Dark Vengeance Read online

  A reflection moved in the glass from behind her. She whirled. The workbooks flew from her hand like escaping doves.

  Janice stood there, ax in one hand, three split logs under the other arm. Sweat beads gleamed amidst the stubble of her hair. The scar along the side of her face pulsed red and angry. Her eyes were black and small in her square face.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Oh, hey, sorry,” Laura said. “No one answered the door so I came around back. I’m Laura Locke, from the school district.” She bent and shuffled the workbooks back together into a pile. She noted the mud caked on Janice’s combat boots. “I had some workbooks for Bo and Caroline I was going to drop off.”

  “They ain’t home,” Janice said. “Went into town with the others.” She pointed the axhead at the back door. “Just leave ’em there.”

  Arguing with an ax-wielding woman seemed like the worst possible idea.

  “I’ll just bring them back later when Tammy’s here so I can talk through them with her.”

  Janice didn’t answer. She just kept staring. Laura slid away sideways. She felt Janice’s eyes on the back of her head all the way to the car. When she got in, she could see Janice through the windshield at the end of the driveway, ax and wood still in hand, eyeing her like a protective guard dog.

  Laura dispensed with the three-point turn and backed down the driveway as fast she could, happy that her twisted view out the rear window was Janice-free.

  The drive back into town went on autopilot as Laura replayed her visit. Something was out of kilter at that house. She was sure of it now. Nothing that she could pursue officially, there was no box for “creepy” to check off on the state forms. The frustrating idea of bouncing her intuition off Theresa rose. She dismissed it immediately. She hadn’t heard from Theresa in all the days since moving. Laura knew how to take a hint.

  She was on her own solving this mystery.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Treasured Things doorbell jingled a customer’s arrival. Theresa paused her packing of a recent online sale as she recognized Sheriff Barnsdale. A visit from law enforcement was a far cry from the usual tourist or local window-shopper.

  She’d only seen Sam in passing, usually in his cruiser, since he’d been made sheriff. Before his big promotion, Sam had stopped by when he patrolled the town square. Theresa had gotten to know Sam, unfortunately, in his professional capacity as a deputy. He’d arrested her ex-husband Bobby twice for DUI and been called out once to enforce the restraining order during the divorce. They spoke in passing at the Piggly Wiggly, able to acknowledge their acquaintance while avoiding the embarrassing reason for it.

  “Good afternoon, Sheriff,” she said. “Long time no see.”

  “Theresa, you’ve got to still call me Sam,” he said. “The title adds distance between me and whoever uses it.”

  “Then, Sam, here in your official capacity?”

  “Only in my official capacity as a brother. I need a house-warming gift for my sister. She’s moving from Nashville to Brentwood and wants a real-antique something for the new house.”

  “Then you are in the right place. I have lots of ‘something’ just about everywhere.”

  Sam started to browse through the items on the floor. His gun belt creaked as he knelt to examine a rack of old milk bottles. He picked one up and paused in his examination, as if other thoughts intruded.

  “Busy week so far?” Theresa said.

  Sam shook himself back to the present and stood up. “No, not really. A dead bull yesterday. Nothing to make into an episode of CSI.”

  “A bull?”

  “Yeah, up at Ben Taney’s,” he said. He gave a weak smile. “We discounted suicide.”

  Theresa never heard the joke. Her blood ran cold at the sound of Ben Taney’s name.

  “What happened to the bull?” she said.

  Sam flinched at her sudden, intense interest. “Looked like an animal attack, but we’re not sure what type. Nothing to get worried about. Your interest in it?”

  Theresa shared her gift of prophecy with few, and certainly not with law enforcement. Not since she was treated as a suspect when, as a teen, she tried to warn the sheriff’s department about an impending fire at the animal shelter, and days later it burned to the ground.

  “Oh, Ben had just been in here a few days ago, dropped off this donkey harness on consignment. That was beforehand though, so I guess that’s why he didn’t mention it.”

