Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 136, No. 5. Whole No. 831, November 2010

The Gods for Vengeance Cry by Richard Helms

A former forensic psychologist, academic counselor, and part-time college professor, Richard Helms has been nominated three times for the PWA’s Shamus Award (in 2003, 2004, and 2006). He told EQMM that he currently has nine novels in print, two out of print, four waiting to be published, and five or six in progress. One of those just published, Six Mile Creek, which headed Five Star’s spring 2010 list, features Judd Wheeler, a character in this new story, Mr. Helms’s first for EQMM.

There are sixteen bones in the human hand. I had managed to break five of mine retrieving a poodle, the object of a messy custody dispute. I had also learned an important lesson: Owning a poodle doesn’t mean you aren’t a tough guy.

Fortunately, I’m also a tough guy. The poodle was returned to its rightful owner, who was so insanely happy that she paid my fee and the medical bills to have my hand set.

The money was dwindling quickly, though. At six-six and two-eighty, I go through a lot of food. I can’t cook anything more substantial than a Pop Tart, so I take all my meals in restaurants.

I was quickly joining the ranks of the bucks-down.

I sat in Holliday’s, nursing a Dixie Beer, when Shorty — Holliday’s owner and my boss — wandered in from the alley. Shorty is a human fireplug, square as a checkers board and ugly as roadkill.

“Gallegher,” he said, “I might have some work for you.”

Besides being a recently handicapped cornet player, I make a few bucks on the side looking for — and usually finding — things that have disappeared. Poodles, for instance. Sometimes people don’t like it when I show up to recover things. Sometimes they try to resist. They seldom resist for long.

“Remember Katie Costner?” he asked.

“Blond kid. Worked here as a waitress about a year ago.”

“She’s dead.”

I nodded. I think I might have furrowed my brow a bit.

Thousands of young people gravitate to the French Quarter each year. Some adapt. Some don’t.

Some die.

You don’t like to admit it, but you get used to it.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “What happened?”

“They found her in her flop, down at the far end of Decatur, near Esplanade. She’d been strangled.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Word has it she wasn’t involved.”

“You kept up with her after she quit?”

“I checked in on her once or twice. Brought her some food from time to time.”

I nodded. Sometimes, Shorty dumps a boatload of surprise on you.

“The police officers working the case say she was from some flyspeck town in North Carolina. Place called Prosperity. Cops can’t locate her parents. There’s five hundred in it for you if you can track them down.”

Shorty pulled a Dixie from the ice bin and twisted off the cap.

“People ought to hear about it when their kids die,” he said.

A check on the Internet revealed that nobody named Costner owned a telephone in Prosperity. That didn’t mean much. The number could have been unlisted, or maybe they used cell phones. Listed land lines are going the way of the passenger pigeon.

I also checked with a friend of mine in the Robbery-Homicide Division at NOPD, a scrawny, scarecrow-like guy named Farley Nuckolls. Farley and I had butted heads a bunch of times over the years, but he was reasonably forbearing since I passed along information when I fell across it.

Most of the time.

“She was strangled,” he said.

“Harder than it sounds,” I noted.

“Do tell. Personal experience?”

“I’ve never been strangled, if that’s what you meant. As a retired psychologist I know a thing or two about the way the brain works. To do a strangling right, you have to cut off a person’s oxygen supply for four minutes, minimum, unless you squeeze hard enough to fracture the hyoid bone in the larynx. Killing someone that way means you really have to go in committed.”

“The forensic boys concur.”

“No clues, then?”

“Not much to go on. The murder weapon was a twisted scarf. The killer apparently wore gloves. No epithelials on the scarf. No prints in the apartment. She was probably killed by a man.”

“Or a female wrestler,” I added.

“Don’t complicate my life.”

When Shorty referred to Prosperity as a flyspeck town, he had inadvertently given it a promotion. The main commercial district was confined to a five-acre area at the intersection of a couple of two-lane highways, and consisted of a strip shopping center, a doctor and a dentist, an attorney, and the town hall. At least the strip had a pizza parlor.

I ordered a garbage pie and sat at a booth facing out the picture window as I ate. It was already dusk, the end of a long day on the road. I hadn’t seen a motel in town, and I was a little hazy as to where I was going to bunk down for the night.

The parking lot of the strip center seemed to be a gathering place for the disenchanted youth of Prosperity. They hung in clusters and stood around trying to look surly and threatening.

I finished my dinner, dropped a tip on the table, and slipped my Saints hat on.

I was halfway to my car when one of the kids stepped in front of me.

“Got a smoke?” he asked. A stray lock of limp hair fell across his left eye.

“No. I don’t smoke, and you shouldn’t either,” I said.

“I don’t like being told what to do,” he said.

“Imagine that.”

“If you don’t have a cigarette, maybe you can spare a few bucks so I can buy my own.”

Several of the kids had circled around and were now at my six. I was slowly being surrounded. I didn’t think they meant to rob me, not in a place this public. They did, however, expect to intimidate me.

I don’t intimidate easily.

I pulled a five from my pocket.

The kid reached for it. I jerked it back. A mix of confusion and anger crossed his features.

“Tell you what,” I said. “This five goes to the first guy who can tell me where a family named Costner lives in this area.”

The kid opened his jacket and showed me a knife in his belt.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You let me have the five and I’ll let you get in your car and get lost.”

