The Guilty

by David Baldacci

  His mouth dried up and his hands shook with the thought of it. He couldn’t imagine his mind playing a trick like that on him. Never. But now that it had, Robie could never be sure that it wouldn’t do so again. And because of that, he could never again completely rely on the one person he always thought he could:

  Me.

  “Have you reached any conclusions?”

  Robie turned to see Blue Man standing on the other side of the bridge.

  He had stepped out from the shadow of the pedestal upon which sat a large sculpture of a horse and rider. There were actually two of these Arts of War sculptures, one on each side of the bridge entrance on the DC side, called Valor and Sacrifice. These were fitting subjects for a bridge that led directly to the nation’s most hallowed military burial grounds at Arlington National Cemetery. There was a lot of valor and ultimate sacrifice in that place.

  “I didn’t hear you walk up,” said a clearly annoyed Robie.

  “I didn’t. I was here waiting for you.”

  “How did you know I’d come here?”

  “You’ve come here before, after particularly difficult assignments.”

  “Which means you had me followed.”

  “Which means I like to keep on top of my charges at all times.” Blue Man crossed the street and stood next to him.

  Robie said, “So are you here to tell me I’m officially finished?”

  “No. I’m here to see how you’re doing.”

  “You read the briefing. I froze. I put a kid in the picture who wasn’t actually there.”

  “I know that.”

  “And you must have realized that was a possibility, which is why you had a backup team in place.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t get that little girl out of my head.”

  Blue Man looked at him appraisingly. “But it wasn’t a little girl.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You told Gathers it was a little boy reaching for his father. Not a little girl.”

  Blue Man drew closer and looked over the side of the bridge and down at the water.

  “The mind can play awful tricks on you. Particularly when you have unresolved business.”

  “What unresolved business?” said Robie sharply.

  Blue Man turned to him. “I don’t think you need me to answer that. What I would say is that you have time off. And you should use that time off to best advantage. If you can resolve your issues, Robie, you will be welcomed back. If you can’t, you won’t. The choice is simple and the decision is largely up to you.”

  “Look, this has nothing to do with my father, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “It may not. But if it does, it needs to be addressed.” He handed Robie a file. “Here are the particulars.”

  With that Blue Man walked away. A few minutes later Robie heard a door open and close, an engine start up, and then a vehicle drive off.

  He looked back down at the water. Then he opened the file, and by the light of his smartphone he started to read.

  His father arrested for murder.

  The facts of the case were sketchy.

  A man named Sherman Clancy was dead. He knew Robie’s father. There was evidence that pointed to his father killing the man. Because of that the elder Robie had been arrested.

  Cantrell, Mississippi, was an undistinguished dot on the map on the southern border with Louisiana barely five miles from the Gulf Coast.

  His father, Daniel Robie, a former jarhead disguised as a rabid pit bull from the Vietnam era, was sitting in a jail cell for murder. Part of Robie could believe it; another, perhaps deeper component, could not. There was no doubt that his father was tough and could be violent. He could kill. He had killed in that war. But “to kill” was different than “to murder.” Then again, every mission Robie had ever successfully completed had technically been a murder, yet he did not consider himself a murderer. And why was that?

  Because I was ordered by others to do it? Well, so were Mafia hit men.

  Cantrell, Mississippi. It was a world and a place that Robie once knew well. For eighteen years of his life it was all that he knew. And then there came a time when he had wanted no more of it. It was certainly never a place he had wanted to return to.

  He had neither kith nor kin left there, except for his father. He had no brothers and no sisters. And his mother? No, no mother either.

  He had known the Clancy family when he had lived there. They were farmers, well known, if not overly liked, in the small town. They mostly kept to themselves. They had their land and they worked it. They sold what they grew and they got by. They had neither money nor grand ambitions. At least back then. But it had been over twenty years now. Things might’ve changed.

  He knew of no bad blood between his father and the Clancys. But that might no longer be the case, since his father had been arrested for murdering the man.

  Dan Robie was someone who could change his opinion of you. Robie well knew that. And when the opinion was altered, the man was unlikely ever to revisit it.

  His thoughts still rambling and confused, he returned to his apartment, a sparsely decorated place that contained not one personal photograph or other memento. Robie had none of those to put out. He sat in a chair and stared out the window.

  He had killed a father and his daughter. Technically, the killing of the little girl wasn’t his fault. In every other respect it was his sole responsibility. He could do nothing to alter that. The dead were dead.

