The Prophet (15 page)

“What?”

“She called five times. I finally answered. She wants to talk to you.”

He sat up, the hangover already throwing a few experimental punches even though the alcohol was still too thick in his bloodstream to be called into the ring yet.

“Here,” he said, holding out his hand. His voice croaked again, and he cleared his throat, tasting the smoke from his last cigarette. She passed him the phone and he climbed out of the bed. The alarm clock said it was twenty past three. He walked out of the bedroom and into the living room, where the darkness faded to light from the heat lamps that sustained the snakes.

“Hello,” he said, and he was pleased with his voice—it sounded clear and sober enough to get by, at least.

“Didn’t want to wake you,” Penny Gootee said, “but figure if you were any bit as good as your word, you wouldn’t care. So it’s the right time to call, maybe. Just right.”

Hers was a voice that was not clear or sober enough to get by.

“It’s a fine time. Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right. You really just ask me that?”

“I’m sorry.”

He paused, waited.

“They bury my daughter this week,” she said. Her voice
reminded him of her eyes the last time he’d seen her, shot through with misplaced blood.

“I know it.”

She let it go for a few seconds before she spoke again. This time she seemed to be trying harder, a drunk’s careful tightrope walk over the treachery of words, wielding a thick and clumsy tongue as the balancing rod.

“You meant what you said, didn’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“You think you can do it?”

“I’m going to.”

“You really going to find him? And kill him?”

“Yes. I’m going to kill him.”

He saw a shadow move, knew that Chelsea was in the bedroom doorway watching him, but he didn’t turn to face her. He watched the snakes in their slumbering coils and he waited to hear what Rachel Bond’s mother had left to say.

“Promise me something else,” she said. “Promise me that if you get him, you’ll tell me. Will you do that? Will you tell me?”

“I will get him,” Adam said. “And you will know when I do.”

She hung up before he could say another word. When Adam turned back to the bedroom, Chelsea was already gone, and the door was shut.

R
ODNEY BOVA LIVED IN A
rental house three blocks from the hospital where he worked as a maintenance supervisor. He was not home on Tuesday morning, and Adam walked the block twice, staring at every car. The possibility of police surveillance could not be ignored. No one appeared to be watching, though. It was for damn sure that no one had a view of the back of the house. He approached from that side, cleared the privacy fence, and used a thin metal carpenter’s ruler to shim the lock on the sliding glass door.

Wearing a pair of latex gloves and working methodically, Adam soon came to know a good deal more about who Rodney Bova had become in the years after he set his stepfather’s Cadillac on fire and disappeared from the halls of Chambers High. He followed horse racing, enjoyed pornography, and was an impulse shopper—there was a wide array of fitness equipment in the apartment, all of it the gimmicky shit they sold on late-night commercials for $19.99, and if you
acted right now!
you, too, could look like a Navy SEAL. According to
photographs scattered around the house, Rodney Bova’s belly suggested he was well into his second trimester, so it seemed he was more inspired to buy the devices than to use them. That was the problem in shifting from viewing porn to viewing home fitness commercials.
With twenty minutes a day on this discount device, I, too, could have a woman like those I was just watching…

Bova’s computer was password protected, and Adam didn’t have the faintest idea how to subvert even simple computer security. That was a shame, because the computer might be of use. For a while he entertained the idea of stealing it and finding someone who could get around that password, but in the end he ruled that out, at least temporarily. For the time being, it was better that Bova’s life not be rattled in any way. Adam needed him operating with a sense of comfort and security.

Instead he took a step backward in technology, digging through stacks of old mail and paperwork, scrutinizing the innocuous and irrelevant in hopes of finding something that spoke to a connection with Rachel Bond. He was just beginning to feel hopeless about his prospects when he opened a Visa bill from July and saw a $100 debit to Mansfield Correctional.

He stood there in Bova’s kitchen and stared at the bill in confusion, trying to figure out the charge. Too low for bail even if it had been a county jail, but it was a prison. You didn’t bond out of a prison, not for a million dollars, let alone a hundred. Then he got it: the commissary. You could mail funds to an inmate’s commissary account, so surely you could transfer money to one electronically as well. Long after he himself had been released, Rodney Bova had been making contributions to the prison’s commissary, supporting someone.

Who?

The rest of the bills told the same tale—a hundred dollars a
month, every month, for as far back as Bova had bills, which was more than two years. He’d never missed a contribution. That was dedication. That was loyalty.

The loyalty payments ended in August. Only two logical options there: either Rodney Bova had decided to stop making his diligent payments, or the recipient had left Mansfield.

End of summer, start of the letters to Rachel. Maybe the inmate stayed with Rodney for a while. Maybe he worked with him, made a trip out to Shadow Wood Lane to nail shingles to a roof.

“Who do you know, Rodney?” Adam whispered.

He replaced the bills carefully, took a final pass through the house, making sure nothing looked disturbed, and then he exited and returned to his car and called Penny Gootee and asked if he could see her.

“Fine,” she said. Her voice sounded sober today but hollowed out. “You can watch the police on TV like everybody else will be.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Press conference,” she said. “They’re going to tell everyone how my baby died. How she was killed.”

She wore an oversized hooded sweatshirt and seemed to disappear inside it. She had to have slept at some point, but there was no indication. When he stepped inside, the television was on, an empty podium in the center of the screen. Penny said, “You can watch it. I don’t want to,” and then she went into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. Adam knew better than to pursue. He sat on the couch beside the comforter from Rachel Bond’s bed and watched Stan Salter step forward and occupy the podium, eyes grim as he adjusted the microphones, glanced at his notes, and then faced the cameras and provided the details
that the public was so desperate to know, the ones they somehow felt they deserved. There had been a time, maybe, when Adam could have been able to get his head around that idea, the way a community could decide that the victim of a tragedy belonged to them, that because they were interested, they were a part of it, but that time was far gone.

