Carol O’Connell - Stone Angel

And now the sheriff hovered behind the prisoner. “Let’s hear it, Jimmy.”

The younger man only looked down to the end of the table, where Riker was coating half of it with official-looking papers. The sheriff put one hand on the prisoner’s shoulder to prompt him. “You told it to Riker, now you tell it to me.”

Jimmy stared at Riker, who didn’t look up, but continued to cover the table with evidence, pieces of a murder. Now Riker did look up as he pulled a blue sheet of paper from the envelope, and held it up to the prisoner.

Jimmy spoke as if he were reading the words. “Cass took me to the meeting at the New Church. She dragged me right into that room. She was so angry, waving her letter around and yelling at people.”

The sheriff bent low, his head close to Jimmy’s. “What was Cass angry about?”

“I don’t remember what she was saying. I just wanted to crawl away and die.” Jimmy looked at Riker, who smiled gently and nodded, making a rolling motion with his hand. Jimmy continued. “She was gonna tell the whole town. She was gonna tell you. The last thing she said was, ‘The sheriff will be back in the morning, you bastard.”

“Who did she say that to?”

“My uncle.” He sank down in his chair and covered his face with his hands.

Riker waved a hand to caution the sheriff. “Don’t get him off on that. He’ll cry, and it’ll take an hour to settle him down again.” To the prisoner, he said. “Go on, kid.”

“My father must’ve put it all together, ‘cause he was looking at me real strange, just staring at me like I’d crawled out from under some rock. After Cass left, Dad told me to wait outside while the grownups talked.”

“Talked about what?” the sheriff prompted.

Riker handed him two blue sheets of paper, hospital lab reports on blood tests for a twelve-year-old boy. “The ID number matches Dr. Shelley’s case file number for Jimmy.”

The sheriff scanned the first line. “Hepatitis?” He looked at Riker. “I knew he had that. Cass treated him for it when I brought the boy back from New York.” But apparently, she’d treated him for a more serious ailment as well. On the next blue sheet was the positive test for venereal disease. “Jesus.” That might explain the downslide of the boy’s life from the day he had brought him home to his parents.

“There’s more,” said Riker.

Jimmy was staring at the blue sheets and crying softly.

“All right, boy.” The sheriff put one hand on his shoulder. “Never mind that now. Get on with the rest of it.”

Again, Jimmy looked to Riker for his instructions, and the detective nodded.

“We all gathered at the Shelley house. At the time, I didn’t know what for. I remember accidentally kicking a stone loose from the flower bed around the big tree in the front yard. So I stooped down and put it back. Dr. Cass was particular about her flowers.”

She loved her flowers. They bloomed all around the house in every season.

“Then I saw the blue letter again and people were talking in whispers. They were going to fix everything so no one would know.”

By killing Cass, who never did you any harm and never would.

“Somebody threw a rock and hit her on the side of the head. She never cried, never said a thing. It didn’t seem real – like TV with no sound. Another rock hit her in the shoulder. Then somebody put a rock in my hand. It was just there in my hand, and this voice whispering in my ear, ‘Do it, do it.’ And I threw the rock and hit her in the knee. That one brought her down. She fell so quiet.”

“And then what did you do?”

Jimmy looked up at the sheriff, with faint surprise. “Well, I went back to the flower bed to get another rock.” As if that were the most obvious answer, the most natural thing to do, for he had thrown his rock and needed another one, didn’t he? Jimmy turned to Riker. “And that second rock was the one that broke her front teeth.”

Riker smiled and nodded in approval.

Behind Jimmy’s head, the sheriff’s hand was rising like a club. Hate was everything now. Charles Butler was getting up from the table. Riker only touched the sleeve of the large man’s shirt to restrain him. “Stay out of it, Charles.”

Jimmy looked up to see the sheriff’s large fist hanging over him. He stared down at his own hands neatly folded in his lap as though he were on best behavior in church. His shoulders stiffened, bracing for the beating. His voice was calm and reasonable when he said, “I’m sorry for it now, but I didn’t want them to know what he did to me.”

The sheriff’s hand was suspended in space.

In the same reasonable voice, Jimmy said, “The dog forgave me.”

Riker held up more blue sheets. “The kid was raped. He says his uncle did it – a lot.” He passed the papers down the table. “It didn’t stop till he was thirteen. There were other kids, too.”

So that was what Jimmy had run from, and what he had delivered the boy back to. Now the sheriff read a blue sheet with an account of the blood workup for a six-year-old boy, identified only by a number.

“Another case of hepatitis.” And now he looked at the other sheet for the same child, bearing a later date. It was a positive test for syphilis “Why would Cass test a six-year-old boy for VD? How did she make the jump from hepatitis? We’ve had hepatitis in the schools before. It’s pretty common.”

Charles said, “Not the blood-borne variety. Small children get a highly infectious form transmitted with clumsy toilet habits. Even that one would be rare in the upper grades, Jimmy’s class. You’d have to be sexually active or shooting drugs to fall into a high-risk group for hepatitis B. It was a glaring marker for abuse in a six-year-old.”

The sheriff turned to the last sheet, a positive VD test for a nineteen-year-old man. He looked up at Charles and held out the sheet. “There’s no name. You’re sure this one is Babe?”

Charles nodded. “It matches Cass’s patient file number for previous treatment.”

Now he looked from one sheet to the other. The six-year-old was the most recent infection of syphilis. Jimmy’s was older – second-stage and apparently not contracted during his brief flight from home.

“Babe’s infection was the oldest,” said Riker, “even at the time of his famous VD party at the Dayborn Bar and Grill.”

“I gather he never completed the treatment,” said Charles. “That would explain the advanced case at the time of his death.”

Riker was talking, explaining the remaining evidence to support the motive for murder, the illegal activities which would not stand up to any investigation, and the pedophile with a preference for small boys.

The sheriff was not listening. His rancor was curiously absent as he picked up another set of papers from the table. This was the handwritten statement of Jimmy Simms. At the bottom of the final page, all of Cass Shelley’s murderers appeared in a neatly printed column. His eyes moved listlessly from one name to the next, and then the sheets dropped from his hand and landed on the table.

This was not the outcome he had been anticipating, feeding on for all this time.

What a cheat.

He had expected something larger, more on the grand scale of Lilith’s stone avenger in flight. The long-awaited moment had finally come, and it was not enough.

Lilith remained to guard the weeping prisoner. Tom Jessop left the room with the hollow feeling that he had missed a meal. No – a great many meals – years of them.

He led Riker and Charles back down the short hallway to the reception area, speaking mechanically, all business now. “Me and my deputy are gonna take Jimmy out the back way. I think he’ll be safer in a New Orleans lockup. We might be a while. I’ve got to scare up warrants for twenty-three people, and I don’t know a single judge that owes me a favor. Riker, could you mind the store and stay close to the phone? I might need the backup if a judge is gonna buy this story.”