Just Cause (67 page)

The lawyer paused, then sighed. 'Okay. They'll take the first flight out. All right? I'm gonna stay here. The guy didn't threaten me, did he?'

'No.'

'Well. Good.'

Another silence crept onto the line, before Cowart added, 'Sandy?'

'Yes, Matt?'

'Don't hang up the telephone and think all of a sudden that this is silly and you don't have to do anything,' he said, his voice steady, low, and even. 'Leave right away. Keep Becky safe. I can't do anything unless I know she's safe. You promise me?'

'I understand.'

'Promise?'

'Yes.'

'Thank you,' he said. He felt relief and tension battling within him. 'I'll call you with details when I have them.' Sandy's new husband grunted in assent. Cowart put the telephone down gingerly, as if it were fragile, and leaned back on the motel bed. He felt better and awful at the same time.

When Brown and Shaeffer returned to the motel room, discouragement seemed to ride their shoulders, perched on top of exhaustion. Cowart asked, 'Did you get anywhere?' Shaeffer answered for them both. The local cops seem to think we're crazy. And, if not crazy, then incompetent. But mostly, I think, they don't really want to be bothered. Might have been different if they could see something in it for them. But they don't.' Cowart nodded. 'Where does that leave us?' Brown replied softly, 'Chasing a man guilty of something, suspected of everything, with evidence of nothing.' He laughed softly. 'Jesus, listen to me. Should have been a writer like you, Cowart.'

Shaeffer rubbed her hands across her face slowly, finally pushing her hair back tightly from her forehead, pulling the skin taut as she did so, as if this would clear her vision.

'How many?' she asked, turning toward the two men. 'There's the first one, the one you wrote about…'

Both men were silent, guarding their fears.

'How many?' she demanded again. 'What is it? You think something bad will happen if you share information? What could be worse than what we've got?'

'Joanie Shriver,' Cowart replied. 'She's the first. First we know about. Then there's a twelve-year-old girl down in Perrine who disappeared

'Perrine?' Shaeffer said. 'No wonder he…'

'No wonder what?' Cowart demanded.

It was his first question for me. When I went to see him. He wanted to be certain that it was a Monroe County case I was investigating. He was quite concerned over where the border between Dade and Monroe counties is. And once he was certain, he relaxed.'

'Damn, Cowart whispered.

'We don't know anything for certain about her, Brown interjected. 'It's really speculation…'

Cowart rose, shaking his head. He went over to his suit coat and extricated the computer printouts that he had been ferrying about. He handed them to Brown, who swiftly read them.

'What are those?' Shaeffer asked.

'Nothing, Brown replied, frustration creeping into his voice. He crumpled the pages together, then handed them back. 'So he was there?'

'He was there.'

'But there's still nothing against him.'

'No body, you mean. Though, judging from what she said, I suspect that girl's body is somewhere in the Everglades, close to the county line.'

'Right.' Cowart turned to Shaeffer. 'See, that's two.

Two so far…'

'Three, Brown added quietly. 'A little girl in Eatonville. Disappeared a few months back.'

Cowart stared hard at the policeman. 'You didn't…' he started.

Brown shrugged.

Cowart, hands quivering with anger, picked up his notepad. 'He was in Eatonville about six months ago. At the Christ Our Savior Presbyterian Church. Gave his speech about Jesus. Is that when…'

'No, sometime later.'

'Damn,' Cowart said again.

'He went back. He must have gone back when he knew no one would be looking.'

'Sure he did. But how do you prove it?'

'I'll prove it.'

'Great. Why didn't you tell me?' Cowart's voice cracked with rage.

Brown replied with equal fury. 'Tell you? So you can do what? So you can put it in the damn paper before I've got a chance to get somewhere on the case? Before I've had a chance to check every small black town in Florida? You want me to tell you so you can tell the world and save your reputation?'

'Get somewhere! How many people are going to die while you put together a case? If you can put together a case!'

'And what the hell will be accomplished by putting it in the newspaper?'

It'd work! It'd smoke him out!'

