Blackbird (12 page)

ELEVEN

Zion Hope, lit from inside, looked like a Japanese lantern against the night woods of Elam Road as I pulled up to let Kat out. A dozen vehicles, most of them as old and beat up as mine, were clustered in the parking lot near the side door, a new passenger van sitting in their midst like a slice of wedding cake among corn muffins. I tried and failed to imagine what kind of meeting was going on inside and who might be there and how Kat fit into it all, watching as she slid out of the passenger seat and held the door open.

‘G’night, Biscuit.’ She blew me a kiss.

‘Goodnight.’

When she smiled at me, closed the door and disappeared into Zion Hope, I suddenly knew this was an ending of some kind, one whose shape and significance were hidden from me, and the knowing left the night emptier than I would have imagined possible, the darkness denser and more absolute.

Less than forty-eight hours later, the telephone voice of Father Beane, edged with fear as jagged as torn steel: ‘Have you seen Kat today?’

‘No, sir,’ I said, blood thumping in my ears as his mood
instantly invaded my veins like a nerve gas. ‘Isn’t she there with y’all?’

‘I don’t know where she is, Biscuit. No one’s seen her since yesterday.’

In my mind I saw Kat again, smiling, blowing me a kiss, but suddenly my mental image of Zion Hope behind her was no longer a Japanese lantern against the soft, starry sky – it was a demonic face leering at me from a darkness beyond darkness, blinding, hellish flames roaring behind the eyes and grinning mouth. I wanted to ask Father Beane what he was going to do, and what I could do to help, but my lips wouldn’t move and my tongue had turned to stone.

Later that night and into the next day, believing they were what they pretended to be and were trying to do what they said they were – and wanting desperately to help them find Kat – I talked to Jerry Casteel, the police chief, and Sheriff Morris Fellows at the police station in town, where the air was heavy with the smells of old smoke, gun oil, dirty feet and vomit. They asked me hundreds of questions, but as the hours went by these gradually condensed down to just a few coming over and over again, until it was obvious that they believed I was responsible for Kat being missing.

The sheriff said, ‘Did you have sex with her?’

I hung my head, my ears burning. ‘Yes, sir.’

They wanted to know how many times, where and when. Then they started asking questions that assumed none of that really happened, at least not the way I was telling it, that Kat had turned me down, that this had hurt my pride and made me angry. Maybe I forced her, even got rougher than I meant to. It was an accident. They could understand
that. Hell, any man would. They guaranteed me the prosecutor would make allowances –

As I was beginning to think about the electric chair in Huntsville, wondering how many volts it was going to take to kill me and whether it was actually true that electrocution is a quick and painless way to go, Dusty, listening from his own chair against the wall, said, ‘Hold it.’

The chief lifted a hand to silence him and started to say something else, but Dusty said, ‘I told you to hold it and I meant it, Jerry.’ He stood up. ‘You too, Mo. Biscuit, don’t you say another word.’

Dusty hired Lucas Fine, the richest lawyer in Rains County, a tall, thin, preacherly man with soft, blueveined hands and big white hair who never asked if I had hurt Kat or knew what had happened to her. Instead he talked about evidentiary rules, admissibility, arraignment, going to trial, the appeals process, the Supreme Court, until I finally understood that he believed as much as Jerry Casteel and Morris Fellows did that Kat was dead and I had killed her.

‘Just relax, son,’ he said. ‘This is a long way from over.’

‘But I didn’t do anything.’

‘That’s right.’

It was hard enough to be wrongly blamed for doing something terrible, but it was a hundred times worse to be blamed for doing it to somebody you loved, and Kat’s disappearance – along with what came afterward – wasn’t just hard or terrible, it was impossible, and it destroyed something inside me once and for all. I didn’t understand exactly what it was, but I never went to church again except for occasions like weddings and funerals, instead spending Sunday mornings with Dusty in the training paddocks or
out on one of the stock ponds trying to catch enough catfish for supper while Aunt Rachel took off alone in her Volvo for the services at First Methodist in town – not because I necessarily stopped believing in what people called a higher power, but because I didn’t trust higher powers any more. I didn’t trust any power any more. I lost the ability to take anything on faith, and when human life was at stake I was no longer willing to make allowances for negligence and wrongheadedness on anybody’s part, whether it was mine or God’s. Or a police chief’s.

