The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  CHAPTER 51

  “HELICOPTER,” SAID JORDAN Glass, cocking her ear to the wind. “Sounds like a JetRanger.”

  Caitlin spun around, scanning the tops of the cypress trees. She saw nothing but looming clouds in the gray morning sky, but Carl Sims was clearly impressed by this deduction, staring at Jordan with a mixture of curiosity and admiration.

  Caitlin heard nothing at first. Then she caught the whup-whup-whup of rotor blades slicing the air. The sound grew steadily louder, and suddenly the engine was roaring and the chopper came in over the tree line, pointed straight at them.

  “Is that Danny McDavitt?” she asked.

  “Who else?” Carl pulled the women toward his truck as the JetRanger flared and settled into the dirt clearing in a roaring cloud of dust.

  Caitlin instinctively looked at Jordan for guidance, but the photographer was already running in a crouch toward the helicopter. She obviously knew that the most comfortable place in relation to a chopper was inside the machine, not out of it.

  Once Carl shut Caitlin inside and she put on the headset Danny McDavitt handed her, the noise dropped considerably. Danny was a handsome man with a craggy face, close-cropped steel-gray hair, and kind eyes that missed nothing. He was basically a more rugged version of John Kaiser. Pulling off her headset, Caitlin motioned for Jordan to do the same, then gave her a sanitized version of their pilot’s personal history, taking care to leave out a few details that had become the feast of local gossips some time ago. She described Danny as a retired air force major—and decorated veteran of Afghanistan—who’d married the widow of a local physician. Jordan looked as if she wanted to ask for more details, but Carl was signaling that they should put their headsets back on.

  “I appreciate you helping us out, Major,” Caitlin said into her headset.

  “All we’re doing is a routine marijuana-crop search,” Danny said with a wink in his voice. “No thanks necessary.”

  “Can we set down and pick some if we find any?” Jordan asked.

  Carl Sims laughed, then leaned between the seats and double-checked that both women were strapped in. Satisfied, he nodded to McDavitt, who pushed forward on the collective and lifted the bird into the air.

  Long shafts of sunlight streamed down through breaks high in the clouds, but there was a gray wall to the east.

  “Do you think it’s going to rain?” Caitlin asked.

  “In an hour or two,” Danny said. “If you go into the swamp today, you’re going to get wet.”

  Carl handed Danny the map and pointed at it, probably at the X, Caitlin figured. Danny nodded and banked to the west. Caitlin saw patches of grassy land between the cypresses below, and spooked game ran everywhere. At least thirty deer burst from cover as they roared over a dense thicket, followed by enormous black animals that looked like giant hogs.

  “They hunt those damn pigs from horses at Valhalla,” said Carl. “With spears. Some of ’em weigh eight hundred pounds.”

  Caitlin was going ask Carl about Valhalla, which she’d read about in Henry Sexton’s notebooks, but Danny said, “Carl’s just jealous. The farmers around here pay him to shoot those hogs at night with his sniper rifle, to keep them from eating their crops. Every one a hunter gets is less money in his pocket.”

  “True enough,” Carl admitted.

  “Hey, look!” Jordan cried, pointing down at a wide circle of water.

  Caitlin saw an old man in a green johnboat staring up at them with what appeared to be shock and even fear on his face.

  “What’s he doing?” Jordan asked.

  Carl laughed. “That’s Mose Tyler. He’s a local fisherman. A little like your man Toby Rambin. I think we surprised Mose setting out a treble-hook trotline, which is illegal in these waters. He probably thinks we’re game and fish wardens. He doesn’t see so good anymore.”

  Danny ascended a hundred feet and left the fisherman in peace. Caitlin was about to ask Carl about Valhalla—and the Knox family—when Carl said, “I asked my daddy about that story you told me last night. About a black woman from Athens Point who got raped out in the swamp. He’d heard a little about it, but he knew another preacher who knew the details.”

  “What’s this about?” Jordan asked. “You didn’t tell me this, did you?”

  Caitlin shook her head.

