The Last Death of Jack Harbin (16 page)

I never paid much attention to the motorcycle repair shop halfway between Jarrett Creek and Bryan–College Station. It's a big barn of a building set back from the highway. A snappy red, yellow, and black sign reads,
HIGH RIDE MOTORCYCLE REPAIR
. I pull up there at nine o'clock. A huge plate glass window displays on a pedestal a vintage motorcycle. A neat, hand-lettered sign says,
Indian
.

I wondered how a motorcycle repair shop could keep five veterans occupied, but I don't wonder anymore. There are at least 30 motorcycles parked out front, all types. There are long, skinny ones, big, round, beefy ones. Some look like they are meant for a leisurely Sunday drive, and others like you could go across the country on them. Signs in the window say they repair every type of hog from Harleys to Yamahas to Hondas. A plaque on the front door announces that the shop won some award from a motorcycle association.

Inside it's noisy, but cleaner than I expected. Motorcycles stand in individual work areas in various stages of disassembly. In the office, Walter Dunn sits behind a desk talking to a burly man with bristly gray hair. Dunn glances over and nods to me. I stand at the window and watch the work in progress while I wait for them to finish their business.

Eventually bristle-top leaves and Dunn comes out from behind the counter to shake my hand. “What brings you over here?”

“I need to have a talk with you if you've got a minute.”

He says he'll make some time for me. “But let's go in the back, otherwise we'll be interrupted every two minutes.” He pokes his head out and yells to Vic, the tattooed man I met at Jack's, to watch the front for a few minutes.

We step into a small back room set up with a tiny table and couple of chairs, a half-size refrigerator, and a coffee machine. Dunn pours us some coffee and we sit down.

I tell him about Rodell being out of commission for a while and my being corralled to find out who killed Jack.

“Sounds good to me. Jack said you were the best lawman they ever had in town.”

“That's a good bit in the past, but I'll do my best.”

“How can I help you out?”

I take the photo of him and Jack out of my pocket and set it on the table in front of him. He doesn't touch it, but his gremlin's face goes still. If you don't look at his eyes, he can look like a fierce man. “You told me you met Jack in Bryan at a veteran's meeting.”

Finally he looks up and pushes the photo back across the table to me. “You're right. I misspoke.”

“Misspoke, or lied?”

“Say it however you want.”

“How come you didn't tell me you knew Jack in the war? Seems like a big omission.”

“It's complicated. I'm not going to go into it, but I can tell you with absolute truth that it has nothing to do with Jack's murder.”

“It have anything to do with California?”

I've hit a nerve. He sits back; suddenly tense. He rubs his thumb along his chin while he looks off into space. “I'm just going to repeat what I said. All that has nothing to do with Jack's murder.”

I pick up the picture and look at it. I feel like I'm soothing a wild beast. “I'd like to leave the matter alone. I really would. But it occurred to me that something that happened back then might have come back into Jack's life.”

He doesn't rush to say no. He thinks on it for several seconds, but then shakes his head again. “Can't be. It cannot be.”

I pull out the article about the homeless man in the dumpster that I found in Jack's wallet and push it over to Dunn. He blinks at it for a minute and then picks it up. He's smiling. “I can't believe Jackie kept this. I cut it out to read to him. Told him if he didn't get his act together he was going to end up like this guy—on the streets, homeless, begging for handouts.”

“Who put the smiley face on it?”

“Beats me.” He gets up, dumps the rest of his coffee in the sink and heads for the door. “I'm going to have to get back out there. Mondays are always busy. You let me know if there's anything else I can help you with.”

“There is one thing,” I say, rising.

He turns back around. “Say the word.”

“You prevented Jack's brother from throwing his mother out of Jack's house the other day.”

He snickers. “I don't know that it would have come to that, but I saw to it that their argument didn't go too far.”

“Marybeth says you just showed up at the back door. What were you doing there?”

He smiles sadly. “I'll tell you what I was doing. I went to get my books and magazines. I brought them over to Jack's after his dad died to have something to read to him, keep him company, get his mind off things. And after Jack was killed, I got to thinking I could bring the magazines back here. Curtis would just throw them in the trash. I doubt he has the stomach for that kind of publication, being an upright Christian, and all that.”

And with that, I have to be satisfied. Dunn says he'll see me at the funeral tomorrow. “The boys and I are planning a special tribute.”

Talking to Dunn gets me thinking about Curtis. When I get back to my place, I fire up my computer and go to work finding out everything I can about the True Marcus Ministry. And what I find chills me.

