The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  “Mom . . . do I know everything you know?”

  Peggy closed her eyes and thought of Tom running through the night. Every fiber of her heart urged her to stand, take Penn in her arms, and do all she could to make him understand the true stakes of their situation. But she had sworn to Tom not to reveal her knowledge without his permission, not even to save his life. She hadn’t wanted to make that promise, but she had. Earlier she’d considered breaking her oath, but now, with Penn like this . . . she knew Tom had been right.

  “I can’t help you,” she said simply. “I wish I could, but your father is the only one who knows what really happened back in those dark days.”

  “I’m not talking about the old days,” Penn said, his eyes leveled at her.

  Peggy’s heart fluttered with fear. After taking a slow breath, she folded her hands together and spoke with absolute conviction. “Son, the violence that exploded this week was like the bombs the work crews used to find in Germany when they worked on the streets after the war. It’s been waiting in this ground ever since the sixties, rusting away. Sooner or later, somebody was going to sink a shovel into the wrong place. That was Henry Sexton. And once he shoveled out enough dirt . . . nothing was going to stop the explosion.”

  Penn shook his head, his eyes unmerciful. “That’s not what happened, Mom. Henry had been digging around that bomb for years and it never went off. It was Viola Turner who triggered it. And why? Why did she come home? To die? Maybe. More likely, it was to make Dad—”

  “Stop!” Peggy hissed, and a door slammed shut in her mind. “I won’t listen to that kind of talk. Even if you’re right, I don’t care to discuss it.”

  “Mom, we have to—”

  She shook her head and looked resolutely down at Annie’s face. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. If we do.”

  “If we’re not going to discuss that, why are we even talking?”

  Peggy took another deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “I know there’s a pistol in your bag. What are you planning to do with it?”

  He looked over at the suede pouch. “I’m not going to hurt myself, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “It’s not. I’m worried you’ll try to hurt someone else with it. Because of what happened to Caitlin.”

  Penn shrugged angrily. “I don’t know who killed her.”

  Peggy gave him a long look.

  “Mom, I’ve been carrying that gun since Monday. None of us has any business leaving this house unarmed.”

  “None of us has any business leaving this house period. Not tonight. And especially you. Your daughter needs you.”

  Penn walked up and stood over Annie, looking down with a mixture of love and grief in his eyes. “Where’s Dad, Mom?”

  “Dear God, son. If I knew, I would tell you. Don’t you know that?”

  Penn looked over at her then, his eyes more lost than she could ever remember. “I don’t,” he said. “That’s what all this has done to us. What Dad has done to us. And now Caitlin’s dead.” He started to continue, then checked himself. His mouth opened and closed as though he were testing the function of his jaw.

  Thank God, Peggy thought, seeing confusion in his eyes. The drug is finally working.

  “Tom still might not know what’s happened to Caitlin,” she thought aloud. “He could be lying unconscious beside a road somewhere. He could have been kidnapped from that hospital.”

  Penn made a contemptuous sound and flipped his hand in the air. “The security cameras filmed him walking out. He put on a doctor’s coat and . . . sneaked out.”

  Penn sounded like Tom after four or five whiskeys. Peggy started to worry that he might hurt himself if he simply passed out.

  “Why don’t you sit down? You’re exhausted.”

  “Dad knows what happened, all right. Earlier today Walt and I were working together. He was glad to take my calls. But now . . . he won’t answer. That tells me he’s hooked up with Dad again.”

  “I hope that’s true! I just pray they’re not dead in a ditch somewhere.”

  A snort of laughter came from Penn’s nose. “No chance of that,” he slurred. “If those two get killed in this mess, they’ll be the last to die. No . . . he and Walt are sitting pretty somewhere . . . playing whatever game they’ve been playing from the start. Unless Walt doesn’t know the game either. He might be just like the rest of them, acting out of blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t exist . . . who never really did. Like Drew, Melba, even Caitlin. And . . .”

  “And what?”

  Penn shook his head. “I forgot what I was saying. I was thinking about the bone creek.”

  “You mean the Bone Tree?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Penn looked at the floor and shook his head like some despairing drunk. “I had to call her father,” he said, wavering on his feet. “Did I tell you that? I called the estimable Mr. John Masters to tell him his daughter had been murdered.”

