Beneath a Buried House (Detective Elliot Mystery Book 2) (22 page)

Elliot turned into the parking lot of a clinic on Utica Avenue and stopped. He had taken the truck back home and was once again in the city car. Before he’d left the shelter, the waitress broke her vow of silence, grabbing his arm and saying, “Will Doctor Sullivan be helping me?”

Inside Sullivan’s Tulsa clinic, Elliot handed the receptionist a warrant to search the psychologist’s office. She gave him a sad smile and said they had been expecting him, then she paged one of the other psychologists, who came out and took Elliot to the office Sullivan had used. Before she could leave, Elliot asked, “Could I have a word with you, please?”

She checked her watch. “I have a few minutes. What’s on your mind?”

“How well did you know Gary Sullivan?”

“Our relationship was mostly professional, but we talked now and then. We were friends.”

“Are you aware that he also conducted business out of his home?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Do you know anything about the nature of his work there?”

She shrugged. “He was a therapist. I imagine he counseled patients.”

“What kind of work did he do here?”

“Most of our patients deal with some form of depression. Mr. Sullivan was good at helping people get over addictions. He excelled in that area.” She paused and shook her head. “He was a good man.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm him?”

“As psychologists, we deal with unstable individuals, Detective. It’s all part of the job. But if you’re asking me if I know of anyone who specifically had it in for Gary Sullivan, the answer is no.” She gestured to the desk. “The key’s in the top drawer.”

With that, she walked out of the office, leaving Elliot to search the files of Gary L. Sullivan.

About an hour later, most of the office staff had left, and Elliot had found nothing in the files that referred to Donegal or the work Sullivan was doing there or anything remotely related to the case. He was preparing to leave when the psychologist came back into the room.

Elliot sat at Sullivan’s desk, and the psychologist stared at him for a moment with a curious look on her face, as if she expected Elliot might change, become the person she’d known, the one who belonged to the high-backed chair, if she closed her eyes and wished it.

She handed Elliot a file made of brown fiberboard. “Gary—Mr. Sullivan—asked me to look this over several years ago. He said it was what got him started, in Donegal, the type of work he did there. I glanced at it a couple times, but couldn’t make much sense of it.” She paused, then continued. “I expect it might be what you’re looking for.”

Elliot placed the file on the desk. “People don’t ordinarily do things like that unless they believe it’s important. Did you and Mr. Sullivan ever discuss the file?”

“Just briefly.”

“Would anyone else in the office be more familiar with it?”

“I doubt it. I never mentioned it to anyone. He asked me not to. I’d forgotten about it until . . .”

“It’s okay,” Elliot said. “I appreciate your giving it to me.”

The label on the file read: THE STONE FAMILY.

The name Stone kept showing up. Llewellyn had referred to it in his notes, and Chief Washington confirmed a family by that name had lived in Donegal. And now this. Elliot opened the file and began to read.

Justin, the youngest child of the Stone family, had been a member of the church. Elliot could only infer that the other family members had followed suit. No other names were mentioned. Part of the file seemed to be missing.

Gary Sullivan had been a member of the church as well. But that wasn’t all. His capacity within the institution had been that of family counselor. His observations concerning the children, however, overshadowed all of that. Again with no name, another part missing, the file indicated that a nine-year old child, extremely antisocial, bordered on being a full-blown sociopath. He was, according to Sullivan—and in the therapist’s own words, contrary to popular belief within the psychiatric and therapeutic communities due to his young age—a disturbed and dangerous individual.

The file also indicated that Sullivan had disassociated himself from the church. No reason was given, but the fact that it was noted in the file caused Elliot to believe that it had something to do with the Stone family.

Elliot looked up and gave the psychologist a brief summary of the file’s contents. “Are you sure Sullivan never consulted further with you on this?”

She nodded.

“Do you know anything about Donegal?” Elliot asked.

She looked at the floor briefly, then back to Elliot. “I did a little checking around on the Internet. The church that Gary mentioned in the file. It’s . . . unusual.”

