“About?” Goof said. “Abuse in the Homes or trimming the fat? Which is it?”
Then he slumped in his chair, drained but wishing he could have listened more. He wondered how the guy answered. So which was it, mister? What is more important to you? Stopping abuse in the Homes or saving money?
“You did real good,” the agent said. “You up for another one?”
Goof took the fedora off. He didn’t want it anymore. A stupid hat. “Can I take a breather? Would that be all right?”
“Yeah. We’ll take five.”
Shackleton turned off the session recorder, took a long drag from his cigarette, and stabbed it out.
“Doing it from a recording takes it out of me,” Goof said.
“Word of advice,” the Bureau man said. “Once I press these buttons here, everything we say is on tape. Our session recordings are typed up word for word as transcripts and read by all sorts of important people. You should only say what’s missing from the tape I’m playing. When I turn it off, you should—”
“Stop talking. Got it.”
“Good. No need to make anybody anxious.”
“I thought I was gonna spy on the Russians.”
“You are doing important work for the government. We’re the good guys.”
“And the bad guys are like what, Congress?”
“You want another hat? Some more Burger King, maybe? A lot of perks I can throw your way, if you do your job.”
“I like it here,” Goof said.
“You sure about that? Because maybe you’d like to go back to the Home. Work on a farm. Eat porridge with a nice fat cockroach in the bottom of your bowl.”
“I said I like it here. I love it. I’m living in high cotton.”
“Then keep scratching my back so I can scratch yours,” Shackleton said.
Goof splayed his hands. “Scratch, scratch.”
“All right then. Are you ready now?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You sure? You don’t have to take a piss or anything?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Wonderful. I got a civil rights lawyer we need to get to next.”
“Yeah, wonderful.”
Goof hadn’t told him the truth. The truth was he wanted to go back to the Home.
Special Facility was heaven to him. Like something out of a fairy tale. He loved the air conditioning, the food, the daily hot shower with no time limit, a couple hours of TV every night. But it was lonesome here. Nobody to talk to except a mute guard and a humorless government man who made poor company.
Shackleton hadn’t been honest, either. Sending him back was an empty threat. They would never send him back. Not after letting him in on their dirty secrets. Not after he showed them what he could do.
He now understood how important his talent was and why Brain had warned him to keep it a secret. Something he used to do just to make people laugh.
If he didn’t like his carrot, they would give him the stick. His choice. Either way, he’d be helping them. For that part, there was no choice at all.
First time in his life, Goof thought maybe he should have kept his big mouth shut.
Twenty
Sheriff Tom Burton got out of his police car thinking it wasn’t eight o’clock in the morning and already it was a shit day to beat all shit days. He squared his hat and set off down the hill toward the pond that was by the old marble quarry.
Deputy Sikes met him coming the other way, a bulge of Redman in his cheek.
“Lay it out for me, Bobby,” Burton said.
The deputy pointed down the grassy hill. At the end of two long lines of tire tracks, the yellow car lay half submerged in the pond, its ass end hanging out.
“That’s where Tolbert found the body,” Sikes told him.
Burton spied Deputy Palmer interviewing the old coot. “All right.”
“And that’s it. Coroner’s on the way. How you want to play it?”
“What you mean, that’s it? You ID the body or not?”
Sikes turned his head to spit a stream of brown juice on the grass. “Most of him is underwater. Besides that, he ain’t got a head.”
“What are you talking about?” Burton growled.
“I mean he ain’t got a head. Somebody took it right off him.”
“That what Tolbert told you, or you saw it yourself?”
“I didn’t see the body. You want me to get in the water and look at it?”
“No,” the sheriff said, wondering if there was a contest for shit days, because this one might just win first prize.
Made up of Huntsville and surrounding farms, Stark County had its share of crime like anyplace else. Bar fights, drunk driving, domestic disputes, men hunting and fishing when or where they weren’t supposed to. Drugs were becoming a big problem. Most situations got taken care of by folks. Self-policing. Murder was a different story. Half the upright citizenry carried on without a lick of sense much of the time, even worse when they added drugs or alcohol to the equation, but they knew better than to go around killing each other.
As for the timing, it couldn’t have been worse. This being an election year, and him running for re-election. People voted for their sheriff on a single issue, and that was law and order. A headless body did not improve his prospects.
He had a lot of work to do.
“Reckon I’ll take a look myself,” Burton said. “You run the plates at least?”
Sikes spat. “We called it into Highway Patrol.”
“I got a feeling I know who this is just from the car make.”
“Well, who is it—”
“Call the office and ask Beth to send J. T. along with a camera and the murder kit. She should get a tow out here while she’s at it.”
“I’m on it,” Sikes said.
The deputy walked off to his car to use the radio.
Burton took another quick look around. Nothing but the grassy hill, trees lining the crest. The Richmond pond, populated with bass and bluegills. Over yonder, the old marble quarry.
He has it now, what happened here. Somebody kills the victim and drives him out to this secluded place. Puts the car in neutral and lets it roll into the pond. Only the car gets stuck before it becomes submerged.
The sheriff continued down to the bottom of the hill. A thick swarm of angry black flies buzzed around the car.
