Time had dulled that injury, but there was still a thirteen-year-old inside of him that hated his father just a little bit for that.
Albert got up and put his hand on Titus’s shoulder.
“Long as I’m on this side of the dirt you ain’t alone, boy,” Albert said before shuffling up the stairs. And that simple action, those gentle words, was why he loved his father more than that little boy hated him. It was the blessing of blood.
Titus put the jar back under the sink and cleaned the shot glasses. He turned off the kitchen light and went out to the porch. Even in the South, mid-October can be chilly. The winds coming off the bay carry the cold down from the North Atlantic like a ghost that caresses your cheeks and makes your teeth ache.
Titus spread his arms and let the cold embrace him. The cool air stung, but in a good way. It sharpened his focus. Tomorrow he’d have Trey talk to the ME. He’d go in at 7:00 A.M. and stay until 9:00. People were afraid. The best way to counteract that was for them to see the sheriff on the road, in their neighborhood. See him doing something, anything, that convinced them he wasn’t cowering in his office behind a desk. Ninety percent of his job was enforcing the law, but ten percent, the percentage most folks saw, was creating an image. Titus didn’t like it, but he knew it was pointless to fight it. He’d told Darlene he wasn’t afraid. That wasn’t exactly true. He was afraid, just not of the man who killed those kids, who probably killed Cole Marshall. He was afraid of what that man, the Last Wolf, was doing to his county. He knew he had to use that fear, break it and bend it to his will. There was a chasm everyone had to traverse at one time or another called failure. Fear was the bridge that carried you over that crevasse.
“Titus! Your radio, they calling you!” Darlene shouted. Titus turned and saw her through the doorway standing at the top of the steps. She was wearing one of his old UVA T-shirts. Titus hurried through the door and up the steps.
He grabbed his radio off the charging station.
“Sheriff Crown, go ahead.”
“Titus, we got a situation down here at the station,” Pip said.
“What kind of situation?” Titus asked.
“Darnell Posey came by here, dropped off a box, then tried to run through the woods. We got him in the holding cell,” Pip said.
Titus held the speaker close to his mouth. “What was in the box?”
* * *
Titus got down to the station in five minutes. Five minutes less than the usual ten it took for him to get there. Pip and Douglas were waiting for him in his office. There was a cardboard box on the desk with a familiar swoosh design on the outside.
“The parchment has some words on it,” Pip said. He handed Titus a pair of latex gloves. Titus slipped on the gloves, then took the parchment.
I Am the Beast Slouching Towards Bethlehem, it said in what appeared to be black ink.
“Is that from the Bible?” Pip asked.
“No, it’s from a poem by Yeats,” Titus said as he handed the parchment back to Pip, who put it in an evidence bag.
“And it’s not parchment. It’s skin,” Titus said.
“What the fuck?” Douglas said. Pip reached into the box and pulled out a ziplock bag.
“Well, that tracks because this was in the box too,” Pip said. He handed the bag to Titus. The older man’s hands trembled as he did.
Titus flattened the bag out on his desk.
The eyeless face of Cole Marshall stared up at him, the mouth stretched into an eternal O of pain.
Charon County
Small towns are like the people who populate them. They are both full of secrets. Secrets of the flesh, secrets of blood. Hidden oaths and whispered promises that turn to lies just as quick as milk spoils under a hot summer sun.
The myth of Main Street in the South has always been a chaste puritanical fantasy. The reality is found on back roads and dirt lanes under a sky gone black. In the back seat of rust-mottled Buicks and the beds of ramshackle trucks. The heart of Charon County beats in time with the spirituals sung in church on Sunday morning. But its soul is a truth that can be scried from the sweat of illicit lovers, the blood that drops from the lips of the PTA president after her husband has had one too many, too many times. It can be augured from the serial numbers on the tens and twenties passed from the hands of Charon’s favorite sons and daughters to the men and women who sell them a taste of the quiet that sends them to dreamland drooling.
It’s there dancing among the fumes of a kerosene heater in a freezing trailer that snatches the breath from a mother, a father, a baby boy.
