Cemetery Road (Sean O'Brien Book 7)

by Tom Lowe

  Max looked at me and then at Nick. I lifted up the package. “I couldn’t return it because there is no one to return it to.”

  “So, what’s in this one?”

  “Where’s Dave?”

  “When you answer my question like that, man I know the shit’s rising in the bilge. Dave’s on Gibraltar. Probably watchin’ C-Span or sleepin’ after he got tired of cussing whatever the hell’s on C-Span.”

  “Politicians, mostly. Let’s go find him, and I can show you both what I received from Curtis Garwood.”

  We crossed the pier and walked down the ancillary boarding dock that ran the length of the trawler, all the way to the transom. Dave sat at a small table on the cockpit, laptop open, his bifocals balanced near the tip of his nose. He had sliced cheese and crackers on a large plastic platter, a bottle of cabernet and a half-filled glass in front of him.

  “Perfect timing, Sean. I was just doing a little research on the Dozier School for Boys, formerly the Florida School for Boys. You can change the name, but you can’t exorcise the demons from the hundred and eleven year history of that place. Come aboard little lady and gentlemen.” Dave stood, getting two more glasses from a small wet bar on deck.

  We took seats around the table, Max sniffing the corners of the cockpit, satisfied, she sat near Nick, hoping for a handout. She was never disappointed. Dave poured wine in my glass and Nick said, “I’ll get a brew.” He stepped to the wet bar, opened the mini-fridge, taking a bottle of Guinness and popping the top.

  Dave leaned forward. “I assume the large envelope you came with brings new revelations.”

  “More puzzles than revelations.”

  “Unless Curtis Garwood left you with hard and tangible physical evidence, he, even though deceased, and Caroline Harper, very much alive, won’t have a legal chance in hell considering the circumstances. Statute of limitations overrides any civil or criminal charges of abuse at this point. Only the crime of murder, excuse the pun—still lives, should you find evidence that may connect some very faded and distant dots.”

  I reached inside the package and set the shotgun shell in the center of the table. “The dots just got a little closer.”

  TWELVE

  Jesse Taylor wondered if she’d remember him. He remembered her. Little Caroline Cope, holding Andy’s hand, walking around mud puddles on the way home from school. He recalled her wearing a Tweety Bird yellow raincoat with a ripped hood, her nose running in a cool April rain. Funny, he thought. Can’t remember my debit card pin number, but I can remember bits and pieces of childhood and slow-motion images of survival in Nam.

  He pulled into the driveway, the house a 1950’s ranch style. Maybe a half-acre yard mixed with Bermuda and St. Augustine grasses, a few weeds in the dry patches. He crushed the remains of a cigarette in the car’s ashtray, stopping next to the brick home. He got out and walked down the slate rock path leading to the front door. At this moment he wished that Harold had given him Caroline’s phone number as well as her address. Maybe he should have called first. And now he’s showing up after fifty years. Why hadn’t he come earlier? Why did it take reading Curtis Garwood’s obituary to motivate him? Because the abuse of a child leaves scars that never fuckin’ heal. That’s why.

  He knocked on the wooden door, paint fading, the scent of blooming azaleas next to the house, a butterfly darting over the pink blossoms. The door slightly opened the length of a brass chain. Jesse nodded, looking into the same pale blue eyes he remembered so long ago. She’d aged well. “Caroline, I don’t know if you remember me. Harold Reeves gave me your address. I’m Jesse Taylor. I went to school with you and Andy. Andy was in my grade. And he and I wound up in reform school together.”

  She stared at him a few seconds, the chant of a mourning dove coming from the adjacent wooded lot. “Jesse Taylor…yes, yes, I do remember you.”

  “Can I come in? It’s about Andy.”

  “Yes, of course.” She slid the chain off the lock and opened the door. “Please, come in. Can I get you something to drink? Coffee or maybe some water?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Let’s go out on the porch to visit.”

  He followed her through the home filled with antiques, family photos, and furniture that was worn but comfortable. She led him to a fully screened back porch filled with lime green and yellow overstuffed pillows on wicker furniture. Ferns grew from large copper vases in three of the four corners. She sat in a rattan rocking chair. Jesse took a seat on a couch opposite from her. “You have a real nice house, Caroline.”

