Hunting Season (29 page)

Maintenance had done a thorough job of cleaning up the site. Anna found two pieces of red plastic, probably from the Crown Vic's taillights, and a piece of chrome from a shattered headlight. That she kept. It was a long shot but it might help to get a positive ID on the truck if they ever found it. Before day's end she would track down the guys who'd cleared the road and go through any other debris they'd swept up.

Rain and wind had cleaned away what maintenance had missed. The only evidence remaining that anything had occurred was the scarring on the stone blocks of the bridge rail. For a minute or more Anna stood in the cold, the air so heavy with moisture that droplets formed on her hair and eyelashes, with one hand on the slick surface of the rock, allowing the stone to remember for her. Memories rushed back: crying metal, ice water filling her boots, the sense of watching her own earthly death from a place removed. No revelations came. Either she was deeply hated by an individual, or she'd gotten close enough to something in the murder investigation that it made it worth that individual's while to take the risk of removing her.

Had anyone hated her sufficiently to go into the berzerker rage in an old Ford truck, Anna believed she would have sensed it, read it in his or her face at a previous encounter, therefore she must be on to something.

"Damn," she whispered and took her hand away from the stone. Had the would-be murderer known how totally in the dark she was, he could have saved himself the time and the taxpayers a car.

When she reached Barnette's Funeral Home, Ray's black Cadillac was parked out front. There were no other customers. Funeral homes weren't big shopping draws, even this close to Christmas.

Anna let herself into the ornate foyer. The place was still and cold as befit the nature of the business. Raymond was not in the chapel or showroom. Following the circuitous route he'd led her and Clintus on the first time they'd visited, she made her way back to his office. That, too, was empty. Opportunity presenting itself, Anna looked through the papers on his desk. Bills for casket fittings, a funeral scheduled for Saturday, catalogues of awnings, black armbands and florists were collected into neat piles. Nothing indicated he was other than what he said he was: a mildly grieving younger brother. Because he stood to inherit a valuable piece of property and because he was a genuinely creepy individual, Anna rather liked him as a suspect in the murder of his brother. Clintus did too, though, given they were rivals for the coveted position of Adams County Sheriff, he'd never been so crass as to say it out loud. He had, however, discreetly checked to see if Raymond had an alibi for the night Doyce was killed. He had: a meeting with seven men and two women at a vestry dinner. According to Clintus Jones, the dinner meeting had gone from seven-thirty to past midnight, effectively letting Raymond off the hook. one of the windowless walls of the undertaker's office held a collection of old photographs. During her first visit, Anna'd been so taken with the commercial macabre of tiny coffins and ads for embalming fluids that she'd not noticed it. There were seven pictures displayed with pride, if being separated from the necessary minutia of the undertaker's trade was any indication. The oldest had the sepia tones of daguerreotypes or tintypes.

Anna loved old photographs, and having come to see Barnette more or less to escape the company of Mr. Thigpen, she was in no rush to find him. The collection chronicled the history of Barnette's Funeral Home over at least a hundred and fifty years. The earliest photo was of greatest interest. Most pictures she'd seen that pre-dated the Civil War were formal portraits of unsmiling people dressed in their best and posed in front of painted backdrops. This was unrehearsed, as if the photographer experimented with a more modern concept of capturing real life on celluloid. Two men stood in a carpenter's workshop. One was black, the other white. They were shoulder to shoulder, both in overalls, the black man's torn out at the knees. Behind them was an exquisite armoire. Three tables and a bentwood rocking chair, not yet completed, were scattered around them. Neither man was smiling, intimidated probably by the momentous event of having their picture taken, but by the way they stood—close, casual, comfortable—Anna guessed they were friends, that they'd worked together long and well.

She took the photograph from the wall and looked at the back. "Papa Doyce and Unk Restin 1861 Natchez" was written in a crabbed and fading hand.

