Voodoo Daddy (A Virgil Jones Mystery)

by Thomas L. Scott

  “Nice speech,” I said. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “How sure are you of Pate’s involvement in Dugan’s death?” he said.

  “He’s our primary suspect.”

  “Based on what?” When I didn’t answer, he went on. “Okay, here it is. I work out of the Houston office, but I guess you know that. It’s the Texas Department of Insurance that’s under investigation by our office for fraud. Not Pate. Pate torched his church in Houston and when the company who underwrote his policy started making waves about writing the check, the Texas DOI got involved and Pate walked away with a wad of cash before the building had stopped smoldering.”

  “So what?” I said. “File charges on the Commissioner of the Texas DOI.”

  “Oh, we did. But his lawyer cut a hell of a deal and now the commissioner is part of witness protection.”

  “Witness protection? What for?”

  Gibson half laughed at my questions. “You Midwestern guys are something, you know that?

  “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “You think the Catholic priests are the only ones tweaking the twangers on little boys?”

  “How about you take the corn dog out of your mouth and tell me the whole story?” I said.

  “Hey, great choice of words. When we took the commissioner down for fraud we discovered his personal computer was full of pictures of little kids with no clothes on. He cut a deal and put us onto Pate, who the commissioner says was supplying the photos. Our analysts compared the background of the photos to ones we could find of Pate’s church before he torched it. We think they match up. In any event, the Commissioner says Pate blackmailed him and had him lean on the insurance company to write the check or he’d start to squeal about the photos.”

  “You’re saying Samuel Pate is a pedophile?”

  “You tell me,” Gibson said. “I read your report on that dilapidated church he bought for five million bucks. What was he going to do with it? Knock it down and build a learning center for pre-school kids or something like that? But let me guess, when you searched the Pate complex and his home you didn’t find one scrap of evidence that ties him to your case or mine. And in the meantime, that old broken down building, the one that wasn’t included in your search warrant burns to a crisp along with any evidence that may or may not have been material to your case, let alone mine.” He stood from his chair and turned to leave. Then, as if I were slow and unable to make the connections he’d just laid out for me he added, “Someone is leading you around by your nose, Detective. Take the corn dog out of my mouth. I love it.”

  * * *

  I walked over to Cora’s office to fill her in on my conversation with Amanda Pate and the meeting I just had with Agent Gibson. She sat quietly and listened, but when I got to the part of Pate’s alleged involvement as a pedophile, her expression was one you might associate with someone staring out the window of an airliner at thirty thousand feet as they watch the rivets pop one at a time from the wing of a plane.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “So we’ve got a suspected murderer and pedophile in custody and Gibson wants us to let him skate?”

  “He’s going to get out anyway,” I said. “Besides, I think Gibson may be right. Someone is pulling our strings behind the curtain. I just don’t know who it is, or why. But I don’t think it has anything to do with Pate.”

  Cora looked at me for a moment, then said something that made me think we were having two different conversations. “Is there something you’d like to tell me regarding the nature of your relationship with Detective Small?”

  When I did not answer her right away, she said, “I see. What about Wheeler? What did Gibson tell you about him? You did ask, didn’t you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Your personal life is interfering with your job, Jonesy. Clean it up.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Cora.”

  “I think you do,” she said, then stared at the paperwork on her desk until I got up and walked out.

  * * *

  My conversation with Cora left me confused and angry. I ate lunch by myself in a small diner I frequent a few miles from my office, and by the time I was finished, I had concluded that Cora was probably right. I was romantically involved with a co-worker who reports to me, and my lifelong friend, Murton Wheeler was somehow connected, at least on the periphery, with a serial murder investigation, and I, the chief investigative officer of the State of Indiana had put no more effort into his apprehension than I had a Sunday jaywalker late for morning Mass. I finished my sandwich, paid my tab, and got ready to leave when something occurred to me. It was something about my conversations with Agent Gibson, and with Cora. Somebody was pulling my strings. I realized I had been in possession of a large part of the answer to what’s been happening all along. Maybe not the entire answer, but a pretty damn big piece. And, I knew what I had to do next, or more specifically, who I had to see.

  I walked out to my truck and just as I reached the driver’s door I heard the footsteps coming hard from behind me. I turned in time to see a club being swung at my head and I tried to bring my right arm up to block the blow, but the attacker made just enough contact with my arm to knock me off balance and I fell face first into the pavement. Before I could move or get up he hit me again, this time in the back of my head, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke some time later, a thick blindfold across my eyes, my body bound with rope across a vertical steel support structure with my arms out from my sides and tied to a cross member as if I were being crucified.

  I tried to pull free, but I knew it was pointless. I had no idea how long I had been unconscious and tied up, but I had virtually no feeling left in my arms and legs.

  Or so I thought.

