Tony Wolf/Tim Buckthorn - 02 - Broken Shield

by J. D. Rhoades

  When she was far enough away, she ducked into one of the deserted bedrooms and took her cell phone out of her purse. She dialed a number she knew by heart.

  “It’s me,” she said, when the party on the other end picked up. “Lofton’s gone off the reservation. He’s made a mess.” She listened for a moment, then spoke again. “Yeah. He took Preston’s kid. Stashed her in of his houses up in Barrett. Then the house got leveled by the storms.” Another pause. “I don’t know if she’s alive, but if she is, it’s a problem. If you can get on top of it, he can’t help but appreciate it.” After a moment, her voice softened. “You too, baby. Miss you.” She hung up and went back to the bedroom. Monroe was snoring loudly. She smiled at him, trailed her fingers gently over him beneath the covers. If the time came, and she hoped it never would, she was going to regret killing him. She hoped she could avoid that.

  She sat down in the rocker next to the bed and picked up the murder mystery she’d left on the bedside table. Nothing to do now but wait and be patient. She smiled at that. She’d picked this name for a reason.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Buckthorn left the Sheriff’s office and went downstairs to where his own tiny workspace was located, in the middle of the cramped warren that housed the actual law enforcement operations of Gibson County. He sat down behind his desk and ran his hand through his thinning hair. Janine, the departmental secretary, appeared in the doorway. She read the news immediately in his face. “He punted it, didn’t he?” she said.

  Buckthorn spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “When he’s right, he’s right. It’s a federal matter.”

  “But you don’t like it,” she said. “I can tell by the way you’re grinding your teeth.”

  He sighed. Every time he went to his dentist, she’d shake her head and warn him that his habit of grinding his teeth when under stress was causing cracks in the enamel. “You’re looking at thousands of dollars’ worth of implants if you keep taking your anger out on your teeth,” she said. “Or dentures.”

  “I’m not angry,” he insisted.

  “Your enamel tells me a different story.”

  Buckthorn had promised to try and relax. Then he’d gone back to work.

  Janine went on. “By the time those federal guys get off their backsides, that girl could be dead. Or worse.”

  “So we make sure we’ve done everything we can by the time they get here.”

  She nodded. “I got the scanner set up, and we’re loading everything that’ll come out clearly into the computers. Except the picture of the girl. Soon as we get it all digitized, I’ll put them up on a Facebook page I set up. Then we wait to see if anyone recognizes their pictures. If they do and get in touch with me, then we have an idea where the stuff came from.”

  He looked at her strangely. “You have a Facebook page?”

  “Unlike some people, Tim, I live in the twenty-first century.”

  “I thought it was just for teenagers. Not for…” he trailed off.

  Janine put one hand on her hip and looked at him over the tops of her glasses. “You want to pick your next words real carefully, Tim Buckthorn,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean you were…”

  She didn’t give him time to finish. “Lots of people are on Facebook. I mostly use it to keep up with Judith and Jonathan.” Buckthorn remembered that Janine’s married daughter had moved to California with her husband, a captain in the Marines, and her son Jonathan was a student at Appalachian State. “Okay,” he said. “Let me know when it’s ready to go up. I want to take a look at it.”

  “Okay. We could use some press coverage on this. You think that girl reporter from WRHO’d be interested? The one who came down last time?”

  Buckthorn felt a jolt of dread run through him at the mention of the last time he’d seen Gabriella Torrijos. An outlaw motorcycle gang had invaded Pine Lake, wreaking terrible havoc while trying to free one of their captured members. He’d lost several good men. He himself had been taken prisoner and beaten savagely by one of them. In the end, he’d had to kill the group’s leader, along with another man. He shook his head to clear the images. It hadn’t been Torrijos’ fault. If anything, it had been the fault of…

  Janine’s voice cut through his reverie. “I said, you want me to call her?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Or someone. Good idea.”

