Stain of Guilt

by Brandilyn Collins

  “Okay, so you interview the ex—”

  “And then I have to look over all my notes and make sense of them. Really get a handle on how Bland thinks and acts, and how that might affect his appearance.”

  “So you’re only talking about a couple of days, right? Three at the most? As scary as this is, Annie, it’s not much time, especially when you consider your drawing might help catch Bland. Besides, if you pull out, it would be too late to tell the newspaper tonight. So Bland wouldn’t even know about it until Monday morning.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe it, Jenna. You’re actually encouraging me to get into something dangerous?”

  “Get into it? What are you talking about? You’re already in it! The question is, what’s the safest thing to do now?”

  Get Bland off the streets. The knowledge punched me in the chest, clear and cold. The safest thing to do—for me and the rest of society—was get Bland off the streets. And my updated drawing was the one thing that could best ensure this happened.

  “Okay, Jenna, just . . . get here. We can talk about it more then.”

  “I’m on my way. Are the doors locked? The alarm on?”

  I flicked a look at the ceiling. Caught again. “Yes and yes, Miss Know-it-all.”

  I hung up the phone and walked to the keypad to activate our alarm. Its light flicked from green to yellow, signaling it was activated to the lowest level. All doors and lower windows were monitored, but I could walk around inside the house without tripping the laser beam sensors.

  An hour and a half later, I heard the distant drone of a plane nearing the Grove Landing private runway. Soon the chut-chut of my sister’s Cessna 210 told me she was taxiing down our wide street. I ran to open the hangar door.

  As soon as Jenna was settled inside, we discussed my situation at length. I told her I was scared to death and would just as soon hide in bed with the covers over my head. Me too, Jenna said, but then what? Even if Bland were to hear that I was no longer on the case, would he stop threatening me? Or was he warped enough to continue, just because I’d dared to help apprehend him at all?

  “Okay.” I slumped on the TV-room couch with my feet tucked under me, rubbing my aching head. “I think you’re right. I need to continue this thing and get it done. I can try interviewing Bland’s ex on the phone tomorrow. Then get right on to drawing. In a few days I can be finished. And I have to admit, with an update of Bland circulating, I’ll feel better protected than I do now.”

  Before my sister could say one more thing, I pushed from the couch. “I’m going to call Chetterling. Tell him I’m still in.”

  I made the call from my office.

  “Great!” Chetterling responded. “You’re a real trooper. I knew you’d make this decision.”

  “Oh, really.”

  He emitted a low chuckle. “Annie Kingston, sometimes I think I know you better than you know yourself.”

  Something about his words. They wrapped around me in a new way. “How . . . frightening.”

  We paused for a moment that seemed almost awkward.

  “Ralph, one thing.” My gaze rested on my drawing table as I thought of the work before me. “When the update is done, how are you going to use it? I mean, American Fugitive is paying me for it, and what if they don’t want it displayed before the show airs?”

  “I’m not so sure they’d mind. After all, their whole reason for the show is to catch the bad guys. Still, I don’t think we’ll post it publicly. We’ll use it internally. It’ll help us know who to look for as we check hotels in the area. And our deputies on the street will have it.”

  “Okay. Sounds good.” My voice fell as I imagined what could lie ahead.

  “Annie? Don’t waste time second-guessing your decision now. Just get to work. And we will catch him. I promise you that.”

  I hung up the phone, thinking Emily and Edwin Tarell had heard the same promises for twenty years.

  Sunday, May 9

  Chapter 13

  Church. The gathering of the saints.

  His mouth twisted.

  While his family went to church with the rest, he performed his own type of gathering.

  The box and its crucial contents. Shirt in a plastic bag. Camouflage clothes. Backpack. Rarely used pair of contacts. Wire cutters. Extra license plate. Lock pick. Backup fake ID. Night-vision binocular goggles.

