by Greg Iles
“Didn’t sound urgent enough for him,” Mayeux says, exaggerating his Cajun accent.
“Urgent,” echoes Overstreet, like a redneck Ed McMahon.
Mayeux laughs. “Things feel pretty urgent now, though?”
I take a deep breath and try to keep my voice steady. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. You don’t have to do this.”
“I don’t? Okay, let’s see. Where’s Miles Turner?”
“I don’t know.”
“See?” Mayeux says to Overstreet. “I had a feeling it was going to be this way.”
“Jesus, Detective, this is a really bad time for me. I’ve got to take care of something important.”
“Bad time,” Overstreet says. “Shoulda called his secretary.”
“I don’t have a fucking secretary!”
The silence that follows this outburst is more threatening than any words. Overstreet clearly does not like his arrestees using profanity. As the Ford thunders eastward along the two-lane blacktop, I lean back and let my eyes rove across the endless fields. Here and there, red or green cotton pickers trundle through the white ocean like great metal insects. The steely clouds I saw this morning have not been scattered like all the rest in this parched summer. They have gathered steadily, like a ghostly Confederate army amassing itself from the tattered remnants of a thousand skirmishes, a fluid gray mass slowly being reinforced from unknown regions.
“Let’s try again,” suggests Mayeux. “Where’s Miles Turner?”
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know.”
“You’ll have plenty of time to remember in your cell.”
“This is crazy, Detective.”
He nods at the windshield. “I’ve been thinking that for several days now.”
Another image of Erin flashes through my mind. She faces Drewe across a brightly lit room, both women screaming, both in tears. To hell with Mayeux and his head games. It’s time to pull out the stops. “Detective Overstreet?”
The Mississippi cop grunts behind the wheel. “Yeah?”
“I get a phone call, right?”
“Eventually.”
“Well, for your sake it better be sooner than later. Because I don’t think the person I’m going to call is going to like a Louisiana cop coming up here and arresting the son-in-law of one of his asshole buddies.”
Very slowly, like a hog looking around for the source of a mildly interesting noise, Overstreet heaves himself around in his seat. His forearm looks as thick as my thigh. “Who you think you gon’ call, boy?”
I try not to look past him to see whether we’re going off the road. “The governor of the State of Mississippi. The first time you let me near a telephone.”
His face does not change. He’s heard a thousand threats like this.
“He’s bullshitting you,” says Mayeux.
“Take the wheel,” says Overstreet.
Mayeux obeys.
“Now, boy. Whose son-in-law you say you were?”
“I didn’t say.”
“Well say, goddamn it.”
“Bob Anderson.”
Overstreet stares without blinking, a long measuring gaze. Calling the governor to save my ass in the name of my father-in-law is the last thing I would ever do, but he doesn’t know that.
“You know this guy Anderson?” asks Mayeux, his voice edgy.
“Bob Anderson from Yazoo City?” asks Overstreet, his eyes boring into mine.
“That’s him.”
“Shit.”
“What does that mean?” asks Mayeux, trying to hold the car on beam and watch me at the same time. “Huh?”
Overstreet blows air from distended cheeks and takes his time about answering. “It means you might have talked me into biting off a big piece of trouble, Mike.”
Mayeux groans furiously. “What the fuck are you saying? You saying some people are above the law up here?”
“No.” Overstreet lifts his forearm and lets his weight slide him back into position behind the steering wheel. “But some people’s tails you don’t step on unless you absolutely have to. And don’t tell me it’s any different down in New Orleans, ’cause I know it’s worse.”
“Shit,” curses Mayeux, slamming the dash with an open hand. “Shit! I’m sick of people protecting this son of a bitch. He is obstructing justice. I can prove it.”
“He’s obstructing it in Louisiana, not here.”
“It’s a federal case! He harbored a federal fugitive in Mississippi. You’re holding Cole for the FBI. Your chief okayed the arrest! ”
Overstreet’s voice sounds even more somnolent than before. “Most of that’s bullshit and you know it, Mike. I’m out of my jurisdiction and you don’t even want the Bureau to know we’ve got this guy.”
