My eyes on the road, I felt along the dashboard for the auxiliary outlet and plugged in my phone.
“You’re dangerous,” Berg said.
“You know very well I’m a good driver.”
I tapped a button on the phone.
A flat but iconic voice boomed from the car speakers: “One, two, three, four, five, six!”
“What on earth?” Berg asked.
“It’s ‘Roadrunner’ by the Modern Lovers. Written about 1971 but not released for five years. Some say it’s the first punk song.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Fantastic when driving down I-25. Less effective on Oliver Street.”
As I drove, I kept an eye out for a blue Camaro in one of the driveways down the block. We still didn’t know exactly where the Nickles lived—I’d searched the internet to no avail—and we had to ask at least one of their neighbors about their dog Jack.
No Camaro, as it turned out. Ray had either parked it in his garage or the Nickles lived in the opposite direction from the one I’d taken.
Though I was no car buff, I knew Camaros, and the vehicle I’d seen leave the church parking lot last night was a small, modern sedan, not a sporty model from the sixties or seventies. That didn’t necessarily leave Ray Nickle out of the murder picture, since it was possible his wife had her own car and he had borrowed it.
I turned the music down. “Here’s the problem with Meyer’s killer being in that car in the parking lot last night.”
“You’re wondering why he killed Meyer and then waited around,” Berg said.
“It doesn’t make sense. A killer with half a brain would take off quickly.”
“Maybe he’d killed him only seconds before, or maybe he wanted to hang around and see who found him.”
I shot him a squint-eyed look.
“Not convincing? I’m afraid I agree. On the way back to the church, let’s find out about the Nickles’ dog.”
“I’d also like to talk to someone who knew Lloyd. One of the church members, if we can find one.”
We pulled into Bricktown’s parking lot a tad before seven thirty and found ourselves a table by the window. Two harried waitresses were working the restaurant, neither of them Nicole. After our waitress, a heavily mascaraed young woman named Jenna, took our order—eggs, toast, and coffee for Berg, coffee and pecan pancakes for me—I asked where Nicole was, feigning a sort-of friendship with her in order to get information.
“She called to say she’d be in late,” Jenna answered. She quickly glanced about her and then in a lowered voice said, “She found a dead man last night. Did she tell you? Seriously, a dead, bloody guy outside St. Michael’s. Anyways, she had trouble sleeping after that, but she’ll be in soon. I hope so, anyway, ’cause we’re busy.”
“Nicole told me that one of her customers yesterday, an elderly man, came up to her and, well, gave her the creeps.”
Jenna nodded vigorously. Her brown eyes were large and round, and she kept pushing her baby-fine blonde bangs from her forehead.
“You know him?” I asked.
“No, I’ve never seen the guy before, but I noticed him talking to Nicole ’cause she looked like she wanted to get away more than usual, and she doesn’t really like customers. An old guy with stained teeth?”
“That’s him.”
“After he left, Nicole and I talked, and yeah, she was freaked out. She said he told her St. Michael’s was haunted, and then he started talking about how some minister there shot his brother or something like that.”
“Was his name Lloyd?”
“Don’t know. Anyway, Nicole never went to St. Michael’s, so she wondered why he told her all that crap. She said there’s no way she’d wait on him again, even if she’s the only one here.”
“And then what happened?”
“Then Nicole gave the guy his takeout order and he left.”
“Do you happen to know where this guy lives?”
“Sorry, no.” Her mouth twisted in a crooked smile. “I don’t mind weird people so much, but Nicole hates ’em. Me? I think if everyone was normal, this job would bore me to death.”
Citing the waitress shortage, Jenna excused herself, saying she’d return in a minute with our coffees.
Berg and I gazed out our window, the two of us wondering aloud when the sun would appear and burn off the fog, watching while customers streamed in by twos and fours from the parking lot, emerging like shadows from the gray mist.
