Mississippi Blood

by Greg Iles

  I’m incredulous that he would assume my assent to this plan. “Dad . . . I’m not doing this. You haven’t given me a thing to work with.”

  With a long sigh he looks down at the floor. Then he looks up and almost inaudibly whispers, “I’ll give you something. On the night Viola died, there was a pickup truck parked in the trees on her road. There was a Darlington Academy sticker on the back windshield.”

  This stops me. Darlington Academy was one of the “Christian schools” founded in response to school integration during the 1969/1970 school year. Darlington’s financial backers had been members of either the White Citizens’ Council or the Ku Klux Klan. Maybe both.

  “Whose truck was that?” I ask.

  “Walt did some digging, and our best guess is an old Double Eagle named Will Devine.”

  “I remember Devine. He was in the jail on the day Sonny Thornfield was killed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Kaiser told me Will Devine agreed to turn state’s evidence after Sonny’s murder, but after the FBI jet went down, he backed out.”

  “But that proves he’s conflicted! You should start with Devine.”

  “Why did Walt dig that up? Does Kaiser know about the Darlington Academy truck?”

  Dad shakes his head.

  “Why the hell not?”

  Another sigh. “I can’t tell you that, son.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “We’re wasting time, Penn.”

  Anger flashes through me. “Why even tell me this? What the hell do you think I can do?”

  “Put pressure on Devine. Squeeze him and see if you can make him pop. Walt tried, but Will wouldn’t talk to him. Slammed the door in his face.”

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  Dad’s hollow eyes implore me across the inches that divide us. “I’m not asking for myself, Penn. It’s for the family.”

  “Sure it is. Like everything else you’ve done, right?”

  “No. Not everything. Most of this happened because of something selfish I did long ago. I fell in love with another woman.”

  “Like I said, no need to go into all that.”

  “I won’t. All I’m saying is this: If you do what I ask, then one of two things will happen. Either someone will agree to testify against Snake, or Snake himself will raise his head.”

  “And then what?”

  “If we’re lucky, somebody will stomp on him.”

  “Who? Kaiser?”

  “Maybe.”

  “One of my guards?”

  Dad turns up his palms. “There’s no way to know. You killed a man last night. An hour before it happened, you couldn’t have conceived of doing that, could you?”

  He’s right, but this only makes me angrier. “How many men have you killed, Dad?”

  After a long silence, he says, “More than I like to remember.”

  “Where?” My father has never told me a single war story about Korea. “In the war?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you were a medic.”

  “That’s right.”

  I wait, but he doesn’t elaborate. “Jesus . . . okay. I’m going to think about what you’ve told me. Or asked me, I guess.”

  “Are you going to be coming back? Next time Peggy and Annie visit, maybe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I understand.”

  “Listen, Mom’s terrified that something will happen to you once you’re transferred to the Adams County jail.”

  Dad dismisses this with a wave of his crooked hand. “Billy Byrd won’t murder me in his jail, or even have me killed by an inmate. He wants to see me convicted. He wants a public downfall and he’s sure it’s coming. He and his deputies gathered the evidence themselves. To Billy, it’s an open-and-shut case.”

  “It looks that way to me, too, honestly. How the hell can you get any semblance of a fair trial with those guys in charge of the evidence?”

  “A fair trial?” Dad smiles strangely. “I never expected one. Any evidence that might even have muddied the water disappeared that first day. Probably never even reached the evidence room. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Dad looks at me as he would a slow child. “Because I’m guilty, son.”

  I must have misheard him. “What?”

  “I killed Viola.”

  His simple, declarative confirmation knocks the breath out of me. I search his eyes for some clue to a deeper message, but I see none. It takes a moment to get my voice working. “Are you speaking literally? Or . . . in some larger moral sense?”

  A sad smile touches his mouth. “This isn’t a philosophy symposium, Penn. I killed Viola. The why is nobody’s business. That’s between her, me, and God.”

