Judas Burning

by Carolyn Haines

  “What proof do you have?”

  “Those girls are the latest. They were on the river and now they’re gone. He took them and he killed them. If anything happens to my daughter, I’m going to hold you responsible.”

  Arguing with Vivian was a waste of breath. “Camille is free to leave Eustace at any time. If it’s any consolation to you, Vivian, I saw her recently and she was fine. You see her all the time when she comes to town, which is fairly regularly. Ruth Ann Johnson saw her in the beauty salon and said Camille looked better than she has in a long time. Rested.”

  “Ruth Ann isn’t a reliable witness and you know it.”

  J.D. shifted on the sofa and checked his watch again. It was going on six-thirty, and still no Calvin. “Would you mind calling Calvin to see if he’s coming home any time soon?”

  “He won’t answer the phone at the bank or his cell phone. It’s one of his little idiosyncrasies.” She leaned forward so that the front of her suit opened, exposing the creamy expanse of her breasts. “Are you afraid to be alone with me, Sheriff?”

  Tempting him was a new game for Vivian. J.D. wanted to sigh, but he didn’t. “Vivian, do you have a weapon?” She frowned. “There are knives in the kitchen—”

  “A gun.”

  “Is there a law against an honest citizen’s owning a gun?”

  “No, but it would ease my mind if I knew it was locked up somewhere.”

  She laughed. “Are you afraid I might hurt myself or someone else?”

  “Both,” he said.

  “Put your mind at ease,” Vivian said. “Calvin took it away from me.”

  J.D. stood. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  “Calvin won’t be home for a while. Are you sure you have to run off?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” J.D. said, walking to the front door. When he stepped out into the still warm evening, he felt a sense of relief. Vivian was like a large cat toying with her prey.

  To Vivian, everyone was prey.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The sky above the river was fuchsia, purple, and gold. The Pascagoula River shared the sky’s fiery palette, and, as the light faded, the river turned silver and then black, merging with the dense tree line on the opposite shore.

  “Eustace, honey, why are you sitting out here all by yourself?” Camille asked as she approached the boat where he sat.

  His rifle was covered with a tarp, and Eustace felt a moment of guilt. Camille trusted him to do the right thing. “I was just thinking,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t like the sound of that,” Camille said with a forced laugh.

  He felt her hand on his back. Her warm fingers slid around his chest, and she held him tightly.

  “Camille, is something wrong?”

  She shook her head against his back, but he felt her tears. He held still, waiting for the storm of her emotion to pass. She was volatile, and it might be nothing serious that was upsetting her.

  “What is it, Camille?”

  “Mother is such a bitch.”

  Eustace felt a familiar stab of hatred. Vivian and Calvin weren’t satisfied with their twenty-three-year-long attempt to destroy Camille. They kept on and kept on, nagging and trying to force her back to a world that gave her only torment and pain. They couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see how happy she was. She’d found her freedom in the woods along the river. She’d found herself in his arms, and he would do whatever was necessary to save her. Even if it cost the lives of those two girls.

  “I love you,” he said, the only words that might comfort her.

  “Mother says she’s going to call the governor to have me taken away,” Camille said.

  She took a deep breath and tried to gain control, but Eustace could feel the warm tears splashing against his back.

  “Camille, you know I never break my word, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I make you this one promise. No one will ever take you from these swamps unless you want to go.”

  “How will you stop them?” she asked.

  “Don’t you fret about that. Should you ever want to go, I’ll be the first one to help you. But if you want to stay, not the governor or the president or Jesus Christ himself will be able to take you away.”

  She lay against his back, her cheek pressed to his spine. He could feel her breathing calm as she relaxed. Finally she spoke. “Eustace, will you make me another promise?”

  “What’s that?”

  “If they come for me, promise me that you’ll kill me before you let them have me.”

  He closed his eyes. “Camille, it won’t come to that.”

  “Promise me.” She rubbed against him. “Old folks sometimes make pacts where one will kill the other if they get sick. That’s all I’m asking. I’d rather be dead than go back to them.” Her fingers were kneading into his back like a baby kitten nursing its mother.

  “Camille, you’re stronger than you think.”

  “Those girls are gone, Eustace. The Indians called them below the river, just like the legend you told me. Remember how you said at night I could hear the Indians singing their death song as they walked beneath the water. It was like that. I saw the bubbles rising from beneath the water.”

  Black fear touched Eustace. “Did you really see those girls, Camille?”

  “On the sandbar. I saw them. One of them was naked. She was acting like a whore.”

  He could hear his heart thump in his temples. “How did you see them? Did you take one of the other boats?” He’d wanted to keep the skiffs locked and chained, but he hadn’t been able to do it. He hadn’t wanted Camille to feel that he didn’t trust her, to be a prisoner to his fear that she would drown in the river if the skiff overturned.

  “Yes, I went up the river. I went to the kiln site and then up the Leaf to look for those turtles again. The yellowish ones with the wavy shells. If I could just touch the shells, I’d know how to make the pattern in my clay pots.”

  Eustace turned and gripped Camille by the arms, forcing her to look at him. Her eyes were dreamy, fevered, intense.

