Chapter Twenty-Eight
TWENTY-EIGHT
I TUG ON THE JEANS from my first night in Mount Zion, carefully slipping the frayed knees past my toes so I don’t make the rips any bigger.
I finish dressing in a hurry and grab my bag and gun, but as soon as I step outside and look at the sky—hazy orange with roiling, violet clouds on the horizon—I go back into the room and grab my leather jacket.
“Finally,” I mutter to myself as I walk to the Bronco. “This place needs a good rain.”
Soon, I’m pulling into the familiar church parking lot.
Most of the cars from this morning are gone.
Two police cruisers remain, along with Will’s and Thelma’s vehicles, and an old beat-up Kia parked near the end of the lot, where Chief Dishman and Gavin are standing and staring into its open trunk.
I park the Bronco, get out, and start toward them.
When Dishman sees me, he gives me a long, meaningful look that seems to ask You okay?
I shrug, half smiling, and he nods to me.
Both of us, I think, are both okay and not okay after witnessing Roman Bradley’s suicide.
And yet, the job goes on. When you’re a cop—even a private cop—the world doesn’t stop for your trauma.
“This is what Ezra King was driving?” I ask, as I approach the Kia. “Where’d he get it?”
Dishman says, “Bill of sale is from a little used-car lot a couple hours south of here.”
“I called them,” Gavin says. “And the guy gave me Mr. King’s description but that’s about it. Said he bought the car on Monday, paid cash.”
“And,” Dishman says, “our station got a call this morning, while you and I were out at Bradley’s cabin. State troopers found Nathaniel Nickels’s abandoned truck on a back road not too far from the car lot.”
“So,” I say. “Until Monday, Ezra was driving Nathaniel Nickels’s F-150. Whether he realized there were cameras at Griffon’s garage or not, he probably figured it wasn’t safe to keep on driving Nickels’s truck around so he dumped it and got a used car. Where the hell was he before then?”
Gavin hands me a pair of nitrile gloves and I snap them on before looking closer at the contents of the Kia’s trunk.
A pile of clothes lies in a jumbled heap; almost all black, they’re definitely indicative of Ezra’s characteristic uniform.
I push them away and, underneath, find an old canvas shopping tote.
Inside, I discover a little less than a thousand dollars in cash, and a few parking and hotel bills from a tribal casino in Arkansas, dated for Saturday and Sunday. And, last of all, Ezra King’s passport.
“Passport,” Dishman says when I hand it to him. “We didn’t even think to check the parsonage for a passport. Jesus Christ.”
“You had no reason to,” I say. “Plenty of people don’t have passports, and besides, until this morning we all thought Ezra was dead.”
Dishman nods and slips the passport into an evidence bag before looking at the parking receipts from the casino.
“I’d bet he was on his way out of the country,” I say. “Figured he’d just drive Nickels’s truck into Mexico but stopped off in Arkansas and ended up sitting down at a blackjack table.”
“But why?” Gavin asks. “He was more than halfway to the border.”
“Trying to multiply his loaves and fishes,” Dishman mutters sardonically.
“You’re probably right,” I say. “He had a gambling problem. Supposedly he quit years ago, when he found God, but when it’s an addiction like that, I don’t think the urge ever leaves you.”
I drop the stacks of bills into the evidence bag Gavin holds open for me.
Times like this, I keenly remember what it was like to be a cop in the military.
The official protocol, the double-checking everything, making sure you never miss an important step that would get the whole case thrown out.
Being a PI, you still have to be careful, still have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, but it’s nowhere near as finicky. Plus, I don’t have to wear polyester.
Shuffling the clothes around, I feel something hard and fish out a large ledger.
“That’s the one you were looking for,” Dishman says. “You said he’d been keeping his shifty finances in a separate book, right?”
“Of course he took it with him,” I say. “Yeah. This looks like exactly what I was trying to find. Well, it definitely wasn’t this that he came back for.”
I page through the ledger, but while I can make some sense of the more regular entries—dates and cash from various tent revival collection plates—most of the book is filled out in code.
“You’re going to need a forensic accountant for that thing,” I tell Dishman as I slide the book into a large bag.
“We’ll have to pass all this up to Frankfort,” he says, looking down into the growing collection of evidence in plastic tubs at his feet.
