The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  Walt felt some trepidation as Darius went to the door to summon Mr. Early to the Lincoln, but once the owner of the funeral home stopped gawking at Tom’s missing beard, he couldn’t move quickly enough to please his guest. Two minutes after they’d pulled up, Jim Early was letting them into the funeral home through the back door.

  Tom thanked Darius and asked if he’d mind going to a convenience store and picking up a couple of Diet Cokes, and their driver agreed without a word. Walt didn’t like the idea of losing their transportation, but once again Tom ignored his concern.

  Mr. Early led them to the room where the pre-service visitation was to be held for Sexton. A gleaming metal casket lay at the head of the room, already surrounded by flowers. By necessity, Early informed them solemnly, the funeral would be a closed-casket affair. The reporter had been burned beyond all recognition. Brody Royal had suffered the same fate. After shaking both their hands, Early excused himself to begin preparations for the day’s operations.

  Walt told Tom to get on with his business, since they were basically sitting ducks. Tom had already arranged his surrender to the FBI, but Agent Kaiser didn’t expect him to turn up until midway through the church service, after the crowd had been seated. Walt had brought a pistol along, but he knew better than to think he’d get the drop on another state trooper like he had with the one by the borrow pits. This time, if the staties came, it’d be the SWAT boys with body armor, tactical sights, and pump Remingtons.

  Tom walked up to the casket and laid his hand on the lid, right about where Henry’s chest would be. He was speaking softly when a woman who had to be eighty entered the back of the room. She started when Walt nodded at her, as if shocked to find someone here. But then, after staring at Tom’s back for a while, something in her gaze softened, and she shuffled forward.

  Walt followed softly behind her, more out of curiosity than anything. As she neared the coffin, Tom turned and looked at her. Walt saw then that his friend’s eyes were wet. Tom held out his right hand to the woman.

  “Hello, Virginia.”

  The newcomer gave Tom her quivering hand, and Walt saw that it was a working woman’s hand, callused and scaly from many washings.

  “Dr. Cage?” she said hesitantly. “Is that you?” She laughed self-consciously. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  “It’s quite all right, Virginia. I shaved my beard.”

  Mrs. Sexton looked blankly around the room, then shook her head like someone lost. “Lord, Doc . . . you’re one of the few people I could stand seeing right now. What are you doing here?”

  Tom’s face reddened. “I came to pay my respects to your son. You may have heard that the police are looking for me, and I hope you’re not offended.”

  Mrs. Sexton dismissed his concern. “No, no. I’m glad to see you. You were so good to us back in the old days. It meant so much to me, and to Henry.”

  “I was just doing my job, Virginia.”

  “Oh, no. You do your work the way my Henry always did his. It’s not a job to you. It’s a calling. That’s mighty rare these days, I’m sad to say.”

  Tom nodded. “Henry was working with my daughter-in-law, you know. Caitlin Masters. Or my future daughter-in-law, I should say. I lost her yesterday. She was killed by the same bunch that got your boy.”

  Mrs. Sexton laid her hand on Tom’s forearm and squeezed, and her eyes said, Have strength.

  “Caitlin loved to chase big stories,” Tom said. “And she was good at it. But your son was different. He reminded me of my boy, actually. Henry was a crusader, like Penn. He didn’t work for the glory, but for truth. For real justice. That’s what’s rare in this day and age. You taught him well, Virginia. Henry believed right and wrong are as plain as day and night, and it’s a man’s duty to stand up and be counted, no matter what the cost.”

  Tears welled in Mrs. Sexton’s eyes, then slid down her cheeks. She did not wipe them. “You’re right, Doc. But Lord, what that costs.”

  “The last full measure,” Tom said softly.

  “Beg ’pardon?”

  “I was quoting President Lincoln. Henry gave the last full measure of devotion to his cause.”

  “Oh . . . yes. I remember now,” Mrs. Sexton said in a voice of detached wonder. “Did I have to memorize that in school?”

