Absolute Rage (42 page)

After Floyd was driven off, Karp hung around to watch the search. Troopers carried out boxes of papers and one locked four-drawer filing cabinet.

“Find any guns?” he asked a technician.

“Yes, sir. Rifles, shotguns, a couple of semiautomatics.”

“Not a .38?”

“Not yet. We're still looking, though.”

Karp nodded and the man went out of the house. After a moment Karp followed him. Puffy clouds had appeared, bringing a gentle mountain breeze. It had turned cooler, too, nice weather for strolling around the grounds. The sun was behind the mountains, but the day still hung on in the long twilight of high summer, still plenty light enough to find things. Karp strolled, observing men probing flower beds, going over the lawn with metal detectors. The man he had spoken to and another man were in the center of the backyard, inspecting a birdbath made from some black, glossy stone. Karp wandered over and inspected it, too.

“That's a birdbath,” said Karp.

Karp's pal smiled. “Yes, sir. It's a birdbath someone moved not too long ago. Lookee here.” He knelt and indicated a tiny width of naked earth forming a crescent around the base.

The man addressed his colleague. “Bob, let's get the digital over here.”

“Wise move,” said Karp. “There might be something under it. Unless an extremely large robin used it.”

“I'd almost rather believe that than that the man buried a murder weapon in his own backyard.”

“Oh, about now I'd believe nearly anything,” said Karp.

The other man came back with a fancy Sony digital camera and began to click it. Karp helped the technician lift the bath proper off its pedestal. When the base column was rolled away, they saw a round patch of naked earth. The technician probed it with a trowel.

“Was that a clink?” said Karp.

The photographer snapped away as the trowel uncovered a revolver wrapped in a Bi-Lo clear plastic bag.

“You think that's it?” asked the technician.

“Would you bet against it?”

The man laughed. “Not me.”

“Me neither,” said Karp. “How long will it take you to generate prints of these pictures?”

“Couple of minutes. We got a laptop and an ink-jet in the van.”

“Everything's up-to-date in West Virginia,” said Karp. “I'm impressed.”

The man gave him a grin and went off. The other technician lifted the weapon. “Looks like a Smith .38, three-inch barrel.”

“Any chance of prints?” Karp asked.

“Well, sir, we'll check, but I kind of doubt it. This puppy's been in the water. It's got rust on it, look here. Probably down in the mud, too. You can see it stuck to the cylinder.”

Karp could. It was greenish and it stank of chemistry.

*  *  *

Karp drove back to town with Hendricks, followed by their motorcade. Karp was silent, so silent that Captain Hendricks broke a life-long habit and opened a conversation.

“Something wrong? I thought it went pretty good.”

“Oh, no, it went great. I'm thinking about that pistol.”

“It's on its way to Charleston with results asap.”

“Right. I'm assuming that we'll find it's the gun that killed Lizzie. If it is . . . it doesn't make any sense. According to Bo Cade, his cousin Wayne used it on Lizzie. According to your technician, someone tossed it into the water. If both of those things are true, how in hell did it migrate to George Floyd's birdbath?”

“Floyd took it from Wayne on the night of the murder?”

“Unlikely in the first place, but suppose he did. Then he throws it into some lake and then thinks, hey, the bottom of a river isn't that good of a hiding place, I think I'll . . .
duh!
 . . . dredge it up and bury it on my property, and I'll stick a birdbath on it, because the cops never think to look under birdbaths.”

“Criminals do stupid things,” said Hendricks.

“Yeah, they do. And to tell you the truth, the first thing I thought when we found it was something like that. This whole murder has been amateur hour anyway, and I thought, it's the impunity. They never thought there'd be a serious investigation, so they were sloppy. George probably had it in his bedside drawer, and then when we picked up the Cade boys, he said uh-oh and shoved it under the birdbath. I'd still believe that, if it wasn't for the mud. That gun was at the bottom for a while, in slimy, polluted mud. What I'd guess is that the boys threw it into a local body of water sometime after the murder, and someone saw them do it and picked it up and sometime later buried it where we found it. Someone was trying to implicate Floyd.”

