“I don’t know,” Raven said. “Maybe it was luck. But I bet his ultimate goal was to not allow Kersey to be taken in alive. Holloway hasn’t finished playing games.”

  “Games? Games?” Billy Ray said. “You listening to yourself right now? Why do you think he’s playing games?”

  She said nothing, just picked at the piling on the plaid couch. Billy Ray looked at her. “Tight around the mouth and eyes,” he said. “Remember what I told you? That’s how I know when you’re hiding something. Spit it out.”

  She took a deep breath, knowing that she had to tell him everything. She told him about the threatening note she found, the conversation with Lovelle, and the Michael Gorman book about her father in Holloway’s office.

  “He’s obsessed with me,” she finished. “I think Holloway believes that the sins of the father should be borne by the children. That’s why he can’t stand me. By his twisted logic, I’m threatening the very order of the planet.”

  She looked at him and found his gaze steady on her. There was hurt and disappointment in his eyes.

  “When did you stop trusting me, Raven?” he said. He cursed under his breath and threw the papers he had been holding onto the coffee table. “You make me feel like two kinds of fool by keeping all this shit to yourself.”

  “I didn’t want you involved, Billy Ray!” she shouted at him with a sob of frustration in her voice. “I thought I could handle it myself. And if I’m going to go down, I don’t want to take you with me.”

  He sighed. “Look,” he said. “You aren’t going down, you aren’t going nowhere.” He reached up and squeezed her hand. “And I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time. But you have got to tell me everything. No more secrets.” And when she didn’t say anything, he said, “Okay? Every step of the way.”

  “All right,” she breathed. “I still say—”

  He shook his head and let go of her hand. “No,” Billy Ray said. “We need to work on this together. Now let me tell you something that you don’t know. Holloway’s alibi for last night is solid. He went over to the chief’s house to apologize for his behavior. And let’s say he did call Jabo. He could say he thought you were unstable, and he was trying to prevent another tragedy. It’s not him. And even if it is, you need more proof than just finding a book in his office.”

  “Then who, me?” she said.

  “Look, homegirl,” he sighed. “I’m not saying I think you did it.”

  “What are you saying, then?” she asked him. “Why the third degree?”

  “I’m saying that we had better find out what’s going on here, and quick before the chief has no choice but to protect his own house.”

  “By kicking me out of it?”

  “He’s a politician, baby,” he said. “And no matter what you think, he’s slicker than owl shit. You saw him yucking it up with the mayor. He isn’t loyal to anyone but himself. And that phone call between you and Hazel scared the shit out of him. I saw that all over his face.”

  She didn’t believe for a minute the chief would betray her, but didn’t say so. It was no use arguing with Billy Ray when he accepted something as true.

  “Speaking of phone records, what about phone records from Jabo?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Yeah, that,” he breathed. “That number from the warning call he got in the casino looks like it came from a throwaway phone. No connection to Holloway. In fact, no connection to anyone.”

  Raven sighed. She knew the killer would not have been dumb enough to use a phone connected to them.

  Maybe not Holloway, Raven thought despondently. Maybe Floyd. Maybe it was Floyd doing this to her, his ghost coming back to haunt her for testifying against him during his murder trial. Maybe that was the reason his spirit hung so heavily on the air that she couldn’t walk two steps without thinking of him.

  She stood up and said, “Maybe it’s Floyd Burns risen from the grave to take his revenge.”

  “Stop talking like a damn fool,” Billy Ray said. “Ghosts aren’t who you should be worried about right now. Let your daddy go.”

  There was silence for almost a full minute. For the first time since she was a child wondering how to escape Floyd’s grasp, Raven had no idea what to do next. Maybe she should run and take to rambling the country like Floyd did. Maybe as Floyd accepted and Holloway was coming to believe, rules were for suckers. Why should she wait for them to catch her and lock her up?

