Chapter Twenty-Five
TWENTY-FIVE
“ANNIE, YOU DID WHAT you could,” Leo says. “Ain’t no more you can do than that.”
I sit on the front steps of the church, waiting for Chief Dishman, as Leo’s voice settles my racing heart, my turning stomach.
“I know,” I say. “I just feel bad for Katie. Her dad was alive this whole time.”
“Well. It sounds like he was a bad dude. You know? I’m not saying it’s better he’s dead. I’m just saying … it sounds like maybe he was involved in some bad shit. Guys like that always know they’re on borrowed time.”
“I know,” I say.
“Have you called Katie yet?” he asks.
“Not yet. I’d like to have more information when I do. The first thing she’ll ask me is What happened? How did he die? Who killed him? and honestly, right now I just don’t have those answers for her.”
I watch as the sun’s light touches the field across the road.
“You did what your client hired you to do,” he says. “You found out that her father’s death and burial wasn’t as straightforward as she was told. You found out what he was probably involved in. And, after all that, you found the man himself.”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not done there, are you?”
“No,” I say. “No, I don’t think I can be done. Not yet. This town … Katie told me when she hired me that her mom used to say Mount Zion was a nest of vipers.”
“Sounds like she was right,” Leo says softly.
I make a sound like hmmm and then listen as he takes a drink of his coffee. After a few quiet moments he says, “You’re gonna stay in that town till you pull every last snake out of its hole, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I think I am.”
He chuckles but his tone is serious when he says, “Be careful, Annie. Call me if you need anything.”
“I will.”
We hang up and I watch as Dishman pulls up in a cruiser, Gavin riding along in the passenger seat. They both look disheveled and sleepy. Dishman’s normally crisp black shirt and gray slacks are rumpled and his duty belt sags to one side. He straightens it as he walks up the steps toward me.
“What the hell happened?” he asks.
I tell him the condition in which I found Ezra’s body. Dishman’s eyes open wide and he runs both hands through his hair, pushing it away from his face.
“Jesus Christ,” he says.
“Aside from the knock on the head, he’s also got a lot of older bruising,” I say. And I tell him my theory about Nathaniel Nickels busting into the parsonage and their ensuing fight.
He looks past me as he listens, into the interior of the church.
Gavin steps up beside him, nods to me, and then looks inside. He says, “I thought he was dead. We all did.”
“I think it was Nathaniel Nickels they buried,” I say. “I think it was his body that Thelma and Will found on Saturday morning.”
“You call the coroner?” Dishman asks Gavin.
Gavin nods and says, “On his way.”
Dishman gives him a curt nod and then looks at me and says, “How the hell did this happen?”
I explain to him what I’d uncovered, pieced together, and guessed so far.
That Ezra King had been playing his congregation from the time he traded his gambling addiction for the thrill of fringe fundamentalism.
That he’d likely been working with Joel for years, using the tent revival circuit as a way to move weed, but he’d recently branched out with Billy Shepherd, selling hard stuff on the side, and that his womanizing habits—feeling up Dean’s girlfriend in the Cherry Dairy parking lot—had finally pushed his trusted lackey over the edge.
“So, Dean’s finally had enough of him,” Dishman says, as I come to the events that led up to Ezra’s supposed death on Friday night. “And rats him out to Joel Shepherd.”
“Yes, I think so. It was a domino effect from there.”
Dishman heaves a sigh, his big swimmer’s shoulders rising and falling as he looks past me into the church.
“Where’s the congregation?” Dishman asks.
“Still up on the mountain, I guess. Probably waiting for Ezra’s miraculous return.”
He runs a hand over his face pulling at his temples as if to wake himself up from a bad dream. He asks, “Do you think Crystal was in on all this? She’s the one who said he’d be up there.”
“I sort of doubt it,” I answer. “I think it’s more likely that she’s a fantasist who trusted a bad guy. But I’ve been wrong before.”
To Gavin he says, “Call Coroner Bradley again. Tell him to get his ass over here. And then start taping the church off. This whole damn place is a crime scene.”
Gavin nods and jogs back toward the cruiser.
“Come on,” Dishman says. “We need to see what we can find.”
He puts on a pair of gloves and hands a second pair to me.
Then, I follow him inside the church and watch as he searches Ezra’s pockets and pulls out a wad of cash totaling a couple hundred bucks.
He bags it and hands it back to me. From the other pocket, he removes a cheap pay-as-you-go phone.
He tries to open it but it’s locked. The screen demands an eight-digit code.
