by Craig Smith
I gave an agreeable shrug, ‘Maybe.’
Chapter 5
Wednesday 4:08 p.m., March 17.
SOUTH OF BETHEL FALLS, WHICH is nothing but a kink in the road with a church and a broken down tavern, the river bends west and the highway goes south. The land between is low and flat, river bottoms turned to farm country, laced together by a network of dirt roads. An occasional house stands empty along the way. Sometimes whole settlements of crumbling shacks line up against the levee.
‘I bet they get a good crop out of this soil,’ I told Max. He had gott
‘Rule was five years of good crops, one year washed out with floods. He pointed at a solitary house with the sky for a roof. ‘When you got a couple flood years in a row, you lost it all. Course, not anymore! At this point the corporations own all this land...’
He went on like this as we ran parallel to the river about a quarter of a mile out from it.
When a grove of trees forced the road toward the river, we had a choice of following a grass lane back into a field or driving right into the water. ‘Ferry still work?’ I asked. There was a little place across the river where I could see a big flatbed raft that looked like it could carry a couple of cars. There was nothing on our side but a steel brace and a low slung cable stretching out over the river to the other side. A faded sign next to a rusted bell said to ring the bell to call the ferry.
‘When the old boy feels like coming across to get you it works,’ Max told me. ‘Why?’
‘How about ten years ago?’
‘Same as now. Nothing on this side but crops and a road to nowhere. Old boy over there, Josh Lawson, he was ten years younger, just as ornery. You don’t live out in a place like this if you like people.’
‘Anyone interview Josh Lawson about what he saw and heard?’
‘He’s the one who pulled Missy Worth out of her grave, Rick. Said he heard gunshots in the middle of the night and came across the river early the next morning to have a look around.
She was down in that field – not far from those trees.’
Max turned into the field on a hard-packed lane and we continued due south, the river maybe a hundred yards away at this point. There was a nice cover of trees and weeds tall enough to swallow us up, and we found the abandoned farm we were looking for a couple of minutes later. There were four buildings still standing. A muddy field ran up close against the structures.
The house was made of clapboard, probably built about eighty years ago, when farmers were still people. It was a one storey, poor man’s paradise with high ceilings and an enclosed porch. The ceilings were mostly fallen in now, the windows all broken. All that remained of the roof was a skeleton. The front steps had been stolen like some of the clapboard. The weeds and trees coming up from the foundations were taking the thing back to nature by degrees. The barn was worse. People had taken about everything they could carry off. Half of it was collapsed in on itself. The garage had fallen down completely, a rubble of rotting boards. Only the milk shed had survived relatively intact. It was made of stone blocks and had a concrete floor. The roof was rotten but still mostly together. A stainless steel lock secured the door.
‘He pried off a hasp and staple to get in,’ Max announced, pointing at an old scar in the doorframe. ‘Then he put his own lock on here.’ Max showed me a second scar. ‘Sheriff’s department replaced it with one of ours.’
‘Did you bring the key for it?’ I asked. I had told him I wanted tade I o look at the place when I called him.
‘We couldn’t find it, but I don’t think it matters.’ Max reared back and kicked the door.
The sheriff’s good lock held, but the wood anchoring it exploded and the door whipped open.
He grinned at me and winked. ‘There you go.’ I stepped in and looked around. The place was close and damp. There were no windows. I saw only a dead light switch on the wall by the door and an empty light socket overhead. There was a big sink just inside, but when I turned the faucet, nothing happened. ‘There’s a pump outside that worked ten years ago, but he didn’t turn it on,’ Max said. ‘Whatever water he gave them, he brought in from the outside.’
‘From the river?’
‘No way of knowing, but I’ll tell you something. If he gave them water from that river, I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did.’
There were only two other items in the room, a big work table that had been painted white and turned black of its own accord and a walk-in refrigerator, which was nothing more than a concrete room with a thick oak door. I went to the walk-in. Max told me that the heavy brass lever that would have originally locked the door had been taken away to avoid someone accidentally getting trapped inside but that Booker had put one on of his own making. It was gone like the first lock. The interior was three feet deep, not quite six feet wide and just over five feet high. ‘He kept four girls in here?’ I asked incredulously.
‘The first one was dead after two or three days, Rick.’
‘I want to go in,’ I said, after a moment of consideration.
‘You’re too fat.’
‘The hell I am,’ I growled and slipped in easily, all two hundred-ten-plus joyful pounds.
‘Push that table against the door and give me fifteen minutes in here.
‘You’re crazy.’
‘Humour me.’
Max Dunn actually grinned as he started to shut the door. ‘Tell me again how you voted in the sheriff’s race, Rick.’
‘For the other guy!’ The door closed. A moment later I heard Max pushing the table against the door.
Chapter 6
Darkness.
I KNEW THE MOMENT THE DARKNESS had swallowed me that I had made a mistake.