I palmed the bill and placed it back in my pocket.

Without saying a word, I turned toward my car.

As I expected, I felt a hand grip my shoulder.

“I’m talkin’ to you, man,” the kid said, with a fearlessness born of the pack mentality. He was certain that numbers made him invincible.

He was wrong.

With my good hand, I reached up and grabbed his wrist. Several seconds later, the kid who’d touched me sat on the ground howling over the greenstick break in his radius bone, and the kid who’d tried to help him sat next to my car trying to hold back a scarlet torrent from his broken nose. The other two seemed to vacillate between taking up the attack and running like thieves.

We were interrupted by the whoop of a siren and flashing lights. I knew what that meant. I stepped back and raised both hands to make it clear that I was unarmed.

“What’s going on?” a man said behind me. I turned to face the cop who had stepped out of his cruiser. He was tall and skinny, with rawhide skin and sad eyes. He had augmented his uniform with snakeskin boots.

“I was going to my car when these punks tried to shake me down.”

“He broke my nose, Slim!” one of the youths said.

“And he snapped my arm like it was a twig!” the leader whined.

“Just defending myself,” I said to the cop. “The kid with the broken arm has a knife in his belt. He threatened me with it.”

The cop leaned down, opened the leader’s jacket, and pulled the knife from his belt. Then turned to me.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No.”

“Didn’t reckon so. You come with me. I need to file a report. Rooster, you and Sonny head on home, get your folks to take you to the emergency room. You come by the station tomorrow if you want to file a complaint.”

“A complaint!” I said.

“That’s enough out of you, mister!” Slim said. “Come have a seat in the cruiser. I need to get some information from you.”

Half an hour later, I sat in the Prosperity Police Station. The cop, Slim Tackett, hadn’t cuffed me, but neither did he seem interested in letting me go.

The front door to the station opened, and another officer stepped inside. He was tall and barrel-chested and athletic. He wore a gray Stetson over close-cropped dark hair going slowly silver at the temples. His eyes were blue and penetrating.

“This him?” he asked Tackett.

“Name’s Gallegher, Chief. Roy Patrick Gallegher. He’s from New Orleans.”

“New Orleans?” the chief said, as he glanced over the report. “You’re a long way from home.”

“I can’t wait to get back,” I said.

“You can go on,” the chief told Tackett.

“Thanks, Chief,” Tackett said. He left without saluting.

The chief told me to sit tight. He walked to the back of the station and returned with two cups of coffee.

“You take sugar or cream?” he asked.

“Beer,” I said.

He grinned, for just a second, reached into his shirt pocket and handed me a couple of paper packets of sweetener. Then he sat behind the desk.

“Judd Wheeler,” he said. “I’m the chief of police here in Prosperity. We aren’t accustomed to riots in the shopping-center parking lot.”

“As I told the other officer, I had just finished dinner and was heading for my car when these kids decided to hit me up for cash.”

“So you assaulted them.”

“The kid with the broken arm threatened me with a knife. I tried to leave. He decided to press the issue.”

Wheeler nodded. “Rooster Broome. You tie fifteen Bliss County Broomes together and you might get a triple-digit IQ. Between you and me, I’ve kind of hoped for some time now that someone would clean Rooster’s clock.”

“So we’re jake?”

“No, Mr. Gallegher. We are not ‘jake.’ I got two Prosperity kids in the ER over in Morgan, and you don’t have a scratch on you. I’m not certain how to explain that. You some kind of tough guy?”

“Yes,” I said.

I thought Wheeler’s eyes might have widened a bit.

“Honest, too,” I said.

“Are you so honest that if I send to New Orleans for your arrest record they’re gonna come up empty?”

“I’ve been arrested in New Orleans,” I said. “Several times. All the charges were dropped. If you want, you can check with Detective Farley Nuckolls in Robbery-Homicide, at the Rampart Street station in the French Quarter.”

“Friend of yours?”

“We go back a few years. He can tell you anything you want to know.”

Wheeler drew a few circles on his desktop with his index finger, and then took a sip of his coffee.

“What I want to know,” he said, finally, “is what you’re doing in Prosperity.”

“I work in a bar in the French Quarter. There was a girl who waited tables there for a while. She was murdered several days ago. I’m trying to find her family.”

“What was this girl’s name?”

“Katie Costner.”

Wheeler nodded, and took another sip of his coffee.

“Katie Costner left Prosperity about five years ago,” he said.

“So you knew her?”

“We crossed paths. Gave her folks no end of grief. Broke their hearts, though, when she blew town.”

“Maybe you can help me track them down. My boss in New Orleans wants me to inform them of her death, make arrangements for the funeral.”

“Well,” Wheeler said. “Now, that’s going to be a problem.”

“They’ve moved away?”

“No. They’re still here. Will be forever, I reckon.”

It took me a moment to catch his drift.

“Oh,” I said.

“Katie’s father died about three years ago. Cancer. Got it working in the textile dye mill over in Mica Wells. Her mother passed about a year later. Ate herself to death after her husband died. Diabetes.”

“Tough deal,” I said.

“It seems to me that the person you need to talk to is Quincy Pressley. He’s the preacher at the Lutheran church over off Ebenezer Road. The Costners are buried in his churchyard.”

I glanced at my watch.

“It’s a little late to call on him now. Is there a motel nearby I could flop for the night?”