“We’ll have to send this up to Frankfort,” he says.
“The crowd is on their way back down the hill,” Gavin says as he steps into the church. “And I just talked to Coroner Bradley’s wife. She said he left a few minutes ago, should be here soon.”
Still looking down at Ezra’s body, Dishman nods and says, “Call Mike and Jeanine. We’ve got to get more manpower down here, check every car. Ezra got here somehow and I’m betting the car he drove is still out in the parking lot.”
Gavin nods and starts to move when Dishman adds, “And find Crystal Snodgrass. I want to talk to her, too.”
“I’ll find her, Chief,” Gavin says, and jogs away.
“He was the same build as Nathaniel Nickels,” Dishman mutters. “Tall, thin, pale.”
We both look down at Ezra’s body. Now completely drained of life, his flesh is already gray and waxy.
“Yeah,” I say. “All Ezra would’ve had to do was chop off Nickels’s hair and color it black. Then he dressed Nickels in his own clothes and gave him his own ID, keys, phone. And with his body swollen … It’s exactly what you’d expect to find if Ezra had been bitten by one of his snakes.”
“What’s going on?” a voice says.
We turn and see Will standing on the other side of the newly strung police tape.
“What happened … Oh my … Is that Brother Ezra?” His voice is thin and high, strangled with tears. He wobbles on his feet, gripping the door frame with white-knuckled fingers.
I rush to the open double doors and catch Will before he collapses, easing him down to the cool concrete just as Thelma Worley arrives with her nephew. The police tape falls with Will and, caught between us, it flutters like a streamer in the morning breeze.
“What’s going on?” Thelma asks from the bottom of the steps. “I heard someone’s died in the church.”
“It’s Ezra,” I tell her. “Apparently he was never dead but…”
“Now he is?” she says, eyebrows raised. She fans herself with her hand and says, “Lord have mercy! Then who on earth did we bury on Sunday?”
“That’s what we need to find out,” Dishman says, as he comes out onto the porch.
Will squirms in my arms, coming to, and looks up at me. “He’s really dead? Brother Ezra is … He’s not coming back?”
“I’m sorry, Will,” I tell him.
He bites his lips together, as if trying to keep himself from crying, but the effort is in vain. Tears fill his eyes as he sits up, away from me. Then, with a gasping hiccup, he hunches forward and sobs. Thelma sits down beside him and rubs his back in slow circles.
“Can you keep an eye on him?” Dishman asks her. “We can’t have anyone going in the church.”
She gives us a silent, sure nod, and Dishman and I walk away from the steps, meeting Gavin, who approaches with Crystal tucked against his body. Her eyes are red and puffy from crying and Gavin’s shoulder is damp.
“All right,” Dishman says to me. “I’m gonna have to question Crystal for myself.”
“Sit her down somewhere quiet,” I tell him. “She’s a fragile type. I know she’s an adult but … Look, I think Ezra manipulated her in more ways than one. You know?”
“Yeah,” he says, softly. “I get it. I’ll go easy.”
He tells Gavin to get the crime scene kit out of his trunk and then steers Crystal slowly off to the side to speak with her in the shade of a tall oak.
“We really need to find that body,” I tell Gavin as I walk toward the parking lot with him, figuring I’ll help him collect evidence or, at the very least, help the other officers look for whatever car Ezra drove here.
“Seems like the best lead we have,” Gavin says as he pops the trunk of Dishman’s cruiser. “To prove whatever really happened.”
“Yeah,” I say. “If only we could find it. In this heat, unless the corpse is in cold storage somewhere, it’s not going to last long.”
“Well, you know where I’d hide it?” Gavin says, as he pulls out the crime scene kit. “I’d put it down the Smell Hole.”
“You mean the Hell Hole?” I ask.
He blushes. “My mamma wouldn’t allow mean language in the house. We always called it the Smell Hole.”
“Okay,” I say. “But we already looked there. You know that.”
“Yeah,” Gavin says. “I do know that. And so does the whole rest of town.”
I grin at him, an idea of what he’s getting at forming in my mind.
He shuts the trunk, sets the crime scene kit on top, and says, “When me and my sister were kids, she would always eat all her Halloween candy as soon as we got home. But I was the opposite. I’d save mine.
And if I wasn’t careful, she’d steal it.
So, I had to hide it. And I had to hide it good.
If she weren’t kin, I’d say my sister was devious as the Devil but …
Anyhow, I figured out pretty early that if I kept an eye on her, I’d know the places she already looked.
