Chapter Eleven #2
Dishman shakes his head and turns away from the hidey-hole, walks carefully out of the RV. I follow him back into the garage and we both stare down at Griffon’s body.
“Come on,” I say. “This isn’t a coincidence. Ezra dies on Friday night—”
“From a snakebite,” Dishman says. “It was an accident.”
I roll my eyes and Dishman groans. Equally stubborn and equally frustrated, we both take a step away from each other.
“Besides, what the hell do you want me to do about it?” he says. “Dig Ezra up?”
My mouth drops open.
“Yes!” I say. “Yes. Dig Ezra’s body up, send him to the medical examiner in Frankfort, get a real autopsy. There might be evidence of foul play on the body itself. Look, that’s all Katie wants. Just to be sure.”
He grimaces, a look of real, pained sadness in his eyes and says, “I feel for Katie, I really do. I understand that … fathers and daughters can be…”
“Complicated?” I fill in, when he can’t seem to find the word.
He looks away from me, steps carefully around Griffon’s body, and maneuvers back through the door and outside.
I follow and, squinting in the sunshine, Dishman lets out a long, thoughtful sigh, and says, “I know your client wants to be sure about what happened to her father and I understand that she wants closure but … we don’t all get the closure we need.
Sometimes we just have to take what life gives us and move on. ”
I study his face, unsure whether he’s really talking about Katie and Ezra or if it’s something closer to home.
When he notices me staring, he steps away from me and says, “Thing is, Katie doesn’t live here.
You go digging up that preacher’s body, you’re gonna have the whole of his congregation and a lot more besides up in arms.”
“So?” I say. “Let them pitch a fit. We need to know the truth.”
“And if it’s all for nothing? As it surely will be? You don’t think our coroner would’ve mentioned it on his report if there’d been evidence of a fight?”
“I don’t think your coroner did much of anything,” I say, trying and failing to stay calm. “He’s a funeral home director. He was probably out of his depth.”
“Coroner Bradley’s been at it a long, long time,” Dishman says. “I’m sure if there were signs of a fight, he would’ve said so.”
I exhale a grunt of frustration and watch as a cruiser pulls up and three officers—two I don’t recognize and the young guy, Gavin—all get out. They’re all carrying tool kits and bagged, sterile crime scene suits.
Dishman and I both step up to meet them.
“You said he was stabbed?” Gavin says to Dishman as he approaches, a mix of confusion, excitement, and anxiety playing on his face.
I think about all the bodies Gavin has seen over the last three days.
Ezra King’s. The man from the house fire, Billy Shepherd.
And now he’ll see this one. Dean Griffon.
“Just see what you can find,” Dishman tells him, resting a hand on Gavin’s shoulder as the kid walks past.
Once the officers are out of earshot, I say, “Tell me about Billy Shepherd.”
Dishman turns and stares at me, apparently stunned.
“How’d you hear about that?”
I explain that I was in his office when Gavin told him about the fire chief’s summons. And I tell him about my encounter with Coroner Bradley this morning, how he’d mentioned needing to drive a body to Frankfort.
Dishman squints toward the officers as they struggle to get into their crime scene suits, but he’s not really watching. Instead, it seems like he’s just wrestling with what he wants to say.
“Billy Shepherd was the grandnephew of Joel Shepherd,” he says. “You ever heard of him?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” I say.
“Well, he was big news around here. The papers called him the Kentucky King of Weed. Pot farmer, huge operation. He went to prison twenty years ago. I always believed that, after that, the operation passed from one Shepherd to another—Joel’s son, who went away himself after his drunk driving got some folks killed, and then Joel’s grandson, who was murdered in a bar fight a few years ago.
Joel’s brother is long dead and his wife passed.
So, that would’ve only left Joel’s grandnephew, Billy. ”
“Okay,” I say. “So, where’s Joel Shepherd now? Is he still in jail?”
“Well, he was locked up in Big Sandy,” Dishman says. “But the prison system being as overcrowded as it is, and Joel Shepherd being near eighty now and not in good health, they released him—couple weeks back—on home confinement.”
“Ankle bracelet?” I ask.
“Yep,” Dishman says. “He can’t leave his house without alerts going off.”
Putting the pieces together, I say, “So, Billy—Joel Shepherd’s grandnephew—turns up dead in a house fire, only weeks after Joel gets out. I’m guessing the fire was not an accident.”
“Well, somebody set it,” Dishman says. “Fire chief said there were traces of propellant all over the place and they’re not even close to finished with evidence collection.”
“And it happened on Friday night?” I ask. “The same night Ezra died?”
“Ezra’s death was an accident,” he says. “Don’t forget that. The man was bit by a snake.”
“But Billy Shepherd was murdered, right?” I say, my voice suddenly insistent, excited. “I mean, someone did set the guy on fire?”
“They tried to,” Dishman says. “Thing is, Billy didn’t actually die in the fire.
That’s what the Fire Chief told me yesterday when I got to the site.
Billy managed to crawl out. Made it as far as the edge of the woods before he finally died.
And it’s a good thing he did, too. Otherwise, he’d have burned up in that house and we’d never have found what we did. ”
“And what was that?”
“Before Billy escaped the fire, he was beaten nearly to death, probably with a baseball bat or something like it. And…” He pauses, grimacing like the next part is especially distasteful.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
“Before they left him to burn to death in that house, they cut off the man’s finger.”