Free Judas Burning by Carolyn Haines Page A

he could see the outline of her breasts beneath the clinging sleeveless cotton shirt.
    “She’s not hard on the
eyes,”
Waymon said. “Too bad she’s a reporter.”
    “Yeah,” J.D. said. “Let’s go. We’ll come back tomorrow with the dogs.”

    From the back seat of the Explorer, Dixon watched the sheriff’s head. J.D. Horton was not typical of her experience with law enforcement. Linda, who knew the ins and outs of everyone in Chickasaw County, said that loss and the sheriff’s experience in Central America had changed him.
    How could it not? People unaffected by violence were the ones sitting on death row—at least the ones who had been caught.
    One man now on death row, Willard Jones, had been there for eleven years, ever since his conviction for the murder of Ray Sinclair. Even in the blistering heat, Dixon felt a chill. She had visited Jones at Parchman, and she had begun to doubt the verdict. Doubt was guilt’s partner in the destruction of happiness, and Dixon suffered. Jones’s execution was only four weeks away. He’d exhausted every appeal. Dixon understood that it was her waffling belief in Jones’s guilt rather than her visits to him that upset her mother. When a man was to be executed in an act of Biblical justice, there was no room for doubt from the family, who were supposed to feel vindicated.
    “Sinclair, I’d watch out for Medino.”
    Horton’s advice was unexpected, and she didn’t respond. She studied his neatly cropped hair. Thick and fine. Even driving, he had the upright posture of a military man.
    The press and law enforcement often ended up at odds with each other. Both were bonded to tragedy. Both sought justice, and Ray Sinclair had believed that newspapering was the greater weight in the scale of justice.
    “Miss Sinclair.” Waymon turned around in the front seat so he could see her. “What do you think about that reporter man:
    “He’s got some impressive credentials,” she said.
    “Like what?”
    “He’s educated at Harvard. He works for one of the most prestigious magazines in the world, with heavy emphasis on culture and politics. He won a Pulitzer for a story he did on abortions in Mexico—”
    “He’s one of them folks like to come in and stir folks up.” Waymon frowned. They bounced off the bridge and onto the dirt road.
    “That’s a journalist’s job, to make people think and see different sides of things.”
    “Don’t need none of that in Chickasaw County,” Waymon insisted.
    “I disagree, Waymon. Chickasaw County needs a good bit of stirring up.” Dixon saw Waymon frown. The deputy wasn’t as dumb as he liked to pretend. “Mr. Medino has a theory on the disappearance of the girls and why he believes this psycho has taken them.”
    “Did Medino elucidate his theory?” Horton asked.
    Horton might not have gone to Harvard, but he could toss around some ten-dollar words. “It had to do with Mexico, a fallen Catholic, a man who is conflicted with his image of women and his lust for them. Medino says the man has taken the girls because he thinks he wants to save them. Then he feels sexual desire for them, and once he’s had them, he’ll have to kill them.”
    J.D. pulled the SUV to the side of the road. “Waymon, find Ms. Sinclair and yourself a ride to town in another vehicle. I have something I need to do.”
    Dixon got out and stood in the hot sun. Horton didn’t look back at her. He drove off, thick dust churning from beneath his wheels.

    Jouncing over potholes, J.D. turned down the rutted lane that led to Eustace Mills’s bait shop and fish camp. Live oaks older than the state shaded the grassless yard. He parked and got out of the SUV, his face turned up to the camp. The tranquility of it always struck him anew. Some twenty feet up on pilings, the cypress structure looked like a strange airborne church nestled in the gnarled arms of the oaks. J.D. had a sense of coming home.
    He wanted to talk to his old friend. Eustace was a man of