The Psalmist (13 page)

“Really?” Luke said, wide-­awake now. “I love the minor keys.”

“I know—­and I'm glad your Catholicism stops there.” She added, “Flagellation, as you know, is frowned upon in the Methodist church.”

He saw her shoulders shaking under the covers and realized that she was laughing.

H
EARING
B
ETSY'S VOIC
E
made Luke think of Tidewater again, as he lay there: Jane Doe's beautiful, vacant face as he walked across the empty sanctuary toward her. Jackson Pynne's whiskey-­colored eyes darkening as he stood at the base of his driveway with no place to go. The Jane Doe in his dream, trying to dance, her damp flesh sticking to his fingers. And the scenario he could only imagine: Someone swinging a bat several times, splitting the bones of the dead woman's legs and ribs. And, later, carrying her damaged but well-­dressed corpse into his church, setting her up in a rear pew and posing her so she faced the altar.

When they returned home that afternoon, and Luke read the news that they'd missed, he learned that the woman had not been identified and that there was still no arrest in the case, although Sheriff Calvert had told a reporter that investigators were “pursuing several strong leads.”

 

Chapter 20

S
ATURDAY,
M
ARCH
18

“S
ERGEANT
H
UNTER?”

“Yes.” She recognized immediately the flat, direct intonation of the sheriff's voice.

“It's Clay Calvert. I know you're very concerned about this being a ‘team effort' and all. So I just wanted to make sure you heard about this right away.”

Hunter waited.
What was he up to now?

“We're at the murder scene.”

“The murder scene.”

“That's right.”

“The murder scene has been discovered?”

“That's correct. I'm at the location right now, along with a ­couple of my deputies. CSI just arrived. We've secured the scene.”

“Where?”

“We're at the old Jenkins cottages down to Oyster Creek. Deputies responded to a call from the owner some forty minutes ago. We're just starting to process evidence.”

So why wasn't I called immediately?
Hunter almost asked, but she knew the answer, of course. As soon as she hung up, she called for Ship, who came half running into the hallway.

A maintenance man had entered the cottages that morning to check the window air-­conditioning units. The mattress on the bed in Cabin 6 seemed to be stained with blood, and there was a stench in the room. Evidence techs had also found what appeared to be blood on the floor, the shower tiles and grout.

“There's something else, too,” the sheriff said over the phone. “Which I'll tell you when you get here.”

Hunter let Shipman drive. Oyster Creek was in the southeastern part of the county, a low-­lying maze of creeks, streams, tributaries, and tall marsh grasses that formed the labyrinthine boundary with Chesapeake Bay. Yellow crime tape blew among the scraggly pine trees by the road, where a gaggle of onlookers and two reporters had gathered.

The killing had occurred in the last of a dozen cottages on a mud beach beside the creek. The Jenkins cottages were built in the late 1940s, originally for fishermen and families interested in an outdoors vacation; now, like Robby Fallow's Ebb Tide Inn, they were often vacant, rented out by crabbers in June and July and hunters in the fall. The road to the cottages was one lane and gravel. Small driveways were slotted beside each of the cabins. Two sheriff patrol cars and a state police evidence collection van were parked near the end of the cabin drive. Hunter studied the scene, quickly noting the various footprint and tire-­track patterns that hadn't yet been marked as evidence, including a series of footprints extending from behind Cabin 10 to the rear of Cabin 11. The footprints had been tramped over by fresh prints, she could see, probably from the sheriff's deputies.

Hunter looked back up the drive, figuring what might have happened. A four-­wheel-­drive vehicle had been parked beside Cabin 12. Two men walked from the drive to the cabin and then walked back out.

“The locks aren't real secure on some of them doors,” the sheriff said, startling her from her thoughts. “If they were locked at all. I'm told they get transients in there occasionally.”

“Kind of like at the church.”

Calvert squinted at her. Wind gusted up the shallow creek, carrying the smells of muck and dead fish. Shipman was at the top of the gravel drive now, talking with Barry Stilfork.

“What's the something else?” Hunter asked.

“Do what?”

“You said there was something else you'd tell me, when I got here.”

He nodded, but took a moment to survey the creek first, his eyes narrowing in the dull light. “State police recovered a Chesterfield cigarette butt up in the woods. At the top of the drive. Barry'll show you when he gets back. As you know, we also found a Chesterfield cigarette outside the church.

“I'm also looking at some of them shoe-­print patterns,” he added, “and thinking they look mighty familiar.”

