Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  “That bastard,” she says. “Shad probably asked the Clarion-Ledger to send someone down.”

  “Shad claims Lincoln did it, and he may have. I’m afraid the media storm is about to hit.”

  “That’s all right. I’m a good sailor. I’ll come by City Hall after lunch. I love you.”

  The instant I hit END, a female voice calls out from behind me, “Mr. Mayor?”

  I turn, ready to politely brush off a constituent, but I find myself looking at Jewel Washington, the county coroner. Jewel’s office is two doors down from the Justice Court.

  “I saw you out here talking to the DA,” she says, beckoning me toward her office door.

  “I don’t have much time,” I tell her.

  “You have time for this.”

  Jewel is an African-American woman of about fifty-five, and a former surgical nurse. Just as Justice Court judges don’t have to be lawyers in Mississippi, coroners don’t have to be M.D.s. But in Jewel’s case, her lack of a medical degree has proved no impediment to the efficient running of her office. A perfectionist in all things, she has an unerring sense of justice. Jewel also happens to love my father, having known him for many years.

  “I heard Shad asked for no bail,” she whispers, opening the door to her office suite, which leads into a small, empty reception area.

  “News travels fast in this building.”

  “You know it, honey. Thank heaven Judge Noyes feels the same way about your daddy that I do.”

  “I appreciate that, Jewel. What’s up?”

  “Shad’s getting on my last nerve about Miss Viola’s autopsy. He wants me to try to rush the pathologist up in Jackson, and also to use my contacts at the state crime lab to rush the toxicology. He wants everything done yesterday.”

  “What does he most want to know?”

  “You know. Cause of death. The exact cause.”

  “Do you know yet?”

  Jewel raises her eyebrows and clucks her tongue once. “She didn’t die from any morphine overdose.”

  “I didn’t think so,” I reply, recalling the recording on Henry Sexton’s hard drive. “How sure are you?”

  “Miss Viola had a PICC line in place for receiving meds, but she’d developed complications with it. Her sister said she’d been getting direct injections for pain the last couple of days. Whoever injected Viola with morphine pushed the needle right through her antecubital vein. Would have been easy to do, because that vein was shot. Some morphine probably got into her system, but most of it went into the soft tissue beneath the vein. No way that killed her. The home health nurse told me she had a huge tolerance built up.”

  “Then what killed her?”

  “It’s looking like an adrenaline overdose. But they’re not positive yet.”

  I squeeze the coroner’s wrist. “Thank you, Jewel.”

  “Wait, baby. That’s not what I came to tell you.”

  Glancing through the small windows that frame her office door, I watch an ancient Chrysler trundle down Wall Street with a white-haired woman at the wheel. “I’m listening.”

  “Two things. One, I worked alongside Dr. Cage long enough to know he wouldn’t push a needle through nobody’s antecubital vein.”

  “Not even under stress?”

  Jewel scowls. “He wouldn’t have wasted time trying to hit that old thing. I’ve seen Doc find a deep vein to draw blood from a four-hundred-pound man. He’s got the best touch I ever saw. Either somebody without medical training gave that injection, or Viola tried to inject herself, and she was so far gone that her nurse’s training was useless.”

  “Good. What’s the second thing?”

  “News flash. Shad Johnson hates yo’ ass, boy. You made him lose one election and beat him yourself in another. Add to that the Del Payton case, Dr. Elliott’s trial, and that casino mess a couple months back . . . that’s a big account coming due, from Shad’s point of view. That Negro ain’t playing. He means for Doc to die in jail.”

  “That’s what Caitlin thinks, too.”

  Jewel’s eyes gleam like the precious stones she was named after. “I always said that girl was smart.” She takes hold of my hand and squeezes. “If you need help, call my son, not me. He’s staying in town for a while. Your fiancée can find out his phone number.”

  Before I can respond, Jewel pulls open her door, pushes me outside, and shuts it again. The lock turns behind me.

  After a stunned couple of seconds, I hear Kirk Boisseau’s excited voice in my head: Bones . . . There was a car sitting on them.

