by Greg Iles
“You know it.” He lets out a cross between a sigh and a groan. “But between you and me . . . Buck was murdered.”
“Tell me how you know.”
“Shape of the wound, for one thing. Blunt force trauma by an object with linear edges, not something irregular like a rock. Second, I found dust down in the wound, in both the skin and the brain matter. All I had was my magnifying glass, now.”
“What kind of dust? Not sandstone?”
“Not sandstone. Brick dust, I’m pretty sure. Those old Natchez bricks. Reddish orange.”
I think about this. “You don’t think Buck could have fallen from a height onto one of those bricks?”
“Oh, he could have. Thing is, they ain’t got any bricks like that at that pirate cave. No bricks at all. Nothing ever got built out there. It’s just loess soil and Catahoula sandstone.”
“I guess there could be bricks out there, right? Taken out there by somebody? To bank a campfire or something?”
“Sure. But what are the odds that Buck would fall from a height onto one of the only couple of bricks at that whole place?”
“You’re right. I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”
Staticky silence stretches as I drive down the narrow asphalt line, which cuts like a cable through trees rising eighty feet on both sides of the road. “What are you thinking, Byron?”
“I been thinkin’ ’bout places where they do got them bricks. Lots of ’em.”
“I know one,” I tell him, remembering my childhood.
“The old electroplating factory, right? The paper mill site where Buck found that Indian pot you wrote about.”
“Yep. Have you told anybody about the brick dust?”
“Not yet. Autopsy’s not my job. That’s s’posed to be done in Jackson.”
“I hear something in your voice, Byron. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know if you know, but sometimes autopsies get done right here in Bienville, if the hospital has a pathologist on staff. That’s on and off in this town, but right now we got one. ‘Locum tenens,’ they call it. Temporary. I just got told he’s gonna do the autopsy.”
My pulse quickens. “Who told you that?”
“President of the county supervisors. I got the first call as I was driving the body up from the river. But I just got confirmation.”
“Jesus, Byron. You think they’re going to dictate the result they want? Or buy it?”
“Why else change regular procedure? They sure ain’t in no hurry to get the real result. So if they’re rushing it, they must already know what the report’s gonna say.”
“The fix is in.”
“Yeah. And I don’t know what I can do to stop it.”
“Nothing, if you want to keep your job. We’re going to need an independent autopsy. I just spoke to the widow. I don’t think it will be a problem, except for the cost. But I’ll cover that. The only problem is time. They’re moving fast.”
“Man, I hate to say this,” Byron says in a portentous tone, “but I been thinking ’bout something else.”
“Yeah?”
“This job means a lot to me. I’m the first black coroner in Tenisaw County. But it’s not just that. I like the work. The science of it, figuring things out. And I treat the dead with respect. Especially these kids that kill each other like it’s Sierra Leone. They deserve respect, even if it’s the only respect they’ll ever get.”
“I understand, Byron. You do great work. I’ve seen it.”
“Lemme finish. If I see things like this here today, and I don’t speak up—what does that say about me?”
“It says you need your job.”
“Yeah. But I’m a deacon in the church. That ain’t just a title to me. It means something. And what them fellas do, that Poker Club . . . it galls me. I been watching them rich white men run this town since I was a boy. In the old days we had to take it. Didn’t have no choice. But now . . . I don’t know.”
I feel my heart beating in my chest. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Spell it out.”
“I’m thinking you run a newspaper. And I got some news.”
A bracing burst of adrenaline shoots through my system. Men of integrity and courage are rare these days. I’ve known a few, but it’s been a long time since I ran into a genuine Christian, one who makes difficult choices based on his faith and then follows through. “Are you talking about anonymous information? Or being named as the source?”
“If I say something, I put my name to it.”
Even though I’m driving, I close my eyes in gratitude. “Okay, brother. I’m ready. Tell me what you want to say.”
When Byron Ellis starts talking, I feel the rush I used to feel in Washington when a whistle-blower started giving me a world-class story. The rush is no less intense because I’m in the small town in which I grew up. The coroner’s words are going to ruin tomorrow morning for a lot of powerful men, and that, in the end, is what I got into this business to do.