“But with a difference,” Hunter said.

“Oh? And what difference would that be?”

“There are two distinct footprint patterns this time,” Hunter said. “There was only one at the church.”

The sheriff looked her up and down, and then turned to see what Stilfork was doing.

Hunter walked up the steps to Cabin 12. A rusty spring creaked as she pulled the screen door. It was a single-­room cabin, with an old musty smell. The bed was at an odd angle and an armchair overturned, as if there'd been a fight. Two evidence techs were dusting surfaces—­a small wooden chest of drawers and a nightstand. She stood just inside the door, looking at the massive bloodstain on the bed, which seemed to have spread from a single point.

“Tell me about the shoe prints you found,” Hunter said to one of the techs, a tiny woman with dark hair and nervous eyes.

“Several well-­defined prints so far,” she answered

“Different prints?”

“No. One.”

“Matching the prints outside?”

“Haven't checked those yet.”

“Please do,” she said. “Before the sheriff's deputies tramp over them.”

Surprisingly, the woman turned her head and gave Hunter a knowing smile.

Hunter studied the room for several minutes, and eventually noticed something else. She walked to the wall on the other side of the bed, traced her fingers around the edge of a small hole in the wood panel.

“You see this?”

The woman looked up and froze. The other tech, a short heavyset man with hair like steel wool, walked over.

“Bullet hole,” Hunter said. “No shell casings here, were there?”

“Nope.”

Hunter nodded. She walked back outside, calculating the trajectory of the gunshot. It took about seven minutes for her to find it, embedded in dried mud beneath a sprinkling of pine needles. A .22 caliber bullet. The probable cause of Jane Doe's death.

Two cabins away the sheriff was standing with evidence techs who were taking tire track impressions. It wouldn't have surprised Hunter if they were taking impressions of their own vehicles.

“W
HAT DO YOU
think?” she asked Ship as they drove back, threading the maze of creeks and coves and back bays.

“Too many ­people involved. Evidence contamination.”

“What did Deputy Stilfork tell you?”

“He thinks the case is looking pretty solid. They're banking on the Chesterfield cigarette now and the shoe prints. In both cases the same as at the church.”

Jackson Pynne, in other words.
The shift in the investigation was palpable, yes. Just as Shipman had mentioned at breakfast the day before: The sheriff's primary suspect appeared to be Pynne now, not Robby Fallow. And Calvert seemed to be embracing this new scenario just as avidly as he had pushed the one about Fallow—­as if it was something
he'd
discovered. Maybe he believed he had.

Was this another version of “necessary outcome”? Sheriff Calvert liked to reach conclusions quickly, Hunter knew. Mistakenly, he considered it a sign of competence.

“Why, though?” she said. “Why would he have taken her to the church? Why would he have carved those numbers in her hand?”

“You know what Beak thinks?”

“Fortunately, no.”

“He thinks that Robby Fallow and Jackson Pynne were in on this together.”

Hunter gave him a look:
come on
. Shipman's smile vanished.

“I'm just saying.”

“How imminent are charges now?”

­“Couple of days? Maybe middle of the week. What about this Psalms thing, though?” he asked. He looked at her. “Is there anything to that?”

“I don't know.” Hunter recalled the sheriff's accusation that she'd been “withholding” evidence, and decided not to tell Ship any more about Psalms right now. The only ­people who knew about Psalm 51:8 were the pastor and Ben Shipman. As much as she loved him, and thought of him as a brother, she sometimes worried about Ship's divided allegiances.

They fell into silence for a while, as the road wound north toward farmland. Then Ship put on his Beatles CD, nodding his head to the music. “Lady Madonna, baby at your breast, wonder how you manage to feed the rest . . .”

Hunter imagined the advice her father might have given her.
Go with your instincts. Don't let anyone throw you off your game.
Pep talks. Her dad seeming to have all the answers, wanting her to play sports, become an athlete. He'd never have imagined she'd be investigating homicides now, playing poor man's chess with the local sheriff. The world her father had tried to prep her for was out there somewhere, it just wasn't the one she lived in. She thought again of the filmy eyes of Jane Doe, above clasped hands in a church pew. The faces never went away; Hunter knew she would still be seeing those eyes years from now.

“What are you thinking about?” Shipman asked, turning down the music.

