The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  “We’re on our way back to the airport,” Carl said. “I was just about to call you and tell you to get out of there.”

  “Why?” Jordan asked, peering into the trees as though an army might emerge from the shadows.

  “We weren’t over Valhalla for more than sixty seconds when the sheriff called us. Somebody at the camp called in and complained. He ordered us to get the hell out of their airspace. Said we were ruining a hunt and spooking their breeding animals. Can you believe that?”

  Jordan was shaking her head. “All that’s academic now,” she said. “We just found a body in the swamp. I presume the sheriff won’t write that off to natural causes.”

  “What do you mean, a body?” Carl asked.

  “A dead man in the water. And he doesn’t have a head. If you guys could start this way, we damsels in distress would sure appreciate it.”

  The radio crackled and hissed for half a minute. Then Carl said, “We’re coming to you. I’ll call you in a few minutes to guide us in.”

  “Thanks. And while you’re at it, would you tell our guide to take us in where we can get an idea of who the deceased might be? Caitlin is worried it might be Dr. Cage.”

  The radio crackled some more. Then Carl said, “Mose, you do whatever those ladies tell you to do, or I’m bustin’ you for all the stuff I know you do when you think we’re looking the other way.”

  In the stern of the johnboat, the old fisherman hung his head.

  “Ten-four,” Jordan said. “I think he got the message. Out.”

  KAISER SHOULD NEVER HAVE asked Sonny Thornfield about JFK. Not until after the plea deal was done. The old Eagle is sitting as smug as a mob soldier who knows his godfather will have him out of jail in time for happy hour at his favorite bar.

  “John, come on,” I say in the most reasonable voice I can muster. “Don’t let him play you like this. How critical is the Kennedy stuff, given the overall situation? Even if he tells you Frank Knox killed JFK? Frank is as dead as Kennedy, and he has been for nearly as long.”

  As tense as a pointer nearing a quail, Kaiser holds up his hand to silence me. “It’s not enough to say Frank killed him. He has to prove Frank killed him. Can you do that, Sonny?”

  Again the little-boy smile animates Sonny’s mouth, and his eyes flicker with secret knowledge. “I can give you chapter and verse, boss. Frank himself told me the story one night, when he’d drunk damn near a gallon of moonshine.”

  Kaiser looks like Ahab after having sighted the milky head and spout of the white whale. Nothing could turn him aside from his obsession now. I feel like slapping him upside the head.

  “He’s read you like a book,” I say angrily. “He’s telling you what you want to hear, and there’s no way to cross-check anything he says. Make him give you details on crimes we know about. The Double Eagle killings. Then we’ll know whether he’s full of shit or not.”

  Thornfield gives me a ratlike glare. “I ain’t sayin’ shit about that until my family is here and they agree to protection.”

  As Kaiser works his mouth around in frustration, my cell phone vibrates. This time, when I take it out of my pocket, I see Carl Sims’s name in the LCD window.

  “Carl?” I ask. “What’s up?”

  A burst of static makes me jerk the phone away from my ear, but then Carl’s voice pops from the speaker with a tinny timbre. “Penn . . . girls found a body . . . swamp. . . . No ID yet. . . . Caitlin trying to reach it. . . . Altitude, Danny. . . . Penn?”

  “Carl!” I cry. “I can’t hear you! The girls found a body?”

  “Ten-four. . . . Lusahatcha Swamp. . . . Haven’t reached it yet. . . . Going down to try to help. . . . Call you soon as we know. . . . Out.”

  My pulse pounds in my ears as the phone goes dead. A body in the swamp? From the sound of Carl’s voice, he wasn’t talking about old bones, but a fresh corpse. An image of my father floating facedown in the swamp rises behind my eyes, and my legs go weak. What if I had to call my mother and tell her that Dad had been found dead? Impossible—

  “What’s happened?” Kaiser asks. “Is it your father?”

  “It sounds like it. Caitlin and Jordan found a body in the swamp. They haven’t ID’d it yet, but Carl wouldn’t have called me unless he was afraid it’s Dad. Goddamn it!”