  “You probably did.”

  Virginia Sexton looked over at Walt, who smiled awkwardly, being a stranger. Then she said, “Dr. Cage, I wonder if I could ask you something?”

  “Anything.”

  “It would mean the world to me if you would say a few words over Henry. It would have meant a lot to him, too.”

  Tom looked stunned by her request. “Actually—”

  “Don’t say no, now. I struggled and fretted over who to ask for a eulogy, and I’d about decided on his publisher. But somehow I just haven’t felt settled with it. And the way you put that just now . . . that’s what I want people to understand about my boy. And coming from you, well, it would really mean something. Everybody knows what kind of man you are, no matter what any law says. Folks know you. And they care about what you say.”

  “Actually, I came here expressly to ask you if I might say a few words during the service.”

  The old woman’s eyes brightened. “Really?”

  “Yes. Henry’s passing affected me a lot more than you might suspect. It made me realize some things about myself.”

  Mrs. Sexton looked flabbergasted by this turn of events. “Well, I never . . . of course. You say whatever you feel called to.”

  Tom took Mrs. Sexton’s hands in his and squeezed them. “I’m going to leave you alone with him now, Virginia. But I’ll see you at the service. And if you would, please don’t mention to anyone that I’ll be speaking. I’ll have Mr. Early inform the pastor.”

  “I understand. But . . . could you stay here a little longer, Doc? You see, I don’t have anybody left now that Henry’s gone.”

  Tom looked back and gave Walt an apologetic glance, then put his right arm around Mrs. Sexton and stood before the coffin in silence. Walt wondered what his friend was thinking. Tom never went to funerals, seeing them as a reminder that in the end, a physician always lost his battles with death. For his part, Walt was thinking about the hours still to pass between now and the moment when the FBI would take Tom into protective custody. So long as they were in Louisiana, someone could alert Forrest or Snake Knox to that fact. And if they did, then Mr. Early would be doing a land-office business in caskets before the day was through.

  CHAPTER 85

  “FBI’S PULLING OUT,” said Alphonse Ozan. “I just got word. They’re staying down at the Bone Tree, but they’re pulling out of the lodge.”

  “Wasn’t anything there for them to find,” Forrest said.

  The two men faced each other across Forrest’s kitchen counter. His wife had left for her yoga class fifteen minutes ago, and Forrest had brewed a second pot of coffee.

  “So what now?” Ozan asked.

  “We go right back in there like we have nothing to hide. I’ll call Billy and get him headed toward Valhalla in his plane. I want Kaiser and Mackiever to see I’m going to brazen this through.”

  “And Snake?”

  “Snake did what he said he was going to do. At this point, the best thing is to let him be himself. Given what I read in the paper this morning, I’m betting somebody’s not going to live through this day.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’ll make one prediction. The mayor’s under round-the-clock protection, but I think there’s a good chance he’ll show up at Henry Sexton’s funeral. Dr. Cage will want to go too, out of guilt, but he won’t be able to risk it. There’s bound to be some FBI agents there—paying their respects, if nothing else.”

  “You think Mayor Cage will want go to that funeral right after his fiancée was killed?”

  “Especially after that. I figured he might be a pallbearer, but he’s not.”

  Ozan looked unconvinced. “Wou
ld Snake really try to hit Cage at a funeral with FBI agents present?”

  “Why not? This isn’t like the hospital, where he had to shoot through glass. The service is at Early’s Funeral Home. Mourners have to walk in from their cars, then walk out again. Probably wait in line, too, at this service. Snake could stand off with his sniper rifle, pop anybody he wants from five or six hundred yards out, and still get away clean.”

  Ozan thought about this. “I guess it’s a good thing he’s not coming after us, huh, boss?”

  Forrest felt a ripple of foreboding along the skin of his arms. “You’re damn right. Snake’s gotta believe we’re on his side right up to the second I put a hollow-point in his head.”