  “Thank you. It still has a lot of Jim’s touch. Can’t bring myself to change much. We were married thirty years before his heart attack. I still have some of his clothes in the closet.”

  “I understand.”

  She crossed her legs, just moving the rocking chair, waiting for him to speak. He cleared his throat, “Caroline, I had coffee with Harold Reeves. He told me you’d been trying for years to get somebody to investigate your brother’s disappearance.”

  “That’s right. It’s been the same excuses: no body no crime, especially in Jackson County.”

  “I was there the night they shot Andy.”

  She stopped rocking, leaning forward. “Did you see who killed Andy?”

  “No. It was rainy and foggy that night. I was taking out food waste to the hog pen. I heard two shots, and I knew Andy was gonna try to make a getaway that night. Maybe there’s something I can do to help you.”

  She smiled, her eyes narrowing some, probing. “That’s kind of you, Jesse. What made you think of Andy after all these years?”

  He looked through the screen toward the back yard, a soft breeze blowing around the tall pines and creating a jingle from wind chimes hanging in one corner of the porch. “I hadn’t really stopped thinking about Andy. I thought about him when I was in Vietnam gettin’ my ass shot off. I thought of him when I saw kids his age in the park or the playground. And I thought of the hell those men put kids like Andy and me through. The beatings were so bad we bled through our underwear for days. And then I saw a death notice in the paper. It was Curtis Garwood’s obituary. I remembered he was Andy’s best friend, and after I learned Curtis committed suicide, I knew the bastards that beat us had taken another life. Curtis just suffered for fifty more years beyond Andy.”

  “Right before he took his life, Curtis copied me on a letter he’d sent to a man Curtis had hired as a charter fishing guide. The man’s name is Sean O’Brien. He has a charter boat near Ponce Inlet. In the letter to Sean, Curtis had talked about Andy. I have an extra copy. You can take it.”

  “Why would he send that to a fishing guide?”

  “Because, before he was a fishing guide, Sean O’Brien was a homicide detective down in Miami. He’d apparently impressed Curtis enough to hire Sean.”

  “Hire him?”

  “Yes, he wanted Sean to investigate Andy’s death, to investigate the abuse you were talking about. After I received my copy of Curtis’s letter, I drove down to the Ponce Marina to speak with Sean. At that point, he hadn’t decided whether he’d look into the case. I pleaded with him to please try. He finally agreed. After that, he went to a postal box to pick up a package Curtis had mailed, probably sent the same day the letter was mailed. Sean told me that in the package Curtis said that three men were chasing Andy that night. And although Curtis didn’t get a clear look at the men’s faces, he did recognize the voice of one of the men. He said it came from a man the boys called the Preacher.”

  Jesse leaned back on the couch, touching his whiskered chin with a finger, his jaw-line rigid. Caroline studied him for a moment. “Who’s the Preacher, Jesse? Do you know?”

  “We didn’t know most of their names. It was Mr. this or Mr. that. We knew them by the nicknames we gave the men. That’s how we could whisper stuff without it gettin’ back to the bastards.”

  “In the package, Curtis included a shotgun shell casing that he’d picked up that night. In the fog and rain, the men appar
ently couldn’t find it. It was from the shooter’s gun. This is the first physical evidence we have.”

  “The question is where the hell’s the gun? You need something more, Caroline.”

  “We don’t have anything more.”

  “What if you had an eyewitness, a grown man who was there as a boy and saw them shoot Andy that night.”

  “As far as I know there isn’t a eyewitness.”

  “Maybe I can find one for you. And if we’re real lucky, maybe he won’t be afraid to tell us who pulled the trigger that night.”

  “What do you know, Jesse? Do you know someone who was there…someone who saw it clearly and who can identify the killer? Even if the killer is dead, we’d have a name. We’d have a case, and we’d have cause to go in there and find my brother’s grave before they start building golf courses and condos.”

