Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  Some half-dozen years earlier, he had watched the frenzy as a mob pulled two teenage boys from a van. The boys had been white, the attackers black. The teenagers had unwittingly wandered into the riot area, gotten lost, tried to escape, only to drive themselves farther into the melee. I wish it were a dream, he thought. I wish I hadn’t been there. The crowd had surged about the screaming youths, pushing and pulling them, tossing them about until finally they had both disappeared beneath a siege of kicking feet and pummeling fists, crushed down by rocks, shot by pistols. He had been a block distant, not close enough to be a helpful eyewitness for the police, just close enough to never forget what he saw. He had been hiding in the lee of a burning building beside a photographer who kept clicking pictures and cursing that he didn’t have a long lens. They waited through the deaths, finally seeing the two mangled bodies abandoned in the street. He had run then, when the mob had finished and had poured in another direction, back to his car, trying to escape the same fate, knowing he would never escape the vision. Many people had died that night.

  He remembered writing his story in the newsroom, as helpless as the two young men he’d seen die, trapped by the images that slid from him onto the page.

  But at least I didn’t die, he thought.

  Just a tiny part of me.

  He shuddered again, turned it into a shrug, and rose, stretching and flexing his muscles as if to reinvigorate himself. He needed to be alert, he admonished himself. Today he would interview the two detectives. He wondered what they would say. And whether he could believe any of it.

  Then he went to the shower, as if by letting the water flow steadily over him, he could cleanse his memory as well.

  4

  THE DETECTIVES

  A secretary in the major-crimes offices of the Escambia County Sheriff’s Department pointed Matthew Cowart toward a lumpy fake-leather couch, and told him to wait while she contacted the two detectives. She was a young woman, probably pretty but with a face marred by a frowning boredom, her hair pulled back severely and a rigid set to her shoulders beneath the dull brown of her policewoman’s uniform. He thanked her and took a seat. The woman dialed a number and spoke quietly, so that he was unable to make out what she was saying. “Someone’ll be here in a couple,” the woman said to him as she hung up the phone. Then she turned away, examining some paperwork on her desk, studiously ignoring him. So, he thought, everyone knows why I’m here.

  The homicide division was in a new building adjacent to the county lockup. It had a modern quiet to it, the noise disappearing in the thick brown carpet and baffled by stark white wall partitions that separated the detectives’ desks from the waiting area where Cowart cooled his heels. He tried to concentrate on his upcoming interview but found his mind wandering. The quiet was disconcerting.

  He found himself thinking of his home. His father had been the managing editor of a small daily paper in a midsize New England city, a mill town that had grown up into something more important, thanks to some lucky investments by large corporations that brought in money and new blood and a certain undeniable quaintness in the local architecture. He was a distant man who worked hard, leaving before light, coming home after dark. He wore simple blue or gray suits that seemed to hang from an ascetic’s lean body; an angular sharp man, not quick to smile, fingertips stained with nicotine and newsprint.

  His father had been possessed, mostly with the never-ending ins and outs, details and dramatics, of the daily paper. What had electrified his father had been the gathering of news, a story, particularly one that burst on the front page, crying for attention. An aberration, an evil, some wrongdoing—then his father’s rigidity relaxed, and he would spin with a sort of jumpy, exhausting delight, like a dancer hearing music for the first time after years of silence. In those moments, his father was like a terrier, ready to latch on to something and bite tightly, worrying it to oblivion.

  Am I that different? he wondered. Not really. His ex-wife used to call him a romantic, as if it were an insult. A knight-errant—he looked up and saw a man enter the waiting area—but, he thought, with the heart of a bulldog.

  “You Cowart?” the man asked, not unfriendly.

  Cowart rose. “That’s right.”

  “I’m Bruce Wilcox.” The man held out his hand. “Come on, it’ll be a few minutes before Lieutenant Brown gets back in. We can talk back here.”