‘Can you hear me?’ I called, but Max made no answer. I called out more loudly. ‘CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW?’ I was certain he would answer. I got silence for my troubles. Fifteen minutes of it, I thought grimly.
Twenty or twenty-five minutes, knowing Max. With my head tucked against my chest in order to fit inside my temporary prison cell, I reached up and searched theNT I D ceiling. There were no soft spots that I could claw at. I turned and tested the outer wall, then stepped away from the door and tried again. I caught a draft of musty air. I felt around for the crack and found it with my fingers. I played at the edges for a while, but nothing was coming loose. I called out to Max again, but he still didn’t respond. I turned and lowered myself to the floor. I could sit without hitting a wall, but when I stretched out on my back, I had to bend my legs slightly in order to fit.
A second person would have been virtually impossible to endure for any length of time. Four living, miserable girls in here must have been like something out of Dante.
I wasn’t sure but it seemed to me I caught the old scent of piss and fear aged on river air.
It was probably only my imagination, but my pulse kicked up some after that. My chest burned with a bit of pressure that scared me. I stared straight ahead, listening for Max, and I felt a surge of irrational fear. I tried not to think. That wasn’t possible. This was too close to Sarah’s end.
The fear my daughter had faced before her own murder washed over me. It was a feeling I knew well. One of my more developed talents, as a matter of fact.
I had spent too long searching for her killer. In doing so I had relived her final hours in my imagination so many times that I could fall into dour moods without even realising what was happening. There had been a time when I could dream of nothing else. The feelings would still resurrect in my weaker moments. They enveloped me now. I was powerless to stop the surge of emotion – the utter emptiness that comes of such a loss.
I felt myself looping back to a time that began eight years ago when I had given up everything in my life for a revenge I never delivered. There was a divorce in the middle of my search, a drunk that had carried on past all reason at the end of it. Then Pat Garrat had made a phone call and asked if I’d like to go to work for her. Things got better slowly after that, but there
were still times when I slipped. Sometimes there were whole nights when I imagined Sarah’s cries for help. Too often I struggled vainly to change what history had already written.
When that happened there was no way back until sunrise.
Suddenly, I could almost believe I was in the middle of it again. I knew I ought to be able to control things this time, this was just a case, but it didn’t feel that way sitting in Will Booker’s homemade hell.
A footstep scratched against the floor. I had lost my sense of time, and for a moment I could not have said if I had been locked up fifteen minutes or eight long years. I remembered my folly with a surge of embarrassment, and I shouted as loudly as I could, ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE!’
‘You had enough?’ Max’s voice was muted by the thick walls.
‘OPEN THE DOOR!’
I heard the table move, and then the door opened. Standing in a square of pale light, Max Dunn looked down at me. ‘You want to try it a full night? I can come back and get you tomorrow.’
I swore at him roughly and reached up to take his hand. I roidt halled out as awkwardly as any fifty-eight-year-old. ‘Where were you?’ I asked, my voice barely holding its manufactured calm.
‘I drove down to the river, trying to find just where Missy Worth was buried, but it’s all overgrown now.’
‘I didn’t hear you leave.’
‘I could hear you shouting when I stood right here, so I went outside to see if I could still hear you.’
‘Did you?’
‘Not a thing.’
I shook my head and walked out of the milk house and into the rain. The air felt good in my lungs. ‘I thought I could smell them,’ I told Max. I kept my back to him so he couldn’t read my face.
‘When we first looked in here, there was a pretty good stench to it.’ I felt dread crawling up my throat, as if I would have to go back inside. I knew what it meant: I wanted Will Booker back on Death Row, but I wasn’t going to get him. He was going to get away with his crime, the way Sarah’s killer had done, and it was going to be on my head.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing,’ I said sharply. Then remembering I was talking to Max, I said, ‘I got to thinking about Sarah while I was in there. How it must have been for her.’
Max thought about it for a minute, then nodded as if he understood, though I doubt anyone can understand that sort of madness. ‘It wasn’t a whole lot different, was it? The way she went and the way these kids got it?’
There were differences, too terrible to consider, but Max was right. The basic outline was the same. Sarah had been abducted and held for nearly a week. Then she had been murdered. ‘Sarah has been gone over eight years, Max, and I still think about her a few times every day.’ Max said nothing to interrupt the hard silence of memories. Finally, I looked at him with a bitterness I let few people see – at least when I could stay sober enough to hold a mask up.
‘I can’t imagine what it would be like if they had caught the bastard and put him on Death Row, then a decade later decided his rights had been violated.’
Max looked ready to tell me something, but seemed to change his mind. Confession is maybe good for the soul, but it rarely assists one’s career in law enforcement. ‘You get what you came for?’
Chapter 7
Wednesday 5:30 p.m., March 17.