  He stopped to caress the sweet gadget. It weighed barely over a pound, including the headgear. Afforded forty degrees width of sight, and distance viewing of one hundred twenty yards on a cloudy night. A handy flip-up raised the goggles from his eyes. Carefully, he wiped the lenses, checked for dust, then wiped again.

  Blake Cremmer had used a pair of these in Last Second on Earth. Effectively.

  Next a blond wig, and a black one, and five hundred dollars in cash.

  The gun.

  His fingers ran down its sleek barrel. He would not think now of the situation that would force him to use it.

  He checked his watch. Almost eleven. Church was in full swing, the preacher spilling his platitudes about hope and peace.

  Time for battle.

  All the items went into the trunk of his car. He positioned himself behind the wheel and drove away, steel-minded, focused. Refusing to look back. He would return to all that held him here. Safe and sound.

  But he would not be the same man.

  Chapter 14

  The dead roses and threatening note were designed to make me drop my fugitive update assignment like a sizzling pan. Instead, as I entered church Sunday morning, I faced the grim reality that I’d been drawn right into the flame.

  I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder. True, Bill Bland might be far away. He might have sent a messenger to drop off that money. But so far the Sheriff’s Department had found no leads as to who left the twenty-five dollars. No one in the area saw anything. And so my overactive brain flashed scene after scene of Bland’s shadowy figure sneaking to that florist shop in the middle of the night. Now I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was close,watching me. Somehow certain of his ability to hide in plain sight. Had he changed his appearance over the years? With what I’d learned of the man so far, I wouldn’t have thought so. I’d expect him to alter little to nothing of himself, even dressing the same.

  Was I wrong?

  Following Kelly’s lead, I drifted into the pew where Erin and Dave sat. Normally I would allow Kelly to sit with them while Stephen and I settled a few rows behind. I hadn’t wanted people to see me hanging near Dave and jump to any conclusions. But this morning I gave social etiquette no thought.

  Neither did I dwell on the fears plaguing me about Stephen. Jeff had dropped him off the previous night a good hour beyond his curfew. Stephen acted even more belligerent than normal, and I couldn’t help but notice his enlarged pupils. My head knew what this meant, but my heart refused to absorb the truth. After the day’s events I already strained against the quicksand of anxiety, and any movement toward my son’s rebellion would have pulled me under.

  I lowered myself into the church pew, glancing left and right, searching men’s faces. Kelly and Erin sat between me and Dave, giggling over who knows what. Stephen glowered on my left. If only Jenna had come, but she never went to church.

  “Hi.” Dave smiled at me over the girls’ heads.

  “Hi.”

  I could not hide my distraction. A crease flickered across Dave’s forehead, but he smoothed it away. He would not ask me what was wrong in front of the kids.

  The service began, and we stood to sing. Since starting to attend church last summer, I’d learned many of the praise choruses. When I didn’t know a song, I could follow the words that were projected on a giant screen. This morning I could not begin to focus on them. Instead, my mind took up its own mocking chant.

  Here I am again, God. Here I am again.

  My father had been an open cynic of Christianity, and though I would not belittle anyone’s faith as he had, his heavy-handed attitud
e had left its fingerprints on my soul. But after Lisa’s murder I’d witnessed the strength that Dave and others who loved her possessed through clinging to God and His promises. Gerri Carson, who volunteered with the Shasta County Sheriff Department’s chaplaincy program, had also made a deep impression as she prayed for me and answered my unending questions about God’s forgiveness of sins.

  The biggest reason for my attendance in church, however, lay in my brink-of-death promise to God. I’d faced a danger I knew I could not survive without help. Save my life, I’d cried to Him, and I’ll seek You.

  Annie Kingston, despite all her shortcomings, does have one redeeming trait. She keeps her promises.

  Promises. The faces of Emily and Edwin Tarell filled my mind. Because of my commitment to help them, I faced this new danger. Because of that commitment, I now cried once more to the heavens.

  Help me again, God, and this time I’ll find You.

  “Mom, you’re not singing.” Kelly elbowed me. Kelly, my beautiful daughter, who’d loved church since the first morning we came. Now she was a prize for God.

