I GOT BACK TO MY HOUSE by midnight and sat on the front porch.
Purvis wandered onto the lawn and squatted, taking his best crack at killing the crabgrass that was growing up around the real grass.
The December night air was cool, and I thought about the Hesters and this crime from 1993.
Was it possible that someone from the old case was tied to the death of Kendrick Webster? Was it possible that someone had bullied my father-in-law into a fight by using my name?
I kept hearing Marvin’s voice in my head. “They said you were a drunk like me.”
I got up and walked into the house. Opening the cabinet to the right of the fridge, I grabbed a bottle of Johnnie Walker. Dumped it into the sink.
Two bottles of wine sat behind it. I poured them out too.
“Good,” I said aloud.
I looked around. The house was an open floor plan, with the kitchen and dining room combined into one big space.
Atop Lena’s antique oak dining table were piles of mail I hadn’t gotten to. Mostly overdue bills.
I heard a noise behind me and turned. It was Purvis, walking into the kitchen. He looked past me, to the empty bottles on the counter.
If you’re gonna do something, do it right, Purvis huffed.
I turned and moved into the dining room. Looked in a brown bag under the table. There was a half-finished bottle of Belvedere. Along with it, a fifth of Bacardi. Down the drain.
I went out to the garage and found a shit brand of tequila. Gone.
A bit of Knob Creek. Drained.
I found a six-pack of Miller and did the same. A bottle of Cuervo on a shelf in the bedroom. A half bottle of Dewar’s had rolled under Jonas’s bed, where I slept some nights.
I watched the browns and clears swirl over stainless steel, and the scent of it rose into my nostrils. The smell alone was intoxicating.
Kamchatka. Patrón. Some vodka with Russian writing and no English words. I carried each one into the kitchen. Hesitated over some really good rum, but dumped it too.
The smells filled the whole house, and when I was done, there were ten cans of beer and twenty empty bottles of liquor on the counter.
Putting them into two garbage bags, I brought them out to the trash. Grabbed Purvis and walked him without a leash down the street.
A few doors down, a neighbor’s house abutted a small pond, and I looked out at the fecund water, wondering if I could make it a day without liquor. The air coming off the pond smelled like stale bread and duck shit, and the winter pansies around the edge looked like faded tissue paper. The plants were being eaten from within, the result of lace bugs or bad sun tolerance or some soil-borne fungus that was just as much a part of the ecosystem as the plants themselves.
Walking back, I climbed into bed with Purvis.
I shivered most of the night, too tired to get up and see if I’d left a window open or if I was coming down with a cold.
By six a.m., I could no longer deny that I wasn’t sleeping, so I got up and showered. Put on a sport coat and shirt over gray slacks. My hair can start looking like a perm if it rains a lot and I don’t brush it, so I tidied up a bit. Shaved too. Then headed out to see Tripp Unger at Harmony Farms.
I got near Unger’s property and slowed my truck.
We’d placed a patrol car there four days ago to keep media away.
I pulled next to Officer Winston Lamar’s car, and he rolled down his window.
Lamar was a blond in his early thirties with spiked hair. Red acne dotted his chin and forehead.
“How you doin’, blue?” I asked.
“Double time for the graveyard.” He shrugged. “Can’t complain.”
“You’ve been checking in with the farmer?”
“Yeah, but it’s pretty uneventful,” Lamar said. “Some new equipment got dropped off at five a.m., but I knew about it. The farmer’s wife drove down around midnight and told me to expect it.”
“What kinda equipment?” I asked.
“There was a backhoe,” he said. “A trencher. Couple others. He’s got some of it going already.” He motioned up property.
I thought about Unger. A few days ago he’d been so broke he couldn’t pay attention, and now this?
My mind was expert at worst-case scenarios, and I imagined one. A farmer who needed money. Who sold the story of a black boy, burned to death on his property.
I moved past the cruiser and up the gravel road.
Passing Unger’s house, I saw a giant machine swiveling around. It was a yellow backhoe with a black stripe down the side. It was double mounted with a scooper on each end and a cab in between.
It was starting to sprinkle, and I parked in a swath of mud. Unger waved, shutting off the backhoe.
“Detective,” he said. The farmer stepped out of the backhoe’s cab. I told him I had a couple follow-up questions.