Buck Ferris’s rental house stands in a neighborhood built in the 1940s for the workers employed at the Bienville fiberboard plant. The small frame houses were modest even for that period, but the carpenters back then were such craftsmen that the homes are considered desirable now and sell for about a hundred grand apiece. There’s no car in the driveway of 325 Dogwood, but I drive the length of the street anyway, checking for signs of surveillance. After satisfying myself that I’m clean, I park in front of a mailbox two houses down from 325. Then I walk fifty yards up the street, cut around back, and try the key Quinn gave me in the patio door.
After a couple of jiggles, it works.
The interior of 325 looks like the abode of a single man, and the books and records on the shelves tell me he’s over seventy. I move to a small hall that leads off the den. The house has only two bedrooms, and the one on the right contains a drafting table. Other than the table, the room holds two filing cabinets and some map tubes. Tacked on the wall above the drafting table is an enlargement of what looks to me like B. L. C. Wailes’s hand-drawn map of what is now the paper mill site. Scotch-taped to the drafting table is a smaller map labeled poverty point site.
Kneeling before the file cabinets, I find they’re only a quarter full, but along with papers they contain several small boxes of pottery fragments, beads, tiny figurines, and what appear to be spear points about three inches long. Rather than try to skim through everything, I transfer the papers into the file drawer with the artifacts, then remove the drawer from the cabinet. If I’m going to meet Jet at three, I can’t sit around here for an hour. The map tubes present a problem. In the end, I tape them together and get them under my left arm, then pick up the file drawer and make for the back door.
Crossing the open space between the rental house and the Flex, I notice a woman watching me from the carport of a house across the street. She’s holding a cell phone to her cheek. Should that worry me? Half the people I see these days are on their phones. As nonchalantly as possible, I load the file drawer and tubes into the cargo area of the Flex, then head back to Highway 61.
I should stop by the Watchman office before I head home. But if I go to the rooftop party at the Aurora tonight with Nadine, I can stop by the newspaper afterward, while they’re finalizing tomorrow’s issue. Instead of going downtown, I point the Flex east and take out my iPhone. As I drive, I dictate a draft story about the coroner’s findings, then email it to Ben Tate. I tell Ben not to post it on our web edition until I’ve had time to ask some Poker Club members for comment.
Less than five minutes later, Ben calls me to complain. I let him vent his frustration, but when he finally takes a long breath, I say, “Don’t post it till midnight, Ben. End of discussion. I’ve got something else for you to do. Call the locum tenens pathologist at the hospital and ask him twenty questions about Buck Ferris’s autopsy. Why the rush? Why break from procedure and do it locally? You know the drill. I want you to scare him. Tell him we’re going to be all over the cause of death in that cas
e. And let him know you’ve already heard the family intends to pay for a private autopsy.”
“You’re trying to intimidate him into an honest result?”
“He’ll find it tough to lie if he thinks Michael Baden will be coming along behind him to repeat the post. And do it now. He might have already cut Buck. He could be dictating his findings as we speak.”
“What if I can’t get him on the phone?”
“Drive to the hospital. Push him hard, Ben.”
“Understood.”
As I end my call with Ben, my burner phone pings. I snatch it off the seat with a frantic motion. Jet’s texted reply reads: You’re right. Paul and I just had a fight. He’s suspicious. Focused on Josh but he did mention you. Don’t know where this is coming from. I’m still planning to come this aft but won’t if I’m not certain I’m clean. I love you. Stay calm and deny everything if confronted. If it all blows up, I know that’s not what we planned, but all we can do is deal with it. For the time being, deny. See you soon I hope!
I feel like that burner phone is wired to my limbic brain. My autonomic nervous system is firing nonstop, and it’s all I can do not to piss my pants. For three months we’ve been gliding under the radar, knowing there was danger yet somehow feeling invulnerable. That changed today.
