South of Shiloh (25 page)

33

RANE WAS WATCHING ANNE WALK AWAY, THINKING
how most times you take a flyer and drive a thousand miles to run out a rumor you come up busted, when his cell rang and Deputy Beeman said, “Where you at, John?”

What is it with everybody calling me by my first name?
“Ah, downtown, by KC’s coffee shop.”

“I had to stop over on the city side. Meet you in five at the police station lobby in the basement of city hall on Childs. You’re three blocks away.”

Rane went back into the coffee shop, asked directions, and was told to walk two blocks north and take a left. As he was walking the first two blocks, three people smiled and said hello. Entering a shaded residential block, he saw a tall church steeple up the street and green
GENERALS SLEPT HERE
signs by the curb in front of several old houses.

City hall was on the edge of the business district; a tall, modern concrete structure at odds with the older and lower surrounding architecture. Rane stopped for a moment and looked across the street at what he thought might be magnolia trees in a walled yard. Then he found the basement entrance to the Corinth Police Department, entered the lobby, and stepped up to a dispatch window to the left just inside the door. “I’m supposed to meet Deputy Beeman here. My name’s John Rane,” he said to a burly cop in a tight blue uniform and a brush cut.

The cop at the desk keyed on his voice and scanned the worn black haversack hanging from one shoulder and the digital Nikon with the wide lens on the other. “Reporter?” he asked.

Rane shook his head. “Photographer.”

“Where you from?”

“Minnesota.”

“Oh,
that
damn thing,” the cop said with a catch of genuine discomfort in his voice. Then he nodded, picked up a phone, talked briefly, put it down, and said to Rane: “Beeman’s upstairs talking to Captain Shipman. Have a seat, he’ll be down directly.”

The chairs in the lobby lined the wall across from the dispatcher and were taken up by a weary heavyset black woman and three anxious-looking children. She was having a conversation with an equally tired-looking white officer with forearms the size of Easter hams. Rane couldn’t avoid hearing their back-and-forth. Her son was in jail and there was a problem with paperwork. They looked like they’d been having the same exhausting conversation for about a hundred years.

Rane left them to their patient, dead-end dialogue and paced the lobby, shifting the straps on his shoulders. The elevator across the lobby opened and two men stepped out. One was a hefty bullet-headed officer in blue, who gave Rane a fast once-over. A catlike smile lit his face and he darted a look at the other man, raised his eyebrows in a “better you than me” expression, and strode off down the hall. The other man crossed the lobby toward Rane.

Beeman.

So this was the guy he’d spoken to on the cell phone last Saturday afternoon; Jenny going into shock, Paul’s body not yet cold.

Beeman wore casual dark chino trousers, an ash gray short-sleeved golf shirt, black ankle boots, a holstered pistol, and a five-pointed badge on a leather cuff clipped to his belt. He was lean and tanned, about five eleven and change, with slow brown eyes and shaggy dark brown hair overdue for a trim. What Rane noticed was his effortless bemused smile, like he’d spent his life being privileged to methodically peel back the layers of an endless joke.

“John,” he said, extending his hand, “Kenny Beeman. I got Lieutenant Cantrell’s fax from St. Paul. He said you ain’t the most likable picture-taker but I just might wind up respecting you.”

Thank you, Cantrell.
Rane had to grin slightly as they shook hands. “I just hit town and everybody calls me by my first name.”

“First time down this way?”

Rane shrugged. “I covered the Olympics in Atlanta. Was in the army.”

Beeman’s eyes twinkled. “Well then,” he said with a slight self-deprecating twist to his smile, “you been exposed to our hospitality.”

A response formed in Rane’s mind. The army training cadre had tended to be Southern and they did call him by his first name. Which, at the time, they determined to be Shithead. But he held his tongue and looked at Beeman as if to imply all this chitchat was fine and all that, but he was here because a man was dead.

“I get it,” Beeman said slowly, sliding gracefully over the speed bump. “Small talk’s not your strong suit. Okay then, before I drive you out to Kirby Creek and show you around where Paul Edin was killed I’m gonna give you the short local tour.” He jerked his thumb toward the other end of the lobby. “See that elevator over there?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, before they fixed it up there used to be this big nick in the back end. March, 1973, the police chief walks in the lobby here, maybe had a few drinks. These two cops were getting on the elevator. The chief was pissed, you see, ’cause these cops had arrested a friend of his. So he says to them, ‘I want you to let him go,’ or some such.