  “A brother from down here married a colored girl from Chicago back in the early sixties,” Carl said. “She was real light-skinned—so light that some folks around here thought she was white. Well, for a while it wasn’t nothing but dirty looks and such. But in 1963, the Klan took notice. One night they kidnapped the couple from their house. They blindfolded them and put them in boats and took them out to this cypress that the old-timers call the Bone Tree.”

  Caitlin felt as though her body temperature had dropped twenty degrees. Why had Carl mentioned the Bone Tree? Was he simply passing on a shocking story that his father had learned last night, confident that McDavitt wouldn’t suspect any connection to their present search? Or had Carl already told the pilot what they were really after?

  “They tied the husband to the tree and started beating him with bean poles,” Carl went on. “They beat him bad, and while it was going on they started hollering things. Well, the wife finally figured out they were beating her man for marrying a white woman! She started yelling that they were making a mistake, but the Klan boys wouldn’t listen. Finally she’s trying to tear them off her husband, screaming, ‘He ain’t done nothing wrong! I’m a nigger, too! I’m a nigger, too!’”

  “Jesus,” Jordan breathed. “That really happened?”

  “Not five miles from where we are, if this map is right. And after they tired of beating the husband, they raped the wife. All of ’em. The husband ended up dying. And believe it or not, they dumped the woman on the road. They’d beat her too, and she had no idea where she’d been. And of course the sheriff at that time had no interest in pursuing that crime. Since it turned out that the woman was black, the law didn’t even see it as a crime. Not the unwritten law, anyway, which was the only one that mattered back then.”

  Caitlin suddenly felt dislocated from her surroundings. “Does your father know where we can find this woman?”

  Carl’s helmet shook back and forth. “I don’t think he’ll tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “The woman’s pastor says she has no idea who attacked her, and more important, no idea where that tree was.”

  “Caitlin?” Jordan asked over the headset. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m sorry if I was too coarse,” Carl said. “I forgot about . . . well . . .”

  Caitlin held up her hand to reassure the deputy, but she knew the gesture wouldn’t help Carl. Deputy Sims had been guarding her when she was kidnapped only months ago. And though Caitlin hadn’t been raped herself, she had been forced to listen while a woman separated from her by only a thin partition had been repeatedly violated.

  Caitlin took out her Treo. It showed one bar. She’d received eight text messages since leaving Natchez, but all were from employees of the Examiner. None from Walt Garrity, and none from Penn, either. A wave of guilt made her face flush. Should she try to call him? If she did, what could she say? That last night she’d had the power to send Penn to his father’s side, but now it was too late and Tom might well be dead. No . . .

  Looking across the chopper’s deck, she saw Jordan studying her with deep concern. The photographer’s eyebrows went up in a silent question: Are you okay?

  Caitlin shoved the Treo back into her pocket and looked out the chopper’s window again. There was a lot more water than earth beneath them now, and McDavitt seemed to have slowed their forward speed quite a bit. After a few seconds, Caitlin realized he was following a game fence that zigzagged between the trees. Somewhere not far away, she realized, stood the tree where Jimmy Revels and numberless others had died, where a woman she did not know had watched her husband beaten to death, and where Frank Knox might have hidden the key to the assassi
nation of a president.

  The Bone Tree.

  EXCHANGING THE MUSTY OLD city sedan for my Audi S4 was like climbing into a speedboat after poling a raft for two days. As I drove west toward the Mississippi River bridge, my mind downshifted into the automatic mode I learned first as a law student and then a prosecutor. While I don’t have a photographic memory, I do have an uncanny ability to retain blocks of text, particularly when presented in the form of cases or reports.

  The assessment of the Knoxes John Kaiser e-mailed me last night is a perfect example. Because it was filled with detail that might be useful in today’s interrogations, my brain recorded it as accurately as a tape recorder, despite my fatigue. Kaiser didn’t write in the sterile, jargon-heavy prose of an FBI report, but the language of a personal journal. I suspect he developed this habit during his stint in the Investigative Support Unit, which focuses heavily on human psychology and cares little about the formality of the rules-based bureaucracy of which it’s nominally a part.

