Fire Raiser (5 page)

Four

ON THE SUNDAY EVENING drive to Westmoreland, Evan checked in with his office, speaking briefly with the deputy on duty about the day’s events. Whenever he thought back to his days as a beat cop in New York, he wondered yet again how the hell his father had done it: year in, year out, robberies and rapes and assaults and murders, every single day. His old man had ended up with a worn-out heart, an alcoholic wife, and two kids who’d fled as soon as legally and financially possible. As Evan listened to Luther run through the list of towns and villages in the county—with
nada
,
zip
,
nuthin’
, or
zilch
after each one—he tried to imagine his father out here in rural Virginia. Something between a laugh and a cough thickened his throat for a moment.

“Sheriff?”

“Yeah, Luther. Gotcha. Anything comes up in the next few hours, I’m at Westmoreland for the thing.”

“Have fun.”

“Yeah. That’s gonna happen.” He pocketed his cell and drove through the open gates of the Westmoreland Inn, where a sign advised him in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Arabic that he was warmly welcomed and that to assure the serenity of the establishment, all guests will please to turn off their cell phones and other electronic devices. (The little hiccup in English grammar was, Evan assumed, deliberate—one of those “charming” mistakes Europeans made that would emphasize the international flavor of the place—for surely Bernhardt Weiss could afford a competent translator.) The sign went on to explain that should any calls be anticipated during his visit, all he need do was leave the phone at the front desk of the Inn or the Spa and messages would be taken. Naturally, in an emergency, he would be contacted at once. Thanking you for your cooperation and have a wonderful stay at The Westmoreland Inn.

“Absolutely. Just
wunderbar
,” Evan muttered, braking gently as he caught up with the line of cars waiting to be parked. Something in him that persisted in finding this place creepy wanted to use his status to jump the line, swerve off the gravel, and park right in the middle of the pristine expanse of green lawn. He contented himself with the fact that valets did not park the sheriff’s car. Ever. They could point him a place to pull in—with easy access out—but they weren’t touching this vehicle any more than they would Holly’s BMW, even though the Beemer wasn’t the one with the shotgun under the front seat and the locked ammo box on the floor.

As he waited, he wondered yet again what it was about this place that he just plain didn’t like. It was pretty enough, no different on the outside from a hundred other restored antebellum residences throughout the South, with its white columns, wraparound verandah, and grounds landscaped with flowers. Across half the south side of the main building was a ballroom with a thirty-foot oak bar displaying every variety of liquor in the known universe. This May the high schools of three counties had merged their proms into one huge party that was counted an awesome success—even if the bar had been denuded of everything but soft drinks and fruit juice.

Out back, invisible from the driveway, were two other buildings that housed offices, a conference room, and dining and dorm rooms for the staff. These had been constructed from salvage of the old stable and barn. Remembering what it had taken to refurbish the house Lulah now lived in, Evan couldn’t help but be impressed by Westmoreland.

But that still didn’t keep him from thinking it was a peculiar place.

One of the boys on valet parking duty waved him to a spot that had been kept especially for him. He knew this because there were RESERVED signs on wooden stakes in the prime spots, and one of them had SHERIFF on it. Other dignitaries who rated good parking included the mayors or town managers of Flynton, Silver Rock, Azalea, and Prince Rupert. Lachlan slid the SUV into the space indicated, switched off the ignition, leaned his head back for a moment, and wished he could go home to a quiet evening with his wife and kids.

And wondered suddenly if his father had ever wished for the same thing.

“Sheriff Lachlan!”

“Show time,” he muttered, and pasted a smile on his face as he opened the door and got out to greet Elliott Rausche, a local judge who had not appreciated
his
sheriff’s department being taken over by a former big-city United States deputy marshal. Jesse McNichol had been sheriff for so long that everyone in the county knew what got you ticketed, what got you a night in jail, and what got you prosecuted. Evan had a different perspective on, for instance, drunk driving. No warnings. Instantaneous arrest. Add this kind of adjustment to the hiring of a new district attorney who didn’t believe in plea bargains, and the criminal justice system of Pocahontas County got itself shaken up for the first time in approximately twenty-five years. What all this meant, of course, was that the two judges were at the bench eighteen days a month instead of nine. Judge Schaefer didn’t much mind; he was recently divorced and just as glad to throw himself even more single-mindedly into the work that had precipitated his marital problems in the first place. But Judge Rausche’s golf game had appreciably suffered. So whenever he could, he caused the sheriff and the district attorney to suffer accordingly.

