Текст книги "The Bone Tree"
Автор книги: Greg Iles
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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 58 страниц)
WEDNESDAY
CHAPTER 1
TONIGHT DEATH AND time showed me their true faces.
We spend our lives plodding blindly through the slaughterhouse gate between past and future. Every second is annihilation: the death of this moment, the birth of this moment. There is no “next” moment.
There is only now.
While the pace of life seems stately in the living, we funnel through that gate like driven cattle, fearful, obedient, insensate. Even while we sleep, now becomes then as relentlessly as a river wearing away a rock. Cells burn oxygen, repair proteins, die, and replace themselves in a seemingly endless train: yet from the womb, those internal clocks are winding down to final disorder.
Only in the shadow of death do we sense the true velocity of time—while adrenaline blasts through our systems, eternity becomes tangible and all else blurs into background. It is then, paradoxically, that seconds seem to stretch, experience becomes hyper-real, and flesh and spirit unite in the battle to remain breathing, conscious, aware—afloat in the rushing stream of time. If we survive the threat, our existential epiphany quickly fades, for we cannot bear it long. Yet somewhere within us, a dividing line remains.
Before and after.
Tonight time slowed down so much I could taste it like copper on my tongue. I felt it against my skin—dense and heavy—resisting every move. Mortality hovered at my shoulder, a watchful beast of prey. Chained to a cinder-block wall, I watched a man older than my father torture the woman I love with fire. I realized then that hell existed; the terrible irony was that I had created it. In arrogance, against the counsel of others, I’d wagered all I had and more—the lives of others—to try to save my father. In desperation, I cast away every principle he ever taught me and reached into the darkness in the hope of a bargain.
What did I get in exchange for my soul?
A pillar of fire roaring in the night. The pyre of three men, probably more, visible for miles across the flat Louisiana Delta. Probably even from Mississippi. Not far to the east, my town sleeps along the high ground above the river, but here all sense, all logic is suspended while the fire devours the dead. Two of those men gave their lives for Caitlin and me. Henry Sexton, reporter. Sleepy Johnston, musician and prodigal son of Louisiana. One a white man, one black. Allies by chance, or maybe fate. Either way, they’re gone forever.
Through the slaughterhouse gate.
I’ve never witnessed such brutality as that which preceded their deaths, nor such heroism as was displayed in their sacrifices. Yet all I can taste is ashes. Three months ago I felt a lot like this, as a flood of biblical scale swept over New Orleans, the only real city between the Gulf and Memphis. Three hours south of here, hazmat-suited crews are still dragging bodies from mildewed houses. That disaster, like this one, had human causes. Greed, apathy, hubris—even loyalty—all demand payment in the end. Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word.
It’s how we respond that defines us.
A FEW MINUTES AGO, gripped by a mad delusion of invincibility, I carried Sleepy Johnston out of the basement inferno where this fire was born, and not once while I staggered through the smoke and flames did I doubt I would reach the surface. I hauled a man nearly my own weight as easily as I would have carried my eleven-year-old daughter—but to no avail. Two minutes after I laid him on the ground, Johnston died of his injuries. Now he lies a few yards behind us, staring sightlessly at the smoke-obscured stars.
I did not pray while Caitlin knelt to ease his passing. Anything I said would have been superfluous, for if any God exists, he must surely fold such martyrs into his embrace. I watched in silence while Caitlin reenacted the oldest ritual in the world, cradling the older man’s head and murmuring maternal reassurance into his ear. Touching my newly scarred face with my right hand, I drove the nails of my left-hand fingers into my palm. Pain is proof of life.
After Johnston expired, I comforted Caitlin as though I had some purchase on reality. But that was only another delusion, though I didn’t know it then.
Then . . . ?
With alarm I realize that these events happened only a minute ago, if that. Does a man in shock know he is in shock?
Probably not.
If I rewind history fifteen minutes, this chaotic mass of fire and smoke was a stunning lake house. Now its owner is being cremated in the ruins of his home, and we two survivors stumble about as reality slowly returns with soul-searing clarity. An imaginary newscaster’s voice speaks in my head: Brody Royal, multimillionaire sociopath, burned to death last night in a fire started by his antique flamethrower. Sadly, Royal was unable to complete the murders he was contemplating prior to his demise, due to a sudden and suicidal intervention by a man he’d ridiculed as harmless for the past twenty years—
Brody’s house shudders like some giant creature, and then, with the sound of cracking bones, one wing implodes. The heat diminishes for a few seconds, then suddenly intensifies, as though feeding on the evil within. Soon it will drive us farther back, away from Johnston’s body.
Caitlin stares at the burning wreckage as though she can’t quite grasp what’s happening. Five minutes ago we both believed we were dead, yet here we stand. Covered with ash and streaked with sweat, her face has a burn scar to match my own. I want to speak to her, but I don’t quite trust myself.
