“No way. We don’t build bridges with a shotgun, and from where I’m sitting, you look loaded for bear.”
“I’ll be good. Besides…”
“Besides what?”
Kel hesitated. “I’m burned to an ember, Les. I mean it. I’ve got to get away for a while before we all end up regrettin’ it.”
“You were just in North Korea.”
“Right. Nothin’ like a trip to a totalitarian country to help you shake off work-related stress. C’mon, Les. Besides, this’ll give me a good excuse to miss the SecDef’s visit.”
Les rocked gently in his chair, staring quietly at Kel for a moment before responding. “Well, if you’re going, I suspect you’ll need these.” He reached under some papers on his desk and extracted a green airline envelope. “I had the travel section get the tickets. They aren’t happy about having to come in so early, by the way. You leave in about”—he looked at his watch—“an hour and a half. Your orders are being cut.”
Kel peered inside the envelope and saw tickets. “You bastard,” he said, looking at Les. “These are in my name. You knew I’d go all along.”
“Didn’t have a doubt. Can you be ready?”
“I guess…an hour and a half…”
“Yeah. You’re going to have to get a move on. I already called your wife, she’s on her way here, and she’s bringing a suitcase for you.”
Kel started for the door.
“And Kel,” Les said. “Try checking in with Headquarters once and a while. You know, like with a telephone.”
“I always do.”
“You never do. That’s the problem. Start. You call in this time.”
“I call in when there’s a situation I can’t handle. Can I help it if that’s never happened?”
“You ass. You call in this time, you hear? I won’t cover for you when Colonel Botch…when Colonel Boschet starts asking how things are going and nobody’s heard from you.”
Kel smiled and tipped an imaginary hat.
“I mean it. Oh, and another thing. Here’s the guy you need to link up with in Memphis.” Les stood up and handed him a yellow sticky note. “You’ve got a week. Do what you can to mend fences and then we need you back here—finished or not. You better get moving.”
Kel read the name written on the piece of paper. “Who’s Michael Levine?”
Chapter 13
Memphis, Tennessee
THURSDAY, AUGUST18, 2005
The flight from Honolulu took him nonstop to Toronto, then Detroit, and finally into Memphis International Airport. It had been one mad dash after another to make the gates. Another interesting fact about the federal government, aside from its belief that prison convicts make quality office furniture, is that it willingly aids and abets the airline industry in one of the most Byzantine forms of pseudosadism in the Western world—the capricious shunting of hapless passengers between random ports of call under the guise of procuring the cheapest ticket. This particular itinerary really was so masterful, however, that Kel had a hard time being too upset—you had to appreciate the artistry of a government travel office that could manage to find a way to route you through a foreign country for what was technically an interstate flight.
The last instruction that he’d gotten from Les Neep, shortly before he embarked on his Homeric odyssey, was that he was to rent a car in Memphis, find a hotel, and meet with FBI Special Agent Michael Levine at his office the following morning. That sounded like a plan, and Kel had been somewhat relieved to know that he could count on getting at least a partial night’s sleep after being routed through the frozen north. Fortunately, his wife knew him well enough that she’d taken it upon herself to cram a week’s worth of clothing into a single carry-on bag.
As he stepped out of the Memphis terminal, Kel looked around as he stood waiting on the sidewalk for the rental car shuttle.
“You by any chance Dr. McKelvey?” a voice said.
A tall man wearing a light-blue, short-sleeved oxford cloth shirt and a red-striped regimental tie and slinging a blue sport coat over his shoulder approached to within an arm’s length. His eyes were flecked gray and so was his black hair. He was thin and projected an air of hard angles and straight thinking. The evening air was still and very warm and humid, and the man was sweating noticeably.
“Excuse me?” Kel said. “Y’all say somethin’?”
“Are you by any chance Dr. Robert McKelvey?”
“Why yes sir, by chance I am.”
“Mike Levine, special agent for the FBI. I believe we’re going to be working together.”
So much for finding the nearest motel. Kel shook his hand. “Special agent, huh? You must be special; otherwise how’d you know who I was?”