  She couldn’t tell if Sam bought her evasive answer. He picked up an old railroad lantern without a lot of consideration.

  “What do you think of this as a gift?” he said.

  “Does the new house have a fireplace?”

  “And a pool and a detached garage with a bonus room. My sister married well.”

  “Then it will look great on the mantle.”

  Sam dug some bills from his wallet and held them out.

  “I’ll come back later and pick it up so it’s not banging around in the cruiser all day.”

  Theresa reached out for the cash and brushed his thumb.

  Her fingers felt like they caught fire. Searing heat raced up from their tips to her elbow. She smelled smoke and burning flesh. She felt panic and pain. She saw a flash of towering flames. Her hand jerked and she dropped the cash on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. He bent to pick up the bills and Theresa took the moment to compose herself. She wore a tight smile when their eyes met again. He handed her back the money. She pinched the end of the bills and took them.

  “I’ll save the lantern here behind the counter,” she said. “Come get it whenever you like. Free gift wrapping for law enforcement.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be back.”

  As he left, he paused with his hand on the door. He looked back over his shoulder.

  “I was always really sad when I had to bring Bobby in,” he said. “I always thought that you deserved better. It’s good to see you on your feet and all.”

  He hurried out before stunned Theresa could form a response. She started to wonder whether that was a shy attempt at a pass and then refocused on the problem that a premonition had just surfaced.

  There was no mistaking the vision. It lacked detail but it was still slammed full of content. There was going to be a fire, a big one. And Sam would be there. Of course that went without saying. How could the sheriff not be there? Was the pain and panic his, or just what he would observe? Was this happening tomorrow or next year?

  That was the curse that accompanied the gift. The intermittent, unannounced information was never complete, always open to so many maddeningly different interpretations that Theresa had stopped trying to put together the puzzle without more pieces. And more pieces always came.

  Was the donkey collar one of those pieces? Or had it just foretold the attack on Ben Taney’s bull? There was no way to know. It was probably unrelated. That premonition wasn’t half as intense as the one she’d gotten from Sam.

  The air conditioner kicked on with a rumble and sent a blast of cold air down the back of her neck. She jumped with a start and swore at herself for not redirecting the vents after any of the dozen other times the unit had caught her unaware at this spot.

  She put the lantern back behind the counter. Sam would be back. She hoped what was destined to transpire didn’t happen before that.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Yellow emergency flashers pulsed up ahead on the edge of Black Spring Road. The sun hadn’t crested the horizon yet, but there was more light than dark along the road and it was easy to make out the white Chevy pickup with its right wheels in the grass.

  Sam hadn’t even gotten to work before work got to him. He pulled his cruiser over behind the truck and flipped on the lights. The tag was out of Alabama. He ran it through his computer and it came up clean, registered to a guy in Huntsville. He trained the cruiser’s spotlight on the truck. The cab was empty. He called in his stop, got out and approached the vehicle.

  A
young man knelt in the fan of the Chevy’s headlights. His clothes had the rumpled look of yesterday’s selection, his hair uncombed. A deer lay in the grass in front of him. He looked up at Sam with relief.

  “Officer!”

  “Sheriff,” Sam corrected.

  “Sorry, Sheriff. I’m glad to see you. Wasn’t sure what to do here with this deer. Being in Tennessee and all.”

  Sam gave the doe a once-over. Sometimes a smack from a car just stunned them, but this one was long gone.

  “It ran out in front of you?”

  “No,” the man said. “More like staggered. I honked the horn and it didn’t react at all, didn’t even look up. I swear, I stopped before I hit it. Then it just keeled over.”

  This sounded like a load of BS. Sam looked over at the nose of the Chevy with its shiny chrome grill and aftermarket fog lights. No dents or dings. No deer fur. Wonder of wonders, someone telling a cop the truth.

