CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I was seated at my desk inside the substation before the sun came up. Outside the window, a camp of brown Myotis dipped in from the dark and fed upon the flying insects that swarmed inside the light beneath the street lamps.

Shortly after dawn, Jordan Powell walked in through the back door and shrugged off his windbreaker. His eyes were rimmed in red and he wore the haunted, over-caffeinated expression of a man who had spent a sleepless night out on the wire, and he smelled of potato chips and unwashed laundry.

“Sam came out to spell me,” he said. “So I tailed a couple of them girls when they drove in from the commune.”

“Did they see you?”

His expression remained intentionally inscrutable. He was a good soldier and he did not like to disappoint.

“Of course not, Captain.”

“You kept a log of who came in and out?”

“I would’ve, but I didn’t need to. Didn’t see one single soul all weekend long. At least, not until this morning, like I just said.”

“Not even from Harper Emory’s place?”

“No, sir,” he said, and rested one of his haunches on the corner of his desk.

I cut my eyes out toward the street and studied the pale blue light behind the ridges of the mountain.

“And no aircraft of any kind either,” he said, his tone shot through with disappointment, believing he had let me down. “Seemed to me like you might have been expecting something. Want to tell me what it was?”

“I don’t know what I was expecting. For all I know, the whole story’s a crock of crap. Every time I ask someone about it, all I hear is crickets.”

“All due respect, how much longer do you think you want to keep up this surveillance? Not to complain, but I’m getting tired of pissing in a soda bottle. Might help if we knew what we were after.”

“If I knew, I’d tell you,” I said, and it came out sounding harsher than I had intended. I was frustrated, but it wasn’t Jordan’s fault. “I thought something—anything—might shake itself out over the weekend. Goddamn it.”

I had known my share of alcoholics over the years. Some went to meetings and some did not. Each one had described to me the marble-eyed raven that visited them at one time or another, roosted on their bedposts through the endless hours of the night, waiting, staring, while they knuckled-out a dry drunk or wrestled with their consciences over some nameless remorse. Something about the rudderless nature of this present situation put me in mind of that, and left me feeling guilty that I had put my deputies through all that discomfort for a steaming pile of fly-blown nothing, while I had spent the weekend at the beach with Jesse.

“Grab yourself a shower and a change of clothes,” I said. “I’m going to Rowan Boyle’s for a bite. Come along with me.”

“Much obliged, Captain, but I think I’d rather catch a few winks at my desk if you don’t mind.”

The street was mostly empty at this hour, the atmosphere was motionless and cool. The geometric fascias of frontier architecture etched themselves against the sky, and my footsteps echoed on the boards along an old section of the colonnade still inset with iron posts where teams of horses had once been tied. The morning smelled of ozone, and flashes of heat lightning flared along the peaks. These were the conditions that struck fear into the hearts of dry land farmers, when the air around you came alive with static electricity while tufts of wild rye and brome made a sound like kindling twigs beneath your boots.

The morning regulars at Rowan Boyle’s diner occupied their usual places. The rhythmic hum and hush and natter of a dozen idle conversations filled the empty spaces of a room already fusty with the smells of toasted bread and sausage. I took a seat along the counter and nodded to Boyle through the pass-through, where he leaned across the surface of the griddle flipping fried eggs and pancakes. A copy of the morning paper lay abandoned on the swivel seat beside me. I ordered a cup of coffee and skimmed the curling pages while I waited for my breakfast, taking in the sounds of normalcy, of flatware raking speckled china dishware heaped with fried potatoes, eggs, and slabs of ham and buttered toast, of cups and saucers banging on the surfaces of laminated tabletops, and punctuated by the ringing of the service bell.