  I am gobsmacked, as the Brits say. And utterly bewildered by the casual tone of his confession. “Dad, I’m feeling a little lost here.”

  “Because you’re overthinking things. I worked in a movie house in the late forties, when I was a teenager. Do you remember me telling you that?”

  I cannot find words to answer.

  A look of nostalgia comes into his face. “The Rialto in DeRidder, Louisiana. I saw a lot of pictures in that grand old dame of a theater. Good ones, bad ones, just okay.”

  A worm of fear is turning in my belly. Has my father lost his grip on reality? “Dad, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m trying to set you straight, son.”

  “About what?”

  “You’re confused about what kind of movie you’re in.”

  “What kind of movie . . . ?”

  “Yes. This isn’t a mystery. It’s not a whodunit, with Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple. I’m the killer.”

  “Dad, for God’s sake—”

  “This isn’t even film noir,” he goes on. “It’s a western, Penn. It always was. With black hats and white hats. Well . . . maybe my hat is gray. Like Henry Fonda’s in his later years.”

  I get up from the table and walk toward the door. His words are so maddening that I want to get physically away from him. Halfway to the door, I stop and turn back. “If you killed Viola . . . why even go through this trial? Why not plead guilty, take your sentence, and live out your last year or two of life in jail?”

  He apparently takes my question very seriously. “I’ve thought about that. A great deal, in fact. But I can’t do that to your mother. Or to Annie. What I do now, I’m doing for them.”

  Right. Tom Cage, the family martyr.

  “You said your motive was between you, Viola, and God. But you don’t believe in God.”

  This time his smile is sad. “That was only a figure of speech. What I meant was, it’s between Viola and me—and she’s gone now. When I go, my motive will be lost to history, just as it should be.”

  Maybe I’m not listening with the proper detachment, because his words hit me like a slap in the face. “That’s great, Dad. Only you don’t live in a vacuum. The decisions you make have consequences for the rest of us. Terrible consequences.”

  “I know. I’ve learned that, if nothing else. If you’d let me—”

  I hold up my hand again, and this time, mercifully, he stops. But when the doorknob is in my hand, he says, “I’m so sorry for everything, son. I mean that.”

  Without turning back, I say, “Is that what you said to your other son? To Lincoln?”

  When he doesn’t reply, I look back.

  “Yes,” he says finally, and then he shakes his head in resignation.

  At these words, something in my mind simply shuts down. There’s only one thing left to say.

  “Good-bye, Dad. I won’t be coming back before the trial.”

  And I leave him.

  Thursday

  Chapter 6

  It took twenty days for the VK motorcycle club to hit back in revenge for Tim and me killing their members, and what they did was something I had not imagined in my most horrific nightmares. What they did proved John Kaiser’s
classification of the Double Eagle group as a domestic terror organization completely justified. What they did was obscene.

  And it happened only yards from my front door.

  I spent the twenty days between those two violent episodes doing what my father asked me to do—visiting Double Eagles, their wives, their children, and where possible their ex-wives and known associates—and I hated every minute of it. Of course I told myself I was picking up the torch Caitlin had dropped, not fulfilling the charge that my father had laid upon me at the federal prison. But whatever I was really doing, it didn’t work.

  Nearly everywhere I went, I was walking in the footsteps of John Kaiser’s FBI agents, and not one of them had gleaned even a seed of valuable information from those sources. This was probably because all those agents had been walking in the footsteps of Henry Sexton, and Henry had died in a ball of fire in Brody Royal’s basement. Everyone I visited knew that. They knew, too, about Glenn Morehouse and Sonny Thornfield. And Silas Groom. And every person I talked to had fully absorbed the object lesson: if you go against Snake Knox’s Double Eagle group, you die.

  My quest through Concordia Parish and the outlying neighborhoods of Adams County was like a journey through my distant childhood. I’d played Dixie Youth baseball with kids from those neighborhoods: freckle-faced, pale-skinned, buck-toothed, bruised-and-scabbed-over kids who could have sprung fully formed from a Norman Rockwell painting. Most had lived the first decade of their lives with big grins; too many had lived the remainder with a confused scowl and a diminishing sense of control over their futures.

