A Dirty Shame Read online

  ***

  Jack pulled into his driveway, and I saw Carver’s shiny black Tahoe parked next to my Suburban. Carver was asleep in the front seat of the SUV, his head resting on the back of the seat. Jack hit the window with his fist and Carver jumped about a foot in the air, banging his head on the ceiling. I winced in sympathy and then got out of the way. I was used to the childish antics of men, and I knew it never paid to be caught in the middle.

  “I was just resting my eyes,” Carver said as he got out of the car. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

  “You’ve got a little drool on your chin,” Jack said.

  “I can get this kind of grief at home,” Carver said, his pout reminding me of a toddler. “How’d the interview with your mechanic go?”

  “Informative,” Jack said.

  We went into Jack’s office, and I hardly blushed at all at the thought of what we’d done on the rug only a few hours before. Carver didn’t seem to notice my distress, and went directly to the white boards. Jack filled him in about the size of the perp who’d given Oglesby the drug and the lab results of the bandana.

  “You can’t tell me Wormy wouldn’t know what was going on in George’s shop,” Jack said. “He was George’s right hand, and he was there six days a week.”

  “Maybe he’s just a loyal employee,” Carver said, playing devil’s advocate.

  “Maybe, but George wasn’t really the type of man to inspire loyalty,” Jack said. “I’ve got Martinez and Lewis sticking to William Vance. They reported in earlier that he spent the night at the hospital on call, but they had no way of knowing if he stayed there the whole time. His car was in the lot, but there are a lot of ways in and out of the hospital, and he could’ve taken any number of means of transportation.”

  “So you’ve got an initial suspect that administered the drug to Daniel Oglesby who matches Wormy Mueller’s physical description,” Carver said. “We can also tie him to the bandana and the crime scene, though his attorney will shred that to pieces. We can’t however, tie Wormy to the Aryan Nation. Not without seeing the membership roster.”

  “I looked for a tattoo while we spoke with him this morning, but I didn’t see anything visible,” Jack said. “Not that that means anything. It could’ve been anywhere. We’ve also got the connection between Greg Vance and Ronnie Campbell.”

  “What about the rest of the employees at Murphy’s Auto?” Carver asked. “Have you finished backgrounds there?”

  “Yeah. Most of them have been working there for years. George pays pretty well, and they’re able to do side work if they want. None of them have inconsistencies in their bank accounts, though a few of the men have blips on their records. They’re worth taking a closer look at, but like Lewis said, I don’t have the manpower for the number of hours involved. It’s going to take time.”

  “I can farm it out to some of my guys if you’d like,” Carver offered. “I can do that since I’m in charge.”

  “I’ll take you up on it, but I still need to go through them all myself. Something might click.”

  Carver sighed. “I’d do the same thing.” He passed out thick folders to me and Jack. “This is everything I could find on the Vances. Relatives, lovers, ex-wives, girlfriends, family friends—you name it. You’ll know the size of their underwear and their last prostate exam by the time we’re finished. Let’s see what we see.”

  I was an hour into reading through the file of Cynthia Vance, ex-wife to William, and my eyes were starting to glaze over with the tedium. There wasn’t enough coffee in the world to make her any more interesting. Charities and being a cardiologist’s wife. That’s what Cynthia Vance had excelled in. She’d come from a wealthy Virginian family—at least on her mother’s side—and she’d married William when she was twenty before giving birth to two offspring.

  I skimmed across the pages, wondering how Jack stood the process of police work. It was mostly boring. At least with a body I had the chance of discovering the occasional abnormality. I looked up at him, and I could tell he was in the zone—just as alert as he’d been when we’d started.

  “You need more coffee,” he said without looking up.

  “I need a lobotomy.”

  He grunted and went back to his file. I rolled my eyes and went back to mine as well, and I almost missed the name. It was at the bottom of the page, and I’d already flipped it over to go to the next when my brain caught up to what my eyes had seen.

