The Bone Tree (18 page)

“I just might surprise you,” Quentin growled. “You go if you need to go. Just don’t tell me what I’m risking to help this man. If the police come for him, I’ll sit in our front door with the Constitution in one hand and a rifle in the other. At least until somebody convinces me he’ll make it to a courtroom alive. After that, I won’t need a damned rifle.”

“You’re a hardheaded old fool,” Doris said, but Tom heard love beneath her frustration. “I don’t know why I put up with you.”

“Yes, you do,” Quentin said. “Let’s get him to a bed.”

“No,” Doris said.

“What?” Quentin asked, sounding truly worried for the first time.

“I don’t think he can make it to a bed. I’ll get some quilts and a pillow. He’s going to sleep right here. And if he’s still alive in the morning, we’ll decide what to do then.”

As the swish of Doris Avery’s slippers receded, Tom felt Quentin’s hand close around his again. “That’s a good woman right there,” Quentin intoned. “Between you and Doris, I’ve been a lucky man. You gonna be all right now, Tom. Just let go. Let go of everything and trust old Q.”

Tom squeezed his friend’s hand. Then he let go and slipped beneath the surface for the last time.

SHERIFF WALKER DENNIS
and I are roaring down a Louisiana back road at ninety miles per hour in a supercharged Ford sedan, a SWAT van struggling to keep pace with us. I feel a little like I’ve stepped onto the set of a 1970s Burt Reynolds movie, but none of the other cast members seems to be in on the joke.

Walker Dennis certainly isn’t playing games. At 5
A.M.
he assembled twenty-four deputies in a staging area beside the Concordia Parish courthouse. Half wore SWAT gear, and all were armed to the teeth. From the warmth of my car in the main courthouse lot, I watched Walker brief his troops. After a short speech, he got into his cruiser and drove toward my car, while his deputies broke into teams and climbed into several different vehicles. As they drove out to Highway 15 and turned left or right depending on their destinations, Walker pulled up beside me and motioned for me to get into his cruiser. When I did, I found a plastic bucket of cell phones on the passenger seat. There were at least twenty handsets in the bucket, of every imaginable make.

“Sorry,” he said, lifting the bucket into the backseat.

I got inside the car, my left thigh brushing against a cut-down shotgun mounted in a rack between us. “What’s with the phones?”

“I collected them before I told anybody where they were going.”

I’ll be damned,
I thought. “How’d they take that?”

“Not well.”

“Do you think you got every phone?”

“Yep.” Sheriff Dennis winked, then backed out of the parking space. “My brother-in-law walked behind the ranks with a scanner while I was
giving my speech. I’m pretty sure the two who had extra phones are having extramarital affairs, but I’ll double-check it later. For today I’ve paired them with reliable partners.” He stopped and put the powerful cruiser in Drive. “Fasten your seat belt, Mayor. This is gonna be a hell of a morning.”

During the next hour, I listened to Walker direct a parishwide assault on the Knox family’s meth operation. His tactical teams rousted users and dealers out of their beds, busted cookers in the midst of their work, and searched a half-dozen probable storage sites for illegal chemicals. By 5:55, twenty-seven people had been arrested without a shot fired. Walker handled the whole operation with absolute professionalism, save for one detail: he’d failed to get wiretap warrants on any member of the Knox family prior to the raids. Had he done that, he probably would have gathered enough evidence in the first hours to put Snake, Billy, and Forrest Knox in Angola Penitentiary for twenty years apiece. But the sheriff explained his oversight pragmatically. The judge who’d granted the search warrants (and kept his mouth shut about them) hated the Knoxes enough to help Walker take a shot at their meth operation, but not enough to sign wiretap warrants on the Knoxes on the basis of rumor alone. Apart from arousing the ire of the state supreme court, that might make him a target of violent retaliation.

After a team of female deputies ferried the prisoners back to the station in vans to begin processing them, Walker told me we were about to lead a tactical team out to the western edge of the parish, where he had a man keeping watch on a suspected Knox drug warehouse. And that’s how I found myself riding shotgun in this rattling car as it threatens to lift off the pavement on every sweeping turn.