Elliot thought about the waitress, and the thugs who’d jumped him at the old house. “The Church of the Divine Revelation?”

She nodded. “I believe it’s some kind of cult. And I think Gary was . . . I want to say deprogramming, but that wouldn’t be very professional. Let me put it like this. Occasionally members of churches such as the one in Donegal will become disillusioned and decide the wrongs they see happening around them are substantial enough in nature that they feel a need to get away from the group. This is not an easy thing for them to do. Groups of this type exercise a tremendous amount of control over their members, and those who choose to leave suffer a certain amount of emotional and psychological damage as a result of their departure. They call them walkaways, Detective. I believe Gary was counseling people who’d decided to disassociate themselves from the church.”

Elliot closed the file. He’d already suspected the fire at Sullivan’s house was no accident. Now he was nearly certain. “It appears Mr. Sullivan was counseling an entire family of walkaways, a family that went by the name of Stone.”

“I think that about sums it up.”

Elliot stood and shook the therapist’s hand. He needed to have a talk with Reverend Marshall Coronet of the Church of the Divine Revelation, but after his escapades there, unless he could enlist the aid of Chief Jed Washington, he was through in Donegal. “Thanks,” he said. “You’ve been a great help.”

Elliot leaned back in his chair and rubbed the back of his head. After leaving Sullivan’s clinic, he’d stopped by the office. Chief Washington had told him that Donegal was a town of factions, but his explanation of what he meant by that had fallen a little short of the truth. Elliot plugged another word into the search engine. Reverend Marshall Coronet had been under investigation due to his involvement with a subversive church in Mississippi back in the early eighties. After that, he’d purchased ten acres of land east of Donegal. A couple of years later, the Church of the Divine Revelation came into being.

But that was only half of the story. The town of Donegal was founded by Brian McKenna, an Irish immigrant with strong ties to the old religion, a self-proclaimed dark spiritualist.

Elliot wasn’t so lucky finding information on the Stone family. It was as if they never existed.

He glanced at his watch, ever aware of the time constraints the captain had placed him under. He logged off the computer to hit the streets. He needed some information, and he had a pretty good idea of where to get it.

Charles Miller, his old buddy Snub the bartender, wasn’t at the bar, but Elliot convinced his partner to give him his address. He found Snub working on a 1954 Mercury convertible, restored, yellow with a brown top. Nice car. “Not bad,” Elliot said.

 Snub looked faintly annoyed. “What did you expect, to find me wearing a black robe with an amulet draped around my neck?”

Elliot grinned. “Something like that, I guess.”

“What are you doing here, Detective?”

Elliot walked over to the Mercury and ran his hand along the polished surface of the fender. “Nice ride.”

“Something tells me you didn’t come here to talk about cars,” Snub said. He took a rag from his pocket and wiped Elliot’s prints from the fender. “What do you want?”

“I thought you might be able to help me with something.”

“Like what?”

“Like, what can you tell me about the town of Donegal, Oklahoma?”

A look of uncertainty flashed through Snub’s eyes. “What do you want to know?”

“Does the Church of the Divine Revelation have connections to paganism?”

Snub stared at Elliot for a moment, as if he was unsure about the sanity of this whole line of questioning. “They claim to be a Christian institution, though I hesitate to dignify it even with that term.”

“What do you mean?”

Snub made a gesture like that of a roller coaster going over its highest point. “An extreme group of people, Detective. Completely over the top.”

Elliot nodded. “I hear the pagan influence is pretty strong there.”

“Who told you that?”

“I’ve done a little research.”

Snub shook his head. “You’d do well to stay away from that town. The atmosphere there is less than healthy.”

“I can’t do that. My investigation won’t let me.”

This time the look that crossed Snub’s face was burdened with pain. “I met some members of the church once, at a Samhain ritual. They’re bad, Detective. The word
dark
isn’t strong enough for that bunch.”

Elliot nodded. He was beginning to feel sorry for Jed Washington, Donegal’s Chief of Police. “How is it,” he asked, “that an extreme faction such as the church can coexist with the non-members?”

