The Psalmist (7 page)

 

Chapter 10

A
MY
H
UNTER'S OFFICE
was near the end of a long, wide, shiny-­floored corridor. Night and day from the dingy brick police building on Main Street, now set for demolition, where anyone could walk in and wander the halls: citizens, criminals, crazies; all had done so at one time or another. Here, you entered through an X-­ray scanner into a glass atrium with four security cameras; a guard called ahead for authorization, issued a visitor badge, and you waited for your escort. Everything smelled of plastic and plaster and new construction.

Hunter welcomed Luke with her professional handshake and led him down the long hallway. In her office, she motioned for him to sit. Luke set his old Bible on her desk. The room had an odd smell, he thought, like french fries.

He took a quick inventory: charts and laser print photos on a corkboard, a timeline with tiny print handwriting. Three computer terminals set up on the desk. He liked the austere aura of efficiency here, which seemed to fit with the directness of her eyes. The only personal photos were of a black and white tuxedo cat and one that seemed to be her parents, standing stiffly beside a waterfall, taken some years earlier. Luke wondered if they were still alive, and if she had time for much of a personal life; probably not, he guessed.

A typed quote, maybe twenty point, was tacked to the bottom of the corkboard:
If you do what you've always done, You'll get what you've always gotten.

“I like that quote.” He nodded at it. “Sophocles?”

Her eyes turned and her face colored slightly.

“Tony Robbins.”

“That would have been my second guess. Sorry.” He
was
, actually, and summoned his best contrite expression. It was, in fact, the sort of quote Luke liked to slip into his sermons occasionally; unfortunately, ­people tended to respond more to inspirational wordplay than they did to scriptural passages.

“So.” She frowned, getting to it. “You think you know what the numbers mean.”

“I have an idea, yeah. The details about her arms and legs helped. Being broken, I mean.”

“Although that was on the QT.”

“Right.”

“Okay.” She leaned forward and clasped her hands on the desk. “So what is five one eight?”

“A Bible verse.”

She glanced at the old Bible he'd set on her desk.

“In the Old Testament, there are only three books with fifty-­one chapters. Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. None of the books of the New Testament would qualify, the longest being Matthew and Acts, which each have twenty-­eight.”

“Okay.” Her eyes shone with interest.

“So, that narrowed it down. I looked up each, and one seemed to fit—­Psalm 51, verse 8. If we assume the
i
was actually a colon, that is.”

He opened the Bible to the page he had bookmarked, rotated it and slid it across the desk to her. Hunter leaned forward, setting her elbows on either side of the Bible. Her eyes found Psalm 51, then the eighth line.

She read silently at first, then aloud.

“Make me hear joy and gladness

That the bones you have broken may rejoice.”

She looked up. “Okay,” she said, her tone neutral. “Tell me about that. What's Psalm 51?”

“It's a prayer of repentance,” Luke said. “One of the better-­known Psalms, actually. It was King David's expression of remorse over his affair with Bathsheba and the fate of her husband, Uriah, whom he sent to war to be killed. He's saying, basically, I was wrong, I sinned, forgive me.”

“King David.”

“Yeah.”

Hunter's eyes went back to the Bible. “This is the same David from David and Goliath, right?”

“Same fellow. Goliath was back in his teen years. Before he went off into the wilderness. More than half of the hundred fifty Psalms were supposedly written by David. Although some scholars question that.”

“Okay.” Her eyes stayed with his. “So, if this was a message, or a calling card of some kind, the message would have to do with repentance, you're saying?”

“Well, that's one interpretation. Of course, it might be something else entirely.”

She read it again, and finally pushed the book back to him. Not quite convinced, Luke could see. “Any idea why someone might've carved the number of a Psalm verse into this woman's hand?”

“No.”

“Okay,” she said. Clasping her hands again. “Well. Thank you for that information, then, Pastor. I'll certainly let you know if we have further questions.”

Luke was mindful not to smile at her sudden formality. “Sure,” he said. “And if I could change the subject for a second?” Hunter nodded. “I do have one other bit of information that I wanted to share. It probably doesn't mean anything, but I assured my wife I'd mention it.”

“Please.”

“I was driving out in the country around lunchtime today, coming back from hospice. And when I got to the stop sign at Goose Creek Crossing, I happened to see someone from my past, driving south. The county's past, actually. Jackson Pynne. Do you know who he is?”

Her eyes filled with a sudden interest. “Yes. He was the developer behind a ­couple of big projects that were never built. Tidewater Landing? Jackson's restaurant?”

