Well, it would have to stay out there. Sooner or later someone would come and then—
Abruptly, I realized it wasn’t just the odor of pine cleanser and urine that was making me cough. Smoke seemed to be seeping in around the edges of the door.
I managed to stand and quietly slide back the bolt, then eased the door open slowly, half expecting gunfire. Instead, I heard the crackle of flames. Horrified, I saw a wall of fire blocking my way to the doors, and clouds of smoke billowed toward me.
CHAPTER 24
The preacher rushes
into his sermon, suffering
happiness in the tears
that drop
in his understanding
of our miserable lot.
—Middle Creek Poems, by Shelby Stephenson
In the register of deeds office, the clerk smiled and handed over the receipt for the fees the office charged to register new deeds. “Good thing for y’all that there’s no transfer tax in Colleton County yet.”
The two men smiled and thanked her for her help.
Outside they shook hands.
“I can rest easy now,” Kezzie Knott said, hefting the small carrying case in his hands. “Can’t nobody ever dig up that man’s body now and I know you’ll use this for the good of the Lord.”
To Faison McKinney’s dismay, the old man opened the case right there on the sidewalk for all the curious world to see had the world been looking. April sunlight gleamed and flashed on the tangle of bright metal and faceted gemstones within.
“Since these here earrings ain’t worth all that much, I reckon you won’t mind if I keep ’em for a souvenir,” he said and drew out the glittering pair that he had given McKinney to prove that his story was as genuine as those diamonds.
McKinney bit back his protest. No point being greedy. Not when he was getting a pile of gems worth five or six million in exchange for land and goods worth half that. “Not a bit, Brother Kezzie.”
“I surely do thank you for all your help, Preacher. And you don’t have to worry ’bout me ever saying a word of this to anybody.”
“Same here, Brother Kezzie. When we do the Lord’s work, we don’t need to tell the devil.”
As they parted, each man to his own vehicle, Kezzie wondered what he was going to do with that failing used-car dealership.
He wished there were a way to see McKinney’s face when his jeweler friend told him that the bag contained only costume jewelry. Good-quality costume jewelry, but worth no more than five or six hundred dollars for the whole bag.
Well, a man can’t have everything, he told himself philosophically, and drove to the outlet mall, where a black Lincoln with tinted windows sat all alone at the far end of the parking lot. He stopped beside the car and waited till the man in the backseat joined him in the truck’s cab.
“Everything go okay?”
“Hook, line, and sinker,” he said. “Just got to know what bait to use.” He dug in his pocket and pulled out the diamond earrings. “And them here was better’n red wigglers or crickets. You want that used-car place? It ain’t worth much and I got no use for it.”
G. Hooks Talbert gave a sour laugh of grudging admiration. “Damn! You got that, too?”
“Yeah. I figured as long as we was scraping him clean, might as well.”
“Do what you like with it. I don’t want my name on anything connected to this.”
As Kezzie drove back through town, sirens seemed to be coming from every direction. The cars ahead were pulling over to the curb and he did the same. Two fire trucks and an ambulance went flying past and in his rearview mirror he saw several police cars weave in and out around them, all headed in the same direction.
CHAPTER 25
Clutching dear life so thin
The stubborn holding on . . .
—Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson
Choking and coughing as smoke swirled around me, my first impulse was to retreat to the bathroom again, to slam the door shut and cram the cracks around it with wet paper towels. Instead, I got as close to the floor as I could, where the smoke was slightly thinner, pulled my wet jacket away from my arm, and tied the sleeves behind my head so that my mouth and nose were covered.
The wound began to ooze blood again and smoke burned my eyes, but somehow I forced myself to crawl toward the fire, which must have begun up closer to the front. I was disoriented and couldn’t remember exactly which way I had come until I saw the trail of my blood on the concrete floor. I followed it on hands and knees. The crawl seemed to take forever, and I could feel the heat building toward me as I finally rounded the wardrobe I had cowered behind only a short time ago. Another few feet and I reached the dollhouse.
The flash drive was gone, of course, and so was my purse. I almost whimpered in fear and desperation, but as I turned to crawl back to the toilet, I caught a glimpse of the leather strap under the edge of a chest where I must have kicked it in my haste to get away from the bullets. I yanked at it and it caught on the foot.
The fire was getting ever nearer. I felt my skin drying and somewhere close by something exploded with a shower of glass that sprinkled down on me, shards catching in my hair. Every instinct screamed at me to leave it and go, but I couldn’t give up.
A lateral tug and the purse popped out. I slung the strap over my head and made like an inchworm trying to break the world speed record.
Once I was back inside the toilet with the steel door closed and my wet jacket plugging the crack at the floor, I heard sirens from outside. Someone must finally have given the alarm.
I almost dropped my phone in my haste to turn it on and push the speed dial for Dwight’s number.
He answered on the first ring and before I could speak, he yelled, “Deb’rah? Where the hell are you? Will’s warehouse is on fire and he says your car’s there.”