“I put a call in to the FBI and the DEA when we found the traces of drugs in Dean Griffon’s garage, but without a more substantial find, they put us on a backlog. ”
“I’d bet they’ll take a keener interest now,” I say.
We finish going through the car, even checking under the floor mats and in the wheel wells, but don’t find anything significant.
I look back at the bagged evidence: clothing, passport, ledger, and receipts.
I step away from Ezra’s beat-up Kia and stare toward the church, where police tape is still strung across the double doors.
“You having your guys search the place?” I ask Dishman. “For whatever it was Ezra must’ve come back for?”
“We’ve got two officers in there, but they’re gonna have a bad time with this place. Public, all kinds of people in and out. The forensics’ll be a mess.”
I start toward the church and Dishman falls in step beside me. We go around the back and up the stairs to the back door.
“Whatever he left behind must be in here,” I say, as we enter the kitchen. Thelma is standing at the sink, washing dishes, while her nephew and Will sit at the little table, slumped over Cherry Dairy to-go boxes.
“What’s going on?” Thelma asks.
“We think Ezra came back to get something,” Dishman says. “Something valuable. Can any of you think what that might be?”
I look from Will, to Thelma’s nephew, to Thelma. They all shake their heads and then Will goes back to poking at his food, in the slow, distant way of someone whose mind is somewhere else.
I look past them, down the hall. This whole area, I think, will already have been searched and cleared. The bathroom (and the path to it) is the first area cops clear, if for no other reason than they need somewhere to pee while they carry on their search.
Thelma leans closer to me, wiping her hands on a towel, and whispers, “I can’t believe Roman Bradley killed himself. And people are saying on Facebook that it was him that killed Ezra…”
She’s louder than she realizes and Will looks up, startled, eyes wide.
“What?” he says, coming out of his chair. His face red, his eyes filling with tears, he says, “What? No, that can’t be right … Mr. Bradley’s dead? No, he—My God, what’s happening?”
Thelma starts toward him, muttering soft sorries, but Will shakes his head, jolts out of his chair, and stomps off into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.
“Bless his heart,” Thelma whispers. “Poor thing hasn’t been eating and I doubt he’s slept half a wink since Saturday morning.
I’m gonna give him some of my Ambien later on.
You know I hardly ever take it anymore since I woke up at four AM, out in the yard, watering the hydrangeas with a gallon of milk.
But when you need it, you really need it. ”
She puts the dish towel down on the counter, takes another step closer to me, and says, “Do you really think Ezra hid something in here? My goodness, what on earth would it have been?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “But I don’t think he was the pious preacher he seemed to be.”
She snorts and says, “Yes, honey, that’s becoming abundantly clear.”
Dishman says, “Well, I’ve got two officers searching. Hopefully, whatever it is, they’ll find it. In the meantime, you folks can head on home. We’ll let you know when we’re out of here.”
“We need to have a service tonight,” Will says, emerging from the bathroom with a wet face and red eyes. “And … what about Brother Ezra’s funeral? His real funeral, I mean. What’s going to happen?”
“Son, I doubt this church’ll be cleared by tonight, but we’ll do our best. In the meantime, I think you need to go get some rest. You too, Thelma.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Thelma says. She goes to the table and starts packing all the leftovers into a single box, which she apparently intends to take with her.
Dishman and I walk away from them into the sanctuary, and I look from the double doors to the red smear on the altar. Ezra’s blood.
I picture Ezra King standing in the middle of the church. And I picture Roman Bradley there before him. Maybe words are said. Maybe not. And then, I picture Roman Bradley swinging, landing the punch, his fist crunching into Ezra’s nose.
“Can we place Roman Bradley here this morning?” I ask Dishman. “Before you found him back in his cabin?”
“I spoke to Diana about it when I visited her,” he says with the voice of a man who’s more than just physically tired.
“She said Roman couldn’t sleep and got out of bed when it was still dark, though she didn’t check the time.
She said she went back to sleep and didn’t hear him leave, but by the time she got up around six, he was already gone. ”
“Did she call him?”
“Yeah. He said he was out at the cabin. Decided since he was up, he’d get some fishing in.”
“But he came here to the church instead,” I say. “And killed Ezra.”
“It’s possible he didn’t mean to,” Dishman says. “It’s possible he just lost his temper, threw a punch, and Ezra fell and died by accident.”
“It’s true,” I say, nodding. “It’s definitely possible.”