Burial Ground (6 page)

Give me two miles of briars to walk through any day.

I picked up my morning paper, telling myself that gnashing my teeth accomplished nothing. If I looked through the news I’d find people with far worse trials to endure than a gauntlet of harpies. Not that Courtney was a harpy, exactly. Stripped of the power clothing, she might look pretty good. Stripped…

CONTRACTOR ACCUSED OF CHEATING GOVERNMENT.

I sighed as my eye picked out the headline. I already felt sorry for the poor bastard. Why didn’t headlines ever say
DRONES CHEAT GOVERNMENT
, and detail the endless meetings, coffee breaks, and training sessions that gobbled the taxpayers’ money? But no, it was always some poor devil trying to keep his company’s head above water.

Okay, so I’m biased.

Then my eye fell on a headline in the “People” section:
ANGOLA WARDEN BELIEVES IN REHABILITATION.

And there was a photo of a smiling Levi Goodeau. I skimmed the story, picking out the facts that Goodeau had a doctorate in sociology and was the first warden of the penitentiary ever to hold such a credential. He’d worked his way up, serving as a counselor and an assistant warden, while attending graduate school at night, and all along he’d retained his faith in humankind. I wondered how that was possible, but graduate school has a way of warping people. He’d held his post for only a few months and he’d made a number of substantial changes: increasing educational opportunities and hiring more counselors. I sympathized with the sentiments, but I hoped he wasn’t a fool; the warden’s job was no place for somebody with a weak stomach. Three thousand hardcore convicts could shake Mother Teresa’s faith in humanity.

I was folding the newspaper when David walked in.

“I finished the Allison report,” he said. “So I’ve got some time.”

“Time for what?” I asked.

He grinned in his little-boy way.

“Well, I thought maybe if I went back and talked to old Absalom, I might get a little more out of him. He seemed to be interested in the fact that we were connected by our first names. If he’s a Bible reader, I figure I can hold my own.”

It was my turn to smile: David was a Talmudic scholar and could hold his own in a room full of Jesuits. More importantly, though, he had a way of talking to people, and I’d seen him succeed in gaining rapport more than once where others, including me, had failed.

“Take the cell phone,” I said.

“Keep it,” he replied. “I’m just going up for a couple of hours.”

I shrugged. “Then call me tonight. If we have to put a team into the field, we’re going to have to call some folks in a hurry.”

I watched him leave, wishing I could go, too. But being away all morning had left me with a stack of paperwork and some letters to write. My progress, however, was desultory. I couldn’t stop thinking of T-Joe, dead at the wheel of a car that had left no skid marks. A dead man with more teeth than nature allows. Finally, I succumbed and called the forensics anthropology lab at the university. I was in luck: The phone was picked up by the lab head herself, an intense young woman named Chloe Messner. She pronounced on the skeletons that turned up in weed-grown lots and sorted out the victims of plant explosions. She loved the outré, so I didn’t waste time:

“Ever worked with the coroner of West Feliciana?”

“Once or twice. Why, Alan? You have something for me?”

“Sorry, not quite.”

“Oh.” The disappointment was clear in her tone.

“I was just curious about what kind of job they do up there.”

“Depends. I think they send most of their clients to Baton Rouge. Better facilities.”

It conjured the image of a hotel with a spa for the dead and hot and cold running formaldehyde, and I shuddered.

“So the pathologist here would find out if an accident wasn’t an accident.”

“Theoretically. But it isn’t always easy to tell. I saw a hit-and-run victim once, beautiful girl, from her picture; she’d been lying in a field for a month and the insects had done their work, so—”

“I get the idea,” I said, cutting her off before I gagged. “And he’d figure out if a body had too many teeth.”

“Come again?”

“If the victim had thirty-three teeth instead of your government-issue thirty-two.”

“Alan, do you know somebody like that?” The excitement was back in her voice and I knew she was visualizing a research publication.

“I don’t know. I just know of a case where the victim in a car accident had some teeth knocked out and when they scooped them up from the floor of the car he had an extra premolar, filling and all.”

“That’s impossible. There must’ve been somebody else in the car.”

“Who got their tooth knocked out and then ran away?”

“Stranger things have happened. I remember the case of a woman they found burned up in her bedroom and there was a wooden leg in the bathtub. They went back through the rubble a second time looking for another body. Turned out she was killed by her husband, who set the house on fire while she was with her one-legged lover. He was taking a shower and when the place went up he took off, hopping, I guess.”

“Must’ve been a hell of a case,” I muttered. “What I’m saying, Chloe, is what if the extra tooth didn’t belong to the victim?”

“What are you saying, there’s a tooth fairy?”

“All his premolars were in place. Even after he hit the steering wheel.”

“Of course they were. Your premolars are in the side of your mouth. They don’t get knocked out like a canine or incisor. It only takes a moderately strong frontal blow. But your premolars and molars …”

“Exactly. So I’m asking, what will they do with the extra tooth?”

“I hope they send it to me. You can tell a lot from a tooth. Different materials have been used for fillings over the years. And as far as tooth morphology goes, American Indians—”

“—have shovel-shaped incisors. I know. You’ll look at the tooth?”

“Sure. As soon as we finish with this body from the train wreck. The tank car exploded and—”

“Right. I’ll see if I can get them to send it along.”

“Great. Later, Alan.”

