Faithless (35 page)

“I was trying to pull it down,” Brock told her, indicating the woman’s jacket, which was bunched up around her shoulders. “She’s kind of husky. If you could hold up her legs and I could pull…”

She heard herself saying, “Sure,” even though this was the last thing she wanted to do with her morning. She lifted the woman’s legs at the ankles and Brock made quick work pulling down the suit jacket, talking all the while. “I didn’t want to have to tote her back downstairs to the pulley and Mama’s just not up to helping with this kind of thing anymore.”

Sara lowered the legs. “Is she okay?”

“Sciatica,” he whispered, as if his mother might be embarrassed by the affliction. “It’s terrible when they start getting old. Anyway.” He tucked his hand around the coffin, straightening the silk lining. When he was finished, he rubbed his palms together as if to wash his hands of the task. “Thanks for helping me with that. What can I do you for?”

“Oh.” Sara had almost forgotten why she came. She walked back to the front row of chairs where she had put Abby’s paperwork. “I told Paul Ward I’d bring the death certificate over to you by Thursday, but I got tied up.”

“I’m sure that won’t be a problem,” Brock said, flashing a smile. “I don’t even have Chip back from the crematorium yet.”

“Chip?”

“Charles,” he said. “Sorry, Paul called him Chip, but I guess that can’t be his real name.”

“Why would Paul want Charles Donner’s death certificate?”

Brock shrugged, as if the request was the most natural thing in the world. “He always gets the death certificates when people from the farm pass.”

Sara leaned her hand against the back of the chair, feeling the need to grab onto something solid. “How many people die on the farm?”

“No,” Brock laughed, though she didn’t see what was funny. “I’m sorry I gave you the wrong impression. Not a lot. Two earlier this year-Chip makes three. I guess there were a couple last year.”

“That seems like a lot to me,” Sara told him, thinking he had left out Abigail, which would bring the tally to four this year alone.

“Well, I suppose,” Brock said slowly, as if the peculiarity of the circumstances had just occurred to him. “But you have to think about the types of folks they’ve got over there. Derelicts, mostly. I think it’s real Christian of the family to pick up the handling costs.”

“What did they die of?”

“Let’s see,” Brock began, tapping his finger against his chin. “All natural causes, I can tell you that. If you can call drinking and drugging yourself to death natural causes. One of ’em, this guy, was so full of liquor it took less than three hours to render his cremains. Came with his own accelerant. Skinny guy, too. Not a lot of fat.”

Sara knew fat burned more easily than muscle, but she didn’t like being reminded of it so soon after breakfast. “And the others?”

“I’ve got copies of the certificates in the office.”

“They came from Jim Ellers?” Sara asked, meaning Catoogah’s county coroner.

“Yep,” Brock said, waving her back toward the hall.

Sara followed, feeling uneasy. Jim Ellers was a nice man, but like Brock he was a funeral director, not a physician. Jim always sent his more difficult cases to Sara or the state lab. She couldn’t recall anything other than a gunshot wound and a stabbing that had been transferred to her office from Catoogah over the last eight years. Jim must have thought the deaths at the farm were pretty standard. Maybe they were. Brock had a point about the workers being derelicts. Alcoholism and drug addiction were hard diseases to manage, and left untreated, they generally led to catastrophic health problems and eventual death.

Brock opened a set of large wooden pocket doors to the room where the kitchen had once been. The space was now his office, and a massive desk was in the center, paperwork heaped in the in-box.

He apologized: “Mama’s been a little too poorly to straighten up.”

“It’s okay.”

Brock went over to the row of filing cabinets along the back of the room. He put his fingers to his chin again, tapping, not opening any drawers.

“Something wrong?”

“I might need a minute to try to think of their names.” He grinned apologetically. “Mama’s so much better at remembering these things than I am.”

“Brock, this is important,” she told him. “Go get your mother.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Yes, ma’am,” Jeffrey said into the telephone, rolling his eyes at Lena. She could tell that Barbara, Paul Ward’s secretary, was giving him everything but her social security number. The woman’s tinny voice was so loud that Lena could hear it from five feet away.