  So far as I can discover, the root of the Knox pathology begins with Frank Knox’s grandfather, Nathan Bedford Forrest Knox. Nathan was an abusive sociopath who fought in the Spanish-American War. He took scalps during the fighting in Cuba and probably murdered several people in the decades afterward. Nathan had two sons: Nathan Jr. (killed at Belleau Wood in 1918) and Elam (who fathered Frank and Snake). Nathan Jr. took some German scalps before he was killed, for which he received only minor discipline.

  Elam Knox became a lay preacher, a sometime farmer and trapper, a wifebeater, and a child abuser. He was decorated for bravery during WWI, and his army record notes that he was a savage trench fighter. There are no records of trophy taking by Elam Knox, but he probably carried on the tradition, because the practice showed up in both his sons, and with a vengeance.

  Elam’s son Frank was probably sexually abused by his father. He was beaten often and had a generally violent childhood. Frank led a life of petty crime, had constant run-ins with the police, yet he never spent more than a night in jail. There were burglaries, probable rapes, and countless assaults. Frank was ejected from several high school football games for fighting. He was about to be charged with rape when World War II came along. The local authorities were so glad to be rid of him, they let him enlist in the Marines. Not even the victim’s family complained.

  Frank was sent to the Pacific along with schoolmates Glenn Morehouse and Sonny Thornfield, and there he flowered. Frank was a born killer, and there was plenty to be done on the islands. The more brutal the soldier, the better his officers liked him, and Frank Knox had no equal. He racked up medals faster than most men did blisters on their feet. But Frank didn’t merely take human trophies—as his father and grandfather had—he started a business selling them to the Merchant Marine. He and his buddies would bleach the skulls of Japanese soldiers they’d killed and sell them to sailors for a hefty profit. They also carved trinkets out of other bones, made bracelets out of teeth, took ears, cut off foreskins, anything that would sell.

  Snake Knox was eight years younger than his brother and consequently served in Korea. Part of the time he spent as a sniper, but Snake also fought hand to hand. His army record contains several notes about one-man incursions he made behind the Chinese lines. One night a foxhole buddy told Snake he was getting frostbite because his boots couldn’t keep out the cold. That night, Snake sneaked through the Chinese lines and brought back a pair of boots with the feet still in them. He said he’d left the feet in to keep the leather warm.

  Given this history, it’s no surprise that when the Knoxes turned their hands to racial violence, they would use the same tactics they’d employed in Asia. The mutilation of Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis by removal of their service tattoos is a particularly egregious example, but the Knoxes employed torture against multiple victims, and even against whites who they felt had betrayed them.

  Frank Knox’s second son, Forrest, became the first Knox to conceal his savage nature under a mask of refinement. But evidence of the Knox pathology abounds during Forrest’s younger years, particularly while he served as a LRRP in Vietnam. While most Lurps living behind enemy lines avoided contact and reported on enemy movements, Forrest did the opposite. If he thought the odds were remotely in his favor (which might mean two dozen VC regulars against a six-man LRRP team), he would either set up an ambush and take them out or follow the VC patrol and pick them off one by one. A few of his men complained, but any soldier who showed initiative and upped the body count was protected in Vietnam. Forrest gave MACV intel they couldn’t get any other way, and several superiors misused his unit as a hunter-killer team (a not uncommon occurrence with LRRP units, which had a 400:1 kill ratio).

  The classic Knox pathology was revealed in a killing ritual Forrest observed in combat. He carried a bag of Kennedy half-dollars in his ruck, and always left a coin in his dead enemy’s mouth. Pretty soon, the VC in his area believed some kind of ghost or demon was operating there. Command didn’t think the coins were particularly crazy. It beat cutting off ears. Of course the army brass couldn’t know that the JFK coin was the talisman of the younger Double Eagle group members back in the States. Not that they would have cared. . . .

