Judas Burning Read online

  “I feel as if my arms and legs are filled with cement.”

  “I’ll be heading to my magnificently decorated room. I have more pillows than Cleopatra in her palanquin.” He hesitated. “Will you be okay?”

  Dixon nodded. “I’m too tough for the stew pot, so I guess the cannibals will leave me alone.”

  He shoved the bottle to her. “Keep it. For next time.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Dixon snatched the telephone on the sixth ring, almost falling out of bed.

  “Who is this?” Her body was tangled in the sheets, and she’d dreamt that she was tied to a chair while people watched her through a small window.

  “Hello,” she said again. She held the phone tightly as she scanned the room where nothing was familiar and a scraping sound came from the window.

  “Dixon?” Her mother’s voice was threaded with worry. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

  “I was asleep.” Dixon swung her legs out of bed and snapped on the light. The night had been an inferno of hellish images and suffocating anxiety. She had not been asleep but in a state of helpless limbo where the demons of her subconscious jumped from their cells and ran wild.

  She walked to the window and flipped the blinds to reveal a morning shrouded in fog. The scraping noise was an azalea rasping the screen.

  “I’m worried about you.” Marilyn said.

  “I’m fine,” Dixon said automatically. She felt naked, talking to her mother as she stood in her underwear at the window. She picked up a pair of dirty jeans.

  “The newspaper looks good. Teasie brought a copy of the Independent to me yesterday. She had a doctor’s appointment here in Jackson with Dr. Winguard. She said she was worried half to death for you. I can see why, too. You’re right in the middle of everything, just like your father. Teasie said half the town thinks you’re marvelous and the other half wants to tar and feather you.”

  Dixon held the telephone against her shoulder, pulling on the jeans while she listened. As she tucked in the pockets, her fingers found a crisp slip of paper. When she pulled it out, she realized it was the sales slip she’d found on the river more than a week before.

  “That’s probably the most accurate statement Teasie ever made,” she said, trying to refocus on the conversation. “But I would have said twenty-eighty.” She forced lightness into her voice. “My approval rating’s higher than I thought.”

  Her mother’s laughter reminded Dixon of summer afternoons.

  “I love it when you laugh, Mom,” Dixon said.

  “I’d laugh more if you sold that paper. You could teach, Dixon. It isn’t big money, but neither is a weekly paper. You could work on a campus for twenty hours a week instead of putting in a hundred and twenty.”

  “If I worked on a campus, I might also find Prince Charming, someone brilliant and dedicated, and settle down to give you those grandchildren you want.” Dixon didn’t really mind her mother’s nagging.

  “I want you to be happy, Dixon.” She hesitated. “Are you drinking?”

  Dixon sagged. Her mother had called to see if she woke up drunk. “Not yet,” she said with a bite. “If that’s why you called, you can hang up now.”

  “Lana’s pregnant. She’s due in April.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Dixon faltered. “I guess Raymond’s delighted. I know how much he wanted a child.”

  “They’re both very happy.” There was caution in her mother’s tone.

  “Me, too, Mom. I can’t wait to have a baby niece or nephew. It’s about time one of the Sinclairs kept the line going.”

  “Raymond and Lana haven’t been getting along all that well. Sometimes a child makes matters worse.” Her mother spoke carefully. Her primary focus in life, since her husband’s death, was her children. Raymond was the son who never disappointed.

  “Sometimes a child makes things better.” Perhaps a child would make Raymond grow up. He was devoted to his engineering career—and his ski vacations and mountain climbing, his boats and travels. A child would center him or sink the marriage. Lana, too, would have to shift her focus from her legal career.

  “I was never happier than when you two were little and your father was working as the political columnist for the Charlotte Observer. Those were the best days.”

  Dixon heard the longing in her mother’s voice. Marilyn McVay had been a photographer. A good one. She’d given up her career to raise her family. But she’d never whined about that decision.

