by Layton Green
“Nope.”
Preach noticed the hallway behind the woman was covered in photos of a girl who looked just like her, without the hardscrabble mouth and prematurely aged skin. The photos ranged from baby years to the prom.
“You’ve never heard that name?” he asked.
“Like I said.” Her eyes narrowed further. “Why would I?”
Preach studied her face; she didn’t appear to be lying.
Another false lead.
Just in case, he took out a photo of Belker and showed it to her. “I need you to be sure.”
As soon as Angie saw the photo, her hand flew to her mouth, and she hiccupped with a spontaneous sob. At first Preach thought the emotion was grief or terror, but then he realized she had broken into a shocked, disbelieving smile, jabbing her finger at the photo.”
“That’s—that’s him!!”
“I take it you do know him,” Preach said dryly. “When did you first meet?”
Her gaze lingered on the photo, as if she couldn’t bear to look away. “There was no first. There was only the one time.” Her eyes teared up, and she began speaking in choppy, emotion-filled sentences. “A year ago I had a factory job that paid fifteen dollars an hour. My daughter and me, we were doing okay. Surviving. But then I got a leg infection, so bad I almost died. I lost my job. No disability or insurance. Medical bills took what savings I had.” She dug out a cigarette and lit it with a shaky hand. “Things got bad. I was living in a homeless shelter, with my daughter. Can you imagine?”
She took a deep drag on the cigarette. Preach got a mental image of filthy bed sheets, drunks leering at her daughter all day, her friends at school treating her like a leper. His voice was thick when he spoke. “No, I can’t.”
“It damn near killed me. I survived because I had to, for her. But I had no job, no credit, no hope.” Angie started to choke up again, ashing her cigarette while she pulled herself together. Preach could tell she was a tough woman. “One night—August 23—one of the workers at the center told me I had a visitor. I’m from Alabama; I don’t got any family here. I went downstairs and a man—” she pointed at the photo—“that man, was waiting to talk to me. He looked nervous, then asked me why I was at the center. I told him.” Her jaw worked back and forth. “He handed me a bag, told me it was mine, and walked away. I never saw him again. I asked around, but no one at the center had any idea who he was. Until today, I never knew his name.”
Preach’s face felt hot as he asked the question. “What was in the bag?”
Tears streamed down Angie’s cheeks as she smiled up at him. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
Preach marched down the hallway of the holding chamber and stopped in front of J. T. Belker’s cell. The author was sitting on his cot and reading a novel, his back against the wall. His hair hung in oily strands, and he smelled as if he hadn’t washed in weeks.
“I found Angie Simpson.”
Belker’s eyes moved lazily to meet his.
“The woman from the shelter. The one you gave the money to.”
“Is that her name? Excellent work. Be honest, Detective: would you have believed me if I’d just told you the truth? Kept me out of jail and gone the extra mile to secure my innocence? I think not. Oh, and I heard about Elliott Fenton. It’s a little hard to commit a murder from jail, don’t you think?”
“You could have paid someone beforehand. Set it up so you were locked in here when Elliott was murdered.”
Belker cackled. “Honestly, Detective, you give me a lot of credit.”
“Yes,” Preach said, looking Belker in the eye, “I do. And if you’re working with Mac Dobbins, you might have wanted to be inside for your own safety. Mac could have hired you to kill Damian and Farley, then had Elliott killed. Why not you next?”
“So which is it? This Mac person convinced me to do his dirty work for some undisclosed reason, or I had another twenty grand tucked away to hire a killer who would stage literary crime scenes for me? You’re delving into the realm of the fantastical.”
“Then help me understand. Why give Angie Simpson your life savings?”
“What else should I have done? Bought a boat? It wasn’t the Rockefeller fortune.”
“It was to you. You want my help? Start by telling me the truth.”
“The truth?” Belker gave a bitter, self-defeated grin. “The truth, Detective, is that I decided to test a theory and reverse engineer Dostoevsky.”