“There it is,” Walker says, pointing through the windshield.

All I see is a white metal storage building about the size of a small gymnasium standing at the edge of a fallow field. Walker keys his radio and says, “This is Whiskey Delta. Give me a sitrep.”

His radio crackles, and then a male voice says, “I see you. I’m in the ditch to your left. Nobody’s gone in or out since I’ve been here.”

“Did you see any lights before dawn?”

“Negative. I think it’s empty.”

The SWAT van pulls up beside us, and Walker signals for its driver to get out. Seconds later, a tactical team wearing full body armor and
black face screens stands lined up beside the car. As Walker gets out and walks around to address them, I crank down my window a couple of inches.

“No sense wasting time,” the sheriff says. “There’s an overhead door on the far side, plus one regular door. Three of you cover that side while the breaching team blows the front. Eyes front, Deputy!”

One of the men wearing the black masks was staring at me. He snaps his head back toward Sheriff Dennis.

“We think this building’s empty,” Walker says, “but we never assume anything. You go in there like you expect a Russian Spetsnaz unit waiting.”

“Yes, sir,” says one of the deputies.

“Go.”

As the deputies fan out around the building, Walker gets back behind the wheel and says, “Did you just send a text message?”

“I’m just keeping Caitlin up to date. We want all the coverage we can get on these busts. I only wish we had Henry with us.”

Dennis nods, still watching his men. “He’s looking down on us right now, brother.”

I wish I believed that, but rather than express my doubt, I give Walker a smile. At this point I don’t want him thinking of me as anything but a solid partner. We sit in silence for about a minute, and then a voice crackles over the radio, “We’re in position.”

Walker looks at me, and I nod, my pulse quickening.

“Door team go,” says Walker.

Two men carrying 10-gauge shotguns step up to the front door of the warehouse and lay the muzzles of their weapons against its hinges at a downward angle.

“Those Remingtons are loaded with Hatton rounds,” Walker says to me. “Turn to dust as soon as they penetrate the door.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“
Breach,
” Walker says into his radio.

Even with the doors of the cruiser closed, the shotgun blasts buffet the air in my lungs. The four men behind the shotgun team crash through the door yelling loud enough for us to hear it in the car.

“What you got, Alpha?” Walker asks in a wire-taut voice.

His radio crackles twice, but I can’t make out the response.

“This is Whiskey Delta,” Walker repeats, “what have you found?”

“Sir, we’ve got a pile of fifty-five-gallon drums here. Could be precursor chemicals, or just plain old herbicide. We’re gonna need some lab rats for this.”

“I’m coming in.”

As Walker grabs his door handle, a shock wave that dwarfs the one generated by the shotguns rocks the car. A gaping hole has opened in the near end of the metal building, orange flame and black smoke jetting from it like the breath of a dragon.

“Booby-trapped,” I mutter. “Just like a pot field. There could be a secondary device—”

“
Get out of there!
” Walker shouts into his radio. “
Move, move, move!
”

“We’ve got two men down, Sheriff!”

“Get out NOW!”

The second explosion isn’t as powerful as the first, but it produces twice the smoke and flame.
Incendiary bomb.

“Goddamn it!” Walker shouts, pounding the steering wheel.

He scrambles from the cruiser and starts running toward the warehouse. As I leap from the car and sprint after him, I pray that the men inside somehow escaped the brunt of both blasts. But the calculating part of me knows this tragedy will bring about one change that can only help my father. After this, the Double Eagle group and the Knox family will no longer be able to operate in the shadows, not even with their political protection. As my father learned yesterday, when you kill a cop, you cross into a zone where neither aid nor mercy can be expected. Though they probably never intended it, the Double Eagles have joined the war.

FORREST KNOX OPENED
his eyes in the dark. The susurrant sound of his wife’s breathing reassured him that nothing was wrong, at least not in the bedroom. The faint blue LCD screen on his encrypted mobile phone had awakened him. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. For the last thirty-six hours he’d been popping “Whoa” and “Go” pills, as he had in Vietnam. Speed to stay alert, benzos to knock himself out. Lifting the phone from his bedside table, he got out of bed and walked to the door. His wife, long accustomed to the routine of a trooper’s life, did not even stir.

