Everything in Rachel urged her to embrace Michelle, beg her to stop torturing herself, but she stayed silent while her sister groped for words.
When Michelle spoke again, her voice came out a whisper. “I’ve been thinking about Mother a lot since all this started. I still miss her so much.”
Rachel’s desire to comfort her sister vanished. “Well, I’m sure she’d be a big help if she were here. Maybe she could hypnotize you and make it all go away.”
Rachel instantly regretted the words. She had to look away from Michelle’s wounded expression.
“How could you say something so cruel to me?” Michelle’s voice quavered. “So much for sisterly understanding.”
“I’m sorry.” This time Rachel meant it. She was fumbling for something more to say when footsteps sounded on the stairs. Michelle yanked a handful of tissues from the box on the bedside table and dabbed and wiped her face. Seconds later Kevin appeared in the doorway.
Chapter Nine
Detective Fagan frowned as Tom pulled onto the shoulder of the road in front of the Lankford house. “Are we going to have a pack of pit bulls jumping us when we get out of the car?”
Two PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING signs hung on the five-foot high chain link fence and a third on the gate. A padlock secured the gate on the inside.
“You wouldn’t put out the welcome mat either,” Tom said, “if you’d been through what these people have. It’s incredible, the crap they get thrown at them. Literally, sometimes.” He plucked his cell phone from his shirt pocket. “Having a convicted murderer in the family doesn’t make life easy.”
Tom punched in the couple’s home phone number and drummed his fingers on the armrest while he waited for an answer. Vance Lankford’s parents lived in a residential area on the outskirts of Mountainview, where the lots were smaller and the houses closer together than anywhere else in the mostly rural county. Tom could remember when robust azaleas had lined the front of the white siding-covered house and the flower beds had overflowed with spring bulbs and colorful summer annuals. Now the azaleas looked sickly, with sparse foliage and only a few pink flowers dotting the branches. Several clumps of gold and white daffodils bloomed beside the front steps—you couldn’t kill a daffodil if you beat it with a shovel, Tom’s mother used to say—but the tulip leaves struggling up through the weedy beds looked like weak afterthoughts of bulbs long since spent.
Although the Lankfords’ cars both sat in the driveway, the curtains on all the windows remained tightly drawn in midday. After the phone rang for the sixth time, Tom tapped his horn. One downstairs curtain flicked back a couple of inches, then fell closed again. A moment later, Jesse Lankford answered the phone inside the house. “What is it? What do you want?”
“I just came by to see if everything’s okay here. Can I come in? I won’t bother you for long.”
Jesse sighed. “I’ll be out in a minute.” He hung up.
“He’s coming to unlock the gate,” Tom told Fagan. They both stepped out of the cruiser.
Slamming the passenger door, Fagan said over the car’s roof, “These people are teachers? They teach in a public school when they have to live this way? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“I don’t know how they do it,” Tom said, rounding the front of the cruiser. He lowered his voice when he saw Jesse Lankford emerge from the house. “Considering the shitty way teenagers behave sometimes.”
Jesse, a tall, thin man whose stooped shoulders made him look shorter, hustled along the driveway with his head down as if he were running a gauntlet. Ten feet from the gate he glanced up and stopped in his tracks. His eyes, fixed on Fagan, widened behind his black-rimmed glasses. “Who are you?”
“This is Detective Fagan from the Fairfax County Police,” Tom said. “Detective, this is Jesse Lankford.”
Before Fagan could speak, Jesse demanded, “What do the Fairfax police want with us?”
Fagan stepped forward. “I’ve been investigating the Beecher girl’s disappearance, and I’m down here looking into her death.”
A blotchy flush traveled up Jesse’s neck to his pallid cheeks. “We don’t need to get dragged into that. It has nothing to do with us.”
“We just want to talk to you,” Tom said. “Can we come in for a minute?”
Jesse shot a look to his left. Tom followed his glance and saw the white-haired woman next door peering through a side window at them. Muttering something under his breath, Jesse yanked a key ring from his pants pocket and fumbled with the padlock inside the gate. He yanked it open, and without speaking again, wheeled around and hurried back up the driveway to the house.
