The Bone Tree (42 page)

Byrd looked back at Caitlin as though suspicious she was playing him. Then he turned to Penn again. “Listen to her, Mayor.”

“This is my property,” Penn said evenly. “I’m refusing you entry without a search warrant. Now, get off my porch.”

“Boy, you’ve lost your mind,” said Byrd, disbelief in his voice.

“I told you to get off my property, Sheriff.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Take it as you will.”

For a few seconds Sheriff Byrd seemed nonplussed by Penn’s defiance. Then he backed up two steps and lowered his gaze to Penn’s feet. “Are you armed, Mayor?”

“I’m licensed to carry a firearm.”

“Goddamn it!” Byrd cursed, jerking his pistol out of his belt. “Get on the floor! Get down, I said!”

Penn didn’t move. Caitlin had no idea what to do. Her own pistol was in her purse, back in the car. She was about to ask Penn to do as Byrd had ordered when tires screeched in front of the house. She looked down and saw Shad Johnson leap from his black BMW and run to the foot of the nearest staircase.

“Hurry!” Caitlin shouted, amazed to find herself relieved to see a man she despised.

The DA froze when he reached the top of the steps. “Why is your gun out, Billy?” he asked.

“Cage is packing!” Byrd snapped. “I told him to get on the floor.”

Shadrach Johnson held up his hands as though to calm both men, but it was Penn’s unnatural calmness that was actually driving the crisis.

“Put your gun away, Billy,” Shad said. “Right now. Put it away and go back down to your car.”

“The hell I will! You don’t give me orders.”

“I’m the district attorney of Adams County, Sheriff. And I’m telling you to go back to your car.”

“I take orders from the governor, not you.”

“Tonight you take them from me,” Shad said, with surprising steel in his voice. “Move your ass, goddamn it.”

Shaking his head as though the world had turned upside down, Billy Byrd stumped over to the stairs and, after one last look at Penn, marched back down to ground level.

Still keeping his hands up, Shad took two steps toward Penn and said, “What’s going on, Penn? Are you okay?”

Penn shrugged. “I’m fine.”

“Is your father in this house?”

“No.”

Shad turned to Caitlin. “Is he?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then what the hell is this about? Why wouldn’t Penn let him in?”

“Penn bought me this house as a wedding present. It was a secret. He was showing it to me for the first time, as a surprise. Suddenly Billy Byrd showed up and started acting like Dirty Harry. That’s all I know.”

Shad studied Penn with apparent concern. Unlike Billy Byrd, he was perceptive enough to see that all was not right with the mayor.

“I tell you what,” Shad said. “I’m going to send Billy back to his office, and I’m going to go back to mine. You two take a few minutes together, and then one of you call me and let me know everything’s all right. Okay?”

Caitlin nodded quickly, thankful for the DA’s restraint.

A deep voice shouted, “What the hell’s going on up there? Make him let you in!”

Shad turned and yelled over the gallery rail at Lincoln Turner: “If you don’t get out of here right now, I’m ordering
your
arrest.”

Caitlin expected Turner to stand his ground, but he apparently heard the same resolve in Shad’s voice that she had. After a few seconds, Lincoln turned and walked back to his truck, then started the engine and drove away.

“Okay,” Shad said. “I’m going now. Call me and let me know everything’s okay.”

“I will,” Caitlin promised.

“Dr. Cage isn’t in there, right?”

“No,” said Penn. “I don’t know where he is.”

“That’s cool. Okay.”

With that the DA turned and retreated down the stairs.

Caitlin rushed to Penn and hugged him, then reached behind him to open the door. His body felt unnaturally stiff, and the door was locked. She rattled the knob hard, her whole body shaking.

“Take it easy,” Penn said, taking his keys from his pocket.

“Take it
easy
? What was that? Huh? What the
fuck
was that?”

Penn shrugged again. “I’d just had all of that son of a bitch I’m willing to take.”

“Oh, really? Well, that stupid redneck could have shot you. He
would
have! Are you really carrying your gun?”

Penn lifted his right leg and placed her hand on his ankle, where the bulge of a heavy revolver suddenly became obvious. This hard proof of what had nearly happened made her dizzy.

“
Why?
” she asked. “Why would you do that?”

“I told you.”

“Oh, come on. Has something happened that you haven’t told me about?”

“No.” Penn’s eyes didn’t waver.

“Did Dwight tell you something upsetting about Tom?”

Penn shook his head.

Caitlin hugged him again, but as she laid her face against his chest, she wondered if she could continue to keep Tom’s location from him. If Tom being missing had made Penn this irrational, then shouldn’t she do what she could to defuse that tension? Yet almost as soon as she had this thought, another more insidious connection closed in her brain. If she did tell Penn where Tom was, then father and son would be joined within an hour. And if that happened—against Tom’s will—there would be two men trying to persuade her to give up her coverage of the Double Eagle murders while Tom tried to cut a deal with Forrest Knox. Last night Penn had proved that he was willing to try to bargain with the devil to save his family, and his effort had nearly killed them. Now Tom wanted to go down the same road, one that almost certainly led to death. She could not let Penn join him on that journey.

“Why don’t you show me the house?” she said, not knowing what else to say. “I do want to see what you’ve done to it.”

“I thought you didn’t want to jinx it.”

“Oh, I was just being stupid. You’re right, we need to be reminded of normal.”

Penn laughed as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Then he put a big square-headed key in the lock and opened the door to what had once been her dream house. When he turned, lifted her effortlessly, and carried her over the threshold, she felt wings beating wildly in her chest. Passing through the door, she realized that the first time someone had done that in this house, Queen Victoria had been sitting on the throne.

