Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 08 - Deep South

by Deep South (lit)

  The only cheery note was the department's uniform. The woman in the kiosk wore a nifty burgundy number.

  Anna introduced herself. "I'm Cameron. We been hearin'about y'all," the policewoman said.

  "It's this big deal. Like there haven't been policewomen down here forever. Glad to finally meet you." After stowing her weapon in a lockbox outside the jail area, Anna was ushered into the inner sanctum, where Cameron showed her the location of the Breathalyzer and the grim double row of locked doors. Prisoners, bored, hungover, angry, shouted questions in hopes of getting a crumb of attention. Anna ignored them.

  Cameron knew them by name and was good-natured about the distraction.

  Davidson was waiting when Anna reclaimed her weapon and her freedom. The sun had set and the velvet evening was upon them. In her mind, Anna heard the strains of the old song "Blue Velvet." Blue velvet was the night, the lyric went. The songwriter must have been from the South. The sky was a deep blue pricked with stars.

  Murder proved a nice distraction and, as the sheriff told her of his day's findings, Anna relaxed into the familiar role with which work always provided her. A comfortable place where reason and not emotion was the most effective tool.

  "The boys are going to stonewall," Davidson said as he backed his vehicle out of the lot. "My deputy got to the two you'd named, Thad Meyerhoff and Lyle Sanders, but the juice ain't worth the squeeze.

  They're saying they were drunk prom night and remember nothing. My guess is that'll be Brandon Deforest's story when next we talk to him."

  "The Three Musketeers: one for all and all for one," Anna said, then explained, telling him of her interviews with Brandon and his father.

  Colonel Deforest and the Meyerhoffs are good people," Davidson said.

  "They won't take kindly to their sons saying they were so drunk they blacked out. Whatever those boys are hiding, they've got to figure it'll get them in worse trouble than admitting to drunkenness,"

  "If I hadn't actually seen those two boys-probably Sanders and Meyerboff-in the graveyard, the story they made up would probably have been less toxic," Anna said. "Maybe the three of them playing cards or night fishing together."

  "No doubt."

  "How about the Sanderses? Are they 'good people'?"

  "Lyle's father is an abusive alcoholic. Hearing Lyle admit to the family failing, my guess is he'll beat that boy half to death." They ruminated on that for a while, the silence In the car deepened by the crackling worries of the police radio. What would a kid take a beating to avoid?

  Jail? A murder rap? "Do you think they killed Danni Posey?" Anna asked.

  "I sure don't want to." Neither did she. "What did you get from our used-car salesman, McIntire?"

  "Not much. He said they'd had a little too much bourbon and went to bed early. He slept right through the cars and the shouting that the other campers complained of. Says be knew nothing about it till the next morning.,, "It seems alcohol's the excuse du lour in these parts," Anna said. "Everybody everywhere drinks too much. It's just in Mississippi most folks don't waste time going to AA meetings in between." That was the first cynical remark Anna'd heard him make. She liked him better for it. Saints had a way of wearing on the nerves of the less exalted.

  "McIntire made a point of asking me to tell you he doesn't think it was your fault," the sheriff said. "You being new and all, and that he and his buddies have no intention of deserting Rocky because of it."

  "Big of him," Anna said dryly. "He thought so."

  "Talk to the lawyer?"

  "Jimmy Williams? Tomorrow, he's at the top of my morning.

  I did have one interesting bit of information turn up.,, Because he was pleased with himself and wanted her to ask what it was, Anna did. "I dropped by the Posey farm and talked to Cindy I'd forgotten I'd met her before four or five years ago when her son got on the wrong side of things. Just the pre-penitentiary warm-ups, I'm afraid.

  Anyway Cindy and I had a two-Coke chat. She's sick enough I think Fred should see if he can get her back into care, but that's not my field.

  Not with this hat on. She said she'd had two other children besides Darml and Mike. She told me they'd been stillborn and they were penguins."

  "Jesus," Anna said. "It gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it. I asked her how they came to be penguins, and she admitted that they weren't really penguins. That a black nurse at the hospital had chewed them up. After he spit them out, they were black babies so she had to turn them loose."

  "Turn them loose?"

  "She said she let them go in the woods so they could return to the wild.

  I got hold of Fred, Cindy had a miscarriage between Danni and Mike. He said that's when she started 'slipping," with a fixation on African-Americans. He swears there were no babies, black or otherwise, turned loose in the woods,"

  "That's a comfort, I guess.

  Did you believe him or do you think there's baby bones buried somewhere under the cotton crop?"

  "I believed him. We'll need to check it out as best we can, but I think he was telling the truth.

  "Then she told me Danni had been insured for forty thousand dollars.

  After the penguins, I wasn't taking anything on faith but I checked. The girl was insured by Mrs. Posey. According to Cindy, Fred Posey didn't know anything about it."

  "Life insurance on a sixteen-year-old girl? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you intend to kill her. They might fool you and me, but insurance companies mean business." Davidson laughed and Anna was relieved. Too often one man's joke was another man's insult.

  "Not life insurance. Mrs. Posey had her daughter's face insured. She'd heard on some TV show that an actress had her legs insured for a million dollars through Lloyds of London, she thought. And she knew Danni's face had to be protected."