Tom and Fagan made their way to the front door, sidestepping a mess of half-rotted fruits and vegetables strewn over the driveway, the front walk and the steps. Dents pockmarked the vinyl siding on the house, and the rocks responsible for the damage lay on the ground along the foundation. Sitting only thirty feet from the road and lacking a porch, the house made an inviting target. Even so, Tom figured you’d need a hell of a strong pitching arm to lob a heavy rock this distance.
A blood-colored stain and bits of red pulp splattered the glass in the storm door—an over-ripe tomato, probably thrown the night before, its acidic aroma still strong.
When they entered the living room, Jesse started to slide one of the three bolts into place on the door, then abruptly abandoned it. “Nobody’s going to bother us with a police car parked outside.”
Sonya Lankford stood by the fireplace, a big box of kitchen matches in one hand indicating they’d interrupted her as she was about to light the kindling and logs laid in the grate. With her free hand she tucked her shoulder-length gray hair behind her ears, tugged at the hem of her green cardigan sweater, smoothed the front of her brown skirt.
“Are you two all right?” Tom asked her. “Has anybody been bothering you?”
“What do you think?” Like her husband, Sonya wore glasses, and her thick lenses made her eyes look disproportionately small above her sharp cheekbones. “People were driving by half the night. Screaming and throwing things. Yelling that Shelley got what she deserved, and we’ll get the same if we keep trying to get Vance out of prison.”
“Why didn’t you report it?”
“What good would that do?” Jesse said. “Are you going to park a deputy in front of our house all night, every night?”
“If it’s necessary, yes.” A rash promise, Tom knew, one he could keep only in the unlikely event that deputies volunteered their time.
Jesse snorted, dismissing the idea. “We don’t know anything that’ll help you with your investigation. Don’t drag us into this. You’ll just make matters worse.”
“If you’ll talk to us for a few minutes, we won’t bother you again.”
Jesse and Sonya locked eyes for a long moment, and Tom had the impression the two were debating without speaking a word. Then Jesse motioned the policemen toward the two easy chairs facing the sofa.
Tom and Fagan took the chairs and Jesse dropped onto the sofa. Sonya crouched by the fireplace and struck a match. For a second the sharp odor of sulfur stung Tom’s nostrils. When she set the fatwood kindling ablaze, a strong but pleasant aroma of pine wafted through the room, carrying with it a jumble of half-formed memories and associations. Childhood. Holidays. Family. It was what Tom thought of as a happy smell, but he saw no happiness in the Lankford house.
With the drapes drawn, the two lamps burning on the end tables by the sofa cast more shadows than light. The room looked clean and neat, but Sonya roamed around, flicking her fingertips across tabletops, straightening a country print on a wall, tugging the curtains more tightly together. A photo of the Lankfords’ only child, Vance, stood on the mantel. A high school picture, from the look of it, a reminder of better times. Tom wondered what the fresh-faced, smiling boy in the photo, ordinary but pleasant, looked like after a few years in state prison.
“I figured Shelley’s body turning up yesterday might set things off again,” To
m said. “I’m sorry about that. I don’t know what gets into people.”
“It’s nothing new.” Sonya paused by the sofa, her lips twisted in a sour imitation of a smile. “This has been our life since the day Vance was arrested.”
“Nobody should have to get used to being harassed,” Tom said. “I’ve told you before, get me some license plate numbers and I’ll put a stop to it.”
“We’d have to go outside to get the plate numbers,” Jesse said. “We don’t open our door at night.”
“We know who’s doing it, though,” Sonya said. “Some of them are our own students. I see them smirking at me in class. I hear them whispering when my back’s turned.”
“Who are they?” Tom asked.
Jesse shook his head. “If we started accusing people, our lives wouldn’t be worth living.”
Are they worth living now? Underneath the pungent pine scent Tom detected layers of stale odors, as if the house had been shut up tight for years, the door never open long enough for fresh air to get in.
