The Psalmist (25 page)

He took the photograph of his wife and sons from his wallet and set it on the table in front of him.
Think about the good things, Gil. The things that are coming.

 

Chapter 43

A
DELICIOUS AROMA
of sherry-­cooked oyster chowder permeated Chez Bowers as Luke came through the front door, following his afternoon visits to Memorial Hospital and Tidewater Hospice. Classical music played very softly from the kitchen, something he recognized as baroque. Bach, maybe, or perhaps Handel.

Charlotte and Sneakers were nowhere to be seen, though. Luke knew that meant one of three things: she was having a great workday, she was having a bad workday, or else she was going to seduce him.

He could tell as soon as she spoke that it wasn't option three. Not today.

“I'm in here,” she called from her study. “I'll be out in a minute.”

“Take your time,” he said.

Luke got a local-­brewed Chesapeake beer from the refrigerator and walked into the living room. He looked through the window at the bay, which was yellow and orange with the sun. Sneakers finally came out to greet him and to collect his neck, head, and belly rub.

“Damn!” Charlotte said, twice.

“Everything okay?” Luke called.

“Oh, crap, I just lost part of a file.
Damn
it!”

“Anything I can do?”

Luke and Sneakers hovered for a moment in the doorway to Charlotte's office. But he knew better than to try to help. Normally, she had the most wonderful temperament. But occasionally she became wildly flustered over some minor problem. The best response, Luke had learned, was to give her space to work through it.

He walked out onto the deck, thinking about his day, feeling grateful for having Charlotte and Sneakers and for the gift of this life he'd been given. Sunset blushed the wetlands, the light sharpening, the air cooling. He kept thinking about Jackson Pynne, wondering what was going through his mind right now.

Charlotte finally joined him, with a glass of wine. The air was breezing up and there were still five or six minutes before sunset.

“Sorry,” she said, giving him a kiss. “I found it.”

“Good,” Luke said. “So everything's hunky-­dory again?”

“Everything hunky-­dory,” she said, leaning against him. “Except we haven't eaten yet.”

“I know. But we can't waste the sunset.”

“No.”

Several minutes later they went in, Sneakers following, and settled for dinner.

Luke told her about his visit that afternoon with Millie Blanchard at the hospice, as they ate oyster chowder and corn bread. And then, to his surprise, Charlotte asked him about Jackson Pynne, even though she'd made him promise not to talk about the case anymore.

“What I heard,” she said, “is that Jackson is going to be charged with the murder in another day or two. And it seems that ­people know about the numbers in Kwan Park's hand all of a sudden now, too.”

“Well, how about that,” Luke said. “Although, of course, we're not supposed to be talking about the case, right?”

“No, that's right.”

“But what else did you hear?”

A sly smile animated Charlotte's face. “My friend Claire, at the Humane Society, told me this. ‘He's capable of it,' she said. But isn't everyone?”

“Capable of it? Some more than others, I'd say.”

“They're saying he might be responsible for these other murders, too,” Charlotte said.

“They may be saying it,” Luke said, “but it's not true.” He wondered if Amy Hunter knew how these new rumors were flying.

The sun was gone now, and he could see lights along the docks at the harbor and the crab houses brightening across the cove.

When they finished, Luke cleared the table. Then he scooped out cups of chocolate chip ice cream for dessert.

“How are they keeping him in jail, anyway?” Charlotte asked. “Don't they say on TV crime shows that you can't hold someone beyond twenty-­four hours? Or is it forty-­eight?”

“He doesn't want to leave,” Luke said. “And no one's in a rush to throw him out. He says that if he leaves, he won't make it to the county line.”

“Very dramatic.”

“Yes. I know. He doesn't want out. He wants police to solve the case while he waits.”

“You want to help him, don't you?” Charlotte said, her pale blue eyes softening as she watched him.

“I wish I could,” Luke said. “I feel bad for him. I think he really loved this woman.”

“Kwan Park.”

“Yeah. I think for him this was a real love story. He wanted to have a life with her. He expected to.”

“Despite the age difference.”

“Despite everything,” Luke said. “Part of it was the impossibility of it. I think that's what appealed to Jackson. That's how he is. He saw it as something real, a real love story. And then it was all pulled away from him. And now, on top of that, he's being accused of killing her. I feel bad for him.”

Sneakers's head suddenly shot up, for no apparent reason. He produced a very subdued growl before he let his face ease back to the floor.