  “You okay, Tim?” she said.

  His smile felt unconvincing, even to him. “I’m fine. I just don’t like bringing the press into these things.”

  She nodded. “I hear you. But this isn’t exactly your ordinary case.”

  “True,” Buckthorn said. “So call her.”

  “On it,” she said, and left.

  Buckthorn leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hands over his face. In reality, he’d never really gotten over that terrible day. It was the first life he’d taken in the line of duty. Afterwards, he’d had trouble sleeping. He’d found himself having more and more trouble holding ordinary conversations. A woman he’d been seeing off and on had finally told him that if she wanted silence, she could get that alone at home. He hadn’t dated since. Janine had gently suggested that maybe he should see somebody professional. He’d turned down the idea of a psychologist. If word had gotten around the tight-knit department that he was seeing a shrink, he told her, he’d never hear the end of it. She retorted that he didn’t give his people enough credit. If he didn’t want a doctor, she suggested, he could talk to her pastor. Buckthorn had changed the subject, not wanting to admit to her that he had begun to have his doubts about the existence of God .He’d buried himself in work, and slowly, the bad memories had weakened to the point where he could lock them away.

  Work, he thought. That’s the solution. He turned to the stack of paperwork on his desk that never seemed to get any smaller, no matter how much he hacked away at it. He was several pages into last week’s incident reports when he saw a shadow move across his doorway. He looked up. Janine was standing there, an odd look on her face.

  “What?” he said.

  “We’ve got the pictures ready to go.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “And, ah, the FBI people are here.”

  “Well, I guess I better meet them first. They may have their own…” He saw the way her jaw was set, the slight tightening of the skin around her eyes. “Okay, seriously, what’s wrong?”

  “Actually, Tim, you’ve already met one of them.”

  “What do you mean I’ve…oh. Oh, no.”

  “Well,” a voice from behind Janine said, “I’ve had warmer welcomes.” Janine stepped aside, and a man entered.

  He was short and stocky. His hair was shorter than the first time he and Buckthorn had met, and he’d shaven the beard and moustache. Without them, he was a thoroughly unremarkable-looking man, which is why he’d been so successful in his former job working undercover. From the looks of the suit he wore, he wasn’t doing that any more. He’d moved up in the FBI.

  “Agent Wolf,” Buckthorn said.

  “Deputy Buckthorn,” Tony Wolf replied, and stuck out his hand. “Good to be back in Pine Lake.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lofton Monroe stood in the sweltering heat and stared at the pile of lumber, piping and drywall that had once been a house. There’s no way the girl could be alive under all of that, he thought. But at some point, someone would have to come and clean up the wreckage. At some point, they’d find the body. In a house that had his name on the deed.

  He took out a bandanna and wiped the sweat from his brow, cursing himself for not using a safe house or even a motel to stash the girl. But he hadn’t expected anything like this to happen. The storms had boiled up suddenly, driven by a savage three-week heat wave with temperatures soaring into the hundreds every day across the South. And Preston was supposed to have the money within a couple of days. That’s what he’d said. Of course, that’s what deadbeats always said. He’d been a mile or so away from the house, getting grocerie
s, when the sky had turned black and the winds began to howl. He’d jumped into the truck and headed back as quickly as he could, vicious gusts of wind nearly buffeting the big vehicle off the road and the rain coming down so fiercely that at times he had to slow the truck to a crawl because he could barely see. When he got back to the house on its cul-de-sac, there was nothing left but rubble. There was no way he could have expected that. It wasn’t fair of Granddaddy to blame him. But Lampton Monroe was never known for fairness. A hard man, people said, and they didn’t know the half of it.

  “Hell of a mess,” a voice said behind Lofton. He jumped, startled, then turned around. Donovan was standing behind him, a toothpick dangling out of one corner of his mouth.

  “The fuck are you doing here?” Lofton demanded.

