“We’re not sure yet,” he said. “Did your mother have a propane tank?”
“No. Everything in the house is electric. The fucking house is gone, Bob. Where’s my mom?”
“We’re looking, Darren.”
“Is her car around? It was in the garage. That’s my car against the tree over there.”
“There’s a car, well, what’s left of a car, buried beneath the rubble at the far end of the house.”
“Then she was home. She’s dead, isn’t she, Bob?”
“It’s too early to say. Take it easy. Maybe we’ll find her.”
I was numb. I felt my legs give, and I dropped to my knees. I wanted to yell at the sky and curse God. I wanted to kill something or someone. I wanted to cry, because at my core, I knew this was somehow related to me. Whoever had done this wanted me dead.
After a minute, I looked up at Bob. He and Grace seemed like apparitions.
“You’ll find her,” I said, “in pieces.”
CHAPTER 8
I was right. Over the next three days, as they sifted through the ash and rubble of what had been my mother’s home, they found bits and pieces of her. Part of a leg here. A burned piece of skull there. A couple of fingers. The only comfort I could take from any of it was that she had obviously been killed instantly. She hadn’t suffered.
What little was found of her was sent to Neeley’s Funeral Home in Farragut, and a memorial service was held a week after her death. I was told later it was well attended and that the preacher did a wonderful job paying tribute to my mom. It was all like a mist-shrouded dream to me. I barely remembered attending and didn’t remember any details.
All of my clothes were gone and my car was destroyed, along with mementos from high school and college, and cards and letters I’d received from Sean, my mom, and Grace. Nothing—absolutely nothing—in that house had survived the blast intact. Grace was kind enough to allow me to move into her apartment, but I slept on the couch. She bought me clothes and hovered over me, but I could barely acknowledge her. I purposefully kept her at a distance, emotionally and physically, because I knew something deep inside of me had changed, something had broken, and I knew innately that I had become dangerous. All I could think about was what I was going to do to whoever had killed my mom. Sometimes I fantasized about kidnapping the person and torturing him, cutting off ears and fingers and toes and limbs. Sometimes I thought about burning him alive. I thought about waterboarding him and then shooting him in the head. The thoughts were ugly and vile, and I was almost ashamed of myself.
Almost.
The police came around immediately. Two Knoxville homicide investigators, Dawn Rule and Lawrence Kingman, were assigned to find my mother’s murderer. They were, of course, assisted by a slew of arson investigators and forensics investigators. The day after my mother’s memorial service, Dawn Rule called me and asked whether I would come to the Knoxville Police Department headquarters the following morning. I agreed. The nondescript brick building was on Howard Baker Jr. Avenue, a couple of miles east of Neyland Stadium. I showed up at eight thirty.
Dawn Rule was a blue-eyed redhead around forty, a little overweight, with pale skin. She wore her hair short and spoke in a chirpy voice. She was wearing a pair of navy-blue pants and a white blouse, open at the neck, with a badge and gun clipped to her belt. Kingman was younger by a few years, maybe thirty-five. His receding hairline had been clipped within a quarter inch of his scalp, and he had chocolate-brown eyes and a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once. I’d already talked to both of them briefly; they’d checked my alibi at the hotel, and I didn’t think I was a suspect in my mother’s murder.
I was escorted into an interview room by Detective Rule, and she offered me a bottle of water, which I accepted. Kingman came in a couple of seconds later and closed the door.
“Dynamite,” Kingman said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Our forensics people have confirmed through the lab that dynamite was used to blow up your mother’s home.”
“What kind of a coward does something like that?” I asked. It was almost appropriate that dynamite had been used, because I felt as though a fuse had lit inside of me. It had been smoldering for years, since Clancy had framed me and sent me off to prison, and while I’d endured and tried to overcome the things that had happened to me there, now my mother’s death had become the spark that ignited the fuse. It was burning hot and fast, and I knew it would soon lead to a violent explosion.
“Any way to trace the dynamite?” I said.
“We’ve been working on it with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It appears the dynamite was purchased by Archland Coal Company in West Virginia. They blow holes in the mountains and mine coal.”
“And why would a coal-mining company in West Virginia want to kill my mother?”
Rule cleared her throat. “We think the question is: why would a coal-mining company want to kill you?”
I nodded my head. “I’ve thought about that—a lot. I’ve made a bunch of enemies during my career, dealt with a lot of whack jobs. I didn’t really think any of them would do something like this, but I guess I was wrong. I don’t recall ever pissing off a coal-mining company, though. What have you found?”
“We think a resident of a little place called Cowen, West Virginia, population about five hundred souls, may be responsible,” Rule said.
“I don’t know anybody from Cowen, West Virginia,” I said.
“Maybe you do, or at least you did.”
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
“A man named Robert Edward Lee Frazier. Ever heard of him?”
I felt my heart speed up just a tick. She was talking about Bobby Lee Frazier, the man who stabbed me eleven times with a twelve-inch ice pick because I kicked his ass in a prison yard and embarrassed him in front of his friends after he’d tried to intimidate me into doing legal work for him for free.
“I’ve heard of him,” I said, “but he’s dead. He didn’t do it.”
“We know he’s dead. Your cellmate killed him, defending you.”
“I didn’t tell you that.” I was still uncomfortable talking about anything that had happened in prison, especially to the police. “But even if I had told you that—which I didn’t—what difference would it make?”
“Bobby Lee has a brother,” Detective Kingman said. “Name’s Donald Jackson Frazier. Everybody calls him Donnie. He was released from prison six months ago. It might have been him looking to get to you.”
If it was him, he would soon be meeting me face-to-face. I certainly didn’t say that to the two police officers sitting in front of me, but that was exactly what went through my mind. “What prison was he in?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, might have run across him.”