Beyond her, the lake’s mirrored surface reflects back an image of the tower of flame, and with a rush of fear I see our future in it. Like the pillar of fire the Israelites followed across the desert, this beacon too will lead men to us.
“Is that a siren?” Caitlin asks, looking away from the raging flames, and toward the narrow lane at the edge of the light.
“I think so.” My older ears belatedly pick up the distant whine.
“That way,” she says, pointing westward, away from the lake.
I peer through the darkness, but I can’t make out any police lights through the orange glare and waves of superheated air.
“What about Henry’s files?” Caitlin asks. “I should hide them.”
The charred box that Caitlin salvaged from the burning basement stands a few feet from Sleepy Johnston’s body. From the looks of the ashes inside, little of Henry Sexton’s journals remains.
“There’s nowhere to hide them,” I tell her.
“What about the boathouse?” she asks, a note of hysteria in her voice.
“They’ll search that. It’s too late anyway. A neighbor’s coming. Look.”
The nearest house is seventy-five yards away, but a pair of headlights has separated from the garage and begun nosing down toward the lane that runs along the lake here. Perhaps emboldened by the siren, the car’s driver has finally decided to investigate the fire. Must have heard the gunshots earlier, I think, or they’d have been here long before now.
The siren is growing louder and rising in pitch. “That’s probably the Ferriday fire department,” I think aloud. “But the law won’t be far behind. I hope it’s Sheriff Dennis, but it could be the FBI or the state police. They may question us separately. We need to get our stories straight.”
Bewilderment clouds Caitlin’s eyes. “We both lived through the same thing, didn’t we?”
I take her hand, and the coldness of it startles me. “I don’t think it’s quite that simple.”
“Everything you did in Brody Royal’s basement was self-defense. They were torturing us, for God’s sake!”
“That’s not what I mean. The tough questions won’t be about what happened in the basement. They’ll be about why it happened. Why did Royal kidnap us? Why did he want to kill us? We’ve held back a lot over the past couple of days.” And not just from the police, I add silently.
“What if we just say we don’t know?”
“That’s fine with me, so long as you don’t plan to publish any stories about it in the Examiner.”
At last, realization dawns in her eyes. “Oh.”
A half mile from the lake, the whirling red lights of a fire engine break out from behind the trees that line the levee, then veer onto the narrow lane that runs along the shore of Lake Concordia. A half mile behind it, three vehicles traveling in train quickly follow. The flashing red arcs are much closer to the road on those vehicles, which means they’re police cruisers. Our window of opportunity to shape history is closing fast.
“I found Brody Royal’s name in Henry Sexton’s journals,” Caitlin says, spinning her story on the fly. “That led me to interview his daughter. Out of fear of her father, Katy panicked and took an overdose of pills before I arrived to question her, but she still implicated Brody in multiple murders. Katy’s husband walked in on us after she passed out—that would have been documented by paramedics, if not police. Up to that point, everything’s more or less true. Royal learned from Randall Regan that I’d questioned Katy, and they retaliated to keep me from publishing what I’d learned from her.”
This fairy tale might convince the Concordia Parish sheriff, but probably not the FBI. “Too many people saw me go into St. Catherine’s Hospital,” I say. “They know I spent twenty minutes alone with Brody. Now that he’s dead, his family’s liable to make all kinds of accusations about me going after him. Kaiser will find out sooner or later.”
“Surely you can explain that conversation somehow?”
“I sure can’t admit that I tried to cut a deal with him.” Under the pressure of the approaching authorities, my mind ratchets down to the task at hand. “What if I pick up where your story leaves off? I went to St. Catherine’s Hospital to make sure Royal wasn’t going to take some kind of revenge against you for his daughter’s suicide attempt. I suspected that he’d ordered several murders during the 1960s, and Katy had verified that to you. I also believed Royal had ordered the hit attempts on Henry at the newspaper and the hospital, and I was worried he’d do the same to you. That makes sense, right?”
Caitlin nods quickly, her eyes on the whirling lights.
I step closer to her. “Are you going to tell the cops about your recording of what Katy said?”
“I might as well, since Brody burned both copies. They’re going to read about it in tomorrow’s paper anyway.”
Closing my eyes, I see Caitlin’s Treo smartphone and my borrowed tape recorder being consumed by the fearsome blast of a flamethrower. “You really don’t have another copy at the newspaper?”
Her look of desolation is my only answer.
The fire engine has reached the head of Royal’s driveway. We only have seconds now.
“What about Brody’s confessions?” Caitlin asks. “That he was behind Pooky Wilson’s death? That Frank and Snake Knox killed Pooky at the Bone Tree?”
“We tell the cops all of that. Every bit of it helps justify what we did tonight.”
