The kid crossed the line. Screw the bonding. Jane took her gloves off. “Yeah, paint your hair purple and call it a
revolution
. Why don’t you drop the wannabe rebel bullshit. You like to call yourself a Jew because you love to watch your preacher daddy cringe every time you toss out some Yiddish.”
“Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. It’s a high order of thought and belief.”
“Is that what the website said where you bought the red string for fifteen bucks plus shipping?” Jane asked, pointing to Mollie’s bracelet.
“
Kish mir en toches
!” Mollie took a hard drag on her catnip joint.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Kiss my ass!”
“Wow, that’s a
high-order
attitude.”
Mollie moved closer to Jane. “And you’re being a
nudje
because I got a little too close to the
truth
with you about suicide.
And
you’re jonesin’ for a cigarette.”
Jane regarded the kid in a different light. “
Truth
, eh? You like to seek the
truth
?”
“You got it!”
“Did you buy Jake his
Truth
poster?”
Mollie pulled back. Jane could tell the kid was surprised that she’d been in Jake’s bedroom. “No,” she said softly. “That was all him.”
Jane was starting to see a puzzle piece fit into place. “Ah, Jake was the one who inspired
you
to seek out the truth.”
Mollie’s face turned sad. Her eyes drifted to the dirt. “Yes.”
Jane leaned down to be on eye level with her. “In a town where secrets rule?”
Mollie looked at Jane. “Yes.” There was a steady burn to the kid’s dark eyes.
“What’s your secret, Mollie?”
There was a tense moment between them. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
Jane peered closer at Mollie’s face. “Is it the eyebrow piercing you’re hiding?” Mollie drew her hand to her left eye, brushing her finger against her eyebrow. “That would piss off your good Christian parents, right? Did you just wear the hoop when you were with Jake and take it out before you got back home?” Mollie suddenly looked very meek. “You know, I can’t remember. Does the tattoo come before or after the eyebrow piercing?”
Mollie furrowed her brow. “What the fuck? How’d you…?”
“It’s called being
predictable
.”
The girl stood back. “It comes
before
the eyebrow piercing.”
Jane stood up. “A rose on your ass?”
“That’s where your
predictable
stops. No rose on my
toches
.” Mollie unzipped her jeans and revealed a half-inch blue dragonfly tattoo just below her belly button. “We got them done together. Jake’s got the same tat, but it’s bigger and it’s on his chest, right over his heart.”
Jane remembered the hand drawing of a dragonfly on the bridge. “Did you sketch that dragonfly image on the bridge?”
Her eyes saddened. “Yes.”
“
Illusions die hard.
That’s what you wrote underneath.” Jane realized the initials,
L.G.
stood for Liora Green. “What did you mean by that?”
“It was one of the last things Jake said to me before he left.”
“You said Jake has the same tattoo over his heart. Why over his heart?”
She zipped up her jeans. “That’s Jake.”
“That’s Jake?”
Mollie looked off to the side and let out a long breath of air. “It’s hard to explain. Over the last year and a half, something shifted inside him. He wasn’t satisfied to live on the surface. He
wanted to dig deeper into his life. He wanted to seek the answers that would explain all the shit he was feeling inside but couldn’t communicate.” She looked at Jane. “That’s why he was my
bubbee
. He was
real
, you know? I wanted to be part of that because I have questions too. I have thoughts that come from deep inside my cells and I can’t explain any of them…”
“Like calling yourself Liora and the Jewish
shtick
?”
Mollie rolled her eyes. “It’s not
shtick
! I swear to
Hashem
, its not.” The kid almost sounded desperate. “Jake understood,” she said softly. “He just couldn’t…”
“Couldn’t what?”
“Couldn’t be there for me. He had too many
tsuris
. His head was trying to sort through too much chaos. He went through bouts of depression.”
“Is that why he liked to dress all in black?”
“Yeah. He said he was in mourning.”
“For who?”
“He didn’t know. He just knew he was in mourning.” Jane was perplexed by that statement but let it go. “He wanted answers. But the more he sought out the truth, the more the nightmares surrounded him.”
