Jonathon King - Shadow Men

"It's my next call, Billy. If I can get the guy this late at night."

"Try hard, Max," he said. "Earlier this evening I had a conversation with Mark Mayes. I filled him in on what we found and told him you'd discovered his great-grandfather's watch. He seemed quite dumbstruck by the whole thing."

"You told him about Jefferson?"

"I told him about the grandfather and the son. He was quite intrigued about the grandson having become a minister."

"He thinks its his destiny," I said, thinking out loud. "The letters with his grandfather's deep beliefs, the whole search for what happened and that thing about forgiveness."

Billy was reading me from the other end of the line.

"You think Mayes will try to contact Jefferson? To somehow bring the thing full circle?"

"Yeah, I do. But I'm not so sure that William Jefferson is so forgiving. You know where Mayes is now?"

"I'll try his number."

"Let me know," I said.

The next call I made was to information, looking for the number to the Highlands County Sheriff's Office. When I dialed it I got a computerized answering service giving me the office hours and instructions to call 911 if this was an emergency, or to press one for the county dispatcher.

"Highlands County dispatch," answered a woman with a tired and bored voice. When I asked for a way to speak to Sheriff Wilson, she repeated the office hours and asked me to call back in the morning. That's when I identified myself as Detective Richards of the Broward Sheriff's Office and told her it was a matter of importance. She was much more agreeable, asked for a callback number, and said she would page the sheriff. I did not like to lie often, but I was very good at it when I did. Richards was staring at me when I put the phone down. Her night had been bizarre enough. I started to explain when O. J. Wilson called me back.

"Detective Richards, please," he said when I answered.

"Sheriff Wilson, this is Max Freeman," I said. I gave him a couple of empty seconds, figuring if he didn't hang up right away, I might have a chance to hold him.

"I'm sorry to have deceived you, sir, but I really need to speak with you on a matter that I think may be of concern to you."

"Must be important, Mr. Freeman, for you to have misrepresented yourself as a working law enforcement officer."

"Yes, sir. I am told by sources, sir, that you have been trying to solve a number of homicides that you think are related. And my understanding is that the link you have is the use of a large-caliber rifle."

Again the line was silent, and I could picture the man's small eyes working beneath that furrowed brow.

"Four of them to be exact, Mr. Freeman," he said.

"Have you determined the caliber of the weapon used, sir?"

"We think so. The sheriff at the time of the first shooting found a shell casing in the area. It's pretty distinctive. But we haven't been so lucky in the other three, and in two cases we weren't even able to find bullets. The wounds were through and through and the rounds were never discovered."

"Was the shell casing an old.405?" I said.

This time I had turned the sheriff in a direction I had not meant him to go.

"Mr. Freeman, if there is something you would like to tell me, or talk to me about, I would much rather do this in person. I could come down and meet you first thing in the morning. Maybe you would like to arrange something at the Broward Sheriff's Office down there?"

"Well, sir, I'm headed in your direction momentarily. In fact, I can be there in a little more than two hours."

Before letting him jump to any more conclusions, I gave him a truncated version of the Mayes case, how the great-grandson had come to us, how I had tracked down the name of John William Jefferson and then Placid City's own Reverend Jefferson. I then told him the secret that the reverend had been keeping in his barn, and that the rifle he turned over to me was indeed a.405-caliber weapon meant to take down large animals, including people.

"You said the first shooting was fifteen years ago?" I said, working the long conversation I had with the reverend around in my head.

"Yes. Before I got here," Wilson answered.

"You might check with the morgue and get the date of the reverend's father's suicide. He told me it was fifteen years ago. I'd be interested in seeing how close the days match."

There was silence on the line.

"I think the great-grandson, Mark Mayes, is coming to visit the reverend. I'm not sure I'd trust the pastor's reaction," I said.

It was this bare accusation that pushed the old sheriff over the edge.

"Freeman, you got some set of brass ones on you, fella," he said, his tone, even over the cell phone, turning icy. "The reverend Jefferson has been a blessed and solid citizen in these parts for more than a decade. Why, that man even presided over my own daughter's wedding.

"Son, I have checked out your record, and according to my own damn sources, you might have gone off the deep end yourself up north in Philadelphia when you shot a young boy in the back. Then I understand that you came down here to Florida and got yourself twisted up with a child abductor and ended up killing him, and that some innocent park ranger went down at the same time. Then not too long ago you were apparently found beating a suspect nearly to death, and another cop was forced to shoot and kill another suspect before that one was over.

"You've got a bloodlust or something, Freeman, and I'm not sure I even want you in my jurisdiction unless I've got you up here as a suspect."

I had not had my recent past raked into a pile with such an efficient stroke before. And Wilson didn't even know about my most recent wounding of PalmCo's hired man, nor could he have been aware of my subway encounter with an evil that I obviously held in my memory. The list made me wonder if I truly knew the man reflected in Richards's kitchen window as I looked out on the light of the pool.

"Do you have a fingerprint on the shell casing found in the first shooting?" I asked him.

He waited to answer.

"Damn right I do."

"Do you have a sample of the reverend's prints?"

Again he waited a couple of beats.

"No. He has no criminal record that I know of."

"No, he wouldn't," I said, then added, "I'll be in town as soon as I can get there, Sheriff."

When I punched off the cell, Richards had her head down, staring at the large stone tile on her kitchen floor.

"I've got to go," I said.

I drove the first half of the trip at seventy-five miles-an-hour. After Billy called me on the cell phone, I did the rest at eighty-five. He had been unable to find Mayes. He was not answering the cell number Billy had for him. His room at the small mom-and-pop motel he had been staying in was empty. The manager said he'd last seen Mayes's small, two-door sedan sometime this morning. He had said something about going to church.

"I called Professor Martin up in Atlanta, and he talked to Mayes yesterday," Billy said. "He said he told him about your discovery of the burial site and the watch. He said Mayes seemed resigned to the truth and glad that it was finally over, that he had some answers."

"Did he tell Martin about Jefferson-the reverend, the religious connection?"

"Martin said he told him he thought he'd made up his mind about the seminary and would pray on it at church today, and that was it."

"What church?"

I could tell Billy was putting it together faster than I was. There was an anxiety in his voice, and the sound of it was ratcheting up my own nerves.

"I did get in touch with Lott," Billy said with an even tighter tone. "I got him out of a late-night place where he was moderately intoxicated, but with the right promise of a bonus remuneration, I convinced him to open the lab.