Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  The woman’s eyes rose and met Caitlin’s with conspiratorial slyness. “Will you promise not to tell?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  A manicured fingernail rose to the red lips, its scarlet nail gleaming. “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  “Stick a needle in my eye.”

  Katy looked right, then left, then finally spoke with the certitude of a courier who had carried a message through miles of bloody trenches. “Daddy did it.”

  Caitlin’s heart thumped against her sternum. “Did what? What did Daddy do, Katy?”

  The heavy-lidded eyes fluttered. “Like Jesus,” she whispered.

  Like Jesus? Caitlin shivered again, though she didn’t know why. “Did your father kill Pooky, Katy?”

  The woman nodded once more. “And Dr. Leland. He killed Mr. Henry,” she said softly. “And that colored nurse, too.”

  At this, Caitlin’s voice deserted her again.

  Katy was listing to the other side now; she looked as though she might fall out of the chair at any moment.

  “Katy?” Caitlin said, coming to her feet.

  Mrs. Regan opened her mouth, but no sound passed her lips. Then she went as limp as a rag doll and slid to the floor. Her head hit the carpet with a wooden thump.

  Caitlin stared, momentarily paralyzed. Then she jumped down and felt for a carotid pulse. It was there, but very weak.

  “Katy!” Caitlin shouted. “Katy Regan! Can you hear me?”

  The woman gave no sign of having heard.

  “How long have you been drinking? Did you take something?”

  Katy groaned but formed no coherent words.

  Crawling to her purse for her Treo, Caitlin heard a bang from the side of the house. Then heavy footsteps clunked up the hallway. She looked at her watch, and a bolt of fear shot through her. Randall Regan?

  She got to her feet, instinctively looking for a place to hide. As she glanced toward the hall door, she saw a large brown pill bottle sitting on the fireplace hearth. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now it seemed the largest object in the room. The bottle had no lid, and it was empty.

  “Who are you?” shouted a male voice. “What the hell’s happening here?”

  Caitlin turned to see a tall, dark-haired man in his fifties kneeling beside Katy. In one glance Caitlin knew this was the man who had raped and murdered two former employees of Royal Insurance. God only knew what he’d done to Katy behind the locked doors of this house—or what he would do to Caitlin if he caught her.

  “I think she took some pills,” Caitlin said, casting about for a lie that would buy the time she needed to escape. “See there?” She pointed to the empty bottle by the fireplace. “I was about to call 911.”

  Regan’s eyes didn’t leave her for a second. “Who are you?”

  He stood and took a step toward her.

  Caitlin grabbed her purse off the floor, spilling out half its contents. Regan was still closing the space between them when she got her pistol out and held it in front of her.

  The sight of the .38 stopped him, but she wasn’t sure it would hold Regan long. He had the eyes of an enraged animal.

  “Call 911!” she shouted. “And let me out of here! Just let me go!”

  “You’re that Masters bitch,” he said in a low, cracked voice. “Penn Cage’s whore. You’re not gonna shoot me.”

  Caitlin felt her arm shaking. Regan was calling her bluff. What would happen if she shot a man in his own home, after having gained entry under false pretenses? Did it even matter? Not if I don’t get out of here alive.

  “Let me out, I said! I’ll shoot!”

  Regan laughed and started forward.

  Caitlin fired into the floor at his feet. He stopped, and the smell of gunpowder filled the room. Caitlin moved quickly around him, keeping the gun pointed at him all the time. Regan turned to track her movements, but the door wasn’t far away now. Then a horrifying thought struck her.

  “You’d better call 911,” she said. “Because I’m calling it as soon as I leave. You can’t let her die on the floor.”

  “You’re dead,” Regan rasped, his eyes burning. “You and your boyfriend both. Dead.”

  Caitlin whirled and ran for her car.