  “Whoa,” I said, turning back. “There’s an interesting connection.”

  “What’s that?” Jack and Carver both asked, leaning over so they could read for themselves.

  “Guess who is a poor relation of Cynthia Vance?” I asked. “First cousin on her father’s side.”

  “Lorna Dewberry,” Jack said. “Little pieces of the puzzle.”

  “Could be just a coincidence,” I said. “But it’d be an awfully big one. Where does she live?”

  “Her address is listed just across from the church. The old Pickering house if I remember right,” Jack said. “Let’s double check though.”

  I listened as he made a call and asked Reverend Thomas if Lorna still lived in the house listed in her file. Jack hung up and smiled.

  “The Reverend said she does still own the old Pickering house, but she’s been renting it out to a young couple. Lorna moved back to her parents’ place when her mother died last year.”

  “Her parents’ place?” I tried to place where it was in my head. “She grew up almost outside the county line, didn’t she? Out past your parents’ tobacco fields?” I asked Jack.

  “Yeah, her father’s fields connected to mine. Though the Dewberry’s haven’t worked the land in almost twenty years. It’s not a working farm anymore. Just a house—and a big barn.”

  My eyes widened, but Carver was already on the ball. “I’m looking, I’m looking,” Carver said, typing furiously on his keyboard. “Only car registered to her is a six-year-old Focus. No white Cadillac.”

  “Go deeper,” Jack said.

  “Patience, young Skywalker.”

  “It makes sense,” I told Jack while Carver whistled under his breath. “She’s the right size, and it would be more plausible for her to go visit Reverend Oglesby than it would for Wormy.”

  “Where’d she get the drug to inject him though?” Jack asked.

  I chewed at my bottom lip and held up a finger. “She’d have to be in it with William Vance. They used to be related through marriage, so they knew each other, and William has access to Augusta General and the drug.”

  “You think they have a thing going on between them?”

  “Romantically?” I asked, not able to imagine Lorna being passionate about anything but the church. “I don’t know, but anything is possible I guess.”

  “Let’s say she has the opportunity,” Jack said. “We still don’t have means or motive. Where did the money come from that was given to Doc Randall? Why would she help her cousin’s ex-husband, who left her for another woman?”

  I blew out a breath. It didn’t make sense.

  “Well that’s something, anyway,” Carver said. “I think we found a possible match on the car. A white Cadillac was registered to an Opal Fife. Hell of a name.”

  “Lorna’s grandmother,” Jack and I said simultaneously.

  “She died more than ten years back,” Jack continued.

  “Makes sense. The car hasn’t been registered since then.”

  Jack and I looked at each other, and I could tell we’d come to the same conclusion at the same time.

  “Jesse Fife was Lorna’s maternal grandfather,” Jack said.

  “Why is that name familiar?” Carver asked.

  “Because he’s standing in that photograph that George Murphy tried to swallow. I’ve got Lewis checking to see if he can find open bank accounts under his name.”

  “Gotcha,” Carver said. We all pushed away from the table and hurried out to the car.

  “You think she’ll be there at this
time of day?” I asked Jack.

  The cruiser kicked up gravel and mud as we sped out of the driveway and made our way down Heresy Road. He barely slowed as he turned onto Queen Mary, and I jerked against the seatbelt as he straightened the wheel.

  “Reverend Thomas said Mondays are her day off since the weekends are so busy with church activities. I guess we’ll find out.”

  “I can’t push a warrant through with what we have,” Carver said. “It’s all conjecture. We don’t even have circumstantial evidence that her barn is where they killed Daniel Oglesby, or anything but suspicion that she’s somehow involved. The tie-in to her grandfather and the white Cadillac might be enough if we find the right judge, but you’ll have to get her to agree to let you look around the property on your own if I can’t work a miracle here.”

  Carver got on the phone, and put a finger in his ear so he could hear the other end of the conversation.

  “She could be innocent,” I said.