Three o’clock is forty minutes away. I fight the urge to speed and force myself to pay attention to the traffic. The last thing I need is a fender bender to prevent me from seeing Jet in private during this crisis. Who knows when we’ll get another chance?
Her text made it clear that she has no more idea than I do about what triggered Paul’s sudden suspicion. We may never find out. The “six degrees of separation” principle applies on a global scale. In a town like Bienville, few people are even one degree removed from everyone else. A huge percentage of residents know each other directly, and not only by name, but by entire family histories. My mama went to school with her daddy, and my grandfather hunted with his, and I’ve heard tell that four generations back, we might even have come from the same Civil War colonel. The idea that two well-known citizens could carry on an illicit affair in this kind of matrix without being discovered is preposterous.
Yet people try it every day.
What strikes me as I drive out Highway 36 is that Paul and I have always been rivals for Jet’s affection. There’s no mystery about that. Even after he married her, he knew I still lived within her heart, the way she lived in mine after my marriage to Molly. But something has made him fear a physical manifestation of our feelings. A present-day resurrection of the sexual relationship that he knows far too much about to sleep easily. And if he truly fears that, then what will he do about it?
Paul Matheson is capable of extreme behavior. No one knows that better than I. I made him famous by writing about his courage, skill, and daring, but also by omitting the truth about his terrifying lack of restraint when under threat. Had I told the truth about all I have seen, Paul would be viewed as a different man today. Celebrated by some, surely, but reviled by others. Most of us are never tested the way Paul has been. A few unlucky civilians endure horrific experiences, violent crimes, or terrorist acts. But apart from survivors of sexual assault, almost no one faces the stress levels present in that soul-killing zone of conflict called war. And the relationship between Paul and me cannot be understood without knowing what we went through under fire together.
Not even Jet knows the truth.
Chapter 16
In January 2004, I left Washington to embed with a company of marines in Afghanistan. Before I left, I reached out to Paul to ask for tips on surviving in combat conditions. To my surprise, I got Jet instead. Newlywed Paul had left Mississippi at the age of thirty-one to begin working as a military contractor in Afghanistan. This shocked me, but Jet explained that 9/11 had tripped a sort of reflex patriotic fervor in Paul. He’d wanted to re-enlist in the Rangers, but this turned out to be more complicated than he’d hoped. Then he heard from some old Ranger buddies who’d been hired as private military contractors. They told him tales that sounded like a cross between the Old West of Hollywood and Lawrence of Arabia, complete with horse cavalry charges.
Paul boarded the next plane to Kabul.
After two ninety-day rotations in Afghanistan, he shifted to Iraq, where he quickly realized that military contracting was the new growth industry. All you needed to get a fat government contract was a couple of armored vehicles and a football team’s worth of vets who didn’t mind getting shot at. Paul already knew the veterans, and the Bienville Poker Club was happy to provide the capital to field an armored unit in Iraq. What better bragging rights could Mississippi businessmen have at every golf course, hunting club, and cocktail party in the South than being able to say they had their own Special Forces team slinging lead at the ragheads in America’s far-flung war zones? I wasn’t sure Paul would get his venture off the ground, but that was his problem.
I flew to Afghanistan and embedded with regular marines. I got to spend a little time with some private contractors, but I came to know only a couple well. They were former Delta operators—very different from the contractors I would come to know in Iraq. I learned a lot about war in eight weeks. Combat answered the questions I’d pondered while reading Hemingway and Conrad and le Carré and Michael Herr. The eternal male questions: Will my nerve hold when the bullets start hitting around me? When the guy next to me gets blasted into big wet pieces? If I’m asked to pick up a weapon and help, will I acquit myself competently? Honorably? The answers to the first two questions proved affirmative. But in Afghanistan I was never asked to pick up a weapon, not to fire in anger anyway. That would come later.
