by Greg Iles
“Maybe they both do.”
I look back at her, but Nadine is staring through the windshield.
Three minutes later, I click us through the security gate with my remote and drive the long road through the woods to my house. Nadine seems to like the isolation, and once we get inside the house, I show her to my spare room. It’s nothing special, just a queen bed, a dresser, and a chair that came with the house.
“Bathroom’s in the hall, I’m afraid, but I have my own in the back. So nobody will be knocking on the door while you’re in there.”
“Thanks. Hey, is that your guitar by the wall?”
I’d forgotten I moved Quinn’s gift to the spare room before heading for the party. “Um, I guess it is now. That belonged to Buck. Quinn gave it to me this afternoon.”
“Wow. Which one is it?”
I shouldn’t be surprised that she’s curious about Buck’s guitars, especially after we played at her store. Nadine isn’t merely a music fan, but a promoter. “That’s Buck’s personal guitar. One he built himself.”
“The baritone?”
“That’s the one.”
“I love that guitar! It almost sounds like a cello.”
This brings a smile to my lips. “That’s what Buck used to say.”
“Will you play it for me tomorrow?”
“Sure, yeah.” I step back into the hall. “Hey, did that muffin fill you up? Or do you need some food before bed?”
She laughs. “You going to cook for me?”
“You’ve done it for me enough. I can scramble eggs. Huevos rancheros?”
“Maybe for breakfast. I need sleep now.”
I nod, then take her father’s pistol from my pocket. “I want you to keep this close.”
Her face darkens. “I’d rather you hold on to it.”
“I have one in my bedroom. But if anybody sneaks up this hall, they’ll get to your room first. Better safe than sorry.”
She reluctantly accepts the handgun.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I tell her.
As I start down the hall, Nadine leans out and calls, “Did I weird you out when I mentioned Jerry Lee Lewis’s son drowning in the swimming pool?”
“No. It’s fine. Hard to believe, really. That and losing his brother, just like me.”
“Truth is stranger than fiction, right?”
“Always.” I wait to see if she has anything else to say. I feel like she does.
After a few seconds, she says, “Have you given any more thought to what I asked you this morning?”
“You asked me a lot of things.”
“About whether, if you had the power to punish Buck’s killer and unravel the corruption behind the paper mill deal, you would do it? If it meant the town losing the mill and all that comes with it.”
“I have thought about it. I asked Jet the same question this afternoon.”
“What did she say?”
“She’d blow it up without a second thought.”
Nadine nods thoughtfully. “Well . . . she can afford to, can’t she? She married well, as they say. At least in an economic sense.”
“What about you? What would you do?”
“I understand the temptation to blow it all up. Especially after what happened to Buck. But it’s like that Vietnam-era saying: ‘We had to destroy this village in order to save it.’ That’s the real dilemma in all this.”
“I know. It’s just hard to take the macro view when you know somebody beat Buck to death over it.”
Nadine is watching me carefully. “Well . . . anyway. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t cross a line before.”
“No. We’re good.”
“Night.” With a small smile she closes the door.
I check the doors and windows to be sure they’re locked, then go back to my bathroom and brush my teeth, glad for quiet after the night’s craziness. It’s strange to have Nadine under my roof, but not at all unpleasant, and it’s absolutely necessary. The break-in at her store was not normal. A skilled criminal was looking for something in her safe. Something specific. The same burglar probably hit at least two other law offices in town. What I don’t understand is how Nadine could have no idea what they might be looking for.
Using earbuds, I call Ben Tate to make sure I know the thrust of the stories he’ll be running tomorrow. While we talk, I open my top dresser drawer and remove the Walther P38 I borrowed from my father after I moved back home. I was living downtown at the time, and street crime was common enough to warrant keeping it in my car. The gun was made in Germany in 1957, and Dad bought it while serving there in the early 1960s. After hanging up with Ben, I set the Walther on my bedside table, then lay my iPhone and the new burner Jet brought this afternoon beside it. I’ve yet to take a call on that burner phone, but something tells me that whatever comes over that illicit connection over the next few days could determine the course of the rest of my life.
