Natchez Burning

by Greg Iles

  “Baby?” Sherry said softly from behind him.

  Henry started at the sound of her voice, but it was too late to hide the picture. Sherry already knew about it, anyway. He jerked when she laid her hand on his shoulder. A working nurse, Sherry had an amazingly gentle touch, but tonight Henry was as jumpy as he’d ever been in his life.

  “Did you show Penn Cage that picture?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I got it months ago, and nothing’s happened since.”

  “Nothing quite as bad, you mean.”

  He turned in his chair and squeezed her hand. “Look, Mama won’t have to be here more than a couple of days, if that.”

  “Oh, I’m fine with her,” Sherry said with sincerity. “She’s your mother, and she’s welcome. I only hope she doesn’t try to make it as hard on Jamie as she does on me.”

  Jamie was Sherry’s fifteen-year-old son.

  “She likes Jamie,” Henry assured her, hoping he was right.

  “Mmm.” Sherry poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the table, her gaze as penetrating as any he’d ever faced. “If this situation is so dangerous, why haven’t you called the sheriff’s department?”

  “Because I’m not sure we can trust them.”

  Fresh concern furrowed her brow. “What about the FBI, then?”

  “I am going to call them tonight. But I don’t expect they’ll send anyone to protect us.”

  “They might, if you told them everything you know.”

  Henry stared at her, then slowly shook his head. “I can’t do that, babe.”

  “Why not? Because you want an exclusive story?”

  “No. Because they never tell me a damn thing, yet they expect me to give them everything I’ve spent my life uncovering. I’m doing their jobs for them, and—by God, it’s just not right.”

  Sherry stared into her coffee cup for a while, then laid a hand on his forearm and squeezed it softly. “What if you get hurt because of that stubbornness of yours? That’s not right, either. I love you, and I need you.”

  Henry acknowledged her concern with a nod, but he knew he wouldn’t change his mind. “That’s a risk I’ve taken from the beginning. It’s just something I’ve got to do.”

  “What if Jamie gets hurt, Henry? What then? These men you write about have used bombs. They’ve shot blindly into houses. I remember that stuff from when I was a little girl.”

  They’ve done a lot worse than that, he thought. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, Sher. But even if I gave everything to the FBI, they wouldn’t send us a protective detail tonight. That’s not how they work.”

  “So it’s you against the world?”

  “No. I have Penn Cage helping me now.”

  She made a sour face. “Oh, Penn Cage. What can he do?”

  “Penn knows a lot of people. When he tried the Del Payton case, he fought the director of the FBI, and he won.”

  Sherry lowered her voice to a whisper. “Then why does he send one old colored man to guard us when people are dying left and right? He’s rich—he can afford to get you a real bodyguard. I’m sorry, Henry, but how do you know he’s not trying to steal your story for that Caitlin Masters he lives with?”

  Henry shook his head resentfully. “He’s not doing that. Penn’s just trying to help his father.”

  “Who may have murdered one of his own patients, according to the reports I heard at the hospital. His own nurse!”

  “You know better than that. You’re talking about Tom Cage, for God’s sake.”

  Sherry laid a hand over one of his. “All I know is, they’re from the high side of the river. They’ve got money. They’re different from us, and I don’t think you can afford to—”

  “I get the message,” Henry snapped, pulling his hand from beneath hers. “But I believe they’re honorable men, as honorable as any I’ve ever known, and I trust them.”

  She shrugged to show how little appreciated she felt. “Well, I hope you’re right. That’s all I can say.”

  “Time will tell. I need to get back to work. I’ve got some calls to make.”

  Sherry huffed and went back to check on his mother.

