Read Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel Online

Authors: Mike Doogan

Tags: #Mystery

Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel (16 page)

BOOK: Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel
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“How do you manage to live together with so many differences?” Kane asked as he rose at a sign from Thomas Wright.
“Why, where else would we live?” one of the Bible-quoting ladies asked, in a tone that made it clear that she thought no sane person would want to live anywhere but Rejoice.
Kane followed Thomas Wright back to the small room he’d used to interview the teens, and both men sat.
“You said you had some questions?” Wright said.
“A few,” Kane said. “Do you know what Faith’s extracurricular activities are this year?”
Wright thought for a moment.
“I don’t really. I assume she is pursuing the same sort of things she did last year, but I don’t know for certain.”
Kane made a note.
“Okay, how about her relationship with a boy everyone calls Johnny Starship? What do you know about that?”
“I’ve heard the rumors that they are involved, uh, romantically, but don’t believe them. Faith came to me and told me about the boy long before the gossip started. She said that he was a nice boy, but troubled about what his father and brother did for a living, and that she was trying to help him through that and, perhaps, into a more Christian life.
“I asked her if she was interested in him romantically, and she laughed and said, ‘Oh, Papa, I couldn’t be. We’re the same age in years, but he is so much younger in every other way.’ ”
“So,” Kane said after finishing his note-taking, “he was just a potential convert to her?”
Thomas Wright smiled.
“Every Christian has a duty to spread the Gospel, but we don’t try to trick or seduce or dragoon people into our beliefs. At least, most of us don’t. I’m certain that Faith’s motives were first and foremost to help a fellow human being, and if through that help he came closer to God, so much the better.”
“Does that attitude have something to do with why there’s no Bible in her room?”
Wright looked confused.
“No Bible? Faith always has her Bible near to hand. It’s the one I gave her when she turned seven and was old enough to begin to understand God’s word.”
“Describe it for me.”
“Oh, it’s hardback-book-sized, with a padded cover done up in brown leather with gold, stamped lettering. It was actually quite expensive. I expected it to last her a lifetime.”
“And your own Bible?” Kane asked. “I didn’t find it in your home, and I don’t see it here.”
Thomas Wright’s ears turned red. He squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. Kane began calculating his chances of taking Wright down if it came to that.
“You said you wanted to search Faith’s room, not my entire home,” Wright barked.
“Calm down,” Kane said. “You’ve hired me to do a difficult job, and to do it I need to know as much as I can find out about your daughter and the world she lives in. That definitely includes the house in which she lives.”
Wright sat still and silent. Kane could see him try to will the tension from his body. He took a couple of deep breaths, unballed his fists, and let his shoulders sag.
“ ‘He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly,’ ” he said, as if to himself, then sighed. “I apologize for my reaction. I suppose you have a job to do, and as I am the one who asked you to do it, I shouldn’t complain if your methods cause me some discomfort. But do you really need to know about the state of my soul?”
“I don’t know what I really need to know,” Kane said. “I just pick up information wherever I can find it, and hope that, somehow, it arranges itself into a story that I can understand.”
“That doesn’t sound very scientific,” Wright said.
Kane grinned.
“It’s not. It’s more like hoping for revelation than waiting for the results of an experiment.”
Wright smiled back at the detective.
“How can I refuse a man striving for revelation? I don’t have a Bible in my home. When my wife died, I put mine away in a drawer in my office. I have not yet figured out how to reconcile her death with faith in God. I understand all the arguments intellectually, but I don’t feel confident of them and, until I do, I guess I am estranged from God.”
“Doesn’t that cause you problems here? Being in charge of a Christian community without sharing the faith?”
“It does,” Wright said, smiling again, “but it also causes many people to pray for me. That can’t be all bad.”
Kane asked Wright a few more questions, then put his notebook away.
“I’m going to do some detecting outside Rejoice tomorrow,” he said, “and one of the things I need is your written permission to search Faith’s locker at the school. I’ll take the trooper along to make it official, but when you’re dealing with the public education system, it’s better to be prepared for anything.”