Deputy Palmer stood holding a pad and pen, taking down Tolbert’s statement. He touched the pen to the brim of his hat. “Sheriff.”
“Morning, Jim.”
“Hey, Sheriff,” said Tolbert, decked out in his fishing gear. “I was telling the deputy here, I got up this morning to do some fishing …”
Burton let the old man ramble on for a while. “I need your wader.”
“My wader?”
“I’ve got a mind to take a look at the body,” said the sheriff.
“But I ain’t got no britches on under. No shoes, neither. Just feet and socks.”
“Ain’t nobody gonna see you but us, Tolbert. Now come on. It’s for a good cause.”
The fisherman grumbled as he yanked down his suspenders and pulled the rubber wader to his waist. Groused even more as he sat on the ground and wrestled it off. Then he stood in his underpants and handed it over.
“Thank ye,” Burton said with a bit of formality, lending some dignity to the act.
Standing on socked feet with his white knobby knees poking out, Tolbert promptly squandered it. His gray-white beard parted in a gap-toothed cackle. “So how do I look, Sheriff?”
“Like a movie star. What side is he on?”
“He were kind of floating around in there, but I’d say passenger. I didn’t stick around to confirm. Stinks like Satan’s asshole in there.”
Burton could smell it from here.
The sheriff stepped into the wader, pulled it up, and hitched the suspenders over his broad shoulders. He scrounged up a stick and pressed a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Then he waded into the pond thic
k with cattails, feet sinking in the ooze. The flies buzzed like a plague of Egypt. He parted the cattails and approached the car, gagging on the unholy stink pouring out the open window.
“Hell’s bells,” he breathed.
The car had angled into the water deep enough to fill its insides with a brackish dead man stew. Pond scum and cassette tapes floated on the water. The windshield was blackened with blood spatter, a big circle of it rubbed out so whoever was driving the car could see. The headless torso rested against the passenger side, the ragged stump crawling with horseflies. A single knee stuck out of the water.
Burton lowered the stick into the soup and lifted the man’s arm. He’d recognize those jailhouse tattoos anywhere: mysterious Latin and crude symbols drawn in prison ink made from baby oil, charcoal, and water.
“Hello, Ray,” he said.
Ray Bowie, a good-for-nothing drifter who rolled into town a year back. Burton pressed him on his arrival in Huntsville, the intent being to take his measure and let him know the law noted his presence. Bowie said he was from Texas and had come up to Georgia from Florida, but Burton doubted either one was true. He was one of those types seemed not to come from one specific place but instead from everywhere and nowhere. His Alabama driver’s license said he was thirty-three years old.
Beth had run a background check on him and found he’d done hard time in Texas for attempted sexual assault on a young girl. With the germ going around and so much prudishness, some men gravitated in that direction. They went for the spring chickens. No high school girl had the plague, and the young felt no shame about sex, only curiosity and ignorance.
His arrest in Houston was just the one offense. Burton had a feeling he’d done a lot more than that. Bowie had struck him as a bad seed from day one.
Now somebody had killed him and taken his head clean off. The deputies would be able to search the car for it once they hauled it from the pond and drained it, but Burton doubted they’d find it. It seemed to him if somebody wanted to go through all the trouble of tearing it off, that somebody wanted it for a reason. He made a note to call in for more men to comb the grounds anyway.
A mallard quacked a feeding call from the cattails on the other side of the pond.
“Hell’s bells,” he said again and returned to dry land.
Sikes came back from his car. “You all right, Sheriff?”
“I ain’t seen anything like it in all my born days.”
“I told you,” Tolbert said. “What happened to that boy ain’t human.”
“You might be right about that.”
“You think maybe a bear got him?” Palmer said.
Huntsville had been settled on the coastal plain but wasn’t far from the Piedmont. Wild animals sometimes came down off the Blue Ridge and crossed over it into the county.
“It weren’t a bear that drove his car in the pond,” Burton said.
“The question is did the driver cut off his head,” Sikes said. “An animal could have come after the fact and took it away someplace.”
“Anything is possible, but I’m guessing the driver took it.”
Burton gave Tolbert his wader back and headed for his Plymouth.
“Where you going?” Sikes called after him.
Burton paused. “I’m going to the Home.”
The two deputies exchanged a glance.
Sikes spat. “The Home?”
“I got an ID on the victim. It’s Ray Bowie. He works there.”
“Is that right.”
“I’ll be back directly. You boys hold the fort here while I’m gone.”
“We’ll do that, boss. Fine day to be a cop.”
Burton snorted and gave his deputies a departing wave over his shoulder.
He put his hat on the car seat next to his thermos and sat behind the wheel. He unscrewed the cap, poured a cup of coffee, and drank it slow.
No bear did that to Ray Bowie before or after the car ended up in the pond. All that blood on the windows.
A creeper, though. Yeah. Maybe.
The plague kids were growing up. Getting older, stronger, more cocksure. Some ran away from the Homes and lived in the woods, going feral. They usually didn’t survive long. Every couple years, a hunter came into the office to report he found monster bones in the woods. That was changing. Today’s feral kids were older and able to hunt small game, stage nocturnal raids on garbage cans.
