Deviations (17 page)

I knew I needed to get away from Rawlings, where
the investigation was dead in the water and Nick Corelli was feeding me and
Ryan a line of horseshit about what he was up to—and perhaps who the fuck he
was. The best I had was what I’d suggested to the chief: talk to Christopher
Barry, the head Nazi, tell him we’re investigating a crime in Rawlings that
might be linked to one of his people, just see what happens. Maybe he’d get in
touch with Willson Fredericks at the university and something might break free.
Fredericks might start telling us who this BC guy was from the emails. The only
thing different about my foolproof plan now was that I was on my own. Ryan wouldn’t
have been willing to violate a direct order from a boss—that’s more my style.

I’d left my suitcase in the car. I decided not to
bring it into the room. The thought of having it stolen from my car was less
depressing than the thought of actually sleeping in this room. I’d already paid
for the night, so Maureen wouldn’t care if she never saw me again. I grabbed my
bag, got in the car, and headed back to Nazi City. This time I parked right up
near the entrance gate. I thought I’d try acting like of course they’d let me
in. I walked up to the gate.

The guard stood there in the middle of my path,
the Kalash across his chest, his right index finger resting on the trigger
guard. He looked like a Doberman Pinscher, his brown eyes following every
movement I made. He didn’t say anything.

“Hi,” I said. He looked into my eyes silently.
“I’d like to see the Reverend Christopher Barry. Know if he’s in?”

He waited a while. “Who are you?”

“My name is Karen Seagate. I’m a detective with
the Rawlings Police Department. Couple hours east of here.”

“ID?”

I reached in my bag and pulled out my wallet and
my badge on its leather holder with the chain. I opened up the wallet and
showed him my ID, then put my badge around my neck.

“Stay there,” he said, which I was certainly
planning to do. He walked back into his booth and began speaking into a radio
unit. It took about half a minute. He came back out. “Weapons?”

I reached into my belt holster and pulled out my Colt,
handing it to him butt first.

He motioned me over to his guard booth. I put my
palms onto the glass and spread my legs. He patted me down: both legs, down to
my socks, inside my jacket. Then he turned me around to face him and pointed to
my bag, which I handed to him. He rummaged through it, slowly. He said nothing
and showed nothing. “Stay there,” he said again. He walked back into the booth,
picked up the radio, and talked into it again. He came out and motioned me in
with the muzzle of his rifle.

He pointed toward the two buildings on the other
side of the compound. “The one on the right.”

I started walking toward the Reverend Christopher
Barry’s place. I looked back toward the guard booth, where I saw the concise
Nazi standing next to his booth, his AK-47 back on his shoulder.

The day was bright and pleasant, maybe forty-five
degrees, with big, lazy clouds drifting across the sky. A slight breeze carried
the sweet smell of the pines that stood outside the chain-link fence. My feet
crunched on the pine needles and twigs. All in all, very nice out here in Lake
Hollow.

Chapter 16

The church was off to the
left: a log cabin, steel roof, one story, three steps leading up to a
double-width door. Thirty yards off to the right sat the Reverend Christopher
Barry’s house. It looked vintage 1950, a three-bedroom, one-bath starter home
for a returning vet. White asphalt shingles with green shutters, a brick fireplace
in the middle, a woodstove chimney pipe at one end. Hugging one side was a twelve-foot
satellite dish and a five-hundred-gallon propane tank. Except that there was no
lawn or shrubs or anything, his house could be seen on any street in Rawlings.

I climbed the three concrete steps, which looked
original to the house because they were cracked and patched. Concrete is no
match for Montana winters. There was a cheap metal handrail, which had been
added recently—both the Rev and his wife were getting up in years. I opened the
aluminum storm door and knocked on the wooden front door. I heard slow, heavy
footsteps on a squeaky floor. A moment later, the door opened. The kitchen had
a linoleum floor, flowered wallpaper, painted cabinets, and a fifties chrome
and Formica dining-room set that now sells for thousands in antique stores. The
smell of bread cooking started me salivating.

