by Nevada Barr
“McIntire made a point of asking me to tell you he doesn’t think it was your fault,” the sheriff said. “You being new and all, and that he and his buddies have no intention of deserting Rocky because of it.”
“Big of him,” Anna said dryly.
“He thought so.”
“Talk to the lawyer?”
“Jimmy Williams? Tomorrow, he’s at the top of my morning. I did have one interesting bit of information turn up.”
Because he was pleased with himself and wanted her to ask what it was, Anna did.
“I dropped by the Posey farm and talked to Cindy. I’d forgotten I’d met her before four or five years ago when her son got on the wrong side of things. Just the pre-penitentiary warm-ups, I’m afraid. Anyway Cindy and I had a two-Coke chat. She’s sick enough I think Fred should see if he can get her back into care, but that’s not my field. Not with this hat on. She said she’d had two other children besides Danni and Mike. She told me they’d been stillborn and they were penguins.”
“Jesus,” Anna said.
“It gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it. I asked her how they came to be penguins, and she admitted that they weren’t really penguins. That a black nurse at the hospital had chewed them up. After he spit them out, they were black babies so she had to turn them loose.”
“Turn them loose?”
“She said she let them go in the woods so they could return to the wild. I got hold of Fred. Cindy had a miscarriage between Danni and Mike. He said that’s when she started ‘slipping,’ with a fixation on African-Americans. He swears there were no babies, black or otherwise, turned loose in the woods.”
“That’s a comfort, I guess. Did you believe him or do you think there’s baby bones buried somewhere under the cotton crop?”
“I believed him. We’ll need to check it out as best we can, but I think he was telling the truth.
“Then she told me Danni had been insured for forty thousand dollars. After the penguins, I wasn’t taking anything on faith but I checked. The girl was insured by Mrs. Posey. According to Cindy, Fred Posey didn’t know anything about it.”
“Life insurance on a sixteen-year-old girl? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you intend to kill her. They might fool you and me, but insurance companies mean business.”
Davidson laughed and Anna was relieved. Too often one man’s joke was another man’s insult.
“Not life insurance. Mrs. Posey had her daughter’s face insured. She’d heard on some TV show that an actress had her legs insured for a million dollars through Lloyds of London, she thought. And she knew Danni’s face had to be protected.”
“She’d told me Danni was going to be a model,” Anna remembered. “As big as Cheryl Tiegs.”
“Cindy Posey’s heard that her daughter was struck across the right side of her forehead over the corner of her eye, disfigured, and she wants that forty grand. She says she paid for it, it’s hers, and she means to have it,” the sheriff said.
“Since the girl’s dead, I wonder if the policy is still valid.”
“Who knows. The point is Cindy Posey thinks it is.”
“And maybe Fred Posey,” Anna added. Secrets were hard to keep, especially secrets requiring paperwork, records, canceled checks. There was a time that it wouldn’t have crossed her mind that anyone could murder their own child for a measly forty grand. No more. Forty grand might be a fortune to the Poseys.
“If one of the Poseys did it, the sheet and hangman’s rope don’t make a whole lot of sense,” Anna said.
“Making sense doesn’t seem to be Cindy Posey’s long suit. This is it.” Davidson turned off the two-lane road they’d followed out of Port Gibson and into the whale-belly darkness of a wooded dirt lane.
A tidy brick house was tucked back in the trees and surrounded by white azalea bushes in such glorious bloom that they glowed like the light of the moon shattered and brought to ground. A Dodge truck was parked in the drive and the porch light was on.
“Are we expected?” Anna asked as they got out of the car.
“I let Leo know I’d be by tonight. No sense wasting a trip if nobody’s going to be home.”
Anna followed Davidson up the walk. The door opened and a cacophony of barks commenced. When they reached the porch, Anna saw the perpetrators through the screen. The minister had half a dozen Boston terriers, all clicking their nails on the linoleum, whiffling through squashed noses and yapping. Not a pretty sight.