“Are these state or federal charges against me?” I ask.
“Shut the fuck up,” snaps Mayeux. “I’ll take full responsibility, Jim. You’re not suggesting we let him go, are you?”
“No. But the minute we hit the station, I’m telling the chief how things stand. If he wants to let Cole walk, he’s gone.”
The remainder of the ride passes in frosty silence. I wish they’d let the windows down, so I could sniff the air for the rain smell. Rain wouldn’t do the cotton any good now, but after months of drought my need for water is almost physical, like the dull headache I get after going too long without caffeine.
As we pull into Jackson, I ponder a backup plan. If the chief won’t kick me loose on the basis of my relationship to Bob Anderson, I know three or four friends from college who practice criminal law here, plus at least thirty more who do corporate work. There are probably more Ole Miss lawyers in Jackson than there are cops. I’ve got money in a couple of banks here, so bail shouldn’t be a problem. The problem is time.
Suddenly a string of letters flickers before my eyes, and I hear them as if read aloud by a chilling digital voice: I am subject to one god above me, and that god is TIME.
Brahma knows whereof he speaks.
Thirty-six minutes after Mayeux and Overstreet walked me into Jackson police headquarters, I was released on my own recognizance with an assurance that no arrest would be recorded against my name. I guess my father-in-law wasn’t exaggerating when he said he had connections. God only knows what ties Bob Anderson has to the people who run this state, but right now I don’t care. The oft maligned old-boy network seems pretty wonderful when you’re sitting chained in a police station. Of course, that system only works if you have access to it, but I’ll worry over the moral implications when I get time. Like maybe next year.
Right now I have one overwhelming need: transportation. Inside the station I was thinking of making some kind of deal with Mayeux for a ride back home, but he stomped out right after the chief told Overstreet to cut me loose. Now my only options are to hit up a friend for a car or take a cab to the airport and rent one. My hand is on the sticky receiver of a parking lot pay phone when a blaring horn forces me to cover my ears. The driver keeps jabbing it, and I look around angrily, searching for the source of the deep-throated honk.
It’s Mayeux. He’s parked about thirty feet away in a vintage blue Cadillac, waving for me to come over.
“Stuck?” he calls genially, as if the past two hours never transpired.
“I’ll get back.”
“I could give you a ride.”
“Like hell,” I say, but I’m tempted. Riding with Mayeux would save me some embarrassing calls. Plus, he could ignore the speed limit all the way if he wanted to.
“Why did you pull this crap?” I ask him, walking toward the Cadillac. “Why didn’t you just talk to me when I got home?”
His smile disappears. “Because the FBI has fucked up this investigation from the get-go. Today was the first chance I had to get at you without having to go through them, and I was sick of your evasions. I knew you’d hold back whatever you wanted in your own house. I figured a police station would loosen you up a little. I just didn’t count on you having th
at much juice. The fucking governor. Jesus.”
“Look, I really need to get home fast. I’ll go with you-and talk to you-on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“You floor this bastard all the way.”
Mayeux grins and cranks the Caddy. “You waitin’ on me, you walkin’ backwards, cher. Jump in.”
He pops a magnetized blue flasher on the roof and switches it on before we even reach the city limits. “Something going down?” he asks, cutting his eyes at me. “That why you’re in a hurry?”
“I don’t know.” The sky to the west, toward the Delta, is nearly black with piled cloud. I have a foreboding sense of things spinning out of control, like battlefield blindness, where you know only what is happening where you stand but are dimly aware that great wheels of action are whirling in the fog around you. “Just a bad feeling,” I tell him, trying to push it all away.
“Hey, I been there. Something I might need to know about?”
“It’s personal.”
He nods gamely. Mayeux isn’t happy, but he can deal with it. Maybe his drive up from New Orleans won’t turn out to be a waste after all.
“Bad weather,” he says, raising a forefinger off the wheel to point ahead. Heat lightning splashes through the sky, giving the cloudscape the massive scale of an Ansel Adams photograph.