Fagan, who had been listening with a frown, now asked, “Why do you put up with it? Why do you stay here?”
Tom winced. The Lankfords focused twin glares on the detective.
“This is our home,” Sonya said. “We were both born and raised in Mason County. We’ve got old people in our families that need us, our parents and aunts and uncles. We’ve been teaching here since we got out of college. We’re not letting anybody run us out of our jobs and our home.”
“But if your own students are harassing—”
“I taught Brian Hadley in my music class,” Jesse broke in. “Coached him in the school band. Sonya had him for English. He was a good kid, and he had a lot of talent. We both encouraged him to go after what he wanted. Now everybody acts like we’re to blame for him being dead.”
“How closely were you working with Shelley on getting your son out of prison?” Tom asked.
“We weren’t working with her,” Sonya said.
“She talked to us a few times, that’s all,” Jesse said. “We couldn’t tell her much. Hell, if we could prove our boy didn’t kill Brian, we would’ve done it before he was convicted. Everybody thought we put Shelley up to what she was doing, but Vance was the one who got in touch with the innocence project and asked them to help him.”
“Everybody hated us already because we wouldn’t disown our son,” Sonya said. “They thought we should be walking around in sackcloth and ashes, begging everybody to forgive us for raising a murderer. Then when Shelley started trying to get him out, that just made them madder.”
A loud pop from the blazing wood in the fireplace made all of them jump. Jesse brushed past his wife, grabbed the poker, and stabbed the logs to settle them in the grate.
“Don’t you believe your son is innocent?” Fagan asked.
Tom groaned inwardly. The detective was ripping into unhealed wounds.
“Yes, sir, we believe our son is innocent,” Sonya snapped. She raked a hand through her hair on one side as if she wanted to tear it out by the roots. “We didn’t raise a killer. And we didn’t raise a fool. Any man would have to be a fool to murder somebody over that little slut.”
Fagan looked at Tom, eyebrows raised inquiringly.
“I’ll fill you in later.” Before Fagan could say anything more, Tom asked the Lankfords, “Did Shelley ever tell you she had some information that might get Vance out of prison?”
“She believed he was innocent,” Jesse said. He returned to the couch and tugged his wife’s arm to make her sit beside him. “She said she was going to do everything she could to prove it. But she never gave us any details about what she was doing. We don’t know if she really had anything or not.”
“We didn’t have any expectations.” Sonya sat upright and stiff, her hands pressed together in her lap, palm to palm and fingers to fingers. “What could a first-year law student do that Vance’s own attorney couldn’t?”
Tom held a low opinion of the attorney who had represented Vance and suspected the defense could have been better. But he was also positive his own father’s investigation had been thorough and the evidence had been corroborated. “The innocence project won’t drop the case because of Shelley’s death. If I can find out what she came up with, I’ll let you know, and I’ll make sure the prosecutor knows about it.”
“Right.” Jesse’s face twisted in a sneer. “We’ll pin our hopes on the prosecutor who sent Vance to prison and the son of the cop who arrested him.”
Tom didn’t bother to answer that. He didn’t care what the Lankfords thought of him. He did care about their safety, though. “You’ve got all my phone numbers, don’t you? Home, office, cell? I want you to call me when anybody comes around here harassing you. Day or night. Anytime. Call me.”
They both looked dubious and didn’t reply.
Tom rose and Fagan followed him to the door. Jesse trailed them outside.
After Tom and Fagan walked through the gate, Jesse said, “The Hadley boy’s one of them. Brian’s brother, Skeet.”
“He comes by here at night?” This information didn’t surprise Tom.
“Yeah. He was here last night, throwing rocks and yelling. Just so you know.”
“You need to make a formal complaint.”
“No. We’ll wait it out. We’ve made it this far.” Jesse slammed the gate and clicked the padlock shut. “Nobody’s going to drive us out of our home. We’re not leaving unless we go feet-first.”
That, in a nutshell, was Tom’s greatest fear for these two.
