Instead, Stacey Weller appeared to be smiling.
In that moment, Stevie appeared at the door, and the deputy drove a key into the lock. Or at least he tried to; his hands were trembling so violently that he missed, and it took him three tries before he could unlock the door.
Liam drove his shoulder into it once again, and it flew wide.
He rushed into the room, Stevie following closely on his heels. He ignored Stacey, who only now backed away and pressed up against the window, and ran directly to Father Smith.
It had only been three or four seconds since Liam had looked away while the door was being unlocked, but in that time, Father Smith had driven the scissors not only into each of his eyeballs, but also into his throat.
Liam only grazed against the priest, and yet he fell backward in his chair and onto the floor, blood spurting from his wounds like a hot spring. Liam pressed both hands against his throat, and the priest’s hot blood immediately coated his fingers.
“Stevie! Stevie get the paramedics here! Get Susan and Dwight here, now!”
Chapter 17
As soon as Rebecca and Teresa left the room, Dwight Porter’s radio on his left shoulder erupted in a static-filled mess.
“Dwight… Get back… Need help… Liam… Dead priest…”
Dwight immediately reached for the walkie and pressed the button.
“What? You’re breaking up, come again?” He was aware that Principal Zanbar was still in the room with him, but the desperation he heard in his boss’s voice even amidst all the static, made this irrelevant.
“It’s Liam, the priest… Detective from New York… Dead… Gouged eyes out…”
Dwight didn’t make out any more of this message than he had before, except for those three words: gouged eyes out.
A chill traveled up and down his spine.
“I’m coming, Liam. I’ll be there in five.”
Principal Zanbar was beside him now, and Dwight quickly turned to the man.
“I gotta go, but this thing with Patty—Patty and Tommy Ray, it’s not over yet. I’ll be back soon. Please, try to keep this under wraps, would you?”
The principal nodded, and he too looked the way that Dwight felt: frightened and confused.
“Okay, I gotta go,” he huffed.
***
It took less than five minutes for Dwight to make the short drive back to the police station. And yet, when he got there, the EMT was already blocking most of the parking lot. He pulled his cruiser up beside it and quickly jumped out, not caring that it was still running.
Dwight hurried into the police station, breathing deeply as he forced his weight to shift back from side to side.
Stevie met him at the door.
“Stevie, what the hell is going on?”
Stevie looked like he had seen a ghost.
“The priest… Father Smith…” But he couldn’t finish his sentence; all he could do was point.
Dwight followed the man’s finger and gasped out loud.
To his right, Sylvie, also as pale as a sheet, was busy trying to console or maybe distract a young girl who looked to Dwight to be about six or seven years of age—her face was so covered in dirt and grime that it was difficult to tell. To his left a man, who was equally as dirty as the child, sat in the cell, stone-faced, his elbows on his knees, his chin propped up in his filthy hands. But most of the commotion was coming from directly in front of them; from the interrogation room.
As Dwight hurried toward the room, the scene began to come into focus.
Susan Bauer was already there, hovering over a dark figure on the floor, a stern expression on her face. Sheriff Liam Lancaster was behind her, also staring down at the figure. There was blood splashed across the table and more of it on the white linoleum floor. When Dwight finally made it to the window, he got his first good look at the body.
It was Father Smith, and his eyes had indeed been gouged out. Blood pooled about his head and continued to seep from the wounds in his neck. There was so much of it that someone even like Dwight with no medical experience knew that the man was already dead.
Dwight’s heart skipped a beat, and he felt all the air sucked from his lungs.
In all of his years in Elloree he hadn’t seen a dead body before, and today it wasn’t quite noon yet and he’d seen two.
Chapter 18
Principal Clifford Zanbar watched the overweight deputy waddle from his room. As soon as the man was gone, he took a giant breath and felt his whole body start to tremble as if a minor electrical shock had coursed through his system.
Patty Smith… is dead?
If he hadn’t known Dwight so well, he might have thought that this was some sort of strange sting operation to reveal the location of the drugs. But he knew Dwight Porter, he knew him because he had been the principal when Dwight had been a student in the school more than 15 years ago. And Dwight wasn’t smart enough to pull something like this off.
No, Cliff had zero reservations about the fact that what Dwight told him was actually true.
And yet he still couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of Patty Smith, the cute 16-year-old with the pigtails and upturned nose who Cliff had known since she had been a young girl showing up for her first day of high school, was now dead.
While this thought registered in his brain, it didn’t quite take hold. It didn’t take hold, because another thought quickly usurped it.
I have to find Tommy Ray, I have to find him and I have to make sure that they don’t find the drugs.