I ask him why he thinks the FBI messed up the investigation.
“Baxter and Lenz kept us from sweating you in New Orleans. We’d have played the whole thing different. Woulda been better for you and better for us. And maybe we’d have that son of a bitch by now instead of the FBI running around embarrassing themselves and everybody else by arresting the wrong fuckin’ guy.”
I doubt this, but I don’t say so.
“I gotta tell you, for a while I was wondering if it wasn’t Lenz himself doing those ladies. I mean, classic case, you know? Shrink does the murders for his own kinky reasons, then takes the starring role in the hunt for himself.” Mayeux laughs. “Serial killers love that kind of shit. Making fools out of cops, staying involved in the crimes long after they’re done. This guy sure hit the doctor where it hurts, didn’t he?”
“Lenz is smart, Detective. He just lost sight of the danger. I knew a lot of guys like him in Chicago. Trading futures. One day they were bulletproof, the next somebody was padlocking their houses and seizing their bank accounts.”
After a couple of beats, Mayeux says in a confiding tone, “I play a little in the market myself. Nickle-and-dime stuff. Never tried commodities, but I’m open to it. Got any tips for an honest cop?”
“You sound like Columbo. The Cajun Columbo.”
He pulls a sour face.
“Buy mutual funds and blue chips and forget them. Anything else is a losing game for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t beat the market from where you are. You haven’t got the money or the time.”
He nods sagely, but he’ll drop a few thousand on some half-baked brother-in-law tip before six months are up.
“What about Turner?” he asks. “That boy’s got alibi problems.”
“I know. But he’s not the killer.” I pause. “I wasn’t sure at first, but I know now.”
He cuts his eyes at me again. “Okay. But look, is he queer or what? It ain’t like I care or anything, but it’d clear up my thinking, you know?”
I wonder where Mayeux is getting his information. “I don’t know if he is or isn’t. And I don’t care. I think he’s trying to protect a married lover by keeping quiet about his whereabouts on the nights of the murders. Whether that lover is a man or a woman is anybody’s guess.”
Mercifully Mayeux speaks no more. I watch the dark sky and wonder if Drewe is on the road home yet. She’s probably done with the delivery by now, but you can never tell with babies.
I jump in my seat the first time thunder shakes the car. This is no empty threat, booming hollow over the fields and dying into nothing. It rattles my eardrums, buffets the reservoir of dead air at the bottom of my lungs, hammers the car like a bass drum in a gymnasium. Mayeux feels it too. He’s from New Orleans, where rain is a constant companion, but even he hunches in his seat when a big blast rocks the car. Otherwise, he remains silent, eating up the miles with a determined stare. Perhaps some of my apprehension has seeped into him.
Suddenly there is wind against the car where there was none before. It whines at the seam of the windshield, hisses at the windows. Then the rain is upon us. Big round drops splatter on the glass like pellets from a sawed-off shotgun; then a hail of water engulfs us like enfiladed musket fire.
“Shit!” Mayeux curses, slowing the Cadillac to forty-five.
“Try to keep your speed up,” I urge him.
“Hey, I’m trying.”
I tap my fingers nervously against the dashboard.
“This Delta’s some fuckin’ flat,” he grumbles, leaning forward and squinting into the rain. “A minute ago I was gonna say it was like the Atchafalaya Swamp without the water, but I guess we got the water now. One of God’s little jokes, yeah.”
The Caddy crawls through the downpour, Mayeux struggling to keep his eyes on the faded white line that marks the right margin of the highway. “What kind of shoulder we got?” he asks.
“Flat dirt. About fifteen feet. But if you go into a cotton field, we won’t be getting out until somebody comes with a winch.”
“Great. How much farther we got?”
“We’re about four miles out.”
“Hey, you see that?”
Something in Mayeux’s voice brings me erect in my seat. “What?”
“Blue lights. Way off there, to the left.”
“Where?”
“Look!” he says, pointing. “That’s a blue bar making that. Mississippi Highway Patrol. Guy must be pretty gung-ho to stop speeders in this rain.”
