Dayane tried to recoil, but he held fast.
“I want you to do me a favor,” Titus said. He lowered his voice. “When you talk to him, tell him I’m coming. Tell him I’m going to make him pay for what he did to those kids. And when he slits you open from neck to navel, remember we tried to help you.”
He let go of her arm.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dayane said before heading out the door.
“What’s that about?” Carla asked.
“We got a call yesterday from someone who knew details of the case no one besides us and the killer would know. He referenced a flock and how he was the wolf that was going to devour it. Then she says something to me about a flock.”
Through the diamond-shaped, reinforced-wire window in the front door of the station, Titus watched Dayane walk out to Carla’s cruiser.
“Take her back to work. Then go back by there around the end of her shift. I want to keep an eye on her,” Titus said.
“Okay. You really think she knows who killed Cole?” Carla asked.
“Yes, I do. And I think he’s the Last Wolf,” Titus said.
“If that’s true, she—” Carla began, but Titus finished her statement.
“Can lead us to him. Go on, take her back.”
* * *
Titus left the sheriff’s office a little after one to go pick up his father for Gene’s funeral. Most days in Charon the roads were chock-full of RVs and lifted trucks pulling cabin cruisers and speedboats, all set to head down to the river or straight out into the bay. Even this late in the year recreational vehicles and their owners flocked to Charon to squeeze out a few more lazy days of whiskey-fueled shenanigans.
Except today the roads that led to the river were nearly empty. Titus passed a combine with its blades up as he headed to his house. He saw a few locals in pickup trucks and SUVs, but that was about it. Death, that black-clad sentinel, had reaped Charon’s tourist season with two swings of its sickle. The first swing was the bodies under the weeping willow. The second swing was Cole Marshall. As much as it pained him, it appeared Scott had a point. Murder had stilled the beating heart of Charon’s economy.
All the more reason to find this monster, Titus thought.
He pulled into the driveway, shut off his official truck, and went into the house. His father was standing in the kitchen with a container of pork chops and wearing his old black suit. If it wasn’t for the calluses on his hands Titus thought you could be forgiven for thinking his father was a bank president or a lawyer.
“Looking good, old man. I guess it’s true about Black not cracking,” Titus said.
His father grunted. “Maybe so, but everything else is broke.”
“You ready?”
“You gonna wear your uniform?”
“It’s got a tie,” Titus said. Albert nodded, seemingly content that Titus was actually consenting to going inside a church.
“Let me take that dish,” Titus said.
“I got it. You get the string beans and the mashed potatoes. And get the flowers. I put them in the icebox,” Albert said.
Titus did as he was bidden. He gathered the plastic containers with the string beans and mashed potatoes, then he retrieved a beautiful bouquet of yellow roses and stargazer lilies out of the fridge. Then he followed his father out the door and to his off-duty vehicle, his Jeep Wagoneer. Titus put the food in the back seat on the floor and the flowers on the back seat proper, then got in the driver’s side. His dad grimaced and groaned as he got in the passenger’s side.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, just this old hip acting up today. You know that means it’s gonna rain later, right?” Albert said.
“All right, Weather Channel,” Titus said. His father chuckled.
* * *
Titus pulled into the parking lot of Emmanuel Baptist Church and slid in between Bernice Berry’s ancient Cadillac El Dorado and Ridley Marks’s cherry-red ’73 Chevy Chevelle with the black racing stripe. Titus got out of the Jeep and grabbed the food.
“Close the car door, Pop, I’ll take these to the kitchen,” Titus said.
“All right. I’ll go get us a seat,” Albert said.
Titus carried the food to the side rear door of the church. One of the deaconesses, Tammy White, saw him at the door and opened it for him.
“Dang, Titus, you didn’t want to make two trips, huh?” Tammy asked. Titus remembered Tammy from school. She was five years older than him, but her matronly bearing made her seem much older.
“Pop made this for the repast.”
“Here, let me take that from you. It’s good to see you. I know you got a lot going on with that Spearman thing. Child, I guess you never know what people doing, do you?”
“People keep their secrets, that’s for sure,” Titus said. Red DeCrain would have agreed with him if he wasn’t already dead.
* * *
* * *
Titus stopped in the vestibule to take off his hat and his sunglasses. He took a series of slow deep breaths. Kellie had taught him some yoga breathing exercises when they were together. This was the first time he’d used them since they’d parted ways. He felt a flutter in his chest that seemed to envelop his entire body. He recognized he was having what a psychologist might call a mini-panic-attack. This wasn’t the first time he’d been in his home church since they’d buried his mother. He’d come here last year, hat in hand, to a Thursday night church meeting to ask for the congregation to mark an X by his name on the ballot for sheriff.
That would make this his second time in his home church since his mother had shuffled off her mortal coil. He went into the sanctuary and found his father sitting in the third pew from the front. Titus squeezed in beside him and took the program with the order of service that Albert offered him. Gene’s casket was a deep battleship-gray with black piping. From his seat, he could see Gene in his final repose. He appeared to be in the midst of a not-so-restful slumber. Titus wondered if the body had given the morticians a lot of difficulty, because Gene Dixon was going into eternity with a noticeable scowl on his face.
“Please stand,” a deep rumbling voice commanded. Titus followed the rest of the attendees as they stood. The mortician came into the sanctuary leading the minister and Gene’s family. Titus recognized Gene’s wife. Even if he hadn’t grown up running in and out of her kitchen with her sons Gerald and Charlie, he would have recognized the pall that grief cast over her face. The kind of grief only a spouse could carry. He’d seen the same look on his father’s face.
Reverend Jackson settled into the pulpit as the morticians closed the casket and the family, Gene’s wife, his two sons, his daughter, Rosie, spoke the language of the inconsolable. Howls of anguish that should have made God reach down and touch Gene with the breath of life just to stop their torment.
But he had never seen that miracle, or any miracles, for that matter. And he still carried his own torment deep within the coldest chambers of his heart. In a place where his mother’s slack, dead face stared up at him out of the depths like a siren from the void.
* * *
As the program progressed, someone turned on all four of the AC window units. Titus knew Emmanuel had one of the larger congregations in the county. On a good Sunday they had to clear at least a thousand, maybe fifteen hundred in the collection plate. Titus thought a church that was bringing in that kind of money should be able to afford a central air unit instead of four rickety ACs that sounded like they all had tuberculosis. They should also be able to afford some better pews. And new vinyl siding.
Titus couldn’t help but notice Reverend Jackson’s ornately embroidered black robe or his brand-new Lexus parked in the spot reserved for the minister. It seemed like Reverend Jackson got a new car every year. Perhaps that was the miracle that confirmed the true believers’ faith.
Or maybe Reverend Jackson took advantage of a congregation bound so tight to the old church at the fork in the road by tradition and tribulations that they closed their eyes and turned their heads from the red in the church ledger. Perhaps they thought the red would change to black like the water turned to wine. Meanwhile, Reverend Jackson lived in one of the biggest houses in the county.
Hallelujah, Titus thought.
* * *
As the service came to an end, Albert nudged Titus.
“Hey, when they take the body out, go get them flowers,” Albert whispered.
“I’ll get them, Pop.”
“God, I’m gonna miss Gene, but I’ll see him again. Yeah, I’ll see him again,” Albert said. He wiped at his eyes.
Titus kept his own counsel on the subject of the afterlife.
* * *
Titus watched as the pallbearers walked the casket over to the grave. His father winced as they walked down the front steps of the church.
“You sure you don’t want me to help you get over to the grave?” Titus asked.