Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith (13 page)

“Who hasn’t? I was told you have some information for me, Miss … What did you say your name was?”

“You’re skeptical of me.”

“Comes with the territory. Do you mind if I sit down?”

She nodded, and I sat down at the other end of the bench. I looked out over the river. It was placid, a vivid green. Some of the trees on the opposite bank were beginning to change to their fall colors of orange, yellow, and red. The sky was azure, the temperature warm.

“You did the drawing?”

She nodded again.

“You put it on my car?”

“You needed it. It was there.”

“Why a drawing? Why not a phone call?”

“I thought the drawing was more likely to get your attention.”

“Who are you? What’s your name?”

There was an aura of calmness about her, a sense that she was perfectly at peace with herself and everything around her. She looked back out over the river.

“It’s cancer,” she said, “your wife.”

Lucky guess. Coincidence. She knows someone who knows me and she’s heard about it from them.

“No,” I said. “My wife doesn’t have cancer.”

“You lie poorly. She’s very strong, isn’t she?”

“I don’t have time for—”

“And so are you, but you draw much of your strength from her.”

“I’m sorry, but you still haven’t told me your name. You know, I could probably have you arrested just because of what was in the drawing. Would you like to continue this conversation at the police station?”

“You don’t want to arrest me,” she said.

“I don’t want to sit here all morning and listen to you talk in circles, either.” I was becoming impatient. “Now, what’s your name?”

She looked back out over the river. “Alisha. Alisha Elizabeth Davis.”

“Are you some kind of psychic?”

“I see things that others can’t see. I hear and feel things that others can’t.”

“I don’t have a lot of time this morning, Alisha. If you know something about the murders, I’d appreciate it if you’d just tell me.”

“They thirst for revenge, and they won’t stop.”

“Who are they?”

“One is Samuel, another Levi.”

“Do they have last names?”

“Boyer. Barnett.”

I reached into my back pocket for a notepad. I didn’t have one, so I pulled a pen from my shirt pocket and started writing on the palm of my left hand.

“Samuel Boyer?”

She nodded.

“Levi Barnett? You’re saying Samuel Boyer and Levi Barnett did these killings? Do you know where they’re from? Where can we find them?”

“They won’t be hard to find.”

“How do you know? And don’t say you know things. Don’t tell me it came to you in a vision.”

“There’s a third. One who commands. She believes she is the daughter of Satan.”

“How do you know?”

My cell phone rang. I looked down at the caller ID. It was Jack.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to take this. I’ll be right back.” I got up and walked twenty or thirty feet away from her, out of earshot.

“Tell me something good,” I said when I answered.

“Surgeon just left,” Jack said. His voice was hushed. “The tumor was stage three, whatever that means. He said it was almost four centimeters long. There was cancer in the skin above the tumor and in the lymph node. He said the type of cancer she has is very aggressive. He already closed her back up. He said he left the tumor so they could see how it responds to chemotherapy.”

“What did he say about the chemo?” It was the one part of the treatment Caroline had talked about the most. She was terrified of chemotherapy.

“Some other doctor is going to handle it, but he said most of the cases similar to Mom’s go through three months of chemo, then surgery to remove the breast and the rest of her lymph nodes, then three more months of chemo. After that she’ll have to go through radiation for a couple of months. He says she’s looking at about a year before she’s clear of it, and that’s if everything goes well.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m standing in the lobby.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“In recovery. The nurse told me we can go back in about a half hour.”

“But she’s okay?”

“Outside of the fact that she has cancer.”

“How’s Lilly?”

“Not good.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Wait for me. I want to be in the recovery room when she wakes up.”

I hung up the phone and walked back over to the girl.

She looked up at me, and I noticed a tear running down her left cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I’d developed a keen intuition over more than a decade of practicing criminal defense law and listening to my own clients lie to me over and over again. Caroline jokingly referred to it as my “bullshit detector.” It wasn’t innate; it was something that I had developed through experience, but I’d learned to trust my ability to detect and sort through lies and to get to the heart of a matter very quickly. This girl gave me no indication that she was lying. Her voice was clear and steady, her manner calm and straightforward. The circumstances were certainly unusual, but I found myself believing her.