Berg pulled out his phone, tapped in a text, and then laid the phone on our table. “I’ve set the pastoral grapevine the task of finding us someone who attended St. Michael’s during Lloyd’s tenure and might know what happened to the church’s financial fortunes.”
“Good. I think money plays some part in Lloyd’s disappearance.”
“We have two parallel threads running through our singular case,” he said in a businesslike tone. “One thread involves two murders committed by human beings. Perhaps the murders are connected, perhaps not, but chances are they’re connected. The second thread involves demonic activity. You know I’m careful about—”
“Signing off on the demonic?”
“But now that we’ve spent a night at the church—the Petersons’ home—I believe there’s evil at work there.”
“The question is, does that evil do more than stink things up, blow cold air, and make me feel like cashing in my chips?”
Berg gave me a wry smile.
Jenna returned to our table carrying a pot of steaming coffee. We right-ended the cups on our table and she poured. After she finished, she extracted a folded slip of paper from a pocket in her apron and slid it toward me. “Don’t say I gave that to you. Your breakfast will be up in a few minutes.”
The second she walked away, I unfolded her note. It read simply, “1051 Oliver Street.” I showed it to Berg.
“The Nickles, I take it.”
“Their house is in the opposite direction from the way we drove. Should we pay them a visit?”
“Not until we have something solid to say.”
I gingerly sipped my steaming-hot coffee and then started to tell him we needed to stop at the Quick Mart on the way back to the church, but before I could explain why, his text tone sounded. Apparently, cell service wasn’t spotty at Bricktown.
Berg texted back—it still surprised me how tech savvy he was for a man his age—then put his phone away. “We have a meeting with the Reverend Dennis Reft in half an hour in the Quick Mart parking lot.”
“You heard me.”
“I’m not deaf, you know.”
“Who’s Reft?”
“The priest whose retirement left a vacancy for Lloyd. By the way, don’t let Reft know when Lloyd was killed. We’re not supposed to know, and I don’t want to break confidences.”
About the time I was ready to chew my arm off, Jenna appeared with our breakfasts. I had to give kudos to this little burger joint on the Colorado high plains. Their coffee was tasty and piping hot, and their pancakes, dripping with real syrup, smelled like pecan muffins from a high-end bakery.
“Jenna, how did you find the address?” I asked quietly.
“It was in our record book for takeout orders.” She smiled, pleased by her own initiative. “More coffee?”
Bricktown’s coffee being vastly superior to the Petersons’, I took another sip then asked her to top off my cup. Berg declined.
The two of us lapsed into hungry silence and ate quickly.
Partway through our breakfast, Nicole showed up and got down to waitressing, hurling us a careworn look as she hurried past our table with a loaded tray. On her return trip to the kitchen, Berg raised a finger and she stopped.
“How are you doing this morning?” he asked.
“I didn’t get any sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes, I . . .” She waved away the rest of it. “I’ll sleep good tonight, I bet. I have to.”
“I’m sorry you had to see that man.”
“I shoul
dn’t have gone to the church. I almost didn’t, you know.”
“But we’re grateful you did.”
Nicole glanced furtively around the restaurant, then said, “It’s this stupid job. I serve weirdos who don’t tip, and I barely make enough to pay rent. If I worked someplace else, I never would’ve met that freak.”
“Can you find another job?” I asked.
“In Wells?”
“Point taken.”
“You knew who the dead guy was,” she said. “I heard you.”
“His name was Weston Meyer,” I replied, “and that’s all we know about him.”
“I’ve never seen a dead body.”
“Try to let it go and think about something else,” Berg instructed. “Focus deliberately on your job, your customers, your friends, and things you enjoy. Can you do that for a while?”
“I can try.”
“I promise it will help.”
“They’re giving me dirty looks. I’d better go.”
Nicole scurried away toward the kitchen, holding her empty tray and grimacing as though she were heading down to the coal mines. I hated restaurant work too. At seventeen I’d worked weekends as a fast-food fry cook, and I recalled coming home at the end of the day with grease on my face, grease in my hair, grease coating my blue and white uniform.
