Darker Than Any Shadow

Chapter Twenty-five

“So he’s still on the team? Even after that stunt?”

Rico’s voice sounded resigned even through the speaker phone. “Yeah.”

“Aren’t there other alternates?”

“None as experienced as Vigil.”

Mornings at the shop were usually slow, and this one was no exception. For some reason, most people preferred to buy firearms during the late afternoon, which typically left me the a.m. hours free for tracking down customer requests or paying bills.

And there were bills, all right, some of them second notice. I made a mental note to pay them first thing in the morning, then shoved them out of sight. I needed all the space I could get to sift through my research on Maurice Cunningham. So far, he was turning out to be a shameless, grasping egoist.

“So choosing Vigil has nothing to do with the documentary?”

Rico sighed. “The movie people are all over his revenge and redemption bullshit.”

“They don’t know that it was staged?”

“They don’t care.”

I printed out Maurice’s corporate head shot and stuck it in a file folder. “I thought Padre wanted this to be an intelligent documentary about the history of spoken word and its contemporary expression.”

“He does.”

“So why not yank the whole project out of Frankie’s hand before she turns it into a soap opera?”

“It’s not that simple. The film crew wants drama. Padre’s too mellow to deliver. And principled.”

I didn’t tell him my suspicions that Padre’s hands weren’t nearly as clean as they seemed to be. He was hiding something too. But then, everybody on the team had secrets, which is why Lex had had such an easy time as a blackmailer. Until someone stabbed him through the heart anyway.

I shoved the folders away. “So now what?”

“Now I practice. I’ve got a competition to get ready for.”

A sudden crash jerked me to attention. I stood. “Hang on, I heard something.”

“What?”

“It sounded like the garbage can falling over.”

But there was no trash pickup that day, and Kennesaw’s raccoons and opossums didn’t go foraging under the noonday sun. I reached under the counter and pulled out my revolver.

“Tai?”

“I’m gonna check out back. Stay on the line.”

“You’re not carrying that—”

“Of course I am.”

I went to the back door and peeked through the mini-blinds. And there I saw Cricket, hastily climbing back into her car. I stowed the gun in the file cabinet and opened the door.

“Cricket!” I hollered. “Wait!”

She whipped her head from side to side, then spotted me. She was dressed like she’d come from the pre-school, in black leggings and white tunic top, her hair knotted at the nape of her neck.

“I accidentally hit your garbage can,” she said.

“No problem, I do that all the time.”

She stood there, looking worn-out, which made sense, and on the verge of tears, which didn’t. And she carried a white trash bag, which also didn’t make sense.

“Cricket?”

She sighed and stared sheepishly at the trash bag. “I guess this needs explaining.”

“I guess so.”

“Can I come in and do it?”

I stepped back and opened the door. “Absolutely.”

***

She entered hesitantly, standing under the fluorescents, clutching her trash bag with both hands. I went to Dexter’s office and dragged the desk chair into the main area. She sat, knees together, clutching the bag in her lap.

“Can I get you some water? Coffee?”

“No. I’m good.”

She started crying then, so I grabbed a box of tissues. She yanked up a handful as the tears streaked her mascara. While she dabbed her eyes and blew her nose, I retrieved the gun from the file cabinet and put it back under the counter. She watched.

“Is that yours?”

I nodded. “Smith and Wesson .38.”

“You carry it around a lot?”

“Mostly it stays under the counter. But I got spooked when I heard the crash.”

“Can I hold it?”

“Sure.”

I emptied the chamber and handed it to her. She held it in her hands like it was nitroglycerin, delicate and dangerous. That was a normal reaction. So was curiosity. Fascination, however, that shiny intense high like the first hit of a drug…that sent off warning bells. Some people poured all their crazy into whatever they touched, and a gun sopped up crazy like a sponge.

Cricket was looking at mine with a determined squeamishness. Eventually she handed it back to me, and I took it back to its hiding spot under the counter. When I got back, she was staring at her hands, at the tissue she’d shredded to fluff.