  “Look, Mom, I’m doing something important, and I haven’t felt that way for a long, long time. Moving to Jexville has been good for me. I just want you to know that.”

  “Life isn’t all about career, Dixon.” Her mother sighed. “I wanted you to have a girl’s name, but your father was so proud of you. He insisted on giving you a family name.”

  Dixon glanced at the clock. It was 6:48. Her mother hadn’t called at daybreak simply to tell her about the baby. “Mom, is anything wrong?”

  Another hesitation.

  Dixon felt her heart rate increase. “Mom, what’s happened?”

  “I got a telephone call Sunday night, Dixon.” There was silence. “The man asked a lot of questions. About the past. About the execution. He wanted to know if I planned on attending.”

  “Who was it?”

  “He wouldn’t give his name.”

  “Mom, don’t answer any more questions. If anyone calls, give them the number of the paper here.”

  “Dixon, I know you think your father’s death was some type of conspiracy.” When Dixon didn’t answer, she continued. “I figure you’ve been poking around again and you’ve managed to stir up a hornet’s nest. I haven’t forgotten that you went to Parchman to visit that man. I’ve told you, when you stir the nest, someone gets stung.”

  “I don’t know who called you, but I’ll find out. I’m calling the phone company and ordering caller I.D. for you. Promise me you’ll let them hook it up.”

  There was a long pause. “I hate those gizmos. There’ll be wires running all over the house. Something else to dust.”

  “Promise.”

  “Okay. Only because I’m curious.”

  Dixon smiled and felt her heart rate slowing. “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you too. Dixon, don’t keep poking. I’m begging you.”

  “I love you, Mama.” Dixon replaced the phone. She sat on the side of the bed in her jeans and bare feet and thought about the bottle of Jack in the kitchen. Her hands were shaking. She stood up and started to remove her jeans. The receipt she’d found fell to the floor.

  It was only a short drive to the Circuit City in Mobile.

  J.D. dropped Visine in his eyes and closed them against the burn. The night had faded, yielding to a gray dawn that could bring only more bad news. Dr. Jose Diaz had been expected back in town last night, but he’d been detained in Rwanda, where he was doing volunteer work for children. J.D. needed to talk to him.

  The good news was that the mug shot of Francisco Chavez had made the ten o’clock news on three television stations in Mobile, and calls had begun to come in. None useful. Yet. A lead would eventually pan out, but eventually might be too late for Angie Salter, if it weren’t too late already.

  He rifled through the paperwork on his desk and picked up the black-and-white photos of Trisha Webster. Cause of death had been an overdose of crystal meth. Her heart had stopped. Her body was so badly damaged and decomposed that the pathologist couldn’t determine if the meth had been administered with a needle or inhaled. The cut to the thigh and the disemboweling had been done post-mortem.

  The telephone rang, but he ignored it; Waymon was at his desk. Besides, J.D. had nothing to say to anyone. His focus was on finding the sick motherfucker who’d killed and then burned a teenage girl. The phone rang again and he wearily snatched it up, anticipating a reporter. “Horton here.” The gruesome murder had begun to attract the national media. It was going to be a shit storm, but one he intended to turn to his advanta
ge. If the pervert who took the girls was anywhere in the area, J.D. was going to get him.

  “J.D., John said you called.”

  J.D. loosened his grip on the telephone. He had called Beatrice Smart two hours earlier. He needed some professional advice and Bea, with her blend of religion and psychology, was a good source. “I hate to involve you, Bea, but this is beyond me.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll help if I can.”

  “I’ll tell you the crime scene, and maybe you can give me some insight into this guy and what he may do next.”

  “I’m not a profiler; I’m just a psychologist.”

  “I’d take your intuition any day.” He filled her in on everything he had, plus Medino’s theory and the description of the body. When he was finished, he waited as silence filled the phone line.

