One Word, as an organization, had a lot of money, but not much of it made its way to Tucker. When we tracked him down that morning, he was dressed in well-worn khakis and a simple oxford shirt. His hair was neatly combed, and a pair of glasses sat slightly askew on his face.
I knocked on the frame of his open office door.
“Hey, Tucker. Sorry to drop in unannounced.”
“Tally! And, uh. . .”
“Finn Harper.” Finn stepped forward and held out his hand. Tucker shook it. I’m guessing he was flying on autopilot at that point.
“I’m, uh . . .”
“Surprised?” I suggested.
His face twitched. “Yes, I guess that would sum it up. I don’t get many visitors at all. Not many adults, at least. And, well, we, uh. . .”
Poor Tucker couldn’t seem to figure out how to say what needed saying without being impolite. Thankfully for us both, I was past worrying much about “polite.”
“Yeah, we don’t exactly run in the same circles. Listen, can we sit?”
“Uh, sure. . . .” He stumbled to his feet as he belatedly realized that a lady had entered his orbit. He gestured to a pair of chairs upholstered in a nubby gray fabric. As he did so, I noticed the long, dark hairs dusting his fingers. They seemed out of place on his long, delicate, almost feminine hands.
We sat together, eyeing each other cautiously, before I got down to brass tacks.
“Who’s suing you?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
Finn took over. “Let’s cut to the chase, here, Tucker. In case you’re not aware, I’m a reporter for the
Dalliance News-Letter
.” Apparently Tucker hadn’t realized exactly who Finn was, because that tidbit of news washed what little color he had right away.
“I know you are being sued,” Finn continued, “but I don’t know why. And I’m curious. I could call in some favors, ask a bunch of questions, but I figure it might be in your best interest to tell us what’s going on all on your own. Last thing you need is more gossip. Am I right?”
Tucker straightened in his seat. “I don’t appreciate being strong-armed.”
Finn and I had done this good-cop, bad-cop routine before. It was my turn.
“I totally understand, Tucker. We don’t want to force your hand or pry into your private business. But Kristen Ver Steeg served papers on you and my cousin, Bree, on the very same day. And the next day Kristen was murdered. We’re just trying to figure out what happened.”
Tucker leaned back, as though he were trying to physically get away from me. “I wouldn’t hurt anyone. Especially a woman.”
“From what I’ve heard,” Finn said, a hard edge to his words, “you prefer girls to women. So I’m not really sure what you’re capable of.”
Tucker leaped to his feet, genuine outrage stamped on his face. “If you dare to print Eloise Carberry’s lies, I will sue you and your employer so fast—”
“Easy,” I crooned. “No one is printing anything. Like I said, we’re trying to set the record straight.”
He eased back down in his desk chair, but his breathing came in short hitches. He was surely riled. “I do not have a thing for little girls. I am deeply in love with a wonderful Christian woman who has been working at an orphanage in Peru for two years. She’s coming home next month, and I plan to propose.”
He reached across his desk to a silver-framed photo and turned it around so we could see it. In the picture, Tucker stood side by side with a sweet-looking woman. She was his height with a soft, matronly figure—must have outweighed the scrawny preacher by thirty or forty pounds. Her pin-straight sandy hair draped over her shoulder, fanning over the bodice of her demure pink shirtdress, and falling all the way to her waist. There wasn’t a lick of makeup on her face, but she glowed with a Madonna-like radiance, her eyes meeting the lens of the camera with clear, gentle kindness.
In the photo, Tucker’s head was turned slightly, looking at the woman. The only word to describe his expression: adoration.
“That’s me and Kim, last Christmas. In Peru. I was visiting.”
“She’s lovely,” I said.
A smile flickered over his face. “Yes,” he said simply.
Tucker couldn’t be that good an actor. He loved his missionary woman as deeply as a man could love a woman. And I didn’t think for an instant that the man who fell in love with Kim would also be attracted to teenyboppers. It just didn’t make sense.
Which left me more confused than ever.
“Why would Eloise say such horrible things about you if they aren’t true?”
“Eloise Carberry has a hole in her soul. I don’t know where it came from, whether someone hurt her or if she was just born that way, but she’s projecting her own sickness onto the world around her. She cannot fathom that I might have a love for her child that is Christ-like in its purity.”