  “When did you see the girls?” he asked

  “Before they disappeared.” She smiled. “They were so young. They made me feel old.”

  Eustace forced his fingers to relax. “Do you know what happened to the girls?” he asked softly.

  “Someone took them.” She gazed beyond him at the water. “Look, there’s a pelican. I haven’t seen one all summer. I was afraid they were dead.”

  Her face was as joyful as a child’s. Eustace wanted to weep. “Camille, this is important. Do you know who took those girls?”

  Her brow furrowed. “There’s a man living across the river, but he’s nice.”

  He sighed. “What’s his name?”

  “He never said. He knows about the girls, though. I told him how they had to leave.”

  “Had to leave?” He could feel his heart pounding now.

  “They were bad girls. They were going to make trouble.”

  “Did the man tell you that?” She looked confused. “The man you met in the woods. The one with the scars. Was he the one who said the girls were trouble?”

  “How do you know about the scars?” She was wary now, backing away.

  “Camille, what did he do to those girls? Were you involved?” He spoke roughly, harshly. He’d frightened her, and for a second he didn’t care. He grasped her shoulders.

  She struggled against him. “Let me go. God damn you, let me go. I’ll cut out your gizzard!”

  “Camille, tell me what you did.” He held her firmly. “Tell me what happened to those girls.”

  “Let me go, or I’ll hurt you!”

  Eustace moaned as he crushed Camille to his chest and held her until she stopped flailing. She sobbed against him. “Promise you won’t let them take me,” she said. “I can’t stand it when they touch me.”

  He held her as he stared out into the black water and the night. “I promise,” he said at last. “I promise,
Camille.”

  Main Street was empty, its asphalt stretching to the end of town and dropping away into darkness down the hill. Dixon was exhausted. She’d gone from the high school to the library and spent the last few hours on the Internet researching everything from Catholicism to Satan worship. She’d tracked down newspaper stories about desecration of church property and located the sites on a map. Robert Medino had not exaggerated—at least not the route of the desecrations or the fact that the assaults seemed to be targeted against images of the Virgin Mary. Her instincts told her that Angie Salter and Trish Webster weren’t coming home.

  She walked back to the newspaper office, unlocked the door, and went inside to get her purse. The message light on the answering machine was blinking, and she hit replay.

  “Ms. Sinclair, I have to talk with you.”

  The soft voice unsettled her. There was intimacy in the tone, a secret—and urgency. She stopped the tape. In the silence, she was aware of her heartbeat. Rewinding, she started the segment again.

  “Ms. Sinclair, I have to talk to you.”

  The urgency unnerved her.

  “There are things you have to know. Things that might make a difference. My father is innocent. He’s going to die unless—” The mechanical beep of the machine ended the message.

  The caller was male and black. The answering machine was kept in the composing room, and Dixon peered around the swinging doors to the front office, which reflected the emptiness of the street beyond. A young black man had stared at her through that very window. She remembered his face. Was this Willard Jones’s son? A child, like herself, who would do anything to turn back time?

  Dixon stared out the empty window. A jury of twelve men and women had proclaimed Willard Jones guilty of building and planting a bomb in the newspaper offices of Ray Sinclair. The motive had been retribution for a series of articles her father had written condemning a black political leader, Grady Duelly, as a charlatan and cheat. The black community had been outraged over the articles, which enumerated the payoffs, deals, nepotism, and corruption that Duelly had been involved in. Ray had been accused of trying to tarnish Duelly simply because he was black.

  Dixon had always felt that it was a weak motive for murder. After two conversations with Jones, she had serious doubts that he’d planted the bomb. But if not he, who?

  Who? That question had tormented her for years now, disrupting her sleep, invading her mind a hundred times a day. Who would want to kill her father?

  The need for a drink came hard and strong. Her mouth began to water, and she knew that in a minute her hands would begin to shake. It had been five weeks. The first week she’d done at Well Haven, a clinic. The last four she’d done on her own, determined to live without a crutch, either a bottle or an attendant. Sometimes she could go a day without thinking of a drink. Sometimes.

  She replayed the aborted message a third time. There was no number or any way to contact the young man. She’d have to wait for him to make the next move. If it wasn’t soon, it would be too late for Willard Jones. His execution date had slipped a day closer.

  She hit the play button again, hoping the young man had left another message. Instead she heard Robert Medino’s voice.

  “Deadline is over, and I want to have dinner with you tomorrow night. Say seven, if that’s a good time for you. Let’s drive to the coast and check out some of the casino action, then grab something to eat. If this is acceptable, call me at the Magnolia. Be sure and leave a detailed message. Ruth Ann is very interested in everything you do.”

  She would deal with Medino in the morning, when she was fresh. Now, all she wanted was to have a drink. But she convinced herself that she could drive home, crawl into bed, and sleep.

  The stream’s current carried her along, and Dixon closed her eyes and let the dappled sunlight shift black and red against her eyelids. The water was artesian-fed cold, and the clay bottom of the small stream was slick. The pool where she swam was clear and deep, surrounded by thick woods. It was a place of peace and contentment.