Alice Barry was a wide, doughy grandma, with white
hair permed into tight curls. Behind her round glasses with silver frames, she
had tiny gray eyes, close set. She wore no makeup and no expression. She was
drying her hands on a dishtowel tucked into a belt on her printed housedress,
which looked like the ones my own Grammy used to make all the time on her
sewing machine from tissue-paper patterns. “May I help you?”

I wanted to ask if she’d made any cookies. “Good
afternoon, ma’am. Detective Seagate from the Rawlings Police Department. I was
hoping to have a few words with the Reverend Barry.”

“This way,” she said.

I followed her across the kitchen toward the
living room.

She stopped and turned back to me. “You said your
name is Detective Seagate from Rawlings? And you’re here on official business?”

“That’s right, ma’am. Detective Seagate, from
Rawlings,” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t lie and say I was on official
business. Maybe because Grammy could always tell if I was lying.

An ancient hound walked over slowly, wagging its
tail in a broad, lazy arc. It had droopy jowls trailing spit tinsel. Sniffing
at my knee, it transferred some slobber onto my jeans.

“Don’t worry about Jasper,” the Reverend Barry
said, walking toward me deliberately, listing back and forth with each careful
step. He bent slightly to touch the dog’s head affectionately. “You’re not
going to hurt this gal, are you, old boy?”

Jasper perked up at his master’s attention.

The Reverend Christopher Barry led me into the
living room, no more than ten feet by fifteen. In the corner, on an old cloth
easy chair, sat a hulking blond boy watching a small black-and-white television
sitting on a pine parson’s table. He looked maybe eighteen or twenty, with wispy
blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had the beginnings of a beard, but it
was so thin and patchy you could miss it. The baby fat in his cheeks made his
blue eyes recede. Slumped in the chair, he was a shapeless mound of white skin.

The Reverend Barry pointed to the boy and said,
“This is Ricky. He helps me out with things around here.” I started to walk
over to Ricky to shake his hand, but he just turned his head slightly toward me
and half nodded, then turned back to the television set. I pegged him as coming
from a slightly lower branch on the evolutionary tree than Jasper.

The Reverend Christopher Barry motioned for me to
sit on the tired orange velour couch covered with Jasper fur ranging in color
from bone and tan all the way to brown and black. On each side of the couch was
a pine end table with a built-in lamp shaped like a miniature tree truck. The
Reverend sank into a recliner, brown vinyl with duct-tape accents. Jasper
walked over to an oval braided rug next to Barry’s chair and slowly eased his
bones down, his eyes closing almost immediately.

Christopher Barry had thick white hair, cut short.
His face was lined with dozens of tiny creases, his eyes ringed by liver spots.
The eyebrows were long, wild wires of gray and white. “Sorry about the clutter,
Detective,” he said, referring to the hundreds of patriot magazines and
pamphlets on the coffee table, the end tables, and the several bookshelves
crammed into the living room. Like I’d come to do a shoot for
Better Homes
and Gardens
but someone would have to straighten up first. “As you might
imagine, I get quite a bit of mail.” He smiled with satisfaction at his own
importance.

“Yes, I can see that,” I said. I was having a
little trouble getting a read on this guy. He couldn’t believe I’d think he was
an important guy, sitting in this crappy, dark old house filled with illiterate
newsletters written by today’s most fervent Neo-Nazi nutjobs. He called me detective,
so he knew I was a cop. Did he think I stopped by to give him a
good-citizenship plaque?

“How do you think the Wildcats will do this year?”

I assumed he was referring to the Central Montana
State football team. Okay, he knew I was from Rawlings. That’s a start. “Tell
you the truth, Reverend, I don’t really follow college football all that
close.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.” He picked up a pack of
cigarettes and a butane lighter from an aluminum TV tray next to his chair.
“You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?”