Preach stared at him.
“If one can become a Napoleon through a random act of evil, why not through an act of good? It’s a lot less risky than committing a murder, after all.”
Preach barked a laugh, then reached out with a hand and gripped the bars of the cell. “Are you serious?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Preach gave a disbelieving shake of his head. “Maybe you gave her the money to ease your conscience. Balance out the murders you were about to commit.”
Belker cackled again.
Preach watched him long enough to decide that the writer was, indeed, serious. “So what did you find out?” Preach asked. “About yourself?”
Belker smirked and returned to his cot.
Preach sensed that line of questioning was a lost cause, maybe even to Belker himself. He had never met anyone who both worshipped and loathed himself as much as this man.
“You had nothing to do with the murders?”
“No, Detective, I did not.”
Preach ran a hand through his hair and started walking down the hallway. He planned to drop the prescription drug charges and release Belker, but he could draw out the processing. He could waste someone’s time, too.
“Get me out of here, Detective! You can’t hold me any longer!”
Belker kept shouting; Preach kept walking. His cell buzzed with an email, and he looked down.
Elliott’s forensic results were in.
43
Preach hurried to the Chapel Hill Evidence and Forensics Services Unit to meet Dax. The forensics expert was working in the lab, his bony frame clad in blue scrubs and bent over a microscope.
Dax peeled off his latex gloves to greet him. “I’m sorry about the leak,” he said. Preach knew he was talking about his psychiatric visits.
“Thanks.”
He swept a hand across the crime lab. “All of us need therapy to deal with this shit. Whether we go in or not.”
Preach pressed his lips together. “What do you have?”
“Autopsy results are back from SBI. Your third vic was poisoned, all right. Coniine was found in his system, in the empty glass, and in the bottle in the drawer—but not in the bottle by the body. Just like you said.” He cocked his head. “How’d you know?”
“I’m very well read,” Preach said. “What about the shards of glass?”
“That will take longer to verify, but it looks like a crushed pipette.”
Preach blew out a breath. “Can we trace the coniine?”
“Maybe, if it was obtained online. The problem is that both the yellow pitcher plant and poison hemlock—plants from which coniine is derived—are all over North Carolina. And the recipe for extracting coniine is all over the Internet. It takes less than a tenth of a gram to induce respiratory paralysis, you know. The toxin is a nasty one; the central nervous system is unaffected, so the victim remains conscious during the process. It can take up to a few hours to die.”
Preach pictured the killer squatting next to Elliott while he was lying paralyzed beside his pool. Gazing into his eyes, watching as his life ebbed away.
But why?
“Anything else?” Preach asked.
Dax opened a folder. “We found latex residue on the glass and the bottles. The same type found on Damian Black’s neck. Rubber gloves, of course. Oh—we also found Rohypnol in Elliott’s system, and in the glass beside the body.”
“Probably used as a backup,” Preach said.
Dax nodded. “Coniine tastes terrible. If Elliott was sipping his beer, he might have noticed it
before he consumed a fatal amount.”
“Our killer’s thorough. But we knew that already.”
Dax flipped through the pages and closed the folder. “That’s it, except for an area of intradermal hemorrhaging on the thoracic spine. Given the color, it likely occurred at the same time as the murder.”
“English, please.”
“There was bruising in the middle of the victim’s back. My guess? The killer stepped on his back to hold him down while the poison was taking effect.”
Preach mulled over the physical evidence as he drove back to the station. Again, there were no signs of forced entry. No fingerprints besides the victims’ own, no neighbors who had witnessed anything unusual, no further leads on the myriad of bizarre objects found at the crime scenes.
Basically, they had nothing—except for Preach’s hunches about the Byronic Wilderness Society and the mayor.
When he returned to the station, the chief told him the mayor had demanded he be removed from the case. That public pressure was too high.
He stilled. “And?”