I hung up and then called Willie Dupont and told him to try to get the pathologist to send the odd tooth to Chloe. When I’d finished talking to him I sat back in my chair and stared idly through my open door and into the next room, where I saw David’s briefcase on the floor next to the sorting table. I wondered if he’d come back for it. Two hours later, when he hadn’t returned, I called his house to see if he wanted me to drop it by on my way home, but his wife told me he hadn’t come home. Maybe, I thought, he’d hit pay dirt with Absalom. At least I hoped so, because it would save us a lot of work. I closed the office and set the alarm, thinking of the empty house on Park Boulevard where I’d grown up and where I now lived.

Since returning to Baton Rouge I’d dated many women, and been serious about several. Some were taken by the old house with its antique furniture, but a few had told me how they’d change the decor. The latter I’d given short shrift, and as for the former, well, I’d managed to find something wrong with them, too. In a word, I was used to being alone, but sometimes—just sometimes—as when I spoke to David’s wife, Elizabeth, and sensed the happiness of their relationship, I felt hollow.

It had been ten years since the dig at Oxmul, in Mexico. Ten years since I’d been a rising young archaeologist at the University of New Mexico. Ten years since Felicia and I had worked at one of the most important Maya sites ever discovered. Ten years since things with Felicia had gone to hell.

There was only one thing to do in such circumstances: I went home, changed into my shorts, put Digger on a chain, and after a few nominal stretching exercises, set out with Digger by my side to make the four-mile run around the lakes.

As we thudded down the hill on the bicycle path, and alongside the golf course, other joggers passed us. Most were younger than I, a few older. Some gave me a nod, others gazed straight ahead with that transfixed stare of the True Runner. They were the kind who jogged in thunderstorms and in the midday heat of summer. Even now, they were oblivious to the sweat soaking their shirts and running down their limbs.

I would never be like them: I was well into my forties and my brown hair was thinning. I had long ago accepted that I would only be average in height, and it was a constant struggle to keep my weight in the acceptable range. I wore glasses, and the prescription had been getting stronger over the years. For me, jogging was a duty, something I did both to get my mind off things I didn’t want to think about, and to keep my weight under control. I got no joy from this mortification of the body, and had little regard for those fanatics who raced by in states of altered reality. It was, I told myself, a cult, and as a freethinker—

My stomach tightened as I saw a figure headed toward us, easily loping at about half the speed of sound.

A woman, long-legged, blond, in yellow shorts and a white jogging tank top with the number 12 on it. No glasses, no attaché case, but there was no doubt…

P. E. Courtney
.

I increased my pace without thinking, and as we closed she gave me a friendly wave. I nodded, painfully aware of my snaillike speed. I gritted my teeth until she was past and then allowed myself to slow down, gulping air. Digger, meanwhile, had taken to the stepped-up pace and was tugging me forward. I started to give his chain a jerk and then heard steps bearing down on me from behind.

“Hi,” a woman’s voice said. “Do you usually walk this time of day?”

Walk…

“Sometimes,” I mumbled, as she slowed to my own speed.

“That’s good,” she said. “A little more and you’ll be in shape.”

I started to reply, but she danced in a circle around me like a boxer before I could think of anything.

“Goodbye,” she said, and I heard her steps dying away.

Damn. She hadn’t broken a sweat.

An hour later I dragged myself out of the stifling humidity, shut the door, and collapsed into my easy chair. Digger headed for the kitchen to lap water from the pan I kept on the floor, and I went to the shower. Once I’d changed into shorts and a T-shirt, I went back to the living room and flipped on the TV. It was just after six, time for the local news. The silver-haired anchorman was just mentioning an escape from the state prison at Angola when Digger launched himself across the telephone table and, with both paws on my lap, proceeded to lick my face to remind me about his supper.

I heaved myself up, went into the kitchen, and opened him a can, then coaxed him out into the backyard with it. I got out some of the burned jambalaya, stuck it in the microwave, and settled down before the TV again with a glass of iced cappuccino.

By that time, the news was over and a boyish-looking weatherman was pointing to a map of the state and explaining that it would stay hot and dry for the next few days, with temperatures in the nineties. I wasn’t paying much attention to him, though, because I was still burned about running into the Courtney woman.

She’d thought I was
walking…

I ate, went to bed early, and dreamed of watching her sink up to her preppie armpits in the gumbo mud that formed the land surface for the southern part of our state. She kept calling for me to throw her a line and I kept replying that I was too decrepit to get the rope out that far.

It was an eminently satisfying dream.

F
IVE

I arrived at the office just before eight and the phone was already ringing. I yanked it up, mildly aggravated that whoever it was couldn’t wait for me to sit down.

“Yes?”

“Alan, this is Elizabeth. I’ve been trying to get you all night, but the phone company said your phone was out of order.”

I blanked for a second, then remembered Digger’s lurch at me across the telephone table. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d knocked it off the hook.

“I’m sorry. Look, what’s wrong? Is David okay?”

“That’s just it,” she explained. “He never came in.”

Something cold stole over me.

“You haven’t heard from him?”

“No. Oh, my God, I was hoping you were together.”

“Elizabeth, you should have come over.”

“I was baby-sitting for friends. They went to New Orleans and I said I’d stay over night. I called David at nine and when he didn’t answer, I called you. But I didn’t start to really worry until I woke up and couldn’t get either one of you. There must have been a wreck.”

“Maybe his car broke down,” I comforted. “But most of that road is four-lane. And it’s only thirty miles.”

“But what could have happened?”

I exhaled. No ready answer came to mind.

“Liz, all I can think is that he broke down and there wasn’t a phone. But, look, David and I’ve been in a lot of spots together. He can handle himself.”

“But I know he’d call.”

“There has to be some reason. I’m leaving right now to go up there.” I didn’t tell her I’d also check with the sheriff’s office and State Police.