The Bone Tree

by Greg Iles

  As the excited mourners stream outside, and a couple of the journalists scrawl in notebooks produced from their suit jackets, Annie tugs at my sleeve. When I look down, I see her holding Caitlin’s cell phone to her ear. Her eyes are wide with an emotion I cannot read.

  “Daddy, you need to listen to this.”

  “What, Boo?”

  “I finally broke Caitlin’s passcode! She left a message on her phone.”

  Only then do I remember that Caitlin originally bought the Treo because it had a Voice Memo function that allowed up to an hour of voice recording, an invaluable tool for a journalist. “That’s a new phone, Boo, but she’s probably got an hour of memos on there already. I’ll listen to them after we get home.”

  As Annie speaks again, a commotion erupts outside, so loud that I can hear it through the back wall. Several voices shout out for someone to stop something, and then “Leave him alone!”

  “Daddy?” Annie asks worriedly.

  “Dr. Cage!” someone screams.

  Caitlin’s cell phone forgotten, I grab Annie’s hand and race through the door by the altar, into the blinding sunlight.

  “Over there!” Annie cries, pointing at the crowded parking lot.

  A burly man in a black T-shirt is gripping my father’s arm with one hand and aiming a pistol at him with the other. Four FBI agents and Walt Garrity have surrounded the gunman, but they seem helpless as the big man yells, “This man’s a fugitive! I’m making a lawful arrest!”

  Only when I get close enough to read BAIL RECOVERY AGENT on the T-shirt do I understand what’s happening. Half of Kaiser’s men have their weapons out, but they’re not aiming them at the bounty hunter yet.

  “Penn, do something!” cries my mother, who’s being restrained by an FBI agent.

  “Everybody back off!” the big man yells. “This man’s wanted for the capital murder of a Louisiana State Police officer! I’m taking him into custody.”

  As I let go of Annie and run toward the group, Walt’s hand disappears under his jacket. A voice that sounds like Kaiser’s yells for Walt to stop, but Kaiser might as well have shouted for a meteor not to fall. Out comes a black semiautomatic, and Walt orders the bounty hunter to release my father. Recognizing the steel of an armed lawman’s voice, the bounty hunter turns toward Walt and finds the barrel in his face.

  “Texas Rangers,” Walt says. “Just take your mitts off him, junior. Nice and easy.”

  “Take it easy, Captain Garrity,” Kaiser says in a level voice, motioning for his agents to holster their weapons. “Put that gun away.”

  The bounty hunter stares back at Walt, and then his eyes narrow in suspicion. “Texas Ranger, my ass. This son of a bitch is wanted, too! What the hell’s going on around here?”

  “You’re disturbing a funeral,” Walt says with eerie calm. “And that’s bad manners in any jurisdiction.”

  “Manners?” the big man scoffs. “I just made a lawful arrest. There’s a hundred witnesses here. You’ll get the death penalty if you shoot me in front of all these people.”

  Walt shakes his head so slightly that only the men who have witnessed lethal violence realize how close they are to it.

  “I’m Special Agent John Kaiser, FBI,” Kaiser says to the bounty hunter. “I’ve already taken Dr. Cage into protective custody. If you don’t holster that weapon and leave now, you’ll be spending tonight in a federal lockup.”

  This threat should be sufficient to defuse the situation, yet somehow it doesn’t. I can’t understand why the bounty hunter would disobey Kaiser unless . . . unless he’s waiting for some kind of backup.

  “John, you need to get Dad out of here,” I say in a taut voice. “Right now. Walt, too, if you can. Something’s wrong about this.”

  “Put down that gun, Garrity,” Kaiser orders.

  “Him first,” Walt says, and for the first time I sense that Walt may be the sanest one of us.

  I step closer to Kaiser. “This guy could be working with Forrest, John. He could be waiting for state SWAT to show, or for a kill shot to come out of the trees across the road.”

  This prospect galvanizes Kaiser beyond anything I expected. He whips out his service weapon and plants its barrel on the temple of the bounty hunter. “You’re under arrest for violation of the USA PATRIOT Act. Drop your weapon now or I will fire. You have three seconds. One, two—”

  “Wait! Shit!” The bounty hunter’s gun hits the ground and his hands fly skyward, his eyes bugging in shock and fear.