Evan knew exactly what lecture he was about to get. Last week Jamey Stirling had won a significant victory in Rausche’s courtroom, quite literally piling up enough damning evidence (gathered by Evan’s department) to make lengthy prison sentences inevitable. All thirty-six kilos of crystal meth were stacked on a table before the jury; all forty-nine padded envelopes, addressed and bearing proper postage, were heaped beside them; all one hundred and forty-two color glossy photographs of various members of the Burker clan cooking, packing, transporting, and/or distributing were displayed. Jamey brought in the receipts for purchased chemicals, the tubs where the meth was stored, the crates and shoeboxes neatly labeled with names and locations of deliveries, and if he could have gotten the rickety old Ford pickup used for distributing into the courtroom, he would have done it. “Overwhelming” had only started there. And it had pissed off Judge Rausche.

As His Honor approached across the driveway, leaving his wife and daughters to climb the portico steps, Evan figured he was about to be told exactly why Rausche wasn’t happy.

He was right.

“Y’all gotta understand somethin’, Sheriff,” began the judge without preamble. “That crystal stuff, it’s worse than moonshining, no argument on that. But it’s a principle we need to deal with here. We been lookin’ the other way on this kind of thing for at least three hundred years. Ain’t no big-city cop or prosecutor gonna come in and tell us what’s what.”

“Look in any direction you want,” Evan replied. “Half that shit was labeled for delivery to middle schools in two counties.”

Rausche stuck a finger into Lachlan’s face. “What you made me do, you with your evidence—which took days to process and inventory, by the way, and hours to present in court, and that’s not a productive use of county taxpayers’ time—you painted me into a corner. I don’t like that. It interferes with my judicial discretion. A little less evidence, fewer charges—that Stirling boy, he really knows how to pile on the counts, doesn’t he? Chargin’ for every piss they took off the side of the road onto some damned protected wildlife refuge! Your way, I had no choice in sentencing.”

Lachlan gritted his teeth. “Let’s see if I’ve got this right. If I’d provided only a kilo of meth for evidence, and Jamey Stirling had prosecuted on only a few counts, you could have slapped their wrists, told them not to do it again, and sent ’em home to cook up more.”

“I don’t much like your tone, boy.”

Lachlan wondered if the man knew what a ludicrous cliché of a Southern judge he was, then remembered what Jesse had told him before his first time testifying in Rausche’s courtroom.
“Short, sweet, to the point. Don’t use any big words, and remember that the judge he replaced was worse. We keep an eye on him.”
The trouble was that Witchly ethics prohibited magical interference with the process of the law. Even if every Witch in the county kept an eye on him, when he sat his ass in his chair, as far as the judicial system was concerned he was one rung down from God.

And besides all that, his eldest son, apple of his eye, was running against Evan for county sheriff.

“Tell you what, judge—the November ballots haven’t been printed up yet, so why don’t you take your name off and let somebody else put up with me and Jamey from now on?”

“What makes you think you’re gonna win an honest term as sheriff, runnin’ against Rick? This ain’t New York, boy. It ain’t even Richmond, where that fancy-ass pansy comes from. This is Pocahontas County, where I been the law for thirty-eight years. And I’ll be the law for thirty-eight more if the Almighty lets me live that long.”

Or if your wife doesn’t find out what you do at legal conventions—or, rather,
who
you do at legal conventions.
Evan widened his smile. Rausche was stupid, but he wasn’t
stupid
—he recognized the taunt, turned his head a fraction, spat onto the gravel about an inch and a half from Evan’s boots, and went to join his womenfolk.

“Well, that was productive,” Evan muttered to himself.

“I’d say predictable,” said a woman’s voice behind him, and he turned to give Louvena Cox a genuine smile. “Politics just ain’t your thing, are they, son?”

He leaned down about a foot and a half to kiss her cheek, then offered his arm. “I leave the charm to Holly.”

“Nice double meaning in that,” she approved. “Where is she?”

