Drowning Barbie Read online

  “I don’t care. He could have done us a favor and ignored his scruples.”

  “He could have, but let’s face it, he knew neither of us would ever darken his door again except for an occasional drop-in for someone else’s wedding or funeral. We are not members of his congregation, never will be, and I guess he didn’t want to turn his church into an East Coast version of the Budding Rose Wedding Chapel.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “Not in so many words, no, but that was the gist.”

  “I don’t care, he could have.”

  “If he’d asked you to put on a mock graduation ceremony and award him an honorary degree to help him be elected bishop, would you have done it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Honorary doctorates are earned by a lifetime of scholarship or…Oh, crap. I get it. Okay, now what do we do?”

  “We have two choices. We can try other churches—Rabbi Shusterman will give us the same lecture, by the way—or we can cowboy up, tell the truth, and throw the town a party.”

  “Cowboy up?”

  “Okay, cowgirl up, bite the bullet, face the music, be the man—”

  “I get it. Right. This weekend, we will go up to the A-frame and start writing guest lists. Call your dad and ask if he can delay lunch an hour or so. Sunday, we’ll drive back here at noon, pick up my mother, cow-person up, and bite the music.”

  “Nicely put. How about some lunch?”

  “As long as you really mean lunch and are not angling for something more physical. I have work to do. The board meets this afternoon and my spies tell me one or two of them have issues.”

  “Issues? What kind of issues? And I did mean lunch as in eating food and drinking liquids.”

  “Good, find us a place where we can sit, bitch about the sanctimoniousness of The Reverend Fisher, repent of it, eat a sandwich or a salad, and discuss the board’s issues.”

  “I know just the place.”

  ***

  Blake Fisher, the object of Ike and Ruth’s annoyance, did not think of himself as particularly sanctimonious nor did he believe he could be fairly described as either rigid or unsympathetic. But he had lately begun to resent and then react to the increasing secularization of society in general and the church in particular. It was one thing to minimize the forms of worship as “seeker churches” did in order to help younger people find a comfortable, if shallow, spirituality. You had to start them off somewhere. But, it was another thing entirely to jettison the substance with the forms in order to be politically correct or make people comfortable in their disbelief. Add to that, this business that Ike and Ruth wanted. Why do people who have no religious grounding or interest think they need a church wedding? Every May he turned away at least four couples who asked to “rent his church.” He really did like Ike and Ruth, respected their position, and he wished them well, but if he bent the rules for them, he’d have to do it for everyone and he did not want to be known as the “Marrying Sam” of the Shenandoah Valley.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a soft knock on his door. His secretary poked her head in and said there was a young woman waiting in the church who wanted to speak to him.

  “In the church? Why there and not in the office?”

  “She didn’t say. Shall I call someone…ask the sheriff to come back?”

  “Ask the— Why would I need the sheriff?”

  “She looks sort of scruffy. I think she’s a homeless person here to hit you up for money. You know how those people are.”

  “No, Dolores, I don’t know anything of the sort.”

  Dolores Manfred was a temp. Happily so. A church needed a secretary who shared at least some basic Christian qualities, and bigotry wasn’t one of them.

  “I’ll talk to her. If she tries to attack me, you’ll be the first to hear me scream.”

  Dolores huffed back to her office.

  Blake’s office gave way to a small room that served as the sacristy and then to the church nave. He stepped through the oak door and glanced around. A figure in a faded hoodie sat slumped over in the front pew. She was only twenty feet away and the hood nearly covered her face, but Blake could see she’d been crying.

  “Mrs. Manfred said you wanted to see me?”

  The girl started. Blake would have sworn she’d cringed at the sound of his voice.

  “I don’t know. See, I don’t, you know, go to church much. Is this a Catholic church? I saw the little statues on the walls with the numbers and figured it had to be.”

  “You saw the Stations of the Cross. They are not necessarily Catholic with a capital C. Other denominations use the stations on occasion as well.”

  “Oh. So you’re not, like, Catholic.”

  “I am catholic with a lower case C, not Roman, if I take your meaning.”

  “What?”

  Blake realized a lecture on catholicity and its many inter-pretations would not be useful at the moment. “I assume you are not a Roman Catholic, Miss. Why did you ask? Do you want to go to a Catholic church, or is there something else?”

  “A guy I used to know…see, one time he tried to fix me, but couldn’t or something. He said I should confess to a priest and then I would be okay with God.”

  “You want to make a confession?”

  “I guess. Will I be okay with God if I do? I’ve been in some pretty bad shit…sorry, I forgot. There, you see what I mean? I can’t even talk to a preacher without pissing off God. Sorry.”

  “God has heard it all before. If you wish, I can hear your confession. Or, if you’d rather, I can tell you how to find a Catholic church, or you can sit here as long as you like and talk to God yourself.”

  “I tried that. It don’t work, somehow I can’t, like, get connected. That’s why I came here. You’re allowed to do that stuff? I mean you’re a priest and all?”

  “If by ‘stuff’ you mean hear your confession, I can, and if you want me to, I will. Does anybody know you’re here?”