  The detective led Cowart through a warren of desks to a glass-walled office in a corner, overseeing the work area. There was a title on the door: LT. T.A. BROWN, HOMICIDE DIVISION. Wilcox closed the door and settled behind a large gray desk, motioning to Cowart to take a seat in front of him. “We had a small plane crash this morning,” he said as he began arranging some documents on the desk. “Little Piper Cub on a training run. Tanny had to go to the site and supervise the recovery of the student and the pilot. Guys went down at the edge of a swamp. Messy business. First you’ve got to wade through all that muck to get to the plane. Then you’ve got to haul the guys out. I heard there was a fire. Ever have to try to handle a burned body? God, it’s a mess. A righteous mess.”

  The detective shook his head, clearly pleased that he’d managed to avoid this particular assignment.

  Cowart looked at the detective. He was a compact, short man, with long but slicked-back hair and an easygoing manner, probably in his late twenties. Wilcox had taken off his sportcoat—a loud, red-checked design—and slung it over the back of the chair. He rocked in his seat like a man wanting to put his feet up on the desk. Cowart saw a set of wide shoulders and powerful arms more suited to a man considerably bigger.

  “. . . Anyway,” the detective continued, “hauling bodies is one of the drawbacks to the job. Usually it’s me that gets the duty . . .” He held up his arm and made a muscle. “I wrestled in high school, and I ain’t big, so I can squeeze into some space half the size of most of the other guys. I expect down in Miami they got technicians and rescue people and the like who get to fiddly-fuck about with dead folks. Up here, it kinda falls to us. Everybody dead is our business. First, we figure out if there was or wasn’t a murder. Of course, that’s not so hard when you’ve got a crashed plane smoldering on the ground in front of you. Then we ship them off to the morgue.”

  “So, how’s business?” Cowart asked.

  “Death is always steady work,” the detective replied. He laughed briefly. “No layoffs. No furloughs. No slack time. Just good, steady work. Hell, they ought to have a union just for homicide detectives. There’s always someone up and dying.”

  “What about murders? Up here . . .”

  “Well, you’re probably aware that we’ve got a drug problem up and down the Gulf Coast. Isn’t that a great way of putting it? A drug problem. Makes it sound kinda cute. More like a drug hurricane, if you ask me. Anyway, it does create a bit of extra business, no doubt.”

  “That’s something new.”

  “That’s right. Just the last couple of years.”

  “But before the drug trade?”

  “Domestic disputes. Vehicular homicides. Occasionally, a couple of good old boys will get to shooting or stabbing over cards or women or dog fights. That’s pretty much the norm for the county. We get some big-city troubles in Pensacola a bit. Especially with the servicemen. Bar fights, you know. There’s a good deal of prostitution about the base, and that leads to some cutting and shooting as well. Butterfly knives and little pearl-handled thirty-two-caliber handguns. Pretty much what you’d expect, like I said. Nothing too unusual.”

  “But Joanie Shriver?”

  The detective paused, thinking before answering. “She was different.”

  “Why?”

  “She was just different. She was just . . .” He hesitated, suddenly forcing his hand into a clenched fist and waving it in the air in front of him. “Everybody felt it. She was . . .” He interrupted himself again, taking a deep bre
ath. “We ought to wait for Tanny. It was his case, really.”

  “I thought his name was Theodore.”

  “It is. Tanny’s his nickname. It was his dad’s before him. His dad used to run a little leather tanning business on the side. Always had that red dye color to his hands and arms. Tanny worked with him, right through high school, summers home from college. Picked up the nickname, just the same. I don’t think anyone, except his momma, ever called him Theodore.” He pronounced the name See-oh-door.

  “Both of you guys are local? I mean . . .”

  “I know what you mean. Sure, but Tanny’s ten years older than me. He grew up in Pachoula. Went to the high school. He was quite an athlete in those days. Went off to Florida State to play football but ended up slogging about in the jungle with the First Air Cavalry. Came back with some medals and finished school and got a job on the force. Me, I was a navy brat. My dad was the shore patrol superintendent at the base for years. I just hung on after high school. Did a bit of junior college. Took the police academy exam and stayed. It was my dad steered me into police work.”