“Marcus” is Marcus Longley, an ex-Southern Baptist from Kentucky, who claims to have seen his way to a new religion after a “series of crossroads” shook his faith. Poking around on the Internet doesn't yield what those “crossroads” might have been.

I get hold of an older cop in Marcus's hometown who remembers Marcus well. “His parents were drunks and when meth came into fashion, they took to it like ducks to water.” He snorts. “I guess they didn't take too well to being parents. Marcus spent his formative years in a juvenile facility.”

“What for?”

“Uh . . . just a minute. Let me see.”

I hear paper rustling. “I wanted to get the wording right. Says here, ‘inappropriate conduct with a six-year-old neighbor.' I remembered it was some kind of high-toned words.”

“Gets the message across.”

“That it does. Then after he got out, when he was eighteen, wasn't any time before it happened again, this time with a twelve-year-old girl.”

“Did he go to jail?”

“Naw, we couldn't get enough evidence to charge him, but we asked him very nicely to leave town and not come back. This is the first I've heard of him since. Is he up to his old tricks?”

“I'm not sure, but I appreciate the information.”

I wonder how Curtis came to be involved in the group. Poking around a little more on the Internet, I find an article about Marcus Ministry in an online magazine called
Religious Soldier
. It says that the mission of the ministry is “survival after the takeover. The ministry is armed and ready to fight back against the SHADOW GOVERNMENT that is determined to deprive us of our right to worship in our own way.” The way they choose to worship isn't specified in the article. But their weapons of choice are discussed in detail, from assault rifles to shotguns to close-range combat guns. Funny how these steadfast Americans prefer weapons manufactured in Russia or China.

As a boy, Curtis was always a little strange, going off in the woods like he did. But a lot of boys went through that phase. As chief of police, I didn't take them too seriously. Mostly it was about shooting possums and snakes. By the time they were old enough to be interested in girls, they either lost their interest in guns altogether or channeled it into hunting. Curtis took a different turn.

Until now, Taylor's concern for her sister seemed nothing more than a logistical problem. Now I'm worried that Sarah's daughters might be at risk. It makes me sick to my stomach. I'm betting that Curtis was so glad to find like-minded people in the True Marcus Ministry that he never bothered to find out about Marcus Longley's past. It's about time someone gave him that information.

Before I can get out of the house to go see Curtis, the phone rings. It's the medical examiner's office with preliminary results of Jack's autopsy. Once an autopsy is complete, it's public record, but the bureaucratic process can take as long as eight weeks. So I asked them to call me informally as soon as they completed the autopsy. Although I was pretty sure I knew what the cause of death was, you can't assume anything in a murder.

But there are no surprises in Jack's report. He died from the knife wounds. Like me, the medical examiner concluded that the attempted strangulation was not sufficiently forceful to kill Jack, just to suppress any noise he might have made. I thank them for the report. “While I have you on the phone, can you email me another autopsy report?”

Within the hour both Jack's and Bob's autopsy files arrive as PDFs. There's something about autopsy results that always shakes me up. I saw Jack dead of his wounds, saw the way he had struggled, the blood, the contortions of his body, and yet the clinical language of the autopsy report seems more final, more intimate even, than seeing it before my eyes.

I take a cup of coffee out onto the porch and sit picturing the vague form of someone creeping into Jack's house, into his bedroom, with the intent of killing him. I wonder where the knife is now, if it was cleaned and put away neatly in a drawer somewhere or thrown away where no one will ever find it.

Hitch Montgomery would be a shoo-in for the role of banker in a Hollywood movie. He's a tidy man who wears neat suits with buttoned-up collars and his hair short in back with just enough to comb over in the front. As long as I've banked with him, I've never known him to make a joke nor to gossip. It's all business, all the time. Just what you want your banker to be.

When I sit down across from him the next morning, I tell him I'm investigating Jack's death and have a question for him. “If it violates confidentiality, just let me know and I'll get a court order.”

He lays his hands flat on the desk in front of him. It's bare except for a pen and yellow pad and a discreet picture of his wife and children. “You know I can't let you see his records without the court approving.”

“I've already seen them. Curtis let me go through them.”

“Then what's your question?”

I ask him what he knows about the money taken out of Jack's account at intervals and then put back in.

He thinks for a time, then draws what I'd have to say is a cautious breath. “The good part is that I can tell you what I know about it. The bad part is, I don't know anything.”

It's as close to humor as I've ever heard from him.

