Time's Witness

by Michael Malone

  Lee stood beside him, applauding with the others. She was very beautiful. She seemed happy for him.

  I noticed Nora glance at me, then back at the screen; then with a deep slow breath that lifted her shoulders, she clicked the set off, swiveled on the knees of her jeans, all the way around to face the couch, where I was lying, my champagne glass resting on my HPD sweatshirt, Martha's chin on my bare feet. Outside, the rain kept falling. It tapped on my windows, steady as time.

  “Listen,” Nora said, and smiled, her head tilting, “why don’t you give me a chance? Come on, don’t you bet if I had, oh, five hundred million dollars or so, I could look pretty good too?”

  On the screen behind her, the Brooksides shrank to a bright diamond, and went out.

  I laughed, and she nodded at me. “Good,” she said. “You’re laughing. Laughter's a very good sign.”

  Champagne spilled on my hand; I brought it to my mouth, cool and sweet. “Oh, honey, laughter's our one hope in hell. And the only one.”

  Nora said, “If you could spare me the next thirty or forty years, Cudberth, I think I can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you don’t believe that at all.”

  Rain leapt dancing down from my balcony, keeping warm the winter earth.

  Please enjoy the following preview of

  First Lady, Michael Malone's third

  Justin and Cuddy novel, available from

  Sourcebooks Landmark.

  Prologue

  I go riding in the mornings on a horse named Manassas. I ride the old bridle path that runs behind the summerhouses at Pine Hills Lake. The lake is just outside Hillston, North Carolina, where my family has always lived. A hundred years ago, they drove their pony carts along North Cove Road and tipped their straw hats to one another. My family's circle is wide. My circle is this narrow red clay track around the lake.

  At dawn the past is still peaceful at Pine Hills Lake, so I begin my ride just as the sky brightens to pink, while a mist still floats above the cove, curling in slow drifts toward shore, as if restless beneath the dark water the Lady of the Lake were waiting to rise through the mists with her sword. This early in the day, before the Southern sun makes everything too clear, even the Piedmont can be Camelot and that's how I prefer it.

  It's rare on my rides to come across anyone out on the old bridle path. Certainly I never expected someone like her.

  She was standing, motionless, mist swirling around her, at the far end of the gray wooden dock. In the fog the dock looked like a road floating out into the water that she could walk on to the other side of the lake. I saw her without warning, when Manassas cantered past a clearing in the pines that opened onto a small pebbled beach. It was owned by a luxury resort called The Fifth Season, built a year ago to look like one built in the twenties. The sight of the woman stopped me as if I were racing toward a wall I couldn’t clear and I twisted Manassas sideways, his long black neck wrenching at the reins, his wild eye surprised.

  Slender, luminous, with hair the color of lions, she was so perfectly beautiful that her appearance startled me the way a great bright tropical bird would have shocked me, flying all of a sudden out of the pines. Maybe it was because of the intense way she was staring across the lake that I thought of the heroine of The French Lieutenant's Woman, but the two were nothing alike. This young woman wore a thin short red silk robe instead of a hooded black cloak. No whitecaps beat against a causeway and I didn’t call out to her to take care and she didn’t turn around to stare at me. She did something more unanticipated.

  Just at the moment when the first gold of the sun rose above the trees behind her, she shrugged the red robe off her shoulders and let it fall to the worn wood of the dock. She stood there for a moment entirely naked. Then she raised her white arms, arched her back and sang out a long lovely phrase of notes that came toward me through the woods like a magic message in a fairy tale. As the phrase ended, in a sparkle of slanted sunlight, she dived far out into the misty water and disappeared.

  The bright red silk lay like a pool of blood on the gray dock, and fearful that her leap was an act of despair, I kicked Manassas into a gallop. A homicide detective, I am trained after all to respond to matters of life and death and I worried that even if the woman weren’t suicidal, she might not have anticipated the hidden rocks into which she’d dived, or how cold the deep North Cove water could be even in late June.

  But as I reached the edge of the beach, she burst flying up out of the lake in a spray of shaken gold hair. She looked around, saw me on Manassas, and laughed with pleasure. Then she raised an arm, waved, and as I waved back, she blew me a kiss with her arm extravagantly outflung. As long as I could see her, I watched her swim strongly away, her feet kicking a path of diamonds behind her.