Snub shook his head. “I don’t know. But if I were you, I’d give up my badge before I’d step into the middle of it.”

An image of Cyndi Bannister blossomed in Elliot’s mind, and he thought of the smoothness of her skin and the sweet smell of her hair and what kind of life they could possibly have together; wives of homicide detectives didn’t see their husbands much. He began to wonder if Snub was right. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about,” Snub said. “I knew Brighid pretty well.” He paused, as if admiring the car, and when he looked up again he said, “I’m pretty sure that wasn’t her at the bar that night.”

Snub’s sudden change of course jarred Elliot. “What are you trying to say?”

“She looked the part all right, but the way she moved and the sound of her voice”—he shook his head—“I don’t know who that was who left with the guy you were looking for, but it wasn’t Brighid McAlister.”

“Thanks for the information,” Elliot said. As he made his way back to the car, a feeling of despair began to churn in his gut. Every new lead sent him in a different direction, and he was running out of time.

On top of that, his phone was ringing.

The caller identified himself as Franklin Taylor, the old man who’d dropped the note in Elliot’s lap at the diner.

Franklin Taylor handed Elliot a cup of coffee, then sat the pot back on the grill, which had come from an old refrigerator and now sat atop a circle of rocks that surrounded a fire pit the old man had constructed. Elliot had found Franklin’s place, a small cabin constructed of plywood and two-by-fours, just like the old man had said, about three miles out of town on a hill overlooking the cemetery, a forlorn-looking area surrounded by a rock and wrought iron fence.

He pulled the plastic chair Taylor had provided closer to the fire. It was starting to get dark, which intensified the chill in the air, but the old man had not invited him inside. Elliot figured it was just as well.

The odor of smoke from the fire filtered through Elliot’s senses as he sipped the strong coffee. “What can you tell me about Gary Sullivan?”

Franklin Taylor sat on a stump next to Elliot. “I seen somebody messing around his house last night.”

“Do you know who it was?”

He shook his head. “Too dark. And I wasn’t what you’d call real close, but I seen them all right, peeking in the windows and looking around, like they was worried somebody might see what they’s up to.”

“Do you remember what time that was?”

“I don’t pay much attention to time.” Orange sparks snapped and crackled in the air as the old man stirred the fire. “I just know what I saw.”

“So you’re telling me that you think someone deliberately set fire to Sullivan’s house?”

“Yes, sir. That’s what happened all right.”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“’Cause Mr. Sullivan was getting people out of that church, helping them get their heads straight, and make their own decision. That didn’t set well with Reverend Coronet.”

“But why now? Hadn’t Sullivan been doing that for a while?”

The sound of a car coming up the gravel road preceded a beam of light that stabbed through the trees, but the road was above Franklin’s camp, and the light missed it. Elliot knew now why the old guy had chosen that spot.

“It’s kind of like politics around here,” Franklin Taylor said. “You get dirt on somebody, but you afraid to use it ’cause you don’t know who got dirt on you. Reverend Coronet knew Mr. Sullivan had dangerous stuff in his files. He just didn’t know how much or what kind. It all runs smooth, see, until somebody fools around and tips the scales too much.” He paused and shook his head. “I knew it was going to come to a boil one of these days. You can’t hide stuff like that forever, no, sir. Sooner or later, somebody going to say something they shouldn’t, and there you go. I kind of figured that’s why you was here.”

  “I appreciate your help with this,” Elliot said, “but I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to tell me.”

The old man pointed to his shack. “I try to find shelter where I can. If it gets to raining too hard, or the wind kicks up too much, sometimes I go down to them old houses, you know, where you was looking for me earlier.”

Elliot nodded, but he still wasn’t following.

“I used to live there. That was my home.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but I still don’t understand.”

The old man took a swig of whatever was in his cup. Elliot didn’t think it was coffee. “There used to be another house a mile or so down the road from there. I never could stay there, though, and nobody else could neither, not even the vagrants who stumble through town now and then. They steered clear of that place ’cause all you had to do was get close to feel something wasn’t right about it. Finally the city just tore it down, bulldozed what was left right into the ground.”