'More like it would just warn him so he'd start being even more careful.'

'No. Everybody else would be warned…'

'Yeah, so he'd change his pattern and there's not a courtroom in the world I'd ever get him into.'

Both men had moved to their feet, eyes locked, poised as if about to come to blows. Shaeffer held up her hand, cutting the two men off. 'Are you both crazy?' she asked loudly. 'Are you out of your minds?

Haven't you shared any information? What's the point of secrets?'

Cowart looked at her and shook his head. The point is, no one ever tells everything. Especially the truth.'

'How many people are dead because…' she started, then cut herself off. She realized that she herself possessed information that she was reluctant to share. Cowart caught it, though.

'What are you hiding, Detective? What do you know you don't want to talk about?'

She realized she had no choice.

'Sullivan's parents,' she said. 'Ferguson was right. He didn't do it.'

'What?'

She described everything Michael Weiss had told her: the Bible, the guard, the brother.

Cowart looked surprised, and then shook his head. 'Rogers, he said. 'Who'd have thought it?' It wasn't nonsense, though. Rogers seemed to be into everything at Starke. Nothing would have been easier for him, but yet…' One thing I don't understand,' said Cowart. 'If it was really Rogers, then why did Sullivan spend all that time implicating Ferguson in the murder to me, while at the same time writing Rogers' name in that Bible?'

Brown shrugged. 'Best way to guarantee someone gets away with murder. Multiple suspects. Tell you one thing. Point some other evidence another direction. Wait until some defense attorney gets ahold of that. But mostly, I think he did it because he was a sick man, Cowart. Sick and full of mischief. It was just his way of dragging down everybody into the same hell that awaited him: you, Ferguson, Rogers… and three cops he didn't even know.'

Everyone was silent for a moment. 'So maybe Rogers did it, and maybe he didn't,' Cowart said. 'Right now, old Sully must be down there laughing his damned head off.' He shook his head again. 'So what does it mean?'

'It means, Shaeffer spoke up, 'that we can forget about Sullivan. Forget his mind games. Let's worry about Ferguson and his victims. Three, you think?'

'He made seven trips south. Seven we know about.'

'Seven?'

Cowart lifted his arms in surrender. 'We don't know when it was for research, when he went for action. What we do know is – Christ! – What we suspect is -three little girls. One white. Two black. And Bruce Wilcox.'

'Four, she said quietly.

'Four, Tanny Brown said heavily. He stood, as if insisting that fatigue was something wrong, and began pacing about the small room like a prisoner in a cell. 'Can't you see what he's doing?' he said abruptly.

'What?'

Brown's voice carried an urgency that seemed to quiver in the small room. He looked at the young detective. 'What is it we do? A crime occurs and our first assumption is that, while unique, it will still fit directly into a clear-cut, recognizable category. Ultimately, we figure it will be typical of a hundred others, just like it. That's what we're taught, what we expect. So we go out and look for the usual suspects. The same suspects that ninety-nine times turn out to be the right ones. We process everything at the crime scene, hoping that some bit of hair or blood spatter or fiber sample will point right at one of the people on the short list. We do this because the alternative is so terrifying: that someone unconnected to anything except murder has walked onto the scene. Someone you don't know, that nobody knows, that may not be within a hundred or a thousand miles of the crime anymore. And did it for some reason so warped that you can't even contemplate it, much less understand it. Because if that's the case, you've got a chance in a million of making a case and maybe not even that. That's why we went to Ferguson in the first go-round, when little Joanie was killed. Because we had a crime and he was on the short list…'

Brown looked at Shaeffer and then toward Cowart. 'But now, you see, he's figured that out.'

The detective hunched forward, slapping a fist into a palm to accentuate his words. 'He's figured out that distance helps keep him safe, that when he arrives in some little town to kill, no one should know him. No one will pay any attention to him. And no one will make him when he grabs his victim. And who does he grab? He learned what happens when he snatched a little white girl. So now he goes to places where the police aren't quite as sophisticated and the press isn't as aware, and grabs a little black girl, because that ain't hardly going to get anyone's attention, not the same way Joanie Shriver did. So he goes and does these things, then he comes back up here and returns to school and there ain't nobody looking for him, 'Nobody.'

