Witness Read online

  A stir of tension flitted through Kathryn. “Are you kidding me, Margie?”

  “I’m dead serious, kid.”

  “Even though I was one of the few people who openly disapproved of what was going on at the time, and tried to get an independent investigation started?”

  “Yes. This thing’s damaged everyone who’s ever associated with Randy Randalls.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m just a receptionist.”

  “You’re so much more than that, Margie.”

  “Perhaps so, but I’m retiring just as soon as I hit my thirty years. I’m not young like you. You may need to set your sights on some other horizon.”

  “Are you saying I’m done in Rowan County?”

  Margie nodded. “Afraid so, Hon. It’s no accident the select committee chose Richard. He’s an outsider.”

  Kathryn winced. “I was afraid of that. Then, I guess I’d better get hired on with the Hamilton County Sheriff.”

  “Hamilton County, Indiana?”

  “No, Hamilton County, Ohio.”

  “Cincinnati?”

  “Yes. I’d like to move to the big city.” She smiled ruefully. “Small town life isn’t right for me.”

  “Your mom will miss you.”

  “I know,” she said miserably. “But I think it’s time I left this place and started over, somewhere new.”

  “Things are gonna get better,” Margie assured her.

  But inwardly, Kathryn didn’t feel so sanguine.

  5

  Friday, April 19, 4:45 p.m.

  “Hey, Kathryn, how’s it going, over there in your neck of the woods?”

  “Hey, Wally,” Kathryn said. “Things are okay.”

  “Well, I just wanted to give you a head’s up.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “There’s a special called meeting tonight, down at City Hall. They’re gonna appoint an interim sheriff.”

  “Oh, my goodness, that’s early, isn’t it? Aren’t they moving kind of fast?”

  “Word is, the Sheriff resigned today, and they’re gonna move fast to find a replacement. It’s at seven o’clock. I suggest you attend.”

  Wally Eubanks was a fellow deputy sheriff, and the fact that he’d had the decency to call, surprised and touched her. Ever since she’d started at the Casino, she’d felt as if her claim to the sheriff’s office was fading. It was nice that someone cared enough to keep her in the loop.

  “Seven o’clock, you say?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I think you’d better show up.”

  “I think I will.”

  They talked a few minutes longer, then hung up. She pocketed her cell and went in search of the pit boss.

  She got the okay to take a long dinner break, but then a thought drifted into her head and she got to thinking. She called Margie.

  “Hey, kid,” Margie said. “Whatcha doin’?”

  “Hey, Margie. I just got off the phone a little bit ago with Wally Eubanks. He told me the select committee’s gonna pick an interim tonight.”

  “Hold on a sec,” Margie said, and Kathryn heard scuffling sounds, and then Margie came back on the cell, her voice furtive. “Things are getting really weird around here,” Margie whispered.

  “Even weirder than usual?” Kathryn joked.

  “Weird and . . . weird and strange.”

  “In what way?”

  “People are talking . . . we’re all wondering what’s happened with him . . . they’re starting to say Rob’s gone missing.”

  “It is strange,” Kathryn said, “that nobody’s heard from him for the last week or so.”

  “Yeah, and you wanna know something, kid. No matter what, Rob wouldn’t’ve missed the select committee meeting. He wanted to be named the interim sheriff.”

  “I know,” Kathryn agreed.

  “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I heard he went back to his wife when she left him and moved back home to Nashville, Tennessee.”

  “I heard that too,” Margie said, “but get this. His wife’s been calling and calling, asking where Rob is.”

  “Oh,” Kathryn said.

  “Yeah. And I gotta tell you, Kathy. He was a shoe-in for the interim sheriff position. There’s no way he’d miss out on an opportunity like that.”

  “I’m gonna apply,” Kathryn said.

  “Oh, honey,” Margie said, as if a five-year-old girl had announced her intention to run for President of the United States. “Good for you, sweetie.”

  “I want the job. I’m gonna show up and put in my application.”

