Betty saw Claire waiting in the car and waved.
“Oh, your wife is with you. Don’t be such a fuddy-dud. Tell her to come on in and have some coffee.”
He focused on his grave task.
“I know Cal isn’t here. I’m just ...”
“Was he supposed to wait for you? That man, I swear. He gets an itch and he’s gotta scratch. The good Lord put fish in the stream with more patience than my husband.”
“Betty, I’m afraid there’s bad news.”
Oddly, Betty Nussbaum’s pretty face brightened at that very moment. Morgan was puzzled, speechless as she looked past his shoulder.
“Then you might as well deliver it yourself,” she said. “Cal, haul your butt up here and apologize to Jeff for goin’ fishin’ without him, you impatient old fart.”
Morgan swiveled to see Cal Nussbaum, very much alive, stowing his fishing pole and old-fashioned basket creel in a lean-to shed beside the trailer. He carried a proud stringer of eight pan-sized browns, fresh from the Nightcap. Breakfast.
Morgan felt the blood drain from his head and, for a moment, believed he might pass out. He reached for the two-by-four handrail that encircled the small porch.
“You’re alive!” he blurted out.
“Hell, yes, I’m alive,” Cal said, irritated. “Fly-fishin’s almost as good for a man as gettin’ up before the chickens. You come all the way up here to tell me that?”
Morgan was dumfounded at the sight of Cal. The scowling old printer suddenly felt self-conscious.
“Christ, you smell like a jerky fart,” Cal said. “You been smokin’ them cow-pie ceegars again?”
“It’s from the fire,” Morgan said lamely.
“What fire? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Cal, The Bullet burned down last night. It was a bomb. They found a burned body in the rubble and I thought it was ...”
Morgan felt light-headed. Cal grabbed his elbow and led him inside, seating him in an easy chair near the door. Betty brought him a glass of water, then hovered nearby like a tall mother hen. Before he knew what was happening, Claire was beside him.
“I went back down there last night to pick up some work and bring it home,” Cal explained to them both. “Godawmighty, no wonder you look like you seen the ghost ship.”
Now Cal’s hands were shaking, too. He sat on a steamer trunk beside the couch.
“Are you okay, Jeff?” Claire asked.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, holding her hand tightly. After a long, deep silence, he began to question Cal.
“Was anybody there when you left? One of the reporters? Anybody?”
“Nope. I turned off all the lights, locked her up and came home. It was nine-thirty, quarter to ten.”
Morgan wondered if the charred corpse in The Bullet’s rubble was the bomber himself, caught in a violent trap of his own making. He was angry. He wanted desperately to know who destroyed his newspaper and the body in the wreckage might hold the key.
“Did you see anybody suspicious out back? Anybody hanging around?”
Cal flexed his fingers, trying to remember. His memory was blank. He shook his head.
“Wasn’t there more’n fifteen minutes. Just loaded up the pages, set some type and hauled my ass outta there. I came home and worked on ‘em for an hour, then went to bed.”
“You’ve got the pages here?” Morgan asked.
“Right over there,” he said, pointing toward the trailer’s breakfast nook. All the page flats for the week’s edition were spread out on the table. “Just missing a couple stories and a few pictures. Pretty much ready to go.”
Morgan leaned forward in the easy chair, his eyes suddenly full of life again.
“Who could print it for us if we fill the holes?”
Cal thought a moment.
“The Trib over in Blackwater, maybe the News-Letter down in Newcastle. They’re good people. They’d make sure we had a paper.”
Morgan stood up and rattled off instructions. He made a few notes for Cal.
“Get to town and find Crystal and the reporters. Leave me forty inches across the top of the front page for a fire story and picture, and a hole on the edit page. Fill up everything else the best you can. Have one of the reporters take photos of the fire scene and soup the film at the high school newspaper’s darkroom. Then call around and find somebody who’ll print The Bullet for the next few weeks. Tell them we’ll have one before the end of the day tomorrow.”
“What the hell are we gonna write these stories on?”
