Favorite Sons (38 page)

I knew that.

When we hit the outskirts of Akron she said, “I can't for the life of me figure out why you are so determined to wreck a campaign on which we have worked so hard, and which we are virtually assured of winning.”

I looked at her in slack-jawed amazement. “You've given me the silent treatment all day and you start this conversation when we're five minutes from my house?”

“I just don't understand why you are so intent on ruining all we've built.”

“I'm not intent on ruining all we've built. I'm intent on keeping a predator, a pedophile, and a reprehensible human being from hurting any more kids. There's a difference. My career is going to be a casualty of doing the job I was elected to do. You don't understand this because it's like a game to you, Shelly. You want to win at all costs. In this situation, I can't do both. I can't do my job and win the election. I don't like it either, but that's a simple fact.”

Shelly Dennison shook her head and drove the rest of the way to my house in silence.

I checked my e-mails from my home computer and picked up my voice mails. There was nothing that needed my immediate attention. I ordered a pizza and took two beers into my office to review the Vukovich file, which I would personally present to the grand jury. Half the pizza and one beer were gone, and Dean Martin was singing of a chapel in the moonlight when my cell phone hummed in my pants pocket. I answered without looking at the incoming number. “Hutchinson Van Buren.” I could hear labored
breathing on the other end of the phone. I leaned forward, pizza crumbs falling off my lap. “Hello?”

“Hey, Hutch. I need a little help here, buddy.”

*    *    *

I pushed the Pacifica harder than it had ever been driven, flying south on Interstates 77 and 76 before jumping on Interstate 277 east and taking Route 93 south to Portage Township. It was a little less than twenty minutes after I had left the garage when I passed through the entrance to the Thimble Lakes. The black Saab was in the carport. A beige minivan was parked along the opposite side of the house.

The door to the screened-in front porch was open, pressed flat against an inside wall. I feared a trick. There was a lump of fear in my throat and my mouth was parched. I walked slowly to the front door, stepping where the cedar decking was nailed to the joists, trying to avoid creaking boards. The door was unlocked. When I pushed it open, the hinges squeaked and plastic blinds fell away from the door then slapped the window; the silence inside the house magnified the sounds. I pushed the door closed while surveying the layout of the ranch. I moved down a small hallway into the kitchen and eat-in dining area where a faint light glowed over the stove. A plastic bag of groceries sat on the kitchen table. A collection of liquor bottles stood at attention atop the refrigerator. “Back here,” came a weak but familiar voice. The linoleum in the hallway creaked under my weight as I made my way toward the voice.

The hallway intersected a living room that extended the width of the house, providing a magnificent view of the lake. I was a half-dozen steps from the metal threshold dividing linoleum and the worn green carpet of the living room when I saw the soles of the shoes, toes down, just inside the room. The shoes extended from a pair of blue slacks that I could see to the crease behind the knees. Another step, two, and the torso revealed itself, clad in a light yellow, short-sleeve shirt that was untucked, exposing a dingy white T-shirt. Blood from the bullet wound in the left ear of Jack Vukovich had created a puddle the size of a dinner plate on the carpet. Gray hair stood erect
around the exit wound, supported by congealed blood and hair gel. Brain matter and blood were splattered in a misty pattern seven feet up on the pinewood paneling.

A couch was pressed against the near wall. Propped in the corner was the Reverend Dale Ray Coultas, a Browning .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun in his right hand and resting on his inner thigh, his left hand covering a bullet wound in his abdomen; blood soaked into a white dress shirt and the top of his khaki slacks. He forced a smile and said, “Quite a mess, isn't it?”

“Oh, mother of Christ, Deak, we've got to get you to a hospital.” I pulled out my handkerchief to inspect the wound, but when I took my first step toward Deak, he bent his wrist, pointing the pistol at my chest. “Close enough, Hutch.” I froze. He pointed across the room to a chair, a battered recliner wrapped in fake leather. “Sit down. We don't need any heroics.” He was weak, his words slowed by the loss of blood. His eyelids sagged and his pupils were dilated. The sides of his face were moist with sweat from shock.