  Someone long ago had partially dammed the creek behind her house, creating the swimming hole. As Dixon floated close to the makeshift dam, she stood in the chest-high water and began to walk back upstream. Trees grew down to the edge of the water. It would be a simple matter to get an old tractor inner tube and tie it to a tree. That way she could drift in the current and never go anywhere. Moored. She liked the sound of the word.

  It was just after seven in the morning, and she’d decided to swim, stop by the Hickory Pit and get some breakfast, and then go in to work. She hadn’t slept well. She’d dreamt of the card suit of clubs and a black carriage drawn by two gray horses with black plumes. She’d been hunting for someone, someone she’d lost at the edge of a river, someone she loved. It had been a vague and upsetting dream.

  She sank up to her chin in the cold water and closed her eyes. Just another few minutes and she’d leave.

  She realized that the woods had grown still, and she squeezed the water from her hair and listened. A stick crackled, sounding loud and sharp. Dixon froze. Her clothes were on the bank, not ten feet away. She glanced into the woods, feeling naked and vulnerable.

  The copper-skinned boy slid out from behind a tree and stood in a shaft of sunlight. The look on his face shifted from nervousness to fear as he realized that she was naked.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Let me get my clothes.”

  He was poised, ready to flee. He held no weapon, but his fists were clenched. There was only the sound of the stream.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said. “About Willard Jones.”

  In the stillness, she heard the waffling sound of a siren. It seemed to shift in and out of the woods, and Dixon wondered if she were imagining it. But the boy heard it too. He glanced around, then looked at her, his mouth open as if he meant to speak, and turned and ran. Even when the thick trees hid him, she could hear him moving through the underbrush. She stared at the spot where he had stood, then moved toward the bank and retrieved her clothes. Not bothering with underwear, she tugged the jeans over her wet legs and grabbed her top. She was still buttoning her shirt as she started running toward the house, toward the sound of the siren.

  Dixon broke from the woods just as the brown sheriff’s cruiser pulled under the four oaks in front of the house. Panting, she stopped.

  Waymon turned off the siren and got out of the car, moving with slow deliberation. He spit beside his boot, a brown stream of deadly accuracy, and walked toward her, eyes hidden by sunglasses. “J-D. sent me to fetch you. They found one of the girls.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dixon clutched her camera as the aluminum boat sped up the Pascagoula River. They passed the sandbar, now gleaming white in the silver light of the rapidly approaching storm. They were working against time, and Dixon felt the pressure. J.D. had sent for her because she could take pictures. He wanted crime scene photos before the rain came, and there was no way a state lab photographer could get there in time.

  The man who piloted the boat said nothing, and whenever Dixon looked back toward him, he avoided eye contact. That, in itself, cautioned her to prepare for the worst.

  They came to the fork where the Chickasawhay and the Leaf flowed together to form the Pascagoula and veered left, up the Leaf. Vegetation grew thick on either side of the river, a jungle. This part of Mississippi was considered pine flats, but parts of it oozed into tropical. J.D. and the tracking teams had searched relentlessly. Every dry inch. An old fisherman had discovered the body.

  In the distance she could see several fishing boats pulled to the east bank of the river. There was no bluff. This was land that often belonged to the water. Her pilot angled the boat and ran straight in at the shore, cutting the motor at the last moment. Dixon stepped out onto what passed for dry land, a sort of muck that pulled at her shoes. Five or six men were huddled near the boats, and when she started toward them, they shouldered in, excluding her. She continued past them, l
ooking for J.D.’s tall figure.

  She saw him waiting and walked as fast as the muck allowed in his direction.

  “It’s bad,” he said.

  She took a breath. “The rain won’t hold off for long.”

  He nodded and turned to lead the way into the woods.

  A staggering odor struck Dixon after only a few steps. J.D. heard her falter and turned, offering his clean handkerchief.

  “It won’t help much.”

  She took it and tied it over her nose and mouth, detecting the faint scent of mint chewing gum in the folds. Dixon nodded that she was ready.

  J.D. parted a frond of bay leaves, and Dixon stepped into a small clearing. A swarm of flies burst from the body that hung from the branch of an oak. Dixon stumbled as she took in the mutilation. The head was a blackened lump rising above a body draped in a filthy white sheet. Hands and feet dangled. A slight breeze gently turned the body, and the rope that held it creaked as more flies, interrupted in their work, buzzed around it.

  “My God,” she said, forgetting the camera.

  “She’s been dead a while,” J.D. said softly. “She was dead before she was gutted and burned.”

  Hands unsteady, Dixon lifted the camera and began to shoot, taking care to move around the body and get every angle. She made certain to photograph the mud, which bore traces of undefined footprints.

  There was no way to tell if the body was Trisha’s or Angie’s. Insects had done their work, and the remains had been burned. Dixon tried not to think of the girls as she worked the scene, taking brief directions from J.D.

  A fat plop of rain struck her head. She moved in closer. There was no time to think, to feel. There was only the click of the camera, the roll of the film. She finished a roll, handed the camera to J.D. for a reload, and picked up the second Nikon she carried, this one loaded with color film. The light was fading fast. She repeated the sequence of shots, then moved in for close-ups. The rain had begun to fall in big drops that exploded on the leaves around them.