  I let my head hang down, my chin against my chest. I heard myself whisper Sandy’s name.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Often, with little care or attention, a seedling of a wish will take root and grow across a windswept garden of unspoken dreams. It will sett ever deeper into the mind, its root structure wide and strong over the darkness of the psyche where it dares to exist as a hushed and secret desire. The subconscious will nurture this desire and feed it until it grows from a seedling of desire into a stalk of hope. And when that happens, a flower of dark faith is born, its root base entrenched deep into the hardpan of who we are, where a dry and unfed hunger is concealed from the killing frost of conscious thought.

  Brian Goodwell lived in the light of such darkness, his mind forced to conjure the images from his faded memories. Were it not for his hearing, his sense of smell, his ability to taste, or touch, Brian Goodwell thought he might go mad. Wondered sometimes if he hadn’t already and no one had ever bothered to tell him.

  Brian shared his life and his love with his wife Tess whom he had not seen in over eleven years. They had been married for only a year and a half when the doctor discovered Brian suffered from Retinoblastoma, a cancer of the retina. Both eyes were affected. When Tess came home from work that night Brian followed her around the house, trying to memorize every curve of her body, the angle of her jaw, the slight gap in her front teeth, the color of her hair, the shape of her hands, and the dimples in her cheeks when she smiled. They made love that night before Brian shared the news with Tess, and when he did, Tess took his face in her hands and studied it as if it were her that was about to go blind.

  The doctor had said that surgical removal of both of Brian’s eyes would be the most effective treatment option. If left untreated, the tumors would travel up the optic nerve to the brain and death would soon follow. They sought a second, third, and fourth opinion. Tess wanted to keep trying. She would have sought a ninety-ninth opinion had there been time. It was her insurance from her employer that would cover the tests and ultimately, the procedure to remove her husband’s eyes. Tess worked as a hotel property district manager, her pay was good and th
e benefits, including their insurance coverage were among the best available. From a financial perspective, the procedure to remove Brian’s eyes would be painless. From a physical and emotional perspective, the procedure would be devastating.

  The night before the surgery Brian and Tess stayed up all night. They turned on every light in the house, as if the flow of electrons through copper wire could beat back the arrival of Brian’s long and permanent night. With less than an hour before sunrise they walked back through the house once again and one by one began to extinguish the lights. “I want to go one more time from the darkness into the light,” he had said to Tess.

  They sat on lawn chairs in their back yard and held hands in the false dawn of the day, and when the sun peaked over the horizon, Brian looked around the back yard. “I was going to put our garden right over there,” he said as he pointed with his chin. “Flowers and vegetables, and both red and green peppers, tomatoes, green beans. It was going to be beautiful.”

  “It will be beautiful,” Tess had said. “You can still do it. I’ll help you.”

  “You’ll have to help me with everything. Everything, Tess. I can’t ask that of you. I won’t.”

  “Brian, don’t. Please don’t do this now. We’ll figure everything out. One step at a time. I promise. It will all be alright. You’ll s—”

  Brian buried his face in his hands for a moment, then stood.

  “Brian, I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean that. It’s a figure of speech.”

  “I don’t feel like I’m losing my sight, Tess. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

  Now, a little over eleven years later, Brian Goodwell grasped the handrail and walked down the three steps of his back door and into the yard. Seven steps forward, then a ninety degree turn to the right, then nine steps more. The edge of his garden. He dropped down to his knees, then felt carefully on both sides to make sure he was lined up properly with the neat rows of vegetables. His garden was getting better and better each year. Tess had told him so.

  The first few years had been a disaster. He would sometimes pull the flowers and vegetables by mistake and leave the weeds to grow and prosper. The first year, out of stubbornness, he refused to allow Tess to help him, and the net result of his garden that year had been six green beans, two smashed tomatoes, and one red pepper. But his sense of touch and smell had gotten better over the years and he now knew his way around the garden like the back of his hand.

  At the beginning of his second season, Tess confessed to him that she had gone to the market and seeded his garden with produce picked from the aisle instead of the ground. Brian confessed to her that he knew she had done so because he liked to eat the tomatoes raw and had, one afternoon, bitten into one that had a sticker on the side.

  But now Brian moved expertly along, feeling first for the stalks and stems of his labor before he pulled any weeds that tried to rise around the plants. When he worked in his garden, he thought only of Tess. It was Tess who had helped him through the last eleven years. It was Tess who remained true to him, who taught him how to be self-sufficient, who did not pity him, who not only told him, but showed him how much of a man he still was, blind or not. Brian loved Tess more than he thought humanly possible.

  He’d run his hands across her face, his fingers barely touching the surface of her skin. Every night when she came home from work he would greet her the same way. First a kiss, then he’d get to look at her beauty with his hands. At first, right after the surgery, this worked well for him. He would picture her face in his mind as he ran his hands across her delicate features. But over the years, the picture of her began to fade to what it was now, a dim shadow of a memory, like an under-developed photograph, a ghost of an image. He sometimes thought he’d give his own life to see his wife’s face just one more time. In death he could look down upon her every day.

  So Brian spent his days in the garden of his mind with a secret wish that grew unchecked, rooted deep in an unfulfilled desire that he cultivated into a depressive hope of death where he could free himself and Tess from the burden he had placed on them both.