  CHAPTER 76

  I’M SITTING ON the second floor of the old City Jail, now refurbished as a meeting hall for the Board of Selectmen but still known as the “old jail.” Tonight the jail is being used for the Joint Governance Meeting, which brings the city and county governments together, an event as rare as a U.S.-Chinese summit. For nearly two hours I’ve listened in excruciating agony while black and white politicians with only one thing in common—a profound ignorance of history—debate the merits of creating a unique but racially sensitive historical park and memorial. As a result, I’ve developed a detailed fantasy of dropping several of my colleagues through the long-disused hangman’s trapdoor upstairs.

  Four days ago, the two projects we’ve met to discuss were the chief goals of my administration (after reforming the public school system). Now they seem like obscure public works projects I read about in the back pages of Newsweek. This is the kind of meeting where I wish the only two people on my side would get off of it. One ally is black, the other white, and neither seems to realize that his impassioned rant will only hurt our chances of securing the votes and funding required to get this park built.

  Not that I give a damn at this moment.

  For the first hour, all I could think about was what Lincoln Turner told me in the juke near Anna’s Bottom, and the deductions I made afterward. Then Sheriff Dennis called my cell. When I stepped out of the meeting, Dennis told me that, not long before, someone identifying himself only as “Mr. Brown” had called his office and insisted on speaking to the sheriff. When Walker got on the line, “Mr. Brown” told him that on the previous night, he’d witnessed a pickup truck bearing the Royal Oil Company logo smash the front door of the Concordia Beacon with its right front fender. Then he’d seen two men get out, one of whom appeared to be carrying a large backpack. They entered the newspaper, and moments later, an intense glow became visible through the smashed door. About a minute later, the arsonists had emerged and fled the scene in the truck.

  “Did you ask this ‘Mr. Brown’ if he recognized them?” I asked.

  “He said he did,” Walker answered in the tone of a man telling a good joke. “He said one was Randall Regan, and the other was Brody Royal himself. Those were his exact words. Himself.”

  This news actually lifted me out of my trance. “He told you Brody Royal torched the Concordia Beacon?”

  “Yep. What do you think I ought to do about that tip?”

  “Have you told anybody else about it?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not even your deputies?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t. Don’t say anything about it to anybody. I’ll get back to you about this later. Okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  I remembered then that Walker had no idea about the existence of Henry’s “Huggy Bear.” “I do, Walker. This could be important.”

  After hanging up with Sheriff Dennis, I returned to my Kafkaesque civic meeting. At this moment, a white Republican is trying to reassure his colleagues that a rebuilt slave market is really “just a king-size diorama, like the ones they have at Civil War battlefield parks,” while a black Democrat makes sweeping statements about forcing white elites to acknowledge the greatest crime in American history. My fantasy about the old hangman’s trapdoor upstairs gives way to a compulsion to offer dueling pistols to each side and let them shoot it out. Or better yet … the silver-handled straight razor Pithy Nolan gave me yesterday is still in my inside coat pocket. I never took it out last night, and the thing is so slim that I forgot it was there until now. What would these blowhards do if I pulled out the “Lady’s Best Friend” and sliced off their ties just below their half-Windsors?

  As I try to banish this thought, one of the saner supervi
sors suggests that we should suspend discussion of the slave market and move on to the intentional flooding of St. Catherine’s Creek, which flows through the middle of Natchez, but she’s instantly shouted down. Apparently even the problems of eminent domain pale next to those involving race.

  When my cell phone vibrates on the table yet again, two selectmen glare at me, almost daring me to check the LCD. Leaning forward, I see Caitlin’s name.

  “Just tell me this!” snaps a supervisor. “If this is such an all-fired great idea, why hasn’t somebody on the South Carolina coast started rebuilding slave ships? Huh? Tell me that!”

  Caitlin’s text message reads:

  Call me NOW. Urgent!

  Lifting my left hand in apology, I say, “Excuse me again, ladies and gentlemen. Family emergency.” With a screech of chair legs, I get to my feet and decamp to the anteroom, where I speed-dial Caitlin.

  “Are you alone?” she asks, her voice quavering.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I think I just killed somebody.”

