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The cruiser kicked up gravel and mud as we sped out of the driveway and made our way down Heresy Road. He barely slowed as he turned onto Queen Mary, and I jerked against the seatbelt as he straightened the wheel.
“Reverend Thomas said Mondays are her day off since the weekends are so busy with church activities. I guess we’ll find out.”
“I can’t push a warrant through with what we have,” Carver said. “It’s all conjecture. We don’t even have circumstantial evidence that her barn is where they killed Daniel Oglesby, or anything but suspicion that she’s somehow involved. The tie-in to her grandfather and the white Cadillac might be enough if we find the right judge, but you’ll have to get her to agree to let you look around the property on your own if I can’t work a miracle here.”
Carver got on the phone, and put a finger in his ear so he could hear the other end of the conversation.
“She could be innocent,” I said.
“We’ll find that out too,” Jack said. He didn’t have the sirens going. That would slow traffic down more than anything in this town because people couldn’t help but stop to look, but he didn’t exactly follow traffic laws as we weaved through the city limits.
“I want Martinez and Lewis to stick to William Vance like glue,” Jack said, hitting speed dial on his phone. “I don’t have enough goddamned men to cover everyone. I’m going to have to pull a deputy working the fire to stake out Wormy Mueller. And I’m going to put Colburn on the senior Doctor Vance to make sure he’s under lock and key. If the Aryan Nationisinvolved, then you damn well better believe he knows what’s going on.”
“You think his spiel about the Blood Brothers was just to throw you off?” I asked.
“Everything he told us in that interview was meant to throw us off. That was the whole point of him volunteering to come in. He gave us just enough of several different threads to check out to keep us off the real trail.”
“It all goes back to the Aryan Nation, like we originally thought,” I said.
“Yeah, but they get their funding from somewhere. Why shouldn’t they be running drugs to fill the coffers?” He looked in his rearview mirror at Carver just as he hung up the phone. “I need that membership roster. I need financials on the organization. How much closer are we on the warrant?”
Carver sighed. “I’ll try again, but the judge working for the ACLU is being a hardass. I just got off the phone with the DA, and I convinced him to press for the warrant for Lorna’s place.”
“That’s something at least,” Jack said.
I’d never been out to the Dewberry farm. Jack and I had played in the surrounding fields as kids, but we’d never ventured far enough so the main house came into sight. The fields were overgrown with yellow grass and so tall it was like driving through a maze, but then the area opened up and Jack slowed the car so we could get a good look around.
“Creepy,” Carver said. “Too many places to hide in all this grass.”
The Fife-Dewberry homestead was a little two-story frame house with a wide wraparound porch. It was painted a dull yellow, almost so it blended in with the dead grass in the fields. A large barn sat about a hundred and fifty feet to the back right of the house, and the structure hadn’t been kept up in good repair. Brownish red paint was peeling, and one of the doors from the hayloft hung by a single hinge.
Lorna’s blue Focus was parked to the side of the house, but I saw her come to the screen door when we parked behind her. She waited for us to come up the creaky porch stairs before she held open the screen door to let us in.
“You’ve caught me on my way out, Sheriff,” she said. “This is my errand day.”
“We won’t keep you long, Lorna. Just a couple of follow up questions. This is Agent Carver,” Jack said, “With the FBI.”
“Well, come in and sit.” Her tone was brusque. “I’ve got things to do.”
I could see a straight shot down a long hall to a back door that mirrored the front. Everything was painted stark white. No color on the walls anywhere. There were also no pictures or knickknacks sitting around.
She led us into a spotless kitchen with white laminate flooring and white counters and cabinets. All I could think was that it’d be really hard to get blood out of this house. Jack sat across from Lorna at her little kitchen table, and I chose to stand with my back against the counter next to Carver. She’d probably be more comfortable if I wasn’t in her direct line of sight.
I realized it was the first time I’d seen Lorna with her hair down. It was straight as a board and fell halfway down her back, and I also realized I’d never seen her in makeup before. She looked—pretty.
“Tell me about William Vance,” Jack said.
Lorna jerked just a little in her chair, and her forehead lined in agitation. “Fornicator,” she spat.
“Can you expound on that any?”
“He was married to my cousin. They took vows, but both of them turned their backs on them.”
“Cynthia cheated on William as well?” Jack asked.
“She might as well have.” Lorna’s posture was so straight I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a steel beam in her spine. “Neglect is just as big a sin as adultery.”
I wanted to say something at that point, along the lines of not remembering neglect being part of the Ten Commandments, but I held my tongue to move things along. The house was starting to creep me out, and I had a bad feeling forming in the pit of my stomach.
