The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  Special Agent Kaiser had taken over the Examiner’s conference room and turned it into an FBI command center. There were now nine special agents spread across Natchez and Concordia Parish, plus a half-dozen technicians of different types, and more manpower was on the way. FBI computer experts had begun the laborious task of trying to reconstruct the deleted scans of Henry Sexton’s files and journals from the Examiner’s servers. And while they did that, Kaiser had been working with Jamie Lewis in an effort to identify a possible second mole among Caitlin’s editorial staff. She felt conflicted about giving the Bureau access to personnel records, but she couldn’t risk another security breach while they were working such critical stories.

  The proximity of Kaiser and his team had made it tough for Caitlin to contact Toby Rambin, the poacher who’d offered to guide Henry Sexton to the Bone Tree. Three times during the night she’d risked calling the number Henry had given her, but each time she’d gotten no answer. By researching the numerical prefix, she learned that the number was a landline, so she figured Rambin might be out in the swamp plying his trade. Caitlin also wanted Kaiser out of the building so that she could review Henry’s most recent journal—the one she’d saved from the burned ruins of the Concordia Beacon—but she wasn’t about to risk Kaiser discovering that. Along with Henry’s journal containing his leads and meditations on the Bone Tree (which, thankfully, she’d kept separate from the group that had been stolen and burned), this was all that remained of the brave reporter’s original records. Right now the two Moleskine journals lay atop Caitlin’s tall office credenza like holy relics hidden from an invading pagan army. Those journals—along with Toby Rambin—represented her only investigative advantage over the FBI, and the crux of her head start against the army of journalists descending on Natchez.

  Just before dawn, Kaiser had told her that he was trying to organize a massive search of the Lusahatcha Swamp, in hopes of locating the Bone Tree and the bodies that might still lie there. This prospect gave Caitlin hives, and she’d felt immense relief when Kaiser slammed down her desk phone and complained that Washington had denied his request. A few minutes later, Jordan Glass confided to her that the director’s position wasn’t exactly unreasonable. Within twenty-four hours of sending “his best New Orleans agent” to Concordia Parish, half a dozen bodies had piled up, and the director was afraid that more would follow. He wasn’t about to organize a military-scale search in Mississippi without more cause than Kaiser had given him so far. He wanted to proceed with “cautious deliberation.”

  Caitlin wasn’t sure Kaiser had given up his plan for the swamp search until word came in that Penn and Sheriff Dennis were sweeping up Concordia Parish’s meth cookers and dealers. It was then that she saw what John Kaiser looked like when he truly lost his temper. She didn’t envy Penn being on the receiving end of that anger. While Kaiser fumed, she pled ignorance and went about her business, thanking her stars that the Bone Tree would remain undiscovered by the FBI for some time yet.

  At 7:45 A.M. Caitlin received one request she could not ignore: a summons to appear before the Adams County sheriff, Billy Byrd, for questioning. After telling Kaiser to send the cavalry if she hadn’t returned in an hour, she went out to her car, trusting that Henry’s journals would be fine where they were until she returned.

  Turning east onto Main Street, Caitlin checked the Motorola cell phone she was currently using—she’d sent one of her advertising people out to replace the Treo 650 that Brody Royal had burned—and saw that she’d received twenty-six text messages in the past fifteen minutes. For the next few days, she was going to have her hands full merely evading friends, much less the remainder of the media locusts. If she couldn’t find a way to set her team’s course for the day and then get out of the office—preferably to meet Toby Rambin—she would be overrun.

  As she turned onto Wall Street, Caitlin saw two TV trucks parked in front of City Hall: one from WAPT in Jackson, the other from WLOX on the coast. After passing the trucks, she glanced right and saw two more parked in front of the courthouse: KNOE out of Monroe and WBRZ from Baton Rouge. There were more to come. When she turned west onto State Street, she saw a big CNN truck parked between the sheriff’s department and the district attorney’s office, and beyond that was a minivan that read MPB—the Jackson PBS station.