“Your boss, Mr. Neep. I called him back this afternoon to find out who he was sending, and he described you. You’d already left. He said to keep my eyes open for someone who looked like an anthropologist. I must admit that I didn’t know what he meant at the time.”
Kel looked down at his chest and feet, taking stock of what he looked like, and then at Levine. “Anthropologist, huh? Good guess on your part—me bein’ caught out here without my pith helmet and shovel.”
“He also said you had a beard and that you always wear long-sleeved shirts.” He nodded at Kel’s rolled-up shirtsleeves. “You’re the only one I saw getting off the plane with long sleeves.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you ought to be a special agent?” Kel didn’t mean to be a smart-ass but he really, really, really had been looking forward to getting a motel room and a bed before anything happened to derail that plan, and Agent Levine looked like a certain train wreck.
“Actually, your plane was a couple of minutes early, and I thought I was going to miss you. I was about to have you paged when I saw the beard and the shirtsleeves. Took a chance.” Levine bobbed his head at Kel’s suitcase. “Carry that?”
“I can manage. It’s light.”
“Okay then.”
“Okay then.” Kel reached down and picked up his small suitcase. The two men stood looking at each other. Each sizing the other up. Kel made the first stab at small talk. “Ya know, Agent Levine, the FBI agents in Honolulu wear aloha shirts.”
“Is that so?” Levine stated without much of an attempt to show interest and even less attempt to continue the topic.
“Yup.” Kel shrugged. “Thought you might find that interestin’.”
Levine continued looking at Kel. After a moment he stretched his lips into something that would resemble a smile if it were backed up by any humor. The awkwardness continued for another thirty seconds, and then Agent Levine stepped off the curb and headed for the parking stall. He was in charge and he took charge. He didn’t wait for Kel, but he did apply some body English to indicate that he was to follow.
“There’s been a change of plans since you left Hawaii, Dr. McKelvey. Come on, I’ll tell you about it in the car, we’ve got quite a drive ahead of us,” he said over his shoulder.
Oh, great,Kel thought, feeling the kink in his leg from the long plane ride,I get another opportunity to sit down.
Neither man spoke as they walked, until Levine nodded in a general way at Kel’s rolled-up shirtsleeves. “Hope you brought some other clothes with you. Don’t know what it’s like in Hawaii this time of year, but the heat down here is brutal. You dress like that and you’ll be dead in an hour.”
I’m not the one carrying a wool sport coat over my shoulder,Kel thought.
“I’m serious,” Levine responded to Kel’s silence.
“Please Bre’r Fox, don’t throw me in that briar patch.”
Levine’s eyes choked down partway in confused suspicion, and he politely smiled again. Again without humor. “Say again?”
“You know…Bre’r Rabbit…Bre’r Fox…Uncle Remus…I was born here in Arkansas, Mr. Levine; I love this weather. Bre’r Rabbit was born in the briar patch and the thorns didn’t give him no never mind. Same for me and this weather.”
Lev
ine continued smiling but said nothing.Another damn nut case, he thought.
Levine nosed his car onto Interstate 40 and headed west across the long, illuminated Hernando de Soto Bridge that spanned the Mississippi River into Arkansas. The river looked like a broad, flat ribbon of dull lead in the reflected light. The plan was to make for Forrest City where they would strike Highway 1; from there they would ease their way south across the floodplain toward the old river town of Helena, Arkansas. Finally, they would angle slightly farther south to the even older small town of Split Tree, governmental seat for Locust County.
The number of visible lights winking in the evening haze diminished geometrically as West Memphis receded in the car’s rearview mirror. For a while, Kel managed to break his share of the silence by answering questions about the quality of the airplane food, the courtesy of Canadian immigration officials, and what living in Hawaii was really like, but slowly the talk stalled out, and he allowed himself to slump against his chest belt and doze.
“Doctor,” Levine said. He paused. He kept looking over at his passenger, unsure what to do. “Doctor,” he repeated, louder this time.