  And then he had seen a little boy raising his arms up to his father. Not a little girl, a little boy.

  He rubbed his thighs with palms that had turned sweaty. He had killed so many times with hands as dry as hands could be. And now his palms were moist. He could smell his own stink. He could smell fear in every pore. For a man who made his living by being, in many ways, fearless, it was a rude comeuppance.

  Family. Everyone had one. The difference was in degrees. But those degrees could be as vast as the size of the universe. And even more complicated.

  Robie had never envisioned himself making the decision he just had. It seemed that the only way he could move forward was to at least make a modest dent in cleaning up the decades-long mess that was his past. He had never had the desire to do this before. Now, it seemed like the only thing he could possibly do.

  It was not easy traveling to Cantrell, Mississippi. But he would get there nonetheless.

  He certainly knew the way.

  And God help me when I get there.

  Chapter

  7

  ROBIE ENDED UP taking a flight to Atlanta and then made a connection to Jackson, Mississippi.

  From there Robie could have taken a puddle jumper to Biloxi, but decided to rent a car at the Jackson airport and drive the nearly three hours due south to Cantrell. It was a journey that would stop only a few miles before he would plunge into the Gulf of Mexico. He figured he could use the drive to get acclimated to where he was now. And it wasn’t like his father was going anywhere.

  He drove along State Route 49, which cut a diagonal path toward Gulfport.

  The state was comprised mostly of lowlands, its highest point under a thousand feet, and nearly 70 percent of it still covered in forested lands. He passed by farmland filled not with cotton or soybeans but rather with sweet potatoes, the state’s most valuable crop by acre. And then there were the chickens. There were nearly forty times more chickens in Mississippi than people. And Robie saw a few thousand of them on his drive down.

  And Lord knows he smelled them, too!

  Mississippi was a strange amalgam of vital statistics ranking near the bottom of all fifty states in many important categories. Yet while it was the poorest of the states, its citizens gave more per capita to charities than their wealthier sister states. And they also were the most religious of all Americans. Indeed, Mississippi’s constitution prohibited anyone who denied the existence of a supreme being from holding public office. Although this article was technically
rendered unenforceable by federal law, the good folks of the Magnolia State apparently did not believe in the separation of church and state, and they most assuredly did not want to be led by a nonbeliever.

  But not long before Robie had left home, this same overtly God-fearing state had authorized offshore casino gambling, and the gaming industry was flourishing. Apparently, one could believe in a supreme being and yet not feel too badly about relieving folks of their hard-earned money at the craps table.

  Blacks had constituted the majority of the population until the commencement of two mass migrations, first north and then west over the course of sixty years starting in 1910. This exodus was largely to get away from the oppressive effects of the Jim Crow laws passed after the Civil War. These laws effectively kept freed blacks as downtrodden as when they were slaves. Jim Crow laws went on for over a century, and the pernicious reprecussions were still clearly felt today.

  Robie kept driving and looking around at a place that in many ways seemed exactly the same as when he had left. More than half the residents here still lived in rural areas. He passed many a small town that was gone before you could blink five times. His trip for the most part paralleled the course of the Pearl River, one of the major waterways in the state. The last section of the Pearl River split Mississippi from Louisiana.

  As a boy Robie had become very familiar with the Pearl: swimming in it despite its sometimes dangerous and unpredictable currents, pulling fish from its depths, and gliding in an old wooden skiff over its mossy-green backwater surface.

  Nice memories.

  Nice but faded.

  At least they used to be.

  He turned off Route 49 and headed southwest. He saw a “Dummy Line” road sign. Dummy Lines were abandoned railroad tracks, not for passenger trains, but to carry lumber when the boom was going on. The boom was long gone, but the signs remained because no one had bothered to take them down. It was just how it was here.

  A half hour later he hit the town limits of Cantrell at exactly one in the afternoon. Interstate 10 was to the north of him and Highway 59 to the west. He was closer to the Louisiana border than he was to Gulfport. The weather was warm and the air full of moisture as befitting a state with a subtropical climate, which accommodated short, mild winters and long, humid summers. Growing up here Robie had seen snow fall twice. The first time, not knowing what it was, four-year-old Robie had run screaming into the house to escape its effects. He had survived hurricanes, F5 tornados, and intense flooding, as had all southern Mississippians.

  He had survived all sorts of things that had arisen in the small town, the population of which had been 2,367 when he had left. The population now stood at three short of 2,000, or so the town’s welcome sign had proclaimed.

