Blackbird (30 page)

The rest of the article was more of the same, Hazen promising an arrest ‘when circumstances warrant’. I tossed the paper into the recycle bin and shrugged at LA, who sat across the kitchen table from me. She had changed the bandage above her eye, and the visible nicks and cuts on her face seemed to be healing well.

She took a sip of coffee from her mug and said, ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’

‘OZ wants us to take
Bufordine
up to DeGray,’ I said. The boat had belonged to a Shreveport dope dealer before he got busted, after which it went through forfeiture proceedings and came up for auction in Traverton in the middle of a sleet storm. Realising nobody else was in the hunt, I bid two thousand dollars, all the disposable cash I had. Under normal conditions it wouldn’t have been enough to buy the trailer the boat rode on, but on this day it put me in possession of a bass rig worth more than my house, a Merc-powered 20-foot Allison capable of a hundred knots on flat water.

Looking the boat over, LA had said, ‘This is a phallic flip-off that can’t be topped, Bis. We’ll call her
Bufordine
.’

I would never have thought of christening a bass boat, but LA had liked Casey’s name for my truck and – probably thinking I needed more continuity in my life – decided to extend the theme.

‘Hey, that’s a great idea, Bis,’ LA said now. ‘Hell of a lot better than sitting around the house grinding your teeth and feeling sorry for yourself.’

‘Yeah, just the thing for a disgraced cop,’ I said. ‘Fresh air and sunshine. A last taste of freedom.’

‘What was OZ’s thinking?’

I sketched out the plan for her. ‘He said the only disgrace would be letting that shorthorn son of a bitch Hazen get the drop on me.’

‘Just what Matt Dillon would’ve said.’

As much as the idea of being off the case galled me, I had to admit OZ was probably right. The last thing he needed was Hazen dragging me in front of the council and the grand jury, and my getting out of town would pull most of the media pressure away from the Gold investigation.
But my real interest was getting Jana and the girls out of the line of fire.

‘What about the Ranger who’s supposed to be investigating you?’

‘No telling. Nobody seems to have any idea where he is, but those guys are a force of nature and a law unto themselves. Nothing anybody can do about him. OZ says at least he’s not talking to Hazen or any of the council members, whatever that signifies.’

LA shrugged philosophically and lifted her cup in salute, saying, ‘Okay, troop,
que sera sera
. At least we’ve got ourselves a plan.’

As it turned out, Jana had scheduled a major buying trip to Dallas that I couldn’t talk her out of, which almost caused me to change my mind about leaving town. But I couldn’t do anybody any good if I was in jail.

Jana’s idea was that distance and anonymity were her best protection. ‘All those miles over there, nobody knows anybody in a town like Dallas – how’re they gonna find me?’

Thinking about this, I didn’t answer her immediately, which she rightly took as a sign I wasn’t convinced. She watched me for a minute, then said, ‘How about if I take the girls with me?’

‘Where would they be staying if you didn’t?’

‘The usual – Casey with Sara McLemore, Jordie with her friend Lindsey down the street.’

‘Where they’ve stayed a hundred times before,’ I said. ‘And everybody knows it.’

‘Well, not a hundred, but yeah, plenty of times.’

‘Take them with you.’

Calling in a personal marker, I got T. Jack Frost, the
Patrol supervisor, a bad dog of a man with three daughters of his own, to agree to give Jana and the girls an unmarked escort out of town, hand off to the Highway Patrol to take them at least as far as Mount Pleasant, and keep an eye on Kiln-Roi and the A-frame until we all got back.

‘On it,’ he said. ‘When you coming back to work, Lou?’

‘I’ll check my horoscope and find out,’ I said.

Next I got hold of Ridout and Mouncey, told them where I was going and asked them to keep me posted if anything happened.

‘You got it, boss,’ said Ridout. ‘Hey, these council assholes are just barkin’ at the moon, ain’t they?’

‘I guess we’ll know soon enough,’ I said. ‘Meantime I’m counting on you guys to keep the wheels on, okay?’

‘You believe it, Lou,’ said Mouncey.