Kel’s head snapped forward, and he felt a thin smear of drool beside his mouth now chilled by the air Levine had blasting from the air-conditioning vents. His brain was in a landing pattern somewhere over Toronto, and it was a second or two before he squared himself with his actual surroundings. He blinked his eyes in Levine’s direction.
“Asleep?” Levine asked.
“No thanks, never touch the stuff.”
“You mind if I call you Robert, or Bob, or Doc? This could be a long week if I have to keep saying ‘Dr. McKelvey.’”
“Agent Levine, I reckon this is goin’ to be a long week no matter what you call me.” He put his palms on the seat and pushed himself erect against the seat back. He sucked in a long lungful of chilled air and rotated his head slowly, stretching his neck muscles. A couple of bones popped. “Most people call me Kel—as in short for McKelvey.”
Levine seemed to consider that before asking, “How about Mac?”
“How about not. Kel’s fine—unless you prefer Dr. McKelvey. I don’t.”
“Okay, ahhh…listen—Kel—what do you know about why you’re here—aside from the fact that I requested some assistance?”
“Almost nothin’. I know that y’all got an unsolved murder case that you think is somehow connected to a case my Lab’s workin’ on, but other than that, I’m waitin’ for you to educate me.”
“It’s not simply any murder case, Doc…”
“We agreed onKel.”
“Okay. Kel.” He said the name slowly and enunciated like he was in a beginning language class. “I suspect not, but have you ever heard of the Leon Jackson murder?”
“Sure. Sort of.” Kel paused and blinked hard while he thought back. “Don’t remember many details. Seems to me…ahhh, let’s see…it seems to me, he was a small-time civil rights leader. Kind of a wannabe who was killed in the early sixties, ahhh, midsixties—1965.” He paused while he took in another deep breath and let it out slowly. He was trying to recall the details that Pierce had given him over the phone, and the ones he recalled from his youth. “Everyone thought it was somehow linked to the killin’ of those three kids in 1963, ‘64, whenever—Goodman, Cheney, and Schwimmer—Schwimmer? Swimmer? That’s not right, is it?…”
“Schwerner. The MIBURN file. It’s theMississippi Burning case.”
“Right, Schwerner. The Goodman, Cheney, Schwerner murders over near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Neshoba County, I think it was. Always liked to say that—Neshoba—Knee-Show-
Bah—makes me feel like Tonto, or somethin’. Knee-Show-Bah, Kemosabe.” Kel smiled, realizing that the jet lag was having an undesirable effect on him. He collected himself. “Sorry. Ahh, other than that…They ever catch the bad guys? I mean in the Jackson case. I don’t think they did…did they? I guess that’s the cold part of your cold case.”
Levine looked long at Kel before responding. “No, we didn’t, but I’m impressed with what you know about the case—it’s more than the local sheriff seems to remember.”
“Well, like I told you, I was born in Arkansas. Actually, my father and grandparents were from Split Tree originally, so we paid more attention to it at the time than a lotta folks probably did—but I was pretty young at the time, and definitely pretty stupid.”
That gave Levine cause for concern. His first impression of Kel was that he was somewhat dim-witted, but given the fact that he’d just stepped off a long airplane flight, Levine had been willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt. But now, after finding out that Kel had ancestral connections to the same town that produced Booger Red, Jimbo Bevins, and three generations of Donnie Hawks, he was sure he was dealing with a congenital half-wit.
“If you have ties to Split Tree, then you have my sympathies,” he said cautiously.
Kel looked out the window and then back at Levine. He shrugged. “It takes some gettin’ used to, that’s for sure. My folks moved away from here before World War II and resettled on the other side of the state, but we stopped here a couple-three times when I was real little—on our way to visit my mom’s people down in Mississippi. I remember my folks talkin’ about the Jackson murder, but to be honest, what I just told you is about all that I remember without benefit of hypnosis…or drugs.”