  I take two steps toward Thornfield, then force myself to stop, my face burning with rage. “Did Snake kill my father and dump him in Lusahatcha Swamp?”

  Sonny gapes at me in genuine terror. “I don’t know! I truly don’t. I hope he didn’t, but he could’ve. Or that Redbone, Ozan. He’s a bad sumbitch.”

  Kaiser pulls me away from Sonny, then interposes himself between us, his back to me.

  “This is getting out of hand, Sonny,” he says in a cold voice. “Let me tell you something. My superiors badly want to talk to Dr. Cage. If he turns out to be dead, it’s going to be tough for me to make any kind of deal for you. My bosses won’t approve it. I can’t believe Snake wouldn’t tell you what he was going to do with him.”

  “That’s the whole ever-lovin’ point!” Sonny cries. “He didn’t trust the rest of us not to break under pressure. Not after what Glenn done. And I reckon he was right not to, wasn’t he?”

  “If I sent you back to the cellblock, could you get it out of Snake?”

  “Shit. I do that, I might as well tell him I’m in here trying to cut a deal with you.”

  “If Snake Knox doesn’t trust you anymore,” Kaiser muses, “I can’t believe Frank Knox ever did. If you want your family brought here on a government plane, you’ve got to give me something to justify your deal.”

  Thornfield grimaces so hard he bares his teeth, which makes him look like a possum cornered between two garbage cans.

  “Look, I know,” he insists. “I know all there is to know—twice as much as Glenn ever did. But how can I prove it without giving away the store?”

  While Kaiser wrestles with this dilemma, my mind fills with an image of Caitlin rolling over a bloated white body in the black water of the Lusahatcha Swamp. I’ve seen many floaters in my career, rotted and half eaten by turtles, snake, and fish. I can’t bear thinking about my mother having to view my father’s body in such a state. I’m not sure I could bear it myself.

  “Turn off the camera, John,” I say sharply.

  “What?”

  “Just do it. And find us a bedsheet to cover the observation mirror.”

  “What exactly do you have in mind?” he asks, getting up and walking to the camcorder.

  “A way for Sonny to let us know what he knows without implicating himself or giving away the store.”

  Sonny looks worried now. “I ain’t saying nothing you guys can record. I know you got all kinds of fancy hidden microphones and shit.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” I assure him.

  “Then what is it?”

  “Have you ever worked a jigsaw puzzle, Sonny?”

  He gives me the cornered possum look again, but finally he nods.

  “This is just like that.” I sit down in Kaiser’s chair and start writing in his notebook. “Get the bedsheet for the mirror, John. You’ll need some duct tape to hold it up.”

  “All right, hell. But I’m not leaving you in here alone with him. I’ll send one of my men.”

  As he goes to the door, I begin writing words across the top of a page.

  VICTIM

  KILLER(S)

  WEAPON/METHOD

  DUMP SITE

  “And bring some scissors, too.”

  Kaiser pauses at the door. “You can’t bring scissors into an interrogation room.”

  I look up angrily. “You want to break these cases? Bring me some goddamn scissors!”

  FORREST HAD FINALLY TIRED of fighting the wind out on the deck. He’d moved into the great room of the Bouchard lake house, and Ozan had built a fire in the stone fireplace. A hidden gas jet made it easy work, and Forrest had moved forward to warm his hands when his cracked StarTac rang.

&
nbsp; “I’m waiting,” he said.

  “Bad news,” said Spanky Ford. “I think one of your guys may be talking.”

  A shiver ran the length of Forrest’s body. “Who?”

  “Thornfield.”

  Sonny? he thought skeptically. But after a few seconds, it made sense. Sonny was probably the smartest of the Eagles. He would sense that things were spinning out of control. And Sonny had family that didn’t actually hate him outright.

  “They’ve got him locked in the main interrogation room,” Ford said. “Snake and Will Devine are locked in questioning rooms, too, but there’s nobody in with them. I think Kaiser stuck them in there so they wouldn’t know what was going on.”

  “Have you told Snake about this?”

  “I just managed to before an FBI agent took up station in front of his door.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said tell you that Dr. Cage is alive but he’s where he can’t hurt anybody. Don’t waste effort looking for him, Snake said.”