“Shoot,” Unger said. He wore a checkered tan flannel under a puffy orange vest.
“Do you know Talmadge Hester?”
“As in Hester Peaches? Sure,” he said. “We’re not close, but the Georgia farm industry ain’t that big. Why?”
“It’s probably nothing,” I said. “But do they go to the same service as you do out at Sediment Rock?”
“Yup.”
“And what about last Sunday, when the fire was? Did you see the Hesters?”
“Well, Talmadge is there every Sunday. These days he’s got his oldest, Wade, working with him. So I saw him and Wade.”
I thought about the crop duster who Unger had sued. “And y’all get along—you and the Hesters? They wouldn’t have reason to set a fire here?”
Unger smiled. “In the farm business, I’m what you call small potatoes, Detective. I don’t think they consider me much at all.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Truth is, we hardly talk at church,” Unger said. “I’m an usher, so there were some issues with his boy a couple times. Being disruptive. Coming drunk to service.”
“This was Wade?” I squinted.
“No, the younger Hester son. Bushy brown beard. Around your age.”
Dathel Mackey had talked about seeing a bearded man at First Baptist the day Kendrick disappeared. “The hunter,” she’d called him.
“I think his name is Matthew,” Unger said.
I jotted this down, glancing at where Unger had been digging. The farmer had trenched a hundred feet in length, first with the backhoe, and then a thinner, deeper channel with the micro-trencher.
“What is that—eight or nine feet?” I asked, staring into the trench.
“Ten,” Unger said.
Too deep for seed, Purvis said.
I looked from the trench to Unger. “My partner and I mentioned the other day that some folks from TV might come at ya. Offer you cash to tell them what happened here.”
Unger put up his hand, seeing where I was going. “It’s not what you think, Detective. A couple fellas came by after you left. But these guys weren’t reporters. They’ve been laying pipe across half this valley over the last month. They finally decided that to go around my property was too expensive.”
“What are they putting inside the trench?” I asked.
“Some broadband fiber.” Unger shrugged. “They wanted to bring in their own crew, but given the fire and all, I didn’t want anyone on my land.”
“Well, good for you,” I said. “I know you guys have had a tough time of it. This sort of thing help out?”
“Let’s just say I’ll make my yearly nut in four days of trenching,” Unger said. “And then the same every year after.”
I whistled. This was some windfall.
He explained to me how he’d be able to farm his whole land now. Even the burned area.
“I took a walk down there this morning to check out the soil,” Unger said. “You know, that boy wasn’t the only casualty. A lamb was burned.”
“One of your animals?” I said.
“Nope. And normally I’d guess it wandered onto the property, but the next farm over with livestock is six miles. So it don’t exactly make sense.”
Unger pulled out his phone and showed me a picture. It was the burnt body of an animal, but there was something wrong.
I stared at it. Not sure what to make of what I was seeing.
“Is its head missing?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Odd, right?”
I drove back to the precinct then. I didn’t even bother going upstairs to my office. I had a patrolman at the intake desk print me the info on the younger Hester brother.
Matthew Hester. Thirty-two years old. Brown hair. Blue eyes.
In his DMV photo, Matthew Hester had a shaggy beard that hung down past his chin. I looked at his description. Five foot ten. Hundred and sixty pounds. From the picture, a wiry athletic build.
If Matthew Hester was involved with Virgil Rowe or Cory Burkette, it would tie together a number of things. The two areas, Mason Falls and Shonus. The two time periods, ’93 and now.
I grabbed my phone and texted Remy, even though she was officially on leave.
You around? Want to bounce some ideas off of you.
I checked my in-box in the mailroom while I waited for a response. I saw that Captain Sugarman from Shonus had sent me a file I requested.
It was on Brian Menasco, the kid convicted of the crime in 1993. The kid who’d gone to prison for the arson-murder of Junius Lochland. Menasco had himself been killed in a prison fight a few years later, never completing his sentence, so the file was pretty thin.
Detective Berry walked by, a Starbucks coffee in hand. He was dressed casually, a golf shirt clinging to his rounded belly.
“Been looking for you,” he said. He made sort of a dumb smirk. “We were about to put out an APB.”
“What do you need, Merle?”
“We got a lady upstairs. She came in to see Abe, but he’s been in with the head shrinker for two hours for the shooting. I put her with a sketch artist.”
