BY THE TIME I returned to the station house, it was a ghost town. I switched on the TV in the break room and raided the fridge for old pizza.
A so-called crime expert from Atlanta was being interviewed on CNN about Burkette’s shooting.
“Police could’ve used Tasers or nonlethal force,” the expert said.
A bottle of Jack was in a cabinet above the fridge. I filled the cap and shot it back.
A second man on the show took the counterpoint. “Why are you defending this guy? He killed a kid. Then he pulled a gun on a cop.”
Someone was walking toward the kitchen, and I turned. It was Sarah Raines. Her blond hair was down, and she was dressed in a blouse and tight black pants that showed off her body.
“I thought all you guys were out celebrating,” she said.
I flicked off the TV and turned back toward my office.
“I had a couple things to clean up,” I said. “Trying to close out the case tonight. Maybe take a couple days off.”
“How’s Remy?” Sarah asked.
“Suspended for a week,” I said.
“That sucks.”
“Well, we got some good press today.” I shrugged. “Maybe the boss’ll let her out of the penalty box a couple days early.”
Sarah put down her purse. “How about a drink with me then?”
Sarah was sweet. But I drank alone for the most part.
And you’re already one drink ahead of her, Purvis said.
Rain check, I thought.
Except I didn’t say those words.
“Sure,” I said. “One drink and then I gotta get back. I came in to connect some dots on Burkette. I need to stay sharp.”
“C’mon then,” she said.
Ten minutes later we were down the street at a place called Fulman’s Acre. One of those bars where the owner took the tips and staple-gunned them to the walls. Fives and ones covered every inch behind the bar; even the ceiling was dotted with money.
Sarah and I sat at the bar, bathed in a red and orange glow from a string of colored bulbs above our heads. The light and dark parts of her hair flickered in color as she talked.
Sarah had worked in Mason Falls for about ten months, but I didn’t know about her life before then, other than some reference she’d made to growing up in a small town in Indiana.
“Where I was born . . .” She smiled. “Let’s just say it makes Mason Falls look like the big city.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Little midwestern place. A thousand people. Biggest building in town is two floors.”
“Six hundred people,” she said. “And a hundred of them went to my high school.”
“And you ran as fast and far away as a girl could run.” I smiled, joking at the stereotype of it.
Sarah hit me on the arm. “I’ll tell ya,” she said. “University of Michigan seemed like a different universe when I got there. Freshman year, I had an English class with six hundred people in it.”
We talked about college and after while she nursed a Chivas and soda water.
“And that’s where you went to medical school too?”
“Yup.” She nodded. “Eight years in Ann Arbor. Go Blue.”
“And why be a coroner?” I asked. “Why the dead?”
“That’s a longer story,” she said. “I guess the short version is that I took a leave during my second year in med school. My brother had stage-four cancer, and I ended up spending most of that year in Bloomington at a clinic.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Yeah, it was tough,” Sarah said. “I went back to medical school, but a year into it, I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t think I could handle telling patients the kind of news my family got.”
“Of course not.”
“One of my professors suggested pathology, and I fell in love. After residency, I got a gig in the county medical office in Atlanta.”
A shot of Wild Turkey sat in front of me, and I lifted it.
“To the dead,” I said.
“To the living,” Sarah responded.
I swallowed the whisky, shifting in my seat. “So why come here?” I squinted. “Atlanta’s a modern city. Bustling. Good place to be in your thirties.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I loved Atlanta. But the department was a factory. Clock in, clock out.”
“Dead-end job?” I said.
Sarah nodded, then caught the joke. Hit me on the arm again.
“The job was good,” she said. “I won’t lie.” She stopped, and her voice lowered an octave. “But things didn’t go as I’d planned.”
I waited, but she didn’t say more.
There was a part of Sarah that was exposed. She was cautious, as if she hid some secret. But at the same time, she left the scab of it open, for me to see.