“I told her that might be possible if she’d given me the help I’d requested.”
“How much time do I have?”
“She’s calling a special budget meeting tomorrow, and she made me put in a request to Raleigh.”
“Days, then.”
“I’m sorry.”
Kirby was huddled in his cubicle, unusually quiet. Over the next few hours, Preach enlisted him and Rance to help him dig into Rebecca Worthington’s world. Using all the research capabilities of the department, he began to paint a portrait of a woman with huge ambitions who had never escaped the confines of her small town.
Rebecca Farmer had graduated valedictorian of her high school class, then turned down an offer to attend Cornell. Her family owned a small diner that had closed her senior year of high school, leaving her parents to scramble for work. Rebecca had three siblings, and Preach’s guess was that she chose UNC so she could save money and help out at home.
The future mayor studied political science and minored in English Literature, which caused a tingling to spread along his arms. She was president of her sorority, a star for the debate team, and she had met Craig Worthington, her future husband, at a fraternity party. Craig was attending UNC on a golf scholarship.
Craig and Becky had a lavish wedding at the Grove Park Inn, a storied hotel in Asheville. Two children and a cocker spaniel followed, then a starter home and the upgrade to their current house. After that, a weekend cabin near Boone. The American dream.
Preach dug deeper.
Craig was currently a sales associate at a local car dealership, a position which Rebecca probably viewed as a failure. It certainly didn’t pay the mortgage at Mediterranean Village. And while Rebecca had risen to become mayor of Creekville, Preach uncovered three failed political bids, one to Congress and two to the state senate.
Rebecca’s parents had both passed, and Craig’s father was a pharmacist, which caused more alarm bells to go off in Preach’s head. Rebecca could have had knowledge of, or even easier access to, both Rohypnol and coniine.
A year ago, Rebecca had filed for divorce and then retracted the petition. The reason: marital infidelity. He also discovered that the Worthingtons were underwater on their mortgage, and that a year ago they had traded their Porsche Cayenne for a Nissan Leaf. Thinking of the environment, no doubt.
Deeper still. To the massive credit card debt Rebecca had accrued, a six-figure debt, most likely to send her children to private school and finance her campaigns. To the collection suits filed by three different banks and defended by Elliott Fenton. To the donations from Damian and Elliott to fund her run for mayor.
Yet Elliott and Damian were not her largest donors, a quick search revealed. A corporation named Vector Agricultural Products had contributed the staggering sum of fifty thousand dollars to Rebecca’s mayoral campaign, an amount that was more appropriate for a town the size of Chapel Hill or even Durham. Preach had wondered before how white-bread Rebecca Worthington had come to be the mayor of a town that prized its diversity and counterculture.
There was something else: soon after she became mayor, the collection lawsuits were dropped, and the consumer debt went away. A hundred and forty grand, paid in full.
Preach researched Vector Agricultural Products and found nothing other than a listing on the Secretary of State website. Vector was an LLC in Columbus County, North Carolina, that had formed for the generic purpose of bringing local agricultural products to market.
He scrolled down to check the principals. The registered agent of process was—Preach’s hand froze above the keyboard—Elliott Fenton. The only listed principal was Radley Jeremiah Barlow, the CEO.
Preach searched the Internet and law enforcement databases for information on Radley Barlow. Nothing. Unfortunately, no proof of identity was required to form an LLC. A random alias could be used.
But just like passwords, most people did not use random aliases.
Preach started thinking. Columbus County was in the southeastern part of the state, on the border with South Carolina. A shockingly poor part of the country.
Rural poverty. Elliott Fenton and the mayor. What connected them all?
“Kirby!” Preach called. The junior officer hurried over. Preach swiveled in his chair. “You said Mac Dobbins was from a trailer park close to South Carolina—you know which one?”
“Somewhere near Tabor City, I heard. Just a patch of dirt near the border.”
