Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith

by Scott Pratt

  “It’s Satan! She has the power of Satan!”

  “Shut up!” Fraley yelled at Boyer. He turned to Norcross. “What the hell happened?”

  “Not sure. Power surge or something. Whole building’s dark.”

  “Stay with this guy.”

  The office was chaotic. Agents were running up and down the hallways, in and out of the front door, shouting commands and asking questions. Fraley moved out of the doorway and down the hall towards his office. The agent who had been watching over the redhead was gone. The office was black. Fraley reached into his pocket for his Zippo cigarette lighter. He flipped open the top, flicked the wheel with his thumb, and stepped inside.

  He could see her silhouette in the chair. As he moved closer, the lighter went out. He flipped the wheel again. Nothing. Again. It came to life briefly, just long enough for Fraley to see that she was smiling.

  Fraley recognized her now. He’d seen her only briefly, and she’d been wearing the big hat and the patch over her eye, but it had to be her.

  The girl cuffed to the chair was the girl in the park.

  Wednesday, October 8

  I spent a sleepless night lying in bed next to Caroline. Her left breast was covered by a large, bloodstained bandage. Another dressing covered a stitched wound and a drain beneath her left arm. The medication she’d been given at the surgery center helped her sleep, but she moaned occasionally and mumbled almost continuously. At four in the morning I tried to call the TBI office to see if I could find out how the interrogations were going, but the number was busy every time I called. I didn’t want to call Fraley’s cell phone; I knew he’d let me know when—or if—he needed me.

  At five thirty a.m., about forty minutes before sunrise, I gave up the idea of getting any sleep and got up to fix a pot of coffee. I let Rio out and wandered through the kitchen onto the back deck. The eastern sky was just beginning to streak with pink and orange light. A soft breeze was blowing out of the southwest, sending the little blue-and-orange sailboat wind gauges that Caroline loved so much spinning slowly in circles. It was a time of day that I usually enjoyed, the calmness of the dawn. Typically, I used the time to contemplate the vastness of the sky, to appreciate the way the light played off of the trees across the lake as the sun crept over the hill to the east, or to daydream about sitting in a luxury box at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park someday, watching Jack play with the big boys.

  But this morning I found myself in a dark mood. The murders weighed heavily on my mind, but even more disturbing were the thoughts of what was happening to Caroline. I knew Caroline would fight with every ounce of her strength, and I sincerely believed she would survive, but I couldn’t stop thinking that cancer would change her in some fundamental way. I imagined her without a breast, and I wondered if she would become somehow inhibited, whether she would lose her confidence or some of her zest for life. I wondered how such a drastic change in her appearance would affect our relationship, and selfishly hoped it wouldn’t lessen the intimacy we’d always enjoyed. I thought about the scars she’d soon have, how a reconstructed breast would look, how I’d react to her losing her hair, what it would be like to make love to her.

  At the hospital, I’d heard Sarah mention something about how fortunate we were that my new job provided insurance coverage that would pay for Caroline’s treatment. From what I’d read, the treatment could cost a quarter of a million dollars, maybe more. I overheard Sarah tell Caroline’s mother that God had intervened. It was God who had caused me to go to work for the district attorney’s office. It was God who had saved us from financial calamity.

  But as I stood on the deck, I didn’t appreciate Sarah’s reasoning or God’s kindness. I would have much preferred He spare Caroline the pain and heartache she was experiencing by falling victim to such a terrible disease. How could the benevolent, loving God that Sarah described allow such a thing to happen to a person so kind, so gentle, so full of love?

  Thoughts of God took me back to my grandmother’s dining room table in the little house in Unicoi County where she and my grandfather lived with my uncle Raymond, who was then fourteen years old. It was a Sunday afternoon, two years before the rape, and my mother, Sarah, and I had made our weekly trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Sarah and I would play while Ma fixed lunch in the kitchen. A little after noon, the door would open and Grandpa, Grandma and Raymond, looking scrubbed and wearing their Sunday clothes, would arrive from church. I was six, old enough that I’d begun to wonder why we didn’t go to church with them. For some reason, I thought that day would be a good day to ask.