“That’s good,” he said . “Yes, ma’am.” He leaned his head against his hand. “Oh, excuse me- excuse-” he tried, then, “I’ve got another call. Thank you.” He hung up, Barbara’s cackling coming out of the earpiece even as he dropped the receiver back on the hook.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, rubbing his ear. “Literally.”

“She try to save your soul?”

“Let’s just say she’s really happy to be involved with the church.”

“So, she’d say anything she could to cover for Paul?”

“Probably,” he agreed, sitting back in his chair. He looked down at his notes, which consisted of three words. “She confirms what Paul said about being in Savannah. She even remembered working late with him the night Abby died.”

Lena knew that pinpointing time of death wasn’t an exact science. “All night?”

“That’s a point,” he allowed. “She also said Abby came by with some papers a couple of days before she went missing.”

“Did she seem okay?”

“Said she was a little ray of sunshine, as usual. Paul signed some papers, they went to lunch and he took her back to the bus station.”

“They could’ve had some kind of altercation during lunch.”

“True,” he agreed. “But why would he kill his niece?”

“It could be his baby she was carrying,” Lena suggested. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Jeffrey rubbed his jaw. “Yeah,” he admitted, and she could tell the thought left a bad taste in his mouth. “But Cole Connolly was pretty sure it was Chip’s.”

“Are you sure Cole didn’t poison her?

“As close to sure as I can be,” he told her. “Maybe we need to separate out the two, forget worrying about who killed Abby. Who killed Cole? Who would want him dead?”

Lena wasn’t entirely convinced of Connolly’s truthfulness about Abby’s death. Jeffrey had been pretty shaken up after watching the man die. She wondered if his conviction of Cole’s innocence was influenced by what had to have been a truly grotesque experience.

She suggested, “Maybe somebody who knew Cole had poisoned Abby decided to get revenge, wanted him to suffer the same way Abby had.”

“I didn’t tell anyone in the family that she was poisoned until after Cole was dead,” he reminded her. “On the other hand, whoever did it knew he drank coffee every morning. He told me the sisters were always on him, trying to get him to quit.”

Lena took it a step further. “Rebecca might know, too.”

Jeffrey nodded. “There’s a reason she’s staying away.” He added, “At least I hope she’s choosing to stay away.”

Lena had been thinking this same thing. “You’re sure Cole didn’t put her somewhere? To punish her for something?”

“I know you think I shouldn’t take him at his word,” Jeffrey began, “but I don’t think he took her. People like Cole know who to choose.” He leaned across his desk, hands clasped in front of him, as if he was saying something vital to the case. “They pick the ones they know won’t talk. It’s the same way with Dale picking Terri. These guys know who they can push around- who will shut up and take it and who won’t.”

Lena felt her cheeks burning. “Rebecca seemed pretty defiant. We only saw her that once, but I got the feeling she didn’t let anybody push her around.” She shrugged. “The thing is, you never know, do you?”

“No,” he said, giving her a careful look. “For all we know, Rebecca’s the one behind all of this.”

Frank stood in the doorway with a stack of papers in his hand. He said something neither one of them had considered. “Poisoning is a woman’s crime.”

“Rebecca was scared when she talked to us,” Lena said. “She didn’t want her family to know. Then again, maybe she didn’t want them to know because she was playing us.”

Jeffrey asked, “Did she seem like the type?”

“No,” she admitted. “Lev and Paul, maybe. Rachel’s pretty sturdy, too.”

Frank said, “What’s the brother doing living in Savannah, anyway?”

“It’s a port city,” Jeffrey reminded him. “Lots of trade still goes on down there.” He indicated the papers in Frank’s hand. “What’ve you got?”

“The rest of the credit reports,” he said, handing them over.

“Anything jump out at you?”

Frank shook his head as Marla’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Chief, Sara’s on line three.”

Jeffrey picked up the phone. “Hey.”

Lena made to leave in order to give him some privacy, but Jeffrey waved her back down in her chair. He took out his pen, saying into the phone, “Spell that,” as he wrote. Then, “Okay. Next.”

Lena read upside down as he wrote a series of names, all men.

