R. E. Bradshaw - Rainey Nights (5 page)

The older man spoke first. “Ah Gillian, Mary said you were coming.”

While Rainey and Danny got out their credentials, Deputy Knox took over the introductions. “Good to see you, too, Pastor Morrell. I can see you’re busy, but could you give us a few minutes? This is Agent Bell and Agent McNally from the FBI. They would like to talk to you about Crystal.”

“This has been so devastating to the congregation. Such a tragedy,” the pastor lamented. “I can’t imagine why anyone would hurt such a beautiful child of God.”

Rainey extended her hand and shook the pastor’s. “Yes, it is a tragedy. Thank you for talking with us.”

Danny shook the pastor’s hand, as well, saying, “We’re very sorry for your loss.”

Pastor Morrell repeated, “Such a tragedy.” Then suddenly seeming to remember the young man, he said, “I’m sorry, I forgot my manners. This is Dalton Chambers. He volunteered to help me set up for the kids tomorrow. He drove up here today from Roanoke. Crystal invited Dalton to help her with the abstinence pledge drive she had planned for this lockdown.”

The curly haired blond stepped forward. The hair framed his handsome face. He looked to be in his early twenties, with chiseled good looks and a dimple on his left cheek when he smiled. Rainey figured him to be six-foot-three, at least. He was built like an athlete and appeared to be in terrific shape. He probably lifted weights. His blue eyes were piercing when he made eye contact with Rainey. Immediately the hair stood up on the back of her neck.

Dalton stepped forward and extended his hand to her, which Rainey shook and felt the strength in his hand. A hand she was sure had been around Crystal’s neck five days ago. She watched as Danny shook the young man’s hand to gauge his response. Maybe she was over-reacting, because she wanted her theory to be correct. While Dalton shook the deputy’s hand, Rainey got her answer when Danny gave her a look that said he thought they found the killer, too.

Dalton said to all of them, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I hope you’re making progress to find this guy. I’m up and down through here all the time, and I tell you the girls on 220 are scared.”

“They have good reason to be,” Rainey said, making eye contact with Dalton again.

This time she saw his right eye twitch when he held her gaze just a second too long. Dalton had a “tell,” a signal to a keen observer that he was under stress. They needed to be careful. Rainey wanted Dalton to talk to them, but she couldn’t let him in on her suspicions. She turned her attention back to the pastor, while at the same time glancing at Knox. Gillian was sizing Dalton up, as well. Rainey hoped the young officer would keep her composure while she and Danny questioned the two men.

“Pastor Morrell,” Rainey began, “we’re trying to locate a ring Crystal may have been wearing. It was not found with her. Do you think she could have lost it or left it here while she was cleaning?”

“Mary would be a better person to ask that question. All the lost and found things get turned in to her.”

Dalton chimed in. “Are you talking about her pledge ring? I know she would never have taken that off voluntarily.”

“Why do you say that?” Danny asked.

“Because it really meant a lot to her. I remember her talking about how the ring made her feel closer to God. It symbolized her promise to him to remain chaste. We talked about it the last time I spoke to her. She said she never took it off.”

Rainey saw an opening. “When did you talk to her last?”

Dalton pretended to be trying to remember. “I think it was the Friday before she went missing. She called me to make sure I was still able to come for her pledge drive.”

Nobody forgets the last time they spoke with someone who died tragically. Dalton was trying too hard to appear uninvolved.

Danny jumped in. “You drove up here from Roanoke. So you’re not from here. How did you meet Crystal?”

Dalton’s eye twitched again. Danny was pressing too hard. Rainey was afraid this guy was going to bolt, or worse, make this his last stand. At that moment, Rainey’s cellphone rang. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket and saw that it was Brooks calling back.

“Excuse me. I need to take this call.”

Rainey stepped back out in the hall away from the others and flipped her phone open.

“Tell me you have some names for me,” she said, without saying hello.

“My, aren’t we a bit tense today,” came the reply.

“Oh God, you have no idea. I need a name and I need it now.”

Brooks laughed. “No honey, you need to get laid. You’re so wound up, you’re liable to just blow a gasket any day.”