“But . . . Floyd
is
implicated,” Hendricks protested. “By Cade. So . . .”

“Yeah, so why go through the trouble of framing a guilty man?”

“Unless Floyd did it himself, to mess up any case against him.”

“Yeah, that crossed my mind, too, but if you don't mind me saying so, that's a little too deep of a game for Robbens County. In any case, it tends to cloud the value of our presumed murder weapon. It's a complexity, and I like it simple. According to Bo Cade, Floyd never had the pistol anyway. The whole thing ranks way up there among stories I would prefer not to tell a jury.”

*  *  *

Upon arrival in town, Karp went immediately to see Stan Hawes. “How'd you do?” Hawes asked.

“Found the murder weapon. It was under a birdbath.”

“A black birdbath? Shiny?” Karp nodded; Hawes snorted. “That's kind of ironic.”

“Why? This is a famous birdbath?”

“Oh, they had a testimonial for George a couple of years ago, fifteen years of distinguished service to the union. It's carved out of slate from Majestic Number One.”

“That's interesting.” Karp told him about the mud and the rust. “It adds to the theory that some third party was trying to make a point. How'd you make out with Earl?”

“Oh, Earl rolled right over when I confronted him with Bo's statement. He got all red up about it. According to him, it was Bo that shotgunned the Heeneys. He was just along for the ride. Confirms that Wayne did the little girl, though, and that Floyd was there. Also confirms the payoff, twenty-five hundred cash to each. He spent his fixing up that truck. Back to the gun: This is not good for the good guys, is it?”

“No, not necessarily. Let's wait for what the lab has to say before we start worrying too much, though. Have you been in to see Floyd?”

A hesitation here, a hint of embarrassment. “No, I was . . . I mean I thought we could go in and see him together.”

“Sure, let's talk for a minute about how we're going to play him. I think double-teaming is the way to go with George. And let me order some muscle from Wade. I don't much trust the jailhouse guys.”

*  *  *

Floyd had taken off his jacket and tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white-on-white shirt. His forearms were massive and flecked with brownish hair. He rested them on the coffee-room table, their muscles flexing as he clenched his fists. Behind him, flexing even more massive forearms, stood Curtis Vogelsang, the largest state trooper in southwestern West Virginia. A much smaller jailhouse deputy, Peagram by name, sat on a chair in a corner.

“Here's what we got, George,” said Karp breezily as he sat down. “We have two confessions to the murders of the Heeney family, from Earl and Bo Cade. They say you organized the whole thing. They say you were there in the house supervising the proceedings.”

“I was at a meeting. Twenty guys will vouch for me.”

“All on your payroll, I have no doubt. We'll see how much they vouch when we explain the perjury statutes to them. Also we have this.” Karp passed across a sheaf of ink-jet printouts—the photographic record of the finding of the .38 under the birdbath. “That's a .38 there, George. If it proves to be the murder weapon, you're in big trouble.”

To Karp's dismay, Floyd barely glanced at the photographs. He grinned and said, “That's horseshit. Someone planted it. Maybe you, or your little dickhead friend there.”

“No, you know it wasn't anything like that,” said Karp dismissively. He stared for almost a minute at Floyd silently, as if examining a specimen. He had found it a useful technique before this. Then he said, “It
is
interesting though. Although we know you're an asshole, I can't quite believe you're
that
big an asshole, because I couldn't help noticing that you walked in here with your shoes on the right feet, and also neatly tied with bows. We know you're an asshole because only an asshole would have planned a murder with a bunch of half-wit hillbillies for triggermen. And of course they screwed it up, and of course we grabbed them, and of course they ratted you out instantly. But you were smart, in just the way that assholes think they're smart. You told them to throw away the gun because you saw on the TV somewhere that we could match bullets to guns. You didn't take the gun and throw it away yourself. You're not capable of that much intelligence, you pathetic sap! No, you
told
your witless accomplice to throw it away. But this moron actually had more sense than you. This moron planted the gun on you, so that if anyone ever asked any questions, they could say, ‘Oh, George did it. George shot a sleeping little girl.' And you're going to go away for it, for the rest of your miserable life. You know, George, they don't like child killers in prisons. You'll be at the bottom of the pecking order in the joint, instead of at the top like you are here. When you go up, you better bring a large jar of Vaseline and a frilly negligee—”