“Knox,” he said quietly.

“It’s me,” said Alphonse Ozan. “We got more problems. Big problems.”

“Did Sheriff Dennis turn up something unexpected in the ashes of Royal’s house?”

“No. They didn’t even go there.”

“What?” Forrest moved down the hallway toward the kitchen.

“Dennis played us, boss. This morning he lined up every deputy he’s got and took away their cell phones. Then he handed out tactical plans for a parishwide bust of every known or suspected meth cooker, dealer, mule, and storehouse.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Yep.”

“Did he bust any Eagles?” Forrest asked, thankful that Snake and Sonny, at least, were out of the state.

“Doesn’t look like it. None of the front shops got searched, either. But they busted all the lower-level people.”

Forrest’s usually steady nerves had begun to fray. He was fighting an urge to punch the refrigerator door. “Find out every location and person that Dennis hit, then do a liability assessment of who and what
they knew. You’ll probably have to talk to Snake and Sonny to do it, so be careful in your communications.”

“Will do. But look, some busts are still going on. Dennis still has a tactical squad out in the field. SWAT.”

Forrest switched on the coffeemaker. “For what?”

“Don’t know. I got all this news late, thanks to Dennis confiscating the cell phones. But most deputies are back at the station now, processing prisoners, so our guy got clear and went to his home phone.”

Forrest wondered what the hell had gotten into Walker Dennis. “Any FBI or DEA involvement?”

“Not so far. It seems to be Walker Dennis on his own hook. But I did hear one strange thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Mayor Penn Cage rode in the car with Dennis during the busts.”

Forrest froze with his hand on the refrigerator door. “
What?
”

“That’s what my source said. Cage was riding shotgun. Joined up with Dennis at the station before the first busts.”

“Well, well. I’ll have to think about that.” Forrest set the milk on the counter, then took a croissant from a white cardboard box and bit a hunk off the buttery roll. “I wonder why they didn’t hit any Double Eagles . . .”

“I’ll get on Mayor Cage’s—” Ozan’s voice stopped, then started again, but seemingly farther away. Forrest realized he was speaking on another line. After twenty seconds, Ozan said, “I’ll call you back, boss. I think the shit just hit the fan, but comm is spotty. I’ll call you right back.”

“No, I’ll wait.”

Ozan’s voice rose in pitch as he barked out a series of rapid-fire questions. From what Forrest could hear, someone had been killed in the field, but he couldn’t tell who. Thirty seconds later, the Redbone was back on the line.

“It’s bad, boss. Shit.”

“Tell me.”

“Sheriff Dennis sent his SWAT team into a warehouse on the road to Jonesville. Somebody had precursor chemicals stored in there, and the damned place blew up. Looks like it was booby-trapped. CPSO’s got one deputy dead on scene and three more in critical condition. Two are being airlifted to Alexandria, one to Baton Rouge.”

“The Jonesville Road? Well, at least that’s none of our concern.”

“I’m not so sure, boss. One of the Double Eagles owns a warehouse on that road. Initials L.S.”

L.S.?
Forrest thought about the initials.
Leo Spivey?
In his mind he saw a heavyset man with a ready grin, a Double Eagle since his father’s days. “Fuck, Alphonse. Did he go into business for himself?”

“I’m betting yeah. I just checked the address online, and it matches. L.S. must have got greedy. And paranoid enough to booby-trap the place.”

“Unbelievable.”

“What you want I should do?”

Forrest had been glad that Snake and Sonny were at Toledo Bend, on the Texas side of the reservoir, but now he wished Snake were close to hand. He would know where to find Leo, and how best to dispatch him. There was always the Black Team, but that seemed like overkill.

“Spivey’s a problem. Once they track him down and threaten him with a mandatory meth-trafficking sentence . . .”

“I know.”

“That can’t happen, Al.”

Ozan said nothing for several seconds. Then he said, “Don’t worry ’bout it, boss. I feel like that old man’s already dead.”

As always, the Redbone had gotten the message.