I narrow my eyes to slits and probe the gray wall for blue light. There. A sapphire halo pulsing far to the left. As I stare, a terrible premonition tightens my gut.
“Fire?” I ask, praying for a yes.
“Wrong color. That’s police lights. Lots of ’em. Looks like Mississippi Highway Patrol, or some local sheriff’s department. Where you think that is?”
“I think it’s my house, Mike. Punch it.”
“Hey, I’m pushing now.”
“Floor this motherfucker!”
The sudden acceleration presses me back into my seat. Mayeux flicks on his blue flasher, and we hurtle through the wall of rain like teenage lovers with a death wish. Even with Mayeux tempting fate, I grip the Caddy’s padded armrest and will the car to go faster. The sapphire glow quickly blossoms into a flashing ball, like a miniature mushroom cloud. What the hell could have happened? Part of me knows the answer, but I fight that knowledge with all my soul, unwilling to believe that Brahma has somehow penetrated Miles’s digital shield, that I have exposed Drewe to the white-hot flame of his insanity. We blast through Rain proper like a blue monorail, leaving a howling vacuum for a wake.
“Slow down! Half a mile to the turn!”
Mayeux touches the brake gently, then begins pumping it as the riot of flashing blue and red differentiates into distinct images. Squad cars, sheriff’s cruisers, rescue and highway patrol vehicles. They surround our farmhouse like a motorized posse. Mayeux turns into the drive and pulls as far forward as he can. I’m out of the car and sprinting through the rain before he even shifts into park.
“Wait up, Cole!”
I run for the porch, dodging between cars, stunned by the amount of light pouring from our house. Two blue-white flashes suddenly blank out my office windows.
“Stop!” someone shouts.
A knot of uniformed men blocks the front door. I charge them without pausing, triggering a metallic flurry of gun slides and hammers.
“FREEZE!”
“This is my house!” I shout, throwing up my arms in the face of a half dozen pistol barrels. “Where’s my wife?”
�
��FREEZE ASSHOLE!”
I finally stop in an ankle-deep puddle at the foot of the porch steps, barely able to contain my panic.
“Anybody know this guy?” asks a Mississippi state trooper with rain sluicing off his hat brim.
“He’s okay!” shouts Mayeux from behind. The detective skids to a stop beside me with his wallet open. “Mike Mayeux, New Orleans homicide. This guy owns the house. What’s going on?”
“One-eighty-seven,” says the trooper. “A double.”
“Who got it?”
“Is that a murder?” I shout. “Get out of my fucking way!”
The cops start to restrain me, but Mayeux manages to get in front and by some combination of civility and intimidation clear a path through them.
“Drewe!” I scream wildly. “Drewe, where are you?”
Nothing.
Another group of cops blocks the door of my office.
“Harper?” A female voice.
I careen up the hall, leaving Mayeux behind.
“Harper? Is that you?”
Drewe whirls from the kitchen sink, dwarfed by uniformed men at both shoulders. Her white blouse is covered with blood, her eyes blanker than I’ve ever seen them. I run to her and grab her by the arms, hearing the uniforms say my name but ignoring them, searching her body for wounds, feeling the reassuring tightness of her biceps.
“Are you hurt?”
She shakes her head violently. “No. But I couldn’t… couldn’t do anything.”
“What happened?” I ask, touching her bloody blouse.
“It won’t come out,” she says, her chest heaving.
“Drewe! What happened?”
Suddenly her face crumples, as if the supporting structures beneath have simply melted away. “Erin’s dead,” she whispers.
I blink. “No. I just left her at….” The words die in my throat as one of the men beside her nods.
“S-somebody,” she stutters. “Horrible… I was too late … couldn’t do anything.”
An image of Patrick Graham flashes in my brain.
“Mr. Cole,” says one of the uniforms, whom I finally recognize as Sheriff Buckner from Yazoo City. “We need to get your wife calmed down. She gave a statement already, but she can’t seem to stop shaking and she won’t let the paramedics near her.”