Then, I’d go right behind her and hide my candy there.
Because she wasn’t gonna look in the same place twice, was she? ”
I think about the Hell Hole, reeking with toxic gas, tucked away in Brimstone Hollow.
I think about how it was the first place Dishman and I went.
The first place we checked. Because that’s where people throw all the stuff they never want to see again.
And Gavin was right, Mount Zion’s virulent grapevine had meant that news of our sinkhole excursion reached town before we did.
By the time I got to the Dairy that day, everybody there knew where I’d been.
“Thanks, Gavin,” I say. “That’s really smart.” He grins at me and I watch as his cheeks flush bright red.
I look around for Dishman and don’t see him. “You know where the nearest spelunking place is?” I ask, checking my watch. If I’m lucky, they might open at eight o’clock, eager for tourist cash.
“If you’re looking for gear,” Gavin says, “don’t bother. I have all the stuff you two took down there the other day. Chief had me spray down the harnesses and then I took the tanks over to the fire department to have them refilled.”
“You mean—”
“They’re still in the back seat,” Gavin says. “I was about to take them back to the station this morning when the chief called with your news about Mr. King.”
He opens the car door and reveals the harnesses, ropes, masks, and tanks.
“Thanks, Gavin,” I tell him, and start unloading the gear for myself.
He starts off, toward the church, and I look around.
Farther up the hill, I see Dishman speaking to a large group of people, all looking frightened and aggrieved.
The other officers, Mike and Jeanine, are busily checking every vehicle, and by the time I catch sight of Gavin again, he’s disappearing into the church.
“Not a problem,” I tell myself, and lug the gear away from the cruiser. “Who needs backup?”
Fifteen minutes later, with Hollis’s Bronco parked at the edge of the Hell Hole, I secure the ropes just as Dishman had, tighten my harness, and fit my mask to my face.
I snap on a pair of nitrile gloves and yank a pair of sturdy leather gloves over them.
Then, at the edge of the hole, I peer down into the murky darkness.
The wind picks up, blows through Brimstone Hollow, and the papery song of thirsty foliage fills my ears.
It rasps, skeleton-like, and sends shivers down my neck and arms despite the heat.
“Okay,” I say, my voice muffled by the mask. “Let’s see if anything’s been dropped in here recently.”
The rope makes a Zzzrrrrr sound as I slide down, which stops as I land gently on a pile of garbage. I take stock of the place again. Old fridge, old water heater, old lawn mower.
The tarp with the bear in it. The other tarp with the bear in it—Wait.
“Two tarps,” I say to myself.
I look from the tarp at my feet to another tarp—body shaped and rolled up like a rug—across the pile.
“One of these,” I mutter, muffled, “is probably not a bear.”
I squat and pull back the edge of the nearest tarp, opening it just enough to get a fresh glimpse of the bear Dishman and I discovered only days before.
Standing up, I maneuver around the detritus and then crouch near the end of the other tarp and peel back the outermost layer, carefully, slowly—and the head and shoulders of a human adult, wrapped in gauze, emerge.
“Oh boy,” I say, taking a quick step back. Despite the mask, I feel sick, my body drenched with sweat and overheating in this warm, stinking, toxic place.
I reach around to my back pocket and pull out my Swiss Army knife, hinge out the little scissors, and kneel again. Snipping away the cloth, revealing an even more necrotic version of the face I’d first seen in the scene-of-death photos in Chief Dishman’s office.
I run a gloved finger over the man’s hairline where black dye or, possibly, boot polish has rubbed away to reveal naturally pale-blond roots.
I peel away more of the tarp, more of the gauze, and see the bruising from a fight along the man’s collarbone, his shoulder.
And then, peeling even more away, I sigh into my mask as my gaze travels to his left pectoral and the small tattoo inscribed there: Two simple, faded hearts, linked together.
It’s exactly like the one I’d seen on Scarlet Nickels.
“Nathaniel Nickels,” I whisper, staring at the dead man’s ruined face.
Is it really possible that Coroner Bradley believed this was Ezra’s corpse?
Maybe he saw the pale roots under black hair color and made assumptions about the vanity of an ageing man.
Maybe he saw the tattoo and assumed it was simply a relic from before Ezra took up preaching.
Maybe, like everyone else at Ezra’s house that morning, Bradley saw exactly what Ezra wanted him to see. There’s only one way to know for sure.
“He’s not dodging my questions this time,” I say to myself. And then, looking down at Nathaniel Nickels, I say, “We’ve got to get you out of here.”