Authors: Jonathon King
“Detective Richards, please,” he said when I answered.
“Sheriff Wilson, this is Max Freeman,” I said. I gave him a couple of empty seconds, figuring if he didn’t hang up right away, I might have a chance to hold him.
“I’m sorry to have deceived you, sir, but I really need to speak with you on a matter that I think may be of concern to you.”
“Must be important, Mr. Freeman, for you to have misrepresented yourself as a working law enforcement officer.”
“Yes, sir. I am told by sources, sir, that you have been trying to solve a number of homicides that you think are related. And my understanding is that the link you have is the use of a large-caliber rifle.”
Again the line was silent, and I could picture the man’s small eyes working beneath that furrowed brow.
“Four of them to be exact, Mr. Freeman,” he said.
“Have you determined the caliber of the weapon used, sir?”
“We think so. The sheriff at the time of the first shooting found a shell casing in the area. It’s pretty distinctive. But we haven’t been so lucky in the other three, and in two cases we weren’t even able to find bullets. The wounds were through and through and the rounds were never discovered.”
“Was the shell casing an old .405?” I said.
This time I had turned the sheriff in a direction I had not meant him to go.
“Mr. Freeman, if there is something you would like to tell me, or talk to me about, I would much rather do this in person. I could come down and meet you first thing in the morning. Maybe you would like to arrange something at the Broward Sheriff’s Office down there?”
“Well, sir, I’m headed in your direction momentarily. In fact, I can be there in a little more than two hours.”
Before letting him jump to any more conclusions, I gave him a truncated version of the Mayes case, how the great-grandson had come to us, how I had tracked down the name of John William Jefferson and then Placid City’s own Reverend Jefferson. I then told him the secret that the reverend had been keeping in his barn, and that the rifle he turned over to me was indeed a .405-caliber weapon meant to take down large animals, including people.
“You said the first shooting was fifteen years ago?” I said, working the long conversation I had with the reverend around in my head.
“Yes. Before I got here,” Wilson answered.
“You might check with the morgue and get the date of the reverend’s father’s suicide. He told me it was fifteen years ago. I’d be interested in seeing how close the days match.”
There was silence on the line.
“I think the great-grandson, Mark Mayes, is coming to visit the reverend. I’m not sure I’d trust the pastor’s reaction,” I said.
It was this bare accusation that pushed the old sheriff over the edge.
“Freeman, you got some set of brass ones on you, fella,” he said, his tone, even over the cell phone, turning icy. “The reverend Jefferson has been a blessed and solid citizen in these parts for more than a decade. Why, that man even presided over my own daughter’s wedding.
“Son, I have checked out your record, and according to my own damn sources, you might have gone off the deep end yourself up north in Philadelphia when you shot a young boy in the back. Then I understand that you came down here to Florida and got yourself twisted up with a child abductor and ended up killing him, and that some innocent park ranger went down at the same time. Then not too long ago you were apparently found beating a suspect nearly to death, and another cop was forced to shoot and kill another suspect before that one was over.
“You’ve got a bloodlust or something, Freeman, and I’m not sure I even want you in my jurisdiction unless I’ve got you up here as a suspect.”
I had not had my recent past raked into a pile with such an efficient stroke before. And Wilson didn’t even know about my most recent wounding of PalmCo’s hired man, nor could he have been aware of my subway encounter with an evil that I obviously held in my memory. The list made me wonder if I truly knew the man reflected in Richards’s kitchen window as I looked out on the light of the pool.
“Do you have a fingerprint on the shell casing found in the first shooting?” I asked him.
He waited to answer.
“Damn right I do.”
“Do you have a sample of the reverend’s prints?”
Again he waited a couple of beats.
“No. He has no criminal record that I know of.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” I said, then added, “I’ll be in town as soon as I can get there, Sheriff.”
When I punched off the cell, Richards had her head down, staring at the large stone tile on her kitchen floor.
“I’ve got to go,” I said.
I
drove the first half of the trip at seventy-five miles-an-hour. After Billy called me on the cell phone, I did the rest at eighty-five. He had been unable to find Mayes. He was not answering the cell number Billy had for him. His room at the small mom-and-pop motel he had been staying in was empty. The manager said he’d last seen Mayes’s small, two-door sedan sometime this morning. He had said something about going to church.