Luke realized after a moment what he must've heard: his cell phone was vibrating in the living room.

“Wonder who that is.”

He didn't get there in time, but saw that the call had come from the Tidewater Correctional Facility. Which could only mean one thing: Jackson Pynne wanted to talk.

 

PART THREE

Violent Man

 

“See, I have set before you an open door, and none of you can shut it.”

—­
R
EVELATION 3:5

“The hunter is taken in his own snare, as the great Psalmist says.”

—­
B
RAM
S
TOKER,
D
RACULA

 

Chapter 44

“A
MY
H
UNTER.”

It was Crowe, calling from Washington. “Have you seen the latest? The AP's saying there may be a connection between Tidewater and West Virginia.”

“I just saw it, yeah.”

“Where do you think that come from?”

“No idea.”

He went silent for several seconds. “If it keeps spinning out like this, they'll have the Psalms thing in another day or two.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because. More than one reporter knows about the numbers now, from what I'm hearing.
You're
not talking to the media, are you?”

Hunter said nothing.

“I mean, not even off the record?”

Hunter didn't respond. She suspected Dave Crowe was into his cups early today and had gotten a wild hair about her deliberately leaking information—­a way of tripping up the local investigation, maybe. She had actually thought about it, but not very seriously.

She considered hanging up on him as she pulled into the marina apartments and parked in her space. She saw the curved outline of Winston in the living room window, waiting for his Fancy Feast tuna dinner. She felt a warm glow of affection for him.

“Regardless,” Crowe was saying, “the detectives you've talked with in the other jurisdictions are letting it out in dribs and drabs. No one's muzzling them, and the press is starting to put it together. How much have you said to them?”

“I haven't told anyone about the Psalms,” she said.

Hunter cut the engine. She watched the boat masts tipping in the early evening mist.

Crowe snorted. “We didn't want this story out there, Hunter. You know that.
That's
why I've been trying to keep it at the local level.”

“Yes, I figured that out.” But it was obvious to her what was happening. Crowe was getting heat from his higher-­ups to contain this story, and he was taking it out on her. “Look,” she said, exaggerating her anger. “I don't appreciate this. I haven't and wouldn't talk to the media. End of discussion. All
right
?”

“All right,” Crowe said quietly.

“Is that all you're calling to tell me?”

“No. In fact, I was calling because I'm told that Stamps's investigator—­Clint Fogg—­went down to Virginia and found a ­couple of things that the state police there apparently missed. Did you hear about it?”

Hunter took out her keys. “No, what do you mean?”

“You didn't know? I thought you would have heard.”

“What did they find?”

“DNA, apparently, and shoe prints again. Tying it back to Jackson Pynne.”

So
that
was why the state's attorney wasn't worried about finding a different result in the other cases? If so, he hadn't even bothered to tell her.
A lie by omission is still a lie.
She felt her heart racing as she walked into the apartment. Winston looked up and ran away, pretending he hadn't been waiting for her.

“What kind of DNA? What are you talking about?”

“A drink container in the woods, apparently.”

Hunter made a scoffing sound. “I've got to go,” she said. “We'll talk later.”

She dumped her files on the kitchen table, poured herself a tall glass of red wine and took a drink. She spooned out half a can of tuna dinner for Winston. Then, as he devoured it, she settled in the living room and began to sift again through the case files. There were enough ingredients there to cook it into something that might satisfy a local jury. Hunter knew that. The argument that this had been a lovers' quarrel almost made sense, except for the bizarre postmortem beating. A jury—­and the Tidewater community—­would probably accept the idea that Jackson Pynne was the killer. But not the idea that he was a serial killer, who'd left behind calling cards. So she needed to show conclusively that this
was
a serial killer. It seemed a simple enough resolution; but simple and easy were two different things. Would the news story implying a connection between Tidewater and West Virginia make any difference? Would it have any impact on Stamps's resolve to move forward? Probably not. She knew that, too.

Hunter wondered who
had
told the reporter about the connection, and decided it had to be Alan Barker. “Barky.” The West Virginia homicide detective whose Red Lobster dinner she had interrupted. Maybe he got off on the idea of being involved in a serial murder case—­particularly one with the potential of going national. She had known police detectives like that.

“Any ideas?” she asked Winston, who had curled up against her on the sofa. She patted the top of his head and Winston made a loud but indecipherable reply.

When the phone rang that evening, Hunter was on her third glass of red wine and staring out the window. Winston snored softly in one of his wicker sleeping boxes. She picked up when she heard Pastor Luke's voice on her answering machine.