  I knew that there was something extraordinary about her. But I didn’t know that she was going to change my life.

  Chapter 1

  Cuddy

  The morning mist burned to haze. Even a thunderstorm tossing tree branches onto sidewalks could do nothing to cool the sun, and by noon drizzle steamed from the steps of the building that housed police headquarters. Climbing them, I was thinking about the woman I’d watched diving from the dock at the lake, how unlikely it was that I would ever know her name.

  Here in Hillston, we still call ourselves Southerners but it doesn’t mean as much. The South has not only forgotten the past, it has forgotten the whole idea of the past. Our old passports have all expired because in the New South they’re useless—not because we already know each other so well, but because we have no expectations of ever being more than strangers to one another. In the past, a Hillston homicide came out of the Piedmont particularities of our town, its tobacco and textiles, its red clay farms and magnolia shaded university, its local people tied to town or college or family, it came out of something distinctive and therefore traceable. But that world is as distant as my grandparents’ straw hats and pony carts, and in the Hillston we live in today, there are no landmarks to guide me to the murderous.

  “Watch where you’re going,” someone snarled, and I was jostled by the crowd pushing out into the soft rain, hurrying for lunch before the Norris murder trial resumed in Hillston's Superior Court. It was the county sheriff Homer Louge who’d knocked into me while reading a magazine with a rock star on the cover. I turned to watch him shoving his way down to the street. At the intersection his path was blocked by two small foreign women, but he shouldered between them, kicked at a garbage bag piled on the sidewalk, and turned the corner.

  They were middle-aged women in cheap black clothes, with thick black straight hair and skin the red color of clay earth. I had no idea whether they were Mexican or Peruvian or Native American—or what odd circumstances might have brought them to Hillston. Each carried a large shopping bag from Southern Depot, an upscale market in the old train station not far from the court-house. These women did not look like typical shoppers for the good Brie or nice Merlots or chrome cappuccino makers sold there. Silent, they stood by the curb in the rain, just waiting. It was the third day I’d seen them on the corner. They noticed that I was staring at them and hurried away.

  In the South it's not polite to stare at strangers, yet staring at strangers has turned out to be my life's work. Since I’m the head of a homicide division, usually the strangers are dead when I first see them, and usually they don’t stay strangers for long. Certainly not as long as the murder victim we were still calling G.I. Jane. In mid-March we had found this young woman in the woods near a Hillston subdivision. It was now the twentieth of June and we still didn’t know who she was. No identification had been left on her body, no file matched her prints, no one claimed her, no one seemed to miss her. According to the local newspapers, the fact that after three months Hillston's police department still didn’t even know the victim's name meant that I wasn’t doing my job very well— which meant that our police chief Cuddy Mangum wasn’t doing his.

  Cuddy had his old suede loafers up on the cluttered desk
of his corner office on the top floor of the Hillston municipal complex known now as the Cadmean Building. His was the biggest office in the place, bigger than the mayor's office downstairs, and the air conditioning was on so high that frost dripped down the two walls of windows. He was eating Kentucky Fried Chicken from a cardboard bucket when I dropped my damp hat on the coffee table. I said, “We lost the South when we lost the past, and what we got in its place was junk food.”

  Hillston's youngest police chief winked a bright blue eye at me. “Justin B. Savile the Five, it's a small price to pay. Want a Pepsi?”

  “I want a blanket.”

  “How about some Extra-Crispy?”

  I showed him my sushi take-out. “No thanks,” I grumbled. “Hail the new millennium. The whole country can watch and eat the same trash at the same time.”

  Cuddy gave me an ironic snort. “I never knew a man so incensed by junk food.” He spun his hands in a tumbling circle. “Well, I say roll out the polyester carpet for the new millennium. Let it roll, let it rock’n’roll, right on over the past. The Old South's got a lot worse to answer for than Colonel Sanders’ family-pack.”

  I opened my chopsticks. “Everybody knows the same trash and that's all they know. One story at a time, one new hot story every week.”