“If you can’t beg or borrow a computer and printer downtown, go to the library and type them to fit the holes, the old-fashioned way. It won’t be pretty but it’ll be a paper.”
“No problem.”
“Cal, I’m sorry to put this in your lap, but you can do it better than anybody else. Keep me in the loop. I’ll have my stories done when the time comes.”
Cal nodded.
“One more thing. Betty, can you take Claire to the airport in Blackwater this morning? I’d sure appreciate anything you could do.”
“Certainly, dear. When?”
“Come to the house in, say, an hour. Is that good for you?”
“I’ll be there.”
“What are you gonna be doin’?” Cal asked.
“You think I’m going to leave this one to the cops? This is personal now,” he said.
Cal smiled broadly and poked his ink-stained thumb in the air.
“Old Bell brung you up right,” he said. “He’s sure gonna get a kick outta this one.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Morgan changed out of his smoky clothes and packed two suitcases while Claire showered and fixed her hair for the trip to Blackwater, the only commercial airport within a hundred miles. In a futile, last-ditch effort, she had begged him to let her stay, argued bravely. But she made no headway and had no choice.
Over the phone, the United ticket clerk reserved the last seat on the eleven a.m. puddle-jumper to Denver, with a two p.m. connection to O’Hare. Morgan left the return ticket open. He arranged for Claire’s mother to pick her up at the airport and drive her home to Winnetka. He told her about the fire, but he said nothing about the butchery of their dog or the sinister threats against her daughter. Some things could wait.
Finally, he called the dispatcher and asked to be patched through to Trey Kerrigan. He told the sheriff that Cal Nussbaum was indeed alive and the burned body belonged to someone else, probably nobody employed by The Bullet. Maybe it was the bomber himself, Morgan surmised. Kerrigan exhaled a frustrated sigh and hung up without engaging in any further conversation, much less speculation, with an erstwhile suspect.
Betty Nussbaum came to the door just before eight, gussied up in a flowery print dress for the hour-long drive to Blackwater. Morgan begged her indulgence for a last few minutes alone with his wife. Betty winked at him and hovered over the marigold bed, pretending to be enthralled by the wizened blossoms and the controlled tragedy of a city flower garden.
Claire sat on the edge of the rumpled bed upstairs. Everything was packed. Morgan sat beside her and rested his head on her shoulder. She wore no perfume but he smelled the sweet fragrance of her long, soft hair.
“I’ll miss you,” he said, “but at least I’ll know you’re safe. You need to take care of our baby.”
Claire didn’t look at him. She began searching in her purse for something, maybe she didn’t even know what.
“But what about you? Will you be safe? I should be here.”
“I’ll be perfectly fine. There’s nothing more that can happen.”
He knew it wasn’t so. Much more — and much worse — could happen. The idea of it crawled around inside him, scraping to get out. Morgan closed his eyes and wished it away.
She kissed him and made him promise to call every night. Morgan carried his wife’s bags downstairs to Betty’s bruised ‘Seventy-eight Chevy pickup and kissed her one last time before she crawled into the front seat
. As the truck rumbled casually away down shady Rockwood Street and disappeared around the corner onto Main, Morgan already felt alone.
Nobody answered the phone at Old Bell Cockins’ house. Morgan let it ring more than a dozen times.
By now, he reasoned, the old editor probably knew about the fire anyway. He’d spent fifty years with his finger on the town’s pulse. He didn’t just stop caring about what happened. Somebody in town would call him. He’d hear it on his police scanner. He’d see the smoke from his majestic cupola. Hell, maybe he’d just know. Old Bell was probably down there right now, taking notes.
Morgan tried to fight off his fatigue. He’d been up more than twenty-four hours. He went upstairs and took some aspirin to tranquilize the drumming in his head. He lay back on the unmade bed, one foot on the floor to fool his body, if not his mind.