As I lie in the bed, waiting for sleep, I see Jet on the mezzanine of the Aurora after dragging me down there in a fit of recklessness. Suddenly I understand what triggered her atypical breakout. From the moment she kissed me on the roof to the moment she hiked up her dress, she was trying to get us caught. The months of secrecy and tension took one kind of toll, but Paul’s suspicion means we must stop seeing each other, at least for a while. The only rational way forward is for her to ask him for a divorce, one that will never be resolved in her favor. Even for a woman as resolute as Jet, the prospect of fighting an unwinnable battle must bring on something close to despair. How much easier—or so it probably seemed while drunk—to blow up her marriage and let the shrapnel fly where it will. A month ago she would never have done what she did tonight. Yeats is always right, I reflect. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. As sleep finally takes me, and the awful weight of this day begins to slip from my shoulders, a sense of foreboding awakens in my mind, too shapeless to define, yet real enough to prevent my descending into true oblivion.
My iPhone wakes me at 1:40 a.m.
Blinking in confusion, I see that it’s Ben Tate, calling from the paper. It’s been two hours since he and I finalized tomorrow’s stories. I can’t believe he’s still at the office. I press answer and lie back on my pillow.
“Ben? What’s going on?”
“Thirty minutes ago the police scanner went crazy. Something happened at Max Matheson’s house, in that ritzy neighborhood out in the county.”
“Like a break-in or something?”
“I don’t think so. Carl got word from a source in the sheriff’s department that Max’s wife had been shot.”
I sit up and turn on my bedside lamp. “That can’t be right.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But Carl’s guy said that when the responding deputy got there, Mrs. Matheson was dead in the bed with her husband, and Max was out of his mind. The gun was in the bed with them, and the sheets were covered in blood. Like a slaughterhouse, he said. She was shot through the heart.”
“Sally Matheson is dead?” I ask dully, seeing an image of Sally dressed to the nines on the Aurora rooftop earlier tonight. “Is this for real, Ben?”
“I know it sounds crazy. It’s like even the cops can’t believe it. But it’s real.”
I rub my eyes and shake my head, as if that could clear my mind. “Actually, the Mathesons had a very public argument at that party on top of the Aurora tonight. Everybody saw it happen. Sally called him a bastard and threw a drink in his face. I’ve never seen her do anything remotely like that.”
“Are you coming down here?” Ben asks.
Nadine rises in my mind. “I don’t know. I may wait and monitor—”
My burner phone is ringing. I don’t recognize the number, but I never do until I’ve had a burner for about a week. It’s got to be Jet. “I’ve got to run, Ben. I’ll work my own sources and call you back later. Keep me updated.”
I hang up before he can reply, then answer the burner. Despite what Ben said, the news I’m
braced to hear is what I’ve feared for the past three months: Paul is headed to your house with a gun—
“I’m here,” I answer.
“I only have thirty seconds,” Jet says, panic crackling in every syllable. “Wake up and listen hard.”
“I’m up. Was Sally shot?”
“Yes. She’s dead, Marshall.”
“The news is already out. Did Max shoot her?”
“That’s what it looks like. The police are over there now. Sheriff’s deputies, actually. Paul went over. I have Kevin with me at home. My God, this is the last thing in the world I could have imagined.”
“Is Max going to be arrested?”
“I don’t know. I guess he might be. It’s all so unbelievable.”
“I saw their argument at the Aurora. Have they been doing that a lot recently?”
“No! Not that I’ve seen, anyway.”
“You told me Sally was acting weird today, that she wanted to talk to you.”
Jet is silent for about three seconds. “That’s right. You know . . . wait—”
She blocks the mic on her phone, and I hear her muffled voice speaking to her son.
“I’ve got to go,” she says with sudden clarity. “I’ll know more after Paul gets home, but I won’t be able to call you. And don’t call me. Not under any circumstances.”
The phone clicks, and she’s gone.
