Gnosis (35 page)

“Eli is fortunate to have you in his corner. You and Rachel.”

 “What about you? Aren’t you in his corner?”

“I’ve seen the evidence against Eli, Detective Dantzler, and it is overwhelming. I can only believe what I see.”

“You believe in God, but you can’t see him.” Dantzler stood. “We believe what we want to believe, Brother Isaac. For whatever reason, you don’t want to believe Eli is innocent.”

Isaac remained silent as Dantzler left the church.

Working a closed case was like performing open-heart surgery on a corpse: no matter how many faulty arteries you replaced, the patient didn’t get any better.

Right now, Dantzler’s patient, the Eli Whitehouse case, was barely on life support.

In a career that spanned more than twenty years, he had never worked a case this frustrating or this perplexing. Most cases had doors he could open, paths he could follow, evidence he could pursue. Not this one. This case offered nothing. There was nowhere to go, no new direction to turn, no fresh ideas. Dantzler felt like a painter who was staring at a blank canvas without a single brush to work with.

“That’s some look you have on your face, Jack,” Laurie said, stepping into the War Room. “You look like a man pondering the mystery of the universe.”

“That might be an easier mystery to solve than this one,” Dantzler said. He was sitting at the table drinking a Diet Pepsi. “Remind me again why I was dumb enough to take on a closed case.”

“Because you are convinced an innocent man is behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, and that’s a situation you cannot tolerate. A very noble undertaking on your part, regardless of how this case turns out.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, let me clue you in on something. For all my efforts, all of
our
efforts, we haven’t changed a damn thing. The evidence as it now stands points directly at Eli Whitehouse as the shooter of those two kids in ’eighty-two. And we aren’t even close to catching the person who killed Rogers and Fraley. All this work and we’ve accomplished nothing. We’re still standing on square one, stuck in neutral.”

“I know.”

“And what makes it especially frustrating is Eli could end it all by simply giving us a name. Two words from him and we have the shooter of four people. Three cases solved. And Eli could walk out of prison a free man. But he won’t. The one person we’re all trying to help refuses to help himself. Thinking about it makes me want to walk away.”

“It’ll never happen.”

Dantzler shook his head. “No, I can’t walk away, not as long as I remain convinced Eli’s case is connected to the Rogers and Fraley murders. Four people are dead—their families deserve answers.”

“Tell me, Jack. Have you seriously considered the possibility Eli did kill those two boys in ’eighty-two? That he is guilty? You’ve even admitted that nothing about the evidence has changed or been disproved. Maybe there is no new evidence. Maybe the verdict was the correct one.” Laurie sat across from Dantzler. “That would, of course, mean there are two shooters. It would also mean that by focusing all our attention on Eli’s case, we’ve placed too much emphasis and aimed too many resources in the wrong direction. By doing so, we’ve given the Rogers/Fraley killer a big advantage.”

“There is only one shooter.”

“Okay, so who are the suspects?” Laurie asked. “If you’ve ruled out Kevin Stone, who’s next on your list?”

“I have no answer,” Dantzler admitted. “And at this point, I have nowhere to turn.”

“Eli is your salvation.”

“I thought I was supposed to be his.”

“Why not approach him one more time? See what he’ll do?”

“Won’t work.”

“Can’t hurt to give it one more shot. Who knows? He might have a change of heart.”

“Waste of time. Eli is not giving us the name.”

“So . . . what will you do?”

“What I’ve always done.” Dantzler stood and picked up the stack of files from the table. “Go back over the case—all three cases—and study them again from top to bottom. Keep my fingers crossed that something new or enlightening jumps out. At this stage of the game, it’s the only thing I can do. The only thing I know how to do.”

*****

Dantzler went home, arriving seconds ahead of a soft, gentle spring shower as pleasant as it was unexpected. An hour later, the rain had passed, the night air was warm and sticky, and he was standing on his deck, drink in hand, looking out at the lake, feeling one of those funky moods beginning to sneak up on him like an invisible assassin closing in from behind.

He sipped his Pernod and thought about the case. More specifically, he thought about Isaac Whitehouse, the one name that kept popping up on his detective’s radar. Of all the players in this drama, Eli’s eldest child was the most mysterious and the most bewildering. His actions, his beliefs, seemed so unnatural, so unlike those of a normal child. So unlike those of his siblings.

Rachel was convinced of Eli’s innocence, and Tommy, despite his personal problems, indicated he also felt Eli had been wrongly convicted. Not so with Isaac, who, during his two meetings with Dantzler, showed not an inkling of love or affection for Eli, only a grudging respect for the old man’s preaching ability. He refused to believe Eli might be innocent, and even more troubling, he displayed an almost total indifference to the possibility his father could leave the prison and die a free man.

It was almost as if Isaac wanted his father to remain locked behind those steel prison bars until his last dying breath.

Not even the biblical Isaac held such a harsh opinion of his father Abraham.

Dantzler tried to dismiss Isaac Whitehouse as a suspect in the murder of those two boys in 1982, but he couldn’t. His instincts wouldn’t allow it. Did he see Isaac as the shooter? No. Dantzler quickly ruled out that possibility. But ruling Isaac out as somehow being involved in the crime wasn’t so easy to do. As Dantzler saw it, there were several critical factors preventing a quick dismissal of Isaac as a suspect.