  “Oh, Kathryn, that’s wonderful.”

  “I guess so,” she said dubiously.

  “Knock ‘em dead, kid.”

  A few hours later.

  Kathryn signed in at the Central Committee’s Select special called meeting to appoint an interim sheriff, mingled a little bit, then went and sat down.

  She saw a lot of new people, fresh faces she’d not seen before. She met with a man who was taking the resumes, handed in hers, asked a few questions, then stood around for a while, wondering what to do next. She felt ill at ease and curiously out of sorts, even though she was no stranger to the select committee. She’d been here before, plenty of times, at various committee meetings over the years. But she felt suddenly as if she didn’t belong. In the time since she’d been gone from the sheriff’s office, something troubling and strange had happened to her. She’d become more acclimatized to life at the Casino, than to her previous political life with the Rowan County Sheriff.

  And to think, she’d felt out of sorts and not at all comfortable with the Casino when she’d first started there, and she’d wondered at the time if she’d ever fit in at the Casino. Now she felt more like a Casino employee than a county employee, and she wondered if it showed. Did she not give the appearance anymore of someone who’d been a county employee? Did she look like someone who’d gone to the private sector? Did she fit in anymore?

  She glanced around her and saw young, fit men. Men who looked as if they went to the gym regularly and ran miles and pumped iron. They looked young and fit and trim and Kathryn suddenly felt out of place and ill-fitting. She belonged more in the world of the Casino than here. That was bad, because she had a sense her days at the Casino were numbered.

  Ah, she finally saw a familiar face. “Rich?” she called out. “How you doin’?”

  Richard McCallister, a seasoned deputy sheriff, looked over, did a double take, then smiled.

  But did she detect a hint of apprehension in Rich’s smile? Or was she just being paranoid?

  “Kathryn,” Rich said. “Good to see you.” They shook hands.

  “You looking to be the interim?” Kathryn asked.

  “Yeah, same as you?”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Good.”

  An uncomfortable silence followed.

  “I miss this place,” Kathryn said, although she knew Rich would understand she didn’t mean the select committee; she meant the sheriff’s office.

  Rich nodded his understanding. “How’re things over at the Casino?”

  She decided to be honest. “They’re . . . not so great.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’m calling the sheriff’s office all the time because I don’t have authority to arrest anybody, and it really sticks my craw.”

  “I know,” Rich said, amused. “You know, Kathryn. Ever since you went to the Casino, we’re running over there a hell of a lot more than we ever used to.”

  “Oh, really?” Kathryn asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Really.”

  “Wow,” Kathryn said. “Cause I’m calling you guys all the time.”

  “We know,” Rich said, and chortled. “Our calls to the Casino went up a hundred and ten percent since you’ve been there.”

  “Wow,” Kathryn said, putting her hands on her hips. “Don’t quite know what to think about that.”

  “It’s not like cri
me suddenly went up at the Casino a hundred and ten percent after you started there. It’s just that you’re calling in these infractions that never got called in before.”

  “Crap,” Kathryn said. “I can’t begin to tell you the number of times in a single shift when I’m calling you guys to arrest some idiot for driving under the influence, and then calling children’s services to perform a removal of their kids, who they’ve left alone in a boiling hot car or a freezing cold one.”

  Rich ran his hand across his jaw. “It’s gotten to the point that we’re thinking of assigning a deputy sheriff rotation to the Casino on a twenty-four seven basis.” He grinned. “I’m kinda thinking, if you want to come back to the sheriff’s office, I could re-hire you, and then assign you to the Casino detail.”

