A Dark Path

by Robert E. Dunn

  “The hell you say.” Sheriff Benson shot back.

  “I mean it. This is bigger than whatever the hell you think you can pin on the son-of-a-bitch. Things are rolling. Big heavy things that will sweep up a lot of trash.”

  “Maybe you want to listen to what’s going on—before you make statements about what’s big and what isn’t.”

  “I don’t.” Birch stood his ground. “I don’t want to listen to anything. Because I don’t care. Just get this done.”

  “That’s the whole problem with feds.” I stood at the door talking past Birch. “They try to big picture everything.”

  “You got that right,” the sheriff answered.

  “That’s hardly a fair assessment—”

  “Save it. Maybe I don’t want to listen.”

  “Who says it’s about you?” I didn’t answer. The sheriff didn’t answer. The weight of our silence was too much for Birch. “What?” he asked, looking from one of us to the other then back again, “What’s going on?”

  “Detective Williams. . .” The sheriff let his voice become soft to match the slump in his shoulders. “Maybe you would like to leave us alone?”

  “No.” I made it a hard pronouncement. “I wouldn’t.”

  “If you two are finished putting on your one-act drama, maybe we can get some work taken care of.”

  “Yeah, maybe we can.” Sheriff Benson sat behind his desk. He did not put his feet up. “Sit down.” He gestured Birch to a seat.

  “I don’t plan on staying.”

  “Sit the fuck down, Agent Birch.” The sheriff has a way of turning a hot conversation cold real quick.

  I actually felt a little sorry for Birch. He was expecting a familiar dance. Feds and locals always did a give and take over jurisdiction and charges. The federal government usually wins. They hold a lot of purse strings. And the big picture is. . .well, the big picture.

  “What’s going on?” To his credit, Birch didn’t get defensive and he had the sense to know it wasn’t personal. He sat.

  “Johnson Rath is in our jail charged with multiple counts of assault on an officer and sexual assault.” Sheriff Benson gave me a look that was part apology. The other part was the same professional sympathy I’ve seen him give to other victims.

  “You mean. . .” Birch followed the sheriff’s gaze to me. “You?”

  That was all I could take. I’ve become all too familiar with a certain facial expression. It is the way good men look when they’re confronted by women who have been sexually assaulted. It is sympathy, welded to an instant cataloging of guilt—for every laugh at every joke—for each backward, appraising glance as a woman passed—for every time they saw a pretty woman and had the inevitable thought. It is a look that shows a broken heart and an understanding of their own flaws.

  It’s a terrible way to be looked at.

  They would talk straighter without me, I realized. So I left.

  Work, the routine work of digging through files, making phone calls, and returning e-mails did little to occupy my mind. In fact, it made things worse. The demands were so light—they left a big part of my brain to dwell on the darkness. In the darkness, a bottle of whiskey was always waiting—claiming to have all the answers.

  Someone laughed down the hall. Another voice spoke cheerfully, and the same someone laughed again. It was Doreen, our daytime dispatcher, laughing. The voice that had her going belonged to Billy Blevins.

  I rushed to close my door. I didn’t make it. Billy stepped into the frame. I pretended like I hadn’t known he was coming. He pretended I wasn’t closing the door.

  “Hey.” Billy took a drink from his ever-present thermal cup full of soda.

  I tried to smile but the expression didn’t feel right on my face. “Hi, Billy.” I inched the door a little more closed. It stood between us, a barrier that I hid behind. “I don’t feel much like talking right now.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No problem,” he answered in a way that refuted the words. “The sheriff’s waiting for me anyway.” He walked.

  “Sheriff?”

  “He called me in for something.” Billy kept walking without looking back.

  I closed my door and stood behind. Hiding lasted only a few minutes. I went to the sheriff’s office and went in without knocking. The sheriff and Birch looked at me. Billy didn’t.

  “Detective Williams,” the sheriff said too formally. “Not now.”

  “If this is about me—”

  “Not everything is about you.” He stared at me after he said it. Waiting.

  I backed out and closed the door.

  Billy came out about twenty minutes later. My door was open, waiting for him. He didn’t even glance in. He walked quickly by and left the building. There was no denying the feeling that I had missed some chance. . .

  When Billy had gone, the Sheriff’s Department building was too small and brightly lit. Everyone inside looked at me like they knew something. I skipped out.

  Without much thought, my truck took me to the place where all of this had begun. Along with the deputy’s cruiser, there were several other vehicles parked on the grass—alongside the dirt road that led to the clearing.

  Everything was different. The burn circle where someone had tried to incinerate Tyrell Turner’s body was staked out with rebar. The thin posts were strung with a combination of crime scene tape and pink plastic construction markings. Dotting the cleared field were tiny yellow flags. People in hard hats were moving through the brown weeds on their hands and knees. When one stopped, she poked a new little flag into the ground before moving on. At the far end, men with chainsaws were cutting down junipers and opening up the remaining overgrowth.

  “Hurricane.”

  I hadn’t even noticed the pop-up awning perched on the nearest edge of the field. Within the shade was Ranger Carter. He waved and called my nickname again.

  The first thing I said when I stepped under the canvas was, “Don’t call me that.”