THIRTY-EIGHT

I did a last walkaround of
Bufordine
in the driveway, made sure we had all the drain plugs and checked that the hitch chains were in place, the trolling motor locked back and the fishing seats snapped down. I reached over and turned the key to confirm fire in the deep-cycle batteries and pushed against the massive lower assembly of the motor with my toe, finding it firmly seated in the transom-saver. The Raker aftermarket prop felt solid.

The day was cool and bright, with a photographic quality to the light, as we pulled out and headed north-east into Arkansas on our way to Lake DeGray. The off-hour traffic was fairly light on I-30 and we were making good time, the big boat tracking smoothly behind us, when my phone buzzed. It was Wayne, and he had apparently just gotten the news.

‘This sucks, Lou,’ he said. ‘What’re we gonna do?’

I was beginning to get the early buzz of a familiar feeling – a sense of things being connected in some way that I needed to see but couldn’t. I tried and failed to pin it down.

‘Nothing,’ I said, distracted and unable to shake off the sense of something at the back door of my awareness, patiently trying to pick the lock. ‘I’m going fishing.’

‘Gotta be some way to turn this around,’ he persisted. ‘Maybe we could go to the AG.’

‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘But I’m curious about what you’ve got. As a citizen.’

He downshifted grudgingly from indignation, reporting that the semen recovered during Gold’s autopsy positively matched Frix’s DNA, and the 28-ounce Gibb Yeoman framing hammer Zito had found in the ashes of Frix’s house was definitely the implement that had driven the spikes at the crucifixion scene. Frix had already been dead when the fire started, with two gunshot wounds and massive blunt trauma to the head that was consistent with the framing hammer. The bullet fragments they had found were from .44 Magnum Federal ammunition, but they were too damaged for ballistic matching.

‘For whatever good any of it’s gonna do us,’ he said.

‘Anything else?’

‘Word is, Hazen’s pushing for us to basically start rounding up rednecks and sweatin’ ’em until somebody breaks. It ain’t happening, though. Chief says he’ll damn well let us know when the gad-blasted city manager starts running our gad-blasted investigations. He kind of left it hanging in the air that if any of us happened to talk to you and if you happened to have any thoughts about how we ought to proceed, it’d be a good idea to follow up on that and keep him advised.’

Imagining Dwight Hazen, or anybody else, trying to stampede OZ actually made me smile. I told Wayne I’d give him a call back if anything occurred to me and thumbed the phone off.

‘What’s funny?’ LA asked.

‘Hazen thinks he’s going to make OZ dance to his tune on this deal.’

She snorted.

When I outlined for her the other side of the conversation, she said, ‘Told you it all hooked up. Gotta pick up on the gestalts.’

‘The whats?’

‘Patterns,’ she said. ‘Foundation of perception.’

I looked at her over my sunglasses. She opened the window a crack, got out a cigarette, lit it and fiddled with the radio until she found a Springsteen number she liked. We watched the passing countryside and listened to the Boss for a couple of miles as I thought about being out of work and maybe even headed for jail. I was surprised at how little the unemployment part bothered me, and it might have been wishful thinking but the idea of going to jail seemed too far-fetched to worry about.

In the rearview mirror I could see a couple of news vans in tandem hanging back a few hundred yards behind us. One of them looked like the Channel Three rig I’d seen in front of Kiln-Roi, and they both seemed to be full of people – reporters and cameramen, I assumed.

We pulled in at DeGray a little sooner than I’d expected but didn’t get on the water right away. First came the reporters, swarming on us like hounds on a boar when we stepped down from the truck. I half hoped to see Cass with them, but I really knew better; she didn’t do this kind of legwork any more. As the media crews were bringing out their microphones and firing up their cameras I drew my fingers across my lips in a zipping motion and said, ‘Anybody who can’t stay off the record for this conversation raise your hand.’ Nobody did. I located Mallory Peck among the reporters, made eye contact with her and said, ‘Do I lie?’

She gave me a crinkle-eyed smile and said, ‘Not if you can help it.’

‘Ever keep you out of the loop without a good reason?’

‘No.’

‘So okay, guys,’ I said to the group at large, after a small nod to Geoff Dean to acknowledge our pre-existing deal. ‘The bandages Dr Rowe here is wearing are for glass cuts, and they are connected to the Deborah Gold case, but the injuries are not life-threatening, and we’re really, truly not going to say anything else on the record about that or anything else while we’re up here – ’

‘Lieutenant Bonham, what about – ’

I held up a palm just as Geoff said, ‘He means it, Rob.’

