Just Cause

by John Katzenbach

  Brown paused before adding, “Nobody now, except us three.”

  “And Wilcox?” Cowart asked.

  Brown took a deep breath. “He’s dead,” he replied flatly.

  “We don’t know that,” Shaeffer said. The idea seemed impossible to her. She knew it to be true yet couldn’t stand to hear it said.

  “Dead,” Brown continued, voice picking up momentum. “Somewhere close to here. And that’s the reason Ferguson’s running. That’s his first rule. Kill safe. Kill anonymously. Use distance. It’s such a damn easy formula.”

  He stared at the young detective. “He was dead as soon as you lost sight of him.”

  “You shouldn’t have left him,” Cowart said.

  She turned, bristling. “I didn’t leave him! He left me. I tried to stop him. Dammit, I don’t have to listen to this! I don’t even have to be here!”

  “Yes, you do,” Cowart said. “Don’t you get it, Detective? There’s a real bad guy out there. Because of accidents, bad judgment, mistakes, bad luck, whatever. And when you add it all up, he let him go . . .” Cowart pointed sharply at Tanny Brown, “. . . and I let him go . . .” He punched an index finger against his own chest, then turned it, like a pistol, toward her. “. . . And now, you’ve let him go, too. Just like that.”

  He took a deep breath. “In effect, there’s only one of us that actually caught up with him. Wilcox. And now . . .”

  “He’s dead,” Brown said again. He stood in the center of the room, clenching his hands into fists, then releasing them slowly. “And we’re the only people really looking for him.” He, too, punched a finger at her. “Now you owe, too.”

  She felt a sudden dizziness, as if the floor of the motel room were pitching beneath her like her stepfather’s fishing boat. But she knew what they said was true. They had created the problem. Now it was up to them to find a solution.

  Wilcox and some little girls, she told herself.

  These two have no idea, she thought. They don’t know what it’s like to feel yourself pinned down and attacked, to know that you might be about to die and can do nothing to stop it. She envisioned the last minutes the little girls must have experienced in a rush of horror that robbed her of her breath and rekindled her determination.

  “Got to be found, first, though,” she said. “Who’s got a suggestion?”

  “Florida,” Cowart said slowly. “I think he’s gone back to Florida. That’s what he knows. That will be where he thinks he’s safest. He has two worries, it seems to me. He’s worried about me and he’s worried about Detective Brown. I don’t think he has you connected in all this. Did he see you with Wilcox?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, maybe that’s an advantage.”

  Cowart turned to Brown. His head was filled with something Blair Sullivan had told him: Got to be a free man to be a good killer, Cowart. He knows that, the reporter realized. So he said it.

  “But you and I, well, that’s different. He needs to know he’s free of us. Then he can get on with what he’s been doing, without worrying and always looking over his back.”

  “How does he do that?”

  The reporter took a deep breath. “The other day. When I saw him. He threatened my daughter. He knows where she lives with her mother, in Tampa.”

  Tanny Brown started to say something, then stopped.

  “That’s why . . .”

  “Tell me about the threat,” the detective demanded.

  “He just said he knew where she lived. He didn’t say what he would do. Only that he knew who she was and that would prevent me from writing anything about him. Especially unproven allegations connecting him to other crimes.”

  “And will it?”

  “Well, what would you do?” the reporter replied angrily.

  “You think that’s where he’s gone now? To Tampa. To . . .”

  “Cut out my heart. Those are his words.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  Cowart shook his head. “No. I think he believes he has me wrapped up. That he doesn’t have to do anything to keep me quiet.”

  Tanny Brown stared hard at him. “I have daughters, too,” he said. “Did he threaten them?”

  Cowart felt a slight queasiness. “No. He never mentioned them.”

  “He knows where they live, too, Cowart. Everyone in Pachoula knows where I live.”

  “He never said anything.”

  “Did he know I was outside, when he was busy threatening you? Did he know I was there, close by?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t he mention them, Cowart? Wouldn’t the same threat work against me as well?”

  Cowart shook his head. “No. He knows you wouldn’t back off.”

  Brown nodded. “At least you got that right. So, Mister Reporter, how does he deal with me? If I’m his remaining problem, how does he get rid of me?”

  Cowart thought hard. Only one possibility came to mind, so he spoke it quickly. “He probably wants to do the same to you that he did to Wilcox. Lead you into a trap somewhere, and . . .”

  He paused. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s figured he should just run. Boston, Chicago, L.A., any city with a large urban inner city. He could disappear, and, if he’s got the patience, after a while start in doing what he wants, once again.”

  “You think he’s got that patience?” Shaeffer asked.

  Cowart shook his head. “No. I don’t know that he thinks he even needs to be patient. He’s won at every step. He’s arrogant and on a roll and he doesn’t think we can catch him. And even if we do, what can we do to him? He beat us before. Probably thinks he can do it again.”

  “Which means there’s only one place he can be going,” Tanny Brown said abruptly. He looked around at them. “Only one place. Back where it started.”

  “Pachoula,” Cowart said.

