Blood of Cain (Sean O'Brien (Mystery/Thrillers)) (40 page)

I came to the railroad bridge across the Savannah River. It was long, expanding the river. The trestle was painted black, the sun’s heat causing the metal structure to groan, the odor of creosote thick in the air. I straddled a very narrow catwalk, running the length of the bridge. I was heading for the center, and the best spot to catch boat traffic. The cigarette boat may have beaten me. Gone. I looked to the south, all the way to the 5th Street Bridge, about a mile away. I spotted a houseboat and a Boston Whaler with one fisherman at the motor.

And then I heard the unmistakable guttural power of the cigarette boat engines. Two big V-8’s cranking. The boat came around a bend in the river. A Donzi high-performance boat, close to forty feet long, spraying a large rooster-tail wake behind the stern. From the middle of the trestle, I tried to estimate exactly where the boat would pass beneath me. I had seconds to decide. I ran another fifty feet to the west.

The boat was screaming. I chambered a round of buckshot and stood on a small ledge near the tracks and overlooking the river. The wind was picking up speed. If I was lucky, very lucky, I might get off two shots. I waited for the right second. Following the boat through the gun-sight. Both passengers were male. Both wearing wrap-around sunglasses. Neither looking up. They never do.

I fired the first shot. Directly into the bow. Fired the second smack in the center of the big engines and fuel tanks. The boat made a thrashing noise as it passed under the bridge. Then the engines sounded like they’d thrown rods. Metal against metal. A NASCAR wreck on water.

Inside of five seconds, the Donzi exploded in an enormous orange fireball. I could feel the heat from up on the bridge. As fire and smoke belched over the Savannah River, I ran back across the bridge, ran down the tracks because it was easier and faster than tiptoeing the outside catwalk.

Because of the explosion and noise, I never heard the train coming.

It was right behind me. Fifty feet and barreling down. I had a second to react. The train engineer sounded the horn as I jumped off the tracks, barely able to hold the shotgun and balance myself on the narrow gangplank. The freight train surged by me with the kinetic force of a tornado moving on steel tracks.

The wind from the passing train raked across my perspiring and bloodied face. I was breathing hard. I hoped no one in the locomotive recognized me. I continued running down the gangplank as the freight train roared by, the slight gap between the boxcars allowing the late afternoon sunlight to catch me in fast staccato bursts of light.

Then the train passed. Carrying with it cargo, wind, noise and possibly acting as a barrier to allow me a more clandestine escape from the bridge. I don’t think anyone actually saw me fire the shots. It was too fast. Too unusual a place. It wasn’t a school or movie theater. And with the exclusion of a few boaters down river, no one was there. No one except the two men in the boat. At least one wore the same boots that made the impressions in the dirt under an oak tree in my yard. He had his chance, but he wanted to play dirty.

The Savannah River is the fourth most polluted river in the nation. And now it just became a little more polluted. As I drove back toward North Augusta, I thought about the text message they’d sent me. I pulled over to the side of the road a moment, put the battery back in my phone and re-read the anonymous text:
O’Brien, consider that a warning shot fired over your bow -- you continue and you’ll receive the same fate as the girl …

I responded by writing:
You chose to ignore my warning. I fired one into your bow. I did it because of the fate you chose for the girl. The girl’s name was Courtney Burke … remember the name that’s going to take your election to the bottom of the river, too.

I was about to remove the battery from my phone when I recognized the incoming number. It was Detective Dan Grant’s cell phone. I answered and he said, “Sean, since all hell is breaking loose on a number of fronts related to Courtney Burke, I thought you’d like to know we hit pay dirt on the partial print found on the ice pick.”

“What’d you find?”

“Down in your old neck of the woods, Miami-Dade PD. A guy was picked up for a B&E, assault and sexual battery. He’s a carny worker with one of Bandini’s franchises on a seven-day run South Florida gig. Rides motorcycles in the Cage of Death. Anyway, the detective was thinking out of the box, ran the prints on the suspect, one thumbprint matched what we retrieved from the print on the ice pick.”

“Dan, tell me the guy admitted he killed Lonnie Ebert.”