  Relief washed through Forrest. If Tom Cage was alive, then he still had some flexibility in dealing with Penn Cage and his fiancée. Of course, if Sonny Thornfield turned state’s evidence, everybody was going down. Then a new possibility came to him.

  “Deputy . . . do you think Snake was telling the truth about Dr. Cage?”

  Ford didn’t answer immediately. Then he said, “I didn’t know he might have a reason to lie, Colonel. I really couldn’t say, sir.”

  “Okay. But you believe Sonny’s really flipping?”

  “All I know is, Cage and Kaiser are the only ones in there with him, and they’ve taped a sheet over the observation window.”

  “Okay.” Forrest thought furiously. “Here’s what I want you to do. The first chance you get to pass a message to Snake, tell him I said to get ready to shut down any talk, and for good. Tell him I’ll get him his chance. Snake will know when to move. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ll have a job, too, but I’ll get back to you with it.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Last thing . . . you tell Snake he’d better bring Dr. Cage to me on a silver platter after I get him out of there.”

  “Will do, Colonel. Is there—”

  “Boss!” Ozan called, walking into the room with an armload of firewood. “I got news! Good and bad. What you want first?”

  “Gimme the bad. Is Dr. Cage dead?”

  “I don’t know, but the Black Team found the guys they left to guard the doc tied up in the Roadtrek at the back of that oil field. They said Snake and his crew took the doc, all right. They’re ready to rip his lungs out.”

  Forrest nodded slowly. He’d never really doubted that Snake had taken Dr. Cage. The question was, what had he done with him?

  “What’s the good news?”

  “One of our highway units stopped Claude Devereux on the causeway outside Lafayette.”

  Forrest pumped a fist in the air. “I’ve got to go,” he told Ford. “You tell Snake what I said.”

  “I will if I can.”

  “And call me in fifteen minutes if they’re still talking to Thornfield.”

  “Will do. Out.”

  Forrest clicked off and pocketed his phone, then turned to Ozan. “You tell whoever stopped Claude to escort him all the way back to his office in Vidalia. And if Claude raises a fuss, arrest him.”

  Ozan nodded. “So Dr. Cage is alive?”

  Forrest blew out a lungful of air. “I don’t know. Snake sent word that he is, but that doesn’t mean a thing now. He’s just trying to get out from under those meth charges. For all I know, the doc has been dead since last night.”

  CHAPTER 61

  TO SPARE MYSELF the torture of waiting to hear whether or not the body in the swamp belongs to my father, I’ve designed a puzzle that will allow Sonny Thornfield to tell us what he knows without it being recorded in any way. I did this by drawing a grid on a piece of notebook paper, then listing the known murder victims vertically on the left side of the page. Across the top I created columns for the killers, the murder weapons or torture methods, the dump sites. Then I gridded a second page and filled it with names, murder weapons, torture methods, and dump sites (multiple copies of each place name). Finally, using Kaiser’s scissors, I cut that page into small rectangles with one word on each. As I did this, an FBI agent helped Kaiser tape a bedsheet over the one-way observation mirror. And though he did it quietly, I also heard Kaiser post an FBI guard at the cellblock door with orders not to let me inside under any circumstances. After what he witnessed in the utility closet, he isn’t going to let me near Snake Knox again.

  With the interrogation room’s two doors shut and the camcorder unplugged, I spread the columned page on the table in front of Sonny Thornfield and pile the rectangular “puzzle pieces” beside it. Then Kaiser and I take up stations on either side of the old man so that we can watch his progress, like parents watching a toddler work a puzzle.

  Thornfield is hesitant to begin, but Kaiser finally convinces him we have no way to record what he might do. That’s the beauty of this method. The revelation only exists for a moment, and once the puzzle is completed, Sonny can simply toss the rectangles in the air, obliterating all evidence of what he’s “told” us.

  After staring at the collection of names and words for a while, Sonny finally sets to work. His wrinkled hands move tentatively across the page, trembling as though he’s in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Time seems to slow as the quivering hands slide the rectangles across the page, and every second that ticks by feels like weight being piled on my heart. At any moment Carl Sims could call back and say they’ve found my father dead.

