A Dark Path

by Robert E. Dunn

  Firemen and deputies had uncovered five more markers in the cleared part of the field. Four of those were concrete squares imprinted, UNKNOWN. The last was concrete as well. It was a homemade circle—decorated with imbedded marbles and toy soldiers. The scrawled inscription said, Baby Boy Roger.

  The sheriff was several yards beyond these discoveries, kicking through the grass and working his phone. For the first time, I took a good look around at the cleared area. It wasn’t a circle. It meandered out from the wide center, claiming ragged parts of the overgrowth. Beyond the edges, it crooked and twisted like a drunkard’s walk home. The cuts made secret rooms in the foliage in which were hidden more piles of brush.

  I followed Sheriff Benson clutching the flyers in my hand, little flags of color that he ignored. He killed the connection on his phone just as I reached him. It wasn’t done on my behalf. Even though I called his name he didn’t turn. His gaze was fixed ahead.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. It slumped under the touch as though conquered. I followed his gaze and saw three open graves.

  Chapter 3

  The graves were not in a neat line like you expect to find. They were all roughly facing east—but spread at random levels like crooked teeth.

  “You know what’s going on here?” I asked the sheriff.

  “I have ideas,” he answered. His voice was as wasted as his posture. “None of them good.”

  “I found these.” I held out the flyers.

  “Johnson?”

  “In his truck.”

  “You searched his truck?”

  “Yes. I—”

  “Hang on.” Sheriff Benson squared his shoulders and took a hard breath before he looked me in the eyes. His expression told me this was one of his Come to Jesus moments. “Under what circumstances did you search the truck of Johnson Rath?”

  I understood without asking. He was making everything that happened today official, and careful.

  “In the course of investigating, I went to question Cherry Dando as a person of interest, believing he had information about or personal knowledge of the current crime scene. Mr. Dando was found attempting to hide or destroy materials in the vehicle driven by Johnson Rath. Mr. Johnson, already in custody for interfering and assault on an officer was already a subject of investigation. The vehicle was opened by Mr. Dando. His activity and Mr. Rath’s gave probable cause to search the vehicle without a warrant.”

  “Think you can unspool that again?” he asked me. “In your report. Logged today.”

  “I can. I’ll take care of it as soon as I get back from escorting the body for autopsy.”

  “Good. I want to be careful about all of this.”

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  He shook his head then took off his summer straw hat to wipe his sweating brow with the bandana pulled from his pocket. “We’ll have a long talk about it soon. Right now, you work without my. . .” The sheriff thought about the word he needed. He put the hat back on and seemed to settle. “Prejudices,” he finally said.

  “You mean these guys?” I held up a flyer.

  “Just follow the evidence. See if we end up in the same place.”

  After that we talked a little more. Neither of us had gone any closer to the gaping graves. I told him about my discussion with Cherry and the word, Boy, that he had worked over so hard. I also informed him about having called Billy and his idea to call in my uncle and Clarence Bolin as volunteers.

  “Billy’s a good man,” the sheriff said.

  “So you you’re always telling me.”

  Several months ago, Sheriff Benson had been ready to retire. He told me in no uncertain terms that I would not make a good sheriff, but Billy Blevins would. That was about the time the mercenaries and government agencies were working the smuggling operation with the Kurds. Billy had gotten a pretty severe beating. He was still on light duty. It wasn’t a good time for the sheriff to retire. It wasn’t a good time in general.

  “You should marry that boy.”

  All the men of a certain vintage in my life want me married, but this suggestion seemed to come out of nowhere. “Why are you saying that now?” I asked. I added, “And he’s not a boy.”

  He resettled the hat on his head. “Billy is the kind of man people will think of as a boy when he’s my age. Everyone likes him. They trust him.”

  “And they call him Billy.”

  “Yep. They always will.”

  “Why bring it up now?”