“So what’s in the trash bag?”

“Stuff that belonged to Lex. I found it under the sofa where he’d been sleeping. Mostly dirty clothes. I thought of throwing it out, but I decided to bring it to you instead.”

“Why?”

“Because of this.”

She pulled something out of the bag and handed it to me. It was a lacquered jewelry box, about the size of a shoe box, jet black and shiny. There was no keyhole, only a stainless steel latch that looked like a stylized Japanese Kanji character. I shook it gently and heard the dry rustle of papers, the rattle of small hard objects.

Cricket watched me. “Rico said your uncle was a locksmith.”

“You can’t find the key?”

“I don’t think there is one.”

I examined the latch. No keyhole. I fiddled with the silvery piece of metal, but it remained closed. I held the box up and studied the finish. Smooth and dark and impenetrable. Even if I’d known how to use Dexter’s tools, they would have been useless in this case.

“It’s a trick box. You have to know the secret to get into it.”

“What’s the secret?”

“Beats me. Every box has its own secret.” I let it rest in my lap. “Lex had something on you, didn’t he?”

She nodded.

“And you think maybe he kept his blackmail materials in this box?”

She nodded again.

I scooted my chair closer. “Tell me the truth, Cricket. Were you and Lex having an affair?”

Her mouth opened in a startled O, and her eyes widened. “What? God, no! He was…” She shuddered. “Omigod, no!”

“Then what the hell was going on between you? Because I know something was. And I know it’s got Rico in white knight mode and Jackson in an overprotective tizzy—”

“And you know what that means, right? He must be on steroids again.”

She said it with snap in her eyes, and I realized then that the waterworks were a piece of stagecraft, as calculated as Lex’s Gothwear and Vigil’s community service. Cricket’s sugar-sprinkled sweetness disguised one tough cookie.

I shrugged. “I’d heard rumors.”

“Everybody has. And they were true back then, but not anymore. He’s been clean since the day we met. He brings me the test results to prove it. He doesn’t have to do that, because I trust him, but he does it anyway.”

“I’m really glad you trust Jackson and he trusts you, but I can’t trust either of you until you tell me what you’re hiding.”

She hesitated. Then, as I watched, she untucked a silver pendant from under her blouse. It was very small, dainty, a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle. I wasn’t really up on alternative religions, but even so, I knew what it was.

A pentacle.

Cricket rubbed it between her fingers. “I don’t tell people I’m Wiccan. Only a few people know—Jackson, my close friends, the team. Lex threatened to tell the principal at my school if I didn’t vote to keep him instead of Vigil. He said he had proof.”

The same speech he’d tossed Rico about the missing money. “Did he?”

“I don’t know. Lex was good at manipulation. Like that ankh he had on at the debut party. I explained to him that it had real sacred meaning, but he didn’t care. He only wore it to piss me off.”

I remembered Jackson’s argument with Lex, right before he threw him into the hallway. And then you show up here wearing that!

“Jackson got pissed about the ankh too, didn’t he?”

“He did, especially when Lex kept saying I’d have a hard time explaining if it showed up in my desk at school.”

“But they can’t fire you for your religion!”

“Of course they couldn’t say that was why they fired me, but that’s what would happen. My job’s not much, but until Lupa gets off the ground, it’s all we have. And if word got out…you know how it is in the Bible Belt.”

She had a point, unfortunately. “So the night Lex was killed—”

“Lex sent me a text while I was at the bar, wanting to meet in the parking lot. That’s when he explained what he would do if I didn’t vote to keep him on the team instead of Vigil.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him he’d better be glad I took that ‘harm none’ part of my faith seriously and went back inside.”

Something was tapping in my brain. I itched to drag down my flow charts and diagrams. Rico had been in that parking lot too, and yet he hadn’t mentioned seeing Cricket. Another part of the story that didn’t mesh, not yet.

“And so you want to see what’s in the box, to see what kind of proof he might have had?”

“Yes.”

We stared at the box between us. Cricket chewed her thumbnail.

