“Who knows? The father also had an upside-down cross cut into the side of his neck. She decided to check on the others, and it turns out that all four of them have these little upside-down crosses carved into their necks. And take a look at these.”
Fraley reached for some photographs and set them down on the desk in front of Dillard. The photos were of the bodies at the crime scene, taken from directly above.
“Does the positioning of the bodies mean anything to you?” Fraley asked.
The children had been placed across the adults’ thighs. Dillard stared at the photos, then looked up at Fraley.
“Crosses,” he said.
“That’s what I was thinking. Maybe upside down, since they’re across the legs instead of the shoulders. Do you know anything about upside-down crosses?”
“Some kind of satanic symbol maybe. I think they call them inverted crosses.”
“Looks like devil worshipers.”
“Either that or somebody wants you to think so. Have you identified all of the victims?”
“They’re local,” Fraley said, “but they’ve only been here about a year. Bjorn Beck, thirty years old, address is 1401 Poplar Street. Clerk at a hotel over by the mall. His wife, Anna, thirty years old, worked at Starlight Marketing selling vacations over the phone. Else, six years old, just started first grade a few weeks ago. The little boy’s name was Elias, seven months old. One of their neighbors said they went to a Jehovah’s Witness convention in Knoxville yesterday. Haven’t confirmed that yet. They were driving a 2001 Chevrolet van, maroon. We’ve got a nationwide alert out on the van.”
“No witnesses?”
“Not that we know of. We canvassed within a mile of the scene. Nobody saw anything unusual. There’s a guy who was checking out a building site about a quarter mile away who heard the shots and called it in, but he didn’t go anywhere near it. As a matter of fact, he said he got cold chills when he heard the shots and headed in the other direction.”
“What about family?”
“Both sets of parents are in Chicago, which is where Beck and his wife were from. Mr. Beck has-or had-a brother who’s flying in from Panama City, Florida, this afternoon to make a positive ID on the bodies.”
“Jesus,” Dillard said, “I can’t imagine having to do something like that.”
The phone rang just as Fraley stuffed another bite of bun into his mouth.
“Fraley. Yeah? Already? Where? Ten minutes.”
He looked at Dillard, trying to decide whether he wanted to tell him. He didn’t seem like such a bad guy. Besides, maybe Fraley could get him to spring for lunch later. Fraley stood up.
“C’mon, Boy Scout,” he said. “They found the van.”
Monday, September 15
A patrol officer noticed the van about five blocks from the downtown area, where a music festival had been held over the weekend. They cordoned off the streets and set up stages all over a blighted five-block area downtown, which had fallen victim to the convenience of mall shopping and the circular development of cities. There were a few junk shops, a couple of bars where the college kids from East Tennessee State University hung out, a couple of hobby shops, and a few lawyer’s offices. If it hadn’t been for a courthouse being located on Main Street, most of the buildings would have been boarded up.
Caroline and I had gone to the festival a few years earlier, because both of us love live music-it doesn’t really matter what kind-and the festival offered a little for everyone: bluegrass, country, rock, gospel, and blues. The city had billed it as a family event, and it was supposed to benefit the merchants downtown, but they’d made the mistake of allowing the bars to give away beer, and they let people drink on the streets. After a couple of years it turned into a two-day drunk. People walked around in a daze, pissing in the alleys, and the more they drank, the more belligerent they became. There’d been several fights two years ago, and last year Caroline and I didn’t even bother to attend. As I gazed at the van, I wondered whether our murderers shot a family of four and then went to the festival to guzzle a few free beers.
There was nothing for me to do at the scene. Men and women with skills far superior to mine in the area of forensic evidence gathering spent their time stooping and examining and picking and poking and photographing. I watched and stayed out of their way, hoping they’d find something that would help identify the killers.
I hung around until they hauled the van off to Knoxville on a flatbed truck; then I went back down to Jonesborough so I could start getting set up in my new office, which was nothing fancier than a twelve-foot-by- twelve-foot Sheetrock box. It was after three when I got there, and the place was nearly deserted. As I walked past the secretary, a forty-year-old, blue-eyed, redheaded bombshell named Rita Jones, she batted her eyes at me and handed me a stack of messages.
“You haven’t even been here a day and you’ve already got more messages than most of us get in a week,” she said.
I’d known Rita for several years. She’d been a legal secretary for close to a dozen lawyers, had broken up more than one marriage, and had hit on me so many times that it got to be a sort of joke between us. My most vivid memory of her was at a Christmas party hosted by the bar association five or six years earlier. She wore red spiked heels, shiny red pants, a Santa hat, and a red knit halter top that barely contained the bounty within. Sometime around nine, after everyone was good and soused, I was leaning against a wall talking to Bob Brown, a lawyer legendary for his ability to ingest huge amounts of liquor and his insatiable sexual appetite. I was listening to one of Brown’s stories when Rita and her bounty happened by. She stopped to say hello, and Brown, without uttering a word, hooked his finger in the front of the halter and pulled it down, revealing her breasts. Rita didn’t bat an eye. Nor did she attempt to cover herself. She looked directly at me, smiled coyly, and said, “All that, and brains, too.” I awkwardly excused myself and walked away, but I hadn’t forgotten those breasts. They were magnificent.
“What’s this?” I said, looking at the stack of messages. “Nobody even knows I’m working here.”
“All media. All about the murders,” she said. She took the stack from my hand and began to go through it. “Associated Press, CNN, Court TV, MSNBC. The list goes on and on. Looks like you’re going to be a celebrity.”
She offered the stack to me again with a wry smile, but I refused to take it.
“Tell them ‘no comment,’ ” I said. “If I have anything to say, I’ll call a press conference and talk to all of them at the same time.”
“I can’t do that, cutie, much as I’d like to,” she said. “You see, it isn’t my job to tell them ‘no comment.’ That’d be your job.”
“Then just tell them I’m not here. I don’t want my phone ringing every five minutes.”
“You mean you want me to lie? Imagine that, a lawyer asking a secretary to lie.”
“Don’t act like you haven’t done it before.”
“But that was back when I was working for those awful private lawyers. Now I’m at the district attorney’s office. Everybody here is honorable, honey. We’re not supposed to lie. We’re not supposed to do anything that would cast aspersions on the office.”
“C’mon, Rita. You’ll make an exception for me, won’t you? I’m not used to being honorable. Maybe it’ll grow on me.”
“I’ll tell you what. You make sure you wear some nice tight pants at least twice a week and I’ll see what I can do.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were sexually harassing me.”
“And when can I expect you to do the same?”
“Sorry, Rita,” I said, holding up my ring finger for her to see. “Still married. Still happily married.”
“Well,” she said with a wink, “we’ll just have to see about that, won’t we?”
I turned and walked back to my office with a strange tingling sensation in my stomach. I was flattered by the attention-it had been a long time since a woman had flirted with me so openly-but I knew Rita’s reputation. She was a conqueror, a woman who chewed up men and spit them out like Juicy Fruit. Besides, after twenty years of marriage, I was still madly in love with my wife.
The office was equipped with a desk, a computer, and a couple of chairs. The walls were antique white and bare. I’d left a box of personal items on the desk early in the morning, before I left to go to Fraley’s office, and I started taking things out of the box and arranging them. I’d just set a photograph of my daughter doing an
