Blood of the Lamb (a John Jordan Mystery) Page 4

  All I could think about was Nicole, how I had failed to protect her, how I had let her get killed—in my office. I should’ve never left her. I had to get back in there, had to find out who had done this profane thing.

  I stepped forward and said, “But I—”

  “You’re not going back inside tonight,” he said. “This is a crime scene now. Whatever you’ve left inside you can get tomorrow.” Then, very slowly, he said, “We will see you tomorrow.”

  The previous summer I had been part of an investigation into the death of an inmate that had not only uncovered the illegal activities of some of his officers, but cast him as either inept or corrupt. In fact, my ex-father-in-law, the inspector general of the department, was still investigating him.

  “I didn’t leave anything inside,” I said. “I thought the inspector might need my help.”

  I could feel myself falling apart, but I was powerless to stop it.

  Suddenly, getting inside the chapel became all that mattered, all I could think about. If I could just see her, just be with her, look at the crime scene, examine the evidence, attempt to redeem my negligence by finding her killer.

  “I’ll get him all the help he needs,” he said, patronizing me and enjoying it. “You don’t have to worry about it. Just go home and—”

  “But I’m a—”

  “A what?” he asked, as if he had been waiting for this. “You’re a chaplain. A preacher. You’re not an inspector. You’re not an officer. You’re not an investigator. You are a chaplain. If you don’t like being a chaplain and want to be something else, then maybe you should quit, but until you are one of those other things, you are not going into my crime scene.”

  A nearby group of officers perked up when they heard Patterson’s rebuke and a couple of them—his boys, as they were referred to—began to edge toward us.

  “You mean Inspector Fortner’s crime scene?” I said.

  “My institution,” he said. “My crime scene.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I asked.

  Stepping forward and bowing up his short, fat body, he got very close to me, looked up and said, “I ain’t afraid of you. I tell you that.”

  “You afraid an officer’s involved again? Is that it?” I asked. “What are you trying to cover up?”

  “I’m giving you five seconds to leave this institution on your own,” he said, “and then I’m gonna have you escorted out. And if you resist, I’ll have you locked up.”

  “Just step inside and ask the inspector if he wants my help,” I said.

  “The inspector’s not in charge here,” he said. “I—”

  “He’s in charge of the crime scene,” I said. “He has full—”

  “Boys,” Patterson said.

  The two officers grabbed my arms, and I struggled against them. Breaking free, I pushed Patterson and tried to get in the chapel, but they grabbed me again—this time with both hands and no matter what I did, I could not free myself.

  “Show the chaplain the way out,” Patterson said. “And if he gives you any more trouble, cuff him and put him in the holding cell.”

  They tugged at me, but I didn’t move.

  “Some chaplain we got,” one of them said.

  “He’s as bad as some of the convicts,” the other one replied.

  They dragged me to the front gate and pushed me through it. As soon as I was on the other side, I tried to turn to keep the gate from closing, but my feet got tangled and I fell hard onto the concrete.

  The two officers who had pushed me and the two inside the control room began to laugh.

  “Walk much, Grace?” one of them asked.

  “Maybe he’s had too much communion wine again,” the other one said.

  With the pain and guilt I felt over Nicole’s death, the frustration and powerlessness of not being involved in the investigation, I lay there in my anger and embarrassment after being tossed out like trash. It was just too much. All I could think about was my first drink—the first of many.

  CHAPTER 7

  When I arrived at Rudy’s just before three in the morning, I drained the remainder of my bottle and threw it toward the dumpster. Clanging off the side, the bottle hit the powdered oyster shell parking lot and shot up a small puff of white dust.

  I sprayed my mouth with breath freshener and opened the door to the diner quietly, hoping not to wake Carla who was slumped on a barstool, her head resting on her outstretched arm next to open school books on the counter. My coordination wasn’t as trustworthy as it usually was and I was unable to prevent the cowbell above the door from clanging.

  She bolted upright and spun around toward me.

  Her blond hair was mussed and stuck out on the side, her brilliant green eyes soft and vulnerable, their sleepy quality only adding to the sublimity of her beauty. At just seventeen she had the old soul of a motherless daughter trapped in a small town with an alcoholic father.

  “I tried to wait up for you,” she said. “I heard what happened. Are you okay?”

  “Can I have some coffee?” I asked as I made my way to my booth in the back.

  “Sure,” she said, studying me for a moment before adding, “I’ll bring the pot.”

  I made it to the booth and pitched into it.

  The thick smell of old grease and stale cigarette smoke hung in the air.

  “Anna’s called looking for you,” she said from behind the counter where she was preparing a fresh pot of coffee. “She told me what happened.”

  As usual, Rudy’s was cold. According to Rudy, it caused people to eat more and had tripled his coffee sales. The way I figured it, the increased revenue might almost be enough to pay for his increased electric bill. The condensation covering the plate glass widows in front made them look like sheets of ice and blurred everything seen through them.

