When the Devil Speaks, page 12
Bosco started the car and drove off.
Keeping half his attention on Bosco in case the moron made another bad choice, Dylan retrieved the plastic bag that contained the paper that Bosco had stolen from Kehoe’s house. With the help of the flashlight app on his phone, Dylan examined the paper.
He discovered it was a regular sheet of notebook paper, the kind a student would use in school. Written on the paper in a faded graphite scrawl was a short cursive note that took Dylan several minutes to decipher. Once he did, he couldn’t believe what the note said, so he reread it. Again and again.
June 2nd, 1998
I, Elizabeth Mary Jordan, bequeath full ownership of my whole property at 1024 Hanson Road, to Nathan Barlow Brinkley, if and only if he wins the round of poker subsequently played between the two of us immediately after the writing of this contract, with no outside interference or assistance, on the date listed above between the hours of 2:00 PM and 3:00 PM at Dunlow Pond in Crenshaw Point, Missouri.
Hysterical laughter broke the silence inside the SUV. It took Dylan a second before he realized the laughter was coming out of his mouth. He transformed the laughter into a furious snarl as he said, “You can’t be serious. This is why Brinkley murdered Pritchard?”
Bosco shrugged, not taking his eyes off the rain-shrouded road. “Seems that way.”
“This ‘contract,’ if you can even call it that, is in no way enforceable,” Dylan said. “A judge would take one look at this and toss it into the trash. It’s not signed. It’s not notarized. And it’s twenty years old.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Bosco said. “I told Brinkley the same thing over the phone when he asked me to go to Kehoe’s house and get it. Brinkley told me to shut my dumb mouth. There’s no arguing with that man. Once he gets the idea that he’s owed something, he will not stop until he gets it. Or, if there’s no way in reality that he can get it, he’ll…”
“Destroy the people he blames for his inability to get it.”
“Uh-huh.”
Dylan dropped the contract into his lap. “You and Mayer just had to climb into bed with the devil, didn’t you?”
Bosco’s mouth curled in disgust. “Don’t phrase it like that.”
“I’ll phrase it however I want.” Dylan opened his glovebox and shoved the contract into it for safekeeping. “You’re part of the reason this has escalated into a murder spree. If you’d possessed even a smidgen of integrity, you’d have folded on Brinkley the moment you found out about Pritchard’s murder and the attempted frame job on Troy Tucker.
“Ogden would’ve arrested Brinkley, and he’d have been locked up in the county jail by now. Instead, he’s killed three more people, burned down a house in an attempt to kill three others, and he’s out there, right now, planning to kill who knows how many more?”
“Well, I…I mean…” Bosco breathed loudly through his nose, like he was trying not to hurl. “I was scared, okay? I saw that lawyer’s body in the garage and—”
“In the garage?”
Bosco clammed up, realizing he’d made a mistake.
“You were the accomplice who helped Brinkley dump the body in the woods.” Dylan smacked his palm against the dashboard. “Were you there when he killed Tucker too?”
Bosco stayed silent.
“Answer me!” Dylan roared.
Bosco flinched. “Yes! I was there. He made me pin Tucker down while he injected him with something to knock him out cold so that he could…stage the suicide.”
The remaining puzzle pieces found their proper places.
A bundle of conclusions tumbled through Dylan’s mind.
First and foremost: He had to keep Bosco alive at all costs. Bosco was the only witness to the dumping of Pritchard’s body and the faked suicide of Troy Tucker. If he died, then the prosecutors who ultimately tried Brinkley’s case would possess only circumstantial evidence to present to the jury. Though he’d likely be convicted regardless, the disturbing testimony of an eyewitness like Bosco would be enough to convince the state to give Brinkley the death penalty.
Nate Brinkley needed to die for what he’d done.
“So that’s how you found the tongue in the woods,” Dylan said. “You were there when Brinkley cut it out of Pritchard’s mouth.”
Bosco gagged. “Please don’t remind me of that.”
Dylan leaned across the console and got up in his face. “I will beat you with reminders of every sin you have committed on Brinkley’s behalf until it sinks into your dense skull that the only way to escape from this situation with any part of your life intact is to do exactly what I say from here on out.”
