Текст книги "The Devil and the River"

Автор книги: R. J. Ellory

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

17

Whytesburg Sheriff’s Office, representative office of the entire Breed County Police Department, provided four basement cells, two on the left, two on the right, with a walkway between them wide enough to prevent prisoner contact. At the end of the room, an inclined vent allowed a ghost of light and fresh air into the space. Regardless, the basement had always suffered from an ever-present odor of damp mustiness that did not change season to season. In the summer it smelled rotten, in the winter merely aged and decayed. A brick wall separated each adjacent pair, the remaining two sides of each merely bars. There was no privacy, no solitary confinement. These were designed for nothing but temporary holding.

Gaines arrived at the office, and even before he started down the steps to the basement cells, he could hear Webster’s voice.

“. . . must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature . . . We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds . . .”

Hagen was down there, exasperated and angry.

“Over and over again, he’s been saying this,” he told Gaines. “Guy’s fucking crazy.”

“It’s Lincoln,” Gaines said. “He’s quoting Abraham Lincoln.”

Gaines approached the cell. He stood inches from the bars and looked directly at Webster.

After a moment, Gaines started speaking, merely echoed precisely what Webster was saying. They went through it twice, and then Webster fell silent. He smiled, nodded at Gaines.

“Sheriff,” he said.

“You think that girl was one of the better angels, Michael?”

“Everyone thought she was an angel, Sheriff.”

“I figure she might very well have been, you know?”

Webster shrugged, at once noncommittally, and then he glanced away, looked down, and when he looked back, there seemed to be tears in his eyes. What was this? Remorse?

“You hungry, Michael?”

“Not ’specially.”

“You eaten anything today?”

Webster shook his head.

“I’m gonna send out for some sandwiches. I’m gonna come on in there with you and we can talk, and then we can have some sandwiches. Sound okay to you?”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

“What do you like?”

“Oh, anything you got. Ham on rye, cheese, whatever’s easy.”

Gaines turned and nodded at Hagen. Hagen gave the cell keys to Gaines and then headed for the stairwell.

“Bring some Coke, as well,” Gaines called out, and then—turning back to Webster—asked, “Or do you want root beer?”

“Coke is good,” Webster replied.

Hagen looked back at Gaines, the expression on his face like, What, all of a sudden I’m a waiter?

Gaines paused until he heard the door close at the top of the stairwell, and then he took out his gun, laid it on the floor out of arm’s reach from the cell, and unlocked the door.

Webster just stayed right where he was, seated there on the bunk, his feet bare, his hands beneath his thighs, but Gaines was alert for any movement, attuned to the slightest shift in Webster’s position. That same sense returned. Gaines could smell the funk of the waterlogged riverbank, the smell of the girl as she surfaced, the smell of her in the morgue as she lay there with her torso unlaced.

Gaines could picture Victor Powell’s face as the snake emerged from the box, its tail in its mouth.

Hesitating for just a moment, Gaines then closed the cell door behind him. It remained ajar, unlocked, but Gaines positioned himself on the edge of the bunk so he could merely stand and block Webster if Webster attempted to run.

There was silence between them for a moment, and then Gaines spoke.

“So you wanna tell me about Nancy Denton, Michael?”

Webster was looking toward the inclined vent, at the vague light that crept on through, at the motes of dust dancing and shifting perpetually.

“I just don’t know what to say, Sheriff,” Webster replied.

“Just tell me whatever you can . . . whatever you want to tell me . . .”

“Well, I don’t know what it is, aside from a terrible thing an’ all. Her being dead like that and what was done to her—”

“Done to her?”

“The way she was killed, you know? She was strangled. She was held down and the life was strangled right out of her.”

“Right,” Gaines said. So consumed had he been by the fact that her heart had been removed that he had failed to appreciate what she must have gone through before she died. She had been strangled to death. Someone—and it certainly seemed that Michael Webster was the primary candidate in that moment—had put their hands around her pale throat and choked her. They had looked right into her eyes, a fragile teenage girl, and had not let go until she had gasped her final, tortured breath. Sixteen years old. It was no life at all. Jesus Christ.

Gaines felt a sudden hatred for Webster. A intense feeling overcame him, a sense of righteous outrage, a feeling that this business would be resolved right here, right now if he also put his hands around Webster’s throat and choked the last of his sick life right out of him.

Gaines closed his eyes for just a moment. He breathed deeply. He tried to center himself.

“It’s a terrible, terrible business,” Webster said. “Somethin’ like that done to a young girl. How do you deal with something like that, Sheriff?”

Webster looked at Gaines.

Gaines didn’t speak.