  To Robie, it was a wonder the place was even still here. Perhaps those remaining had no way to get out.

  Or lacked the will even to try.

  His shiny rental stood out in a sea of dusty pickup trucks as well as old Lincolns, Furys, and wide-trunked Impalas, although there was a cherry-red late-model Beemer parked at the curb in front of a storefront advertising the best deep-sea fishing known to man.

  It had been twenty-two years since he had left this place, and he swore that nothing he could see had changed much. But of course it had.

  For one, his father was in jail for murder.

  Unless it had been moved, Robie knew exactly where the town’s stockade was. He drove in that direction, ignoring folks staring at the newcomer. He imagined there weren’t many of those. Who would travel all this way to get to a place like Cantrell?

  Well, I did.

  Chapter

  8

  THE TOWN JAIL was in its old location, though it had been spruced up some and fortified with more bars and steel doors. Robie parked his car, got out, and stared up at the brick front with the heavy metal door and barred windows. He had on jeans, a short-sleeved shirt with the tail out, and a pair of scuffed loafers. He slipped his sunglasses into his front shirt pocket.

  The sign next to the door required visitors to hit the white button. He did. A few seconds later, the voice came out of the squawk box that was bolted to the doorjamb. The words were spoken slowly and each seemed to be drawn out to the absolute limit of their pronounceable length. Growing up here Robie sometimes felt he had never heard a consonant, certainly never an r. And while n’s and g’s at the ends of words were clearly seen on paper they were—like children and lunatic relations—never, ever heard.

  “Deputy Taggert here. Can I help y’all?”

  Deputy Taggert was a woman, Robie noted. He also noted the surveillance camera above his head. Deputy Taggert could see him, too.

  Robie took a breath. As soon as he said the next words it would be all over town with no possibility of ever taking it back. It was like social media, without need for an Internet.

  “I’m Will Robie. I’m here to see my father, Dan Robie.”

  The voice said nothing for four long beats.

  Then—

  “Can I see me some ID?”

  Robie took out his driver’s license and held it up to the camera.

  “Dee-Cee?” said Taggert, referring to Robie’s District of Columbia license.

  “Yes.”

  “You carryin’ any weapons?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we see ’bout that. We got us here a metal detector. You care to answer that question different now, Mr. Robie?”

  “No. I’m not armed.”

  The door buzzed open. Robie gripped the handle and pulled.

  He walked into a darkened space and had to blink rapidly to adjust his eyes to the low light level. A metal detector stood in front of the doorway across the space that led into the interior of the building. A uniformed man stood there, hand on the stippled butt of his nine-millimeter sidearm. He was taller than Robie, with a protruding belly but also broad shoulders and a thick neck that made his head look shrunken.

  The uniform eyed him up and down. “Y’all want’a step over here.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  Robie was searched and then passed through the metal detector that never made a sound.

  The room Robie next entered looked like a waiting room because it was. He wasn’t the only one in there. A young black woman, skinny and frail, was bouncing a pudgy diapered baby on her lap. In the far corner an old white man sat dozing, the back of his head propped against a wall painted the color of concrete. The place smelled of sweat and burned coffee and the passage of time, which held its own moldy stink. The confluence of smells hit Robie like a gut punch. Not because they were unfamiliar, but because they weren’t.

  A female deputy emerged from behind a scarred wooden desk with an ancient, fat computer resting on it. She was five-five, sturdily built, with copper-colored hair cut sharply around her narrow face, which was topped by a pair of penetrating dark brown eyes.

  “Will Robie?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh. Let me see that ID again.”

  He handed it across. She studied it closely and then looked at him for comparison.

  “Do I know you?” asked Robie, squinting at her.

  “I was Sheila Duvall before I got myself married to Jimbo Taggert.”

  In the dim recesses of his memory emerged a skinny tomboy with a chip on her shoulder that weighed a ton and who seemingly lived to fight any boy within reach of her bony fists. Robie had given her a black eye when they were eight, and in return she had bloodied and nearly broken his nose. He also recalled a tall boy with hair the color of straw who went by Jimbo and never spoke.

  “I see your eye healed up, although sometimes I still breathe funny through my nose.” He tacked on a smile to this statement, which she did not return.

  She gave him back his license.

  “You want’a see your daddy, you say?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I like to had a heart attack when I heard your name and now you standin’ ri
ght here.” She cocked her head and looked up at him.

  “Can I see him?” asked Robie.