Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

‘Then we’ll talk to him again,’ said Griffin. ‘In the meantime, I want people down at Hindman High interviewing the kids from the band, the music teacher, the custodian, and anyone else who might have been around when Donna Lee got into that truck. For now, that’s the last sighting we have of her.’

Colson said that she’d take care of the school business once she’d had a chance to use the restroom and freshen up. Griffin told her to get something to eat, and she assured him she’d grab a breakfast bagel from the Dunk-N-Go, and wolf it down in the car on the way to Hindman. Griffin gave her a nod of approval. Colson was the first female officer in the history of the Cargill PD, an appointment that had not been greeted with universal approval in the town. She was also a rarity by the standards of many police departments in the state, unusual enough to have featured in newspaper and TV coverage. Griffin had worried about her in the beginning, but stopped worrying after she ruptured Donnie Stark’s right testicle and busted two of his ribs when he made a grab for her outside Boyd’s one Friday night.

Once Colson was out of earshot, Knight asked Griffin if he could have a word.

‘It’s about Parker.’

Tilon Ward lived next to his widowed mother on a property to the east of Cargill. He’d moved back in with her after his divorce, initially recolonizing his former childhood bedroom while he worked on converting an old stable building into suitable accommodation for himself. He now had his own kitchen and living area, and a large, comfortable bedroom in which he could enjoy female company without inconveniencing his mother. She was a tolerant woman by any standards, but Ward saw no reason to parade his conquests before her, especially when they were younger than was appropriate for a man in his thirties – or when they were black, his mother’s sufferance of her son’s vices not extending to miscegenation.

Seated at his kitchen table, Tilon flipped his cell phone open and closed, open and closed. The instrument had revolutionized his business, but he now had fewer excuses for being out of contact with his partners. Dead zones apart, he was on call 24/7.

Tilon’s employer would want to know about his relationship with Donna Lee Kernigan, but Tilon’s view was that it wasn’t yet an issue, and would only become so were it to be discovered by the law. First up, he needed to get in touch with Sallie, offer his sympathies on the loss of her daughter, and make sure she wasn’t about to land him in a cell through whatever she might have to say to the police. Even amid her grief, he was confident she could be made to understand the necessity of discretion, particularly if she wanted to keep the supply chain open, for both herself and others. Unfortunately, Sallie didn’t possess a cell phone, and when Ward tried to call her at work, he was told she hadn’t yet arrived. He declined to leave a message, because his mother hadn’t bred a simpleton.

He mused for a while on who might have wanted to kill Donna Lee. If the rumors were true about what was done to Patricia Hartley, then the same person or persons responsible for her death had also murdered Donna Lee. Unless the two girls were connected in some way – and Ward couldn’t see how, given that they weren’t even friends – it looked like the police were dealing with a random sex killer, maybe even the serial kind about which his mother liked to read in her true crime books, and possibly the same one who had done in Estella Jackson, back when Tilon was still married and looked to have escaped Cargill forever.

In which case, thought Ward, at least Donna Lee’s death wasn’t personal.

21

Griffin sat at his desk, Kel Knight opposite him. The office was small, barely spacious enough to accommodate the desk, two chairs, and a selection of mismatched file cabinets. The walls were decorated only with official notices, Griffin being reluctant to advertise his personal or professional history in the form of commendations and photographs. Those that needed to know about his past already did, and the opinion of the others did not concern him.

Griffin had just finished talking on the phone with the mayor, Joe Haines. Cargill, in common with the rest of Burdon County, utilized a weak-mayor system, in which the mayor had no formal authority outside the council, and lacked the power to hire and fire, or veto council votes. This suited the Cade family, which was why the system had been instituted to begin with. Haines, who owned the town’s sole auto dealership, was a conscientious man, and honest to boot, which made him a lousy car salesman, and not much better as an Arkansas politician. Griffin had listened as Haines engaged in ten types of handwringing over the discovery of another body before finally hanging up on him.

Now, his coffee going cold, Griffin was reading a litany of Parker’s pain: his father, a detective, lost to suicide after a fatal shooting involving two teenagers; and his wife and child taken from him by a killer unlike any Griffin – or, it appeared, most everyone else – had ever encountered. Mother: dead. Grandfather, a retired state trooper up in Maine: dead. Griffin was convinced that he had never before encountered a man so alone. He felt both guilt at his treatment of Parker and anger at him for permitting the situation to have arisen in the first place through his obduracy. Occasionally, depending upon the page he was reading, Knight would offer information not included in the document, but mostly Griffin was permitted to read in silence. When he was done, he returned to the murder of Parker’s wife and child: blinded, partially skinned, and left for him to discover in the kitchen of his own home. Griffin didn’t know how the man was still walking upright, let alone functioning on any identifiably human level.

‘Billie got all this?’ asked Griffin, when he was done.

‘The majority of it.’

‘What about the rest?’

‘I made a call.’

Knight’s sister-in-law was married to Jack Kavanagh, a police lieutenant in Brooklyn. He and Knight met only at weddings and funerals, but a contact was a contact, especially when it came to police.

Griffin saw that Knight was playing with his damn pipe again.

‘If you’ve got something to say,’ said Griffin, ‘then say it, but you’re still not going to ignite that contraption in my office.’

Knight restored the pipe to his shirt pocket before speaking.

‘Parker was regarded by some in the NYPD as a blue flamer’ – ‘blue flamer’ was police slang for a rookie who wanted to change the world – ‘and by others as a Jonah. He was carrying baggage for his old man, and the killing of those two kids, so he probably felt he had something to prove. He made detective in three years, and scored some good busts, but didn’t seem set on winning popularity contests. According to Jack, Parker wasn’t cut out to be police. He was too solitary, and too troubled. He took chances with his safety, which meant he also took chances with the safety of his partners. He joined to do penance for his father’s sins, but he was always going to burn out, or get himself or someone else killed. What happened to his wife and daughter, no one would have wished on him, but …’

‘If it was going to happen to someone,’ Griffin concluded.

‘Yes.’

‘Is that it?’

‘No.’ Knight looked over his shoulder, instinctively checking that no one was nearby. ‘Those almost-healed cuts on his knuckles.’

‘What about them? I never believed they came from an accident with a car tire.’

‘Someone killed a guy named Johnny Friday in a Port Authority restroom up in New York a while back. Beat him to death and left his body cuffed and gagged in a stall.’