  A loud thunk startles me as my Audi ramps up onto the westbound bridge and the river opens a hundred feet beneath me, spreading right and left like a broad valley filled with liquid bronze. Suddenly the horizon is miles away rather than a few hundred yards, and the effect is like gulping cold water. I’m tempted to call Walker Dennis and find out whether he’s actually busted the Double Eagles for the planted methamphetamine, but I can’t take the chance. If anyone is monitoring his calls, I could find myself tied to a serious felony. With an impatient sigh, I force myself to focus on the remainder of Kaiser’s psychological assessment. I can wait five minutes to find out whether Snake Knox and Sonny Thornfield are about to be facing mandatory thirty-year sentences. If they are, I won’t need to try to take them apart by applying pressure to well-hidden emotional cracks. . . . I’ll have a legal bludgeon that would pucker the sphincter of a hardened con.

  God, let that be the case. . . .

  WALT DROVE SLOWLY PAST the Bouchard lake house for the second time. The GPS tracker had shown this as Forrest Knox’s current location, a fact supported by the state police cruiser parked beside a Mercedes convertible at the end of the home’s long driveway.

  Walt paid more attention to the house on this second pass. Though two stories tall, the structure appeared long and low. The modern design stood out strongly from the ranch houses and A-frames that dotted the shore on this side of Lake Concordia, especially its metal-clad walls, which gleamed in the winter sun. The name Bouchard had been painted in a festive script on a sign below the mailbox, which was the custom along this lake. Walt cursed Mackiever for the hundredth time for not bugging the interior of Knox’s cruiser. He wished he’d done it himself. If he had, then he would already know where Tom was being held—or at least his final fate. If he was damned lucky, it might turn out that Knox was holding him inside this luxury retreat.

  Since trees obscured his view of the Bouchard house, he shifted his gaze to the house next door. It was a typical ranch-style suburban built on a lot so narrow it didn’t even have a carport. Walt felt a rush of hope as he saw there were no vehicles parked at that house.

  An ideal observation post if ever I saw one, he thought, slowing to turn.

  CHAPTER 52

  BY THE TIME Forrest’s phone rang again, he sensed that something was wrong. He wasn’t sure what it might be, but he never doubted his intuition. As soon as he answered, he heard the high pitch of panic in Deputy Hunt’s voice.

  “Calm down, son,” Forrest said. “What happened?”

  “There’s no stash under the sheriff’s house!”

  “Bullshit,” Forrest said, his mind speeding through possibilities. Who the hell would have the nerve to rip off crystal meth from cops? “You must have missed it. Talk to whoever planted it.”

 
“I planted it. That’s how I know. It’s gone! All four bags.”

  Forrest thought about this. “How is that possible? Could anybody have seen you plant it?”

  “No, sir. No way. It was pitch-black.”

  “Somebody had to. What about Dennis himself?”

  “He was twenty miles away!”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He left for work ten minutes ago. His wife and kid left at the same time.”

  “Was anybody with you when you planted it?”

  “Kyle Allard drove me.”

  “Then Allard’s got it.”

  “I don’t think so, Colonel. Kyle ain’t crazy. And he knows he’d be crazy to cross you.”

  “Either Allard’s got it, or he warned Dennis about it.”

  “Due respect, sir . . . no way. Kyle hates the sheriff.”

  “Well, you talk to him, then. Tell him if he doesn’t come clean, I’ll have Captain Ozan cut it out of him. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir. Loud and clear. But this don’t make no damn sense.”

  Forrest hung up and speed-dialed Claude Devereux at his home in Vidalia. The phone rang six times, and then an answering machine picked up. Forrest listened to the old lawyer’s oily voice and waited for the beep.

  “Claude, this is Forrest. If you don’t call me back within five minutes, I’ll make sure you spend the few years you have left handling death row appeals pro bono from your cell in Angola. Have a nice day.”

  Forrest hung up.

  Twenty seconds later, Devereux returned the call.

  “Jesus,” said the Cajun, “you don’t have to get my blood pressure up like that.”

  “Take a goddamn pill, Claude. I need you to get down to the CPSO and advise some clients who are about to be questioned.”

  “You mean Snake and Sonny and the others?”