She replaced the picture with care and studied the others. The closer they came to the present, the less interesting they became. The last, in glossy color, of a slightly younger Raymond Barnette, leaning on a younger version of his black Cadillac and grinning at the camera, she gave barely a glance. on a waist-high filing cabinet that ran beneath the photographs was a stack of color posters: Barnette for Sheriff. Including Randy Thigpen, there were at least three hats in the ring. Anna knew Barnette had high hopes. Some of them were undoubtedly pinned on the fact that he was white and Clintus Jones was black.

Except for a handful of hard-core, old-style racists, Anna doubted it would do him much good. Of the fifty or sixty percent of Adams County who were not African-American, Barnette's association with a brother, not only murdered, but branded a sexual deviant by the story leaked to the papers, would rob him of their vote. Once that story had come out, Ray Barnette's campaign was dead in the water, though he'd chosen to stay in the race.

Thigpen might be another matter. Anna was the first to admit he had a plethora of faults, but racism was not one of them. The African-American community would know that. In order to survive and prosper, most had developed good intuitions along those lines. Another factor might win Randy a few votes: older blacks sometimes preferred "the Boss" to be a white man. There was a sense of security in the familiar that helped shield them from a younger generation of African-Americans whom they feared and could not understand. Randy's career as a park ranger would also lend him an unearned reputation for having a history in law enforcement. That could turn the election in his favor.

It crossed Anna's mind to give Clintus a helping hand by lousing up Randy's plan. Since she'd more or less given her word that she'd help, she abandoned the idea as soon as it came to mind.

Snooping having availed her nothing, she resumed her search for the funeral parlor's proprietor. Clichés of the dead dogged her as she wandered down the hall past a bloodlessly non-denominational chapel: silent as the grave, cold as a tomb, dead still. The next door opened into the showroom. Ornate caskets lined with tufted crepe and polished to a satin finish, their hinged Dutch-door lids half open as if inviting one inside, lay in state on dark wooden tables. The air smelled faintly of varnish.

Anna had never bothered to write a will. With the exception of a couple of good Navajo rugs, she had nothing of value to leave anyone. Looking into these empty houses of the dead, she promised herself she'd write one if for no other reason than to demand her remains be cremated and let free to blow on the prevailing winds.

Further back in the mazelike bowels of Barnette's establishment she came to a door that, unlike the others, had no pretense of somber elegance but was of metal, scratched and dented by good hard use.

Pushing it open, she stepped into the only part of the building that felt alive: a carpentry shop. The air was warmed and dried by an old woodstove. Classical music full of strings gentled her nerves. The smell of newly cut wood and coffee reminded her of life and industry.

Raymond Barnette stood at a lathe in the middle of the far wall. His back was to her. He whistled tunelessly, relaxed in the mistaken assumption that he was alone. Anna had been well trained in shop etiquette. One never startled a man working with machinery. Careful to make no sound, she studied Barnette while he completed his task: rounding off the edges of an oddly shaped piece of hardwood.

He wore faded Levi's, an old sweatshirt and boating moccasins stomped into slipperlike shapelessness. It was the first time Anna had seen him that he wasn't dressed in his meet-the-public clothes. He looked smaller, nicer, more approachable.

Having finished his task, he switched the lathe off. Anna cleared her throat to announce herself in the least alarming manner.

"Ranger Pigeon," he said, recognizing her, then spoiled the kinder gentler thoughts she'd been having of him by smiling with all his big white teeth.

The better to eat you with, my dear.
The words of the Big Bad Wolf came unbidden to Anna's mind and she knew why she'd come to see him. She wanted to know whether he owned an old Ford truck with a cowcatcher welded to the front bumper. Perhaps he hadn't killed his brother, but there was something about the man with his toothy ways and his closeness with the dead that led her to believe he might be willing to kill as long as he didn't have to actually lay hands on a live body in the process.

To his credit, he didn't seem either surprised or disappointed to see her alive, but she put little credence in that. During their brief acquaintance, she'd seen him don then doff half a dozen emotions in minutes without blinking an eye at his own duplicity. If he had a police scanner, he could have heard her call clear of the scene of the wreck the previous night and had time to prepare his face for when they should meet again.