  Two FBI agents hustle him through the crowd, while another jerks Walt’s pistol from his hand. One agent starts to arrest Walt, but Kaiser waves him off. Then I hear tires spinning as an FBI vehicle leaves the lot, hurling gravel behind it.

  The standoff has stunned everyone within sight of it. The faces in the crowd run the gamut from green looks of seasickness to fascinated stares. As I pull Annie into my arms, a black Suburban with tinted windows rumbles up beside Dad, who is hugging my mother like he’ll never see her again. Kaiser gently separates them, then shepherds my father toward an open door halfway down the passenger side. Dad turns, possibly looking for me, but I look down and put an arm around Annie’s shoulders so that I don’t have to endure whatever he wants to communicate to me.

  After he’s been closed into the SUV, it waits only for Kaiser to board. The FBI agent climbs in, then rolls down the window and addresses us through it. “We’ve federalized the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office. I emptied out the jail. Let us get Dr. Cage processed into custody, and then you can see him.”

  My mother clenches Kaiser’s hand and thanks him, and then the Suburban speeds away. As Mom falls into my arms, I hear a strange whir to my right. Turning, I see Quentin Avery rolling up in his motorized wheelchair. Despite missing both legs, he manages to look more debonair than any male present, thanks to his still-handsome face and his five-thousand-dollar suit.

  At least a hundred people stand behind him, watching expectantly. Beyond them I see Swan Norris on the church steps, looking serene and resigned as people mob her with what politeness they can manage. Her grandson, too, is shaking hands with well-wishers. Quentin rotates his chair to face the mourners and, in the voice of a man with an enviable ability to stop and smell the roses, says, “That Swan sure sang Sam Cooke pretty, didn’t she?”

  “She sho’ did,” someone agrees.

  Annie tugs anxiously at my trousers. “Daddy, where were they taking Papa?”

  I lean down and give her a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t worry, Boo. Mr. Quentin’s going to take care of Papa.”

  “How? That man with the gun looked really mean. The guys in the black truck looked scary, too.”

  Quentin leans toward her with a confident smile and then winks. “Don’t you worry, pretty girl. Bullies are my specialty.”

  “But they were a lot bigger than you are. And . . .”

  The old lion’s smile broadens. “And they’re not in a wheelchair?” Quentin reaches out and taps Annie’s forehead. “Looks can be deceiving, darling. That’s an important lesson. Ask your daddy about it on the way home.” He gives me a mock salute. “I’m off, my brother. Keep your chin up, and remember what’s important.”

  “Which is?”

  “Those women on either side of you.”

  As Quentin’s wheelchair hums off toward a white Mercedes van, Doris Avery climbs out and opens the side door, then deploys the ramp. She sees me watching, but she does not wave. This is exactly the kind of situation she wanted to avoid when she urged Quentin not to take Dad’s case, which already seems a lifetime ago.

  Looking around for Mom, I see that Walt has taken her aside to explain what happened with the bounty hunter. For a brief moment I feel released from the weight of supporting her, and into that vacuum rushes all my grief and anger at my father. The logistics of getting to Henry’s funeral—and the intensity of the event itself—had distracted me from it for a while, but now the nearly unendurable reality returns with shattering force: Caitlin is sti
ll dead, and two days from now we have another funeral to attend.

  “Daddy?” says Annie. “You need to listen to that message now.”

  “I told you, babe, I’ll listen to it when we get home. I promise.”

  “Now,” she insists, her face angry. “It’s important!”

  There’s a desperate note in my daughter’s voice that I can’t ignore. “All right. Okay. You start it for me.”

  Annie goes to work on the keypad with fingers as deft as her mother’s once were—and Caitlin’s, too.

  “The passcode was ya’ll’s wedding day,” she says. “Or what it was supposed to be. All numbers. Lean down by me to listen.”

  I do.

  Annie presses a button, and then—as though calling from some plane beyond the grave—the second love of my life begins to speak in a strained whisper:

  “Penn . . . this may be the last time you hear my voice. I’ve been shot. In the heart, according to your father.” The rasp of labored breathing comes from the phone’s tiny speaker. “Tom was . . . trying to help me, but his hands were cuffed, and . . . now he’s passed out. I’m afraid he may be dead. I’m going to try to save myself, but . . . in case something goes wrong . . . I want to tell you some things—”

  “Daddy?” Annie asks, her eyes wide. “Daddy, are you okay?”

