The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  After taking a deep breath, she walked back out to her car, started the engine, and set off for the Walmart two miles away. The cash cell phones were the most important item on the list, Jack Cage had told her, as important as the drugs. Melba hoped she would find Quentin Avery with Tom when she finally reached his home. She was of two minds about the wily old lawyer, but she knew one thing for sure: no attorney in the country stood a better chance of keeping Tom out of jail. As she drove north, Melba kept her eyes on her rearview mirror.

  CHAPTER 28

  CAITLIN’S CAR IS parked outside Washington Street when I arrive. When I unlock the front door, I find her standing on the other side, wearing a smile like a hastily painted door on a storm-damaged house. The circles beneath her eyes are so dark that her makeup can’t mask them, and the Band-Aid on her left cheek reminds me of the painful burn beneath it.

  Without a word I pull her to me. She’s stiff at first, but after a few seconds, her muscles give way and she sags against me. She feels so light that I know she must have been skipping meals for days, as she does whenever she’s immersed in a story. When she begins to sob, I pick her up and carry her to the guest room on the ground floor, then lay her on the bed and enfold her in my arms.

  We hold each other in silence for several minutes, and l lose myself in the smell of her dark hair in my face. After she quiets down, she asks if I’ve had any word of my father. I tell her about Drew and Melba lying for Dad last night, and Caitlin doesn’t seem at all surprised. She guesses at least a few hundred more people would be willing to lie for him, and that the odds of us—or the Double Eagles—finding him and Walt are almost zero. I’m not nearly so sure, but I don’t argue the point with her. I tell her about my trip to the lake, the face-off with the Monroe cops, their story of Dad’s gunfight, my rescue by Lincoln. She listens closely but says little, her mind recording every word with the mechanical dispassion she often shows when she’s working. She does ask if my mother and Annie are adequately protected. I tell her they are, and that I plan to move them somewhere safer still as soon as I can arrange it. Caitlin doesn’t ask where they are or where I mean to take them, and I know why. If she were to be taken during the next few days, she wouldn’t be able to tell anyone where they are.

  To lighten the atmosphere, she describes a morning confrontation with Billy Byrd, then updates me on the FBI’s progress in reconstructing Henry’s files. She seems most excited by my news that Kaiser will be staying in town for the next twenty-four hours, tending to Dwight Stone. I assume this is because she hopes to see and possibly interview Dwight, whom she got to know during the Del Payton case. I soft-pedal the JFK stuff, making it sound as though Stone has a pet conspiracy theory about the assassination and because he’s ill, Kaiser is humoring him. Caitlin does ask whether Dwight might be willing to answer some questions from her, but I tell her it’s doubtful. I use his cancer and impending surgery to avoid giving my real reason, which is keeping Caitlin out of Kaiser’s JFK quest altogether. If she gets her teeth into a story that sensational, she’ll lose whatever remains of her perspective, and everything else could go by the wayside. But she will not be deterred.

  “How seriously is Kaiser taking the Kennedy stuff?” she asks, lightly touching my mouth. “Does he think those rifles we saw last night were real?”

  “He’s doing his due diligence, treating them as though they might be. Honestly, I think he may share some of Dwight’s conspiracy theories.”

  Caitlin’s finger stops moving. “What makes you say that?”

  I can’t find it in myself to lie to her completely. “Well, the director has refused to offer Dad protective custody for information on any of the civil rights cases, but Kaiser told me that if Dad has knowledge pertaining to the JFK assassination, he probably could get him protection.”

  “What?” Her eyes have filled with disbelief. “What the hell could Tom know about the JFK assassination?”

  “Nothing. I think Stone and Kaiser have convinced each other that the Double Eagles had something to do with killing Kennedy, and since Dad was their doctor, he might know something.”

  “Oh.” Caitlin lies back on the covers. “That sounds like nothing but a shot in the dark.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Unless . . .” She rolls over and looks at me. “How could the Double Eagles be tied to the JFK assassination?”

  Now there’s no avoiding it. “Stone believes Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans godfather, ordered Kennedy’s death. And the Double Eagles apparently did occasional muscle work for Marcello over the years. Through Brody Royal, I guess.”