  "She'd told me Danni was going to be a model," Anna remembered." As big as Cheryl Tiegs."

  "Cindy Posey's heard that her daughter was struck across the right side of her forehead over the corner of her eye, disfigured, and she wants that forty grand. She says she paid for it, it's hers, and she means to have it," the sheriff said. "Since the girl's dead, I wonder if the policy is still valid."

  "Who knows. The point is Cindy Posey thinks it is."

  "And maybe Fred Posey," Anna added. Secrets were hard to keep, especially secrets requiring paperwork, records, canceled checks.

  There was a time that it wouldn't have crossed her mind that anyone could murder their own child for a measly forty grand. No more.

  Forty grand might be a fortune to the Poseys. "If one of the Poseys did it, the sheet and hangman's rope don't make a whole lot of sense," Anna said. "Making sense doesn't seem to be Cindy Posey's long suit. This is it." Davidson turned off the two-lane road they'd followed out Of Port Gibson and into the whale-belly darkness of a wooded dirt lane.

  A tidy brick house was tucked back in the trees and surrounded by white azalea bushes in such glorious bloom that they glowed like the light of the moon shattered and brought to ground. A Dodge truck was parked in the drive and the porch light was on.

  "Are we expected?" Anna asked as they got out of the car.

  "I let Leo know I'd be by tonight. No sense wasting a trip if nobody's going to be home," Anna followed Davidson up the walk. The door opened and a cacophony of barks commenced. When they reached the porch, Anna saw the perpetrators through the screen. The minister had half a dozen Boston terriers, all clicking their nails on the linoleum, whiffling through squashed noses and yapping. Not a pretty sight. "Father Davidson, come on in," said a voice Anna recognized as that of the dark man under Captain Williams's command. "Ma'am," he said as Anna was ushered in first. She'd forgotten how striking Leo Fullerton was. The lowering brow with black eyebrows that extended far beyond the corners of deep-set eyes, the full mouth that she suspected could turn cruel, but mostly the stiff way he moved, as if he'd not yet grown accustomed to the human form.

  Amid the canine crisis that raged unabat
ed and unreprimanded below their knees, Fullerton led them into a tiny formal dining room.

  Seated in straight-backed cherrywood chairs, they stared at one another across a centerpiece of fake magnolias and bunched ribbon that suggested a craft-mad woman tended to at least some of the minister's domestic needs. "Like I said on the phone, Paul, I can't tell you anything." The statement was flat, lifeless. Leo's hands, palms down on the table, the fingers splayed, looked flat and lifeless, robotic limbs not yet needed.

  The only part of the minister that was animated was his eyes, and they disturbed Anna.

  One did not track. The other moved so quickly at times she caught herself glancing around the room to see if he followed the progress of a moth or a fly.

  Methodically, Sheriff Davidson led Leo through the evening Danni had been killed. The minister said be and the others had turned in early They slept in one tent, army-barracks style, on folding wood and canvas cots. He didn't hear the cars. He was a sound sleeper. Answers were given in dull monotone, and Anna began to wonder if he suffered from severe depression or was on psychotropic drugs for other reasons, but his eyes-or his one tracking eye-was clear, the pupil size within normal parameters. Not that pupil size mattered with psychotropics. Anna knew very little about them. She'd ask Molly.

  The only time he came to life was when Anna asked if he, like McIntire, had consumed a little too much bourbon.

  "I'm a Baptist minister," be said, obviously affronted. "I don't drink spirits." Anna suffered an evil temptation to ask him if he danced. Not because he was a Baptist but because he came across as an audio animatronic Disney creation from the 1960s. The picture of him cutting a jig tickled her.

  Finally, the questions were over. In a clatter of claws, the dogs escorted them to the porch and the minister closed the door, politely leaving the porch lamp on to light them to their car.

  When they were partway down the walk, the preacher called from within, where he'd remained protected by the screen. "Paul?"

  "Yeah, Leo?" The sheriff stopped and turned. "There's something I'd like to say."

  "I'm listening, Leo."

  "This thing is ungodly for the girl, for whoever killed her, but it doesn't end there." Anna and Paul waited. Anna was waiting for some sort of Christian revelation. What Paul waited for, she didn't know, but she could feel the tension in him.

  "How so, Leo?" he asked. "That sheet, draping the girl like that, that's stirring up racial hatred that we've fought so long and so hard.

  Pointing the finger at old prejudices, giving them new life.

  It's as much a horror, as unforgivable, as the... the other. Don't you let it happen, Paul. Don't let this be written in that book." They waited a bit, but he was done talking. "I'll do my best," the sheriff said finally. "Good night, Leo."

  "Good night," Anna echoed.

  "Beating a dead horse," Anna summed up her take on the interview.

  There's something strange about that guy. He was creepy when I met him.

  Tonight did nothing to change my first impression. He looked like a man in shock. The kind that are going to walk around for a while right as rain and then suddenly fall over dead."

  "Leo's got a brooding aspect to him, but there's something bothering him. I haven't talked much to him since his mom died.

