Three Degrees of Death Read online

“But they knew,” I argued. “And as far as they were concerned, they hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  Marti stepped back into the conversation. “I suspect Verl will find someone to represent him. There’s always some attorney with a grudge against the police who will jump at a case like this, even if it’s defending someone like the Greaves.” She paused and again glanced in Grace’s direction. “I suppose that will mean we’ll be seeing a lot of Officer Joseph again if you’re working together on a defense.” Grace kept her eyes on me, her face a mask.

  “There is no suit yet,” I reminded them. “We’ll worry about that when it happens. Anyway, the main reason for Jerry’s call was to tell me something’s happened out at Fits Loony’s place. I’m going to run by the junior high to talk to the Wilkins boys, then check on Fits.”

  Grace’s cell rattled against her desktop. She glanced at the number, rolled her eyes, and lifted it begrudgingly.

  “Good morning, Mother,” she said, her voice reflecting the exasperation of these all-to-frequent calls. As she listened, her face darkened, then tightened with worry.

  “I’ll be right there,” she said and pushed up from the desk, tucking the phone into the seat pocket of her uniform pants.

  “Something wrong?” I asked as she grabbed her jacket.

  “The kids are missing,” she said sharply, heading toward the door.

  “The kids?” Marti called after her.

  Grace turned at the outer door. “My brother Danny. And Miriam Haddad.”

  2

  Granny Durbin’s third calamity descended on us with a heart-wrenching thud. And in my mind’s eye, I was seated again at a cloth-draped table in a clapboard cabin up on Webber’s Mountain.

  To be honest, my personal life during the past three years, for reasons I might get to later, has been a train wreck waiting to happen. Granny and my mother were always getting advice from the Webber twins and their reading of the tea leaves, advice I’d often found disturbingly on the mark. So I thought, What the hell? Let’s see what the two old sisters have to say about what’s headed my way.

  When I went to the mountain, I didn’t have to tell the twins why I was there. They already seemed to know. They took me through their little tea ritual, emptied my cup, and bent over the dregs still scattered across the bottom of the white porcelain bowl.

  What they’d said about my screwed up personal life wasn’t what came back to me now as Grace hurried from the office. In fact, they hadn’t helped much there. Just said that the dilemma I faced would take care of itself—the kind of answer you’d expect from some dollar-a-minute dial-up psychic who tells you she lives in San Francisco. It was the rest of what they had said that now tripped a circuit in my brain. They had gazed at the leaves, muttering back and forth with the telepathic connection that everyone found so unsettling about the twins. Then Ethel murmured, “A friend will need your help to save what is most important to him. Two lost children. Travel to a distant place.”

  The missing kids Grace was talking about—her brother Danny and Miriam Haddad—were with a high school summer study group somewhere in Scotland.

  I followed Grace the six blocks to her parents’ home on South Jefferson and parked my Explorer behind her squad car. The family residence is a Kilgore Homes prefab from the plant out on the highway: a rectangular box with three small bedrooms in the back and a walk-in living room that opens in one direction into a dining nook and in the other into a cramped kitchen.

  “Who called your mother?” I asked as I hurried behind her up the walk.

  “Erin,” she called back, leaving the front door open for me to follow her into the family’s sparsely furnished front room.

  Erin Graham teaches music at both the junior high and high school. I dated her once just after I returned to Crayton. Though she’s a bright, attractive woman who can talk intelligently about just about anything, that was just it. She talked non-stop about one thing after another until I began to beg for an off switch. We’d driven up to Springfield for dinner and after half an hour, even the people at surrounding tables were skipping dessert, just to get out of earshot. It took three extra-strength Tylenol, a beer, and an hour staring at a muted late-night re-run of Quigley Down Under to get my mind relaxed enough to sleep. When I’ve seen her since, she has given me an embarrassed, sheepish smile that tells me she knows she has the problem, but just can’t seem to master it.

  Erin is the proud descendant of Scotch-Irish immigrants to the hills of North Carolina and from there to the Missouri Ozarks. She sees herself as a history teacher as much as the head, and sole faculty member, of the high school music department. Her life’s work, she enthusiastically told me over a plate of double crunch shrimp at Applebee’s, is to help her students understand the origins of the music that makes Crayton’s Folk and Bluegrass Festival our major spring community event. The kids tell me her classroom presentations are mind-numbing, but worth enduring because of what the woman knows about how music made its way from the British Isles into our back-hill country.

  With the help of one of the English teachers, Donna Beck, they organized the sale of enough chocolate bars, coupon books, and cookie dough to send eighteen of them to Scotland for a two-week immersion program in Scottish music and literature they called ‘Rabbie Burns to Bob Dylan.’ Two of the lucky travelers were Grace’s sixteen-year-old brother Daniel and Miriam Haddad, the daughter of one of three Syrian immigrant families in Crayton.

  When we entered the Torres house, Grace’s mother Isabella was pacing one end of the living room pressing a cell phone tightly against her flushed cheek. Looking at the woman, it was clear where Grace got her striking good looks. Bella, as her family calls her, has stayed slender and raven-haired into her fifties, with high cheekbones, a full, expressive mouth, and large dark eyes that now blinked and watered with worry.