Wow.
Christ-like in its purity
? Was this guy for real? I exchanged a “what the heck?” glance with Finn.
“I know she looks like an ordinary woman,” Tucker said, as though he’d read our thoughts. “But the devil takes many forms.”
“Maybe you could be a little more specific,” Finn suggested.
Tucker sighed. “Last spring, I chaperoned a trip to South Padre Island.”
The infamous spring break trip Kyle had mentioned.
“Right,” I said. “The tequila shooters.”
Tucker winced. “Exactly. A bunch of the kids slipped out after curfew. Got horribly drunk. Made themselves sick.”
“And you didn’t report them,” I said.
Tucker removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That’s true. In retrospect, I probably should have turned them in. But I didn’t. That sort of overindulgence reflects an injury to the spirit. Those kids needed ministry, not punishment. I invited them to join us at One Word, where they could find something other than liquor to make them happy.”
“And did they take you up on that offer?” Finn asked.
“Only one of them. One soul, saved.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Dani Carberry.”
Tucker nodded. “She came to us, a lost lamb. And we offered her the peace of Christ. But her mother wanted to stand between her daughter and the true word of God. She forbade her child to pray with us.”
“Is that why you didn’t want her to chaperone that trip to Glen Rose?” I asked.
“Yes. What kind of Christian woman denies her child the opportunity to hear the true word of God? Eloise was not fit to care for her own child, let alone others. But Dani was made strong in the Lord, and she continued to seek our fellowship.”
Uh-oh.
“So the Carberrys filed suit against me and the church. For interference with parental rights.”
“Is that even a real thing?” I asked.
Finn answered. “Some states recognize a tort for interference with parental rights. It’s usually used against a noncustodial parent. I have no idea about Texas.”
Tucker snorted. “The church elders and I, we were anxious to vindicate our rights in court. I would have gone to the papers with news of Eloise Carberry’s efforts to deny her child Christ’s word on the very first day, but the Carberrys had the file sealed. Our attorneys said we couldn’t discuss it.”
I decided not to point out that Tucker wasn’t very good at following his attorneys’ instructions.
If he was telling the truth—and his righteous indignation suggested he was—then Tucker didn’t have any motive to kill Kristen Ver Steeg. He didn’t want to keep the lawsuit quiet or even make it go away. He wanted his day in court, his chance to defeat Satan with a gavel.
“If you were so gung ho to litigate, why did you leave that threatening message for Kristen?” Finn asked.
“What threatening message?”
“The one about minding her eternal soul.”
Tucker smiled, without a trace of malice. “That wasn’t a threat. Just good advice. The church and I, we didn’t mind fighting evil because we recognized its true face. But it would be selfish to allow Miss Ver Steeg to take the side of Satan unwittingly, just so we could be vindicated. I gave her the information. She made the choice, of her own free will, to ignore it.”
So. Tucker Gentry. Certifiable whack job, yes. Murderer, probably not. The man might do any number of crazy things in the name of his faith—I wouldn’t even rule out the possibility of violence—but he would do it in the bright light of day. He saw himself as a champion of good. He wouldn’t see any need to skulk around in the shadows. If he’d decided to gun down Kristen, he would have done it on the midway in broad daylight, not in the haunted rodeo.
Tucker’s tale, though, presented another mystery. Why was Dani so determined to defy her mother and attend services at One Word? I knew that young converts were often the most zealous, but Dani didn’t seem like the type of kid to get swept up by religious fervor. She was smart, well-to-do, from a stable home, and, most important, popular. As evidenced by her flag corps friends’ willingness to cut off their hair in solidarity with her.
Maybe that was it. Maybe the cancer had made Dani go searching for meaning. And maybe there was something in the message at One Word that resonated with her in a way her own church’s teachings didn’t.
“Pastor Gentry, we blew a fuse on the big amp. Can I take the van to go buy a new one?”
I turned to face the newcomer with the blown fuse. His arms were sleeved in tattooes, including a blocky X on the back of each hand, and a silver stud in the shape of a fish adorned his lower lip. And the sides of his head were shaved in a modified Mohawk.