  Alzheimer's.

  Long and slow and ugly."

  "That would do it," Anna said. "Has he got any reason to lie about what he saw or heard that night?"

  "None that I can think of. I've known Leo for twenty-three years, and far as I know he has no connection with the Posey family. Or the Deforests for that matter.

  He's always been an odd duck but not to do harm. He's one of those fellows who feels everything. Though he's just an awful preacher, his flock thinks he walks on water. He feels their pain and carries their guilt in a way that would land me in Whitfield." He named the local lunatic asylum.

  Words Paul Davidson had spoken earlier, that hadn't made sense at the time, snapped into focus. Davidson had said of charity work that it wasn't his job "in this hat." Once he'd said of Leo Fullerton, the minister, that they spoke the same language. "Fullerton called you Father Davidson," Anna said. It came out like an accusation.

  "I'm a priest," the sheriff said simply. 1 had the congregation at St. James for nine years before I ran for sheriff. I still pinch-hit now and then when Father Johnson's sick or on vacation."

  "A priest." Anna was appalled. Mentally she was inventorying everything she'd said or thought about the man since they'd met.

  Probably she was going to hell. "You'll get used to it," he said mildly and, in the faint glow of the dashboard lights, Anna thought he was laughing at her discomfort. "In these parts, ninety-five percent of everyone is, was, or is married to the son, daughter, or brother of a priest. The other five percent are clergy spouses. "Every region has its pitfalls," Anna said, managing to be rude without even trying.

  Davidson pulled up beside Anna's patrol car in front of the Sheriff's Department and shut his engine off. The night was mild and even in town smelled of exotic blooms and was rich with the song of frogs.

  "Can I take you out for coffee one of these days, go someplace where neither of us has to wear a gun?" Too weird. Anna's mind flashed to Bedazzled starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. The devil granting wishes, then screwing them up.

  She'd been lusting after a fucking priest. "Probably not a good idea," she said and pulled too hard on the door handle. Her fingers slipped off the chrome and she cracked her crazy bone so hard against the butt of her pistol that for a moment her arm went numb and she was blind with the uniquely miserable buzzing of nerve pain. "Goddamnit," she hissed.

  Then: "Oh my God, sorry. Shit, I did it again." Davidson laughed. "Not a lot of men of the cloth in your past?"

  "I've never known a priest," Anna admitted. "With the exception of Father Todd in high school who ordered the nuns around and, when he bothered to talk to us girls, always put his hand on our thighs."

  "Abusive?" Davidson's voice turned so uncharacteristically cold, Anna focused past her tingling arm to the man's face.

  "Ridiculous is more like it."

  "Ab," he didn't sound much mollified.

  "Coffee'd be fine," Anna said.

  Davidson smiled. It was truly a lovely smile, even with teeth green from the light on the speedometer. "It'll be easy," he said. "No confession.

  I'm an Episcopal priest." Layers upon layers, nothing was just what it was-Anna was at a loss as to where her Yankee forebears got the impression that Southerners were simple folk.

  It was just past eight, dark and fragrant and warm. Anna'd put in a twelve-hour day and was glad to be going home. The town of Port Gibson lay just west of the Natchez Trace. There were two ways to get back on the parkway, one a mile or so south of the ranger station at mile marker thirty-nine and the other a road that angled northeast out of town to join the Trace at mile marker forty-three, closer to Rocky Springs.

  Having had her fill of business for the day, Anna took the shortcut. On the way home, to amuse herself, she played with her radar. As it locked on each oncoming car, their speed was registered digitally.

  The previous district ranger had it set at sixty-two, twelve miles per hour over the posted speed limits. When any car exceeded that, and this night most of them did, the unit beeped and the number was locked in place till Anna erased it. Sixty-five, sixty-three, sixty-seven, Anna just couldn't get inspired to write any tickets. Since the speed limits on the interstates had been raised to seventy it was hard to get excited over sixty-seven, even in a fifty.

  Traffic was light and she slipped into a pleasant torpor, dreaming about the frozen fettuccine Alfredo dinner waiting for her. On the long straight stretch crosscut by Big and Little Bayous Pierre, the radar unit shrieked her back into the present.

  One hundred seventeen.

  Too high to ignore. The car was by her in a flash. Anna stepped on the brakes, flicked on lights and siren, executed a Y turn and w
as behind them, way behind them. At one hundred seventeen miles an hour, you could cover a lot of country. The Crown Vic was powerful, but Anna'd not had call to test it. She stepped on the accelerator and watched as the needle climbed smoothly to a hundred and twenty.

  Uncomfortably aware of the Trace's deer population, she lifted her mike.

  "Seven hundred, this is five-eight-zero headed south from Big Bayou Pierre in pursuit." Now if she crashed, they'd know where to start looking for the body. For four quick miles-time enough for her pulse to catch up with her speed-she gave chase. The driver of the car ahead was either too drunk or too distracted to notice the lights in his rearview mirror. Or he was deciding whether or not he could outrun her. Finally his brake lights pulsed. "Thank you, dick-brain," Anna hissed, She'd spent too many years on foot and horseback. High-speed car chases scared her half to death.