Rivers to Blood

by Michael Lister

He still didn’t say anything but the tremors in his hands and the moistness in his eyes told me what I needed to know.

  “I’m sure what happened to you had to be beyond horrible,” I said, “and I’m very sorry. We’re going to catch the guy who did it to you and make sure he doesn’t do anything like that to anyone ever again. But Cody, if you ever threaten Carla again, I’ll put you in the hospital. And things will only escalate from there.”

  He didn’t say anything and didn’t look up.

  “Carla, do you wish to continue dating Cody?” I asked.

  She hesitated a long moment then shook her head. “Not right now,” she said. “Maybe later when … after …”

  “Do you understand?” I asked Cody.

  After a moment, he nodded his head, but still didn’t look up.

  “Okay,” I said, standing, “Carla, why don’t you go get some rest. Cody and I have a few things to discuss.”

  She stood and looked down at him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I love you.”

  Cody’s family was solidly middle class, which in an economically depressed area like ours, where the highest earners are teachers and correctional officers, made him a “rich” kid. He was also attractive, popular, and the star quarterback. Carla was poor, not involved in any extracurricular activities because she had to work so much, and though not unpopular, she wasn’t a cheerleader, wasn’t allowed completely inside the cool kids clique.

  As I sat back down and waited for Carla to make her way into the back, I wondered how much this social and economic dynamic was involved in what Carla was calling love.

  “Look at me like a man,” I said.

  He looked up, anger burning in his narrowed eyes.

  “We’re going to get you some help,” I said. “And we’re going to catch the man who did this to you. But the first step is being honest about what happened. My first priority in this situation is Carla, but you are my second. I won’t judge you. I won’t think any less of you. I’ve spent my life working with people who’ve gone through similar things. What happened to you is not your fault. It’s about evil, about a sick individual who has given himself over to it. None of that has anything to do with you. So, tell me what happened?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I sipped some coffee and waited.

  I wound up waiting a long time, but eventually something inside him broke loose, and he began to cry. I wasn’t able to make out all of his tearful story, but I got a lot—including the most telling line of all: “The worst thing of all was that he made me do the stuff to myself.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  “That means the rapist isn’t an inmate, right?” Anna asked.

  We were in the Monte Carlo heading toward Panama City Beach to talk to the owner of Air Ads Inc.

  It was midday, the sun directly overhead shrouded in rain clouds, thunder rumbling in the distance.

  The warden had reluctantly approved my request to use a couple of hours of my comp time—and only because I was visiting my mom, which I would be after going to Air Ads Inc.

  Before approving the request, he had given me a lecture about the importance of being at the institution and, as a department head, setting a good example. I agreed with him and reminded him that the reason I had so much comp time was because of how much of my recent life had been spent at the prison, and that I only had one mother so this shouldn’t be an issue in the future. I felt guilty for using Mom as an excuse and not being completely honest, until he told me to make sure that it wasn’t.

  “Probably,” I said, “but not positively.”

  As usual 23rd Street was crowded, the multiple stoplights adding to the congestion of the slow-moving traffic. The parking lots of the ubiquitous chain restaurants were packed, cars of hungry workers circling in search of an empty slot, the precious minutes of their lunch hours ticking away.

  “How could it be an inmate?”

  “It would be difficult,” I said, “but Cody said the guy only came to the place he holds them periodically. It’s not inconceivable that an inmate assigned to a negligent city worker on an outside work crew could be doing it. Some of them don’t really supervise at all—especially if the inmate’s been working for them a long time. When the inmate is alone, he could use the city truck to snatch the kid and take him to an abandoned building or empty river camp, then come back each day for another session, and eventually let him go. Not the most probable scenario. Just saying it’s not impossible.”

  “We’ve certainly had negligent supervisors before,” she said, “but …”

  “It’s about as likely as someone committing the murders to make Dad look bad and lose the election,” I said. “It’s possible, but …”

  “Does he think that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s crossed his mind. We can’t rule either of them out completely but we need to focus on other possibilities. Lisa’s creating a new list of rape suspects from staff, correctional officers, and inmates on an outside work crew.”

  “That should narrow it down greatly,” she said.

  Classes were back in and the parking lots of Gulf Coast State College’s main campus were full. As we rose atop Hathaway Bridge amid a steady flow of traffic in both directions, I slowed and looked out over the bay. The waters were choppy, a seemingly infinite number of whitecaps bouncing, rocking, jostling. The overcast day drained much of the vivid color from what was normally a picturesque announcement that crossing the bridge from Panama City to Panama City Beach signaled a transition between a small panhandle town and a world famous vacation destination, between the monotony of responsibility and the variety of possibility.

  “How’re you feeling?” I asked.

  She frowned and shrugged.

  “Any morning sickness?”

  “A little. And a little afternoon. A little evening. I’m usually so nauseous at night that the only relief I can get is to go to sleep. Eating helps but only briefly. No wonder us preggos get so fat.”

