The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  Praise for R. J. Ellory

  ‘An awesome achievement . . . a thriller of such power, scope and accomplishment that fanfares should herald its arrival’

  Guardian

  ‘Voodoo and murders and gothically imposing southern dynasties – what’s not to like? There are moments of genuine chills, fearsomely speedy page-turning and real humour . . . an enjoyable summer read’

  Observer

  ‘A great read’

  Irish Examiner

  ‘R. J. Ellory sets out his stall with terrific vim and a gripping premise in his latest thriller . . . an energetic and winning exercise in pulp fiction with a Southern Gothic flavour’

  Metro

  ‘Ellory’s complex procedurals feel influenced by The Wire and the hard-boiled cop thrillers of the 1970s. The accumulation of detail is accompanied by a powerful sense of location and wellpaced action sequences. In this siren-filled world there are no easy answers. The result is vivid storytelling with a dark heart and an angry conscience’

  Financial Times

  ‘Classic noir, a journey to the dark corners of man’s foolishness, where nothing is ever what it seems and no one can ever be trusted. Ellory is beginning to sound like the master [James Ellroy]. I can think of no higher praise’

  Daily Mail

  ‘A pedal to the metal thriller’

  Irish Independent

  ‘Ellory’s the real deal, giving us another horrific chunk of smalltown American violence, neglect and psychopathy. ****’

  Daily Mirror

  The Devil and The River

  R. J. ELLORY

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise for R. J. Ellory

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  By R.J. Ellory

  About the Author

  Copyright

  ‘What’s past is prologue’

  William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  1

  Wednesday, July 24, 1974

  When the rains came, they found the girl’s face. Just her face. At least that was how it appeared. And then came her hand—small and white and fine like porcelain. It surfaced from the black mud and showed itself. Just her face and her hand, the rest of her still submerged. To look down toward the riverbank and see just her hand and her face was surreal and disturbing. And John Gaines—who had lately, and by providence or default, come to the position of sheriff of Whytesburg, Breed County, Mississippi, and before that had come alive from the nine circles of hell that was the war in Vietnam, who was himself born in Lafayette, a Louisianan from the start—crouched on his haunches and surveyed the scene with a quiet mind and a steady eye.

  The discovery had been called in by a passerby, and Gaines’s deputy, Richard Hagen, had driven down there and radioed the Sheriff’s Office dispatcher, Barbara Jacobs, and she had called Gaines and told him all that was known.

  A girl’s face has surfaced from the riverbank.

  When Gaines arrived, Hagen was still gasping awkwardly, swallowing two or three mouthfuls of air at a time. He bore the distressed and pallid hue of a dying man, though he was not dying, merely in shock. Hagen had not been to war; he was not inured to such things as this, and thus such things were alien and anathema to his sensibilities. The town of Whytesburg—seated awkwardly in the triangle between the Hattiesburg-intent I-59, and the I-18, itself all fired up to reach Mobile—was a modest town with modest ways, the sort of place they rolled up the sidewalk at sunset, where such things as these did not occur too frequently, which was a good thing for all concerned.

  But Gaines had been to war. He had seen the nine circles.

  And sometimes, listening to the small complaints of smaller minds—the vandalized mailbox, the illegally parked car, the spilled trash can—Gaines would imagine himself walking the complainant through a burned-out ville. Here, he would say, is a dead child in the arms of her dead mother, the pair of them fused together for eternity by heat and napalm. And here is a young man with half a face and no eyes at all. Can you imagine the last thing he might have seen? And the complainant would be silent and would then look at Gaines with eyes wide, with lips parted, with sweat-varnished skin, both breathless and without words. Now, Gaines would say to them, now let us speak of these small and inconsequential things.

  There were parts of humanity that were left behind in war, and they would never be recovered.

  But this? This was enough to reach even Gaines. A dead girl. Perhaps drowned, perhaps murdered and buried beneath the mud. It would be a raw task to excavate her, and the task had best begin before the rains returned. It was no later than ten, but already the temperature was rising. Gaines predicted storms, perhaps worse.

  He called to Hagen, told him to radio Dispatch and get people out here.

  “What people?” Hagen asked.

  “Call your brother. Tell him to come with his camera. Get Jim Hughes and both his boys. That should do us. Tell ’em to bring shovels, rope, buckets, a couple of blankets, some tarps, as well.”

  “Should I tell ’em why, Sheriff?”

  “No. You just tell ’em they’re needed for an hour or more. And get Barbara checking for any outstanding missing persons reports for teenage white girls. I don’t know of any, but have her check.”

  Hagen went to the black-and-white. Gaines walked down to the riverbank and stood twelve or fifteen feet from the girl. If he could have washed off her face, maybe he would have recognized her.

  Ninety-three percent of abduction victims were dead within three hours. Dead before anyone even knew they were missing. Couldn’t file a missing persons report for forty-eight hours. Do the math. It didn’t work out well in most cases.

  Gaines’s heart then began an awkward rhythm, a flurry of irregular beats, not dissi
milar to the rush of medic-administered Dexedrine he’d been given in-country. This will keep you awake, he was told back then, and he had taken it and then stayed awake for hours, awake until his nerves screamed for some small respite.

  Now—once again—his throat was tight, as if a hand had closed around it. He felt sick. His mouth was dry. He was unable to blink, the dry surfaces of his eyes adhered to his inner lids.

  Oh God, what was this girl doing here?

  And seeing this girl brought back memories of another child . . .

  The child that never was . . .

  He could hear Hagen on the radio. People would come—Jim Hughes and his eldest sons, Hagen’s brother—and photographs would be taken. Gaines would survey the area for anything indicative of foul play, and then they would reach into the blackness and bring the girl out. Then, and only then, would they know what fate had befallen her, a fate that had buried her in the riverbank before her life had even really begun.

  The rain did come, an hour later. The rain was black. Gaines would remember it that way. It fell as straight as gravity, and it was hard and cold and bitter on his lips. He had seen the pictures taken, and then he and Hagen and Hagen’s brother, Jim Hughes and his two sons, had started working their hands into the mud around the girl in an effort to release her. They knelt there, all six of them, and they tried to work ropes down under her, beneath her neck, her arms, her waist, her thighs. And then they had to lie down, for the mud was black and depthless, and it sucked relentlessly. And the smell was damp and rank and fetid. It was a smell that filled Gaines’s nostrils, a smell that he would always remember. The smell of blood and mud and stagnant water, all blended together into some unholy brew. And there was fear. Only later would he understand this. That he had smelled his own fear. That he had smelled the fear of the others. Fear of what had happened to this girl, that something terrible would be revealed, that her body would surface in pieces perhaps. Fear for themselves, that the mud was too deep, too strong, that they—in their efforts to help, unable to leave her, unable to do anything but persevere—would be drawn into the blackness as well.

  Back there, back in the war, perhaps in the hours following his return from some long-range recon patrol, Gaines would walk down to the medical tent and watch the sawbones at work. Hands, arms, legs, feet. A bucket of devastated limbs beneath each makeshift operating table. Perhaps he’d believed that if he could grow immune to such things in reality, he could grow immune to the images in his mind. It had not worked. The mind was stronger than anything reality could present.

  He saw those things now. He saw them in the face of the girl they were bringing up from the mud.

  And when they brought her out, when they saw the deep crevasse that had been cut into her torso, the way it had been bound together again like laces in a shoe, they were bereft of all words.

  Finally, it was Jim Hughes who opened his mouth, and he simply said, “Oh my God . . . Oh my God almighty . . .” His voice was all but a whisper, and those words drifted out into the mist and humidity, and they were swallowed without echo.

  No one asked who she was, and it was as if no one wanted to know. Not yet.

  They paused for a little while, almost unable to look at her, and then they worked on silently, nothing but the heaves and grunts of effort as they brought her onto the tarp and lifted her free from the darkness of her grave.

  And the rain fell, and the rain was black, and it did not stop.

  The one thing that combat gave you was a willingness to expect everything and nothing at the same time. It took hold of your need for prediction, and it kicked it right out of you. Run for three days; stand still for four. Move at a moment’s notice; go back the way you came. And all of it without explanation as to why. How come this is so utterly, utterly fucked? someone asked. Because this is the way God made it was the answer given. How else d’you think he gets his rocks off? After a few weeks, a couple of months perhaps, you realized that there was no one who gave a single, solitary crap about where you were.

  One time, Gaines had taken a forty-five-minute chopper ride with six dead guys. Just Gaines, the pilot, and half a dozen dead guys. Some were in body bags, some just wrapped in their ponchos. Ten minutes in and Gaines unzipped them, uncovered their faces, and they all had their eyes open. He had talked for thirty minutes straight. He’d told them everything he felt, everything he feared. They did not judge him. They were just there. Gaines knew they understood. He also knew that Plato was right, that only the dead had seen the end of war. He believed that had he not done that, he would not have been able to go back. He unloaded those good ol’ boys and then returned in the same chopper. He could still smell their dead-stink for five clicks.

  That same smell overwhelmed Gaines as they carried the girl away. The rain had washed her clean. She was fifteen or sixteen years old; she was naked; and a crudely sewn wound divided her body from neck to navel. It had been sewn with heavy twine, and the mud had worked its way inside her. Even as her pale frame was carried to a tarp above the bank, the mud appeared and disappeared again like small black tongues from the stitched mouths of the wound. Gaines watched the men as they transported her—a line of sad faces, like early-morning soldiers on the base-bound liberty bus. Fun is done. Girls and liquor are all left behind. Like the faces of those transporting the dead to a chopper, the weight of the body in the poncho, their faces grim and resolute, eyes squinting through half-closed lids, almost as if they believed that to see half of this was to be somehow safe from the rest. The precise and torturous gravity of conscience, the burden of guilt, the weight of the dead.

  And then Gaines noticed the trees, these arched and disheveled figures, and he believed that had they not already skewed and stretched their roots into rank and fetid earth, they would have come forward, shuffling and awkward, stinking their way out of the filth and shit of the swamps, and they would have suffocated them all within a tangled, knotted argument of arthritic branches and spiders’ webs of Spanish moss. There would always be some grotesque and gothic manner of death, but this would perhaps be the worst.

  The sorry gang carried her as quickly as they could, the mud dragging at their feet, the rain hammering down, drowning all words, drowning the sound of six men as they stumbled up the bank.

  The memory of the dead is the greatest burden of all. That’s what Lieutenant Ron Wilson had once opined in a field beyond 25th Division Headquarters at Cu Chi in February of 1968. He uttered those words to Gaines, the very last words ever to leave his lips, and he uttered it in the handful of seconds between changing his damp socks and the arrival of the bullet that killed him. There were no sounds—neither from the bullet itself, haphazardly fired without aim, merely a vague hope that somewhere it would find a target, nor from Lieutenant Wilson’s lips. The bullet entered his throat at the base and severed his spinal cord somewhere among the cervical vertebrae. For a brief while, his eyes were still alive, his lips playing with something akin to a reflective smile, as if The memory of the dead is the greatest burden of all had been the precursor, the introduction to something else. Lieutenant Wilson was a philosopher. He quoted Arnold Bennett aphorisms about time and human industry. He was a good lieutenant, more a leader than a follower, a characteristic founded more in his vague distrust of others rather than any real sense of trust in himself. Gaines did not know what Wilson had done before the war. Later, after Wilson had been choppered away, he had asked the other guys in the platoon. Who was Wilson? Before the war, I mean. Who was he? They did not know either, or they did not say. Where he had come from was of no great concern. His life before was irrelevant. The life after was all that concerned them, and for Lieutenant Wilson there would be none.

  Gaines remembered Wilson’s face—the moment alive, the moment of death—as they reached Jim Hughes’s flatbed with their grim burden. They laid the girl out on the rough, waterlogged boards, and Gaines set one half of the tarp beneath her, the other half over her, and he instructed Hughes to drive, his two so
ns up front, and he would follow them in his squad car back to town. He told Hagen to radio in and request both Dr. Thurston and the coroner be at the Coroner’s Office upon their return.

  It was now two o’clock in the afternoon. It had taken the better part of four hours to release the girl’s body from the mud.

  In a little while, once her body had been handed over to the coroner, Gaines would begin the onerous task of identifying whose child this was. And once identified, the task would be to find her parents and deliver the truth. There would be no triangled stars and stripes. There would be no telegram. There would be John Gaines, sheriff of Whytesburg, lately of the nine circles of hell that was Vietnam, standing on a mother’s porch with his eyes cast down and his hat in his hands.

  2

  I remember it like my own name.

  That day.

  That Thursday.

  I remember waking with a sense of urgency, of excitement, anticipation.

  I remember the light through the window beside my bed, the way it glowed through the curtain. I remember the texture of the fabric, the motes of dust illuminated like microscopic fireflies.

  It was as if I had slept for a thousand years, but sleep had let me go without any effort at all. I felt as if I could just burst with energy.

  I rose and washed and dressed. I tied my laces and hurried downstairs.

  “Maryanne!” my mother called when she heard my footsteps in the hall. “You come on here and get some breakfast before you go out playing!”

  I was not hungry, but I ate. I ate quickly, like a child with endless siblings, hurrying through the food before one of them could snatch it away.

  “Now, I need you back before dark,” my mother said. “I said you could go today, but I don’t want a repeat of last time. I’m not coming out looking for you at ten o’clock at night, young lady. You hear me?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “And that Wade boy . . . You remember that they’re different from us, Maryanne. Don’t you go falling in love with a Wade, now.”

  “Mom—”

  She smiled. She was teasing me.

  “And Nancy will be with you, right?”