“I’m looking for something in particular,” Stan said. “A spider.”
The man pushed the curtain back and came through, giving Stan a once-over. “Spider, huh?” He pointed to one that Stan hadn’t noticed yet. “Like that there?”
“Yes.” Stan stepped closer to examine the lines of the drawing. “You do many of those?”
“What are you, some kind of cop?”
Stan studied the man, wondering why his simple question would have led him to that assumption. He pulled his shield from his pocket. “Stan Shepherd, Newpointe P.D. Do you do many tattoos on necks?”
“Newpointe? Ain’t you a little out of your territory?”
“I’m investigating two homicides we had there last night.”
“Blacks?” the big man asked.
Stan frowned. Why would he ask that? “No, actually. Both white women. Why?”
The man shrugged. “You lookin’ at spiders and talkin’ about necks and murder investigations. They usually only kill blacks. They can’t get the spider ’til they do.”
Stan didn’t want to appear ignorant, but he needed information. “They being some kind of white supremacists?”
“You might call ’em that,” the fat man said.
“How many of these have you done?”
“That’s privileged information.”
Stan smirked. “There’s no law protecting tattooer confidentiality.”
“No written law, maybe. But there’s a law, all right, and if you violate it, you get dead. Besides, I don’t keep lists. They come in and pay me, I do my job, and I never see ’em again.”
“Do they talk when they’re here?”
“Some do, some don’t.”
Stan pulled out a copy of Hank Keyes’s mug shot and showed it to the man. “Remember doing one for this guy?”
“All the faces just blend together after a while.”
Stan smirked, reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and held out a twenty-dollar bill. “Does this help your memory?”
The man took the bill. “It’s coming back to me. Still a little blurry, though.”
Stan handed him another twenty, then closed the wallet and slid it back into his pocket.
“What do you want to know?”
“What kind of gang it is he belongs to. The name of it, the code they have, anything you can give me.”
“That’s easy. Why didn’t you just ask?” The man began to laugh, a wet, phlegmy laugh that ended in a coughing fit. Stan considered calling an ambulance before the coughing finally subsided. “They’re called the Slashers, and they’re mostly former military dudes. Hate blacks, and they have to kill one to earn their spider.”
“What about women? Do they have anything against white women?”
“They like ’em.” Amused, the man laughed again, which once more threw him into a round of coughing.
After that Stan got nowhere. Fearing reprisals, the tattooer wasn’t about to give Stan any specific information about the Slashers-where they met, the names of any other members, anything that would be useful to Stan in his investigation. As he drove back to Newpointe, he struggled to make sense of things. Why would a skinhead-who’d killed at least one black person to earn his spider-want to kill two white women? Was there anything in what he’d just learned that supported the theory that these murders were just a drug deal gone bad? Had the Nazi-like group decided to start killing off Caucasian women, or were these murders unrelated to the Slashers? If the murders were gang-related, then he’d have to charge Keyes—and maybe his roommate, too-with conspiracy, as well as murder one.
He was bone-tired. He hadn’t slept all night. Maybe he should get some sleep and let someone else interrogate Hank’s roommate, now that they had the killer off the streets.
No, he thought. Not yet. He wanted to make sure no one dropped the ball. This was too important, and he didn’t want Keyes to slip through their fingers just because something wasn’t done right.
Chapter Sixteen
The funeral services were scheduled for two days later, back to back in Calvary Bible Church, the little nondenominational church in the heart of Newpointe. Brother Nick Foster sat at the big table in the firehouse kitchen and stared with tears in his eyes at the telephone in front of him, on which he had just spoken to Cale Larkins. Cale wasn’t one of his church members, nor had Jamie been, but since the Larkins had no church home, Cale had asked his friend Nick to officiate at Jamie’s funeral. Earlier, George Broussard had made the same request for Martha’s funeral, but George’s request had been natural, expected. From the Sunday they’d joined Calvary, Martha and George had been active members of the small church, and Nick would have much to say about the woman who had so often demonstrated tireless service and devotion to God.
But Jamie was another story. Nick hadn’t known her well, which meant that he would have to find people who had and ask them for things to share at her funeral, good things about the woman that would make them smile or nod, that would give them hope or encouragement. On the phone, he had asked Cale a question that had been plaguing his mind since her death. “Cale, where was Jamie spiritually?”
“Oh, she was a real spiritual person, Preacher,” Cale said. “Really. She was real interested in angels and swore she had her own personal guardian angel. She talked to her sometimes, right out loud. And she wore that cross around her neck most of the time, with a little crystal right next to it, because she said it had healing powers, in case she ever got sick.”
Nick had groaned inwardly. “Cale, did Jamie ever pray, that you knew of? Did she study Scripture?”
“Everybody prays sometimes, don’t they, Preacher?” Cale asked. “She wasn’t much of a reader, though.” His voice had cracked then, and there was a long moment of silence. “I know what you’re gettin’ at, Nick. I’ve been to church enough in my life to see what you’re leadin’ up to. You’re tryin’ to decide whether she went to hell or not.”