  Slowing to scan the block for parking spaces, Caitlin saw Shadrach Johnson giving an on-camera interview on the steps of his building. As usual, he was dressed to the nines and standing as straight as a man announcing his candidacy for governor. When she looked left, she saw Sheriff Byrd doing the same on the steps of the ACSO building across the street from Shad. At least five reporters had microphones jammed into Byrd’s face, and he looked as happy as a pig in slop.

  Caitlin parked around the corner near Judge Noyes’s chambers, then walked back to the ACSO building. Byrd was winding up the interviews as she approached, and he motioned for her to follow him inside. She soon found herself sitting before his desk like a schoolgirl called to see the principal. Her chair had been chosen to drop male visitors half a head lower than the potbellied sheriff, so she was forced to sit ramrod straight to achieve any sense of being on equal terms.

  Squinting down at her like a caricature sheriff from some 1960s western, Byrd announced that he’d brought her there because of complaints filed by the Royal family, who claimed she’d broken into Katy Royal Regan’s house and harassed the woman until she committed suicide. However, it quickly became apparent that the sheriff’s real objective was discovering why Penn had been riding shotgun in Sheriff Dennis’s cruiser during the drug raids. Caitlin only smiled and asked whether Sheriff Byrd planned to make a similar sweep of Adams County. Bristling, Byrd declared that Adams County had no significant meth problem, which was ridiculous, since only the river separated Natchez from Concordia Parish, and traffic flowed over the twin bridges twenty-four hours a day. Caitlin only smiled and kept pressing him.

  After Byrd realized she wasn’t going to give him anything on Penn, he began questioning her about the stories in the morning edition of the Examiner. Byrd was obviously accustomed to women deferring to him, so Caitlin played the game, hoping to discover how much or how little he knew by way of his inept questioning. The risk was negligible. Fooling Billy Byrd was child’s play compared to dealing with Kaiser.

  Ninety seconds of back-and-forth told her that Byrd knew nothing of the real situation, and she was trying to think of a way to gracefully extricate herself from his office when his cell phone rang. He held the phone away from him and squinted at its LCD, then took the call. After listening for a few seconds, he turned pale and sat up straight.

  “How many?” he asked, his face darkening.

  Caitlin took the opportunity to check her cell phone, which she’d silenced before entering Byrd’s office. The last text message was from Penn. It read: Disaster at the warehouse. One deputy dead, others critical. I’m ok, headed to C hospital w Dennis.

  Caitlin felt the blood drain from her face.

  “Call me as soon as you know more,” Sheriff Byrd said, and slammed the phone down on his desk.

  “What happened?” Caitlin asked, fighting the urge to bolt from the office.

  Byrd cursed and rubbed his forehead. “Sheriff Dennis just lost a man in an explosion. Looks like a booby-trapped drug warehouse. He’s got three more men in critical condition, some being airlifted out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I know you’ll have a lot to do.” Caitlin got to her feet and headed for the door.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going, missy?”

  “Back to work,” she said, wondering how long it had been since she heard that archaic term.

  “Hold it right there. You’ve haven’t answered one damn question I asked, and now people are dying across the river. What the hell is your boyfriend up to over there?”

  Caitlin turned back to the red-faced sheriff. “Helping Sheriff Dennis do his duty. At least on that side of the river, they h
ave a sheriff who knows his duty. Not one who wastes his time playing games with the law.”

  “I’m not playing any damn game.”

  She walked back to his desk and spoke with cold conviction. “Bullshit. You and Shad Johnson are using the law to settle your personal scores. Penn thrashed Shad in court and an election, and Tom helped your first wife get away from your beatings. You and Shad want to punish them for that.” Caitlin nodded for emphasis. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  Byrd blinked like a man confronting some animal he’d never seen before. Then his expression hardened and he got to his feet. “You have no idea how much trouble you’re biting off.”