“Hi,” he said. Still uncomfortable calling her Amy. “I'm sorry to bother you.”

“Hey, no, I'm working,” Hunter said. The sound of his voice was a pleasant contrast to Crowe's earlier. “I need to keep on this.”

“Maybe I can help. I received a message from Jackson Pynne,” he said. “He's agreed to talk with you. He
wants
to talk with you. I'm no longer involved, of course. But I said I'd pass it along.”

“Great,” she said. “When can we talk?”

“Can you meet him tomorrow morning? Nine-­thirty?”

J
ACKSON
P
YNNE'S W
ORLD
had shrunk to nine feet by nine feet. Just a bed, toilet, and attached sink. Stale air, the sounds of human bodies. There was nowhere he could take his anger anymore, nothing he could do with it. At first it had consumed him, being stuck with it in this box, knowing he'd been outmaneuvered by something he didn't understand. That they had taken everything from him again, and in a way he'd never seen coming. First Kwan, now his freedom. Not even knowing who
they
were, exactly. But then, gradually, he began to see his circumstances as a different kind of freedom; freedom in reverse.

Jackson believed that he could turn this thing around, and trap the men who had killed Kwan Park. That he might even be able to come out of it as a good guy in some way. Maybe even a kind of hero.

And during that long night, as he tossed on his metal bed, listening to the sounds of other men sleeping, he began to nurture a new idea. A redeeming one. The idea began to play itself out in a seemingly endless series of variations, giving him surges of hope. And finally, a ­couple of hours before dawn, it even allowed him to sleep.

 

Chapter 45

T
HURSDAY,
M
ARCH 23

H
UNTER DROVE
PAST
the courthouse, the grocery, the 1960s movie palace, the Blue Crab Diner and Holland's Family Restaurant, the antiques shops and the Baptist church, then into the corn and bean fields of farm country. She was thinking of the questions she needed to ask Jackson Pynne.

There were only two, really.

The pastor's call the night before had felt like a gift, her chance to finally learn what Jackson Pynne knew about Kwan Park's death. And, probably more significantly, to learn exactly where he'd been on Monday and early Tuesday.

She waited for him in the small concrete-­block interview room, reading through the list of questions she'd stayed up past midnight writing out—­more than she'd have a chance to ask. Luke Bowers had warned her not to push Jackson Pynne. “He has to tell you things on his own terms or he shuts down.” This time the conversation would be digitally recorded. Whatever Pynne said would become part of the case against him. Or, she hoped, it would form the basis for a different case.

He came in accompanied by an armed guard, wearing an orange jumpsuit, walking with a slight bounce, as if happy about something. The guard stood across the room by the door. Around the metal desk were four stacking chairs.

“Good morning, Mr. Pynne,” Hunter said.

Jackson seemed surprised from the moment he saw her. Shaking her hand, he held on longer than expected, although his grip was surprisingly weak. A roguish smile etched his mouth as she laid out the ground rules, his eyes roaming her face.

Hunter was used to all that. He was reacting to her physical appearance and to her age. She wondered what he'd expected.

“Okay?” she said. “So we're on tape here.”

Jackson Pynne nodded. And then he began to tell his story, keeping his eyes on her the whole time. Pausing occasionally to give her what he must have imagined were meaningful looks. Hunter nodded at intervals. She could feel him performing a little as he spoke, overgesturing at times. Punctuating his narrative with “as you know” and “as I already told the pastor.” Often the sly smile appeared just as his eyes turned to hers, and she would nod instead of smiling back.

The story ended with his return to Tidewater County last week, and his talk with Luke Bowers, “the only person here I trust anymore.”

Once he finished, Hunter said, “The state's attorney is planning to charge you tomorrow morning with the murder of Kwan Park. First-­degree murder. How do you feel about that?”

Pynne watched her. Still smiling slightly.

“Sir?”

“I don't feel anything about it.”

“But you didn't kill her.”

“No, that's right, I didn't.”

His eyebrows arched as if he were going to say something else.

“Here's their case,” Hunter said. “This is the prosecution's theory: You met Kwan Park in Cincinnati on Sunday night or Monday morning. You drove together to Tidewater County, on your way to somewhere else, probably somewhere down South. You planned to stay in a cottage at Oyster Creek. Laying low. You argued. It escalated. You killed her. You beat her. You took her to the church.”