It persists when all the niceties of civility fall away under the weight of their own impermanence.
It can be divined in the eyes of the Wolf who buried seven young men and women under Tank Billups’s weeping willow tree. The Wolf who dreams of angels with their wings unfurled, their four faces rippling with a madness that comes from being too near the throne of God.
The Wolf who revels in its secret. Who delights in hiding its true face.
Yes, small towns are like the people who populate them.
Eventually they will give up their secrets, but the price for those revelations is always paid in blood.
FIFTEEN
Titus walked into the room they used for interviews and sat down across from Darnell Posey. Darnell had his head down on the table.
Titus slapped the table with the palm of his hand.
Darnell popped up, tried to stand, realized he was handcuffed to the table, then sat back down in the steel chair. Titus put a folder on the table.
“How you doing, Darnell?” Titus asked.
“Man, I ain’t do shit,” Darnell said.
“Well, that’s not exactly true, is it? You left that shoebox on our front step, then took off for the woods. What do you call that?” Titus asked.
Darnell licked his lips. “I don’t know, man. A joke? Was, like, shit in it or something?” Darnell said. His brown skin had a pasty, ashy patina that gave him a dehydrated appearance, like he’d crossed a vast desert.
“No, not a joke, Darnell. This,” Titus said. He took out a photo of the contents of the ziplock bag that he’d blown up to an eight-by-eleven size.
Darnell took one look at the photo and tried to get up again. “What the fuck, man? What is that? Is that a fucking face?”
“Yeah, it’s a fucking face. Still got some blood on it. So you better start talking real fast, and Darnell? I better fall in love with every word that comes out your mouth,” Titus said.
“Man, I don’t know nothing about that shit!”
“Darnell, I’m not feeling like I’m falling in love here. Where’d you get the box?” Titus said.
“Look, man, I woke up around eleven and that box was on my step with five hundred dollars in cash in an envelope. Had a letter said, ‘Drop this off at the police station,’ so that’s what I did. I ain’t know it had no goddamn face in the box. What the fuck, man?” Darnell said.
“Darnell, I have to ask, why didn’t you just take the money and toss the box?” Titus said.
“Cuz I figured whoever left it was watching to see if I did it. Duh,” Darnell said.
Titus put the photos back in the file. He steepled his fingers and pushed himself back from the table. “Darnell, how well did you know Latrell Macdonald, and before you say you don’t know him or you don’t know anything, you should know I already know y’all were friends.”
“What Latrell got to do with this?” Darnell asked.
“Do you want to get charged with the murder? Because that face belongs to a murder victim. Now tell me what you know about Latrell, unless you don’t want to ever touch grass again,” Titus said.
He studied Darnell, watched him bite his lip and roll his eyes like marbles in a tin can. Did Darnell realize Titus was bluffing? That despite delivering a box to the sheriff’s station with Cole Marshall’s face in it he really didn’t have anything incriminating on Darnell? They’d dusted the box for prints and even though Darnell’s were on the outside of the box there were no prints on the inside. There were none on the bag or the piece of tanned skin. Darnell didn’t strike Titus as a criminal mastermind so the absence of prints inside the box spoke to a more organized person.
Organized killer. The killer left that box on Darnell’s step, Titus thought, correcting himself. The Last Wolf was taunting them. He wanted them to know he was the one who killed Cole. This didn’t really shock Titus. A killer like the Last Wolf, who was the dominant personality in their triumvirate, was a narcissist. He would see the police in general, and Titus specifically, because he was the sheriff, as his nemesis. His need to prove his superiority would be his downfall. Titus had seen it time and time again. It’s how they finally caught the BTK killer.
“Look, man, me and Latrell used to kick it sometimes.”
“Y’all get high together?” Titus asked.
Darnell hesitated. “Yeah … we did. Latrell used to be able to get good shit. He did some work for Jasper Sanderson from time to time.” His shoulders slumped as he poked out his bottom lip. He wore defeat like a comfortable old coat.