BY SEVEN-THIRTY P.M., our crime scene tech, Alvin Gerbin, had arrived in the field.
The sun had gone down, and heavy shadows fell on the unlit irrigation ditch where we’d found the bike. In the distance, lights from cars up on SR-902 flickered in the spaces between pecan trees.
We’d found nothing else since discovering the metal cord, but Gerbin would print the hell out of it, and the bike too.
Remy hung back with our crime scene tech, and I walked up to the highway.
As I got a ride in with patrol, I thought about the first twelve hours of the case and the horror the Websters were going through.
Somebody had ambushed Kendrick out in this field, but then killed him miles away at Unger’s farm. What had happened in between?
The black and white pulled to the curb outside the station and let me out. As it drove away, a high-intensity light nearly blinded me.
“Detective Marsh.” The voice of Deb Newberry broke through. “Can you confirm the dead child found in Harmony is Kendrick Webster?”
Newberry was a brash field reporter for the local Fox channel, and the brightness of the camera caught me off guard. I could hardly see where I was walking.
“Jesus, Deb,” I said. “I’m gonna break my ankle out here if I can’t get around you.”
I moved past the reporter and her cameraman, but they followed me to the front door of the precinct.
“Is it true the department is heavily concerned about leaks in this investigation?”
“We’re concerned about leaks in every investigation.”
“But you don’t always block off a room, do you?” Newberry asked. “Away from your fellow officers—for your evidence and timeline? Cover the windows with craft paper?”
My face gave away my answer. Her question also made me second-guess everyone around me. I opened the door to the precinct.
“Do you see the case as an opportunity to address the racial insensitivity in the police department?”
“There is no racial insensitivity on my squad,” I said. “Every homicide is our top homicide, regardless of race.”
I let the door swing shut on her face and moved inside the precinct, but my mind was conflicted about the decision to remove the rope from Kendrick’s neck. Sooner or later the details of the lynching would come out. If we didn’t have our killer in custody, folks like Deb Newberry would skewer me. And I’d deserve it.
I made my way to the conference room and plopped down in a chair next to Abe. “Tell me you found something new on Kendrick.”
Abe picked up his notebook. “Well, I know how much you love coincidences, P.T. So here’s one for you. Our vic, Virgil Rowe, out in the numbered streets? He’s got some ink on his back.”
Abe pulled out a photo, a tattoo on pale skin. An eagle, riding on a black cloud. “It’s a local neo-Nazi group called StormCloud.”
“What do we know about them?” I asked.
“They started as an online bulletin board in the ’90s,” Abe said. “Flew under the radar until 2005, when they made a website denying the Holocaust. Recent tax returns say they run a two-million-dollar budget.”
“They must have legitimate businesses then.”
“Now you’re thinking, podna,” he said, slipping into the diction of his youth. Abe was originally from New Orleans, the son of a riverboat waitress and an oil-derrick driller. “They own a towing company,” he said. “Stormin’ Norman Tow.”
I looked up from the tattoo.
“Vaughn McClure has a towing company,” I said. “We saw one of his trucks in the driveway.”
“Exactly,” Abe said. “McClure’s an independent with five trucks. So far I haven’t found anything to connect him to Stormin’ Norman. But there’s the optics of it.”
“Which don’t look good,” I said.
I sat back. Putting things together in my head. I’d been trying to figure out how someone would know Kendrick was coming down the irrigation ditch at that exact time.
I hadn’t considered a different option. That Kendrick was sent away from the sleepover on purpose. That the McClures might have deliberately driven him into the arms of an ambusher.
“No one was home at the McClure house when we tried them,” I said. “Have you been able to reach Vaughn McClure at his business?”
Abe shook his head. “Put wishes in one hand and shit in the other. See which fills up first.”
“What else?” I asked.
“Well,” Abe said, “we got a big lead on Virgil Rowe’s killer.”
“The neo-Nazi?”
Abe nodded. “This lady Martha Velasquez called into the tip line. She lives on 30th Street in the numbereds. A block over from Virgil.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
“Retired school counselor. Sixty-three. Hispanic,” Abe said. “Her Pekingese woke her up Sunday morning around three a.m. She took the pooch out for a piss. Saw some white guy walking down from the boulevard.”
“At three a.m.?” I asked. “She could see then?”
“Per Velasquez, this guy entered the property where Virgil was killed. Two minutes later—out comes Corinne, the stripper.”
I swallowed hard.
That’s you, Purvis said. I thought you were careful.
“Now, if you remember, P.T.,” Abe said. “Corinne told patrol that she was gone at her girlfriend’s house from midnight to seven a.m. This means she lied.”
I attempted a nod but my head just kind of bobbed.
“I’m thinking that whoever came over,” Abe said, “they told Corinne to make herself scarce while they killed Virgil. Which means Corinne knows the killer.”
We’re dead, Purvis huffed.
“So I sent patrol to pick the stripper up,” Abe continued. “But apparently she split town.”
I hadn’t inhaled in about a minute.
“So we lost her?” I said.
“Don’t worry,” Abe said. “She uses plastic and she’s ours. Plus, I put in a request to pull traffic cams up on the boulevard. How many cars you think are driving around the numbered streets at three a.m.?”
I swallowed again. Sick to my stomach.
Breathe, Purvis said.
“I’m tired as all get out.” Abe stood up. “There’s a box of Banquet microwave chicken with my name on it. And a soft pillow.”
I nodded as Abe grabbed his old leather bag. Put his notebook inside. “Kendrick’s pop came up here, by the way. Talked to Chief Dooger.”
