A killing fire, p.30
A Killing Fire, page 30
“You first,” he said, his back still to her. She could see the orange flames leap beneath the skillet as Billy Ray scraped it against the burner.
He had finished the shrimp and was dividing them between two plates of baguette rolls already toasted and soaked with butter. Watching him, she told him about her visit with Westcott and what she had learned about Blue Luther.
“So, that’s what the perp used to control Hazel,” he said.
“Looks like it,” she confirmed.
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “Man looked like he was trying to make up for something with all that money he gave away.”
“That’s not all, Billy Ray.”
He twisted around briefly to look at her and lifted an eyebrow. She started telling him about the fact that Holloway was at the party, but Billy Ray was shaking his head before she could get the words out.
“No,” he said. “It’s not him.”
He sat the plates with the po’boy sandwiches on the Formica table. He went to the fridge, took out two beers and used an opener to flick off the tops before coming to sit down opposite her.
“How can you be so sure?” she asked.
He took a mouthful of beer. He held it for a few seconds before swallowing. “There is no way in everything that’s bright in hell that man could’ve taken that shot from the trestle. He was a math teacher, remember? You even said yourself that the only reason the chief put him in IA was so he wouldn’t shoot his own foot off.”
“Who is it then?” she challenged.
“Now I’m not sure,” he said. “But it’s not Holloway. Not by himself anyway.”
The music was still playing, softly, but playing. The piercing wails and uneven beat of Buckwheat’s accordion were setting her nerves on edge. She was about to ask him to turn it off when he picked up a bag of plain Lay’s potato chips and tore it open. As he was dumping the chips out over his plate, she realized that the entire time they had been talking, he had barely looked at her. He reached over to dump chips on her plate. She caught his wrist. He stopped.
“What’s happened?” she asked him again. “Why am I here?”
She let go of his wrist and he turned the bag over. For the first time he leveled a steady gaze her way. She read fear and worry in his eyes, and something else. Secrecy. He was keeping something from her.
“You need to lay low for a while,” he said.
“What do you mean, lay low?”
“Disappear. Get out of sight. Lay low,” he said. “Not long. Just for a little bit.”
She gaped back at him. “Billy Ray, are you outside of your mind right now?”
He sat the bag down, and picked up his beer again. “I’ve never been more inside of it.”
“Why won’t you just tell me what happened?”
“Not happened,” he corrected. “Is. Is happening. You heard the chief this morning.” He stopped and dragged a forearm across his sweating brow. “After you left, I got called to a meeting with the chief and Holloway and….”
“And?”
“Pam Jones.”
“Pam Jones, the DA?” she asked, a finger of fear caressing her throat. “Without me?”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “Without you.”
“Why?” she asked.
“I think you know.”
“And the chief was there?” she said, trying to keep the hurt from the chief’s betrayal off her face and the agitation out of her voice.
From Billy Ray’s look, she guessed that she hadn’t done a good job of either. He shook his head. “I told you that no matter what you think about the chief or what he’s done for you, that man’s a politician. He’s protecting his own house.”
She sat back and stared at the sandwich on her plate. Her stomach lurched and for a minute she thought she was going to be sick. “He saved my life and now he thinks I had something to do with these murders?”
“I’m not sure what’s going on in his head,” he said. “But the evidence is all leading back to you, Raven. It may be circumstantial, but it’s a problem. You’ve got motive and no alibis and – I hate to say it because I don’t believe it has anything to do with you – a past that most people around here are starting to remember.”
She nodded, fighting the urge to run again. “So it all comes right back down to Floyd,” she said.
He nodded back, a troubled look on his face.
“Why were you there?” she asked.
“They wanted to know where I stood,” he said.
“And where is that? Where do you stand, Billy Ray?”
“As if you have to ask. I stand with you, my partner,” he said, “but I didn’t tell them that.”
They said nothing for a while. The Zydeco from the portable speakers on top of the fridge appeared to be whispering a frenzied warning.
“They’re trying to build a case against me?” she finally asked.
“It’s mostly Holloway. I don’t think the chief would be so focused on you as the perp if that bastard didn’t have his ear.”
“I don’t understand how the chief could think that I’m a monster like….” She stopped at the sound of Floyd’s voice in her head – You mean like your ole man, Birdy Girl? Maybe he thinks the apple don’t fall far from the tree. She put her hands to her temples and shook the voice away.
“You scared the chief at Oral’s,” Billy Ray said. “I think he saw something in you that he didn’t like.”
The thought of being locked up even for a short time made her frantic. She would suffocate in jail. No more long trail runs on Scorpion’s Tail, no more gym sessions, and more importantly no more career, the one she had worked so hard on, and the one she had used to put men like Floyd away. If they arrested her, no matter what happened in the long run, her life in Byrd’s Landing would be over. And so would her life as a cop.
Now her mind was whirring with the music. She felt like a trapped animal. “How much time do I have?” she asked, wondering if they were coming for her right now. She stood up so quickly that the table shook. Billy Ray reached out an arm to steady it. He caught the neck of the open bottle of beer in front of her before it fell to the floor.