“I called Professor Martin up in Atlanta, and he talked to Mayes yesterday,” Billy said. “He said he told him about your discovery of the burial site and the watch. He said Mayes seemed resigned to the truth and glad that it was finally over, that he had some answers.”
“Did he tell Martin about Jefferson—the reverend, the religious connection?”
“Martin said he told him he thought he’d made up his mind about the seminary and would pray on it at church today, and that was it.”
“What church?”
I could tell Billy was putting it together faster than I was. There was an anxiety in his voice, and the sound of it was ratcheting up my own nerves.
“I did get in touch with Lott,” Billy said with an even tighter tone. “I got him out of a late-night place where he was moderately intoxicated, but with the right promise of a bonus remuneration, I convinced him to open the lab.
“He took a look at the rifle and said that there were several patterns of rusting going on in the barrel. One layer was very old from the samplings he took, but it had been disturbed at least a couple of times since forming. New rust had apparently started, and it too was marred. His quick conclusion was that it had been fired and then stored away for a long period of time and then fired again. He’ll have to do more extensive analysis to give any kind of timeline, though.”
The reverend could have used his grandfather’s gun four times or even more. He would not have had to clean and oil it. Without any particular fondness for its past or maybe because of that past, it could have been a simple tool to him.
Billy had also done some computer searching.
“I found archived newspaper accounts of four homicides in and around Highlands County that were the result of gunshot wounds that fit your sheriff’s timeline. The victims in each case were not exactly upstanding members of the community,” Billy said.
All four were convicted felons. A rapist. A child abuser. A domestic batterer. And a man with more convictions than the paper had space to go into. His last crime was beating and choking a woman because he wanted her red sports car.
“He was awaiting trial when he was shot in Sebring, only a few miles up the road from Placid City,” Billy said.
“So the reverend is a man on a mission to rid the world of evil?” I said.
“Maybe. But Mayes isn’t evil. He wouldn’t be a target.”
“That’s your opinion, Billy—the opinion of a rational man,” I said.
I swung north from the bottom of Lake Okeechobee and my headlights found the sign that read
OUR SOIL IS OUR FUTURE
. I pressed harder on the accelerator.
When I got to Placid City the eastern sky was showing the soft gray glow of dawn, but it was still early, even for the rural farm folk. I passed Mel’s and could see that there was a light on deep in the building somewhere. Maybe it was for security. Maybe an early cook was dicing up breakfast ingredients. If Sheriff Wilson was somewhere awaiting my arrival, I saw no sign of him, and I doubted that it would be his style to hide himself. I continued through town and out to the Church of God.
When I turned down the entry road, the sun’s first rays sheared over the horizon and the huge oaks caught the light in their upper branches. There was dew in the grass and it was disturbed by three sets of footprints, one going and coming back, the other leading from a van to the front steps. I remembered the van as Mrs. Jefferson’s. I got out and could tell from the moisture on the van’s hood that it had been here awhile. The windows were layered with a wet sheen, but I could see through the windshield. No one was inside. I took the precaution of rubbing a clear spot on the back window and checking the floorboards in the backseat. Nothing.
I turned to the church. The high steeple was slightly afire with the early sun and all was silent, save for the ticking of my truck engine cooling after its hours of abuse. I followed the tracks in the grass and got to the porch before realizing that the front door of the church had been left open, not enough to peer inside, but enough to show that the bud of metal on the catch mechanism was not engaged. My right hand felt empty. I had left my Glock behind.
I moved to the side of the building, looking for any other vehicles that might be parked in back. I checked the height of the windows and quickly gave up the idea of peeking inside. I went back to the front, stepped quietly across the porch boards, held my breath and eased the door open. The inside was dim but my
eyes
adjusted and I could see the shape of someone sitting in the first seat off the aisle in the front pew. The head was bowed as if praying and did not move. I swept the room as I moved down the center but noticed nothing out of place. I was halfway up the aisle when I said, “Mark?”
When she lifted and spun her head to look at me the movement scared the hell out of me. My knees flexed and my heart jumped in my chest.
“Why, Mr. Freeman. What are you doing here?”
I don’t think I exhaled until I sat down next to her. Margery Jefferson was wearing a dark shawl over her shoulders. Her
eyes
were red-rimmed and her face was pale. She maintained her quizzical look, as if she’d been expecting someone else.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Jefferson. You OK?” I finally asked, looking away.