“In any case, when I saw the spot open here,” she said, “I thought to myself, I can be a tiny part of a big system in Atlanta, or play a bigger part in Mason Falls. I drove here and looked around. It reminded me of where I grew up. Good place to meet someone. Start a family.”
I suddenly thought of Lena and Jonas. Of our plans for the future.
I downed the rest of my shot and stood up.
“I should go,” I said. “Back to the case.”
Sarah looked up. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” I said. “Really.”
I threw a twenty down on the bar, and Sarah placed her hand on my forearm.
“How old was he?” she asked. “Your son?”
I felt the back of my neck get warm. “Eight,” I said.
“This case must’ve been impossible.”
“Yeah.” It was the first time I’d acknowledged out loud how much Kendrick and Jonas seemed connected.
Sarah leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
I smiled and walked her back to the station parking lot. Went inside alone. Settling in the conference room, I put together my notes to close the case out.
I began with everything Abe had found on Cory Burkette, starting first with his criminal record.
I found a typed interview that Abe had done with Dathel Mackey, who worked at First Baptist and cooked and cleaned for the Webster family.
Q: Did Burkette spend a lot of time with Kendrick?
A: It was more of the other way around. That kid followed him everywhere. I think Cory might’ve been teaching him too.
Q: Teaching him what?
A: To ride. Cory had a motorcycle.
I grabbed the paper with the final text Kendrick had sent as the sleepover ended.
2nite is ending early. U said you’d show me when rents r asleep.
Maybe “show” wasn’t something sexual. Maybe it was Burkette teaching Kendrick how to ride his Suzuki. Then again, maybe teaching him to ride was how he’d earned Kendrick’s trust. Before abusing it.
Around ten p.m. my boss called. “We’re doing a little presser around lunchtime tomorrow,” Miles Dooger said. “Wear a clean shirt and tie.”
“Sure,” I said.
Miles waited for me to fill the silence, but I didn’t.
“It’s the best of all worlds, P.T.,” he said. “The mother and father have justice, and no one wastes the taxpayers’ money going to court.”
“You mean no one finds out about the lynching?”
“You think those parents need to know that?” he asked.
I thought of my own son. Knowing every detail of how he’d drowned hadn’t helped me move past it.
“No,” I said.
I hung up and laid down on the couch in my office, closing my eyes.
In police work you see all kinds of photos that are untenable for regular folks to stare at. And the reality is, you get used to them as a detective. “Desensitized” is the word Miles uses.
But the images of Kendrick’s burnt face and body were different. Every time I saw them, I noticed some new horrific detail.
I focused on the darkness inside my eyelids and tried to rest.
In my dreams, I was an eagle, flying over the land. I saw the Spanish moss swaying in the wind on Unger’s farm. I saw the tree burning and steered west. Still a thousand feet above the ground.
“Dad,” Jonas’s voice said. “Look closer.”
I angled my body down, diving toward the loblolly. As I got lower, Kendrick’s face melted, and I jolted awake with a start.
I wandered across to the conference room. The crop duster. We hadn’t followed up with him.
Out in the bull pen, I heard a noise and looked over. Through the open door of the conference room, I saw Alvin Gerbin, our crime scene tech.
“Hey, P.T.,” Gerbin’s voice boomed. “Sorry, I didn’t think anyone was here.” Gerbin had taken off his signature Hawaiian shirt and had on a wifebeater T-shirt underneath. His man boobs showed prominently through the fabric.
I looked at my watch: four a.m. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I just finished processing evidence out at that cabin,” he said. “I’m headed home to crash.”
Gerbin set six or eight clear bags into a file box on his desk. Inside one of the bags was a cell phone.
“Anyone go through Burkette’s stuff?”
“Not yet,” Gerbin said. “Chief told me there’s no need to rush it. That with all the overtime this month, it’s gotta get in line with everything else.”
“You mind?” I asked, pointing at the phone in the evidence bag.
Gerbin shrugged. “Hell, it’s just the two of us at four a.m. Gonna land on your desk or Abe’s sooner or later.”
I gloved up and turned on the phone. A locked screen came up.
