Joe Dillard - 02 - In Good Faith (17 page)

“Moron,” he hissed. “Why can’t you keep your fucking mouth shut? Now my dinner’s gonna get cold.”

I picked myself up off the ground and walked out to the barn. I could hear voices coming from inside the house, the voices of my mother and grandma, shrill and forlorn as the argument raged. Eventually, the voices quieted. An hour later, my mother yelled from beside the car that it was time to go home. I descended the ladder from the hayloft, and as I climbed into the backseat, I could see Ma’s face in the rearview mirror and I knew she’d been crying. The following Sunday, we stayed home for lunch. We went back occasionally on Sunday after that, but it was always well after Grandpa and Grandma had arrived home from church, and Grandma always prepared the meal. We never spoke of God again.

A couple of years later, Raymond raped Sarah on that Friday night in my grandparents’ bed. Less than a year after that, he drowned in the Nolichucky River. Maybe his death was God’s way of punishing him for what he did to Sarah, but I always wondered, if there was a God, why He would have allowed Raymond to rape a nine-year-old girl in the first place.

Just as the sun was showing itself, the sky streaked with orange and purple, the telephone rang in the kitchen. I hurried inside to answer before it awoke Caroline, and as soon as I picked it up I saw Fraley’s now-familiar cell phone number on the caller ID.

“How’d it go?” I said.

“We need to meet,” Fraley said. “I need another search warrant.”

Wednesday, October 8

I told Fraley I’d meet him at a Waffle House near Boone’s Creek and went in to check on Caroline. She was so sore I had to help her to the bathroom and back to bed. Lilly was getting ready to drive back to Knoxville to school, and Jack was packing up for his trip back to Nashville. Once I got Caroline settled, I went upstairs to Lilly’s room. She was already dressed, standing in front of the mirror by her dresser applying lipstick.

“Can you take another day off?” I said. “I have to go to work, and I don’t want to leave your mom here alone.”

“Are you asking if I want to sleep in?” she said. “Are you asking if I’d mind not driving to Knoxville and going to class? Would I like to stay here and not have to eat in the cafeteria for another day? Sounds awful.”

“Good. You’re the designated nurse. Her pain medication is in the cupboard above the microwave. Two every four hours. I just gave her a couple, so she’ll be due again around eleven.”

Lilly grinned. “I guess this means I’ll have to go down and get in bed with her.”

I stopped by Jack’s room to say good-bye. He’d spent the entire summer on the road playing baseball and had been in college for over a year, but it still broke my heart to see him go.

“Thanks for coming,” I said as I hugged his neck. “It means a lot to both of us to have you around.”

“Are you going to be able to handle all of this?” he said. “Can you juggle the work and everything?”

“Lilly’s going to stay one more day, but after that, I’ll be fine.”

“All you have to do is call. I’ll take a semester off if I have to.”

“I love you,” I said. “Have a safe trip.”

The restaurant was less crowded than I expected, so Fraley and I were able to get a booth in the corner.

“I’ve seen corpses that look better than you,” I said as soon as he sat down.

“You ain’t exactly Miss America yourself.” The waitress set a pot of coffee down in front of us and we both ordered breakfast. Fraley, ever the picture of health, ordered four eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hash browns with cheese, and four pieces of toast.

“So what’s going on?” I said after the waitress left.

“The raid went fine. Took them down quick and got them out of there. We interrupted some kind of ritual or something. They were wearing robes with nothing on underneath, and the guys were bleeding from fresh razor cuts on their arms. There was a silver chalice with blood in it in the middle of the floor. I guess they were bleeding into the cup. They had candles all over the place. It looked like maybe they were getting ready to drink the blood or something.”

“Vampires?”

“I’m not sure. Probably some kind of satanic ritual. I’ll have to study up on it. We found two nine-millimeter pistols in the car, both stolen during a burglary back in July. All of our lab people came in at five this morning down in Knoxville just to work this case. One of the ballistics guys has already matched several of the bullets we found at both scenes with the guns.”

“That’s fantastic,” I said. “Looks like we’ve got our murderers.”