  Henry slid the original photo of the four men in the stern of the fishing boat out of the envelope. He’d studied this image for countless hours, and he’d gleaned a lot from it. What most struck him was how profoundly Brody Royal dominated the group. Dr. Cage and Claude Devereux were highly intelligent men, even brilliant, while Presley possessed animal cleverness. Yet Royal’s eyes held an awareness of the other men, and of the camera, that the others’ eyes did not. And while Ray Presley was feared by all who knew him (and was known to be a killer), it was Royal who exuded the aura of a predator. The hawklike face with its gray eyes and proud beak of a nose made a statement, but there was more to his charisma than this. An invisible field seemed to surround the older man, creating a buffer zone that the others would not enter. This deference might have been due to Royal’s wealth, of course, but on balance Henry didn’t assign much weight to that. It was more that in any group of men, a natural hierarchy always established itself, and in this one—despite the presence of some very strong personalities—Brody Royal sat atop the ziggurat.

  Henry slid the photo aside and rubbed his forehead. He’d revealed far more to Penn tonight than he’d originally intended, but he hadn’t told him everything. The rifle scope photo was one omission. Another was the story of Brody Royal’s daughter, Katy, the girl who’d triggered the deaths of Pooky Wilson and Albert Norris, by inviting Pooky to cross a line that meant death to him but not to her. Not to imply that the girl didn’t suffer, Henry thought. Because she had—terribly. After Pooky vanished, Katy Royal had gone a little crazy, by all reports, so crazy that her father had forcibly committed her to a private sanitarium in Texas. The Borgen Institute no longer existed, but after dozens of phone calls, Henry had managed to track down a nurse who’d worked there during the sixties and seventies.

  He soon learned that electroshock therapy had been a staple of treatment for Dr. Wilhelm Borgen, who’d founded the hospital. Five minutes’ research told Henry that “electroshock therapy” could mean a lot of different things, so he’d called the nurse back with specific questions. All her answers were discouraging. By the 1960s ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy, had begun to move away from the bilateral sine-wave method that caused so many terrible side effects, but when Katy Royal resided at the Borgen Institute, they had yet to embrace any of those advances. And while informed consent was today a prerequisite of ECT, at the Borgen Institute prior to 1971, patients were routinely administered electroshock therapy against their will. The side effects of such treatment ran the gamut from broken bones to long-term cognitive degradation and even amnesia.

  Four days ago, Henry had seen the results firsthand. After years of fruitless attempts to get past Katy’s husband and interview her about Pooky Wilson, Henry had done something he almost never did: scheduled an interview under false pretenses. Under the pretext of doing a human interest story on breeding bichons frises (Katy’s main hobby), Henry had visited Mrs. Regan at home while her husband was at work. After making her comfortable with some puffball questions, he’d segued into her childhood in Ferriday. At first Katy spoke glowingly of those years, as most adults tended to do of rural childhoods. But when Henry brought up Albert Norris, a glaze had come over the woman’s face. When he pushed on and mentioned the name Pooky Wilson, Katy denied any knowledge about the boy. At first Henry had been sure she was hiding something. After all, following her return from Texas, her father had married Katy off to Randall Regan, the brutal roughneck who had chauffeured his boss away from the Albert Norris murder scene. One of Regan’s jobs had been to insulate Katy from reporters like himself. But when she insisted that she recalled nothing about either Pooky or Albert Norris, Henry began to wonder whether the doctors at the Borgen Institute had turned those sections of her memory to mush. When he left the house, Mrs.
Regan had politely thanked him for coming and invited him to return anytime he wished. Henry felt so guilty about what he’d done that he actually went back to the office and wrote a story about Katy Regan and her dogs.

  But later that night, lying in bed, the nagging thought had returned that she must remember something. As a young girl, Katy Royal had made love to Pooky Wilson many times, and she must have been as heartbroken by his disappearance as Henry had been by the realization that Swan Norris would never be his. How much had Katy known at the time? Surely some trace of the intense pain she’d felt as a young girl must remain in her cerebral cortex.

  As the volume of the den television rose to compensate for his mother’s increasing deafness, Henry realized that with Viola and Morehouse dead, Katy Royal’s importance as a potential witness against her father had dramatically increased. Next time he got access to her, he decided, he would confide to Katy his love for Swan, and the heartache he’d suffered at losing her. Maybe that would summon an echo from the white space that supposedly lay in Katy Royal’s traumatized memory banks.