“This is good,” Jeffrey told Sara. “I’ll call you later.” He hung up the telephone, not even pausing for a breath before saying, “Sara’s at Brock’s. She says that nine people have died on the farm in the last two years.”

“Nine?” Lena was sure she’d heard wrong.

“Brock got four of the bodies. Richard Cable got the rest.”

Lena knew Cable ran one of the funeral homes in Catoogah County. She asked, “What was the cause of death?”

Jeffrey ripped the sheet of paper off his pad. “Alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses. One had a heart attack. Jim Ellers over in Catoogah did the autopsies. He ruled them all natural causes.”

Lena was skeptical, not of what Jeffrey was saying, but of Ellers’s competence. “He said nine people in two years, living on the same place, died from natural causes?”

Jeffrey said, “Cole Connolly had a lot of drugs hidden in his room.”

“You think he helped them along?” Frank asked.

“That’s what he did with Chip,” Jeffrey said. “Cole told me that himself. Said he was tempting him with the apple, something like that.”

“So,” Lena surmised, “Cole was picking out the ‘weak’ ones, dangling drugs or whatever in front of their faces, seeing if they would take them and prove him right.”

“And the ones who took them ended up going to their maker,” Jeffrey said, but she could tell from his crocodile smile he had more.

She asked, “What?”

He told her, “The Church for the Greater Good paid for all the cremations.”

“Cremations,” Frank repeated. “So, we can’t exhume the bodies.”

Lena knew there was more to it than that. She asked, “What am I missing?”

Jeffrey told them, “Paul Ward got all their death certificates.”

Stupidly, Lena began, “Why would he need-” but answered her own question before she finished. “Life insurance.”

“Bingo,” Jeffrey said, handing Frank the paper with the names. “Get Hemming and go through the phone book. Do we have one for Savannah?” Frank nodded. “Find the big insurance companies. We’ll start there first. Don’t call the local agents, call the corporate national fraud hotlines. The local agents might be involved.”

Lena asked, “Will they give out that information over the phone?”

“They will if they think they’ve been cheated out of some dough,” Frank said. “I’ll get right on it.”

As Frank left the room, Jeffrey pointed his finger at Lena. “I knew this had to be about money. It had to be about something concrete.”

She had to admit, “You were right.”

“We found our general,” he told her. “Cole said he was just an old soldier, but he needed a general to tell him what to do.”

“Abby was in Savannah a few days before she died. Maybe she found out about the life insurance policies.”

“How?” Jeffrey asked.

“Her mother said she worked in the office for a while. That she was good with numbers.”

“Lev saw her in the office once at the photocopier. Maybe she saw something she wasn’t meant to.” He paused, mulling over the possibilities. “Rachel said Abby went to Savannah before she died because Paul had left some papers behind in his briefcase. Maybe Abby saw the policies.”

She asked, “So, you think Abby confronted him in Savannah?”

Jeffrey nodded. “And Paul called Cole to prod him on to punish her.”

“Or he called Lev.”

“Or Lev,” he agreed.

“Cole already knew about Chip. He followed him and Abby out into the woods.” She had to say, “I don’t know, though. It’s strange. Paul didn’t strike me as the overly religious type.”

“Why would he have to be?”

“Telling Cole to bury his niece in a coffin in the woods?” she asked. “Lev seems more like your general to me.” She added, “Plus, Paul was never in Dale’s garage. If that’s where the cyanide came from, then it points straight back to Lev, because he’s the only one we can connect to the garage.” She paused a moment. “Or Cole.”

“I don’t think it was Cole,” Jeffrey insisted. “Did you ever have a real conversation with Terri Stanley about that?”

She felt her blush come back, this time from shame. “No.”

His lips pressed into a tight line, but he didn’t say the obvious. If she had talked to Terri before, maybe they wouldn’t be sitting here right now. Maybe Rebecca would be safe at home, Cole Connolly would still be alive, and they would be back in the interrogation room, talking to the person who had killed Abigail Bennett.

“I fucked up,” she said.