AT STUCKEY’S I GOT OUT of the sheriff’s cruiser and thanked Max for running me through things. Max laughed with the humour of watching someone walk on ice. ‘Worth absolutely nothing, wasn’t it?’
I gave him what he expected, a lonesome shrug, then got in my car and drove back to town. I dropped my county car off at my house and wandered over to Simple Simon’s for last call on happy hour. It was just over a city block from my house, crawling distance in case things got serious. I didn
‘Is Garrat going through with it,’ Liffick asked, ‘or just barking like the bitch she is?’
My affection for the man washed, though I answered him all the same. ‘What do I know? I’m just the office grunt.’
‘Let me buy you a drink, big guy.’
I never turned down a drink from a lawyer. They knew the kind of money I made, so never expected me to buy them one in return. Of course, what Liffick and the rest of his kind wanted for the canary piss they bought me was information. Sometimes I gave it to them, if only to keep the lines of communication open. In the business of law it is a commonplace that today’s opponent may well become tomorrow’s ally. So I took a seat where Liffick indicated and found myself next to Kathy James, one of the field reporters for WSLO. Liffick sat to the other side of me, effectively holding me in place for the interrogation. He called to the waitress and signalled for her to bring me a glass of beer. Kathy James was the one who spoke. ‘I heard Garrat’s going to be cutting her losses once the storm passes, Rick.’ This was purely a fishing trip, and I knew it. She had heard it from Darrel Liffick, who was merely speculating. Pat Garrat confided in no one. It was how she had climbed to the top of the political dung heap by the age of thirty-one.
That and a serious family fortune.
‘You think she’s going to have losses?’ I asked innocently.
James leaned in closer, as intimate as a dagger, ‘There’s no way in hell Garrat’s going to convict this guy. All she wants out of this mess is a scapegoat. The way I hear it, you and Massey are the leading candidates. Everyone I know is betting on the bald guy.’
I was working on a comeback to this when a man put his face in front of us. Kathy James smiled like an innocent and I was forgotten. My beer came. There was some nonsense to bat around with Liffick and a few more people I knew who weren’t all that keen on local politics.
Before I left, though, Liffick got me aside and put a friendly arm over my shoulder. ‘She’s not like her old man, Rick,’ he told me in a whisper that barely missed turning into a kiss. ‘Don’t think she is or she will break your heart, pal.’
I MIXED BOURBON AND water the colour of strong tea when I got home, then another while I watched the news, which was mostly about Will Booker and his influential friend, the Reverend Connie Merriweather. Somewhere along the line I thought about dinner but the refrigerator was empty. I wasn’t legal to drive anymore, and I was too drunk to walk four blocks to my neighbourhood restaurant, so I just poured another drink. Like the old days. Around midnight I found some stale bread the mice had refused and washed it down with the last of the booze.
Chapter 8
Thursday 8:00 a.m., March 18.
THE NEXT MORNING I STOPPED at St. Jude’s, an old Gothic Revival filled with plaster saints and guarded by cheerful gargoyles. I spent a few minutes on my knees at one of the side altars and ran out some rusty prayers from my protestant upbringing. Then I just stayed there waiting for God to answer. He had been quiet a long time, so I wasn’t expecting the skies to open this morning. I just wanted to give him the chance to point me toward a piece of evidence no one knew existed – something to send Will Booker to a well-deserved execution. I usually went to St. Jude’s two or three times a month, never when they were actually having services. I wanted the quiet of the place and to believe for a few minutes that what we do matters.
Before I left I looked at old Jude himself. His emblem is the club. It is how he was martyred. The thing I always noticed about the old paintings, these folks took their pain with more ease and forgiveness than I ever did. It had never made sense to me not to fight back, but then no one ever mistook me for a saint. They say Saint Jude had no cult for centuries since he bore the name of the arch-betrayer Judas, but some wag a few centuries back came up with the catchall of ‘lost causes.’ Now there’s not a saint with a larger following.
I got to the office around nine and had pretty much decided to go in and face Garrat with the scapegoat theory. What did she really want from me? Was I supposed to take the blame if nothing turned up? Well, fine, but just tell me up front. Don’t insult my intelligence with lies of omission! I was ready for a knock-d
own-drag-out if it came to that, and I’ve had a few with different folks over the years so I’m practiced at it, but Sandy told me Garrat wasn’t coming to the office. ‘She’s meeting with the attorney general’s people,’ Sandy explained. ‘Didn’t she tell you?’
I nodded. She had. Wrapped up in my own worries and paranoia, I had forgotten.
‘If she calls again, I’ll let her know you want to talk.’
‘That’s all right,’ I drawled, my anger and arguments failing me suddenly, ‘I’ll talk with her tomorrow.’ There was a chance, after all, Garrat could do something about this case at the federal appellate court level; still a chance, too, I could pull something off. I looked at my watch. Solve the mystery before happy hour, find the truth, save the day.
