Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  Cowart stared at the detective’s red face and mad eyes. Both men’s voices were raised over the noise of the hurtling engine and the scraping and scrabbling of the tires against the road.

  “Let go!” Cowart yelled. “What the hell are you doing?” Shadows and branches whipped past him, leaping from the sides of the road at them like so many attacking beasts.

  “Stop, goddammit, stop!”

  Abruptly, Wilcox released him, grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and simultaneously slammed on the brakes. Cowart thrust out his arm to try to prevent himself from pitching into the windshield as the car screeched and shimmied to a stop.

  “There,” the detective said. He exhaled rapidly. His hands were shaking.

  “What the hell?” Cowart shouted. “You trying to get us both killed?”

  The detective didn’t answer. He just leaned his head back and inhaled rapidly, as if trying to gain back the control that had fled with the wild ride; then he turned to Cowart, fixing him with small, narrowed eyes. “Relax, Mr. Reporter-man,” he said steadily. “Take a look around you.”

  “Jesus, what was that little show for?”

  “Just showing you a little reality.”

  Cowart took a deep breath. “By driving crazy and trying to kill us?”

  “No,” the detective replied slowly. He grinned, his even white teeth glistening. “Just showing you how easy it was for Ferguson to take that child from civilization into the fucking jungle. Take a look around you. You think there’s anybody can hear you if you scream for help? Who’s gonna come along and help you out? Look at where you are, Cowart. What do you see?”

  Cowart stared out the window and saw dark swamp and forest stretching around him, covering him like a shroud.

  “Who do you see who’s gonna help you?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Who do you see who’s gonna help a little eleven-year-old girl?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You see where you are? You’re in hell. It takes five minutes. That’s all. And civilization is gone. This is the fucking jungle. Get the point?”

  “I get the point.”

  “I just wanted you to see it with Joanie Shriver’s eyes.”

  “I get the point.”

  “All right,” the detective said, smiling again. “That’s how fast it happened. Then he took her farther in. Let’s go.”

  Wilcox got out of the car and went to the trunk. He got out two pairs of bulky brown rubber wading pants and tossed one pair to Cowart. “That’ll have to do.”

  Cowart started to struggle into the waders. As he was doing so, he looked down. He bent down suddenly and felt the ground. Then he walked to the rear of the police cruiser and stood next to the detective. He took a deep breath, smiling to himself. All right, he thought, two can play.

  “Tire tracks,” he said abruptly, pointing down at the ground with his finger.

  “Say what?”

  “Fucking tire tracks. Look at this dirt. If he drove her in here, there would be tire tracks. You could have matched them up with his tires. Or don’t you cowboys know about such things?”

  Wilcox grinned, refusing to rise to the bait. “It was May. Dirt turns to dust.”

  “Not under this cover.”

  The detective paused, staring at the reporter. Then he laughed, a wry smile creasing his face. “You ain’t dumb, are you?”

  Cowart didn’t reply.

  “Local reporters wouldn’t be that sharp. No, sir.”

  “Don’t flatter me. Why didn’t you make any tire prints?”

  “Because this area was drove all over by rescue personnel and search fucking parties. That was one of the big problems we had at the start. As soon as the word hit that she’d been found, everybody tore ass out here. I mean everybody. And they trampled the shit out of the crime scene. It was a fucking mess before Tanny and I got there. Firemen, ambulance drivers, Boy Scouts, Christ, you name it. There was no control whatsoever. Nobody preserved a damn thing. So suppose we made a tire track. A footprint. A piece of ripped cloth on a bramble, something. No way to match it up. By the time we got here and damn, we were moving as fast as we could, this place was crawling with folks. Hell, they’d even moved her body out of the location, pulled her up on the shore.”

  The detective thought for a minute. “Can’t really blame ’em,” he went on. “People were crazy for that little girl. It wouldn’t have been Christian to leave her in the muck getting gnawed on by snapping turtles.”

  Christianity had nothing to do with this case, Cowart thought. It is all evil. But he said, “So, they fucked up?”