  The girl started again and gave him a look he would have described as frightened—except why would that question scare her? Unless she was on the run.

  “Yeah. I told my…I told the people I am staying with about it, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “They’re not, like, church people. I don’t think they’d get it, so I said I wanted to take a little walk.”

  “Okay. I don’t want to be accused of misleading anybody. So, yes, I can hear your confession.”

  The girl frowned and scrunched up her face. “I don’t know. Aren’t there rules or something about that?”

  “Probably, but that would be someone else’s problem. Here’s the deal. I will listen to you. Anything you say will be confidential. You know what the ‘Seal of the Confessional’ is?”

  “You can’t tell the cops?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “You know I’m crazy?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Like if I let go for even a minute, I lose it. Like, I am hanging on to being normal by my fingernails.”

  Blake glanced at the girl’s hands and saw little evidence of nails. She had chewed them to the quick.

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s like the shit…the life I was into back in the day. One doc who saw me said I’m ‘chemically imbalanced’ from back then, like when I was born or something. Hey, if it’s not something you can do, you know—”

  “It’s okay. Do you have a name?”

  “Yeah, but not today. Maybe I can say it later, but I better not yet. Is that part of the confessing? I gotta tell you my name?’

  “No, not a part. God knows you. That’s enough for now.”

  The girl scratched her arm and studied the carpet. Blake noted that there did not seem to be any needle marks on it. A good sign.

  “Okay. What do I do now?”
r />   Blake handed her a prayer book. “Read the pages I’ve marked with a ribbon. When you’re ready, just tell me what’s going on.”

  Blake watched as the girl read the pages he’d indicated. Her lips moved as she tracked the words. She looked up, her expression a question mark. Blake motioned her to kneel at the altar rail. He sat in a chair on the other side at a right angle, facing away from her and staring at the wall to her left. Twenty minutes later, when she’d finished, he gave her absolution. He assured her he would not talk to the police. He understood why she might not want to, but that she should. She mumbled something about it being part of her problem, shook her head and left. He didn’t know if she felt better. He knew he didn’t. He returned to his office furious at a society that allowed people to do terrible things to their children. He still did not know her name.

  He wanted to weep.

  Chapter Nine

  Tom Wexler had been hired as the county’s newest medical examiner a little over two months earlier. He had not yet had a chance to assess the various actors in the area. Ike Schwartz especially seemed a puzzle to him. Half the time Ike sounded like one of the good ole boys, and the rest of the time he could pass for a faculty member from the local university. Tom preferred his cops to be slow and respectful and uncomplicated. Schwartz was certainly not slow and the respectful part was still up for grabs. He’d think about the complicated bit. He knew Schwartz had a story, but beyond that, little else. He’d had heard rumors but discounted them. Why would an ex-CIA agent become a small-town sheriff? He couldn’t think of any reason, and with big-city wisdom on his side, he’d dismissed the thought.

  Before moving to the Shenandoah Valley, Tom had served as assistant ME in Detroit, which at one time held the dubious title of Murder Capital of the World. That honor now rested with Juarez, Mexico, or Honduras. The honor seemed to have become a moving target. Tom believed the correct answer to the question of what city should bear the dubious title is Cabot Cove, but he received only a blank stare when he said so. How soon they forget. He also found that the rural pace of western Virginia took some getting used to. His desk, when he’d arrived, faced a window. He’d had it turned one hundred and eighty degrees after two days on the job. The valley’s lush scenery and the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains had become a major distraction. Now he sat facing an orange-yellow-glazed brick wall adorned with official-looking paper Scotch-taped to its surface.

  He rifled through the papers on his reoriented desk and stared at a blue computer screen. He pulled up the newly digitalized dental record he’d constructed of the dead man found in the woods who now occupied a drawer in his morgue. He would send the chart to the registry. If he were lucky, he might have an ID back in a few days.

  It would be the first time he’d tried this—for him—relatively new technology, and he had no idea how well it would work, if at all. But he’d been assured at the recent forensic conference that if the subject had a dental record on file with the National Dental Imaging/Information Repository, an ID could be made. All this assumed that he’d correctly translated the dental information into the computer and that the dead man’s record had found his way into the system at some time—a missing person, a perp. At the very least, the chart could confirm an identity. He compared the chart with the X-rays made. Satisfied that the chart correctly represented the teeth and that he’d done what he could; he punched the “send” button and sent the data sailing off through cyberspace to the NDI/IR and the FBI.

  Next, he turned his attention to the toxicology screen made on the dead woman. No surprises there. Her bloodstream could have been distilled and sold as a one hundred-proof methamphetamine-alcohol tonic. He shook his head. Whoever clonked the old woman on the head after stabbing her could have saved time and a murder charge if he or she had waited another week. No one could survive much longer with titers of drugs and booze as high as those found in Ethyl Smut. Of course, druggies did have an amazing resilience to things that would kill an ordinary person. Somehow Darwin’s theory of natural selection didn’t work in the drug world. First-timers and the chronically stupid would frequently succumb on their first or second foray into that dark world, but hard-core stoners seemed indestructible. Then, just when it appeared they had super powers, their personal Kryptonite locked on and they imploded.