“It gets better, and it gets worse. There were two pairs of boots and a pair of shoes in the motel room. The boot prints match up to prints at both scenes. They belong to the boys.”

“Great. What about DNA?” I said. “Anything in the car?”

“They’re running the tests,” Fraley said. “It’ll take a while longer, but I don’t have much doubt they’re going to find traces of Brockwell’s DNA in the car. My main concern now is the girl.”

Fraley filled me in on the details of the preceding night: the familiar-looking redhead who’d been arrested in the motel room; her cold, calculating demeanor; the interview with Boyer and the chaotic scene just as Fraley thought Boyer was about to break down and confess; Fraley’s realization that the girl they had in custody looked just like the girl we’d talked to in the park.

“It took me a while to figure it out,” Fraley said. “I went back to the juvenile records. You said the girl in the park’s name was Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Like I told you before, Alisha Elizabeth Davis was reported missing by her foster parents ten days ago. They said she woke up screaming the night the Brockwells were murdered and she went missing the next day.”

“Why was she in foster care in the first place?”

“Because her sister stabbed her.”

“That’s strange,” I said. “Why did they take her out of the home instead of putting the sister in jail?”

“Because the sister’s crazy,” Fraley said. “The foster parents told the agents that the sister has some serious mental problems. She’s already been in a mental institution, and for some reason the mother didn’t want her to go back. So they put Alisha in foster care, I guess to keep her from getting hurt again. From what the foster parents said, Alisha’s a great kid. They said she volunteers at the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter and at the pediatric cancer ward at the hospital. She graduated near the top of her class in high school and is working her way through college now. She sells paintings and drawings and makes pottery in a little shop in back of their house and sells it at craft shows. They said she was happy there.”

“So what does this have to do with the girl in custody?” I said.

“She’s the sister,” Fraley said. “The crazy sister. I went back into the records and took a closer look. Her name is Natasha Marie Davis. She’s Alisha’s identical twin.”

I sat back and let it sink in for a moment. An identical twin.
The girl in the park has an identical twin? And she was trying to tell me that her twin sister is killing people?
I suddenly made a connection.

“You say the girl in the park was stabbed by her sister?” I said.

“That’s right.”

“She wore a patch over her eye. Was she stabbed in the eye?”

“In the eye.”

“The patch was over the right eye, wasn’t it?”

“You’re catching on.”

“Any idea what she used to stab her?”

“Ice pick.”

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Son of a bitch! Tell me we have something that links the girl to the murders.”

“Not a thing. That’s why I need the warrant. We’re going to look for an ice pick, along with anything else we might run across.”

“Where are you going to search?”

“Her mother’s house. That’s where she lives.”

“I’m going with you.”

“She has an inverted cross tattooed on her neck,” Fraley said. “I saw it just before I left. And there’s something else.” He reached over and picked up a napkin and set it down on the table in front of him. He took a pen out of his pocket, scrawled something on it, and shoved it towards me. I looked down at the napkin. On it Fraley had written the same letters that had been carved into the foreheads of Bjorn Beck and Norman Brockwell—“ah Satan.”

“What about it?” I said.

“Write it out,” Fraley said. “Backwards.”

Wednesday, October 8

Four hours later, after I’d drafted yet another warrant application and gotten it signed by Judge Rogers, Fraley and I climbed the front porch steps of a small frame house in what was known as the Red Row section of Johnson City. It was a poor neighborhood in the southeast part of the city that bordered a massive “environmental center,” what used to be called a landfill and before that a dump. A small sign on the front door informed visitors, “A Christian Lives Here.” Underneath the sentence, in ink, someone had printed, very neatly, “And a Witch.”

I winced when I saw the woman who opened the door. She was tall and looked to be around sixty years old, although the information we had on her put her age at forty-seven. The skin on her face was sagging and had the faded yellow look of an old newspaper. Her unruly hair was a peculiar shade of red, and her eyes were covered by opaque glasses so thick that she appeared to be wearing goggles. She was wearing a full-length flowered robe that made her body shapeless.

“Marie Davis?” I heard Fraley say.

“Yes.”