“Sorry. Nearest motel is over in Morgan, about fifteen miles. Why don’t you stay here?”

“In the jail?”

“Sure. The beds in the cells are plenty comfortable. We serve a first-class breakfast in the morning, from over at the Piggly Wiggly in the shopping center. It’ll be nice and quiet.”

“Am I under arrest, Chief?”

He shook his head.

“Let’s call it protective custody. The Broomes are a clannish bunch — you know, with a capital ‘K.’ They aren’t going to be very happy that some out-of-towner maimed one of their own, no matter how much he may have deserved it. They won’t come anywhere near the jail, though. They seem to be allergic to it. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll leave the cell door unlocked.”

And that’s how I came to spend the night in the Prosperity jail.

Chief Wheeler hadn’t lied. The breakfast carted in from the Piggly Wiggly was top shelf. Market-cut pepper bacon, scrambled eggs, grits, and two biscuits, which I washed down with coffee from the pot in the back of the station. It wasn’t Café du Monde, but as country breakfasts go, it hit the spot.

Chief Wheeler had kept his word also about unlocking the cell door.

I was just finishing my second biscuit when he walked in the front door of the station and headed straight back to the holding cells. He carried a thick sheaf of fax paper.

“Your buddy Nuckolls gets to work early,” he said. “You failed to mention last night that you used to be a cop.”

“I was a consultant. Nashua PD in New Hampshire. Forensic psychologist. I did their profiling.”

“Says here you killed a suspect named Ed Hix.”

“I don’t like to talk about that,” I said.

“I can imagine why.”

“Read the report, Chief. Hix killed the detective working the case, and it was down to Hix or me. I decided that it was a lot better for everyone in the long run if Hix didn’t walk out of those woods.”

“You emptied an automatic into him. Fourteen shots.”

“That was all the gun held. I’m not going to apologize for what I did, and I’m not going to minimize it either. Either Hix was going to die, or I was. I can’t complain about the way things worked out.”

“It seems you’ve had a very interesting life down in New Orleans. Detective Nuckolls seems to think that you’ve killed as many as six people over the last decade.”

“He’s entitled to his opinion.”

Wheeler set the sheaf of faxes down on his desk.

“Besides the fact that you seem to be some sort of walking Angel of Death, Detective Nuckolls says you’re generally dependable, probably honest, and even says you were responsible for stopping a serial murderer down there a couple of years ago.”

“It could have gone the other way very easily.”

“Here’s my problem, Gallegher. I keep the peace here in Prosperity. This is a quiet little town. We like it that way. I would be very appreciative if you’d complete your business here and then go home, preferably without littering the landscape with bodies I’d have to bury.”

We talked for a while longer, as he vetted me by way of the reports he had received from New Orleans, and then he offered to drive me over to meet Reverend Pressley.

“I have a car, over in the shopping-center lot.”

“The roads, once you get away from the commercial district, can get a little confusing. Let me drive you out there, then I can bring you back once you have an idea of where you’re going.”

I couldn’t argue with logic like that. He led me out to one of the cruisers and held the passenger-side door for me as I sat down.

“Have you lived in this town long?” I asked, as he pulled out of the lot onto the Morgan Highway.

“All my life,” he said. “My father was a farmer. His father was a farmer. All the Wheelers back to before the Revolutionary War were farmers.”

“You’re not a farmer.”

“Had to end sometime. I wasn’t very good at it. Guess I didn’t inherit the right genes. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to be a farmer in Prosperity in a few years.”

“Why’s that?”

He pointed to a subdivision off to the left of the highway. It was filled with large, boxy, redbrick houses of the style I had come to refer to as “garage-mahals.”

“Tax refugees. They think they’re getting away from it all, but they insist on having all the comforts of big-city life. These neighborhoods are spreading like seventeen-year locusts. The population in Prosperity has doubled in the last five years. I expect it’ll double again in the next two.”

“Tough break, suburban sprawl. And you have to keep a lid on all of it.”

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.”

We drove past an opulent new high school, and over a bridge spanning a tributary called Six Mile Creek. Slowly, the McMansion developments faded away, the land seemed to become more fertile, and farms began to appear on each side of the highway.

“This is the Prosperity I remember from when I was a kid,” Wheeler said. “I’m going to miss it. Now, to get to Quincy’s church, you turn left just past this tobacco-drying barn up here, onto the Ebenezer Church Road…”

A few minutes later, we pulled into the gravel parking lot of a white frame church. A plaque screwed into the siding next to the front door proclaimed that the church had stood on that spot since 1764.

As we climbed out of the cruiser, a man stepped out the front door and waved at Wheeler. He stood in the high five-foot range, with a paunchy stomach, two and a half chins, and thinning hair. He wore glasses. He stepped down to the gravel lot and extended his hand to the chief.

Wheeler shook with him, and then pointed in my direction.

“This is the fellow I mentioned on the phone,” he said. “Quincy Pressley, Pat Gallegher.”

I grasped Quincy’s hand. Despite looking out of shape, he had a surprisingly strong grip.

“I was so sorry to hear about Katie,” Quincy said. “The Costners have been a tragic family over the last several years. If you’ll follow me…”

He turned and started to walk around the church. We followed him. As we rounded the corner, I saw a cemetery behind the building. It stretched for almost an acre.

“We have people in our churchyard from pre-Revolutionary times,” Pressley boasted. “People come from five counties in every direction just to do gravestone rubbings. Katie’s parents are buried just over here.”