  He closed the toxicology file and sorted through the rest of the tech’s findings—fibers, clothing, estimates of the weapon used to stab her. Not much to work with. Most of what he had would confirm a killer, or method, but not lead to him or her. He envied those TV characters that could identify pollen from Patagonia with a click of the mouse, or clinch the ID of a killer by running a DNA test in twenty minutes on a sample of gummy bears taken from a garbage can. With that thought in mind, he remembered he wanted to order a DNA screen on the tissue scrap from the skeletal remains. It would be a long shot at best. Schwartz hadn’t asked for it, and although it would put a dent in his budget that he might have difficulty justifying later, his gut told him it would be needed. He didn’t know why. He claimed no extrasensory powers, but when his intuition spoke, he listened. Today it was nagging him to order the test.

  ***

  Ike returned to his office alternately annoyed at Blake Fisher and admiring him for standing by his convictions. In a world committed to the homogenization forced on it by political correctness, the mediocrity of celebrity worship, and the cult of self-empowerment, a person standing on principle was a welcome rarity. He would not have objected if the good vicar had bent the rules this one time, however. A problem he believed solved now owlishly stared at him, daring him to find a quick and easy solution. There did not seem to be one.

  He placed a notepad in front of him. Pen in hand he considered who and how many people he should include on his guest list. If there is one thing a man hates to do, party-planning would be near the top of the list. Party-planning, reading Christmas letters, pets wearing clothes, and drinks made with crème de menthe. He was okay with quiche.

  The intern, who by now had acquired the label “TAK,” The Academy Kid, walked past his door. Ike called him in.

  “How good are you with computer stuff?” Ike was not a Luddite, but his skill set in most things electronic was pretty much limited to pushing the I/O button and double-clicking icons.

  “I get around the web,” TAK said.

  “Our original geek installed some sophisticated software on our system and I want to know if you’re good enough to run it.”

  “Yeah, I scanned through some of your programs. ‘Sophisticated’ isn’t the half of it. You have enough stuff jammed into your box to start World War III.”

  “To end it, maybe, but we’d never start it. Here—” Ike picked up the yellowed photo on his desk. “See if you can scan this in and run it through the facial recognition program. If this child ever entered the system, we may get a hit. I want know who left their antique trash in my father’s barn. Also, run it through the program that ages people. How old would you say this picture is?”

  TAK took the photo from Ike and turned it over. “Eleven years more or less. There’s a date on the back.”

  “Okay, I’m guessing the girl in the photo is five or six, so age her eleven years.”

  “I don’t know, Sheriff. I know computers as good as the next guy, but running that software might be beyond me.”

  “TAK, do you know the first rule of police work?”

  “Umm…which first rule would that be? The instructor who teaches forensics said the first rule was ‘Never screw up a crime scene until the ME clears it.’ The range officer said the first rule is ‘Always use two hands.’ The traffic instructor said—”

  “Okay, I got it. So here’s the first rule that trumps all previous first rules: ‘Fake it ’til you make it.’”

  “What?”

  “When you are faced with something new and unexpected, you can’t wait for the experts to arrive. If y
ou do that you will never get anything done and you may end up with some bullet holes in places you’d rather they weren’t. You live by your wits on the streets, son. Do something. What’s the worst thing that can happen here?”

  “I could fail.”

  “Fear failure and you flunk life. There, you can write that down and put it on your refrigerator or your Facebook—what did you call it?”

  “Wall.”

  “Exactly. Post it on your wall thing. Now go see what you can do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The intern wandered back to the converted cell where the Picketsville Sheriff’s Office had assembled its electronic presence. Ike returned to the consideration of his guest list. The phone rang. With any luck, he thought, this will be a massive catastrophe of some sort that will require my undivided attention for the next twenty-four hours. After that, the list-making could be addressed with ample amounts of bourbon to make it doable. It was Ruth with a request. Close enough.

  “Before we go this weekend, you need a haircut.”

  “Thank you for that.”

  “Thank me for…? Never mind, get a haircut.”

  “Just one? Wouldn’t it be better to get them all cut?”

  “Don’t be a smartass. Call Lee Henry and move your uniformed butt down the street.”

  “I do not wear my uniform except on special occasions.”

  “I stand corrected. Move your non-uniformed butt and get a haircut.”

  Chapter Ten

  Hannibal Colfax worked at the FBI as a career agent. He had survived the tag end of the Hoover years, not Hoover himself—he wasn’t that old—but the residue, you could say. And he’d endured the succession of directors since. He understood the ramifications the politicization of the agency. Furthermore, he was old…well, getting old. His arthritis plagued him no matter how many Percocets he popped. His wife of forty years left him for a classmate from grammar school, and the children took her side in the divorce procedures. His coworkers knew all this and wondered why the kids chose their mother over him and consequently looked sideways at him. Hannibal was not a happy man. He walked toward the meeting room with a gait that signaled his aches and wore an expression that confirmed them.