“Brooks, I could be standing in the same room with a serial killer, as we speak. Tell me you have this guy’s name.”

Suddenly serious, Brooks began to speak rapidly. “What I found is these pledge folks do not have employees that travel a route like you’re looking for. They train people at retreats around the country, but there are no representatives that actually go from church to church like you said.”

Rainey let out, “Shit,” just a little too loud.

She looked through the doorway to see if anyone was watching her. Dalton was answering Danny’s questions. No one heard her.

Brooks went on, “Now, hold on. I did get a list of churches requesting information and materials to hold their own pledge drives. I pulled the ones in your geographic area. There are quite a few. Don’t these people know sexual experimentation is a healthy part of growing up? Lord honey, I tried out a bunch before I found the one that rocked my world and then I married him. Anyway, each of your victims lived in or near a town where one of these pledge travesties took place.”

Rainey sighed. “But no names.”

“I tried to get a list of trainees, but they don’t keep that information on computer. That ought to tell you how backward these folks are.”

Rainey was suddenly hit with inspiration. She backed slowly out of sight of the others, and then broke into a trot down the hall and out of the building. Once outside, she ran to the front of the truck. Virginia was one of those states requiring tags on the front and back of vehicles.

Breathing faster now, she rushed out her words. “I need you to run a license plate for me.”

“Okay, shoot.”

Rainey read the plate off and then added, “It should come back to a Dalton Chambers. See if he has any traffic violations that correlate with the dates of the murders, credit card receipts too, and run a background check on him. I’m going to stay on the phone with you.”

“You do know I will call you right back, don’t you?” Brooks quipped.

“Well, since we don’t know how he’s going to react, if he knows we suspect him, I’d rather stay on the line.”

Brooks let a whispered, “Shit,” escape into the receiver, before she said, “Okay, you stay with me. Let’s see what one Dalton Chambers has been up to.”

After a few seconds of keys clicking on a keyboard, Brooks began to speak. “Your boy is from Acredale, Virginia. He is twenty-five years old. He drives a Ford F150, black, four by four. He has no criminal convictions other than a few traffic tickets. I’m running his credit card receipts through a program, looking for matching dates. That will take a few minutes. He was charged once in a sexual assault, let’s see, at age seventeen, but those charges were dropped and should have been expunged from his record, but the wheels of justice do turn slowly.”

Rainey needed more than that. She pressed, “Where and when did he get the tickets? Can we tie him to a murder site?”

“No, these tickets were all before the killing started… Wait… There is an article here. Damn, somebody beat the shit out of your boy a few years back.”

“What? What?” Rainey almost shouted.

“It says Dalton Chambers was savagely beaten his senior year, by unknown assailants, so severely that he spent several weeks in the hospital. Evidently, he was a star baseball player and the beating ended his career. The head injuries gave him chronic vertigo, so he couldn’t play anymore… Hang on… It says, ‘he credits God with his recovery and knows that he has a better plan for him…’ This is your guy, Rainey. From what I’ve read of the files, he’s a Jesus freakazoid, or at least pretending to be.”

Rainey had a hunch. “Can you access his medical records?”

“I’m already doing it, but it looks like I need to make a phone call. Do you want to stay on hold, or should I call you back?”

As badly as she wanted to hold on, Rainey knew she couldn’t leave Danny in there alone much longer.

“I’ll hang up. I’m going back in the building. I’m sure Danny is running out of dance moves by now.”

“Okay Rainey Bell, you be safe and Big Momma Brooks will be right back to you.”

The line went dead. Rainey flipped her phone shut and put it back in her pocket. Just before she turned away, she glanced up at the windshield. By law, it could not be as dark as the other windows. Suspended from the rearview mirror, a gold chain glinted in the sunlight. Rainey saw at least a dozen gold bands dangling from the chain. Dalton kept his trophies where he could see and touch them. If she asked him about the rings, he would claim that they were just trinkets to hand out to others. Rainey had a gut feeling DNA testing would prove that to be a lie.