“Does the dad have some information for us?” I asked.
“He doesn’t want you leading the investigation,” Abe said. “That’s his information.”
“He offer a reason?”
“Nothing in particular,” Abe said. “He’d done some minor recon on you. Pointed out some cases he didn’t love the outcome on. But mostly, you didn’t come for the notification.”
There was a reason I’d sent two black cops out on day one. I was trying to keep this city under control.
“What’d the boss say?” I asked. “He want you leading this?”
Abe shook his head and patted me on the shoulder. “Miles said to keep doing what we’re doing.”
Abe headed out then, and I moved to my office.
Sliding open the top drawer in my desk, I pulled out a bottle of Thirteenth Colony. Threw a quick capful back and let the rye whisky coat my throat.
Under the liquor was a framed photo of my son sitting on the front porch.
Jonas.
I ran my hands over the glass frame.
My son had honey-colored skin and a short reddish Afro that was a mix of my wavy chestnut locks and his mother’s beautiful black curls.
I thought of the reverend assuming I was unfit to find his son’s killer. Hell, maybe I was.
But I’d experienced more than Webster thought.
I’d walked into stores. Into restaurants. I’d come to school events holding Jonas’s hand and get that look. That “What’s he doing with that black kid” look.
I’d also put Jonas in the ground. In a casket that was so small it broke my heart into a thousand pieces. Littered them from the mountains of northern Georgia to the wire grass of the coastal plains.
I shot back another cap of whisky and popped some gum in my mouth, put the liquor and the frame away. I threaded my way to the first floor of the building, to the medical examiner’s office.
Sarah Raines sat on a stool in the lab, her flats up on the edge of a washing basin. She held a digital voice recorder in one hand. A sheet covered the body beside her.
“There you are,” she said, hitting stop on the recorder and putting her feet down. “How are things out at that ditch?”
“Slow,” I said. “We gotta break one more detail before I feel good about going to bed.”
Sarah motioned at the body. “Well, maybe I have that for you.”
I grabbed a chair from a desk nearby and slid it over. Under her lab coat, Sarah was dressed in a sleeveless red top and black yoga pants that showed off her thin figure. Her shoulder-length blond hair had streaks of brown in it.
“Kendrick had third-degree burns covering seventy percent of his body,” she said, moving to the top section of her report.
I grabbed my phone and jotted this down. It was good information, but no Aha.
“The initial cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning.” Sarah pointed. “But in the last hour, I’ve pulled enough soot from his lungs to change that to chemical edema.”
“Asphyxiation,” I said.
So there it was. Soot was in Kendrick’s lungs.
I’d been gripping the edge of the tray Kendrick’s body lay in; my knuckles were white.
“So he was alive when they burned him?”
Sarah nodded, her lips quivering. I’ve always been told I’m a hard person to read. Sarah was the opposite: every emotion on her face.
“Anything else?” I asked. “Gunshots? Knife wounds?”
“Yeah,” Sarah said. “Something else, but not a knife or gun wound. That’s why I wanted to talk in person.” She got up, but didn’t say anything. Reached over like she was gonna pull back the sheet, but didn’t do that either.
Then I realized she was tearing up, her cheeks glistening. I don’t know why this surprised me—that coroners cried.
“Hey,” I said, a hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”
“No,” she said. “It’s worse than you think. He was tortured, P.T.”
I hesitated, not following her.
“Both of Kendrick’s elbows were broken,” Sarah said.
I blinked. “I don’t understand. I thought he was hung by his neck, not his arms. The rope I took off—”
“He was,” she said. “This other thing—with his elbows—it happened earlier. Before the lynching.”
My brain was sore.
Sarah was talking about two separate injuries. The final hanging that I’d seen evidence of—and then something else, where Kendrick’s hands had been pulled back, his elbows breaking in the process.
“Wait a sec,” I said. “Elbows breaking—that doesn’t happen naturally in fires? Bones break, from pressure?”
“They can,” she said. “High temperature can cause muscles to contract. It can flex joints and break bones. Fires can put the body in what we call a pugilistic posture. Like someone’s fighting.”
“But not here?” I asked.
“No way,” Sarah said, paging forward to show me an X-ray. “You see how the olecranon process is cracked?”
I nodded. “Is that post- or antemortem?”
“Ante,” she said. “This is before he was dead.”
I needed to put together what this meant. The sequence of things.
Someone had set up a trap to capture Kendrick, knocking him off his bike. Then they’d grabbed him. Brought him somewhere and broke both of his elbows. And then while he was still alive, they strung him up by his neck, hoisted him into a tree, and lit him on fire.
I didn’t see Kendrick’s body anymore. I saw my son, his age accelerated to fifteen. His eyes like mine. His hair more like his mom’s. And the people who did this—they did it to my son.
I steadied my breathing.
Was this McClure? Was he some racist fuck who sent Kendrick away—into the arms of his Nazi buddies?
We had nowhere near the evidence needed to get a warrant to search the McClures’ house, and another possibility flashed in my head. That maybe I could find the tow truck owner myself—do what I had to to make the world a better place without him. The only thing keeping me from doing this was the gnawing memory of Virgil Rowe. What I might’ve done to him. What it might cost me.
A flicker of lightning whitened the sky out the window. More rain was coming, and I hoped Remy was done out at the irrigation ditch.
Sarah used the back of her hand to wipe tears from her face. “You gotta find this son of a bitch, P.T. So he doesn’t do this to any more kids.”
I’d never heard Sarah curse before.
“I’ll find him,” I said. “And when I do, I’ll watch as they stick a needle in his arm.”