  After a paranoid glance at the sheriff’s department, I start running for my car.

  CHAPTER 34

  KIRK BOISSEAU DRIVES a scarred Nissan Titan with kayak racks mounted over its bed and roof. His truck is parked in the side lot of Easterling’s Music Company, a family-owned music store that’s surely connected in spirit to Albert Norris’s long-vanished emporium. The owner, a man nearly my father’s age, is a gifted musician and a country philosopher in the mold of Will Rogers. His store sits right beside Carter Street, the busy main thoroughfare of Vidalia, Louisiana, and thus makes a convenient but unobtrusive place to pick up the bones Kirk found in the Jericho Hole.

  When I pull my Audi to the far side of the Titan, I find Henry Sexton standing beside the truck’s passenger window, where Kirk’s girlfriend, Nancy something, is sitting. Henry’s Explorer must be parked behind the store. The reporter’s face is bright with excitement, but Nancy’s is lined with concern.

  By the time I climb out of my car, Kirk has gotten out and come around to my side of the truck. The ex-marine’s face shines like that of a boy who just dug up a dinosaur bone. An inch taller than I, Kirk has a waist no bigger than a woman’s and the shoulders of a mountain gorilla, the result of good genes and kayaking miles every day on the Mississippi River.

  “Where’s the fossil?” I ask.

  He grins and reaches through the passenger window, down between Nancy’s legs, then brings up a foot-long object wrapped in wet newspaper. When he unwraps the soaked paper, I see a dark brown cylinder with a rounded head at one end. I’ve visited the burial sites of many murder victims, and in seconds my brain categorizes this artifact as the distal end of a femur.

  “Human for sure?”

  “It’s no chimpanzee,” Kirk says.

  If the bone is in fact a human femur, then I’m looking at what must be the lower three-quarters of it. Below where the hip should be—the trochanter and other protuberances—the bone appears to have been crushed.

  “The water mineralized this?” I ask.

  “Obviously!” Henry Sexton exults, shivering with excitement. “Do you realize what this means?”

  “Is this all you brought up?” I ask, trying to stay focused.

  Kirk reaches into the truck and brings up more wet newspaper. “Three more in here. I think the whole skeleton is down in the Jericho Hole, but it’s got a car sitting on it.”

  “What make of car?” Henry asks sharply.

  Kirk purses his lips. “I’m not sure. I was focusing on the bones. It was a convertible, I know that.”

  Henry’s eyes bug halfway out of his head. “Luther Davis drove a 1959 Pontiac Catalina convertible!”

  “Did it look like a Pontiac?” I ask.

  Kirk snorts in derision. “It looked like a big hunk of rust lying upside down.”

  “Were the bones just loose on the bottom?” asks Henry.

  “Hell, no. The river would have scoured any loose bones out long ago. The only reason I found these is because they were in the car. The femur was fastened to the steering column with barbed wire. I had to dig my hand up from under to reach it.”

  “Oh, man,” Henry breathes. “Oh, shit. After all this time.”

  “Check this out,” says Kirk, his eyes flashing. From the new bundle of paper he brings out another brown piece of bone. This one is long and thin, with a rusted piece of barbed wire still embedded in it.

  A rush of adrenaline flushes through me.


  “Jesus Lord,” Henry breathes. “Morehouse was telling the truth. That’s Luther Davis.”

  “Maybe,” I say with caution born from experience. “Boys, we are in dire need of expert help.”

  Henry gazes reverently at the find as though at a perfect new specimen of Australopithecus. “Were there enough bones under that car to be two people?”

  “You’ll have to move it to find out. But you guys haven’t seen the showstopper yet.” He removes what looks like a fossilized vertebra from the newspaper. “This was buried under a couple of inches of mud. Looks like part of a backbone to me.”

  “What’s special about it?” Henry asks.

  Kirk rolls the bone over in his fingers and points to a small, dark protrusion with his other hand. “See this?”

  Henry squints at the bone like an orthopedic intern. What is it?”

  “A bullet.”

  The reporter’s hand flies to his mouth.

  “Can you tell what caliber it is?” I ask.

  “No, but it’s small.”

