The White Road

by John Connolly

  So the landlord locks the door, bars the windows, and waits until people forget or until someone too desperate or dumb to care agrees to pay a cut-rate rent and he accepts it, if only to try to erase the memory of what has taken place there with the problems and worries of a new family, a kind of psychic cleansing that might succeed where the immigrants have failed.

  You could go inside, if you chose. You could show your badge and explain that this was routine, that old unsolved cases are rechecked after a few years have passed in the hope that the passage of time might have revealed some previously undiscovered detail. But you don’t need to go inside, because you were there on the night that they found her. You saw what was left of her on the kitchen floor, or in the garden among the shrubs, or draped across the bed. You saw how, with the last breath of air that left her body, something else had passed away too, the thing that gave her substance, a kind of inner framework wrenched somehow through her body without damaging the skin, so that now she has crumpled and faded even as she has swollen, the woman both expanding and contracting as you watch, marks already appearing on her skin where the insects have begun to feed, because the insects always get there before you do.

  And then maybe you have to find a photo. Sometimes, the husband or the mother, the father or the lover, will hunt it down for you, and you’re watching as their hands move across the pages of the album, through the shoe box or the purse, and you’re thinking: did they do this thing? Did they reduce this person to what I’m seeing now? Or maybe you know that they did it-you can’t tell how, exactly, but you just know-and this touching of the relics of a lost life seems somehow like a second violation, one that you should stop with a sweep of your hand because you failed once and now, now you have the chance to make up for that failure.

  But you don’t do it, not then. You wait, and you hope that with the waiting will come the proof or the confession, and the first steps can be taken toward restoring a moral order, a balance between the needs of the living and the demands of the dead. But still, those images will come back to you later, unbidden, and if you’re with someone whom you trust, you may say: “I remember. I remember what happened. I was there. I was a witness and, later, I tried to become more than that. I tried to achieve a measure of justice.”

  And if you succeeded, if punishment was meted out and the file marked accordingly, you may feel a twinge of-not pleasure, not that, but of…peace? Relief? Maybe what you feel doesn’t have a name, shouldn’t have a name. Maybe it is only the silence of your conscience, because this time it isn’t screaming out a name in your head and you won’t have to go back and pull the file to remind yourself again of that suffering, that death, and your failure to maintain the balance that is required if life and time are not to cease forever.

  Case closed: isn’t that the phrase? It’s been so long, it seems, since you’ve had call to use it, to taste the falsity of the words even as they are forming on your tongue and passing through your lips. Case closed. Except it isn’t closed, for the absence continues to be felt in the lives of those left behind, in the hundred thousand tiny adjustments required to account for that absence, for the life, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that should be impacting on other lives. Irv Blythe, for all his faults, understood that. There is no closure. There are only lives continued or lives ended, with attendant consequences in each case. At least the living are no longer your concern. It is the dead that stay with you.

  And maybe you spread the photos and think: I remember.

  I remember you.

  I have not forgotten.

  You will not be forgotten.

  She was lying on her back on a bed of crushed spider lilies, the dying white blooms of the plants like starburst flaws upon the print, as if the negative itself had been sullied by its exposure to this act. Marianne Larousse’s skull had suffered massive damage. Her scalp had been lacerated in two places at either side of her central parting, hairs and fibrous strands crossing in the wounds. A third blow had broken through the right side of her cranium, and the autopsy had revealed fracture lines extending through the base of the skull and the upper edge of the left eye socket. Her face was completely red with blood, for the scalp is very vascular and bleeds profusely after damage, and her nose had been broken. Her eyes were tightly closed and her features contorted, wincing against the force of the blows.

  I flipped forward to the autopsy report. There were no bite marks, bruises or abrasions to Marianne Larousse’s body consistent with sexual assault, but foreign hairs recovered from the victim’s pubic hair were found to have come from Atys Jones. There was redness around Marianne’s genitals-a result of recent sexual contact-but no internal or external bruising or laceration, although traces of lubricant were found in the vaginal canal. There was semen from Jones in her pubic hair, but no semen found inside her. Jones told the investigators, just as Elliot had told me, that they regularly used condoms during intercourse.

  Tests showed fibers matching Marianne Larousse’s clothes on Atys Jones’s sweater and jeans, while acrylic fibers from his car seat were found in turn on her blouse and skirt, along with cotton fibers from his clothing. According to the analysis, the chance that the fibers had a different origin was remote. Over twenty matches had been found in each case. Five or six would usually be enough for relative certainty.

  The evidence still didn’t convince me that Marianne Larousse had been raped before she died, but then I wasn’t the one that the prosecutors would be trying to convince. Her blood alcohol levels were above normal, so a good prosecutor could argue that she was probably not in a position to fend off a strong young man like Atys Jones. In addition, Jones had used a condom and lubricant, and the lubricant would have reduced the level of physical damage to his victim.

