Once he was back in the car, he pulled out his notebook and wrote down the information Dr. Kim had given him. While it was true he had an excellent memory, he always backed it up with detailed notes.
“Poor rabbit that only got one hole,” his mother used to say. Her homilies and colloquialisms were usually intended to be responses to some particularly juicy bits of gossip, but that didn’t change the veracity of their wisdom.
Titus wrote down all the details that Dr. Kim had shared. At the top of the page he wrote the phrase “Curse of Canaan.” He was sure that was a reference to the Curse of Ham in Genesis. A bit of Old Testament vitriol that multiple empires had used to justify subjugating various peoples and keeping them in chains. Titus could remember one social studies teacher who had said without a hint of compunction that Black people were cursed to be slaves by the word of God. When he’d gotten home from school that day and told his mother, he watched as a tornado brewed behind her eyes.
“We going up there to talk to that wench tomorrow. Listen to me, Titus, and don’t ever forget this. The Word is perfect, but the way men interpret it is corrupt. And your teacher is full of shit.”
Titus could still remember the shock of hearing his mother curse. It was like seeing Jesus drinking Henny. Later, after his mother was in the ground, he realized the Word was just as corrupt as the men who read it. Old Testament, New Testament, it was just words with a little w, written by zealots as PR for their new cult founded in the memory of a dead carpenter.
Titus wrote another phrase at the top of the page: “Our salvation is his suffering.”
That had been carved into the forehead of the body in the third photograph. That wasn’t a biblical phrase, but Titus was still familiar with it. Of the twenty-three houses of worship in Charon County, six had used that phrase at one time or another over the past three years as an attention-grabber for their church signs.
He’d noticed it on a sign in front of St. Ignatius. Then he’d seen it on a sign in front of his father’s church. Later he’d seen it at Trinity Baptist Church and Nazareth United. First Corinthian had taken it up as well, but the first church to actually put it on a sign had been the Holy Rock of the Redeemer, a nondenominational family-run church on Piney Island, a little spit of boulders and sand that was attached to Charon by the world’s most rickety bridge. The Holy Rock of the Redeemer was known as a fire-and-brimstone, holy-roller, snake-handling, and strychnine-drinking church of true believers. Or, as his father said, “A bunch of racist loony tunes sons of bitches.”
Titus put his notebook away and started the SUV. It wasn’t much, but it was something to grab on to even if he was just using his fingertips. Was the Last Wolf a member of one of the six churches that had used that phrase? Or was he a sick bastard who lived in the county and thought it was cute to cut that phrase into some poor child’s forehead with a razor? Either way, he was local. Titus was sure of that. Only a local would know where the willow tree was located. Only a local would work with Spearman and Latrell. Only someone who had Charon tattooed on their bones could hate the county enough to sow its soil with the blood of innocents.
* * *
Titus got back to the office by noon. Cam was at the switchboard fielding dozens of calls. Titus noticed how his face was set in a series of hard lines.
“The sheriff is going to answer those questions at the press conference, Toby. I can’t tell you nothing because I don’t know nothing, all right?” Cam said. He hung up on Toby and answered another call.
“Charon County Sheriff’s Office. Ma’am, the sheriff is holding a press conference today at four to talk about all that. Thank you,” Cam said. His voice cracked with exasperation. The phones were quiet for a moment, a brief lull that plunged the office into silence.
“Been busy, I guess,” Titus said.
Cam grunted. “Everybody talking about what we found out in that field. People flipping out. Ricky Sours called up here talking about deputizing his crew. Folks talking about should they leave town. Scott calling up here talking a bunch of trash. I swear to God, that man got a face made for punching,” Cam said.
Titus clapped him on the shoulder. “Scott’s the least of our worries. Do me a favor. Call Freddie Nickels at Channel Seven and get him to put the word out about the press conference. I sent him an email, but I wanna follow up. I sent one to Dan Dawson at Channel Twelve and Stacy Weddle at Channel Twenty-three. Call them too.”
“Want Charlie from The Charon Register too?” Cam asked.
“The more, the merrier,” Titus said.
Cam nodded. “Roger called.”
Titus sighed. “What he talking about?”
“Just wanted to know where you were. Said he had talked to Scott about his suspension,” Cam said. He said the last part hesitantly, like a child reluctantly tattling on a sibling.
“He can talk to Scott all he wants. Long as this badge says SHERIFF he can talk to anybody he wants. Gonna do him about as much good as a wagon with square wheels,” Titus said.
He went into his office thinking that if his former colleagues at the Fort Wayne Field Office had heard him roll that particular bon mot off his tongue, they would have left a pair of bib overalls and a packet of hayseeds on his desk.
As a joke, of course. They were always full of jokes.
Titus turned on the laptop and started writing his speech for the press conference. He knew he had to strike the right tone. Concerned but not afraid. Stern but not demanding. There was a balance one had to strike when you told your constituents three of their fellow citizens had turned their county into a killing field.
Titus paused and peered at Ward Bennings’s photo on the wall in the lobby. He was there with all the other previous sheriffs of Charon. Some of those bodies had been under that willow tree for more than five years. Spearman and Latrell and the Last Wolf had carried them out there, passing under branches and tearing through brambles, without so much as a wink from Ward or anyone else. How had they done it? They must have been careful, but they weren’t magicians. They should have been seen, even if only once. Charon was too small for a trio of men carrying bodies into the woods to go unnoticed. At least that was what he hoped.
He looked at the row of past sheriffs. A lineage of stewards who had protected some citizens of Charon while ignoring others. A tradition of watchmen who had turned a blind eye to the suffering of anyone who didn’t look like them. Each one had passed through the world, generation after generation leaving the pieces of their broken county for the next man to try to repair. Now Titus found himself standing in the shadow of a specter with a wolf’s head while he did his best to hold those shards, even as they sliced his hands to ribbons.
* * *
“Damn, everybody and their mama is here,” Davy said.
Titus peeped through the window. The parking lot was jam-packed. Not only were the vans for the three main TV stations that served Southeastern Virginia here, but three of the stations that served the greater Richmond area were here, along with a couple from Northern Virginia. Titus saw Frank from The Register and a couple of other folks with tablets and notepads and that sly gaze that only reporters on the hunt for a good story have. Filling out the rest of the parking lot was about sixty percent of Charon County. Cars and trucks were parked down the street to the Safeway.
“All right, well, let’s get to it. Davy, you, Carla, Pip, and Steve are crowd control. I’ll go to the mic, say my piece, and end it. We’re not taking any questions right now. We all on the same page?” Titus asked. The deputies nodded in unison.
Titus checked his uniform in the reflection in the window. The crease in his pants was sharp enough to slice a cake. His hands and face were moisturized with lotion. His badge was gleaming like a diamond. For some folks it wouldn’t matter, but for the majority of Charon’s citizens he had to be a larger-than-life character for them to even pretend to respect him. And he needed that respect today more than he ever had before. He was about to shatter their fantasies of safety and security. He was set to smash one of their idols. He was going to have to drag them into a new reality where people they knew, people they’d known all their lives, were monsters with human faces.
Folks hated receiving that kind of news.
They often ended up hating the messenger too.
“Let’s get to it,” Titus said.
* * *