The morning sun streamed through the bedroom’s skylight, its elongated symmetry sliding across the floor imperceptibly toward the bed. Morgan closed his eyes, still raw from smoke and dulled by exhaustion. Ghostly designs in the shape of reflected light drifted in the blackness behind his eyelids. He nestled his face in the cool pillows and smelled Claire’s body beside him again.
Sleep took him without a fight.
And except for dark shapes that flew across his subconscious like the shadows of frightened birds, he didn’t dream.
Morgan heard the thumping even before he awoke. It echoed in his empty sleep.
When he opened his eyes, the sunlight had filled the bedroom and he was sweating. His mouth was dry and his left arm, folded beneath his chest, was numb and bloodless.
Someone was pounding on the front door downstairs. Morgan glanced at the clock as he rolled out of bed. Two thirty-nine. He’d slept more than six hours, though it seemed only minutes to him.
He made his way stiffly down the stairs and opened the front door. Trey Kerrigan stood on the porch with two companions: a balding, moon-faced man in a yellow golf shirt embroidered with the State Fire Marshal’s logo, and a clean-cut Hispanic man in a dark suit and tie. Neither smiled.
The sheriff introduced them. The yellow golf shirt was Ray Forney, a state arson investigator from Cheyenne. The suit was Bruce Montoya, the sole ATF agent in Wyoming. Morgan shook their hands and invited them inside. He offered cold drinks, but they declined.
Trey Kerrigan sat on the edge of the long sofa, uncomfortable and grim. The two investigators sat on either side of him.
“Jeff, we’ve got a tentative ID on the body.”
“Was it somebody from around here?”
The two investigators looked at their shoes. The sheriff cleared his throat.
“Jeff, it was Old Bell. I’m very sorry.”
“What?”
“His wallet was still in his back pocket, underneath him. It was protected by his body and it didn’t burn. Carter McWayne found it among the remains.”
“Are you sure?”
“He’s comparing dental records from Jake Switzer’s office right now, but we’re pretty sure. I’m really sorry, Jeff. I know what he meant to you.”
“Jesus Christ ...” Morgan swallowed hard.
Old Bell must have been inside when the bomb exploded, just like the night Morgan found him there, lonely and alone. Morgan covered his eyes. He didn’t want them to see him cry for his old friend and mentor.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked without looking at them.
“Are we off the record here?” asked Forney, the state arson investigator. Morgan noticed his unusually small hands were smudged black.
Morgan looked up at Forney’s round face, angry.
“Where the hell would I print the story if we weren’t?”
Nonetheless, the dweebish Forney looked to his colleagues for assurance. Kerrigan consented with a patronizing nod.
“Looks to me like a fertilizer and fuel-oil bomb,” he said. “It was a high-order blast and my gut tells me it was ammonium nitrate, some diesel and a simple fuse. Common ingredients, untraceable, big boom in a little package.”
“Like Oklahoma City?”
“Same stuff,” Forney said, his head bobbing comically. “In this case, small enough to carry, but big enough to bring down half a brick building. It detonated inside and ignited some flammable materials in the printing area, probably ink or solvents.”
“Was it already there?” Morgan asked. “Did we just not see it?”
“There’s a remote chance it was planted earlier and wired to a timing device, but I don’t think so.”
“Why’s that?”
“Well, you got a nice sized crater in a fairly open and conspicuous area of the floor, just a few feet from the back window of your building,” Forney said. “Assuming your bomber had any brains at all, if he’d planted it deliberately, he’d have placed it more strategically, to do more immediate damage. Plus, two or three people came and went without seeing it. Personally, I think the bomb came in through the window and exploded right where it fell.”
“A toss and run thing?” Morgan asked.
“Probably. We found a fairly large fragment of a five-gallon gas can in the debris.”
Forney rubbed his tiny fingers together nervously. He was intimate with volatility, blast physics, chemistry and burn patterns; he wasn’t so comfortable with soft tissue.
“And, uh, there was some shrapnel, um, some pieces of the same material we found imbedded in the, uh, body.”
“Will you be able to trace this thing?” Morgan asked.
Forney’s round face rumpled.