A car driving the opposite direction whipped past, and the headlights lit up Bosco’s terrified face. “And if I do, you’ll help me get out of this?”
“Oh, Bosco”—Dylan roughly patted his arm—“there is no way out of this. Not for you. But if you cooperate, I’ll put in a good word with the judge who delivers your sentence, make sure you get life with the possibility of parole instead of life without it.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I’ve changed my mind,” Dylan said. “Take me to Jordan’s farm.”
Ignoring Bosco’s irritated grunt as he was forced to stop and turn the Cherokee around, Dylan mentally reviewed everything he had learned since he arrived in Crenshaw Point. So much had happened since that arrival, it felt like weeks had passed, though it had been less than a day.
To get his thoughts in order, Dylan stripped away the turbulent emotions that had been plaguing him all afternoon and put together an objective timeline of events that led up to the present moment.
Twenty years ago, Elizabeth Jordan bet her dairy farm in a poker game against Nate Brinkley. She lost the game but decided not to honor the bet, a decision that angered Brinkley. At the time, however, she and Brinkley were good friends, and Brinkley hadn’t yet escalated to the level of violence that would drive them apart.
Later that year, the incident with Quinton Farley occurred, and Jordan finally severed her relationship with Brinkley. On the other hand, Dave Kehoe, who’d been close with both Brinkley and Jordan, chose Brinkley over Jordan because he was too afraid to cross Brinkley and risk self-destructing his burgeoning drug business.
At some point between the poker game and the dissolution of Brinkley and Jordan’s friendship, Kehoe had come into possession of the flimsy contract that Jordan had written for the poker bet. For some reason, he’d kept it for two whole decades. Perhaps Brinkley had asked him to hold onto it. Or perhaps he stored numerous pieces of nostalgia, to remind him of the better days before their friend group dissolved. Whatever the reason, he still had it in his possession right up until the moment Brinkley shot him dead.
Why did Brinkley kill Kehoe? Well, that wrapped back around to Jordan.
Last week, Elizabeth Jordan, diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer, decided to write her final will and testament. She contacted an estate lawyer from St. Louis, Joe Pritchard, who arrived in Crenshaw Point on Monday morning and spent the day helping Jordan create a draft of her will.
Early the following morning, Pritchard left his room at Ms. Hightower’s bed-and-breakfast to go eat at Stacy’s Diner, where he coincidentally sat next to Nate Brinkley and Dave Kehoe. Pritchard brought with him a printed version of the draft will onto which he jotted notes while he ate his breakfast, and this caught the attention of Nate Brinkley.
When Brinkley realized that Pritchard was writing Jordan’s will, and that she had decided to bequeath the dairy farm to her two kids, it reopened the old wound that Jordan had inflicted on him when she reneged on the bet. Brinkley, whose anger issues had only grown worse over the past two decades, had flown into a rage and stormed out of the diner.
But he hadn’t gone far. He hung around the diner, somewhere out of sight, watching as Kehoe meandered from the diner to Harley Bob’s Bar, watching as Pritchard finished his meal and left the diner, intending to return to the bed-and-breakfast.
Brinkley intercepted him, beat him into submission, and abducted him. He took Pritchard to Troy Tucker’s property, knowing that Tucker was out of town because Tucker had told him that he and his buddy Brian Price were taking a trip to St. Louis to buy drugs.
Brinkley probably questioned Pritchard about Jordan’s will, his rage growing as the terrified Pritchard gave him honest answers, answers that Brinkley didn’t like. When his anger peaked, Brinkley picked up a knife that had been lying around in Tucker’s garage and eviscerated Pritchard.
Once the man bled out and died, Brinkley, whose anger wouldn’t be satisfied until he “punished” Jordan, blackmailed Bosco into helping him transport Pritchard’s body in Tucker’s car to the woods along Hanson Road—where Jordan enjoyed taking long walks because the woods bordered her farm.
Brinkley and Bosco left Tucker’s car parked in the road, where someone nearly rear-ended it. They carried Brinkley’s body to the tree. Brinkley tied it to the tree with rope, facing the direction of Jordan’s property.
