Whispers from the Dead (Serenity's Plain Secrets Book 2) (15 page)

I would have laughed if I wasn’t so angry. I began walking up the driveway toward the car. I glanced at Daniel who was even with me. “We need to pay Sheriff Gentry a visit.”

Daniel smiled. “I knew you’d say that.”

I tossed Daniel the car keys. “I’m calling Todd.”

“You came up with twenty-six missing women in a four state region that are possible matches to fit our burn victim?” I asked Todd in astonishment.

I immediately figured half of them had purposely vanished on their own accord, and the rest were probably involved in their own criminal behavior that added to their disappearances. But still, it was a large number of women to work through.

“Let me work on it for a couple of more hours. I think I can whittle it down to about nine possibilities. Three are from the Indianapolis metro area,” Todd said.

“Start with them first.” I could hear the muffled background noise of people talking and knew that Todd was sitting beside Rosie at the front desk of the Blood Rock Sheriff’s Department. Rosie was our elderly receptionist and unofficial personal therapist. The woman was incredibly wise and she wasn’t shy about telling everyone else that they were idiots. A small stab of homesickness washed over me and I asked, “How’s Bobby doing?”

Todd snorted, “As annoying as ever. He’s still in a tizzy trying to get last year’s files sorted.”

I smiled into the phone picturing Bobby exhausted and rubbing his eyes with a pile of folders on the desk in front of him. Bobby put everything off until the last minute and then he completely freaked out when the mayor came storming in wanting to see this or that. It was really quite comical to watch the two old men bantering back and forth. It was something that I didn’t realize I enjoyed so much until this very moment.

“I’m glad things are quiet there for you guys. Tell Rosie, I said, hi.” I heard Todd immediately relay the greeting to Rosie and then Rosie said loudly enough to clearly penetrate the phone line, “You tell Serenity to hurry up and get her skinny butt back here. I’m tired of being surrounded by a bunch of idiot men.” Todd quickly said, “Ah, Rosie says, hi, too.”

I chuckled as I looked out the window at the sun glistening off of the snowy field that we were passing by. The bottoms of the corn stalks poked up through the snow, making me think of rows of skeletons littering a battlefield. Once again, Naomi popped into my thoughts. I shivered and had to blink away the image of her body lying among the dried up, autumn cornstalks.

“I really appreciate this, Todd,” I said.

“No problem. It’s been incredibly boring around here anyway. I’ll call as soon as I have something for you.”

When I hung up, I glanced over at Daniel.

“What’s wrong?” Daniel asked, taking his eyes off the road for a moment to meet my gaze.

“I came up here to investigate some barn burnings, but it’s grown into something much more sinister. And I don’t like it one bit.”

“I really don’t know how you’re keeping everything straight in your head. There’s a lot going on in this town,” Daniel snorted.

“Brody’s department could be doing the same kind of research that I’m having Todd do right now. The fact that they aren’t, is ringing an alarm bell in my mind.”

“What do you think the story is with the woman’s body?”

I took a deep breath, “The woman was dead when she was placed in the barn. The fire was set to get rid of her and any evidence on her body.”

“How can you be so sure?”

I shrugged. “It just makes the most sense.”

“But what about the other fires, and Rowan’s house explosion?”

“I have some ideas, but I need more time…and answers from the sheriff.”

A few minutes later, we parked in the little parking lot beside the sheriff’s department. As timing would have it, Brody was walking out of the building by himself as we approached. We intercepted him on the sidewalk.

“Sheriff, do you have a minute?”

Brody stopped, but said, “It’s a busy Sunday. What do you need?”

With the sun out and the milder temperatures, it wasn’t uncomfortable having a conversation outside, but it still irritated me that Brody wasn’t showing any inclination to invite me into his office for a meeting. I caught a glimpse of Daniel peeking at me with one eyebrow raised. I ignored him. This had to be handled extremely delicately.

“All I have is one question. It won’t take long.” I tilted my head and watched his expressions closely. “What’s the deal with Asher Schwartz? He has a rap sheet a mile long in Indy and he’s been involved in criminal activities in Poplar Springs that include murder. Why aren’t you gunning for him? If he was in my jurisdiction, I know I would be.”

A curious flash of fear passed over Brody’s features and then, just as quickly, he relaxed. “It was self-defense. No witnesses and Asher’s word against a dead man’s, who had an equally long rap sheet of his own. Some cases just aren’t worth the tax payer’s money.”

Brody sniffed and shifted on his feet. He was a really big guy, and standing in his shadow would have been intimidating if he had been a different sort of man. But I was convinced that he was the type who would rather run from a fight than make a stand. I knew a lot of guys like him. The easy way was always the best way in their book.

