by Layton Green
Wade gave an ugly little laugh. “You don’t have anything. And you sure as hell don’t know anything about Mac, or you wouldn’t mention a wire. Off the record?”
“Yeah. Off the record.”
“Between you and me, a little birdie told me that over the last few months the recently deceased had developed a three-G habit.”
“Per month?” Preach said.
“Per week.”
Preach stared at him.
“Hooked something fierce,” Wade said, “and probably supplying his johns, too. But like I said, he was straight with us. No debt. So how’s a strung-out bookstore owner keep up an account like that? Why don’t you detect that, Joe?”
12
As soon as Preach walked Wade into the station, a tall and trim man in his fifties approached them. A crown of sandy hair rimmed his comb-over, and his bespoke brown suit with a red-and-white-checkered tie screamed attorney.
“Why, exactly, are you driving my client around town without his consent? Maybe this is how things are done in Atlanta, but not here. Not unless you want a civil suit with your morning coffee.”
Despite the challenge, the attorney’s voice remained polite. His rural North Carolina accent, as rich and smooth as oak-aged chardonnay, sounded a touch overdone to Preach.
“It’s fine,” Wade said. “We were just talking.”
Preach saw Chief Higgins standing off to the side, watching the exchange with folded arms. Kirby hovered behind her.
The attorney gave Wade a piercing stare. “They have no reason to hold you.” He turned back to the detective, as if daring him to challenge the statement.
Preach spread his hands. Maybe they had enough for an arrest, maybe they didn’t. Either way, this attorney was going to stonewall further questioning. Preach decided it was better to let Wade walk—for now.
“Believe it or not,” he said, “I have your client’s best interests in mind.”
“I’ll choose skepticism in this instance.” The lawyer curled a finger at Wade. “Let’s go.”
Preach called out to his old friend as they left. It was depressing to see how his life had turned out, a lackey for a local drug dealer. “Do you really want us to start digging? Are they worth it?”
Wade sniffed and reached for another cigarette. “Do what you have to. Great seeing you again, Joe.”
After Wade waltzed out with his attorney, Chief Higgins stopped by Preach’s desk. “That was Elliott Fenton, Creekville’s best defense attorney. Mac called him.”
“Must be a peach of a guy, if Mac Dobbins has him on retainer,” Preach said.
“Elliott’s not known for his client selectivity.”
“Which lawyer is? Atticus Finch?”
Chief Higgins snorted and crossed her meaty arms. Her red curls looked oilier than usual, the color of a low-grade grease fire. “Be careful. Elliott’s connected, and this town is so focused on doing the politically correct thing they’ve cut off their own balls.”
She looked not in the slightest bit abashed about her gender-specific reference. Preach knew the chief drank herbal tea and practiced yoga and shopped at the co-op, but she’d also told him about growing up poor in a small town outside Fayetteville. She belonged to that class of scrappy Southern women far removed from the debutante set: nurturing, but tough as a cast-iron skillet. Trailer parks instead of subdivisions, Folger’s instead of Starbucks, pork rinds instead of sweet potato soufflé.
She lowered her voice. “My point is you can’t take the gloves off around here, and my other officers are as green as unripe figs. Most of them have never fired their guns.”
“What about bringing in a few people with some experience?”
“You think I haven’t tried? I only got you because someone retired.”
Preach and Kirby spent the rest of the afternoon digging through Farley Robertson’s emails, searching for connections. The elements of the case swirled in Preach’s mind like an inchoate chemistry experiment, the materials scattered in dark places around Creekville, waiting to be unearthed and combined into a combustible form.
Thermos in hand, Kirby appeared at Preach’s cubicle. “My eyes are bugging from all this screen time. What’s the next play? Shake Mac down?”
“His attorney would just handcuff us. Let’s get a forensic accountant on Farley’s finances.” He rose and shrugged into his jacket. “An expensive drug habit and a bookstore losing money? I want to know where the money came from.”
“Going somewhere?” Kirby asked.
“I’ve got an appointment.”
As he brushed past, Kirby stepped aside and eyed him with raised eyebrows, waiting for a longer explanation that never came.
The nighttime streets were glossy, slick with the yellow glow of headlamps as Preach cruised through downtown during what passed for rush hour in Creekville: a brief flurry of commuters returning home from Durham and Raleigh.
The chief, and no one else at the station, knew where Preach had to go. After his breakdown in Atlanta, despite his stellar record, he had been forced to transfer out of the department. Reeling, he had applied to a few cities, but no one had an opening. Or maybe they’d gotten a whiff of what happened in Atlanta and decided to pass. He’d widened his search and discovered the opening in Creekville. At first he’d recoiled, unwilling to deal with a past he’d left behind like a discarded snakeskin, but then his inner voice started urging him to return: hole up someplace calm, handle some minor crimes while he figured out if he was fit to be a murder cop again.
So much for that idea.
The chief was thrilled to take on someone with his experience, but she had mandated therapy as a condition of employment. Preach had not been happy. A negative psychiatric mark could ruin a career.
