Deadliest of Sins

by Sallie Bissell

  At nine the next morning, aided by three aspirin and a mega-cup of coffee, she stood in Galloway’s cubicle, her map of North Carolina rolled out across his desk.

  “You’re telling me getting 74’ed is not a gay sex thing?” he asked, staring at her bloodshot eyes.

  “No, it’s not. I went back to Asheville, talked to a gay bartender. It’s slang for getting ditched. If you get 74’ed, it means your lover has left you. They even have a drink for it.”

  He chuckled. “Like ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’?”

  “Yeah. Except here in Campbell County, there might be a more sinister connotation to it.” She pointed to the ribbon of Jackson Highway that traversed the county. “This is Highway 74.”

  He squinted at the map. “La carretera del dolor?”

  “What does that mean?” asked Mary.

  “Road of Sorrows,” he explained. “The Latinos say it carries them far from home to a lot of hard work and pain.”

  “Well, the Latinos are on to something. It is the road of sorrows. Look at poor dead Bryan Taylor and Alan Bratcher.”

  “They were both dumped within two miles of Clancy’s bar,” Galloway admitted. “But this highway runs the length of the state. Probably half a dozen bodies are found along it every year.”

  “Okay,” said Mary. “I’ll give you that. But just for argument’s sake, look back through your case files and see if you’ve got any other Campbell County deaths along 74.”

  He leaned back in his chair, dark brows drawn over those startling blue eyes. He started to say something, then stopped. “Okay,” he finally said, turning to his computer. “But only because you’re the governor’s super cop. How far back do you want to go?”

  “Three years,” said Mary.

  “Just as long as your boss has been in office?”

  “Yeah. Everything on her watch.”

  His fingers flew over the computer keys. Mary watched as the computer churned, the official county seal spinning like a golden disk. A few moments later, the records appeared—all Campbell County investigated deaths in the past three years. Galloway scrolled through them, gleaning the particulars of the cases.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “Excluding Alan Bratcher, who’s Sligo County’s problem, in the three years of Ann Chandler’s administration, three Campbell County residents have been found dead along Highway 74. Other than Bryan Taylor, a sixteen-year-old white female was found murdered three years ago east of the Poplar Springs Road intersection, six months later another female was found dead of undetermined causes a mile west of the Gaston County line.” Galloway frowned at the screen. “Here’s something interesting. Your little hitchhiking buddy? His sister’s car was found empty a month ago, again near Poplar Springs Road.”

  Mary leaned over the desk, peering at the computer screen. “You found Samantha Buchanan’s car on 74?”

  “I didn’t, but Crump did.” Galloway read more of the case file. “Lights on and motor running, purse untouched inside the car.”

  Mary felt a thrum of excitement. “What about the other two girls?”

  Galloway gave her an odd look. “What about them? I thought you were researching gay conspiracies.”

  “Indulge me,” Mary said, trying to tamp down her enthusiasm over the two cold cases. “I used to be a prosecutor. Murder still gets my juices flowing.”

  With a snort, Galloway turned back to the computer. “Tiffani Wallace had a pretty thick jacket, but all petty stuff—shoplifting, D&D. She was found beaten and strangled to death. Maria Gomez was a Latina who’d worked on a sweet potato farm. Her injuries were consistent with a hit-and-run—the only thing odd about her was she had defensive wounds on her hands and arms.”

  Mary turned her attention away from the computer and back to the map still spread across Galloway’s desk. “Can you show me exactly where these people were found?”

  “Not on that map.” Galloway grabbed a handful of push pins and walked over to the huge map of Campbell County that was tacked to the wall.

  “Bryan Taylor was here, just inside the county line,” he said, placing a red pin close to the western edge of the county. “Maria Gomez was here.” He stuck a blue pin near the right border of the map. “And Tiffani was here.” A yellow pin went in the western edge of the county. “Samantha Buchanan’s abandoned car was about half a mile from where they found Tiffani’s body.” He stuck a green pin close to the yellow one.

  Mary frowned at the map. “Do you know which side of the road everybody was found on?”

  Galloway walked back to his desk to recheck his files. “Bryan Taylor was found by the side of the eastbound lane, within a mile of Clancy’s bar,” said Galloway. “The women were both found on the westbound side of the road, as was Samantha Buchanan’s car.”