“No.”

“None of that's true?”

“None of it. I was never in Cincinnati. Or Oyster Creek. I was in D.C. all day Monday, as I already told the pastor.”

“Okay. And they have nothing to prove you weren't. But can you prove you
were
? Where specifically were you Monday? Think about every street you drove down, every store you entered, every phone call you made, every conversation you had. Let's start first thing in the morning when you woke up and go through the day. We need to check out the whole day, for witnesses, surveillance video, traffic cams. That's how we win a delay, and that's how we get you off. Okay?”

The pastor had told her that Pynne's attention span was limited, so she wanted to get this on the record right away. Jackson took his time, enjoying talking to her. He gave a detailed account of what he'd done on Monday: all morning he'd been at his apartment in the Maryland suburbs, watching television and reading. Kwan was supposed to fly into Reagan National just before noon, he said. He drove to a Virginia Metro stop to meet her.

But Kwan never showed up. She didn't answer her phone, didn't e-­mail. He waited more than an hour and returned home. He repeatedly tried to reach her, without success; then, at about eight-­thirty, he received the e-­mail, asking him to meet her in front of the Methodist church in Tidewater County the next morning at seven.

Hunter knew that cell phone and e-­mail records would be able to prove or disprove much of this, although she'd need stronger evidence to clear him.

Jackson told her he rose before sunrise on Tuesday and drove across the Chesapeake Bay to Tidewater County. He idled in front of the Methodist church but never went in. He was sure something was wrong. The e-­mail didn't sound like Kwan, and he knew she would've called if she'd been delayed.. But he didn't begin to understand what had really happened until later—­when he read the news Wednesday that a woman had been found dead inside the church.

Hunter felt satisfied with the details of his timeline. It gave them a number of specific times and locations to check and to run through computer forensics. But behaviorally it didn't quite add up.

“Why didn't you go to the police?” Hunter said.

He shook his head.

“Mr. Pynne?”

“Jackson,” he said. “A lot of reasons.”

“Okay.” She nodded for him to go on.

But Jackson again shook his head and said nothing. Hunter looked at her questions. “A ­couple of weeks ago,” she said, “Mark Chandler transferred funds from a corporate account to a private bank account, then distributed it into four separate individual accounts. More than six million dollars in all. Three of those accounts have been frozen. The fourth was emptied on Monday, the day before Kwan Park died. Did you and Kwan Park have access to that account?”

He was looking at the backs of his hands, giving no indication he'd heard her.

“Sir? Did you have access to that account?”

“Jackson,” he said.

“Jackson.”

“No.”

“Did you know about it?”

“I had nothing to do with that.”

“But did you
know
about it?”

Only his eyes moved as he looked up at her, slowly. “Kwan told me, yeah,” he said. “The day before she disappeared.”

“Okay, what did she tell you?”

“Just what you described.”

“About the embezzling?”

“Yeah.”

“And what did you think about that?”

“What'd I think? It's like—­if someone finds a briefcase full of money on the street. Do you turn it in or do you keep it? It was a test of loyalty, that's what I thought. That's what
she
thought. They were leaving a briefcase of money for us, just to see what we'd do. But I didn't take it..”

“What do you mean? Who was it that left the briefcase of money?”

He shrugged.

“Could that be the real reason she wanted you to help her disappear?” Hunter asked. “Was this about stolen money?”

“No.” He added, “Not to my knowledge.”

“So you're not sure.”

His eyes seemed to fill with anger for a moment, and Hunter could see she'd maybe pushed too hard. There was a contained quality to Jackson Pynne that she was afraid could blow up any moment.

“Did you
know
Chandler?” she said. “Had you agreed to help the others, too?”

“I didn't know the others, but I met Chandler once. He was the attorney who came in the office to buy the stores. We met with him and he negotiated the deal. The others? Never. Was Chandler the John Doe in Virginia?”

“Yes.”

He nodded.

Hunter said, “Why would someone want to kill Kwan Park and why would they want to frame you for it? I don't understand that.”

He hunched forward slightly, his elbows on his knees, fingers clasped, looking intently at the floor. He said nothing.

“You told Pastor Bowers yesterday that if you got out, you didn't expect you'd make it to the county line. Why would you have said that? Who is after you?”

Jackson opened his mouth in a strange fishlike motion. His eyes seemed busy now finding patterns on the concrete. He'd forgotten about flirting with her.

“You also told Pastor Bowers that this person or these persons are after you because of what you know. Not what you did, but what you know.”