The stories in the paper were full of talk about a gap between the generations, yet we adults had a tendency to speak of younger people as though they are no different than we had been at their age. Maybe we had grown blind or complacent, perhaps both, when looking through their eyes; failing to register their lives using the same prism that they did. The histories I was taught in school had been replete with hope and triumph, but I myself had participated in an armed conflict that the leaders we had entrusted with our government had never had the courage or commitment to declare for what it was. The soldiers in my war had bled and frozen and starved and died and fought the damned thing to a stalemate. We had since elected a new cadre of oligarchs and egotists who appeared to treat their obligations to our children with the same indifference they had shown to us, yet we somehow expected the younger generation to be willing to endure it as we had. Nor did we want to recognize the kids who ran away from home, who contracted sexually transmitted diseases or had abortions before they ever graduated from high school, or got themselves strung out on smack or speed because we wouldn’t take the time to have a simple conversation at the dinner table. We raised our voices in alarm about the feral nature of our children, unwilling to see them as we had created them, because to do so would have forced us to examine our own culpability. It was easier instead to react with bewilderment and outrage, wondering how a man like Deva Ravi could have shown up in our town.

I blew the steam off my coffee and glanced outside the window. The sky was fading to light blue and a gathering breeze was blowing shriveled leaves down the center of the street. The phone beside the cash register rang and I watched Lurline’s expression falter as she listened to the caller. She nodded several times, then cupped the receiver to her shoulder. She saw me looking at her and she pointed to the phone.

“Sheriff,” she said. “It’s for you.”

The taste at the back of my throat was exactly like that of burnt copper. It was the bitter tang of unbridled rage. Some men speak of seeing red, or bursting into uncontrollable fits of violence of which they later hold no recollection.

That is not how it is for me.

When I get angry, truly gut-twistingly angry, I get a tingling sensation at the back of my throat and a taste that is exactly like scorched copper. My vision spins down like an aperture and I am temporarily deaf to all but the sound of my own pulse pounding in my temples and the searing white heat that shoots up my spinal column to my brain stem. It bypasses all the folds and creases and lobes that are responsible for reason or reflection, tactile sensation or even fear, and lodges squarely in that place behind my eyes where physical reactions and mental focus fuse together, regulated by that singular part of the human mind that is purely reptilian in nature.

Dr. Abel Brawley was a fixture in Meridian. He had been the town’s sole medical doctor back when I was born, and even after all these years, remained the most beloved. He had delivered more babies, set more broken bones, and stitched up the muscle tissue of more cowboys and kids than he could count since he had moved to Meriwether County, when he was known to accept fresh eggs or garden vegetables as payment if a family couldn’t pay.

He had coached little league baseball for two decades, though he and his wife had never had a child of their own. Abel and Ruth Brawley had been honored as Grand Marshals for the Rodeo Parade on three separate occasions, and he had volunteered as the chief medic for that event for as far back as I could recall, with Ruth acting as his nurse, accountant, and receptionist all the while. They were members of my church, and had been my family’s doctor since I had been a kid myself. Decades later he had handed me the scissors to sever the cord the day Cricket was born.

Doc Brawley and Miss Ruth had come to their second-story walk-up office, directly across the street from tiny Pioneer Park, six days a week for nearly forty-eight years without complaint or misstep. At nearly eighty years of age, Doc Brawley could still greet almost everyone in town by name if he saw them on the street.

Not one of those folks would have recognized him as I saw him now.

It was two full hours after Jordan Powell and I arrived, before the team from the Criminal Investigation Unit showed up to the scene. While Powell taped off the front entry to Doc Brawley’s office building to mark it as a crime scene, the first call I had made was to Captain Rose at the State Police in Salem. While my deputies and I had the capacity to handle the basics of forensics, like taking photos or lifting prints off a doorknob, for anything much more complex than that I call in the experts for technical support. The ground rules had changed since my granddad’s day, and enforcement of the law was no longer about what you know to be the truth about a crime, it is now only about what you can prove in court.

After finishing that call, I tasked Powell with the documentation of the scene as we had found it, while I led Miss Ruthie to the anteroom to ask her a few questions and to wait for the staties and the coroner to arrive. I held a chair out for her and waited as she sat, then took a seat beside her and held her hand. The pale blue of her eyes had gone cloudy, her features fragile and birdlike, with thin lips and tiny teeth much like a child’s.

