Free JJ09 - Blood Moon by Michael Lister

behind him.
    Pete Pine Tree Peavey was the largest man I’d ever seen in person. Not just tall, but wide, he wasn’t a narrow, quick-growing slash pine but a massive, thick-bodied loblolly pine.
    “ Us ? Who? The chaplain is on suspension.”
    “He won’t be after you hear what Pi––Sergeant Peavey has to say,” Randy Wayne said, adding, as if an afterthought, a subtle smartass “Sir.”
    “He’s an eyewitness,” Carrie said.
    “To what?” Matson asked.
    “What happened in H Dorm the night Ms. Ling was killed,” Pine said. “I was on duty. Saw the whole thing.”
    “My office,” Matson said. “I’ll be there in a minute. Sergeant Davis, tell Crystal to call Inspector Peterson and tell her to meet us there.”
    Matson entered the restroom and the rest of us headed toward his office, Pine in front now.
    “Think you’d ever see a cavalry that looked like the four of us?” Carrie asked.
    “You literally can’t see anything on the other side of him,” Randy Wayne, who was right behind Pine, was saying.
    “Four?” I said.
    Carrie and Randy Wayne started laughing.
    “Yeah,” she said. “Merrill’s on the other side of Pine.”
    Merrill, Carrie, Randy Wayne, Pine, Rachel Peterson, and I were all crowded into Matson’s office.
    Of course, had it just been Pine, it would’ve still been crowded.
    “What’s this about?” Rachel asked.
    “That’s what we’re here to find out,” Matson said.
    “We don’t understand why Chaplain Jordan has been suspended,” Randy Wayne said. “Sergeant Monroe corroborated his account of what happened in H Dorm the night Hahn was killed.”
    “Let’s just say we’re not sure Sergeant Monroe is the most reliable witness where his best friend, the chaplain, is concerned,” Rachel said.
    “Well, how about the sergeant who was on duty in the dorm that night?” Carrie said.
    “I assume you mean Sergeant Peavey,” she said.
    “I do.”
    “Are you a good friend of the chaplain’s too?” Rachel asked.
    “Barely know him at all,” Pine said. “I know of him. We both grew up here, but he’s at least ten years older than me, so we really didn’t even go to school together, and––”
    “I was being facetious,” she said.
    “Oh.”
    “Give us your account of what happened in H Dorm the night Hahn Ling was killed,” Rachel said, snapping on her recorder and holding it out toward him.
    He did.
    And it matched what Merrill and I had already told her.
    “Did anyone coach you on what to say?” she asked.
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Not in any way?”
    “I was just called up here from the compound,” he said. “Had no idea what was going on.”
    Rachel looked at Matson. He frowned and shrugged. “Think maybe you should’ve spoken with the officers on duty in the dorm that night before suspending the chaplain?” he said.
    “The suspension was your idea,” she said.
    “Based on what you told me your investigation was revealing,” he said.
    She shook her head and sighed.
    As if suddenly realizing we were all still in the room, Matson looked at us and said, “Get back to work. All of you. You too, Chaplain.”

Chapter Twenty-two
    “Thank you,” I said to Carrie as we walked from the admin building toward the control room.
    “Thank Randy Wayne. It was all him.”
    “Thank you,” I said to him. “Thank you all.”
    He and Pine, who were a few steps in front of us, slowed and turned.
    “Just did what was right,” Randy Wayne said. “I hate a bully. The new warden’s a bully. And you do so much good around here, Chaplain. And I don’t ever see anyone thanking you.”
    “Thank you,” I said again.
    When they turned back around, Carrie Helms lowered her rough, scratchy voice and said, “What can you tell me about what happened to Chris Taunton? I heard he was dead. Shot to death.”
    That afternoon I counseled with an officer whose wife was leaving him.
    “She says I’m a different person from the one she married,” he said.
    He was a meek