  “Look, Raven,” Billy Ray said, interrupting her thoughts. “I know you think Hazel’s killing has something to do with Floyd, maybe someone who’s obsessed with him knocked her off. But look how Floyd laid out your mother.”

  “No thank you,” she said. “I’ve looked enough at those photos to last a lifetime.”

  “That may be right,” Billy Ray said. “But not in relation to Hazel’s death. Look at it again.”

  She turned away but he shoved the photograph into her face. “I’m not playing, Raven, look.”

  “Okay, okay.” She snatched the photograph from him. She stared at it for a long time.

  “Pretend like it’s not your mother,” he said.

  She gave him a disgusted look, but he ignored it. “Pretend like she’s just another vic.”

  She shut her eyes. Billy Ray was right. She couldn’t let emotion cloud her judgment, especially not now.

  She looked down onto Maylene’s open grave. A fireman leaned on a shovel next to it, his hat pushed back on his head and his face grim and dirty with soot. Maylene’s corpse lay exposed in the rich soil that used to be the only nourishment for the tomatoes and the zinnias. It was an ugly scene. Maylene’s dress lay in rags over her body. She was still wearing her apron but it was filthy with dirt and tattered by rips that could only have been made by the butcher knife Floyd Burns had wielded. Her head was thrown back in agony, her mouth open as if in screaming prayer. The brown eyes that Raven had only a faint memory of were two black holes in her face. Raven shuddered and thrust the picture back to Billy Ray. He didn’t take it. He gently pushed it back to her.

  “Look,” he said.

  “I’ve seen it,” she snapped.

  He took it from her and then picked up the crime scene photo of Hazel Westcott’s body and handed it to Raven. It couldn’t have been more different. Maylene Love’s corpse was hideous, the stuff of nightmares. Hazel Westcott’s was beautiful and easy to look at. It was something that a romantic could stare at for eons.

  Maylene was buried in a shallow grave with little protection from the environment, including the animals and birds that fed on the dead. One glance would be enough to freeze the blood of a strong person. Hazel Westcott was laid out carefully among the azalea bushes, her body very easy to find, her eyes still open, her lips parted and still tantalizing enough to kiss. Raven stared at it for a long time. Then she said, “They’re opposite.”

  Billy Ray nodded. “Not a copycat. You are letting what Floyd did get to you. And whoever is messing with you now knows that. Put it out of your head and let’s get this bastard.”

  “Exactly opposite, but related,” Raven said slowly with sinking realization. “They were both murdered. They were both marked with the feather. Maylene was buried in a shallow grave. Hazel was laid out in full view, like someone was getting her ready for a funeral viewing.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bill Ray said. “You don’t know that Hazel’s scene was marked. I told you—”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence,” Raven answered. “Hazel’s scene is Floyd but not Floyd.”

  “Now you aren’t making any kind of sense.”

  “It’s exactly opposite,” she said. “Not only are the scenes opposite, but the killers. My mother was killed by a crazed serial killer, and Hazel supposedly by a cop.” She stopped and looked at Billy Ray. “Two things opposite. Like ghost eyes, Billy Ray,” she whispered, bringing her hand to her face. “The ability to see evil and good from within the same body.”

  “Shut up. Stop it.”

  “But the same results,” she went on. “Murder, violence, and evil. I’ll never outrun it. I shouldn’t even try.”

  “You need to cut this shit out,” Billy Ray said quietly.

  Raven stood up. She felt shut in, alone, as if an invisible hand had reached through her chest and started to squeeze her heart. She heard Floyd in her head, the words he dared only to tell her in nightmares. You should have seen it, Birdy Girl, he giggled. Them ribs just moved on aside and let the blade in as if it were a long-lost son returning from the battlefield to the heart of his mamma. He hadn’t passed the fifth grade, but Floyd was all about experiments, empirical evidence. He wanted to kill Maylene to see if the lights really went out of a person’s eyes like they did in the movies. And he loved twists, puzzles. Was Holloway patient or smart enough for this? Or could she be underestimating him?