“Wait, wait,” he said. “You don’t need to do anything right now. Just lay low. Leave town, even, while I try to work this thing out. But if you wait too long kicking around here…”
“…then I’m screwed.”
“No,” Billy Ray said. “You’re fucked.”
“And what are you going to be doing while I’m laying low?” she asked.
“Trying to find out who killed these people, Raven,” he said. “What you think? Rita already calling in that favor to get the elimination samples of the DNA checked against the hairs found in Hazel’s bed, including Holloway’s. If it’s somebody in the department, we’ll get them. You just have to be patient and smart right now.”
“No,” Raven said. “This is my problem, Billy Ray, not yours.”
She didn’t wait for him to answer, but turned away and started for the front door. Billy Ray followed her. He tried to grab her arm, and even though he was her partner and ally in this, his hand felt like a manacle closing around her wrist. She shook him away, ran out of the door and into her Mustang. As she sped away she could see him in the rearview mirror staring at her with his hands on his slim hips.
A few blocks away from his house, she stopped the car next to a set of empty shotguns in the abandoned neighborhood. She flung open the car door and tumbled out. She sank to her knees on the broken asphalt, looked up at the clear sky bright with stars and asked the universe what she should do next. But it was Floyd who answered back.
Chapter Forty-One
When she made it to her apartment from Billy Ray’s that night she went back to where it all started – back to Floyd. She dumped the contents of the boxes she had retrieved from the storage shed onto her glass coffee table. A multitude of death row groupie letters, visitor logs, and notebooks of Floyd’s sermons piled onto the coffee table and slid down to the floor.
She found herself holding the Michael Gorman book, Straight Razors and Peacock Feathers, and asked herself the hard question. Was she disturbed by the lies in the book, or because the author accused Raven of being a willing partner to Floyd’s killing spree? After all, the author posited, some murders Raven had to have watched; some victims she must have lured. In the foreword, Gorman claimed that he had visited Floyd many times in prison, which was a lie. His name wasn’t in the visitor logs. He might have written Floyd, but he never visited.
But maybe Gorman didn’t lie about everything, Raven thought. Maybe Gorman had found her own true memories, the ones that she had been trying to bury all of these years by being a good cop, the ones that occupied her dreams. Floyd had used her to lure some of his victims. She was only a child, but she was complicit.
Heart beating, she threw the book as hard as she could against the wall. In an attempt to calm down, she listened to the breath scraping against her chest until it slowed. This is just what Holloway had wanted, she thought, to unhinge her before destroying her by putting her in a cage. That is why he had the book in his office. He was using it to find ways to torture her, to make possible her greatest fear that she was as evil as Floyd. What else did he have in store for her? Now I rightly don’t know about that, a voice answered. But if I was you, I’d be tryin’ lickety split to find out.
Raven waited until she thought the whole world had to be asleep before changing clothes and slipping into her Mustang. She didn’t put the key into the ignition right away. She just sat there for a moment or two in the three o’clock in the morning darkness, thinking of Floyd. So fuck it, she thought, the unpracticed curse slicing through the confusion and fear in her mind. They would never let her escape her past. If they wanted her father, maybe that’s who she should give them.
She looked over at the passenger seat. Floyd was sitting right there, as neat as a pin, so unlike the grinning, bloody disaster he had been at his death. He was wearing his favorite hat. The peacock feather, dark blue at its very center and fluorescent green around the edges, glowed from the hatband in the darkness of the Mustang’s cabin. She watched him until the grin on his face and eventually the rest of him faded into the darkness.
She still didn’t put the key into the ignition just yet. Instead she placed a peacock feather flattened between two sheets of wax paper on the dash. She smoothed the feather against the surface of the dashboard for several seconds. Then she unstrapped the hunting knife from her ankle holster and stared at its jagged tip. She wondered if it was anything like the knife Westcott used to kill Blue Luther. She held it by the handle and asked herself who it was really for. Holloway or the ghost who had just been in the passenger seat? She wasn’t entirely sure.
She looked over at the passenger seat once again. Floyd, who was back, said solemnly, I hope you ’bout to have a little fun, Birdy Girl. Lord knows you been boring the shit out of me lately.
She drove the Mustang until she was several blocks from Holloway’s tract home, parked and got out. Still on automatic pilot, she scaled the fading redwood side fence next to Holloway’s house, wincing a little from the small pains caused by battered muscles still trying to heal from her adventures with Jabo Kersey.
Holloway’s side yard was neatly kept with a narrow strip of grass rimmed by a funnel of white cement. She stood still for a while plastered against the stucco until she was sure that the neighbors hadn’t heard. Even though it was late, there could be an insomniac or two sitting on their front porch or having a smoke on their backyard patio.
When Raven was sure it was just the moon, herself, and Holloway’s perfect side yard, she peeled herself from the side of the house and considered the best way to enter. She had been waiting beside a window that had been slightly cracked to let in the night air. A blue light soft as a whisper floated from the window. Raven thought this was the best shot she’d have. She removed the screen using the knife from her ankle holster, lifted the window and wriggled inside.