It was the hair that gave him away. He was the boy I’d seen groping Dani at the fair.
Tucker dug in his pants pocket and produced a set of keys. He held them up, jingling them, offering them to the boy. “Here you go, Matt,” he said as the boy took them from his hand.
And there was my answer.
Kyle’s friend Matt had a girlfriend all right. But her identity was a secret no longer. Dani’s fervent devotion to the One Word Bible Church had less to do with love of God and more to do with love of her straight-edge beau . . . who wasn’t even faithful to her.
chapter 23
F
inn and I regrouped at the A-la-mode. “I feel like we’re spinning our wheels,” I said.
“Not true. We’re crossing off suspects. That’s helpful.” He held up his right hand and began ticking off items on his fingers. “It probably wasn’t Neck. And it probably wasn’t Maddie. And it probably wasn’t Tucker.”
I still had my doubts about Maddie, but I decided to let that slide for the moment.
“Who’s left?”
“I don’t know.” He took a sip of his soda. Diet. He’d put on a few pounds once we started dating. Apparently, between his own fabulous baking skills and my ice cream, he was finding it more and more difficult to keep his girlish figure.
“The one piece of information we’re still missing, which I really, really wish we had, is that ethics question. We know it’s out there, but all our attempts to guess what it might be about have failed to play.”
“Hmm. Maybe she knew that Sonny was a fraud and wanted to go to the authorities. If Sonny knew his own lawyer was going to rat him out, maybe he killed her to protect his con.”
Finn’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe. But as much as I’d like to have some reason to pin this on Sonny, all we can do is speculate until we get our hands on that letter to the ethics board.”
I nodded and sipped my own diet soda. “I could try Jason again. I feel bad. Poor kid is trying to do the right thing, you know.”
Finn shook his head. “I think you’re better off hitting up Maddie again. She may be turning over a new ethical leaf, but we have a bit of leverage against her. And she seemed sincere about wanting to know who killed Kristen.”
“Oy,” I moaned.
“Here, let me try.” He fished his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed.
“Hey, Maddie. Finn Harper.” A lopsided grin spread across his face. He covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Maddie can cuss a blue streak,” he said to me.
“Listen, we don’t want to jam you up. Honest. I think we ought to swing by your office again and give you back that envelope so you can return it to your associate.”
He paused, listening.
“You’re a smart woman. But we wouldn’t be so crass as to resort to extortion. However, if a certain letter to an ethics board happened to be on the receptionist desk, it would let us know where we ought to file the envelope. Make sense?”
He flipped the phone closed, and held out his hand for the infamous envelope.
“Finn, I don’t know about this. I mean, I want to get my hands on that ethics letter, too, but what Maddie’s been doing is really bad. Selling out her clients to protect a bunch of drug dealers? I don’t think I can help her cover that up.”
“Oh, never fear,” he said. “The envelope you got from Neck helped us figure out what Maddie was up to, but it’s not really evidence of anything. She may feel more secure having it back in her hands, but I guarantee she won’t be so pleased with me when she reads the article I’m planning to write.”
“Yeah?”
He laughed. “Even if I didn’t share your moral concerns with her behavior, I couldn’t let an opportunity for a juicy story pass me by. I took notes at the courthouse, have a long list of clients of Maddie Jackson who are serving the max for their petty possession charges. I’m guessing that some of those guys who are cooling their heels in jail will be happy to talk to me about the advice Maddie gave them and how they chose her as their lawyer, especially once I tell them what she’s been doing.”
“You’re my hero,” I teased.
His smile faltered, and suddenly the moment felt serious. He looked at me hard, as if he were trying to figure out a puzzle he saw in my eyes. Then he cleared his throat, and his smile returned . . . a bit forced.
“All I need is a cape. You sit tight, and I’ll take care of this. Be right back.”
After he left, I went back behind the counter and tidied up. I usually kept the place spotless, terrified of an impromptu health inspection. But that afternoon, the counter was littered with dirty scoops and drips of ice cream. What with splitting our crew between the store and the fair, me being busy investigating a murder, and Bree busy getting arrested, we’d been stretched a little thin.