River of Secrets
Page 28
Gently, Mason rocked back and forth. “Remember how I told you she said Lister was about to start traveling, delivering a call to arms to the faithful?”
Wallace tensed.
“We heard from her again. This morning.”
She pushed Mason’s arms away and turned to face him.
“Did she happen to mention where Lister’s next stop is going to be?” Her jaw tightened and the light drained from her eyes.
Mason nodded.
THIRTY-TWO
FRIDAY: JUNE 8 2:00 P.M.
Lister sat on the little campstool, his back against the warm aluminum siding of the barn.
It had been a long night. After bidding farewell to Ollie and disposing of Garrett Landry’s body on Parker’s Island in the middle of the mighty Mississip, he had returned to look for the detective, the old man’s wishes to the contrary notwithstanding. But she had slipped into the wind. Others would have to deal with her now.
In about six hours, the next rally would begin and he would be there to fire up the crowd.
In a few more weeks, he could begin to shed the ballast of old men who were once so useful but were now increasingly timid and out of touch. And he would be on the front line of a refocused movement—a movement that could begin to sail out of the shadows.
It would be a dangerous time. Transitions always were. Stepping into the open made one an easier target and those against him were many and violent and well organized.
For a while, he would have to stay on the move. He smiled at the irony that some in the civil rights movement, back in the fifties and sixties, had lived this way, never sleeping in the same place two nights in a row, keeping word of their movements under wraps until the last possible moment. An inconvenient but necessary tactic in the face of dangerous change.
* * *
Burley had offered Wallace the option of standing down on the chase for Carlton Lister. Her look had been enough to convince him that was not going to happen.
She had left him and others in the department working hard to keep a lid on Davis’s suicide for as long as possible. Once the story got out—once Lister knew their nasty little game was over—he would surely disappear, burning every bridge behind him as he went.
From the front passenger seat of an East Baton Rouge sheriff’s department SUV Wallace stared across the pasture to her right. They were parked on an old farm access road. It was little more than a dirt track running just inside the tree line on property adjacent to a cattle ranch owned and operated by Coco Beckwith—a longtime sympathizer with causes that drew inspiration from the Third Reich. They were over a mile from Beckwith’s ramshackle farmhouse.
LeAnne and another deputy were in the backseat.
Wallace brought a pair of field glasses to her eyes and looked across Beckwith’s land toward a cluster of metal buildings.
She could see Lister perched on a canvas and metal-frame stool, leaning back against a faded barn, his hands folded in his lap, the sun on his face.
Wallace consulted her watch. Lister had been there nearly twenty minutes. He had arrived with two other men—both of them openly carrying weapons. They had chatted for a while and then left Lister alone.
LeAnne had tried to eavesdrop on their conversation with a parabolic microphone, but the wind through the foliage and their low voices produced an unlistenable signal-to-noise ratio.
“It almost looks like he’s asleep,” Wallace said
“Is he armed?” the deputy in the driver’s seat asked.
“I can’t tell.”
“Any word from the other—” LeAnne asked.
The driver waved for quiet as he pressed an earpiece tighter into his ear. “Beckwith and Listers’s two handlers are being detained inside the farmhouse. The two ranch hands have been rounded up and they’re being held off the property.”
“Is there anyone else?” Wallace asked as she raised the binoculars to her eyes again and scanned the area around Lister.
“Just your boy, over there, getting himself a suntan.”
Wallace passed the binoculars to LeAnne in the backseat and then checked her phone, for the hundredth time, to make sure it was off.
“The sharpshooters are in position. They have Lister in the crosshairs, and they can pivot to cut off his escape, if need be,” the driver reported.
“I want him alive.” Wallace opened the door and slid from her seat onto the rutted hardpan of the road. She twirled a finger in a let’s go gesture.
“We’re moving in,” the driver announced over his radio.
Wallace and LeAnne clipped on their communication devices and pushed their earpieces into place. The deputy in the backseat joined them. After a quick com check and a weapons inventory, the three of them took off, moving quietly along the sunbaked dirt of the old road. The layout of the ranch they had studied on the drive over was simple enough. If Lister didn’t move too far from where he was now, they would reach him in two or three minutes, give or take, depending on how slow they were forced to move, once they got close.
Through her earpiece, Wallace heard the driver back in the SUV giving their location to the snipers, warning them that officers were about to enter the field of fire.
Another team of two was approaching from the opposite direction. They would stop at the pinch point between a pond and another large metal structure—the target’s only other avenue of escape.
* * *
Lister thought through what he would say, later today. It was a simple message that would appeal to his listeners’ sense of fear—the most powerful and basic of all the emotions and the easiest to provoke and manipulate.
The old guard had been needed to set financial and logistical resources in motion, but Lister sensed that the importance of that chapter, with its stale intellectualism and endless talk, was drawing to a close. A time of pure, focused emotion was needed to propel like-minded individuals into concerted action. That was the future.
He thought about the changes that would be demanded of himself, about how the messy work that began when he took care of Herbert Marioneaux would now best be done by others. The fight had not gone out of him, not by a long ways. But he pictured himself waging a different kind of fight going forward.
He breathed in the pine-scented air and felt the sun warming his face and arms. A vague smile formed as his thoughts carried him away from the sunshiny day, deeper and deeper into his vision of the ways and traditions he would help to maintain and restore. Then he felt the muzzle of a gun—that distinctive cool metal—pressed against his left temple
“Stay very, very still.”
His eyes flew wide and his mind fought to clear away the fading remnants of his reverie. He recognized her voice. He considered his chances of getting clear of the danger before she could pull the trigger. It could be done. By design, squeezing the trigger of a service weapon took effort—and effort took time.
