The three men exchanged courtesies, and Lynch excused himself. He made one more offer to fetch coffee or water before leaving, which was kindly declined. He reached for the door.
Uh-oh!
A sliver of fluorescent light from the hallway shone on the floor of the interview room. The door hadn’t latched. In a single panicked motion, Lynch whipped it open and popped his head into the hall. It was empty. The old break room was directly across from where he stood. There was someone in it who sounded like the Chief, but the door was closed so he couldn’t tell for sure. Whoever it was, they couldn’t have heard anything that went on between Lynch and the two priests. The latch faux pas must have gone without notice.
Lucky.
Gomez was still at the pastry cart. Lynch could only imagine how many French crullers he’d fired down since he left him there.
“You ready, Jaime?”
“Put a lid on your coffee, would you? I’ll tell you about my boned-up morning on the way to Ellisport.”
12. The Old Break Room
Thirty seconds…Gordy was left alone in the old break room with the door open for thirty seconds. The idiot cop in the room across the hall failed to close his door completely. When the sketch artist he’d played for a fool returned, he brought the Chief of Police with him. They barely had the door closed before the bucket of intimidating B.S. began. Ten ridiculous minutes later, Gordy turned on the waterworks. Walter Matthau and Dick Van Dyke would have been proud.
Between spasms and snorts, he squeaked out an apology and swore that the man outside F & J’s threatened to hurt his mother if he went to the cops.
The pinheads fell for it.
What did Gordy care? He’d just give another description, this time of the bass player for Forever Damned. No one ever noticed the bass player in a band. He probably should have done that the first time around anyway. Maybe they’d believe him; maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they could eat shit.
As he tried to fake-stop his fake-crying, he did his best to catch a couple more words from across the hall, but it was no good with the door closed.
Gordy hadn’t been able to see what was going on in there, but he’d heard everything…for thirty seconds. It was enough.
13. Southbound on Route 202
Gomez drove.
Lynch had copies of the ballistics and related incident report and was smiling wider and wider as he flipped through the pages. The bullet had been dug out of a wooden barrier fence that bordered the property of…
“A church. Do we find that interesting? Do we call that a connection?”
“I dunno. It’s something’”
“Yeah, it’s something.”
The Fellowship Church of Ellisport was located right along the Schuylkill River about an hour from Potterford. It was known locally as the “Church of Rock,” due to the Battle of the Bands benefit concert they held every summer.
The last one was held, July seventeenth, the date of the report.
“It says a junkie named Eddie Williams pulled a gun on some musicians behind the church. According to them, he squeezed the trigger by accident, scared the piss out of himself, and ran. Nobody was hurt. They chased after him, but he ditched the gun before they caught up. When they did catch up, they kept him…whatever the hell that means…until the uniforms arrived.”
Lynch’s smile faded when he read that the gun was never found, and Williams was discovered dead some weeks later from an overdose.
Well, that sucks.
Ellisport was a great hang. The restaurants were fantastic, the streets were clean, the people were friendly, and all the retail businesses were family-owned. There was also very little crime, which made Lynch optimistic that people would remember the incident behind the church.
“It should be at the end of this street.”
Both detectives felt as if they’d entered some alternate universe where everything went smoothly. They’d called the Ellisport P.D. en route. Since Potterford ballistics had requested PDFs of the paperwork, the call was expected and Lynch was (shockingly) put on the phone with the arresting officer. His name was Blakely and was possibly the most agreeable flatfoot that Lynch had ever met. Blakely enthusiastically agreed to meet Lynch and Gomez at the church, and said he’d also try to contact one of the witnesses.
“There’s only one explanation, partner.”
“What’s that, Jaime?”
“Robots…Ellisport is populated by robots.”
The well-kept brownstone church was almost as old as the town itself. Like all the other buildings on its street, it sat atop a fifteen-foot riverbank and was separated from the water by a sturdy elevated wooden walkway edged by a thick barrier fence.
The minister was Danielle “Dani” Adams, a petite woman in her early fifties with red graying hair and permanent dimples. She, along with Officer Blakely and a man who obviously had fond nostalgia for the eighties, were waiting next to Lynch’s reserved parking space when the detectives arrived.
“I’m tellin’ ya, man…robots.”
Blakely filled in a few gaps as the five of them walked back to the wall. The eighties throwback guy introduced himself, with a complex handshake, as Chaz. He was the drummer for the band that encountered the meth-head.
“We’re called Generation Us. We do 70s and 80s covers, but it’s like we choose songs where the lyrics can be like reinterpreted to mean faith and stuff.”
He was forty if a day.
The wooden walkway behind the church connected all the neighboring structures. It functioned as a mini-boardwalk, although it appeared to have restricted access. The cedar pole fence designed to keep people out of the river came up to Lynch’s chest. Blakely (probably for the first time ever) pulled out his expandable riot stick and used