  “Hurricane?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled and bobbed his head, considering. “I get it. Nobody calls me Jesus. In fact they work hard to avoid it. It sounds like we have the same kind of problem with names.”

  “Different sides of the same coin, maybe.”

  “Did you come to check on your tax dollars at work?” He pointed to the table in front of him. It was spread with huge sheets of graph paper.

  “Actually, I came out to think about the recent crimes committed here. I thought I’d be alone to do it.”

  “We didn’t expect to have much time with this place. Like I said, the legal legs we’re standing on are lame. The history is too rich. And it doesn’t deserve to be buried under some kind of half-assed Reichstag. We got a team of grad students to do the work.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “He means the Park Service. But it’s my team.” A petite blonde woman walked into the shade from behind me. She was wearing khaki shorts that—despite their color—showed the fresh ground in dirt. Her knees were covered with hard shelled pads. My first thought was that she was, maybe, twenty. She pushed the boonie hat from her head. Her face was softly lined. Her eyes were beauty-pageant blue. She offered her hand. “Dr. Janice Carter.”

  “Carter?” I couldn’t stop my eyes from shifting to Agent Carter.

  He grinned proudly. “My wife.”

  “Jesus.” At first I thought Dr. Carter was cursing. It took a moment to catch the familiarity. She was chastising her husband. To me she said, “He always makes it sound like he has the prize hog at the county fair.”

  “A man can’t be happy with his own good fortune?” he asked.

  As we shook hands, she smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s not a race thing. It’s the doctor thing.”

  “Janice has her Ph.D. in cu
ltural anthropology,” Agent Carter offered.

  “See?” she asked. “You’re the one they call ‘Hurricane’.”

  “She doesn’t like that nickname,” her husband jumped in, before I could say anything.

  “Why?” She beamed blue eyes at me. “You look like a force of nature. You’re six foot without those boots.”

  “Close enough,” I answered.

  She leaned close. In a conspiratorial whisper asked, “You know what advice I would give any woman?”

  I shook my head.

  “Be the hurricane.” She smiled warmly, then slapped dust from her shorts. “I’ve got something for you, by the way.”

  “For me?”

  “Oh yes, for you.” Janice lifted a notebook from the table. It was stuffed to overflowing with loose papers and photographs. She rifled through, then pulled several pieces and handed them over. “I checked out the scene over there.” She pointed to the taped off burn circle. “I didn’t go in. I know what kind of trouble that can be. But I gave the outside a good going-over. We were doing the survey anyway so. . .”

  I scanned the first page. It was a drawing over a grid—showing the burned area and the ground around it. “That’s amazing.” I meant it. I reached into my pocket and produced my own notepad. Opening it to the sketches I made Sunday morning, I passed it over to Janice.

  “You do good work,” she said, “but you need scale for real clarity.”

  “It’s not for evidence. It’s more to help me see.”

  “We get down to a little more detail.”

  I looked at the next page, another drawing. “What’s this?”

  “Look at the photos.”

  I did. There was a black and white photo of a cigarette butt. There was another of a tire tread pattern in the dirt. The third was something that just looked like more dirt. “What’s this last one?”

  “See this?” Janice ran a short, ragged nail along the edge of a barely visible pattern. “Something was spilled here. It soaked into the dry ground. The spot still smelled of gas.”

  I looked at the photos again, then turned back to the drawing. “This isn’t part of the burn area.”

  “No.” Janice pointed over to the far edge of the clearing where we had found open holes. “Over there—” Then she used the same finger to show the spot on the drawing. “Is this open grave. Nothing has been touched and they are flagged. It might not be anything but. . .” She shrugged broadly.

  “That’s a motorcycle tread,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll have to work very hard to find a match.”

  “What about the cigarette? Will you get DNA?”

  “We’re a county sheriff’s department. Spending that kind of money is a last resort.”

  “Janice watches too many of the cop shows with ten minute forensics, and every speck of dust getting the third degree.” Agent Carter said with good humor. “Never her husband.”

  “My husband is no fun.”

  They had everything I needed. I picked up the cigarette butt with tweezers. It got sealed into a zipper bag. I even scooped a bit of the soil where Janice said there had been a spill—to make her happy. She enjoyed playing a part in the investigation.

  “I have a question,” I said, as I tucked the bags away. “You said, ‘cultural anthropology.’ This looks like archaeology.”

  “Lines blur,” she answered. “The kids out there, clearing trees and marking things, are grad students—both archaeology and anthropology. If this was an Indian mound or a Civil War battlefield, a real archaeologist would take the lead. Something like this. . .” Janice walked to the open grave and looked inside. “Well, I was interested and available. May I ask you something?”

  “I guess.”

  “Fair warning. It’s a favor not a question.”

  “Okay. . .”

  “We have a daughter. She’s in the fourth grade. They have parents come in all the time and talk about their jobs.” Her look turned hopeful. “It would be pretty amazing for her. . .”

  “You want me to come talk to her class?”

  “They have moms come in—nurses, a lot of nurses, some work at factories, or banks—good jobs. But all the cops, or firefighters, surgeons, utility line workers, are dads.”