“How do you think he died?” Forrest asked with irony in his voice.

“I figure he killed himself as soon as he heard the news. But you never know. Maybe rival drug dealers killed him to send a message. What you think?”

“I think he killed himself, Alphonse. That’s a message all its own.”

“I hear you. Anything else?”

“Yes. If Dennis picked up that many foot soldiers, it’s time for a little negative reinforcement. Have somebody round up a couple of their kids and hold them somewhere. Don’t hurt them or anything. Just let the word spread through the jail. That’ll stop any talk.”

“Consider it done.”

“How long would it take you to assemble the Black Team for action in Concordia?”

“Two hours. I alerted everybody last night. They’re pretty much on standby. You want me to make the call?”

“I’ll call you back when I decide. What about Mackiever? Is he home yet?”

“Not yet. I’m running cruisers by there regular. Just his wife’s car at the house.”

“Where the hell did he go? I expected his resignation call before now.”

“He’ll turn up. You scared him half to death with that kiddie porn stuff.”

Forrest recalled the ashen face of his superior when he saw some of the pictures that could now be found on his home and office computers. “We need him to resign by noon,” Forrest said. “I never should have given him forty-eight hours.”

“Reckon you ought to go ahead and leak the story? That would flush him out of the bushes.”

Forrest thought about it, more instinctively than rationally. He’d always relied on instinct during battle, and that’s what this was shaping up to be.

“No,” he said. “But I’m going to call a press conference and announce that I’ve been carrying on a long investigation of a high-ranking state police officer, after members of the Technical Division brought certain workplace computer traffic to my attention. Also the disappearance of confiscated evidence checked out of the evidence room in violation of departmental procedure. When Mackiever hears that, he’ll feel the branch creak.”

Ozan laughed heartily. “What about them French Quarter boy toys?”

“We’ll keep them in reserve. That’s the nuclear option.”

“He’ll crack before noon. All a guy like the colonel has is his reputation. His wife’s a big churchgoer, too, and he goes with her.”

“That still leaves one loose cannon rolling around the deck. Tom Cage.”

“I got no idea where the doc is, boss. It’s like he fell off the planet.”

A couple of hours ago, Ozan had sent patrolmen to the houses of Peggy Cage’s Louisiana relatives, but no one they talked to seemed to know anything, and they’d seen no sign of Grimsby’s pickup truck.

“He’s still on planet Earth,” Forrest thought aloud. “And we’ve got to find him.”

“Are you still thinking about the deal he offered? I figured after
Dennis and Penn Cage declared war on us, you’d be ready for the scorched earth plan.”

“Not if Dr. Cage can do what he says he can. Anything that ups the body count at this point is asking for more trouble. We’ve got to stabilize the situation.”

“Why don’t you just revoke the APB, like Dr. Cage asked for? Then Cage will come to us.”

“I can’t afford to go that far. Once we revoke that APB, we undermine the image of Dr. Cage as a cop killer. I won’t do that until I know he can neutralize the threat from his son and the Masters girl.”

“I see.”

“Send Grimsby back out to Drew Elliott’s lake house in case the doc heads back there. I don’t think he would, but you never know.”

“Will do. That it?”

Forrest listened to Ozan’s expectant breathing over the line. While the Redbone waited, another thought occurred . . . “I wonder if Dr. Cage could have made it back to Mississippi somehow. Did you ever get hold of the data from the Mississippi River bridge cameras?”

“Not yet. Homeland Security told Tech Division they’re having trouble with their data links. At first I thought it was legit, but they sure seem to be dragging their feet.”

Forrest thought about this. Technical glitches weren’t uncommon with high-tech surveillance, but this didn’t feel right. Did anyone have the power to interfere in the relationship between the state police and the Department of Homeland Security? If so, their power had to be federal. And last night Ozan had said Kaiser had somehow invoked the Patriot Act. . . .

“Alphonse, I want you to get me everything there is to know about Special Agent John Kaiser. And I mean everything.”