“Okay, Alisha,” I said, “if you really want to help me, this is what has to happen. I’m going to go up and talk to that officer for a few minutes. Then he’s going to come back down here and take a statement from you. He’s going to write down everything you say. In the statement, you’re going to tell him exactly what you know about the murders and the people you’ve mentioned. And more important, you’re going to tell him
how
you know these things. We need details. We need something concrete if we’re going to be able to get warrants and arrest these people. If what you say checks out, I’ll probably need you to testify in front of a grand jury. You may even end up testifying at trial. Do you understand?”

A feeling came over me that reminded me of the way I felt the night I went to the Beck murder scene, but it was different somehow. I felt as though I were experiencing something unnatural, perhaps even supernatural, but the sickening sense of being in the presence of evil was absent. I wanted to talk to this girl, to question her, and I could sense that she wanted to tell me what she knew, but I couldn’t stop envisioning Caroline lying in the recovery room, about to come out of the anesthesia-induced coma. Someone would have to break the news to her, and I wanted it to be me.

“I have to leave,” I said, “but I’m going to go talk to the agent, and he’ll be back down here in just a minute. Just sit tight. Won’t take but a second.”

I jogged back up the hill to where Fraley was standing.

“Well?” he said.

“Write these names down.” I opened my hand so he could see them.

“Who are they?”

“She says they’re the killers.”

“You’re shitting me. You wrote them on your hand?”

“I didn’t bring a notepad. Didn’t know I’d need one.”

“And I took you for a Boy Scout. At least you had a pen.” Fraley began copying the names down. “One of those names is familiar,” he said.

“How so?”

“I put a list together of kids Norman Brockwell had serious problems with before he retired. One of them, Boyer, is on your hand. What’s her name?” He nodded towards the river.

“Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Take a statement from her. Get everything you can. Names, addresses, ages, shit, you know the drill. All we can do is check out everything she says. And let’s make sure we check her out at the same time. I have to get back to the hospital.”

“Bad news?”

“You could say that. Go ahead, before she changes her mind. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”

I jogged back to my truck and pulled out of the lot. My cell phone rang less than a minute later. It was Fraley.

“She’s gone,” he said.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I walked back down to the bench and she was gone. I don’t think she could have walked off without me seeing her, but she’s not here. She disappeared.”

Monday, October 6

As soon as I got back to the hospital, I ran down Caroline’s surgeon and talked to him for about ten minutes. One thing he said stuck in my mind: “The only way to deal with cancer is to kill it.” From there, I headed straight back to the recovery room.

Her eyes fluttered open when I rubbed my fingers across her forehead. Caroline was lying on a gurney behind a flimsy curtain in a gray room that smelled of anesthetic and floor cleaner. A monitor loomed above her, its digital display reflecting her blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature. A plastic tube carried antinausea medicine from a bag on a hook into a vein in her forearm. The skin on her face was dry and splotched with red, and when I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek, I noticed a bitter smell coming from her mouth.

“Hey, sugar,” I said. “How do you feel?”

She looked up at me, and her eyes lit with a glint of recognition.

“My mouth tastes like a thousand elephants took a dump in it,” she said.

“Smells like it, too.”

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand self-consciously.

“Just kidding, baby,” I said. “Your breath smells fine.”

“Liar. Would you get me some water?”

I poured some water from a pitcher that was sitting on a table near the bed into a plastic cup and helped her drink. Her lips were dry and scaly.

“I’m freezing,” she whispered.

“Be right back,” I said. I went and found a nurse, who directed me to a large cabinet just down the hall. I grabbed a couple of thin blankets and went back to Caroline’s cubicle. I laid the blankets over her and tucked the sides snugly beneath her.

“Is it that bad?” she said after I moved back to the head of the bed.

“What do you mean?”

“I can tell by the look on your face. And the kids aren’t in here. If the news was good, they’d be here, too.”