  Jesse said nothing, looking down at the scars across the tops of his weathered hands. “I don’t personally know anyone who saw it. I might have a way to find somebody. He’s a local recluse, keeps to himself. Maybe he’ll talk to me.”

  “Be careful, Jesse. There’s a reason he hasn’t talked. One man was going to, maybe twenty-five years ago. Before the grand jury was convened, they found his body floating in the Chattahoochee River. His tongue had been cut out. Let me give you something.”

  Jesse looked at his hands, silent.

  Caroline stood, walking over to a bookcase, removing a pen and post-it notes. She wrote something, giving the paper to Jesse. “Take this. It’s Sean O’Brien’s number. Please share with him anything you have, okay? He’s done this before, Jesse. He’ll know how to use it in the legal sense. Write your number down here, too.” She watched Jesse struggle to write, his right hand not able to fully enclose around the pen. “Take your time, Jesse.”

  “What they did to Andy, to Curtis, to me and hundreds of other boys wasn’t legal. Maybe in this county, they’ll just look the other way. Kinda like slapping an old Nazi on the wrist for death camp crimes ‘cause he’s an old man. Bull shit.” He stood, handing the piece of paper to Caroline. He smiled, glanced toward the woods and then looked at Caroline. “I remember you and Andy walking home from school after a hard rain. He was holding your hand and guiding you around mud puddles. At the very last one, you just jumped in and stomped up and down, laughing your head off. You made your brother laugh, too. You were wearing a yellow Tweety Bird raincoat, and it had a rip in the hood. You didn’t care. I always liked your spirit, Caroline.”

  She smiled, rising from the rocking chair, reaching out for the paper. She noticed the scars on the tops of his hand. Caroline gently held his right hand, lifting her eyes up to him. “What happened to you?”

  “I got those scars because I tried to cover my butt one time from the beatings. Preacher was infuriated. He screamed at me and forced me to hold my hands against a concrete cinderblock in the White House, and he brought the strap down hard, three times. The third time broke bones in my right hand. The bones never healed properly. Even after all these years, it’s hard to hold a pencil to write.”

  She looked at him, his eyes watering, embarrassed. He glanced away, to the edge of the pinewoods. She continued holding his hand, the wind chimes tinkling, a tear rolling down her face. “Jesse, I am so very sorry.”

  THIRTEEN

  After I finished reading Curtis Garwood’s last letter, Dave Collins stared at the shotgun shell in the center of his table. Nick sipped from his Guinness, feeding Max a shard of Havarti. Dave reached for a small, clean cheese fork and inserted it into the open end of the shell casing. He lifted the shell and inspected it. “I haven’t seen one of these since I was a lad. It’s made of durable paper. Today’s shotgun shells are plastic, of course. And look at the images of pheasants in flight on the casing.”

  Nick blew air out of his puffed cheeks. “Why the hell did Curtis keep that thing all these years? He sees his friend shot dead, and he picks up the shell casing the next morning. I don’t guess he could have given it to the cops, considering the shit he was dealing with at the time.”

  Dave’s brow furrowed, studying the shell. “The letter doesn’t say who shot the kid. So maybe he kept it because one day he thought it could be linked back to the shooter. Or maybe it was to remind him never to forget.”

  Nick shook his head. “In the meantime, fifty years pass, and my man Sean’s got the baton handed to him. But what the hell can you do with an old shotgun shell. You can’t trace those loads. And you don’t have a body to see if the rounds match. You can’t lift prints off a fired shell, especially after so many years. So all you have, Sean, is a creepy souvenir from a murder.”

  “Maybe not. In lifting fingerprints the conventional way, you’re right. But if a print is on a brass shell, when that shell fires there can be a chemical reaction between the salt from the print and heated brass. It can create a corrosive imprint, almost like a branding iron burning a mark into something.”

  Dave set the shell down. “Indeed. You can’t see the print like you might on a window. And the perp can’t wipe it away. To find if there’s a latent print, forensic techs shoot a high voltage charge through the brass, that couples with the application of a special powder that adheres to the print’s ridge points.”

  Nick looked at the shell in front of him. “So if the shooter used his thumb to push that shell into the shotgun, the print might be there…even after half a century.”