“I mean, we saw some things out there,” Webster went on. “We saw the worst of all of it out there. Kids all blown to hell an’ back. People decapitated, people run through with knives and machetes. People smashed up in pieces and spread all through the trees, right? We seen all of it and then some, but there’s little I can remember that compares to Nancy Denton . . . seein’ her lyin’ there, not a movement, not a sound . . .”

Webster’s voice trailed away.

Gaines was struggling to comprehend how someone could do such a thing and then speak of it with such distance. Was this what war had done to Lieutenant Michael Webster? Was this the legacy of Guadalcanal for this man? For America? Surely not, for Gaines himself had seen the very things of which Webster spoke and yet he was not compelled to strangle a child, to cut out her heart, to defile her body in such a way and then bury it in mud. No, this was not the war; this was just the man.

“So you want to tell me how it happened, Michael?” Gaines repeated.

Webster shook his head. “I don’t want to say nothin’.”

Gaines turned at the sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs. Hagen came down with sandwiches, bottles of Coke. Gaines went out through the door and collected them. He returned to the cell, set the sandwiches on the bunk, handed a bottle to Webster, and then started eating.

Webster followed suit, neither of them speaking, Webster looking in the direction of the vent, Gaines looking at his shoes, every once in a while glancing at the man beside him.

When they were done, Gaines took the bottles out and placed them near the wall on the far side. He went back to the cell and sat down.

“We saw the lightning and that was the guns,” Webster suddenly said, “and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns . . . and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling . . . and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped . . .”

Gaines frowned.

“Harriet Tubman said that,” Webster explained. “And there were two guys on the radio back in sixty-seven, guys called Gragni and Rado, and they said that the draft was white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.” He smiled. “It was a different war, but it was the same war.”

Gaines nodded. “I heard that.”

“You know what Hemingway said?” Webster asked.

“No, Mike, what did he say?”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. That’s what he said.”

“Right.”

“But war is war, right? War is about two groups of people who know they might die, and they go anyway. They go because they believe in something, because they think something is important enough to fight for.”

“Except for the draft.”

“Even the draft,” Webster said. “There were plenty of people who didn’t go, plenty who dodged it, went to Canada and whatever. Conscientious objection an’ all that.” Webster smiled. “But that’s not the point here, is it? The point here is that Nancy Denton wasn’t in no war. She wasn’t in no army. She wasn’t fighting for anything except her own life. And it was taken anyway, wasn’t it? Her life was taken anyway, and what the hell did she ever do to anyone?”

“I don’t know, Mike. Why don’t you tell me what she did?”

Webster looked at Gaines. His expression was one of confusion. “What did she do? It wasn’t what she did, Sheriff; it was who she was. Bright, pretty, funny, kind. That’s who she was, and that’s why she had to die like that? Everyone loved her, but this time she was loved too much . . .”

“Loving someone too much means you have to kill them? Is that it? Because you don’t want anyone else to have them?”

“Christ almighty knows, Sheriff. Hell, maybe it was just to feel what it was like to strangle a girl like that.”

“Is that what happened?”

“Well, it’s what I think, is all,” Webster said. “You just asked me what I thought an’ I told you.”

“Was there a ritual of some kind? Is that why she was killed?”

Webster frowned, and for a moment he looked vexed. “How the hell do you think I know that?” he asked. “You think if I knew I wouldn’t tell you?”

“I don’t know, Mike,” Gaines replied. “I don’t know anything about you. You could be an honest man; you could be a liar. I just know that I have a dead sixteen-year-old girl and a lot of people waiting for an explanation.”

“Sixteen. That’s no time at all. That ain’t any kind of a life, is it, Sheriff?” Webster replied, echoing Gaines’s own thoughts from just moments before.

“No, Mike, it isn’t.”

Webster whistled through his teeth. “Sixteen years old. Jesus Christ almighty.”

“Does that change the way you feel about her?” Gaines asked.

Webster didn’t speak for a moment. He looked away toward the vent and then back at Gaines. “Change the way I feel about her?”

“Thinking about her being sixteen.”

“Would it have made a difference if she was fourteen, or fifteen maybe? Hell no, she would still be nothing but a child, Sheriff. You think if she was a year or two older it would have been any less worse?”

“No, Mike, I don’t.”

“Well, what the hell you askin’ me that for, then?”

“I’m just trying to understand why someone would do this to a girl like Nancy Denton, is all. I’m just trying to understand—”

“Same as me. I’m tryin’ to understand, too. Hell, why does anyone do anything crazy? Because they’re crazy, that’s why. Why do people start wars? Why do people murder other people? Why do people up and marry some girl and then get tired of her and beat her half to death and throw her out the car into the fucking road? I don’t know why, Sheriff. Seems to me you’d be the better one to answer that question, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t understand it, Mike . . . no better than you.”

