Avengers of Blood

by Gae-Lynn Woods

  Joseph stayed silent, scrolling through the vast database in his head, trying to match the man’s voice and face to someone he’d known before.

  “Your brother, Joseph. He was a hacker, wasn’t he? A good one, from what I’ve heard. But in all my time in the can, I never heard of anybody doing violence to a computer criminal. I wonder why somebody would start with your brother?” The tapping began again.

  An image from a booking photograph snapped into Joseph’s mind: sunken cheeks, sallow complexion, scabby skin, scraggly hair, wild eyes. “What do you want, Conroy?”

  A reptilian smile crept across the other man’s face and he swiped at his nose. “That veil of grief is lifting, is it? Good.” He leaned forward. “I don’t know who took those shots at your house, but I do believe that you were the target. I’m not saying that you should have died instead of Joseph. That would be illegal, wouldn’t it? Wishing a Do Right Boy dead? But as a reformed citizen of Forney County, it’s my duty to recommend that you watch your back. And pass that message along to Detective Stone and ol’ Hoff, would you? Gotta take care of those who serve and protect, don’t we?”

  Joseph’s eyes flattened. “That’s mighty kind of you, Conroy. I’ll make sure we keep an eye on you, too. Wouldn’t want an ex-convict being targeted by an angry public, would we?”

  Conroy slipped from the booth. “See you around, Officer Franklin.”

  “I expect you will.”

  Joseph watched as the thin man hitched his jeans up and left the café. Stan appeared with more coffee. “Who was that?”

  “An ex-con named Rob Conroy.”

  Stan flicked his ponytail over his shoulder and stood, head cocked to one side, gaze thoughtful. “Name rings a bell. What’d he do?”

  “He was a meth cooker.”

  “I remember. It was in the news when we moved here. He’s out already?”

  Joseph nodded.

  “Is he causing problems?”

  “I don’t think so, Stan, but keep an eye out.”

  “I’ll let you know if I hear any grumblings about him.”

  “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”

  Stan moved to another table to take an order, leaving Joseph to his laptop. His search led him to several websites that discussed Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Bible. The phrase ‘avengers of blood’ translated from the Hebrew term “go’el ha’dam”, which meant blood-avenger. This was the next of kin responsible for enacting the privilege of seeking revenge for a slain family member. Under the Old Testament, vengeance was only permitted in cases of premeditated killing or willful murder. In cases of accidental homicide, the killer could flee to one of six cities of refuge and live without fear of retribution until the high priest died. At that time, the killer was free to return to the land of his inheritance. However, if the killer was found outside the city of refuge before the high priest died, the avenger of blood had the right to kill him.

  Joseph leaned into the booth’s cushioned seat and sipped his coffee. Technically, Moore’s interpretation of the Old Testament was correct and she, Moses, and Emmet were entitled to kill the men who had willfully murdered their fathers. However, modern interpretations of a ‘life for a life’ meant that it was the state that had an obligation to prosecute a murderer. Since the state failed to even attempt justice in the case of this lynching, Joseph understood why the unlikely trio had started out on their path of retribution. And in spite of his brother’s status as an enforcer of the law, Joseph thought Moses would’ve been able to justify this type of killing.

  The question was, could Joseph?

  His mother and brother had been taken from him in a violent act. Joseph believed that the detectives were doing their best to find the killer. But Joseph had a strong hunch that he knew the killer’s identity. If he could confirm that hunch, would he share the information with the police, or with Emmet? As he finished his coffee and waved to Junie for a refill, he knew he wasn’t sure. Not yet.

  “Hey, Moses,” she said softly, watching him even as she poured. “Are you ready for today?”

  “I am,” he said. “And I’m also getting close to the person who killed them.”

  Behind perfect mascara and eyeliner, her dark eyes twinkled. “I’m not surprised. Hugo tells me how good the Forney County force is at what they do.”

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Not the police, Junie. Me. I’m getting close.”