Caitlin looks strangely hesitant, which I don’t understand. Even if we tell the police about those confessions, she can still publish the story before any other media outlet gets the information.
“For God’s sake,” I say, “until tonight, no one was even sure the Bone Tree was real. And Royal admitted taking part in the gang rape of Viola Turner. We’ve got to tell them that.”
Caitlin gives me a pointed look. “Brody also told us your father killed Viola. Do you want to tell the police that?”
“Of course not.”
“All right, then. That’s why I’m asking what we hold back. Is there anything else?”
I can’t read her eyes. We’ve kept so much from each other over the past few days that it’s hard to know where our stories might diverge if compared to one another.
“The rifles,” I say softly. “Those two rifles in the cabinet that he showed us just before you held the razor to his throat. Did you see them?”
“Yes, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was waiting for my chance to attack him.”
“There were identifying plaques beneath every other rifle in the gun collection. But on those two plaques there were only dates. Dates, and a small American flag emblem.”
Caitlin shrugs. “So?”
“The dates were November twenty-second, 1963, and April fourth, 1968.”
She blinks in confusion for a couple of seconds, but then her eyes go wide. “No way. I mean . . . do you really—”
“I don’t think so. But if we don’t tell Kaiser about them, whatever’s left of those guns might disappear tonight. And we’ll never know.”
Caitlin gingerly touches the burn on her cheek. “Let’s hope Sheriff Dennis is in one of those cars, and not the goddamn state police. Not that Captain Ozan.”
I reach out and squeeze her shoulder. “Whoever it is, act more disoriented than you are. You really are in shock, but play it up more. When they question you, try to stick to the past hour, nothing more. Act exhausted, and play up your injuries.”
Caitlin doesn’t appear to like this plan. “I don’t want to spend the night in a damned hospital. This is the biggest story I’ve ever been involved in. I’ve got zero time to waste.”
“I know.” Moving forward, I pull her tight against me. An hour ago I made the worst mistake of my life by begging her to suppress part of a story in order to try to bargain with a killer for my father’s life. I’ve got no right to try to control anything she does now. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. You tried to tell me something like this would happen. My worry over Dad blinded me.”
She shakes her head against my chest. “It wasn’t just you. Once I made that recording of Katy, Brody was going to come after us, no matter what.”
“But he wouldn’t have known about the recording if I hadn’t told him.”
This is debatable, but Caitlin only draws back and looks hard into my eyes. “Whatever happens now, I need to get back to the newspaper. Please do whatever you can to make that happen.”
The fire engine screeches to a stop thirty feet from us, and uniformed men leap off and out of it. The hoses come out faster than I would have believed possible, but these guys don’t have a prayer of putting out this inferno. One fireman hurries toward the body on the ground and drops to his knees, but I call out to him that the man is dead.
“What happened?” shouts another man from behind me. “Is there anybody still in the house?”
When I turn, I see a fire captain wearing a black hardhat and a fireproof coat. “Three dead men. That’s all I know. Not from the fire, though. There was a gunfight.”
His mouth drops open. “Gunfight? In Mr. Royal’s place?”
“Brody Royal’s one of the dead.”
“Oh, no.”
“His son-in-law is another. The third is Henry Sexton, the reporter.”
The fire captain shakes his head, unable to comprehend what I’m telling him. “Is that it? Nobody else?”
“I really don’t know. There’s nobody I’d risk my men to save.”
The fireman looks at me as if I might be out of my mind.
“They were torturing us,” I say. “Before the fire.”
“Torturing . . . ?” The captain looks closer at me. “Hey, I know you. You’re the mayor of Natchez. Penn Cage.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you okay?”
“I guess so. This is Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Natchez Examiner.”
“What the hell started the fire?”
The answer to this question isn’t something the fire captain could accept. Let’s see . . . Brody Royal was preparing to burn off Caitlin’s arm with a flamethrower. I was chained to the wall, tearing my hands to shreds in my desperation to break free. That’s when Henry Sexton, despite his injuries, somehow struggled to his feet and shielded Caitlin with his body. Royal meant to burn him too, but like some medieval martyr, the reporter charged Royal and threw his arms around him before the old man could safely ignite the flamethrower. While the rest of us stared in horror, Henry pulled the trigger and immolated them both, creating a firestorm that no amount of water could smother—
“Mayor?” says the fire captain, catching hold of my shoulders. “Maybe you ought to sit down, huh?”
“A World War Two flamethrower,” I mumble. “Loaded with gasoline and tar.”
The man shakes his head in disbelief, then motions for help and starts shouting orders.
The sound of gunning motors makes me turn toward the driveway entrance. Three Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Department cruisers roar up behind the fire truck. Two park there, but a Chevy Tahoe pulls around the fire truck and drives up to within ten feet of me before it stops.
“Thank God,” Caitlin says in my ear.