  My chest goes so tight that my next breath takes conscious effort. “What do you mean? With your car?”

  “No. I just interviewed Brody Royal’s daughter, Katy Regan.”

  “What?”

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry. I just felt that I couldn’t write the story without at least trying to talk to her.”

  My intimate knowledge of Caitlin’s ambition fills me with foreboding. “What did you do?”

  “I ambushed her. I know it was wrong, but it was the only way. Henry had interviewed her about Pooky before, and it hadn’t upset her, so I figured it was okay. She let me into her house quite happily—”

  “Jesus. You know Randall Regan is a killer.”

  “I know. Please just listen. She seemed fine with it, seriously. Even when I told her why I was really there. I figured she might be ready open up to another woman, you know?”

  Cold dread closes around my heart. “What happened, Caitlin?”

  “It went fine for a while, and then she passed out right in front of me. She’d taken an overdose of pills before I got there.”

  “Is she alive?”

  “She’s in a coma at St. Catherine’s Hospital.”

  I blow out a rush of air and force myself to start breathing again. “Caitlin, you—”

  “I know,” she says again. “I should have told you.”

  “No, you should have waited. Christ, this is a disaster.”

  “Not totally.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d rather not say anything on the phone. I’m almost outside the Selectmen’s Building. Can you come out and talk for a second?”

  I feel like screaming at her, but that’s not going to solve anything. And if she knows anything that can mitigate this tragedy, I need to hear it. “How close are you?”

  “I’ll be out front in twenty seconds.”

  “I’m on my way down.”

  THE INTERIOR OF CAITLIN’S car is twenty degrees warmer than the outside air, but the voice of the disturbed woman coming from Caitlin’s Treo chills me more deeply than any wind. Katy Royal Regan’s voice as she accuses her psychiatrist of using her for sex sounds like that of a little girl shaken awake in the midst of a nightmare.

  “Let me skip ahead,” Caitlin says, fiddling with the phone’s controls. “Right here. She’s talking about the Bone Tree that Henry wrote about in his journals. That’s a killing ground that dates back to Indian and slave times, but the Klan also used it, and they dumped bodies there. Just listen to this shit.”

  Caitlin presses PLAY.

  “Who took Pooky to that tree?”

  “I was always going to tell,” says the childlike voice. “But I have to wait until Daddy passes. Then he can’t hurt me.”

  “Katy—”

  “Shh! He might hear us. Daddy can hear from miles away sometimes. You know … before Henry came and talked to me, all this was blank. Everything had fallen down Dr. Borgen’s hole. But then it started to come back. First the bathtub … Daddy killed Mama in the bath. Did you know that? I thought he was just talking to her—and he was. But later I figured it out. He was holding her head under the water while he talked.” There was a pause. “Then, when you called a few minutes ago, I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s too late.”

  “What do you mean? Too late for what?”

  “For me. For Katy-Poo.”

  “Jesus,” I mutter. “This woman belongs in a hospital.”

  “Oh, yeah. Just listen.”

  “Katy. Whatever you were waiting to tell, you can tell me. Now. No one will hurt you anymore. I’ll make sure of that.”

  “Will you promise not to tell?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  “Stick a needle in my eye.”

  “Daddy did it.”

  I clench the door handle so hard my arm shakes.

  “Did what?” Caitlin presses. “What did Daddy do, Katy?”

  “Like Jesus.”

  “Whoa,” I breathe, shuddering at the implication of these words. She must be talking about the crucifixion that Henry has always heard rumors about.

  “Did your father kill Pooky, Katy?”

  “She nodded right here,” Caitlin says in a taut voice.

  “And Dr. Leland. He killed Mr. Henry … and that colored nurse, too.”

  “Oh my God. Does she say Viola’s name?”

  “No. She slides out of her chair right about here. Totally unconscious.”

  “Katy?” Caitlin cries on the recording.

  The sound of a blunt impact follows.

  “Katy! Katy Regan! Can you hear me?” Silence. “How long have you been drinking? Did you take something?”