“They say words to the effect ‘Hell no, we got him good.’

“The chief pulls out his weapon and points it at the cops and repeats his demand. Bullshit, say the cops.

“Bang, the chief lets off a round, misses, hits the doorjamb, and skims the back of the elevator. One of the cops draws, fires, and shoots the chief deader’n shit right here in the lobby, about where you’re standing right now. True story.”

Beeman’s patient smile did not alter one tiny muscle. “Welcome to Corinth, Mississippi, John.”

34

BEEMAN SHOWED RANE THE WAY TO HIS BLACK
Crown Vic parked on the street. They got in and Beeman leaned back, relaxed, as he drove through the residential section. The big houses thinned out, then the smaller houses thinned out, and he turned right on an access ramp.

“We’re going north on new 45 to the Kirby estate, where the reenactment was held,” Beeman said.

Rane nodded and made a gut decision to test Beeman’s tolerance for Northern newsies. So he started right in, “You got a new side-view mirror, huh?”

“How’s that?” Beeman said, not taking his eyes from the road.

“To replace the one Mitchell Lee Nickels shot out,” Rane said.

Beeman slouched back behind the wheel, still smiling, and asked softly, “You like newspaper work?”

“Like being on my own, out of an office,” Rane said carefully, confirming his impression that Beeman was a tricky slow dance in deep water.

“Usually photographers come with reporters who ask the questions,” Beeman said.

Rane turned and looked right at Beeman. “I met with Manning and Dalton, the two Minnesota guys who came down here with Edin. You spent some time with them after he died.”

Beeman nodded. “Yes sir, I did. Helped expedite the remains from the autopsy lab in Jackson…”

“I got the feeling it was more than that. I heard you confided in them that you argued with the coroner’s cause of death,” Rane said.

Beeman’s smile tightened a bit. “I thought you’d come to take a few pictures. Damn if you ain’t starting to sound like a reporter.” He slowed the car, and Rane thought, Uh-oh, I’ve crossed one of those bright lines. This is where I get dumped off. But Beeman was slowing to make a left turn across the four-lane onto a gravel road. A sign announced:
PRIVATE PROPERTY. KEEP OUT
.

Beeman said, “This is the back way into the Kirby land. Right up here a ways, not long before the reenactment, Old Man Kirby had a massive stroke driving this road. They got him in Magnolia Regional on life support and he ain’t expected to live.”

They drove through an archway of shadowy branches smothered in a gray mesh of vines. Perry’s kids’ zoo.

“Don’t look like the road crew’s been through here lately,” Rane said as a branch scraped the top of the car.

“How Banker Kirby likes it, pretty much growing wild. Except for the battlefield,” Beeman said. “He puts crews on it, light-sentence inmates from county. Has them trim back the fuckin’ kudzu. Ran a mess of goats in here for a while to eat the stuff. That’s a losing battle.”

They drove out of the trees and the land opened. Sunlight dappled a swampy stretch of flooded cypress and, up ahead, the land rose in a long low ridge. Rane heard a rush of water, and a moment later they crossed a narrow bridge over a creek running out of the swamp. The road forked: one branch went up the ridge, the other descended into a broad amphitheater of fields surrounded by thick woods.

Beeman took the ridge road, and when they reached the top he stopped the car. The heights overlooked a long lake to the left. Halfway down the ridge he saw a white one-story house at the crest of the slope, with a gleaming monument in the front yard, next to what looked like four Civil War cannons.

“Those cannons?” Rane asked.

“Yep. Boys’ll be by eventually, load them up and truck them to Shiloh. Let’s get out. Give you the overall lay of the land. Then we’ll go down where it happened.”

They got out of the car and Beeman explained. “The main battle started down the ridge opposite the house. Some of the Yankees come up through that swamp we passed. I worked security on the swamp walk part…” Beeman turned and casually closed the distance so he stood a fraction closer to Rane than was comfortable for civil conversation. “…That’s when I got to know Paul Edin.”

“Know him,” Rane said.

“Well, slogging side by side for hours, you get to talking. He was new at this stuff, so I kept an eye on him.”

Rane asked, “What was he like, Edin?”