And with that, Cliff hurried out of the office. On the way past, Teresa looked up at him, her cheeks still wet with tears. Across from her, sitting on the bench, was Rebecca Hall who appeared to be in some sort of trance, or maybe sleeping. And yet, despite this oddity, Principal Zanbar ignored them both. Indeed, he would have hurried by without comment, if Teresa hadn’t looked up at him then.
“Cliff? Where you going?”
He took one look at her, then quickly averted his eyes before the lie formed on his lips.
“I need to get some air, this is all too… this is all too much for me.”
In his periphery, he saw Teresa’s large head bob up and down in acknowledgment.
“Just try to… try to keep things under wraps for a little while longer,” he said as he fled the room without waiting for a response.
As he exited through the large blue doors, his eyes scanned the school parking lot. He had told Tommy Ray not to buy the Porsche, that it would only raise eyebrows, but the kid was incorrigible and did whatever he wanted. It had been a risk getting the kid involved, a risk that Principal Zanbar had to take to move the drugs through the community and out into South Carolina proper, into Batesburg and other surrounding towns. And yet he had implored the boy, to listen, to wait until he was done here, wait until he graduated before he spent his share.
But no, Tommy Ray Ross didn’t listen to nobody.
Cliff didn’t see the Porsche in the parking lot, but couldn’t decide if this was a good or a bad thing.
He swore anyway as he made his way to his own car, a six-year-old Kia Sorrento. The moment he got inside, he took his cell phone out of his pocket, checked to see that there were no messages from his ex-wife, and laid it on the dash. The next thing he did was retrieve his other cell phone from glovebox. Like the first, this one had no new messages, but he didn’t put on the dash. Instead, Cliff unlocked it and then called the only number in the contact list.
“Come on, come on,” he grumbled as the phone continued to ring. After three or four rings it went straight to voicemail, which had no greeting, just a solitary beep. “Tommy Ray, call me back as soon as you get this.”
With that, Cliff hung up the phone and put it back in the glovebox. Then he slammed his hands down on the steering will once.
“Fuck!”
Cliff slammed his hands down a second time, and then a third.
Goddammit, we were so close.
In less than a calendar ye
ar, they managed to move nearly ten kilos of heroin. Ten kilograms. It was an unprecedented amount, and when Clifford’s contact had first approached him, he had thought it an impossible task.
Clifford thought back to that day when he had been drinking at the local tavern, six deep in Manhattan’s, and had overheard a man he didn’t recognize speak in a hushed tone to a colleague about moving a ‘product’. Clifford wasn’t naïve, he could read between the lines, but if it hadn’t been for his inebriated state, there was no chance that he would’ve approached them, let alone offered to lend a hand. At the time, he had been going through an expensive divorce, which was why he was at the tavern on a Tuesday afternoon the second classes let out for the day. And for whatever reason, the alcohol or the divorce had given him the balls to approach the man with the strange tattoo on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger of a snake devouring an eyeball.
Maybe it was the fact that his whole life he had wanted something more, that he wanted out of this place, this small shitty town called Elloree that constantly reeked of swamp water and caused sweat to trickle down his back the instant he opened his eyes. Sure, he had made the rise to principal of the town’s only high school, but this was the epitome of a small fish in a small pond. He wasn’t the mayor, he could never be the mayor, not that he wanted to, anyway. He was a minnow swimming in a goldfish bowl, simply banging his head against the glass every few seconds.
But a man who could move ten kilos of heroin? Ten kilos in a year? A man who had never so much as seen a bag of heroin in his entire existence? Well, that man could do something.
That man was somebody.
Only now…
He pictured Patty Smith’s pretty face, when Tommy Ray had first brought her out to the swamp, to the spot where they were holding the drugs. Cliff protested getting her or any other students involved, but for once in his life, Tommy Ray had made a salient point.
What did every town in South Carolina have? Schools, hospitals, police stations, a library… sure. But there was only one place that they all had come to with the sanctum of privacy, a place where they could go without being judged, without being considered out of place regardless of locale.
Churches; they all had churches. And what better way to get entrenched in the church than to get Patty Smith, the preacher’s girl, involved. And once they met up with Father Carter Duke in Askergan, things had just fallen into place.
But now…
He shook his head and dialed Tommy’s number again. When there was no answer the second time, he hung up and peeled out from the parking lot, heading to Tommy’s house intent on wrangling the boy, asking what the hell happened, and how they could justify everything that they had done over the last year.
In the back of his mind, he pictured the man that had loaned him the drugs, the man with the tattoo on the webbing of his hand, scars in his eyebrow and a stare that could strike fear into the heart of a veteran soldier, let alone a principal of a town of only about a thousand people.
PART II - The House in the Swamp
Chapter 19
“Let him out of his cell,” Liam said under his breath.