  “Pachoula,” the detective agreed. “Home for him. Home for me. Place he thinks is safe. Even if everybody there hates him, it’s still where he’s safe and comfortable. Good place to start things, or finish them. And that’s where I think he’s going.”

  Cowart nodded and gestured toward the telephone. “So, call. Get his grandmother’s house staked out. Get him picked up.”

  Brown hesitated, then walked to the telephone. He punched numbers on the dial rapidly, then waited while the line was connecting. After a moment, he said, “Dispatch? This is Lieutenant Brown. Connect me with the day-command duty officer.”

  He paused again before continuing. “Randy? It’s Tanny Brown. Look, something has come up. Something important. I don’t want to go into details now, but I want you to do something for me. I want you to assign a pair of squad cars to spend the day in front of the high school. And I want another car in front of my house. And tell whoever you send to tell my old man I’ll be back as soon as possible and he’ll get his explanation then, okay?”

  The detective paused, listening. “No. No. Just do what I ask, all right? I appreciate it. No, don’t worry about my old man. He can handle himself. It’s my daughters I’m worried about . . .” He paused, listening, then added, “No, nothing that specific. And I’ll take care of all the paperwork when I get back. Today, if possible. Tomorrow, for sure. What are they looking for? Anyone who doesn’t fit. Got that? Anyone.” He hung up the telephone.

  “You didn’t tell them about Ferguson,” Cowart said with surprise. “You didn’t tell them anything.”

  “I told them enough. He hasn’t got that much of a lead on us. If we hurry, we can catch up with him before he’s ready for us.”

  “But what if . . .”

  “No ifs, Cowart. The squad cars will keep him away until we get there. And then he’s mine.” He glared at them. “No one else’s. I finish this. Understand?”

 
They were quiet a moment, and then Cowart went to his bureau and found an airline schedule stuck in a corner of his small suitcase.

  “There’s a noon flight to Atlanta. Nothing down to Mobile until late afternoon. But we can fly to Birmingham and drive from there. Should get to Pachoula by day’s end.”

  Tanny Brown nodded. He glanced over at Shaeffer, who mumbled an approval.

  “Day’s end,” the policeman said quietly.

  26

  THE BRIAR PATCH

  They crossed the Alabama border into Escambia County, moving fast as the Gulf evening crowded them toward night. The southern sky had lost its eggshell-blue vibrancy, replaced by a dirty gray-brown threat of bad weather streaking the horizon. An unsettled hot wind gusted about them, sucking and pulling with occasional bursts at the car windows, stripping away the residual cold and damp they felt from the Northeast. They cut past dust-streaked farms and stands of tall pine trees, whose towering, erect bearing reminded Cowart of spectators rising in a stadium at the moment of tension. Their speed underwrote the doubts they all felt. They all felt an urgency, a need to rush ahead, uncertainty shadowing their path. The countryside hurtled past them; there hardly seemed enough space to breathe on the narrow roadway. Cowart grabbed at the armrest when they bore down on an ancient school bus, painted a gleaming snow white, bouncing and jiggling slowly down the one-lane road. Tanny Brown had to push hard on the brake to keep from slamming into the back end. Cowart looked up and saw, hand-lettered on the back of the bus over the emergency-exit door, in a flowing, joyously enthusiastic bright red script, the words: STILL TIME TO WELCOME YOUR SAVIOR!

  And, below that, in slightly smaller but equally florid writing: NEW REDEMPTION BAPTIST CHURCH, PACHOULA, FLA.

  And finally, on the bumper, an exhortation in large, bubbling letters: FOLLOW ME TO JESUS!

  Cowart rolled down his window and could just make out the thunderous voices of the church choir bursting beyond the heat, above the grinding and groaning of the bus engine. He strained his hearing but couldn’t make out the words of the hymn they were singing, though elusive strands of music poked at him.

  Tanny Brown jabbed the steering wheel of the rental car, punching the gas pedal simultaneously. With a quick thrust, they maneuvered past the bus. Cowart stared up and saw dozens of black people, swaying and clapping to both the rocky ride and the energy of the singing. The sound of their voices was swept away by speed and distance.

  They continued through the growing darkness. The weakening light seemed to blur the straight edges of the houses and barns, made the twisting road they traveled less distinct, almost infirm.

  “Jesus works overtime in this county,” Brown said. “Gathering in the souls.”

  Brown had driven silently, unable to shake a memory that had crashed unbidden into his thoughts. A wartime moment, horrible yet ordinary: He’d been in country seven months, and his platoon had been crossing an open area; it was near the end of the day, they were close to camp, they were hot, filthy, tired, and probably thinking more of what was waiting for them, which was food, rest, and another uncomfortable, breathless night, than paying attention, which made them immensely vulnerable. So, in retrospect, it shouldn’t have come as a great surprise when the air had been sliced by the single sound of a sniper’s weapon, and one of the men, the man walking the point, had dropped with a suddenness that Brown thought was as if some irritated god had reached down and tripped the unsuspecting man capriciously.

  The man had called out, high-pitched with fear and pain, Help me! Please.