  “I see.” Caitlin’s bright green eyes are impossible to read. “And is there any indication that Tom knew Carlos Marcello?”

  This is where I draw the line. I’m not going to have Caitlin digging into my father’s past in New Orleans, upsetting my mother and making me crazy. I’ll be doing enough of that myself. “Dad and Mom lived in New Orleans while he was at LSU med school. Dad did an externship at the parish prison, and Marcello was the don of the city at that time. But that’s all they’ve got. The flimsiest imaginable connection.”

  Caitlin watches me in silence for several seconds, then says, “If that’s all they have, then Tom’s got nothing to worry about. On that score anyway.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Him treating the Double Eagles who worked at Triton Battery and Armstrong Tire is something else, though. I can imagine him hearing things about the civil rights murders that might be important.”

  “Well, if we ever find him, we’ll ask him about that.”

  Lying on our backs, staring at the ceiling, we fall into an exhausted but companionable silence. After only a couple of minutes, I feel myself jerk at the edge of sleep.

  Caitlin laughs softly. “I’m tired, too. What if we set an alarm and sleep for two hours? Do you think we’d feel better or worse?”

  “Worse. I need sleep, but I’ve got to get Mom and Annie moved before I can rest.”

  “Okay. You’re right.”

  “I wish Stone weren’t coming down here. Not in the middle of all this. I’ve been trying to think of a way to persuade Kaiser to head down to the Lusahatcha Swamp and hunt for the Bone Tree. That would keep him out of my hair for at least a couple of days. Walker and I would have a lot more freedom to pressure the Knoxes that way.”

  After a couple of seconds, Caitlin makes a sound of acknowledgment but offers no comment.

  I feel my breathing deepen. As consciousness begins to dim, I fight against sleep. “The Bone Tree is out there somewhere,” I murmur. “Brody wasn’t lying when he told us about Pooky dying there. And Kaiser has the resources to find it. Surely Dwight would love to find it, too. Have you found any clue in Henry’s notes as to where that tree might be?”

  Caitlin doesn’t answer. At first I think she’s asleep, but then I hear the sound of a zipper. As I blink my eyes against the light, she arches beside me, then works her jeans down over her feet.

  “I thought we didn’t have time to sleep,” I say.

  “We don’t. This is the next best thing.”

  She rolls on top of me and peers down into my eyes. “It’s been a long time,” she says, looking surprisingly awake. “Are you really that tired?”

  In truth, I am. But she’s right. It has been a long time. As she straddles me and begins unbuttoning my shirt, it strikes me that the only respite I might find from my chaotic thoughts would be inside her. Caitlin clearly feels the same, and within a minute she’s put me there. As she labors purposefully above me, the world contracts to the boundaries of her eyes, and sensation blots out thought as surely as intravenous morphine.

  HALF AN HOUR HAS passed since Caitlin climaxed and lay across my chest, her face buried in my neck. She’s sleeping as soundly as a child who’s stayed up past her bedtime. I haven’t had the heart to wake her, nor have I fallen asleep myself. My thoughts have been occupied with finding a truly safe haven for Annie and my mother.

  In th
e past, I’ve moved them as far as Texas to get them out of danger, but this time I want them close enough that I can stay with them at night. No hotel would be safe, or any local B&B, though I know of several secluded ones. With Sheriff Billy Byrd and Forrest Knox on the hunt, any public or even semi-public accommodation will ultimately be traced. I’ve just about decided to leave them where they are when I remember that Sam Abrams, one of my best childhood friends, recently moved his parents to a retirement community in south Florida—Sea Haven Towers, or something like that. Sam was raised in Natchez’s once-thriving Jewish community, and he and I found we had a lot in common in high school. Like me, he’s one of the few successful members of our class who returned to Natchez as an adult. Sam has helped me during difficult times before, and most important, he makes the cut for what I call my “foxhole friends,” guys I’d trust with my life no matter what the circumstance. If I died tomorrow with no money to my name, Sam Abrams would make sure Annie made it through college with everything she needed. Since I’m now at war with Forrest Knox, that’s the kind of friend I need.