  I feel trapped in some bizarre, real-world demonstration of the physics paradox known as Schrödinger’s cat. At this moment, while an old murderer uses a child’s puzzle to reveal the knowledge that resides in his aging brain, a body floats facedown in the Lusahatcha Swamp. At this moment, that body both is and is not my father. It exists as a superposition of probabilities, and I must somehow hold myself together while accepting both outcomes as possible. But soon Caitlin—or Carl Sims, or Jordan Glass—will turn that body over, and all possible states will collapse into the single observed reality: the corpse will either be my dead father or it will not. And even if one believes that this choice has already been made, or is known, until it is made known to me, both realities must be endured.

  “Look,” Kaiser whispers, pointing over Sonny’s shoulder.

  Thornfield hasn’t filled in the second column—the killers’ identities—but the third and fourth columns: the weapons and methods of torture or killing, and the dump sites.

  Albert Norris flamethrower

  Pooky Wilson flamethrower Bone Tree

  Joe Louis Lewis flayed Bone Tree

  Jimmy Revels shot Bone Tree

  Luther Davis shot, drowned Jericho Hole

  Viola Turner overdose Home

  Glenn Morehouse overdose Home

  “You haven’t filled in the killers’ column,” Kaiser points out. “I get you leaving the dump site blank for Norris, because he died in the hospital. But if you want lifetime protection for your family, you’ve got to give me every name of the killers.”

  Sonny looks up like a reluctant child. Then, slowly, he tears off a new sheet of paper, writes about twenty names on it—many of them repetitions—and asks Kaiser to cut them into rectangles. Once Kaiser has complied, Sonny slides most of the new squares onto the paper. After he’s finished, Kaiser stands so still that I’m sure he’s stopped breathing. The first two columns of the puzzle now read:

  Albert Norris Frank

  Royal

  Snake

  Glenn

  Pooky Wilson Frank

  Snake

  Royal

  Joe Louis Lewis Frank

  Snake

  Glenn

  Jimmy Revels Snake

  Glenn

  Forrest

  Royal
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  Luther Davis Snake

  Viola Turner

  Glenn Morehouse Royal

  Snake

  Forrest

  As I stare at the gridded page, I note that our prisoner has not only omitted his own name from every murder, he’s listed no killers beside Viola Turner’s name. Before I can comment on this, he lifts the makeshift puzzle and shakes it in the air, creating a snowstorm of paper. While the rectangles flutter to the floor, he puts his head down on his desk like a schoolboy.

  I give Kaiser an angry, questioning look.

  “All right, Sonny,” he says, “we’ve got two problems. First, if you’re not willing to implicate yourself, this is worthless. You’ll be given immunity, but you have to tell the whole truth. And second, we need to know who killed Viola.”

  “I need to know my grandkids are safe,” Sonny replies without looking up. “I ain’t saying nothing else, or doing no more damn puzzles.”

  Crouching beside the table, I look into Thornfield’s one exposed eye. “Did you love your father, Sonny?”

  The eye widens, then blinks slowly. “My father?”

  “You see . . . if that corpse in the swamp turns out to be my father, my mother won’t be able to stand it. My little girl, either.”

  “They can stand it,” he says. “People can stand almost anything, when they have to.”

  Kaiser taps my shoulder, but I don’t move. “I’m not letting myself believe that corpse is my dad, Sonny. Any minute, I’m going to get a call saying it was some other poor bastard who crossed the Knox family. And when that happens, you’re going to go back into the cellblock and find out where Snake took my father.”

  “Get up, Penn,” Kaiser says sharply.

  As I stand, I say, “If you don’t, I’m going to flush this deal you two are making straight down the toilet.”

  “No, he won’t,” Kaiser says, pulling at my arm. “He can’t, Sonny.”

  “You don’t think so? All I have to do is let Forrest Knox know who’s been blabbing in here. I talked to him face-to-face less than an hour ago, and I’ve got a phone that’ll put me right back in touch with him.”

  Thornfield’s eyes have locked onto mine, and the terror in them gives a measure of the fear Forrest inspires in his ranks.