  Tanny Brown hadn’t moved. He had known the sniper was waiting in concealment for someone to go to the wounded man. He had known what would happen if he went. So he had remained frozen, hugging the earth, thinking, I want to live, too. He had stayed that way until the platoon leader had called in an artillery strike on the line of trees where the sniper hid. Then, after the forest had been smashed and splintered with a dozen high-explosive rounds, he’d gone to the wounded man.

  He was a white boy from California and had been in the platoon only a week. Brown had hovered above him, staring at the man’s ravaged, hopeless chest, trying to remember his name.

  He had been his last wounded man. And he had died.

  A week later, Brown had rotated home, his tour of duty cut short as it was for many medics. Back to Florida State University, the criminal justice training program, and finally a spot on the force. He hadn’t been the first black to join the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, but it had been tacitly understood that he would be the first to amount to anything. He’d had much going for him: Local boy. Football star. War hero. State-college diploma. Old attitudes eroding like rocks turned to sand by the constant pounding of the surf.

  He felt a tinge of guilt. He realized he’d often heard the memory cries of wounded men, but they had always been the cries of men he’d saved. They were easy voices to recall, he thought. They remind you that you were doing something right in the midst of all that wrong. This was the first time he’d thought of that last man’s cry.

  Did Bruce Wilcox cry for help? he wondered. I left him, too.

  He realized that he would have to tell Wilcox’s family. Luckily, there was no wife, no steady girlfriend. He remembered a sister, married to a career naval officer stationed in San Diego. Wilcox’s mother was dead, he knew, and his father lived alone in a retirement home. There were dozens of old-age homes in Escambia County; it was a veritable growth industry. He recalled his few meetings with Wilcox’s father: a rigid, harsh old man. He hates the world already. This will simply add to it. Abrupt fury creased his thoughts: What do I say? That I lost him? That I put him on a stakeout with an inexperienced detective from Monroe County and he vanished? Presumed dead? Missing in action? It’s not like he was swallowed up by some jungle.

  But he realized it was.

  He flicked on the car’s headlights. They immediately caught the small, red pinprick eyes of an opossum, poised by the side of the road, seemingly intent on challenging the car’s wheels. He held the wheel steady, watching the animal, which, at the last moment, twitched and dove back into a ditch and safety.

  In that moment he wished that he, too, could dive for cover.

  No chance, he told himself.

  Not long after, he pulled the car into the parking lot of the Admiral Benbow Inn on the outskirts of Pachoula and deposited Cowart and Shaeffer on the sidewalk, where their faces were lit by a gleaming white sign bright enough to catch the attention of drivers heading up the interstate. “I’ll be back,” he said cryptically.

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Arrange backup. You don’t think we should go get him alone, do you?”

  Cowart thought about what Brown had said up in Newark. It had not occurred to him that they might seek assistance. “I guess not.”

  Shaeffer interrupted. “What time?”

  “Early. I’ll pick you up before dawn. Say, five-fifteen.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll go out to his grandmother’s place. I think that’s where he’ll be. Maybe we’ll catch him asleep. Get lucky.”

  “If not?” she asked. “Suppose he’s not there. Then what?”

  “Then we start looking harder. But I think that’s exactly where he’ll be.”

  She nodded. It seemed simple and impossible at the same time.

  “Where’re you going now?” Cowart asked again.

  “I told you. Arrange backup. Maybe file some reports. I definitely want to check on my family. I’ll see you here just before the sun comes up.”

  Then he put the car in gear and accelerated swiftly away, leaving the reporter and the young detective standing on the sidewalk like a pair of tourists adrift in a strange country. For a moment, he glanced in the rearview mirror, watching the two before they moved into the motel lobby. They seemed small, hesit
ant. He turned the car, and they dropped away from his sight. He felt an unraveling starting within him, as if something wound tight was beginning to work loose. He could feel bitterness welling inside him as well, taste it on his tongue. The night swept around him, and for the first time in days he felt quiet. He let the reporter and the detective fall from his thoughts, not completely, but just enough to allow his own anger freer rein. He drove hard, rapidly, hurrying but heading nowhere specific. He had absolutely no intention of filing any reports or arranging for any backup officers. He told himself, The accountancy of death can wait.

  Cowart and Shaeffer checked into the motel and headed into the restaurant to get something to eat. Neither felt particularly hungry but it was the proper hour, so it seemed the natural thing to do. They ordered from a waitress who seemed uncomfortable in a starched blue-and-white outfit perhaps a size too small for her that pulled tightly across her ample chest, and who seemed only mildly interested in taking their order. As they waited, Cowart looked across at Shaeffer and realized that he knew almost nothing about her. He realized as well that it had been a long time since he’d sat across from a young woman. The detective was actually attractive behind the razor-blade personality she projected. He thought, If this were Hollywood, we would have found some intense common emotion in everything that had happened and fall into each other’s arms. He wanted to smile. Instead, he thought, I’ll be satisfied if she simply converses with me. He wasn’t even sure she would do that.

  “Not much like the Keys, huh?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Did you grow up down there?”

  “Yes. More or less. Born in Chicago but went down there when I was young.”

  “What made you become a police officer?”

  “This an interview? You going to put this in a story?”