  I hear a groan but no coherent words. Then there’s a bang, and heavy footsteps on hardwood.

  “Right here I saw the empty bottle of pills by the fireplace.”

  “Who are you?” yells a male voice, one I recognize from earlier today.

  Caitlin stops the recording. “That’s Randall Regan. He came at me, Penn. He would have killed me if he could. I had to fire a shot into the floor to stop him. He got my tape recorder. It fell out of my purse. But at least we have this.” She holds up her phone in triumph. “So, what do you think? As a lawyer?”

  I shake my head in disbelief. “As your future husband, I think you’re crazy. As a lawyer … it’s the closest anyone’s gotten to real evidence in the Albert Norris case.”

  “The Norris case! Penn, Katy Royal just said her father killed at least seven people, if you count the plane crash—including Viola Turner.”

  “I know,” I murmur, troubled by something I can’t quite pin down. “Five minutes ago, I was sure Lincoln Turner had euthanized his mother. Or screwed up trying to revive her.”

  “Based on pure conjecture. That’s a theory, and a damned complicated one.” She shakes the phone in my face. “This is Royal’s daughter saying he killed Viola. On tape. Or in digital memory, whatever.”

  “She didn’t use Viola’s name.”

  Caitlin’s mouth forms an O of disbelief. “What other ‘colored nurse’ could she be talking about?”

  “But my scenario explained Dad’s behavior. His willingness to take the fall.”

  “Because he believes Lincoln is his son?”

  “Right.”

  She gives an exasperated sigh. “Maybe Tom does believe that. Maybe Lincoln believes it, too. That explains his willingness to take a DNA test. But I don’t. No way is Tom the father of that man.”

  “Why not?”

  “Logic, for one thing. You told me Lincoln is blacker than Viola was, right? Tom’s ancestors were Scots-English. He’s as light as I am, and that’s saying something.”

  “Lincoln says that’s possible. He’s checked the genetics of it.”

  “He’s a disbarred lawyer with zero objectivity! I’d prefer the
opinion of an actual geneticist on that.” Her voice gains certainty as she goes on. “Lincoln claims your father has known about him for years, right? Again—no way. Tom wouldn’t have kept that secret for forty years. He would have owned up to it.”

  “I’m not sure. Dad has his secrets. He’s never told me what happened to him in Korea.”

  “A lot of veterans are like that. If you’d been drafted to go fight somewhere, he’d have told you about Korea. Did Lincoln say or imply that your mother knows anything about him?”

  “No.”

  She gives me a pointed look. “Do you plan on asking Peggy about Lincoln?”

  “Hell, no! Not if I can avoid it.”

  “Let me give you the female perspective. Viola was terminally ill. She’d had a hard life, and Lincoln’s probably wasn’t much better. At some point, somebody probably told him he was someone else’s kid. Maybe the stepfather. Lincoln would have confronted Viola, asked who his real father was. What’s she going to say? Your father was a Klan rapist from Mississippi? The math is the same as a pregnancy by your father, you know. And a black woman impregnated by a Klansman has a lot better reason to keep a boy’s paternity secret than one pregnant by a white physician she loved.” Caitlin shakes her head with conviction. “No, she lied. She blamed a one-night stand, a long-gone boyfriend from Chicago, something. Because if she’d told Lincoln his father was a rich white doctor, Tom would have heard from the boy long before now. But he didn’t.”

  Before I can interject anything, she says, “But later—after she got cancer—she was overwhelmed by guilt. She’s facing an early death and failure as a mother. Her son’s a disbarred lawyer, no prospects. She wants to leave him some security, give him the best life she can.”

  “So she tells him Dad is his father?”

  “Yep. But it’s not what she told Lincoln that’s important. It’s what she told Tom that matters.”

  The heat of recognition flushes my skin.

  “You know your father. Atticus Finch with a stethoscope. If Viola told him they’d had a son that she’d kept secret for forty years to protect your family—what would he do?”

  “Whatever Viola asked him to.”