Chapter 55
Night Twenty-Three
Sybil
Sybil had narrowed down Levi’s location to just three possibilities.
There were only twelve postcards, leaving three landmarks on the Fodor’s list remaining.
The last postcard had been sent from Mount Rushmore eight months ago, May, back before any of this started between the four of them.
Sybil could barely remember the time before she’d hopped online, posted to the forum, found Beartown and KingofQueens, before they met at the diner on the Upper West Side and became inextricably linked to one another in a way that felt permanent.
Sybil had texted Simone earlier that morning.
She wondered if Julian’s partner—Richard, according to his notes, which were scattered across her kitchen island—might have any insights.
Simone had replied with Richard’s cell number.
He picked up on the first ring, and after Sybil assured him repeatedly that she wasn’t a telemarketer and that she was calling about the Revivalist Church, and that Simone had given her his number, he sighed and said he didn’t remember many of the details.
“Could you look?” she asked. “It’s sort of important. I think Julian wasn’t settled with how it ended.”
“You have to understand, Julian and I dealt with dozens of bad operators over the years. Once we closed a case, we closed it,” he said. “Although Jules always had a harder time moving on than I did.”
“Do you think his…accident, uh, the car that hit him, could be retaliation for a case?” Sybil was surprised to hear herself pose the question. As if the notion only just presented itself in her brain and then it flew out of her mouth.
“Possibly,” he said.
“Actually?”
“No one could dismiss that. What we do, what he did, I should say, before he retired, was dangerous work. You know he nearly dropped dead from this case, right? We forced him into retirement. Simone and me.”
She heard him shuffling some papers.
“Right, but in this case, the guy we were investigating, he’s been ruled as dead,” he said.
“Aaron Jones?”
“The one and only.”
“The newspaper articles said it was quasi-inconclusive.” Sybil grabbed a pen and made a note to follow up with Annabeth.
“Yeah, the determination came out a few months after the fire department cleared the place for the rebuild. DNA remnants, his wedding band. No signs of any bank account usage. They could only identify his wife by dental records. It was…oh, here’s a photo of the scene…
right, it was gruesome. Did you know the human body burns at about seven hundred degrees? ”
“I—I did not,” Sybil stuttered. She thought about it. She remembered something vaguely about burn victims from medical school, but Richard was a man who knew more than she did. And she was learning to accept this.
“Right, well, the main explosion occurred…” Sybil heard him reading his notes, and she reached for Julian’s folder, a road map to what Richard was saying.
“The main explosion occurred off the kitchen, by the boiler, just off the dining area where dozens of congregants had gathered for dinner. In a confined space like that, the explosion could easily reach a thousand degrees upon combustion.”
“I see,” Sybil said. She stared at the photo of the aftermath. Bodies that had turned to dust.
“Yep, it became an incinerator,” Richard said, with the passivity of a man who had seen too much.
“So Aaron Jones is declared dead, and the case against him is dropped?”
“No, ma’am, we didn’t have a rock-solid case, at least nothing that was indictable yet.
That’s not what Jules and I did. We gathered evidence to make the case.
And we didn’t have any reason to believe that anyone else, at least who was still alive, in his…
clergy, I guess you could call it, was involved in the questionable financial issues.
It wasn’t that we didn’t want to nail Jones, it’s just that when he died, there wasn’t much else to chase down.
Whatever he was doing seemed to die with him. ”
“But Julian may have disagreed?”
“Did you know him well?” Richard asked.
“Fairly,” Sybil replied. She didn’t know how well anyone could have known Julian.
“Then you know that Julian disagreed with just about everything. I fucking miss that bastard but ‘agreeable’ was not a word you’d ever use to describe him.
And anyway, we were partners because I was more of the numbers guy, he was more of the personnel guy.
He reviled the scheme that Jones was pulling—”
“Scheme?”
“Well, yeah, I mean, I don’t know, I’m not religious, but it seemed to be basically a pile of bullshit. An entire grift. And Julian really had a problem with that. Which, since you knew him, I’m sure you don’t have problems imagining.”
“And Levi? Any thoughts on him?”
More papers being shuffled.
“Oh, the son. One of the sons. No thoughts on him, he was never a suspect. We confirmed—” He paused. “Yep, we confirmed that he was out of the state. Had gotten a job selling tickets at Niagara Falls.”
“Right.” Sybil hesitated. “But when you say ‘suspect,’ I thought it was ruled as an electrical fire.”
“It was. But we check out everything else just in case. And in this situation, there were some just-in-cases.” He sighed.
“Look, ma’am, I know you mean well. I know that every person now fancies themselves amateur sleuths.
” Sybil’s ears burned pink. “But I remember saying to Jules at the time that Aaron Jones was a bad motherfucker, and though we couldn’t shut down the church, we could rest easy that this slippery fuck was dead.
And I honestly haven’t given it another thought since. ”
How lucky, Sybil thought now. To be so unburdened.
She knew that in Richard’s line of work, he must carry plenty of burdens.
But not the way Julian did. Not even the way that Sybil did, feeling as if she had to carry everyone else on her shoulders.
Even now, trying to help Betty when Betty hadn’t asked.
Based on the list and the postcards, Levi was either in San Francisco (the Golden Gate Bridge), Los Angeles (the Hollywood sign) or Arizona (the Grand Canyon).
Part of Sybil hoped he was in Arizona, which might give her a reasonable excuse to call Zeke, but part of her wanted to solve this all on her own.
Show him what he had missed out on. That she was a mastermind of sorts, that she was dogged, that she would do anything at all for the people she loved.
She was googling “Levi Jones” in the state of Arizona and coming up with no real leads when she remembered the flip phone.
She found it in the Bankers Box, dead again.
While she waited for the charger to revive it, she typed out a text to Eloise, apologizing for how badly Christmas break had gone, and thanking her for telling Mark to apologize.
Sybil: El, I don’t need you to worry about me though or get involved with stuff between your dad and me.
Surprisingly, Eloise wrote her back immediately.
Eloise: mom, I do
Sybil: no, that’s not your job, I should have done a better job keeping you out of it
Eloise: mom, for real, I’m an adult now.
Sybil: sweetheart, I know that
Eloise: no, what I mean is that you have to let someone look out for you too. we r studying that in abnormal psych. Care has to be reciprocal.
Sybil’s eyes welled in seconds.
Before she could thank her daughter for her thoughtfulness, however, the flip phone sprang to life, vibrating and skittering across the counter.
Sybil snapped it open and gasped.
There was a new message from Levi.