Nick was speechless, something that didn’t happen often. Quickly, his mind searched for some type of verbal Band-Aid. “Not at all, Cale. That’s not up to me to decide. I just didn’t know her very well, and I’m trying to find out as much as I can about her.”
“Still…” The silence hung like a cloud over the phone line. “Don’t you think the way she died would have been hell enough? I mean, wouldn’t a lovin’ God—the kind you preach—have mercy on somebody who was…” His pitch rose and his voice cracked. “…murdered like that?”
Since he’d become a preacher, Nick had often wished that he didn’t have to be bivocational, that he could devote all of his time to shepherding his flock. But right now, he wished the opposite—that he were just a fireman, and not a preacher at all. He was supposed to give honest truths to people who asked him spiritual questions, but this was a tough one. The man was in the depths of grief and needed comfort desperately. And Nick wasn’t sure he could give him any.
“Cale, where are you? I’m on duty right now, but as soon as I get off, I’d like to come talk with you, face-to-face.”
“That’s it, then, huh? You do think she’s in hell, but you don’t want to say it over the phone.”
“Cale, I can’t pretend to know where Jamie’s soul is.”
“You know where Martha’s is, don’t you, Preacher?”
“I knew her better than I knew Jamie.” It was a lame, weak response to a complicated question, and he wished he’d studied more, gotten deeper into Scripture this week, prayed harder this morning…
“It all boils down to the sentence, don’t it, Preacher?”
“Sentence?” Nick asked. “What sentence?”
“The prayer sentence. The one where you say you accept Jesus as your Savior. I grew up in church, Preacher. I know all the rules. And you expect me to believe that if my Jamie didn’t say that one sentence some time in her life, that she’s burnin’ in hell right this minute?”
Nick rubbed the tears from his eyes and realized that his hands were
trembling. He closed his eyes and asked the Lord for an extra helping of wisdom. “Cale, the gospel has little to do with a bunch of words strung together. It’s a heart’s commitment, an emptying out of self, and being filled, instead, with the Holy Spirit. It’s not about repeating a sentence. I don’t know what condition Jamie’s heart was in, and I would never pronounce her to be in hell. Besides, Cale, neither of us knows what might have happened in her heart and soul in her last moments.”
“That’s right,” Cale said. “We don’t know.” He grew quiet again, then asked, “Preacher, do you think if I got my heart right, that I could pray and ask God to put her in heaven, just in case she ain’t there, after all?”
“We’re each responsible for our own souls, Cale,” he said sadly. “The only person you can pray out of hell is yourself.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Cale drew in a deep, shaky breath, then sniffed hard, and said, “She was a good person, Preacher. She loved me. She had a lot of friends, and loved to laugh. She was a good person.”
“I know she was, Cale. I know she’ll be missed.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Cale was sobbing now, and Nick wished they were face-to-face so that he could offer the man more than hollow words. Handling needs such as this over the telephone made Nick feel so awkward, so helpless.
“Cale, I’m so sorry this all happened.” Nick’s own voice cracked, and he rubbed his face. “If there’s anything more I can do for you—if you need to get away, I can borrow my uncle’s boat, and we can go sit out in the middle of the lake for a few hours, and think and talk…”
“Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind,” Cale said. “I’ll get back in touch.”
Now, sitting in the kitchen of the firehouse, Nick wondered what Jesus would have done. He closed his eyes and tried to think. Jesus wouldn’t have pulled any punches with the truth, he thought. He would have told Cale exactly like it was. Then maybe he would have taken Jamie’s hand, brought her back to life, and forgiven her sins.
But Nick wasn’t Jesus. He was just a man, and he’d never healed anyone, much less raised anyone from the dead. Today, he couldn’t even provide the simplest comfort. Maybe he was just fooling himself into believing he was called to be the shepherd of this little church in this little town. Maybe he should resign, and just fight fires.
As he always did when his soul cried out, he opened his Bible and began to search for God’s answers to the painful questions that plagued him.
It was getting close to lunchtime when Aggie Gaston got out of her big lavender Cadillac. As she opened the back door to retrieve the groceries she’d bought on her way there, she saw the front door of the firehouse open. Mark Branning hurried out. “Aunt Aggie, I’ll get that.”
They pampered her here, as if she were an old lady, but she didn’t mind. To most people, eighty was old. But most eighty-year-olds didn’t walk five miles a day, or have the entire fire department as their adopted sons. Those things kept her young. She reached for a hug as Mark got to the car, and gave him an extra pat because of the bad news.
“Where y’at, Mark?” she asked in her thick Cajun accent.
“Awright, Aunt Aggie.”
“You okay?” Still holding him and examining his face, she said, “You lookin’ mighty tired, mon ami.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “We’re all a little shaken up.”
“With good reason.” As he bent in to get the groceries, she said, “Careful with dat, now. I’m makin’ a gumbo for tonight—a little lagniappe to cheer everybody up.”
“You’re a princess.”
Aggie beamed and followed him in. As she cut through the firehouse, each of the firemen greeted her with a hug and asked what was for lunch, and she told them just enough to whet their appetites before she started cooking.