“Yes, of course, sir.”
“Uh, is the reverend here, ma’am?”
“My husband is at home, Mr. Freeman,” she said. “Are you looking for him or for your Mr. Mayes, sir?”
It was my turn to be anxious.
“Has Mark Mayes been here?”
“He was waiting outside when I arrived,” she said, turning her face back to the altar. “We spoke for some time. He was very comforting, Mr. Freeman. He told me of the things you had found out for him, the past about his family. He reminds me very much of Mr. Jefferson when he was that age. Full of questions and wonderings.”
I stayed silent and scanned the polished wood floor, the open door to the back of the church, the pure white cloth covering the altar.
“I don’t know whether to thank you or to despise you for bringing out these truths, Mr. Freeman. I am asking the Lord to guide me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, standing up, not knowing how else to answer.
“I suspect you will find Mr. Mayes at our home,” she said. “I gave him directions.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said.
My tires spun in the wet grass when I pulled away from the church. I drove back through town and then west on the blacktop road, thinking that my speed might alert the local law. The sun was up full by the time I pulled in between the oaks in Jefferson’s front yard. When I got out I quietly closed the door. The air was still and the dust I’d raised caught up and settled around me. The reverend’s car and Mayes’s small sedan were parked side by side next to the house. The veranda was empty and the front door closed. I took a survey of the windows before moving to the side of the house. I hesitated before rounding the corner, then stepped out onto the two- track that led to the barn. In the distance the angle of the sun threw a shadow across the half-opened barn door. It was forty feet of open ground, and I felt naked without a weapon.
“Reverend?” I called out with no expectation of an answer. “Mark Mayes? It’s Max Freeman.”
The call returned nothing, and I had little choice. I walked upright and slowly toward the barn, concentrating on the shadow and any possible movement. The air held the smell of sun on grass and the odor of turned dirt. When I got to the door, I hesitated again, then scanned the back of the house, unnerved by the flash of sunlight on the panes of glass.
“Mayes?”
When I stepped into the space of the open doorway, the smell of cold dust touched my face. The windowless room was dark and I pulled on the metal handle to let in more sun. The low, waist-high swatch of light caught the shined black leather of the reverend’s shoes.
He was in his dark suit. The coat unbuttoned. The black shirt wrinkled up with the twisted position of his body. The white cleric’s collar stained on one side by dirt from the rope. He had fastened one end high at the top of the center beam that ran from ceiling to floor. The joists that formed the floor of the second story had provided the crosspiece, and it appeared as though the reverend had measured carefully so that his chest was positioned at the intersection. I had seen enough dead men to know that to cut him down would be fruitless.
“He didn’t wait for my forgiveness, Mr. Freeman.”
The words snapped my head around, and for the second time that morning my heart jumped.
Mark Mayes was sitting cross-legged on the floor behind me, exactly where the shock of the sight of a hanged clergyman had probably dropped him to his knees.
“Why would he do such a thing, Mr. Freeman. The Lord would have long ago forgiven what his grandfather had done.”
I helped Mayes to his feet and backed him out of the barn and into the sunlight.
When we got back to the front of the house, I sat him down on the steps of the porch, opened my cell phone and called O. J. Wilson. Mayes didn’t flinch when he heard me ask the dispatcher to send the sheriff to the Jefferson home.
“You know, after Mr. Manchester told me about my great-grandfather’s watch being found, it was like everything in my head just fell together,” Mayes started.
“He hadn’t run out on his family. He had been true to his beliefs. Ever since I was a kid I had this ache to believe in God, and I wondered where it had come from, how it had gotten inside me. I guess I wanted to know it was him, Cyrus Mayes.
“Then, when Mr. Manchester told me about the Jefferson in the letters and what you’d found, Mr. Freeman, I couldn’t get it out of my head. The grandson of Cyrus Mayes’s killer chose this, the ministry? How? I looked up the address of the church and drove over. I talked with his wife and asked her if I could talk with him, to maybe, I don’t know, maybe offer some kind of forgiveness.”
The silver crucifix he wore around his neck was out of his shirt. He had been handling it while he sat quietly in the barn and prayed. The glow of his innocence bothered me. Maybe I was jealous.
“Yeah, maybe you did,” I said.