  CHAPTER 88

  THE ROAD FROM the AME Church to the Valhalla Exotic Hunting Reserve has passed like a hallucination. I couldn’t say whether I’ve been driving thirty seconds, thirty minutes, or thirty hours. All the way I’ve played back Caitlin’s last words, spoken into her cell phone before she performed that last, desperate self-mutilation in an effort to save her life. Her message is a sequence of broken sentences punctuated by gasps, gurgles, wheezes, and wracking coughs. Each sound of distress makes it plain that she has little time to live. Yet I’m as powerless to stop listening to it as I am to stop breathing.

  “I did something stupid, Penn. . . . I went looking for the Bone Tree by myself. I found it and . . . got myself shot . . . my own damn fault. A black kid offered to show it to me and . . . because he was black . . . I just assumed we were on the same side. Anyway . . . he shot me with a .22. Otherwise I’d be dead. . . . I scared him away with my pistol, but . . . doesn’t matter now . . . wasn’t him anyway. . . . Forrest Knox . . . did this to me. The kid . . . who shot me told me . . . Forrest promised to get his brother paroled . . . from Angola . . . if he killed me.

  “After the boy ran . . . I realized Tom was in the tree . . . don’t know how he got there. He was unconscious . . . sugar shock, I think. . . . Thought he was dead at first . . . revived him with . . . a goddamn peppermint. I’m sorry I sound this way. . . . Veins in my neck are filling up. . . . Can’t get my breath. Tom said I have . . . pericardial something . . . my heart’s being smothered by blood . . . in the sac around it. Sorry . . . the point was to tell you some things. . . . I feel like that guy on Mount Everest . . . who got to talk to his wife on the radio before the end. . . . I heard a chopper a couple of minutes ago. I hope it’s you . . . or at least Danny and Carl. Anyway . . . here goes nothing.”

  There were more savage wheezes, and then she said, “First, I love you. I . . . don’t know why the hell we waited so long . . . to get married. . . . Stupid, I guess. Second . . . you have to forgive your father. There’s stuff . . . stuff you need to know. Viola and Tom killed Frank Knox. . . . Frank was hurt, but . . . Viola finished him off. She shot his heart full of air . . . and Tom stood by while he died. . . . Covered it up. That’s why Tom kept silent all those years. . . . He thought Viola would go to prison . . . he’d be jailed and taken from his family, or . . . killed by the Double Eagles. . . . Oh, God, I feel like my neck’s going to burst. . . . I don’t want to pass out.”

  There was only gasping and wheezing for a few seconds, and when Caitlin spoke again, her voice was much weaker, and far less coherent. “. . . to think about. . . . Forrest raped Viola . . . when he was a teenager. He raped another woman, too . . . here at the Bone Tree. . . . I think Forrest may be Lincoln’s father. . . . Look at his skin color. Anyway . . . can’t believe I actually found the Bone Tree. . . . I’m leaning against the thing . . . but didn’t find what I was really looking for. . . . Tell John that Frank Knox kept something . . . something from the assassination. . . . It tied him to Marcello. . . . Frank killed JFK, Penn. . . . I believe that now. . . . Tell John to look for a letter written in Russian. . . . Snake told Morehouse about it. . . .”

  At this point her voice constricted into a strangled squawk, and I feared I would hear no more. Then she coughed and somehow went on:

  “I’ve got my multi-tool . . . tell Jordan it saved me . . . fucking pen in my chest. . . . Need some kind of suction . . . but Tom can’t help me. . . . I’m afraid he’s dead, Penn. . . . Oh, God. . . . If I don’t make it, tell Annie . . . I loved her . . . like she was my own. . . . I want to tell her myself, though, because . . . I don’t want to die in this fucking swamp. Okay . . . this is me, babe, signing off. . . . Heard rotors again . . . hope to God you’re in that chopper. . . . Don’t ever blame yourself for this. . . . I asked for it and . . . I got it. I love you. . . . Bye for now.”