I told him as concisely as I could, trying not to babble hysterically, “Look for a small high window and oh, Dwight, please hurry!”
“Stay on the phone,” he said. “Don’t hang up. We’ll get you out.”
More sirens outside, and now I heard them through the phone wherever Dwight was. I could also hear him barking orders and then he was back on the line.
“We’re almost there now. I can see the warehouse.”
The front part must have been engulfed with flames by then, for I heard him groan. “Oh, my God! Deb’rah! You still all right?”
I was trying not to panic but now that help was so close I was terrified that they would not get to me in time. The walls were built of concrete blocks. Built to last. Like a brick oven. And me the loaf of bread dough.
“Talk to me, Deb’rah,” he said and his voice was suddenly calm and reassuring.
“I’m scared, darling. Really scared.”
“It’s gonna be okay. I promise. We’re here. Get as far from that window as you can and turn your back. They’re gonna smash it open.”
No sooner had he said that than bits of glass showered down. I looked up and there was the face of a fireman who called to me and said, “What we’re gonna do, ma’am, is pull this wall down, so you stay back as far as you can and put this over you.”
“This” was a bulky insulated fireman’s coat that he pushed through the broken window. I grabbed it and cowered beneath its comforting weight, my arm throbbing with pain.
A grappling hook on a cable caught the bottom edge of the opening and soon a chunk of concrete blocks broke away. Pieces of mortar fell and bounced off the sink, but the heavy coat protected me from the few chips that reached me.
As fresh air poured in, smoke rushed in from cracks at the top of the door. Then the hook was back and another small section of blocks tumbled away.
“One more ought to do it,” said Dwight’s voice in my ear. “How you doing, shug?”
“Hanging in,” I managed to say before another fit of coughing took my voice.
Seconds later, a fireman appeared in the now-sizeable opening. This one wore a face mask against
all the swirling smoke. He slid a ladder over the wall and lowered it to the floor on my side. “Can you make it yourself, ma’am, or—?”
Before he could finish his sentence, I had shucked off that coat and was halfway up the ladder, choking and gasping till I reached the top. He grabbed me and guided me over the broken wall to his own ladder and down into blessed fresh air. My purse was still around my neck and one grimy hand still clutched the phone to my ear until Dwight took me from the fireman and gently loosened my fingers.
“It’s okay, now,” he said, as I hugged him wordlessly. “It’s okay.”
CHAPTER 26
You knew loss and ambiguity.
Divorce, wars, and the untouched area memory
Fails to get ready for the direct answer.
—Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson
Three hours later, my arm had been stitched and bandaged. I had brushed the glass from my hair and Nadine and Herman let me use their bathroom there in Dobbs to scrub away all the dirt and filth and smoke odor. When I was squeaky clean once more, I put on the fresh underwear, jeans, and T-shirt that Annie Sue had laid out for me. Except for the bra, which Dwight had to hook for me because of my arm, she and I were almost the same size.
Will’s warehouse was a total loss, a sodden shell of charred rubble. The fire was out, but everything of value was destroyed, including that exquisite dollhouse that Candace had loved, a dollhouse where she had hidden her flash drive within easy access of her laptop. She had never let her daughter play with it and in the end, it had led to Dee’s death.
From the moment he saw all the blood, Dwight had barely let me out of his sight and now I sat in Bo’s crowded office to give an official statement.
The order for Gracie Farmer’s arrest went out within five minutes after I was rescued.
“No cushy retirement in Costa Rica for her,” Dwight growled.
So far, the charges included first-degree murder in the death of Candace Bradshaw, second-degree murder in the death of Dee Bradshaw, attempted murder (me), and arson.
“And if she didn’t smash that flash drive as soon as she got her hands on it—”
“The Ginsburg twins have it now,” Terry assured me.
“—then there’s probably evidence that she and Candace ransacked the files of the offices where they have the cleaning contract. Candace wasn’t just checking up on her cleaning crews, she was using that flash drive to copy any unprotected computer files that looked interesting or could help her cronies.
“Bradshaw did say she was always asking him about hypothetical scenarios,” said Dwight. “If we pin him down, we may learn that some of those scenarios had nothing to do with her commissioner’s agenda.”
I nodded. “Every office has a copier of some sort these days and I’m willing to bet good money that she or Farmer printed out John Claude’s memos and trial preparation notes and sold them to Greg Turner. Probably one of my old cases, too. Jamie Jacobson said another advertising firm came up with an almost identical presentation for the Grayson Village project, so I’m guessing there’ll be other instances of selling a firm’s work product to interested parties.”
“Including Danny Creedmore?” asked Bo Poole with a sardonic glance at Doug Woodall.
Our DA was sitting there with a stunned expression on his face. I could almost see the wheels turning as he tried to figure out how this was going to affect his race for the governor’s mansion.
Mayleen Richards was there at Bradshaw Management when Gracie Farmer was arrested. “Her assistant told me that a week or so ago, one of their clients—a caterer—accused them of selling his customer list to his main competitor so that the competition could undercut them. She said Mrs. Farmer managed to convince him that it was a coincidence, but that was the second time this month a client had complained. Candace Bradshaw must have gotten a little careless.”