  As I sat at the table picking at a piece of fried chicken, I looked up at my mother.

  “Ma, how come we don’t go to church with Grandma and Grandpa?” I said.

  An expression of horror came over my mother’s face and she dropped her fork. It clanged noisily off of her plate and fell to the hardwood floor.

  “Hush your mouth and eat,” she said.

  Everyone was quiet for a minute, until my grandma spoke.

  “Why don’t you explain it to him, Elizabeth?” she said to my mother. There was a coolness in her voice I’d never heard. “Why don’t you tell the boy why he doesn’t go to church? I’d like to know myself.”

  At the time, I knew very little of my family history, but I knew my father had been killed in a war in a faraway place called Vietnam not long before I was born. Most mothers would probably have described a fallen soldier to their sons as a hero, but not my mother. His death was a “waste,” she said. Politicians were to blame, politicians greedy to feed what she called the “war machine.” My father didn’t want to go to Vietnam. He didn’t volunteer to go. He was drafted, forced to leave his home and his pregnant wife to fight a war in which neither he nor his country had any business. My mother was full of bitterness, contempt, and distrust for anyone or anything that might be able to exert power or control over her, including, as I was about to find out, God.

  Confronted with my grandma’s challenge, my mother turned to her with narrowed eyes.

  “You know good and well why he doesn’t go to church,” she said. “He doesn’t go because I don’t want him to go. He doesn’t go because he’s my son, it’s my choice, and I choose not to have his head filled with lies and false hope. He doesn’t go because there is no God, and if you had the least bit of sense you’d have realized it by now.”

  “How dare you!” my grandma yelled, rising from the table. “How dare you blaspheme the Lord in my home!”

  I didn’t know the definition of blaspheme, but even at that early age, I was capable of discerning meaning from context. I’d never before heard my grandma raise her voice. She was trembling as she pointed her fork at my mother’s face.

  “Are you going to raise him to be a godless heathen?” she yelled. “How do you expect him to get through life without faith?”

  “He’ll get through the same way I do,” my mother shot back. “He’ll learn to rely on himself.”

  “Joseph!” Grandma said harshly. “Take your sister and go outside. Now! Raymond, you go with them.”

  I looked at my grandpa, who was sitting there with a bewildered look on his face. He rarely spoke, and it appeared that he had no intention of inserting himself into the battle I’d unintentionally started. I crawled down off the chair and walked outside to the front porch with Sarah and Raymond right behind me. As soon as we walked onto the porch, Raymond shoved me hard in the back and I went sprawling onto the front lawn.

  “Moron,” he hissed. “Why can’t you keep your fucking mouth shut? Now my dinner’s gonna get cold.”

  I picked myself up off the ground and walked out to the barn. I could hear voices coming from inside the house, the voices of my mother and grandma, shrill and forlorn as the argument raged. Eventually, the voices quieted. An hour later, my mother yelled from beside the car that it was time to go home. I descended the ladder from the hayloft, and as I climbed into the backseat, I could see Ma’s face in the rearview mirror
and I knew she’d been crying. The following Sunday, we stayed home for lunch. We went back occasionally on Sunday after that, but it was always well after Grandpa and Grandma had arrived home from church, and Grandma always prepared the meal. We never spoke of God again.

  A couple of years later, Raymond raped Sarah on that Friday night in my grandparents’ bed. Less than a year after that, he drowned in the Nolichucky River. Maybe his death was God’s way of punishing him for what he did to Sarah, but I always wondered, if there was a God, why He would have allowed Raymond to rape a nine-year-old girl in the first place.