“Well sir, he was…ah…” Beeman looked down, “he had a wife and a daughter.” His eyes swept down the slope, came back at Rane constricted to pinpoints. “I had to tell the woman, talked to her a couple times. It was…hard…”

Rane waited for Beeman to continue as the cop’s right hand slid casually to the butt of his holstered pistol and he edged a fraction closer. “Hard,” Beeman repeated. “See, thing is, if Paul wouldn’ta moved when he did and threw off the shot and took that
accidental
bullet, it woulda hit me right about here.” The cop’s left hand came up in a fist, knuckles protruding, and thumped Rane on the sternum with the perfect amount of force. Just hard enough to be menacing.

Rane smiled and did not flinch.

Beeman dropped his hand and narrowed his eyes.

After a moment Rane said, “Okay, let’s cut the shit.”

Beeman reached in his back pocket, withdrew a sheet of folded printer paper, and handed it to Rane, who unfolded it and saw it was a printout from the
Pioneer Press
Web site—the story about his suspension.

“Internet’s a wonderful thing,” Beeman said.

“So?”

“So I read up on you. You write books, you been on TV, you was even a cop for a while, and you have a reputation for being big-time trouble. You got a habit of getting out in front of people. Like policemen. That can create problems. So you gonna tell me exactly why you’re here? Take your time answering ’cause what you say’s gonna determine whether you sleep in Alcorn County tonight,” Beeman said.

Rane went for it. “For starters I don’t believe a hunk of broken ramrod killed Edin, or some guy came here with a loaded junky Italian repro and didn’t know it,” Rane said.

“Okay,” Beeman said slowly.

“Looks to me like you got a sniper,” Rane said. “And people say it’s personal, he’s only interested in shooting one person. You. I figure if I stay close to you I’ll be there if this Nickels guy tries again. Like at Shiloh.”

Beeman laughed. “Mitchell Lee? Hell, man, that’s just barroom gossip.”

“Bullshit,” Rane said. “Why’d he disappear all of a sudden?”

Beeman mugged his lips, looked away, and said more seriously, “Done some homework, huh. Well? Stay close to me? You’ll be the only one, considering what happened down there.”

“You’re in the middle of a story,” Rane said. “It started when Edin got shot and it’ll end when you get the shooter or he gets you.”

“Let me get this straight,” Beeman said. “You want to follow me around and wait for a nut to take another shot at me?”

Rane shrugged.

“My own personal picture-taker,” Beeman said, mulling it.

Rane watched Beeman’s face and tried to clock the Southern cop on the ego meter. Many policemen dreamed of having their stories told. But to tell their story they had to overcome a toxic aversion to journalists. It was a ticklish balancing point.

“Be right there with me, huh? So you can write one of your books about it?”

Rane smiled. “Gravity’s a myth; self-interest makes the world go round.”

“Well,” Beeman said, hitching up his belt and scanning the surrounding trees with a spooky cop stare, “ain’t like I got a lot of folks in a clamor to hang out with me right now…”

“Is that a yes?”

Beeman rubbed his chin. “We gotta work out some ground rules.”

“You let me in, I keep my mouth shut till it’s over and the chips fall where they may,” Rane said.

“It ain’t ever that simple, John,” Beeman said.

“Why don’t we find out,” Rane said.

35

BEEMAN CLEARED HIS THROAT AND CHANGED
the subject. “Okay then. Now look down the slope to where the trees curve around. That’s where we come out of the woods. Paul and I were on the extreme left of the Union line…”

“So you were close to wood line on the right?” Rane said.

“Varies, between a hundred and two hundred yards give or take. He was hit after we fired the first volley. C’mon. Let’s go down there.”

As they walked to the car, Rane said, “Edin took a bullet, you said. I thought you didn’t recover a round?”

“We’re keeping it quiet for now. This Ohio reenactor, one of the guys standing behind us, found a spent round he says penetrated his pack. He gave it to Dayton Homicide. They forwarded it to the sheriff’s office. State crime lab’s got it now.”

Rane nodded. “What kind of round?”

“Lead cast minié round, looks to be a .577, kind an Enfield fires. Which don’t help much. We got the registration lists for the Confederate reenactors and there was more than four hundred Enfields on the field last Saturday. Smart, huh? Make it look just like an accident.” Beeman nodded at the field below. “You can imagine what the crime scene looked like, all trampled to shit.”

They got back in the car; Beeman turned around and took the other gravel road down into the clearing at the base of the slope. Rane removed the gun manual from his haversack and consulted the section on Enfield rifles. Beeman craned his neck and glanced at the thumbed pages illustrated with ballistic charts and notations crowded in the margins.

