Thomas Cook - Sacrificial Ground

“You mean Linton?”

“Him, yes.”

“They weren’t lovers,” Frank told him.

Toffler looked at him. “Of course they were.”

“You think Derek Linton was the father of Angelica’s baby?” Frank asked.

“Who else could it have been?”

“It was a boy she knew. We blood-typed the fetus.”

Toffler’s eyes drew in, and his lips parted slowly. “So she was wrong,” he murmured.

Frank leaned forward. “Angelica?”

Toffler’s face stiffened. Nothing Frank could do would get him to say another word.

For two hours after he left Toffler, Frank sat alone in one of the remote corners of Piedmont Park. Something was missing. He had missed something. He could see Toffler’s lips as they parted in surprise. So she was wrong .

Who? Who was wrong? Angelica was wrong about who the father was? But she’d called Doyle three times on May 15. No, she knew who’d gotten her pregnant. Then what?

He remembered what he’d always been told about a murder. Follow blood or follow money.

He saw the old man in the portrait which hung from the white walls of Karen’s foyer. Blood. There was so little left for the Devereauxs. Both parents gone, and after that, Angelica. Devereaux blood had been reduced to a single set of veins.

He set his mind adrift, let blood flow in a steady red stream. Arthur Cummings’ face swam into his mind. It was a calm, reasonable face. His voice was the same, stable, solid, matter-of-fact. Frank could hear it very clearly: She’s all alone now, Karen. Angelica’s money will go to her, of course .

Of course it would, Frank thought, for there was no other Devereaux. There was only Karen. Angelica was dead, along with her baby. But Karen? He could not see Karen having anything to do with Angelica’s death. He could not. There must be something else.

Desperately, he took out his notebook and went over the details of the case yet another time. There were hundreds of them, separate, isolated. Blood or money, he whispered to himself, as he turned one page after another.

Then suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at a single note. It was blood, yes. And it was money. But they were both arranged in a different configuration. Money might be gained by murder, but it could also be spent for it. And though blood usually meant kinship, it might also mean passion—sudden, fiery, beyond explanation, and yet to all mankind still the one lost clue.

He was surprised that she answered the door herself.

“Good afternoon, Miss Castle,” Frank said.

“Edna has the afternoon off,” she explained.

She looked at him solemnly, then closed the door behind her.

“Let’s stay out here, if you don’t mind,” she said. “Did you have any more questions, Mr. Clemons?”

“Yes,” Frank said. He took out his notebook. “I suppose you read about the arrest.”

“And the man who murdered Angelica?” Miss Castle asked. “Yes, of course.”

“Did you know him?”

“What?”

“His name is Toffler. Vincent Toffler. Did you know him?”

Miss Castle sighed. “Yes, I know him. The Atlanta art world is small, Mr. Clemons, you can’t help running into such people. A disagreeable person, I always thought, and a bad artist.”

Frank glanced down at his notebook. “Yet I’ve done a little research tonight,” he said. “Toffler hung a lot of his paintings in one of the galleries on Hugo Street. It was the only gallery that hung his works.”

Miss Castle looked at him steadily.

“You own that gallery, Miss Castle.”

Miss Castle said nothing.

Once again, Frank drew his eyes down to his notebook. “I was looking through all my notes,” he said. “All the interviews, that sort of thing. Something struck me.”

Miss Castle turned away slightly, resting her eyes on the distant stream.

“When we went for that walk, you said something about truth,” Frank said. He flipped a page of his notebook. “Right here it is. You said that you were feeling like you were ‘full of things.’ Then I asked you ‘what things?’ And you said, ‘Truths.’” He looked up at her. “Then you said that even difficult truths could be beautiful.”

“Yes,” Miss Castle said, without looking at him.

“Something else, too,” Frank said. He flipped to another page. “You said that Angelica was trying to inflame people, and that there was a danger in that. You said that a person might get engulfed by the flames.”

Miss Castle nodded quickly. “You are very thorough in your notes, Mr. Clemons.”

Frank closed the notebook and put it in his pocket. “You believed that they were lovers, Angelica and Derek Linton.”

Miss Castle’s eyes lowered slightly. “Yes.”

“You were close enough to Toffler to know that he knew Angelica,” Frank added.

Her eyes stayed closed.

“The gallery on Hugo Street,” Frank said. “The one you own. It hung all of Toffler’s paintings the morning after Angelica died.”

She looked at him now. “That was the greatest pain, I think, having to hang that dreadful man’s work on my walls.” She turned to Frank. “I have loved Derek Linton all my life. I could endure his lifestyle. I could endure that. His men did not betray me.”

“But when you thought it was another woman,” Frank said.

“That was unendurable, “ Miss Castle said. “And I knew that she would destroy him, rob him, in the end, of what little he had left. I couldn’t let that happen.” She stepped off the porch and walked a little way out toward the stream. For a moment she stopped, stood very still, then turned back toward Frank. “You don’t have to worry about my leaving,” she said quietly. “I’ll be there when you come for me. I’ve spent my whole life waiting.”

It was close to midnight when he pulled up to the house. He’d sent a car for Miss Castle, but had refused to stick around for Brickman’s questions. There was one thing left to do, one piece of unfinished business. Standing at Caleb’s graveside that day, he had promised he would take care of it, but now, sitting in the car outside the man’s house, he wondered if he could go through with it.

And then he thought of Caleb again, of the chisel rising and falling into his neck, his face, of Angelica’s abused body lying in its shallow grave, of all the bodies he had seen for so many years and all the faces, battered, bruised, of those not quite dead. And he knew he owed it to them all.

He could see a single light shining in the front room, but he could not see any movement inside. He took a deep breath and, when he thought he’d achieved a certain, vague calm, he got out of the car and walked quickly up to the front door.

It opened just enough from him to see a single, brown eye.

“Yeah?” the man said harshly. “What do you want?”

“Are you Harry Towers?” Frank asked.

“Who wants to know?” the man asked coldly.

“Ollie Quinn,” Frank said. He stepped back slightly, then slammed into the door. “And Caleb Stone.” Towers’ body crashed backward and tumbled over a small wooden table. He scrambled to his feet, and reached for the pistol in his belt.

Frank hit him in the stomach, then jerked him up and punched him twice in the face. Towers staggered backward and fell on his back, moaning loudly. He tried to rise, but Frank fell upon him, grabbed his head in his hands, and pounded it twice against the floor.

Towers groaned again, as his eyes closed, then fluttered open.

Frank tossed the pistol across the room, then grabbed his own. For a moment, he wanted to press the barrel into Towers’ gaping, toothless mouth and pull the trigger. He wanted to see Towers’ head explode beneath him, but he saw Karen in the darkness, the rose still in her hand, and heard her voice over his shoulder, whispering Caleb’s words: Not yet .