Berry was normally Abe’s partner, and this was good form, to cover for him.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I might just be able to show her a picture instead.” I held up the photograph of Matthew Hester. “This is the black lady? Seventy or so? Works at First Baptist?”
Berry shook his head. “No, this is a Latino gal in her sixties. Lives in the numbered streets. Saw someone skulking around the night your neo-Nazi got beaten to death.”
Jesus, I thought. It was Martha Velasquez. The woman who’d seen me enter Virgil Rowe’s.
“She’s here right now?”
“Sitting up in your office with a sketch artist,” Berry said. “That’s why I joked about putting out the APB.”
“How’s that?” I asked Berry. Not following him.
“Well, the drawing’s only halfway done,” he said. “But it looks a lot like you. Me and Vannerman in patrol were saying when we find our guy, we should put P.T. in the lineup with him. For kicks, you know.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’d be funny.”
Hilarious, Purvis said.
My phone buzzed. Remy texting back.
Come on by.
I glanced down. Made sure my heart pounding wasn’t obvious through my shirt.
“There’s something else.” Berry fished through his notes. “Here,” he said, finding a file. “Abe was checking neighboring cities on arrests. Guy with tattoos that read StormCloud. This came in from Macon PD.”
Berry handed me a rap sheet, and I stared at the name on the outside cover.
“Donnie Meadows,” I read.
He looked at me, and I shrugged.
“He’s got StormCloud ink on his left biceps.”
I flipped the folder open and stared at Donnie Meadows’s booking photo.
Meadows was the big’un that I’d seen outside the Hester place last night. He was part of StormCloud, the same hate group that Virgil Rowe belonged to.
“You know him?” Berry asked. “Some kind of giant. Seven feet tall is what it says.”
The file described Meadows as being of mixed race. Half Samoan and half German. His head was shaved and he had a wide bulbous nose with flared nostrils. In the photo, he didn’t look like someone you messed with.
“I’ve seen him around,” I said.
I’d left the Hesters in Shonus County, curious about a connection between 1993 and now, other than the coincidence of both Unger and them attending the same church.
Now someone outside their mansion belonged to the same Nazi group that Virgil Rowe did?
I was onto something. I just didn’t know what it was.
At the same time, I was skating dangerously close to being linked to Virgil Rowe’s murder myself.
“I’ll see you upstairs,” Berry said. “The woman in your office . . . ?”
I felt the urge to run. To get in my car and drive out of Georgia as fast as I could.
Just as much, I needed a drink.
But something else was banging around in my head. The word “giant” that Berry had just used. I’d heard the same reference two days earlier—in the jail cell here in Mason Falls—from that crazy loon.
“Yeah,” I said to Berry. “I’ll be right there.”
Berry left, and I popped down to the basement where the holding cells were. Found the patrolman in charge.
“There was a guy here,” I said. “Kinda went crazy on me. Reached through the bars and tried to grab me. I think his name was Bernard Kane.”
“Sure,” the patrolman said.
“I need to chat him up real quick.”
The patrolman grimaced. “Bad news, P.T. We did our seven a.m. check, and Mr. Kane was dead in his cell.”
I blinked. “What?”
“He hung himself. His people came an hour ago and got the body.”
“You sure it’s the same guy?” I asked. “Sport coat? Jeans? Didn’t smell good?”
The patrolman nodded.
“What do you mean they got the body?” I asked. “There’d be an autopsy. An investigation. We’d pull camera feeds—”
“The family insisted,” the patrolman said.
“Who cares what they insist?”
The patrolman held up a hand, as if to say, Let me explain.
“Their lawyer shows up with some paperwork, P.T.,” he said. “It apparently holds the department free of any blame in Kane’s death—in exchange for releasing the body right away. The chief checked with counsel at the city, and they said we’d be idiots not to sign it, especially given the guy died on our watch.”
I backed up against the wall. “You keep a log on who visited Kane?”
“Sure,” the patrolman said.
He pulled it out, and I saw the time the lawyer came. Seven-twenty a.m. How’d he have the agreement ready that fast?
I turned to the previous page. The same name was written in the log the night before, when Kane was alive. Lauten Hartley. The same lawyer had visited him.
What the hell was this? And how did it relate to Kendrick?