The Prophet (37 page)

Salter arrived just as officers with gloved hands were removing the photographs from the front door. It had been more than thirty minutes; other officers had conducted the first round of interviews and then told him to wait on Salter. Why Salter was taking so long was not clear. When he finally appeared, Kent looked at him and said, “I thought it was done.”

“It’s not,” Salter said. His voice was tired. Sad, even. He watched his officers at work and then said, “I guess I’ll need to see if they’re the same.”

“The same?”

“You were not the only recipient, Coach. Photographs were also left for Rachel Bond’s mother. That’s where I’ve been.”

Kent just stared at him. Beth whispered, “Dear God.”

“Her mother,” Kent said, and he thought that he would be sick, those three unfamiliar beers roiling his stomach.

“Yeah,” Salter said, and there was no mistaking the man’s fatigue and sorrow now. “Let me review the pictures, and then we need to go somewhere away from here to talk.”

“All right.”

Salter crossed the yard and went to speak to his team, and across the street a neighbor called out to Kent, asking if everyone was safe. He didn’t answer. Beth lifted a hand and nodded but did not speak either. She wrapped an arm around Kent and lowered her face to his chest and said, “Who is it? Who is doing this?”

He had no answer. He thought he had known, he’d been sure
of it, but the only certainty now was that the terror had not ended.

Salter studied the photographs, said a few more words to the officers on the porch, and then returned to them.

“We’re going to take you to a hotel, Mrs. Austin. You and your children, if that’s all right with you. I’d like to be certain of where you are, and I’d like to have one of my officers with you.”

“Okay. Yes, that’s okay.”

“What about Penny Gootee?” Kent said.

“She refused, unfortunately. She asked us to leave. Demanded it.”

“She’s alone.”

“Yes. We have a car nearby, though.” Salter ran a hand over his face and said, “If you could come back to the station with me, Coach, it would be a help.”

Kent said good-bye to Beth, gave her an empty kiss, and watched as a uniformed officer escorted her across the street to get their children. Salter put a hand on his arm and guided him toward his car. Up and down the street, the neighbors watched.

“He’s dead,” Kent told Salter, as if the lieutenant were unaware.

“Clayton Sipes is dead,” Salter agreed. “That doesn’t mean Rachel Bond’s killer is dead.”

“He did it,” Kent said.

“No, Coach, he did not.” Salter opened the passenger door of his unmarked car for Kent. “In fact, he was at your football game the night she was murdered.”

Kent was in the seat and the door was closed before he could respond. When Salter got in on the other side and started the engine, Kent said, “He was at the game? That night?”

“Yes.”

“How can you be sure?”

“We went through the newspaper’s photographs. They ran two pictures of the game, but they took about a thousand. He’s in three of the crowd shots.”

The rain started again as they drove away. Kent sat in stunned silence. He did not speak until they were out of the neighborhood. Then he said, “He could have been at the game and still killed her.”

“Not based on the scenarios the coroner gave us. Certainly not very likely.”

“You found him in pictures? Why wasn’t I told?”

“That was the FBI’s decision, not mine. I suggested it, and I was overruled. I understood their position, though. We’re trying to resolve a complex situation, and updating civilians is not a priority, nor is it a help, necessarily.”

“But he came to my house, with a gun. He admitted that he had killed her.”

“You said that he did not. I asked you specifically, and you said that it was implied, not stated outright.”

“I know that, but, still… it had to be him, Salter. He could have left the game and—”

“No.” Salter shook his head. “The timeline does not make that likely, and other evidence suggests it is even more improbable. He wasn’t working alone, Coach. And what happened tonight should remove your doubts. Clayton Sipes did not put those pictures on your door.”

He certainly had not. Kent stared at the dark road ahead and listened to the windshield wipers thump.

“He didn’t just show up out of nowhere,” he said. “He had to be involved.”

“He was clearly involved. But he didn’t kill the girl.”

“Then who did?”

“Agent Dean would like to talk to you about that. I’ll let him handle it. It’s become part of his investigation.”

“Part?”