  “What story's that?” Cuddy pulled a KFC wing from the bucket. “I sure hope it's the story of how you just found out who murdered G.I. Jane and you came in here to tell me. Because I am under the tree with a noose around my neck, and the press has an electric prod aimed at my horse's behind.”

  “I can’t find out who killed her ’til I find out who she is.”

  “Justin, we’re talking about a human being. Somebody knows her.”

  I shook my head. “Not in Hillston they don’t. Not anymore.”

  Two teenagers had come across the slender fair-haired woman lying in a rain-flooded incline under wet dead leaves and rotted branches deep in scrub forest on the north edge of town. Her killer had cut her throat open to her spinal cord. He’d apparently used the same serrated knife to saw off her hair close to her scalp and to slice off the skin attaching a small pierced ring to her eye-brow. Then he’d roughly shaved her head. That's why we called her G.I. Jane. She was unclothed except for a new gray Guess T-shirt.

  It was the hair and this Guess T-shirt that had brought the press running. For back in November in Neville, North Carolina, a town less than fifty miles from Hillston, the body of another young woman had been found with her throat cut, her head shaved and she was also naked except for a gray Guess T-shirt. There were red roses strewn on this young woman's breast. But her body, lying in a drainage culvert, had been discovered within twenty-four hours of her death. The Neville police had no trouble identifying her as one Cathy Oakes: her fingerprints were on file because they’d arrested her often for prostitution. The fact that her head was shaved and she had worn nothing but a Guess T-shirt had been, at the time, of no particular interest. But when four months later the same kind of shirt was found on our victim in Hillston, an affluent Southern college town, the press jumped. A forensic pathologist thought it was “possible” that the same knife had cut the throats of both women. He wasn’t sure about it, but the press was. Patterns suggest a killer with a habit, a killer who likes to call attention to his habit by repeating it. A serial killer.

  In the case of G.I. Jane, there was no doubt that the killer had wanted the police to take notice. He had cut off her tongue at its root. There were small burn marks on her arms and torso, inflicted after her death, and there were burnt sulfur kitchen matches arranged in a circle around her head. The small earring that had been sliced from her eyebrow, with her skin still attached, was threaded through a dirty white shoelace and tied around her neck. And just to make things clear, there was a label on a string tied around her toe, and on this label was printed in red marker:

  LT. JUSTIN SAVILE V,

  PLEASE DELIVER YOUR FRIEND TO:

  CAPTAIN C. R. MANGUM, HILLSTON POLICE

  The fact that the head of homicide was being asked to pass along a dead “friend” to the police chief gave the G.I. Jane case both urgency and (after somebody leaked to the press what was written on the tag) media pizzazz. Without asking me, the press announced that I knew the victim. I didn’t, but it would have been hard to tell if I had. Our medical examiner calculated that her corpse had lain there in the woods unnoticed for about eight weeks before we’d found her. Her blood had drained deep into the earth; her bones had settled. Finally, some animal dragged out from under the leaves enough of a human arm for the teenage couple to see it. By then it was too late. The killer had left his signature behind but no easy way to trace him, or his victim.

  Impressions of the girl's beautiful teeth matched none of the missing young women whose dental records were on file in national computer banks. Of as little help were the red painted tattoos of coiled snakes around her ankles and possibly around her wrists as well—but since her hands had been gnawed off by the wild creatures that had presumably also eaten her tongue, we could only guess. She might have been pretty.

  As I kept telling Cuddy, I didn’t know who the dead girl was because nothing about her was particular enough to tell me. Today, in Hillston, a girl from anywhere could paint on snake tattoos with a Magic Marker, could wear a new Guess T-shirt, Nike shoelaces, Kenneth Cole sunglasses. A girl with expensively cared for teeth could now be murdered without being missed, even in Hillston. But the media was impatient for G.I.'s Jane's killer to do something else, like kill a third woman, or kill me or Cuddy, or kill himself, or at least get caught trying, and when he didn’t do any of these as spring turned to summer, they took it out on the Hillston police.

  I finished my sushi roll. “Cuddy, these days it's not just big cities where homicides can go dead cold. Three, ten, thirty years or more. Then all of a sudden, you stumble onto a clue and kazaam, the door opens.”

