Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  “But this story isn’t just about civil rights murders!” she explodes. “You can’t demand that I jump the gun on parts of the story and hold back the rest.”

  “Did you really look at Henry back there?” I ask. “I don’t want you to end up like that. And the best way to prevent it is to convince Royal and the Double Eagles that the information they most fear is already out there. And that the FBI has it.”

  Caitlin sighs and looks out the window at the river, which appears slate gray today, rather than reddish brown. “This is one of the most complex stories I’ve ever worked. I can’t possibly do it justice by tomorrow. I’m going to pursue it as hard as I can, but methodically. I’m going to get it right. I won’t let redneck psychopaths determine my publishing schedule.”

  “Caitlin . . . Sherry Harden gave you the keys to Henry’s safe-deposit boxes. How quiet do you think she’ll stay about all she’s heard and seen? If the Double Eagles find out you have Henry’s files, you’ll be next on their hit list. The only way to stay off it is to publish the story Henry planned to publish, or one like it.”

  Caitlin turns back to me and squeezes my arm, her eyes imploring. “But Henry had years to digest this stuff. He had it all in his head. I’m starting from zero! If I had his rough draft of the story, maybe I could pull this off. But that was destroyed in the fire last night.”

  “I’m sorry. But you have a handpicked staff, most of them way overqualified. If you push your deadline till two or three A.M., you’ve got plenty of time to put a great story together. Caitlin . . . all you have to do is make the Eagles believe the FBI already has everything you do, even if they don’t. I’ll be glad to help you sift through Henry’s stuff—but I have to track down Dad first.”

  “I don’t need your help,” she says sharply. “And I sure can’t wait for you to track Tom down. You don’t even know where to start looking.”

  “I suspect Quentin might know where he is.”

  “I’d start with your mother, if I were you.”

  “She already lied to me about Dad once.”

  “Well, you can’t blame her for that. What woman wouldn’t lie to protect her husband?”

  “To her own son?”

  Caitlin squeezes her knees in frustration. “We’re getting off subject. I just don’t like the way this thing has gone down. I’m still not sure you’re telling me everything.”

  “Are you telling me everything you know?”

  She blows out a rush of air, then says something unintelligible under her breath.

  “Look!” I cry, pointing over the steering wheel as we come to a hard left turn on the levee. “What is that?”

  Two hundred yards north of our car—and twenty feet below it—I see two huge tractor trailers with massive blue and white machines like blocky Transformers mounted behind them. Four black SUVs surround the trucks, and even from this distance, I hear a low, powerful rumble through my window glass. Some sort of workboat lies anchored about thirty yards out in the Jericho Hole.

  “What the hell’s going on over there?” Caitlin asks.

  “I have no idea. I figured we’d find an SUV filled with sonar equipment and a couple of FBI divers.”

  A deeply rutted dirt road leads from the levee down to the Jericho Hole, and I’ve taken great care not to bottom out or get high-centered on it. Caitlin’s impatience is tangible in the car. The Jericho Hole is surrounded by trees except in a few places, but with the branches bare, you can clearly see the great loess bluff of Mississippi a mile across the river. As we draw nearer the semi trucks, I see Kirk Boisseau’s Nissan Titan parked at the water’s edge.

  “How the hell did they find Kirk?” I wonder aloud.

  “Look!” says Caitlin, pointing to her right. “That’s Jordan Glass.”

  Forty yards past the trucks, an athletic-looking woman about my age is crouching on a log, shooting pictures through a long telephoto lens. The fleece jacket tied around her waist tells me she’s already learned that December in Natchez isn’t discernibly cooler than in New Orleans.

  Parking beside Kirk’s truck, I notice a knot of men standing on the far side of the semi trucks. They seem to be studying a map.

  “Penn!” cries a voice from my left, startling me. “You believe this shit?”

  I turn and find Kirk Boisseau watching me with flushed cheeks and an excited smile. He’s wearing a wetsuit with a down jacket over it.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “I had to show them where I found the bones.”

  “But how did you get here? I mean, how did they find you?”