  At last Bea spoke. “I’m confused. Trisha Webster dies of a drug overdose, but then her body is treated with a kind of ritual that implies a person to whom God and Satan are very real. The hanging and burning are ritualistic. Whether it’s Satan worship or a sacrifice to God, it is worship. Most people who believe in God also believe in Satan, or vice versa.” She hesitated. “But the drugs are off kilter somehow. It’s as if the killer had two personalities.”

  “The man I’m looking for may have defaced church property, specifically images of the Virgin Mary. If it’s the same man, he’s been on a spree for better than six months.”

  “That’s helpful,” Bea said. “But it still doesn’t jibe with the drugs.”

  “Put the drugs aside. What do you get from the body?”

  “Based just on that, I’d say the killer is someone so conflicted that he or she has moved beyond the ability to discern between archetypes and the reality of human form. I believe that Trisha and Angie represented temptation or sin or something that would be damning to a Christian. What confuses me is that, traditionally, the approach to sin is to forgive, to redeem the sinner. There is no redemption in death.”

  J.D. wished for something stronger than coffee. “So you’re saying this religious fanatic wouldn’t have killed the girls?”

  “Not with crystal meth. At least, that’s my take on it. J.D., I’m a minister who offers marriage and family counseling. My experience isn’t with serial killers.”

  J.D. sighed. “This complicates things, Bea.”

  “I’m only connecting the dots you’ve given me based on my understanding of theology. Certainly there would be no murder if Christians followed the teaching of the religion. We both know that isn’t the case. I’m just saying that it’s a big leap from decapitating a statue to murdering a teenager.”

  It wasn’t what J.D. had expected to hear.

  “Thanks, Bea.”

  “I wasn’t much help.”

  “Maybe more than you know.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The last vestiges of morning fog were burning away in the shallow fields that lined the old blacktop county road. Cotton had made a return to the pine barrens, as well as soybeans and peanuts. Dixon had chosen a back-road route rather than four-laned Highway 98, the most convenient corridor to Mobile. Her mother’s phone call had stolen any chance of sleep, and she needed the drive to put physical distance between herself and Jexville. Between herself and the swamp where Trisha Webster had surely died a horrible death. And where Angie Salter might yet be suffering.

  In avoiding the murder, though, she found herself trapped in the past. As she drove past a dairy farm, she remembered her father’s large hand holding her small one as they had toured a dairy. She’d been four or five, but Ray had taken time to expose her to the world. He wanted her to know where the milk she drank came from and to understand the balance of agriculture in a world where family farms were already verging on extinction. He had been shaping and molding her sensibilities in the guise of a field trip.

  Not once since their father’s death had her brother, Raymond, spoken of what had happened. He’d attended the trial, sitting poker stiff in the row behind the prosecution. Each day, he’d fled the courtroom, refusing to talk to anyone, even her. Once the trial was over, Raymond would not acknowledge that his father had been murdered. If he mentioned Ray’s name at all, it was linked to a family memory. Now, with the execution looming, he refused to talk about Willard Jones. On the few occasions when Dixon brought the subject up, Raymond had simply hung up the phone. Not in anger, but with finality.

  Dixon contemplated a fencerow sagging under the weight of kudzu, leaves silvered with morning mist. Since moving to Jexville, there had been times when she felt that if she stood still too long the vines would slip up and cover her.

  She reached the outskirts of Mobile and headed to the shopping center where the red block of Circuit City appeared to plug into the empty parking lot. While she waited for the store to open, she examined the sales slip she’d picked up in the woods, feeling a twinge of guilt that she hadn’t shared her find with J.D. yet.

  It wasn’t much of a lead and she was no detective, but the receipt’s crispness meant that someone had dropped it in the woods around the time the girls were on the sandbar. A witness. Or the killer.

  She got out of her truck as a red-jacketed clerk unlocked the front door and was the first one inside. In a matter of fifteen minutes, she had the information she sought. She felt as if a weight pressed on her chest as she walked to the parking lot and got in her truck.

  Tommy Hayes had purchased a boom box at 8:47 on the evening of September eighteenth. The girls had disappeared on the nineteenth. Dixon had found the sales slip, crisp and clean, in the woods on the morning of the twentieth.