  “Grace is here,” she said hastily into the phone. “I’ll call you after I talk to her.” She disconnected with a thumb and turned to pull her daughter into a desperate hug. Grace eased her away.

  “Tell us everything you know,” she directed, steering the older woman to a chair on one side of the dining table and sitting beside her, their hands wrapped tightly together. I slid onto a cushioned vinyl seat across from Grace.

  Bella looked entreatingly at me as she spoke, as if this were something the county sheriff could somehow resolve. “Miss Graham called just before I called you,” she began, still looking at me, but speaking to Grace. Her English was still heavily flavored with the Spanish accent of the mountain villages of Chiapas, Mexico.

  “It is afternoon there. They had a morning when the students could do what they want. When they gathered for their lunch, Daniel and Miriam did not come. The group has been looking for them for two hours and no one has seen them. The teacher called to see if Daniel had called or texted. But I have heard nothing.”

  “Where are they?” Grace asked, lightly stroking her mother’s arm with her free hand.

  “Inverness. The students wanted to go there while they were in Scotland, you remember—to the places where Outlander was filmed?”

  Grace glanced over at me and arched a brow. “That was Erin’s concession to the kids,” she muttered. “And it was a chance for them to visit Loch Ness.”

  “Can’t go there without a visit to Loch Ness,” I agreed.

  “They went to the Loch yesterday,” Bella said. “Today they had the morning to explore the city before leaving for the Isle of Skye. I have the schedule here on my phone.” She released Grace’s hand and fumbled with her cell.

  “Two hours doesn’t seem like a lot of time to begin to panic,” I suggested. “The kids probably got lost in the city and are finding their way back.”

  “Their bus was ready to leave when Miss Graham called,” Bella explained. “Danny and his friend knew they had to be back for lunch and to catch the bus. They had their phones with them and could have called. But now, the teachers can’t even reach them.”

  “They let
them wander off on their own?” Grace wondered aloud.

  “Just what I said,” Bella sniffled. “Miss Graham said they were allowing them to show some independence as long as they stayed in small groups and did not go far from the hotel.”

  “She considered two a small group?” Grace said more irritably.

  “I said that too,” her mother mumbled. “No one knew just the two of them had gone off together.”

  I stood and gave Grace’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “Why don’t you call Erin and see what more you can learn. Better yet, call Donna. She’ll give you a chance to ask whatever questions you have. I need to get out to see what’s happened at Fits’ place and lecture some kids at the junior high. While I’m there I’ll talk to the high school principal and see what he knows. And you might stop by the Haddad’s and see if they’ve heard anything.”

  Grace nodded without looking up. I left the mother and daughter consoling each other and muttering about two sixteen-year-olds being allowed to wander around a foreign city on their own. Hell, when I was sixteen, my father had been dead for six years and I was holding a job after school to take care of my mother. They were right not to be coddling the kids.

  3

  Josh Wilkins had a pretty decent explanation for why he and his brother had been trying to pull him up the flag pole. There may not have been a word of truth to it, but I was impressed. According to Josh, they had been learning about simple machines in science, had noticed the pulley at the top of the pole, and wondered if it would allow them to lift ninety pounds, which was about where Josh weighed in.

  “It did, too,” Josh said confidently. “It just wasn’t hooked to the top of the pole good enough.”

  “Not a bad experiment,” I agreed. “But it wasn’t your pulley or your pole. Before you try something like that, you need to ask permission.”

  “They never would have gave it,” Jared insisted.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Cause they’d a thought it would break.”

  “Which it did. Are you boys in a position to pay for the damage?”

  Their puzzled look at each other told me it was a question that had never entered their heads. “We got no money,” Josh said. “And please don’t say nothing to our dad. He’s got none neither and will be whoopin’ mad.”

  “You should have thought of that when you tried that stunt,” I said.

  “Well, maybe you can find something around here we can do to make it good,” Josh offered, looking nervously toward the door of the office where I’d been left with the boys. “Just don’t tell Pa. He’ll kill us.”

  I looked at them long and hard enough to make them believe I had to think it over. “This one time,” I finally agreed. “I’ll see if Mr. Payson can find something for you to do to earn the money. But next time, we’ll have to bring your father in. Think about that before you find some lever or wedge you want to test out.”

  They nodded solemnly. I went to find the principal to arrange work duty.

  Down at the high school end of the building, I found Yusef Haddad already planted in Rick Sherill’s office. Yusef is a commanding presence, even when he hasn’t just received news that his daughter is missing. Rick is a former history teacher and basketball coach and stands a good 6’ 6” with his shoes off. But with the Syrian father at full boil, the principal was hunched behind his desk trying to fend off one pointed question after another—questions he had no answers for. He looked past Yusef as I entered, begging with his eyes for me to run interference.

  “I’m trying to explain that this report about the kids is news to me,” he maintained. “Erin contacted the families before calling here, hoping one of the kids had called or texted. We’ll follow up, of course, but so far, I haven’t been able to reach either of the chaperones. I’m sure they are working with local police to find the students.”