Fraley produced an ID and introduced us. Four more agents stood at the bottom of the porch, waiting.

“We have a warrant to search your home,” Fraley said, “and we need to speak to you about Natasha.”

She sighed, muttered something under her breath, and moved away from the door.

Fraley motioned to the other agents to walk around the house, and he and I walked in. She led us to the kitchen table and motioned for us to sit down. As she walked to the counter and retrieved a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray, I looked around. The tiny den was a Christian shrine.An oversized King James Bible nearly covered the coffee table in front of the couch, and there were angels on every shelf, atop the television, and in every nook and cranny in the room. There were wooden angels, ceramic angels, plastic angels, brass angels, all different sizes. They gave the room the tacky look of a roadside flea market.

A large crucifix, at least three feet in length, dominated the paneled wall opposite the front door. On the wall to my left was a print of da Vinci’s
The Last Supper.
But it was the large print on the far wall that caught my attention. It depicted an eyeball atop a pyramid. The all-seeing eye of providence.

“Is she dead?” Marie sat down across from Fraley. The way she said it sounded almost hopeful. I watched her light a cigarette. Her teeth were the same color as her skin and as unruly as her hair.

“No, ma’am,” Fraley said. “She’s fine. She’s down at my office. We picked her up last night at a motel in Johnson City.”

Marie stared off towards the living room for a long moment. She looked like she’d gone into a coma without closing her eyes.

“Ms. Davis, are you all right?” Fraley said.

Smoke rose up in a spiral from the end of her cigarette. She had the slow mannerisms and defeated look of an addict. The house was dirty and poorly lit. The carpet in the den was stained and matted. The linoleum floor beneath my feet was sticky, and a sour, musty odor hung in the air. The sound of dogs barking and snarling suddenly came reverberating through the house from the backyard.

“Jesus!” Fraley said as he rose from the table. “Are they loose?”

“They’re penned up,” Marie said, “and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t use the Lord’s name in vain in my home.”

Fraley stepped through the kitchen to a back door and opened it. The other two agents walked in, both looking a little pale.

“Dobermans,” I heard one of them mutter. “I hate Dobermans. My neighbor had one when I was a kid and it damned near killed me.”

“What can you tell us about Natasha?” Fraley said after he returned to his seat at the table.

Her expression turned hard and she looked away. “I got nothing to say about Natasha,” she said.

“Can you at least tell me why you won’t talk to us about her?” Fraley said.

She blew out a lungful of smoke and turned back towards Fraley. The hand that held her cigarette had started to tremble.

“I reckon you’ll find out soon enough,” she said.

“What about your other daughter?” Fraley said. “What can you tell us about Alisha?”

“Can’t say nothing about her either.”

“Why not?” Fraley said. “Why won’t you tell us anything about your daughters?”

“I’m gonna go in and sit in my chair,” she said. “Y’all got no idea what you’re up against.”

She got up from the table and began to walk stiffly towards the den. When she reached the recliner, she sat down and picked up a remote control from the arm of the chair. She pointed it at the television and flipped it on. A televangelist wearing a bushy gray toupee was pointing back at her from his pulpit, warning her about the wages of sin.

“Ms. Davis,” Fraley said, following her into the room. “This warrant says we can search your home, but you could make things easier on both of us. Do you know if there’s an ice pick anywhere in the house?”

She responded by turning the volume up on the television.

“Fine,” Fraley said. “We’ll do it the hard way.” He snatched the remote out of her hand and turned the television off. “Where’s Natasha’s room?” he said.

“Right down the hall,” Marie said. “I don’t never go in there myself.”

“Go check it out,” Fraley said to me. “You guys go ahead and get started.”

I walked through the den and into the dim hallway. About ten feet down the hall on the left was a door, painted black. I reached for the doorknob, but hesitated, not wanting to go in the room alone. I could hear commotion coming from the kitchen as the agents began their search. I walked back to the edge of the den and waited for Fraley.

“What’s wrong?” he said as he pushed past me into the hallway. “Scared of the dark?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “For some reason I feel like I’m about to walk through the gates of hell, and I think I’d like some company.”