She walked back into the room with the others, forcing herself to remain calm. They were within inches of a serial killer, she was sure, but they had no evidence to take him in. They could ask him to come with them, but he was too smart for that she thought. Of course, he could be one of those killers that liked playing games with the police. Dalton struck Rainey as the type who would disappear, as soon as they lost sight of him. He would reinvent himself somewhere else and start killing again. He was intelligent enough to pull it off. Ted Bundy did it and took his dirty deeds all the way across the country. They could not let Dalton Chambers leave here today, not without some kind of plan to keep track of him.

Rainey rejoined the group. She looked at Danny. “Sorry, that was my mother. I had to answer it or she would just keep calling.”

Danny knew it wasn’t her mother. Rainey avoided answering her mother’s phone calls at every opportunity. He feigned concern. “Is everything all right?”

“It’s my little brother. He’s gotten himself in a bit of trouble.”

Danny also knew Rainey was an only child. “Is there anything you can do?”

Rainey needed him to know Brooks was looking into something and that they had nothing so far, except the rings. She thought the rings were the answer. Now, they just needed enough probable cause to get a search warrant. “I told her to call a lawyer and then call me back. I don’t know what she thinks I can do from here. My hands are tied.”

Pastor Morrell spoke up, “May God be with your family during this trying time. Thank goodness he never gives us more than we can bear.”

Dalton added an, “Amen.”

Rainey wanted to pull her gun and put this guy in cuffs right then, but they could not jeopardize a conviction by moving too quickly. She needed evidence beyond the churning in her gut.

Danny began to fill her in on what she missed. “Dalton has been telling me what a wonderful young woman Crystal was. He met her at a retreat last fall in Roanoke.”

“Oh, is that where you’re from?” She wanted to catch him in a lie.

Dalton was too smart to fib about something she could check so easily. “No, ma’am.” He poured on the charm. “I’m from a little town about a hundred miles south of here called Acredale, but like I said, I travel a lot.”

“All in the service of God,” the pastor chimed in. “Dalton is on a crusade to help our youth make the right decisions, ignore peer pressure, and follow the Lord.”

Rainey looked at the pastor. “So, you know Dalton through his work?”

“No, I just met this fine young man today,” the pastor answered. “He’s been filling me in on his mission. We discovered that he has been to many of the churches of pastors I’m very familiar with. It does my heart good to know the youth have a positive role model to look up to. This young man has traveled from Rockingham, North Carolina to Iron Gate, Virginia and back, all to the Glory of God and…”

Rainey watched Dalton, as he listened to the pastor. His body language suggested he wasn’t comfortable with the preacher continuing to speak. His eye twitched again, just before he interrupted.

“Pastor Morrell, thank you for those kind words, but these folks want to know about Crystal’s mission, not mine.”

“No, I’m very interested in your work,” Rainey said to Dalton. His veneer cracked just a little, so she decided to push him. “I’d love to hear more about this abstinence ministry. I’m also curious as to why you only travel 220 on your quest. Surely there are bigger audiences in larger towns, more souls to save.”

Dalton regained his composure, answering, “There are already abstinence programs set up in most of the big cities. These kids out here need me more than the ones in the city do. This is the kind of place I grew up in and I know we needed it when I was in high school.”

“Since you minister at churches along this road, you may have come in contact with some of the other victims. Do you know if you were in one of the churches they could have attended? We’re researching any tie the victims may have in common. We think they may all have signed an abstinence pledge.”

Rainey wanted to watch Dalton squirm. She just told him they were connecting the dots. He had to be thinking it wouldn’t be long now until they had proof of his involvement in the case.

He answered, “No, I don’t think I met any of the other girls. It’s hard to tell from the pictures in the paper.”

The pastor started to speak and Dalton visibly lost the color in his cheeks.

“Well now, Dalton, you told me you were at Pastor Wells’ church and I think one of those girls went there. Maybe you did meet her. And I know one of them went missing from Pastor Smith’s congregation in Rockingham. You were there last September you told me. That was a while before the girl went missing, but if she signed the pledge, I’m sure you must have met her.”

Dalton tried to recover. “I’m sorry, Pastor Morrell, but I meet so many girls. I’m sorry to say they all start to blend together after a while.”