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “Just that I hadn’t seen you,” she said.

  “If she calls again, tell her the same thing,” I said.

  Carla turned toward me, her brow furrowed, eyes questioning.

  My eyebrows shot up. Challenging.

  She looked back down at the coffee pot. “Sure,” she said softly.

  Since I’d moved back to Pottersville, I had spent many nights here in this booth in the back, reading, studying, making case notes and sermon outlines, and talking to Carla. Most of the time, it was just the two of us, which is why I came. The café sat on the highway and Rudy, Carla’s single father, insisted that it stay open twenty-four hours. And since Rudy was in the back passed out most nights, Carla was the one to keep it open, napping at the bar throughout the night before getting ready and going to school the next morning.

  Like the Pinkertons, I didn’t sleep, not much anyway, so when I was here, Carla could. She often thanked me for keeping an eye on the place, never seeming to realize it was her I had come to watch over.

  She brought over the coffee pot and two cups.

  Wearing faded jeans and an Evanescence T-shirt, inexpensive white tennis shoes, no make-up or jewelry, she moved like she was on the runway—a carriage imbued with such elegance and dignity she made Dollar Store clothes look designer.

  “You can go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll be here.”

  “But—”

  “In fact,” I said, “you can go in the back and lie down. I can make a pot of coffee if someone comes in. And if something has to be cooked, I’ll come get you.”

  Her sad sea-green eyes were full of compassion and I could tell she wanted to talk, but I didn’t want to be around anyone, not even her. All I wanted to do was drink my coffee and not sleep it off.

  “You don’t want to talk?” she asked.

  “I’ll gladly listen to anything you want to tell me,” I said. “But I have nothing to say.”

  She hesitated before speaking and I added, “Do you have anything you need to talk about?”

  She shook her head very slowly. “No,” she said softly, “not really.”

  “T
hen get some sleep,” I said.

  As she turned and began to walk away, I called after her. She turned quickly, a hopeful, even expectant look on her face. “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said with a small smile. She then continued walking away another step or two before turning around and coming back, taking a seat in the booth across from me.

  “I know you’re… well… anyway, I do need to talk—if you can,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  As far as I knew, I was the only adult she really had to talk to.

  Looking at her so closely in the harsh light of the diner, I realized she was not nearly as pretty as I thought she was—not physically anyway. Her eyes were just slightly too close together and her nose was a little on the long side. Perhaps if I were seeing her for the first time—or looking at a photograph of her—I would say she was a little above average at best, but I wasn’t. I was seeing her after knowing her. I was seeing, if not nearly all of her, far more than a first glance or picture could ever reveal. And I still say she was beautiful in a profoundly subtle way.

  She took a deep breath and let it out. “I know we’ve talked about a lot of stuff, but this is hard.”

  I waited. I should have encouraged her to continue, reassured her in some way, but I was in no condition to do either.

  “I’ve got a couple of friends whose boyfriends are pressuring them to…” she began, then hesitated a moment, before dropping her voice and adding, “have sex with them.”

  I nodded. Nothing new there.

  “But they want to be virgins when they get married—or at least when they really fall in love and think the guy’s the one. So they’re considering alternatives—”

  “The girls?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but only because the boys are begging them to,” she said. “Do you know what I mean by alternatives?”

  “Well, unless your generation has come up with some new ones, I only know of three,” I said.

  A small smile twitched on her lips, then she raised her eyebrows and nodded slightly, trying to get me to elaborate.

  “You want me to say them?” I asked.

  I felt myself getting frustrated, but remembered how much I could have used someone to talk to besides my friends when I was her age.

  Wincing slightly, she asked, “Would you?”

  “Well,” I said, finding it more difficult to say than I thought it would be, “there’s manual, oral, and anal.”

  She nodded, a look of relief filling her face. “The third one,” she said. “They already do the first two. They think if they do it—the other thing—their boyfriends will be satisfied and they’ll still be virgins.”

  I shook my head. “They might be virgins—depending on how you define it, I guess—but their boyfriends will never be satisfied. At least not for more than a few minutes at a time. And if the, ah, standard way becomes the thing they can’t do, it will become the thing they most want to.”

  She nodded. “I told them that,” she said. “Well, something kind of like that.”

  “Are we really talking about friends of yours?” I asked.

  She nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, I’ve thought about it some, too, but I don’t even have a very serious boyfriend.”

  “Just be very, very careful,” I said. “You’re all making decisions that can affect the rest of your lives.”

  “It really is about two of my friends,” she said. “I thought if I told them you said it, they’d listen.”

  I laughed.

  “You’re very influential,” she said with a wry, self-satisfied smile. She patted my hand and stood up.

  “I’ll leave you alone now,” she said. “Thanks.”

  When she had climbed back onto the bar chair and laid her head down on the counter next to her school books, I said, “Go get in bed. At least get a couple of good hours.”