  “I know that was hard.”

  Penn’s glassy eyes found hers again. “Do you know what he said to me? What the great John Masters said to me . . . after I told him I’d let his favorite daughter get killed?”

  Peggy shook her head.

  Penn opened his mouth but no sound emerged. She was about to slide Annie’s head from her lap when he turned in place and fell across the club chair beside his desk.

  He was out.

  As carefully as she could, Peggy reached into her pocket, took out her cell phone, and dialed Drew Elliott’s home number.

  After three rings, a reassuring voice said, “Dr. Elliott.”

  “Drew, this is Peggy Cage.”

  “Oh, Peggy. I’m so sorry about Caitlin. Is everything all right over there? Can I do anything to help?”

  “Actually . . . you can. Penn isn’t handling Caitlin’s passing very well. I slipped him three of my sleeping pills and got him down, but it’s going to take more than that to keep him asleep until morning. I’m worried he’s going to wake up in the middle of the night and go hunting for someone.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right over.”

  “Thank you, Drew. We’re in the basement.”

  “Have you had any word from Tom?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “I’m afraid not. But sit tight. I’m on my way.”

  “Bring something strong, Drew. Penn’s just like his father. It’s not easy to get him angry, but once he is, there’s no stopping him.”

  CHAPTER 77

  WALT GARRITY SAT half-conscious in the backseat of a massive silver Bentley, Tom’s head cradled in his lap. The only light came from the dashboard, but the muscular shoulders of the young man called Xerxes looked a yard wide in the passenger seat ahead. To Xerxes’s left, his more conventionally sized father, Darius, gently steered the vehicle through the night without benefit of headlights.

  It had taken Tom’s last conscious effort to guide Walt to the front gate of Corinth, which was one of the most magnificent plantations Walt had ever seen. Eighty-eight acres of virgin land right in the middle of Natchez, fenced from prying eyes and owned by a woman who had loved Tom for more than forty years. No better sanctuary existed in the world for the two fugitives, and they’d been lucky to reach it at all. Only moments after the great iron gate came in sight, Tom had finally collapsed from exhaustion.

  As Darius and Xerxes carried Tom from Drew’s pickup truck to the gleaming Bentley, Walt had felt lost in a dream. Once inside the car, he’d nearly fallen asleep himself. Now, after what he judged to be a slow ride of about a minute, the heavy Bentley came to a gentle stop like a boat settling against a dock.

  Walt leaned over to make sure that Tom was still breathing, then looked between the shoulders of the two men in front and saw a pair of white columns as thick as oak trees beyond the car’s winged hood ornament.

  “Home safe,” Darius announced from behind the wheel. “Tell Doc hang on jes’ half a minute.”

  Walt felt a cold rush of air as
both back doors opened and Tom was slid off his lap. Tom groaned but did not wake. Walt clambered out of the luxurious backseat and trudged up the steps of a Gone with the Wind–era palace. As Darius and Xerxes approached a great walnut door with Tom in their arms, the door receded before them as if by magic.

  Walt followed the men into some sort of entry hall, where they laid Tom out on a worn red sofa. Thirty seconds later, a door at one end of the hall slowly opened, revealing an old woman seated in a motorized wheelchair. Behind her stood a black woman who had clearly once been beautiful, but now looked as stern as any general’s batman. The wheelchair whirred forward, and in the dim light Walt gradually made out its occupant’s features. The woman was at least ten years older than he, but age had not stolen the refinement from her face. Her paper-thin skin was the color of bone china, and Walt could see that it had once been soft as cream. The eyes beneath her high brow held many things, but most of all intelligence. They settled upon Walt and seemed to take in the whole of his being at a glance. Then her gaze moved to Tom.

  “Can he survive without a hospital?” she asked.

  “For a while,” Walt replied. “If his heart doesn’t give out. He needs medicine, though. Insulin, antibiotics, nitro—God knows what else. And it sure wouldn’t hurt to get his partner here to look at him. I was a medic in Korea, but that was a long time ago.”

  The woman looked back at him, her eyes filled with something he couldn’t quite make out. “Was it? To me that was yesterday.”