“Father Davidson, come on in,” said a voice Anna recognized as that of the dark man under Captain Williams’s command. “Ma’am,” he said as Anna was ushered in first. She’d forgotten how striking Leo Fullerton was. The lowering brow with black eyebrows that extended far beyond the comers of deep-set eyes, the full mouth that she suspected could turn cruel, but mostly the stiff way he moved, as if he’d not yet grown accustomed to the human form.
Amid the canine crisis that raged unabated and unreprimanded below their knees, Fullerton led them into a tiny formal dining room. Seated in straight-backed cherrywood chairs, they stared at one another across a centerpiece of fake magnolias and bunched ribbon that suggested a craft-mad woman tended to at least some of the minister’s domestic needs.
“Like I said on the phone, Paul, I can’t tell you anything.” The statement was flat, lifeless. Leo’s hands, palms down on the table, the fingers splayed, looked flat and lifeless, robotic limbs not yet needed. The only part of the minister that was animated was his eyes, and they disturbed Anna. One did not track. The other moved so quickly at times she caught herself glancing around the room to see if he followed the progress of a moth or a fly.
Methodically, Sheriff Davidson led Leo through the evening Danni had been killed. The minister said he and the others had turned in early. They slept in one tent, army-barracks style, on folding wood and canvas cots. He didn’t hear the cars. He was a sound sleeper. Answers were given in dull monotone, and Anna began to wonder if he suffered from severe depression or was on psychotropic drugs for other reasons, but his eyes—or his one tracking eye—was clear, the pupil size within normal parameters. Not that pupil size mattered with psychotropics. Anna knew very little about them. She’d ask Molly.
The only time he came to life was when Anna asked if he, like McIntire, had consumed a little too much bourbon.
“I’m a Baptist minister,” he said, obviously affronted. “I don’t drink spirits.”
Anna suffered an evil temptation to ask him if he danced. Not because he was a Baptist but because he came across as an audio animatronic Disney creation from the 1960s. The picture of him cutting a jig tickled her.
Finally, the questions were over. In a clatter of claws, the dogs escorted them to the porch and the minister closed the door, politely leaving the porch lamp on to light them to their car.
When they were partway down the walk, the preacher called from within, where he’d remained protected by the screen.
“Paul?”
“Yeah, Leo?” The sheriff stopped and turned.
“There’s something I’d like to say.”
“I’m listening, Leo.”
“This thing is ungodly for the girl, for whoever killed her, but it doesn’t end there.”
Anna and Paul waited. Anna was waiting for some sort of Christian revelation. What Paul waited for, she didn’t know, but she could feel the tension in him.
“How so, Leo?” he asked.
“That sheet, draping the girl like that, that’s stirring up racial hatred that we’ve fought so long and so hard. Pointing the finger at old prejudices, giving them new life. It’s as much a horror, as unforgivable, as the ... the other. Don’t you let it happen, Paul. Don’t let this be written in that book.”
They waited a bit, but he was done talking.
“I’ll do my best,” the sheriff said finally. “Good night, Leo.”
“Good night,” Anna echoed.
“Beating a dead horse,” Anna summed up her take on t
he interview. “There’s something strange about that guy. He was creepy when I met him. Tonight did nothing to change my first impression. He looked like a man in shock. The kind that are going to walk around for a while right as rain and then suddenly fall over dead.”
“Leo’s got a brooding aspect to him, but there’s something bothering him. I haven’t talked much to him since his mom died. Alzheimer’s. Long and slow and ugly.”
“That would do it,” Anna said. “Has he got any reason to lie about what he saw or heard that night?”
“None that I can think of. I’ve known Leo for twenty-three years, and far as I know he has no connection with the Posey family. Or the DeForests for that matter. He’s always been an odd duck but not to do harm. He’s one of those fellows who feels everything. Though he’s just an awful preacher, his flock thinks he walks on water. He feels their pain and carries their guilt in a way that would land me in Whitfield.” He named the local lunatic asylum.
Words Paul Davidson had spoken earlier, that hadn’t made sense at the time, snapped into focus. Davidson had said of charity work that it wasn’t his job “not with this hat on.” Once he’d said of Leo Fullerton, the minister, that they spoke the same language.