I eased myself onto the edge of the seat cushion. He kept the gun trained on my chest. “What'd you do here, Deak?”

“This is the result of gross stupidity on my part. You know, I've fantasized about killing him for years—years, ever since I was a kid. Just daydreams, you know. You dream about things you wish you had the courage to do.” He licked at his lips. “I'd been thinking about the harm he had done to Petey, me, and God knows how many other kids. I'd been thinking about how he was trying to blackmail you. Then, I got to thinking about the boy he'd just molested, the one you were telling me about, and I decided Jack needed to die.” He held up a bloody left palm for my inspection. “As you can see, it didn't work out quite the way I had intended.” His words were soft, strained. “They taught us in seminary school that God protects the weak and innocent. What happened?”

“There's evil out there that even God can't stop.”

Deak nodded. “Apparently.”

“Where's Vukovich's gun?”

“He used this one.”

“How'd that happen?”

“When I pulled up in the yard he looked at me like I was trash. He sneered, ‘What the hell do you want?' I said I needed to talk to him for a few minutes. I brought in that bag of groceries, you know, like I was on a mercy mission. I followed him in the house. When he turned his back I pulled the gun on him, but I forgot to take the safety off . . . ” He shook his head and forced a light laugh. “I didn't know how to use it. I took it from a guy who was staying in our homeless shelter.” He swallowed; his stomach heaved as he struggled to pull in air. “We wrestled over the gun and he twisted it in my hand and it went off into my stomach. I think he panicked.” Deak took a few seconds to catch his breath. “He jumped away from me. I said, ‘Oh my God, you shot me, Uncle Jack.' And he helped me to my feet. When he did, I raised the gun up and shot him in the ear.”

“We've got to get you to the hospital.”

He rested the pistol on his thigh, but kept it pointed at my chest. “I don't expect you to understand this, Hutch, but there are worse things than death. When a man loses his honor, he has nothing left.”

“That's crazy talk. You've got a lot to live for—a wife and kids, and would you please lower that gun.”

He dropped the barrel down along his thigh. “You don't get it, Hutch. It's me they're after.”

My brows pinched. “Who's after you?”

“The Main Street Task Force. It's me they want.”

“Why would they want you?”

“They know where Vukovich was getting the money. It was from my church's foundation, the nonprofit for at-risk women and children. Uncle Jack there, he showed up at the church a day after he got released from prison. He threatened to expose the whole Petey Sanchez mess unless I helped him get back on his feet. That's how he phrased it. He said he would tell all who would listen that I had sex with him. I was scared and I panicked. I paid him. I shouldn't have. It was like feeding a stray cat. He wouldn't go away. At first, he just wanted a little cash, but then he realized how scared I was. He pushed harder, wanted more, all the time talking about the years he had spent in prison for a crime he didn't commit. First, I drained my personal account. When that was gone, I started siphoning money from the foundation. The board president approached me about it
because he thought our church secretary was stealing the money. You know who he called first, don't you?”

“Botticelli Junior?”

“Yep, our corrupt prosecutor questioned me about it. When I told him that Vukovich was the one blackmailing me, he went white. He wanted nothing to do with anything involving Jack Vukovich. He told me to repay the foundation and he'd ignore it. I'd already skimmed about forty thousand out of the account and I was broke, so there was no way to pay it back. When Botticelli didn't do anything, the board president went to the state attorney general. That's when the Main Street Task Force began investigating. Last week when you stopped by the church and the girls told you I was at a conference? I was in Columbus with my board president meeting with investigators.” He swallowed and took two breaths. “The board president told them he still thinks it was the church secretary. You know who that is? Darlene DiSabito. Remember her? She was a couple of years behind us in school. Darlene's a wonderful lady. They're investigating her for crimes that I committed, and I didn't have the common decency to step up and tell them that I was the thief.”

“You're not a thief, Deak. There were extenuating circumstances.”

He tried to sit up, clutched hard at his stomach and winced. Traces of blood appeared at the corners of his mouth.