  Kathryn’s heart plummeted. She realized, to her sorrow, she was looking at the new interim sheriff, Richard McCallister. He was the entire package; young, fit, honest, not subject to corruption, and so involved in the inner workings of the sheriff’s office, that he knew the intimate details of what was going on with the staff. It meant Pete, who didn’t bear the imprimatur of the hypocrisy and corruption, had managed to rise above all that, but at the same time he’d been there long enough that he knew the inner workings of the sheriff’s office. With a trace of bitterness, Kathryn realized, Rich had it all going on for him. He hadn’t been indicted, he hadn’t been forced out of the office, and for some reason he’d gotten along well enough under Rob Billings’s and Randy Randalls’s tenure, that none of the dirty politics that’d dogged Rob had managed to stick to him at all. He was already an employee of the sheriff’s office. He was young, fresh, well trained, a recent grad from the academy, and he knew how to run the sheriff’s office.

  Kathryn put her hands on her hips and sighed.

  And if the Sheriff’s Office was going to put a deputy on rotation at the Casino from now on, then it meant she was going to be out of a job at the Casino as well.

  She stood around and shot the breeze with Rich for a few minutes longer, but after a bit, she sensed the growing presence of some of the other guys from the office standing around, wanting to talk to him.

  They didn’t, she noticed, want to talk to her.

  They knew where the balance of power had gone to. It’d gone to Richard McCallister, who’d soon become the new interim sheriff of Rowan County, and once he became the interim, it’d be an easy ace for him to run for the office next year as the incumbent.

  Kathryn’s dreams and hopes of becoming a sheriff were fast becoming a sad memory.

  6

  Thursday, April 18, 5:45 p.m.

  At a remote villa in the distant mountains of Columbia, a group of men finished their leisurely meal and waited as the women cleared the table, then, when the last woman had left and closed the door behind her, they brought out their cigars and cut the ends and lit them, and sat back for a good few minutes, in the silence, listening as the women chattered in the kitchen. They smoked and blew rings into the air, but did not speak they listened, until, finally, when the women finished their work and disappeared into other parts of the hacienda, the men stirred restlessly and looked to the end of the table where their leader, their Patron, sat. He tapped some ash into an ashtray, blew a ring of white smoke up into the air, and spoke.

  “What are they saying, our gringo friends, up north?”

  Pedro, a dark-skinned, compact man with a brute strength and the reptilian eyes of a born killer, said, “Manuel says things are going badly, out at the farm.”

  “Which corridor is that?” Gabriel asked.

  “The highway seventy-five from Florida through to Toledo, Patron, and then from there on to Canada,” Pedro said.

  “Where is the farm stop on that journey, Pedo?” the patron asked.

  “North of Dayton, Patron, near the town of Shelbyville.”

  “I see,” the Patron said. He considered. “Don Diego, is it time for us to change our path?”

  Don Diego, who sat at the opposite end of the table, stirred and looked at Patron. “Indeed, Patron, it may be time. I was starting to think we should move our operation more to the west, to Merrillville. We would be closer to our ties in Chicago.” He shrugged. “The Sheriff of Rowan County is facing persecution for many things, and may be indicted soon, and if that happens, he will lose his power.”

  “For what is the Sherrif facing legal troubles?” Patron asked.

  “No, Patron,” Don Diego assured him. “Not for anything to do with us, but if he finds himself facing a long prison term, he may turn us over to the authorities.”

  “We have encountered this kind of difficulty before,” Patron said.

  “Si, Patron,” Don Diego said.

  “Very well,” Patron said. “If that is the case, then there is no other choice. We do not want that kind of attention focused on us.”

  “Si, Patron,” Don Diego said.

  “Patron turned his gaze to Pedro. “Assemble your team, Pedro.”

  “Si, Patron,” Pedro said. “I only need one man with me. I shall take Hector.”

  “Very good,” Patron said. “Make it happen, Pedro.”

  “Si, Patron,” Pedro said. “It is done.”

  7

  Thursday, April 18, 1:01 p.m.

  An investigator Randy recognized from the Attorney General’s office was waiting for him at the front door of the Sheriff’s Office when Randy returned from lunch.

  “What now?” Randy asked.

  “Let’s talk,” the man said.