“That's right.”

“And why would that be of interest to us?”

“Well, I don't know exactly. I just remember there was a saying ­people used to have around here: ‘Something strange happens every time Jackson Pynne comes to town.' And, of course, something strange did happen this week.”

Hunter held her frown.

“It just seemed odd. As far as I know, he hasn't been here for several years. I think he may still have a few enemies in the county, I don't know.” Luke could see things clicking and whirring behind her eyes. This, for some reason, interested her more than Psalms. More than he'd imagined.

“What kind of vehicle was he driving?”

“Pickup. A Dodge Ram, I believe.”

“Silver?”

“Silver, yes. How do you know?”

She reached for a manila folder, and handed him a computer printout image of a pickup parked by a gas pump. “This look like it?”

“Yeah, actually,” Luke said. “I think so. Where is this from?”

She showed him another, of a man wearing a dark overcoat, pumping gas, a baseball cap jammed down over his face.

“Is that Jackson Pynne?”

“Actually, I think—­ It's hard to tell, but, yeah, it looks like him.”

“Any idea why he might've been here? Or how we might reach him?”

“No, not really. To both questions.” Thinking about it some more. “Why? Where did this come from?”

“Between us? This matches the description of a pickup truck that was seen idling on the church road early Tuesday morning. About an hour before you found Jane Doe.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

She called up a map on one of her monitors and asked Luke to pinpoint where he'd been driving and which direction in which Jackson Pynne was going when they intersected. Luke felt numb, knowing where this was heading. His instincts told him Pynne couldn't have been involved in the church killing, although Jackson's life had a been a mystery for the past several years.

Afterward, they walked in silence to the lobby, as if traveling in separate dimensions. Standing in the atrium, realizing it was time to say goodbye, Luke said, “Still no lead on who the woman is, I guess.”

“Not yet.”

“I guess sometimes bodies are never ID'd.”

“Thousands a year, unfortunately.”

“Could I share one other thought?” Luke asked.

“Please.”

“I just have a funny feeling,” he said, “that if the carving in her hand was a message of some kind, it might not be the only one. There might be a larger context to this, in other words.” Hearing his own voice say it, though, he realized he was just trying to convince himself that Jackson Pynne couldn't have done this.

Watching her watching him, Luke again had the impression that there was someone much older inside the physical shell Amy Hunter inhabited.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

“Well, it's just a feeling.”

“Okay.” Hunter nodded. He felt sure that she was about to say something else, but she just thanked him again.

A
MY
H
UNTER RAN
Jackson Pynne's name through the motor vehicle data bases. Two minutes later she had a registration ID on the truck. She spent the next thirty minutes running public records and motor vehicle searches on Pynne, finding a Delaware driver's license, an address listed in Newark, and companies he owned, or co-­owned, in Delaware, Florida, and Maryland. There was another vehicle registered under his name, a 2009 white Audi, and three cars registered to his company, Bay Forest Development, which owned property in several states, including a town house in Tidewater County.

She saw that Jackson Pynne had been charged with a DWI in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, seven years earlier, and with a domestic assault in Boca Raton in 2006. The assault charge was dropped in a plea deal.

She skimmed through the transcripts of the house-­to-­house interviews conducted on Tuesday by sheriff's deputies and found the two descriptions of a silver pickup.
That has to be it
. Hunter called in an alert on Pynne's license tag. State police cruisers were equipped now with trunk-­mounted license plate scanners that automatically photographed the plates of passing cars. The plate-­readers were capable of scanning 1,800 license plates a minute and checking them against registration records, fugitive warrants, and criminal data bases.

Jackson Pynne.

Pynne with two n's. What kind of name was that, anyway?

Hunter went through the FBI data base and then ran Internet searches on Pynne. There was a sister in Anne Arundel County, or had been, but she couldn't find a current phone number. And there were no active phone listings anywhere in the country for Jackson Pynne. It was as if he had gone out of his way to keep a low profile.

Hunter glanced out at the parking lot, feeling a kick of adrenaline. Ever since she'd been called to the church on Tuesday morning—­
after
the sheriff was called—­she'd felt obsessed with this case. In the middle of the night she opened her eyes and her mind immediately went to work. For the two years that she'd been assigned to Tidewater County, her job was to sift through cold cases and assist on hot cases elsewhere in the state. This was the first homicide in her own backyard. She wasn't going to let it get away from her.

It might not be the only one.

A larger context, in other words.