  “So whoever dumped them was going west. Presumably coming from the east.” Mary stared at her state map on Galloway’s desk. “So the killer or killers might have been coming from Charlotte or Hickory or even Gastonia.”

  Galloway shrugged. “They could have been coming from anywhere. I-77 and I-85 go through Charlotte—not that far away.”

  “And the South Carolina line is about ten miles away?” Mary traced the road that ran due south, between Tiffani Wallace and Samantha Buchanan’s pins.

  “Yeah,” said Galloway. “What are you getting at?”

  “I don’t know.” Mary shook her head. “Maybe nothing. Is there somewhere I can set my computer up here? Or do I have to go back to the Gastonia Holiday Inn?”

  “Nobody’s using the cubicle next to mine,” he said. “The sheriff probably won’t like it, but I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  “What about Crump and all the other guys who wander through here?”

  “They won’t care. I’ll only be here a few more minutes. I’m interviewing some people about our boy Honeycutt.”

  “Your teammate?” asked Mary.

  “Yeah.” Galloway stuffed his badge and ID in the pocket of his shirt. “Seems the stud muffin has an ex-girlfriend who does not hold such a high opinion of his batting ability.”

  “Is she a member of Trull’s church?”

  “She used to be,” replied Galloway. “But she quit.”

  “Wow,” said Mary. “That could be interesting.”

  “I’ll let you know if I find out anything the governor might like to know.”

  “Thanks,” said Mary.

  Galloway lifted a hand in farewell. “Enjoy your time in the office.”

  “Enjoy your time with the fuming ex.” Mary took a step toward the empty cubicle, then stopped. “And be careful, Galloway.”

  “I’m always careful,” Galloway called over his shoulder as he walked out the door.

  Nineteen

  While Mary Crow was setting up next to Victor Galloway’s office, Ralph Gudger was making another patrol of his house—marching through the kitchen, then the den, then onto the front porch where he would, sentry-like, reconnoiter his property. He’d kept watch throughout the night, as Amy and Shithead slept in their beds, listening for a twig to snap beneath his den window, a muffled footstep on his front porch.

  “This is how they fuck with you,” he whispered, holding his big Glock 17 close as he remembered what the old Nam vets had told him, back at Fort Bragg. When you thought the gooks were coming at you, they didn’t. You’d wait for hours, sweat dripping, hearing nothing but your heart beating. Then, when the Sarge called a stand-down, they’d open up on you. Just as you relaxed they’d come out of the jungle, screaming like demons from hell. It wasn’t the shooting that drove you crazy … it was the waiting.

  He watched the sun come up, fixed a pot of coffee, then, after Amy left for work, he decided to call Smiley again. He was too old for this shit—his knees were stiff and his eyelids felt like sandpaper. He could volunteer to meet Smiley’s people, to explain thing
s to them in a logical way. He’d just started to punch in the number when he felt an ominous rumbling in his gut. Forgetting about the phone, he raced to the bathroom, reaching the toilet just in time.

  “That goddamned Olive Oyl,” he moaned as a wave of fiery diarrhea gripped him. “All this is his fault.”

  He leaned over and cradled his head on his knees. As much as he wanted to blame the boy, at heart he knew it wasn’t Chase’s fault. The true blame belonged to a younger, dumber version of himself, fifteen years ago. 1999, or maybe 2000. He’d finished his shift, gone to the Am Vet club in Gastonia, and put a five-dollar bet on the Braves. Though he’d always thought gambling was a fool’s game with odds never in your favor, for some reason he’d placed a bet. Chipper Jones had driven in the winning run in the bottom of the ninth, and he’d walked away with two hundred bucks. From then on he was hooked—playing the slots at Cherokee, the poker machines at the 7-Eleven, putting bets on whatever sport was in season. Three years later he owed so much money he couldn’t sleep at night. Then his bookie sent a barrel-shaped man named Smiley to see him. Though he was a pudgy five feet of gold jewelry and polyester pants, something about Smiley terrified him.

  “You send us some lot lizards, we’ll forgive the debt,” the man’s accent was so thick Gudger felt like he’d been dropped into a Sopranos rerun.

  “Lot lizards?” he’d asked. “What the hell’s a lot lizard?”

