someone at the shelter or the newspaper. I tried the shelter first. The girl you had talked to at the funeral — Sarah — was missing. Paul said he was really worried about her and asked if we would let him know if we located her. I had gone back over the journal and made a list of initials from it. I was thinking of going over them with Paul, but then I remembered you telling me about Sarah’s dramatics, sneaking the journal to you when he came into the room. For some reason she hadn’t wanted Paul to know about the journal, and it made me decide to hold off.”
Jack looked away from us when Paul’s name came up. I felt damned awkward and I guess Frank did, too, because he hesitated.
“Maybe we could finish talking about this some other time,” he said.
“No,” Jack said tightly. “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late. He wasn’t who I thought he was, that’s all. Go on, Frank.”
Frank waited, then hearing Jack sigh with impatience, continued with his story. “I went home and tried to sleep. I couldn’t. Jacob called me, and asked if I wanted to get your car — in all the excitement, he had gone home with your car keys. I drove over to the Hendersons’ and picked him up. We went back to your car and he followed me home. I invited him to come in, and Jack stopped by while he was there.”
“I was being a nosy neighbor,” Jack said. “I had just moved into my mom’s place and saw somebody else pulling up in your car, Irene. I wondered what was up.”
“Well, I for one am damn glad you were curious,” Frank said. “I don’t know how much longer it would have taken if both of you hadn’t been there at the same time.” He looked at me. “As far as I could tell, there were only four things that had gone on at the shelter that could have made you a target for someone: you had talked to Sammy, you had talked to Sarah, you had taken Sammy’s journal, and you had asked around about members of the coven, particularly this ‘Goat.’
“So I started asking Jacob if he knew the names of the people whose initials had been in the journal. I left out the ones for Romeo and Juliet.”
Jack’s eyebrows went up at this, but he didn’t get anything for the effort.
“When I got to the initials DM and RA, Jacob said, ‘Devon Morris and Raney Adams.’ And suddenly Jack looked like someone had slapped him.”
“I asked Jacob to repeat the names,” Jack said. “They were Paul’s cousins. Remember I told you he had lived with Cindy’s sister for a while? Well, Devon and Raney were two of her five kids.”
“Devon told me he and Raney were half-brothers,” I said quietly.
“They’re all half-brothers. I just didn’t know Paul still had anything to do with them. I didn’t know they were hanging out at the shelter. I doubt they were ever around at the same time my mother was there. She couldn’t abide any of that bunch.”
“You’re right — at least, on the day I was there with your mother, Devon and Raney weren’t around.”
Frank went on. “Things started to look a little different once we knew they were related to Paul. You had seen Paul order them around; Sammy’s journal mentions a connection between them and the Goat. Pete tracked Sarah down; she had gone to stay with an aunt in the San Diego area. She said she left because Paul had threatened her about the journal. She told Paul it wasn’t in the shelter any longer and that he’d never find it. He grabbed on to her and she thought he was going to hit her, when Mrs. Riley walked in. He walked off and she packed up and left.
“We asked Mrs. Riley about it and she said Paul had kicked Devon and Raney out the day before the funeral. But she also said she was convinced that Paul had received a phone call from Raney very early Wednesday morning — she answered the phone, thought she recognized the voice — and Paul had taken off not long after he got the call. He hadn’t returned until late that afternoon.
“So we put a tail on Paul, hoping he’d lead us to wherever Devon and Raney were. I figured he had to be the Goat. He was connected to the shelter, to Sammy, to Devon and Raney, and to Mrs. Fremont. And he knew about Jack’s leukemia. So he stood to inherit. He probably picked the goat and Satanism because of Jack’s tattoo. Paul was hoping Jack would be suspected of murdering Mrs. Fremont. I guess Sammy found out what they were up to. She probably threatened him by telling him she had a journal.”
“She knew Paul was the Goat. She saw the scars on his arms,” I said. “I saw them when — I saw them,” I finished weakly, trying to not feel the memory in my shoulder and thumb.
Frank waited, probably wondering if I was going to burst into tears again, and went on when I didn’t.
“I checked vehicle registrations for Devon and Raney. Devon had a registration for a Blazer. So now it was a matter of waiting and praying to God that Paul got back in touch with them before — well, before it was too late. Jack knew them by sight and I didn’t; I only had a DMV photo. So he came with me to watch Paul and on Friday it paid off. We followed Paul to a place where he met Raney. Then we followed them up into the mountains. By then, we knew where they were headed.
“Sure enough, they took the Pine Summit turnoff. I didn’t know what the situation would be, and Jack and I weren’t really official—”
“You mean Carlson didn’t want you working on this,” I said.
“Well, actually, he let me work on it. I don’t know if he felt sorry for me or what. He told me I seemed to be personally connected to every murder in Las Piernas, so I could work on a missing persons case. He knew I’d look for you anyway. But he didn’t like the idea of Jack getting involved, and so we were sort of an unofficial back-up tail, you might say. Good thing, because Paul shook the official one.
“Anyway, like I said, I didn’t know exactly what the situation would be, but I knew there were at least three of them, and Paul had other cousins. So I stopped off at the sheriff’s station and told them what was going on. By the time we convinced the sheriff and his deputy to get up off their behinds and follow us up there, Raney had apparently started back down. We came across his truck — what was left of it. I was afraid… well, we stayed just long enough to determine there was only one body. The sheriff fooled around calling another unit but I couldn’t wait. Jack and I took off for the cabins. You know the rest.”
I know we all had our own mental pictures of what happened from there, and the silence that followed was an uneasy one.
“I don’t know how I could have been so wrong about Paul,” Jack said, just above a whisper. “I can understand why he hated me. I just never thought he was so bitter toward his grandmother.”
No one said anything for a long time. I felt myself wearing down and told them I was going to call it a