I raised a questioning brow. “On a first name basis with him?”

Brody cracked a little smile and said, “I know everyone in this town…and I’m a friendly man. You might learn a thing or two from my actions, Serenity.”

I gave him my deadliest stare and asked, “I need to know, Sheriff, before I bother going any further with this investigation, whether you’ll prosecute Asher Schwartz if I discover that he’s involved with the arsons in the Amish community…and possibly other criminal acts?”

I had to give Brody credit for not blurting out what I wanted to hear, just to pacify me. He hesitated for a long moment before he steadily met my gaze. “There are a lot of factors in play here that I’m not going to discuss with you. But I will say this. Asher has a big mouth and he won’t be taken quietly.” Brody took a step closer, leaning down to the side of my face. He whispered so quietly that I wasn’t even sure if Daniel could hear him. “Asher is a cancerous wart on my community. He needs to be brought down, but as long as he’s able to talk, I won’t touch the man.”

Brody stood up tall again, and tipped his gray hat to Daniel. He left us alone on the sidewalk just as an uncomfortable burst of apprehension struck me. It was the same type of feeling you get when you’re swimming in the ocean and you suddenly have a horrible feeling that something is beneath you in the dark, greenish water, and it’s about to bite your foot off.

I finally breathed again and looked up at Daniel. “This town is a lot more messed up than I originally thought.”

Without hesitation, Daniel said, “I’m right here with you, however you want to proceed.”

Daniel was watching me with a still, unreadable face. His eyes were warm and alive, though, and for a moment, I was completely at a loss. I certainly wasn’t used to the sickening feeling of trepidation spreading quickly inside my gut, but having Daniel standing there at attention, waiting for me to make my move, was encouraging. Suddenly a thick knot lodged in my throat and I struggled to swallow it down. Oh, how I wished that Daniel and I really were more than just partners. I was tiring of the cat and mouse game. Even now, sparks were tingling inside of me as I gazed up at his handsome face.

But I couldn’t mention to him what Brody had just insinuated. It was just too dangerous. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do, but the less Daniel knew about it, the better for him. I was about to go down a very slippery slope, one that I wasn’t even sure myself if I would be able to climb out of.

I cleared my throat. “Todd gave me Asher’s address. That’s our next stop.”

Daniel’s smile and his immediate willingness to follow me deeper into the mud gave me a burst of hopefulness for an instant, but as I turned away and walked to the car, I wondered if I should just keep on driving, right out of this town for good.

20

I
t was a typical trailer park, only with the snow and the bare, skeletal trees, it was even gloomier than usual. Absently, I had already counted a dozen different dogs chained to dog houses in the front yards and there were enough older model cars in the driveways to fill a junk yard. Children’s large, plastic toys littered most of the simple porches and even on this cold day, several people were outside on those porches smoking cigarettes.

This was the perfect place for Asher Schwartz to blend into. People that lived in places like this didn’t snitch on each other. They had unwritten rules that everyone automatically knew and followed. And with the depressed, chipped paint look of most of the homes, the main portion of the inhabitants of the East Side Trailer Park were probably unemployed and living on government assistance. They were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty. Asher would be king in such a place.

“This neighborhood has a rough look about it,” Daniel commented.

“No kidding,” I muttered. In the academy I had been trained to trust my instincts, which I usually did. But I knew cops that were by nature jumpy, and ended up making the wrong call in a sticky situation. I certainly didn’t want to wind up on the evening news for shooting an innocent person. The thought made my hand inadvertently slip into my jacket. I touched the cold steel of my gun, and immediately, my heart rate calmed.

I turned two more times before I saw the black Charger parked on the one lane road. The trailers were lined up tightly along the lane, and I had to slow the car down considerably to maneuver through the parked vehicles making the lane even narrower. The trailer that the Charger was parked in front of was a little better kept than most of the others. The bushes were trimmed neatly and the stone walkway from the carport to the house was shoveled free of snow. It occurred to me that even though Asher had strayed as far away from his roots as a man could, he had maintained the same compulsiveness to have a very clean and manicured property that all Amish people seemed to have.

“Here we are,” I said with exaggerated flourish as I parked behind the sports car.

Before I had a chance to touch the door handle, Daniel touched me. He swallowed and said, “Are you sure you want to confront this guy without the local authorities here?”

I searched Daniel’s eyes, looking for fear, but found none. He was just worried about the legal consequences that I might have to deal with. He had no idea what kind of hornet’s nest we were walking into. I hesitated. Again, the thrum of wrongness shook me.