  “Nine millimeter?”

  Kirk scrapes the encrusted projectile with a fingernail. “Closer to seven, I’d say. Hard to tell with the mineralization. But the owner of this vertebra was definitely shot in the spine.”

  While Henry looks stricken, Kirk says, “You want me to go back down there and try to bring up some more? With that landowner on the lookout, I’d have to make a night dive.”

  “No!” his girlfriend snaps from the passenger window. “You heard Penn. It’s time to bring in the law.”

  “I didn’t say that exactly,” I point out. “But we probably don’t have any choice.”

  Henry appears torn. “I don’t like the idea of turning this over to Sheriff Walker Dennis.”

  “I know, but this parish is his jurisdiction, first and foremost. We ought to give Walker a shot at doing the right thing.”

  “Even if Sheriff Dennis is honest, I worry about leaks in his department. He’s got some deputies with family connections I don’t like. I know an expert down at LSU that even the FBI consults in murder cases. They call her the Bone Lady. Nobody in the world could tell us more about these bones than she could, and we wouldn’t have to show the sheriff anything until we were sure.”

  Henry’s past experiences with law enforcement have obviously left him cynical. “Let’s talk about the FBI for a second. Last night you said you needed me to run interference for you. What’s your relationship with the Bureau?”

  Henry cocks his head like a man who can’t make up his mind. “For a long time they ignored me. Then they started warning me about talking to witnesses in what they called ‘open’ cases. I laugh at that now. If the public ever finds out how the Bureau dragged its feet on those murders, there’ll be hell to pay. Now, of course, field agents call me every week. They basically want to use me as a de facto investigator.”

  “Who’s your main contact with them?”

  “I’ve dealt with a dozen different agents. The FBI has jurisdictional problems within its own agency. Different field offices or resident agencies handled the various original cases, so the records are spread out, and each agent only has a few pieces of the puzzle. They’ve got a cold case squad, but not even those people have access to all the data. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Do you trust any of them?”

  “There is one guy I like,” Henry concedes. “He works out of the New Orleans field office now, but he’s no suit. He’s a Vietnam vet named John Kaiser. That’s who I called about Morehouse last night.”

  The agent’s name tweaks something in my memory.

  “Kaiser’s not officially responsible for any of these cases, but he’s got a personal interest. He trained under some of the agents who originally worked the murders, and he’d like to solve them, if he can. He’s helped get me in touch with old-timers when I needed to. If we’re duty bound to share information with somebody official, I’d prefer to deal with Kaiser.”

  “I’m glad you’re open to somebody in the Bureau, but we’ve got to at least give Walker Dennis a chance.”

  “What if the bones disappear? More than bones disappeared out of that office in the old days.”

  Henry is referring to several ice chests that reportedly held the decomposing flesh of two civil rights murder victims in 1965. Like a lot of other evidence from that era, those coolers vanished without trace.

  “We’ll only show him one,” I promise. “Remember, Walker was probably in kindergarten during the bad old days.”

  Kirk Boisseau’s eyes have been moving back and forth between us like those of a grunt watching two officers argue strategy. “Don’t worry, Henry,” he says, “there’s a lot more bones where those came from.”

  “After you talk to the sheriff,” Nancy interjects, “where will we stand? Kirk and me? We took these bones off private property.”

  “If these bones are what we think they are,” I tell her, “that won’t matter. You might be asked some questions to establish exactly where you found them, but no one’s going to press trespassing charges. They’ll be too busy trying to keep out of trouble themselves.”

  “What if they’re not what you think?”

  “Then your names will never come up.”

  Nancy breathes a little easier after this, but her jaw remains set.

  Henry tugs anxiously at his mustache. He’s clearly afraid to let these bones out of his personal custody, and after all the work he’s done on these cases, I can hardly blame him.

  “Sheriff’s an elected position,” Kirk reminds us. “Walker Dennis won’t want any part of this tar baby.”

  “I don’t want you to say a word to him about my sources,” Henry says.

  “No chance,” I promise. “And Kirk is probably right. Walker will want to punt this to the feds to protect his own ass. But at least we’ll know where we stand with him.”

