A Living Grave (14 page)

A
fter the intrusion of the Nightriders, the afternoon was quiet. Heat broiled down out of the pure blue sky. The temperature seemed to be racing past the slow creep of the sun. Almost no one came into the shop or onto the dock to take their boats out. The lake was a glossy green plane, like old glass with just enough ripple to give it some character.

Three of us were hot and sweating in the un–air-conditioned bait shop. But Nelson was looking like he'd been steamed and rung out. His clothes were wet and sticking to his bony frame. Water ran in constant beads down his face and into his shirt. Despite that, he was standing straighter and, I thought, breathing better. Everything about him was signaling that turn he'd told me about. He was smiling when he asked if he could take us all to one of the music shows on the Branson strip.

Dad and Uncle Orson looked at me like it was my decision. I made it.

Nelson asked me to take him to his house for appropriate clothes and I found myself telling him we would only go out if he took a nap. The other two men in the room were suddenly very interested in the view out the window. They were no help to him when Nelson tried to tell me he was fine and didn't need to be treated like an invalid.

He took a nap.

It's funny how power can go to your head. I told the other two to dig out some clothes of their own. No jeans tonight. No one argued. Dad said he would have to go home for clothes and to make some calls he'd been putting off. Uncle Orson gave him a look, but Dad gave it right back. I didn't worry about it. They had probably been arguing about my life. They'd get over it.

It was good to have something to do. Downtime is nice but my head was full of strings. None of them seemed to lead anywhere, but every one of them wanted pulling. I probably should have been thinking about what I had done to the Barnes kid and the possible consequences. Or maybe I should have been thinking about what I was getting myself into with Nelson. That was a knotted rat's nest of strings it would take an army of therapists to straighten out. The truth was that none of the obvious things had my attention. As I got into the truck for the trip over to Nelson's house it was something new bothering me. Like a splinter it had gotten under my skin without my even noticing, but once there it kept nagging.

The biker, Leech, had said something. “Sell out and get out.” It didn't mean anything to me at the time, but it bothered me later and was still working on me as I drove. These guys had been trying to get rid of Nelson. Maybe they were just not very bright or maybe they thought he knew what it was all about, but something got lost in translation. They wanted him gone. And they wanted him to sell out something before going.

Other people, the creep and his muscle from Moonshines, were trying to get him to sell out too. His own partner seemed to want a deal made. Nelson had said Middleton wanted to buy him out but seemed to be trying to fix Figorelli up with the deal. The easy thing would have been to ask Nelson. Or it should have been. I had the feeling he was holding back from me almost as much as from them. I decided to make a little detour to Moonshines before heading over to Nelson's. It was time to have an off-the-record conversation with Mr. Middleton.

That turned out to be harder than expected. I got to Moonshines and they were busy with an afternoon crowd. Everyone working wanted to know where Johnny Middleton was too. They were just too busy to look for him.

I found him at the far end of the parking lot in the only shade available. The car was a Jaguar, but it had apparently lost a lot of its resale value. The engine was off and the windows were up. Flies were already crawling along the edges of the door and window glass. I didn't open the door. There was no point. Heads don't hang like that unless the person attached to it is dead.

I called it in, then I called the sheriff at home. Even without a closer look I could tell that he had been shot at least two times. There were bloody red blooms at his temple and in the center of his expensive white shirt. A quick look around the ground showed no brass casings, but that didn't mean a lot. They could be inside the car or the killer could have used a revolver. The other option had to be considered: There would be none because the killer had taken them with him. I was betting that there would be casings in the car along with the small-caliber weapon that killed Middleton.

Television and movies have muddied a lot of water for cops. People now think that there is a magic DNA machine in every department that tells us the killer the same day. They think we can pull prints off of anything and enhance video too. They think miracles are routine and never imagine the hard work or man-hours that go into every major case. At the same time everyone knows now that Mob killers use .22s and shoot in the head. Every night of the week they get a little crime lesson that includes gems like
use an untraceable weapon and drop it at the scene so you won't be caught with it.

Most citizens would be amazed how hard it is to keep a weapon untraceable. And the thing about .22s: TV will tell you it's so the low-power bullet goes in the skull and bounces around without coming out the other side—the truth is it's mostly about noise. Like when you shoot someone in a car with the windows up. Even in the full light of day, in a public parking lot, a .22 or .25 fired within a running car would be swallowed up in the usual noise of traffic, wind, talk.

Deputies arrived within a few minutes. The sheriff was there in about fifteen. He brought my shield and weapon.

“I was going to wait another day,” he said. “Thought you could use some time to ponder on what had happened.”

“But?”

“But—since you were involving yourself in an investigation and dragged
this
into our yard—I figured it would be better to have you back on duty. And by the way, if anyone asks: I was out at your place and gave you these things an hour ago.”

“Okay, I understand,” I said, not entirely sure I did. “What about what I did to the kid?”

“I have it on good authority there won't be any charges coming from that. And your record will show that you were overly enthusiastic in your apprehension of a suspect, rather than that you used wildly excessive force on some kids getting dirty in the woods.”

“What good authority?”

“My authority. And the DA's. Barnes had Angela Briscoe's crucifix in his pocket.” He let that sink in for a moment before he said, “We also followed up on your request for time and location of the speeding ticket he got the day of the killing. It was given that afternoon, less than a mile from where you found Angela.”

“Circumstantial,” I said.

“Lethal-injection circumstantial,” he said right back.

“Death penalty for a juvenile?”

“That shit's not up to me, thank God. And speaking of penalty . . .”

“What?” I asked. He stood there looking at me like he had bad news that he enjoyed delivering. He did.