  What could not be denied was that Marianne Larousse’s blood had been found on Jones’s face and hands when he entered the bar to call for help, and that mixed in with it were found dust fragments from the rock used to kill her. The bloodstain analysis of the area around Marianne Larousse’s body revealed medium-velocity impact splatter, the blood droplets radially distributed away from the impact site both above and beyond her head and to one side where the final, fatal blow was delivered. Her assailant would have received blood splatter to the lower legs, the hands, and possibly the face and upper body. There was no apparent blood splatter on Jones’s legs (although his jeans had been soaked through from kneeling in Marianne Larousse’s blood, so the splatter could well have been absorbed or obscured) and the blood on his face and hands had been wiped too much to reveal traces of any original splatter pattern.

  According to Jones’s statement, he and Marianne Larousse had met that night at nine o’clock. She had already been drinking with friends in Columbia, then had driven to the Swamp Rat to join him. Witnesses saw them talking together, then they left side-by-side. One witness, a barfly named JD Herrin, admitted to police that he had hurled racial epithets at Jones shortly before the two young people left the bar. He timed his abuse at about ten after eleven.

  Jones told police that he then proceeded to have sexual intercourse with Marianne Larousse in the passenger seat of his car, she on top, he seated beneath her. After intercourse, an argument had commenced, caused in part by a discussion of JD Herrin’s abuse and centering on whether or not Marianne Larousse was ashamed to be with him. Marianne had stormed off, but instead of taking her car she had run into the woods. Jones claimed that she started to laugh and called for him to follow her to the creek, but he was too angry with her to do so. Only after ten minutes had passed and she had failed to return did Jones follow her. He found her about one hundred feet down the trail. She was already dead. He claimed to have heard nothing in the intervening period: no screams, no sounds of struggle. He didn’t remember touching her body, but figured that he must have since he got blood on his hands. He also admitted that he must have handled the rock, which he later recalled as lying against the side of her head. He then went back to the bar and the police were
called. He was interviewed by agents from SLED, the State Law Enforcement Division, initially without the benefit of a lawyer since he had not been arrested or charged with any crime. After the interview, he was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Marianne Larousse. He was given a court-appointed lawyer, who later stepped aside in favor of Elliot Norton.

  And that was where I came in.

  I ran my fingers gently across her face, the indentations in the photographic paper like the pores on her skin. I’m sorry, I thought. I didn’t know you. I have no way of telling if you were a good person or a bad one. If I had met you, encountered you in a bar or sat beside you in a coffee shop, would we have got on together, even if only in that small, passing way in which two lives may briefly interlock before continuing, somehow both altered yet unchanged, on their own paths, one of those small, flickering moments of contact between strangers that make this life liveable? I suspect not. We were, I think, very different. But you did not deserve to end your life in this way and, if I could, I would have intervened to stop what occurred, even at the risk of my own life, because I could not have stood by and allowed even you, a stranger, to suffer. Now I will try to retrace your steps, to understand what led you to this place, to rest at last among crushed lilies, the night insects drowning in your blood.

  I’m sorry that I have to do this thing. People will be hurt by my intervention, and elements of your past may be revealed that you might have wished to remain undisclosed. All I can promise you is that whoever did this will not walk away and will not be allowed to go unpunished because of any action that I may take.

  In all of this, I will remember you.

  In all of this, you will not be forgotten.

  11

  I CALLED THE number on the Upper West Side the next morning. Louis picked up.

  “You still coming down here?”

  “Uh-huh. Be down in a couple of days.”

  “How’s Angel?”

  “Quiet. How you doin’?”

  “Same old same old.”

  “That bad?”

  I had just spoken to Rachel. Hearing her voice had made me feel alone and had renewed my concern for her now that she was so far away.

  “I have a favor to ask,” I said.

  “Ask away. Askin’ is free.”

  “You know someone who could stay with Rachel for a while, at least until I get back?”

  “She ain’t goin’ to like it.”

  “Maybe you could send someone who wouldn’t care.”

  There was a silence as he considered the problem. When he eventually spoke, I could almost hear him smile.

  “You know, I got just the guy.”

  I spent the morning making calls, then drove up to Wateree and spoke to one of the Richland county deputies who had been first on the scene the night Marianne Larousse was killed. It was a pretty short conversation. He confirmed the details in his report but it was clear that he believed Atys Jones was guilty and that I was trying to pervert the course of justice by even speaking to him about the case.

  I then headed on up to Columbia and spent some time speaking with a special agent named Richard Brewer at the headquarters of SLED. It was SLED special agents that had investigated the murder, as they did all homicides committed in the state of South Carolina, with the occasional exception of those that occurred within the jurisdiction of the Charleston PD.

  “They like to think of themselves as independent down there,” said Brewer. “We call it the Republic of Charleston.”

