The Prophet (5 page)

He drove with the windows down and the radio off and he prayed aloud, as was his habit when he drove in the darkness. He prayed for Rachel Bond and her family and for Colin Mears and for the police tasked with the investigation. Prayed for everyone he could think of except himself, because of all the people deserving, he was well down on the list.

Prepared for this,
he told himself, flicking a glance at the mirror.
You are unusually, terribly prepared for this. Every horror has its purpose, and this…

He prayed for his sister then, and her name rose through him and passed his lips like a strand of cold barbwire tugged from a coil within.
Marie Lynn.
How it hurt to let that go, as if by saying it aloud he was releasing her into a world that would not return
her, and he knew that but did it anyhow. Memories of the dead. You wanted them close; you needed them far.

The police station was bright, clean limestone, the sidewalk marred by scattered leaves. Kent crunched through them and went up the steps to where the Mears family waited.

Looking for a leader,
he reminded himself. It was important to know that people were watching. You carried yourself differently when you remembered that, carried yourself better. There under the bright lights when the crowd was watching, you could become a different man, the one you knew you should be. How much better would the world be if everyone operated under the lights and before the crowd, if they were not granted moments alone in the dark?

The police led him through a hall and into a room where Colin Mears and his parents sat at a small round table. Colin’s face was a winter pallor with anguished and unbelieving eyes. Kent said, “Let’s do what we have to do to help her, son. Let’s do that first.”

He meant doing
this:
the police station, the questions. He meant holding his head above the waters of grief for just a little longer. The boy understood.

“Yes, sir,” Colin Mears said. “I’m trying.”

Kent reached across the table and laid a hand on his shoulder, gave it a squeeze, and Colin’s mother, Robin, said a soft “Thank you for coming.” Kent nodded and stepped back and looked at the police officer who’d brought him in, a Lieutenant Salter.

“Anything you need from me, or my staff, I can get you immediately. Beyond my statement, and verification that he was with our team, what can we offer that will—”

“Hang on, Coach,” Salter said. “We don’t need any of that from you. We know where Colin was, and we understand that can be verified several hundred times over. What we need is a little more personal to you.”

“Personal?” Kent said, and he thought,
Here it begins, the shared experience. They will want you to tell the boy how to carry this weight, because you had to once before.

“Yes,” Salter said. “Do you have any idea how we might get in touch with your brother?”

Kent swiveled his head a quarter turn, as if he’d had his ear in the wrong place and missed the question.

“My brother.”

It wasn’t Lieutenant Salter who answered but Colin.

“He helped her, Coach. But she wasn’t… I don’t think she was honest with him.”

“Helped her,” Kent said. “My brother helped Rachel.”

He was squinting at the boy now.

“You have a number for him?” Salter asked. “We haven’t been able to reach him. Sent someone out to his house, but he’s not there.”

“Probably a little early for that.”

“It’s past midnight.”

“Yes,” Kent said, and then he looked at Colin, catching up now. “You went to him for help with her father?”

“He wrote to her that he was out of prison. She wanted to find him. She believed him. We both believed him. And so I suggested…”

His words were swept away from him then like flimsy things in a gust of wind, and Kent said, “What do you mean, you believed him?”

Salter answered for the boy.

“Rachel’s father never left prison, Coach. We don’t know much yet, but that part is clear. So whoever your brother found for her… well, it was not her father.”

“She didn’t tell me she was going alone,” Colin said, the tears spilling now. “I wouldn’t have let her do that. She promised me I could go with her. I got a message just before the game, she said
she was going to see him and would meet me at the game, but she wasn’t there. She was missing at the start and she…”

Was missing at the end. Kent didn’t need the boy to finish that sentence. He thought of the fumbled kickoff, the kid standing there alone waiting on a football to float through the air to him and trying to tell himself that it mattered. Why hadn’t he told anyone? What might have been avoided if he’d spoken?

But of course he wouldn’t have said anything. Kent’s demands on the field were consistent: total focus. Total.