I did, but what was I going to say? It was his
house.

“You’ve got a running back, a boy named
McDaniels—he’s going to be a good one.” He lit the cigarette and pulled on it
long and hard. A moment later, the blue-gray smoke came shooting out of his
nostrils like he was a cartoon dragon.

I expected to hear a real phlegmstorm gurgling in
his lungs—a guy this old, sucking that hard on a cancer stick. Actually, I
expected him to be dead already or working on Stage 3 or 4 lung cancer or
emphysema or something, but he sounded fine. “Yeah,” I said, nodding my head.
“That’s what I hear. McDaniels.”

“You know, the coach is changing the whole offense
around to take advantage of him.”

I put my arms out, palms up, and shook my head to
signal that I had no idea what he was talking about. Two back-and-forth’s about
college football ought to be sufficient for this occasion, especially since I’d
made clear it’s way high on my lengthy don’t-know-don’t-give-a-shit list.

“Well, Detective, you didn’t drive all the way out
here to talk about college ball, I imagine.”

“No, Reverend,” I said, glad he’d finally got my
message. “No, I didn’t.”

“Tell me what’s on your mind.” He put on a serious
face and leaned in toward me, like we went way back, so whatever it is that was
bothering me, he’d help. We’d discuss it, work it out. It was important to him.

“I want to let you know we’ve got a case in
Rawlings, I just want to fill you in on it a little bit.”

“Well, I do appreciate that, Detective,” he said,
nodding his head, as if detectives make courtesy calls all the time.

“Three days ago. Dolores Weston, state senator.
Somebody bashed her skull in, raped her.” No reason not to tell him it was Weston.
Willson Fredericks had figured it out immediately. Christopher Barry surely would
know about it. I hadn’t planned to mention the rape, but after the words came
out of my mouth, it felt right. Maybe he was old school and thought rape was
over the line. At least, it was a way to make the point that the Rawlings
Police Department took this case seriously. I wasn’t certain that was true, of
course, but I wanted him to think it was.

“Yes, terrible. She wasn’t exactly my cup of
tea—as a senator, I mean—but that was a terrible thing. Just terrible.” He took
a long pull on his cigarette, blowing the dragon smoke up toward the low
ceiling. The windows were closed, and the smoke just hung there, the air motionless
in the room. “That took place in Rawlings, if I remember correctly?” He reached
down and scratched his dog behind an ear. The dog’s eyes stayed closed, but the
tail gave a little swoosh.

Okay. I was worried he was a little senile, but he
knew exactly what was going on. He looked up in time for me to answer his
question. “The body was discovered in Rawlings. Yes, that’s right.”

“Interesting,” he said. “You’re thinking the
murder happened … happened someplace else? Then the body was moved to
Rawlings?”

“I’m sorry, Reverend, there’s a couple
details—forensics and some other things—I can’t go into at this time.”

“Hmm,” he said. He tapped his cigarette on the
ashtray, breaking off a long ash. “I understand completely. Forensics and some
other things.” He nodded, as if giving serious thought to my phrase. “You have
to be very careful. Public finds out the details of the case, makes it a lot
harder for you to sift through any new leads that come in.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Do you have any suspects?”

“We’re watching some people, but it’s early.”

“Well, Detective,” he said, lifting himself to his
feet, “I’d sure like to be able to help, and if there’s anything I can do, you
just get in touch.” I stood up, too. “I do appreciate you stopping by for a
chat. All of us in the Montana Patriot Front support local law enforcement—even
if, as in this case—it’s not that local to us here in Powell County.” He took
one last pull on his cigarette and stubbed it out. “Are you heading out to do
some camping, some fishing?”

At least it wasn’t football. “No, Reverend. Just
came here to visit with you today.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. It’s beautiful out here,
don’t you think?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “No place like it.”

“You can’t stay even one night in God’s country?”