  He shrugs. “I figured you gave them my name.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Kirk shrugs again. “That Kaiser guy just called me out of the blue, late last night. He said the FBI needed my help, and they wanted to hire me as a diver. He’s a marine, too. Vietnam. What was I going to say?”

  A tall, brown-haired man has detached himself from the group and is coming toward us. He’s carrying a neoprene bag in his hand.

  “That’s him,” Kirk says quickly. “He brought a couple of FBI divers up with him, and they’re damned good. We’ve already brought up most of the bones.”

  Kaiser has almost reached us.

  “And those trucks?” I whisper.

  “Pumps. King Kong shit, man.”

  “Hello, Mayor,” says Kaiser, leaning forward and shaking my hand with a firm but not overzealous grip. “I see you and Kirk found each other.”

  I nod and smile, trying to read him as well as I can before we get to anything that matters. John Kaiser looks younger than I imagined, but he has the wise eyes of a man who has seen much—maybe too much. His hair is longer than that of most FBI agents I know.

  “Kirk,” he says, “do you mind if the mayor and I take a walk?”

  “Nah. You guys do what you need to do. I’m gonna get some heat going in my truck.”

  Kirk heads for his truck, but before we can move away, Caitlin gets out of the car and plants herself in our path. Even as I introduce her, Kaiser takes out his cell phone and calls his wife. Looking up the shoreline, I see the brunette stand and put a cell phone to her ear, then wave and start walking toward us.

  Jordan Glass looks very well put together, but not in the way of models or pinup girls. She looks like the kind of woman who could easily run fifteen miles if her car broke down. As she nears us, I sense Caitlin vibrating like there’s a motor inside her.

  “Jordan Glass,” says the woman, holding out her hand to Caitlin. “You’re Caitlin Masters?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re younger than I thought you’d be.”

  Her familiarity leaves Caitlin uncharacteristically quiet. The photographer looks between forty and forty-five, and though she wears little makeup, she doesn’t suffer from the lack. Her eyes are clear and bright, her forehead and cheekbones high, and her mouth only faintly lined at the corners. She has shoulder-length hair, but it’s pulled back and bound with a multicolored elastic hairband, which gives her an almost bohemian look among the government agents.

  “How many bones have you found so far?” Caitlin asks Kaiser. “And from how many different people? Can you tell?”

  Kaiser’s lips widen in an understanding smile. “Off the record, Ms. Masters?”

  “All right,” Caitlin concedes, though I know it must pain her to do so.

  “All the bones appear to be from one skeleton.”

  “Have you identified it yet?”

  “Not conclusively, so I don’t want to say more than that.”

  “What’s in the bag?” I ask.

  Kaiser unzips the neoprene bag, then carefully removes a corroded set of handcuffs.

  “From the car?” I ask.

  The FBI agent nods. “They may have just used them to chain the body to the car. But from what I know about these murders, I’m betting he was alive when he went into the water.”

  Caitlin’s eyes are locked on to the dripping handcuffs, which lo
ok like something raised from the wreck of the Titanic. “Is it Revels or Davis?” she almost whispers.

  Kaiser hesitates. “Probably one or the other. Let’s not go any further than that just yet.”

  Jordan touches Caitlin on the shoulder. “You want to walk down the shore with me? I think these boys are about to go way off the record.”

  Caitlin gives me a frustrated glare, but after looking back at Glass, who seems to be treating their imminent exclusion as a juvenile exercise by her husband, she says, “Sure. Why not?”

  As soon as they are out of earshot, Kaiser’s face loses any trace of humor. “Do you know where your father is?”

  The shock of this question almost prompts me to speak frankly, but at the last instant my protective instinct kicks in. “I assume he’s at work. Why?”

  Kaiser studies my face for several seconds in silence. Then he says, “I’m sure you’re right. Let’s take a walk.”

  CHAPTER 65

  AS THE FBI agent and I walk down the muddy shore of the Jericho Hole, I wave my arm toward the great machines behind us, hoping to buy myself time to think.

  “What’s on those trucks? Pumps?”