“Fullerton called you Father Davidson,” Anna said. It came out like an accusation.
“I’m a priest,” the sheriff said simply. “I had the congregation at St. James for nine years before I ran for sheriff. I still pinch-hit now and then when Father Johnson’s sick or on vacation.”
“A priest.” Anna was appalled. Mentally she was inventorying everything she’d said or thought about the man since they’d met. Probably she was going to hell.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said mildly and, in the faint glow of the dashboard lights, Anna thought he was laughing at her discomfort. “In these parts, ninety-five percent of everyone is, was, or is married to the son, daughter, or brother of a priest. The other five percent are clergy spouses.”
“Every region has its pitfalls,” Anna said, managing to be rude without even trying.
Davidson pulled up beside Anna’s patrol car in front of the Sheriff’s Department and shut his engine off. The night was mild and even in town smelled of exotic blooms and was rich with the song of frogs. “Can I take you out for coffee one of these days, go someplace where neither of us has to wear a gun?”
Too weird. Anna’s mind flashed to Bedazzled starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. The devil granting wishes, then screwing them up. She’d been lusting after a fucking priest. “Probably not a good idea,” she said and pulled too hard on the door handle. Her fingers slipped off the chrome and she cracked her crazy bone so hard against the butt of her pistol that for a moment her arm went numb and she was blind with the uniquely miserable buzzing of nerve pain.
“Goddammit,” she hissed. Then: “Oh my God, sorry. Shit, I did it again.”
Davidson laughed. “Not a lot of men of the cloth in your past?”
“I’ve never known a priest,” Anna admitted. “With the exception of Father Todd in high school who ordered the nuns around and, when he bothered to talk to us girls, always put his hand on our thighs.”
“Abusive?” Davidson’s voice turned so uncharacteristically cold, Anna focused past her tingling arm to the man’s face.
“Ridiculous is more like it.”
“Ah.” He didn’t sound much mollified.
“Coffee’d be fine,” Anna said.
Davidson smiled. It was truly a lovely smile, even with teeth green from the light on the speedometer. “It’ll be easy,” he said. “No confession. I’m an Episcopal priest.”
Layers upon layers, nothing was just what it was—Anna was at a loss as to where her Yankee forebears got the impression that Southerners were simple folk.
It was just past eight, dark and fragrant and warm. Anna’d put in a twelve-hour day and was glad to be going home. The town of Port Gibson lay just west of the Natchez Trace. There were two ways to get back on the parkway, one a mile or so south of the ranger station at mile marker thirty-nine and the other a road that angled northeast out of town to join the Trace at mile marker forty-three, closer to Rocky Springs. Having had her fill of business for the day, Anna took the shortcut.
On the way home, to amuse herself, she played with her radar. As it locked on each oncoming car, their speed was registered digitally. The previous district ranger had it set at sixty-two, twelve miles per hour over the posted speed limits. When any car exceeded that, and this night most of them did, the unit beeped and the number was locked in place till Anna erased it. Sixty-five, sixty-three, sixty-seven, Anna just couldn’t get inspired to write any tickets. Since the speed limits on the interstates had been raised to seventy it was hard to get excited over sixty-seven, even in a fifty.
Traffic was light and she slipped into a pleasant torpor, dreaming about the frozen fettuccine Alfredo dinner waiting for her. On the long straight stretch crosscut by Big and Little Bayous Pierre, the radar unit shrieked her back into the present.
One hundred seventeen.
Too high to ignore. The car was by her in a flash. Anna stepped on the brakes, flicked on lights and siren, executed a Y turn and was behind them, way behind them. At one hundred seventeen miles an hour, you could cover a lot of country. The Crown Vic was powerful, but Anna’d not had call to test it. She stepped on the accelerator and watched as the needle climbed smoothly to a hundred and twenty. Uncomfortably aware of the Trace’s deer population, she lifted her mike. “Seven hundred, this is five-eight-zero headed south from Big Bayou Pierre in pursuit.” Now if she crashed, they’d know where to start looking for the body. For four quick miles—time enough for her pulse to catch up with her speed—she gave chase. The driver of the car ahead was either too drunk or too distracted to notice the lights in his rearview mirror. Or he was deciding whether or not he could outrun her. Finally his brake lights pulsed.