She regretted her choice the moment she stood upright.
The room wasn’t empty and Holloway’s mother wasn’t asleep. Trapped eyes moved over Raven’s tight black jeans, the athletic black jacket, and the ski mask she had pulled over her head but not her face.
“It’s okay,” Raven said in a soothing voice though she knew it was ridiculous to try and ease the woman’s fear. “I’m with the police.” Even more ridiculous, Raven thought, feeling like the slime she arrested. “I’m not going to hurt you, I promise.” Like her promises meant anything to the woman watching an intruder invade her house. “I’m just looking for something. I’ll be on my way as soon as I find it.”
Raven remembered the car accident. Jane Holloway’s larynx had been crushed by the steering wheel of her new Cadillac. And that tragic mistake at the hospital left her paralyzed from the neck down with brain damage that appeared to allow her to understand but not respond. Unable to speak or write, she had become a mute prisoner inside the horror of her own body Now, a tear slipped down the side of the woman’s face. Raven wiped it away with a gloved finger, thinking that if she was sent to hell for only one thing, it would be this.
Raven had never been in Holloway’s house but she had obtained the plan for the tract home from the internet. Saving the master bedroom for last, she began a methodical search of the house. She started in the kitchen, looking in the pantries and the cabinets where he kept his dishes. His study was as unrelentingly tidy as the kitchen; the only item even slightly related to the murders was a file folder on the middle of his desk with her name on it, probably a copy of the one he had shown the chief in his office. She opened it and browsed through the pages as if reading about someone she didn’t know. The folder held every negative article written about her along with newspaper accounts of the crimes Floyd committed.
She looked in closets, even returned to Holloway’s mother’s room to run her fingers under her body, surprised at how cool she was in the late summer heat, cool and dry. Yes, indeed Holloway took very good care of his mother. But she found nothing. No peacock feathers. No silver cane with a wolf’s head. And no signs of any manufactured evidence in the shooting of Quincy Trueblood.
She found Holloway’s room at the end of a short hallway. His curtain was open. The frosted light from the moon allowed Raven to see him quite clearly. In spite of the heat, it looked like he slept in a full set of striped pajamas with the covers pulled up to his chest, his arms resting on top of the smooth blankets. One side of his face was pressed against the pillow. Raven could tell by the clear trickle of drool falling from the corner of his lips that he was deep in some dream. As she stood at the foot of the bed staring at his half-lit and half-dark face, she wondered what she would do if he woke up.
But she didn’t let herself wonder about that too long. She walked around the bed until she was to the side of him. In one hand she had the hunting knife, in the other she held the peacock feather between wax paper. Floyd would have used both. She had planned to use only one.
She took the peacock feather from between the wax paper. She fanned it out with gloved fingers, noticing how the green tips glowed in the moonlight. Through the top of Holloway’s pajama shirt, she saw the skin of his neck, as pink and smooth as a puppy’s belly. How easy it would be to press the tip of the hunting knife to his throat in search of the first drop of blood, and then harder to get at the rest of it. A quick jerk up to the left and it would all be over.
And if the pain woke him Holloway wouldn’t even have time to scream. She could watch him gurgle and clutch at his throat in an effort to hold in enough blood to keep life in for another second or two. They’d surely catch her, she knew, but the satisfaction of seeing him choke on his own blood would be worth it. She hadn’t found any evidence that he was framing her, but at least she would have revenge. He had killed Hazel after befriending her, and then he had killed Oral after sitting down with him and sharing a glass of wine. And now he was finishing the job by plotting with the chief to send her away like Floyd was sent away.
She cocked her head to the side, wondering, barely realizing that the knife hovered over his throat at the very spot she was thinking about making that first incision. And then Holloway’s face morphed into another one. He was Maylene Love. Jean Rinehart. She saw Quincy Trueblood lying there sleeping peacefully with drool slipping from his lips, his hand curled innocently on his chest like a child’s.
Her heart didn’t thump as she realized what she had allowed to crawl inside her head. She didn’t feel disgusted with herself like she had with Jabo Kersey. With the gesture of holstering the hunting knife, she simply moved the thought aside, gently, and reminded herself that there was still time to get Holloway the right way.
She picked up the peacock feather from the floor where she hadn’t even realized it had fallen. She once again spread and smoothed the feather to make it a perfect specimen of what it was. She placed it on Holloway’s chest right next to but not quite touching his curled white fingers.
It would be the first thing he would touch when he woke up in the morning. Maybe he would thank God for letting him wake up. Or maybe he wouldn’t.
But Raven knew one thing for sure. His fingers would brush against the feather lying on his chest, and fear would close in on him. He would feel watched and marked, perhaps too afraid to kill again. She hadn’t found Oral’s cane or a stash of peacock feathers, but letting him know that the killer was marking him would give her time to catch him and put him away. And if he accused her of leaving the feather, he would have to prove it.
Before Raven left she opened the front door, the back door, the door leading to the garage. She opened the door to every room in the house to let in the moonlit morning air. She did so to let Holloway know that he may have been smart, but now he was vulnerable. He would never be able to bar any door against her.