  By the time J.D. reached New Orleans, it was almost ten o’clock. He parked in the airport lot, went directly to the ticket counter for Southwest Airlines, and booked a flight for San Antonio. His law enforcement identification and lack of baggage eased his way through airport security, and he was on the plane and in the air in less than an hour. He paid for the spur-of-the-moment trip out of his own pocket and brought little with him except identification and the articles he’d printed off the Internet.

  Alan Arguillo had created the sculpture of Mary that had been destroyed at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Jexville. Arguillo and Francisco Chavez were both from Zaragoza in the state of Coahuila. It was a long shot, but J.D. could not sit around waiting for Dr. Diaz to return or Angie Salter to be found.

  In San Antonio, he rented an Explorer and drove to Eagle Pass. From there he crossed into Mexico and Piedras Negras, a border town filled with vendors, restaurants, and music. Once out of town, he bumped over the rutted dirt road to Zaragoza.

  In the marines, he’d spent some R and R time in Mexico and knew there were places of lush beauty. Zaragoza was not one of them. The town consisted of seven thousand people on land not suited for agriculture and an unpaved main street that sloped gently down to a central business district where farmers and craftsmen sold their wares.

  He found the police department two blocks off the main drag, parked, and went inside. He didn’t expect help, but he didn’t want to rile anyone either. If a strange law enforcement officer arrived in Jexville, he would expect a courtesy visit.

  The police station was unair-conditioned and hot. Three officers in uniform sat behind desks and seemed glad of a diversion. Miguel Sanchez was the man in charge, and he waved J.D. into a chair with a smile as they exchanged introductions.

  “What brings you to Zaragoza?” Sanchez asked.

  J.D.’s relief at Sanchez’s fluent English must have shown on his face.

  “I was educated in San Antonio. I came home to help my family,” Sanchez said

  “I’m looking for an artist. Alan Arguillo.”

  “Many people seek out this man. His work excites the imagination.”

  Sanchez showed some finesse, J.D. thought. “Yes,” he said. “We have a sculpture in my town.”

  “And you want to buy another?”

  J.D. hesitated. It was one thing to come to a small town seeking an art
ist. It was another to look into the past of a man who might be a killer.

  “No,” he said. “I’m actually looking for a man named Francisco Chavez. The artist may know something about him.”

  “And you suspect the police don’t?”

  “Do you?”

  “The name Chavez is an old one in this village. One that brings many questions. Has Francisco done something wrong?”

  J.D. noted Sanchez’s use of Chavez’s first name.

  “I’m not certain.”

  “You’re here, all the way from Mississippi. You must be fairly certain.”

  J.D. could read nothing in Sanchez’s dark eyes. “We have a murdered teenage girl and one missing. Arguillo’s statue of the Virgin Mary was decapitated and splashed with cow’s blood before the two girls disappeared. Chavez was arrested in Eagle Pass for breaking windows in a Catholic church. The level of coincidence is a little too high for me to ignore.”

  Sanchez leaned back in his chair. “Francisco left here about eight months ago, after vandals struck at three of our churches.”

  J.D. felt his pulse increase. “Did Chavez commit the acts of vandalism?”

  “We don’t know. We found prints, but his were never on record here. He was always a quiet kid, a few years younger than me. I knew him in school, and I would have sworn that he would never make trouble for anyone, especially not the church. He was there every afternoon. He followed Father around like his shadow.”

  J.D. remembered his conversation with Beatrice Smart. The person who killed, hung, and burned Trisha Webster had a very real relationship with God and Satan. “Chavez was a religious child?”

  “Excessively. In the first years of school, he told the teachers he would become a priest. I think he was trying to make up for his mother’s shame.”

  “Shame?”

  “After Francisco was born—he was illegitimate—Maria Chavez gave up all attempts to live a decent life. La punta. She serviced the soldiers. The boy saw all of it. He was taunted in school.”