He wended his way between faded gravestones and depressed patches of earth to a section filled with more recent monuments. We stopped in front of a rectangle of relatively new grass.

“Katie’s mother,” he said, pointing to the rectangle. Above it was a flat bronze plaque set into the ground, with the word COSTNER in large raised letters.

“There’s a space on the other side reserved for Katie. I had hoped that it would be many years before I would have to use it.”

“So she’s going to be buried here,” I said.

“Yes. John and Susan insisted on it. Despite the fact that Katie left them many years ago, they always believed that they would be reunited. And now, I suppose they will. How did she die?” he asked.

“It was murder,” I said. “She was strangled.”

“How sad. I’m afraid there aren’t many people here in Prosperity who will attend the funeral. So many of the young folks have gone off to the cities, or have married and moved away for new jobs.”

“Hold on a minute,” I said, as I pulled out my cell phone.

Farley was in his office at the Rampart Station. There were no new leads in the case, but the forensic team and the M.E. had completed all their procedures.

“The family belonged to a Lutheran church here in Prosperity,” I reported. “They had arranged for a burial site for her, before they died.”

“Okay. Have the preacher there fax the release papers, and we’ll arrange for transport.”

He gave me the numbers for Pressley to send the information.

I folded the phone and placed it back in my pocket.

“Fastest five hundred bucks I ever made,” I said.

“What?” Pressley asked.

“My boss hired me to find Katie’s parents. I did. I guess my job’s over.”

“Did you know Katie?” Pressley asked.

“A little. She waited tables in the bar where I work.”

“Would you mind, in that case, staying on for a while?”

I guess my face reflected the question in my head.

“For the funeral,” he clarified. “It’s so sad when I hold a funeral and nobody attends. It would be nice to have someone here who knew the girl. I never really got to know her, personally. Someone should be here who did.”

I know a thing or two about lonely deaths and somber, empty funerals. Next to an advertisement for an unused wedding gown, a funeral without mourners is about the saddest thing I can imagine.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem. I’ll need to find a place to stay until they deliver the body.”

“Why not stay with me?” Quincy said. “The church provides me with a nice little house — three bedrooms, lots of space. It’s just me there. You’d be welcome to stay.”

I thought about it for a second.

“Sounds great,” I said.

“I’ll take you back to your car,” Wheeler said. “And I’ll draw you a map to get back here. It’s trickier than it looks.”

I awoke the next morning to the smell of frying sausage and cinnamon.

I pulled on my clothes, made my bed like a good guest, and found my way to Quincy’s kitchen. He stood there in his black slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, with an apron tied around his waist.

“Thought the aroma might awaken you,” he said, as he sat at the table. “I have oatmeal with brown sugar and cinnamon, sausage, and scrambled eggs. You take coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, as I took a seat.

I picked up the fork with my weak hand and started to sample the sausage, when I noted that Quincy had his hands folded in front of him, and his eyes closed. One eye winked open.

I set the fork down and waited for him to finish his prayer.

“Are you a religious man?” he asked.

“I was raised Catholic,” I told him. “Even went to seminary, but I didn’t finish.”

“Crisis of faith?”

“You know about that sort of thing?”

“Of course. Doubt is a human condition, Mr. Gallegher.”

“Please, call me Pat.”

“How’d you do that?” he said, pointing to my cast.

I told him the story about the poodle and the tough guy. Some of it was funny, if it hadn’t happened to you. He laughed at the appropriate places, but as I finished the story his face seemed to go dark.

“I have a feeling you lead an adventurous life,” he said.

“Things happen,” I said.

“And then you have to fight your way out.”

“It isn’t something I do on purpose, at least not most of the time. You get a reputation, though. People know you can do something other people can’t, and they come to you when they’re in need. I have a hard time turning down people in need, no matter how badly I want to.”

“So you’re some kind of detective?”

“No,” I said. “I’m a musician. I play a horn in a bar. The rest of it is… it just happens. I suppose being a musician doesn’t really count for much.”

“Nonsense,” Quincy said. “You have a gift. You can speak a language in which it is impossible to say a mean or hurtful thing. You should be proud of that.”

I nodded and turned my attention to the meal. As I ate, a thought occurred to me.

“Where would you suggest I go to learn more about Katie?”

He hesitated for a second.

“I’m going to be the only mourner at her graveside,” I added. “I think I should know more about her. Where did she go to school?”

“Everyone in this town goes to Prosperity Glen High School.”

“You think there might be people there who’d recall her?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Quincy said.

It took me about five minutes to reach the school parking lot. I had a feeling it took about five minutes to get anywhere in Prosperity from just about anywhere else in Prosperity.

I first asked to see the principal. If things went as I expected, I would probably ask a lot of personal questions before the day was out. It would be nice to have the imprimatur of the big guy in the front office.

The principal was a sallow, bleary-eyed man in his fifties named Hart Compton. He invited me directly back to his office.

“How can I help you, Mr. Gallegher?”

I told him about Katie Costner’s murder, and how I had come from New Orleans to find her family.

“Yes,” he said. “Very sad. The whole affair. So the entire family’s dead now.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not certain what you want.”

“The police detective investigating her murder back in New Orleans likes to have as much information as he can get. He’s there. I’m here. Maybe I can find out something about Katie’s life in Prosperity that had some bearing on her murder in New Orleans.”

