Leni gasped. “Oh, God.”
“Why do you think that, Katie?” Nick asked.
“She told me. One time when she was mad at me, calling me a nerd and a goodie-two-shoes… She said she was going over to Hilltop House to give a little—” she drew up short and looked at her mother “—pussy.”
Leni quailed.
“But she didn’t go, Mom. Well, at least not that time.”
“Why not?” Nick asked.
“Ace called. She went with him instead. I think she only started in with Mr. Calloway to make Ace jealous.”
“I don’t believe this,” Leni said.
“When did this happen, Katie?” Nick asked. He sounded calm, but Erin knew better. A cold rage was building inside.
“June.” That was Leni, and everyone looked at her. Her face was blank as a stone. “Right after she moved back home. She said she wanted to go take pottery classes. It wasn’t like her. Oh, God, I should have known, I should have known…”
Nick said, “Why did you go to Hilltop House yesterday, Katie?”
“I wanted to get him in trouble. I had proof and wanted to show his wife—”
“What kind of proof?”
“A note to Becca. From Mr. Calloway.”
“You thought a man who’s accused of murder was sleeping with your sister, and instead of telling me, you went to
him
?” Leni was losing it. “Are you crazy?”
“Okay, okay,” Nick said. “Listen, Becca’s probably fine. She could be anywhere.” To Leni: “When was the last time you saw her?”
“This morning. When I left for the restaurant, I peeked in her room. She was still in bed. It was four-thirty.”
“Jack Calloway died
yesterday
morning. That means if Becca was here in bed a few hours ago, he didn’t hurt her.”
“Unless he’s not dead,” Leni said. “They haven’t found his body.”
“Mom, Becca’s always talked about running away with Ace. She probably went with him.”
Nick said, “Go check Becca’s things. See if there’s anything missing.”
Leni spun on her heel and dashed up the stairs. A minute later, she was back. “A suitcase is gone. She packed.”
“Okay,” he said. “That’s good, then. Wherever she is, she went willingly.” He turned to Katie. “What happened yesterday when you got to Hilltop?”
Katie sniffled. “I looked around, at the inn and the garage—or carriage house—or whatever they call it. Then Mrs. Calloway came out.”
“From where?”
“She was in the barn, in her workshop, I guess. She had clay on her apron.”
“What time was it when you got there?”
“About seven-thirty. I drove there from the restaurant
and left pretty soon after. I missed homeroom, but I made it in time for first period.”
“Okay,” Nick said, and Erin wondered what was going through his mind. For damn sure, he was focused on something. “You said something about a note. Where is it?”
“I stuck it—” she looked around, saw her purse sitting on a pie safe, and went to get it. Dug around in the outside pocket, getting agitated. “I had it. I had it in my hand when I saw Mrs. Calloway.”
“What did it say? Were there names in it?”
“Just Rebecca’s. It was like, ‘Rebecca, come meet me. I have something for you.’ Signed with a J.” She paused and looked at Leni. “He meant coke, Mom. Becca got it from him all the time.”
Leni dropped her head. Erin had been here before, watching a mother learn her child’s painful secrets.
She’d often wondered why her own mother hadn’t bothered hearing hers.
“So,” Nick continued with Katie, “you were going to confront Mrs. Calloway.”
Leni’s head popped up. “And you didn’t think Jack might have been there, that he might have hurt
you
? Are you cra—”
“Dr. Sims had just told me he’d disappeared, at the restaurant,” Katie shot back. “Besides, I had your gun. I’m not stupid, Mom.”
“Gun?” Nick looked astonished.
“I… Well, I took Mom’s gun from the back room of the—”
“Stop,” Nick said. His voice was so sharp, Katie jerked back. “Don’t say another word.”
Nick went still for ten seconds, then pushed from the table. He raked his hand through his hair.
“I wasn’t going to
use
it,” Katie said, “I just want—”
“I said,
stop
.” Nick held a long finger in front of her face, his expression frightening. He turned to Leni. “Come with me,” he said, and they disappeared into the next room.
Erin reached across the table and took Katie’s hand. “It’s okay. You had to tell.”
“Am I in trouble?” Katie asked.
“Not if you tell the truth.” What a crock.