“Look down. Can you see them?”
The muzzle of the gun moved with him as he tilted his head forward. Two brilliant red dots, an inch apart, hovered dead steady between the edge of his pocket and the line of buttons down the middle of his shirt.
“Good to see you again, Detective Hartman. How’s that right kidney feeling?”
He felt her flinch at the revelation, and he snapped his head left, shunting the barrel of her firearm into the empty space behind him. His left arm snaked around her waist, pulling her between him and the sharpshooters.
The momentum of her falling body tumbled them toward the ground. He let his weight drop heavy to crush the wind out of her, but she pushed off with her legs and kept them rolling until he was beneath her.
He knew she would center up her gun on his chest, so he swept his left arm forward to counter her move, but she wasn’t there. He arched his back, his right hand grabbing beneath him for the sidearm in his waistband.
At the edge of his vision, he saw Wallace’s gun hand whipping down from his right, the black mass of the weapon closing fast.
THIRTY-THREE
On Saturday, the day after the horrible events in Davis’s office, Wallace’s mother moved in with her. Neither wanted company, yet neither could bear to be alone.
Mason had come by in the afternoon and the three of them watched a streaming interview of the freed Eddie Pitkin on Mason’s laptop.
Eddie struggled with his emotions at the beginning but had fully recovered himself by the end.
“I’ve been at this a long time,” he told the interviewer. “And I expect to be at it for a long time to come.”
He was looking straight into the camera, the bright white bandage covering the upper left half of his face a stark contrast to his dark brown skin.
“You’ve paid a heavy price,” the interviewer remarked. “At this point, many in your position would be content to hand the baton to the next generation, and no one would blame you if you did.”
Eddie shook his head. “No, thank you. My goal is to change hearts and minds. It’s a mission that requires confrontation, but success depends on cooperation. And I’m in this for the long haul.”
Wallace wandered into her bedroom at that point. She was happy to see that Eddie was unbowed by the events of the last several days, but the bandage over his eye left her feeling uneasy. He was upbeat now, but who knew how this was going to change him. Wallace wondered how it would change her. And her mother.
* * *
On Sunday, Melissa Voorhees showed up and Wallace told her about Peter. A farmer who owned property along the Mississippi River had seen a dense vortex of buzzards wheeling through the sky over Parker’s Island, one of the huge uninhabited marsh islands in the middle of the river channel north of Baton Rouge. He had never seen such a thing before and he never expected to because he knew that nothing living on the island was large enough to attract such a large contingent of the airborne carrion eaters. He scooted across in his high-end Zodiac inflatable to investigate and found the bodies of Garrett Landry and Peter Eccclestone.
* * *
On Monday, Wallace was still seeing the awful moment when Davis pulled the trigger. She couldn’t make it stop. And every time she saw it, she felt it and heard it like it was happening for the first time.
The endless tumble of raw thoughts and feelings crowded out her awareness of mundane things like the passage of time. Her mother haunted the house like a ghost, and Wallace found herself arguing with her over silly things like the need to eat.
Burley came over in the middle of the day to check on her and to tell her about the progress on the investigation. A private server was discovered in Davis’s office building. Thousands of emails, dating back years, told a sickening story.
Garrett Landry had been a great admirer of Herbert Marioneaux, but when the senator confided his intention to run for governor and to create a Commission of Inquiry to explore the feasibility of reparations for the state’s history with slavery, Landry realized that his admiration of the senator had been misplaced.
Landry had tried to convince Marioneaux the idea was wrongheaded, but the senator pushed back, showing him Lydia Prescott’s discovery that such an initiative would solidify his reputation as an evolved leader and attract voters who had dismissed him as an un-Reconstructed poser.
Unable to persuade the senator, Landry pled his case to a group he knew could exert greater influence. But once it became clear that Marioneaux would not abandon his plan, the plot to get rid of him was set in motion.
Marioneaux would be killed and the dangerously disruptive Eddie Pitkin would be framed for the murder. The plotters would make it look like a murder for personal revenge as opposed to a killing in pursuit of some higher principle. That way, Eddie would either rot in prison or take a ride on the needle, but he would not be seen as a martyr for his cause.
Lex, Wallace’s younger brother, brought food, just as he had every day for the past three. He stayed for a few hours, doing chores around the house and sitting quietly with Wallace and his mother.
Mason came and went in the early afternoon. When he left, Wallace was sitting on the back steps. She could tell he was worried. She promised him she was fine—better every day—and then, when he was gone, she retreated once more into the endless repetition of Davis and the gun.
She tensed when she heard the gate to her backyard squeal open. She had forgotten to lock it when Mason left. The falling darkness was her only clue that hours had gone by since his departure.
She heard the sound of the gate latch clink into place and the rasp of leather soles on the flagstone path. She didn’t look up as he approached.
He sat next to her on the step. His arms went around her shoulders and she leaned into him.
“You did good, little white girl. Thank you.”
ALSO BY ROGER JOHNS
Dark River Rising
About the Author
ROGER JOHNS is the author of Dark River Rising, his first mystery, and is a former corporate lawyer and college professor with law degrees from Louisiana State University and Boston University. He was born and raised in Louisiana, though he and his wife now live in Georgia. Visit Roger’s website at www.rogerjohnsbooks.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Also by Roger Johns
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
RIVER OF SECRETS. Copyright © 2018 by Roger Johns. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Cover design by James Perales
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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-11012-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-11014-5 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250110145
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First Edition: August 2018
Secrets