Still, the chief just wanted to tick a box, and she didn’t care what form the therapy took or who Preach saw. He knew colleagues who had seen a friend or relative when they needed an easy sign off, and his Aunt Janice happened to be a brilliant psychologist. She’d reluctantly agreed to see him, free of charge, for a few sessions.
He was praying that was all it would take.
He swung into the parking lot of the office complex and parked beside his aunt’s Passat. She had a purple lambda bumper sticker, and a flag-shaped decal that read At Least The War on the Environment Is Going Well. In the passenger seat, he saw a red wig that made him smile: serious Aunt Janice liked to moonlight as a clown at the pediatric cancer ward.
Aunt Janice was his favorite relative. His parents had been early adopters in Creekville, professors at the University of Chapel Hill who had helped establish the nearby town as a bastion of extreme liberalism. “Greenwich Village with BBQ,” it was called. “San Francisco of the South.”
Young Joey had run with the kind of Orange County crowd they abhorred: the popular kids, the lemmings of the mainstream, the kinds of kids who judged each other based on looks and how much alcohol they could consume at keggers.
That was okay, though. Joey would go to Berkeley or NYU and realize the pettiness of his ways, discover the joys of the counterculture. Hit the used bookstores, see a few shows, drop some acid. Then he would take up the family mantle and fight the good fight against evil corporations, the war-mongering government, and the scourge of organized religion.
His parents could deal with his teenage rebellion, but they had not been able to abide his sudden adoption of Christianity or his decision to become a cop.
Aunt Janice was a big part of the reason Preach had returned. She was the only person who had visited him during his ill-fated stint as a junior pastor in a West Virginia town so provincial they didn’t even have a physician. Yet his mother and aunt had not seen each other since Janice had moved back to Creekville the year before. His mother always deflected Preach’s questions about the source of the animosity. Janice was gay, so it wasn’t jealousy over a lover. Preach assumed his mother had offended her in some way. He hoped it wasn’t due to jealousy over his fondness for his aunt.
/> The ravenous chirp of insects echoed from the surrounding woods. Preach stood with a hand on the door, lost in the past, unsure of his decision. Baring his soul in front of his aunt would be embarrassing. And what if there was truly something wrong with him?
He took a deep breath and reached for the door.
13
Her nametag read Dr. Allen, but Preach could think of her only as Aunt Janice. He remembered her as a handsome woman, but middle age had grayed her hair, thickened her limbs, and broadened her midsection. Her ash-colored locks bobbed on either side of her chin, framing crinkly eyes and a mouth whose lips always seemed slightly parted, as if in perpetual knowledge of a secret.
With her hefty build, dowdy sweater, and down-to-earth mannerisms, she didn’t look too much like a psychologist.
Which was probably why she was a good one.
“Here’s the deal, Joey. It’s not an ethical violation for me to see you, but it’s frowned upon. I’ll see you for a handful of sessions, and if I think a real issue might be present, I’m sending you to someone else. No favors. No special treatment.”
“I understand,” Preach said, working not to show his disappointment. Special treatment had been exactly what he was hoping for.
They moved to the green-walled therapy room that overlooked the forest. After a few minutes of lightly probing questions, warm but clinical, she said, “I’d like to discuss the past.”
“You mean Atlanta?”
“Not the recent past. Not yet.”
“I don’t understand.”
“With law enforcement officers, an incident such as yours is often a reaction to an accumulation of stress. It can happen to the best of us. True trauma, however, is typically rooted in a past event.” She clasped her hands. “Has anything similar to Atlanta ever happened to you before?”
He hesitated. This was part of the reason he had chosen his aunt: she already knew what he was about to tell her and had never mentioned it as a potential problem.
Then again, he supposed she had never had a reason.
“Cousin Ricky,” he said. “But you know that already.”
“I think you should tell me.”
He shrugged. “I was at his house when it happened. I went to the hospital with him.” Preach was a seasoned interviewer himself, so he was aware of how telling it was when he spoke in monotone and stared into the woods. “We were seventeen.”
“They were mostly third-degree burns, weren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“On his face?”
“His face, his arms, his legs, his chest, his genitals.”
“Do you feel responsible for the accident?”
“He was working on his car. I was just watching.”
“That’s not what I asked,” she said.
He looked away. “Of course I wonder what I could have done. But the truth is, probably nothing.”
“Did you know he was going to die? At the hospital?”
“Probably. That wasn’t the issue, never has been. I can accept death.”
“Then what is the issue?” she asked in surprise.
His eyes flicked back to regard her. “Suffering.”
She paused a beat before she spoke, expressionless. “I see. What about before Ricky? Had you felt that way at other times?”
He moved his hands into his lap, rubbed at the callouses on his palms from the weight room. “Before that, for all of my life, I struggled to express emotion. As if there were something alien bottled up inside me, which I couldn’t even put a name to. Do you understand? I’m not even sure I do. For example, at granddad’s funeral when I was twelve, I just . . . shut down. I sat there and stared at the body and then started doodling random shapes in my notebook. There was so much going on inside, so much that didn’t manifest in a relatable form like grief or rage or sadness, that I just turned off. Everyone thought I was cold-hearted, and that’s what I thought, too.”