  He rubbed his paper napkin between his large bony hands. “Tell me that's not a prediction. I want kazaam tomorrow. I’m with Mavis Mahar. I’m living for tomorrow.”

  “Oh god, even you. Nobody in town's even talking about G.I. Jane anymore. Nobody cares about the Norris murder trial right downstairs either. This week everything's all about this idiotic Mavis.” I held up the Hillston Star where the front page had a huge headline, “MAVIS COMES TO TOWN.” Mavis Mahar, the Irish rock star, had just arrived in Hillston for two sold-out concerts at the Haver University football stadium. “Livin’ for Tomorrow” was one of her big hits.

  Cuddy stood up, pounded on an invisible piano and started singing:

  So I’m givin’ you your sorrow

  Hug it home without delay.

  While I’m livin’ for tomorrow,

  Stay the king of yesterday.

  Then he rolled the newspaper and tapped me with it on each shoulder. “That's you, Justin, the king of yesterday, the Gallant Last of the Moronic Byronics. No wonder your wife headed for the mountains. Years of listening to you yapping on about how the world's turned to trash finally drove her off. Alice has been gone a damn month. When's she coming back?”

  I told him the truth. “I don’t know.”

  He tilted his head, looked at me until I turned away. “Go bring that sweet lady home.”

  “I’m not sure Alice wants to come home.” I picked up two old magazines from his coffee table, pretended to flip through them.

  He shook his head. “Why don’t you ask her?” I ignored him. There was a long silence then he said, “Justin, I know you’ve been in a bad way. Do you want me to turn G.I. Jane over to—”

  “No. No, I don’t.” I changed the subject. “So, you going to check out this Mavis concert?” There’d been a near riot last night before the rock star had finally made her appearance at her first concert and Cuddy had already predicted security problems tonight as well.

  He gave up and walked back to his desk. “The university asked the sheriff and the sheriff doesn’t want my help. You going?”
r />   “I don’t like rock’n’roll.”

  He shook his head. “Just ’cause Mavis isn’t one of those old dead jazz singers of yours doesn’t mean she's no good. Ever listen to her?”

  “It's hard to avoid it.” I showed him that both magazines on his coffee table had Mavis Mahar with a buzz cut on their covers. As I glanced at them, there was an odd familiarity to her smile. But I suppose that's what stardom means. Everybody thinks they know you. “Look at this. Same cover, same star, same scandal…” I pointed at Cuddy's greasy bucket of chicken. “KFC in Hong Kong tastes no different from KFC in Hillston. That's my point. Same Mexican burritos, same Greek gyros sold in the same plastic wrap coast to coast.”

  He nodded cheerfully. “You think they were selling sushi in Hillston back in your glorious good old days? Hey, Thai take-out is a nice change from growing up on canned sausages and black-eyed peas. I don’t like the way the past treated me.” He stroked his air conditioner. “Now I can freeze in June. I’m not squeezed up naked in a tin wash tub in a red-dirt yard, trying to cool off in six inches of water you could boil eggs in. I like tomorrow. And I like Mavis Mahar.”

  I shrugged. “You and everybody else.”

  All over town there were Mavis posters in store windows and Mavis CDs by checkout counters, there were bins of her music videos and cases of her trademark bottled stout in stores near the Haver University campus. Even here in Hillston, everyone called her Mavis as if they were her friends, and, after all, they probably knew more about her than they did about their neighbors. Her latest stunt had been so repeatedly covered by CNN that even I knew she had seduced a right-wing politician into meeting her at five A.M. on the steps of Nashville's replica of the Parthenon. Handcuffing herself to this intoxicated national figure (who’d clearly thought he’d been invited to a romantic tryst), she’d sung him a song about hypocrisy while paparazzi (whom she’d previously called) snapped photos that they then sold for vast sums to the tabloids. After the politician resigned, the new Mavis Mahar album went triple-platinum, her new single “Coming Home to You” (the theme song of a popular new movie) sold even more records than “Livin’ for Tomorrow.” By the time of her arrival in Hillston, millions of teenage girls could sing “Coming Home to You”—a pulsing ballad full of defiant sorrow and mournful Celtic moans—and thousands of them had apparently pierced their left nipples just as their idol had apparently done.