“That’s a good start. We can get into the details tomorrow, but basically here’s the skinny: The Bureau thinks that the Jackson case is worth taking a fresh look at; it’s been open all these years—inactive but open—and what with the recent developments in DNA analysis and the recent conviction in the Goodman, Cheney, Schwerner case, and so on, it warrants a relook.” Levine saw no reason to surface the snipe-hunt aspect of his own involvement. “There’s another aspect to the case too, though you may not remember it. There’s a John Doe that was found with Jackson. Young white kid—hence one of the similarities to the Mississippi case—white kid, black guy, levee, rednecks—you can connect the dots. Anyway, I was sent down here, among other reasons, to see if we could piece together the identity of the John Doe. The basic idea is that…are you following?”
“Um humm.”
“Well, as I was saying, the idea is that maybe if we know who he was, we might be able to figure out who did it. That’s the theory anyhow, and that’s why I requested an anthropologist a couple of weeks ago—to help examine the skeletal remains.”
He paused again and looked at Kel momentarily before continuing. “I’ll be honest with you, I’d thought I was getting one from the Smithsonian, but then I’m told that this case may be related to something that army CID is handling, and that they’re sending one of their people in to assist me instead.”
“Hold on, partner, how about backin’ the truck up. D’you say C-I-D or C-I-L? C-I-D is the Criminal Investigation Division—the cops; I’m C-I-L—the Central Identification Laboratory—the docs. We’re the ones who identify U.S. war dead.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what I learned yesterday when I was given a contact number in Hawaii. You’re the guys that screwed the pooch in the Gonsalves case, right?”
“Oh goddamn. That was an FBI fuck-up from the start. One of your evidence techs filled out the wrong chain-of-custody forms. We linked one of the victims to Gonsalves, but the evidence was bounced because of the screwed-up paperwork. We had nothin’ to do with that.”
“Anyhow,” Levine continued, as if Kel had said nothing. “By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late to stop you. You were already somewhere over the Pacific. Your boss…Mr. Neep?…he’s a very funny man, by the way—he just kept chuckling all through our conversation. He thought you’d find all this pretty amusing. Anyway, the newest wrinkle in the case is that no one seems to be able to find the John Doe’s remains, not the coroner, not the sheriff, not even the Boy Scouts…” Levine saw Kel about to question that last one and quickly added, “I’ll tell you that whole story when we have about six ho
urs and a large dry-erase board.”
“Maybe I’m missin’ somethin’, Special Agent Mike; let me clarify this in my own mind since it seems to be makin’ sense in yours. First, you’re sayin’ that you didn’t request me.” Kel kept count with his fingers. “Next, you thought army CID was comin’, and now that I’m here, you’re tellin’ me that y’all don’t have any remains for me to examine? Does that about bring me up to cruisin’ speed on this one?”
“I think that’s a fairly accurate summary.”
“Aw shit.” Kel closed his eyes and tilted his head back so that it pressed against the headrest. “Were you ever in the army, Mike? Do you know what a ‘cluster fuck’ is? This one hasCLUSTER stenciled all over it in shiny bright red paint.”
“Yes, I was in the army, and I couldn’t agree more.”
Kel took several breaths and lifted his head. He stared into the dark floodplain for several minutes. Finally he spoke. “Did I mention that I flew all the way to Toronto—that’s in Canada, you know?”
“Why yes, I think you may have made some mention of that—several times, actually. And did I mention that your boss thought all this was pretty funny?”
“Yeah you did—several times, actually. Remind me to key the side of his car when I get back—he’ll get a real kick out of that.”
After a few minutes, Levine spoke. There was an awkward tone to his voice. “We might as well get some cards out on the table right up front. I’m here to do a job, that job happens to be the investigation of a forty-year-old double homicide. Understand? This is not my first choice of assignments and you’re not my first choice of partners either—no offense.”
“None taken.”
“Definitely not my first choice of locations. Fucking Bible Belt.” He paused. “You’re not a religious nut, are you? You a Baptist?”
“Hmm. My mother’s people were Methodists.”
“Methodists, huh? You handle snakes and shit?”
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