  “Yeah.” The detective looked at him. “I don’t want to see that in the paper. I mean, you can point out the scene was a mess. But I don’t want to see ‘Detective Wilcox said the crime scene was fucked up . . .’ but yeah, that’s right, it was.”

  Cowart watched the detective slip into the waders. He remembered another Hawkins maxim: If you look close enough, the scene will tell you everything. But Wilcox and Brown had had no scene. They had had no evidence that wasn’t contaminated. So they’d had to get the other thing that would get them into a court of law: a confession.

  The detective tightened his straps and waved to Cowart. “Come on, city boy. Let me show you a real good dying place.”

  He stepped off into the woods, his waders rustling against the shrub brush as he walked.

  The place where Joanie Shriver had died was dark and enclosed by tangled vines and weeds, with overhanging branches that blocked out the sun like a cave made by nature. It was a small rise, perhaps ten feet above the edge of the swamp, which lurked with black water and mud, stretching away from the forest. Cowart’s hands and face were scratched from pushing thorns out of his path. They had traveled a bare fifty yards from the car, but it had been a difficult trip. He was sweating hard, perspiration dripping into his eyes and stinging them. As he stood in the small clearing, he thought it seemed diseased somehow. For a terrible instant, he pictured his own daughter there, and he caught his breath. Find a tough question, he insisted to himself looking at the detective. Something to break the clammy hold his imagination had thrust on him.

  “How could he haul some kid kicking and screaming through that?” Cowart said slowly.

  “We figure she was unconscious. Deadweight.”

  “How come?”

  “No defensive wounds on the hands or arms . . .” He held up his arms, crossing them in front of his face, demonstrating. “Like she was fighting against that knife. No sign that she fought back at all, like skin under her fingernails. There was a pretty large contusion on the side of her head. Pathologist figured she was knocked out pretty early. I suppose that was some comfort. At least she didn’t know much about what was happening to her.”

  Wilcox walked over to a tree trunk and pointed down. “This is where we found her clothes. Crazy thing was, they were all folded up nice and polite.”

  He walked a few steps away, back into the center of the clearing. He looked up as if trying to see through the overhang to the sky, shook his head, then motioned to Cowart. “This is where we found the major blood residue. Killed her right here.”

  “How come no murder weapon was ever discovered?”

  The detective shrugged. “Look around you. We went all over the area. Used a metal detector. Nothing. Either he threw it away someplace else, or I don’t know. Look, you could walk down to the edge of the swamp, take a knife and just stick it straight down in the mud ten, twelve inches and we’d never find it. Not unless you stepped on the damn thing.”

  The detective continued to walk through the clearing. “There was a little blood trail leading right along here. The autopsy showed that the rape was premortem. About half the cuts were, too. But a bunch were afterwards. Kinda like he went crazy when she was dead,
just cutting and slashing. Anyway, after he was finished, he dragged her down here and dumped her in the water.”

  He pointed to the swamp edge. “He pushed her down, got her under those roots there. You couldn’t see her unless you were right on top of her. He’d tossed some loose brush on top. We were lucky to find her as quick as we did. Hell, we were lucky to find her at all. The guys would have gone right past her, ’cept one of them had his hat knocked off by a low branch. When he reached out to grab the hat, he spotted her down there. Just damn-fool blind luck, really.”

  “But what about his clothing, wouldn’t there be some sign? Like blood or hair or something?”

  “We tossed his house pretty good after the confession. But we didn’t come up with nothing.”

  “Same for the car. There had to be something.”

  “When we picked the son of a bitch up, he was just finishing cleaning out that car. Scrubbed it down real fine. There was a section cut out of the rug on the passenger’s side, too. That was long gone. Anyway, the damn car was shining like it was brand-new. We didn’t find anything.” The detective rubbed his forehead, then looked at the sweat on his fingers. “We don’t have the same kind of forensic capability that your big-city guys have, anyway. I mean, we aren’t in the dark ages or anything, but lab work up here is slow and not altogether reliable. There may have been something that a real pro could have found with one of those FBI spectrographs. We didn’t. We tried hard, but we come up with nothing.”