  Before Walt could analyze this, she said, “Take Dr. Cage upstairs, Darius. My old chamber, if you please.”

  The two men moved as one to obey.

  “He’ll get all he needs here, Captain Garrity,” the woman said. “I’ll see to that. You need rest now. Can you make it up the stairs? Or do you need to use my elevator?”

  Walt was now certain he’d fallen into a dream, or maybe a hallucination. He blinked several times, waiting to awaken in a gully off Highway 61.

  “Who are you?” he asked dully, but What are you? was the question that ran through his mind.

  “I’m Pythia Nolan. You may call me Pithy.”

  “Pithy,” Walt repeated. “Yes, ma’am.”

  The spectral woman reached into a bag attached to the arm of her chair and brought out some sort of mask, which the stern maid fitted over her face with an elastic strap. Then she pointed up the hallway like a military officer ordering a charge.

  Walt followed blindly, glad to be only an infantryman once again.

  WALT AWAKENED SOME TIME later in the half darkness of a guest room on an upper floor of Pithy Nolan’s great mansion. Darius and Xerxes had installed Tom in a hospital bed just up the hall from Pithy’s bedroom. When Walt found him, his first thought was that he was watching his old friend die.

  It had been fifty years since he’d done any real medicine, and back then most of his patients had been soldiers in their twenties with various holes in their bodies. Treating a wounded seventy-three-year-old man with a multitude of co-morbid conditions was far beyond his abilities. Drew Elliott had done a good job with Tom’s shoulder wound on Tuesday, but Tom belonged in an ICU now, not on the second floor of a decaying antebellum mansion.

  Still, you worked with what you had. Afraid to risk calling Dr. Elliott yet again, Walt dispatched Xerxes on a dangerous mission to Tom’s clinic to retrieve a list of medicines and equipment. After the young man succeeded, Walt caught Tom up on his cardiac and diabetic drugs, then hung an IV “banana bag” by duct-taping it to the four-poster bed. But what really worried him were the rales he’d heard when he put a stethoscope to Tom’s chest. Wet rales could be signs of pulmonary edema secondary to congestive heart failure, which Tom had experienced long before the crisis of the past few days. Walt had little choice but to pray that the diuretic he’d administered would drain some of the fluid off Tom’s heart.

  Pithy Nolan had twice driven her electric wheelchair into the room, but Tom had been asleep both times. The matron’s breathing sounded even more labored than Tom’s, but her oxygen mask seemed to give her some relief. If Walt was honest with himself, the old lady gave him the creeps. She seemed almost incorporeal, masked and wrapped in her voluminous blanket, yet her love for Tom could not be questioned.

  Xerxes remained outside the door like a sentry, ready to run whatever errand Walt might command. Walt had already sent his father, Darius, to Walmart to buy four more TracFones. No matter what course of action he and Tom took now, they were going to need secure lines of communication to get out of this mess alive.

  It was one of these phones he used to call Griffith Mackiever when he checked his old burn phone and saw that the embattled superintendent of state police had tried to reach him only minutes earlier.

  “What’s the situation?” Walt asked when Mackiever answered.

  “We’ll get to that,” Mackiever said. “Did you check the GPS coordinates on Forrest’s car around the time the Masters girl was killed?”

  “Why?”

  “I figure he was within eight miles of that Bone Tree when she was shot.”

  “That’s about right, I’d guess.”

  “I’d like to prove Forrest killed her, but we also have a videotape of Ms. Masters leaving the Crossroads Café with a black kid.”

  “I’ll go you one better. I saw Ozan drive away from the swamp in that kid’s truck. And I found blood on the ground at the edge of the water.”

  “What? Christ, Walt. I could do something with that.”

  “A statement from a fugitive cop killer? Wake up, son. You’d be a lot better off using that Katrina video I gave you.”

  “I’m working on it. I haven’t had any luck reaching my former friends in state government. I think my only choice now is the feds.”

  “I agree. What’s happening at the Bone Tree now? Who’s got control of the scene?”

  “It was shaping up to be a jurisdictional dispute, but then the FBI went in there like the goddamned Marines and cordoned off about twenty acres. A U.S. attorney issued some kind of special directive under the Patriot Act, and they ran the goddamn Lusahatcha County sheriff right out of there. The senior agent is Agent John Kaiser out of the New Orleans field office.”

