The Pact: A Detective Locklear Mystery Read online

  While Carter lay in the back of a truck in a pool of his own blood, Jo Mendoza sat four blocks away in the incident room alone, thinking out Ricci’s story. She wondered if the other Fehr deaths were as a result of suicide and if perhaps there was a genetic predisposition to mental illness. If so, it would put paid to Locklear’s suspicion of multiple murders of the Fehr family. She sat at the computer and, starting with the earliest dates, began typing in the names of the Fehr men whose headstones stated that they had died in their twenty-first year. Few of the deaths appeared in the state records, and those were recorded as farm accidents. Mendoza wondered if, like in her own faith, suicide was considered a sin and covered up by Mennonite families in the hope of their loved one being buried in consecrated ground. Carter, she reasoned, would know if there was any other way of finding out what happened to these men. She lifted her phone. Carter’s phone was answered after only two rings – by a woman – a screaming woman at that.

  “Hello?” Mendoza said. “Hello? Hello?”

  “This is – Anabel Schumer – from the library. His phone was on the ground so I – he took him – my God, he took him!”

  “Carter? Who took him?”

  Mendoza thought the line had gone dead but realised the woman was sobbing silently into the phone.

  “Luke Fehr.”

  Chapter 10

  By the time Locklear reached Harrisonburg, an anonymous person had brought Lee Carter into the emergency room of the town’s general hospital and had disappeared without giving a name. Locklear already knew that person was Luke Fehr and, unlike Mendoza, did not believe that it was Fehr who attacked Carter. Instead of going to see if his trooper was going to live or die, he drove to the station where the librarian was giving her statement.

  Locklear pulled up a chair and listened as the shocked woman shook beneath a heavy blanket.

  Frustrated by the cop’s generic questions, he pushed his chair into the centre.

  “I just want you to focus on this – you walked out the back door – then what? Just relax. Take it step by step.”

  The librarian’s lip trembled. She preferred the other cop who was walking her through the whole day, who came in, who went out.

  “I opened the back door to go to my car. It was dark. I was surprised that Lee’s car was still in the parking lot. I let him park it there because it’s free. No one else has access. I saw a light in his car because the door was open. I heard a woman’s voice but I couldn’t see anything. The outside light was broken. It wasn’t broken last night. There were bits of glass on the ground but I didn’t see it until I closed the door and stood on the glass. It cracked. I looked down at it and I heard a gunshot. I screamed. There were more voices and noise, a scuffle I think. A car took off. I looked down and someone was putting Lee into the back of a truck. I shouted and he looked up. It was ... it was Luke Fehr.”

  “You know Luke Fehr?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure it was him?”

  “Yes, I was at high school with Luke. Lee also. I can’t believe he’d hurt Lee. They used to be friends.”

  “So, there was another car, apart from Luke Fehr’s truck?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see the make, colour?”

  “No, I didn’t even know it was there until I heard it take off. It must have been parked round the side.”

  Locklear stood to leave.

  “There’s something else!” she said. “Before the gunshot I heard a voice. A woman’s voice.”

  “What did she say?”

  “It was muffled but I think she said ... take all ... something … Grant.”

  “John Grant?”

  “She didn’t say John or least I didn’t hear her say John but that’s who I was helping Lee research earlier – John Grant.”

  When Locklear arrived at the crime scene, Carter’s trunk was empty and beside his vehicle lay a pool of the trooper’s blood. Forensics had found the single casing on the ground, which did not match Carter’s weapon.

  In the hospital foyer he saw Nick Lombardi, hunched over in a hard plastic chair, crying into his hands. For a brief moment he considered approaching him to enquire if Rosa Lombardi was still alive but instead climbed the three flights of stairs to the floor where Lee Carter lay in a serious but stable condition.

  Mendoza met him at the door and beckoned for him to remain outside. There were things she did not want to say in front of Carter’s distraught wife.

  “They’re taking him to surgery in the next half hour or so. They’re just waiting on the surgeon to arrive. Looks like the bullet fractured his clavicle and he’s gashed his head badly but he’ll be fine. I put out an APB on Luke Fehr.”

  “What? Without my order? Undo it. Fehr didn’t attack Lee. It was Shank.”

  “Shank?”

  “Not him personally but his people – the woman the librarian heard – I think it was Shank’s granddaughter.”

  “Or Esther Fehr! Sarge – the librarian saw Luke bundle Carter into his truck.”

  “To take him here obviously! Come on!”

  In the hospital’s security room, Locklear and Mendoza watched as the security guard rewound the grainy video to the exact time Carter was dropped off at the hospital.

  At 21.37, a tall man wearing a cowboy hat could be seen carrying Carter into the hospital foyer. The screen filled with hospital staff rushing towards him. A trolley came into view and the man waited for a moment, said a few short words to a doctor and turned away. A second camera kicked in and as he passed, the man glanced up it, revealing part of his face.