  The man stood up and wiped his hands on his pants. “There’s no report I need to fill out or anything? My truck is fine.”

  Now that was the kind of nervous patter Sam was used to. There was something here to hide after all.

  “See,” the man continued, “I was heading home to work. I spent the night with my girlfriend…”

  Sam checked the wedding ring on the man’s left hand. He crossed out girlfriend and inserted mistress.

  “…and got a late start. I really can’t afford to be late.”

  “No report to make here,” Sam said. “You found a dead deer. You can take it home if you want the meat.”

  “Oh no, no.” The man backed up to the door of his truck. “I like my meat wrapped in plastic. Thanks, Sheriff.”

  As the Chevy hightailed it back to an irate wife in Huntsville, there was now enough light to see the deer clearly. The legs weren’t broken, there was no evidence of impact, but there was something strange at the neck.

  Sam pulled two blue vinyl gloves from his belt and put them on. Twice in three days was more often than he’d used these gloves in a month. He parted the fur around the neck. Puncture wounds. Four quarter-inch holes in a trapezoidal pattern. Farther back on the haunches were another set, four holes in a crescent, with one a few inches below them. If they had been made by buckshot, it had been from one weird weapon.

  He looked down the jagged path the deer had taken from the woods. The trampled grass had already started to revive in the morning sun. Movement in the trees caught his eye. He backtracked the deer into the woods.

  A dozen yards in, he came upon a clearing and saw the motion that had gained his attention. The carcass of a ten-point buck hung, head down, from the branch of a tree. Its broken jaw lay canted at an angle that exposed its pink upper palate. A serrated slit ran from its neck to its hindquarters along the belly. Internal organs lay in a pile on the ground that was oddly almost bloodless. The undamaged organs were easy to identify: intestines, liver, kidneys, stomach. The lungs still hung plastered to the walls of the buck’s empty body cavity. Sam looked for the rope to cut the animal down and did a double take at the rear hooves.

  From the shanks down, it appeared as if the bones had been pulverized. Around the branch, the lower legs were tied in a knot, like two thick fur straps.

  Sam couldn’t begin to understand how, or why, someone would do that to a deer. Now in full daylight, he saw two other deer, both bucks, hung on adjacent trees in the same twisted manner: legs tied above like some sick Boy Scout display, a pyramid of organs underneath.

  The dirt in the clearing had no footprints but his. There were no hints that anyone had been here all night. Whoever had done this had cleared out and covered their tracks long before Sam’s arrival. The deer at the road must have escaped its fate here, at least temporarily.

  Something about the pile of organs bugged him. They reminded him of a pile of seeds scooped from a pumpkin, a careful culling to avoid too much damage. Damage to what? Everything was left behind. Wait, not everything.

  He double-checked the three piles.

  Not one contained a heart.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The imposing county courthouse occupied Moultrie’s central square, a great red-brick cross with a central cupola where all four faces of the clock were stopped at four past noon and put the government on a permanent lunch break. A bronze statue of a Confederate soldier stood perpetual guard outside the northern wing, ready to repel a second wave of the Yankee horde.

  Mayor Maggie McCormack’s office owned the first floor of the north wing. Her campaign slogan had been Big Things for Moultrie. She’d taken a personal lead on that concept and immediately expanded her office into the one next door. The displaced clerical cubicles were crammed into half their previous space. The staff called her Maggie Mussolini behind her back.

  Sheriff Sam tried not to let her imperious, overbearing manner cow him. He reminded himself he was the sheriff (he had to do that frequently anyway), and, after all, they were all just Shaw County folks deep down inside. He wasn’t that convinced. After all, he wasn’t born in Shaw County, and neither was she. He thought that was another reason behind his selection as sheriff.

  When he entered her office, Mayor McCormack was at her desk, typing with the fury of a thunderstorm. Her shoulder-length, dark hair was parted to one side and the tips bobbed in time with her head as she pounded the keys. The narrow, black-rimmed reading glasses she wore whenever she was not in public had worked their way halfway down her nose.