When no one moved, he repeated the instruction, louder this time.
“Boss, you sure that’s a good idea?” Stevie asked from his left.
No, Liam wasn’t sure that this was a good idea, but he didn’t know what else to do. He needed help, and if this man was really from New York City, really was a detective, then he could help them.
Or at least, that’s what Liam hoped.
“What about the girl?” Stevie asked as he made his way toward the cell.
Liam chewed his lip as he thought this over. As he did, his eyes drifted to Father Smith’s corpse, which thankfully Susan had laid a sheet over.
What the hell did she say to you? What could she possibly say to you to make you do this?
“Boss? Should we put her in the cell?”
Liam shook his head, hoping that the girl didn’t pick up on what Stevie had said, and resisted the urge to look over at her.
“No,” he said out the side of his mouth, “we don’t put her in a cell for Christ’s sake. Just let her sit there with Sylvie, tell Sylvie to keep her occupied. She’s not to leave here though, not before Officer Jenkins gets here from Batesburg.”
And yet, this posted a bit of a dilemma for Liam, because while he wanted to speak to his deputies, needed to speak to his deputies about what happened, there was nowhere they could talk in the small police station that the girl wouldn’t overhear them… the girl and Sylvie of course.
Aside from the interrogation room, which Liam wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of at this present moment.
The Sheriff brought a finger to the bridge of his nose and rubbed at it absently as he thought about a solution to the problem. Thankfully, Susan Bauer spoke up and relieved him of what was likely to be a lengthy and uncomfortable silence.
“You think we should call his next of kin?”
Liam thought about this for a moment too, but then decided against it. Protocol dictated that they get a doctor to sign off on the body first.
Susan Bauer, for all of her medical knowledge, wasn’t actually a doctor, but an EMT.
“Susan, can you please give Dr. Larringer a call? Get him to come out here? And try to do it discreetly, if the town finds out about this…” Liam let his sentence trail off. There was nothing that needed to be said here; Elloree, like many of the towns surrounding the swamp, had a deeply religious culture, and Liam himself was a practicing Catholic.
If something like this got out, the rumors would start immediately, rumors that Stevie would no doubt perpetuate on account of not being able to keep his mouth shut.
A thought occurred to Liam then, and he turned to Stevie who had since unlocked the cell door.
“We can go to my cruiser,” he said. “Let’s go there and have a chat.”
Dwight raised an eyebrow at this, but eventually nodded.
“What about the detec—” Stevie began before being cut off by the sound of the Fax machine finally turning on.
“Dwight, go grab that. If it looks like Detective Freeman, then we bring him into the cruiser with us, alright?”
Dwight was confused, but did as he was told; Liam himself didn’t want to go look at the fax report that came through.
He was scared that Hugh Freeman would be a sixty-year-old black man, and then he really wouldn’t know what to do.
Dwight tore the sheet out of the Fax machine, scratched at his ass, which Liam noted was dark with sweat, and then proceeded over next to the man who claimed to be detective Hugh Freeman.
Dwight, in an act that was almost comical, held up a sheet of paper beside the man’s face. Even at his distance, and even with the dirt that covered the man’s features and the fact that in the image his hair was perfectly coiffed it was clear that this Hugh Freeman was the Hugh Freeman.
And despite everything that happened, Liam let out a sigh of relief; perhaps there was some good to come out of today, some help to put together the pieces of a soon to be broken town.
But when Dwight scanned the paper more closely, lowering it away from Hugh’s face, and his expression turned sour, Liam once again felt anxiety build inside.
“What? What is it?”
Dwight didn’t answer, he just shook his head and walked over to Liam and handed him the sheet of paper. He snatched it from his deputy, and then scanned the report quickly. At the bottom, was a single line of text that was underlined several times by hand.
Wanted in connection with the death of Jonah Silvers, and suspected in aiding and abetting Carson Black.
Liam gritted his teeth and then scrunched the paper into a ball.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered.
From behind him, he heard Sylvie inhale sharply, but she was too distraught to call him on his curse.
“Everything okay, boss? Is it him? Is this Hugh Freeman?” Stevie asked, a hint of excitement in his
voice. At first this confused Liam, but then he realized that this was just the man’s way of dealing with stress. Behind him, he heard Susan finally reach Dr. Larringer on the phone.
And then, unexpectedly, his thoughts flicked to the mayor, to Bobby Lee Ross, and what he would make of this; Liam had started this day thinking that he would retire without having a single murder during his tenure as Sheriff.
But now… now that a man—no, not man, a fucking priest—had killed himself inside the police station with not just Liam present but also his deputy head and the head of HR, he was doubtful that he would finish the week as the Sheriff.
Daughter Page 7