  The first ten times I listened to this recording, her voice was like a blade shaving shreds of muscle from my heart. Then I started to curse Caitlin for talking so long, talking to me when she could have been trying to save herself. But finally I realized the terrible truth: she’d known all along that without my father’s help her efforts would be futile. Whatever she said into that cell phone would be the last words I would ever hear from her. Typical that she spent so much of that precious time catching me up on facts, as though the message were her final news story.

  When I get within a mile of where I expect the Valhalla road to be, I start watching the turns that lead into the woods between the highway and the Mississippi River. I try two that lead nowhere, logging roads that wind through the dense trees and then peter out. But then I come to an asphalt lane blocked by a wrought-iron gate set between two enormous stone pillars. A gleaming sign on one reads:

  VALHALLA EXOTIC HUNTING RESERVE

  Absolutely No Trespassing

  Seeing no other option, I press a small black button on the keypad and wait while the wind blows through the dry leaves still clinging to the trees. A fire is burning somewhere nearby, but the scent of woodsmoke brings me no pleasure. To the right of the gate I notice a small sign nailed to a tree trunk. It reads: FORT KNOX. The letters look as though a child made them with a woodburning iron.

  “Who’s there?” asks an accented voice that reminds me of Captain Ozan.

  “Penn Cage.”

  The silence from the intercom lasts a long time. Then the same voice, laced with amusement, says, “Come on in, Mayor. But if you’ve got a weapon, be advised I’m going to take it off you.”

  “I didn’t come here to kill anybody,” I say in a robotic voice. “I came to talk.”

  Five seconds later, the great gates slowly part. For a moment I’m reminded of Corinth, Pithy Nolan’s mansion, but then I realize that the two places could not be more different. Corinth is essentially a sanctuary, while Valhalla has always been a killing ground. Approaching the lodge, I see a large rough-hewn timber building served by central air and heat. The telephone wires, satellite dishes, and antennas make the place look more like an army outpost than a hunting camp.

  Alphonse Ozan awaits me on the porch, a pistol in one hand and his black wand in the other. The sight forces me to accept a grim reality: before I can speak to Forrest Knox, I must give up my ability to defend myself. I could leave my gun in the car, but some primitive impulse makes me jam it into my waistband at the small of my back.

  As I get out of my mother’s car, Ozan watches me as he might a rabid dog. He doesn’t take his weapon off me for a moment. After I climb the steps, he instructs me to lean against the porch rail, and I comply like the most docile of prisoners. The Redbone kicks my calves apart, then pats me down from sho
ulders to ankles. Yanking the .357 from my belt, he pulls me away from the rail and, with a flourish like an overzealous doorman, motions for me to enter the lodge.

  The great room of Valhalla is a surreal museum filled with dozens of stuffed animal heads. Some appear to be endangered species. A fully grown mountain gorilla squats in one corner, its glassy gaze trained on the massive flat-screen TV across the room.

  Ozan prods me toward a cypress door at the far end of the room.

  As I make my way toward it, four gleaming samurai swords catch my eye. To the right of them hangs a photograph of an American sergeant beheading a Japanese officer in a World War II uniform. It makes me think of John Kaiser and his psychological history of the Knox family, but Kaiser is a million miles away from here.

  In a study beyond the door, Forrest Knox sits waiting behind an antique desk, his freshly pressed state trooper’s uniform worn like protective armor. He regards me with curiosity but does not speak as I survey the room. His trooper’s hat hangs from an iron coatrack in the corner to his right. A finely tooled leather holster containing a semiautomatic pistol hangs beside it. Opposite the desk stands a massive feral hog, stuffed and mounted on an ash pedestal against the wall. A long spear protrudes from the animal’s back, but it’s clear to me that whoever killed that tusked giant must have struck it through the heart in order to get away alive.

  “Seven hundred pounds,” Forrest says. “A worthy opponent, wouldn’t you say?”

  “An armed man against a pig?”

  Forrest smiles. “Get out there in those woods on horseback and you’ll change your mind.” He glances at Ozan. “He’s clean?”

  “As the sheets in a convent.”

  “Give us a few minutes, Alphonse.”

  Obviously disappointed, the Redbone slips through the door and pulls it shut behind him. Knox smiles enigmatically, then motions for me to take the chair that faces his desk. As I sit, he leans back in his leather chair and cradles his hands behind his head.