“Thank you, dick-brain,” Anna hissed. She’d spent too many years on foot and horseback. High-speed car chases scared her half to death.
Another three-quarters of a mile and the car moved to the side of the road and stopped. Anna pulled in behind it, parking nose slightly out toward the road, where her high beams would light up the interior of the other car and, in theory, her car would provide her with some protection from the next brain-dead speeder to come down the pike.
For a count of ten she sat, letting her mind, wild on adrenaline, stop crackling. “Seven hundred, this is five-eight-zero,” she called dispatch, before she realized she hadn’t the foggiest idea where she was. Undoubtedly a number of tiny roadside mile markers had whipped by in her peripheral vision.
“Seven hundred,” the dispatcher’s voice was female, calm and deep.
“Vehicle stop approximately five miles south of Big Bayou Pierre. A red Thunderbird. Mississippi plates CCJ- 395. Could you run those for me?”
“Stand by.”
Three heads in the Thunderbird, two in the front seat, one in the back. As she watched, the head in the backseat disappeared. Someone ducking down to hide? Just sweeping corn chips up that got spilled during the chase? Anna didn’t like it.
“Five-eight-zero, seven hundred.”
“Go ahead.”
“Nineteen-eighty-two Thunderbird registered to a Loretta Doolittle, Alcorn address. Do you want that?”
“Not right now. Thanks.” Anna put the mike back on its holder, got the flashlight out of the door pocket, and stepped onto the pavement. Holding the flashlight high as she approached, she shined it into the rear window, checking the backseat. The third head reappeared. A good sign. She stopped a minute, working her light over what she could of the backseat and floor. The car was a mess of fast-food wrappers and laundry. The man in the rear seat was young, dark-haired, white, and looked so familiar that Anna had a sense of déjà vu.
No weapons that she could see.
The driver had his window up and his hands down. Anna positioned herself behind the door post and tapp
ed on the glass. “Window down please,” she said.
Seconds passed; then the smooth electric purr and the window came down.
“Hands on the steering wheel, please.” “Please” was habit. When she spoke, she could hear the cold tight bark of anger held at bay in her voice. Anger was a distraction. She knew it was the godchild of the adrenaline rush and breathed it out to keep her mind alert, keep herself from getting tunnel vision.
A faint smell of marijuana smoke and gum came from inside. Anna could see the driver’s jaw working, chewing vainly in hopes of disguising whatever was on his breath. He put both hands on the steering wheel.
“Passengers: hands where I can see them.”
The passenger in the backseat started to say something. “Shut up,” the driver hissed. “Yes, ma’am.”
Anna stepped up by the driver’s side and shined her light in their faces purposely. A little night blindness wouldn’t kill them. White boys, early twenties, roughly dressed in heavy boots and dirty jeans. Working men, not college boys. “Give me the car keys.” Anna pocketed them and said: “Everybody step out of the car, please.”
“Jesus Christ, lady, give us a break—” this from the strangely familiar face in the backseat.
“Shut up, Mike.” The front seat passenger spoke this time.
“Fuck you,” Mike said and started to jerk open the car door. Anna was well clear of it but wondered if he’d known that.
“Slowly,” she said to the man called Mike. “I don’t want anybody having an accident. Move back to the right rear of the car and wait there.”
Making a point to move at his own pace and stand near the center of the trunk to prove he wasn’t taking orders, Mike did as he was asked.
“Sir, you on the passenger side, get out please. Go to the rear of the car.”
“Look, Officer, what’s this about?” the driver asked. “We’re just going home. Have a—”
“I’ll be with you in a moment, sir.” Anna cut him off and watched till the others had stopped at the rear of the car. “You in the blue T-shirt,” she said to the boy who was not Mike. “Put both hands on the trunk and push down hard.”