Then the train passed. Carrying with it cargo, wind, noise and possibly acting as a barrier to allow me a more clandestine escape from the bridge. I don’t think anyone actually saw me fire the shots. It was too fast. Too unusual a place. It wasn’t a school or movie theater. And with the exclusion of a few boaters down river, no one was there. No one except the two men in the boat. At least one wore the same boots that made the impressions in the dirt under an oak tree in my yard. He had his chance, but he wanted to play dirty.
The Savannah River is the fourth most polluted river in the nation. And now it just became a little more polluted. As I drove back toward North Augusta, I thought about the text message they’d sent me. I pulled over to the side of the road a moment, put the battery back in my phone and re-read the anonymous text: O’Brien, consider that a warning shot fired over your bow — you continue and you’ll receive the same fate as the girl …
I responded by writing: You chose to ignore my warning. I fired one into your bow. I did it because of the fate you chose for the girl. The girl’s name was Courtney Burke … remember the name that’s going to take your election to the bottom of the river, too.
I was about to remove the battery from my phone when I recognized the incoming number. It was Detective Dan Grant’s cell phone. I answered and he said, “Sean, since all hell is breaking loose on a number of fronts related to Courtney Burke, I thought you’d like to know we hit pay dirt on the partial print found on the ice pick.”
“What’d you find?”
“Down in your old neck of the woods, Miami-Dade PD. A guy was picked up for a B&E, assault and sexual battery. He’s a carny worker with one of Bandini’s franchises on a seven-day run South Florida gig. Rides motorcycles in the Cage of Death. Anyway, the detective was thinking out of the box, ran the prints on the suspect, one thumbprint matched what we retrieved from the print on the ice pick.”
“Dan, tell me the guy admitted he killed Lonnie Ebert.”
“Wish I could. What he did say is he doesn’t remember not doing it. He was working at the carnival the same time Courtney Burke was there.”
“Did he work at the two other carnivals … where the first two murders happened?”
“Thought you’d ask that. And the answer is yes. He’s lawyering up. But he did say he went through hypnosis to get up the nerve to ride a motorcycle in a cage with two other guys on bikes all going different directions. And he said he remembered holding the ice pick, but swears he doesn’t remember stabbing Lonnie or the other two guys.”
“Who hypnotized him?”
“Don’t know. Thought I’d take a ride down to Miami and question the guy.”
“Who’s working the case from Miami PD?”
“Hold on … a Detective Mike Roberts. You know him?”
“Yeah, I do. Thanks, Dan.”
Driving back into North Augusta, I thought about what Dan just told me. I knew Detective Mike Roberts in Miami. We’d worked together on a homicide case a two years before I quit the department. He was tenacious, a bulldog. And now I needed to call him.
I thought about Andrea, how much she’d changed since we were in college. If the dead girl in the swamps outside of New Orleans was Courtney, what did it mean to Andrea, believing Courtney was our daughter? Did she give a damn? Or was she intoxicated with the fringes of power she’d ride on her husband’s coattails? I could leave a message on her phone and say the young woman your husband just had murdered was not our daughter, she was my niece. Would Andrea even believe me? Doubtful. All they consider is what the polls are saying. And right now they weren’t saying much for Senator Lloyd Logan.
I would keep the battery out of my phone for a few hours, my mind now on Kim. I hoped she was recuperating well, hoped she and her sister could share a few laughs through this. Then, as I crossed a bridge over a wetlands, I could see the sun setting beyond the marshlands, the water drenched in ruby merlots and pinks, the cattails quivering under the nestling of the red winged blackbirds.
I glanced at the sun going down and thought about my short time with my mother. Played back in my mind her request for me to find Courtney, and the warning she’d left me about my brother, Dillon. I glanced down at the letter, my dried blood splattered across her handwriting. She’d said that Dillon carried the blood of Cain in his veins. And I remembered what she told me about his father: “Through the years, I discovered he stays in touch with only one person.”
“Who?”
“His father, the man who raped me … Father Thomas Garvey.”
In the next forty-eight hours I would bury my mother, and then I’d find a way to deliver a strong message to my brother, Dillon Flanagan. If Courtney was still alive, I’d hunt for Dillon.
And I would find him.
79
I wasn’t sure if my brother would show up for the funeral. I didn’t know his adult face. Wouldn’t recognize him in the crowd. More than thirty-five people came to pay their respects to my mother. We left Saint Francis Catholic Church and drove four miles to Hillcrest Cemetery through a light rain, skies dark and sinister.
At the gravesite, the rain tapered off and each of the neighbors who I’d met in my mother’s home, two days earlier, stood with me and the others as she was laid to rest. Beneath the black umbrellas, and hidden in the murkiness, I looked at faces. Trying to see if any of the men, all strangers, had a genetic resemblance to me, Courtney, or some of the pictures I’d seen of my mother in her youth.
If Dillon had showed, I wanted no surprises.
I didn’t see the Murphy Village resident in the white pickup with the wide off-road tires. But because he wasn’t at the graveyard didn’t mean he wasn’t prowling in the shadows. Along the fringes of the cemetery, a willowy mist hung around the base of the pine trees like white socks that had fallen below knotty ankles. I heard gentle sobbing amid the dark clothes and umbrellas.
A fiddle player stepped forward and began playing Amazing Grace, a song, I was told, my mother loved. When he stopped playing, a Catholic priest, Father Joseph Duffy, early sixties, flushed face, cotton-white hair, delivered a graveside mass and that was more of a eulogy than a sermon. He’d known my mother, and his affection for her was genuine.
Within forty minutes, they were all gone. Gone back to their trailers and mansions, a dichotomy as unique as their nomadic history. Although, at home, they were known to be as insular and unreceptive as the Amish, these Irish Travelers were there when my mother needed them and they were there, today, when she did not.
I waited for the backhoe operator to scoop the dirt into the grave. Her headstone was set in place, and in a few minutes the backhoe was loaded on a flatbed truck and hauled away, the sound of the diesels fading in the drizzle. Silence revisited the cemetery. I stood there and looked at her grave. It was adjacent to the burial site of Sarah Burke, her daughter, my sister, and Courtney’s mother.
I set flowers on my sister’s grave, and then stepped close to my mother’s headstone. I reached into my jacket pocket and took out a hand-carved piece of wood about the size of a plum. It was the figure of a little puffin, painted black, white, red beak, and matching webbed feet. The figurine was shellacked. Its wings were outstretched. “I want you to roost here for a while,” I whispered, setting the little bird down on the edge of the gravestone.
I stood as the rain began to gently fall. I opened the umbrella, the sound of the raindrops popping, the smell of fresh earth and pine needles in the still air. The desolate call of a mourning dove came from the fog-shrouded trees. I looked up and thought I saw someone standing in the mist, at the edge of the woods, a man standing, looking at me. Was it my brother, Dillon? I felt for my Glock in the small of my back. I just touched the butt of the pistol, ready. But I didn’t sense an immediate threat.