Hunter had been thinking the same thing, ever since she'd witnessed the crime scene. This was a case with big problems. And maybe the biggest problem was that it wasn't what they thought it was. Everyone was treating this like a local case.
What if it wasn't?

 

Chapter 11

T
HERE HAD BEEN
seven Jane Doe/John Doe cases in a six-­state region over the past month. Printouts from all seven were in a folder on Hunter's desk. Fisch had made contact with detectives in three of the jurisdictions but hadn't yet turned up anything useful.

Fischer was on board with the idea that the Tidewater killer might have also killed elsewhere. Shipman wasn't, although he was too good-­natured to say so. Ship seemed to have bought into the sheriff's theory that Jane Doe had been a paid escort, probably from the Baltimore or Washington area. Someone had hired her, maybe through Craigslist, transported her to Tidewater County, and dumped her body in the church. The only thing that seemed to give this theory any credibility, Hunter observed, was its repeated retelling.

But Fisch had been unable to find any evidence of escorts who'd gone missing anywhere in the region, and no one who advertised on Craigslist matched her description; also, it seemed unlikely to Hunter that an escort would have ended up in Tidewater County, let alone in a pew at the Methodist church.

Four of the John Doe/Jane Doe cases were fairly routine—­a man and a woman pulled from rivers; two women, one young, one old, sexually assaulted, their bodies dumped in remote wooded areas. But the other three contained odd details, not typical in these sorts of cases. Those were the ones Hunter wanted to look at more closely.

In a small Delaware municipality an hour and a half to the north, an arson fire had destroyed a storefront wax museum four days before Tidewater's Jane Doe was discovered. A woman believed to be in her forties died in the fire, among melted figures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Elvis Presley.

In West Virginia, a woman in her late thirties was discovered at the bottom of a 4,000-­foot waste pit four days before that, wrapped in a sheet and bound with duct tape.

And in central Virginia, the body of a man was left in the woods beside a rural highway. He'd been shot once in the chest, but his body had also been mutilated. After he was killed, his lips were surgically sliced off and his tongue cut out.

Hunter saw from Fischer's task force log that Detective Michael Gale headed up the case in Delaware. Fischer had obtained a copy of the case file, then played telephone tag with Gale for two days, getting only his voice mail. Hunter decided she'd try again herself.

F
ORTY-­SEVEN MILES
FROM
the Tidewater County line, Gil Rankin placed a call to Kirby Moss in Massachusetts. He would need Moss for the last part of this assignment, the details of which he was still working through in his head.

“I need you to come back here,” he said.

“What are you talking about, I thought we were done.”

Rankin said nothing at first. Then, “I know you thought that. But we're not. I need you back here.”

“Jesus.”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No, of course not. You need me back there, I'll be there.”

“Right. Very good.”

Moss had been with Gil Rankin Monday. He'd returned to New England thinking he wouldn't hear from Rankin again for months. Maybe never. But Moss had a talent that Rankin needed. And he could help make this happen quickly.

Rankin's arrangement with Moss was similar to his own deal with the Client. When you were called, you made yourself available. You carried out your assignment. You received substantial compensation. You went your way and never talked about it again.

The difference was, Rankin couldn't cast a spell over ­people the way his client did. Nobody could. Sometimes, in idle moments, Rankin still wondered how that worked. How the Client pulled it off. But trying to figure it out was like going into a maze full of dead ends.

Rankin knew that idle time could be the worst part of his job—­thinking too much, and sometimes thinking in the wrong ways. It made him miss his boys and his wife and the good things he had down in Florida. Things he had to leave behind every time the Client called.

One hour after hanging up with Kirby Moss, Rankin was lifting weights at a storefront gym near Cambridge, Maryland. Bench-­pressing 250 pounds, a dozen reps. Going to the edge, using up all the reserves of strength he could summon. Lifting was Gil Rankin's self-­medication when he was on an assignment. He thrived on the process of tearing down muscles and building them up again. The feeling of new strength growing inside him.

He felt good walking out into the cold Maryland afternoon, the fresh air in his lungs, his muscles tingling again. The sky was gray and cloudy over the cornfields, a taste of snow in the breeze. But as he drove away, he heard the Client's voice in his head, as clearly as if he were sitting right there in the Jeep beside him.

Fear has a smell, Gilbert. So does betrayal. A different smell. Two very distinctive smells. You understand that now, don't you? We help these ­people because no one else will. They're considered malcontents and we make them soldiers. But when they turn onto those crooked paths, they become something else. We smell that betrayal, we have no choice. I wish they hadn't made us do this.