  I’m about to prod Caitlin awake when I notice a Treo sticking out from behind the base of the lamp on her bedside table. Since Brody Royal destroyed her Treo last night, along with my BlackBerry, she must have gotten another. Moving smoothly, I reach over and slide the phone off the table, then enter her old passcode.

  The phone rejects the code.

  For a moment I lie staring at the screen, wondering why she would change her passcode. But since her previous phone was in the possession of more than one person before Royal destroyed it, perhaps she simply took the precaution of changing it when she got a new one.

  Replacing the Treo on the bedside table, I get up and walk into the kitchen, where we keep a small laptop for recipes and shopping lists. The sweat on my skin evaporates quickly, chilling me enough to make me shiver. Booting up the computer, I check my e-mail, something I haven’t done nearly enough since losing my BlackBerry. My box contains more than thirty messages, but my quick scan stops instantly at the third most recent. The sender is KaiserJohn@fbi.gov. Opening the mail, I wait several seconds for it to download, then read the following:

  Penn,

  We traced several fingerprints on Brody Royal’s M-C to a Cuban émigré from New Orleans. You’ll recall that this M-C was part of the lot shipped from Italy after the rifle LHO bought via mail from Klein’s in Chicago. It was wholesaled to a Dallas retail gun store, and the earliest it could have been sold was August 1963. Cuban émigré was one Eladio Cruz, a student reported missing on November 21, 1963. (Yes, you read that right.) Cruz was never seen in the U.S. again. We’re now trying to determine whether Cruz was pro- or anti-Castro. Don’t miss the meeting with Stone. I told him you were coming, and we may have a decision on getting protective custody for your father by then.

  P.S. Keep your eyes open and stay indoors when possible. Caitlin, too. Snake Knox could shoot you both from 600 yards, maybe more, and we can’t be positive he’s in Texas. His flying skill gives him a lot of mobility.

  Kaiser’s mention of Caitlin makes me wonder if he knows I’m with her now. Is there an FBI agent outside my house, giving Kaiser regular reports? Or possibly a static surveillance camera? Right now I don’t really care, but I don’t want to be followed all afternoon. Kaiser’s warning about the danger from the Double Eagles only strengthens my resolve to hide Annie and my mother somewhere safer. As soon as Caitlin and I separate, I’m going to call Sam Abrams and try to arrange a move.

  Rereading Kaiser’s e-mail, I wonder why he bothered to code anything when the overall meaning of the message is so clear. Maybe he was in a hurry. “M-C” obviously refers to the Mannlicher-Carcano, and “LHO” is Lee Harvey Oswald. The six-month separation between the sale of the two rifles must have miffed Kaiser, but the fact that Cruz went missing one day before the Kennedy assassination would have more than made up for that. That the Carcano was purchased by a Cuban student living in New Orleans is doubly provocative. First, because New Orleans was the private preserve of Carlos Marcello, and second, it throws Cuba into sharp focus in relation to the assassination. The answer to whether Eladio Cruz was pro- or anti-Castro will push Kaiser’s theory either toward or away from Fidel Castro and Russia. Away from Castro would mean toward the Cuban exiles who landed in the Bay of Pigs, and their CIA and Mafia backers. John Kaiser—and Dwight Stone’s Working Group—must be salivating over this possibility.

  I’m suddenly more sure than ever that I don’t want to open this can of worms with Caitlin. After double-checking that I’ve signed out of my e-mail account, I switch off the laptop, then return to the guest room, take hold of her upper arm, and gently shake her.

  She makes no sound.

  I shake her again. This time she groans like a teenager who doesn’t want to get out of bed on a school day.

  “Caitlin?” I say sharply. “Wake up.”

  “Nooooo,” she moans. “I feel like hell.”

  “I know. But we’ve got to get moving.”

  She raises her head and brushes black hair out of her eyes. “Did you even finish? I don’t remember.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” She smiles lazily. “For half a second there I felt guilty.”

  With a deep sigh she rolls over and sits up on the edge of the bed. The ladder of her spine shows through her skin. “This sucks,” she says.

  “Yep.”