  He paused. “Well, actually, we found one thing, but it didn’t help none.”

  “What was that?”

  “A single pubic hair. Trouble was, it didn’t match up with Joanie Shriver’s. But it wasn’t Ferguson’s neither.”

  Cowart shook his head. He could feel the heat, the closeness of the air suffocating him. “If he confessed, why didn’t he tell you where the clothes were? Why didn’t he tell you where he hid the knife? What’s the point of a confession unless you get all the details straight?”

  Wilcox glared at Cowart, reddening. He started to say something, but then chewed back his words, leaving the questions hanging in the still, hot air of the clearing. “Let’s go,” he said. He turned and started to make his way out of the location, not looking back to see if Cowart was following. “We got someplace we gotta be.”

  Cowart took one last lingering look at the murder site. He wanted to sear it into his memory. Feeling a mixture of excitement and disgust, he trailed after the detective.

  The detective pulled the unmarked car to a stop in front of a small house more or less like all the other houses in that block. It was single-story, white, cinder block, with a well-cropped lawn and an attached garage. A red-brick walkway led down to the sidewalk. Cowart could see a patio area stretching around the back, a black kettle grill on one side. A tall pine tree shaded half the house from the day’s heat, throwing a large shadow across the front. He did not know where they were or why they had stopped, so he turned away from the house and looked at the detective.

  “Your next interview,” Wilcox said. He had been quiet since they’d left the crime scene and now a tinge of harshness had crept into his voice. “If you’re up for it.”

  “Whose house is it?” Cowart asked uneasily.

  “Joanie Shriver’s.”

  Cowart took a deep breath. “That’s . . .”

  “That’s where she was heading. Never got there.” He glanced down at his watch. “Tanny told them we’d be here by eleven and we’re a bit late, so we’d better get a move on. Unless . . .”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless this is an interview you don’t want to do.”

  Cowart looked at the detective, up at the house, then back to the detective. “I get it,” he said. “You want to see how sympathetic I am to them, right? You already figured out I’m going to be real easy on Robert Earl Ferguson, so this is part of some test, right?”

  The detective turned away.

  “Right?”

  Wilcox spun in the seat and stared at him. “What you haven’t figured out yet, Mr. Cowart, is that son of a bitch killed that little girl. Now, you want to see what that really means, or not?”

  “I generally schedule my own interviews,” Cowart replied, more pompously than he wanted.

  “So, you want to go? Come back maybe when it’s more convenient?”

  He sensed that was what the detective wanted. Wilcox wanted immensely to have every reason in the world to hate him, and this would be a good one to start with.

  “No,” Cowart said, opening the car door. “Let’s talk to the people.”

  He slammed the car door behind him and walked quickly up the pathway, then rang the doorbell as Wilcox chased after him. For an instant he heard shuffling noises from behind the door, then it swung open. He found himself staring into the face of a middle-aged woman who had an unmistakable housewife’s look. She wore little makeup but had spent time fixing her light brown hair that morning. It haloed her face. She wore a simple tan housedress and sandals. Her eyes were bright blue and for a moment, Cowart saw the little girl’s chin, cheeks, and nose in the mother’s face, looking at him expectantly. He swallowed the vision and said, “Mrs. Shriver? I’m Matthew Cowart, from the Miami Journal. I believe Lieutenant Brown told you . . .”

  She nodded and interrupted him. “Yes, yes, please come in, Mr. Cowart. Please, call me Betty. Tanny said Detective Wilcox would be bringing you around this morning. You’re doing a story about Ferguson, we know. My husband’s here, please, we would like to talk with you.”

  Her voice had an easygoing pleasantness to it that failed to conceal her anxiety. She clipped off her words carefully, he thought, because she doesn’t want to lose them to emotion quite yet. He followed the woman into the house, thinking, But she will.

  The murdered girl’s mother led Cowart down a small hallway and into the living mom. He was aware that Wilcox was trailing behind, but he ignored him. A bulky, large-bellied, balding man rose from a reclining chair when he entered the room. The man struggled for a moment to push himself out of the seat, then stepped forward to shake Cowart’s hand. “I’m George Shriver,” he said. “I’m glad we had this opportunity.”