  Just as the sun was showing itself, the sky streaked with orange and purple, the telephone rang in the kitchen. I hurried inside to answer before it awoke Caroline, and as soon as I picked it up I saw Fraley’s now-familiar cell phone number on the caller ID.

  “How’d it go?” I said.

  “We need to meet,” Fraley said. “I need another search warrant.”

  Wednesday, October 8

  I told Fraley I’d meet him at a Waffle House near Boone’s Creek and went in to check on Caroline. She was so sore I had to help her to the bathroom and back to bed. Lilly was getting ready to drive back to Knoxville to school, and Jack was packing up for his trip back to Nashville. Once I got Caroline settled, I went upstairs to Lilly’s room. She was already dressed, standing in front of the mirror by her dresser applying lipstick.

  “Can you take another day off?” I said. “I have to go to work, and I don’t want to leave your mom here alone.”

  “Are you asking if I want to sleep in?” she said. “Are you asking if I’d mind not driving to Knoxville and going to class? Would I like to stay here and not have to eat in the cafeteria for another day? Sounds awful.”

  “Good. You’re the designated nurse. Her pain medication is in the cupboard above the microwave. Two every four hours. I just gave her a couple, so she’ll be due again around eleven.”

  Lilly grinned. “I guess this means I’ll have to go down and get in bed with her.”

  I stopped by Jack’s room to say good-bye. He’d spent the entire summer on the road playing baseball and had been in college for over a year, but it still broke my heart to see him go.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said as I hugged his neck. “It means a lot to both of us to have you around.”

  “Are you going to be able to handle all of this?” he said. “Can you juggle the work and everything?”

  “Lilly’s going to stay one more day, but after that, I’ll be fine.”

  “All you have to do is call. I’ll take a semester off if I have to.”

  “I love you,” I said. “Have a safe trip.”

  The restaurant was less crowded than I expected, so Fraley and I were able to get a booth in the corner.

  “I’ve seen corpses that look better than you,” I said as soon as he sat down.

  “You ain’t exactly Miss America yourself.” The waitress set a pot of coffee down in front of us and we both ordered breakfast. Fraley, ever the picture of health, ordered four eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hash browns with cheese, and four pieces of toast.

  “So what’s going on?” I said after the waitress left.

  “The raid went fine. Took them down quick and got them out of there. We interrupted some kind of ritual or something. They were wearing robes with nothing on underneath, and the guys were bleeding from fresh razor cuts on their arms. There was a silver chalice with blood in it in the middle of the floor. I guess they were bleeding into the cup. They had candles all over the place. It looked like maybe they were getting ready to drink the blood or something.”

  “Vampires?”

  “I’m not sure. Probably some kind of satanic ritual. I’ll have to study up on it. We found two nine-millimeter pistols in the car, both stolen during a burglary back in July. All of our lab people came in at five this morning down in Knoxville just to work this case. One of the ballistics guys has already matched several of the bullets we found at both scenes with the guns.”

  “That’s fantastic,” I said. “Looks like we’ve got our murderers.”

  “It gets better, and it gets worse. There were two pairs of boots and a pair of shoes in the motel room. The boot prints match up to prints at both scenes. They belong to the boys.”

  “Great. What about DNA?” I said. “Anything in the car?”

  “They’re running the tests,” Fraley said. “It’ll take a while longer, but I don’t have much doubt they’re going to find traces of Brockwell’s DNA in the car. My main concern now is the girl.”

  Fraley filled me in on the details of the preceding night: the familiar-looking redhead who’d been arrested in the motel room; her cold, calculating demeanor; the interview with Boyer and the chaotic scene just as Fraley thought Boyer was about to break down and confess; Fraley’s realization that the girl they had in custody looked just like the girl we’d talked to in the park.

  “It took me a while to figure it out,” Fraley said. “I went back to the juvenile records. You said the girl in the park’s name was Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Like I told you before, Alisha Elizabeth Davis was reported missing by her foster parents ten days ago. They said she woke up screaming the night the Brockwells were murdered and she went missing the next day.”