  Those kids were in their midforties now, and I hardly got a sympathetic echo at a single house. Children of Double Eagle members had picked up the code of silence by osmosis, and they observed it faithfully. Suspicion was the order of the day. A couple threatened me, but most were simply uncomfortable or resentful—uncertain how to behave when torn between the southern compulsion to be hospitable and the instinct to push away all inquiry about their families. I took someone along on every visit, even to see the women. Usually Tim Weathers, but sometimes Kirk Boisseau. Kirk didn’t have the training the Vulcan guys did, but my old school buddy had an asset they did not—intimate knowledge of the local population. As a former marine working in the landscaping business, Kirk had become familiar with this segment of society that I hardly knew anymore, if I ever really had.

  I didn’t question Will Devine—the probable owner of the Darlington Academy truck—right away. But the day after visiting my father, I called Keisha Harvin and begged for everything she could tell me about Devine and his family. The young reporter came through for me within hours. Like most original Double Eagles, Devine had spent his working life employed by the Triton Battery Corporation, just south of Natchez, on the Mississippi River. In age, Devine fell between Frank and Snake Knox. For the past five years he’d been suffering from a chronic lung disease and didn’t leave the house much. According to Keisha, Henry Sexton’s journals didn’t supply much detail on Devine regarding the Eagles’ modern-day criminal activities, but Henry had believed the man played a major role in some of the 1960s murders.

  According to Dad, Walt Garrity had visited Devine at home. A retired Texas Ranger, Walt can be pretty persuasive with white guys from his own generation, but Devine had slammed the door in Walt’s face more than once. John Kaiser’s FBI agents must have gotten the same treatment, because if Devine came close to turning state’s evidence back in December, John wouldn’t have let up the pressure on the old Double Eagle.

  I first tried Devine at his house on a Sunday morning, thinking maybe he’d be in a Christian frame of mind. From behind a screen door, he told me that if I didn’t get off his property, he’d give me a blast from the double-barreled shotgun he was aiming at my belly. The fat old bastard was huffing while he threatened me, and he looked like he could barely hold himself on his feet. But he also looked like he would shoot if I provoked him further. The bug eyes behind big plastic glasses held a mixture of outrage and fear. It was then I realized that to Will Devine I probably appeared to be an incarnation of the retribution he had dreaded since his violent youth.

  An old woman was talking low in the shadows behind him. I couldn’t make out her words, but her tone seemed less bellicose than that of her husband. I considered asking Devine about the pickup truck with the Darlington Academy sticker—which was parked in a driveway thirty feet to my left—but then I thought better of it. As I drove away from the house, I started going down the list of the man’s children and grandchildren.

  Will Devine’s sons proved to be less combative than their father, but they also claimed to know nothing substantive about his involvement with the Double Eagles. They knew I would happily jail their father if I could, but they seemed to accept this as simply the way of things. Like most Double Eagle kids, they remembered the barbecues where the fathers had drunk beer and blown up stumps and junk cars, but claimed they’d believed the men were just horsing around. If they had known that their churchgoing father had been rehearsing bomb attacks on local blacks, they said, naturally they would have . . . well, they didn’t know what they would have done, but you know . . . something.

  I didn’t mention that the mothers had obviously known what those exercises were for, yet not one ever called the FBI to warn anybody. The longer I spent with Will Devine’s boys, the more I saw guilt in their eyes. Not personal guilt—not the shame of conscious collusion or conspiracy—but a knowledge that they had heard and seen enough to know that Daddy meant to harm somebody with those “big fireworks,” and that “somebody” was a different color than they were.

  When I left those grown-up boys, I had the feeling that if I’d met them a little earlier in life—before so many people died—they might have been glad for the chance to confide to me the secret fears of their childhoods. Both Devine sons revealed that their father had beaten them ruthlessly for the slightest misbehavior. But that, they insisted, was common among their friends’ families. “It was a different time,” they said. “Tougher. Children were there to be seen, not heard. That was just the way it was, and maybe ought to be again.”