  “Raven, what? Tell me.”

  She took a deep breath, gulped air all the way down to her belly. She let it out slowly and turned to Billy Ray.

  “I thought the feathers had to do with Floyd, with ‘Fire’, you know?” She stopped. Billy Ray nodded. “But they have nothing to do with Floyd. They have everything to do with me.”

  “I don’t—”

  She took the Maylene photo from Billy Ray and held it up alongside Hazel Westcott’s.

  “Yes, like I said—” he was almost shouting in frustration now, “they aren’t copycats.”

  “But it’s someone trying to prove that no matter how much I try to make myself the opposite of my father, I will never outrun my true nature. I can dress up like a cop. I can catch killers, but I will always be just like him. His evil will follow me wherever I go…no.” She stopped, reconsidering. “Not following me. The killer wants to prove that Floyd’s evil is inside of me.”

  Billy Ray said nothing, so she went on in the space his silence left. “The murders may be opposite, but they are still murders. It’s the reason he killed Jabo. If Jabo had been accused, it would have taken the attention away from me and ruined his plans.”

  “His plans?” Billy Ray asked.

  “He’s not done,” Raven said.

  “What you talking about?”

  “There will be at least one more murder.”

  “What?” he groaned. “No, Raven. No. No more killings.”

  “When I was a kid I had this babysitter. Girl, about sixteen. She disappeared.”

  “And you telling me you think your daddy killed her.”

  “Don’t think,” she said. “I know. I think I was there.”

  “Think?”

  “I mean I dream about it. Him luring her into the truck with us one night. I was with him because it was the only way he could get her in the truck. Fed us first, Burger King. And then drove us down to the levy. They got out and walked a little ways out of sight into the trees. When I saw him again, he was by himself.”

  “And you think he killed her? He could have—”

  “No,” she said. “He could have nothing. He came back to the truck. She didn’t. And he told me. He said she was getting too nosy, and that she had to go. A few days later it was all over town that she was missing. Her body was found about two weeks after that. Throat slit.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  “I couldn’t.” She swallowed. “But they figured it out anyway. They attributed the murder to Floyd but never tried him for it. He already had been given the death penalty for Maylene, and that trial had been a circus.”

  “Felicia Harris,” she said with wonder in her voice. “He’s not going to be able to resist it.”

  “You are freaking me out,” he said quietly. “You need to cut it out.”

  “Don’t you see, Billy Ray?” she said. “It’s going to be an old man. Exactly opposite of Felicia Harris. It’s going to be brutal.”

  “Why do you think that murder?” Billy Ray said. “Why not one of his others?”

  “Because Felicia was the only one he killed because he had to,” Raven said. “He had a good reason. It was a murder that Floyd didn’t really want to commit. And it was so clean, like slaughtering an animal. No torture. No fun and games.”

  She could see Billy Ray’s mouth begin to form the word bullshit, but then his cell phone rang. At some point Billy Ray had changed the ringtone from Zydeco to an old-fashioned telephone ring, and the sound took Raven further back into the past. The iPhone rang loud in the silence and vibrated among the papers spread out on the coffee table, causing them to rattle and shake. She thought of Floyd calling from the grave. Raven froze. Billy Ray looked at her as if she were twelve years old and just had her pants scared off from watching a horror movie that she had no business watching.