  “How were they allowed to go off by themselves?” Yusef demanded. “My daughter and a boy her age? In our culture, we would not have allowed such a thing.”

  Now, if you’re not from around Crayton, you may not know that one of the things that separates me from your run-of-the-mill sheriffs in the Missouri Ozarks is that I speak Arabic. While my cousins were raising hell with my predecessors in the sheriff’s office, I found that I loved books, words, and languages, especially those that used other alphabets. They seemed to me like tantalizing puzzles to be solved. I also took school a lot more seriously than the run-of-the-mill graduate from Crayton High. The result was a scholarship to American University in D.C. to study Middle Eastern languages. After completing a degree in Arabic studies, I did what almost every run-of-the-mill boy my age had done after high school in Crayton for generations. I enlisted in the Marines. It was something of a community rite of passage. But in my case, I ended up as an interpreter with the Fifteenth Expeditionary Unit in Iraq. It’s been a godsend at times like this when one of our Syrian immigrant families needs a little extra help.

  “Yusef, you aren’t in your culture,” I reminded him in Arabic, sparing him public criticism in front of the principal. “And your daughter is a smart and careful girl who wouldn’t have done anything that would put her in danger or embarrassed the family. Why don’t we let the principal get in touch with the teachers and see what he can learn?”

  Yusef glared at me, then back at Rick and pushed out of his chair. “I will let him learn what he can,” he growled back in his native language. “But someone from here needs to go there to help find them. You know I cannot go because of our protected status—and neither can my brothers. You should go, Tate. You know Miriam and the boy who is with her. And you know that we have enemies.”

  “Travel to a distant place,” the Webber twins had predicted. The tea leaves apparently had failed to take into account that Fits Loony would go missing and Verl Greaves would hit me with a wrongful death lawsuit.

  4

  I had thought about Yusef’s enemies as soon as I’d heard that Miriam was one of the missing teens. The Haddad families weren’t just immigrants. The men had been rebel leaders in the northern Syrian city of Idlib and were secreted out of the country when it looked like their home was about to be overrun by Assad forces.

  In its wisdom, the US government had figured that tucking them away in a small town in the rural Missouri Ozarks would keep them safe. But during my short tenure as Sheriff, there had already been two attempts by Yusef’s old enemies to get to him. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if, having failed on American soil, the same enemies had gone after Miriam while she was in Scotland. That would mean the Haddads were still being watched and targeted. After thwarting the first two attempts on Yusef’s life, the last thing the county needed was another attack on the families—especially one that endangered two of our young people.

  As I drove out to where Fits Loony had created his squirrel sanctuary, I sorted through how someone might keep track of the Syrians’ activities without having an informant in town, which I thought highly unlikely. The men all work at the modular home plant and are liked by their co-workers. They are Syrian Christians and their new host minister, Matt Frazee, tells me they’re among the most faithful members of his First Christian Church congregation. And you’d have to be willing to face the wrath of hell to rat out a good Christian family in Crayton. I know everyone in the county and couldn’t think of a soul who would be willing to inform on families we had agreed to take in and protect. Once they became ours, no one had the right to mess with them.

  But I also knew there were simpler ways to gather intelligence about what was going on around town. True to its name, the ‘Daily’ in Crayton Daily News means someone is in the office every weekday. But publication is now down to two days a week. Tuesday and Friday. Page One is a mix of local news and state and national AP stories. Then there are two pages of sports covering everything from peewee football through Crayton High’s varsity exploits, with an article or two about the Kansas City Chiefs or Royals or the St. Louis Cardinals, depending on the
season. Then a page of classifieds, obits, and display ads. Jerry runs a half-page insert with specials and coupons for Family Market in the Friday edition which, along with the sports news and obituaries, are about the only reasons anyone still subscribes. Those who are looking for serious news get a national paper delivered in the mail or take the News-Leader out of Springfield.

  The problems for families like the Haddads, though, is that the front page of the Daily is so desperate for local news that if you so much as fart out loud on the square, it’s likely to make the paper. So the ‘Burns to Dylan’ excursion to Scotland was a journalistic gold mine.

  Aside from Erin Graham and Miriam Haddad, no one in the group had been out of the country. Only six had ever been on an airplane. When families in Crayton vacation, they go to their cousin’s cabin on Table Rock Lake or hook the trailer to the back of the pickup and head for Elephant Rocks or Johnson Shut-Ins over on the east side of the state. If someone ventures as far as the Grand Canyon, the adventure merits all of Page One above the Daily’s fold. The high school trip to Scotland? Top half of the front page on both Tuesday and Friday with quotes from every student, including Miriam Haddad, about what they hoped to get out of the experience. Hers was one of the more memorable.

  In my old culture, our music and stories were so much a part of our history and tradition that you really didn’t fully know who we were unless you understood them and knew where they came from. I believe that is true here too—more than people realize. I listen to the music at the Bluegrass Festival and especially the banjos. They sound like this new place we live—free and lively and full of energy. I am a proud American from Crayton. When I come back from this program, I know I will understand more about what that means.

  A bright girl, that Miriam Haddad. But I digress.