“An… official inquiry?”

“Some friendly questions,” I said. “You can check with the detective.”

I gave him Farley’s number. Compton asked me to wait in the outer office while he called. After ten minutes, he opened his door and gestured for me to come back in.

“Your detective friend vouches for you,” he said.

“He’s in a charitable mood.”

“He also asked me to pass along a request, in the interest of good public relations, that you not kill anyone in the course of your inquiries.”

I cleared my throat.

“Is this something you’re likely to do?” Compton asked.

“I’ll make a special effort.”

“Yes,” he said, with obvious discomfort. “I should advise you in advance. You aren’t likely to find many of the faculty and staff receptive to your questions.”

“Why’s that?”

He took off his glasses and rubbed a spot on the bridge of his nose, as if warding off a headache. I had a feeling he did that a lot.

“Katie left town under something of a cloud. People weren’t particularly sad to see her go.”

“Could you tell me more?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll hear plenty.”

“Where’s your library?” I asked.

“We call it a Media Center.”

“Of course you do.”

“It’s just down the hall to the right. Why do you ask?”

“More background. Would it be all right if I peruse some of your back yearbooks?”

I asked the woman at the front desk in the library where I could find back yearbooks. She directed me to the reference center and showed me where it was.

“Are you looking for anything specific?” she asked.

“I’m trying to find anything I can on a girl who attended Prosperity Glen several years ago. Her name was Katie Costner.”

It was as if someone had flipped a switch on her entire personality. She stepped back half a step. The air between us chilled ten or twenty degrees.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s nothing I can tell you.”

“You don’t recall her?”

“I’m very busy,” she said, which I found a very facile way of avoiding my question. “The yearbooks are in the reference center.”

I shrugged and walked to the reference center. According to the papers Hart Compton had given me, Katie had graduated six years earlier. I flipped directly to the senior pictures. Each one had a quote at the bottom and a list of the student’s achievements. It took me a moment to find Katie’s picture. She didn’t look terribly different from what I remembered, except that her hair was longer. She also seemed somewhat happier in the picture than I recalled her in real life.

Her quote read: “Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.”

She had only one achievement in four years of high school — Chorus I.

It was as if she had drifted through four years of school and scarcely made a ripple.

Katie’s algebra instructor was on a planning break. I decided to stop by her classroom.

Myra Soames was in her fifties, plump, red of cheeks, and going gracefully gray. She invited me into her classroom when I knocked on the door. I introduced myself.

“I’m from New Orleans,” I said. “I’ve been sent up here to look into some background information on a former student named Katie Costner.”

Just as the librarian had, Myra Soames suddenly bristled and grew cool toward me.

“Why are you asking about Katie Costner?” she asked. “Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“Only if the theologians are right,” I said. “She’s dead.”

I thought the news of Katie’s death might soften Ms. Soames a bit. Instead, she grew even colder.

“I wish I could say I was sorry,” she said. “But if you’re right, and there is an eternal judgment, then Katie is in a great deal of trouble. I’m a Christian woman, Mr. Gallegher, Bible-raised and river-dunked. It’s a sin to speak ill of the dead. I’ll say no more on the matter. If you’ll excuse me, I have papers to grade.”

“Is there anyone you can think of — a former classmate, maybe — who knew Katie when she was a student here?”

“I’d say there were a great number of students who knew Katie, in every sense. You should check at the Piggly Wiggly. The assistant manager there, Rob Kiser, was a friend of hers, as I recall. Now, please, I am very busy…”

I visited three other teachers, and none of them would discuss Katie with me. I got the strong impression that none of them had cared for the girl, and that none of them was particularly distressed to discover that she had died.

I gave up and drove over to the Piggly Wiggly. The manager there paged Rob Kiser to come to the front office.

Kiser, like Katie, was probably in his early twenties. He had red hair and residual facial acne. His fingernails were ragged and bitten.

I introduced myself, and dropped the news about Katie on him.

“That’s too bad,” he said, without a lot of emotion.

“I was led to believe that you were one of her friends.”

“Friends,” he repeated. “Yeah, I suppose you could say that. At least at one time. Katie didn’t keep friends for long.”

“Why was that?”

“She just didn’t. It was her personality, I guess. I reckon most people in this town weren’t sorry to see the back of her car when she left.”

“Just what did this girl do that was so bad?”

“Sorry, Mr. Gallegher, but you come to the wrong place. I got work to do, if you don’t mind.”

The Prosperity Police Department was in a row of buildings on a hill overlooking the strip mall and the Piggly Wiggly. I hiked up the concrete steps and around to the front of the station.

“Chief Wheeler in?” I asked the woman at the front desk.

Before she could page him, Wheeler walked out of his office and stepped into the waiting room.

“You’ve been busy,” he said. “Step back to my office.”

I followed him into the other room. He gestured toward a couple of chairs across the desk from his seat, and we both sat facing each other for several moments.

“I’ve gotten three different calls about you today,” he said.

“It’s nice to know people care.”

“Oh, they care, all right. They care a great deal about people walking in out of the blue and dredging up muck from years ago that ought to be left alone. If I’d known you were going to drive around Prosperity upsetting people, I’d have let you stay at the motel in Morgan.”

I leaned back in my seat and soaked in his menacing-cop gawp. People who never hang around the police tend to be intimidated by them. I had learned a long time ago that intimidation is one more coin of the realm in law enforcement.