In Zabul Province I bonded with young men whom I would never have met back in the world. The America those boys had grown up in was far different from mine, though I was only ten or twelve years older than most of them. Their notions about war were alien to me—I who had been nursed on Paths of Glory and The Bridge on the River Kwai by my father. Those kids had a kind of nihilistic enthusiasm about combat, one bred from later war films and first-person shooter video games. They’d come to Afghanistan expecting an adrenaline-churning synthesis of Rambo and Apocalypse Now, but one fought behind an insulating layer of technology, as in Doom, Halo, and Call of Duty. They seemed to understand that they’d been posted to the graveyard of empires, but this awareness was hidden behind the ironic distance they wore like an extra layer of armor. They’d evolved this armor as children, to protect themselves from the pain of disintegrating families. They’d never been infused with the unified, idealized image of America that still lives within me. Nevertheless, they fought with remarkable bravery, and they made sure that I was as safe as possible under fire.
Iraq was different.
I hadn’t even planned to go there, but in March 2004, something happened that shook the public and private masters of the American military effort. In Fallujah, four contractors employed by Blackwater USA were ambushed, killed, and mutilated. I felt the reverberations 1,400 miles away, when a team from DynCorp, a Blackwater competitor, described to me how the four operators had been dragged naked through the streets of Fallujah. This atrocity sparked outrage among the contractors, which was easy to understand. What surprised me was the fury that surged through the ranks of the regular military, right up to the generals. Instinct told me that the Blackwater ambush would not go unanswered, so I started reaching out to everyone I knew working in Iraq.
All agreed that some kind of payback was imminent, but no one knew where the hammer would fall. At that point, I decided to call Paul Matheson. I hadn’t spoken to him since deploying to Afghanistan, and I didn’t reach him right away. But I did reach Jet in Mississippi. As it turned out, my old quarterback had succeeded in starting his own defense contracting outfit, which he’d christened ShieldCorp. At that time he had two teams in Iraq: one escorting supply convoys from Baghdad Airport to the Green Zone; the other in a town called Ramadi, near Fallujah, protecting dignitaries for th
e Coalition. Jet gave me a satellite phone number, and fifteen minutes later, I was speaking to my old teammate.
Paul sounded like a starving gold prospector who’d just seen a buddy scoop plum-size nuggets out of a stream: “Something’s about to happen here, Goose. No more Somalias, that’s the word. The Pentagon’s gonna punish somebody. Afghanistan’s about to become a sideshow. Iraq’s gonna blow. You’d better hop a plane and get your ass down here.” I asked him how his business was going. “We’re just getting off the ground, but we’re doing good. I’ve got two contracts worth $4.1 million, but there’s a lot more coming. I can smell it. It’s about to be boom times for PSCs. I gotta run. Call me if you come down. You can ride some convoys with us. It’s like The War Wagon with IEDs.”
I still remember Paul’s wild laughter as he broke the connection. It unnerved me a little, the idea of war as a business opportunity—especially one that a ragtag start-up like Paul’s could play a part in—but I got on a plane and headed for old Babylon.
Iraq was a world away from Afghanistan. For one thing, it was urban warfare. It also attracted a different breed of contractor, probably due to rapidly escalating demand. While many contractors in Iraq were ex-soldiers, far fewer were former-JSOC guys. To my amazement, many were ex–police officers or sheriff’s deputies from tiny American towns, a majority from the South. ShieldCorp’s meager ranks exemplified this demographic. Contracting was the only hope most of them had to earn more than minimum wage. They’d gone through a dusty “training school” Paul ran outside Laurel, Mississippi—thirty acres of overgrown piney woods and a half acre of asphalt for driving school. But unlike Navy SEAL training, where only 6 percent of an experienced applicant pool is accepted for training and 75 percent of those fail to make the grade, about 80 percent of the semi-desperate applicants to Paul’s new company had been accepted. This, I learned, was true of most other private outfits in Iraq as well. I don’t mean to say that Paul didn’t have some good people. He had eight Rangers who’d served with him in Somalia in the ’90s. He had one ex-Delta operator called “Rattler” whom he exploited heavily at recruiting time (though I had to wonder why, with Delta credentials, Rattler hadn’t signed on with one of the blue-chip companies; I never found out).