  “How long have you been working homicide?”

  “Me? About three years. Tanny’s been at it longer.”

  “Like it?”

  “It’s different. A lot more interesting than driving a patrol car. You get to use your head.” He tapped himself on the forehead.

  “And Joanie Shriver?”

  The detective hunched his shoulders together as if drawing inward. “She was my first real case. I mean, most murders, you know, they’re subject murders, that’s what we call them. You arrive on the scene and there’s the murderer standing right next to the victim. . . .”

  That was true. Cowart remembered Vernon Hawkins saying when he went to the scene of a murder he always looked first for the person who wasn’t crying but was standing wide-eyed, in shock, confused. That was the killer.

  “. . . Or else, now, these drug things. But that’s just collecting the bodies for the most part. You know what they call them down at the state attorney’s office? Felony littering. You don’t ever really expect to make a murder case on a body found out in the water, that’s been floating about for three days, that doesn’t have any ID and not much of a face after the fish get finished. Single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Designer jeans and gold chains. No, those you just tag and bag, yes sir. But little Joanie, man, she had a face. She wasn’t some anonymous Colombian drug runner. She was different.”

  He paused, thinking. Then he added, “She was like everybody’s little sister.”

  Detective Wilcox appeared about ready to say something else when the telephone on the desk rang. He picked it up, grunted a few words in greeting, listened, then handed it over to Cowart. “It’s the boss. Wants to speak to you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Cowart?” He heard a slow, distant, even, deep voice, one that didn’t betray any of the Southernisms with which he was becoming so familiar. “This is Lieutenant Brown. I’m going to be delayed here at this crash site.”

  “Is there some sort of problem?”

  The man laughed, a small bitter burst. “I suppose that depends on how you look at it. None that one wouldn’t expect with a burned plane, a dead pilot and student, all sunk in ten feet of swamp, a hysterical pair of wives, an angry flight-school owner, and a couple of park rangers pissed off because this particular landing came down in the midst of a bird sanctuary.”

  “Well, I’ll be happy to wait . . .”

  The detective interrupted. “What I think would be wise is if Detective Wilcox took you out and showed you where Joanie Shriver’s body was found. There are a few other sights of interest as well, which we believe wilI help you in writing your story. By the time you two get finished, I will have cleared this location, and we can discuss Mr. Robert Earl Ferguson and his crime at our leisure.”

  Cowart listened to the clipped, orderly voice. The lieutenant sounded like the sort of man who could make a suggestion into a demand merely by lowering his tone.

  “That’d be fine.” Cowart handed the phone back to Detective Wilcox, who listened to the earpiece momentarily and replied, “You sure they’re expecting him? I wouldn’t want to . . . ,” then started dipping his head in agreement, as if the other man could see him. He hung up.

  “All right,” he said. “Time for the grand tour. You got any boots and jeans back at your hotel room? It ain’t too nice where I’m taking you.”

  Cowart nodded and followed after the short detective, who bounced down the hallway with a sort of impish enthusiasm.

  They drove through the bright morning sun in the detective’s unmarked squad car. Wilcox rolled down his window, letting the warm air flood the interior. He hummed to himself snatches of country-and-western songs. Occasionally he would half-sing some plaintive lyric, “Mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be homicide detectives . . . ,” and grin at Cowart. The journalist stared out across the countryside, feeling unsettled. He had expected rage from the detective, an explosion of animosity and frustration. They knew why he was there. They knew what he intended to do. His presence could be nothing but trouble for them—especially when he wrote that they had tortured Ferguson to obtain his confession. Instead, he got humming.

  “So tell me,” Wilcox finally asked as he steered the car down a shaded street. “What did you think of Bobby Earl? You went up to Starke, right?”