  Without warning, Henry suddenly saw a vision of Glenn Morehouse fighting for his life in his sickbed, struggling against friends who saw him as a traitor. He knew he was going to die, Henry thought. He knew talking to me would cost him his life, and he still did it. Henry closed his eyes and said a silent prayer for the murderer who’d chosen him as confessor. When his cell phone rang, it took a few seconds to register that it was his, not Sherry’s. He didn’t recognize the number, and he almost decided not to answer. But in the end, he did.

  “Henry Sexton,” he said, holding his breath.

  First he heard only staticky silence. Then a voice he placed as belonging to a rural man of African-American descent began to speak. He hardly met men who talked this way anymore.

  “Yassir. I heard you lookin’ fuh dat tree wha all dem boys died at.”

  Henry’s belly clenched. Unlike so many would-be tipsters before, this caller was the real thing. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Man I know told me tha might be some money in it, if a body could show you that awful place.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How much you payin’, suh?”

  Henry’s personal finances were modest, and always stretched to the limit. He was willing to pay up to five hundred dollars, but he didn’t want to pay more than he had to. “How much do you want?”

  “A thousand dollah. Cash money.”

  Henry felt a cold sweat break out on his face. A thousand dollars? Most black folks he knew around Ferriday would do a hard month’s work for that sum.

  “That’s a lot of money. How can I be sure you know what you claim to know?”

  “I guess you can’t. But I knows everything they is to know ’bout that ol’ swamp, and that be my price. I’s liable to need some luck just to live to spend it.”

  Henry couldn’t argue with this logic. He was trying to think of a way to bargain with the man when it struck him that Penn Cage would probably be glad to subsidize the discovery of the Bone Tree. And Penn wouldn’t hesitate to pay that sum. “All right,” Henry said in a voice just above a whisper. “One thousand dollars, cash. But not a dollar more.”

  “Aiite, den. When you wants to go?”

  “When can you take me?”

  “Not till Wendsy, mebbe T’ursy. I call you back in a day or two.”

  “That’s fine. Could I ask what you do for a living?”

  Low, rich laughter came down the line. “I helps people find game when it be’s scarce. Mebbe take a little out o’ season, sometimes, you know.”

  A poacher, Henry thought. A poacher might well know the secret paths of the Lusahatcha Swamp. “Will you tell me your name?”

  “Toby,” said the poacher.

  “Toby what?” Henry asked, grabbing a pencil and flipping over the photo of Tom and the men in the fishing boat.

  “Toby Rambin. But don’t axe around about me. I don’t exist, hear? I call you back in a couple days. You jus’ get that cash ready.”

  The connection went dead.

  As Henry scrawled on the paper, he thanked God that Sherry hadn’t heard this conversation. He looked down at the phone shaking in his hand.

  “Who was that?” Sherry asked from the doorway.

  “Nobody, babe. Just another dead-end lead.”

  CHAPTER 27

  WALKING UP MY front steps for the second time in fifteen minutes, I pause before the door to gather myself. I was unable to catch up to Lincoln after he disappeared over the hill on Washington Street. I cruised the parking lots of the hotels on the bluff—the casino lots, too—but I saw no white pickup with Illinois plates. On my way back, I called Don Logan, the chief of police, and asked him to have his patrolmen keep an eye out for Lincoln’s truck. Not a legitimate use of power, exactly, but the office of mayor comes with some perks.

  I feel a little odd hesitating before my own front door, but on the other hand, I feel like I’m bringing home a kilo of heroin that must be hidden from a drug addict. Caitlin would give almost anything to possess the information Henry confided in me tonight. Armed with that, she would begin a newspaper crusade that would blast open those cold cases, eventually solve the murders, and probably win her a second Pulitzer Prize. But that honor is reserved for Henry Sexton, who worked the cases when nobody else gave a damn, and who’s now living under the threat of harm to himself and his family. When Caitlin demands to know what I’m doing to help my father—as she will when she learns that he’s in danger—I will have to edit myself very carefully.