Rane returned the book to his bag as they parked. They left the car and walked into the field through knee-deep brush toward yellow bands of crime-scene tape that rippled in a soft breeze, threaded through the tall grass, anchored to tiny saplings. The tape formed a rough square about thirty yards across. They stepped over the tape and stood in muddy, trampled weeds.

“Near as I can recollect I was standing right here. Paul…” Beeman took Rane’s arm and tugged him into position to his immediate left, “…he was right next to me; elbows touching.” He extended his fingers, making a knife-edge palm, and sliced the air to the front. “Reb infantry was about ninety yards in front of us on slightly higher ground.”

“Who decides where you come out of the woods, before you get out in the open?” Rane asked.

“The Union troops come out the same place every year they do this thing.” Beeman pointed. “There’s a trail comes through the woods leading up to the edge of the trees.”

Rane’s eyes tracked across the field, up the slope into the trees. The yellow tape rustled against the grass in a gust of rising wind, and grasshoppers darted at his feet. He turned to locate the scamper of a squirrel, then he walked a few paces and sat down on a fallen tree. He reached down, dug his fingers through the grass, and brought up a clump of damp red earth, kneaded it between his thumb and first two fingers, raised it, smelled it.

“What was the weather like?” he asked.

“Stormed the day before, rained off and on all night,” Beeman said.

“Wind?”

“Dead still the day of the event, real thick ground fog all morning.”

“Humid, lot of moisture in the air,” Rane said, thinking out loud as he got up and studied the ground between where Beeman stood in the crime-scene square and the edge of the trees. The area was dotted with tall brush and saplings.

“Our best guess, from the angle of the wound, was a shot from that copse of trees up yonder, on that knoll,” Beeman pointed to the tree line on the left.

“That’s under a hundred yards,” Rane said.

“Ninety-four yards, we measured it,” Beeman said slowly, narrowing his eyes with interest.

“And you think the round you recovered is from an Enfield?”

“Yep.”

“You recall reading in Civil War history how the officers were always telling the troops to fire low, aim at their feet?” Rane asked.

Beeman squinted at him. “So? Large-caliber rifles in the hands of rookies tended to climb.”

“There’s another reason,” Rane said. “The baseline sight on a three-band Enfield was service-set for a hundred fifty yards at the factory in England.”

“Huh,” Beeman said.

“Off the record, you think it was Nickels, right?”

“Go on,” Beeman said slowly.

“He any good?”

“Shot competition with the Forrest Rifles. People who know say he once put three out of five shots in a can of Skoal, offhand at two hundred yards,” Beeman said.

“Iron sights or with a scope?”

“Original sights on an original Enfield with a re-rifled barrel by some fancy gunsmith up North. No expense spared. His father-in-law’s gun.”

“If that gun was here he didn’t shoot from ninety yards,” Rane mused. “The round would still be in trajectory at that range. He’d have to hold low for a serious chest shot. That’s leaving too much to chance. You’d want your sights dead on target.”

Beeman thought about it as Rane left him and walked back to the edge of the trees, where Beeman said the reenactors had emerged from the woods. Trying to reconstruct what happened, he spent twenty minutes picking along the tree line, then he took another ten minutes walking slowly toward, then past Beeman, moving serpentinely through the clumps of brush. Every few steps he looked past the copse of trees deeper into the woods at a low saddle of ground.

He stopped about fifty yards past where Beeman stood in the rectangle of tape. “Hey Beeman, come over here.”

Beeman joined him and Rane pointed to the branch of a frail scrub oak, no more than six feet tall. Beeman extended his hand and fingered a long wisp of frayed brown yarn wrapped by rain and wind around the slender branch. Virtually invisible.

“Like from a scarf, got snagged when somebody walked through? It was cold that morning when we got up. Some guys were wearing knit scarves,” Beeman speculated.

“Uh-huh,” Rane said. “Same guy walked through about fifty yards over there.” He pointed back toward the woods. “C’mon.”

Rane led Beeman through the field to another thicket, bent down, picked up a twig, and used it to lift a barely intact length of yarn fouled on a bush. A wad of dead leaves was loosely tied on the end.

“How the hell you think to look for shit in the bushes?” Beeman asked, now giving Rane his full attention.

Rane shrugged. “Ninety-eight percent of what I do is watching. About two percent involves pushing the button on a camera. I’ve covered black-powder shooting competitions where they hang pieces of cardboard from their spotting scopes on string so they can judge the wind.”