“Or greedy,” said Bo. “We thought her letter was an apology for misusing her public office. Instead it was Gracie’s attempt to throw all the blame on Candace for misusing her business office. Even if it did almost get you killed, Deb’rah, it’s a good thing you remembered hearing that—what was it? A toy freezer?—rattle.”
“Yeah, wasn’t it?” Dwight said, his voice carefully neutral.
I knew he didn’t totally buy my story, but he wasn’t ready to cross-examine me in front of his colleagues.
Sensing that my throat was still raw and parched, Mayleen Richards handed me a bottle of orange juice from the vending machine down the hall. For the first time, my presence didn’t seem to make her self-conscious and she was finally treating me normally. “Mr. Bradshaw said that when he mentioned to Farmer that your brother had taken the dollhouse back to his warehouse yesterday, she suddenly remembered a lunch appointment. What she really remembered was that Dee Bradshaw was probably packing it up right before she called to ask about some of the stuff she’d read on the flash drive. Farmer’s not talking yet, but I seriously doubt if her phone conversation with Dee was about umbrellas. Besides, Dee knew the password and her computer’s still missing.”
“She knew her mother’s password?” I asked as innocently as I could.
“Yeah. She told us last week that she was the one that showed her mom how to use a flash drive and also how to use a digital shredder to delete the cache files from her hard drive. She even set up the password for her—hot water. Run together as one word.”
Hotwater? Of course! “Our country’s greatest achievement.” And I’d even seen that bathroom.
“Hot water?” Terry grinned. “That’s where a lot of people in this county are gonna be finding themselves, don’t you reckon?”
CHAPTER 27
. . . the world’s so finely
balanced a beetle could push it along.
—Fiddledeedee, by Shelby Stephenson
THURSDAY MORNING (EIGHT DAYS LATER)
With heads rolling all around the county and rumors and promises of indictments to come in the wake of the Bradshaw murders, the burning of a warehouse and the near-murder of his very own daughter, Kezzie Knott was not surprised to see that the story of an embezzling preacher received only three or four inches of print in The News & Observer, but he did think that the Ledger would have had more to say about it.
One disillusioned member of the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal was quoted as saying, “Guess you can’t really call it embezzling if it’s all in his own name, but I sure did think we were giving our dollars to the Lord, not to Faison McKinney.”
“Looks like the bank’s gonna take the church house,” said another fallen-away member. “They say there’s not enough in the treasury to pay the light bill.”
“What you reckon happened to the money?”
“I heard it all went up his nose.”
“You know not!”
“Well you’ve seen him preach. We thought he was hopped up on the Holy Spirit, but what if it was drugs?”
“Not drugs,” someone said firmly. “My wife said she heard Marian McKinney all but say he’s got a gambling problem.”
The biggest media stories centered around the murders and the alleged malfeasance of the Colleton County Board of Commissioners, now being investigated by the SBI and the district attorney’s office. Two commissioners had already resigned and there was talk that Danny Creedmore had hired himself one of the best lawyers in Raleigh.
John Claude Lee and two other attorneys were suing that brilliant young legal star Greg Turner, and the bar association had begun its own investigation. Some of the cases Turner had won were in danger of having the judgments reversed and he faced the distinct possibility of disbarment.
Despite a cornucopia of Pulitzer-worthy material right there in its own backyard, The Dobbs Ledger managed to resist any in-depth coverage of those juicy tidbits. Instead, the paper, which came out three times a week, had devoted most of its news pages to the significance of Candace Bradshaw’s Toyota being found down in Augusta, Georgia. It ran a long interview with Sherif
f Bowman Poole, who stopped just short of drawing a straight line from the dead commissioner’s car to the hit-and-run death of Linsey Thomas, the Ledger’s late and much-beloved editor.
“The crime lab hasn’t finished comparing her car with the evidence found at the crime scene,” said Poole, “but the rough findings are quite significant.”
“Yes,” said Ruby Dixon, the current editor, when asked to confirm a probable motive for her former boss’s death. “Linsey Thomas believed in sunshine and paper trails and he planned to roll up the window shades on Mrs. Bradshaw and her tenure as chair of the board. She knew it, too, because he tried to interview her a few days before he died and she blew him off.”
When asked if she would put more reporters on the board stories now, Dixon took a swallow of the orange juice that was ever-present on her desk and allowed as how maybe she would wait to see what Sheriff Poole came up with.
All in all though, thought Kezzie Knott, maybe it was just as well people weren’t paying too much attention to the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal. He had sworn the six people involved to secrecy before handing them back the title to their lands, but even though the registrar of deeds was a good ol’ fishing buddy, transferring property was a matter of public record.
“We don’t necessarily have to open the page in the right deed books where something’s recorded,” he told Kezzie, “but I can’t sequester the books either.”
“Ain’t asking you to,” Kezzie told him. “I don’t reckon they’s all that many people interested anyhow.”
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