“Changing clothes. Chocolate on silk seems to be out of fashion this year.” He escorted her toward the steps. “Are you here on or off the
Record
?”

“You’re just full of puns tonight, aren’t you? I’m here for the champagne and crab quiche. And you.”

“Me?”

“Not to pat your pretty butt—though I’ll manage it sometime this evening, I’m sure. No, I figured out a little something about those church fires. It’s not much—”

He drew her away from the front door and around the corner of the verandah. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

“The Methodist one doesn’t show up on any of the Look-see spells.”

“You mean there’s magic involved in the others, but not the Methodists?”

“Not a breath of it. I got to thinking about what Holly and I dug out of the files back in November—the articles we found using the spider crush. Now, I know damned good and well the barn fire over at Silver Rock in nineteen-and-twenty-four wasn’t dry lightning the way it got written up in the paper, and I know this because my daddy started it while he was practicing a coupla spells. Grandma whopped him for it, too. Same with the article on the fire here at Westmoreland, back when Jesse and Lulah cleaned the place out. If Old Man Hartford hadn’t called in to the Sheriff’s Office to report it, we would never have mentioned it in the paper a-tall. But those articles and a few others were about fires I knew for a fact had magic in ’em somehow. So I checked all the ones since last September.”

“And all of them except for the Methodists . . .” Evan mulled this over. “Copycat? Nah, couldn’t be—there’s nothing to copy. Denominations, points of origin, accelerants—or not—there’s no pattern at all.”

She lowered herself into an ornate white wicker chair. “Lord and Lady, it’s hot. That rain can’t come fast enough tonight.”

Lachlan regarded her in silence for a moment. “Louvena, do you know something I should know?”

“Many, many things,” she replied with a deep chuckle. “Where’d y’all like to start?”

“I’ll let you pat my ass all night if you just give me a clue here,” he grinned back.

“
Let
me?” she snorted. “Now, where’s the fun in that? It’s when they don’t know it’s comin’ that they jump the best. Timing, Evan. Life is all in the timing.”

Because he had long ago acknowledged this as a Truth of the Universe, he applied it to the topic at hand. Seeing his frown, Louvena helped him out.

“Here’s how I see it. It’s August of last year, and Cousin Poppy Bellew figures out three days ahead of the National Weather Service that Katrina is gonna be worse than the Battle of New Orleans and the New Madrid earthquake rolled into one. She and some of her Calvary Baptist ladies head down there to help, because that’s what Poppy’s always done. A couple of friends from Gospel Baptist join them. The Old Believers send down two pickups full of supplies the next day.”

“But every church in the county sent stuff—”

“Hush up and listen,” she snapped. “Katrina hits. Everybody from PoCo gets separated, nobody knows what anybody else is doin’—and the Feds couldn’t find their own asses with both hands and a road map. It’s more than a week after the hurricanes before our folks start limping back to home, bringing three New Orleans families who end up liking it here and decide to stay.”

“The Westlees, the Dumaines, and the Thomsons,” he supplied. Latisha Dumaine had, in fact, become his secretary at the Sheriff’s Office. “Wait—they’re all Baptists?”

“They surely are, and all at Gospel. But I’m not done yet. Everybody makes it back home eventually—except for Poppy.”

Evan mulled this over, too. The last time anyone had heard from Poppy Bellew, she was at a rest stop in Mississippi on her way back to Virginia with three teenaged girls and a thirteen-year-old boy. Her brief conversation with Pastor Deutschman of Calvary Baptist had included no information about who the evacuees were or precisely where she had found them, but before the sketchy cell connection had been lost she had asked him to find host families for children who had been victims of human trafficking.

The shock of this revelation was considerable; Poppy’s disappearance was even worse. Deutschman had done as much checking as he could—not much, in the chaos after Katrina and Rita—before Poppy’s friends had come home with tales of teenaged girls and boys who’d been kept in a New Orleans brothel. Poppy had taken four of them with her; the others had been turned over to the care of local church groups.

Southern Baptists had been on the wrong side of the slavery issue. Deutschman decided neither he nor his flock—nor anybody he could buttonhole long enough to explain things to—would be indifferent to this resurgence of trade in human beings. Allied with most of the other Baptist denominations in PoCo, Calvary had organized a fundraising and awareness campaign.