  He snatched up the phone and, still looking at her skeptically, he said, “Chastain.” He listened for a few moments before hanging up. He folded his hands together and said, “That was the chief. They’re putting together some people to look into the Kersey killing. He wants me in the office. You,” he said, pointing to her, “he wants home and resting. A couple of days off, he said. And right now, after this conversation here…” he wagged an accusing finger at her, “…I’m agreeing with him. You are not using the thinking side of your brain, Raven. Get a grip.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Floyd chose gas. Not many know that you can choose gas over the needle in the state of California, but you can and Floyd did. The state hadn’t killed anybody in the big green can since Harris, and he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter. The guards he was friendly with told Floyd that San Quentin hadn’t used the chamber in so long that they had to practice for weeks like they were rehearsing for some sort of play. The executioner acting out Floyd’s part was all calm and solemn in the face. His movements were small and co-operative as they strapped his hands and feet to the arms and legs of the chair where Floyd was to take his last breath. Floyd listened to the guards tell him about the practice with a grave and serious look on his face as if he was listening for his life. He didn’t bother telling the damn fools that they were working from the wrong script.

  Floyd Burns was not about calm. Fire didn’t co-operate. Floyd could imagine the warden, a sure and arrogant man, saying to those who asked, “The coming of death has a way of quieting even the most hardened of men. I’ve seen it plenty of times.” And he had. The warden liked telling Floyd how many executions he had presided over during his time at San Quentin. Ten times total. But he hadn’t had his eleventh yet.

  He hadn’t ever executed a man like Floyd ‘Fire’ Burns.

  * * *

  There was a man on the death team by the name of Gerald Lockhard. His duty was to guard Floyd while Floyd shuffled from one place to the other like the exercise yard or the room where they let Floyd have visitors during his last days. Gerald was the size of a tractor, strong, but he had a weak mind that you could find your way into easy if ever you needed to do it. Floyd told him when he met him that his name should be Smitty and he called him that just to see how far he could go with him. Lockhard didn’t tell him to cut it out, so Floyd found he could go pretty damn far. He knew a man that was willing to be renamed probably didn’t have a lot of steel in his backbone.

  Lockhard wore a ring with a cross carved on top of it on his pinky finger. Knowing that he was a religious man, whenever Floyd got close enough so that only Lockhard could hear, he would start up with the whispering – Bible verses so twisted around with Floyd’s own words that they didn’t resemble their original form at all. He kept up with the Bible verses for a while, and then he started whispering made-up things with birds and snakes and disloyalty in them like he did when Raven was little. He whispered his dreams to Lockhard. “They’ll drop the pellets to start the gas,” he would say, “but I don’t care nothing about that. It’s what happens after the gas gets me. I wake up spread out in a field and black crows circlin’ forever and ever in a sky wide and blue and not heaven and I know they ain’t never gone stop. Them crows tease me. They dip and swirl and fly around my head pretending to poke out my eye. But they lift them black bodies up just before they touch my eyeballs. The devil divided them up into a thousand little devils and God gone send ’em back to y’all. He’s gone have them drag y’all to hell ’cause you know why? ’Cause you killin’. You takin’ the power of God and God gone make you pay.”

  Lockhard would stop and cock his head until Floyd finished or someone came up and interrupted.

  But Floyd kept going at him hard and with a purpose. He needed him for the big show. He needed him and he told him like he told Raven, “Them sonsofasumpthin’s gone know they killing me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  They set the execution up for ten p.m. on a summer’s night absent of both moon and stars. The sky was just a stretch of black nothing overhead as if it never held anything since it had come into existence. At the execution were Jean Rinehart’s parents and some state officials along with five or six people from the media.

  Except for Raven, nobody from Floyd’s family was there. Floyd told the warden that he was an orphan without any family that would claim him. Maylene Love’s parents had died one right after the other about five years after Floyd killed their daughter.

  They kept Raven, Floyd’s witness of one, separated from Jean Rinehart’s parents by two guards who looked harried and stressed as only Floyd could harry and stress a person. Since she was the only one there supporting Floyd, they directed her to the side of the viewing area with the reporters and official witnesses of the state. But she was still in full view of Jean Rinehart’s parents. Jean’s father was a man with a large belly and legs as skinny as birch trees. Her mother’s face was made up so perfectly she looked like an advertisement for cosmetics. And her perfume was strong. It lay over the witnesses, cloying and sweet-smelling, like lilies at a funeral.

 

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