Webster smiled wryly. “Then if you don’t get it an’ I don’t get it, I’d say we’re screwed.”

Gaines was quiet, and then the need to know overcame his training and his common sense. “Tell me what happened, Mike.”

“ ’Tain’t complicated. Happened not half a mile from where I live. She was just there, just right there in a shack at the side of the road. Just lying there in the doorway. Picked her up and took her back to my place. Did what I could there, and then I buried her near running water.”

“Why running water, Mike?”

“ ’S what my friend said to do.”

“Friend? What friend?”

“Friend I had back then. Al Warren was his name.”

“Was his name?”

Webster shook his head. “He didn’t make it back. He died out there. He was like a brother to me. Hard to explain that, but when you’re in a unit together, when you fight together, when you are engaged in looking after someone else’s life day after day, something happens. It’s closer than brothers, you know? Like it’s something spiritual. He was the smartest man I ever knew. No, not the smartest; he was the wisest. He was like a Buddhist or something. He was like a religious guy, but not like going to church and sayin’ prayers and whatever. He was true religion, like it was something he had a mission to do. A mission for the truth, you know?”

“I don’t understand, Michael. Your friend in the war told you to bury Nancy Denton in the riverbank?”

“He told me a lot of things, Sheriff. All about the magic. He told me who to trust and who not to trust. It was because of him I made the deal, and the deal I made has got me where I am now. I knew it would happen, and I knew I’d have to make the payback. I just didn’t know when.”

“The payback?”

“For getting out of there. For getting through the war despite the fact that everyone around me, everyone I knew, was blown to shit that day. I made a deal for that, and just to prove to me that the deal was good, that thing happened in fifty-two, and it was the same thing all over again. That’s when they started calling me the luckiest man alive.” Webster shook his head resignedly, and then he looked through Gaines as if Gaines were not there at all. “They didn’t understand that I was already dead. Had been dead ever since the moment I made that deal.”

“I don’t understand, Michael. What deal? What payback? What happened in fifty-two?”

Michael shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? She’s gone. She’s dead. She ain’t never comin’ back. Whatever I did to help her after she was dead, it all counts for shit now, doesn’t it?”

Webster turned and looked at Gaines directly. This time Gaines believed that Mike was really seeing him. Webster’s eyes were filled with tears, his skin pale, and a fine sweat varnished his brow. He looked sick, upset, agitated. “Just trying to do whatever I could to get her through this thing. I read stuff afterward, you know? Trying to understand what I’d done. Trying to understand the deal I’d made, if there was any way out of it. Well, I found out one thing for sure. There ain’t no way out of a deal like that. I was raised in Louisiana, out in Baton Rouge, and I heard what Al was saying, ’cause he was out of Louisiana, too, and later on, afterward, I read all about that stuff, and I figured there had to be some truth in some of it. That’s the way it goes when you’re raised out that way . . .”

Gaines heard the words, words he had heard before, and the memories came back, images from his own childhood, the things he had seen, and he knew what Webster was talking about.

“But when she didn’t come back, I figured maybe it was because of the deal I’d made. And then I figured that maybe I just had to be patient and never say a damned word about it, because saying anything about it would have ruined any hope that it would work . . .”

He shook his head, lowered his chin to his chest, and for a moment Gaines believed the man was crying again.

When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.

“But it didn’t work, did it? She didn’t come back. You found her all this time later, and now all I can hope for is that she made it through to the other side and she’s safe somewhere, someplace where she don’t hurt no more . . .”

But she did come back, Gaines thought. She was preserved perfectly, looked the same as she had twenty years before.

“But why, Mike?” he asked. “Why do what you did to her after killing her so brutally?”

Webster’s eyes widened. “What?” he asked, in his voice a tone of disbelief and incredulity. “What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t kill her. Is that what you think I did? Jesus Christ, no, I didn’t kill her. I found her dead, Sheriff . . . found her dead in the doorway of that shack by the side of the road and just tried to help her the best way I knew how . . .”

18

Gaines could only listen to so much. He knew he was dealing with a crazy man, and whatever chords might have struck with him, it was still delusion and insanity.

Gaines did not want to question Webster further, not until a lawyer was there, not until they could get this on tape. He did ask Webster one other question, however, and that was the location of where Webster had found Nancy Denton. Where he said he’d found her. The location was a half mile or so from the motel where Webster lived. Gaines took Hagen with him and drove out there. He just stood at the side of the road and tried to imagine what had happened twenty years before. If ever there had been a shack there, it was long since gone. Perhaps if they tore up the undergrowth, they could find the footprint of it, but Gaines wasn’t about to do such a thing.