“Wish I could. Got to be heading back this
afternoon.”

“Ricky,” he said to the mound of pasty white white-power
flesh sitting off to the side watching the TV, “you want to show the detective
out?”

Ricky stood, silently. He was a few inches over
six feet, with a large chest and a larger stomach. He had a crude, handmade
swastika tat on his forearm. It looked like prison ink. He had the perfect
demographics for going inside and joining a white-power gang, but he didn’t
look old enough to have been in and out. He walked over to me and put out his
arm in a gesture that was more sweeping than escorting me out of the room and
back toward the kitchen and the front door.

Alice Barry was back at the sink and didn’t look
up as Ricky opened the door, then the screen door. As I walked out onto the top
concrete step, he turned to go back inside to his television.

“Say, Ricky?” I said. “That Reverend Barry, he’s
quite a man, isn’t he?” See if the kid could talk.

Ricky paused a moment. I thought he might be processing
a cop asking him about his boss. “I love the Reverend Barry,” he said, mouthing
each word like a three-year old slogging through
Pat the Bunny.

“The Reverend Barry mentioned you help him out
here, is that right?” Ricky just nodded, slowly. “You keep yourself in pretty
good shape, I see. You lift?” The fat head nodded. “I’m guessing you can bench …
what, two fifty?” Come in low, let him correct me.

“Three twenty-five.” He seemed to relax a little.

“You help out with some of the chores around
here?”

“Yeah. I cut wood for the stove. Repairs, things
like that. Help out around the church any way I can.”

“You do security for the Reverend, too, I guess?”

“Me and a few other guys. He’s never more than twenty
feet from one of us.”

“That’s a pretty important job. I imagine that
there are some people who would want to hurt the Reverend.”

“Not gonna happen,” Ricky said, slowly, shaking
his head to underscore the point.

“Good meeting you, Ricky.”

He didn’t say anything as I walked down the steps
and started across the meadow toward the entrance gate.

* * * *

Walking across the
compound, toward the entrance gate and my car, I took stock of where I was. I
glanced back at Reverend Barry’s house, not sure what I expected to see. Fat
Ricky wasn’t standing on the steps, nobody was peeking through any curtains. From
the look of things, I hadn’t disturbed any of the local flora or fauna during
the last ten minutes.

But I’d learned something. Reverend Christopher
Barry might be a nicotine addict with some nasty opinions about Jews and blacks
and Muslims, but he wasn’t senile and he wasn’t stupid. He knew what case I was
working on, and he didn’t seem surprised that Weston was raped, even though
that information wasn’t public. He was aware I was out of my jurisdiction. Our
little chess game ended in a draw, unless I could prove that the murder
happened out here in Lake Hollow and the guy moved Weston’s body back to Rawlings.
But that seemed unlikely because the murderer was into symbols—putting the 1488
on her chest—and he didn’t signal that he grabbed her in Rawlings and brought
her out to Lake Hollow to kill her. And there was no reason to think Weston had
been hanging around out here in the woods before her murder.

Christopher Barry was pretty smooth in asking if I
was staying someplace around Lake Hollow. That way, if I was becoming a serious
pain in the ass, he could send a couple of guys to pick me up and knock me off
the game board—or, if necessary, put me in a lot more trouble. I made a mental
note to see if I was being followed as I left the compound.

I was pleased that I hadn’t revealed anything I
didn’t want to. I didn’t mention Willson Fredericks or his pen pal BC, didn’t
mention the 1488. Didn’t really mention anything that wasn’t public, except the
rape. As a result, I came off kind of dumb—after all, what exactly
was
the
purpose of the interview?—but coming off dumb was better than coming off smart.
You want to keep expectations low, so in case you do get an idea it might
surprise them. Still, it was anybody’s guess whether Barry would get on the
phone and contact Willson Fredericks or take some other action that I might be
able to pick up back in Rawlings.