“What truth?”
“He tried to explain it to me, but he said I wouldn’t understand. He said it was complicated. I told him I was no
shlub
… that I could grasp a lot of concepts. But he wouldn’t bite.”
Jane’s head was spinning. A cigarette would have tasted damn good at this moment. It would slow down the whirring sound she kept hearing—the sound of too many ideas banging into each other. She grabbed the first one that flew to the surface. “The dragonfly tattoo? What does that signify?”
“The way Jake told me, dragonflies remind you that you can be the light in the darkness. But before you can do that, you have to bust through the illusions that surround you. Then, and only then, can you let your
true
light shine and know who you really are.”
Jane was dumbfounded.
Little Juice Box
Jake sounded like an esoteric philosopher. But the kid must have busted through one illusion too many for him to end up on the bridge with a rope around his neck.
Illusions die hard
suddenly took on a whole new meaning. “Light in the darkness,” Jane said aloud. “Your mom told me Liora means
my light
and
I see
. Is that why you chose the name?”
“No. The name just came to me before I got the tat. I swear I didn’t know that’s what it meant.” Mollie thought for a second. “It’s creepy, huh?” She shook her head. “I never liked the name Mollie, but
Liora
…it felt right…like I was finally home.”
As if oddly on cue, Sara called out to the girl. “Liora!”
“I gotta go back inside,” Mollie muttered, extinguishing the catnip doobie in the dirt. “She’s had such
shpilkes
since Jake went missing.”
“Hey,” Jane lightly touched Mollie’s arm. “There was a retractable rope outside on Jake’s deck.”
“Yeah. So?”
“When he ditched his folks and went down the rope, was he coming to see you?”
“Maybe.” She started to move but Jane held her back.
“What does that mean?”
“Jake liked to wander around at night. Sometimes he’d sneak over here and sometimes he wouldn’t. He liked the nighttime because he said he could hear his thoughts better. That’s why he worked the late shift at The Rabbit Hole. It’s a sports bar down the street. You wanna learn more about Jake, go talk to his boss, Hank Ross.”
After securing the clothesline upstairs in her room, Jane grabbed her leather satchel, sans laptop, told Weyler she was going to check out the town and left the B&B. It was coming up on 3:30 pm when she rolled to a halt in front of The Rabbit Hole sports bar on Main Street. A large handwritten sign in the front window announced that the place would re-open at 5:00
pm. Jane contemplated returning to the B&B, but her anxious foot tapped the accelerator and continued down Main Street. She meandered up and down the side streets trying to soak in the heartbeat of Midas. But watching the people move about on the street was like observing a carefully choreographed ballet of faces that projected a vacant front that belied the stark reality of what was too dangerous to reveal. This town where secrets collided—where all things hidden came to be buried—was going to be a tough nut to crack. She could almost feel the ghosts roaming the streets, hoping to remain as obscured as the ones who had a pulse.
Jane dropped back down onto Main Street as the sky darkened, filtering the weak sunlight through a bank of black clouds. The weather shift made the shadows on the pavement even more ominous. Jane turned at the end of the main drag and headed toward the bridge. It was beginning to feel like a portentous location to her. Bo may have said that it was an old, unused bridge but Jane knew differently. She was almost certain that Jake spent a great deal of time there, perhaps making it his nighttime destination after he got off work. Maybe it took a certain amount of sensitivity, but it seemed patently obvious to Jane that that little slice of real estate held a wealth of emotions and possibly a lot of secrets.