“Doctor had insomnia,” she told me. “And when he couldn’t sleep, he’d just get up and come in to the office.”

For as long as I had known Ruth Brawley, she had always referred to her husband in that manner.

“Did he do that very often?”

Her eyes flickered and slid away from me, beyond my shoulder where Powell was snapping photos inside the exam room. She flinched visibly with every flash emitted by the camera.

“Doctor did it all the time.”

Since my arrival, she had moved beyond hysteria and had lapsed into a glazed state of abstraction. She searched my face for reassurance and I watched her drift away again when I could offer her so little of it. Her husband’s body lay shattered on the floor not thirty feet from where we sat.

I stood and shut the door between the waiting area and the space where Powell worked, stepped over to the water cooler, and brought a cup to her. Her skin was pallid, moist from the stillness of the heat trapped inside the room, her face latticed with fine wrinkles like the obverse of a fallen leaf.

“When I came in a little after six this morning,” she said. “I found him in there on the floor.”

“Did you touch his body, or anything in the room, Miss Ruthie? Anything at all?”

She shook her head, and her focus shifted inward, fingers flexing, seeking purchase in the folds of the knitted cardigan she wore.

“I didn’t have to,” she said softly. “I’m a nurse. I could see that there was nothing I could do for him.”

I heard the footfalls of the crime scene techs echo in the stairwell. I gently squeezed Miss Ruthie’s hand and went to meet them at the door. There were three of them in dark-colored jackets emblazoned with the emblem of the state police, each carrying hinged leather satchels and wearing the clinical expressions of men who had seen it all, men who earn their paychecks extracting secrets from the dead. I led them through the doorway and introduced them to my deputy, then came back out and used the office phone to call my wife.

Captain Christopher Rose arrived as I was walking Miss Ruthie down the stairwell to the street. He nodded to me briefly as we passed him on the landing, Miss Ruthie’s fingers digging deep into the crook of my arm. Her posture had grown stiff, her demeanor monotone and blank, taking her refuge in some distant place reserved for the casualties of violence and the prorogation of grief.

Jesse waited behind the wheel of our station wagon, idling at the curb outside, the sun visor casting a shadow across her eyes. I could tell that she’d been crying, but she showed me a small smile to let me know she was okay. Wind whipped the ends of the yellow crime scene tape that had been looped around the trunks of trees along the sidewalk, tied onto the balustrade behind me. I led Miss Ruthie to the passenger side and got her buckled in, then came around to Jesse’s door and spoke softly through the open window.

“Call Pastor Dunn,” I said. “As soon as you get time.”

“I already did. Don’t worry, Ty. Miss Ruthie won’t be left alone.”

I kissed Jesse on the cheek and waited on the sidewalk as they disappeared around the corner.

“This is some special kind of shit show,” Captain Rose said as I stepped into the confines of the exam room. Jordan Powell had moved over to the doctor’s file room to give the techs some space to work, and he shot a questioning look at me as I passed by.

“Go get that film processed, Powell,” I ordered through the open door. “Then head back to the office and start writing. Every detail, every sound and smell. I want everything in that report while it’s still fresh in mind.”

“Roger that.”

“One more thing: Not one word of this to anyone, you read me?”

“Understood, sir,” was all he said, and he was gone.

Rose studied my face for a long moment before he spoke to me.

“You’ve got that look, Ty,” he said.

“What look?”

“Like you got dry powder in your head and somebody torched your fuse.”

Rose squatted on his haunches beside Doc Brawley’s body, tossed a pair of rubber gloves to me, and gestured at the blood that had been smeared across the walls.

“You ever had a scene like this before, Dawson?”

“Not since Korea.”

“Check this out,” he said, and directed one of the techs to turn Doc Brawley’s body on its side. “Exit wounds. Two of them. Looks like a .38: one through the lung, and one straight through the heart. Your victim bled out right here on this spot.”