  She pulled back, her eyes more serious. “You’d take the law into your own hands?”

  “Once I find the man who killed my family, yes, I will. Wouldn’t you?”

  Junie studied him, chewing the bright red lipstick from her lower lip and tapping a short, unpolished fingernail against the coffee pot. “No. I wouldn’t kill someone because they murdered my family.”

  Joseph cocked his head. “You wouldn’t?”

  “Nope. But I would kill the people who murdered my family before I had the chance.” She tapped the pot three times, and then flashed a smile. “I’ll go check on your food, Moses. Be back in a tick.”

  CHAPTER 104

  “YOU WERE RIGHT.”

  CASS heard Kado’s voice as she opened the door and a swarm of butterflies fluttered to life in her stomach. She fought back a smile and did a double take at the straps of cash and stack of yellow-ish bricks on the evidence table. “Is that gold?”

  Kado nodded, grinning. Cass caught his glance as he took in her hair, hanging loose around her shoulders. “Want to hold one?”

  She slid the coffee and burritos onto the counter next to a stack of sausage biscuits, and gasped as she hefted one of the bars. “It’s heavy.”

  “Twenty-seven and a half pounds.”

  “Where did all this come from?” she asked, waving her elbow at the cash and gold.

  “Donna’s safe deposit box.”

  Cass thought for a moment. “Did you test the currency for drugs?”

  Kado nodded. “It’s clean.”

  “So she wasn’t laundering money.”

  “At least not for a drug runner.”

  In a quiet voice, Mitch asked, “How’s Abe?”

  She flushed and returned the bar to the stack. “I didn’t see him this morning, but he was okay last night, considering.”

  “Casualties?”

  “He got Bruce with a punch to the cheek, and Harry slipped and split his scalp.”

  Mitch winced. Kado watched the exchange with a look of curiosity.

  He might as well know now, she thought. “My dad’s a drunk. He’s in AA, but can’t seem to stay on the wagon. He’s almost always violent unless he passes out before one of us finds him.” She looked to Mitch. “Goober actually helped sober Daddy up.”

  “What was he doing at your house?”

  “He’s been staying with us since he found Calvin Whitehead. It freaked him out.” She drew a deep breath and released a sigh that spoke volumes about her dysfunctional family. “Did you find anything else interesting in Donna’s safe deposit box?”

  “Before we get to that, there was a shooting at that dive of a motel near downtown,” Mitch said.

  “That pink stucco place?”

  “Yeah. Emmet Hedder was there.” Kado provided the details.

  “I wonder why he won’t come to us for help?”

  “We think he wants to settle things himself.” At Cass’s raised eyebrow, Kado nodded at Mitch. “You tell her.”

  “Let’s start with the worst of it.” Mitch reached for his hanger and poked it beneath his brace. “Moses Franklin is involved in all this.”

  “In all what?”

  “In whatever caused somebody to want to kill the Franklins, Donna, and Emmet.”

  Cass swiveled a chair around and sat. “What are you talking about?”

  Mitch released the hanger and dug his fingers into his eye sockets. When he dropped his hands, Cass realized how exhausted he looked. She glanced at Kado and saw the same worn expression on his face. His gray eyes were bloodshot and d
ark stubble shadowed his jaw. Both made him even sexier.

  “Do you remember,” Mitch said, “when that cell phone vibrated at Mojo’s house last night?”

  Cass absently rubbed a finger across one of the gold bars. “Kind of. Mojo came and got it, didn’t he?”

  “But I answered it, and nobody was there. Nobody spoke, anyway.”

  “So what?”

  “The number that flashed on the screen from the incoming caller? It was from the same phone that called Donna’s cell. The one you found in the safe at her house.”

  Cass rocked back in her chair, all thoughts of romance gone. “Are you sure?”

  “It gets worse.” He looked at Kado and then reached for a cup of coffee. “You tell her, my head is spinning.”