  “Goddamn town council doesn’t know when to—” She cut her whispered tirade short when she noticed Sam. She painted on a politician’s smile

  “Sheriff Barnsdale!” She always addressed him as sheriff, as a reminder, Sam assumed, of the status he owed to her alone. “How’s your day going?”

  “Uh, fine.”

  “Super. Well, mine isn’t. The town council wants to install parking meters, the state wants us to maintain more of US 41 and it’s damn near Donkey Day. And what do I get to ice that cake? The word is that you are investigating animal deaths.”

  Apparently it was true that nothing in the county escaped the mayor’s attention.

  “As a matter of fact, Ben Taney had a cow, uh, bull killed a day ago. And then today there were deer—”

  “Well, hunting deer out of season is a crime, but nothing we are going to spend taxpayer dollars on. We’d arrest half the county and it’s not like the pests are an endangered species or something.”

  “I don’t think those deer were hunted.”

  “But still, nothing like what I heard happened to Ben’s bull. What do you think went on there?”

  “Someone butchered it. Ripped it apart in a frenzy.”

  “Like a wild animal?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “And there you’ve got it right, Sheriff. Ben’s bull tangled with some transient predator. A cougar moving through, a mother black bear. Maybe it dropped dead of a heart attack and got scavenged. Whatever it was, it’s a one-time event. The last thing we need are rumors about some crazed, wild beast stalking the county. Not before Donkey Day. Donkey Day keeps this town on its feet.”

  Sam was about to voice the strange forensics around the scene of the dead bull but the mayor continued.

  “Speaking of which, what’s the plan for fairgrounds security?”

  “The whole department will be on double shifts, EMS on-site for anyone with an emergency.”

  “Post EMS near the main entrance. That’s the only gate that’ll be open.”

  “Only one?”

  “We’re keeping the rest locked this year. And I’m having the fence reinforced this week. Too many people just wander in there without buying a ticket, and too many people bring coolers and don’t buy from our vendors. We need to kill both of those birds with one stone. One way in means no free entry. And a longer walk to the car means our nine-dollar beers look pretty good on a hot night.”

  “But in an emergency—”

  “We’re not having an emergenc
y, we’re having a fair. And the fire chief signed off. You just make sure we have a solid perimeter and visible presence in the fairgrounds. Check?”

  The mayor turned back to her computer and stabbed at the keys. The audience was over.

  “Check,” Sam said. He closed the door behind him as he left.

  The static-laced voice of Gladys, the dispatcher, called from his radio when he returned to his cruiser.

  “Sheriff? You sent two deputies out to the woods along Black Spring Road to check out some deer?”

  “What did they find?”

  “Nothing. Completely nothing. No deer anywhere.” Gladys then added with the touch of condescension Sam had come to expect. “Are you sure you told them the right place?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Laura turned her cart up the aisle of the Piggly Wiggly and crashed.

  She looked up at the other victim in the shopping-cart head-on and caught her breath.

  “Ms. Locke!” Dalton Gowan said. The sleeves of his white, button-down shirt were cuffed, his tie loosened, as if he’d left his suit jacket in the car on the way home from work. A container of ice cream sat atop a few cans of soup in his cart. “I was not looking where I was going.”

  “Well, that must make two of us then.”

  She pulled back her cart and swung right to go around him. He reached down with two fingers against her cart’s front end and stopped them next to each other.

  “You know, I was going to call you,” he said, “to thank you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Luther has, well, brightened, is the best word I can think of for it. Since his remedial reading time with you, he hasn’t fought me every day getting ready for school. Yesterday he told me to hurry up.”

  “He’s having a lot of new experiences at a new school,” Laura said. “I’m just one of them.”

  “But you’re the only one he talks about.”

  Laura was taken aback, to be mentioned ahead of other teachers, teachers Luther spent far more time with.