by R.J. Ellory
“Nancy, Mike . . . tell me about Nancy Denton,” Gaines urged.
“I can’t, Sheriff. I made a promise. Too many people loved her too much. I done what I had to do, and that’s all there is to the story.”
It was a little after one when Gaines brought Lieutenant Michael Webster into the Sheriff’s Office. Not only in the stark normalcy of the office, but also in the car on the drive over, Gaines had been aware of how dirty Webster was. His hands were gray, filth ingrained in the pores, the fingernails black, the smell of him close to unbearable. It was the sickening funk of bad meat, as if Webster himself were rotting from within. But it was not only the way Webster appeared; it was not only the smell, the things he said, the expression in his eyes; there was also a kind of haunted intensity, something that Gaines had seen all too often in war. In truth, it was the way Webster felt. The very presence of the man was unsettling—even when silent, even when his distant expression was directed elsewhere, Gaines could feel the tension around the man.
Webster said nothing on the drive over, and Gaines did not encourage him. Until Webster was in a room with a tape recorder and a second officer, Gaines didn’t want to hear what he had to say about Nancy Denton.
Gaines just drove, his eyes on the road ahead, but he was so terribly aware of the man beside him. Webster was a product of war. Webster was a product of nightmares. Webster had perhaps carried some demon inside of him all the way from the foxholes of Guadalcanal and delivered it to Whytesburg.
They had dug up the body of a teenage girl, but what else had they dug up? Had they released something preternatural, some malevolent force, some specter of the past that would now forever haunt the streets and the spaces between the houses?
Gaines knew enough to understand that he could not ignore the unknown, especially in this part of the country. There were reminders everywhere that the world was not limited solely to the physical and the tangible.
As they approached the Sheriff’s Office, Webster spoke for the first time since they had left the motel. “Did you find her, Sheriff Gaines? Did you find Nancy?”
“Yes, Michael, I did.”
Webster closed his eyes. He made a sound as if he were deflating inside. “So she is never coming back?”
“No, Michael, she is never coming back.”
Gaines pulled up ahead of the office. He started to get out, and then he realized that Webster was sobbing. He turned and looked at the man—this filthy, bedraggled man—and he watched as his chest rose and fell, as he tortured himself through whatever emotional storm he was experiencing.
After a while, a good while, he started to settle. “I knew she wouldn’t,” he eventually said. “Inside, deep inside, I knew it was impossible.”
Gaines did not reply; he needed the man in a room with a witness and a recorder.
Webster turned and looked at Gaines. Somehow Webster’s tears had made small tracks through the grime on his face. “Will I be able to see her again?” he said.
Gaines took a moment to register what Webster was saying.
“Why?” he asked. “Why would you want to see her again?”
Webster shook his head and sighed. “To see if what I did helped her in any way. To see if what I did helped her at all . . .”
15
Gaines was used to small-time, at least as far as Whytesburg’s law requirements were concerned.
The predominant order of business was the drunks—the garrulous, the sentimental, and the violent. Those in the third category were the only ones who ever inhabited the cells beneath the Sheriff’s Office, and that type was rare. Seemed that the wives of Whytesburg had that kind of thing under control before it ever reached the streets. Occasionally, Gaines held on to a hobo for a few hours, waiting to see if he’d figure out some way to pay the train fare he’d just skipped. Invariably he did not, and invariably said hobo was released before he stank up the place too much. One time Gaines snared a couple of paperhangers from Mobile who figured that small-town Mississippi was as good a place as any to write checks that would never cash. In truth, Gaines’s clientele was ordinarily insufficiently crooked or ballsy to cheat on their tax forms or buy stolen goods, but still found it necessary to redress the balance of imagined social ills by committing pointless and negligible misdemeanors. These then consumed his days. Gaines’s legacy, when he retired, would be measured in traffic violations, speeding tickets, and stern words with teenagers regarding the downside of Richards Wild Irish Rose or Ripple wine.
Whytesburg was neither ready nor able to absorb the horror of Nancy Denton and Lieutenant Michael Webster.
Gaines put Webster in a cell. The man had not confessed to anything; nor had any evidence—damning or circumstantial—been isolated or identified that could attribute the death of Nancy Denton to Webster. Regardless, the very presence of the man was sufficient to instigate a sense of agitation and disturbance in the place. Gaines had Hagen, Chantry, and Dalton take Webster’s clothes from him. They gave him a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt, and a blue-and-white-striped shirt. His feet were left bare, and he was given no belt. Webster did not profess to understand what was happening, nor did he question their actions. They asked for his clothes. He stripped and handed them over. He did not complain, protest, or resist. When he stood there in his clean clothes, he seemed ageless, almost a child, the expression on his face one of bemused detachment.
Once his clothes had been bagged and tagged, Gaines went down there.
Webster was seated on the bed. Gaines stood outside the cell.
“You understand why you’re here, Mike?” Gaines asked.
“Because you think I did something to Nancy Denton that I shouldn’t have done.”
Gaines could not argue with that.