“Yeah, you did.” He waited a few seconds before saying, “You don’t listen to me, Lena. I need to be able to trust you to do what I say.” He paused as if he expected her to interrupt him. She didn’t, and he continued, “You can be a good cop, a smart cop. That’s why I made you detective.” She looked down, unable to take the compliment, knowing what was coming next. “Everything that happens in this town is my responsibility, and if somebody gets hurt or worse because you can’t follow my orders, then it’s all on me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry isn’t good enough this time. Sorry means you understand what I’m saying and you’re not going to do it again.” He let that sink in. “I’ve heard sorry one too many times now. I need to see actions, not hear empty words.”

His quiet tone was worse than if he had yelled at her. Lena looked down at the floor, wondering how many times he was going to let her screw things up before he finally cut her loose.

He stood quickly, taking her by surprise. Lena flinched, gripped by an inexplicable panic that he was going to hit her.

Jeffrey was shocked, looking at her as if he had never seen her in his life.

“I just-” She couldn’t find the words to say. “You scared me.”

Jeffrey leaned out the door, telling Marla, “Send back the woman who’s about to walk in.” He told Lena, “Mary Ward is here. I just saw her pull up into the parking lot.”

Lena tried to regain her composure. “I thought she didn’t like to drive.”

“Guess she made an exception,” Jeffrey answered, still looking at her like she was a book he couldn’t read. “Are you going to be able to do this?”

“Of course,” she said, pushing herself out of the chair. She tucked in her shirt, feeling fidgety and out of place.

He took her hand in both of his, and she felt another shock. He never touched her like that. It wasn’t something he did.

He said, “I need you to be on your game right now.”

“You’ve got me,” she assured him, pulling back her hand to tuck in her shirt again even though it was already tight. “Let’s go.”

Lena didn’t wait for him. She squared her shoulders and walked across the squad room with purposeful strides. Marla’s hand was on the buzzer as Lena opened the door.

Mary Ward stood in the lobby, her purse clutched to her chest.

“Chief Tolliver,” she said, as if Lena wasn’t right in front of her. She had a ratty old black and red scarf around her shoulders, looking more like a little old lady now than the first time they had seen her. The woman was probably only ten years older than Lena. She was either putting on an act or was truly one of the most pathetic people walking the face of the earth.

“Why don’t you come back to my office,” Jeffrey offered, putting his hand at Mary’s elbow, guiding her through the open doorway before she could change her mind. He said, “You remember Detective Adams?”

“Lena,” Lena supplied, ever helpful. “Can I get you some coffee or something?”

“I don’t drink caffeine,” the woman replied, her voice still strained, as if she had been screaming and had made herself hoarse. Lena could see she had a balled tissue up her sleeve and assumed she’d been crying.

Jeffrey sat Mary at one of the desks outside his office, probably wanting to keep her off guard. He waited for her to sit, then took the chair beside her. Lena hung back behind them, thinking Mary would be more comfortable talking to Jeffrey.

He asked, “What can I help you with, Mary?”

She took her time, her breathing audible in the small room as they waited for her to speak. “You said my niece was in a box, Chief Tolliver.”

“Yes.”

“That Cole had buried her in a box.”

“That’s right,” he confirmed. “Cole admitted it to me before he died.”

“And you found her there? You found Abby yourself?”

“My wife and I were in the woods. We found the metal pipe in the ground. We dug her out ourselves.”

Mary took the tissue from her sleeve and wiped her nose. “Several years ago,” she began; then: “I guess I should back up.”

“Take your time.”

She seemed to do exactly that, and Lena pressed her lips together, fighting the urge to shake it out of her.

“I have two sons,” Mary said. “William and Peter. They live out west.”

“I remember you telling us that,” Jeffrey said, though Lena didn’t.

“They chose to leave the church.” She blew her nose in the tissue. “It was very hard for me to lose my children. Not that we turned our backs on them. Everyone makes their own decisions. We don’t exclude people because they…” She let her voice trail off. “My sons turned their backs on us. On me.”

Jeffrey waited, the only sign of his impatience his hand gripping the arm of the chair.

“Cole was very hard on them,” she said. “He disciplined them.”

“Did he abuse them?”

“He punished them when they were bad,” was all she would admit. “My husband had passed away a year before. I was grateful for Cole’s help. I thought they needed a strong man in their lives.” She sniffed, wiping her nose. “These were different times.”