  Kado sighed. “In the brief time that he had the phone, Mitch looked at Mojo’s call history and the phone’s information to try and figure out who the phone belongs to. It isn’t used often. Most people make several calls each day, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Until recently, Mojo’s phone received calls only from Donna’s phone. And it received those calls sporadically.”

  Cass peeled the wrapper from a breakfast burrito and squeezed picante sauce over the top. “What do you mean?”

  “Mitch said there was one call Wednesday afternoon from Donna’s phone. She called twice the week before. Three times in April. Then nothing until a few calls in December of last year. That’s all Mitch was able to see.”

  “And Mojo’s outgoing calls?” Cass asked.

  “Only to one number. The same number that called Mojo’s phone when Mitch answered it last night.”

  “So that same number called Mojo back?”

  “Right. But the incoming calls from that number didn’t start until after Donna was murdered Wednesday night. And those have come from the number that called Donna’s phone.” Kado tapped the cell phone on the evidence table. “The only number that called Donna’s phone.”

  “What are you saying? That Moses, Donna, and some unknown person had a call circle going?”

  “Yes,” Mitch answered.

  “So Moses really did know Donna, even though he said he didn’t.”

  Mitch nodded slowly.

  “Why would he lie?” Cass asked.

  Mitch stretched a long arm across the evidence table, shuffled through a pile of paper, and snagged several documents. He passed her one. “Maybe because of this.”

  Cass skimmed it. “Donna Moore was adopted?”

  “By Harry Moore in 1970. She was born Donna Silverman in 1962. Guess where?”

  Cass shrugged and took two additional pieces of paper and a silver Star of David on a chain that Mitch held out.

  “Thayerville, Alabama,” he said as she read the 1962 birth certificate and the announcement in the Calvary Baptist Church bulletin from 1970 about Moore’s baptism. “She was Jewish, but converted with her mother when they moved here.”

  “Thayerville. That’s where Martha Franklin came from.”

  Mitch nodded. “And where Charles Franklin, Ebenezer Silverman, and Robert Hedder were lynched. Their fathers.”

  “So, there’s actually a long history between the Franklin, Hedder, and Silverman, now Moore, families.” Cass sipped her coffee, her violet eyes clouded. “You think the person who called Moses last night when you answered the phone, Mitch, is Emmet Hedder?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s so super secret that they need separate phones to talk to each other? Or, really, to pass messages to each other. Because that’s what was happening. One called the second, who called the third.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Kado said. “From Donna’s phone, we can match many of the dates and times she received a call from the unknown guy –”

  “Emmet, right?” Cass asked.

  Kado nodded. “We can match the times of some of those calls to times she was away from the office, or to shortly before she left the office.”

  “That makes sense given how often they were away from work at the same time.” She looked at Mitch. “Did you tell Kado about Emmet’s letters?”

  Mitch nodded. “The originals were on your desk. They’re exactly like the letters Sheriff Hoffner got about Mojo.”

  “It’s almost like somebody’s been stalking them. Trying to disrupt their lives before deciding to kill them. I wonder if Moore got the same kind of thing?”

  Kado’s gaze was thoughtful. “I doubt it. The letters went to Mojo’s and Emmet’s bosses. Donna was her own boss. She couldn’t be threatened in the same way.”

  “Good point.” Cass sipped for a moment. “If Emmet and Donna were meeting, isn’t it possible that Moses was meeting them, too?”

  “It is.” Kado showed her a hand-written matrix. “We’ve gone back and looked at old shift assignments. Every time that Donna was away from work, Moses was, too.”

  “How could that be? Shifts are assigned days, sometimes weeks, in advance.”

  “Yeah,” Mitch said, “but anybody can switch a shift. And on some days, he was already off.”

  “It could be coincidence,” Cass said, “that all three were off of work at the same time.”

  “It could be.”

  “And that they had some weird call circle going.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No,” Mitch said. “And neither does Kado.”

  “So, what were they up to?”

  Kado and Mitch exchanged a glance. “We think,” Kado said, “they were on a murder spree.”

