The Prophet (20 page)

He’d stop that. He’d find a way to get it in check.

Saturday practices weren’t practices so much as prep sessions. They’d watch some video, then put the boys through a light workout, running and stretching, designed to speed recovery, loosen the aching and bruised muscles after the previous night’s combat, and then return to the locker room to watch more video.
He was running late, delayed by Robin’s phone call, but still half an hour ahead of the team, enough time to gather his thoughts. Went into his office, turned on the lights, and shut the door. Ninety-five percent of the time, the door to Kent’s office stayed open. When it was shut, though, everyone understood, players and coaches alike—he wanted privacy for a reason, and if you interrupted, there’d better be good cause and you’d better knock.

He was organizing his notes when he discovered the letter, tucked in with the preliminary scouting reports. His mind was still on Saint Anthony’s when he slit it open.

Later, he would be surprised by how immediately he thought about fingerprints. How carefully he set the envelope down, handling it now by the edges, even though it was probably too late to help. There was no moment of stunned pause, just sick understanding.

There were three items inside. The first was a standard sheet of printer paper, cut in half, a short message typed across it.

Kent read it three times, a chill spreading through his chest and out to the rest of him, until his temples and fingertips felt tight and tingling. The other two items were cards: a business card for AA Bail Bonds and a weathered sports card with perforated edges, Adam Austin kneeling in full pads, helmet resting beside him, staring into the camera with a loose, easy grin.

Gideon Pearce’s wallet. The random traffic stop, the first clue. This was the football card that started him on his way to prison, the football card that brought Kent to him all those years later, saying he forgave him, telling him he’d like to say a prayer together, Pearce laughing—a wild, mocking laugh—as Kent got through it, head bowed and eyes shut, his voice shaking and his hands folded together so tightly the nails left half-moons of blood.

He shifted his eyes back to the business card. It was nondescript—cheap stock, gray, the name and address and two phone numbers. He used the letter opener to turn the business card over. Blank. He turned the football card over next and then, for a long time, a very long time, sat in frozen silence at his desk. When the door banged open, he rose to his feet and rushed into the locker room. Steve Haskins, playbook in one hand and cup of coffee in the other, nodded at him.

“If you’re ready, I was hoping we could go over—”

“I’m going to need you out of here for a while,” Kent said. “Kids, too. Everyone. Make sure nobody comes in here. Practice is yours.”

“Coach?”

“Practice is yours,” Kent repeated. “And keep people away from that door until the police are here.”

He went back to his office then and called Stan Salter to tell him that he knew who had killed Rachel Bond.

A
DAM WAS ON HIS WAY
to Mansfield Correctional to interview Jason Bond when the phone began to ring. Chelsea, calling from the office, so he expected she would be calling about business. He did not care about business, and let her calls roll to voicemail three times. It wasn’t until the fourth that he finally gave in with a sigh.

“Yeah?”

“Where in the hell have you been?”

“Working. What’s up?”

“Police are searching your property, Adam.”

“Not surprised. Salter’s unhappy. Let them do their thing.”

“They aren’t here. They’re at your house.”

A tenth of a mile rolled by, two tenths, three, and Chelsea said, “Adam? You hear me?”

“They’re searching my house?”

“That’s what I’ve been told. Based on new evidence.”

“What new evidence?”

“They don’t volunteer that, Adam. They just show the warrants. We got one here, too.”

“They broke down my door?”

“No. Your brother gave them a key.”

“Gave them a key.”

“Yes. The deed’s in both of your names. He’s allowed to grant them access, legally.”

Chelsea was still talking, but his mind was empty, the world empty, consisting of nothing but gray pavement and the far-off sound of Chelsea’s voice.

“Adam? Do you want me to go there? Or call a lawyer?”

“No,” he said. “No, I’ll handle that myself.”

He hung up. He was thinking of the closed door with the handwritten sign, thinking of police entering the room, and ahead of him the highway seemed to narrow like a tunnel and pull him underwater, swift and silent.

In his entire coaching career, Kent Austin had missed one practice. That was the day his son was born, and he was back the next morning.

Today he missed his second, spent it with a sergeant from the Chambers Police Department and an FBI agent named Robert Dean. Kent wondered why the FBI was here already, recalling how long it had taken for them to get involved in Marie’s disappearance. His father had shouted for them, screamed for them, as if they were mythical problem solvers, would walk in and listen to the situation and produce his missing daughter immediately, tip their caps, and go on their way. By the time the FBI actually got involved, though, most of the heart had gone out of Hank Austin, the shouts turning to numb musings, as if he’d already checked out of his life and was studying it sadly from afar.

He kept up those musings for the rest of his life, but only Adam was allowed in. Not Kent. That was his brother’s rule,
though, not his father’s. The two of them would sit in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of Scotch and an ashtray, and his father would tell tales of revenge. Never mentioning Marie’s name. They were always historical, or anecdotal, or flat-out apocryphal. He’d talk about how the Apaches would bury enemies up to their necks in the sand, coat their eyes with sweet sap from cactus, and wait for the ants to come. Talk about spies who’d had their tongues cut out, soldiers who had been left impaled on stakes in Vietnam.

There was a time when Kent felt that he should sit with them. Adam wouldn’t allow it.

“Get your ass down to the weight room,” he’d say when their father began to get warm, began to tip the bottle a little more frequently, glass clinking off glass. “Go see Coach Ward.”

Kent would go. Always with a shard of guilt, a sense that he belonged there, three men sharing their alcohol and their pain, and that he was slinking away from it like a coward. Once, and only once, his father tried to get him to stay. Poured a third glass and slid it across the table and told him to have a seat. Adam caught the glass, and told Kent to go see Coach Ward.