Yet even that job was better than the factory work I’d endured in my early twenties. Mindless assembly-line work, only two breaks a day—lest the temporary absence of my hands caused the conveyor belt to slow or, horrors, stop. Like most people, I’d slogged through a mountain of lousy jobs in my lifetime, so my empathy for Nicole’s predicament was real but measured. At her age, she needed to find work that didn’t grate on her so.
Berg and I finished our breakfasts and drove for County Road 64, making it to the Quick Mart ten minutes ahead of schedule. I parked at the back of the lot, per Berg’s request, and shut off the engine.
To the east, over a newish development, woodsmoke rose from chimneys into the gray sky, and fog floated over the stubbled fields to the west, around the old, rusty wrecks. Gray on brown on gray.
I unhitched my seat belt. “I’ll get my Cokes and be right back. Need anything?”
“A bag of coffee, if they have one. To make up for what we’ve used.”
Striding to the register, I said hello to the clerk—the same guy I’d seen yesterday—and asked where they kept the ground coffee. He smiled, said I should grab fresh donuts while I could, then pointed me to an end-cap display one aisle over. “We only have one brand, but it’s tasty.”
I’d never heard of Schneider’s Coffee, but it being the only option, I nabbed a bag and headed for the donuts. You’d think three pecan pancakes in heavy syrup would’ve been enough flour and sugar for one morning, but I told myself I was stocking up for the hours ahead, when the pancakes would be nothing but a fond memory.
Cheered by the sight of several dozen donuts behind a clear plastic door, I opened a wax paper bag and got a bakery tissue ready for action.
“Hello there, Teagan.”
I turned and came face to face with Hattie Nickle. Close enough for me to see the filigree of blood vessels in the whites of her eyes.
“Hattie, right?” I said stupidly.
“That’s right. I thought you were at the church with that man.”
“John Bergland. We are at the church.”
“But a girl needs her donuts.”
“This girl does.”
She leaned toward me, bent shouldered and frailer looking than I remembered. “I was hoping I’d run into you. I don’t know if you believe in the importance of dreams, but I had a dream about you last night, and I think it could be a warning.”
“To lay off the sugar?”
“You were drowning, Teagan. And there were children all around you—playing water games while you drowned.”
She grinned and my flesh went cold.
CHAPTER 14
I stepped onto the Explorer’s running board, leaned in, and handed Berg the coffee, bag of donuts, and six pack of Diet Coke before clambering into the driver’s seat. “Any sign of Dennis Reft?”
“Not yet. I saw Hattie Nickle come out of the Quick Mart just now.”
“There are half a dozen donuts in that bag, by the way. For both of us. And no comments about sugar, please. It fuels me.”
I’d managed to bag my donuts after Hattie told me about her dream, though before she said goodbye she’d gazed at me briefly with triumphant glee, as if she’d just declared checkmate and was waiting for her prize.
Pretending to ignore her, I’d grabbed the Diet Coke and paid for the lot at the register, chatting idly with the clerk while he rang me up, knowing without looking that Hattie was still watching me.
I hadn’t thought anyone could beat her toffee-toothed husband for making my skin crawl, but boy had I been wrong.
“. . . so did you see her?” Berg was saying.
“Um, yeah, for a moment. I think she was buying paper towels.”
“Fascinating.”
I looked over at him.
“Talk to me,” he said.
“She’s evil.” I felt my chin begin to quiver and willed myself not to cry.
“Teagan? What happened? Tell me.”
How could I? No one, and I mean no one, was allowed behind that double-bolted door. This good man thought I was good too. Or as good as human beings can be in a fallen world, which isn’t all that good as it turns out.
“She just . . .” I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Dang it. “There’s something sick and dangerous about her, and I don’t use those words lightly. I mean it when I say she’s evil.”
“I don’t doubt you.”