  “That’s who you want to see, Mack. He and Penn Cage know each other. Do you know where Penn is now?”

  “They flew him back to Natchez in the Lusahatcha County air unit. He and his family are under twenty-four-hour FBI protection at his residence.”

  Walt sighed in relief. “Okay, good.” Walt hesitated as Tom stirred in the bed, but he didn’t awaken. “Are you going to go see Kaiser now?”

  “That’s my plan. I wish to God I didn’t have to bust open this Katrina sniping mess in order to do it. But I guess that’s the only way to take Forrest down.”

  “There’s always my derringer.”

  “Don’t even mention that.” Mackiever was silent for a few seconds. “I tell you, Walt, when I think about what happened this afternoon—those Eagles killing Sonny Thornfield right in that jail, while it was under FBI control—I wonder if even the feds can stop Forrest. It’s like he’s three steps ahead of us all, no matter what we do.”

  “No,” Walt said. “He’s scrambling just like the rest of us. Worse, he’s got dissension in his ranks.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Trust me. Him and his uncle, Snake, don’t exactly see eye to eye. Sooner or later, one of them’s going to have to go.”

  “Not soon enough for me. I’m gonna talk straight to you, Walt. I’ve got a bad feeling about those Knoxes. They remind me of a couple of crews back in Texas, in the old days. I don’t think even the FBI scares them much. And I think that rather than let themselves be taken, they’ll try to take down everybody. I think a lot of people could die.”

  “What are you saying, Mack?” Walt asked, but he already knew.

  He and the LSP chief had been Texas Rangers in an era when they’d gone after certain outlaws with the tacit understanding th
at they were not to return with a prisoner. And to Walt’s ear, Mackiever’s voice had echoed into the present from that time.

  “It’s not 1955 anymore, Griff. Not even 1965.”

  “You could have fooled me, these past coupla days.”

  Walt listened to the phone hissing in his ear. Mackiever wasn’t speaking hypothetically. He saw a malignant cancer eating his department from within, and he wanted a fellow Ranger to rip it out by the roots.

  “I’ve got a wife now,” Walt said.

  “I know. I’ve got no right to ask anything of you. But the situation is fluid, and I just want you to know that . . . if anything were to happen to Knox, I can promise you’d have an angel on your shoulder in the aftermath. I’d move heaven and earth to protect you. You and Dr. Cage both.”

  “I hear you. And my advice is, take everything you’ve got to Special Agent Kaiser.”

  Mackiever was silent for several seconds. Then he said, “I’ll do that, Cap’n. Just don’t forget what I said.”

  The connection went dead.

  Walt stared at Tom for a long time after he set the phone down. Then he reached over to the bedside table and opened a box of Tom’s precious cigars. Xerxes had retrieved them earlier when he’d gotten the drugs from Tom’s clinic. Walt knew that lighting one would be bad for his friend’s lungs, but he needed to settle his nerves. He also knew Tom would thank him for the vicarious pleasure he would experience upon waking. Biting off the end of a Partagas, Walt picked up the lighter Xerxes had brought in and lit the cigar, savoring the flavor of one of the few luxuries Tom Cage allowed himself each day.

  Tom stirred, but thanks to a hefty dose of oxycodone, he did not awaken.

  Walt smoked thoughtfully, watching the man he’d fought with like a brother through the killing snows of Korea. In the deep shadows, he turned his mind away from the war and thumbed back through the years he’d spent chasing desperate men across Texas, first on a horse, then in motor vehicles of various types. He recalled times that he’d followed the rules, and other times when he’d thrown the book away and simply done what was necessary. He wasn’t proud of those occasions but he wasn’t ashamed, either. While Tom slept fitfully, Walt wondered whether John Kaiser and the FBI could take on Forrest Knox—who personified the endemic corruption of an entire state—and win. Even if they did, how many more people would become casualties in that war? Caitlin Masters’s death had already come close to destroying Tom. As the cigar slowly burned down, Walt pondered Colonel Mackiever’s final words, and what it might cost him personally to relieve the world of the burden of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest Knox.