“Cricket? How bad do you want to get into this?”

“Pretty bad.”

I did too. My fingers practically itched.

I looked her in the eye. “I can get us in.”

“Okay.”

“But it won’t be pretty.”

“Okay.” She straightened her spine. “Whatever it takes.”

I handed it back to her. “Hold on. I’ll go get the pry bar.”

***

In five minutes, we had it open.

The latch would never work properly again, and I’d scratched the finish, but at the moment, I didn’t care. Item by item, we unloaded the box. And item by item, Lex himself gradually materialized.

There was the usual detritus—a watch, some spare change, a MARTA pass—but mostly I saw paper. Receipts, scribbled sticky notes, torn envelopes, the kind of trash that ends up on the floorboards of cars. No photographs, no incriminating documents. No tiny computer, no phone, no portable drive, no recording devices.

I picked up a Chinese takeout menu. The entire margin was a scribble of words. Snatches of verse. An embryonic poem. And it was then, with his words tangible between my fingers, that Lex finally became real, a person who had existed and who’d been violently erased. The sudden punch in the heart took me by surprise.

I picked up a sticky note. Words tangled with words, crossed out and looping back on themselves. A poet’s inheritance, scraps and words. Cricket examined the box’s contents. She looked puzzled and disappointed.

“That’s it?”

“Looks like.”

“So there’s nothing in there he could have used against me?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Well. That’s a relief, I guess.”

She stood. The woman could work sweetness, that was for sure. I’d watched her do it on stage, easing her way through the rawest lyrics, rimming them with sugar. All poets had their favorite tools of manipulation. Cricket used a honey tongue and blue-eyed innocence.

“So you’re…” I waited for her to fill in the blank.

She obliged me. “A witch.”

“And Rico knows?”

“The whole team knows, not just Rico. But Rico’s been keeping his mouth shut especially hard.” She moved toward the door, stepping over the trash bag as she did.

“Wait, you forgot his stuff.”

“Keep it in case any next-of-kin show up. There might be someone in the world who misses that son of a bitch.”

I went with her to the back and held the door. “One more thing. This may sound weird, but…did Lex have a snake?”

“A snake?”

“You know, like a pet.”

“No, no snakes. Not that I saw anyway.”

She left quickly, with no further questions or commentary. When I got back in the shop, I pulled the box out one more time. In the harsh afternoon light, it looked bedraggled, its broken latch like a wound. The black lacquer didn’t shine as brightly anymore, and its lack of ornamentation suddenly seemed cheap, not sophisticated. In short, it broke my heart. No matter what trouble Lex had caused, he didn’t deserve to die the way he had. He deserved justice.

I opened it and sifted through the artifacts of his life. The receipts were random and varied—small towns up and down I-75 , the typical debris of a traveler. No credit card numbers, no names, just dates and locations, all of them over a year old. Only one thing wasn’t a repurposed scrap, a folded piece of notebook paper. I opened it gingerly and read a poem so startling in its tenderness that I had to blink back tears.

Justice. Yes. Regardless.

I refolded the poem carefully and tucked it back in the box. I noticed the last receipt then, not crinkled with age, but crisp and relatively new. It was also the only scrap of paper not covered in words. I examined it closer.

This was no roadtrip detritus—it was from one of Atlanta’s car storage places, one of those climate-controlled facilities where automobile fanciers parked their classic Corvettes. And it was recent.

But Garrity had told me that Lex supposedly drove a beat-up Chevy Suburban that no one had been able to find. That wasn’t the kind of car one preserved in air-conditioned comfort. Nonetheless, the receipt showed a check-in Thursday morning.

I immediately called Cummings, but got his inbox. I left a quick message to call me ASAP. Then I closed Lex’s box and tucked it amongst my accumulated research, an entire paper box full of incomplete circle graphs, unstapled articles, and empty folders. I knew a coffee shop with big tables and free wi-fi and a wait staff who didn’t mind if I spent a couple of hours sifting through reams of paper.

But first…I had quick trip to Atlanta Custom Auto Care to make.