Salter nodded. “You’re a piece of a complex situation, Coach. You and Sipes both. And while it might have seemed like a very
good thing to you to have Sipes removed, it ultimately might be a problem.”

“How?”

“He was a link we needed,” Salter said. “He was someone who understood, and who maybe could have helped. Maybe. Now that’s gone.”

A
DAM WAS IN BED BUT AWAKE
, Chelsea curled on his chest, when Penny Gootee called. The sound of the ring woke Chelsea, and she murmured unhappily and tried to burrow deeper in his chest, then grudgingly moved and opened her eyes when he reached for the phone, recognizing the number.

Shit,
he thought,
don’t call me to talk about it. We do not need to talk about it, ever. Just know that it is done, and take what comfort you can from that. But we cannot discuss it.

He thought about ignoring it, but he couldn’t do that, not to this woman, so he answered, sitting up in bed as Chelsea slid off him and rolled onto her side. He was trying to get away from her, this not being a conversation he needed anyone to overhear, but he thought he’d have time to get out of the room before they began to speak in earnest. He was not prepared for the scream.

“You told me he was dead! You told me he was dead!”

Even if he’d made it out of the room, Chelsea might have heard. It was that loud. As it was, she was at his side, and the words were clear. She grabbed his arm and spoke his name in a harsh, questioning tone. He pulled free and stumbled out of the
bed and into the living room, banged into one of the snake shelves, heard an immediate strike against the plastic.

“Penny, you can’t do this. You can’t call me and say—”

“You told me you’d done it.” She was sobbing. Adam pulled up short in the dark living room, frightened now, wondering what in the hell had gone wrong.

“I did,” he said. He’d feared saying something so damning over the phone, but now, listening to the woman’s hysterical sobs, he no longer cared. He just needed to understand.

“No, you didn’t! That sick piece of shit is still alive, because he brought me
pictures.
He brought me
pictures of my baby!
”

No,
Adam thought.
No, he could not have done that. He’s in the morgue now. I left him in the rocks and the water and he was dead, Penny, I am sure of it, he was dead. I put a bullet through the man’s heart. He is dead.

“He must have sent them before,” he said. “That’s the only possibility.”

“He didn’t
send
anything. He left them in an envelope at my front door!”

This was not possible.

“Someone else did,” Adam said. “I’m sorry, Penny. I’m so sorry. But it was not him. Someone else—”

“I don’t believe you.” Her voice was choked with tears. “I don’t believe you did a damn thing. You lied to me, and what sort of evil are you that you would lie about
that?
”

“I did not lie.”

“Go to hell,” she said. “Just go to hell, you and him both, you belong together.”

She hung up and then he was alone in darkness and disbelief.

For a moment there was no sound but the soft rustling of the shifting snakes. Then Chelsea said, “Why did that woman think the man who killed her daughter was dead, Adam?”

He turned to her as the display light faded out on his phone and left him in blackness.

“Because he is,” Adam said. “He is. He was supposed to be, at least. I don’t understand, someone else had to do this for him because—”

“You know who it was?”

“I thought I did.” He could not lie to her, not now, he had no energy left for lies. Hardly had the energy to breathe. He had finished it, he had made good on every promise, but now Rachel Bond’s mother said that nothing was fixed, nothing was finished.

“How? Who told you?”

“Kent gave me the name. He gave it to the police, and to me.”

Kent saw him,
he thought.
Kent knew that it was true, he was certain.

Chelsea had slipped into a sweatshirt, and she approached him now and put her hands on the side of his face, holding him as if to prevent him from turning from her, though he had no desire to do so.

“What did you do, Adam?”

“I killed him.”

She took her hands away from his face. Whispered his name. That was it, just his name.

“He came to my brother’s house with a gun,” Adam said. “He threatened his family, and he talked about Rachel Bond’s death. He did it, Chelsea, he did it, so I don’t know who gave these photographs to Penny, but the man I killed was the right man.”

“You shot him? Murdered? Just went out and—”

“He had a gun, too,” Adam said.

“You murdered him,” she repeated.

“I did what I promised I was going to do. What needed to be done.”