“Wish I could. What he did say is he doesn’t remember not doing it. He was working at the carnival the same time Courtney Burke was there.”

“Did he work at the two other carnivals … where the first two murders happened?”

“Thought you’d ask that. And the answer is yes. He’s lawyering up. But he did say he went through hypnosis to get up the nerve to ride a motorcycle in a cage with two other guys on bikes all going different directions. And he said he remembered holding the ice pick, but swears he doesn’t remember stabbing Lonnie or the other two guys.”

“Who hypnotized him?”

“Don’t know. Thought I’d take a ride down to Miami and question the guy.”

“Who’s working the case from Miami PD?”

“Hold on … a Detective Mike Roberts. You know him?”

“Yeah, I do. Thanks, Dan.”

Driving back into North Augusta, I thought about what Dan just told me. I knew Detective Mike Roberts in Miami. We’d worked together on a homicide case a two years before I quit the department. He was tenacious, a bulldog. And now I needed to call him.

I thought about Andrea, how much she’d changed since we were in college. If the dead girl in the swamps outside of New Orleans was Courtney, what did it mean to Andrea, believing Courtney was our daughter? Did she give a damn? Or was she intoxicated with the fringes of power she’d ride on her husband’s coattails? I could leave a message on her phone and say the young woman your husband just had murdered was not our daughter, she was my niece. Would Andrea even believe me? Doubtful. All they consider is what the polls are saying. And right now they weren’t saying much for Senator Lloyd Logan.

I would keep the battery out of my phone for a few hours, my mind now on Kim. I hoped she was recuperating well, hoped she and her sister could share a few laughs through this. Then, as I crossed a bridge over a wetlands, I could see the sun setting beyond the marshlands, the water drenched in ruby merlots and pinks, the cattails quivering under the nestling of the red winged blackbirds.

I glanced at the sun going down and thought about my short time with my mother. Played back in my mind her request for me to find Courtney, and the warning she’d left me about my brother, Dillon. I glanced down at the letter, my dried blood splattered across her handwriting. She’d said that Dillon carried the blood of Cain in his veins. And I remembered what she told me about his father: “
Through the years, I discovered he stays in touch with only one person.”

“Who?”

“His father, the man who raped me … Father Thomas Garvey.”

In the next forty-eight hours I would bury my mother, and then I’d find a way to deliver a strong message to my brother, Dillon Flanagan. If Courtney was still alive, I’d hunt for Dillon.

And I would find him.

I wasn’t sure if my brother would show up for the funeral. I didn’t know his adult face. Wouldn’t recognize him in the crowd. More than thirty-five people came to pay their respects to my mother. We left Saint Francis Catholic Church and drove four miles to Hillcrest Cemetery through a light rain, skies dark and sinister.

At the gravesite, the rain tapered off and each of the neighbors who I’d met in my mother’s home, two days earlier, stood with me and the others as she was laid to rest. Beneath the black umbrellas, and hidden in the murkiness, I looked at faces. Trying to see if any of the men, all strangers, had a genetic resemblance to me, Courtney, or some of the pictures I’d seen of my mother in her youth.

If Dillon had showed, I wanted no surprises.

I didn’t see the Murphy Village resident in the white pickup with the wide off-road tires. But because he wasn’t at the graveyard didn’t mean he wasn’t prowling in the shadows. Along the fringes of the cemetery, a willowy mist hung around the base of the pine trees like white socks that had fallen below knotty ankles. I heard gentle sobbing amid the dark clothes and umbrellas.

A fiddle player stepped forward and began playing
Amazing Grace
, a song, I was told, my mother loved. When he stopped playing, a Catholic priest, Father Joseph Duffy, early sixties, flushed face, cotton-white hair, delivered a graveside mass and that was more of a eulogy than a sermon. He’d known my mother, and his affection for her was genuine.

Within forty minutes, they were all gone. Gone back to their trailers and mansions, a dichotomy as unique as their nomadic history. Although, at home, they were known to be as insular and unreceptive as the Amish, these Irish Travelers were there when my mother needed them and they were there, today, when she did not.