“The place where… where she was located,” Salter said, choosing his words with gentle care, “is not where she was sent. This is why we need your brother. To find that place.”

Kent lifted a hand, squeezed the bridge of his nose, and told himself to focus. He could not think of the full weight of it yet, could not allow himself to consider the scope of this night, the way it was spreading away, seeping into corners he’d never imagined it would touch.

“I can give you his cell phone number,” he said. “I just can’t guarantee that he’ll answer.”

Salter took the number and left to make his call and then, for a few minutes, it was just Kent and his star receiver and the boy’s parents. Kent said, “Tell me how we got here, son.”

It started in the summer, Colin explained, and this much Kent already knew. Rachel was around their house often because she was their regular babysitter and because Kent’s wife, Beth, had taken a special interest in her. Mostly, Kent left her to Beth. The exception was in the situation with her father, who’d never been a figure in her life and was currently in prison. She was interested in Kent’s prison visits, asked about them often, from details of the cells to what he thought of the men inside. She told him that she wanted to see her father again. It had been nearly ten
years since their last encounter, when he stopped by to drop off a birthday card days after her seventh birthday, a crumpled ten-dollar bill inside, and Rachel’s mother, a woman named Penny Gootee, chased him off. Kent’s advice was to start with a letter. He warned her not to expect an answer.

She’d received one.

Short, curt, and to the point. Jason Bond was sorry they did not have a relationship. He appreciated her taking the time to write. He hoped her mother was well. Things for him were as good as could be expected. She was to stay in school, take care of herself, and make better decisions than he had.

Kent remembered this letter. He also remembered that the four Rachel sent back went unanswered. He’d tried to counsel her through that, tried to remind her that she represented guilt to the man, and that you could not rush a relationship along, could not force one into existence.

He was unaware of other letters. He hadn’t pressed after learning that those beyond the initial attempt had been ignored. Then the season began, and while he was focusing on football, she was focusing on her father. Letters had been exchanged regularly, according to Colin, who had seen most of what Rachel’s father had to say: apologies, always couched in the warning that he did not want to fail her again and perhaps they should not be in contact. There was talk of guilt, talk of almost everything Kent had explained to her earlier in the summer.

There was also talk of a pending release.

By September the letters were more frequent, and more detailed. Jason Bond said he was back in Chambers, close enough to tantalize the daughter who wanted to meet with him. But he would not be rushed. He urged her to understand that one-way communication was best, urged her not to discuss the situation with her mother because that was another relationship that he was not ready to handle just yet, if ever.

Not a bad ploy, because Rachel Bond’s relationship with her mother was hardly a strong one. Penny Gootee was an alcoholic, given to struggles with depression and greater struggles with maintaining employment. Her only words for Rachel’s father were soaked in bitterness. If there was one person to whom Rachel was unlikely to rush for guidance, it was her mother.

So she rushed to her boyfriend, to Colin. He had an idea. If she wanted to find a way to return her father’s letters, she would have to locate him. And Coach Austin? He had a brother who was a detective.

H
ASLEM’S HAD A
single TV mounted in the corner above the bar, an ancient, heavy thing in an age of sleek flat screens. Nobody ever complained, because what people came there to watch wasn’t on television but cavorting across the stage and swinging around a stainless steel pole.

Adam Austin watched it for ten minutes, though. At 11:20 he asked the bartender, Davey, to tune it over to Cleveland’s ABC affiliate.

“Volume?” Davey asked.

“No.”

It was the sports segment of the local news, and all Adam wanted to see were the scores ticking by at the bottom of the screen. He wanted to know who was coming at his brother’s team from the other side of the bracket. The only team in the state that posed a real risk was probably Saint Anthony’s, a program that had dominated Kent’s squad consistently. They’d won, of course. By forty points. A confident thrashing. Chambers, on the other hand, had advanced with a win that felt more like a sigh of relief.