In the cruiser as they drove away, Tom’s thoughts shifted to Rachel. He wished he could have stayed home today so he’d be with her when her sister and brother-in-law arrived. He didn’t like the nervous, almost fearful vibes he’d been getting from her since she told him Michelle was coming. He didn’t think her jitters had much to do with her sister’s stalker story. Michelle herself was the source of Rachel’s anxiety. When anybody needed Rachel, she was there heart and soul, but she wasn’t approaching her sister’s dilemma with her typical passionate abandon.
Fagan broke into his thoughts. “So what’s the story? I’m starting to think the Beecher girl’s murder might have something to do with the innocence project after all. Even the convicted man’s parents didn’t like her poking around.”
“It’s a small community,” Tom said. “Things like that fester because everybody knows everybody else and they run into each other everywhere they go.”
“So what happened? Who’s the slut Mrs. Lankford mentioned?”
Tom slowed at an intersection, paying respect to the four-way sign without coming to a full stop when he saw no vehicles approaching in any direction. “Brian Hadley had a country music band, and Vance Lankford was in it. Played electric guitar, I think. He was a little older than Brian, and he was teaching biology at the middle school and playing in Brian’s band in his spare time.”
“And the girl?” Fagan prompted. “Who is she, and how did she figure in it?”
“Rita Jankowski. She was a singer.” Tom drove into Mountainview, past a used car lot and an Exxon station. “She and Brian sang together. Brian was just twenty-one when he died, but he was already married, had one baby, another on the way. And he made the mistake of getting involved with Rita.”
Now Tom realized what was wrong with the picture of Brian’s band he’d seen at the Hadley house the night before. Somebody had cut Rita out of it. Not surprising. The family wouldn’t want a reminder of her part in Brian’s death.
“She was already paired off with Lankford?”
“She’s never been the type to tie herself down to one man,” Tom said, “but yeah, they’d been seeing each other, then she and Brian started up. Classic story.”
Fagan was about to say something when the squawk of the dispatch radio cut him off. “Unit two?” the young woman’s voice asked. “Are you on the road?”
“Unit two here,” Tom answered, silently wondering, What now?
“We’
ve had a call from Maureen Hadley about Dan Beecher causing a disturbance over there,” the dispatcher said. “I sent Brandon Connolly out, but I figured you’d want to know too.”
“I’m on my way.” The fallout was starting already. Tom swung the cruiser around in a U-turn and sped south again.
When Tom slowed in front of the Hadley house, Blake Hadley and Dan Beecher stood three feet apart in the yard, screaming at each other while Maureen and Skeet watched from the porch. Brandon stood with the two men, gesturing and talking, but they didn’t seem to notice he was there.
“Aw, crap.” Tom braked hard enough to jolt Fagan forward against his seat belt. “Dan’s gone completely off the rails.”
He jumped out and jogged over to the men.
“I was afraid of this,” he said when he reached Brandon. Dan and Blake went on yelling. “We’ll have to babysit Dan when we should to be trying to solve his daughter’s murder.”
“Can we lock him up for disturbing the peace?” Brandon asked. “Keep him where he can’t stir up trouble?”
“I’m tempted, but I don’t have the heart to do that to Sarah and Megan.” Hitching up his gun belt, Tom shoved his way between Dan and Blake. “All right, calm down and back off.”
“How am I supposed to calm down when my daughter’s dead?” Dan demanded. Pressing against Tom’s shoulder, he pointed at Blake. “For months now the Hadleys have been saying somebody ought to make Shelley shut up. How do we know they didn’t take it in their own hands and decide to shut her up themselves?”
“Dan, come on,” Tom said. “You’re not thinking straight.”
“You calling me a murderer?” Blake shouted at Dan, close enough to Tom’s ear to make him wince. “Go ahead and say it. You think I killed your girl?”
“I wouldn’t put it past that boy of yours.” Dan flung an arm toward Skeet on the porch. “The way he talked about her, like she was some kind of pest y’all wanted to get rid of.”
“She was an ignorant little girl who didn’t know what she was doing,” Blake said. “Getting in over her head, acting like she knew better than the police and the courts.”
Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 7