“The truth is that I went to see Mr. Calloway with a gun and a couple hours later, they found out he was dead.” Not a stupid child.
“Yes, but they think it was suicide. And we don’t know what time he disappeared. Maybe it was before you went there. Sheriff Mann knows you didn’t kill him. You can trust him.” And that, Erin thought, with a fair amount of surprise, didn’t feel like a crock.
Leni came back, Nick right behind her. He crooked a finger at Erin and when she joined him, said, “A public defender for Katie will meet us at the station. Until Calloway’s body shows up without any bullet holes, we need to cover her ass. And I’m calling in a counselor to work on her, get the story straight and make sure she has whatever emotional help she needs. Leni agreed. The court-appointed guy is named Andrew Bak—”
“I’m a counselor,” Erin snapped, “and she asked to talk to me.”
He looked at her like she was nuts. “Jesus, Erin. This girl’s sister is gone and she had an affair with a man you’ve been chasing for years. You’re not exactly unbiased.”
Now she was pissed. “You think I’m
leading
Katie—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“I do this for a living. I didn’t put words in her mouth.
I didn’t
lead
Katie to suggest that Rebecca had been with Calloway.”
His eyes flared. “And do you think Dorian Reinhardt is gonna buy that? With your brother on Death Row and your history against Jack, do you think there’s any court in the country that will believe anything
you
milked from that child about Calloway?”
“I didn’t
milk
her.” Seething now. “I came over here when
she
called
me.
Then I called you.”
“Not quite,” he reminded her.
“Well, I was going to. You just showed up first.”
“Right.”
“It’s the truth.”
“
Truth.
” He laughed, a raucous sound that held no humor at all. “How did you get so naïve, Doctor, spouting about truth?” His eyes were cold. “This is going public, Erin. From here on out, it will have nothing to do with truth.”
Eloise Farmer was sixty-two years old, had her silver-blue hair set once a week at Amy’s Salon on Heritage Farms Road, and drove her late husband’s 1972 Cadillac. It got nine miles to the gallon. She was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican who tithed generously, but didn’t turn away the six-thousand dollar per year salary Ebenezer paid her to work part-time in the church office. Her tithing was a tax deduction, of course, and the salary a nice little addition to her Social Security check, which she drank, religiously, every week. Vodka, usually—she liked vodka mixed with just about any fruit juice—but sometimes she splurged and drank the fruity champagnes. And lately, she’d discovered fruit liqueurs. Pricey, but they went down nice. You didn’t need to mix them with anything.
Eloise arrived at the church on Tuesdays and Fridays at ten o’clock, and parked by the side door. This morning, Carl’s car was in the parking lot—he was an early bird; he liked to work on his sermons in the mornings before the phone started ringing and people started coming and going. She went inside, warbled her normal greeting, and unlocked the top drawer of her desk. Took out the empty bottle, replaced it with a full one.
She pushed the power button on the Xerox machine—it took a few minutes to warm up. Warbled to Carl again.
No response. Restroom, maybe. She picked up the phone and took down the messages that had come yesterday while she was in Toledo. Her uncle, bless his heart, hadn’t even known she was there. God getting ready to take him, Eloise thought, her sadness tinged with the knowledge that it was time. He was ninety-two. Rich. She would inherit.
Yes, it was time.
The phone rang the second she set down the receiver. Deputy Jensen. He was a sweet young thing, and a
deputy.
Ah, if she were thirty years younger… All right, forty.
“Just a moment, Deputy, I’ll transfer you to his office.”
The light on the phone flashed and she watched, knowing Carl might still be in the restroom. After a suitable amount of time, she picked up again. “He’s not answering right now, but his car is here. Why don’t you let me go find him and he’ll call you back? Yes, okay.”
She dropped the phone on the receiver and got up, decided to take a shot of that
good
raspberry liqueur first, smacked her lips, and walked down the hall. The church was unusually quiet, what with Carl not answering. Not that they often chatted while he was working, but when he was in the building there was a
vibration
—a hippie sort
of word, but the only thing she could think of to describe it. She’d come into the church alone only once before, to pick up the bulletin to copy at Kinko’s when their Xerox had broken down, and noticed then that she didn’t like being alone in the building. The silence, the lack of
vibration
, had given her the willies.