  Donovan ignored the tone. “Mr. Monroe sent me up here from Biloxi to see if ya needed a hand,” he said. His voice retained just a hint of the Irish accent he’d grown up with.

  “I’m fine. I’ve got this.”

  “Yeah,” Donovan said. “I can see that.” He took the toothpick out of his mouth and gestured towards the rubble. “She down there?”

  “No way she could be anywhere else.”

  “Unless she got away.”

  “There’s no way,” Lofton said.

  “We got to get the body out, then,” Donovan said. “Can’t have dead girls turnin’ up on family-owned property.”

  It was exactly what Lofton had been thinking, but he didn’t like hearing it. Especially not from Donovan. Hell, he wasn’t even family. “And just how do you think we’re goin’ to go about that?” he said. “Use our hands?”

  Donovan shook his head. “Front-end loader.”

  “Uh-huh. You happen to bring one of them with you?”

  “No. But we can find ourselves one.” He cocked his head slightly. “Ya hear something?”

  __________

  Callie could feel the wetness on her face. She couldn’t tell if it was blood or tears. The effort of rubbing the duct tape off had resulted in some painful scrapes. If she got out, would she be scarred for life? Boys had begun paying attention to her, but she’d always been shy about her looks. Even the beginnings of a zit were enough to make her painfully embarrassed and self-conscious. If I’ve messed up my face… she put that thought away for the moment. She needed to let people know she was alive down here.

  “HEY!” she yelled as loud as she could, then waited. “HEY!” she yelled again. “DOWN HERE!” She listened for some response. All she could hear was a trickling sound, like running water. It sounded very near. She realized then how thirsty she was. She moved towards the sound, to the end of the chain that tethered her to the wall. She was startled when she ran up against what seemed to be a wall where one hadn’t been before. Maybe I’ve gotten turned around in the dark, she thought. But no, the wall she was chained to was behind her. Then she comprehended what had happened. Most of the cellar was gone. The house had collapsed into it. She was in a tiny chamber that was left. The word came back to her from the T.V. program she’d seen. A void. That’s what she was in. A void.

  Buried alive, the voice in her head was nearly shrieking now. She took a deep breath and got hold of herself. She listened again for the water, then leaned forward. She suddenly felt a steady stream of liquid, flowing like a tiny waterfall from the rubble above her. She stuck out her tongue. It was warm and tasted of metal. She didn’t have any idea what kind of nasty stuff was in it. But if she didn’t drink, she risked dying of thirst. She opened her mouth and took a swallow, then another. Then another, until she’d taken the edge off her thirst. She leaned back. The panic was still there, but she thought of it as being in a little room, locked away like she was. The trick was not to let it out. If she did, she’d lose her shit. She’d forget what she needed to do. And then she’d die. She took a deep breath. “HEY!” she yelled. “HEY! HELP!”

  She was lucky, she told herself. If she wasn’t, she’d have died in the collapse. She wouldn’t have found the water near enough to drink. If that luck held, someone would come to get her.

  __________

  Lofton turned back to the pile. He wiped his brow again, straining his ears. He heard nothing but the sound of the slight breeze stirring the leaves of the few trees still standing. Then he heard it. It was unmistakably a voice, coming from beneath the ruins of his house. “Hey!” the voice said, faint but distinct. “Hey! Help!”

  “Holy shit,” Lofton said.

  “We better get moving,” Donovan said. “We need to get her out before anyone else does.”

  Lofton gestured at the empty lots around him. He’d bought the house shortly before the real estate crash had driven the developer into bankruptcy. He liked not having neighbors. “There’s no one out here.”

  “Not now. But that won’t last. Let’s go steal a loader.”

  “And what are we going to do, even if we can dig her out?”

  “We’ll deal with that when the time comes. But we have to keep her quiet.” He looked at the ruined house. “We’ll be back, little girl,” he said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Good to see you too, Agent Wolf,” Buckthorn said as he got up and extended his hand.