  Brewer was about my age, with straw-colored hair and a jock’s build. He wore standard issue SLED gear: green combats, a black T-shirt with “SLED” in green letters on the back, and a Glock 40 on his belt. He was one of the team of agents that had worked the case. He was a little more forthcoming than the deputy but could add little to what I already knew. Atys Jones was virtually alone in the world, he said, with only a few distant relatives left alive. He had a job packing shelves at a Piggly Wiggly and lived in a small one-bed walk-up in Kingville that was now occupied by a family of Ukrainian immigrants.

  “That boy,” he said, shaking his head. “He had few people in this world to care about him before this, and he has a whole lot fewer now.”

  “You think he did it?”

  “Jury will decide that. Off the record, I don’t see no other candidates on the horizon.”

  “And it was you that spoke to the Larousses?” Their statements were among the material Elliot had passed on to me.

  “Father and son, plus the staff at their house. They all had alibis. We’re pretty professional here, Mr. Parker. We covered all the bases. I don’t think you’ll find too many holes in them there reports.”

  I thanked him and he gave me his card in case I had any other questions.

  “You got yourself a hard job, Mr. Parker,” he said as I stood to leave. “I reckon you’re going to be about as popular as shit in summertime.”

  “It’ll be a new experience for me.”

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “You know, I find that hard to believe.”

  Back at my hotel, I spoke to the people at the Pine Point Co-op about Bear, and they confirmed that he had arrived on time the day before and had worked about as hard as a man could be expected to work. They still sounded a little nervous, so I asked them to put Bear on the line.

  “How you doing, Bear?”

  “Okay.” He reconsidered. “Good, I’m doing good. I like it here. I get to work on boats.”

  “Glad to hear it. Listen, Bear, I have to say this: you screw this up, or cause these people any trouble, and I’ll personally hunt you down and drag you to the cops, you understand.”

  “Sure.” He didn’t sound aggrieved or hurt. I figured Bear was used to people warning him not to screw up. It was just a question of whether or not he took it in.

  “Okay, then,” I said.

  “I won’t screw up,” he confirmed. “I like these people.”

  After I hung up on Bear, I spent an hour in the hotel gym followed by as many lengths of the pool as I could manage without cramping and drowning. Afterward, I showered and reread those sections of the case file that Elliot and I had discussed the night before. I kept coming back to two items: the story, photocopied from an out-of-print local history, of the death of the trunk minder Henry; and the disappearance, two decades before, of Atys Jones’s mother and aunt. Their pictures stared out at me from the newspaper clippings, two women forever frozen in their late teens and vanished from a world that had largely forgotten about them, until now.

  As evening approached, I left the hotel and had coffee and a muffin in the Pinckney Café. While I waited for Elliot to arrive, I leafed through a copy of the Post and Courier that somebody had abandoned. One story in particular caught my eye: a warrant had been issued for the arrest of a former prison guard named Landron Mobley after he had missed a hearing of the Corrections Committee in connection with allegations of “improper relationships” with female prisoners. The only reason the story attracted my attention was because Landron Mobley had hired one Elliot Norton to represent him at both the hearing and what was expected to be a subsequent rape trial. I mentioned the case to Elliot when he arrived fifteen minutes later.

  “Old Landron’s a piece of work,” said Elliot. “He’ll turn up, eventually.”

  “Doesn’t seem like a high-class client,” I commented.

  Elliot glanced at the story, then pushed it away although he still seemed to feel that some further explanation was necessary.

  “I knew him when I was younger, so I guess that’s why he came to me. And, hey, every man is entitled to representation, doesn’t matter how guilty he is.”

  He raised his finger to the waitress for the check, but there was something about the movement, something too hurried, that indicated Landron Mobley had just ceased to be a welcome topic of conversation between us.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Least I know where one of my clients is at.”

 
The Richland County Detention Center stood at the end of John Mark Dial Road, about one hundred miles northwest of Charleston, the approach marked by the offices of bondsmen and attorneys. It was a complex of low redbrick buildings surrounded by two rows of fencing topped with razor wire. Its windows were long and narrow, overlooking the parking lot and the woods beyond on one side. The inner fence was electrified.

  There wasn’t a great deal that we could do to prevent the knowledge of Atys Jones’s impending release from reaching the media, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to find a camera crew and a handful of journalists and photographers in the parking lot, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I had gone on ahead of Elliot and had been watching them for about fifteen minutes by the time Elliot’s car appeared. Nothing exciting had happened to either them or me in the interim, apart from one brief flurry of domestic theater when an unhappy wife, a small, dainty woman in high heels and a blue dress, arrived to collect her husband after he’d spent some time cooling his heels in a cell. He had blood on his shirt and beer stains on his pants as he emerged blinking into the fading light of the early evening, at which point his wife slapped him once across the head and gave him the benefit of her wide and pretty profane vocabulary. He looked like he wanted to run back to jail and lock himself in his cell, especially when he saw all the cameras and thought, for one brief moment, that they’d come for him.