Angling in my seat to look him directly in the eye, I said, “Could she be in contact with demonic presences?”
“Demons?”
I nodded.
“Say it.”
“In contact with demons.”
“Did you sense that?”
“I heard it. She knows something about me she shouldn’t.”
“What?”
“What matters is that there’s literally no way she could know this thing unless . . .”
My God. I’d been in the presence of evil before, but until now, until I’d looked into Hattie’s soulless eyes, I’d never truly comprehended the depth and power of this darkness, this primordial evil Berg had told me about. This dung from the pits of hell Berg had dedicated his life to fighting.
But why come after me? Why Berg? Though he was much more of a threat than I was, the Petersons’ home wasn’t exactly a Gettysburg-sized battlefield. It was a former church in little Wells, Colorado.
“Listen carefully,” Berg said. “Evil has no claim over you. It can’t touch your heart or soul. Never. We’ll talk later, but I think that’s the Reverend Reft who just pulled up on the right. You’re safe, Teagan. Whoever or whatever the Nickles are, you’re safe with God.”
I looked out the passenger window as an older man with thinning gray hair got out of a Honda and approached my car, looking at Berg and tilting his head as if to ask, Is that you?
Berg rolled down his window. “Reverend Reft?”
He grinned. “Call me Dennis.”
“Call me Berg, and this is Teagan. Mind sitting in the back?”
“Not in the least.”
Reft got in and scooted over until he was sitting in the smaller middle seat. “This fog is something else. I couldn’t see your car until I was almost on it.”
“Hopefully it’ll burn off soon,” Berg said, swiveling in his seat for a better look at the man.
I turned toward Reft and nodded my hello. He smiled as he settled himself.
On the short side, he carried a hefty paunch, which I supposed was why he didn’t fully zip his winter jacket, and his beefy face and days-old gray beard gave him a friendly, approachable air.
“You wanted to know about Edward Lloyd,” he began. He chuckled softly. “Well, I’ve wanted to
know about Lloyd for a very long time.”
“You were St. Michael’s priest before him, I understand,” Berg said.
“I was the church’s first priest, eight years ago, right after the diocese purchased St. Michael’s from the Methodist Church. I only stayed five years—I was already an old man, you see—and then turned the reigns over to Lloyd, though I had nothing to do with him succeeding me.”
“It sounds like you didn’t get along.”
A small sigh escaped Reft’s lips. “Let me give you a little background. When I joined St. Michael’s, there was a plaque on the wall left there by the Methodist Church. The Apostles’ Creed. I left it in place my five years. When I attended Lloyd’s first sermon—I remained a member for another seven months—the plaque was gone. His first sermon and it was gone. A week later, Lloyd and I shared a whiskey in his office—you know how it is with clergy.”
“I’ve shared many clerical whiskeys,” Berg said.
“Well, Lloyd and I talked about this and that, and toward the end of our talk I asked him what happened to the plaque. He said he couldn’t in all good conscience leave it up because modern science had caused him to doubt the virgin birth. Now, I’m not a neophyte. I’ve heard nonsense like that before. So though it dismayed me, it didn’t shock me. But when I asked him what he thought modern science would say about the resurrection of our Lord, he wouldn’t answer.”
“What did he do?”
“He poured more whiskey and changed the subject.” Reft spread his hands. “Well, Occam’s razor. In at least two respects the man didn’t hold to the foundational beliefs of our faith.”
Perhaps I was naive, but to me this was stunning. “How and why did he become a priest?” I asked.
“How did he stay a priest?” Reft asked. “That’s what I want to know. He was one year out of seminary. He decided late in life to be a priest, but he’d been in religious circles, and not just in Illinois, where he’s from. Surely others knew what he thought from the very beginning. But for some reason his path to St. Michael’s was swift and well greased.”
“How so?” Berg asked. “Because he’d so recently been a seminarian?”
Chasing Angels (Teagan Doyle Mysteries Book 1) Page 10