  THE TWENTY-EIGHT-STORY state capitol building dominated the Baton Rouge cityscape like a spike against the sky, and it was the key offices in that building to which Colonel Griffith Mackiever had been trying to gain access for two days. Stymied at every turn, he’d finally been forced to settle for a glass-and-steel box within sight of the capitol: a branch of one of the wealthiest private banks in Louisiana. Victor Marchand, its chairman, was not only an architect of the secret plan to transform post-Katrina New Orleans into a much whiter city that could bring back the corporate tenants it had lost in recent decades, but also one of Forrest Knox’s most powerful supporters in his bid to be the next superintendent of state police. Marchand’s influence in the political corridors of Baton Rouge was second only to his power within the less visible conclaves of New Orleans. Short of the capitol, there was no better place to test the power of the weapon Walt Garrity had given Mackiever than Marchand’s office.

  The colonel watched the banker sit behind his desk and fold his arms in what Mackiever could only interpret as a combative position. A handsome and urbane fifty-five, Marchand was dressed to the nines—probably for some fund-raising luncheon—but Mackiever couldn’t imagine an honest citizen giving this man any money. An executive assistant stood behind his boss like a cross between a bodyguard and an attack dog.

  “I assume,” said the banker, “you understand that I don’t relish being asked to come into my office on a Saturday to see a child molester.”

  “Alleged child molester,” Mackiever said, nervously gripping the notebook computer in his lap.

  “It’s only at the strong insistence of the FBI that I’ve agreed to see you.”

  But here you sit, Mackiever thought. After being publicly pilloried by the media, he could not deny the degree to which he would enjoy the next two minutes.

  “I’m sorry to have to say this,” said Marchand, not sounding sorry at all, “but I see absolutely no reason to postpone your resignation, which frankly we expected long before now. No matter what you have to show me, neither I nor my associates in government can possibly intervene in a matter that will soon be under adjudication. We’re going to have to let law enforcement and the courts settle this.”

  Mackiever opened his computer and made sure it was powered up with the appropriate file cued in the viewing program.

  “I hope that contains your resignation letter,” the banker said.

  Mackiever stepped forward and set the computer on the desk, the screen facing Marchand. “If you’ll just hit Play, I think you’ll understand a lot better where things actually stand.”

  “What am I about to see?” the banker asked irritably. “Not anything illegal, I hope?”

  “Very much so, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not going to look at child pornography.”

  “Just hit Play. You’ll understand.”

  After a heavy sigh, Marchand started the video. Mackiever knew from watching Kaiser’s face what he should expect, or he thought he did. But the banker’s eyes went so wide during the executions that he looked as though he were watching the kiddie porn that Mackiever had been accused of trafficking in.

  “Are those men doing the firing police officers?” he asked.

  “At least two are. And they are under the direct command of Forrest Knox.”

  Marchand swallowed, then glanced at his assistant. “When did this happen?”

  “One day after the storm made landfall, before General Honoré took over the city.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And who was that I saw shot?”

  “Drug dealers. Specifically, African-American drug dealers.”

  “Why were they shot like that?”

  “Because they were cutting into the profits of Forrest Knox’s ongoing drug operations. And by that I do not mean his anti-drug law enforcement operations. I mean his family’s drug sales operations.”

  The banker blinked in disbelief. “Are you saying—”

  “That Forrest Knox uses his troops as a private enforcement arm of his family’s drug smuggling and sales organization? Yes.”

  Marchand closed his eyes. He had just glimpsed the beginning of a PR disaster that could bring down not only politicians, but also any known private sponsor of the man who had ordered these murders.

  “Do you have proof of what you just said?” Marchand asked.

  Mackiever let the banker twist in the wind for a few seconds, so he could better appreciate the abyss yawning beneath him. “As we speak, the FBI is interviewing the man giving the kill order in that video.”

  Marchand’s face went completely white. “You went to the Bureau before you came to us?”