But I ignored the sensation, remembering the pasty shade of Mariah’s face when she had exited the telephone shed after meeting secretly with Asher. If I didn’t intervene, something bad would eventually happen to Mariah and maybe other kids in the Amish community, too. And then there was Cody’s obvious terror of the ex-Amish man. Asher Schwartz had gotten away with his corruption long enough. I still wasn’t sure what he had over Sheriff Gentry’s head, but whatever it was, I didn’t really care at the moment. The Sheriff had not-so-subtly given me his blessing to take matters into my own hands, and I had the distinct feeling that it wouldn’t take much to put Asher into a situation where he forced my hand. Daniel might have felt some kind of comradery with Asher since they both shared the experience of leaving the Amish, but that didn’t play into this at all as far as I was concerned. Brody was right—Asher was a disease that wouldn’t stop until he had infected everyone he could in Poplar Springs.

“It will be all right. I’m just going to put Asher a little off balance, see if he’ll break.”

Daniel nodded and once again, without question, he walked beside me up to the trailer. When I knocked on the door, a fluffy gray and white cat strolled up the steps and stopped at my feet. It pushed up against my legs and I could clearly hear its loud purring.

Daniel reached down to stroke the cat, but I stayed alert. I stood sideways at the door, darting my eyes from the carport back to the road. I was listening hard for any sound of a possible ambush or escape. But the only thing I heard was the muffled noise of a children’s program on a television inside the house and dogs barking from behind the house. With my bad luck as of late, the dogs were probably all Pit Bulls or German Shepherds. The blinds were pulled tight. I couldn’t see into the rectangular shaped window to the right of the doorway at all.

I knocked again, a little louder this time. My heart began pounding in my chest and I glanced at Daniel wondering how he could be so relaxed.

“Maybe he’s not home?” Daniel suggested.

“He’s here,” I said with sureness.

The door finally opened a few inches and a gauntly thin woman stared out with pure venom in her eyes. Her hair was dyed an outrageous orange color and the mascara around her bloodshot green eyes was smudged. It was well past one o’clock in the afternoon, but the woman was still in satin pajama bottoms and a white tank top. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her nipples were clearly visible through the thin fabric.

With a slight drawl to her words, she growled, “What do you want?”

The child peeking around her legs was probably around two years old. The girl’s wispy blonde hair was greasy and her face was smeared with something yellow. The strong smell of a soiled diaper wafted off of the girl and I wrinkled my nose for an instant.

The woman was high. No doubt about it. I kept the sympathy that I felt for the child at bay. I had been on a lot of domestic violence calls in Indy, and there was almost always a rag-tag child like this one hanging onto her mamma’s leg. Social services were overrun with these kinds of cases. They could hardly keep up with the number of kids in the system, and sometimes foster care was even worse than the circumstances that the kids were already living in.

I put on my stony, cop face and said, “I would like to talk to Asher.”

“He’s not here.” She began to slam the door, but my hand was quicker. With a thump, I braced the door open. I saw the heroin tracks on her arm.

“I don’t believe you. And if there is even an ounce of you that wants to do the best thing for your daughter, you’ll leave that man. You need help and I can get it for you—if you’ll just go get Asher for me,” I tried to convince her.

“I don’t need your help, bitch!” the woman shouted.

The scurrying sound in the snow by the carport got my attention. Daniel bolted up and I released the door, letting it slam shut. The cat hissed, and like a flash of smoke, it was gone just as the dogs rounded the corner. My mind only had a split second to register that they
were
Pits. The brindle one hit us first, snapping its jaws around Daniel’s leg.

The acidy taste of bile rose in my throat as I freed my gun in one smooth, fluid motion, and fired at the black dog that was a just few strides behind the first. The disgust of having to shoot a dog flowed through me, and an almost blind rage toward Asher followed next.

The black dog rolled into the snow and was dead by the time its momentum stopped. A gush of dark red spread onto the snow beside it. Between the shot blast and Daniel striking its head with his fists, the brindle let go of Daniel’s leg and backed off the porch, barking at us.

Under the circumstances, I would have been within my rights to shoot that dog as well, but as long as it was holding its position, I decided to take my chances and leave it alone.

“Get in the car, Daniel, and call 911,” I ordered.

“What about you?” Daniel demanded. He clutched his bitten leg, trying to slow the bleeding, but his hands were already covered with blood. Fear was now flashing in his wide eyes.

“Right behind you,” I lied.

As Daniel limped across the yard, I kept an eye on the dog that hadn’t moved, but was still barking up a storm, and ran to the carport. I was sure that Asher was running out the back door, and was ready for pursuit on foot, when another gunshot blast split the air.

Twisting, I saw Daniel go down beside my car and I stopped breathing altogether.