  “Sorry.” For her sake, I sang along. On the other side of me, Stephen stood silent, arms folded. Resentment undulated off his shoulders like heat from asphalt.

  A male voice some rows behind me began singing loudly, off-key. The sound made my spine tingle. Was it Bill Bland this close, mocking me? Ridiculous as that seemed, my heart stumbled. Of its own accord my head began to turn toward the source.

  Please, God, no. He’ll have seen my children . . .

  I came to my senses. How tactless I would seem, craning my neck to see some poor man who sang badly. I forced myself to face forward.

  The singing ended. I sat with the rest of the congregation and tried to listen. But thoughts of Bill Bland continued to grind my personal projector into motion, pictures of Don Tarell’s and Peter Dessinger’s murders flashing through my head in vivid sequence.

  Don Tarell’s knuckles rapping against his desk . . .

  Flash—

  Edwin Tarell’s eyes widening at the sight of the gun . . .

  Flash—

  A slow-motion bullet hits Peter Dessinger below his hairline, pushing his head back, spraying blood and tissue through the air . . .

  “This week I’m going to continue my two-part sermon on ‘The Reality of Redemption.’” Pastor Storrel’s voice cut through my gruesome thoughts.

  “Turn with me please to Isaiah chapter one, and we’ll read verse eighteen again.‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool.’”

  Flash—

  The scarlet stain of blood on Don Tarell’s shirt . . .

  “We spent most of last week on that first phrase, ‘Come now, let us reason together.’” Pastor Storrel moved away from the podium, relying on the small microphone clipped to his lapel.“We talked about the awesome promise of these words. That the Lord of all, the God of the universe, would humble Himself to approach mankind and say, ‘Come.’ That He would offer ‘let us reason together,’ as one friend or spouse might say to another.”

  Flash—

  Emily kneeling beside her spouse, watching his life drain away . . .

  Pinpricks marched up the back of my neck. The more intense the images, the more I sensed Bill Bland’s presence. Could he possibly be here? Watching me?

  I forced the scenes from my head.

  “That the God who hung the sun and moon would say these words to you and you—” Pastor pointed to various sections of the congregation—“‘Come, let us reason together.’ People, if you ever doubted your worth, if you ever doubted what you mean to God, that phrase alone should set you straight. You mean enough to God for Him to beg just to talk to you.”

  Talk to you . . .

  Edwin Tarell had phoned last night,wanting to hear how the dead roses had been traced. He was appalled to learn the trail went no further than the florist shop, and that we believed Bland could be in the area. “Annie, then please tell me you’ll drop the assignment. I don’t want anything to happen to you. Do it for me. I just couldn’t handle the guilt over one more person’s—lack of safety.”

  “ . . . not done with that verse yet,” Pastor Storrel’s voice sliced into my thoughts, “but turn with me for a moment over to Jeremiah 2:22.”

  I dragged my mind back to the sermon. Something told me I would need the pastor’s words in the coming days. I looked to Kelly and we exchanged a smile. I patted her arm—a touch to ground myself.

  “Here’s the verse. ‘Although you wash yourself with soda and use an abundance of soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me,’ declares the Sovereign Lord.” The pastor looked up. “Now that word ‘soda’ sounds kind of strange to us. We’re not talking about a soft drink. The word could be translated as ‘lye.’ What God is saying here is: It doesn’t matter how clean you are on the outside. It doesn’t matter what you do or where you go, for that matter, or any of your surrounding circumstances . . .”

  Where you go.

  Bill Bland had run for two decades. He’d escaped justice, but he hadn’t escaped the stain of his sins. Surely he’d paid for them every day. Had it been worth it? Running, hiding, ever on the defensive? If I were Bill Bland, wouldn’t I get tired of it all? Wouldn’t I just want to stop fighting and turn myself in? Twenty years, and what did he have to show for it?