  “We’ll find that out too,” Jack said. He didn’t have the sirens going. That would slow traffic down more than anything in this town because people couldn’t help but stop to look, but he didn’t exactly follow traffic laws as we weaved through the city limits.

  “I want Martinez and Lewis to stick to William Vance like glue,” Jack said, hitting speed dial on his phone. “I don’t have enough goddamned men to cover everyone. I’m going to have to pull a deputy working the fire to stake out Wormy Mueller. And I’m going to put Colburn on the senior Doctor Vance to make sure he’s under lock and key. If the Aryan Nation is involved, then you damn well better believe he knows what’s going on.”

  “You think his spiel about the Blood Brothers was just to throw you off?” I asked.

  “Everything he told us in that interview was meant to throw us off. That was the whole point of him volunteering to come in. He gave us just enough of several different threads to check out to keep us off the real trail.”

  “It all goes back to the Aryan Nation, like we originally thought,” I said.

  “Yeah, but they get their funding from somewhere. Why shouldn’t they be running drugs to fill the coffers?” He looked in his rearview mirror at Carver just as he hung up the phone. “I need that membership roster. I need financials on the organization. How much closer are we on the warrant?”

  Carver sighed. “I’ll try again, but the judge working for the ACLU is being a hardass. I just got off the phone with the DA, and I convinced him to press for the warrant for Lorna’s place.”

  “That’s something at least,” Jack said.

  I’d never been out to the Dewberry farm. Jack and I had played in the surrounding fields as kids, but we’d never ventured far enough so the main house came into sight. The fields were overgrown with yellow grass and so tall it was like driving through a maze, but then the area opened up and Jack slowed the car so we could get a good look around.

  “Creepy,” Carver said. “Too many places to hide in all this grass.”

  The Fife-Dewberry homestead was a little two-story frame house with a wide wraparound porch. It was painted a dull yellow, almost so it blended in with the dead grass in the fields. A large barn sat about a hundred and fifty feet to the back right of the house, and the structure hadn’t been kept up in good repair. Brownish red paint was peeling, and one of the doors from the hayloft hung by a single hinge.

  Lorna’s blue Focus was parked to the side of the house, but I saw her come to the screen door when we parked behind her. She waited for us to come up the creaky porch stairs before she held open the screen door to let us in.

  “You’ve caught me on my way out, Sheriff,” she said. “This is my errand day.”

  “We won’t keep you long, Lorna. Just a couple of follow up questions. This is Agent Carver,” Jack said, “With the FBI.”

  “Well, come in and sit.” Her tone was brusque. “I’ve got things to do.”

  I could see a straight shot down a long hall to a back door that mirrored the front. Everything was painted stark white. No color on the walls anywhere. There were also no pictures or knickknacks sitting around.

  She led us into a spotless kitchen with white laminate flooring and white counters and cabinets. All I could think was that it’d be really hard to get blood out of this house. Jack sat across from Lorna at her little kitchen table, and I chose to stand with my back against the counter next to Carver. She’d probably be more comfortable if I wasn’t in her direct line of sight.

  I realized it was the first time I’d seen Lorna with her hair down. It was straight as a board and fell halfway down her back, and I also realized I’d never seen her in makeup before. She looked—pretty.

  “Tell me about William Vance,” Jack said.

  Lorna jerked just a little in her chair, and her forehead lined in agitation. “Fornicator,” she spat.

  “Can you expound on that any?”

  “He was married to my cousin. They took vows, but both of them turned their backs on them.”

  “Cynthia cheated on William as well?” Jack asked.

  “She might as well have.” Lorna’s posture was so straight I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a steel beam in her spine. “Neglect is just as big a sin as adultery.”

  I wanted to say something at that point, along the lines of not remembering neglect being part of the Ten Commandments, but I held my tongue to move things along. The house was starting to creep me out, and I had a bad feeling forming in the pit of my stomach.