“I've added a mandatory additional six months to your therapy requirements. It's written up and put in your file.”

“Sheriff, that's—”

“Don't say it. Not another word because I promise that you will regret it.” Sheriff Benson, an honest man, stared straight into my eyes with a look that said nothing will ever be plainer than this. “It's bullshit. I bet that was what you were gonna say. It's what I would have said. And it is. But it's the kind of bullshit that is keeping you on the job—cause, God's honest truth, girl—you have a problem. I'm on your side fighting it, but if you ain't doing the work it will eat you alive and I will cut you loose. Do you have any more to say about it?”

“No, sir,” I answered.

“Good. This is your scene and your investigation. Get to it.”

“Sheriff?” I said before he could walk off. “There is something I wanted to ask you.”

He waited and I thought carefully.

“Major Reach suggested to you that maybe I killed the man who hurt me in Iraq. You told me how you felt but didn't say if you believed I did it.”

“Is that what you're asking me? Do I believe you killed that man?” I nodded, watching him watch me. He didn't look away. Then he said, “No. I don't believe you killed him. But I do believe you could.”

Somehow that made me feel like my own violence was a punch line to the bloody scene I had been given to investigate.

* * *

We'd gotten the car door open and I was right about the weapon. It was a .25 automatic, the kind of gun ladies were supposed to keep in their purses in bad neighborhoods. This particular example was old and the grip was only metal frame covered with tape. There was a casing partially ejected so the gun had jammed after only two shots. Two were enough. When everything obvious was photographed and then collected I released the body to the coroner's office and told a deputy to get the car towed and secured.

I went back into Moonshines to talk to the employees. No one could give me a time that Middleton had left the building, but several mentioned a group of bikers that rolled into the parking lot and left just as quickly. That was troubling. One or two hanging out and trying to push meth was a concern, but a normal one. A bunch of them at the scene of another murder was something else. Clare had seen bikers around where Angela had been found. I saw Leech on Angela's street the next day. Cotton Lambert had beaten Nelson and tried to run him off. Twice, some of the Nightriders had been at Nelson's house. Then they'd come to the dock, warning Nelson away again.

There were links that just weren't clear yet. But how did Danny Barnes's killing Angela Briscoe fit in? Did it fit in at all?

I spent another hour taking notes and sketching in my pad. At one point, flipping through pages, I noticed one of my sketches of the Leech image with the arrow points. That was something else that was puzzling. Why all the graffiti about a greasy biker? I wanted to find out more about it but there was a fresh case at hand. When I had everything down and noted and timed, I sent a deputy looking for Byron Figorelli.

Johnny Middleton's murder looked like textbook Mob work. That didn't mean a thing because the whole point of having a textbook style is to send a message. Mob hits only looked like Mob hits when someone wanted them to. That someone may or may not be Mob. Again, this was thanks to the
Godfather
movies and that
Sopranos
show.

With that in mind, the only people around who fit the mobster description were the guys I had put in the can Saturday night. No one had mentioned them today, but they were my first choice for this.

Imagine my surprise when Byron Figorelli and Jimmy Cardo, the man Billy had stunned when we arrested them, came rolling up into the parking lot in an RV the size of some homes.

It took about two minutes to ascertain that they'd been clowning it up in go-karts and at the batting cages, getting a lot of attention from management all day long.

Once again I had to note that my life was never easy.

* * *

As soon as the scene was cleared and I had talked to everyone at Moonshines, I started home. If I hadn't seen a billboard for the Oak Ridge Boys, the show we were going to, I would have gone all the way back. Almost four hours after I had left the dock I finally pulled into Nelson's drive.

I was careful this time, going slow and checking every spot someone could hide. Before going in I walked the perimeter and checked the doors and windows. Inside, everything was the same and secure as well. Before going to his bedroom I stood for a few minutes in the middle of the great room with the view and the art in progress. It was a good room and fit the man.

It would be impossible not to know I was falling for Nelson. It was just as impossible not to picture myself here, with him, maybe in winter with snow on the ground and a fire in the woodstove. A month ago—no, less than a week ago, even—that thought would have probably given me a panic attack. I could not have imagined—this—any of this, my feelings, desires, plans for a future.

Things—
life
—seemed different in just the last few days. It was so strange to think that I had spent years worried about men. I had feared them and their intentions and believed all of them capable and ready to do the kind of things to me that had been done in that other life. Standing there in Nelson's house, for the first time I began to see the men who were actually in my life. They were so much more than the shadows I was running from. So many good men surrounded me that I wondered then how it was I had only seen the bad.

The rack of paintings beside the work space drew me. I knelt beside it and flipped through the canvases and art boards. It was a catalog of the Ozarks, colors and places that I thought lived only in my mind. Streaks of paint, built-up and shifted, pushed by brush and knife all conspired to present the world the way I had always thought of it. Beautiful.

Nelson's tools were there, scattered but clean and ready. I held his brushes and smelled the rag that rested by the easel. It smelled of the oils and thinners he used. It smelled like his hands after he worked.

To one side, there was a small end table with a drawer that stood open. Inside the drawer was a small case. It would have been so easy to write it off as just another box of paint. I couldn't do that. It was obviously new. Everything else was worn and used. Then there was the texture to it. The box was dead, dull plastic. It had a utility that clashed with the wood and animal bristle all around it. Most of all I couldn't ignore it because I had seen its kind so many times before.

I opened the case and pulled the revolver from its perfect vacuum-formed cradle.

Sometimes we stumble across parts of other people's lives that we know are secret, even if they are not well hidden. We seem to have a sense about these things and touching them imparts an instant guilt that is greater than the action. It's the knowing, not the finding. And we can never unknow.