I sit naked on the edge of the bed for a minute or so, stunned beyond belief. The image of Sally Matheson, the archetypal steel magnolia if ever there was one, lying beside her husband on their bloody bedsheets is something my brain simply refuses to accept. It’s like hearing that Sally Field got her brains blown out. Of course, Sally Field never married a man like Max Matheson. Burt Reynolds and Max probably shared more than a few traits, but so far as I know Burt never killed anybody. Yet despite all I know about Max, I’ve never heard a whisper about him raising a hand against his wife. In his own way, Max worshipped Sally.
A tentative knock sounds at my door.
“Hello?” I call.
“It’s me.”
For an instant Jet flashes in my mind, but Jet can’t be standing at my door. It has to be Nadine. Getting up, I pull on a pair of Levi’s, then go to the door and pull it open.
Nadine stands there in a long T-shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, nothing else.
“The house phone rang,” she says. “You didn’t answer, so I got up and checked it. The caller ID showed it was from the Watchman office. As I was walking back to my room, I thought I heard your voice. You sounded upset. Is everything okay?”
“No. Sally Matheson has been shot. By Max, apparently.”
Nadine stares at me without blinking. “Shot dead?”
“That’s what my editor told me.”
“That’s . . . it seems impossible. Crazier than Buck getting killed.”
“I know. But it’s happened.”
She walks past me and sits on the edge of my bed, looking shell-shocked. “My God. She was so nice to me tonight.”
“She really was. It truly doesn’t seem real.”
Nadine looks up. “What are you going to do? Do you need to go down to the paper?”
“I should. But I don’t feel like it.”
“What do you feel like doing?”
An image of Denny Allman flying his drone fills my mind. “To tell you the truth . . . something crazy.”
“Like?”
“Every cop in this county, municipal or sheriff’s deputy, is going to have only one thing on his mind tonight: Sally’s death. This is the best chance I’ll ever get to sneak onto that mill site and do some digging. I mean literal digging—with a shovel.”
Nadine’s eyes widen, but she looks more intrigued than afraid. “What would you be looking for? Evidence that Buck was murdered there?”
“That, and Indian bones. And thanks to little Denny Allman, I know just where to look.”
Nadine covers her mouth with a fist while she transitions from shock to action. After a few seconds, she says, “I sure don’t see us getting back to sleep tonight. What the hell? Let’s do it.”
“The last guy who tried this wound up dead.”
She winces, but I can see she wants to forge ahead. Anything seems better than sitting around uselessly in the wake of tragedy. “We shouldn’t sneak down there,” she says. “Let’s put on the clothes we wore to the party, take a bottle of wine and a blanket with us. We’ll act like we drove down there to make out by the river. If there’s a guard, we’ll have a good excuse to be there. If not, we dig.”
“That’s a damn good idea.”
She nods and stands. “I’ll be dressed and made up in five minutes.”
“I’ll see you in the kitchen.”
Nadine spins and pads quickly down the hall, then turns into the guest room. I’m starting to see why she was such a good lawyer.
She’s a force of nature.
Chapter 22
Ben Tate dropped the Buck Ferris murder story into our web edition at 3:30 a.m., and it was like kicking over a hornet’s nest. Suggesting that Buck had been murdered was bad enough in the eyes of the town; backing up that implication with an opinion from the coroner was worse. But speculating that Buck had been killed at the paper mill site, then dumped upriver to hide that fact, made people crazy. Our main switchboard started ringing off the hook at 5:30 a.m., as the print subscribers began calling in to voice their displeasure. By 8:30 there were 336 reader comments beneath the story, and I’d received sixty-seven emails at my Watchman account.
None of that surprised me, and I was too tired to care anyway. By the time I limped into my office this morning, I’d only slept two hours, having spent the middle of the night at the paper mill site with Nadine, digging in the dark in my suit and dress shoes. After driving down to the industrial park, we parked beside the foundation of the old electroplating plant and waited to see if any guards would challenge us. None did. After ten minutes of ticking silence, I got out my small shovel and a handful of trash bags and started hunting for the concrete footing where Buck had found his Poverty Point–era pottery samples. Nadine stayed in the Flex to keep watch. If she saw anyone approaching, she was to switch on the headlights and speed-dial me. I would dump my tools and walk back as though I’d simply left the SUV to take a leak.