  “No one in the state government would even return my calls. About the manufactured charges Knox leveled against me? They went straight to the media and called for my head.”

  “But this could destroy . . . destroy the effectiveness of the state police for years.”

  “It could destroy a lot more than that,” Mackiever said softly.

  Marchand looked back at his assistant, who obviously had nothing to offer.

  “Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “What are we going to do about this?”

  LESS THAN FIVE MILES from Victor Marchand’s bank, Special Agent John Kaiser sat in the backseat of a black FBI Suburban. Beside him sat the state police sergeant whom Griffith Mackiever’s son-in-law had finally identified as the man giving the kill order in the Katrina sniping video. Kaiser’s agents had snatched the sergeant right off the street as he walked out of a coffee shop down the block from the parking lot where they now sat, watched over by four heavily armed FBI agents.

  “You can’t fuckin’ do this,” the sergeant growled. “I don’t give a shit who you are. There’s laws in this country.”

  “And you’ve broken the most serious of them,” Kaiser said calmly. “Keep your eyes on the screen.”

  Once the filmed replay of the murder began, the SWAT sergeant knew exactly what he was about to see. He didn’t wait for the shots to begin defending himself. His first instinct was to use the classic Nazi defense—I was just following orders—only in this case he was clearly the man giving the orders.

  Kaiser finally silenced him with a wave of his hand.

  “You’re not under arrest,” Kaiser said. “Although I’ll be happy to oblige you right now if you’d prefer it. Second, we are operating well outside the parameters of what you think of as normal procedure. The special provisions of the Patriot Act give me truly frightening power over your ass, so please keep your mouth shut while I finish. You have only two choices: one, you turn state’s evidence and tell us everything you know about Forrest Knox and his illegal activities before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina—”

  The SWAT sergeant’s eyes bugged.

  “Or two, you become the epicenter of the biggest police scandal in modern American history, after which you spend the rest of your life in a maximum-security prison, praying that no relatives of the black drug dealers you murdered during the storm put out a gang hit on you behind bars.”

  The SWAT officer turned to stare out the window at the people walking up and down the street. The world of which they were a part had just shifted forever beyond his reach.

  “Forrest Knox will never be head of the state police,” Kaiser said wit
h finality. “Somebody in this video is going to flip. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather risk Forrest’s retribution than what will happen to the guys in this video once it hits the Internet, and you’re all identified.”

  It took the sergeant less than a minute to make up his mind. He insisted on speaking to a lawyer before signing any plea agreement, but in principle he agreed to give up everything. After all, he had no blood stake in the Knox organization.

  “One thing,” Kaiser said, as an agent in the front seat put the Suburban into gear. “Do you know if Forrest is planning any sort of hit today?”

  The sergeant shook his head. “Not that I know of. But he ain’t the one I’d worry about. I’d worry about Snake. ’Cause that motherfucker is crazy.”

  Duly noted, Kaiser thought.

  “Two of my agents will drive you to our New Orleans field office,” he said. “Your attorney can see you there. This is obviously a politically sensitive matter, so we’ll play it by ear as the day progresses.”

  Kaiser leaned over the sergeant and opened the door, and two FBI agents unceremoniously pulled the man from the vehicle, then closed the door.

  Kaiser tapped the shoulder of his driver. “Let’s get back to Concordia Parish, and fast. We’ve got a funeral to go to.”

  CHAPTER 86

  WHEN I ENTER the broad door of the AME Church for Henry Sexton’s funeral, less than eighteen hours have passed since I cradled Caitlin in the shadow of the Bone Tree. Were it not for Annie, I probably would not have come here. But after awakening groggily from what I would soon learn was drugged sleep, I found her sitting beside my bed, dressed for church.

  “Where are you going?” I asked her.

  “We’re going to Mr. Sexton’s funeral,” she said.

  I blinked and tried to think of ways to dissuade her, but before I could voice the first objection, Annie said, “That’s where Caitlin would be today, and she’d want us to go in her place.”