"What brings you here?" he asked as he slipped the piece of wood he'd been working on out of sight behind a canvas-draped sawhorse. Till he did that, Anna'd been singularly uninterested in his woodworking project. Now she wanted to see it. "Good news, I hope," he added.

The words jarred. When one's only sibling was ignobly and irretrievably dead, what good news could one possibly expect? "We've no new leads as to who might have killed Doyce, if that's what you mean."

"Too bad." He didn't sound particularly aggrieved. Niceties concluded, he looked at her expectantly.

Anna told the first easy lie that came to mind. "I know in your capacity as a concerned family member and possibly the next sheriff of Adams County you've been doing a little investigating of your own. I was down to meet with Clintus and thought I'd drop by, see if you've come up with anything we might have overlooked."

The mixture of girlish—if aging—respect and a plea for assistance worked its customary magic. As the words were soaked up, Ray's lugubrious features rearranged themselves into avuncular condescension.

"Coffee?" he offered. "It's cold enough to freeze a grave digger's hind pockets today." He grinned at his topical humor, and Anna dutifully grinned back. She was afraid they'd retire to his claustrophobic little office for the proposed coffee klatch, but he had a pot on a hotplate by the lathe.

"Hope you take it black," he said.

"Black is good." Anna couldn't stomach the stuff without a healthy dollop of heavy whipping cream, but she wasn't here to drink; this symbolic breaking of bread might help her find out what he knew. Coffee attended to, Ray slung one buttock onto a table and Anna perched on a sawhorse.

"Like you said, I've done a bit of nosing around on my own," Barnette said importantly. Anna could almost see his chest swelling under the imagined sheriff's badge. He rambled on for a while. Listening expression in place, wide eyes, furrowed brow, chin tilted down, Anna let him. He'd done little and learned less, but after ten minutes or so he'd softened himself up with love of his own voice sufficiently that she could ask the questions she'd come to ask.

"Do you know of anybody who owns an old Ford pickup truck? Burgundy or dark red probably, with a heavy iron grill custom-welded to the front?"

Barnette laughed. His laughter sounded hollow but it always did; the sound of a man aping his fellows but never getting the joke. No change came into his face that Anna could detect, no infinitesimal twitch of surprise, guilt or recognition, not even the faint glimmer of smugness that occasionally gave away smart criminals who took pride in their work.

"Old trucks with heavy grills are not exactly rare as hens' teeth in these parts," he replied. "Oh, you see those SUVs everywhere, but they're just for show. Mostly moms hauling kids and guys with desk jobs pretending they're big game hunters come the weekend. Anybody around here really wants to haul something's got himself an old truck."

"Anybody special sell used trucks around Natchez?" Anna asked.

"Sells? Sure. Everybody. They sell them, trade them for work, a used deep freeze, a load of lumber. But pink slips and taxes? With a truck that old I'd say not. After a while they get passed on like old clothes." Barnette bared his ominous teeth once again, happy to have given Anna information that showed she didn't know a whole hell of a lot. Other than that, it was totally useless.

"You're probably right. Keep you ears open and give me a call if you hear anything," Anna said. No harm in keeping up the fiction that they were working together. She eased her rump off the sawhorse. She'd learned what she'd come for. Unless her instincts deceived her, which wasn't out of the realm of possibility, Barnette had nothing to do with the assault truck. "Thanks for the coffee." on the way to the door she passed the lathe and remembered the undertaker's surreptitious stowing of the wood he'd been working. She stopped and turned. "This is a nice shop," she said. "You work in wood?"

"Not as much as I'd like to. Business is too good." Anna waited for the "people are just dying to trade with me" joke, but mercifully it never came.

"What're you working on now? That was—what?—oak you were finishing?"

"Just keeping my hand in. My great-great-granddaddy Doyce started out as a cabinetmaker. Had pieces in some of the finest homes in Natchez."