It was hard for me to reconcile that the body I was looking at had once been a younger man, and built like a lumber wedge, though he had softened around the edges in old age. He had always been robust, if somewhat slower than he had been in his youth, but none of that was visible anymore.

“My guys’ll find the spent slugs in here somewhere.”

“And the stab wounds?” I asked.

“Thirty-one of them. Two separate blades. Post mortem, near as we can tell. Autopsy will confirm.”

“Jesus.”

“Then they crushed his face with that thing,” Rose said.

He pointed toward a heavy piece of crystal on the floor, where it had been discarded. The object had been cut as though to imitate the facets of a diamond and was roughly the size of a softball, an award or trophy of some kind. It was crusted with dried blood and flecks of gristle; the one clean spot along its base, presumably where the killer had been clutching it, had been blackened by smudges of fingerprint dust.

Rose’s knees cracked as he came out of his crouch. He cast his eyes around the room and shook his head.

It had once been an ordinary exam room: Linoleum tile floor, exam table covered with waxed paper, hospital scale, little stool on rubber casters, and posters depicting various components of human anatomy on every wall. Now nearly everything had been stained by viscous castoff, one wall smeared intentionally with a hand towel that had been drenched in Doc Brawley’s blood.

“We figure they started to write something up there, then changed their minds,” Rose said. “Overkill like this? This is Chuckie Manson-style shit right here.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Anything stolen?”

Rose shrugged.

“That cabinet’s smashed in,” he said. “Could have been drugs in there. They might have got off with a prescription pad or two. Does the doc keep cash in the office?”

“I’ll look into it.”

Captain Rose followed me into the outer office and peeled off his rubber gloves. I leaned against a waist-high counter that described a half circle around the nurse’s station where Doc Brawley’s patient files were maintained.

“Any decent prints so far?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

“Does that strike you as odd? Overkill like that, and not a single fingerprint?”

“What are you saying, Ty?”

“I’m saying the crazed-hippie Manson deal is a little on-the-nose, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know what I think. But hippies can wear gloves just like anybody else.”

I was about to comment when the door to the waiting room squeaked on its hinges. I saw a young woman in civilian clothes, maybe twenty-five or thirty, standing at the threshold carrying an oversized handbag strapped across her chest.

“You didn’t see the hundred yards of yellow tape strung across the front door?” I asked.

‘“Police Line, Do Not Cross,”’ she said. “I saw it.”

She spoke like a wiseass, but something in her eyes appeared to harbor apprehension, as though she had been expecting a reprimand from me.

“I assume you are a cop,” I said.

“I’m with the Salem Observer.”

“Then you need to leave.”

“I’d like a word with you about the wave of violent crime that’s broken out here in Meridian.”

I pulled back my shirtsleeve and looked at my watch.

“It’s more than a two-hour drive down from Salem,” I said. “Care to tell me how you knew to come here so quickly?”

“Police scanner,” she said.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the captain shake his head from side to side. “We didn’t use the radio to dispatch my teams.”

“Neither did we,” I said. “I’ll give you one last chance to tell the truth.”

She reached into her bag and withdrew a Nikon camera.

“Any comment on the recall vote tomorrow night?” she asked.

“You need to get outside and stay behind the line,” I said. “And if you snap a single photograph in here, I will arrest you, and confiscate your camera and your film.”

She smiled, but she knew I wasn’t lying.

“So no comment then, Sheriff Dawson?”

“Have a nice day.”

It was early evening by the time the crime scene techs finally packed up. I locked Doc Brawley’s office door behind us and sealed it shut with red security tape. Captain Rose hung back as his team departed, followed me across the hall and down the stairwell to the street.

Rose leaned his bulk against the trunk of an ash tree that had been planted in a square of soil where the concrete had been cut out. He slid a comb through his hair and watched me peel the police tape off the doorway.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked. “Does this have to do with the Polaroid and the prints you asked me to run for you?”

