to stomach the sight of his daughter or her child.
“That’s something to look into once we establish whether or not his alibi checks
out. My guess is that since he considered the baby the devil’s spawn, he either buried it or threw it somewhere where it could never be found.” He started up his car. “Okay, let’s see if the reverend even knows how to tell the truth.”
* * *
Three hours later they discovered that not only did the minister know how to tell the truth, but apparently he had. According to several members of his faithful flock, Reverend Phillips was indeed at the prayer meeting as he’d claimed. He was the one conducting the meeting, expounding on the evils of a thankless child.
“Bet Christmas was a barrel of laughs in the Phillips’s household,” Shane commented. They’d already discovered that the reverend’s wife, Monica’s mother, had left him shortly after their daughter had run away from home.
The moment the words were out of his mouth, Shane realized that the woman with him had no yardstick to go by when it came to what could be regarded as a good Christmas, and that his reference probably just drove that home for her.
“Sorry,” Shane apologized quietly.
“For what?” Ashley asked. As far as she was concerned, he hadn’t said anything he needed to apologize for, at least not recently.
Shane spelled it out for her as he put the church and the community behind them. It was a shrinking image in his rearview mirror. “For forgetting that you don’t have a frame of reference when it comes to Christmas.”
She surprised Shane by contradicting him. “Sure I do.”
All right, he was officially confused now. Ashley had good memories when it came to the holidays, but she hadn’t experienced something as personal as a birthday celebration? That didn’t make any sense to him.
“I don’t understand,” he told her. “You said you had no family.”
She stared straight ahead, out the window. “I didn’t. I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a frame of reference. I have It’s A Wonderful Life, and I watched Home Alone at least half a dozen times. Just because I never had one of my own, I still know what the right kind of Christmas is supposed to be like.”
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