Chapter Twenty-Eight

"Mrs. Cranley?"

"Yes. Who's speaking?" The woman on the other end of the line had an unusually deep voice that rattled. A smoker, Mark guessed.

"Hi, ma'am. This is Agent Mark Gallagher. I'm with the Montana Department of Justice."

There was a brief pause and some rustling, and then Mrs. Cranley said, "What is this about?"

"Ma'am, I'm very sorry to inform you that your brother was found deceased."

Another pause, longer this time. "Isaac?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Did he leave something for me in his will?"

Well, that was abrupt. Mark was taken off guard for a moment. "Actually, ma'am, it appears Isaac didn't have a will. But you're listed on several documents as his next of kin."

"Well, I'll be." Mark heard some more rustling and then Mrs. Cranley's muffled voice yelling to someone in the background, "Lester, Isaac died and didn't leave a will. I'm his next of kin."

"When was the last time you spoke to Isaac, Mrs. Cranley?"

"You can call me Georgette. And, eh…maybe twelve years ago at our daddy's funeral. Me and Isaac didn't get on real well. Guess that doesn't matter now. He was a creep, truth be told."

Mark cleared his throat. Apparently, this woman had no problem speaking ill of the dead. Made his job easier anyway. "How do you mean, ma'am? Georgette?"

Mark heard a deep inhale as if the woman had just lit a cigarette. "He just was. He was always watching everyone with this weird look on his face. Gave me the chills, and he was my own brother. It got worse as he got older. I was happy when me and Lester moved to Portland and I had no reason to see him anymore."

"I see."

"'Course I figured it out when I went over to his place in Missoula, oh…I guess it'd have been going on eighteen or nineteen years now and there was an old lady neighbor at his place with her grandson, I guess. Kid was just a toddler, so it'd have to be. Isaac kept staring at him with this look on his face." She made a sound that gave Mark the idea she'd just done an exaggerated shiver. "Well, that's when I said, ah, bingo. Isaac's a pervert. It all made sense."

Mark felt suddenly sick. He cleared his throat. "But you never saw any evidence of him abusing children?"

"Nah. Just that look. But women know things, ya know? Intuition." He heard her suck in another inhale of her cigarette.

"And this was in Missoula, you said?" Mark pulled Isaac Driscoll's file closer and noted that his last known address had been in Missoula—probably an apartment building. He'd been in Unit A.

"Yup. I don't have the address anymore, but that's the last place I seen him."

"From what I understand, your brother did volunteer work for several social services agencies in the area."

"Well, there ya go. Gave him access."

Mark cleared his throat again. He'd spoken to several people at the volunteer agencies Driscoll had done work for, but no one had said anything disparaging about him. He made a note to widen the net of people to interview who might have known Driscoll in a volunteer capacity.

"This woman at your brother's house all those years ago, can you tell me anything about her?"

"Yeah, she was real hard to understand. Had a thick accent. She left pretty quick with the kid but not soon enough for me to see how Isaac looked at him. I thought about going over to her apartment and warning her away from Isaac, but I figured people gotta learn their own lessons, ya know?"

Again, Mark was taken off guard. Maybe the whole Driscoll family was just off. "Um, right. Well, I'm calling for another reason. Your brother owned quite an extensive acreage of land outside Helena Springs. As his next of kin, the acreage will go to you, but Isaac was allowing a young man to stay in a cabin on the property."

She made a small huffing sound. "Yeah, I bet he was."

"There is no evidence of any sort of abuse. The man is in his early twenties. It appears Isaac let him stay there after his parents abandoned him and the man grew up without any exposure to society."

Georgette laughed, a low sound filled with phlegm. "So Isaac was raising himself a mountain man? Weird."

"I can't say Isaac did much of his raising. But like I said, he let him stay on the property. When the estate is released to you, would you allow him to remain in his cabin until he figures out what to do? His options are very limited."

Georgette sucked in another loud inhale, and Mark grimaced on behalf of her lungs. "Nope, nope. I don't want a thing to do with Isaac's weirdness, not when he was living and especially now he's dead. Nope, that mountain man's gotta go. The sooner the better."

Mark sighed. "If you reconsider, ma'am—"

"I won't. He'll need to vacate immediately. As far as I'm concerned, he's poaching on my land."

***

The internet was filled with information about the Spartans, and for fifteen minutes or so, Mark got caught up in the research. He'd needed a palate cleanse after talking to Isaac Driscoll's sister and her blackened lungs, and sad to say, stories of war and carnage were more appealing at the moment.