‘So if you have to have quotes you’ve got to get them from Three,’ I said, ‘but take all the footage you want. And since we’re going to be up here a day or two, why don’t we just kick back and enjoy the weather?’

LA and I walked over to the lodge dining room and ordered an early lunch – blackened catfish, jalapeno hush-puppies and fried apples – from a friendly, freckled Texas waitress who was homesick for Vernon, a feeling I wouldn’t have thought was possible. Outside the windows of the dining room the lake stretched away between the hills, with little timbered islands here and there that looked like the tall ships of another century. Some of the reporters had settled in twos and threes at other tables around the room, checking out the menus and occasionally glancing our way, probably to make sure none of their colleagues was poaching.

I decided to call Ridout and ask if he’d pulled together the background I’d asked for on the local psychologists. He had. Thinking ahead to the hours I was going to spend on
the boat, I waved away another coffee refill. I didn’t expect Ridout’s news to amount to much, and I was mostly right. There were no felonies, because that would be a licence-killer, but a misdemeanour popped up here and there, along with several traffic tickets and a few lawsuits by disgruntled patients.

And one revoked licence. Mark Pendergrass.

‘How’s he working without a licence?’

‘Prison system doesn’t require it. He’s got a counselling licence in Texas, but at the prison he doesn’t even need that. Out there he’s still a psychologist by job title.’

I thought back to the paper I’d seen on Pendergrass’s wall but couldn’t remember seeing anything there with the word ‘Psychologist’ on it. I said, ‘What happened with his licence?’

‘Messing with women patients,’ he said. ‘They tell me that’s the usual reason.’

‘Who filed the complaint?’

‘Care to guess?’

‘Deborah Gold.’

‘Ten-ring,’ he said. ‘How’d you know?’

‘Shot in the dark,’ I said.

‘I got one left, Lou – you want it?’ He’d saved Max Karras for last.

‘Anything there that connects to the case?’ I asked.

‘Don’t look like it.’

‘Shred everything but Pendergrass,’ I said.

THIRTY-NINE

At the dock LA said, ‘Let me run her, Bis?’

I saw a couple of reporters hustling out along the rental dock down the shore, cameras and gear swinging from their necks and banging on their hips.

I considered
Bufordine
fairly intimidating, but that wasn’t a concept that had a lot of meaning to LA. I helped her get her lifejacket on and the kill switch snapped into place, watching as she stowed her Braves cap under the dash and captured her hair with a yellow elastic headband. Then she put on her sunglasses, zipped her peach-coloured tracksuit up to her chin and settled into the captain’s seat behind the wheel. Slowly backing the boat clear of the ramp, she eased us out the channel through the no-wake zone to open water, swung the bow toward the centre of the lake and started bringing the throttle forward.

There were no medium settings in LA’s personality, but today for some reason she gave the boat only enough gas to get us up on plane and running at a decent clip. Behind us a couple of boats were already pulling away from the rental dock. LA glanced back, then returned her attention to the water ahead of us. We were cruising at low revs, the following boats by now almost half a mile
back but no longer losing ground. LA seemed to forget about them.

But a few minutes later as we were passing one of the little uninhabited, heavily wooded islands that dotted the lake, a couple of other bass boats travelling in opposite directions crossed in front of us about two hundred yards ahead, just beyond the island, the occupants tossing each other friendly waves as they passed.

By this time LA’s course had taken
Bufordine
past a small promontory of the island, temporarily blocking the view of the trailing boats, and now her eyes narrowed as she swung into the churned water left by the other bass boats, cutting hard to starboard and throttling up.
Bufordine
jumped forward, and LA took her in a tight curve around the tip of the island, the low rumble of the motor rising to a murderous roar, the tach needle bouncing at the redline. She trimmed the boat out and with one hand on the wheel, the other on the power bar, took us back along the far side of the island, intently scanning the bright water ahead for other traffic, debris or birds. I held on. At five hundred miles an hour in an airliner it’s possible to be bored. At a hundred miles an hour in a bass boat, it’s not.