Gaines and Hagen then drove on out to Bogalusa, only to learn that Sheriff Graydon McCarthy was off shift. A couple of questions and they found him in a bar up on Wintergreen. He was sitting in the corner with another man, the pair of them watching a pickup band rehearsing a set for a visiting singer. Above their heads, right there on the wall, was a sign.

Bar Tabs Available

Terms & Conditions Apply*

*$1,000 Deposit Required

“Didn’t think I’d be seein’ you so soon,” McCarthy said.

“Looks like maybe we got our man,” Gaines said.

“Good to hear it.”

“Need to coordinate this with you.”

“Understand that, Sheriff,” McCarthy said, “but this here is my brother, come on down from Hattiesburg to see a little music with me. We don’t get to see each other much these days, but we do like a bit o’ country music.” McCarthy nodded at the band. “This here shower o’ half-wits are strangling a couple of classics, but we got Mary May Coates arrivin’ sooner or later, and she’s an old-time star, a real class act.” McCarthy smiled. “You could stay and have a drink with us, sociable like, and then we could deal with this mess in the morning.”

“Thank you, Sheriff McCarthy, but I gotta get back. All I need is your sanction on taking this case. The guy we got lives out in that motel place you spoke of, so, in truth, that makes the arrest itself a Travis County matter. However, the girl was from Whytesburg. Her ma still lives there, and that makes it Breed County. I wanna take this thing, Sheriff, but I’m more than likely gonna be back and forth in Travis checking up on things and getting myself involved in other people’s business, if you know what I mean.”

McCarthy set down his glass. He leaned forward, rested his hands flat on the table. His expression was serious, almost foreboding.

“You’re tellin’ me that you wanna take a murder case off my hands? You want to take a case from Travis and just move it all over to Whytesburg and leave me with nothin’ to do?”

“I don’t mean this disrespectfully, Sheriff—”

McCarthy grinned—high, wide, and handsome. “Hell, son, I’m just yankin’ your chain. You go on and take all the cases from Travis you can carry, and when you’re done with them, you can come on back and take some more.”

Gaines nodded. “ ’Preciated, Sheriff.” He stood up, extended his hand to McCarthy’s brother. “Pleasure to meet you, sir.” They shook hands. “Sheriff,” Gaines added, replacing his hat and touching the brim.

Gaines headed back to the door, found Hagen standing beside the car watching an overweight woman in full country singer regalia—rhinestones, knee-high maroon leather boots, a mountain of blond curls—as she maneuvered her way out of a station wagon.

“Miss Mary May Coates, I believe,” Gaines said.

The woman turned, beamed at Gaines.

“Think you’ll find yourself an enthusiastic crowd tonight, ma’am.”

“Why, honey, that’s mighty sweet of you,” she crooned.

Gaines got in the car, and Hagen headed around and got in the passenger side. They pulled away sharply, left a wide crescent in the gravel of the forecourt behind them.

“He all right?” Hagen asked.

“It’s our case,” Gaines replied. “Because he doesn’t want it, first and foremost, but mainly because we do.”

Back at the Whytesburg office, Gaines headed on down to see Webster. Webster was sleeping, snoring lightly, the expression on his face one of a man seemingly untroubled by anything.

Gaines woke him.

Webster rubbed his eyes, sat up, stretched his neck from side to side.

“Mike, I have to get straight what you’re telling me here. You’re telling me that you found Nancy Denton dead in a shack at the side of the road.

Webster nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“And the things that were done to her . . . before she was buried?”

“I just did what I had to do,” Webster replied. “To help her through, you know? Just to help her through.”

“And she was already dead? This is what you’re telling me?”

Webster looked hurt. “I cannot believe you would think I was capable of killing Nancy—”

Gaines was silent for a moment—taking it all in, trying not to picture this man sweating over the body of Nancy Denton, the strength it must have taken to cut through her chest, the removal of her heart . . . and as far as the snake was concerned, he could not even bring himself to mention it.

“I need to look in your room, Mike. I can fuck around for a day getting a warrant, or you can give me permission to go look in your room.”

“Go look,” Webster said. “I ain’t hiding nothin’ from you.”

“You’ll sign something to that effect, that you gave me permission to search your room, your belongings, everything?”

“Sure I will.”

“Good enough,” Gaines said, and then he turned to walk away.

“Sheriff?”

Gaines hesitated, turned back to look at Webster.

“After you’re done searchin’ my place, can I see Nancy?”

Gaines didn’t reply. He took a deep breath. He exhaled slowly. He walked as quickly as he could to the stairwell and left the basement.