  “ . . . and what are you left with? Sin that stains your soul, on the inside, and separates you from God. That is the circumstance we are all in, folks. But thank God He doesn’t end it there, with Jeremiah 2:22. No. Instead, He gives us the divine invitation of Isaiah 1:18.‘Come, let us reason together. Let me wash away your sins; let me take that scarlet stain and make it white as snow.’” Pastor Storrel leaned toward the congregation. “Now I know there are some here today who’ve resisted that invitation. Who’ve run from God for years. Let me ask you, in light of all He has to give, why do you keep running?”

  The question fisted around my heart. The pastor seemed to be looking into my own thoughts. I changed my position on the pew. Why did I keep running?

  Now wait a minute, I hadn’t really run from God. I was in church, wasn’t I? I’d learned a lot about Him in the last ten months—about how He sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross, and how through that death all people could be forgiven of their sins if they would only accept the gift of salvation . . .

  So why hadn’t I done that myself?

  I shifted in my seat again. Checked the floor to make sure my purse was still there, as if it may have magically vanished. Because I wasn’t ready, that’s why. Because even if I accepted this sermon, accepted God’s promise to wash away sins and make me like new, it would be no time at all before those stains were right back in place. In a way, it would be like Bill Bland turning himself in. We both could say, Now it’s over, no more resistance. But he’d have to be accountable for his actions from then on. So would I.

  Resisting may be a disheartening job, but at least I was my own boss.

  “There’s no need to continue carrying the burden of your sins, folks. No need at all. Not when God has provided you a way out. And don’t think you’re sitting on the fence about this. There is no sitting on the fence when it comes to Christ. If you’re not saying yes to Him, you’re saying no. ‘No to your gift of redemption; no, I don’t need You in my life; no, I’ll take my chances with eternity.’ And each no, you see, puts a new stain on your soul. So I ask you: Is it worth it?”

  No to your gift of redemption.

  I did not want to think about this.

  My heart knocked around in my chest during the closing hymn. I could feel the flush of my face as I meted out a smile to Dave and Erin, as I quickly herded my kids out of the suffocating sanctuary.

  “Why do we come here, Mom?” Stephen kicked at a nonexistent stone as we crossed the parking lot. “You don’t even like it.”

  “
Yes, I do.” My tone could have cut steel.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Knock it off, Stephen.”

  We headed for the car to go home. A home, by the way, that I couldn’t be sure was safe anymore.Well, thanks, God. I come to church to seek peace in the midst of all I face. Couldn’t You just give me that? Instead You make me feel guilty.

  “Let me drive home, Mom.” Stephen swiped at the keys in my hand.

  “Fine.” I climbed into the passenger seat, ignoring Kelly’s questioning looks.

  I am not running like Bill Bland, God. I am not.

  Chapter 15

  “Mom, are you sure you’re all right?”

  Kelly slumped on one of the couches before our fireplace, curling a strand of hair around a finger, her forehead creased. “I know there was something wrong with you after church. Erin and her dad saw it too.”

  Regret washed through me. Kelly had not forgotten the dangers I’d faced the previous year. I really needed to hide my emotions better. Not for the world would I upset my sweet daughter. Sinking down beside her, I put an arm around her shoulders.

  “I’m fine. Really. It’s just that this case I’m working on is beginning to get to me.”

  “Why?”

  I stared at the glass coffee table, searching for an answer that would not be a lie. “I’ve had to find out a lot of information about this man who killed two people. Soon I’ll be holed up in my office, doing the drawing. I’m just feeling a lot of pressure right now. That television show depends on me getting everything right. Just imagine if I didn’t do a good job, and as a result, the man isn’t found. I’d feel really bad.”

  She twirled her hair. “But how would you know if you didn’t do a good job? I mean, you could draw him perfectly, but still he’s hiding so well that he can’t be found. That wouldn’t be your fault.”

  How right she was. Kelly knew all too well my tendency to take on blame.

  “Erin guessed that you’re worried about the drawing.” Kelly gave me a wan smile. “She said to tell you she’s praying for you. And I will too. Okay?”