  She glanced toward the back and the small living quarters she refused to call home, then back at me. “I’d rather just stay here.”

  I nodded and smiled at her.

  Before I finished my first cup and just about the time Carla dozed off, the cowbell above the door clanged and Anna walked in.

  It was the only time in my life I could recall not being happy to see her.

  She spoke to Carla, then walked over and slid into the booth across from me.

  We sat in silence for a long moment, staring at each other. Her huge brown eyes took me in, and though there was only acceptance and compassion in them, I didn’t like the reflection I saw.

  My embarrassment at her seeing my weakness was compounded by how much I needed her, but the self-loathing I felt couldn’t compare to the pain her presence inflicted.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “No,” I said bluntly.

  “Can I do anything?”

  “No,” I said again, shaking my head.

  “Have you been drinking?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “And more than just coffee.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I shot her a quizzical look.

  “For what you saw,” she explained. “For what you’re feeling.”

  I couldn’t tell her that part of what I was feeling was anger and frustration at not being allowed to stay and investigate, at being treated like a chaplain and not a cop. In the light of what had happened to Nicole, my self-centered, sophomoric feelings seemed even more silly and superfluous, my hypocrisy more pathetic. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, I was telling her how I wanted to stop investigating so I could concentrate on chaplaincy.

  “I can’t know what you’ve seen or what it’s done to you,” she said, “or how much pain you must be feeling.”

  I didn’t say anything, just tried to get some of what I needed from the energy of her full attention. Desiring her so strongly and not being able to have her hurt so badly that I couldn’t tell which was stronger, the wounds or the wanting, and I wondered if I had the ability to inflict the same unseen injuries on her.

  “But it’s just an excuse you’re using,” she said.

  “What?” I asked, my anger flaring.

  “You’re drinking because you want to,” she said. “Fine. But don’t use that precious little girl to justify it.”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s late,” I said. “I’m a single man. You’re a married woman.”

  “John—”she started before I cut her off.

  “I’m not your concern,” I said. “Don’t come chasing after me in the middle of the night. Have some self-respect.”

  “John,” she said, her stunned tone filling the single syllable with more pain than I thought possible.

  “Go home to your husband,” I said.

  Which she did, and, as I sat there alone in the comfortless silence, her absence was as palpable as her presence had been.

  CHAPTER 8

  After waking up late at Rudy’s following a fitful few hours sleep in my booth, I raced down the empty stretch of pine tree-lined highway between my trailer and the prison. White clouds filled the sky and the air was fresh and cool, especially for May.

  A quick shower had helped revive me, but my head throbbed, aching with every beat of my heart. As I drove, I thought about Nicole and the nightmares her death had resurrected. Like an old black and white film in an empty auditorium, they flickered in the theater of my mind.

  I’m running up Stone Mountain, my heart slamming against my breast bone from exertion and the fear of what I’d find when I reached the top. I’m weary and unsteady, a mixed drink of bone-tired fatigue, mental exhaustion, and vodka coursing through my veins. Still I run as fast as I can, but I’m too late. When I reach the top, he releases her, and her body slides down the cold solid granite, following its contours like a tear in the crevices of a wrinkled face.

  It was why I didn’t sleep much… why it wasn’t restful when I did, and why I was speeding to work on the empty highway with a hangover and
didn’t see the flashing blue lights until they were suddenly reflecting off my rearview mirror.

  I pulled my truck to the side of the road and rolled down my window by hand since my old Chevy S10 didn’t have power anything, even when it was new nearly two decades before.

  Since my dad was the sheriff of Potter County, and everyone in the small county recognized my truck, I had never been pulled over before. I glanced at my watch. When I looked back up, I caught sight of a young deputy in an ill-fitting green uniform swaggering toward me like John Wayne. The walk alone was enough to let me know it was my younger brother, Jake.

  When he reached my window, he flipped open his ticket book and withdrew the small piece of toothpick from the corner of his mouth.

  “This ain’t I-75, hot shot,” he said. “You ain’t in Atlanta anymore.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. The only thing more absurd than the obviousness of his observation was the fact that it came from Jake, who more than anyone reminded me of just how true it was.

  I found his slow, thick drawl more grating than usual, and though the last thing I needed this morning was getting into it with him, I lacked the restraint to resist.

  “Thanks for the reminder, Officer,” I said, the sarcasm coming out with an edge that had nothing to do with Jake.

  In my mirrors, the official lights on top of his car blinked ominously like silent alarm signals, and the passing drivers slowed to look, shaking their heads or blowing their horns when they recognized us.

  Jake and I had never been close, but the enormous gulf between us had grown to infinity because I had moved away and he had not. Before, I had simply not quite fit in. Now, I was an outsider, and in addition to everything else, the gap between us had in many ways become cultural.

  “Are you giving me a ticket or what?” I asked in frustration. “I really need to go.”

  “What’s the rush?” he asked. “Inmates can’t wait until they’ve had their breakfast to get their religion?”