  “Look at that.” He pointed to the graves. “People were buried here and forgotten. Then someone came and did this shit. If a person disrespects death, they don’t respect life. I’ll be gone one day, sooner than later.”

  “Sheriff—”

  He put up a hand to stop me. “It’s not sadness or being morose that makes me say it. It’s time. And my hope for the people in my life is that they go on. Secure and happy.”

  “It’s a nice thought.”

  “Maybe. But nice thoughts don’t make the world better. Hard action does. That’s what we’re going to do here.”

  “I understand.”

  “Let’s get back.” Sheriff Benson turned and walked back toward the burn circle. “You need to get that body to autopsy and I need to make a lot more calls.”

  When we came around the cut into the larger clearing, I was struck by how large the area was. If the whole thing was a graveyard, we could be talking about hundreds of plots. I was about to ask Sheriff Benson what his thoughts were, when a shout took my attention.

  My Uncle Orson stood at the open back door of the cruiser I had left Cherry Dando in. Orson was yelling and reaching into the car, while Clare Bolin worked to hold him back.

  I started running across the rugged field. There was no point in calling out. It wouldn’t do any good, I knew, and I needed my breath and concentration to navigate the holes and stumps.

  Orson pulled Dando from the car and threw him to the ground. Clare imposed himself between them—giving Dando the second he needed to roll, then wiggle—still cuffed—under the car. My uncle kicked a foot out and hit the sheet metal. From the sound of it, Dando was lucky it didn’t connect with him.

  As I got closer I could hear Dando laughing. It was a taunting hoot that didn’t sound at all afraid.

  I heard Orson too, but I didn’t understand the words. His shouting had escalated almost to the point of screaming rage. I made eye contact with Clare, and he looked glad to see me coming.

  I put up both hands as I reached him, pushing into Uncle Orson. “Stop it,” I shouted and shoved.

  “Stay away,” he screamed, but not at me. He reached over my shoulder to shake a fist at Dando still hiding and laughing. “Stay the hell away or I’ll gut you—”

  I slapped a hand over Orson’s mouth. “Stop it,” I said again. “Stop. Calm down and tell me what’s going on.”

  Dando laughed harder, “Hell yeah. Tell the princess what’s going on.” He seemed to think that was even funnier than my uncle’s rage.

  “Shut up,” I ordered without looking at him. To reinforce the point, I kicked back with the heel of my boot against the car. To Orson I said, “You can’t do this.”

  “You have no idea what I’m ready to do to this son-of-a-bitch.”

  “And I don’t care. I don’t want the story. I don’t need to know why. Not yet. But I can’t have you hurting my prisoner.”

  “Then I’ll make it quick and painless.”

  Clare, who had been pulling my uncle as I pushed, let him go and walked away.

  “Where are you going?” I called.

  “To call on a higher authority,” he answered and disappeared.

  In addition to being a moonshiner, a former teacher, and a closet Democrat, Clarence Bolin was an ordained Assemblies of God minister. Honestly I didn’t think that was the k
ind of help we needed at that moment.

  Uncle Orson sidled around me and pointed his finger like a bayonet at Dando. “You should have stayed away. Next time you disappear you won’t come back.”

  “Knock it off, Orson.” Sheriff Benson commanded. His voice wasn’t raised, but it wasn’t something to be ignored either. He was the higher power to which Clare had referred.

  Orson stopped to look at the sheriff. It was only a pause. I felt the tension of his muscles still under my hands.

  “I’ve got this,” I told the sheriff. I didn’t want this to get any worse than it already was.

  “Are you going to cuff your own uncle?” he asked. “You going to arrest family?”

  I took my hands away and set my gaze right into Uncle Orson’s scowling face. “If I have to.”

  The anger drained and Orson said, “Yeah. She would.”

  “Maybe so,” Sheriff Benson said. “But she won’t slap the sense into you that I’m ready to. Clare told me the situation.”

  “Anybody mind telling me?” I asked.