  Henry slaps the side of Kirk’s truck. “Screw it. It’s been thirty-seven years since those boys disappeared. Let’s find out what the sheriff’s made of.”

  I take the carefully wrapped bones from Kirk and give him sober thanks, but the marine just laughs and shakes his head. “Beats the shit out of working for a living.”

  Nancy clearly has a different opinion.

  Twenty seconds later, the parking lot is empty again.

  THE CONCORDIA PARISH SHERIFF’S Office occupies the lower floor of the parish courthouse, an incongruously modern building constructed in the 1970s. Partially faced with brown reflective windows tilted back at an angle, the stucco building looks onto the junky sprawl that lines Highway 84 from Vidalia to Ferriday. The presence of the sheriff’s department is evidenced by clusters of white cruisers to the left of the courthouse, augmented by rescue boats and a mobile command post parked under metal shelters at the rear.

  I called Sheriff Dennis as soon as Henry and I pulled out of the music store parking lot, and he agreed to meet us with the understanding that I would explain why we needed a deputy to escort us out of Ferriday last night. When we arrive at the basement motor pool, we find a brown-uniformed deputy waiting to lead us up to the sheriff’s office.

  After walking a gauntlet of good old boys in uniform, we find Walker Dennis seated behind his desk, watching CNN on a TV mounted in an upper corner of the room, as in a hospital. Like Sheriff Billy Byrd, Walker wears a Stetson, but he’s younger than Byrd (maybe forty-seven) and in slightly better shape. In my youth, I played a few baseball games against Vidalia teams that starred Walker Dennis, but unlike me, he went on to play college ball. Walker’s default expression is a smile of private amusement, as though he’s in possession of information others are not. As Henry and I take the seats he offers us, I note the usual artifacts of political office around the room: framed photos with local dignitaries and sports stars, memorabilia from notable cases, and citations from various civic and professional groups.

  I know nothing of Sheriff Dennis’s politics, but no sheriff in North Louisiana gets elected for b
eing liberal. This is hard-shell Baptist country, as red as Mississippi when it comes to political litmus tests. On the other hand, 40 percent of this parish is black, and the city of Ferriday has a much higher black-white ratio than that. Walker couldn’t do his job if he didn’t know how to walk the tightrope between the races.

  Before he speaks, the sheriff leans back in his chair and gives us an expansive smile, distorted by the dip of snuff packed beneath his lower lip. “I’m mighty honored to have the mayor of Natchez over here,” he says, obviously meaning to begin with small talk, the Vaseline of political interaction in the South. “Must be important business.”

  “It is,” I say flatly.

  The sheriff’s smile vanishes like smoke. “Let’s hear it, Penn.”

  I lay the wet newspaper on his desk and open it to reveal the dark bone with rusted barbed wire set in it.

  “What’s this?” Dennis asks, leaning over his desk.

  “Looks like a piece of ulna to me.”

  “A what?”

  “An arm bone.”

  The sheriff clears his throat. “Who’d it belong to?”

  “Luther Davis, probably,” Henry says.

  The sheriff’s cheeks lose three shades of color.

  “Luther was a big man,” Henry says, “much bigger than Jimmy Revels. We also found a leg bone, and it’s big, even for a femur. These bones were found underneath a convertible, which is what Luther Davis drove before he disappeared. Those bones almost certainly belong to Luther Davis.”

  A sheen of sweat has formed on the sheriff’s scalp and forehead. “And where is this convertible?”

  “At the bottom of the Jericho Hole,” Henry says with a touch of resentment. I’m guessing he’s asked Walker Dennis to investigate that body of water before. “We didn’t even have to look hard.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” Dennis almost moans. “Did you have a federal warrant or something?”

  I shake my head. “We didn’t find this bone, Walker. A local scuba diver did. A recreational diver. Under a rusted convertible, as Henry said.”

  Walker Dennis closes his eyes and shakes his head. “That’s not a bone. That’s a stick of dynamite. And it could blow us all to hell.” He gives me a sharp look. “Especially you and me.”