  “You won’t be fat,” I said. “You’ll be pregnant, and there’s nothing in this world more beautiful than a pregnant woman.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. You’re sweet.”

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  The traffic on Back Beach moved a lot quicker than in town and soon we were passing the driving range and the defunct independent Charismatic church whose preacher’s extravagant lifestyle and acrimonious divorce had bankrupted far more than its budget.

  “I’m worried,” she said.

  “About?”

  “I’m afraid all my anxiety and negative feelings about this pregnancy will affect the baby,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Tell me they won’t,” she said.

  I smiled. “You’ll work through them before they have a chance to,” I said.

  “Are you mad at me?”

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t hate me?”

  “Of course not. I love you.”

  We were silent a moment, and feeling the need to move away a bit from what I’d just said, I added, “You’re gonna make a wonderful mother.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, her smile wide and warm, her deep brown eyes intelligent and intense, her smooth skin and countenance radiant, and time did what it does when I’m with her and the next thing I knew we had reached Air Ads Inc.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Air Ads Inc. consisted of a grass runway, two planes, and a small portable office trailer. It was situated off the highway behind a few rows of pine trees that served as a buffer between it and the traffic on Highway 98.

  A dirt road with several deep ruts and potholes led from the highway through the trees to the small operation.

  When we pulled up in the Monte Carlo an older man with a sun-damaged face and a long gray ponytail stopped working on one of the planes to stare at us suspiciously.

  “I think my car is being subjected to racial profiling,” I said.

  Anna laughed.

>   “Junior,” he yelled, as I opened my door.

  “John,” I yelled back, as I got out of the car.

  “My bad,” he said. “Thought you were someone else.”

  “I am,” I said. “Tom around?”

  “Inside,” he yelled, and went back to work.

  “I think he’s disappointed,” Anna said.

  “I get that a lot,” I said.

  We found a heavy blond teenage girl inside with one of the most accomplished attitudes of indifference I’d ever seen. She didn’t even speak to us when we walked into the small room. To the extent she acknowledged our presence, she seemed angry at the intrusion, though she wasn’t even pretending to work. She was texting on a small cell phone with her thumbs.

  We waited for a few minutes, as if not wanting to interrupt her work, but she never stopped or looked up once since we had first walked through the door.

  “Tom in?” I asked.

  She looked up and glared at me, her pale blue eyes narrowing angrily, then she jerked her head toward a door behind her in the right corner.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  We walked in Tom’s office to find him on the phone. Cupping his hand over the receiver, he said, “Give me one minute. I’ll be right with you.”

  He uncupped the receiver then recupped it again. “Have a seat—if you can make a space for yourself.”

  His small office consisted of a cheap desk, a credenza, and a single small bookshelf, and was cluttered and overcrowded. Piles and stacks of aerial maps, contracts, weather reports, and three-ring binders littered every available surface and several places on the floor. An aquarium with everything but water and fish sat in one corner, several rolled-up banners in the other.

  We cleared piles of paper from the chairs across from his desk and sat down.

  “Whatever you’re paying the girl out front,” I said when he got off the phone, “it’s too much.”

  He smiled. “She’s a charmer, isn’t she?”

  “A couple of other words came to mind,” Anna said.

  Since we had entered his office, Tom Brown had found it difficult not to look at Anna. He tried to steal glances at her, to feast his eyes surreptitiously, but it only drew more attention to his schoolboy reaction to her beauty.

  “Well if it’s any consolation,” he said, “she’s not getting a dime from me. She’s a, ah, friend of my son’s who’s getting community service credit for sitting in there talking on her cell phone and doing her nails all day. Our justice system in action.”

  “Inaction is right,” Anna said.

  He smiled but it was obvious he didn’t get it.

  “So what can I do for you two? Need some inexpensive, cost-effective advertising on the beach?”

  “I read about your plane that went down last week,” I said.

  He instantly became wary, defensive.

  “Uh huh,” he said.

  “I thought I saw a similar one in trouble a week and a half or so ago,” I said, “and I wondered if it was one of yours?”

  “Where was this?” he asked.

  I gave him all the details and what I thought I saw.

  “And you’re sure it didn’t have a banner?” he asked.

  I nodded. “When I read that the first thing your pilots do when they get into trouble is drop their banner, I thought that maybe the plane I saw was one of yours.”

  He shook his head. “That’s too far east to have been one of mine,” he said.

  “And you’re not missing any planes?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are there any other companies like yours in the area?” I asked. “Maybe more to the east.”

  He shook his head. “I’m the only one. And the only business is on the beach.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”

  Anna and I stood to leave. He stood and extended his hand. First to Anna, then to me.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, why does it matter whose plane it was?” he said.

  I shrugged. “I’d just like to know. I thought it may have gone down. It probably has nothing to do with the escape or the murders, but we won’t know for sure until we find out whose it was and why they were there.”