  “Why was she in foster care in the first place?”

  “Because her sister stabbed her.”

  “That’s strange,” I said. “Why did they take her out of the home instead of putting the sister in jail?”

  “Because the sister’s crazy,” Fraley said. “The foster parents told the agents that the sister has some serious mental problems. She’s already been in a mental institution, and for some reason the mother didn’t want her to go back. So they put Alisha in foster care, I guess to keep her from getting hurt again. From what the foster parents said, Alisha’s a great kid. They said she volunteers at the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter and at the pediatric cancer ward at the hospital. She graduated near the top of her class in high school and is working her way through college now. She sells paintings and drawings and makes pottery in a little shop in back of their house and sells it at craft shows. They said she was happy there.”

  “So what does this have to do with the girl in custody?” I said.

  “She’s the sister,” Fraley said. “The crazy sister. I went back into the records and took a closer look. Her name is Natasha Marie Davis. She’s Alisha’s identical twin.”

  I sat back and let it sink in for a moment. An identical twin. The girl in the park has an identical twin? And she was trying to tell me that her twin sister is killing people? I suddenly made a connection.

  “You say the girl in the park was stabbed by her sister?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “She wore a patch over her eye. Was she stabbed in the eye?”

  “In the eye.”

  “The patch was over the right eye, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re catching on.”

  “Any idea what she used to stab her?”

  “Ice pick.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Son of a bitch! Tell me we have something that links the girl to the murders.”

  “Not a thing. That’s why I need the warrant. We’re going to look for an ice pick, along with anything else we might run across.”

  “Where are you going to search?”

  “Her mother’s house. That’s where she lives.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “She has an inverted cross tattooed on her neck,” Fraley said. “I saw it just before I left. And there’s something else.” He reached over and picked up a napkin and set it down on the table in front of him. He took a pen out of his pocket, scrawled something on it, and shoved it towards me. I looked down at the napkin. On it Fraley had written the same letters that had been carved into the foreheads of Bjorn Beck and Norman Brockwell—“ah Satan.”

  “What about it?” I said.

  “Write it out,” Fraley said. �
��Backwards.”

  Wednesday, October 8

  Four hours later, after I’d drafted yet another warrant application and gotten it signed by Judge Rogers, Fraley and I climbed the front porch steps of a small frame house in what was known as the Red Row section of Johnson City. It was a poor neighborhood in the southeast part of the city that bordered a massive “environmental center,” what used to be called a landfill and before that a dump. A small sign on the front door informed visitors, “A Christian Lives Here.” Underneath the sentence, in ink, someone had printed, very neatly, “And a Witch.”

  I winced when I saw the woman who opened the door. She was tall and looked to be around sixty years old, although the information we had on her put her age at forty-seven. The skin on her face was sagging and had the faded yellow look of an old newspaper. Her unruly hair was a peculiar shade of red, and her eyes were covered by opaque glasses so thick that she appeared to be wearing goggles. She was wearing a full-length flowered robe that made her body shapeless.

  “Marie Davis?” I heard Fraley say.

  “Yes.”

  Fraley produced an ID and introduced us. Four more agents stood at the bottom of the porch, waiting.

  “We have a warrant to search your home,” Fraley said, “and we need to speak to you about Natasha.”

  She sighed, muttered something under her breath, and moved away from the door.

  Fraley motioned to the other agents to walk around the house, and he and I walked in. She led us to the kitchen table and motioned for us to sit down. As she walked to the counter and retrieved a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray, I looked around. The tiny den was a Christian shrine.An oversized King James Bible nearly covered the coffee table in front of the couch, and there were angels on every shelf, atop the television, and in every nook and cranny in the room. There were wooden angels, ceramic angels, plastic angels, brass angels, all different sizes. They gave the room the tacky look of a roadside flea market.