  “I don’t imagine that there are many moms who are anthropologists.”

  “I’m her mother. Nothing I do is cool.”

  “I’d be glad to.”

  “Great. I can’t wait to tell her. It can be hard—mothers and daughters.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I don’t know if there was something in my voice or my eyes. I would not have wanted there to be, but Janice caught something. Her face changed. Her gaze shifted down into the open grave. “It could be worse you know.”

  “What could?”

  “Mothers. Families.” She squatted and used the side of her hand to draw some loose dirt from the edge of the hole. “We can lose them all. To time and history. This poor woman—”

  “Woman?”

  “Henrietta Patee.”

  The name struck me. Patee. The first stone I found had the name Freeman Patee engraved on it. Earl Turner had said his family was buried here, the Turners and Patees. “How do you know? I haven’t seen a stone.”

  “No stone. It was a board, rotted off at the bottom. Whoever dug the body out tossed the marker aside. We found it there.” Janice pointed out the pile of dirt taken from the grave.

  A breeze, slow and hot like fevered breath, walked over us. It had just enough strength to bend the tips of the tallest weeds. Movement caught my eye. Color held it. The dry dirt was wasted and pale. The surrounding plants were scorched to a wan yellow. Caught on a desiccated thistle, was a ribbon of rich, dark, brown.

  I walked around the pit to the side Janice was on. Getting down on my hands and knees I put my nose as close to the little strip as I could without touching it. There were smaller flakes of the same color all around it. I breathed in the scent of the ribbon. Tobacco. It was the same cheap cigar tobacco I’d smelled when Charlie Lipscomb was smoking at Roland’s trailer.

  I bagged it. As I labeled the plastic with a few notes, I said to Janice, “I have a favor to ask, too.”

  “Anything.”

  “From your notes, are you able to tell me the family names on the graves that have been opened?”

  “I don’t need notes. We’ve only found two families included in the desecration.”

  “Turner and Patee.” I finished for her.

  Chapter 17

  I tried Roland’s mobile home first. The door was again standing open. No one was inside. With the mess inside, it was hard to tell if he had moved out. There was a bed but no sheets or blankets. In the kitchen there were dirty dishes and bugs. In a corner, there was an empty trash can and dozens of empty beer bottles sat on every flat surface.

  On my way out, I noticed a cheap cigar sitting on the edge of the counter top. Its front end was nothing but sagging ash. The butt was chewed ragged. It was the same kind I’d seen Lipscomb smoking. I was certain of it. I was just as certain that Charlie Lipscomb was the provenance of the stripped down tobacco I’d seen by the grave.

  I left there, and drove to The New American Covenant building in the woods. It was the closest thing I knew to an organized, gathering spot for the Nightriders and their Nazi friends.

  I arrived to find the building all but gone. The fire was out, but the bones of the old shack were still smoldering. There was a volunteer fire unit spraying the ashes. I made a quick inventory of faces, but Cherry Dando wasn’t there. I checked with the truck captain to see if they needed anything.

  They didn’t. I called in and asked dispatch to send a deputy. I used my cell phone to call Agent Birch. I assumed that he’d want to know about the fire. He didn’t pick up, so I left a message.

  From the shack,
I went right to our jail. Duck had reported himself sick and checked out for the day. He wasn’t the only one missing. Both Cherry Dando and Johnson Rath had been released again.

  There was a hollow in my chest, right behind the sternum. It was diffuse as a cloud, reaching from my heart to my stomach. A swallow of whiskey would have been the perfect size to fill it. If I knew one thing at that moment, it was that I was either going to drink or find some answers. It took all I had to opt for answers.

  Duck lived in a hundred year old farmhouse with lap siding that had been white, once. The house clearly hadn’t been painted in my lifetime. I knocked on the screen door, letting the rattle of it in the frame amplify the sound.

  “What are you doing here?” Duck walked over from a dilapidated barn. He was wiping his hands on a dirty shop towel.

  “Sick day?” I asked.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Where’s Roland?”

  “Again. What’s it to you?”

  “He knows something.”

  Duck stopped at the bottom of the porch stairs and looked up at me. “Roland’s my son.” He kept working his hands thoughtfully. “But what that boy knows wouldn’t fill a shot glass.”

  “I need to talk to him, Duck.”

  “Good luck with that. He ain’t much for sharing. And before you ask, I have tried.”

  The big door of the barn flopped slowly open as if caught in a wind. There wasn’t any wind. An engine fired up.

  I moved to the stairs but Duck blocked me.

  “Get out of my way, Duck.”

  Roland, on his motorcycle, burst through the open barn door and tore up dirt getting to the road.

  “Duck!”

  He didn’t fight me. Duck simply let his bulk block me—and looked shamefully after his son. “He’s my boy, Hurricane.”

  The sound of the bike’s loud pipes faded in the distance. There was no chance I would catch him. “Why?”

  “I told you, he’s my boy.”

  “You’re not helping him.”

  Duck stepped out of my path and sat on the porch step. “That’s not the way he sees it. Wrong or right, he sees me on his side. Right now that seems better than anything. How many chances do you get to show someone you love that you’re in the fight with them—no matter what.”