  “It’s just a little quirk of his,” Anna said. “Cute, isn’t it?”

  “Well good luck,” he said.

  When we walked back out into the office, we found the overweight blond teenager doing even less than when we had arrived.

  “No message to respond to?” I asked.

  “Battery’s dead,” she said. “Charger’s in the car.”

  “Where’s your car?” Anna asked.

  “Out there,” she said, jerking her head toward the front door.

  “All the way out there?” I asked.

  She didn’t say anything, as if to do so required too much energy.

  I laid my card on her desk. “In case he thinks of anything else,” I said.

  “Or you think of anything at all,” Anna said.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Fisher and Son was the only funeral home in Potter County. Located in an old two-story clapboard house with a wide wraparound veranda, it was situated on the back of a large lot beneath enormous Spanish moss-draped oak trees. As kids growing up in Pottersville, we always suspected it was haunted, and often dared each other to sneak into it—especially on Halloween.

  Nathan Fisher lived upstairs and operated the business beneath. He lived alone since his son died and his wife left him, and was a source of small-town talk—how could a normal person live with all those bodies? What exactly was his relationship with them? He had never been accused of anything or even received a single complaint over the years, but that didn’t prevent people from some highly imaginative speculation.

  Since Potter County wasn’t large enough to have a morgue, bodies were housed by Fisher, and occasionally autopsies were performed in his prep room. This didn’t happen often, but the county contract helped Fisher survive as more and more people used the services of large homes in Tallahassee and Panama City.

  When I arrived at Fisher’s I found Nathan in the parlor playing a video game on a small handheld device. As he stood, he quickly slipped the player into the inside coat pocket of his ill-fitting, inexpensive, carbon-dated black suit.

  “Sorry about that. You’re a little early.”

  Nathan Fisher was a tall, gaunt, nervous man with pale skin and dark features. His long fingers were narrow, his hands cold and clammy, his handshake limp. As usual, his breath smelled of equal parts cigarettes and mouthwash.

  I had dropped Anna off after leaving Air Ads Inc. and had come straight here. Fearing I was running late, I had driven far faster than I normally did—actually the borrowed car enabled me to drive far faster than my truck had been capable of doing.

  “The others are on the way,” I said.

  He nodded. “Would you like anything?” he asked. “Coffee or something?”

  “No thank you,” I said.

  “How’re things at the prison?” he asked.

  I never quite knew what to say to that. “About the same I guess.”

  “A lot of people don’t understand why you do it,” he said. “The whole chaplain thing. But I do.”

  I smiled politely and nodded.

  “Whatever’s left after we die is not us,” he said. “It’s not. And if we’re spirits, then we had to be created by a spirit, and that means there’s got to be a God.”

  Before he could say anything else, Dad and the others arrived.

  Dad looked weary and stressed, the tension visible in the lines of his narrow-eyed scowl and the deep crevice just above the bridge of his nose. I could tell by the way he walked he wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  The man with him, Chuck, the SEAL commander I had met the day before, looked very different cleaned up and in his civilian clothes.

  Once everyone had been introduced and Nathan made his final preparations, we all stepped into the v
iewing room for Chuck to see if he could identify the lynching victim.

  When Nathan pulled back the sheet to reveal the face of the man who had been beaten to death and then hanged, Chuck shook his head.

  “That’s not him,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” Dad asked.

  He narrowed his eyes and gave Dad a look of incredulity. “Positive.”

  “Okay,” Dad said. “I guess we’re done here. Thank you, Nathan.”

  As we walked back through the parlor toward our vehicles, Chuck said, “I don’t know whether to be relieved or more worried.”

  “You do what you like,” Dad said, “but I’m gonna go with more worried.”

  As we stepped out onto the veranda Chuck’s phone rang, and he stopped to answer it. I could tell by his reaction that it was bad news. When he finished the call, he slowly closed his phone and slipped it back into his pocket.

  “They’ve found him,” he said.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  In what must have appeared to observers to be a strange alternate reality, it looked like I, in my pimped-out ride, was chasing Dad, in his siren-screeching, emergency light-flashing sheriff’s truck, but no one pulled me over and we made good time.

  As we neared the landing my phone rang. It was Carla.

  “How fast can you get to the landing?” she asked.

  “Very,” I said. “Why?”

  “Cody’s real upset,” she said. “He needs to talk to you.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said. “Are you with him?”

  She hesitated and I knew she was.

  “I thought it was over and you were going to stay away from him?”

  “I know,” she said, sighing heavily. “But you know how these things are.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “Which is why I wanted you to stay away from him.”

  “Just get here as fast as you can,” she said.

  Before she had finished saying it I was pulling into the landing, and could see her sitting next to Cody under one of the pavilions near the playground.

  The landing was empty except for a few trucks and boat trailers scattered throughout. Besides Carla and Cody, the only other people visible were an elderly couple on the dock.