  “That’s Fehr,” Locklear said. “Let’s go see what he said to the doctor.”

  After a brief visit back to Carter’s room, Locklear and Mendoza, satisfied that their colleague was not in danger, returned to the emergency department to look for the doctor Fehr had spoken to in the foyer.

  When they found Adrian Haak he was asleep on a trolley, exhausted after a thirty-six-hour shift.

  Locklear poked him until he opened his weary eyes.

  “What did he say? You woke me for that?”

  “Yes.”

  “He had an accent. He said, em ... ‘He’s my friend … save him’ or ‘please help him’ – something like that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No. Now can I go back to sleep?”

  Locklear and Mendoza walked away without answering. Haak was already snoring before they had walked ten yards.

  Nick Lombardi was nowhere to be seen.

  “Feel like a beer?” Mendoza asked.

  “I’ll join you but .... no beer.”

  In the corner of O’Mahony’s pub, Mendoza and Locklear drank quietly while Irish music played in the background.

  “Ever wonder why Irish music can be found pretty much anywhere in the world?” Mendoza mused.

  Locklear did not answer. At the moment, he wondered about nothing except who was killing, or trying to kill the Fehr family and anyone else who got too close to the truth.

  “I think it’s because it’s happy,” she said. “You know, it sounds happy.”

  Locklear laughed. “Doesn’t take much to get you drunk!”

  Mendoza put down her beer. “You worried about Carter?”

  “Yes,” he replied quietly. “Seems like I’m always one step behind Shank.”

  “You don’t even know if it’s him.”

  “I do. I know it’s him. I just have to prove it.”

  Mendoza smiled, revealing the thin white scar beneath her lip.

  “You gonna tell me now where you got those scars?” Locklear asked.

  She lifted the bottle again and took a long, deep swig.

  “Those,” she said, “are courtesy of Manuel Santiago Garcia.”

  “A perp?”

  “My husband. Ex-husband. And those are only the ones you can see. I got lots more.”

  “You didn’t ring the cops?”

  “He was a cop! Who was I gonna call? Ghostbusters?�
�

  Mendoza laughed but Locklear could see the sadness in her dark-brown eyes. They reminded him of his mother’s.

  “How’d you get away?”

  “I left one night. The first time he hit Santiago. I left.”

  “Your son?”

  “Yes. It was one thing him hitting me but not my son. I would kill to protect him. My only regret is that I didn’t leave earlier.”

  “You said you got them in the line of duty. What did you mean?

  “You, sir, have a very good memory.”

  Mendoza pulled the label off her bottle and spread it onto the bar.

  “When my brother told our parents he was gay, it nearly killed them, especially my dad. He was already upset that Diego wanted to be an artist and not a cop. Dad just didn’t understand. They were devout Catholics and they felt so ashamed in the community. For a while Dad wouldn’t allow Diego to visit. They only made up a few weeks before Dad died of cancer. He’d been battling his illness for months so when I said I was pregnant it was too much for them. There was no question of me being a single mom. Sad part is I already knew I didn’t want to marry Manuel. He had already begun to hit me, even when I was pregnant with Santiago, but I had no choice. I did my duty. I did it for my parents and I stayed in that marriage through my dad’s illness. I just couldn’t tell them how unhappy I was or what was happening to me. I just couldn’t tell them who I really was or what it was I wanted from life. I hadn’t realised any of that until I had locked myself into a life that just wasn’t for me.”

  “Religion!” Locklear replied, unsure what else to say.

  “No ... you cannot blame religion. I love my God.”

  “Now I know you are drunk, Mendoza.”

  “No, I have my faith. People do things in God’s name that he doesn’t want.”

  “Are you sure it’s not a She?” he said.

  “Yes, maybe God is a woman!” Mendoza raised her bottle to the barman. “Another – per favor! Seriously, Locklear, it’s true. Our parish priest talked my parents into making me marry Manuel – God didn’t. Like Shank – we could think God’s way is the Mennonite way but those people, they’re so kind. Shank is one piece of poison among so much good.”

  “You sound like Carter!”

  Mendoza didn’t reply to that jibe.

  “What about you? You ever been married?” she asked after a while.

  Locklear visualised the many suitcases that had stood in his apartment hallway. Women who got tired of waiting for something he never pretended he would, or could, give.

  “No.”

  “Well, tell me about you then.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. I was an only child. My mother and me, we travelled around a lot. I joined the army, then joined the police. She died. That’s about it really.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “What the hell kind of a question is that, Mendoza?”

  “A simple one.”

  Locklear sighed. His soda glass was empty.

  “She was always running away from something. She ... it ... made my life hard.”

  “A man?”

  Locklear shook his head.

