Judas Burning (3 page)

Dixon looked back at Farrell. The light of battle was in his eyes.

“Come, ladies, let us sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ “ Farrell launched into the hymn, his tenor leading the women.

The sheriff came up the steps and stopped beside Dixon. He leaned down to speak softly to her. “Giving them publicity will only excite them to more of this kind of behavior.” He nodded toward the church grounds. “With just one little push, this could turn into a riot. I don’t want you to be the match that lights that fuse.”

“I’m not here to make news; I cover it.”

The sheriff turned to Farrell. “You’ve got quite a scene going here, James.” His voice was low, conversational.

“It is a scene designed by God to show His will.” Farrell nodded as he spoke, his focus now on the sheriff.

The woman beside Farrell blanched as a tall man came toward them. His white hair crested in a wave atop a handsome face. He wore a navy blue suit, tailored to fit. Although she’d never met him, Dixon knew instantly he was James “Big Jim” Welford, superintendent of education in Chickasaw County.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing, Farrell?” Welford demanded. The singing faltered to a stop. Welford ignored everyone except the minister. “Have you lost your mind?”

“When God speaks, I listen, and then I act.” Farrell’s angelic demeanor was spoiled by a slight frown.

Welford looked at the women. “Get out of here.” They scurried like leaves in a wind. He turned to Dixon. “Who are you?”

“Dixon Sinclair, publisher of the
Independent.”

Welford’s gaze went to Farrell, quick and deadly, then to J.D. “She’s the new owner of the newspaper?” He turned back to stare again. “This has all been blown out of proportion.” He put his hand on her shoulder in a gentle, familiar gesture. “I need to speak with the minister here, see if I can’t talk some sense into him before this thing goes too far.”

“Are you affiliated with the church?” Dixon asked.

“I’m on the board of deacons.” He nodded at her notes. “There’s no need for any of this to go in the paper. I’ll have it settled in less than an hour.” He grasped Farrell’s arm. “Get inside,” he ordered. “Now!” He propelled the minister through the church door.

Dixon and J.D. were left. He stared at her long enough that she lifted one eyebrow.

“Looks like it’s over.” He pulled the brim of his hat so that it shaded his eyes. “Have a good day, Miss Sinclair.”

Dixon hurried to catch up to him. “Sheriff, just a minute; I have some questions. Have you got any leads on the vandalism of the statue at St. John the Baptist?”

He studied her a moment. “Nothing for print.”

“I need a comment,” she said.

“Religion is Chickasaw County’s claim to fame. There’re eighty-seven churches in the county.”

She couldn’t read his expression, which was carefully neutral. “And St. John’s? Is this related?”

“Only in that Farrell saw an opportunity to get on the front page.”

“What about the blood?”

He hesitated. “Cow blood. Juney Moons found one of his cows with its throat cut. The blood came from the cow.”

Dixon tasted something metallic in the back of her throat. “Who would do such a thing?”

“I couldn’t accurately speak to that. You take care, Ms. Sinclair.” He started down the steps, his gait casual, as if he were out for a stroll.

“Sheriff, why was Reverend Beatrice Smart at the church last night?”

He turned and studied her. “Because I asked her to be.” He tipped his hat and turned away.

Dixon’s
eyes
followed him until her attention was diverted to the dark-haired man, who was still staring at her. Then he turned and walked away.

The fish were elusive shadows in the big, artesian-fed vat. They swam frantically, almost colliding with the sides. As they approached a wall, they swerved at the last instant, darting toward another corner.

Eustace Mills never tired of watching the fish. Some were better than five pounds, others just under two, perfect for church fish fries. He liked the bigger ones himself. The darker, gamier meat made the best-tasting stews. In his sixty-odd years on the Pascagoula, he’d seen river cats that weighed eighty pounds, granddaddy fish with dangling whiskers on a head as big as a man’s. Those were fighters, fish that sought the mud bottom of the river and went deep, ignoring the hook that tried to pull them to the surface.