The two men walked over to the office trailer, where Kane dictated a permission form. Wright typed it into a computer, printed it out, and signed it. Then he reached into a desk drawer and came out with a key attached to a piece of wood by a thin chain. He tossed it to the detective.
“We’re putting you into a cabin of your own, so you can play the violin or use cocaine or whatever it is detectives do these days,” he said. “I could show you where it is, but I’m late for a building committee meeting. We’ve decided it’s time for a proper church, and you wouldn’t believe the details involved in that. But there’s a map in the community hall, so I can show you where it is.”
The two men walked back to the community hall and stood in front of a big, hand-drawn map.
“This is the way we keep track of everyone, and know which homes are available for new arrivals,” Wright said. He pointed to a large rectangle. “We are here.” He pointed to a smaller one nearby. “That is my home.” He pointed to a rectangle next to a much bigger one labeled “Airport.” “My father lives here.”
“He lives far away from everyone else,” Kane said.
“His home is on the edge closest to Devil’s Toe, right on the road that leads to the highway,” Thomas Wright said. He smiled. “My father says he lives there because he is Rejoice’s bulwark against the evils of the secular world. Others say he lives there so he can keep an eye on everyone else’s comings and goings.
“You will be here,” he said, pointing to a rectangle on the other side of the town, not far from the greenhouses. As he traced the route to it, Ruth Hunt came into the room.
“I wondered who still had the lights on,” she said with a smile. “Are you lost?”
“No,” Wright said, “I’m trying to show Mr. Kane how to get to the cabin he will be using. I’m late for a meeting, so I can’t take him there.”
“You’re always late for a meeting, Elder Thomas Wright,” the woman said, walking over and standing next to the detective. She smelled of cooking and clean skin. “Where is it?”
Wright pointed to the little rectangle that represented Kane’s quarters.
“That’s not far from me,” the woman said. “I’ll be happy to show Mr. Kane the way and see him settled.”
“Thank you very much, Ruth,” Wright said. “I’ll leave you to it.” He picked up a marking pen, wrote Kane’s name next to the rectangle, and headed off to his meeting.
“Not much chance of privacy here,” the detective said, pointing to the names written next to other rectangles on the map.
“If you live here for a couple of weeks, you don’t need this map,” the woman said, “but it comes in handy for newcomers.”
Kane retrieved his coat from his interview room and followed the woman out into the cold.
“Just follow me,” she said, getting into a Jeep very like the one Faith had been driving.
Kane unplugged his pickup and followed the Jeep’s taillights through the darkness, thinking about one of the last exchanges he’d had with Thomas Wright during their interview.
“Do you remember anything that might have happened to Faith right after her mother died?” he’d asked. “Anything that might have changed the way she acted?”
Wright had shaken his head.
“I don’t. Faith never said anything to me, and frankly, those days aren’t very clear in my mind. It was like I was living in some sort of fog. You may not know what it’s like to lose someone close to you, someone you love, but it’s like a blow that dazes you. It took me a long time to recover. If, in fact, I have recovered yet.”
I do know what it’s like to lose someone close, the detective thought. Laurie’s not dead, it’s true, but she’s gone and she’s not coming back. And that’s every bit as inexplicable to me as why Thomas Wright’s wife died of cancer. And every bit as final. And I don’t have a faith to fall back on or a community to support me.
Whoa, he thought. That sounds a lot like whining. Better to think about what’s happened to Faith and get on with it.
He pulled in behind the Jeep at a small cabin, got out, and unlocked the door with the key Thomas Wright had given him. Ruth Hunt walked to a box on the back wall, opened it, and thumbed a set of switches. Then she walked back and switched on a lamp, then another.
The cabin was one room: sink and sideboard at the front, wood stove and a couple of chairs in the middle, bed at the back. A long, doorless closet ran along the foot of the bed. There was a window over the sink and another in one of the long walls near the wood stove. Off the living area was a door that Kane figured led to a bathroom. A trickle of water flowed from the sink’s faucet.