The GPS coordinates Denny had emailed me helped, but they required that I use an unfamiliar app on my phone to exploit them. I felt like a World War I soldier crossing no-man’s-land with a lighted cigarette as I carried that phone around the mill site. The whole time, I wished I’d stuck my father’s Walther into my waistband instead of leaving it under the seat of the Flex, but I didn’t want some sheriff’s deputy catching me out there carrying. Eventually I figured out the GPS app, and I ended my search by sliding down into a trench beside the exposed concrete footing of a foundation pier.
I know nothing about archaeology, but with the LED light from my phone, I saw what looked like defined soil strata on the face of the five-foot-deep hole. As quickly as I could, I scraped shovelfuls of dirt from the lowest two feet of the trench and dumped them into doubled Hefty yard bags. After collecting about twenty pounds of dirt, I hauled that bag over to the Flex and loaded it into the back. Then we drove to the next set of coordinates, which turned out to be two plots of turned earth in the middle of a patch of Johnsongrass. I figured this work would be in vain, but for Buck’s sake I dug up another thirty pounds of dirt and bagged it.
As I started back to the Flex, my right foot kicked something hard, and I cursed. Shining my light down, I saw a brick protruding from the soil. On closer inspection, it appeared to be one of the reddish-orange bricks that Byron Ellis had referred to as “Natchez brick.” Turning in a circle with my phone light, I saw three more—fragments rather than whole bricks. Setting down my Heftys, I untwisted one plastic neck and dropped in the bricks. Then I slung the heavy bags over my shoulder and humped them back to the Flex, which was parked thirty yards away, on a strip of J
ohnsongrass.
“Somebody’s coming down Port Road,” Nadine hissed as I tossed the bags under the hatchback. “Headlights just hit the bottom of the hill.”
Looking up, I saw the lights, and my pulse kicked into overdrive. I started to hide my shovel under the trash bags, but on impulse I shut the hatchback, took the shovel by its handle, and hurled it as far into the dark as I could. By the time the sheriff’s cruiser pulled up beside us with its red lights flashing, Nadine was lying across my chest, kissing me deeply. The shock of her cool tongue in my mouth blanked the cruiser from my mind, until I heard a male voice over a PA ordering us out of the vee-hickle.
Nadine broke the kiss, squeezed my shoulder, and said, “Play it cool.” Then she winked.
I got out, holding both hands up in clear sight. A flashlight beam blinded me, and my heart began to pound as I remembered the ghastly wound in Buck’s skull. Then Nadine got out, making a show of straightening her cocktail dress.
I didn’t know the deputy, but after he got a look at Nadine, it didn’t take much effort to sell our story. Once he recognized my name, he felt compelled to tell me about the murder at the Matheson house. I feigned ignorance to give him the pleasure of shocking me with a bloody tale. We were lucky. If we’d gotten a different deputy—or, worse, a private security guard who knew my connection to Buck—things would have gone differently. This deputy did shine his flashlight into the Flex, but he didn’t question the trash bags. I wondered if the shovel would have triggered more suspicion or if I’d made a mistake by tossing it into the dark. But since the deputy let us go, I made myself forget about it.
As we drove up the face of the bluff—ten car lengths ahead of the cruiser—Nadine joked about the deputy staring a hole through her chest. I wasn’t quite ready to laugh. If he called in my plate to the wrong person, he might still pull us over and arrest us for trespassing. But when I peeled off eastward at the top of the bluff, he continued north into the city, and my pulse returned to normal. Nadine and I went back to my house and took a cursory look at the soil samples I’d collected. They were full of fragments, some of which were clearly charcoal, while others appeared to be pebbles. In the bag of dirt taken from beside the pier, I found three spheres that looked and felt like baked clay. They weren’t uniform in size, but each fit easily into my palm. A few small fragments from that bag had the feel of bone, that damp, ossified roughness of something that might once have been alive. But even if they were bone, we had no way to know if it was human. We also discovered two teeth that looked human, but I’d seen hog teeth that looked like they came from people, so I encouraged Nadine not to jump to conclusions. Our ultimate judgment was that we weren’t qualified to make any sort of valid analysis of those samples.