“Tabor City—which county is that?”
“Hell if I know.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“What gives?”
“I’ll let you know.”
When Kirby left, Preach looked up Tabor City, North Carolina, a dying tobacco town near a large state prison. Billed itself as the “Yam Capital of the World.”
And it was in Columbus County.
A tingle of excitement spread through him. Either Rebecca Worthington had befriended a rich yam farmer who cared about Creekville politics—or Big Mac Dobbins had funded her campaign and paid off her debts.
His fingers tapped a rapid tempo on the desk. This was the reason Mac was involved, the missing link. He was protecting his political investment.
But from what?
Preach did another quick search in Columbus County, this time under Mac’s own name. Zilch. But he did find two cash purchases in Tabor City by Radley Barlow, both within the last five years. A three hundred thousand dollar house and a Cadillac XTS. He checked into those. The cable bill at the house was in the name of Martha Dobbins, the same person who was listed on the insurance as the principal driver of the Cadillac.
Another search uncovered that Martha Wilma Dobbins was the birth mother of seven children, one of whom was Malcolm Willard Dobbins.
Mac was taking care of his mother.
While Preach processed it all, a clerk dropped off a stack of mail from Farley’s townhouse. Farley’s sister had given Preach permission to forward it to the station. He couldn’t open anything until the executor of Farley’s estate—formerly Elliott Fenton—signed off, but he could hold it.
He flipped through the usual assortment of advertisements, bills, and manila envelopes from authors. Near the bottom of the stack was a thin envelope from an insurance company Preach had never heard of. He checked Google; the company was local to Dare County, North Carolina. They specialized in property insurance.
Dare County, he knew, was in the Outer Banks.
Beach house territory.
He hunched over the envelope and started to tear it open, then stopped. Property records were easy to check. Maybe he didn’t have to break the chain of evidence.
He searched under Farley’s name and came up empty. He did the same for Farley’s father and drew another blank. After drumming his fingers on the keyboard, he looked up Farley’s mother’s maiden name—Darden, a quick search revealed.
He searched under that name and located a p
roperty in Dare County, North Carolina. He mapped the address, his skin feeling flushed. The property was located on one of the long slivers of land that comprised the Outer Banks. From the map, it looked like the property backed right onto the Atlantic Ocean.
A family beach house that was four hours out of town, not listed under Farley’s surname, and which might contain a shed, a safe, or a trunk.
Which, Preach was betting, would be unlocked by the key Farley had hidden inside a Dickens novel.
44
Kirby watched from his cubicle as Preach grabbed his coat with one hand and took off down the hallway like he was late for a funeral. The detective had muttered something about having to go somewhere, then left without an explanation.
He knows, Kirby thought.
He knows and he no longer trusts me.
So why hasn’t he ratted me out?
Because he’s good people, that’s why.
Wherever the detective was going, Kirby did not think it was a social call, or even a visit to his therapist. No, the detective was pursuing a lead—and he was doing it alone.
If Preach broke the case without him, then Kirby’s plan would have misfired in a very big way. And what if something happened to the detective, while he was out there alone? Kirby slumped into his chair, his hands trembling from nerves.
Or what if Preach was waiting for the right time to turn him in, maybe after the case was over and the department was under less scrutiny?
Kirby didn’t know which was worse, the guilt or the stress of knowing someone else knew and might decide to ruin him.
He put his head in his hands. He needed to talk to Preach. Confess and let him know it would never happen again. No matter what.
Decision made. As soon as he got the detective alone, Kirby would come clean. Well, almost clean. Preach would probably give him a pass on Monica, but the other thing . . . that was more personal.
Kirby felt like he was able to breathe again. As if a stone had just been rolled off his back. He could still have it both ways, keep his job and smile for the cameras.
Help his family.
As he reached for his wheatgrass smoothie, an email popped up. The sender was crawfordlyons@BMDMedia. Weird. He clicked on it.
