Gravewriter (29 page)

“We know Garrett Nickel's criminal record began with graffiti,” Billy continued. “Supposedly, he had a talent for it. Whoever painted
this
had talent, wouldn't you say?”

“I'd prefer some separation between the characters, to make it easier to read.”

“I'd prefer to look at Henri Matisse, but this is pretty good,” Billy said. “I think Garrett Nickel painted it just before he was killed.”

“I'm with you,” she said. “What's it mean?”

“It comes from Isaiah, from a verse that speaks metaphorically about a foundation, a cornerstone,” Billy explained. “And when I read that, I realized that this building has a cornerstone. If you build something from steel and concrete, you expect it to last, so you have a little gathering and install a ceremonial cornerstone with the date chipped into it. You entomb a copy of that day's newspaper and some other trinkets behind the cornerstone, for some future race to dig up two hundred years from now.”

“Like a time capsule,” she said.

Billy took from his pocket a square torn from a newspaper. “This
ran in my paper a day before Garrett Nickel escaped prison,” he said. “I looked it up after I called you today.”

The clip was from the newspaper's business page—the paper had published a photograph of six well-groomed executives, looking goofy in business suits and hard hats, standing around an unfinished wall of cinder block. The photo caption confirmed the event that had taken place: “Cornerstone laid at waterfront office building.”

“That photo was taken here,” Billy said.

Mia read the caption and then said, “They were going to close up the cornerstone permanently that weekend,” she said.

“They did close it up,” Billy confirmed. “But it was open the night Garrett Nickel decapitated your friend J.R. and ran off with the head.”

Mia nodded, understanding. She looked intently at Billy and said, “I've got my dad's old tools in the car.”

The ceremonial cornerstone was a pink granite plaque about the size of a traffic sign and one inch thick. The date and the names of two dozen corporate executives had been chiseled into it. The stone was at the far back corner of the building, which was fine with Billy, since he never liked to destroy private property under a streetlight. He ran his finger along the edge where the slab had been cemented in place. Rain fell, light and fine, and it was not so cold now that Billy had gotten used to it.

He tapped a nine-pound sledgehammer on the stone. “Holy shit, that's loud,” he said. “And that was only a test.”

“At least it sounds hollow,” said Mia.

“That's loud enough to wake Garrett Nickel from the fuckin' stream.”

She laughed and looked at him sweetly. “I wish you were funny
more often. You have a real sense of humor—I've seen it the last couple times we talked. Why do you keep it hidden?”

Billy pulled on work gloves.

“Haven't felt funny since Maddox killed my wife,” he said. He looked to see if his bluntness had shocked her. She didn't seem shocked. “I laugh at stuff when I'm distracted.” He smiled. “I've felt funnier around you, but I haven't been myself for thirteen months.”

“That's not a
long
time,” she said softly, “but isn't it a respectful amount to mourn?”

Billy rocked the hammer like a pendulum, getting the feel for its weight and balance.

“I'm not mourning,” he confessed. “I'm thinking that this stone … is Maddox's head.”

He swung the hammer in a wide arc and crashed it into the slab.

Wham!

The blow echoed like a gunshot. A crack appeared in the center of the stone and zigzagged to the top.

Mia covered her ears. “Holy shit! We're gonna get caught.”

Billy gestured to the cargo ship. “So much noise down there, nobody lives around here,” he said. “So there's nobody to call the cops.”

Her thoughts were elsewhere. “You sound so
sure
that you know what happened in that car,” she said.

Billy choked up a few inches on the hammer. “The cops say they lost the original police report. That makes it sure enough for me.”

He swung.

Wham!

When the bang had echoed and died, Billy pulled off a glove and ran a finger along the crack. “This won't take long.”

Mia asked, “What would you do with the proof about the cause of that crash? Would you hate Charles Maddox even more? Or would knowing that you're right allow you to forgive him?”

“I am right.”

Wham!

“You're so positive Maddox is evil—yet, as you said, there's no proof. Do you hate him for the crash? Or for shacking up with your ex?”