And I realised for the first time that what was called criminal justice had nothing at all to do with justice, nothing to do with guilt or innocence, and most of all, nothing to do with the truth, but only with which story the lawyers and judges and juries liked best.

Meaning that my innocence didn’t matter; they had me dead to rights. My life was finished. I was going to be executed for something I hadn’t done. This new understanding uncovered a vein of stubbornness in me that I hadn’t known was there, and I made up my mind to kill myself, by stuffing my socks down my throat if I had to, rather than let that happen.

But when the investigators had satisfied themselves about where I was when Kat disappeared they lost interest in me. Lucas Fine shoved everything back in his briefcase and drove away in his red Jaguar. The investigators talked to the whole Bragg football team and all the VISTA volunteers, Reverend Hooks and the members of Zion Hope, and everybody who worked at the Skillet. They kept coming back to Coach Bub, Father Beane and Reverend Hooks, but none of it did any good. For a while they took a special interest in Claude McCool, our defensive end, because he
got stubborn and wouldn’t say where he’d been during some of the time they were asking about. But that didn’t help them either. The strict-looking men from Washington in dark suits and sunglasses, who said very little and went everywhere in pairs, had no better luck. Neither did the dowsers, reporters, photographers, the packs of slobbering bloodhounds or the two different psychic ladies with big straw hats and white gloves who bristled when they ran into each other.

As we watched Sheriff Fellows climb into the FBI helicopter warming up on the lawn beside the fire station, Daz, pale and obviously shaken up, said, ‘This here’s a sure enough cluster-fuck, ain’t it?’ The helicopter roared and lifted itself in a curling cloud of dust and grass clippings, tilted forward and thumped away over the trees.

Dozens of Rains County deputies and reserves, along with volunteers from as far as three counties away, fanned out across the countryside on foot, in cars and on motorcycles and horses, scouring the hills, woods and fields for any sign of Kat. A lot of them were riding horses from the Flying S, Dusty turning them over to the searchers only according to how the horse’s personality matched up with the rider’s skill, even though some of the animals were dressage stock or big-purse racers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The horse I rode was called Mephisto, and I had never liked him because every time he sensed a lapse in my concentration he bucked me off, and he’d never liked me, maybe because no matter how many times he did it I always got back on. He had unbelievable stamina and intelligence, but what I picked him for was his vigilance. He noticed everything – a broken branch, a dead mouse, even the tracks of another horse in an unexpected place.

Every morning Dusty and I, and any of the Flying S hands who could be spared for the day, or for an hour, rode out as soon as there was light enough to see by, straggling back sometimes hours after dark to put up the horses and search each other out to ask if anybody had seen anything. But of course even before they could answer, it was obvious from the set of their shoulders and the bleakness of their eyes that they hadn’t.

Little by little, I lost my sanity. Sometimes, far from the house, miles from any other rider, I could hear a strong, clear tenor voice softly singing ‘Cielito Lindo’ in the darkness. Other times I saw Kat, made not of flesh and blood but of pale light, floating in the air ahead of me, her eyes burning into mine.

Rachel got into the habit of meeting me at the back door when I came in at night to hand me a bread and meat sandwich or something rolled into a tortilla, which I usually took a couple of bites of before falling face-down on my bed, unwashed and without even kicking off my boots. I’d wake up in the same position an hour before dawn, fight off the stiffness and head for the door, Rachel there again with food and a bottle of water, probably knowing I’d drink the water but throw the food to the birds, her eyes filled with pain but steady and sober and registering no awareness of how I must have looked and smelled.

Once she found me trying unsuccessfully to gouge an extra hole in my belt with my pocket knife, my hands shaking and the knife slipping through my fingers. She brought a chocolate bar from the kitchen and made me eat all of it while she watched, waiting a couple of minutes to make sure I wasn’t going to throw it up, then cut three neat new holes in the leather to let me cinch the belt tighter.