  “Not just pumps,” Kaiser says, still looking after the girls. “Monster pumps. Each one moves twenty-eight thousand cubic feet per minute. This hole has fifty million gallons of water in it, give or take, and they’ll drain it dry in fifteen hours. They’ve already been running for nearly three.”

  Looking closer, I see a ring of damp earth several feet wide already surrounding the Jericho Hole, and the small hollows of bream beds in the mud.

  “Where’s the water going? The river?”

  He nods and points to four big-bore hoses running off to the east, away from the levee.

  “How did you get this equipment up here so fast?”

  “Politics. Which I detest. I’ve cleared this through the U.S. attorney’s office, all the way up to Washington.”

  “All this effort for a couple of musicians who went missing nearly forty years ago?”

  Kaiser raises one eyebrow. “Those musicians were kidnapped and murdered by a domestic terror organization, Mayor Cage. A terror cell that murdered FBI informants and probably executed one of its own members only two days ago. Which means that it’s still active.”

  I detect a hint of sarcasm in his voice, but he sounds deadly serious about his motive.

  “Are you saying—”

  “I’m saying that the Patriot Act, flawed as it may be, has its uses.”

  “That’s how you got Morehouse’s body. Right?”

  He gives me a conspiratorial smile.

  “Agent Kaiser, I have a feeling you’re not the standard-issue Quantico robot.”

  “True, I’m afraid. I usually like to do things quietly, but when those bastards tried to kill Henry Sexton, I decided to take the gloves off.”

  “Kirk said you’ve already gotten most of the bones up.”

  “On their way to the crime lab in Washington, as we speak.”

  “I’m betting they belong to Luther Davis.”

  Kaiser nods. “But that’s not for your girlfriend.”

  “I know. You already ID’d the car, right?”

  Kaiser smiles again. “Nineteen fifty-nine Pontiac Catalina. Two-door, full-size convertible. Split grille, twin tailfins, the only year they made them. This one has a 389-cubic-inch Trophy V-8, three-two barrel carburetors, and Wide Track Tiger wheels. Three hundred forty-five horsepower. If the Double Eagles hadn’t had Concordia Parish deputies radioing ahead to help them, they’d have never caught Davis and Revels the night they beat them up for going to that all-white drive-in.”

  “You got all that while it’s still under the water?”

  “I knew what I was looking for. That’s the same car Luther Davis bought used in 1961, right after he was discharged from the army.”

  A twinge of excitement ripples through my chest. “You’re positive?”

  Kaiser reaches into his pocket and takes out a folded photo print. At first it looks like a bad underwater shot of the Loch Ness monster. Then I realize I’m looking at a rectangular metal plate with rounded edges and several faint numbers and letters engraved on it.

  “One of my divers shot this forty-five minutes ago.”

  “The numbers look like they’re in groups,” I muse, taking the photo from him. “One—five-nine—P—four . . . zero-three-five?”

  “The VIN number,” he explains. “On that model Pontiac, it’s on the left front door hinge pillar. The ‘one’ represents the model series: Catalina. The second number is the year of manufacture: 1959. The P means the car was built at the home plant in Pontiac, Michigan. And this last number is the car’s serial number: four-zero-three-five. According to Dwight Stone’s case notes, Pontiac Catalina number 4035 was registered with the Adams County Department of Motor Vehicles in 1961 by one Luther Elijah Davis, age twenty, a Negro veteran of the U.S. Army.”

  “Jesus,” I breathe, thinking of Henry. “You did it.”

  “I called Dwight as soon as I matched the VIN. That old hardass was ready to fly down from Colorado and start digging into the case himself. I couldn’t allow that, of course, even if his health was good—which it’s not. But Dwight’s daughter works at headquarters in Washington, and she’s helping me grease the skids for all this support.”

  “Lucky you. But why keep draining the Hole, since you’ve already ID’d Luther’s car? Why not just pull the car up with a cable?”