  “Girls, mostly.” Smiley reached across the bar for some peanuts, gold necklaces glinting through a dark forest of chest hair. “But sometimes boys, too. We’ll let you know.”

  “For what?” he asked, still not understanding.

  “For sex, you idiot.” Smiley frowned. “Don’t you-all fuck down here in Nawth Car-o-line-a?”

  “Yeah, we fuck.”

  “Well, that’s what you’d be supplying. Fresh fuck meat, for us.”

  Gudger laughed—he’d never been asked such a thing. “So where do I get this meat? The mall?”

  “No, asshole. They’re the kids you’re collaring anyway. The druggies and the drifters—instead of taking them to jail, you just give ’em to us.” Smiley tossed a peanut and caught it in his mouth, like a bass snapping a dragonfly. “It’s a win-win. They stay out of the pokey, you get ’em out of your hair. Street crime goes way down, police department’s bottom line improves. Your captain gives you a fucking medal for being such a good cop.”

  “Where do you take them?” Gudger asked.

  Smiley gave a low chuckle. “Everywhere.”

  He couldn’t, at first, believe what he was hearing. “But some aren’t bad kids … some have families looking for them.”

  “So?” said Smiley. “Most wind up doing this anyway. We do ’em a favor—make sure they have a place to stay, bail money if they get caught. It beats hooking up with street pimps.”

  “But what if they come back? And finger me?”

  Suddenly Smiley’s eyes seemed like pools of darkness. “They don’t come back, Gudger. Not ever.” He slid a twenty to the bartender and stood up. “Don’t wait too long on this,” he warned. “I got another cop on the line in Gaston County, but they told me to give you first dibs. You owe us some big bucks. You don’t pay up, some guys not as nice as me are gonna come looking for you. And they already know where you live.”

  The next day, Gudger made the deal. Twelve lizards, girls unless they let him know otherwise. They couldn’t be so strung out that they couldn’t move. Other than that, it didn’t matter—black or white, fat or thin, blonde or dark—the clients didn’t care.

  “These truckers ain’t lookin’ for love,” said Smiley. “Just a little pussy while they gas up their tanks.”

  Relegating that conversation back to memory, Gudger wiped his bottom and flushed the john. But as he pulled up his trousers, his first lizard came to mind. Lucinda, a sixteen-year-old crack addict he’d arrested many times for shoplifting and petty theft. She was weaving down Main Street when he picked her up. Pretty, in the hard way of street girls, she assumed he was taking her to jail. Told him she was grateful to have a warm bed and a couple of good meals. But he didn’t take her to jail that night; he took her far out into the country, to a deserted road where a white panel van waited. His palms had grown sweaty as Smiley got out of the van and walked up to peer into the back of his cruiser. For a long moment he just watched as the terrified girl cried, shrinking back from the door, then he gave Gudger a thumbs up. “You got a keeper there, Gudger.”

  They’d had to wrangle her out of the car. She started shrieking, kicking and clawing like a little bobcat. When one of her feet connected with Smiley’s jaw, he took a syringe out of his pocket and plunged it into her butt. She looked pleadingly at Gudger for one awful moment, then she went limp. They shoved her in the back of the van and closed the door. “One down.” Smiley lifted a finger as he climbed back in the driver’s seat. “Eleven more to go.”

  He’d gone home and gotten drunk that night, trying to erase the memory of the look in Lucinda’s eyes. For months she haunted him, railing at him in dreams, appearing over his shoulder as he shaved. Then her image began to fade as he brought Smiley more girls. Though his first dozen girls ultimately grew to a dozen dozen, Lucinda’s look of terror never left him.

  “Let go of it!” he said as he gazed at himself in the mirror. “All that was years ago. You did what you had to do. Those kids had no future, anyway.”

  He left the bathroom and walked into the den. Shithead was sitting in a little puddle of sunlight, eating a bowl of cereal, staring at the TV. The sight of the little pock-marked weasel made him angry all over again. He ought to take off his belt and give the kid a taste of what his father used to do to him. But that would leave bruises—marks that Amy would take exception to. Right now, he needed peace inside his home. Better to put Mr. Charles Oliver Buchanan on the right path in less visible ways. “What are you watching, Olive Oyl?”

  “The History Channel,” the boy muttered, slurping Cheerios. “About the Mafia.”