Hunter glanced at his steady freckled face and her suspicions about him evaporated. There was something irresistibly companionable about Shipman. He became uncomfortable when ­people were upset or quiet for too long. “Sorry,” she said. “I guess I was thinking about my dad. Thinking what he might've said about all this.”

“What would he have said?”

“Stick with it. Go with your instincts, stuff like that.”

Ship was silent for a few beats. “He died suddenly, didn't he.”

“Heart attack. Forty-­three. Yeah, no one saw it coming.”

“Sorry.”

“Weird, the impressions our parents leave on us, isn't it? Even all these years later.”

Then, after a pause, Shipman said, “Mine died young, too.”

Hunter glanced at him, and felt bad that she had never asked about his father. She knew he'd been a waterman and that he was no longer alive, but little else; the narrative about Ship's dad always seemed to begin and end there. It was something he seemed uncomfortable talking about.

“Yeah, he was a deep sea crabber,” Ship said. “His boat started taking on water forty miles offshore. Off the coast of North Carolina. I was thirteen.”

“I didn't know. I'm sorry.”

“Nah, it's okay, I never talk about it.”

Hunter watched the road unfolding in front of them, the cloud-­tinted light in the fields. When Shipman spoke again, his words were a complete surprise: “Tribulation leads to perseverance, perseverance to character, character to hope. And that's how it goes.”

“What's that?”

“Thing my daddy used to say a lot,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. “It's from the Bible.”

Hunter made a mental note to look it up. “Your dad grew up in Tidewater.”

“Yep, born and raised. Tried to leave a ­couple times. Like me. Something about the air here, I guess, the water. Draws you back. Some ­people, they think they can leave their worries behind if they go somewhere else. Doesn't work that way. My ex-­ thought that. She moved to North Carolina, thought she'd start over, her problems would disappear. My daughter Becca, she tells me Donna's just the same as always, though only worse. She's bipolar, we think. Everything's fine for a while then it's like, whoa, look out.”

“Well, I'm glad you came back,” Hunter said.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

It felt comfortable going into silence after that. Faintly, Hunter heard the Beatles, the chorus on “I Am the Walrus.” She began to think about the case again, about what she'd seen in the woods at Oyster Creek, the game the sheriff was playing.

Finally she said, “Jackson Pynne's company owns a town house here in Tidewater County, you know.”

“Does it?”

“A rental. I think it might be a good idea if you went over and had a look at it.”.”

“Okay. Sure.” He turned the music off. “Why? Do you think he's been staying there?”

“No,” Hunter said. “But I think we might find something.”

“Okay.” After a pause, he said, “What do you think we might find?”

“I don't know,” Hunter said. “For starters, maybe a pair of shoes.”

 

Chapter 21

J
ACKSON
P
YNNE HA
D
taken the narrow back roads out of Tidewater, south through the corn and bean fields to Virginia, determined again to disappear. He'd thought a few times about going to police, telling them what he knew. But it was too risky. Tidewater County was poison now and would be for a while. If he stayed, he might not get out. Better to put some distance between himself and what had happened. Try to figure things out on his own.

He kept imagining her face—­the way she had looked at him that last time, with her dark, complicated eyes, portals to a world full of secrets, most of which he'd never learn now. He kept thinking there must be some way of changing it, reversing what had happened. Of bringing her back.

Pynne made it as far as Selma, North Carolina. Exit 97 on the interstate. He stopped in a parking lot on the commercial strip, for a hamburger and a smoke, to think about what he was doing, where he was going.

He lowered the windows and lit a Chesterfield. Watching the thick cumulous clouds over the chain motel roofs and the giant green interstate signs. Breathing the Carolina air. The slight irritation was there in his throat again as he smoked, and he wondered, as he often did, if he had throat cancer. Then he closed his eyes and tried to just savor that breeze. It made him feel good—­the fast food smells, the asphalt and diesel, the pinewoods, the rushing sound of traffic, the taste of the cigarette.

His cell rang as he was driving back toward the entrance ramp. And when he answered, he heard her voice again. Just as if she were still alive. Just like that.

But not talking to him.

“No, please,” she said. “You're not going to do this. Please don't.”

Jackson pulled to the shoulder and jammed the car into Park.

“No, no no!” he heard her say, followed by a loud, percussive sound.

Jackson Pynne came out of the car and vomited his lunch in the gully beside the road. Knowing now. Knowing that this plan to disappear would never work. They would find him. Wherever he went, they would be following.
Until they find me.
He was never going to get away from what had happened.