  Wolf shook the hand, cocking an eyebrow at Buckthorn. “Really? I seem to remember last time we met, you said if I ever came back here, you’d throw me in jail.”

  Buckthorn let go of the handshake, let his hand drop awkwardly to his side. “Yeah. Well. I was a little upset.”

  Wolf nodded. “Understandable.” He looked around. Buckthorn was suddenly aware of how cramped and cluttered the space was, jammed floor to ceiling with shelves that were crammed with a variety of loose-leaf notebooks, manuals, guides, books and circulars. A similarly untidy pile of papers covered every inch of his desktop. His old desk chair was worn, a few rips patched with duct tape. “Nice place you got here,” Wolf said.

  Buckthorn watched him carefully for signs of sarcasm, and saw none. Wolf noticed the wary look. “No, really,” he said. “This looks like a place where stuff gets done. Not…” he pointed to the ceiling, indicating the Sheriff’s office directly above. He didn’t finish the sentence. His look said everything Buckthorn needed to know about Wolf’s opinion of Sheriff Stark.

  “We try,” Buckthorn said. There was a brief uncomfortable silence. Janine broke in. “I’ve got that picture for you, sir.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Wolf said. “My partner will be asking you to fill out some affidavits about chain of custody. Who’s handled the photograph and…”

  “I know what chain of custody forms are, young man,” Janine said. “You’re not in Mayberry.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Wolf said. “I realize that. Remember, I used to live here.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Under another name.” She turned and walked away.

  Wolf turned to Buckthorn. “Sorry. I seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot with your girl.”

  “She hears you call her that,” Buckthorn said, “you’ll be even sorrier.”

  “Noted. So what do we know?”

  Buckthorn took notice of the ‘we’ as he motioned Wolf to the single office chair across from him. “We know squat,” he admitted. “A retired schoolteacher named Maddie Underhill was cleaning up storm debris with her son and grandson. Suddenly, all of this stuff started falling out of the sky. She saw some old photos and papers in the mess, remembered a story she’d seen about a similar incident, and started trying to get the debris organized.”

  Wolf looked puzzled. “Why?”

  “Because that’s the kind of person Maddie Underhill is,” Buckthorn said. “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”

  “You know her, then,” Wolf said, then held up a hand as Buckthorn began to reply. “I know,” he said. “Everybody knows everybody here.”

  “Except you,” Buckthorn said.

  “Except me,” Wolf agreed. “But let’s try to let the past be past, okay?”

  “So why did you ge
t sent here,” Buckthorn said, “except because of what happened two years ago?”

  Wolf didn’t speak for a moment. He got up and went to the glass wall of the office, where a half-closed floor to ceiling mini-blind gave partial privacy while allowing Buckthorn’s people passing by to note that the boss was inside working. He looked out through the shade and fiddled with the pull. Finally, he said, “I volunteered.”

  “What?”

  “I wanted to come back,” he said. “I always liked this place.”

  Buckthorn didn’t know what to say to that, so he blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. “It’s a fine town.”

  “I know,” Wolf said. “I’m sorry I never got to know it better than I did.” He snapped the blind pull against the shade with an abrupt motion and turned back to Buckthorn. “So,” he said, “can I see this picture?”

  Buckthorn punched a button on his desk phone. “Janine,” he said, “can you bring…” but she was already standing in the doorway, holding the Ziploc bag in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. Wolf smiled. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said as he reached for the bag.

  “I’ll need you to sign the chain of custody form,” she said.

  “Yes ma’am.” He laid the bag gently on one of the few clear spaces on Buckthorn’s desk. He looked at Buckthorn. “Do you have a pair of…” He stopped as he saw Janine holding out a pair of tweezers. “Thank you, ma’am,” Wolf said again with elaborate courtesy. Gently, he worked the soggy photo out of the bag. The three of them gathered around the desktop and looked down at it as if expecting it to speak and reveal its secrets.