  She’s been working south of town all day, but she may already have heard about Dad’s trouble. On the other hand, if she had heard something, she probably would have texted me. I’m only thankful that neither she nor Annie noticed Lincoln Turner’s truck rumbling outside the house.

  Taking out my key, I let myself into the foyer and bolt the door behind me. The laughter of my eleven-year-old daughter rings down the hallway from the kitchen. “Annie?” I call. “I’m home!”

  The laughter stops, and a rush of feet heralds the appearance of my dead wife’s avatar in the hallway. I probably shouldn’t think of Annie that way, but anyone who knew her mother shares this perception. My tall, willowy daughter is almost the reincarnation of Sarah. Sometimes I wonder if this impression is a trick my mind plays on me, but then I’ll see an old photograph and realize the resemblance is growing stronger with each passing year.

  “What’s the matter, Daddy?” she asks, stopping in mid-stride and staring at me with the preternatural perception that also descended from her mother. “You look scared.”

  “No, I just missed you today.”

  She comes forward and wraps her arms around me, in a single gesture draining away half the anxiety that Lincoln Turner caused in me. “Come in the kitchen,” she says. “Caitlin and I are cooking pasta primavera.”

  “You mean you’re cooking it.” I know from experience that my fiancée never cooks anything more complicated than a Lean Cuisine.

  “Caitlin’s helping,” Annie says with a wink.

  She pulls me down the hall and into the kitchen, where Caitlin is standing over a pot with a frown knotting her brow.

  “This is why I don’t cook,” Caitlin snaps. “I can’t even boil effing water.”

  Annie snickers and checks the pasta pot. “Those noodles have definitely been in there too long. Let’s get them out.”

  Caitlin wisely stands aside for Annie to rescue the noodles, and I’m glad to see the twinkle of a smile in Caitlin’s eyes, though her lips are tight with frustration. Caitlin still has two or three inches on Annie, but it won’t be long before my daughter catches up to her. Despite both being tall beauties, they could not be more different in type. Caitlin has pale skin and jet-black hair, with startling green eyes that shy away from nothing. Her build is angular and almost masculine from some perspectives, but she’s curved where it counts. Annie is dark blond with light blue eyes that radiate kin
dness, not calculation, and her skin glows with the bloom of youth.

  “See?” Annie says, carefully dumping the noodles into a colander in the sink, while boiling water steams around her head.

  “I’d already have third-degree burns,” Caitlin says. She once tried to make her mother’s lasagna, but that effort is best forgotten. That’s the level of domestic bliss you get with a newspaper publisher.

  “You know what Ruby used to say.” I laugh, hugging Caitlin to my waist. “If you ain’t burnt yourself, you ain’t cookin’.”

  Ruby was the black maid who raised me, and very much a second mother to me. Annie laughs at my remark, and Caitlin pinches my behind while Annie deals with the noodles.

  I was thirty-eight when I met Caitlin, and I’d been a widower less than a year. She was ten years my junior and out to win a Pulitzer before she turned thirty. Her chosen venue was the Natchez Examiner, one of twenty-odd newspapers owned at that time by her father, a North Carolina businessman who cares more about profits than changing the world. During the Delano Payton case, Caitlin and I formed an unlikely partnership that brought us closer than either had expected, and we quickly fell in love.

  Looking back on that time, it seems hard to believe we’ve let seven years pass without getting married. The fact is, when you’re both working full-time and enjoying the benefits of marriage without the burdens, it’s easy to let time slip by without looking too closely at things. During those years we suffered one or two periods of cool distance, when Caitlin took extended assignments in Boston and even farther afield, but those were exceptions. Yet no matter how close we grew during the years prior to our engagement, Caitlin kept one last wall between herself and my daughter—probably to protect them both from heartbreak, should things not work out in the end. But ever since we made the decision to get married, Caitlin and Annie have become inseparable. Annie has insisted on helping with the wedding preparations, from the shower and the flowers to choosing the band for the reception. I’ve done little, of course; my most important contribution has miraculously remained secret. But after the events of today, I’m not sure it can remain so.