Brown paused before adding, 'Nobody now, except us three.'

'And Wilcox?' Cowart asked.

Brown took a deep breath. 'He's dead,' he replied flatly.

'We don't know that,' Shaeffer said. The idea seemed impossible to her. She knew it to be true yet couldn't stand to hear it said.

'Dead,' Brown continued, voice picking up momentum. 'Somewhere close to here. And that's the reason Ferguson's running. That's his first rule. Kill safe. Kill anonymously. Use distance. It's such a damn easy formula.'

He stared at the young detective. 'He was dead as soon as you lost sight of him.'

'You shouldn't have left him,' Cowart said.

She turned, bristling. 'I didn't leave him! He left me. I tried to stop him. Dammit, I don't have to listen to this! I don't even have to be here!'.'Yes, you do,' Cowart said. 'Don't you get it, Detective? There's a real bad guy out there. Because of accidents, bad judgment, mistakes, bad luck, whatever.

And when you add it all up, he let him go…' Cowart pointed sharply at Tanny Brown, '… and I let him go…' He punched an index finger against his own chest, then turned it, like a pistol, toward her.'… And now, you've let him go, too. Just like that.'

He took a deep breath. 'In effect, there's only one of us that actually caught up with him. Wilcox. And now…'

'He's dead,' Brown said again. He stood in the center of the room, clenching his hands into fists, then releasing them slowly. 'And we're the only people really looking for him.' He, too, punched a finger at her. 'Now you owe, too.'

She felt a sudden dizziness, as if the floor of the motel room were pitching beneath her like her stepfather's fishing boat. But she knew what they said was true. They had created the problem. Now it was up to them to find a solution.

Wilcox and some little girls, she told herself.

These two have no idea, she thought. They don't know what it's like to feel yourself pinned down and attacked, to know that you might be about to die and can do nothing to stop it. She envisioned the last minutes the little girls must have experienced in a rush of horror that robbed her of her breath and rekindled her determination.

'Got to be found, first, though,' she said. 'Who's got a suggestion?'

'Florida,' Cowart said slowly. 1 think he's gone back to Florida. That's what he knows. That will be where he thinks he's safest. He has two worries, it seems to me. He's worried about me and he's worried about Detective Brown. I don't think he has you connected in all this. Did he see you with Wilcox?'

'I don't think so.'

'Well, maybe that's an advantage.'

Cowart turned to Brown. His head was filled with something Blair Sullivan had told him: Got to be a free man to be a good killer, Cowart. He knows that, the reporter realized. So he said it.

'But you and I, well, that's different. He needs to know he's free of us. Then he can get on with what he's been doing, without worrying and always looking over his back.'

'How does he do that?'

The reporter took a deep breath. 'The other day. When I saw him. He threatened my daughter. He knows where she lives with her mother, in Tampa.'

Tanny Brown started to say something, then stopped.

"That's why…'

'Tell me about the threat,' the detective demanded.

'He just said he knew where she lived. He didn't say what he would do. Only that he knew who she was and that would prevent me from writing anything about him. Especially unproven allegations connecting him to other crimes.'

'And will it?'

'Well, what would you do?' the reporter replied angrily.

'You think that's where he's gone now? To Tampa. To…'

'Cut out my heart. Those are his words.'

'Is that what you think?'

Cowart shook his head. 'No. I think he believes he has me wrapped up. That he doesn't have to do anything to keep me quiet.'

Tanny Brown stared hard at him. I have daughters, too,' he said. 'Did he threaten them?'

Cowart felt a slight queasiness. 'No. He never mentioned them.'

'He knows where they live, too, Cowart. Everyone in Pachoula knows where I live.'

'He never said anything.'

'Did he know I was outside, when he was busy threatening you? Did he know I was there, close by?'

'I don't know.'

'Why didn't he mention them, Cowart? Wouldn't the same threat work against me as well?'