  When they spoke of their mother, Nita Devine, both men got soft looks in their eyes. One even wept as he spoke of her selfless devotion. Nita was, it turned out, the woman I had heard speaking from the shadows behind old Will. When I asked if the sons thought they could get me some time alone with their mother, both clammed up instantly—obviously equating my suggestion with betrayal.

  The younger son, Deke Devine—named for an astronaut—gave me a lot of information about other children of Double Eagles. Most had settled within ten miles of their childhood homes. A few had gone into the military, but most worked in the oil fields, plus a smattering of small-engine mechanics, arc welders, electricians, taxidermists, or farm chemical salesmen. I wrote down as much information as I could before a feeling of betrayal shut Deke Devine up again, and I left on relatively good terms. As I drove out to Highway 65, I made a mental note to return and delve deeper into the younger son’s conflicted mind.

  For twenty days I crisscrossed the parish with my list, moving from houses to trailers to apartments in the hope of persuading a living Double Eagle or one of their children to talk to me. I wasn’t even sure what I most wanted to know; I simply had to poke at the hornet’s nest until something came swarming out. But nothing did. Going through the motions of my former career as an assistant district attorney partially restored my sense of order, and with it my connection to the world. But by the time the morning of the VK’s retaliation rolled around, I was still suffering from a fundamental sense of dislocation.

  I awakened to the scent of coffee coming from the kitchen, which told me that Mia was up, and probably Annie, too. Most mornings I find Mia at the kitchen table, reading a novel or working at her MacBook while Annie takes her shower. That morning, Annie poked her mother’s face through my door and said, “Eggs and toast or oatmeal and blueberries?”

  “You pic
k.”

  “Both. You need to get some weight back.”

  “How about some garlic cheese grits?” Mia called. “That’ll put some meat back on your bones.”

  “I’ll give the oatmeal a shot, if you put brown sugar in it.”

  With a groan I rolled out of bed, stretched, then went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the shower.

  Keisha Harvin had fallen in love with Caitlin Masters’s house the first night she stayed in it, and in the months since, she’d only grown to love it more. A three-story Victorian on Washington Street, directly across from the mayor’s house, it was the kind of place Keisha might never be able to afford on her own. Every morning she awakened in the cavernous house, she smiled, then rose and padded like a princess across the hardwood floor and down the stairs to the gleaming kitchen, feeling all the while as though she were acting in a movie.

  Sabrina, she thought sometimes. I’m the black Audrey Hepburn.

  And yet . . . Keisha never could get quite comfortable in the house. Wherever she walked, she felt Caitlin’s unquiet ghost hovering nearby. Keisha had no sense of any malevolent spirit, only one that hated to let go of the world of light and life. Keisha told herself that since she devoted almost every waking hour to completing Caitlin’s work on the Double Eagle cases, Caitlin’s ghost would forgive a sister for trespassing in her home.

  This morning Keisha had meant to get to work early. She’d set an early alarm, but for some reason she slept through it. Whenever that happened, she always felt as though some cosmic force were trying to sabotage her plans. She’d skipped her shower to make up time, and now she stood hunched at the back door, fumbling with her keys, trying to cram the flat metal into the lock while her backpack and purse dragged her right shoulder earthward and threatened to upend the jellied toast balanced in her left hand. Stuffing the toast into her mouth, she finally slid the key into the lock, turned it, then yanked it out and trotted awkwardly toward her Prius, which was parked in the narrow driveway beside the house.

  Keisha thanked God for her keyless remote, which she clicked with an immense sense of relief. As she tossed her purse across the driver’s seat, someone called to her from her front yard. Keisha forced a smile as she turned, expecting her elderly neighbor—who was always watering his flowers—or even maybe Penn’s daughter, Annie. What she saw instead was an old white woman wearing a leather jacket and holding a McDonald’s cup in her hand.