“You’re sure you wanna do that? I don’t mind having you, but I think there are folks who might see you as a traitor,” Titus had said.
“I suppose so, but I think it might be nice to finish up my career working for a sheriff who ain’t meaner than a rabid weasel. One who keeps his white sheets on his bed,” Pip had said.
“If he was so bad, why’d you stay on for all these years?” Titus had asked.
A pall had come over the old man’s face. “Ward was a nasty piece of work. Person like that, well, if they think there’s a pair of eyes on them that might be taking note of the things they doing, it might give them pause,” Pip had said. Titus had just nodded. He didn’t ask Pip if it had worked. He knew the answer to that question. He did wonder if Pip thought about that answer when he faced the man in the mirror.
“Gentlemen,” Titus said as he walked over to Trey’s car.
“Sheriff Crown, my granddaughter told me to tell you that you ruined her graduation,” Pip said.
“No, she didn’t,” Titus said.
Pip grinned. “Nah, but she was thinking it.”
“My fiancé said it. She said it more than once on our way back,” Trey said.
Pip stopped grinning. “It’s … bad, ain’t it?”
“It’s not bad. It’s about twenty-five miles past bad. Let’s get inside,” Titus said.
Davy, Steve, Carla, and Douglas, who’d been handling a domestic assault call when the shooting at the school went down, were waiting in his office when he got there. He hadn’t talked to Tommy yet, but Tommy was off, so he could catch up with him later today.
Titus sat at his desk. The deputies made a semicircle around him.
“First thing, we need to make sure we aren’t sharing the details of the investigation into the shooting yesterday with anyone. Not our loved ones or our neighbors or our friends or folks at the market. The details of the case are changing rapidly. We don’t need rumors floating around town. Understood?” Titus said. He locked eyes with Davy. Davy’s face turned maroon.
“Second, Trey, I forwarded you all the reports on the fatal shooting of Latrell Macdonald. I want you to take a look at everything. Make sure it was a good shoot. I want to think it was, but what I think don’t matter right now. We need fresh eyes on it.”
“Yes, sir. Gotcha,” Trey said.
“Carla, can you get the painting we took from Spearman’s house?” Titus said. He slipped on a pair of latex gloves. “I knew that tree looked familiar.”
When Carla returned, he took the painting from her and unfurled it. He held it in front of him by the corners.
“Davy, you ever do any hunting out on Tank Billups’s seventy-five acres? Over on King Field Road?” Titus asked.
“Yeah. Me and my daddy went deer hunting over there a few times,” Davy said.
“Me too,” Steve said. “Me and my daddy and my uncle used to go over there. Tank charges fifty for the day for each person in your party.”
“Me and my brother and my daddy went a few times too. I got a twelve-pointer over there. He charged us a hundred a person.”
“He charged you that much?” Steve asked as if he hadn’t heard what Titus had said thirty seconds before.
“Privilege is a hell of a drug. Now look at this tree. Where have you seen a weeping willow this tall before?” Titus said.
Davy and Steve exchanged confused expressions.
“It’s on Tank’s property. About four or five hundred yards in. I’ve seen it when we was tracking the blood trail on a buck my brother had shot. I remember it because it’s rare to see one this big in the middle of the forest. On the videos, Spearman mentioned a secret garden. I think this is it,” Titus said.
“Goddamn, you’re right. I remember it now,” Davy said.
“So, why is that tree important?” Steve asked. Titus turned to answer him, when Trey spoke.
“You think that’s where they buried them, don’t you?” Trey asked.
Titus nodded. “I do. There are at least seven different victims on the … videos. They aren’t under Spearman’s house. They aren’t in the walls. There is always the possibility they could have been disposed of in other ways, but this painting was important to Spearman. It was so important he hid it with his external drives. Killers like Spearman and his partner are driven by fantasy. They think about their fantasies all day. If possible, they like to relive them until the fantasy isn’t enough and they need a new victim. I think they buried them near this tree and then went back to visit the site. More than once,” Titus said. Talking about it this way, in cop jargon, helped him, albeit slightly. It gave him a measure of distance from the memories of those children and their screams.
“What you wanna do?” Douglas asked. Unlike Trey and Carla, Douglas didn’t have any higher aspirations. He was a former bouncer who’d gotten a job with the sheriff’s office for the health insurance. He didn’t feel like it was his calling like Roger, but he didn’t see it as a career like Trey. It was just a job to Douglas. Titus could respect that. There were times when Douglas’s dispassionate demeanor came in handy.
“I want to call Warren Ayres and have him bring both the volunteer fire department and the volunteer rescue squad out to Tank Billups’s property. We are going to excavate the area around that tree and we are going to need help. Pip, I’m gonna need you to handle the patrol in the northern part of the county. Steve, you and Douglas ask around with the teachers at the high school, Spearman’s friends. Find out if any of them saw Latrell and Spearman together. Rest of us are going to go over to Tank’s. Right now, this stays quiet as kept until we find something,” Titus said.
“You really think Jeff Spearman buried those kids out under a tree in the woods?” Steve asked.
“Spearman and the Last Wolf. I think they did it and I think they got off on it. They liked knowing those bodies were out there. They liked having that secret. But secrets can be corrosive. You hold it in, and it starts eating your insides. Pretty soon you find yourself willing to do anything to stop the pain. For Latrell that meant blowing a hole in Jeff Spearman’s head wide enough to put your fist through,” Titus said. It occurred to him he could have been talking about himself as well as Latrell. His secret was patiently waiting to be revealed. Hanging over his head like a dull sword of Damocles.
“There’s nothing we can do to Latrell or Spearman. But that third man? The one who never took off his mask? We can find him. We can make him answer for what he did. Take off that mask and show him to the world. The things they did on those videos…”
He paused, took a breath, then continued.
“No one should get away with that. No one. That kind of sickness won’t stop because his partners are dead. I’ll be damned if I let him take somebody else’s child on our watch. The scales gotta be balanced. First step in that is finding the bodies. Bodies hold secrets of their own,” Titus said.
“They called it their secret garden. What the hell is wrong with people like that, Titus?” Davy asked. Titus rolled up the painting and laid it on his desk.
“Everything, Davy. Everything.”
* * *
Like most back roads in Charon County, the way to Tank Billups’s wooded seventy-five acres was beset by shadows even during the brightest part of the day. Deciduous and coniferous trees lined the ditch banks like the first regiments of an army trying to reclaim a captured kingdom. Titus thought the trees seemed to be encroaching on the narrow ribbon of asphalt like the Great Birnam Wood from Macbeth.
Titus did some math in his head as he drove. The date codes on the video files from the thumb drives went back five years, to 2012. The photos were older. Way older. In the earliest ones Spearman had black hair and was alone with a child who was obviously a young Latrell. Later there were other children. Titus recognized some of the faces. He’d seen them around town, lined and weathered, with beards or tattooed eyeliner. Adults who had once been scared little children in the hands of a man who was the second-most-trusted grown-up they knew after their parents.
Titus fought the urge to drive to Richmond and pump some bullets of his own into Spearman’s body.
After the meeting Titus had sent his team home to change out of their patrol uniforms and get into clothes they didn’t mind getting dirty. Titus kept on his uniform. If the good citizens of Charon County saw him in a filthy, soiled uniform they would fixate on that image like a posthypnotic suggestion. It would become fodder for gossip at the post office or the grocery store. They would subconsciously file it away as another reason he wasn’t fit for his office. The color of his skin was reason enough for some folks. He didn’t intend to give them any more kindling for that hateful fire.