To begin with, Isaac knew the combination to the safe, which gave him access to the .22. He could easily have gotten the gun and given it to the shooter, having made sure Eli’s prints were on it. Given Isaac’s apparent apathy toward his father, such action, although unlikely, was not beyond the realm of possibility.

Also, Isaac was only a couple years younger than the two victims, and although he denied knowing them, it didn’t mean he was telling the truth. They may have been friends, or at the very least, acquaintances. If so, and if a link could be established, it enhanced the likelihood that Isaac was somehow involved. If nothing else, it would prove him to be a liar.

And having been involved in the crime, Isaac could be counted on to remain silent all these years.

But why would Isaac help perpetrate such a crime? Did he really hate Eli enough to watch him sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Was Isaac that bitter, that cruel and uncaring? And if Isaac was involved, who was he covering for? Who was he protecting? Who was the shooter?

So many unanswered questions, so many dots yet to be connected.

Dantzler went into the kitchen and made another drink. Sitting at the table, his thoughts kept coming back to the two meetings with Isaac. During those talks, Isaac demonstrated no love for his father, but neither had he displayed any outward or overt signs of hate. Or at least, none Dantzler could detect. More than anything, Isaac seemed indifferent, almost strangely removed from his father’s plight. It was as though he simply didn’t care what happened.

But was Isaac Whitehouse an accessory to a double murder? Was he so hate-filled, so heartless, that he was willing to ruin his own father’s life? Could any son feel so much animosity toward his father?

Dantzler cringed at the thought. Hating a parent was unnatural, and harboring enough hatred to help send a parent to prison was even more unnatural. But . . . if twenty-five years as a detective had taught him anything, it was this: human behavior is the ultimate mystery.

At a little past eleven p.m., a second thunderstorm, this one accompanied by heavy winds, drove Dantzler off the deck and into the house. Once inside, he mixed another drink, settled into the recliner in the den, and began surfing the tube for something worthwhile to watch. His first stop was The Charlie Rose Show, the most intelligent and enlightening of the interview programs, and one that rarely failed him. However, that wasn’t the case on this night. Tonight, Charlie was talking to the director and two actors from a new movie based on a graphics novel. Dantzler had no interested in that. Things didn’t improve with a switch to usually reliable CNN, or to any of the other cable networks, where, for the most part, there was a lot of screaming and finger pointing between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans. 

So much for intellectual and civil debate.

In the end, Turner Classic Movies came to the rescue, as it often did at this late hour. After giving the remote a solid workout, Dantzler landed on
White Heat
, the classic black and white gangster flick starring the great Jimmy Cagney as Cody Jarrett, the psychopathic criminal with the mother fixation who yells “made it, Ma—top of the world!” just seconds before he’s blown to smithereens in spectacular cinematic fashion. It was one of Dantzler’s all-time favorite movies, and certainly his favorite Cagney performance.

Dantzler was enough of a movie buff to know every serious actor from Brando on down idolized Cagney. The legendary director Stanley Kubrick rated Cagney as one of the five greatest movie actors of all-time, and with good reason. Cagney never let you down. Energy and truth were at the heart of Cagney’s acting. No matter the situation, or how lame the dialogue, he was always believable. For Dantzler, ten minutes of the marvelous Cagney was preferable to the endless, numbing hours of barking, biting, and screaming constantly found on the major cable networks. It wasn’t even a close contest.

After Cagney went up in flames, Dantzler turned off the TV and relocated to the kitchen. For the next half-hour he waded through a stack of unopened and long-neglected mail, separating the important (bills, bank statement) he had to address from the unimportant (credit card offers, various coupons, the Watchtower), which accounted for the ninety-five percent he could deep-six without bothering to open.

With the mail taken care of, Dantzler thought about finding another movie to watch. But the chances of running across a worthy follow-up to Cagney were slim to none. Instead, he decided to take another look at the obituary information Eric had gathered. It was tedious grunt work, and his previous studies had yielded nothing helpful, but he felt compelled to pore over the information one more time. Or ten more times, if necessary. After all, according to Eli, this stack of clippings was where the answer to the mystery could be found.

All Dantzler had to do was find it.

Two hours later, having gone through every obit notice in the three folders, he was still batting a solid zero. There was simply nothing linking anyone mentioned in any of the obits to the Eli Whitehouse case. If, indeed, Eli’s secret was hidden within these pages, it was beyond Dantzler’s grasp.

When Dantzler set the three folders aside, he noticed a fourth folder, one not nearly as thick as the others, lying on the table. At first he was puzzled; the folder seemed to appear almost out of nowhere. Then it dawned on him what he was looking at. The folder with the female obituaries he had asked Eric to check out. Staring at it, he realized he had never studied its contents.

Could it possibly be?

Dantzler opened the folder and took out the stack of newspaper clippings, photographs, and notes Eric had written. Slowly and methodically he began reading the obits, which had been arranged alphabetically by Eric, beginning with Adcock, Shirley.