  “A woman never runs from a good life,” Mendoza said. “She will always put her child first. If she was running, it was to protect you from something,”

  A memory surfaced. The day after his mother bought him a new school uniform. They had settled into a new town. She had found steady work, a steady boyfriend and a steady home in a trailer park on the outskirts of the small friendly town. Two days after his mother filled in the enrolment forms for his new school, he watched from the window as a man pulled into the parking lot in a mustard-coloured mustang. He had never seen the man before. His mother was sleeping on the sofa after a night shift in the local diner. He stood and watched the Indian run in and out of several trailers before barging into theirs. His mother screamed. She cried. They talked. He slept on the couch, she in her bed. Her boyfriend from the next trailer did not call. For two days the man pleaded, insisted, begged, cried – but his mother would not be budged. Locklear didn’t understand what the man wanted her to do. Only once did the man speak to him, using words from his mother’s language that he understood because she had said the same thing to him many times. Paleface. He never uttered another word to Locklear. On the third morning the man drove his mustang out of the trailer park, leaving a trail of dust behind him. Locklear never saw him again. When his mother stopped crying he asked her who the man was. She didn’t answer. Instead she began to pack. The next day they left. He never got to wear his uniform, never got to go to that school and never enrolled in another school using his real name again.

  Now, when he occasionally remembered the episode, he wondered if the man was one of her family. His family.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Mendoza said, waking him from his reminiscing.

  “I know what my mother was running from, Mendoza, and it wasn’t a man. It was herself.”

  Chapter 11

  The following day, Locklear woke to the news that the town’s library had been burned to the ground in the early hours of the morning.

  “Dumb redneck fuckers!” he said to Mendoza who sat in the booth facing him and was unusually quiet. “You OK?”

  “Yes. Look ... I’m worried that I may have told you too much last night ... I’m ... I’m a bit embarrassed. I don’t usually tell anyone about my marriage. I hope you don’t think me weak, or vulnerable. I’m neither.”

  “I know,” Locklear responded.

  “That’s it? You know?”

  Locklear turned from her and took his wallet out to pay for breakfast. He knew it was one of those situations when a woman wanted more and he never quite knew what he was expected to add to what he’d already said. He turned back to Mendoza, who was holding her head in her hands, and thought for a moment.

  “I think it took more guts to stay in a marriage to keep your parents happy than it would have taken to leave.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly. “It was stupid though.”

  “Oh, it was stupid,” Locklear replied, smiling.

  Mendoza returned her boss’s smile as he paid the check.

  He shoved her hungover body towards the exit.

  “OK, I need you to find where that librarian lives and ask her what Carter found out about John Grant. Then I want you to go see Plett and see if he has historic death records for the area. I want to know what those Fehr men died from. Most likely if Plett has them he won’t show them to you. Probably doesn’t have them. If so, go see John Rahn – he’s the Mennonite bishop in Richmond. He’s probably got copies of the records in his offices.”

  “OK, sarge. Is it OK if I go see my kid while I’m in Richmond?”

  “Sure, stay overnight. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to see Samuel Shank and, trust me, he won’t leave me in his waiting area.”

  Shank Creamery was situated on the main highway, exactly equidistant from the towns of Dayton and Harrisonburg – a strategic location and one that was not lost on Locklear – the old man clearly kept one foot in the old world and one firmly planted in the new.

  Locklear poured himself a coffee and lowered himself into the soft leather sofa in the reception area. A flyer on the glass table pictured Shank and another man in Old Order clothing driving a buggy along a Dayton slip road with several milking cows in the background. A caption said: “From our humble farms to your table.” Locklear grinned and placed the flyer in his pocket.

  He had been hoping that he’d be kept waiting, at least for a while. He wanted to take in his surroundings. Every wall in the large glass-fronted foyer was adorned with expensive-looking modern art. Beside him, a large framed photo revealed the office’s modest origins – it was an old black-and-white photo of a group of about twenty young Mennonite male farmers, staring into the camera with serious faces. Locklear read the names of the men beneath the pictu
re and locked in on one – Aaron Fehr, no doubt the man Carter said was a grand-uncle of the Fehrs, stood slightly apart from the group and the expression on his face said he did not want to be there. Carter had said the old guy was crazy and warned Locklear not to go anywhere near him.

  A sculpture of a Grecian-styled semi-nude sat in the middle of a small water fountain in the centre of the reception area. Two elevators to his right brought frantic-looking employees to their floors and the air was one of general haste and anxiety – not the atmosphere you’d expect a Mennonite employer to support. One look around the area told Locklear that Shank did not lead a simple Mennonite life and that his black clothing and horse-drawn buggy were mere costume pieces dusted off on the occasion he visited the town of his roots. Twice he noticed the nervous-looking receptionist glance his way as she spoke quietly, yet urgently, into her phone.