‘There,’ she said, her voice breaking as she helped me get it on and buckled. ‘Now you’re set.’

Kat’s mother and father arrived from Shreveport International in a rental car and stayed with us at the farm for a week.

‘Katherine writes such nice things about you, James,’ Mrs Dreyfus said, dabbing at the corners of her tired eyes with a tissue.

In his business voice Mr Dreyfus said, ‘Maybe when we get all this straightened out you can come visit us in Massachusetts, Jim. I know Kat’ll want to show you around.’

‘Oh dear God,’ Mrs Dreyfus cried, pressing the tissue to her mouth.

Eventually deputies started dropping out of the search, riders had to get back to their jobs, Sheriff Fellows said things about the cost of operating the helicopter, and I could feel the world beginning to move on.

The sheriff’s last press conference was about how the investigation was ongoing and every lead was being pursued, how justice would not rest until the answers were found, how Rains County was still a good and safe place for families to live and raise their children. Everyone understood that he was pronouncing the search a failure. Kat was gone.

I believed it was over.

TWELVE

Looking up from the forensics report, I saw Danny Ridout, wearing stacked Wranglers, Lucchese python boots and a turquoise Navajo shirt, walk into the conference room, drop into the first empty chair and flip his pocket notebook open. Mouncey came in behind him wearing a white tracksuit with a gold accent stripe and silver Nikes, carrying a can of Sprite. She strolled past him to take the chair across the table from me, a half-sprung red wingback that had been knocking around the offices for as long as I could remember. She crossed her long legs and sipped from the can.

I held up a finger for time. According to the forensics update Wayne had just handed me, he hadn’t found any identifying marks, foreign materials or ‘adulterants’, except for fibres from the victim’s clothes and the rope, on the crossbeam, but the cut ends of the tree limbs showed two different tool signatures that could be seen in the close-up photographs – what he called macros. The biologist he borrowed from Domtar thought the crossbeam had most likely come from a tree that had grown in central or south central Arkansas, and the ring growth showed it had been cut down between eighteen and twenty-four months ago. I
was impressed that she could tell all that from looking at the wood but couldn’t think of any way it was likely to help us. Possible DNA samples and a partial cast of somebody’s molar were recovered from a piece of bubble gum and two gobs of snuff and saliva found at the scene. Also found within fifty metres of the body were hairs from mice, rats, cats, squirrels, raccoons, opossums, even armadillos – which most people thought had no hair – deer, at least six different dog breeds and freshly shed hairs from three different human heads other than Gold’s or any of the bystanders Wayne’s crew had taken samples from. Two of the types were medium brown and the third was dark blond, all of them testing positive for various combinations of methamphetamine, opiates and marijuana. No useable footprints were identified. Dozens of cotton, wool and synthetic fibres were recovered, all apparently from clothing, but the fibre types and dyes were too common to be of much use. The whitesuits had also found a pewter button and a musket ball from the mid-nineteenth century, and both halves of a broken chert arrowhead that was probably a lot older.

As I laid the pages down, Mouncey said, ‘Do he point out the murderer?’

‘My job’s the blueprint,’ Wayne said. ‘Framin’ up is on y’all.’

‘Perp’s white,’ offered Mouncey.

‘How come?’ Ridout asked, his shoulders and arms straining the fabric of his shirt as he reached across the table for the water pitcher.

‘Brother chewing on anything, be a Kool,’ she replied.

‘Nothing tucked between cheek and gum?’ said Wayne.

‘Nothing he gone spit out, honey.’

I said, ‘They’re about my size, in pretty good shape – at least one’s probably a rough carpenter, or was, and at least one’s a deer hunter. They could have hauled Dr Gold out there in a crew-cab or four-door pickup, but I’d bet on a van.’

The room went silent. Finally Ridout said, ‘Not questioning anybody’s investigative skills, least of all yours, boss, but how the shit do we know all that?’

I summarised what I’d learned on my second visit to the crime scene – except for the results of my meat thermometer experiment – ending with the damage to the back of the tree trunk. ‘The marks were from the bottom half of a climbing deer stand they used to reach the crosspiece – ’