I wadded up the ball of tape and stuffed it into the pocket of my jacket.

“Most likely,” I said.

“Step carefully, Ty.”

“I can’t arrest folks just because of my suspicions, but if I could, I know who I’d be talking to.”

“Have you spoken to Rankin about any of this?”

“Mr. Reasonable Doubt? I’ve got nothing to take to him to file charges. No evidence, no witnesses.”

Rose’s eyes cut away from me and focused somewhere up the street.

“I’ll give you that,” he said. “I’ve seen more aggressive DAs in traffic court.”

I reached into my pocket for a cigarette, but changed my mind. I took out my sunglasses instead.

“I need that ID, Chris.”

He drew his car keys from his pocket and stepped out of the tree shade.

“I’m working on it,” he said. “I’ll get this scene’s evidence processed right away, Ty. Looks to me like you could use a win.”

It was an odd turn of a phrase, I thought, as I watched him walk off toward his car. In this line of work, I wasn’t certain that there ever were any victors; the ultimate zero-sum endeavor. To get a win, someone first had to lose.

Somewhere out along the state road, the rumble of glass-pack mufflers reverberated on the asphalt, reminding me that this was the final week of school before the summer break. Across the street was Pioneer Park. At one time it had been the site of an assay office, built during a time before the Civil War, when failed prospectors flocked here from California gold fields, following the rumor of rich veins of copper and silver in these mountains. The boom, such as it was, that came into this valley served only to enrich the promoters of the mining claims and the tent merchants who sold tools and canned goods to the dreamers. It did prove out to be good land for livestock, though, and those who had retained the means, the guts, and the flexibility of spirit had found their home. A stone obelisk fitted with an engraved bronze plaque stood between a pair of benches a short distance from the bandstand. It was all that remained to mark the memory of that time. The plaque wept green patina on the stone, and I wondered if anybody even read the words inscribed there anymore. When I was in grade school, our teacher made us memorize that inscription.

I moved slowly up the street to where I’d parked my truck. The setting sun felt warm across my back. I spotted Jordan Powell driving up the street, his forearm resting on the open window frame. He pulled over to the curb and waited for me, his pickup blanketed in dirt and dust from staking out the commune and the Emory place.

“You okay, Sheriff?”

“I’m fine.”

“You want a ride?”

“Just heading to my truck.”

Powell hesitated for a moment, chewing his lip as he glanced into his rearview mirror.

“Something on your mind, son?” I asked.

“You believe in God, right, sir?”

“I do.”

“Even after what we seen today?”

I changed my mind about that cigarette, slid the pack out of my pocket, and lit up. I inhaled deeply and took a moment to watch the smoke swirl away before I answered.

“You fought in Vietnam, didn’t you, Jordan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you know the devil ain’t an atheist.”

He grinned.

“I guess I never thought of it that way.”

“I got a question for you,” I said.

“Sure thing.”

“How’s the new kid working out?”

“Snoose’s nephew?”

I nodded and leaned a hand against his truck bed.

“Old Caleb being too hard on him?” I asked.

“No, sir, I don’t believe so.”

“Only wanted to make sure that Caleb’s rough opinions of the Corcorans don’t cloud his judgment about the kid, is all.”

Powell took off his hat, scratched his head, turned in his seat, and leaned a little farther out the window.

“The kid says he wants to be a top hand someday,” he said. “Just callin’ yourself a cowboy don’t make you one. You know that better than anybody, Mr. Dawson.”

I flattened my hand and slapped the truck bed twice, letting Powell know that he was free to go. As he began to pull away, I thought of something else.

“One more thing,” I said.

“Sir?”

“We’ve got one shot at this investigation, Jordan,” he said, “and we’ve got to keep the crime scene details to ourselves. If we go off half-cocked, or screw this up in any way, whoever did all this will end up sipping daiquiris in Aruba.”

He gave my words a few seconds’ thought.

“I won’t let you down,” he said. “And neither will Sam Griffin.”

“I know you won’t.”