“What I mean is, I remember Bob came in and told me he wanted to take some money out of the account. Seemed like a lot. You know, we're not like one of those Wall Street banks, trying to stick it to everybody. We pride ourselves that we aren't just here to deposit your money, but to guide you. We need to be alert if somebody is investing unwisely.”

When Jeanne and I first bought an expensive painting, Montgomery had a little chat with us about art not being such a sound investment. Turns out in a couple of cases he couldn't have been more wrong, but we were glad he took a personal interest.

“I can't tell people what to do with their money, but I can tell them if I think they're making a mistake. Sometimes they even listen.”

“I'm guessing Bob didn't tell you what the money was for.”

“Only that it was Jack's money and Jack wanted it for a friend.”

“He didn't say who the friend was?”

“He didn't. I don't mind telling you, I was a little worried. You might think it's none of my business. But like I said, we take care of our own. When the money was put back, I stopped worrying about it.”

“And it happened several times.”

“That's right. Seemed odd to me, but it got to be a regular thing, so I figured it was just what he said—helping out a friend.”

“Is there anybody else here at the bank who might have handled one of these transactions?”

He shakes his head. “I'm the one who handles his account. If anything happened while I was away, I would have been told.”

“I do know Jack liked to go to Coushatta and gamble with some friends. I'm wondering if that's what it was about.”

He laughs. “If he was gambling with the money, you can be sure he'd be taking more out than he was putting in.”

If the money wasn't used for gambling, there's another thought I have about what happened to it. And I don't like where the idea takes me at all.

An hour later I use my talk with Montgomery as an opening with Curtis. We're sitting out on the patio. It's the first real fall day we've had, crisp and clear. “I had a talk with Hitch Montgomery and he said he doesn't know why big sums of money went in and out of Jack's account. You had any more thoughts about it?”

“There's still $10,000 missing. Of course I've thought about it. I figure one of those vet friends of his needed to be tided over.”

“You have any particular reason for thinking that?”

Curtis is restless. He's hunched forward in his seat and his foot keeps bouncing when he's not talking. “No. But all you have to do is look at them, scruffy and driving those motorcycles. Probably not one of them with a steady job.”

“You're wrong there.” I tell him about the motorcycle shop. “They've got more business than they know what to do with.” I'd bet the shop brings in a lot more money than what Curtis makes buying and selling guns, but what do I know about that?

“Still, could be that they need tiding over every now and then. But they're not going to have that tit to go back to anymore.” He's stubborn; I'll give him that.

“Taylor told me you offered to let her see her sister.”

He's instantly still and suspicious. “What of it?”

“Is that real?”

“I don't see where you come into it.”

“I don't. But I do have a question. Have you ever looked into the background of the guy who heads Marcus Ministry?”

“I don't need to look into it. I know everything I need to know just talking to him.”

“I doubt if he'd tell you if your daughters are at risk from a pedophile.”

He jumps to his feet. “My wife is perfectly capable of taking care of my daughters, and she hasn't said a thing about it. I take good care of my family and I don't like your insinuations.” Despite the cool air, his face is flushed. He starts toward the back door.

“Hold up! You might want to hear what I have to say. Then you can do what you please with the information.”

He takes a step back toward me. “I doubt you have anything to say that will be of value.”

“I found out a little more about your buddy Marcus. And he's not who you think he is.”

His body is as tense as a coiled snake. “What are you talking about?”

“Seems like Marcus has a record of sexual interest in underage girls.”

Curtis steps close enough so he's towering over me. “That's just a flat-out lie. I've known the man for ten years and never known him to take the slightest interest in a young girl. He's happily married to a fine woman who knows her duty.”

I sit back and cross my ankle over my bad knee. I'll be damned if I'm going to look up at him, so I speak to the air in front of me. “I had a talk with the police department in the town where Marcus grew up.”

Curtis sits back down in the lawn chair, perching on the edge. “So what?”

“They confirmed that Marcus was arrested twice for sexual assault on two underage girls.”

Curtis draws the back of his hand across his mouth as if wiping off an unwanted kiss. He leaps up and stalks around the patio like a caged animal, and then wheels on me. “It's got to be a different man. Lots of people with the same name.”

I hand him a photo the police in Mississippi faxed me. He looks at it for a long minute, and then wads it up and tosses it aside. “There's some mistake. I know this man. He's a good, law-abiding, god-fearing man.”

I get up. “Maybe so. But if it were my daughter, I'd want to be damn sure.”