  CHAPTER 105

  JOSEPH KNOCKED ON THE sheriff’s office door and turned the knob at the muted, “Come.”

  “Morning, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but Rob Conroy had a word with me at The Golden Gate this morning. He said that me, you, and Mitch should watch our backs.”

  Hoffner’s nostrils flared “A threat?”

  “Not explicitly. In fact he said that it would be illegal to threaten a ‘Do Right Boy’ and was speaking as a concerned citizen.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about Conroy. The detectives have ruled him out of involvement in your mother and brother’s deaths and it sounds like he’s using drugs again. If so, I doubt he’ll have the fortitude to come after one of us.” Hoffner’s eyes narrowed as he took in the younger man. As the silence grew longer, sweat formed on Joseph’s brow and he fought the urge to squirm. The sheriff’s face seemed to soften. “I expect today will be hard for you, Moses. Are you sure you want to be at the station this morning?”

  “Yes, sir. It’ll help keep my mind occupied.”

  “I’ll see you at the church then, before ten o’clock.”

  Joseph tiptoed past the forensics room. Although he wasn’t hiding, he wanted to keep a low profile until he knew where the investigations stood and learned more about Junie Archer. He settled in Moses’ chair, turned the computer on, and waited for it to run through its start-up routine. He’d come up empty-handed in his search for information on Junie on the internet. It was time to use more powerful channels.

  Once the case management system was running, Joseph dug through everything the detectives had collected on the shootings. It didn’t take long. For the time being, they had no link between Moses, Emmet, and Donna. Which meant that he and Emmet could operate below the radar for a while longer. After exhausting all the evidence in the shootings, Joseph opened the system file on Calvin Whitehead’s murder. If Emmet was telling the truth and the three of them had killed the man, Joseph needed to know where the investigation was headed. He scanned the documents added since his last visit and opened an attachment. Joseph blinked. A photograph of a younger Calvin Whitehead stared at him from the screen. Dark, thick hair, deep brown eyes, and a strong face, just like Junie Archer’s. Joseph scrolled down the page and caught his breath.

  Calvin Whitehead was really Calvin Whitman, former sheriff of Thayerville, Alabama. The notes indicated that Calvin Whitman had a so
n, but made no mention of a daughter. Even though their last names differed, the resemblance was too strong for Junie to be anything but a blood relative of Whitman’s. A niece, maybe? If Whitman had a son, he was probably the shooter, and Junie was working to gather information through Officer Hugo Petchard and the other cops who came to The Golden Gate. But regardless of whether she pulled the trigger, Junie was part of the puzzle.

  Joseph read on. By the time he finished with the case updates, he thought he knew how all the pieces fit together. The detectives had no idea that Calvin Whitehead’s murder, the Franklin and Moore killings, and the attempt on Emmet Hedder’s life were linked. But that knowledge vacuum wouldn’t last long.

  He printed and collected several pages, then switched his computer off. Emmet was right. It was time to turn the tables. He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and dialed. “Emmet? I’ve got it. I know who we’re after. Or at least,” he clarified, “I know who knows.”

  CHAPTER 106

  CASS’S JAW DROPPED. “A what?”

  Kado sighed. “Murder spree might be too strong. But we think they were tracking people down and killing them.”

  She gathered her hair and twisted it up, then jabbed two pencils into a straggly French twist. “Who?”

  “The men who lynched their daddies,” Mitch answered. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. Tell her about the shoe.”

  “What shoe?” Cass asked.

  Kado reached into a milk crate and pulled out a massive running shoe. “You picked Joseph’s shoes up at the Franklin’s house, remember?”

  She nodded.

  “One of the shoes had red stuff caught in the tread. It contains sucrose, tomatoes, garlic, strawberries, and loads of preservatives.”

  “Yeah, you found that earlier. So what?”

  “That’s the same stuff that was on the floor in Calvin Whitehead’s stockroom.”