  “I’m freezing.” She flips back her hair and searches the covers for her panties. I try not to laugh while I watch this familiar ritual. At last she finds them, tangled in the sheet near the foot of the bed. As she pulls then on, she says, “Do you realize if all this hadn’t happened, we would be getting married in nine days?”

  “I do.”

  “I guess we’ll get there eventually.”

  “We will.” While I pull on my own pants, it strikes me that once I’ve moved Annie and my mother out of Edelweiss, I could take Caitlin over there and show her what would have been her wedding present.

  “You know what?” I stand beside the bed. “If we can find half an hour later on, I could show you a real surprise.”

  She pauses with her bra halfway on and stares at me with narrowed eyes. “What kind of surprise?”

  I realize I’m grinning stupidly at her. “A one-of-a-kind surprise.”

  She looks suspicious for several seconds, but then she seems to intuit that I won’t reveal my secret no matter how hard she presses me. “I’ll see what I can do. Call me after eight or so?”

  “Before sundown would be better.”

  She draws back her head, once again mistrustful. “What did you do?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Before sunset is tough. There’s too much going on, and too much competition in town. Plus, we already stayed here too long—my fault, I know. Are you sure it can’t be later than that?”

  “I guess later’s okay. But it won’t be as good.”

  She sighs and snaps her bra, then begins hunting her shoes. “Later will have to do. Story of our lives, right?”

  Right.

  CHAPTER 29

  WALT GARRITY PAUSED behind a large oak tree and stared up a hill at the Valhalla hunting lodge. He’d been working his way through the forest of Lusahatcha County for nearly ninety minutes, and he was winded. He’d cut through the game fence a mile south of the main gate, then taken a circuitous path through the hunting camp to avoid the wildlife cameras he saw mounted on pine trees at regular intervals. He could still see the gate in his mind, an enormous wrought-iron thing set between stone pillars. A brass sign on one of the pillars read:

  VALHALLA EXOTIC HUNTING RESERVE

  Absolutely No Trespassing

  Nailed to a tree to the right of the gate was a smaller wooden sign with letters burned into it. Those letters read: FORT KNOX. Beyond the gate, an asphalt road led deep into the forest. Walt had given the road a wide berth, but during his hike into the hunting camp, he’d crossed several logging r
oads that led nowhere, food plots for game, and always the cameras, affixed to trees with plastic flex-cuffs.

  When the lodge appeared through the trees, he approached it with extreme caution. Though the GPS tracker in Drew’s truck had told him Forrest was back at state police headquarters in Baton Rouge, there might be anything from a gang of Double Eagles to a full complement of visiting hunters staying at the camp. As Walt neared the big building, the hum of a central heating unit reached his ears. He paused behind a large thornbush and watched for another five minutes, then made a careful circuit of the house.

  Its rustic appearance was merely an illusion. The rough-hewn timber building was served by both power lines and a massive backup generator, while the telephone wires, satellite dishes, and various antennas made it look more like an army outpost than a hunting camp. Walt saw no vehicles, which encouraged him. Then, to his amazement, he saw that a sliding glass door on a deck at the side of the lodge was standing partly open. Taking a Browning 9 mm from the holster at the small of his back, he moved quickly up to the door and scanned the interior.

  The great room of Valhalla looked as he’d expected: dozens of stuffed animal heads adorned the walls, many of them of African origin. Some appeared to be threatened or endangered species; a fully grown mountain gorilla stood in one corner as though pondering a charge toward the center of the room. A staircase led up to a broad landing on the second floor. Following his instincts, Walt slipped inside, bypassed the stairs, and moved along one wall to a cypress door at the far end of the room.

  Near the door, he noticed a display of weapons on the wall. Most prominent in the rack were four katanas—samurai swords—that appeared to be antiques. To the right of the rack hung the framed photographs Mackiever had told him about early that morning: a Japanese officer with two Caucasian heads hanging from his belt, brandishing a samurai sword; and beside it Sergeant Frank Knox beheading the same officer, who knelt like a slave at his feet. Walt suspected that one of the swords on the wall was the one from the photos, but he didn’t waste time finding out.