“Nobody will talk with me,” I said. “Just what did Katie do that was so terrible?”

Wheeler stood for a second and stared out the window of his office, his thumbs hooked in his Sam Browne belt. Then he turned and took his seat behind his desk again.

“I had only been chief of police for a couple of years when Katie took off,” he said. “Katie was what you’d call wild. I reckon the only way anyone could have contained her would have been with a whip and a chair.

“There was this boy, Roger Thoreson. Nice kid. Lived with his mother. His father was dead. Tall kid. Clear of eye. Athletic. Smart. A real winner. He was the class president at both the middle school and the high school. Three-letter man at Prosperity Glen. He turned down a football scholarship to South Carolina because Duke offered him a full ride on academics.”

“A shining light.”

“Like a beacon. Everyone loved him, expected great things out of Roger. Thought he was going to put Prosperity on the map. Roger took an interest in Katie Costner. Katie came with a lot of baggage, a lot of whispers behind her back. Everybody knew she was promiscuous. This is a conservative town. People who don’t conform spend a lot of time fending off those who do.

“I think, maybe, Roger felt bad for Katie. He started spending time with her. One thing led to another and… well, by August that boy was just plain girl-stupid over her. Most people think she was his first, you know, in bed. Roger started talking crazy, saying maybe he’d go to the state college over in Parker County rather than Duke. He even talked about getting married.

“His mother — shoot, just about everybody — tried to talk him out of it. It was like talking to a fish. Nothing got through to him. Then, about two weeks before school was supposed to start, Katie pulled the plug.”

“She broke up with Roger?” I asked.

“Told him it was over. Said she’d taken up with some boy over in Mica Wells. Roger drove over there, looked up the kid, and offered to fight him for Katie. The kid kicked Roger’s butt all over half the county. Roger had to go to the ER over in Morgan, get some stitches in his scalp.

“After Roger got back from the hospital, he and Katie had a terrible fight on his front porch. Stories vary depending on who tells them, but all the neighbors agree that Katie told Roger to get out of her life. Then she stomped off the porch, got in her car, and peeled out as she left the driveway.”

“Tough deal for a young guy.”

“Later that night, Roger’s mother went up to his room to tell him good night. She found him in a bathtub full of pink water, his eyes fixed on some point a billion miles away. When I got there about five minutes later, Karen Thoreson was still screaming.”

“The people in this town thought Katie killed their dreams for Roger Thoreson,” I said.

“That pretty much sums it up. If people didn’t like Katie before that, they plain despised her afterward. She tried to stand up to it. That only made people hate her more. Finally, she gave up, packed what belongings she had, climbed in her car, and drove away.”

“That’s why people didn’t want to talk about her,” I said.

“There’re people in Prosperity who still think Lee gave up too early at Appomattox. Katie Costner’s affair with Roger Thoreson is still an open wound. You ran around Prosperity today pouring salt in it.”

“You could have told me all this yesterday,” I said. “Could have saved me a lot of trouble.”

“You weren’t looking for Katie yesterday. You were looking for her parents. If I’d thought you were planning to dig up all the bodies in town, I’d have told you. That was my mistake.”

I drove back to Quincy’s house. He had been cutting the grass. I found him sitting on his front steps, sipping from a bottle of beer.

“Got another one?” I asked as I walked up.

“In the fridge.”

I grabbed a bottle and joined him on the steps.

“Nice little town you have here,” I said.

“We like it.”

“You might have mentioned that Katie Costner was the town hump.”

“I’m no gossip, Pat. That kind of thing doesn’t go over well with the congregation.”

“I think I understand now why Katie’s funeral will be so poorly attended.”

“It’s a sad story.”

“A lot of people hated her.”

“True.”

“You think any of them hated her enough to kill her?”

He had been raising the bottle to his mouth, but stopped halfway.

“What are you suggesting?”

“I haven’t been completely open with you, Quincy. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. For the last ten years or so, I’ve been trying to make that right. A lot of the things I do to balance the scales of my flimsy karma involve crimes. Like murder.”

“And?”

“I know a thing or two about murder. I understand some of the reasons why people kill. Revenge is one of the biggies.”

“I don’t know. It seems a stretch to me.”

“How so?”

“You can’t escape yourself. Katie might have fled Prosperity, but she had to take herself wherever she went. Her personality being what it was, she was certain to behave the same way wherever she landed.”

“Meaning that she was bound to make people angry with her no matter where she lived.”

“Seems reasonable. Maybe Katie pulled the same stunt she did with Roger Thoreson on some poor guy down in New Orleans, someone more inclined to kill her than he was to kill himself.”

“Maybe that makes more sense.”

“It’s certainly a simpler explanation than somebody from Prosperity harboring a grudge for five years before driving or flying all the way to New Orleans to do Katie in. I’ve made the arrangements for Katie’s body to be transported here. We could have her funeral the day after tomorrow, and then you can be on your way back home. Would that suit you?”

My curiosity about Katie had been satisfied. I called Farley and told him what I had learned. I also suggested that he might consider the possibility that Katie had been murdered by a disappointed suitor in New Orleans.

That done, I had little to occupy myself until Katie’s body arrived. Fortunately, Quincy had an excellent library. He left after breakfast the next day to make hospital visits. I foraged his bookcase until I found an interesting collection of stories. Then I settled in his living room to read.