I waited for the backhoe operator to scoop the dirt into the grave. Her headstone was set in place, and in a few minutes the backhoe was loaded on a flatbed truck and hauled away, the sound of the diesels fading in the drizzle. Silence revisited the cemetery. I stood there and looked at her grave. It was adjacent to the burial site of Sarah Burke, her daughter, my sister, and Courtney’s mother.

I set flowers on my sister’s grave, and then stepped close to my mother’s headstone. I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a hand-carved piece of wood about the size of a plum. It was the figure of a little puffin, painted black, white, red beak, and matching webbed feet. The figurine was shellacked. Its wings were outstretched. “I want you to roost here for a while,” I whispered, setting the little bird down on the edge of the gravestone.

I stood as the rain began to gently fall. I opened the umbrella, the sound of the raindrops popping, the smell of fresh earth and pine needles in the still air. The desolate call of a mourning dove came from the fog-shrouded trees. I looked up and thought I saw someone standing in the mist, at the edge of the woods, a man standing, looking at me. Was it my brother, Dillon? I felt for my Glock in the small of my back. I just touched the butt of the pistol, ready. But I didn’t sense an immediate threat.

The image seemed to dissolve in the haze, not back off or even walk away—but rather melt away. Maybe the vision was from my lack of sleep, living on the extreme edge, stress and fatigue causing hallucinations. I blew out a breath, took my hand off the gun, and lowered my eyes to the headstone. It read:

Katherine O’Sullivan

1943 – 2013

A mother, a wife, an artist

I turned away from my mother’s grave and walked in the rain back to my Jeep. As I was unlocking the door, my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID: UNKNOWN. Maybe it was Andrea calling from an undisclosed number. I answered. The voice was deep, smooth as silk, exuding coolness. He said, “Hello, little brother. This is Dillon. You left your number at our mother’s house. On the kitchen table, I was told. So, I assumed you wouldn’t mind if I called it. Did you bury our sweet mother today?”

“Where were you?”

“I was rather indisposed. Couldn’t make travel arrangements. Sean O’Brien—what a fine Irish name, although I like Sean Flanagan better. You’re somewhat late to the clan, little brother. So, let me make myself very clear. You have no claim to mother’s estate and property, including the land in Ireland. So, just turn around and go back to whatever world you came from.”

“Where’s Courtney?”

“She’s none of your business as well. And she, too, has no rightful claim to mother’s property. You probably didn’t know Courtney was diagnosed with acute paranoid-schizophrenia. Mother tried to hide it. Unfortunately, it seems to run in the family. How’s your head, Sean?”

I said nothing.

“Give me time, I will get in your head if you get in my way. Head trips are my specialty. If you’re in contact with our delusional little niece, tell her to relinquish any claims on mother’s property, and her allegations against me are a sad by-product of her pathetic mental state. My attorney will handle all probate proceedings. Poor thing, Courtney, when off her medication, believes I did an injustice to her and her parents. So now she has this vendetta for me. It’s one that will be quite dangerous for her.”

“The injustice you did to Courtney’s parents—our sister and her husband, is called murder. And you raped Courtney when she was a child. In my book, there’s a special place in hell for men like you. You touch Courtney, and you’ve just bought yourself a one-way ticket to that special place. Now, big brother, do I make myself clear?”

His voice changed. It dropped into a throaty whisper, his threat coming from someplace deep and dark where absolute evil dwelled. “Our sweet mother, the whore, might have told you she thought of me as a distant cousin to Cain. Well, the neurotic bitch was right. Like Cain, I’m a wanderer. Like Cain, who committed the first murder on earth, slaying his brother, I will do the same to you. You don’t want me getting into your head, little brother. Because once I move in … I never leave.”

He disconnected. I looked across the cemetery, the fog rising above the tombstones, the puffin barely visible, like a bird surfing the crest of a cloud, catching a holy wave to a better place.

The thunderstorm followed me on the drive back from South Carolina to Florida and Ponce Marina. Once in Florida, I made a call to Miami-Dade PD. When I got Detective Mike Roberts on the line he said, “Sean O’Brien, it’s been a long time. I’d ask how the hell you are, but I know your ass is in deep shit. You’re a household name. What’s all this stuff about you and Senator Logan’s wife and a daughter? Is that suspect, Courtney Burke, really your daughter?”