“But I know what I know, and I see what I see,” Webster went on, “and unless you knew what I knew, unless you had seen what I have seen, then there’s no way to understand what I did.”
“I don’t think I will ever understand what you did.”
Webster smiled. “Then you surprise me, Sheriff Gaines. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate what had to be done.”
Gaines restrained himself from asking a direct question.
Did you kill Nancy Denton?
Did you cut open her body and remove her heart, and did you put a snake inside her and bury her in the riverbank?
A confession was needed, but on record, on tape, and preferably in the presence of a lawyer. Gaines did not wish to exhaust whatever urge Webster might have to confess in a way that could not be admissible when pressing charges and seeking arraignment.
There was silence between them for some time. Gaines could hear Webster breathing. He could feel his own heartbeat—in his chest, in his temples, in his wrists. He felt electrified, a raw tension throughout his whole body, as if his skin had been stripped and he was being doused in salt water.
He had not felt this way for six years.
“And now?” Gaines asked.
“Now?” Webster asked. He raised his eyebrows and looked directly at Gaines. His expression was clear and uncomplicated, the expression of a curious infant, an intrigued child.
“Are you not concerned about what will happen to you now?”
Webster shook his head. He smiled ruefully. “We have done too many things, Sheriff. People like you and me are consigned to some dark place. I’ll say this now, and without any great concern for who hears it. If I wind up in heaven, well, I figure I’ll be the first of my kind. If you follow me, then you’ll be the second.” He smiled, looked away for a moment. “I did what I thought was best, as we all do. Most of us, anyway. I did what I believed was the right thing to do, and I prayed that good would come of it, and I have been praying for twenty years, but I knew, you see? I knew in my heart of hearts that she would never come back to me.” He closed his eyes, lowered his head. “I am sad. I am so desperately sad. She has gone, and had I chosen to go after her, then maybe we’d be together someplace now. I waited for h
er for twenty years, and now I am simply afraid that she was not able to wait for me.”
Gaines didn’t reply for a while, and then he stepped away from the bars. “You’re gonna stay here for a while, Mike, and then I’m gonna have some more questions, okay?”
“Sure thing, Sheriff. I ain’t fixin’ to go anyplace anytime soon.”
Gaines turned and headed for the stairs. He felt nauseous, lightheaded. He did not understand what was happening, but he did not like how Webster made him feel. It went beyond the fact that the guy might be a child killer. It went beyond the fact that the mere presence of the man dredged up memories that Gaines had long since committed himself to forgetting. It lay in the realm of something altogether more sinister and unsettling. There was something about it that possessed undertones of the occult. The murdered girl. The heart excavated and removed. The snake in the box. The riverbank burial. It carried with it images from the stories he’d heard as a child, stories of wanga charms filled with the poisonous roots of the figure maudit tree, of voodoo queen Marie Laveau, the rituals performed behind her cottage on St. Ann Street in the French Quarter, of Li Grand Zombi and Papa Limba, of the Dahoman spirit Legba, the guardian of crossroads. If Gaines’s mother got word of this, she would be in her element, her own childhood and upbringing rooted firmly in the wild collision of voodoo and Catholicism.
St. Peter, St. Peter, open the door,
I’m callin’ you, come to me!
St. Peter, St. Peter, open the door,
Papa Legba, open the gate for me, Ago-e
Ativon Legba, open the gate for me;
The gate for me, papa, so that I may enter the temple,
On my way back, I shall thank you for this favor.
Gaines paused at the top of the stairwell and looked back toward the cell. Webster was immobile, seated there on the bed, his regulation blues, his bare feet, his dirty hands, his unkempt hair.
From a distance, he seemed harmless. But then, from a distance, so did the devil.
Gaines understood what would happen if word got out about Webster. He didn’t know whether a lynching party would show up on the doorstep, but such a thing would not have surprised him. Sometimes the very worst solution for dealing with something like this was the only solution people could comprehend. But for this to be contained, Gaines needed a solid and sustainable case. He had nothing but a handful of words from Webster that there was a connection between himself and the girl.
I done what I had to do, and that’s all there is to the story.
And then later, the things he’d said as they’d arrived at the office, when he’d asked if he could see the girl again.
Gaines would have to go down to Webster’s room at the motel and search it, but for that he would need a warrant. And the likelihood of there being anything that had survived twenty years . . . unless, of course, Webster had kept some memento. Such a thing would be circumstantial, but anything that gave Gaines sufficient reason to further detain Webster would be appreciated. He would have to get a confession. That was the simplicity of it.
In those moments at Webster’s motel room, in the panic he felt, the rush of alarm that assaulted his senses, his primary concern had merely been to get Webster in a cell, to hold him down, to remove any possibility of flight. Now that that had been done, he had time to think, but given the time to think, he did not know which direction to take.