“Hold on,” I said. I grabbed the file we had on Burkette. Located his social security number and tried the last four digits as the password.
Locked still.
I found his prison ID number in his file. That had been his identity for eight years.
The phone unlocked, and I started moving through pages of apps.
I looked at his texts and found the one Kendrick had sent. I searched backward through chat, but found nothing that suggested a sexual relationship.
I looked at Burkette’s photos then.
There were shots of his motorcycle. Then one of a spinning ride at the county fair. Then of animals. Lots of animals at the fair.
“You come from a farming family, right?” I asked Gerbin.
“Future Farmers of America. Born, raised, and proud,” he said.
I saw photos that Burkette had taken of the main stage, where prizes were awarded. Biggest gourd. Best apple pie.
“You go to the winter fair last weekend?” I asked. “See who won what?”
“Never miss it,” Gerbin said. “I mean, it’s not like the one in summer, but still. Saturday night under the big top. The awards.”
Saturday night?
Saturday night Burkette was at the county fairground?
I stared at a photo of a pig with a blue ribbon on his neck.
The fairgrounds thirty miles from Harmony? The same Saturday night that Kendrick was abducted and killed?
I thought about the conversation I’d had outside the cabin with Burkette. I’d asked him about Virgil Rowe and he had seemed confused. He’d thought he was a member of First Baptist, not a fellow neo-Nazi.
Was it possible we had it wrong?
That the two men didn’t know each other? And that Burkette wasn’t involved in Kendrick’s murder?
I found a selfie of Burkette with the prize pig at the fair. In the background, I could see the moon just coming out. It was enough to guess that it was around seven or seven-thirty p.m., putting Burkette a half hour away from Kendrick at the time of the abduction.
I walked into the conference room, still holding the phone. Looked at the pictures of the hundred-dollar bills I’d found inside the matchbox in Virgil Rowe’s place.
The word “Rise” had been written on one of them. And on a Post-it note: P.B. 2 p.m.
P.B. wasn’t someone’s initials. It was Paragon Baptist. Kendrick’s school.
When Remy had interviewed the Webster family about Kendrick’s schedule, the parents had mentioned Kendrick got out of school each day at two p.m.
I looked out the conference room windows. The dogwoods were blowing gently in the rainy night, dark shadows against a black sky.
Maybe the Post-it note was an indication of where and when to find Kendrick, but something had gone awry at two p.m. when Rowe was supposed to grab Kendrick.
I bit at my lip, thinking this over.
What if Virgil Rowe had followed Kendrick since two p.m., watching him go home? Then watching as he rode through the fields to his friend’s house the next night? And maybe when Kendrick left the sleepover, Rowe was still in the field, waiting. He wouldn’t need any text or information from Burkette as to Kendrick’s whereabouts. He wouldn’t need Burkette at all.
I selected the photo of Burkette at the fair. Forwarded it to my personal email. Then I went into the phone’s sent mail and deleted it.
I walked out of the conference room and back toward my crime tech.
“Anything good?” Gerbin asked.
“Nah,” I said, putting the phone back in the bag. “I’ll leave Merle or Abe to look at it when they get around to it.”
It was a quarter to five, and I needed some fresh air.
If Burkette wasn’t involved in Kendrick’s murder, then the events of the last day were more than bad. Remy getting caught on film had alerted the media to Burkette. And like most ex-cons, when his face hit TV, Burkette ran, hiding at his cabin until we eventually shot him.
The last thing the Mason Falls PD needed was us shooting an innocent man. But worse than that was the effect of Burkette being innocent. It meant the real killer of Kendrick was still out there. And this meant our last good lead was to dig into Virgil Rowe again. Which would steer the case right back to me.
I drove home and crashed for an hour. But the dream about flying came back again, and I was startled awake. By six a.m., I showered and put on a blue linen suit and threw a tie in the back of the car for the press conference later.
I got on the road to talk to the crop duster. The case wasn’t closed, and I needed a lead.