“We keep heat tape on the pipes all winter, and leave them running so they don’t freeze up,” Ruth Hunt said. “We heat-tape the sewer pipes, too. It’s costly but cheaper than replacing burst pipes all the time.”
She went to the stove and opened it.
“Why don’t you bring in your things,” she said, “while I start a fire and get some heat in the place?”
It took Kane three trips to bring everything in. By that time, a fire was going in the stove and the woman was putting big chunks of spruce on it.
“This should make the place warm enough for you to sleep in,” she said, “and I’ll leave you to do that.”
Kane was suddenly aware that, for the first time since Laurie had thrown him out, he didn’t want to be alone.
“Do you have to leave right away?” Kane asked.
The woman smiled.
“The community will be scandalized if I stay long,” she said, “but I have a few minutes.” She walked to the table and sat down. Kane took a seat across from her.
“Is your investigation going all right?” she asked.
Kane shrugged.
“People are cooperative, for the most part,” he said, “but no one has said anything that is likely to lead me directly to Faith.”
They were silent for a moment.
“Well, that topic doesn’t seem to be taking us anywhere,” Ruth said. “Why don’t you tell me about why you went to prison? You said you would.”
To his amazement, Kane found himself telling her about the shooting, about the force’s inability to turn up a gun, about the newspaper and TV campaign demanding his prosecution, about Jeffords’s refusing to intervene and about the district attorney’s deciding to prosecute.
“I could see what was going to happen then,” Kane said, “so I told my lawyer to string it out as long as he could so that I could prepare for prison.”
“Prepare?” Ruth said. “How?”
“Physically, for one thing,” Kane said. “I didn’t figure that, wherever they sent me, an ex-cop was going to be the most popular inmate in the place. So I went on a diet and spent my afternoons with the department’s hand-to-hand combat teacher. I was glad I did, later.”
With the delays Kane’s lawyer requested, it took nearly a year to get the case to trial. The charge was second-degree murder, but Kane’s lawyer did a good job discrediting the so-called eyewitnesses and calling into question the Breathalyzer test results. So the jury came back with manslaughter, and the judge gave him seven years.
“Is that a lot?” Ruth asked.
“The sentencing guidelines call for five years, first offense,” Kane said, “but the judge said, ‘If the law tells me to add two years for being drunk when you run over somebody with a car, I’m surely going to add them for being drunk when you shoot somebody.’
“And so I spent the past seven years in prison.”
Ruth reached over and put a hand on Kane’s wrist.
“You poor man, it must have been terrible,” she said. “Couldn’t you have gotten out earlier?”
“I could have,” Kane said, “but I didn’t want parole. I wanted to pay the full price all at once.”
“How did you come to be cleared of the crime?” she asked.
“First-class detective work,” Kane said with a bitter laugh.
The woman said nothing. She just looked at Kane expectantly.
“The other kid there that night, the one they called Train, got shot in a dispute with another young gentleman and ended up in a wheelchair,” he said. “The experience seemed to bring him to Jesus. One of the sins he had to repent was lying about what happened that night.”
“Enfield, he had him a gun that night,” Train Simmons told a police sergeant named Tater Therriault who’d been on duty when the young man wheeled himself into the station to confess. “That cop who got shot, he was knockin’ boots with a young thing name of Sharilee. Was supposed to be my bitch. Well, I couldn’t allow that kind of disrespect, could I? When I find this out, I beat her ’til she told me when the cop was gonna be in our neighborhood. Then I called in a phony crime and shot the cop when he showed up.”
Train asked for a glass of water and drank it down.
“Okay,” Therriault said. “Then what?”
“I never shot nobody before,” Train said, “so I dropped the gun and kind of staggered back. And that dummy Enfield runs out his house and grabs the gun and starts dancing around like some sort of crazy man.”
“Why didn’t you take the gun away from him?” Therriault said.
“Man, I was tryin’,” Train said, exasperation pushing his voice up an octave, “but a dummy with a gun be dangerous. And that other cop got there so fast.”
BOOK: Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel
4.42Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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