  Kaiser doesn’t answer immediately. “We have a lot of unsolved crimes on our books in this parish. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years about bodies being dumped into water. I think it’s time the sun shone on the bottom of this little lake.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  Another enigmatic smile. “Well . . . you might say I’m poking my stick in the rattlesnake hole and waiting to see what crawls out.”

  I point toward the massive pump trucks. “It won’t take long for word of all this to get out.”

  Kaiser starts walking again, and I follow. “I want every ex-Klansman and Double Eagle in this parish to know the federal government just stomped in here with the biggest boots we’ve put on the ground since 1964. I want ’em pissing their geriatric diapers by morning.”

  His audacity leaves me speechless for the moment. Pointing to a fallen cottonwood log, he moves toward it, meaning to sit. Before he can, I grab the back of his shirt, then kick the log to scare off any snakes that might be nesting under it.

  “Snakes don’t hibernate up here any more than in New Orleans,” I tell him.

  “Thanks.” He sits on the thick log and turns his brown eyes on me, reading more than I usually like to let people see. “Penn, I know your father’s jumped bail. He’s in real trouble, and you need to get him back before anybody else finds out he’s gone.”

  “What makes you think he’s jumped bail?” I ask, hoping my face doesn’t betray my guilty knowledge.

  “Come on, man. Let’s not do this. You already knew he skipped.”

  Blood is pounding in my ears. “My father didn’t kill anybody, Agent Kaiser.”

  He gives me an appraising look. “From what I’ve read of his history, I tend to believe you. But if he’s innocent, why did he jump bail?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But this whole prosecution is motivated by revenge. The local sheriff and DA have wanted payback on my father and me for a long time.”

  Kaiser nods slowly. “I figured it might be something like that.”

  “How did you find out he skipped?”

  “I’ve got an agent over at the hospital, covering Henry Sexton. Last night, a former Double Eagle named Sonny Thornfield was dropped off outside the Mercy Hospital ER. He was having a heart attack. I wondered if he could have been faking, trying to get close enough to finish the job on Henry. But the ER doc says the coronary was real, and Thornfield made no attempt to reach Henry’s room.”

  “What’s the connection to my father?”


  “Around the time Thornfield appeared, a nurse saw your father driving a big silver van in the hospital parking lot.”

  A chill rockets up my spine. Walt Garrity’s Roadtrek. I remember the sleek silver van parked in front of my house only two months ago.

  “The nurse had gone outside to smoke a cigarette,” Kaiser goes on. “The van looked empty, but when the hospital’s rent-a-cop pulled alongside to check it out, your father suddenly climbed behind the wheel. He moved the van to a parking space near the front. When the guard came around the building again, the van was gone. Do you know anybody with a big silver conversion van?”

  Oh, man . . .

  “Obviously you do.”

  “I didn’t say that. Was this nurse sure it was my father?”

  “Positive. She’d worked with him for fifteen years at St. Catherine’s Hospital in Natchez.”

  I shake my head as though confused, but all I’m thinking is, What the hell are Walt and Dad trying to accomplish? “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “No, but it won’t stay secret long. Nurses talk. And don’t bother trying your dad’s cell phone. He’s shut it off. Whoever owns that van is giving him good advice.”

  Thank you, Walt. A low-grade panic has begun to build in my chest. To distract Kaiser, I say, “You know you’re about forty years late, if you’re here to solve the murders of Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis.”

  “Better late than never.”

  “According to Henry, the Bureau hasn’t even classified their disappearances as murders.”

  Kaiser’s eyes look somber. “Henry’s been holding back a lot from the Bureau. I don’t blame him. We didn’t give these victims much respect back in the day. Some shine got burned to death in Armpit, Louisiana? If Bobby Kennedy wasn’t calling Hoover about it every day, he didn’t want to know.”

  The mention of Bobby Kennedy makes me think of Brody Royal. “Your agency has had a lot of years to make up for that, and it chose not to.”

  “I know it.” Kaiser reaches into his inside coat pocket and takes out a yellowed piece of paper. It looks like an old typed letter, folded twice to fit into an envelope, then once again to fit into a pocket. He hands it to me, and on its face I find three typed sentences: