“I would be intrigued, Ms. Monroe,” Tribue said, “to have your professional estimation of the shooter. Since you experienced his abilities firsthand.”
“Yeah, Monroe,” Sheffield said, with a droll look. “Give us your professional estimation of the shooter.”
She stared off at the Dumpster.
“He’s an amateur,” she said. “And he got rattled.”
The sheriff took off his hat and wiped the inner band.
“And how do you draw that conclusion?”
“Guy puts Panther down with the first two shots, then started spraying rounds all over the place. Same as this afternoon. Is the guy just a bad shot? Or maybe he’s some kind of gutless nutcase? He panics, then unloads his whole clip. I don’t know. But my bet is, when you do the ballistics, you’ll find the shooter tonight is the same freak who killed your uncle.”
The sheriff set his hat back in place. He looked at Charlotte, his eyes smoldering briefly, then fading like the glow of a lightning bug.
Sheffield rubbed at the gray stubble on his chin. He was looking haggard, the mountain air not treating him well. He hadn’t been getting his eight hours, maybe a few too many rum-and-Cokes to knock himself out in the evening. Droopy lids, a slump in his shoulders, a downward slide in his mouth. Gravity winning this week’s tug-of-war.
“So the gunman’s not a master criminal,” Frank said. “Thirty years on the job, I still haven’t met one of those yet.”
“From what I can surmise,” Sheriff Tribue said, “it was a bit chaotic at the time. If indeed that was the case, it strikes me as doubtful that even the most proficient marksman would have scored well in such fluid circumstances.”
“You’re sticking up for the guy?” Sheffield said.
“I’m hypothesizing,” Farris said. “I believe it’s referred to as playing devil’s advocate.”
“Chaos or not,” Charlotte said. “Given the bad shooting after Panther went down, you can’t even be sure Jacob was his real target.”
The two poodles sat down on the pavement behind the sheriff. Both of them looking at Charlotte as if they sensed something about her, some threat.
“So, big deal, the guy’s a moron.” Sheffield gave her a sly look, having fun with this, then turning back to Tribue to see how the sheriff would come back.
“Moron?” the sheriff said. “Why would his intelligence be at issue?”
“I don’t mean dumb, just sloppy.”
The sheriff turned his eyes toward the Dumpster.
Sheffield said, “So you satisfied, Monroe?”
“One more thing, Sheriff,” she said. “Who is Roberta?”
The name stunned him. His jaw muscles loosened, eyes slid sideways toward the dark, and a vein in his temple rose like a blue worm to the surface.
“Why do you ask?”
“Roberta Tribue,” Charlotte said. “Do you know her?”
Farris brought his eyes back from the darkness. The earlier emotion had drained away, and now his eyebrows were drawn close and his eyes had clenched and his lips puckered with restrained rage.
“Roberta Tribue was my mother. She died a year ago. Where did you hear her name?”
“Oh, I came across a pamphlet in a local bookstore that mentioned her. I understand she was something of a philanthropist.”
“You apparently have the wrong Roberta. My mother was as parsimonious as a stone. I doubt she spent a hundred dollars in her lifetime.”
“I’m mistaken, then.”
Sheffield looked back and forth between Charlotte and the sheriff, then cleared his throat.
“Look,” he said. “I know this is in poor taste, but truth be known, whoever the shooter was, I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass what his motives were. Far as I’m concerned, the asshole performed a valuable public service. He should be pursued and arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, yeah, yeah. But personally, just from this federal agent’s point of view, I’m glad the dead guy’s out of action.”
“Amen,” Tribue said.
“For chrissakes, Frank,” Parker said. “You can’t take five minutes off from being an asshole?”
Frank bowed his head and raised an open hand as if he were swearing off glib remarks forever.
The four of them were quiet for a while, watching the tech guys down on all fours scouring the asphalt.
Charlotte caught Farris glaring at her with open contempt. That spike of rage at the mention of his mother’s name was clear enough. But there was something else about him she was having trouble naming. Something gawky and incongruous, like an ill-fitting suit. Or maybe it was like that movie Gracey enjoyed so much, where the ten-year-old kid wakes up one morning to find himself in a body three times his natural age. Moving through the rest of the film in a clumsy Frankenstein walk.
“You sent me a note, Frank—what was that about?”
“Oh, that. It was nothing really. A guy was asking some questions about Parker and you, I wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“What guy?”
Sheriff Tribue had turned his face toward his forensics people, but she could see his attention had not strayed from their talk.
“County chief of police over in Murphy. Guy named Brody Maxwell, he wanted to ream somebody a new asshole. I think that’s how he put it.”
“Why?”
“Seems a friend of yours at Gables PD, a Marie Salzedo, called his office today, started bullying one of his secretaries about some police report Panther supposedly filed last year.”
“Marie doesn’t bully people,” Parker said.
“Miami manners, then,” Sheffield said. “A little culture clash. In any case, this guy Maxwell had a bug up his ass and wanted to yell at somebody, so I thought I better give you the caution flag. He doesn’t like out-of-town cops and their lawyer husbands running investigations in his neighborhood.”
“What crime was Panther reporting?”
“It was bullshit.”
“What was it, Frank?”
“Brody wasn’t giving out lots of detail, but it was some loony horseshit about a murder conspiracy going on forever, somebody killing Cherokees. Unexplained disappearances. That kind of thing. Total wackjob.”
“Ah, yes,” the sheriff said, drifting back into their circle. He had his hat off again, fingering away sweat from his brim. “My department receives that same report on a regular basis. Naturally we treat each one with the utmost seriousness, though they clearly spring from the deeply superstitious nature of the Cherokee people. ‘Please help me, Sheriff Tribue, my Uncle Joe disappeared, and we believe he’s a victim of the ancient campaign against our people.’ And then, more often than not, a week later we locate Uncle Joe sleeping off a two-week drunk in the Atlanta county jail. Personally, I believe the outbreaks may be related to the lunar cycle.”
The sheriff attempted a smile.
“Don’t you just love getting out of Miami,” Sheffield said. “All this funky local color.”
“It’s my daily reality,” the sheriff said with a meager grin. “To live among people who believe the wings of giant buzzards created the mountains and valleys.”
“You mean they didn’t?” Sheffield said.
By the time the parking lot was clear of law enforcement, it was four in the morning. Parker took a long time in the bathroom, then finally lay down in the dark beside her.
“It’s not too late. We could move to an inside hallway. It’d be safer.”
“This is fine,” Charlotte said. “He’s not coming back.”
He was quiet for a while. Charlotte stared up at an orange stripe on the dark ceiling. The security lights sneaking around the curtain’s edge.
“Are you all right?”
He touched her shoulder, stroked her bare flesh.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Considering.”
Parker shifted beside her, raised himself up on an elbow, and brought his lips to hers. They completed the ritual kiss. A few seconds longer than usual.
Parker’s voice was quiet in the dark.
“I was terrified out there. I was frightened out of my skin.”
“Yeah, so was I.”
“And Jacob. That must have been horrible. Dying in your arms.”
“He’s your son, Parker. You’re the one I’m worried about.”
“Don’t be.” He was quiet. She wondered for a moment if he was going to cry again. But when he spoke into the darkness, his voice was firm. “You and Gracey are my family. Biology by itself doesn’t make someone a father. I didn’t know the kid. I mean, let’s face it, someone can’t just walk into your life out of the blue and make claims on your emotions. It’s not possible.”
It sounded like high-grade bullshit to Charlotte. Trying to argue himself out of the grief before it had a chance to take root. But who was she to argue? It was Parker’s call. His way of dealing.
Charlotte lay still and waited for him to pronounce the other name. But when he didn’t, she whispered a question to him.
“And seeing Lucy again? How difficult was that?”
He lay still for a moment as if he were picturing her. Charlotte had only seen her for a few frenzied seconds, but her impression was vivid. Lucy Panther was not as exotic as she’d imagined. She had a well-structured face and flawless skin and lush lips, but it was her eyes, their dark primal energy, that set her in a class apart from the merely beautiful. A woman who could stir men in ways Charlotte could only guess.
Parker rolled onto his side, the sheets rustling around him, and he reached out beneath the covers and touched her bare upper arm. Keeping his voice low, he said, “The memories came back, yeah. But I was a fifteen-year-old kid. The world was simple. The feelings I had for Lucy were simple, too.”
“Nothing’s simple anymore.”
“No, it’s not.”
His hand roamed up her arm, smoothing his palm lightly across her skin, but she halted it with her own.
“I was wrong about Jacob,” she said. “He meant us no harm. He was coming here to explain things. The locket. Show-and-tell.”
“I know,” he said.
“And when he was done, they were going to hand over Gracey.”
“That’s my guess, too,” he said.
“Lucy will bring her back tomorrow. She’ll find a way.”
“I think she will, yes. I think you’re right.”
“Unless she believes it was me who shot her son.”
“She knows it wasn’t you. She probably knows who it was, and that’s what she and Jacob were trying to tell us. Who it is, what it’s about.”
“So we’ll stay around here tomorrow and wait. Just sit in the room where she can find us.”
“I think that’s our only choice.”
She released Parker’s hand and reached out and drew his face to hers. And though she would never have believed it could happen, the day’s horrors fell away as their kiss lengthened, and all the accumulated grief and uncertainty and frustration gave their hunger an urgency it hadn’t had in years. Even with the name of Lucy Panther hovering over them.
The jealousy she’d felt for Lucy had been stupid, sophomoric. Everyone was the product of all the loves they’d known, all they’d lost and still hungered for. Knowing Parker’s secret, his long-ago passion for that young girl gave a new dimension to this man she loved, and even if some part of Parker’s desire for Charlotte was seasoned by his memories of Lucy Panther, it mattered not at all.
They came together with such fierce need that within seconds Charlotte lost touch with the disastrous day. His hands moved across her flesh lightly but with the craving of someone starved for human touch. The exact pressure and pace she longed for and that he had always been so adept at providing. But something more this time, something that seemed to spring from deeper within, as if their mutual need to obliterate the images in their heads, erase the bloody visions, had stripped away years of habit and restraint.
Sweaty and struggling for breath, they reached that familiar place together, then gradually they went beyond it to another altitude, a place where light and air and gravity dropped away entirely.
Thirty-Three
It was nine on friday, a sunny morning, the lawn glistening with dew, and in the Hensoldt telescopic sight of the Heckler & Koch, Congressman Otis Tribue’s head was magnified so vividly that Farris could make out three dark hairs sprouting from the tip of his right ear.
Farris stood in his mother’s bedroom, aiming out the open front window, sighting on his father’s skull as Otis Tribue worked his way through a bucket of golf balls, driving them off the cliff edge into Raven’s Gorge—showing off his manly swing for Shannon Muldowny.
One after the other the white orbs arced upward, then stalled and plunged into the steep valley, disappearing a half-mile below into the scrub pines and boulders.
The cliff edge where his father stood was fifty yards across the broad green lawn from the front of the Tribue home. Built eighty years before, the house was a brick two-story with eight white columns and a majestic front porch. A sunny, many-windowed dwelling with gleaming maple floors and elegantly detailed banisters and filigreed trim throughout. Lush views from every window stretched for miles. It was in that airy house Farris and Martin had been born and several generations of Tribues before them took their first and last breaths.
Adjusting his sight an inch to the right, Farris captured Shannon’s pale blond hair in his lens. He centered the crosshairs on her thin, arching neck, the upper knobs of her spine. Shannon was a year younger than Farris, with a boyish build and shoulder-length hair and crisp blue eyes. A Boston native, Shannon had spent the last twenty years in single-minded devotion to the political career of Otis Tribue. Somewhere along the way Otis promoted her from his chief of staff to his full-time concubine, a nubile, city-bred replacement for Roberta Tribue, Otis’s lawful wife and Farris’s beloved mother.
Never legally divorced, Otis resided in Georgetown and ventured back to his home district only to campaign for reelection. It had been well over a year since Farris last saw the old man, though Otis was rarely out of his thoughts.
Farris despised the two of them—as much for their betrayal of his mother as for their current indiscreet displays of affection. That they would fondle and steal kisses on this land where Roberta’s dying wails still echoed was an unforgivable blasphemy.
During the long torture of his mother’s dying, as the tumor sprouted its poisonous vines inside her, her husband, the esteemed congressman, paid not a single visit, nor had he once inquired by phone about her condition.
So cold was he to his estranged wife and so complete was his removal from family life that when Roberta died, Otis did not even make an appearance at her funeral, though four dozen white roses were sent in his name, a bouquet that in a fit of rage his brother Martin promptly carted outside and pitched over the edge of Raven’s Gorge at almost the very spot where Otis Tribue stood at this moment, teeing up another ball and driving it out into that green abyss.
With two curls of his fingers, Farris Tribue could remedy this portion of his torment, and send the two of them pitching over the cliff. Their bodies would free-fall for half a mile and vanish into the pine and rocks below. Farris was confident the corpses of the two sinners would never be discovered. The canyon was so steep and impenetrable that, as far as Farris knew, no living soul had ever attempted to rappel its walls. Positioned as it was, almost dead center in the three hundred acres the Tribue family owned, it was as secure a dumping ground as any place on earth.
Out on the cliff edge, Otis handed Shannon the driver and she took her turn, teeing up a ball, setting her feet, and swinging with clumsy enthusiasm.
Through the sight, Farris watched as Otis stood behind her, smoothing a vain hand across his healthy mane. In a Washington salon it was tinted twice a month to the shade of a man thirty years younger. No doubt Shannon had canvassed a thousand registered voters to choose t
hat exact hue.
Farris lowered his aim a fraction and lined up the crosshairs, his finger tightening against the trigger just as Shannon was taking a backswing. Timing the shot with her downstroke, Farris fired his weapon a half-second before the club head reached its nadir. With the highly effective sound suppressor, the blast was reduced to no more than a gentle clap of hands.
At Shannon Muldowny’s feet the white ball disintegrated on the tee. With its sudden disappearance, the young woman’s club whiffed through the air, and in her shock and loss of balance she staggered forward toward the precipice.
Otis Tribue stabbed out his hand and grabbed his mistress’s arm and held her at the teetering edge, one of his cherished drivers slipping from her grip and disappearing into the chasm.
Farris stepped away from the window and lay the rifle on his mother’s deathbed. Her quiet voice resounding in his ear, a chuckle of approval.
He had another use in mind for these two. Something far more inspired than a bullet through the skull.
Yesterday, when his father had arrived, he advised Farris that he’d scheduled his return to Washington in two days.
There was to be a quick, public funeral for his murdered son, then a couple of speeches to local VFW and Rotarian groups, a chance to bask in the pity of his constituents, and he would be off.
So Farris could bide his time at least for a little while. And though it was tempting to send the tumbling slug exploding into the old man’s brain, Farris wanted his father to linger in some degree of pain approaching, if possible, what his own wife had suffered.
For Shannon Muldowny, Farris had another treat in mind. Retribution that perfectly matched her crimes.
Such brutish thinking was new to Farris. For all of his adult years he had lived a life of moral rectitude, abiding by the same law he enforced. It was only recently that he had discovered a profound and fundamental truth at odds with all he’d once believed. When a man’s heart has been completely hollowed out by bereavement and he has made his unwavering pledge to follow those he loved into the endless hereafter, all one’s petty worries and moral restraints evaporated.
Forests of the Night Page 26
