Voodoo Daddy (A Virgil Jones Mystery) (24 page)

Sometimes you learn to trust your gut after it’s too late. A few minutes later when I got up, Amanda was gone, but the man still stood at the curb, his arms wrapped firmly around his dead dog, his shoulders rounded, his back to the world around him as a means to protect his pet even though fate had ensured it no longer mattered. Looking back though, I discovered that fate belongs to us all, and the event I witnessed out my window that day and the feelings I had were ones I should have given more thought. Had I done so, things may have turned out much different than they eventually did.

* * *

An hour or so later I was still at my desk when Agent Gibson knocked on the door jamb and walked into my office. He sat down in front of my desk, bit into the bottom corner of his lip then raised his eyebrows at me.

“So maybe we got off on the wrong foot,” he said.

“Heard you tried to brace the Governor,” I said. “How’d that work out for you?”

“Hey, I’m trying here. You want my help, or not?”

Good question, I thought. “What exactly do you want, Agent Gibson?”

“Bottom line? I want you to drop the charges against Pate. His arraignment is less than an hour from now.”

“You asked me if I wanted your help,” I said. “How exactly does my dropping charges against Pate help me?”

“Look, Detective. You’ve managed to drop a turd in the punch bowl and now I’m the one who has to clean it up. We’ve been monitoring Pate’s activities for months trying to put our case together. You’re getting in the way. And this penny ante charge of assault you’ve got hanging over him is going to hurt our chances. And while you’re doing that, I have to wonder, Detective, is it helping your case at all? Is it putting you any closer to solving the murders you’re working on?”

“Nice speech,” I said. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“How sure are you of Pate’s involvement in Dugan’s death?” he said.

“He’s our primary suspect.”

“Based on what?” When I didn’t answer, he went on. “Okay, here it is. I work out of the Houston office, but I guess you know that. It’s the Texas Department of Insurance that’s under investigation by our office for fraud. Not Pate. Pate torched his church in Houston and when the company who underwrote his policy started making waves about writing the check, the Texas DOI got involved and Pate walked away with a wad of cash before the building had stopped smoldering.”

“So what?” I said. “File charges on the Commissioner of the Texas DOI.”

“Oh, we did. But his lawyer cut a hell of a deal and now the commissioner is part of witness protection.”

“Witness protection? What for?”

Gibson half laughed at my questions. “You Midwestern guys are something, you know that?

“What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “You think the Catholic priests are the only ones tweaking the twangers on little boys?”

“How about you take the corn dog out of your mouth and tell me the whole story?” I said.

“Hey, great choice of words. When we took the commissioner down for fraud we discovered his personal computer was full of pictures of little kids with no clothes on. He cut a deal and put us onto Pate, who the commissioner says was supplying the photos. Our analysts compared the background of the photos to ones we could find of Pate’s church before he torched it. We think they match up. In any event, the Commissioner says Pate blackmailed him and had him lean on the insurance company to write the check or he’d start to squeal about the photos.”

“You’re saying Samuel Pate is a pedophile?”

“You tell me,” Gibson said. “I read your report on that dilapidated church he bought for five million bucks. What was he going to do with it? Knock it down and build a learning center for pre-school kids or something like that? But let me guess, when you searched the Pate complex and his home you didn’t find one scrap of evidence that ties him to your case or mine. And in the meantime, that old broken down building, the one that wasn’t included in your search warrant burns to a crisp along with any evidence that may or may not have been material to your case, let alone mine.” He stood from his chair and turned to leave. Then, as if I were slow and unable to make the connections he’d just laid out for me he added, “Someone is leading you around by your nose, Detective. Take the corn dog out of my mouth. I love it.”

* * *

I walked over to Cora’s office to fill her in on my conversation with Amanda Pate and the meeting I just had with Agent Gibson. She sat quietly and listened, but when I got to the part of Pate’s alleged involvement as a pedophile, her expression was one you might associate with someone staring out the window of an airliner at thirty thousand feet as they watch the rivets pop one at a time from the wing of a plane.

“What is it?” I asked.

 “So we’ve got a suspected murderer and pedophile in custody and Gibson wants us to let him skate?”

“He’s going to get out anyway,” I said. “Besides, I think Gibson may be right. Someone is pulling our strings behind the curtain. I just don’t know who it is, or why. But I don’t think it has anything to do with Pate.”

Cora looked at me for a moment, then said something that made me think we were having two different conversations. “Is there something you’d like to tell me regarding the nature of your relationship with Detective Small?”

When I did not answer her right away, she said, “I see. What about Wheeler? What did Gibson tell you about him? You did ask, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

“Your personal life is interfering with your job, Jonesy. Clean it up.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Cora.”

“I think you do,” she said, then stared at the paperwork on her desk until I got up and walked out.

* * *

My conversation with Cora left me confused and angry. I ate lunch by myself in a small diner I frequent a few miles from my office, and by the time I was finished, I had concluded that Cora was probably right. I was romantically involved with a co-worker who reports to me, and my lifelong friend, Murton Wheeler was somehow connected, at least on the periphery, with a serial murder investigation, and I, the chief investigative officer of the State of Indiana had put no more effort into his apprehension than I had a Sunday jaywalker late for morning Mass. I finished my sandwich, paid my tab, and got ready to leave when something occurred to me. It was something about my conversations with Agent Gibson, and with Cora. Somebody was pulling my strings. I realized I had been in possession of a large part of the answer to what’s been happening all along. Maybe not the entire answer, but a pretty damn big piece. And, I knew what I had to do next, or more specifically, who I had to see.