Driving closer to the bridge, the smell of smoke seeped into the Mustang. Jane rolled down her window and sourced the aroma coming from outside. She passed the bridge and kept driving slowly, paralleling Jordan Copeland’s ten-acre expanse of property on the left that sat on the other side of the rushing river. Brackets of bushes and evergreens made it difficult to see the area clearly but after about three hundred feet, Jane could easily see a coal black cylinder of smoke lifting into the darkening sky. She turned the Mustang around and headed back to the bridge, parking her car in front of the rickety structure. Getting out of the car, she pulled her leather jacket tighter across her chest, steeling herself against the growing cold that swept
around the bridge. On the other side of the bridge, Jane found a rough pathway in the shade, still covered with pads of snow. She followed the path down a gentle slope where a thicket of evergreens and leafless gambel oaks crowded around her. The smell of smoke grew as she moved closer to a barbed wire fence that laced around Jordan’s property. Above her, the clouds joined together, stealing the sun and leaving a swath of gray and ashen gloom across the ground. What in the hell was Jordan burning? The smell was acrid and sickly sweet, like when hair singes. The fact that Jane knew what a dead body smelled like when it burned only intensified her resolve into finding out what he was doing. Yes, this was not aboveboard or a by-the-book endeavor and she knew that if Weyler was with her, there’s no way he’d authorize it. But Jane reasoned that Weyler told her he brought her along because she “thought outside the box.” Her murky plan certainly fit that criterion.
Jane found a large rock and laid it on the bottom rung of the barbed wire, providing a somewhat larger opening for her to crawl through. She’d almost made it under the fence safely when her brown hair hooked on a barb in the line above her head. It was just enough to throw her off balance and send her forward into the damp dirt. “Fuck!” she exclaimed, as the butt of the Glock bit into her ribs. Peeling her body off the ground, she brushed the palms of her hands against her jeans and canvassed the area. She took about ten steps and nearly tripped on a metal rod that poked six inches out of the dirt. It was painted bright red and seemed to have no reason for being there.
The plume of smoke blew toward her, laying a soft cloudy pillow across the dead leaves. Her cowboy boots sucked into the wet earth as Jane crisscrossed the terrain, holding back now and again behind a spruce trunk to make sure she was hidden from Jordan’s view. The smoke seemed to seek her out in the woods, winding its hazy fingers around her muddy boots and exploring every crevice of her body. Jane heard a distinct crackle close by. She ducked behind a tree and carefully surveyed the landscape
in front of her. Beyond the coppice, there was a small clearing with a four-foot-wide circular stone fire pit. The fire roared, sending amber tentacles into the air and created an optical illusion of waves in midair. Jane cautiously scanned the forest for Jordan but saw nothing. The fire actually felt good against her chilled frame. It lulled her senses momentarily, but then the realization that a body might be baking in the coals brought her back to life.
Satisfied that Jordan was not around, Jane pushed through the sharp, unyielding branches and into the clearing. The fire licked without prejudice from one side of the stones to the other. Jane’s face burned hotter as she inched her way closer to the pit in an attempt to decipher what had been thrown into the inferno. She raised her jacket to shield her face from the heat and took another step closer. The fire popped loudly as she heard his gravelly voice.
“Looking for his dead body?”
CHAPTER 11
Jane spun on her heels, instinctively reaching for her Glock.
Jordan Copeland stood ten feet away right in one of her fresh footprints. Had he been right behind her the entire time, stalking her as she stealthily moved on his property? There was a second of indignity on Jane’s part followed by a realization that she was, in fact, trespassing and holding no warrant. Now with only ten feet between them, Jane could take in the towering beast in front of her. He stared at her with those penetrating, hypnotic steel-blue eyes, set under his elongated forehead. Flecks of debris nested in his grey beard and mustache, and continued through the wet, salt-and-pepper tangles of unruly curls that draped heavily across his shoulders and midway down the
back of his oilcloth olive green duster. His enormous hands—gnarled, dark and thick with hard calluses—were balled into ready fists, waiting for an excuse to pound.
Jane stood her ground, fingers still inside her jacket touching her Glock. She’d stood up to a few monsters in her life and there was no way she was going to be intimidated by this one. She just hoped Jordan couldn’t hear her heart nearly beating out of her chest.
“Go on,” he said, his voice raspy and low. “Check the fire. See if he’s in there. Maybe I didn’t tuck his foot in tight enough.”
Jane took a step back. “I’m Sergeant Detective Jane Perry from Denver.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, aren’t you official?” Jordan’s fists relaxed. “I know you’re a cop. We’ve already met. On the bridge? Right before your Negro partner came to step ’n’ fetch you?”
“Negro?”