Billy pressed his lips tightly together to stop himself from cursing.

He swung the hammer three times.
Wham! Wham! Wham!

He stopped, panting. He confessed in a low, hoarse voice, “I can't accept that she could have loved him, too. Not after me. I don't accept that the grandest emotion in the universe is so … temporary.”

He wiped his face on a glove. The stiff leather scratched his cheek. He looked off toward the bay. The sprinkling had stopped and the air smelled like wet asphalt.

“You find it inconceivable that a woman could love two men,” she said.

Billy glanced at her as he swung. The hammer's steel head smashed against the stone. The slab shattered into chunks that crumbled to the ground, revealing a dark hole in the wall.

“You got it,” she cried.

Billy flung the hammer away and dropped to his knees. He aimed the light into the hole. The compartment behind the ceremonial slab was half-filled with sand. “Hold the light,” Billy told her. “I'll dig.”

He wormed his shoulders into the hole. The sand was cool and loosely packed, very dry.

Within a minute, Billy pulled out a plastic bag. Parts of it were stiff with dried blood.

From its size and its weight, they knew what was inside and saw no need to open it.

“When Garrett Nickel painted that message about the cornerstone,” Mia asked grimly, “was he reminding himself where he had hidden the head?”

“After hearing about Nickel in court, my guess is he painted that because it made him feel clever,” Billy said.

“But why bring it here? Why take such a risk?”

Billy set the bag down and reached back inside the hole. He found a piece of stiff cardboard. He brought it into the light.

A photograph.

Mia glanced at it and confirmed who it was. “That's J.R.”

“Are you sure?”

“I chased him from back alleys to abandoned houses all over this city. That's definitely the guy who called himself J.R.”

“Because I could swear—” The hairs on Billy's neck waved on their own, like hundreds of little creatures that had just had a fright.

“What?”

“This guy looks like a younger version of Pastor Abraham Guy.”

She stared at the photo. “I never saw the pastor before.”

“Who ever sees people from the radio? But I'm telling you, the resemblance is striking. This guy could be his son.”

Mia slapped a hand over her mouth. She blurted, “He called himself J.R.! Billy, can you see? J.R. stands for
junior.”

They stared at the photograph.

“I should have figured it out,” Billy whispered. “For Chrissake,
I'm
a junior.”

T
he white van turned up Martin's street at 6:00
A.M
., right when it was supposed to be there.

Waiting on the sidewalk, Martin Smothers suddenly felt hollow in his gut. If he'd whistled, he might have echoed on the inside, like a cave.

Should I be doing this?

He remembered the call that had awakened him: a woman's voice. She had wanted to meet. She knew of the bloody jumpsuit that had arrived anonymously at Martin's office, and that it had come by way of FedEx.

Nobody beside the attorney general and the judge knew how that box had arrived.

She sent it.… What else could it be?

The van slowed. Martin saw a young woman at the wheel. Spiky hair, freaky-looking silver piercings, tattoos, friendly smile.

The van stopped.

Martin hesitated a moment and then got in.

He slammed the door and the van drove off.

From the back of the truck, a man said, “Good morning, Mr. Smothers.”

Martin whirled, blinked, then slapped his cheek lightly. “William Povich?” he said, nearly in a shriek. “What the hell! Ohmigod! I can't be talking to you. You're a juror.” He clutched his own head. “I could get thrown off the fucking bar.”

Martin looked to the young woman for help. Her eyes were on the road.

“There's some stuff you need to know,” Povich said. “C'mon back here, out of sight.”

For the next twenty seconds, Martin seriously considered throwing himself from the van.

The van needed shocks. It squeaked over bumps. Martin sat cross-legged over the rear axel, on the dusty metal bed, with no care for his linen suit. He sipped a Dunkin' Donuts dark roast they had bought him at a drive-through. He tried not to think about professional ethics. Legal and moral were not always the same, he reminded himself. If he helped an innocent man beat a bad rap, wouldn't that be moral?