  Cowart nodded and quickly glanced around, trying to lock details to his memory. The room, like the exterior, was trim and modern. The furniture was simple, colorful prints were hung on the walls. It had a cozy haphazardness to it, as if each item in the room had been purchased independently from the others, solely because it was admired, not necessarily because it could match up with anything else. The overall impression was slightly disjointed but exceptionally comfortable. One wall was devoted to family photos, and Cowart’s eyes fell on them. The same photograph of Joanie he’d seen at school hung in the center of the wall, surrounded by other shots. He noted an older brother and sister, and the usual family portraits.

  George Shriver followed his eyes. “The two older kids, George Junior and Anne, are away at school. They’re both at the University of Florida. They probably would have wanted to be here,” he said.

  “Joanie was the baby,” said Betty Shriver. “She’d have been getting ready for high school.” The woman caught her breath suddenly, her lip quivering. Cowart saw her struggle and turn away from the photographs. Her husband reached out a huge, chunky hand and gently steered her over to the couch, where she sat down. She immediately rose, asking, “Mr. Cowart, please, where are my manners? Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Ice water would be nice,” Cowart replied, turning away from the photographs and standing next to an armchair. The woman disappeared for a moment. Cowart asked George Shriver an innocuous question, something to dispel the pall that had fallen over the room.

  “You’re a city councilman?”

  “Ex,” he replied. “Now I just spend my time down at the store. I own a couple of hardware store
s, one here in Pachoula, another down on the way to Pensacola. Keeps me busy. Especially right now, waiting on the spring.”

  He paused, then continued. “Ex-councilman. Used to be I was interested in all that, but I kinda fell out of it when Joanie was taken from us, and we spent so much time with the trial and all, and it just sort of slipped away, and I never got back into it again. That happened a lot. If’n we hadn’t had the others, George Junior and Anne, I suspect we would have just stopped. I don’t know what might have happened to us.”

  Mrs. Shriver returned and handed Cowart a glass of ice water. He saw that she had taken a moment to compose herself.

  “I’m sorry if this is difficult for you,” he said.

  “No. Rather speak our feelings than hide them,” replied George Shriver. He sat down on the couch next to his wife, throwing his arm around her. “You don’t never lose the pain,” he said. “It maybe gets a bit duller, you know, like it’s not so sharp so it’s pricking at you all the time. But little things bring it back. I’ll just be sitting in the chair, and I’ll hear some neighbor’s child’s voice, way outside, and for just an instant, I’ll think it’s her. And that hurts, Mr. Cowart. That’s real pain. Or maybe I’ll come down here in the morning to fix myself coffee, and I’ll sit here staring at those pictures, just like you did. And all I can think of is that it didn’t happen, no sir, that she’s gonna come bouncing out of her room, just like she always did, all morning sunshine and happiness and ready to jump right into the day, sir, because that’s the sort of child she was. Just all golden.”

  The big man’s eyes had filled with tears as he spoke, but his voice had remained steady.

  “I go to church a bit more than I used to; it’s a comfort. And the damnedest things, Mr. Cowart, will just make me hurt. I saw a special on television a year ago about the children starving in Ethiopia. Man, that’s all the way on the other side of the world and, hell, I ain’t ever been anywhere except North Florida, save for the army. But now, I been sending the relief organizations money every month. A hundred here, a hundred there. I couldn’t stand it, you know, thinking that some babies were gonna die just because they couldn’t eat. I hated it. I thought how much I loved my baby, and she was stolen from me. So, I guess I did it for her. I must be crazy. I’ll be in the store, working on the receipts, and it’ll start to get late, and I’ll remember some time that I stayed to work late and missed dinner with the kids and got home late so they were all asleep, especially my baby, and I’d go in and see her laying there. And I would hate that memory because I missed one of her laughs, or one of her smiles, and there were so few of them, they were precious, sir. Like little diamonds.”