Getting some kind of basic training, winding up with a certificate to prove it, well, there was a little more to policing than that. City detectives and small-town sheriffs needed the same skills. Didn’t matter who or what you were investigating; the same basic tools were required. Seeing what no one else saw. Maybe just seeing the same thing but reading something different into it. That was it. That was the first thing you needed. And when everyone else had stopped looking, when everyone else has just up and quit because whatever the hell they were seeing wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear, you were the one who just kept on looking, kept asking questions, kept nagging at it until the wrong-colored thread pulled loose. There was little more required than an open mind and an inexhaustible supply of patience. And part of that ability to persevere in the face of contradiction and contrariness had to come from experience. Life experience. Experience that told you there were always truths to be found, even in the company of liars.
And despite all of this, this desire to find the truth, to do the right thing, to then spend your working hours reviled and despised by people—people who didn’t know you, would never know you, not unless something happened—was harder than people imagined. And when that something happened, when the darkness of the world came at them with all the forces it could muster, you became the most important person in the world—friend, confidant, confessor, vigilante.
It was a strange and awkward existence, crowded with people, but lonely.
Gaines spoke briefly to Hagen. Hagen concurred. Until they had something more concrete, they could do little. A confession would give them a warrant. A warrant would give them access to Webster’s room, and a thorough search might give them something substantive and physical to connect Webster and Nancy Denton. Unlikely, but always a possibility.
For some reason, however, Gaines believed that Webster would talk. Hadn’t he said that he’d been waiting twenty years for someone to ask him the question? He had carried the guilt of whatever he’d done for two decades, and now he was ready to unburden himself, to seek forgiveness, to experience the relief that so often comes with telling the truth. If Gaines went down there right now and asked Webster what had happened, he believed Webster would just open his mouth and tell Gaines whatever he wanted to know.
But, for some reason, Gaines believed he was not ready to hear it.
He told Hagen to get busy on finding Webster a lawyer, that he was leaving to check on his mother, that he would be back soon.
Gaines did not need to see his mother. Caroline would be with her, and all would be fine. In truth, he simply wished to be out of the building, to breathe a different air than that which Michael Webster was breathing, to see something other than his own office and the basement for a brief while. He needed an interlude before he faced up to this madness again.
16
Gaines met Caroline in the kitchen of his house and knew immediately that something was awry.
“Sheriff,” she said, in her voice a sense of urgency. She grabbed his sleeve and tugged it like she needed to secure his undivided attention. “I heard that some girl was killed . . .”
Gaines stayed silent. He’d known word would get out quickly, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite this fast.
“Heard that someone killed her . . . killed her and put a snake inside her . . .” She shuddered visibly. “Put a dead snake in her . . . you know, her . . .” She looked awkward, embarrassed. She indicated her midriff, then lower, finally resting her hand just above her crotch.
“And who in Christ’s name told you such a thing, Caroline?” Gaines asked, less amazed at the wild variation of the truth that had found its way to Caroline Rousseau than the speed at which it had happened. The Denton girl’s body had been discovered only twenty-four hours earlier, and already there was rumor and hearsay on its way around Whytesburg.
“So they didn’t?” she asked.
“Didn’t kill her, or didn’t put a dead snake up inside of her?”
“I know some girl was killed, Sheriff, but it was the snake thing . . .”
Gaines indicated left. “Sit down,” he told Caroline. “Just calm yourself for a minute and let me explain the deal here.”
Caroline Rousseau sat down.
Gaines sat facing her, his hands on the table, his palms together, and as he spoke, he emphasized his words with brief and emphatic gestures.
“A girl called Nancy Denton was killed, yes. Twenty years ago, okay? She was killed before you were even born. We don’t know how. We don’t know who did it. There was something unusual about the way in which her body was f
ound, but she sure as hell did not have a dead snake in her vagina.”
As Gaines spoke, he looked directly at Caroline. Caroline grimaced, shuddered again.
“And I would appreciate it, Caroline, if you would do everything possible to prevent such a rumor from finding its way into the collective ears of Whytesburg. More important, I don’t want you discussing this with my mother . . .”
It was there in the sudden widening of the eyes, the way she raised her brows, the tension in her lips.
“You already told her,” Gaines said matter-of-factly.
“I couldn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”
Gaines raised his right hand and Caroline fell silent. “What’s done is done,” he said. “I’ll deal with that, but what I said about not spreading this rumor—”
“I won’t say a word, Sheriff. And I’m sorry about speakin’ to your mom an’ everything . . .”
“It’s okay, Caroline. I’ll go see her now.”
Gaines got up. He realized he still had on his hat. His mind was elsewhere. He never entered the house without removing his hat.
The expression was there. Alice Gaines had something on her mind and there was no way she wasn’t going to be talking about it.
“Seen it before,” she said as Gaines entered the room, “and the one thing that shocks me, John, is that I had to hear about it from the help and not from you.”
“For Christ’s sake, Ma, you can’t call her that. She is not the help. She comes over here because she cares for you and because she likes your company.”
“Don’t change the subject, John. You tell me what has been going on now . . .”
“Police business, Ma, that’s what’s been going on.”
“This dead girl, what, all of ten or twelve years old, a virgin no doubt, and someone killed her and put a snake in her . . .”
“They did not.”
Alice stopped suddenly, her eyes wide. “Didn’t what? Kill her?”