  “He tells an interesting story.”

  “I bet he does. But what’d’ya think of him?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet.” It was a lie, Cowart realized, but he wasn’t sure precisely how much of one.

  “Well, I pegged him in the first five seconds. Soon as I saw him.”

  “That’s pretty much what he says.”

  The detective burst out with a single crack of laughter. “Of course, I bet he didn’t say I was right, though, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t think so. Anyway, how’s he doing?”

  “He seems okay. He’s bitter,” Cowart replied.

  “I’d expect that. How’s he look?”

  “He’s not crazy, if that’s what you mean.”

  The detective laughed. “No, I wouldn’t figure Bobby Earl would get crazy. Not even on the Row. He was always a cold-hearted son of a bitch. Stayed frosty right to the end when that judge told him where he was gonna end up.”

  Wilcox seemed to think for an instant, then he shook his head at a sudden memory. “You know, Mr. Cowart, he was like that from the first minute we picked him up. Never blinked, never let on nothing right up until he finally told us what happened. And when he did confess, it was steady-like. Just the facts, Christ. It wasn’t like he was talking about anything more difficult than stamping on a bug. I went home that night and I got so damn drunk, Tanny had to come by and pour me into bed. He scared me.”

  “I’m very interested in that confession,” Cowart said.

  “I expect you are. Ain’t that the whole ball of wax?” He laughed. “Well, you’re gonna have to wait for Tanny. Then we’ll tell you about the whole thing.”

  I bet you will, Cowart thought. Aloud, he asked, “But he scared you?”

  “It wasn’t him so much as what I felt he could do.”

  The detective didn’t elaborate. Wilcox pulled the car around a corner, and Cowart saw that they’d approached the school where the abduction took place. “We’re gonna start here,” Wilcox said. He stopped the car under a dark willow tree. “Here’s where she gets in. Now watch carefully.”

  He drove forward swiftly, took a fast right turn, then another quick left, heading down a long street with single-story homes set back amidst shrubbery and pines.

  “See, we’re still heading toward Joanie’s house, so there’s nothing yet for her to get scared about. But we’re already out of sight of
anyone at the school. Now watch this.”

  He pulled the car to a stop sign at a Y intersection. Down one street there were more homes, spaced wider apart. Down the other fork in the road there were a few decrepit shacks before a yellow-green, neglected hayfield and swaybacked brown barn at the edge of a dark tunnel-like overgrowth of forest and twisted swamp. “She’d want to go that way,” the detective said, pointing toward the houses. “He went the other way. I think this is where he popped her first. . . .” The detective clenched his fist and made a mock punching motion toward Cowart. “He’s strong, strong as a goddamn horse. He may not look big, but he’s plenty big enough to handle a little eleven-year-old girl. It must have surprised the hell out of her. Forces her down, floors, it . . .”

  In that instant, all the easygoing jocularity that had marked the detective’s behavior vanished. In a single, murderous gesture, Wilcox suddenly reached over and grabbed Cowart’s arm up by the shoulder. In the same motion, he punched the accelerator and the car shot forward, fishtailing briefly in loose gravel and dirt. His fingers pinching into Cowart’s muscles, tugging him sideways off balance in the seat, Wilcox steered the car down the left fork in the road. Cowart shouted out, a grunting mixture of surprise and fear as he fought to hang on to the armrest in the wildly pitching vehicle. The car swerved, skidding around a corner, and Cowart was tossed against the door. The detective’s grip tightened. He, too, was shouting, roaring words that made no sense, his face red with exertion. Within seconds they were past the shacks, bouncing on a washboard highway, disappearing into cool shadows thrown by the enveloping forest. The dark trees seemed to leap out at them as the car raced ahead. The speed was dizzying. The engine surged and howled and Cowart froze, expecting to be slammed into death.

  “Scream!” the detective demanded sharply.

  “What?”

  “Go ahead, scream!” he shouted. “Yell for help, damn you!”