“I just wanted to be alone with you for a minute,” I said.

“So you could break the bad news to me?”

“It could be worse. I think you’re going to make it.”

She grimaced and adjusted herself on the gurney. “Was there cancer in the node?”

“Yeah, baby. I’m sorry.”

“Did it spread to the skin above the tumor?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

I squeezed her hand gently.

“So I’m going to lose my breast?”

“I don’t think you have much choice.”

“What do I need a breast for, right? We’re not going to have any more kids.”

“They’ll make you another one if you want them to. They do it all the time now.”

“When do I have to start the chemotherapy?”

“A couple of weeks. They want you to heal up from this for a little while first.”

“Will you love me when I’m bald?”

Caroline wasn’t particularly vain, but she loved her hair, and so did I. It was a reflection of her personality, beautiful but occasionally a bit on the unruly side. It was auburn and thick and curly and fell to the middle of her back. It turned a few shades lighter in the summer when she spent more time in the sun. Losing it was the side effect of chemotherapy that she dreaded the most.

“I’ll shave my head if you want,” I said. “We can be bald together.”

Two hours later, after I’d rolled my wife out of the surgery center in a wheelchair, helped her into the car and taken her home, gotten her settled into bed, and made sure Lilly and Jack knew what to do in case something went wrong, I drove back up to the TBI headquarters in Johnson City. Fraley’s office was buzzing. People were running in and out while Fraley alternately barked commands like a general and talked into the telephone. As I sat down across from him, he hung up the phone. He got up from behind the desk and walked over and closed the door.

“How’s the wife?” he said as he returned to his seat.

“In bed. Resting.”

“She okay?”

“Yeah, she’s all right. What’s going on here?”

“I can appreciate what you’re going through,” Fraley said. “I lost my wife to breast cancer.”

The comment shocked me. It was the first time Fraley had given me any indication that he had a life outside of his job.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m truly sorry. What was her name?”

“Robin,” he said, unconsciously smiling at the thought of her. He reached to his left and picked up a small, framed photograph. “Beautiful woman. It was thirty years ago. The treatment has come a long way since then, but at the time, there wasn’t much they could do. It was too far along by the time it was diagnosed. Took her in a hurry. We’d only been married five years.”

“Can I see?” He handed me the photo. It was a studio portrait of a pretty young brunette, maybe twenty-five years old, sitting in front of a fireplace. She was holding an infant wrapped in a blanket, and beside her was a handsome young man smiling the smile of a proud husband and father. I looked back up at Fraley and could see that the young man in the photo was him many years, many heartaches, and many miles ago.

“That’s my daughter,” he said. “She was three months old that day.”

“Where is she now?”

“Nashville. Married to a banker. He’s a good guy. She has a couple of kids of her own.”

“You raise her by yourself?”

“Yeah. Did the best I could. I don’t think I fucked it up too bad.”

“Nice little family.” I handed the photo back to him.

“She’ll be okay,” he said. “Your wife. She’ll be okay.”

“Thanks,” I said. I briefly imagined Caroline lying in a casket covered in flowers, eyes closed, the serene look of the dead on her face. Fraley must have sensed what I was thinking.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to … I mean, I wasn’t trying to make you think about—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I appreciate the concern.”

“So I guess you’re wondering what’s going on here.”

“You could say that.”

“Reasonable suspects,” Fraley said. “Boyer was thrown out of Brockwell’s school the same year he retired. The boy has a long juvie record, mostly drug related, a couple of assaults. His probation officer says he’s dyed his hair black recently, so he might be a Goth. The other one, Barnett, is still a juvenile. He’s only sixteen, but he’s already spent a year in detention. He’s got drug charges, a couple of thefts, three assaults, one of them aggravated. The aggravated assault is what got him shipped off. Hit a kid with a baseball bat and broke his leg. He’s only been out of detention three months. He’s still on probation, and his probation officer said the last time she saw him, which was two weeks ago, he’d dyed his hair jet-black. Looks promising.”