The telephone rang around eleven o’clock. I hesitated answering it, since I was little more than a traveler using his home for shelter. Then I recalled that — as a minister — Quincy had to respond to any number of emergencies on a daily basis. The least I could do was take a message.

“Quincy Pressley’s residence,” I said.

“Could I speak with Reverend Pressley?” a woman asked. Her voice sounded dry and weathered.

“I’m sorry. He’s out. Can I take a message?”

“Who’s this?”

“I’m visiting with Reverend Pressley. He’s making hospital visits this morning. Any message for him, ma’am?”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him that Inez Stillman called.”

I wrote her information on a pad next to the phone.

“Anything else?”

“No, just tell him that I hope his cousin is feeling much better. He hasn’t said anything about her, has he?”

“Not to me, ma’am.”

“And one more thing. Could you tell him I called to thank him for those delicious pralines he brought back from his trip?”

Something like an electric tingle began at the base of my skull. It was a signal that I’d long since learned not to ignore.

“Pralines, ma’am?”

“Yes, he brought them to me to apologize for canceling our dinner. He picked them up while visiting his sick cousin.”

“Of course,” I said. “Reverend Pressley didn’t say exactly where his sick cousin lives, did he?”

“I think he mentioned someplace in Louisiana. Isn’t that where they make the best pralines?”

“So I hear. Do you still have the box the pralines came in?”

“Certainly. They’re so rich, I may be a month finishing them.”

“As it happens, I’m from Louisiana, and I’m always on the lookout for good pralines. Could you check the box and see where he bought them?”

“Just a moment.”

I tried to keep my breathing and pulse from racing, as the electric tingle became a buzz that filled my head.

At the very best, Quincy Pressley had withheld information from me.

I didn’t like to think about the worst.

“Here it is,” she said, as she got back on the phone. “The box is from the Allons Praline Factory. That part is in English. Then the rest is words I don’t recognize. The first is R-U-E. Then D-E, and after that is C-H-A-R-T…”

“Rue de Chartres,” I said, in a practiced French accent. “What about the rest?”

“The next line is spelled V–I-E-U-X, and C-A…”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Stillman. I know the rest.”

“Now how on earth can you know the rest? I haven’t spelled it yet!”

“I know it anyway. I’ll be sure to pass your message on to Reverend Pressley. And you enjoy those pralines, you hear?”

I racked the receiver and stared at the wall for a few moments.

I knew the Allons Praline Factory, and I knew Rue de Chartres.

Vieux Carre was another name for the French Quarter in New Orleans.

Where I lived.

Where Katie Costner had been murdered.

And, as I had just discovered, where Quincy Pressley had been only a day or so before I came to Prosperity.

Perhaps, I tried to convince myself, it was all a coincidence. Maybe Quincy really did have a sick cousin. Maybe he had simply neglected to tell me he had just returned from New Orleans.

I had to know more.

Among the many dubious talents I have acquired over the years is the ability to toss a desk without leaving any evidence that I’d been there. I quickly went through his drawers. Quincy kept his desk in meticulous shape. It didn’t take long to find his bank and credit-card statements.

Within minutes, I discovered a set of used air tickets indicating that he had flown to New Orleans two days before Katie Costner was murdered, and had flown back the day after the killing. They were sitting on top of a manila envelope, the only two items in the top right drawer of the desk. I opened the manila envelope, looked at the contents, and knew almost everything I needed to know.

Circumstantial, maybe. On the other hand, it meant that I had to confront Quincy with what I’d found.

And I needed to make a telephone call.

Quincy returned from the hospital around lunchtime. I waited for him in the living room, with the canceled ticket stubs in my hand.

“Hi, Pat,” he said. “Hope you weren’t too bored.”

“Not at all,” I said. “You had a call.”

“Oh? From whom?”

“Inez Stillman.”

I thought I saw him freeze, for perhaps half a second.

“Lovely woman,” he said. “Pillar of the church.”

“She likes you, too. She asked me to give you a message.”

“What is it?”

I lowered my voice, and tried to sound menacing.

“She loves the pralines.”

This time he did come to a full stop, his back to me. I think I saw his shoulders rise and his chest expand in an exhausted sigh. When he turned toward me, slowly, I could see the concern in his eyes.

“You have something to say?” he asked.

“Just a question. Why?”

Quincy shrugged and sat in the wing chair that had been placed perpendicular to the sofa.

“That’s a pretty big question,” he said. “It implies that you think you know something.”

“Let’s say that I’m about ninety-five percent certain that you killed Katie Costner. Can we start with that?”

“Sure,” he said. “You can’t prove anything, of course. I really do have a sick cousin in Louisiana. She provided me with an excellent reason to go to New Orleans. I’d been waiting for some time for an excuse.”

I held up the manila envelope I had found.

“This is a report from the private investigator you hired to find Katie.”

“Yes. Her mother’s request. Susan was all alone after her husband died. She knew she was sick, and she wasn’t inclined to do much about it. She asked me to find her daughter. She wanted Katie to come back to Prosperity for the funeral when she died. I hired that investigator. He did a very thorough job. Doesn’t prove I did anything.”

I laid the envelope on the sofa.

“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m not in the proof business. I know you did it, and you know you did it. I only want to know why.”

Quincy stood, slowly.

“I think I may have a sherry. Could I interest you in one?”

