The Guilty

by David Baldacci

  Chapter

  43

  ROBIE SAT NEXT to Reel in the car and stared at the laptop.

  “I’m not getting this,” he said.

  “You’re not the only one. I thought we were looking at drug or arms dealers or maybe human trafficking. But not this.”

  “This” was a series of photos showing a man in his forties with very young children in grossly perverse sexual situations.

  “Who is this prick?” asked Robie.

  “Don’t know. But I’d love to put a round in the sucker’s head.”

  “All the kids are either black or Latino.”

  Reel nodded. “I wonder why.”

  “But why would these photos be on Sherm Clancy’s computer? Blackmail?”

  Reel nodded. “Well, the guy’s not Clancy, right?”

  “No, not even close.”

  “Then blackmail it could well be. Probably what these guys were looking for when they came after Pete. But you beat them to it.”

  “But they may not know that. They might think they got the laptop and all the files.”

  “Then why come after you using the girl as bait?”

  “Because I jacked them and they wanted to put a bullet in my head as payback,” said Robie. But he knew that probably wasn’t right. They risked a lot coming after him, and taking Sara Chisum to do so. There had to be a more compelling reason than simple payback. These guys weren’t street punks like Pete. He had a sudden thought.

  “Is there a way to tell if a file has been copied from a computer, like I did with these?”

  “I asked Little Bill that very question and he says there is. A few keystrokes and you’ll know if files were downloaded to another storage device.”

  “So that’s the answer. They know I made copies.”

  “Well, they know someone made copies. They couldn’t know for sure it was you. But they needed to cover that end. They might think Pete has other copies, too.”

  “Which is why he ran for it,” added Robie.

  “Which is why he ran for it,” agreed Reel.

  “So Sherm Clancy was blackmailing this person presumably for money.”

  “Do you think the guy in the photo is connected to the Rebel Yell casino people?”

  “I wouldn’t bet against it.”

  “When did Clancy hook up with the casino?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I was told he made money selling the mineral rights to his farmland. Then he used that stake to buy into the Rebel Yell.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “More than one person, actually. So it seems to be an accepted fact.”

  Robie leaned back in his seat, his brow furrowed.

  “I know that look,” said Reel. “What’s going through that head of yours?”

  “Mineral rights,” said Robie.

  “What?”

  “We need to go check something out.”

  * * *

  “What is this place, Robie?”

  They had driven a long way through dusty back roads to arrive at a place that, even for Cantrell, was in the middle of nowhere. They were now standing in the middle of that nowhere.

  “This is, or rather was, Sherman Clancy’s farm.”

  “Looks like the wilderness has reclaimed it.”

  “Looks like it.”

  They spent thirty minutes walking the property before Robie sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree.

  Reel came to stand in front of him.

  “So?” she said.

  “This property hasn’t had anything done to it in a long time. The fields are all overgrown. The farmhouse and barns have pretty much fallen in. The only thing left intact really is that shack at the very rear of the property.”

  “Okay, what did you expect to see?”

  “I expected to see some evidence of drilling for any oil and gas under the property. That process leaves signs, even after all these years. I don’t even see traces of an access road for the big equipment they would have hauled in here.”

  “Well, maybe they didn’t find anything here.”

  “There would still be evidence of them looking. And I was told that Clancy got a pretty penny for his property. No energy company is going to shell out big dollars unless they’re pretty damn sure whatever it is they’re looking for is here. They typically will do an exploratory contract to check. Or get permission to drill in from an adjacent property. But there really isn’t an adjacent property here. The rest of it is forest. There was one road in and out when I was growing up here and knew the Clancys. There’s still only one road. The one we walked up, because we couldn’t drive up it anymore. And it wasn’t nearly wide enough or sturdy enough for the sort of equipment they’d be bringing in to extract either the oil or gas.”

  Reel sat down next to him. “So you think the sale of the mineral rights story was just a cover for how he really came by the money? A payoff for the photos?”

  “I don’t see any other way it makes sense. Then Clancy could have used that money to buy into the Rebel Yell business.”

  “So we need to find out who the guy in the photo is. He might have a motive to kill Clancy. Which might very well let your dad off the hook. By the way, when do I get to meet him?”

  “You want to meet my father?”

  “You got to meet mine.”

  “He was in prison,” began Robie. Then he paused as Reel hiked her eyebrows at him.

  “I just love ironic symmetry,” she said.

  Chapter

  44

  ROBIE HAD CALLED Toni Moses on the way over and she was waiting for them with Dan Robie, in the visitor’s room at the jail.

  Dan Robie eyed Reel curiously. “You saved Will’s butt?”

  “One could interpret it that way,” said Reel matter-of-factly.

  Dan looked at the wall. “Good you were there to clean up his mess.”

  “Well, since he was there trying to save your butt maybe I cleaned up both your messes.”

  Dan shot her a look while Moses studied both of them. She interjected, “Before we get too far down that road, did you find out what the files said?”

  “We found out what they showed,” amended Robie.

  He slid open his laptop and brought the images up on the screen.

  “Damn,” said Moses. “Who the hell is that?”

  Robie looked at his father. “Recognize the guy?”

  He shook his head and looked like he wanted to punch the screen. “I don’t know any pedophiles,” he snapped.

  “We think Clancy was blackmailing this guy. That’s where his seed money came from. Not from selling his land to an energy company.”

  Now Dan Robie looked interested. “How do you figure that?”

  “Everybody told me that Clancy had hit a home run because his farmland had oil or gas under it. Only no one could tell me if it was oil or gas. Or who the energy company was, for that matter. Jessica and I walked the property today. There is no sign that anyone ever tried to get any oil or gas out of that land.”