“That's right.”

“So you know something about this organization that they're afraid you're going to talk about.”

He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“This was something Kwan Park told you?”

He shrugged, meaning,
Could be.

“Tell me about it. What did Kwan Park say to you about the setup?” Jackson cleared his throat and coughed. He said nothing. “And why didn't she go to the police or the FBI with this?”

“She wanted to get out first, okay?” he said. “We had a feeling that someone had already gone to the FBI, told them some things. She thought it was Patterson.”

“Sheila Patterson.”

“Yeah. And we know how that ended.”

Hunter suddenly realized something. “How did it end?”

“You know how it ended. She wasn't supposed to talk. None of them were. That may have been what ruined it.”

“How do you mean?”

Jackson exhaled dramatically. “Just because—­he finds out about things. I don't know how, but he does. And he thought one of them was betraying him, one of the four. He may not have known which one, but he knew it was one of them. And he probably thought they were talking to each other. So he had all four of them taken out. He considered them all betrayers.”

“Trumble, you mean.”

“Trumble, yeah.”

Hunter decided to try something else. “You didn't do the Psalms to make it look like Trumble?” she said.

Jackson's face went blank.

“You knew that Trumble had an obsession with the Book of Psalms, right?”

He looked at her a long time before answering. “What?”

No. He doesn't know about the Psalms.
She could tell.
He doesn't have a clue.

“You said ‘like vapor' to Pastor Bowers the other day,” she said. “Where did that come from?”

Jackson blinked several times in rapid succession, as if they were now speaking different languages. “What?”

“You said, ‘Right now they're like vapor.' Where did that come from?”

“Oh.” A faraway smile rose to his face and vanished. “That was something Kwan said. She was quoting the security guy. The big guy who used to come around, those last ­couple of weeks.”

“What big guy? Who was the ‘security guy'?”

“Guy that did security for the organization. There were two of them. There was a guy named Kirby, a funny looking guy, and a guy named Gilly, who was his boss.”

“Was Gilly the big guy?”

“Yeah.” He began to pick at one of his nails and made the strange motions with his mouth again. “Not a friendly guy. The Violent Man. That's what Kwan called him. I only saw him once.”

“What was Gilly's full name?”

“Don't know.”

“Kirby's?”

He shook his head. “Never came up. They just started coming around the last few weeks. Two or three times, maybe.”

“Together?”

“Together, separate. Whatever they wanted.”

“To do what?”

“Nothing. Check up on her. Scare her.”

Hunter waited. She could see something else was going on.

Finally Jackson said, “He has a connection here, you know.”

“Who does?”

“Trumble.”

Hunter waited. She wondered if this was just a way of changing the subject. “What do you mean—­in Tidewater County?”

He nodded. “Take a close look at property records, you might find something. His company, anyway, had some property here. Probably still does.”

“You're saying Trumble's a player here in Tidewater County?”

“No, I'm saying he has a connection here.”

“Okay.” She could see he wasn't going to elaborate.

“Who did this murder, Mr. Pynne?” she said. “What are your instincts telling you?”

After a long time he said, “Between us?” Hunter nodded. “The security man.”

“Gilly.”

“Yeah.” His eyes looking up at her slowly. Hunter tried to remember who he reminded her of. Someone well known. An actor, maybe.

“Why?”

“Because he was Trumble's enforcer. Trumble wasn't violent, but he needed someone who could enforce the law. Trumble's law. He obeys something he calls the ‘higher law.' ­People who work for him, he tells them they have immunity from the laws of society—­but not the higher law. And part of his job, at the end, was to keep an eye on Kwan. Because he thought she was breaking some of that.” His eyes seemed to lose focus. “Sometimes, this security guy took things too far, roughed ­people up, raped a ­couple of the women. That's what Kwan said.”

“Did he rape
her
?”

Jackson looked down, tilting his head at a funny angle. Answering by not answering.

“When did he rape her?” Hunter said, feeling a charge of adrenaline. “When and where did it happen?”

“He went to her home.” His eyes suddenly glistening. “Three or four days before she disappeared. Just showed up in the middle of the night.”

“And what happened?”

“It was a night she wasn't working. She went to bed at two or three. Hadn't been asleep more than an hour, I think, and he showed up, banging on the back door, trying to get in. Woke her. Told her that something had come due. That there was no way she was going to be able to prevent it from happening. She'd been talking too much, not being careful.”