  “I know you’re a big man in this county. You’ve got an army of deputies, your own private crime lab, your jail. And I’m just a newspaper publisher. Nothing to be afraid of, right? But you forgot one thing. Yours is an elected position. The voters put you behind that desk, and they can snatch you right back out of here. My father owns twenty-seven newspapers across the southeast. And I—”

  Caitlin jerked back as Byrd came around the desk, his bloodshot eyes blazing. “You sassy bitch. I don’t care how much money your old man’s got. I run this county, and you’re about to find that out.”

  “You’re right about one thing,” she said evenly. “I can be a bitch. And up till now, I haven’t taken much interest in you. But that’s about to change. There’s a reporter who works for one of our papers in Alabama—a twenty-five-year-old black girl named Keisha Harvin. Last night, Keisha told her boss she was taking her vacation, then drove all night to get here so that she could work on the Double Eagle case. I trained that girl, Sheriff, and she is hungry.”

  Byrd snorted in apparent derision, so Caitlin gave him the rest of it. “I’m going to feed you to Keisha Harvin, Sheriff. She’s going to crawl so far up your butt you’ll feel like you had a weeklong colonoscopy. Then I’m going to post the results of her investigation for everyone to see. The next time you go to a meeting of the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association, your oldest buddy won’t walk within twenty feet of you. Any plans you have for reelection will be as dead as that deputy across the river. Am I making myself clear? Or do you want to harass me some more?”

  Sheriff Byrd aimed his finger at her like a pistol and spoke softly, but with implacable malice. “Listen to me, hon. Sometime in the next few hours, I’m going to hear one of two things: either Tom Cage was shot, or he’s on his way to my jail. You’d better hope it’s the first one. Because if he winds up in my jail, you’re going to come back here and beg me to go easy on him. Then you’ll find out how things really work in this county.”

  Byrd’s mention of Tom’s plight had shaken her, but Caitlin pressed down her fears. “Oh, I think everybody knows that already. And they’re sick of it.”

  Byrd’s face went purple, but he made no move to arrest her when she turned and reached for the doorknob.

  “You’ll be back,” he said with certainty. “And you’ll be begging.”

  Caitlin opened the door and went out, her heart in her throat.

  TOM AWAKENED WITH A desperate need to urinate, but when he opened his eyes, he had no idea where he was, or how to find a bathroom. Only when he saw a large framed portrait of Doris Avery did he remember that he was inside Quentin’s house, sleeping on the sofa. The heavy curtains had been drawn, but daylight leaked through at the edges. Tom tried to raise his arm to look at his watch, but pain knifed from his shoulder to his fingertips. He groaned and dropped his arm. He didn’t think he could get to his feet, much less make it to the bathroom.

  After the pain receded, he looked toward his legs. Someone had laid a quilt over him during the night—Doris, he was sure—and a glass of water stood on the coffee table within reach of his right hand. Three pill bottles stood beside the water glass. As carefully as he could, Tom extended his right hand and pulled the water glass across the open space and leaned it against his hip. Then he pulled the pill bottles near. One held Cipro, and he swallowed one of the big white pills. Another held Vicodin, which he’d prescribed for Quentin one month earlier, according to the label. The third bottle held nitro tablets, but only three, which would not last him long under his present stress load. Tom chewed up a Vicodin despite the bitter taste, then swallowed the fragments. Then he picked up the water glass and drank steadily until it was empty.

  Looking once around the large living room, he slid the glass under the quilt and unzipped his fly. After several surgeries, Tom was an old hand at using a urinal, and a tall glass was close enough. After he’d finished, he set the glass on the floor and fell back on the sofa, his back and shoulder seething with pain.

  As he stared at the vaulted ceiling, he remembered he was supposed to text Walt a message that he’d reached safety, and also pass on his location. A coded message, he recalled. The problem was, he was supposed to get a new burn phone before he sent it. Given the two alternatives—taking a chance that someone had discovered the numbers of their burn phones, or Walt wondering if the hit man in Tom’s backseat had killed him—Tom decided to split the difference.