The sheriff started the car and drove to the Home.
The dirt track led through once fertile land reclaimed by wilderness. Briars and branches swept his car as it bounced on the ruts. Then the old plantation house and its outbuildings came into view, shaded by Spanish moss.
He remembered coming out here as a boy with his friends to explore, back when the house stood derelict and empty. Legend had it the spirits of dead slaves haunted the homestead and its environs. Moaning and whip cracks in the deep woods. Lynched Blacks hanging silent from creaking ropes.
Now new things, far worse than anything Burton’s childish imagination ever produced, haunted the place. They ambled across the yard on claws and hoofs and horny feet, trilling and hooting and growling, every one looking like he fell out the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. The teachers herded them into trucks for another workday at the farms and beef ranches.
Burton got out, squared his hat, and started for the house. Emmett Willard came out the door as he walked up.
“Morning, Colonel.”
“Good morning, Sheriff. To what do I owe this rare pleasure?”
“It’s about one of your teachers, Ray Bowie.”
“Haven’t seen him in days. Did he get himself in trouble with the law?”
“He got himself dead,” Burton said.
“I see. Why don’t you come inside?”
“I’d like that, Colonel.”
“Would you be put out if Mr. Gaines joined us?”
“Dave Gaines? Why do you want him?”
“He knew Mr. Bowie best,” Willard said.
“That’d be fine.”
The teachers were all keeping one eye on the sheriff and principal. All Willard had to do was glance at Gaines and tilt his head to get him running. Burton sized up the teacher as he hustled up with his lazy eye and fake smile. Not a bad guy, at least he had no record. Otherwise, he was the kind of man who couldn’t find his own ass with both hands in his back pockets.
They all went inside together and sat in chairs in Willard’s office. Burton explained what Tolbert found at the Richmond pond.
“Motherogod,” Gaines said. “They took his head?”
“When did Ray last come to work?”
“Last Tuesday,” Willard told him.
“He been missing that long, and you didn’t think anything of it.”
“Faculty members come and go. A certain caliber of individual, you understand.”
“Not sure I do, Colonel.”
“Men made of iron but feet made of sand,” Willard said.
Burton glanced at Gaines. “I think I follow.”
“The Home is a job, not a career,” the principal added. “Mostly, we get niggers and drifters, men fresh out of jail and needing some money.”
“Did Ray have any enemies?”
Willard looked at Gaines, who wagged his head and said, “No, sir.”
Burton very much doubted that was true, knowing what he did about Bowie’s disposition. “I understand one of your kids died last Sunday.”
“That is correct,” the principal said.
“Fell down the stairs,” Gaines clarified.
“Anybody push him, maybe?” Burton said. “Any kids causing problems?”
The principal smiled. “They don’t cause problems. They are problems. But no, nobody in particular comes to mind who would do a heinous thing like you described.”
Burton nodded. He knew the old man governed the Home with an iron fist. Had to, really, with four hundred creepers under his care. If there were problems, they got handled here. A go
od town policed itself. The Home did better than most.
He said, “Any kids unaccounted for last Tuesday evening after he left work or any time since?”
“Enoch stayed out at the Albod farm that evening,” Gaines said. “He walked home. He was gone an hour. He did it again yesterday.”
The sheriff did a quick calculation. From the Albods’s to wherever Bowie was and then to the pond. After that, a long hike home. “This Enoch fella. Anybody at the Home ever teach him how to drive?”
“No, sir,” Gaines said. “We don’t want any kids learning that.”
The one big thing that didn’t fit his theory. No creeper could drive a car.
“I doubt he’s the one,” Burton said. “Enoch is the skinny doggie-looking boy, hangs out with the uppity gorilla and Edward?”
“That’s right,” Gaines said.
“Saw him about a week ago last Saturday night. He and his friends were hanging around with some normal kids. The preacher’s boy, Reggie’s girl Sally, Amy Green, Michelle Johnson, and some boy named Troy. They just ran into each other, apparently. I rousted them with a strong warning. Thought you should know.”
“Thank you for sharing, Sheriff,” Willard said, meaning he’d handle it.
Gaines’s face burned red. “Yeah, thanks a lot.”
“That upset you, Dave?” Burton said.
“No, I mean, yeah. I’m their teacher. They’re my crew.”
“Last question, Colonel. Any kids going missing of late?”
“Not in some time,” Willard answered. “I believe the last runaway we had was back in March, what was her name.”
“Annabelle Rockford,” Gaines said. “The kids call her Catty Wampus.”
“Yes, that’s her. The police over in Davis caught and returned her. Are you thinking one of the children was involved in Mr. Bowie’s murder?”
“Not unless a bear came down off the Blue Ridge,” Burton said. “Then bit Ray’s head off and drove his car in the pond.”
“You say something bit him, sir?” Gaines said.
“The stump had bite marks,” the sheriff said. “Big teeth. Like the shark from Jaws chomped him.”
“Motherogod,” Gaines said.
Burton put his hat on and stood. “We may have a feral kid running around who did this. A kid who somehow picked up some driving along the way. Let me know you see anything. And keep an eye on your own.”
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