Sparta, Greece, was a warrior society centered around military service. Apparently, it began in infancy when children were inspected for strength, and then, at age seven, soldiers came and took the children from the caretakers, whose gentle and affectionate influence was considered a negative, and housed them in a dormitory with other boy soldiers. The Spartan child then endured harsh physical discipline and deprivation to learn how to be strong and rely on his wits. In his early twenties, he had to pass a rigorous test and only then became a Spartan soldier.

Sounds brutal. Mark could be grateful for one thing—he hadn't grown up in ancient Greece.

He looked up the Battle of Thermopylae, a military encounter with the Persians, who greatly outnumbered the Spartans. He studied the picture online, and just as it had the first time, it sent a strange shudder down his spine. It was definitely the presence of bows and arrows in the warriors' hands—that obviously could not be ignored based on the weapon used in the two murders—but it was something else too. Something that skated just out of reach. Maybe not something in the painting so much as a puzzle piece that would link all of this together. Make sense of it.

A mystery woman, murders, bows and arrows, an abandoned boy, a sister who thought her brother was a "pervert," government-run social studies… Had Driscoll been attempting to raise…a modern-day Spartan? But why ? Had he been plain batshit crazy? Or did he really believe he was helping Lucas?

He rifled through the case files sitting on his desk in front of him. Crime scene photos, information obtained about the arrows used in the murders—a popular brand sold in hundreds of sporting goods stores, both locally and on the internet. All dead ends at the moment.

The ding on his phone alerted him to an email, but since he was sitting in front of his computer, he opened it there. "Well, that's interesting timing," he murmured to himself when he saw it was from Dr. Swift. When he opened it, there was a very short note, and attached was the final study that Isaac Driscoll had worked on at Rayform. Mark scrolled through it. It was a study on the incidence of incarceration in inmates raised by single mothers. There were lots of stats and graphs, none of which seemed to make a good case for single motherhood—though Mark knew that in any good psychological study, other variables needed to be accounted for or at least mentioned as contributing factors. The study did that, naming low income, gun and gang violence in the area where the inmate grew up, and things of that nature. It painted a bleak picture, and Mark realized that it was mostly because the piece of work simply offered numbers and stats—not solutions. Which, of course, was what studies were meant to do. They weren't designed to solve problems, simply identify them. He could see why Isaac Driscoll, or anyone working in that field for that matter, might become cynical about society after performing such studies year after year.

His door creaked open, and his wife peeked around it, her smile hesitant. He sat back in his chair, offering her one in return. "I made lunch if you're hungry."

Mark ran a hand through his hair. "Thanks. I'm kind of involved in this though. Will you set some aside for me?"

He didn't miss the minute drop in her smile, but he also didn't acknowledge it. The truth was, he'd gotten lost in his work, lost in the puzzle of the case in front of him, and he craved it. God, he craved it. An escape that wasn't only for him, but for two dead people counting on him for answers. Is that how you're justifying it, Gallagher? He heard his inner voice whisper the question but pushed it aside. Maybe it was a justification, but it was also true.

"Need any help?" Her smile grew, but he could see the nervousness in her eyes. He knew her. He still did, he realized. Knew her expressions and her body language. What had changed was his desire to respond to what he knew she was asking for. Inclusion. But he had gone to her for the same thing, during moments when she had been the one unwilling to let him in. It felt like they just kept missing each other emotionally. He had to focus though. In the past, she'd been his sounding board, the person he bounced ideas off if he was stuck, the person who'd helped him so many times when he couldn't connect A to B. Now, having her around would distract rather than assist him.

It will take time. He kept telling himself that, and somehow it kept ringing hollow, but he didn't know what else to hope for. "No, thanks. Not on this one. I'll be out soon."

Her smile did slip then, but she nodded and turned, closing the door softly behind her. He released a breath, massaging his temples, trying to move his mind back to the case.

But his focus was gone, at least for the moment. As he was closing the study Dr. Swift had sent him, he made note of not only Isaac Driscoll's name, but also the name of his assistant who had worked on the study: Kyle Holbrook.

He put in a call to Rayform and found that the man was still listed on the directory, but his voicemail picked up when Mark dialed it. He left a message and then tapped his pen on the desk, the smell of grilled cheese and tomato soup drifting under his door as he sat staring at the wall.