Sheriff Walker Dennis gets out of his cruiser and stumps toward us. Three years shy of fifty, he carries himself like a minor-league baseball star gone to seed. He weighs 220 pounds and has forearms that would discourage anyone from betting against him in an arm-wrestling match. The way he wears his brown uniform and Stetson gives the impression that he’s been a sheriff all his adult life, but in fact he only took over the job about six weeks ago, after his predecessor was indicted on corruption charges that decimated the entire department.
“Are you okay?” Dennis shouts, striding forward and grabbing my forearm as though to reassure himself that I’m alive.
“Yeah, yeah. Caitlin, too.”
The sheriff looks over at the fire. Two crews have trained hoses on the base of the flames, but most of the house is gone already.
“Anybody in there?” Dennis asks.
“Royal and Regan, both dead.”
“Shit. They couldn’t get out?”
“No.”
The sheriff gives me an odd look. “You couldn’t get ’em out?”
“I didn’t try, Walker. They kidnapped us from the Examiner office—or sent two guys to do it. They were torturing Caitlin for information when this guy”—I point at the dead body of Sleepy Johnston—“busted in with Henry and saved us. Royal had a flamethrower in there. It was a miracle we got out alive.”
“Henry’s dead too,” Caitlin says.
Walker Dennis rubs his forehead like a man with an incipient migraine. This has already been one of the worst days of his life, and this event will only compound his difficulties. “I obviously should have pressed you harder about Brody Royal.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered.”
He takes a tin of Skoal from his breast pocket, opens it with some urgency, and jams a pinch beneath his bottom lip. “Who the fuck is that?” he asks, pointing at the dead man on the ground.
“Sleepy Johnston. You know him better as ‘Gates Brown.’”
The sheriff’s eyes widen. Dennis knows “Gates Brown” as the alias of a man who haunted the periphery of our investigations for the past couple of days. Walking closer to the body, he looks down at the face of a sixty-seven-year-old black man who lived in this area as a boy, then fled to Detroit for the rest of his adult life.
“This the guy who called me about seeing Royal and Regan burning the Concordia Beacon?”
I nod.
“We need to get the hell out of here. The state police could show up any second, and we need to get some things straight before you talk to them.”
I glance at Caitlin, who’s watching us closely. I nod, thinking the same thing that she and Dennis must be: Captain Alphonse Ozan.
“All right,” Dennis says. “Let’s get back to the department to get your statements. At least that way I’ll be on my home turf if they try to take this case away from me.”
“What about the FBI?”
“Agent Kaiser called me just before I got here. He’d just heard about the fire, but he didn’t seem to know it was Royal’s house yet.”
“I’ll bet he does by now.”
Sheriff Dennis spits on the ground and leans close to me. “We’ve got a jurisdictional clusterfuck on our hands here. And both our asses are on the line.”
“I know.”
“You ride with me,” he says, pulling me toward his Tahoe. “Ms. Masters can come in the car behind us.”
“Hold on.” I yank my arm loose. “Caitlin rides with us.”
Walker shakes his head. “Sorry. I have to separate you two. A lot of eyes will be watching this. I’ve got to follow procedure.”
“Surely she can ride with us? You can swear we didn’t talk on the way.”
Sensing danger, Caitlin has come up beside me and taken hold of my arm.
“I’m sorry,” Dennis says firmly. “It’s got to be this way.”
Before I can argue further, Walker leans in close and says, “My brother-in-law will be driving the second car. If you need to call her on the phone, you can. The stupidest thing we can do is stay here and argue. You want Ozan to arrest you two for killing one of the richest men in Louisiana? A friend of every governor for the past fifty years?”
“I’ll be fine in the second car,” Caitlin says, nudging me toward Dennis’s truck. “Let’s not waste one more second. Just let me grab Henry’s files.”
Walker gives her a grateful look, then signals a deputy standing by one of the cruisers behind the fire truck. The man reaches us as Caitlin trots back with her box, and Dennis introduces him as Grady Wells, his brother-in-law. I beg Wells to take care of Caitlin like he would his own flesh and blood, and he promises that he will.
“If the state police try to pull us over,” Walker tells Wells, “ignore them. Don’t stop until we get back to base. You only take orders from me. Ignore the radio, and if they start yelling at you over their PA speaker, pay no mind. We’ll hash out the jurisdictions when we get to the station.”
Moments later, six doors slam, and our small convoy begins racing toward Highway 84 and the Mississippi River. Turning to look back through the rear windshield, I see the pillar of fire still towering over the vast alluvial plain, announcing calamity to the world. If my mother and daughter were to look out of their third-floor window high on the Natchez bluff, they would see it in the distance. As I think of my mother, a double-edged knife of guilt and anger slips between my ribs, and I wonder whether my father is within sight of that roaring flame.