“Maybe we’ll get lucky and a witness or a feed-store clerk will come forward. We’re sending the gas-can remnants to the ATF lab in Glynco, Georgia. Don’t quote me on this, but it has all the markings of a militia-style bombing.”
Morgan stared at his own hands. Like Forney, he couldn’t wash off all the sooty stains, almost as indelible as printer’s ink. Or a memory. Still, he tried to rub it away.
“And Old Bell was inside. A fluke. He wasn’t supposed to be there,” he told them.
Trey Kerrigan began to question him.
“Do you have any idea why he was at the newspaper at that time of night?”
“He’d come down at night sometimes, after everybody left, just because he missed the place.”
“Did you know he was there last night?”
“No. He’d never tell anybody. He was too proud. Christ, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“When did you leave last night?”
“After nine. I came home for dinner and was planning to go back to print some photos when I heard the explosion.”
“Was anyone else around?”
“Nobody. Cal Nussbaum came back to pick up some pages after I left. He said he was there maybe fifteen minutes around nine-thirty, then went home. You can ask him, but he told me he didn’t see anybody or anything unusual.”
“And you ran downtown when you heard the explosion, a little after ten, right?”
Morgan thought about it.
“Yeah, about then.”
“Stayed all night?”
“The whole time. The firefighters will tell you. When I got back, I found the dog out back and the phone message on the machine.”
“A deputy should have been here already to pick up the dog and examine the scene. Was there anything else you think we should know?”
“The tape. Did you listen to it?”
Montoya, the ATF agent, spoke. He was less animated than Forney, professional and concise.
“We have it now, Mr. Morgan. The ATF will be very involved in this investigation. We’ll analyze the tape in the next few days for voice characteristics and so forth.”
“Have you contacted Jerry Overton in Chicago?”
“Yes,” Montoya said. “He vouches for you. He said you reported some threats against you and, rest assured, we’re investigating those. We’ve already had some intelligence on those individuals.”
“You’ve talked to Malachi Pierc
e already?”
“Not yet. We’d wanted to round up a few more details before we went out to Wormwood,” Kerrigan said.
“So am I still a suspect?” Morgan asked.
“Everybody’s a suspect,” the sheriff said. “But let’s just say you’re looking less and less likely.”
After the investigators left, Morgan rummaged through unpacked boxes in his little room at the top of the stairs, the place he dreamed of putting all his books and some day writing his own book. His laptop computer would come in handy until The Bullet could be rebuilt, but he needed it for something more pressing now.
Cassie’s disks were still in his briefcase, rescued almost accidentally from the inferno. So was Kate Morning’s only photograph of her dead daughter.
Morgan cleared the dirty dishes from the breakfast table and propped Aimee’s picture against the sugar bowl. He plugged in the wall adapter for his IBM 760ED and began downloading all of Perry County’s court data since 1962 into his laptop’s ample hard drive, where once he’d pieced together the puzzle of P.D. Comeaux.
It took only an hour. Within another thirty minutes, he’d adapted his database software to the court records and was ready to search for the key to Malachi Pierce’s demons.
First, he queried for the name “Pierce,” just as he had asked Cassie Gainsforth’s computer, Alyx, the day before. And again, his search produced nothing more than twenty-two unrelated hits, plus the locked case of Hosanna Pierce.
Morgan scrolled down and highlighted Hosanna’s filename, then asked the computer to retrieve it. He expected his request to be rejected, but the computer whirred softly, ticking occasionally. Cassie might have unlocked all the sensitive data when she transferred it to disk. He got no lock-out message, no high-tech rebuff. A good sign.
Within half a minute, a screenful of data appeared. The once-secret case of Hosanna Pierce proved to be brief and undramatic, except for one detail:
On April 24, 1976, Malachi Pierce sought the court’s permission to commit his nine-year-old daughter, Hosanna, to the state mental hospital. District Judge Harold Biggerstaff scheduled hearings on Case No. 76-368J within the month and appointed a lawyer to represent young Hosanna’s interests in the matter.
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