Today, though, with Rachel Bond’s case, he listened with the same interest shared by all the rest who considered the murder a spectator sport. Only he was no spectator.

The autopsy results had been completed, Salter said. Rachel Bond had been asphyxiated, with marks on her neck indicating the use of a plastic bag wrapped in place with duct tape. The bag had not been found at the kill site, but they believed it to be of clear plastic.

Adam thought about that, and what it meant. The sick bastard had wanted to watch her go. That had been important to him, to see it happen. No guns, no knives, no bludgeoning, not even any blood.

Just a slow, horrific expiration, a final gasp that found no oxygen, the sudden removal of one of those universally promised things: you will have air to breathe.

In the end, she had not. That had been taken from her.

Salter explained that the property owner was not a suspect, that the house was vacant. He explained that Rachel had gone there in hopes of reuniting with her estranged father, and that someone had been impersonating her father in a series of letters. He said the investigating team was gathering leads and analyzing forensic evidence and would reveal more information when it was prudent to do so. Adam found the remote and turned off the television. When the volume was gone, the bathroom door reopened and Penny Gootee appeared.

“Heard enough?” she said.

“Yeah.”

She came back down the hallway and sat on the couch at his side and wrapped Rachel’s blanket around her.

“I want you to do it,” she said.

“I know. I’m going to need your help.”

“Just tell me how.”

“Do you know more than they just shared? Have they asked you about suspects?”

“They’ve asked me if I have ideas. I don’t. They haven’t shared any names with me.”

“No questions about people who were in Mansfield with your husband?”

“Jason was never my husband. Don’t call him that. I don’t have his name.”

“Did they ask you any questions about people who were in prison with Jason?”

She shook her head.

“Does the name Rodney Bova mean anything to you?”

A frown, then another shake of the head. “No. Why? Who is he?”

“Just a guy who might have crossed paths with Jason,” Adam said. “Probably nothing more.” He didn’t want her to focus on the name, not yet, so he did not tell her that Bova also was connected to the house where her daughter had been killed. Instead, he asked her if she’d seen any of the letters.

“Yeah. That’s all they’ve shown me. I’ve got photocopies.”

They would have wanted her to spend time with the letters, to read them and consider them and see if, through prolonged study, any suspects suggested themselves.

“Can I see them?” he asked.

“Yes.” She rose again and returned with a small stack of papers. “That’s Jason,” she told him, isolating two of the photocopies, moving an ashtray aside to spread the documents out. “I
can recognize him, no problem. Can smell the shithead rising right off the page.”

The first letter had been innocuous enough:

“Shithead,” Penny proclaimed again.

The second letter was even shorter. A curt thanks, a reminder that Rachel’s mother wouldn’t like any contact between the two of them, a repeated request not to visit, and then an instruction to get good grades in school and be careful with boys.

It was the third letter that Penny deemed someone else’s work.

“See how he starts acting sincere?” she said. “Jason can’t fake sincere. Jason doesn’t give a damn about anyone, and he doesn’t care enough to fake it.”

The tone was different, yes, but only slightly. There had been no rush to suggest contact, just a careful building of the relationship. Patient, that was the word that kept rising to mind; whoever had taken up writing as Jason Bond had been very patient.

The next letter raised the cautious suggestion that he would soon be released.

Bet your mother didn’t tell you, and maybe you shouldn’t tell her. She and I shouldn’t see each other again. I need you to understand that. For her if not for me.

That had been the first test. If Rachel had been paying close attention herself, or if she’d had anyone else looking out for her, she’d have known that he wasn’t eligible for parole yet. Whatever she wrote back, though, had clearly established that she was in this alone, and was accepting his news without verifying it.

None of her letters existed. Jason Bond had discarded the two that reached him, which said everything Adam needed to know about him. The others might still exist—in fact, they probably did; whoever killed her was the sort who kept souvenirs—but there was no way to know what Rachel had written. You could guess at some of it from the responses, but it was impossible to know for sure. The only person she’d discussed the matter with, apparently, was her boyfriend. And Kent.

His brother was even referred to in the later letters.

I’m so glad you decided to begin writing, Rachel. It was a very good idea. You should tell the football coach that I appreciate his understanding, his encouragement. There aren’t many men who would do that. He’s something special.

“He could have told me,” Penny said. “Your damned brother could have thought to talk to her
mother
before he encouraged her to do something like that.”

Adam didn’t argue. “Did she tell anyone else about these? Beyond Colin Mears and my brother? Who else would she have trusted?”

“Should have trusted me. But she didn’t, and it’s my fault. She knew how I felt about Jason. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so harsh, you know? Maybe I should have… you got to understand,
he’s a hurtful man. Hurt me worse than anyone ever had, until this. And I just wanted to… shield her. I didn’t want him to have the chance to hurt her the way that I knew he would. But maybe I should have said, Rachel, let’s go see your dad. Let’s talk about all the reasons you need to stay away from that man. Maybe—”

Her voice was rising, tears chasing behind, and she lowered her face, fingered the zipper on the sweatshirt. “I could have told her, you know? But she hid the letters. Because she knew I wouldn’t like it. That was Rachel, she never wanted to upset me.”

Adam watched a tear fall onto the back of her hand. He made no move to reach for her.