George Floyd actually shouted
arrgh
like they do in comic books and came out of his chair at Karp, knocking the table aside. They grappled. His clawing hands came within millimeters of Karp's throat before Trooper Vogel-sang whipped a mighty arm around Floyd's neck and strangled him back into his chair. Karp cocked a fist and went for Floyd, but Hawes got in his way and pushed him back. “What are you, crazy?” Hawes shouted. “Don't ever talk to a prisoner that way in my courthouse again! Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I'm in charge of this investigation,” said Karp in as authoritative a tone as he could manage.

“The hell you are! This is my courthouse, goddamnit, and right now you're not welcome in it. Get out!”

Karp did a glare and then spun on his heel and walked out, slamming the door behind him. Outside in the narrow corridor he straightened his clothes and took a drink from the water fountain. The guard on duty looked at him curiously as he signed out of the jail.

“Having some trouble?” the deputy asked.

Karp replied, “Just torturing the prisoners, Deputy Wyatt,” and walked up the stairs.

He thought it had gone fairly well. Because he had a genuine sympathy for evildoers—he could not have stayed married to his wife had he not—Karp was extremely, famously effective as the good cop and hardly ever got the chance to be the bad one, as he had just now. He did not think he would ever get to like it, although he knew some perfectly decent people who doted on the role.

It was dark when he left the courthouse and walked the few streets to the Burroughs Building. As he had expected, the lights were burning still. Hendricks and his team had taken over the largest room in the place. At desks and at makeshift trestle tables, several detectives were methodically ploughing through George Floyd's papers.

“Did you find the diary, yet?” Karp asked Hendricks.

“What diary is that?”

“The one with the entry ‘June 26, pick up frozen yogurt, kill Heeney family.' ”

“Oh,
that
diary. No, not just yet. Floyd seems to be a cagey fellow. Most of what we looked at so far is copies of routine union business and personal stuff. How did you make out with the man?”

“I did my crude New York monster impression. Stan is soothing him as we speak. Somehow, I doubt we'll get much. We don't
have
much except the confessions.”

“And the pistol.”

“Could've been planted.
Was
planted, more likely, and, boy, would I have loved to have found it all oiled and fingerprinted under his Simmons. But anyway, whether or not Floyd was at the scene, he's definitely the guy who set the whole thing up. He
paid
for the whole thing. You serve that subpoena for the bank stuff yet?”

“Right after we got it, Floyd's personal account. Mel Harkness is going over them now. It might take a while.”

“As long as it takes. We're looking for seventy-five hundred dollars, if the Cade boys aren't just blowing smoke. Seven point five K cash.”

“Follow the money?”

“That's what they say. The weak point of every criminal enterprise. It'll probably be in the union accounts, though. We need those, too.”

Karp went to the room he was using as an office and called Marlene at Four Oaks. Not in. He sat back in his chair, a cheap old-fashioned job, not nearly as comfortable as the big judge's swivel he used in New York. He swiveled. It squeaked. He tried to make it play a tune while he tapped out “The Yellow Rose of Texas” on his teeth with a pencil. The phone rang.

“Butch? Stan.”

“A full confession. Remorse. Tears. You stroked his head and said, ‘There, there.' ”

Hawes laughed. “Not quite. I had to take some abuse, but I calmed him down. He thinks I'm still one of the boys.”

“Yeah, that's why you were the good guy. What's his story?”

“Outraged citizen. He allows as how it might have been suggested around the Cades that Heeney was trouble and that no one would cry their eyes out if he got hit by a truck. But planning his murder? Heaven forbid! It was like that old movie with what's his name, Richard Burton?”

“Becket,”
said Karp. “ ‘Who will rid me of this troublous priest?' He mentioned that?”