I walked out to my truck and just as I reached the driver’s door I heard the footsteps coming hard from behind me. I turned in time to see a club being swung at my head and I tried to bring my right arm up to block the blow, but the attacker made just enough contact with my arm to knock me off balance and I fell face first into the pavement. Before I could move or get up he hit me again, this time in the back of my head, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke some time later, a thick blindfold across my eyes, my body bound with rope across a vertical steel support structure with my arms out from my sides and tied to a cross member as if I were being crucified.

I tried to pull free, but I knew it was pointless. I had no idea how long I had been unconscious and tied up, but I had virtually no feeling left in my arms and legs.

Or so I thought.

I let my head hang down, my chin against my chest. I heard myself whisper Sandy’s name.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Often, with little care or attention, a seedling of a wish will take root and grow across a windswept garden of unspoken dreams. It will sett ever deeper into the mind, its root structure wide and strong over the darkness of the psyche where it dares to exist as a hushed and secret desire. The subconscious will nurture this desire and feed it until it grows from a seedling of desire into a stalk of hope. And when that happens, a flower of dark faith is born, its root base entrenched deep into the hardpan of who we are, where a dry and unfed hunger is concealed from the killing frost of conscious thought.

Brian Goodwell lived in the light of such darkness, his mind forced to conjure the images from his faded memories. Were it not for his hearing, his sense of smell, his ability to taste, or touch, Brian Goodwell thought he might go mad. Wondered sometimes if he hadn’t already and no one had ever bothered to tell him.

Brian shared his life and his love with his wife Tess whom he had not seen in over eleven years. They had been married for only a year and a half when the doctor discovered Brian suffered from Retinoblastoma, a cancer of the retina. Both eyes were affected. When Tess came home from work that night Brian followed her around the house, trying to memorize every curve of her body, the angle of her jaw, the slight gap in her front teeth, the color of her hair, the shape of her hands, and the dimples in her cheeks when she smiled. They made love that night before Brian shared the news with Tess, and when he did, Tess took his face in her hands and studied it as if it were her that was about to go blind.

The doctor had said that surgical removal of both of Brian’s eyes would be the most effective treatment option. If left untreated, the tumors would travel up the optic nerve to the brain and death would soon follow. They sought a second, third, and fourth opinion. Tess wanted to keep trying. She would have sought a ninety-ninth opinion had there been time. It was her insurance from her employer that would cover the tests and ultimately, the procedure to remove her husband’s eyes. Tess worked as a hotel property district manager, her pay was good and the benefits, including their insurance coverage were among the best available. From a financial perspective, the procedure to remove Brian’s eyes would be painless. From a physical and emotional perspective, the procedure would be devastating.

The night before the surgery Brian and Tess stayed up all night. They turned on every light in the house, as if the flow of electrons through copper wire could beat back the arrival of Brian’s long and permanent night. With less than an hour before sunrise they walked back through the house once again and one by one began to extinguish the lights. “I want to go one more time from the darkness into the light,” he had said to Tess.

They sat on lawn chairs in their back yard and held hands in the false dawn of the day, and when the sun peaked over the horizon, Brian looked around the back yard. “I was going to put our garden right over there,” he said as he pointed with his chin. “Flowers and vegetables, and both red and green peppers, tomatoes, green beans. It was going to be beautiful.”

“It will be beautiful,” Tess had said. “You can still do it. I’ll help you.”

“You’ll have to help me with everything. Everything, Tess. I can’t ask that of you. I won’t.”

“Brian, don’t. Please don’t do this now. We’ll figure everything out. One step at a time. I promise. It will all be alright. You’ll s—”

Brian buried his face in his hands for a moment, then stood.

“Brian, I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean that. It’s a figure of speech.”

“I don’t feel like I’m losing my sight, Tess. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

Now, a little over eleven years later, Brian Goodwell grasped the handrail and walked down the three steps of his back door and into the yard. Seven steps forward, then a ninety degree turn to the right, then nine steps more. The edge of his garden. He dropped down to his knees, then felt carefully on both sides to make sure he was lined up properly with the neat rows of vegetables. His garden was getting better and better each year. Tess had told him so.

The first few years had been a disaster. He would sometimes pull the flowers and vegetables by mistake and leave the weeds to grow and prosper. The first year, out of stubbornness, he refused to allow Tess to help him, and the net result of his garden that year had been six green beans, two smashed tomatoes, and one red pepper. But his sense of touch and smell had gotten better over the years and he now knew his way around the garden like the back of his hand.

At the beginning of his second season, Tess confessed to him that she had gone to the market and seeded his garden with produce picked from the aisle instead of the ground. Brian confessed to her that he knew she had done so because he liked to eat the tomatoes raw and had, one afternoon, bitten into one that had a sticker on the side.

But now Brian moved expertly along, feeling first for the stalks and stems of his labor before he pulled any weeds that tried to rise around the plants. When he worked in his garden, he thought only of Tess. It was Tess who had helped him through the last eleven years. It was Tess who remained true to him, who taught him how to be self-sufficient, who did not pity him, who not only told him, but showed him how much of a man he still was, blind or not. Brian loved Tess more than he thought humanly possible.

He’d run his hands across her face, his fingers barely touching the surface of her skin. Every night when she came home from work he would greet her the same way. First a kiss, then he’d get to look at her beauty with his hands. At first, right after the surgery, this worked well for him. He would picture her face in his mind as he ran his hands across her delicate features. But over the years, the picture of her began to fade to what it was now, a dim shadow of a memory, like an under-developed photograph, a ghost of an image. He sometimes thought he’d give his own life to see his wife’s face just one more time. In death he could look down upon her every day.