His voice was growing weaker, like someone struggling against sleep. “The world finds out I'm a thief and a murderer. Everything will come out about Petey. That will make for some juicy headlines— the ignominious fall of the Reverend Dale Ray Coultas. Everything I've worked for, my lifetime reputation, ends in a humiliating prison sentence. No, thanks.”

“It's not worth your life.”

“Really?” He took several short breaths and swiped at the blood on his mouth, leaving smears of red on his sleeve. “Isn't that why we kept quiet about Petey—to save Adrian's reputation?”

“So, are you just going to let yourself bleed to death? Is that the answer?”

“When I got here I planned to kill myself after I killed him, but I didn't know if I had the courage. Uncle Jack did me a favor by shooting me. It makes it easier.”

“Deak, I can't sit here and let you die.”

His arm was starting to quiver as he struggled to hold on to the pistol. “If you had just gone to the parole board hearing, maybe this all could have been avoided. You could have kept Jack in prison.”

“That wasn't my responsibility. He wasn't in my jurisdiction.”

“Then why did you write a letter to Mrs. Sanchez saying you would do everything you could to keep him in prison?”

“How did you know that?”

“Lila belonged to my church. She was a good Christian woman. She wasn't scared of dying; she was just scared that Jack Vukovich would get out of prison and hurt another child. I told her to write to you. She sat in my office at the church and I helped her write the letter.” A trickle of blood rolled down the corner of his mouth. His voice was becoming weaker, harder to hear. “I'm the one . . . who told her to write to you . . . because you were a good man and wouldn't let her down. ‘I pray that you will be my voice when I am gone.' I remember that line from her letter. It was all hers.” He took several short breaths. His eyes seemed to lose their focus. “She showed me the letter you wrote back. She died at peace because of that letter.”

“I didn't mean to . . .”

The pistol fell to the floor.

“Deak?”

T
en minutes after the gun hit the floor, I called the 911 operator and told her I needed the Portage Township Police Department and a squad on a non-emergency run to 1288 Little Thimble Lake Drive.

“What's the nature of the emergency?”

“There are two dead men at the residence.”

Her tone leaped in volume and pitch. “How do you know they're dead?”

“It's quite evident.”

She asked several additional questions, including my name. I hesitated, but said, “Hutchinson Van Buren.”

Three Portage Township Police Department cruisers, two Summit County Sheriff's Department cruisers, two township emergency squads, and a pumper truck arrived with lights flashing and sirens blaring. Newsrooms all over the area monitor police radio transmissions. When the 911 operator sent out a call of two dead bodies in a Thimble Lakes house, and the reporting person was Hutchinson Van Buren, not a name that blends among the John and Jane Smiths of the world, reporters, photographers, and videographers were soon crawling over the yard like fire ants.

From my vantage point inside the house I watched as television reporters did live, stern-faced cut-ins announcing two men were dead in the Thimble Lakes home behind them and that Summit County Prosecutor Hutchinson Van Buren was the one who discovered the
bodies. Chief Jerry Adameyer had been at a meeting of township trustees when an officer tracked him down forty minutes after the 911 call. He arrived with a red emergency light flashing from the dashboard of the family car, but couldn't get to the driveway because of the congestion caused by the police, emergency, and news vehicles. He jogged across the front yard in street clothes, cursing and waving off questions by reporters with microphones.

“What the hell is going on?” he growled to no one in particular the instant he hit the front door. When he walked into the back room he groaned, “Aw, Jesus H. Christ.” Adameyer received an update from Officer Davidson, then walked to the far end of the room and sat down next to me on the fireplace hearth. “Well, at least we don't have to pay to keep the sonofabitch in prison.” It was a sentiment I heard from cops nearly every time a bad guy met an untimely demise. “Who's the stiff in the corner?”

“A minister from Steubenville.”

Adameyer gave me a quizzical look. “You know him?”

I nodded. “He was a friend of mine for as long as I can remember. He called and asked me to come down, said he was in trouble. I didn't know anyone had been shot until I got here. By the time I arrived he was breathing his last.”