“No.”

He crossed to the small cabinet in the front room, opened it, and poured a bit of amber liquid in a cordial glass. He returned to his seat and took a sip.

“I came to Prosperity, oh, thirty years ago, only a few years after I was ordained. I felt a calling. I wanted to work in a small town, where I could make a real difference. I wanted my service to have meaning.

“There was a young man who came to me. He brought his wife. They were having…” He waved his free hand in the air. “… marital difficulties. The man was depressed. The woman was frustrated, and unsatisfied. They were on the verge of separation and divorce. The woman wanted a child, very badly, and it didn’t appear that she was likely to have one.

“I was in this very room one day, preparing a sermon, when the wife came to my door. She was crying. She was frightened that her husband might be considering leaving her. I tried to comfort her. I offered her a sherry,” he said, holding up the glass. “She accepted it.

“We talked at length. When she left, I felt that I had done a good thing. I liked that feeling. It was the reason I came here, to do good things.

“She returned several days later, again seeking comfort. I did what I could. After a few weeks, she visited every three days or so. Then she offered to volunteer in the church. I needed the help, so I accepted.”

He took another sip from the cordial glass.

“I have no desire to go over the more sordid details. I’ll simply say that we became much closer than we should have. I regretted it, certainly. I am a man of the cloth, after all, but I am also a man. A… very weak man, it seems. The wife came to me after a few months, almost shaking with excitement. She said there had been a miracle and that she was going to have a baby. She believed that this child would mend the torn fabric of her marriage.”

“This came as something of a surprise to her husband, I’d imagine.”

“I think he ignored the improbability of it all and decided to accept the child as a gift from God — which, in an abstract and indirect sense, it certainly was. They had a boy.”

“Roger Thoreson,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Roger was your son, and the apple of everyone’s eye in this town. Everyone blamed Katie Costner for his suicide.”

“Yes.”

“You blamed Katie for his suicide.”

“Well, of course I did. After his father died, I tried to act the role of a surrogate father to Roger. I tried to warn him about Katie. He wouldn’t listen. She lured him in, and she drained him, and then she moved on, like the vampire she was.”

I tried to pick up the story.

“Katie’s father died, and she didn’t attend the funeral. Her mother became ill, and asked you to find her. You hired the detective. He located her and told you where she was. Katie’s mother died, and you didn’t bother to tell Katie.”

“She wouldn’t have come,” Quincy said. “Katie had no intention of ever setting foot in Prosperity again, after the way she had been treated. There was no point in contacting her.”

“You knew where she was, though,” I said. “You waited until you had a reason to travel to Louisiana. You flew to New Orleans. You went to Katie’s home. She welcomed you, of course. You’re a preacher. You weren’t one of those people who drove her out of town. You passed the time of day, and then you found the opportunity to strike and you choked the life right out of her.”

“And then I bought a box of pralines for Inez Stillman,” he said. “It’s true. Every word.”

He drained the glass of sherry and examined the glint of sunlight in the cut-glass cordial.

“I… think perhaps another would do nicely,” he said.

He stood and went again to the cabinet. He reached in, but instead of pulling out the decanter, he withdrew a nasty looking revolver.

“It really would have been much better if you had stayed in New Orleans.”

“You don’t want to do that,” I said.

“The gravediggers were at the church this morning. They just finished Katie’s grave. The people from the funeral supply will deliver the vault for the casket in an hour or two. My plan is for you to be at the bottom of that grave, covered with a tarpaulin. The vault will be placed on top of you. It’s made of concrete, and I daresay it will crush you quite badly. Nobody will ever know you are buried underneath Katie.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I said.

“You’re a stranger here. Nobody knows you. Nobody will miss you if you simply disappear. Now, I need you to go to the back of the house. I can’t have blood all over my living room. Clues, you know. I watch the television crime shows. I know what to avoid.”

“No,” I said.

“What? This is a real gun, Pat. I know how to use it. Don’t think for a second I won’t just shoot you where you sit.”

I should have been angry, but Quincy just saddened me.

“You aren’t going to shoot me.”

“Give me one good reason why I won’t.”

Judd Wheeler stepped into the room from the kitchen and leveled a pump shotgun at Quincy.

“Because if you do, I’ll have to shoot you,” he said. “I heard everything. Gallegher called me right after he found the evidence, and explained his theory. He picked me up at the station, so my cruiser wouldn’t be here when you got home. Drop your gun right now, or I will drop it for you.”

Quincy was distracted, so I shot out my hand and grabbed the revolver from him. He seemed mystified. He didn’t even bother to resist.

I felt a little sorry for him.

The next day, I stood at the graveside while the local Methodist minister conducted Katie Costner’s burial ceremony in Quincy Pressley’s stead. I had long since resolved my differences with religion and I allowed myself to focus on the reverence of the occasion.

Katie was buried next to her parents. Just two rows over lay Roger Thoreson and his mother, and the man who died thinking he was Roger’s father. It felt a lot like the end of a Shakespeare tragedy — two families brought to ruin by the weaknesses and flaws of a man who believed that he was both an instrument of mercy and a sword of vengeance.

I didn’t stick around to see them lower the casket into the vault. I didn’t want to hear the scrape of wood on concrete, or the thud of falling earth. I had endured enough of Prosperity and its secrets to last me a lifetime.

By dinnertime I was three hundred miles closer to home.