CAITLIN MASTERS HAD RARELY
experienced a media frenzy like the one that began Thursday morning, and never in a small market. Henry Sexton’s work had penetrated much deeper into the national media consciousness than she’d suspected, and his violent death had caught the attention of journalists from coast to coast. The fact that it was associated with a violent Ku Klux Klan offshoot and unsolved civil rights
murders pushed the story toward critical mass. But it was the deaths of Brody Royal, Royal’s daughter and son-in-law, Sleepy Johnston, and a Natchez police officer that magnified the story to epic proportions. Reporters were converging on Natchez from every corner of the country, and even from overseas. All the major national papers were sending people, and the TV networks had been calling without letup. Friends Caitlin hadn’t spoken to in years were calling to get an inside track on the story, and she simply hadn’t time to spare for them.

Special Agent Kaiser had taken over the
Examiner
’s conference room and turned it into an FBI command center. There were now nine special agents spread across Natchez and Concordia Parish, plus a half-dozen technicians of different types, and more manpower was on the way. FBI computer experts had begun the laborious task of trying to reconstruct the deleted scans of Henry Sexton’s files and journals from the
Examiner
’s servers. And while they did that, Kaiser had been working with Jamie Lewis in an effort to identify a possible second mole among Caitlin’s editorial staff. She felt conflicted about giving the Bureau access to personnel records, but she couldn’t risk another security breach while they were working such critical stories.

The proximity of Kaiser and his team had made it tough for Caitlin to contact Toby Rambin, the poacher who’d offered to guide Henry Sexton to the Bone Tree. Three times during the night she’d risked calling the number Henry had given her, but each time she’d gotten no answer. By researching the numerical prefix, she learned that the number was a landline, so she figured Rambin might be out in the swamp plying his trade. Caitlin also wanted Kaiser out of the building so that she could review Henry’s most recent journal—the one she’d saved from the burned ruins of the
Concordia Beacon
—but she wasn’t about to risk Kaiser discovering that. Along with Henry’s journal containing his leads and meditations on the Bone Tree (which, thankfully, she’d kept separate from the group that had been stolen and burned), this was all that remained of the brave reporter’s original records. Right now the two Moleskine journals lay atop Caitlin’s tall office credenza like holy relics hidden from an invading pagan army. Those journals—along with Toby Rambin—represented her only investigative advantage over the FBI, and the crux of her head start against the army of journalists descending on Natchez.

Just before dawn, Kaiser had told her that he was trying to organize a massive search of the Lusahatcha Swamp, in hopes of locating the Bone Tree and the bodies that might still lie there. This prospect gave Caitlin hives, and she’d felt immense relief when Kaiser slammed down her desk phone and complained that Washington had denied his request. A few minutes later, Jordan Glass confided to her that the director’s position wasn’t exactly unreasonable. Within twenty-four hours of sending “his best New Orleans agent” to Concordia Parish, half a dozen bodies had piled up, and the director was afraid that more would follow. He wasn’t about to organize a military-scale search in Mississippi without more cause than Kaiser had given him so far. He wanted to proceed with “cautious deliberation.”

Caitlin wasn’t sure Kaiser had given up his plan for the swamp search until word came in that Penn and Sheriff Dennis were sweeping up Concordia Parish’s meth cookers and dealers. It was then that she saw what John Kaiser looked like when he truly lost his temper. She didn’t envy Penn being on the receiving end of that anger. While Kaiser fumed, she pled ignorance and went about her business, thanking her stars that the Bone Tree would remain undiscovered by the FBI for some time yet.

At 7:45
A.M.
Caitlin received one request she could not ignore: a summons to appear before the Adams County sheriff, Billy Byrd, for questioning. After telling Kaiser to send the cavalry if she hadn’t returned in an hour, she went out to her car, trusting that Henry’s journals would be fine where they were until she returned.

Turning east onto Main Street, Caitlin checked the Motorola cell phone she was currently using—she’d sent one of her advertising people out to replace the Treo 650 that Brody Royal had burned—and saw that she’d received twenty-six text messages in the past fifteen minutes. For the next few days, she was going to have her hands full merely evading friends, much less the remainder of the media locusts. If she couldn’t find a way to set her team’s course for the day and then get out of the office—preferably to meet Toby Rambin—she would be overrun.