A fish tail broke the surface, and Eustace straightened. He limped toward the supply of hooks, knives, hammers, and pliers he kept on a picnic table beneath the tin roof of his skinning shed. He led with his right foot, the left one dragging after him. He was glad to be in the shade during the early afternoon heat.

Next to the open-sided shed a stout creosote post held a heavy board where he cleaned fish. The three fish heads he’d left nailed there the night before were gone. The board, five feet off the ground, was empty. The six-pack of beer he’d left on the picnic table was gone too.

“Eu-stace! Eu-stace, honey! Are you on the grounds?”

“Here.” He looked at the table again to make certain the beer was truly gone and not just playing with him.

“Are you busy?”

He could tell by her voice that she was sitting in the middle of the floor. She’d have an ashtray beside her slender right thigh and tarot cards spread out by her left. He could almost smell the dark coffee she drank each morning as she read the cards.

Limping slightly, he made his way across the grassless yard and climbed the twenty-three steps to the cypress camp that he’d built on pilings driven deep into the clay bank of the river.

“I’m goin’ to check the trot lines up the Leaf,” he said. “I got the Chickasawhay earlier.”

“You’ve got half the fish in the river in your vat already.” She turned over a card revealing a man hung upside down. She put her hand over the card and looked up at him. Eustace got the feeling she was protecting him.

“I got to check the lines anyway. You can’t just leave the fish hanging on ‘em. They’ll die there.”

She nodded, looked into his eyes for several seconds, then took a drag off her cigarette. “We need some coffee and some other things. Shall I go into town and do some shopping?”

“Okay.” He touched his face. “I need some razor blades.”

“I’ll be back by five. I’m going to stop by Mama’s and make sure she hasn’t driven Daddy completely insane. She has her massage on Tuesdays. Maybe I’ll have one.”

“Be careful.” He turned and went back down the stairs, past the skinning shed, and on toward the Pascagoula River that glimmered reddish yellow through the dense oak leaves. When he looked back at the fish camp he saw her coming down the stairs. She wore her hair tucked up in a man’s hat, utterly feminine with a red slash of lipstick. She waved once, and he turned to the water.

His boat was chained to a cypress knee. He freed the rusted lock and climbed in. The small outboard cranked instantly, and he aimed the boat north. He’d set his lines some five miles upriver, beyond the fork. The sun was hot on his head and back. He dipped his hand in the water, then ran it through his thick hair.

When he rounded the bend and came in sight of the bridge, he heard music above the gurgle of his motor. He crossed under the old bridge, moving fast and steady. The tip of the sandbar came into view, and in a few moments he passed two girls.

One was topless and sat cross-legged. She held a silver beer can out to him in an apparent toast. “Hey, old man, come on up and have a drink!” she yelled. The sun glinted off a thick gold bracelet on her left wrist.

Eustace increased the throttle.

“Hey! We’re having a party. Come have a beer with us.” She laughed, holding the beer high as she poured it into her mouth, some of it splashing down to the breasts she covered with her hand.

The other girl lifted her head, and brown hair fell forward over her sunglasses. She simply looked at him before she lowered her head.

Eustace notched the motor up, never looking back.

One of the girls let out a blood-curdling yell. “Tell everybody they’re invited to the party! Just a little harmless fun!” she called.

The sandbar disappeared behind him, and he took the fork of the Leaf River. He worked the lines on the west bank, easing his boat among the trees that managed to survive in soil that was more water than dirt. The point of land between the Leaf and the Chickasawhay was treacherous swamp. Not even poachers wandered into it.

Once, fifty years before, Eustace had packed a lunch, stolen his daddy’s best shovel and boat, and deliberately headed into that swamp searching for buried treasure. He had gone hunting fancies—and had almost died in the sucking kiss of the swamp. Now he lurked on the edge, going no farther than the river willingly took him. There were still places the river demanded to keep as her own, and he respected that. He pulled up the line he’d tied in a dying sweet gum, unhooked a five-pound cat, and moved farther up river.