“Ah, he can stay,” Hank Austin had said. “It doesn’t always need to be football.”

“For him it does,” Adam said, and he looked their father in the eye and his voice was hard. There was a long pause, a frown but no argument, and then Adam spoke again, not looking at Kent. “He’s not worth a shit right now, anyhow. Dances in the pocket, throws high on the first pass after anybody gives him a good hit, and if he’s checked down to a third read in his whole damned career I’ve never seen it.”

That had been the end, the cue to leave, and Kent popped open the door and slipped out into the night and walked to the Wards’ house, where he was eating dinner more nights than not, where he listened to the family say grace before each meal, where
he watched game tapes and talked to the coach and tried to pretend he was oblivious to Beth, that he didn’t live for a moment of eye contact with her.

Right up until the end, his father remained entranced by revenge stories. They weren’t always so dark, but he had an unerring ability to return to the concept. Talk about a baseball game, he’d segue over into the memory of a pitcher who’d thrown a beanball at someone who slid into a base with spikes up. Mention football, and it was a savage late hit delivered in retaliation for the way a teammate had been treated. His daily scans of the newspaper became a quest, a search for reminders of balance in a world that had ceased to offer it to him.

It always comes back around,
he’d say, whether the topic be sports or war or an embezzling business partner.
You always pay your dues.
There was a tragic hopefulness to the assertion. He needed to believe that pain circled. If you caused it, you caught it.

Today, Kent believed that pain circled. The only problem was that all he did was catch it. He found himself thinking, as he answered questions, that he was relieved his father was dead.

“Clayton Sipes?” Robert Dean said.

“Yes. I believe that letter is from him.”

“And you know this man how?”

“I met him in prison. This summer. I was there on a speaking visit.”

“Tell us about that interaction, please.”

Something in the question caught Kent’s attention; it reeked of preparation. He appreciated a prepared man. But Dean shouldn’t be prepared for this.

“You’re already aware of this name, aren’t you?” Kent said.

“Why do you say that?”

“It doesn’t seem to have caught you by surprise.”

“We have a list of everyone who was paroled from Mansfield around the time those letters started. Everyone who might have
had access to Jason Bond or awareness of the contact with his daughter. Sipes is on that list. He is not alone on it, but he’s on it.”

“Have you interviewed him?”

Dean tapped his pencil, eyes down, and shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s missing.”

“Missing?”

“He’s made none of the required contact. There’s an active warrant for parole violation.”

Kent closed his eyes. “When was he paroled?”

“In August.”

“When the letters resumed with Rachel. The false letters.”

“Yes.”

Kent rubbed a hand over his face and said, “He was in for assault, wasn’t he?”

“How do you know that?”

“I asked the director of our outreach program to find out for me. His name is Dan Grissom. He said it was assault. Is that correct?”

“It is. Sexual assault, stalking, violating a restraining order. Why are you so sure he wrote this letter?”

“Because it’s a repeat conversation.”

“Pardon?”

“I’ve done a lot of prison visits,” Kent said. “There are men who listen, and men who don’t. Men who mock, men who get on their knees and pray with you. I’ve seen them all by now. Or I thought I had. I’d never seen anything quite like him, though. He was… combative, I guess that would be the word. But not in an angry way. The best way I can describe it is… intensely interested.”

Focused attention
was the phrase that first came to mind, but that was his coaching mantra, and he could not transfer it to Clayton Sipes, refused to do so.

“Interested in your message?” Dean said.

“Interested in challenging my message. Interested in challenging the very idea that I believed in a God, but he wasn’t content to keep that debate theological.”

“Explain that.”

“It was personal,” Kent said. “Immediately. When I go to a prison, I tell a personal story, of course. I talk about my sister, the way I had to learn to bear that grief. I talk about my own journey. But his reaction…” Kent paused and shook his head, remembering the man so vividly, shaved head, wiry muscle, neck and left arm covered in brightly colored tattoos. “His reaction was disturbing. It was as if… as if I woke something up in him. He was all dull eyes and boredom and then he just kept… intensifying. I don’t know the best way to describe it. The way his interest grew as I talked was unsettling. Like it was this dim light when I walked in the room and with every detail I shared it got brighter and brighter, right? Not in a healthy way.”

“You simply observed this? Or was there direct interaction?”

“Oh, there was direct interaction. He asked to speak with me alone when my talk was done. What he wanted from that conversation was specific. It was very important for him to hear me say that my faith couldn’t be broken.”

“But you didn’t think he was taking reassurance from that?”

“No. I thought he was taking a challenge from it. I know that he was.”

“Did you mention Rachel Bond?”

“No. I’d never have done that. She was a child.”

Dean frowned. “The letter seems to indicate otherwise.”

“Well, I mean, I didn’t use her name. I didn’t identify her.”

“But you discussed the situation?”

“To an extent.”

“What extent?”

“Minimal.” Kent realized how defensive he was becoming,
realized that he was acting as if he were being accused of a crime, and for the first time understood exactly why. He felt guilty. What Dean was asking about wasn’t speculation, it was the truth. Clayton Sipes had found his way to Rachel Bond through Kent.

“I’m going to need a little more than—”

“I was talking about forgiveness,” Kent said. “And family. Those are regular points for me. Usually I keep it focused on my own experience. But this summer, the situation with Rachel and her father was fresh. She’d been so relieved to make contact. She’d replaced something that was missing, you know? So I used her”—he stuttered then, hating the word choice,
used
—“as a, uh, an anecdote. A lot of those men have lost ties with family. Maybe through their choice, maybe not. Many of them have isolated themselves from family because of guilt and shame. I wanted to talk about that, and… her situation was fresh. It was relevant.”