  He looked at the screen. Men who closely resembled Smiley sat at a restaurant, shoveling spaghetti in their mouths, then a row of bloody corpses came on, all victims of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Once again, his bowels clenched, but this time he made no move toward the bathroom. He had nothing left to donate to the toilet. Instead he left Shithead to his TV show and went back to the kitchen to get his phone. He was about to punch in Smiley’s number when he wondered if he ought not to just go about his business, like normal. Forget about calling and making any plans to meet. Just go out to his garage, start the new tractor, get some mowing done. He had a frigging Glock 17—at ten rounds a second he could have his own little St. Valentine’s Day massacre right here in the front yard. And it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to convince his own police force that he’d acted in self-defense. Deciding that was a much healthier way to deal with everything, he opened the refrigerator and grabbed his fresh carton of Jo-Jo chocolate milk. He’d just taken two long swallows when he heard a car in the driveway. He put the chocolate milk down and hurried into the living room. A black Mercedes sedan with smoked windows was bearing down upon the house, its wheels raising a cloud of white dust.

  “Oh shit,” Gudger whispered. He hadn’t expected anything like this. He’d imagined thugs in pickups, or a rogue cop on the take, like him. This looked serious—professional was the word that came to mind. He realized he would have to approach things differently. Checking the safety of his Glock, he stuck the gun in the waistband of his pants, just beneath the small of his back. With its barrel pointing at his ass, he pulled his baggy gray sweatshirt over it and hurried out to the driveway. The car, a long, evil slug of a thing, pulled up to a stop ten feet in front of him. While the driver stayed in place, the front seat passenger emerged—a tall, beefy guy whose long black hair and beard gave him the look of a bear dressed in a shirt that strained to close around his neck. Without
a word, he walked over and opened the back door behind the driver’s seat.

  “Are you Gudger?” came a voice from inside the car.

  Gudger stepped closer to the car. A bald man in a white suit sat on the edge of the seat. His eyes were nearly colorless and his high cheekbones gave him a feline look—as if he might grow fangs and claws and leopard spots at the smallest provocation.

  Gudger nodded, his heart beating like a drum.

  “I am Boyko.” The man patted the seat beside him. “We need to talk.”

  Before he could move or speak or even breathe, the bear-man who held the door open pulled his sweatshirt up over his head, taking his Glock and thrusting it so hard between his legs that his knees gave way. He fell to the driveway, paralyzed with pain as big hands pawed him, checking for more weapons. When no more were found, the goon lifted him up and threw him in the backseat as if he were a bag of dog chow.

  Spots glittered on the backsides of his eyes as the man called Boyko started to laugh. “Never is it polite to greet people with hidden guns,” he said, speaking in odd, accented English. “I expected better of you. Maybe is time you learn some manners.”

  By the time he could breathe again, they were heading back down the driveway. He turned in the seat, tried to grab for the door handle, only to find there was no door handle on his side of the car. He banged on the car window, but it was hopeless. All he could do was cast a long look at his house, where Shithead’s pale, terrified face stared at him from the living room window.

  Twenty

  Mary worked in the empty police cubicle for most of the day. At Galloway’s suggestion, she requested Campbell County State Police records for the past three years. While those wheels turned, she ran the SBI database on the two new Highway 74 deaths. Tiffani Wallace had multiple arrests for silly stuff—shoplifting a CD, disturbing the peace, drunk and disorderly. Despite her penchant for petty crime, she had a pretty face that belied her sketchy lifestyle. Given different circumstances, Mary could envision her graduating from college, working at a job, going home to a husband and family. The second girl, Maria Perez, was even sadder. She had nothing beyond an autopsy photo—eyes shut, her complexion dark with lividity. She’d been identified by an empty pay envelope from a sweet potato farm in South Carolina. The post-mortem found defensive wounds—scratches on her arms, a broken nail. She had skin fragments beneath the nails of her right hand, but they didn’t match anybody in the system. The skin of her own fingers was stained orange from her work picking sweet potatoes, and a small religious medal hung around her neck. Mary sighed. Latinos worked hard, usually sent most of their paychecks back home. What had this girl’s mother thought when her money had quit coming? Did she think Maria had forgotten about them to run away with some man? Or did she know, in her heart, grieve with the sense that Maria had made her last contribution—that this little chick would not be returning to their nest?