“So Pastor Guy helped plan the prison break with Garrett Nickel?” Martin said, summing up some of what he had been told.

“Nickel must have been planning the escape a long time,” Povich said. “But he needed help on the street, once outside the prison.”

“He needed a car.”

“And regular clothes, too. And money.”

“Okay,” Martin said, “but how did they arrange it?”

“The pastor met alone with Garrett Nickel every week in Bible study. You remember Larry Home's testimony about Garrett having
cocaine in his Bible? If I were a betting man—and God knows, I am—I'd wager that the pastor was supplying the drugs, hiding them in his own Bible. When the two of them got together, they just switched books. All those prison Bibles are the identical edition.”

“This is nutty,” Martin said, though he wanted to hear more.

“Just before he was killed, J.R. had been shooting off his mouth about coming into money—a lot of it, more than any homeless drunk could make with bottle deposits.”

“Blackmail?”

Povich spread his hands. “Why not? Let's say that somewhere along the road, Pastor Guy made his own deposit—which turned into the son he never wanted. Maybe he paid off the mother to keep it quiet. He put the kid out of his mind. But imagine—on the eve of his run for governor, some smelly homeless guy shows up claiming to be his son, and looking for cash.”

This crazy theory was becoming too much for Martin. “Who would believe it?” he scoffed. “Just deny it, dismiss the guy for what he is—a crazy fuckin' bum—and get on with the campaign.”

Povich reached into his back pocket, drew out a photograph, and gave it to Martin. “This,” he said, “was J.R.”

Martin studied the picture. “Wow,” he said. The man in the frame needed a shave, a shower, a barber, and a dentist. But the eyes were Pastor Guy's. The chin, the shape of the head. He whistled. “This could be persuasive.”

“Imagine this guy on the front page, pictured next to Pastor Guy,” Povich said. “That would give the pastor a lot of grief, probably derail his campaign.”

Martin flicked his finger on the photo. “So what happened to this guy? Why did Garrett kill him?”

“I'm guessing,” Povich said, “that in exchange for the coke, some cash, and the getaway car, Garrett Nickel agreed to use his
underworld sources to find where J.R. spent his nights, and then track him down, kill him, and make sure the body was unrecognizable.”

Martin frowned. “Taking the head would certainly accomplish
that.”

“But the pastor didn't want witnesses,” Povich said. “Especially one like Nickel, who would have skinned his own mother for ten cents and a roll of Certs.”

“He'd have done it for half that.”

“So the pastor double-crossed Garrett, and shot him,” Povich said. “Peter Shadd got pinned with the crime. It's the perfect resolution for the pastor—so long as Peter is convicted and there are no loose ends, or open investigations.”

Martin twirled a lock of beard in his fingers and considered what Povich had alleged. A terrible thought struck him. “Alec Black!” he cried.

“Your best juror,” Povich confirmed. “It was obvious Alec would never vote to convict. The pastor had to get rid of him.”

“Can't be,” Martin insisted. “Alec left a suicide note—I saw it.”

“Handwritten? Or typed?”

Martin stroked his beard as he called up the memory. Alec's note had been simple—too much pressure in his life … considered himself a failure—pretty standard stuff. “Holy Jesus—it was typed,” he suddenly shouted.

Povich nodded. “Planted on him.”

Martin inhaled deeply and thought more about Povich's theory. He wanted to ask how one juror had become so involved—and why—but he thought better of it. Martin had already danced a jig upon the code of ethics.

What Povich had outlined sounded possible, but…

“You're hesitant,” Povich guessed. “I would be, too. That's why
I'm giving you the photograph to keep, and I'm going to give you this …”

He dragged something heavy inside a ratty, balled-up plastic bag and set it in front of Martin.

“How we found this,” Povich said, “is a story by itself.”

B
illy felt brittle, having skipped a night's sleep on Saturday, but alert, almost hyper, as if the jury box might not be able to contain him.

Pastor Guy returned to court that morning in a blue pinstriped suit, gray vest, red bow tie. He scootered slowly to the witness box.