  When the Sids pulled the trigger, Brian got his wish.

  * * *

  When consciousness came it was in progressive, laborious steps as if I were walking up a steep incline on the bottom of the ocean’s floor. I couldn’t see because of the blindfold that covered my eyes, but I knew I was naked.

  Naked in every sense of the word. My guns, my badge, my clothes, and my boots were all somewhere I’m sure, but they were not on my person. My shoulders ached from supporting the weight of my body and I could no longer feel any sensation in my hands, the bindings on my wrists tight against the cold steel. I found that if I stood on my toes I could relieve the pain in my shoulders for a short time, but then my legs would begin to tremble and buckle under their restraints and I would once again fall against the weight of myself, my body its own burden. To say at that moment my life was not rooted in fear would be an outright lie.

  I am not certain how long I had been unconscious or in fact how long I had been awake before I heard the footsteps echo off the walls around the area of my confinement, their sound drawing close until I could sense a nearby presence and smell an odd mixture of cheap cologne and nicotine stained clothing. When I heard him start to move away, I said, “Who are you?”

  When I spoke, the sound of my words stopped the man for just a moment, but then he continued to walk away from me, his footsteps growing faint until I could barely hear them. I counted ten steps in all from his hard soled shoes before I heard a door open and a voice say, “He’s awake.”

  Tens steps. Thirty feet to a door. Tied to a steel beam and cross section in a wide open space indoors. A warehouse? I tried to think how to turn the situation around, but my options were limited, if not down right non-existent. Two sets of footsteps approached this time, and when I felt they were near enough I spoke again.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I’m a cop. I don’t know what you’re doing, or what you’ve got planned here, but I want you to know it’s not too late to throw it into park and just walk away.”

  “You hear that,” a voice to my left said. “It’s not too late. What do you think? Should we just walk away?”

  A laugh came from my right. I felt myself swallow and hoped the two men did not notice. I tried again. “Look, sometimes things happen and before you know it you’re on a certain path and it looks like there’s no room to turn around or go back so you just keep going forward no matter how bad forward may seem, but I’m here to tell you, it’s not too late. Listen to me when I tell you that. You had me out before I saw your faces. I’m blindfolded now. That means I don’t know who you are or what your agenda is, and I don’t care. Cut me loose and walk away. I can’t identify you, so no harm will come to you, I guarantee it.”

  “Take his blindfold off. He’s supposed to see it coming.”

  “You don’t want to do that,” I shouted. “Do not remove my blindfold.” I felt a hand on the back of my head and then the cloth that covered my eyes was removed. The two men who had followed Murton into my bar the other night, the same two men who worked security for Samuel Pate stood before me, their faces void of any emotion. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “You’ve just complicated the situation.”

  The two men looked at each other. “Get a load of this guy,” the taller of the two said. “We’ve just complicated the situation.” He turned and looked at me. “It’s your situation that’s complicated, Hoss. It’s about to get worse, too.”

  I was in a large room that looked like an abandoned warehouse. A solitary light fixture hung low on its cord over a small card table with two chairs. On top of the table were a rubber mallet, a roll of duct tape, a handheld stun gun, a pair of tin snips, an electric chain saw, and a small digital camera. The shorter of the two men saw me looking at the table and said, “We’re supposed to get pictures along the way. Seems a little excessive to me, but people like this, you gotta do what you’r
e told. Nothing personal, you understand.”

  I felt a quiver run through my jaw and I was ashamed at my inability to control its movement. But something else was happening along the way as well, and when it did, my breathing became more regular and my heart began to slow. If I was at my end, if this was my time, I would go with as much courage as I could muster. My regrets were few, though significant. When I closed my eyes I saw Sandy and how we were just beginning our journey, a journey she would have to continue without me. I saw a faceless, unborn child, and though I could not tell if it were a boy or a girl, I knew it was mine and Sandy’s. The thought of how I would never know a child’s love or the joys of being a grandparent in the later season of my life filled me with a sense of loss I thought myself not capable of. I saw my father then, and realized that any pain I was going to endure just now would be immeasurable compared to the pain he has suffered at the loss of my mother and then finally the loss of his only son. When I spoke again, it was not for myself, but for those who would live on without me. My voice was strong, and for a moment I showed no fear.

  “No matter what happens to me here, I’ve got people in my life that won’t rest until this is squared. Do you hear me? Whatever you think would happen to you if you walk away now is nothing compared to what it will be if you don’t. You won’t be caught and convicted. You’ll be hunted like animals and someone, somewhere will flip your switch. You won’t even see it coming. Samuel Pate isn’t worth what you’re doing here, don’t you see that?”

  The taller of the two men walked over and picked up the roll of duct tape from the table. He took the cloth they had used to blindfold me and forced it into my mouth, then tore a foot-long piece of tape from the roll and placed it over the cloth. “Samuel Pate? You think this is about Ol’ Sermon Sam?” He looked at the shorter man and said, “You hear that?”