Cade tapped at the bars with his right foot.
‘Hey, you okay in there?’ he said.
Parker raised a hand, seemed to recover himself, and released his hold on the toilet bowl to sit back against the bunk. He wiped his mouth and rubbed his face.
‘I’ve been better.’
‘You’re a long way from home.’
‘I’m traveling.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘I’m hoping to pick up work.’
‘What kind of work?’
‘Security.’
‘In Burdon County?’
‘I took a detour.’
‘To what end?’
‘I got tired of looking at highways.’
Cade didn’t register happiness with this explanation. He tapped at the bar again, and contemplated the toe of his boot, as though imagining the harm it might do to this man were he permitted time alone with him.
‘Where are you headed?’
‘Louisiana, maybe.’
‘Maybe?’ Cade smiled at the use of the word. ‘You got people down there in Louisiana?’
‘Contacts.’
‘Contacts. Is that so?’ Cade wagged a finger at Parker. ‘You know, I don’t believe a word that’s coming out of your mouth. Cargill PD will run you through the system. If they come up with wants, you’ll be sorry you found your way to my county.’
My county. Knight stifled a sigh. The arrogance of the man.
Wants were outstanding warrants, or pickup orders from a judge. Knight noticed that Parker didn’t ask for a clarification of the term. Neither did he respond to Cade’s goading. He rubbed his mouth again, climbed back onto his bunk, and closed his eyes. Cade appeared to be on the verge of saying more to Parker, before deciding that it would probably be a waste of both their time.
Cade and Knight headed for the door, the latter dimming the lights upon leaving as a courtesy to the prisoner. No point in torturing the man with bright bulbs if he wanted to rest.
‘Sometimes I think we ought to put a sentry box on the roads in and out of this county,’ Cade remarked.
‘To stop people from leaving?’ said Knight.
‘You hate it so much here, you could always go be a pain in the ass someplace else.’
‘You might think so, but nobody’s recruiting pains in the ass.’
‘My conclusion is that there’s always a surplus.’
‘That would also be my reasoning, based on the available evidence.’
Cade cracked the knuckles in his hands, as though girding himself for bloodshed.
‘You’re testing my self-restraint, Kel.’
‘I’m sure trying, Jurel.’
Cade requested a look at Parker’s ID, and Knight watched him write down the details in a notebook. Had it been a different hour, Cade might have taken it upon himself to delve deeper into the reasons for Parker’s presence in Cargill. Had he done so, it wouldn’t have taken him long to establish that Parker had been asking questions about Patricia Hartley. Cade might yet discover this, which could cause problems for Knight and Griffin down the line, although both would stand by the story about Parker being drunk and mouthing off, because at least fifty percent of it was true and the rest couldn’t be disproved, which made it true by default.
Cade looked back in the direction of the cells. ‘That man didn’t smell much like a drunk to me.’
‘You ought to have been here earlier.’
‘Yeah, I kind of wish I had,’ said Cade. ‘I think I’ll be about my business.’
‘Justice never sleeps,’ said Knight.
Cade paused at the door.
‘I can’t always tell when you’re being sarcastic, Kel,’ he said.
‘My wife says the same thing.’
‘You figure she’d know by now. I guess you’re a conundrum to her.’
‘That must be it.’
‘To her, possibly,’ Cade continued, ‘but not to me. I had you pegged a long time ago.’
‘We understand each other, then.’
‘We probably do, at that. Don’t fuck with me, Kel. You ought to know better.’
He used the profanity deliberately, and with relish. He was well aware that Knight didn’t hold with swearing – didn’t hold with much at all, that Cade could see. He found Knight’s self-righteousness aggravating, not least because if Knight and his kind had their way the whole county would be doomed. As far as Jurel Cade was concerned, the needs of the many outweighed those of the few, and being forced to live with the implications of that conviction was one of the burdens of public service.
‘As for our friend in there,’ said Cade, ‘if he comes up dirty, I want to hear about it, and if he comes up clean, I want him expelled from this locality. You have a good night, now.’
And with that he was gone.
When Knight returned to check on him, Parker was lying on his back in the shadows, contemplating the ceiling of his cell.
‘That was quite the performance you staged,’ said Knight.
‘I heard you talking to Chief Deputy Cade. I thought I should back up your story.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘For the same reason you lied to him in the first place, I suppose.’
‘And what would that be?’
‘Because the less he knows, the better.’
‘Knows about what?’
‘About anything.’
Knight tamped fresh tobacco into his pipe. ‘Just who are you?’
‘You know my name.’
‘That’s not what I meant. We’re accumulating agitation because of your presence here. If you were more open, it might serve to diminish it, and enhance your general likability.’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference what I said. Most of the details you won’t be able to check until morning. And I’m starting to grow fond of this cell. It has character.’
Knight relit his pipe. Griffin wasn’t around, and the smell would most likely have faded by morning.
‘There’s a fresh pot of coffee,’ he said, ‘if you want some.’
‘I’m good, thank you. If no one else is likely to be kicking at the bars for the next few hours, I’ll try to get some rest.’