Like Aunt Bea in Mayberry, who cooked all the meals for the residents of the town’s jail, Aunt Aggie had a reputation for mothering the firefighters, but that was where the similarity ended. Though she seldom mentioned it herself, it was well known around town that she had been Miss Louisiana back in 1938, and she had held onto her figure and good looks. She still watched her weight and carried herself as if she had an Amy Vanderbilt book of etiquette balanced on her head. When she was sixty, she’d had a face-lift that made her look forty, and now that she was eighty, and looked sixty, she wanted to have another one. But she couldn’t find a doctor who would perform it on a woman of her age—a fact that she considered quite an insult. Despite her efforts to cling to her youth, she had long ago allowed her hair to turn white, but only because it was a pure white that looked glamorous—and because she secretly hated the humiliation of sitting for an hour in the chair at the beautician’s with her hair all pasted on top of her head while peroxide burned her eyes and color trickled down her temples.
Besides, the men she served each day seemed to like her hair the way it was. They told her daily how good she was looking, and she never ceased to believe it. They also complimented her taste in clothing and her exquisite talent for creating fine cuisine. It was the only payment she required. Every day, including weekends, she pampered the firefighters with crawfish bisque, lobster tails, and a million other Cajun concoctions that had brought a little culture into the otherwise boring little firehouse. It had started over forty years ago, when she’d tired of hearing her husband complain about the meals other men cooked in the firehouse, so she had begun then to bring meals so often that they stopped cooking entirely and came to depend on her. They never worried about how much money she spent on the food—she was independently wealthy, having first inherited her father’s money and then made a substantial ground-floor investment in a little company called Microsoft. Besides, she considered this the closest thing she had to a “calling.” Had she believed in God, she would have sworn this was the job he had foreordained for her.
But she didn’t believe in God. She considered herself a fine example of someone with strong moral fiber and a good life, none of which she attributed to church, an institution she considered a waste of time. She proudly boasted that she hadn’t darkened the doors of any church in four years, not since Celia, her great niece-the only one in town who had a blood right to call her Aunt Aggie-had married Stan Shepherd. Still, she fed Nick Foster, Celia’s preacher, when he was on duty at the firehouse, and treated him as kindly as she did any of the others, even though she thought he was probably no better than a car salesman peddling his congregation a weekly bill of goods. Still, she liked Nick, and she was glad he’d kept his day job so he’d have something to fall back on when his proselytizing got old.
As if her very thoughts had conjured him, she found him sitting at the table in the kitchen when she went in, looking as if he’d seen better days. The books all spread out on the table in front of him, Bibles and notebooks and whatnot, didn’t seem to be offering him much help. She stepped over the phone cord and gave him a hug. “You awright, mon petit?”
“I’m okay, Aunt Aggie. How are you?”
“Dandy. I’m gonna cook you some good eats, make you feel better.”
Nick gave a faint smile. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Mark left the groceries on the counter, pulled out a chair, and sat down with the preacher. “Was that Cale you were talking to?”
“Yeah,” Nick said, rubbing his eyes. “It wasn’t an easy conversation.” He looked up at Mark. “He wanted to know if I thought Jamie was in hell.”
“Oh, heaven’s sake,” Aggie spouted. “I hope you didn’t say yes!”
“Of course not,” Nick said.
“Then you told him she was in heaven or wherever it is he wants to believe people go?”
Both men looked up at her, and she realized she’d stepped on some toes.
“No, I couldn’t tell him that, either, Aunt Aggie,” Nick said. “I would never just tell someone what they want to hear to make them feel better.”
She pursed her lips and decided to bite her tongue, though she didn’t kno
w how long she would manage it. “Whatever happened to preachers havin’ compassion, what I want to know,” she muttered under her breath.
She heard a chair scraping back, and Mark appeared beside her, that charm-your-socks-off grin on his face. “Aunt Aggie, Nick has compassion. And he believes the things he preaches.”
“How would you know?” she asked, looking up at him. “Accordin’ to Celia, you ain’t been to church in months.”
Mark’s smile crashed. “It hasn’t been that long.” He glanced self-consciously back at Nick. “Nick, tell her it hasn’t been that long.”
The preacher’s gaze locked on the small Cajun woman. “What are you getting at, Aunt Aggie?”
“Just that all these grande convictions do get shaky when times get rough.”
“Aunt Aggie—you’re saying I’m a hypocrite,” Mark said, with the same hurt-little-boy look on his face he’d have had if she’d spat on him.
She considered him for a moment. He was a handsome man, always had been, even when he was fourteen on the junior-high football team, scoring touchdowns and driving the girls crazy. He had been one of her husband’s favorite local athletes, and now he was one of her favorite young men. “Mon petit, I’d never call you somethin’ that mean. I just don’t understand all the rules, and all the mumbo jumbo. No better’n voodoo, y’ask me. Seems to me at a time like this, when a friend needs a little comfort, you’d just give the comfort any way you could.”
“Just because I fail, Aunt Aggie, doesn’t mean what Nick preaches isn’t true.”
She patted his back with affection, and began unloading the groceries. “Awright, darlin”. It’s just…Cale is one of mes enfants, too, and I hate to see him hurtin’.”
“What about George?” Nick asked, catching her attention again. She turned back to him. “Aren’t you concerned about him and the baby?”