I picked myself up off the ground and walked out to the barn. I could hear voices coming from inside the house, the voices of my mother and grandma, shrill and forlorn as the argument raged. Eventually, the voices quieted. An hour later, my mother yelled from beside the car that it was time to go home. I descended the ladder from the hayloft, and as I climbed into the backseat, I could see Ma’s face in the rearview mirror and I knew she’d been crying. The following Sunday, we stayed home for lunch. We went back occasionally on Sunday after that, but it was always well after Grandpa and Grandma had arrived home from church, and Grandma always prepared the meal. We never spoke of God again.
A couple of years later, Raymond raped Sarah on that Friday night in my grandparents’ bed. Less than a year after that, he drowned in the Nolichucky River. Maybe his death was God’s way of punishing him for what he did to Sarah, but I always wondered, if there was a God, why He would have allowed Raymond to rape a nine-year-old girl in the first place.
Just as the sun was showing itself, the sky streaked with orange and purple, the telephone rang in the kitchen. I hurried inside to answer before it awoke Caroline, and as soon as I picked it up I saw Fraley’s now- familiar cell phone number on the caller ID.
“How’d it go?” I said.
“We need to meet,” Fraley said. “I need another search warrant.”
Wednesday, October 8
I told Fraley I’d meet him at a Waffle House near Boone’s Creek and went in to check on Caroline. She was so sore I had to help her to the bathroom and back to bed. Lilly was getting ready to drive back to Knoxville to school, and Jack was packing up for his trip back to Nashville. Once I got Caroline settled, I went upstairs to Lilly’s room. She was already dressed, standing in front of the mirror by her dresser applying lipstick.
“Can you take another day off?” I said. “I have to go to work, and I don’t want to leave your mom here alone.”
“Are you asking if I want to sleep in?” she said. “Are you asking if I’d mind not driving to Knoxville and going to class? Would I like to stay here and not have to eat in the cafeteria for another day? Sounds awful.”
“Good. You’re the designated nurse. Her pain medication is in the cupboard above the microwave. Two every four hours. I just gave her a couple, so she’ll be due again around eleven.”
Lilly grinned. “I guess this means I’ll have to go down and get in bed with her.”
I stopped by Jack’s room to say good-bye. He’d spent the entire summer on the road playing baseball and had been in college for over a year, but it still broke my heart to see him go.
“Thanks for coming,” I said as I hugged his neck. “It means a lot to both of us to have you around.”
“Are you going to be able to handle all of this?” he said. “Can you juggle the work and everything?”
“Lilly’s going to stay one more day, but after that, I’ll be fine.”
“All you have to do is call. I’ll take a semester off if I have to.”
“I love you,” I said. “Have a safe trip.”
The restaurant was less crowded than I expected, so Fraley and I were able to get a booth in the corner.
“I’ve seen corpses that look better than you,” I said as soon as he sat down.
“You ain’t exactly Miss America yourself.” The waitress set a pot of coffee down in front of us and we both ordered breakfast. Fraley, ever the picture of health, ordered four eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hash browns with cheese, and four pieces of toast.
“So what’s going on?” I said after the waitress left.
“The raid went fine. Took them down quick and got them out of there. We interrupted some kind of ritual or something. They were wearing robes with nothing on underneath, and the guys were bleeding from fresh razor cuts on their arms. There was a silver chalice with blood in it in the middle of the floor. I guess they were bleeding into the cup. They had candles all over the place. It looked like maybe they were getting ready to drink the blood or something.”
“Vampires?”
“I’m not sure. Probably some kind of satanic ritual. I’ll have to study up on it. We found two nine-millimeter pistols in the car, both stolen during a burglary back in July. All of our lab people came in at five this morning down in Knoxville just to work this case. One of the ballistics guys has already matched several of the bullets we found at both scenes with the guns.”
“That’s fantastic,” I said. “Looks like we’ve got our murderers.”
“It gets better, and it gets worse. There were two pairs of boots and a pair of shoes in the motel room. The boot prints match up to prints at both scenes. They belong to the boys.”
“Great. What about DNA?” I said. “Anything in the car?”
“They’re running the tests,” Fraley said. “It’ll take a while longer, but I don’t have much doubt they’re going to find traces of Brockwell’s DNA in the car. My main concern now is the girl.”
Fraley filled me in on the details of the preceding night: the familiar-looking redhead who’d been arrested in the motel room; her cold, calculating demeanor; the interview with Boyer and the chaotic scene just as Fraley thought Boyer was about to break down and confess; Fraley’s realization that the girl they had in custody looked just like the girl we’d talked to in the park.
“It took me a while to figure it out,” Fraley said. “I went back to the juvenile records. You said the girl in the park’s name was Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Like I told you before, Alisha Elizabeth Davis was reported missing by her foster parents ten days ago. They said she woke up screaming the night the Brockwells were murdered and she went missing the next day.”
“Why was she in foster care in the first place?”
“Because her sister stabbed her.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “Why did they take her out of the home instead of putting the sister in jail?”
“Because the sister’s crazy,” Fraley said. “The foster parents told the agents that the sister has some serious mental problems. She’s already been in a mental institution, and for some reason the mother didn’t want her to go back. So they put Alisha in foster care, I guess to keep her from getting hurt again. From what the foster parents said, Alisha’s a great kid. They said she volunteers at the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter and at the pediatric cancer ward at the hospital. She graduated near the top of her class in high school and is working her way through college now. She sells paintings and drawings and makes pottery in a little shop in back of their house and sells it at craft shows. They said she was happy there.”
“So what does this have to do with the girl in custody?” I said.
“She’s the sister,” Fraley said. “The crazy sister. I went back into the records and took a closer look. Her name is Natasha Marie Davis. She’s Alisha’s identical twin.”
I sat back and let it sink in for a moment. An identical twin. The girl in the park has an identical twin? And she was trying to tell me that her twin sister is killing people? I suddenly made a connection.
“You say the girl in the park was stabbed by her sister?” I said.
“That’s right.”
“She wore a patch over her eye. Was she stabbed in the eye?”
“In the eye.”
“The patch was over the right eye, wasn’t it?”
“You’re catching on.”
“Any idea what she used to stab her?”
“Ice pick.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Son of a bitch! Tell me we have something that links the girl to the murders.”
“Not a thing. That’s why I need the warrant. We’re going to look for an ice pick, along with anything else we might run across.”
“Where are you going to search?”
“Her mother’s house. That’s where she lives.”
“I’m going with you.”
“She has an inverted cross tattooed on her neck,” Fraley said. “I saw it just before I left. And there’s something else.” He reached over and picked up a napkin and set it down on the table in front of him. He took a pen