  “Oh, hell yeah. Let’s all share old home stories.” Dando chimed in.

  The sheriff crouched down and looked at the skinny man hiding under the car. “You come on out of there and keep your ugly mouth shut. One word—only one word that pisses me off—and I’ll hand you over to Orson and walk away. I’ll let you know right now, you’re dancin’ on my last nerve.”

  Cherry Dando squirmed out from under the car without a sound.

  Sheriff Benson stood and looked at me. “You need to get that body to autopsy.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll handle this.”

  Dando was grinning at me with secret joy. The sheriff was looking with expectation. Clare and my uncle were looking off into the distance with pointed avoidance. I went.

  As I followed the coroner’s van along the rutted trail I pulled alongside Billy’s car. He had steered into the weeds to give us room to pass.

  “Where are you going?” he asked through his open window. He smiled in the kind of way a woman wants a man to smile after they spent the night together. It was a nice moment—that ended when he raised a straw to his lips. Billy Blevins had a soda problem. The problem being, he was always drinking soda from one of those giant, convenience store, refill cups.

  “You need to knock that off,” I said. “You’re going to get fat.”

  He raised the insulated container. “I switched to diet.”

  “Yeah, chemicals. Much better.”

  “A man’s got to have a vice.”

  “I didn’t know that was a rule.”

  “Guy code. What’s going on?”

  I pointed over at the coroner’s van as it pulled carefully onto the rutted path. “I’m following the CA to drop the body off for autopsy.” I watched the vehicle’s slow progress on the dirt track. There was no chance of losing it anytime soon.

  “Why?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. The sheriff is being weird and cagy about this one.”

  “I think I know part of the reason. Your uncle and Clare mentioned something.”

  “What?”

  “Missouri was a slave state. And after that it wasn’t much better for free blacks.”

  “They said this is a black cemetery?”

  “From what they said, cemetery might be putting it kindly. Part cemetery and part dumping ground.”

  “That fits,” I said, thinking of the UNKNOWN markers and the haphazard layout. It made me wonder how many graves were there with no marking at all. “I have to go.”

  “Will I see you tonight?”

  “I’m thinking we’ll both be working tonight until too late for what you have in mind.”

  He smiled with the straw in his mouth. The expression had just the right combination of lust and humor. “It’s never too late.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, Romeo.” I pressed the gas and caught up with the van.

  We’re a big county with lots of rural space and giant tracts of National Forest lands. The county is served by an elected coroner who is really a bureaucrat. We send autopsies out of county to a private contractor. From where we started, it was shy of thirty miles, but the drive would take closer to an hour. County blacktop laid over the twists and turns of old game trails gave me time to think.

  Morning had burned away. Summer was dying a brown death without giving up the grudge it seemed to have against the Ozarks. It would have been a good time to roll the windows and let the A/C cool me down. It was an even better time to keep the glass down and let the wind have its way with my skin.

  I thought better in the freedom of roads and open windows. There was a lot to think about. As much as I wanted to bask in thoughts of the night spent with Billy, my mind kept pulling to other concerns. Racists. Grave robbing. Possibly murder. Those were all mismatched pieces of a puzzle. The biggest problem with that was my ignorance of the picture I was trying to put together. That didn’t bother me half as much as knowing that the people I needed seemed to be keeping the big picture from me on purpose.

  After a few winding miles, I put all of that aside to think about one question that I couldn’t get out of my mind. Why would avowed racists own a piece of land that held a black cemetery?

  I pulled my phone and called the County Recorder’s office.

  “Are you asking about the same plot of land the sheriff called about?” the secretary asked in response to my question about the cleared land.

  “Yes.” I was relieved. I didn’t have a plat map or the legal description of the land. I thought we would go through a lot of back and forth only for her to tell me the parcel could not be found over the phone.

  “The sale was closed a month ago,” she told me. “The buyer was the W&S Foundation.”