She passed through the annex, calling for Carl, the willies tickling the hairs on the back of her neck. She wrung her hands, peeking around corners before she stepped past. By the time she reached the front entrance, she felt like Miss Marple, more than half convinced she’d find a dead body sprawled at her feet. So convinced, in fact, that when she actually
did
find a dead body sprawled at her feet, she stopped, studied the hole in the bridge of the nose for the space of a full breath, and said, “Oh, my, that’s a mess.”
Then she passed out.
N
ICK’S PHONE RANG
before he was finished with Leni. He ignored it, trying to account for Leni’s whereabouts during the hours in question without quite accusing
her
of killing Jack. The news-makers hadn’t gotten on the murder bandwagon yet—too busy watching Rawling County officials drag the quarry—so the public, by and large, still thought he’d committed suicide. Leni was beginning to suspect something more.
“Nick, for God’s sake,” she said. “I never left the restaurant yesterday morning and there are probably fifty people who will tell you that. But let me tell you something else: I wish now I had. I wish I’d known what that bastard was doing with Rebecca, and I wish I’d gone over there and killed him with my bare hands—”
“Jesus, Leni, don’t say that,” he said, his phone ringing again. This time he picked up. It was Valeria.
“Sheriff, sheriff,” she said, and there was no accent. She wasn’t thinking about it. “Chris Jensen found Reverend Whitmore at the church. He’s dead.”
Carl Whitmore had been standing at the front door of the main entrance to Ebenezer, apparently greeting his killer. The .38 slug punched through the top of his nose and into his brain, and exited into an easel holding a poster that announced a Bible study session for Thursday night and a chili cook-off for Friday.
Nick looked at the body and rage nearly choked him. “Who found him?”
“Eloise Farmer,” Jensen said. He was pale. Shaken. “She’s in the office. That’s where she was when I got here. She was supposed to have Carl call me, and when he didn’t, I came out. I found her sitting at her desk, drinking raspberry liqueur.”
“Okay.” The forensics unit was filing in. Martin Gamble, the supervisor, swiveled his head, taking in the scene with a faint twitch of his nostrils, like a prairie dog surveying the landscape. His usual alertness turned to sadness. He was a member of Ebenezer.
“Carl told me once he wanted to find a way to get you to church, Sheriff,” he said, looking at the gray body. “Don’t think this was what he had in mind.”
Predictably, Eloise Farmer was no help. Besides the fact that she was only half-sober, she’d been in Toledo when the murder happened, early yesterday morning. As far as they could tell, with the office closed, no one but Carl had been at the church.
Except for the murderer.
Reverend, forgive me…
Nick phoned one of Eloise’s old friends to come and get her, and wandered back through the front lobby of the church. He waited, his pulse throbbing in his temples,
until Martin and his team had finished the preliminaries. “Can you match to a specific gun?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Martin said, tweezing remnants of the bullet from the wood frame of the easel. “Hollow-points don’t hold up very well going through bone, wood. This one went through both. It’s pretty messed up.”
“How close?”
“Inches. Nitrates all over his face. I’d say he just opened the door and
pop.
Probably didn’t have time to be scared.”
“Someone he knew, then.”
“A stranger wouldn’t get that close. Not unless this is some sort of freaky execution.”
Nick stayed until the crime scene guys were ready to flip the body, watched, felt his gut lurch, and saw nothing that changed his mind about what had happened. Martin announced that
rigor mortis
had already set in and was on its way out, which would make pinning the exact time of death harder.
“Early yesterday?” Nick pressed.
“Could have been.”
“Before nine?” He meant,
Before Jack’s truck went into the quarry?
And,
When Katie Engel was out running around scared with a .38?
“Could have been.”
Rebecca had wet herself; the odor of urine rose from the table.
“Not pretty,” the Angelmaker said, but it happened. In fact, it happened more often than not. It was a lengthy process, silencing an angel. On the road, in particular, finding a viable workspace for long enough to make a mask was difficult to manage. With Lauren, all those years ago, the studio van had sufficed, though it had taken
some extra sanding to get the mask suitable for an art piece. And once, in Minnesota, there had been a fishing shack handy. But in those days, there had still always been the challenge of disposing of the body, and making sure it was clean just in case it was found.