  I nodded. “And that means, if a print is there, it came from one person—the man who shot Andy Cope in the back.”

  Dave laced his fingers over his stomach, looking at a white pelican waddling across the dock railing. “So we know that Curtis describes the perp, or one of the three men, as someone called the Preacher. This guy has or had, assuming he’s dead, a tattoo of the Southern Cross on his arm. If he’s not dead, he’s probably close to it. What does Caroline Harper want you to do?”

  “To prove that her brother was murdered. There may be no one left to prosecute, but it’ll help bring closure to her. And in the end, if she has one wish left on earth, it’s to find her brother’s grave and bury him in a family plot away from where he was shot and killed.”

  Dave shrugged his wide shoulders. “You know, Sean, you are under no obligation to chase ghosts for Caroline Harper or for Curtis Garwood.”

  “I told her I would look into it.”

  “But you never simply look into something. You go full bore until there’s nothing left of the onion to peel away. You go to the core. And, in this case, particularly, that might prove to be one hell of a dangerous place to be. You agreed to nothing with Curtis. If you can’t find his heirs, then find his favorite charity. Give the money to them. Walk away with a clear conscience. All you ever did was to take Curtis Garwood on a fishing trip. The rest, even his sending a copy of the letter to Caroline Harper, was his choice. It wasn’t something you solicited.”

  “But I do feel an obligation, and here’s one reason.” I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out the photo, propping it up against the shotgun shell. Dave and Nick leaned in to look at it, Nick folding his arms across his chest. “I feel an obligation to a kid—a victim. His name is Andy Cope, and he was killed by those responsible for his welfare while in custody of the state. He and other kids like him were the throwaway boys. The nobodies, the ones to be made examples of…And, too often, they’ve become captive prey in the hands of sexual predators on the department of corrections payroll—to become the whipping post to men whose hatred and psychosis were further unleashed with each cut of the leather strap.”

  Nick adjusted his weight in the deck chair and blew a low whistle through pursed lips. “Every time I see that look on your face, man, I know you’ve made your decision.”

  My phone buzzed. I recognized the incoming call. It was the number Caroline Harper had given me. I answered and she said, “Sean, it’s Caroline. I wanted to let you know I had a man knock on my door, someone I hadn’t seen since I was a little girl. His name’s Jesse Ta
ylor. He was a friend of Curtis Garwood and Andy’s. Jesse’s been gone from this area for many years. He returned because he read the obituary for Curtis. Something about how Curtis died…the suicide, well it really hit Jesse hard. He wants to do something. His heart is in the right place, but he’s not trained to investigate. I’m worried. As a kid, Jesse was always funny. And now he has some of the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. I asked Jesse to call you. If he doesn’t, would you mind speaking with him, just to let him know you’re looking into things, and he doesn’t have to?”

  “Do you have his number?”

  “Yes, I can text it to you. There’s something else. Jesse said he’s trying to find somebody he says was an eyewitness to my brother’s killing. He wouldn’t tell me who, though. Whoever this person is, he was probably incarcerated in that awful place when this happened…just another boy. And he’s probably someone who’s also been afraid for years to speak up. Maybe you can find him before Jesse does.”

  FOURTEEN

  He looked for the gray mailbox with the small redbird painted on it. Jesse Taylor drove his car slowly down a backwoods hard-packed dirt road, braking when he approached a gray mailbox. Most of the mailboxes, he thought, were some form of gray. But none of them had a redbird painted on the side. The houses in the neighborhood reminded Jesse of where he grew up. Tired, old cinderblock homes, cobbled together in the fifties and sixties. Scraggly yards with “the wash” hanging from clotheslines. Drainage ditches that never drained. Mosquitos that never left.

  Jesse lit a cigarette, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, his left arm propped on the open window of his truck. He drove a little farther, the country road winding through piney woods, laced with hammocks of cabbage palms. He stopped at a slate gray mailbox, a large dent in the center, the front hanging by its hinges, just moving in the breeze as if the mailbox was yawning. A wasp’s nest grew from under the box, resembling a fist-sized barnacle. “Imagine you don’t get much mail,” Jesse mumbled.