Still not satisfied by the level of gore, he plucked out the body’s eyes, cut out most of the tongue, and stuck the eyes in the mouth, angled directly at Jordan’s farmhouse. He also shoved a threatening cassette tape into Pritchard’s abdomen. Because why not?
Then he and Bosco returned to Tucker’s trailer, unaware that Johnny Singleton would shortly stumble upon the body after slipping and falling off the walking trail. Back at Tucker’s trailer, Brinkley probably argued with Bosco about how to manage the horrifically bloody scene in the garage, but before they could make a decision, Tucker returned home.
Tucker discovered what Brinkley had done in his garage, and Brinkley, thinking on the fly, convinced Tucker that he would take the fall for Pritchard’s murder unless he stole Pritchard’s laptop from the bed-and-breakfast. Knowing Brinkley was dangerous, Tucker tried to lessen the risk to himself by having Kehoe hold onto the laptop until Brinkley and Bosco cleaned up the murder scene, but that strategy only delayed the inevitable.
After stealing the laptop and handing it off to Kehoe, Tucker went back to his trailer. Once there, Brinkley and Bosco restrained him, knocked him out with drugs, and staged his suicide. The frame job was then complete.
Brinkley, his temper cooling, was satisfied that Jordan would get his message but that the murder of Pritchard would fall on Tucker’s shoulders. He was also certain that Sheriff Ogden, with some coaxing from the two corrupt deputies that Brinkley had under his thumb, would conclude that Tucker tried to rob Pritchard while high, something went disastrously wrong, and Tucker killed himself in remorse once he was clearheaded enough to understand what he’d done.
It all would’ve gone down as an unfortunate random incident…if Sheriff Ogden, put off by the freaky state of Pritchard’s body, hadn’t called Dylan Specter in to consult. When Dylan began poking holes in the murder-suicide theory, Adam Headley, the town mayor—who recognized his brother’s handiwork but entrenched himself in a state of denial—pressured Sheriff Ogden to draw the “obvious” conclusions about the case and conspired to send Dylan packing before he could uncover anything more damning.
Unbeknownst to anyone in Crenshaw Point, however, Dylan Specter never closed cases unless he was sure he had the right answers.
And that, friends, Dylan thought wryly, is how I wound up neck deep in the consulting job from hell.
“Uh, Specter,” Bosco said, “we’re here.”
Yanking himself out of the mental cesspool into which all the foulness of this case had flowed, Dylan looked out the window to see that they had in fact arrived at Elizabeth Jordan’s dairy farm.
Jordan’s truck was parked in the same place it had been earlier in the day, and a soft yellow light in the living room cast a glow onto the front porch. There were no broken windows, no bullet holes, and the door hadn’t been kicked in by a colossal foot.
But none of that meant Jordan was safe. Now that Brinkley’s clever schemes had unraveled, he had nothing to lose by going for broke. At some point or another, he would try to murder the woman whose actions had inadvertently set him off in the first place.
“Brinkley was planning to come here,” Dylan said to Bosco, “after you gave him the contract. He was going to shove it in Jordan’s face and terrorize her until she apologized for reneging on the bet. And once he got his fill of the fear and loathing on her face, he was going to shoot her. Just like he shot Tucker, Kehoe, Ogden, and your receptionist, Shirley.”
Bosco curled in on himself. “But that didn’t happen.”
“Because I intercepted the contract before it reached him.” Dylan cut the engine and pocketed the keys. “Just think, if Brinkley had arrived at the gas station before me, you’d have another murder on your hands by now.”
“I haven’t killed anyone,” Bosco croaked. “I didn’t want anyone to die.”
“You know what they say about the road to hell, Bosco,” Dylan said as he opened the door and allowed the wind to blow frigid rain inside the vehicle. “And honestly, you should’ve known better than to walk the same road as the goddamned devil.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jordan didn’t answer the door.
Knocking once, twice, three times prompted no response from inside the farmhouse, and Dylan’s worry intensified with each second that passed. Gun drawn, he tried the doorknob and found the door unlocked—which was odd, considering the warning he’d given her earlier. He uneasily entered the house, expecting to find the cooling remnants of a violent confrontation that hadn’t been noticeable from outside. But as he looked about, he spotted no blood, no bullet holes, no broken bodies.