  “William gave her the perfect marriage and environment to raise their children, and she forced him to look for attention elsewhere when she decided she enjoyed giving his money away to ridiculous charities instead of keeping him satisfied. William was justified in looking elsewhere, though he should have waited to quench his carnal cravings until after the vows had been dissolved.”

  “And did you ever—quench William’s carnal cravings?” Jack asked.

  My eyes got big, but I somehow managed to keep my laughter contained at the way Jack phrased the question.

  Lorna’s face turned so red I was afraid she was going to go into cardiac arrest, and I saw her knuckles go white as she pressed her fingers into her legs, probably hard enough to leave bruises.

  “Of course not,” she sputtered. “How dare you imply such a thing? If this is how you get your jollies then I’m going to report you to the mayor.”

  “Good friends with the mayor, are you?” Jack asked. He pulled a copy of the photo I’d found inside George’s throat and placed it on the table in front of her. “What do all these men have in common, Lorna?”

  She licked her lips once and looked at the photograph, but she didn’t say anything.

  “There’s your grandfather,” Jack pointed out companionably. “Right next to Frank Greenbaum. Did you know Frank gave George the loan to start up his auto shop? Jesse and Frank were good friends, weren’t they? In fact, this whole group seems pretty tight.”

  She stayed silent, but I could see the beads of sweat on her upper lip. Jack left the picture in front of her and put the crime scene photo of Reverend Oglesby on top of it. She went pale.

  “That’s an abomination,” she said, scooting back her chair. “I want you out of my house.”

  “It is an abomination,” Jack said, nodding. “The group who did this—they don’t have any regard for those they see as the minority. Whether it be skin color, religion, sexuality—or gender. They hate women. But you know that, don’t you? How did your grandfather feel when he was presented with a granddaughter instead of a grandson? He couldn’t pass on the legacy to you, could he? I bet he was angry.”

  “My grandfather loved me.” Her voice quivered with the lack of conviction.

  “He figured out a way to use you though, didn’t he, Lorna? Right from the beginning. He trained you to act as a woman should. To be whatever they needed. These men find whoever’s malleable enough to do what they ask. Until they’re through using them. You should ask George Murphy how that turned out
.”

  Lorna was completely still, her gaze directed down and slightly away from the sight of Reverend Oglesby.

  “You know what someone did to Daniel Oglesby, Lorna?” Jack put his finger on the picture so her gaze was drawn to it again. “Someone went to his house. Someone he knew. Maybe even someone he thought was a friend. And that person injected him with a drug that rendered him unconscious. And then this group of men—the men who hate everyone who doesn’t fit their ideal—they loaded up his body and took him somewhere secluded. And they beat him and tortured him until this is what was left of Daniel Oglesby.”

  Jack’s voice never faltered as he played it back for her. “The person that gave him that first drug—they’re guilty of murder. Did you know that? Just as much as the person who took the whip to his back or the knife to his genitalia.”

  “Do you have a point to make, Sheriff?” she asked, her eyes finally coming up to meet his. There was fear in her gaze, but also hatred—mostly hatred. “Like I said. I have things to do.”

  “Tell me again where you were the afternoon Reverend Oglesby went missing.”

  “I spend Sundays at the church. All day.”

  “You ever have a chance to drive your grandmother’s Cadillac?”

  If I hadn’t been looking for it I never would have seen the change that came over her. She became more confident—almost defiant—right in front of our eyes.

  “I haven’t seen that car since Grandmother died,” she said. “It’s probably nothing more than scrap metal by now.”

  “I guess a good mechanic would know all about how to make that happen.”

  She scooted her chair back further and stood. “I don’t like the tone you used today, Jack.” She omitted his title this time. I guess she wouldn’t be voting for him when it came election time again. “Now if that’s all—”

  “Actually, I do have one more request. Would you mind if we took a look at your barn?”

  Her eyes snapped up. “I’m afraid I don’t have time to spare today. I think it’d be best from here on out if you speak with my attorney.”

  We followed Lorna back to the front of the house and Jack’s phone rang. “Excuse me a minute.”