“Wind dangles,” Beeman said slowly. “Sonofabitch.” He raised his eyes to the copse on the knoll. And Rane, looking across the field, up the slope, was thinking he was looking at the last view Paul had seen. He turned away from Beeman, calling over his shoulder, “I’m going to have a look up in those woods.”

“I was all through that knoll with a half a dozen deputies and city cops…” Beeman said. Then he nodded. “Might as well…” Beeman’s cell phone rang; Rane heard him say, “You go ahead, I’ll be along directly,” as he flipped it open.

Rane continued to walk toward the trees, absorbing Paul’s death at every step. He saw Jenny’s eyes go wide with shock, saw Molly uncomprehending at first, then that first intimation of the vacancy, of something torn out at the root and gone forever.

Rane did the tricks, bore down, rinsed his eyes clear of distraction, and focused on the trees ahead, on the idea of the man who had crouched up there with his smug plan and confidence in his skills with his rifle. The man who took away Molly’s father.

As he walked, he instinctively figured angles, distances, and the roll of the ground. Didn’t want to shoot downhill. And you thought the wind would be a problem, so you came in here, set up your kill zone, strung the dangles. Figured you could monitor them with a spotting scope or a good pair of binoculars. The copse would put you in under a hundred yards but you’re good and you trust your sights. So you were deeper in the trees, more cover there, and you’d have a flatter shot. Wanted the round to fall exactly where your sights were placed.

He looked over his shoulder to confirm his direction and distance to the square of rippling yellow tape where Beeman leaned his head back, stretching his spine, still talking on the cell. He turned and snagged the toe of his Nikes on a root. Off-balance, he stopped, blinked, and looked at his sweaty hands. Christ, he was shaking.

And then, almost mechanically, by a process of elimination, he arrived at the possibility that feelings don’t emerge one at a time. The whole messy gob tumbles out. John Rane had lived his life through his eyes, instincts, and reflexes. So what’s this? Thawing out?

The tremor passed and he carefully approached a low saddle of ground secluded in the trees.

Five minutes later, Beeman joined him as he squatted above a leaf-matted depression behind a thick fallen oak. The hollow was screened by trees to the left and right, but they opened in front to give a view of the portion of the field with the yellow tape.

Carefully, he probed the decayed leaves with a stick and turned over a soggy cigarette butt. “You know anybody who smokes Pall Malls?”

Beeman studied the butt and said, “Fucking Darl Leets. But Darl was located down the field from me. Got witnesses…still,” he thought out loud.

Rane raised the stick and extended his arm, directing Beeman’s attention to frail wisps of fuzzy material snagged on a branch; bare remnants of the same yarn thread. Real fast, they’d reached a point where they were communicating pretty much with their eyes.

“I make the range at two hundred yards, maybe a little more,” Rane said, thinking out loud, hunkered down, forearms on knees, looking out at the field. “Game it out. He was shooting a low-velocity ball traveling maybe eight hundred feet a second at a little over two hundred yards. There’s a lot of moisture in the air and that could slow it down more. Do the math. The round takes almost a second to get there. That’s enough time for Paul to turn in front of you.” Rane stood up, dusted off his jeans, and then gently placed his fingertip on Beeman’s chest. “If he’s as good as you say, he didn’t miss.”

Beeman cocked his head. “Go on?”

“Things don’t jump in front of your target on the range, Beeman. And soon as he shot he was blind with the smoke.”

Beeman squinted. “You get that out of your book?”

Rane smiled blandly and shrugged. “You make certain assumptions you come up with a hypothesis.”

“Hy-poth-e-sis, huh?” Beeman said, enunciating carefully.

Rane leaned back, hoping he was coming across to the Southern cop as Just Plain Rane, a news guy long on bookish technique and short on experience.

“Sonofabitch,” Beeman breathed. “We didn’t look back here inside the trees that much, figured he’d be up on that knoll. Leave this. Don’t touch anything. I’ll get somebody out here with an evidence kit and take some pictures.” He pulled a blue bandanna from his back pocket and tied it to a branch to identify the site. “C’mon,” he said. “I gotta get back to the sheriff’s office.”

They walked to the car without speaking. When they got there, Beeman casually pointed into the passenger seat. “Left your camera. Taking pictures was the last thing on your mind, huh John.” It was not a question.

Rane did not respond. Make a note: beneath his good old boy routine, Beeman’s a lot smarter than he looks.