She stepped away from him, then slid down the wall until she
was sitting on the floor, her bare legs stretched out in front of her. She wasn’t looking at him anymore. Didn’t seem to be looking at anything.

“How did you even find him?”

“I was getting close by myself,” he said. “Then Kent took it home for me. He gave me the man’s name, and I’d already found his half brother. Rodney Bova.”

“You used his brother?” she said. “That’s how you found him? By putting a tracking device on his brother?”

“Yes.”

“Rodney Bova didn’t just happen to get arrested in time for this.” Her voice was soft and distant and impossibly sad.

“No.”

“So you… what did you do? Just call in a tip after you found out he had drugs on him?”

“I did a little more than that.”

“Adam.”
She put her face in her hands.

“I intended to fix that at some point.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, Chelsea. But I will make that right. I always was going to. I just needed him. And it worked, damn it. He led me right to him. It worked.”

“You could have called the police. When you found him, you could have—”

“When Gideon Pearce killed my sister, the police had been looking—”

“This isn’t about your sister!”
she screamed.

He didn’t answer. It was silent for a while, and then he sat down on the floor, too. Not close to her, though. Across the room, widening the distance, staring at her from the shadows.

“They’ll find out, Adam,” she said. “Someone will talk. Bova, Penny, someone.”

“They’ll be suspicious. They won’t be certain. There’s a difference.”

“To a guilty man, I guess there is.”

What could he say to that?

“Can they prove it?” she asked finally.

“That won’t be as easy for them as connecting it back to me was.”

“What will the tracking logs show them?”

“That Rodney Bova went to a house on Erie Avenue where Sipes was staying, and that I knew about it. It will be hard to prove anything beyond that. Possible, of course. But harder.”

Chelsea didn’t speak. Adam said, “He killed that girl, Chelsea. Murdered a child.”

“It sounds like maybe he didn’t.”

Adam couldn’t begin to wrap his head around that. He’d known it was true. He’d walked all the way down to the lake with Sipes and Sipes knew what he believed and he’d never said a word, never issued a denial. Why?

“He was a predator,” Adam said. “Even if somehow we were wrong, and I don’t know how we could be, he was still a threat. He’d stalked a woman for years and ended up in prison because of it, and as soon as he was back out, he began to stalk my brother and his family. He came to their home with a gun in his hands, Chelsea. He was a predator.”

“And so you decided to become one, too.”

“What do you want from me?” he said. “I’m asking honestly. Tell me what you think I should do, and I will do it. Do you want me to confess? I can call them now.”

“I want you to be with me,” she said. “And I want you to be right, Adam. To be the person you really are, not the person you’ve let yourself become.”

“I may need an alibi,” he said slowly. “If it comes down to that,
if they push hard enough, I’m going to need to be able to say where I was.”

“I’ll do it.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Who else will, Adam? Who else?”

“My brother, maybe,” he said.

A
S HE FOLLOWED SALTER DOWN
the sidewalk, up the steps, and into the police station, Kent recalled the trip after the first playoff game, the night it all started. How terrible that night had seemed. How impossible for it to get any worse.

Robert Dean was waiting for them. The agent showed not a trace of Salter’s fatigue. He hummed with the same quiet energy he’d had in their first meeting.
Good motor,
Kent would have said of him if he were a football player. He just struck you as the sort of guy who could run a long time without rest.

“I understand your family is secure,” Dean said.

“They are,” Salter answered for Kent.

“Good.” Dean nodded. He had the notepad and pencil out again. He looked at the pencil and not at Kent when he said, “I’m sure you will not share my opinion after the encounters you had with the man, but I consider the loss of Clayton Sipes rather disappointing.”

“I don’t wish death on anybody,” Kent said. “I want to know what I haven’t been told, though, and why things were hidden from me.”

“You’re entitled to your frustration, but I don’t agree with the categorization. I did not
hide
anything from you, Mr. Austin.”

He was the only one who didn’t call Kent “Coach.” Salter couldn’t help himself, it seemed; in this town, Kent was the coach. Robert Dean was not from this town.