“Too close, Franchise,” Adam muttered as he thought about it, using a nickname that only one other person in the world had ever called his younger brother. “Way too close.”

Kent had probably spent the past week preaching them up instead of teaching them to hit. That was his way. But they’d gotten the job done, they were 11–0, and the state title was no longer a dream for this town, it was an expectation. How his brother would handle that remained to be seen. Perhaps some of the Psalms would be forfeited in favor of the lessons of Lombardi, and the teachings of Paul would come to mean one man and one man only: Paul Brown.

Behind Adam there were three girls working the stage and maybe two dozen rednecks shoving bills at them. Every now and then somebody who’d just sold a used jet ski or some such bullshit would get giddy over his fortune and flash a twenty, but mostly these girls were dancing for dollars quite literally. Adam kept his back to them. He was waiting for the appearance of one Jerry Norris, who hadn’t deemed Thursday’s court appearance worth his time. Jerry hadn’t shown yet, which suggested one of two things: he was too wasted to make it to the titty bar, or he had been tipped off to Adam’s presence by a friend.

Adam meant to leave at midnight, but Davey poured him a shot of Jim Beam on the house, and it was sacrilege to pass on free whiskey. By the time it was gone, he felt a little less tired and a Drive-By Truckers song was playing on the computerized bastard imposter of a jukebox and he thought he might as well have one more last beer.

He’d had three last beers before the phone call came. He felt no surprise; the calls that came for him often came at this time of night. It was late and he was tired, but this would be money calling, and when money called, it didn’t matter if it was late and you were tired. Hell, in his business, money rarely called at other
hours. When it turned out to be Stan Salter, he was surprised but not stunned. He dealt with police too often for that.

“Which one of my favorites has done what?” he asked.

“It’s not that kind of situation,” Salter said. “We’re going to need to talk to you in person, Adam. You good to drive in, or should I send someone out to get you?”

“The hell you talking about?”

“Homicide,” Salter said. “When I say I need to talk to you, I mean
now.
”

This wouldn’t be the first time one of Adam’s charges had killed somebody—it would, in fact, be the third—but it was never a pleasant experience.

“Who did it?” he asked.

“Adam, it’s not that kind of case. We need to talk to you about the victim. I’ve been told you spoke with her recently.”

“Name?”

“I said we’re going to need to speak in person.”

“And we will. I can still hear the damn name.”

There was a hesitation, and then Salter said, “Rachel Bond.”

“Don’t know her,” Adam said. He wouldn’t have forgotten posting bond for someone named Bond. That shit would stick with you.

“We’re hearing otherwise.”

Rachel,
he thought.
Rachel. Was that the woman who came in all bruised up, asking to get her husband out?

“Blond chick, ’bout thirty?” he said. “Husband’s name is Roger?”

“No,” Salter said. “Brunette, and she wasn’t about thirty. She was exactly seventeen. Came to you to ask for help finding her father.”

“That’s not right. No. That girl… her name was April. She was a college student.”

But he was remembering the way he’d looked at her and thought that he was getting old fast, because college girls were beginning to look impossibly young.

“That may be what she said,” Salter told him, “but that’s not what she was. And she’s dead now, Adam, and we need to talk about it. We need to talk
tonight.
I’ll ask you again—can you make the drive or do I need to send someone?”

“I can make the drive,” Adam said, thinking that she’d brought the letters in one of those plastic-covered folders that students carried. Not college students. And the nail polish. Red with silver sparkles. She’d painted her nails for the Cardinals.

“Then get down here. I’ll be waiting on you.”

Salter hung up, and Adam set the phone onto the bar and stared into the mirror in front of him. With all those rows of bottles, all he could make out of the reflection were his eyes and receding hairline.

“Fuck me,” he whispered.

He didn’t remember the address, to the great frustration of the men in the room with too-bright lighting and the smell of new plastic, a digital recorder running on the table.

“It was out in the country,” he said. “On a lake. It was… Shadow Lane. No, Shadow Wood Lane. I don’t remember the number.”