  Dan Robie sat back in his chair. “And the photos were used to blackmail the guy who’s abusin’ the kids. And that was Clancy’s jackpot?”

  “Yes,” said Robie.

  “Damn good incentive to kill him,” said Moses. “Aubrey Davis will shit a brick when I bring this up.”

  Reel said, “But if Clancy had these photos all this time and the guy never tried to kill him, why would he kill Clancy now? What changed?”

  Robie said, “Maybe Clancy kept squeezing the guy and he got tired of it. Maybe he was afraid that Clancy would screw up and inadvertently show someone. From what I’ve heard around town, he’d been going downhill for years now. Drunk most of the time.”

  “Well, it seems that it has to be this guy, or at least his goons,” said Moses. “They were goin’ to kill Pete, because they assumed he knew about the pictures. They wanted them back. So maybe the guy was sick of payin’ off Sherm. And he sure as hell wasn’t goin’ to start payin’ off his s
on.”

  “Which brings us back to the guy,” said Robie. “Who is he? He must be rich, because he could afford to pay Clancy a lot of bucks.”

  “Maybe the FBI can help us there,” said Reel. “They could run it through their databases for facial recognition.”

  “And then we go ask this person some questions,” said Moses. “Like did he kill or have Sherman Clancy killed.”

  “It’s too bad we shot down all those guys,” said Reel. “I should’ve just wounded one of them so he could answer our questions.”

  Moses looked at her wide-eyed. “Remind me not to get on your bad side, girl.”

  “Do you think Sara Chisum might be able to tell us something about them?” asked Robie. “They took her. She thought they were going to do a deal with her. She might have seen or heard something.”

  “Worth a shot,” said Reel. “How do you want to do it?”

  “Delicately.” He looked at his father. “You want to answer my question now?”

  “Which one?”

  “Were you driving your Range Rover the night Clancy was killed?”

  “You do what you need to do,” said his father grimly. “And I’ll do what I need to do.”

  * * *

  “He’s not how I pictured him to be,” said Reel.

  They were in Reel’s car outside the jail.

  “How did you picture him to be?” asked Robie.

  “I don’t know. Just not like that.”

  “He doesn’t want me down here. He told me to go back to where I came from.”

  “Well, what did you expect, Robie? For him to welcome you with open arms after twenty years? Hell, you never talked about your family. I didn’t even know your old man was still alive.”

  “Well, I did come back. And I am trying to help him. That should be worth something in his eyes.”

  “Do you really care about that?”

  Robie shot her a glance. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean is this about your dad or your inability to pull the trigger on a target because you inadvertently shot a little girl and then imagined you saw a little boy in the way of another shot?”

  “I see that Blue Man did fill you in.”

  “Would you expect him not to?”

  “Why are you really here?”

  “My mission, which I chose to accept, was to come down here and help you.”

  “But you didn’t expect to drop into a firefight.”

  “No, that was just gravy on top of the mashed potatoes.”

  He smiled weakly at her comment and then leaned back against the car seat.

  “I’m sort of screwed in the head right now, Jess.”

  “I’ve been there. And there is a road back.”

  “That’s why I kept asking Blue Man when you were getting back. I…thought we could talk about things. That you would understand.”

  “Every situation is different. And I’m not a qualified shrink. But I can give you the benefit of my experience, Robie.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Of course it is. It’s in your head. How can it not be complicated?”

  “You’re right. I came back here more for me than my dad.”

  “Okay.”

  “I felt like I had unfinished business.”

  “I can relate to that. You helped me clean up my past.”

  Robie rubbed at his temples. “And after seeing the little boy in the middle of my last shot, I began to think I had to go back to move forward, if that makes sense.”

  “It does.”

  “Right before I was to take the shot on my last mission…everything was off. I thought I, I don’t know, that I might be having a heart attack.”

  “Or more likely a panic attack.”

  “I couldn’t make the shot, Jess. Even if I had fired, I would have missed.”

  “So to get back to where you can do your job, you need to work through Mississsippi?”

  “Unfortunately, this isn’t a peaceful walk down memory lane while I get my head straight. My dad’s on trial for murder. And people are shooting at us.”

  “You take life as it comes at you, and it’s rarely perfect.”

  “But things aren’t going to get any better between my father and me.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “You saw him today.”

  ‘“I saw a man mightily confused and unsure what to do. And I’m not just talking about you.”

  “You saw that?” Robie said skeptically. “In both of us?”

  “Yes, I did. Now tell me what happened between you two to start this whole thing.”

  Robie took a long breath. “It wasn’t one incident. It was years of incidents. He was a jarhead back from Vietnam. He was one of the toughest men you’ll ever meet. Never asked for any quarter and never gave any. He would beat the shit out of me for the slightest thing. But it wasn’t the fist or the belt that hurt the most.”

  “It was the words,” said Reel.

  “Yes. He made me feel worthless. Like I would never amount to anything. No matter what I did to please him, it was never good enough. Would never be good enough. I finally stopped caring. I didn’t feel anything toward him. He wasn’t my father. He was some guy I had to live with until I got old enough to where I didn’t. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Cantrell.”

  “And your mother?”

  Now Robie took a shallow breath. “That was the other thing. He drove her away. She loved me, but she hated him more. She was the only thing that made my life here tolerable. After she left…”

  “Did you ever see her again?”

  “No,” Robie said curtly.

  “She never tried to contact you?”

  “No.”

  “So do you feel she abandoned you?”

  “Of course not,” snapped Robie. “It was my father’s doing.”

  “But she did leave you.”

  “Because my father made her.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  Robie sat up straight. “Look, we need to get going on other things. We need to talk to Sara Chisum. We have to find Pete. We have to ID the guy in the photo. So let’s hit Sara first.”