‘You do that. We’ll pick you up some breakfast from Ferdy’s come seven. By the time you’ve scraped your plate clean, we should know more about you.’
But Parker didn’t reply, so Knight left him in peace. He chatted with Colson, who had just returned, and began catching up on paperwork. He was halfway through the first report when he realized that Cade had never introduced himself to Parker, yet Parker had known him by sight.
Knight looked at the clock and decided that morning, and answers, couldn’t come quickly enough.
9
Despite what he’d told Knight, Parker did not close his eyes. He had some Ambien back at his motel room, but he wasn’t about to ask someone to go get it for him. In any case, he worried about growing dependent on it, and used it only when even a series of disturbed nights failed to make him tired enough to rest well – which, for Parker, meant dreamlessly.
Who are you?
I do not know. I can only say what I was.
And what was that?
I was a husband, a father.
And now?
I am neither of those things. I am a widower. I do not know if there is a name for one that has lost a child. If there is, there should not be. It is unnatural.
What do you see when you close your eyes?
That’s easy.
I see red.
10
Evan Griffin’s phone rang shortly after 5 a.m. He heard Ava, still half-asleep, start to complain as he dove for the receiver to stop the noise. She’d never wanted a telephone in the bedroom, but Griffin was a heavy sleeper, and the phone downstairs could have sounded until doomsday without waking him. He turned his cell phone off at night and left it in the kitchen. He’d heard stories about radiation, and decided the device properly belonged with the micro
wave.
‘Hello?’
‘Evan, it’s Kel.’
Kel Knight rarely called him Evan. The last time was when Griffin’s mother died. He sat up as Ava came fully awake beside him.
‘What is it?’
‘We have another body.’
Parker opened his eyes. Dormancy, or some version of it, had come to him eventually, but now he’d been woken by sounds of activity in the station house. After a few minutes Naylor, the young officer who’d put the cuffs on him back at the bar, appeared, dressed in full uniform. Parker asked what was happening, but Naylor gave him the cold eye before leaving again, once he’d established that the prisoner still appeared to be in one piece. Parker listened closely, trying to pick up some clue as to what might be happening, but the door connecting the cells to the main body of the station was firmly closed, and any conversations between the officers were muffled and unintelligible.
Parker hadn’t liked the look on Naylor’s face. It suggested that trouble had not only arrived but was unpacking its bags for a long stay, and might well find a way to involve him, if it hadn’t already. He glanced at the damaged knuckles of his right hand. He should have kept driving, he thought, and never left the highway for Burdon County.
Patricia Hartley, like the town of Cargill itself, was a dead end.
The girl lay naked on her back among dwarf sumac, her arms and legs splayed. Her body bore evidence of multiple piercings from a blade. A partially stripped branch had been jammed into her mouth and forced down her throat, while a second was buried deep enough in her vagina to have hit bone. Griffin surmised this without the benefit of an X-ray, because Estella Jackson had been violated in a similar way, and probably Patricia Hartley as well, although the worst of her injuries had not featured in any newspaper or autopsy reports and were therefore the subject of base rumor and conjecture. Jurel Cade, meanwhile, had warned all those with knowledge of the facts to keep their mouths shut, even around husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.
Like Jackson and Hartley, the girl was black, and probably no more than sixteen or seventeen years old. Griffin didn’t recognize her, even allowing for the disfigurement caused by the branch in her mouth, but then he couldn’t have named more than a handful of the colored kids around town, and then only the ones who had crossed his path for the wrong reasons. But no child deserved this, no matter her color, her disposition, or her place in the hierarchy of the county.
He asked Kel Knight who had found her.
‘Tilon Ward.’
‘What was he doing out here?’
‘Claims he was heading into the Ouachita to check on his raccoon traps.’
‘Before five in the morning?’
‘He said something about early birds.’
Tilon Ward purportedly lived on welfare, but like many such individuals, he found ways to supplement his income. One of them was hunting, both in and out of season. The other, it was strongly suspected, involved the production and distribution of methamphetamine, which sold for about $100 per gram in Little Rock, Fayetteville, and Fort Smith. Here in Cargill, locals got a discount, because good deals made good neighbors. Ward wasn’t a bad guy as suspected meth manufacturers went, but that didn’t make him a good one. Residents of the state were currently being sentenced at three times the national rate for methamphetamine offenses, which wasn’t a statistic to make anyone proud. Even the dealers didn’t need the kind of attention those figures would inevitably attract. Griffin had tried speaking informally to Ward about his activities in an effort to encourage a reconsideration of his life choices, but hadn’t got anywhere. Eventually, he knew, Ward would end up dead or behind bars, and neither of those solutions to the problem he represented would give Griffin any pleasure.
There was history between them, these two.
‘You want to talk to him?’ said Knight.
‘In a few minutes. Did he call 911?’
‘No, he got in touch with the station house direct.’