“You didn’t recognize the emotions for what they were?”
“Everyone was crying, and I didn’t feel like crying at all. I felt something, as I always did, but it was cold and hard and vast, not soft and human. To be honest, it made me feel like a monster. And that’s the way I acted for most of my youth. Like a monster.”
“And you figured it out when you saw Ricky in the burn ward?”
“I didn’t figure anything out. For whatever reason, when I saw my cousin in agony on that hospital bed, his body shaking with pain, his eyes shining with it, an avalanche of sadness overwhelmed me. I cried for the first time since grade school, and I didn’t stop until I went catatonic. As you know, they put me in the same hospital. I was home the next day, but after that, for weeks, I got emotional at the slightest provocation. Everything affected me, sent me spinning.”
He stopped speaking, but he could tell she noticed something in his eyes.
“Is that all?” she asked.
His gaze landed on a wall calendar displaying a bonsai tree garden with a view of Mount Fuji. “Every time I was in that room with Ricky . . . it was as if I could feel it myself.”
“The burn?”
“Not the physical sensation, but his mental anguish. His pain.” Preach waved a hand, as if to say, it’s all in the past.
“Mirror-touch synesthesia,” she said, after a long pause. “Have you heard of that?”
“No.”
“Hyperactive mirror neurons that fire when others are in pain, causing tangible physical sensations in the sufferer.”
“If I had that, I couldn’t be a cop. I’ve never felt physical pain in response to someone else’s suffering, not anywhere on the spectrum.”
“Then where?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I guess that depends on one’s belief system.”
“And what do you believe?”
He laughed. “Auntie—”
“Not in here.”
He looked at her. She was dead serious. “Sorry—Doctor. And you know what I believe.”
“You’ve kept your faith.”
“As well as my doubts,” he said.
“I’m curious; how did you cope for all those years? I would think no one has seen more suffering and extreme emotion than a police officer.”
“Isn’t it better to look the world in the face than ignore it? For me it is. And I’ve never had another . . . incident. Well, not like that.” He paused and looked down. “Not until Atlanta.”
“We’ll get there,” she said.
He pressed his hands together. The blood was starting to pound in his head at the memory. He didn’t want to look up and see his aunt’s face, deal with the horrors of the past or the shame of the present.
A buzz from his phone saved him. He dug it out of his pocket and saw a text from Ari.
-I found something in Farley’s office you need to see. Can u come?-
Preach looked up. “I’m sorry, but I have to go. It’s work.”
She put her hands on her knees. “That’s enough for tonight, anyway.”
“How many times do we have to meet?”
“As many times as it takes.”
“I know we have to do this, but I’m okay, really. There’s nothing going on that will affect my job.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to be the judge of that for myself.” They left the room and she embraced him at the door, compassion warming her eyes, a beloved aunt once again. “Take care, Joey. Come see me at home soon.”
Preach parked on the street outside the bookstore. The evening was cool and foggy, the buildings a smudge in the early darkness.
Ari unlocked the door. “Thanks for coming so quickly,” she said, her eyes scanning the street as she pulled her cropped denim jacket tight over a lacy emerald shirt. “I was getting nervous.”
He stepped inside, wary. “Did something happen?”
“No, but after what I found . . . Let me show you.”
She led him to a walnut bookshelf in the interior office that Preach and Kirby had searched on the
ir first visit. “I put it back so you could see.” She pulled out a weathered, hardbound copy of Great Expectations. The cover bore a picture of Pip and Estella creeping through the old Victorian manor.
“Farley’s favorite author,” she said, opening the book to reveal a hollowed-out center. A folded manila envelope was tucked inside the artificial pocket.
Preach opened the envelope. Inside was a plain metal key, about the size of a post office box key. It possessed no numbers or other identifying marks. He whistled. “Any idea what this unlocks?”
“No, but it got me thinking.” One by one, she moved around the bookshelf and pulled out a series of hardback Dickens novels. She stacked them on the desk and opened the one on top. The Pickwick Papers.
Inside was another hidden pocket. This one contained a roll of hundred dollar bills, bound by a rubber band.
Preach flipped through the wad. “That’s got to be five grand.” He opened the six other Dickens novels and found similar stacks of cash.
His gaze met Ari’s. He could tell by her eyes that she was seeing her employer in a whole new light.
“You know, Dickens was a contemporary of Dostoevsky,” she said. “He was born about a decade earlier. You think that means anything?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. Have you looked through the rest of the books?”
“Just a few,” she said.
“Do you mind waiting while I finish?”
“Sure. I’ve got some studying to do.”
She started to walk away, and he asked, “Any more stalker sightings?”
“No. But thanks for asking.”
After she left, he pulled out the rest of the books one by one, raising a cloud of dust. Farley had shelved his personal collection by topic: classics, modern lit, poetry, modern architecture, travel guides to Napa and the North Carolina coast.
He found nothing else. After giving the entire office another once-over, he placed the money and the Dickens novels in evidence bags. He found Ari perched on a chair by the front door, reading Night Film by Marisha Pessl.