  Randy led him inside the building, down the hallway, opened the door to his office and gestured for the investigator to enter ahead of him. The investigator walked into Randy’s office and handed over a thick Manilla folder as Randy walked around to his side of the desk but did not sit down.

  A thread of unease flitted down his spine and he put his hands on his hips. “Just tell me what’s in it.”

  What was this asshole going to show him, a series of gruesome color photos of Rob’s bloated body as it got hauled out of the Ohio? Or a photo of some dead Mexican girls, hog-tied and left in a meat locker to freeze to death, their bodies hardening into slabs along with the sides of pork?

  The investigator crossed his arms over his chest and tucked his hands under his armpits. He did not speak.

  Randy reached forward tentatively with his right hand and traced his finger along the manila folder seam. What horror waited for him inside this envelope? What fresh misery?

  He put his right hand back on his hip and stood there, with the envelope sitting there like a dog’s ripe, warm turd.

  He was prepared to stand there for an hour, perhaps longer, if that’s the way the investigator wanted to play it. He could wait all fucking day.

  Finally, and with a heavy sigh, the investigator reached for the envelope, unfolded the flap, and pulled out a series of glossy 8 x 10 color photos of Miranda, back when she was still alive, back when she sported the bruises all over her face, her arms, her neck, her shoulders.

  “You got anything to say?” the investigator asked.

  In a slow, even voice, Randy said, “I’m calling my lawyer, and you’re leaving this office before I throw you out on your ass.”

  “Have your lawyer call me,” the investigator said, taking a card from his billfold and tossing it onto Randy’s desk.

  The card landed on top of Miranda’s wide-open eyes.

  And then the investigator turned on his heel and sauntered out of Randy’s office.

  8

  Thursday, April 18, 7:45 a.m.

  Margie hung up the phone, stood up, walked down the hallway to Randy’s office and was grateful to see the door was open, because this was something that required his attention. She stood in the doorway and waited patiently until he finally let out an aggravated sigh and looked up at her. “What’s up, Margie?”

  “Rob Billings’s wife, Shelley, called.”

  He sat there, impassive.

  “I was on the phone with her for f
orty-five minutes, and she’s madder than a hornet.”

  He leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up on the desk and crossed them at the ankles. Margie resisted the urge to scream at him herself. “What’s she’s carrying on about?”

  Clearly, he couldn’t care less.

  She knew this conversation had been coming for a long time, and she’d prepared herself for it, but it still made her angry that she had to confront him herself.

  She inhaled sharply, steeled herself, and forced herself to speak calmly. “Shelley says that Rob didn’t come home last night, and even when they’ve been fighting—”

  “Hah,” Randy said humorlessly. “I’ll bet that happens a lot.”

  “Will you let me talk,” she snapped at him, and Randy started with surprise and she took secret pleasure in her anger.

  God-damn you, Randy. I’ve put up with your shit for years and years.

  She half-expected Randy to yell at her, but instead, his eyes turned cold and he said nothing. That was all the permission she needed.

  “Shelley’s convinced something’s happened to him, and, like I said, she’s madder than hell and she’s talking about going to the Attorney General’s office, the Shelbyville Police Department, Channel Five News. She keeps saying—” and here, Margie paused briefly “—that she knows things, she knows a lot of things, and Rob shared a lot of information with her, a lot that even you don’t know about, and she’s not afraid to do something about it, if you won’t tell her where Rob is.”

  But those weren’t precisely Shelley’s words. Margie had toned it down quite a lot. Shelley’s exact words had been, “I know you’re not a part of this secret fucking club, Margie, and I don’t want to get you in trouble, but I’ve had it, I’m through with that cocksucker. I’ve had it, I’ve really fucking had it. You tell that mother-fucking bastard that I know everything, and I do mean everything, Margie. I know all about Randy’s little side businesses and side ventures, and side deals, and I know all about the shenanigans he’s been engaging in all these years, and I know exactly where all the money’s coming from, too, and if Randy doesn’t start telling me where my husband is, I’m gonna take matters into my own hands.”