‘Huh,’ said Griffin. That was another thing about Ward: he wasn’t dumb, and didn’t allow wax to build up in his ears. He was fully aware of the tensions in the region, and the whispers about Patricia Hartley. Ward was setting down a marker by electing to inform the Cargill PD about the body, and not Jurel Cade, who was chief investigator for the county. Ward liked Griffin a whole lot better than he did Jurel Cade, and perhaps trusted him to do what was right by the town – although what that might be, Griffin himself had yet to determine. All he knew for sure was that he now had a second body with which to contend – or even a third, depending on how one counted Estella Jackson, and there was only so long a man could allow such a state of affairs to continue.
‘What about clothing or possessions?’ he asked.
‘Nothing nearby,’ said Knight, ‘but we’ll wait for better light before we start the search.’
Griffin forced himself to look again at the girl’s body, but without anger or sorrow. They would serve no purpose here.
‘We won’t find anything, not unless he was careless, and this doesn’t look like the work of a careless man.’
‘Indeed, it does not.’
In the beam from his flashlight, Griffin could see some blood on the ground between the dead girl’s legs, and some more around her mouth, but not a lot of it. She’d likely been killed elsewhere, and the branches inserted after her death. The latter was a small mercy. She’d endured enough pain at the end.
‘Any idea who she is?’
‘No, but I’ve sent Lorrie Colson to fetch Pettle.’
Reverend Nathan Pettle was pastor of the Cargill African Methodist Episcopal Church. He also ran an outreach program for the poor of all denominations, and was the main point of contact between the black and white communities in Cargill. Pettle was their best chance of identifying the girl quietly and quickly.
‘What about forensics?’
‘Tucker McKenzie is on his way.’
Which Griffin was glad to hear, because he had questions for McKenzie about the photographs of Patricia Hartley contained in Parker’s file.
‘Who’s at the station house?’ said Knight.
‘Naylor.’
Joshua Petrie, one of the part-time officers, was standing nearby, keeping an eye on Tilon Ward, who was sitting on the rear fender of his truck, smoking a cigarette and looking sallow, even allowing for the cocklight, as Griffin’s English grandmother used to call this time of morning. If it wasn’t for Parker, Griffin could have had Naylor here as well. Then again, it might be that Naylor was no longer guarding some drifter from New York, but a killer.
Griffin wondered how long he could get away with keeping the fact of the body’s discovery from Jurel Cade: just a few hours, probably. Loyd Holt, the coroner, wasn’t actively corrupt, but he was ineffectual, and wouldn’t be disposed to making an enemy of the sheriff’s office. His handling of the Hartley case was confirmation of that, if any were needed. Burdon was one of only three counties in the state in which coroners were appointed, rather than elected to two-year terms. In practical terms, this meant Loyd Holt served at the pleasure of the Cade family. He was their creature.
Tucker McKenzie, on the other hand, didn’t give a rat’s ass whether Jurel and his kin liked him or not, because they didn’t pay his salary, so Holt was the weak link. With some arm-twisting, he might be willing to hold off for a while on informing Jurel Cade. Holt received $2,500 a year as county coroner, and for that he was required to be on call 24/7. On the other hand, he possessed zero medical qualifications, had only been appointed because he was a chronic insomniac – which meant he was usually wide-awake when the night calls came through – and was additionally the third-best undertaker in the county.
Of three.
‘We’re not equipped to handle a killing like this,’ said Griffin. ‘We need more people, and a level of expertise that’s beyond us at our best.’
‘We could let Parker go,’ said Knight. ‘It would free up Naylor, at least.’
&nb
sp; ‘The hell we will. We don’t even know for sure who he is yet, and now we have a dead girl, and a stranger in custody who was asking questions about other dead girls.’
‘If you really think he’s a suspect, I can tell you for nothing that he didn’t kill this one.’
‘How do you figure that?’
‘The body’s dry. It rained last night from midnight until two, which means she was dumped here after the rain stopped, when we had Parker locked up tight.’
‘What about the trees? They could have sheltered her.’
‘Not enough to keep her completely free of rainwater.’
Griffin conceded the point. Oddly, he was relieved to have Parker cleared of suspicion, although he could not have said why.
‘You didn’t find out anything from searching his motel room?’ said Knight.
Griffin reddened. ‘Why would you ask that?’
‘I saw you palm his key.’
‘You ought to be a detective.’
‘I like to think I’m helping to keep you straight. Well?’
‘If I had examined his room – which I’m not admitting I did, because that would be an illegal search – I might have found two guns: an old .38 Special, and a ten milli Smith and Wesson, a weapon that, last time I checked, was in the arsenal of federal agents.’
‘If he was a fed, he’d have told us so. They don’t take well to being locked up. You think he could have stolen those guns?’
‘He was too relaxed for a man hoarding illegal firearms, and he’s in possession of a permit. He also had a file containing graphic photographs, along with autopsy and police reports relating to the murders of women and children, material on Patricia Hartley and Estella Jackson among them.’
‘So if he’s not a criminal …?’
‘I didn’t say he wasn’t, but he might also be more than that.’
The Dirty South - Charlie Parker Series 18 (2020) Page 5