  Surprising—but not a surprise. It was exactly what I expected, and—I imagine—what the sheriff expected when he made his call.

  After that, I kept working the phone. A lot of investigation is routine. It’s information gathering. I gave one of the station deputies a list of people to pull CDR’s on. Call detail records, or local usage data, are the records of local traffic on a specific phone number. They provide phone numbers connected, who initiated, and call durations. Since there is no information about the content of the call, there is no requirement for a court order. Another part of the routine was pulling the jackets on Johnson Rath and Cherry Dando. I also asked for any available information on The New American Covenant–The Word and The Sword. I suspected that there would be federal, as well as state and local, files on them.

  At the intersection of highways 65 and 160, we had a choice. Both would take us to the same place, but 65 was four lanes and straight. 160 was slower going, but more fun to drive. The CA made the reasonable choice and turned right onto 65. I hated him for it. There is something about back roads to me. Travel should be active. The wide, gentle ribbons of concrete get you there quicker—but there is no joy in the trip.

  There is something to be said about boredom as well, I guess. We glided down to the Bear Creek overpass and I noticed a truck. It was stopped and waiting at an intersection well ahead of us. On the twists of the other highway, I doubt I would have paid any attention to it. On 160, it was impossible to miss. The truck was an old Chevy. Some kind of 1950’s custom pickup with shining black paint and deep tinted windows. In this part of the country, it wasn’t unusual. The fact that it was sitting there—seemingly waiting for nonexistent traffic—was.

  As we passed the truck, I shifted my gaze to the rearview mirror. The black truck pulled out behind us.

  We were keeping a steady sixty-five miles-per-hour pace. The old truck must have hit the gas pretty hard. It caught up to me in no time and drafted my rear end too close.

  I lifted my foot off the big GMC’s pedal and coasted. It put more distance between me and the van an
d forced the Chevy back. In the mirror, I could see the driver was a woman—but no details. For a couple of miles she seemed content to follow. That changed with a sudden, swerving lane change. At the same time, she accelerated up to where the bumper of her truck was riding just back of my cab. She held there, keeping pace, as I sped up and slowed down.

  I was about to get a little reckless, and enjoying the thought, when I saw three big motorcycles ahead of the van. From where I was I couldn’t read the bikers’ colors or rocker patches. I didn’t need to. I’d run up against the Ozark Nightriders before. They were a local club that messed around in meth and pills. A couple of years back, I had put some of them away and hurt a few pretty bad.

  The question was, were the Nightriders there for me or the van?

  The question was answered pretty quickly—when one of the bikers peeled off and dropped alongside the CA’s van. At the same time, the Chevy gunned it and tried to cut me off. The woman driving was timid and not up to the task. She got ahead of me. When she cut in though, she pulled back at the last instant—fearful of making contact. For my part, I didn’t waiver. My truck was a GMC 2500HD. It had the edge in power, weight, and handling. I had the edge in experience and willingness.

  After she pulled out of the cut off, the woman sped up and tried to get in front to block me. I didn’t let her. I stomped the gas and raced right up to the bumper of the van. We drove like that for a bit, with the Chevy edging over every so often to try to shake me loose. Each time she got close I held my ground and she pulled back.

  There was no telling if she got tired of the impasse or the Nightriders did. It didn’t matter. The woman dropped back. The biker riding at the van’s window slowed, falling back into her position. When he was at my bumper, he released his throttle and pulled a pistol from inside his jacket.

  Before he could get a bead on me, I slammed my brakes. The bikes, van, and black truck rocketed forward as my speed was given away. When I opened up enough space, the Chevy took to the center line and let herself fall back from the convoy.

  She had a lot more confidence in front of me. When I caught up, she kept me from passing by blocking each time I went for a side. The more time I took trying to pass, the more distance the bikers and the van were getting ahead. I had no idea what they planned on doing when I was out of the way, but I wasn’t going to let it happen.