An hour later he had twenty pounds of writhing fish in the big chest that centered his boat. He’d cut one spoonbill free. A snapping turtle, dead on a line, had been flung into the bottom of the boat. Blacks would pay good money for turtle meat. He headed back to the camp.

The sandbar was half a mile away, but his thoughts had already jumped ahead to the girls. They were so young. He knew they could hear his boat motor. Had probably heard it for the last ten minutes.

The sandbar loomed in front of him, nearly a mile of the whitest sand anywhere. Music vibrated off the water, the bass booming in a steady rhythm with words that sounded like another language. He eased the motor back, drifting.

He saw the blonde, basking in the sun and the beat of the music. She didn’t bother covering her naked breasts. She was a bold one. The other girl had her back to him.

It occurred to him, not for the first time, that half-baked, naked girls, alone on the sand, were incentive for a fucking or a fight.

J.D. Horton wasn’t a man who let his demons or the opinions of others govern his actions. He lived by few rules, preferring a code of personal ethics where judgment came into play. There were truths about human nature, though, that he believed. One was that an emotionally unhinged man or woman was capable of anything. Decapitation of the statue at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church was the work of someone unbalanced, someone enraged, someone who had lost control. And that was dangerous.

Beatrice Smart had only confirmed what he’d seen in the gory splashes of blood and the power of the blow that decapitated the figure of Mary. This was not the work of teenage pranksters, as he wanted most of the county to believe. A man had done this. A strong man, and one with a burn on for the Catholic Church, a symbol of miracles, or someone in particular at St. John’s.

What he knew of Father Patrick did not lend itself to warped hatred. Still, it was an avenue J.D. would explore until the physical evidence he’d accumulated from the crime scene told him differently. Based on the blow that had been struck, he believed the assailant to be under six feet. A partial shoe print in the blood was a size ten sport shoe of undetermined brand. Most important, the perpetrator had not been careful. He’d tracked back and forth through the blood repeatedly, as if he didn’t care about concealing his identity, or as if he were justified in his actions.

J.D. jotted down a few notes and put his hand on the phone. Dixon Sinclair had asked for a comment, and he had something to give her.

A knock on his door interrupted him. When Robert Medino walked into the sheriff’s office, J.D. already knew as much about him as his deputy, Waymon, had been able to find out. Medino was a writer for a “very important” liberal magazine that specialized in politics and culture. He was an authority on Central America, and he was staying at the Magnolia Bed and Breakfast, where he had charmed the socks—and possibly the pants—off Ruth Ann Johnson. When Waymon had talked to Ruth Ann, she’d been all a-twitter about Medino’s accomplishments.

“He went to Harvard,” she’d told Waymon. “Imagine that. A Harvard man here in Jexville. I asked him what he was writing about, but he said it was top secret.” Waymon had done a pretty good imitation of Ruth Ann’s breathless soprano. The fact that Medino was single didn’t hurt, either. Ruth Ann had sampled the men of Jexville and found them wanting. A writer would make a good pet for her, at least for a while.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Medino?” J.D. asked, curious about what a writer for a liberal magazine was doing in Jexville, a town with a head count of no more than five liberals.

“It’s more like what I can do for you.” Medino held out his hand, reassessing J.D. “Since you know my name, you probably know that I’m a writer for
Cue
magazine. You’ve heard of it?”

The man’s assumed superiority shimmered like an aura. “What can I do for you?” J.D. repeated as he took Medino’s hand.

“I’m in town on a story,” Robert said, unfazed.

J.D. leaned back in his chair. The man’s brown eyes were alert, almost amused. He reminded J.D. of a boy poking a snake with a stick. “What kind of story would interest you in Chickasaw County?”