All was silent and still.
In the living room, Jordan’s favored recliner sat empty, save for the shawl she’d worn to fend off the cold seeping into her dying bones. A half-empty mug of tea had been left on the coffee table, and Dylan touched it—still warm but not hot. On the kitchen countertop lay a ceramic teapot on a woven tea cozy, and beside it, a plate with store-bought chocolate chip cookies, one of them missing a bite. There were no open drawers or cabinets, nothing spilled on the floor.
Elizabeth Jordan had left, but it didn’t appear that she’d fled.
“Where did you go?” Dylan muttered to himself.
Dylan searched the rest of the house top to bottom. In the utility room, a pair of shoes were missing from a line of shoes on a towel that had been laid on the floor to prevent mud from collecting on the tiles. In the only bedroom that was lived in—clothes in the drawers, the bed unmade—the closet door had been left open, and a closely packed bunch of coats disturbed, a bare clothes hanger stuck between them. In the bathroom, two bottles of prescription pills had been left on the sink counter, one of them a strong painkiller. And in the basement…
“Uh-oh.”
Dylan lingered in the basement for some time while he processed the object that had been wedged between the washing machine and a stack of plastic storage bins: a gun locker. The door on the locker wasn’t shut properly, so Dylan tucked a finger behind the lip and tugged it. It swung open to reveal a row of shotguns and several boxes of ammunition. One shotgun was clearly missing, and a box of shotgun slugs had been torn open, several bullets taken.
Had Jordan moved to a safer location and armed herself in case Brinkley came after her, or had she decided to do something reckless?
“Please be option one,” Dylan said as he climbed the stairs back the ground floor. “You’re already dying, Jordan. There’s no reason to speed it up.”
Preparing to give the house one quick, final sweep, Dylan froze at the sound of his Cherokee’s horn blaring over the shriek of the wind. He dashed to the front door and looked out to where he’d parked. Bosco was frantically laying on the horn, though his attention was glued to something off to his right. Between the darkness of the night and the pounding rain, Dylan couldn’t see anything in that direction, so he turned on his phone’s flashlight app and pointed the phone toward the cow pasture.
A hulking figure flashed across the beam of light, and a shot rang out over the din of the storm. The bullet smashed through the living room picture window, and Dylan dropped to his knees behind the flimsy cover of the porch railing. Dylan returned fire in the general area in which he’d seen the figure then heaved himself over the porch railing. Pain seared through his ribs as he landed in the muddy flowerbed in front of the porch, but he suppressed a groan and took off toward his Cherokee.
He dove for the cover of the engine block a second before the shooter fired again. This bullet pinged off the front fender, and Dylan crawled in the opposite direction, till he reached the back passenger door. Opening it, he reached between the back seat and the trunk space, tossing aside various pieces of equipment until his hand wrapped around a cylindrical object.
Bosco, hunched over in the driver’s seat, cried out, “What are you doing? Get in the car!”
“Shut up.” Dylan yanked out the object and shuffled around to the back end of the SUV. Sucking in a breath to compose himself, he leaned out from behind his cover and flicked the switch on his high-powered flashlight.
The wide beam lit up the cow pasture and the adjacent yard with a punishing bright white light. The shooter, who’d jumped the fence of the pasture and had been approaching Jordan’s truck, reeled back and shouted as the light burned into his retinas. He slipped in a slick patch of mud and fell flat on his ass, his gun bouncing across the dead grass and sinking into a deep puddle. Hand slapped over his eyes, the man hissed out a long line of swears, all of which were muffled by the immense swelling that had puffed up the lower half of his face.
“Headley?” Dylan shouted. “What the hell?”
Headley squinted through the gaps in his fingers. “Wait. Specter?”
Lowering his gun, Dylan marched over to the wayward mayor. “You’re supposed to be in the hospital. Why are you here, shooting at me?”
Grasping the side mirror of Jordan’s truck, Headley pulled himself to his feet. “I didn’t know it was you,” he slurred. “I thought it was Nate.”