  Without pencil or paper ready to hand, he closed his eyes and thought of the simplest message he could send that would allay Walt’s fears. He finally settled on “Safe. Loc to follow aft new fon.” Once he had that, he popped the flimsy back off his cell phone and removed the SIM card, then switched on the phone. While it tried in vain to make contact with a nearby tower, he began to key in the message. One letter at a time, he converted each to its alphabetical number, then, as Walt had instructed, multiplied those numbers by the number of soldiers who had died in the ambulance outside Chosin, which was seven. Shutting his mind against the memories of that night, Tom did the math in his head, then entered the digits on the tiny keypad, putting a hyphen between each one. After the message was entered, he reinserted the SIM card and waited for the phone to acquire a tower. As soon as it did, he pressed SEND. When the LCD read “Message Sent,” he killed the phone again, then removed the battery and dropped the pieces on the floor beside the couch.

  These actions had utterly expended his energy. He felt light-headed enough that he worried about his blood sugar, but he hadn’t the equipment to check it. He thought about calling out for Quentin, who was diabetic, but Quentin and Doris were probably still asleep. For a few seconds Tom saw an image of the would-be killer he’d abandoned in the dark cotton field last night: the anger in the man’s features, the childlike desolation in his eyes. Had that man reached Forrest Knox yet? Had he even tried? Or had he feared the punishment for failure so much that he’d simply run for his life?

  “Time will tell,” Tom muttered. Then he slid back on the couch and slipped into unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE CONCORDIA HOSPITAL emergency room is a Babel of frightened wives, wailing children, and deputies so furious they’re ready to kill someone—anyone who might have played a part in the warehouse explosion. In the wake of that lethal blast, the most the hospital staff could do was try to stabilize the injured deputies and evacuate them to the nearest urban hospitals via helicopter. Walker Dennis has been circulating among the families of his men, doing what he can to instill calm, but it’s a tough job with one deputy dead and at least one other barely clinging to life. I can’t help but think of last night, when an unknown sniper killed Henry Sexton’s girlfriend just down the hall from this ER and came close to killing Henry himself. Walker is standing in the door of one of the treatment rooms, comforting the sons of one of his less seriously injured men. I’m trying to decide how long I should hang around when Special Agent John Kaiser marches through the main ER doors, scans the area, then homes in on me.

  “What in God’s name possessed you to do something this stupid?” he asks, taking little care to keep his voice low.

  “We obviously didn’t believe it was stupid,” I counter, motioning for him to quiet down.

  “I told you last night how risky this kind of attack would be. And pointless.”

  “We
didn’t attack anybody. Sheriff Dennis simply enforced the law, which has been a neglected practice in this parish of late.”

  Kaiser glances at Dennis, whose back is to him, then looks back at me. “Oh, bullshit. You hit the Knoxes, and they hit you back. Nothing surprising about that.”

  “I’d bet money Forrest Knox was surprised this morning.”

  Kaiser shakes his head in exasperation. “Do you realize I had the director sold on a massive search of the Lusahatcha Swamp? He was talking to the Mississippi National Guard commander and the sheriff of Lusahatcha County. He’d even contacted Dwight Stone to consult about the 1964 search. If you hadn’t started this fiasco, we might have found the Bone Tree by sundown today. We might have had Jimmy Revels’s and Pooky Wilson’s remains. But now? There’s no way I can leave to run that effort. I’m stuck doing damage control. Only this time the damage is so great, I don’t know if it’s fixable.”

  “We’re not your problem, John. You’re working a massive case that could take months or years. We’re going after some drug dealers and crooked cops. It’s that simple.”

  “More bullshit. You’re going after the same targets I am, only you’re doing it in the stupidest possible way.”

  My temper is starting to rise, which tells me Kaiser might be taking his life into his hands if any of the nearby deputies are listening. “We’re taking the shortest distance between two points, which in my experience is a good strategy. Besides, after last night’s conversation, I thought you were after Carlos Marcello, not the Knoxes.”

  At last Kaiser lowers his voice to an angry whisper. “I told you I was after Forrest Knox. It’s all the same case anyway.” Before the FBI agent can vent more fury, Sheriff Dennis walks over from the treatment room. “Can I help you, Agent Kaiser?”