Caitlin smelled new paint and plaster, lemon oil and varnish. Yet as Penn carried her deeper into the house, she had a sense that dreams and reality had begun to diverge at some inaccessible level where nothing could be influenced by human action. Whatever was going to happen had been determined at some point in the past—perhaps decades ago, or maybe only a few hours—but either way it was irrevocable. From this point forward, she sensed, choice was illusory. All they could do now was ride out the waves of consequence.

“What do you think?” Penn asked, his eyes filled with pride.

She blinked and tried to focus on her surroundings, but all she could think about was tomorrow’s rendezvous with Toby Rambin, the poacher who had sworn to guide her through the trackless swamp to the Bone Tree.

“I don’t want to think,” she whispered, recalling this afternoon at Penn’s house, when she’d used sex to stop him asking questions about the Bone Tree. Now she needed it to take her mind off the same thing, and to connect with the man she felt slipping away from her. “Is there a bed upstairs?”

“Of course. This is a
wedding
present.”

She looked up the long, narrow flight of steps that led to the third floor. “Can you carry me up those?”

Without a word he swung her in a circle and started up the stairs, his legs pumping as though they would never tire.

Caitlin shut her eyes like a little girl on a carnival ride, but inside she felt like a traitor.

FORREST KNOX HAD
not yet gone to Concordia Parish, as he’d told Snake he meant to do. After pulling back onto Highway 61, he’d decided to return to Baton Rouge and check on how things were progressing at headquarters without Colonel Mackiever, then go home to pack a bag and make sure his wife hadn’t been too rattled by the kiddie porn she’d seen on his desk. He also packed a briefcase with sensitive material he had removed from Valhalla, and to this he added certain files and digital media from his home. He would deposit the briefcase in a nearby storage unit that he rented under another name. Given that he was locked in battle with Colonel Mackiever, he could not risk a surprise search turning up material that could destroy him.

When his bags stood packed by his office chair, he began skimming the online edition of the
Natchez Examiner
for updates. He’d scarcely gotten through page one when his departmental cell phone rang.

The caller was the duty officer of the tech division at LSP headquarters, a man from Shreveport named Keith Caton.

“Sir, I’ve been going back over all the digital records on Dr. Tom Cage. His family, known associates, some patients—everybody we know about.”

“And?”

“On Monday, Dr. Cage made two calls to an attorney named Quentin Avery. Those were cell to cell. I’ve recently gotten the phone records of City Hall in Natchez, and I show a flurry of calls to Quentin Avery from there also, to three different numbers. One was to his cell, another was to his residence in McLean, Virginia.”

“And the third?”

“To a house in Jefferson County, Mississippi. Avery’s got a residence there also.”

Forrest felt something shift in his gut—a familiar sensation that
always accompanied the discovery of a fresh track. “Who made those calls?”

“Some came from what looks to be the office of the mayor. This past Monday.”

“Quentin Avery must be Tom Cage’s lawyer,” Forrest thought aloud. “The Viola Turner case was just unfolding then. It’s natural that they would try to get hold of Avery.”

“Yes, sir. But I’ve also been analyzing the call patterns on the Jefferson County house, and also the Internet traffic.”

“And?”

“I can’t see the searches, but this morning about three
A.M.
somebody logged on to the Internet and stayed on for two and a half hours. That’s totally anomalous, relative to the normal pattern.”

“You can’t see the actual searches that were done?”

“Not yet, sir.”

Forrest thought about this. “What do you know about this house?”

“I checked it on Google Earth. It’s very isolated. Practically a mansion, for that area. It’s sitting on eighty acres of forestland.”

Certainty clicked in Forrest’s mind like a trap snapping shut. He thought about Tom Cage’s last known position—dumping that stupid cop Grimsby in a northeast Louisiana cotton field. To reach Quentin Avery’s Mississippi estate, Cage would have had to pass through one of the roadblocks guarding the bridges over the river. Motorists had complained so much about the bottleneck those barriers had created that he’d finally had to take them down, but there were still the bridge cameras.

“Have you guys been working the relatives of Dr. Cage’s wife, like I told you to?”

“Yes, sir. Augustin handled that. He spoke to all the known relatives, then went home around fifteen minutes ago. He didn’t think anybody acted suspicious.”

Lazy prick,
Forrest thought, marking his underling for later punishment. As he thought about the geography of Jefferson County, a new thought struck him. “Sergeant, I want you to find every vehicle registered to any of Mrs. Cage’s relatives, then see whether any have crossed the bridge at Vicksburg in the past twenty-four hours.”

“Not at Natchez?”

“Natchez and Vicksburg, but give Vicksburg priority. How long will that take?”

“I’m not sure. We’ve been having trouble getting the records of the camera data from Homeland Security. They say it’s a technical glitch.”

“Do you have the data now?”

“Let me check Augustin’s box. Yes, sir, it came in twenty minutes ago.”

“Run the plates.”

“Yes, sir. You want me to call you back?”

“I’ll wait.”

Forrest put the phone on speaker and got up from his desk. He didn’t know much about Quentin Avery, but he knew enough not to rule out the possibility that Cage had run to his lawyer’s house for sanctuary. The two men were close in age, and while Avery was a rich lawyer now, he’d been a civil rights activist in his youth. At one point the regular Klan had been hunting him across the state. Forrest remembered his father talking about it.

“Colonel, I’ve got it!” said the excited voice. “I got a hit.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“A plate belonging to a John McCrae crossed west to east last night at one twenty-two
A.M.
That’s the wife’s brother.”

Forrest’s blood quickened. “What kind of vehicle is that?”

“It’s not a vehicle, sir. It’s a horse trailer.”

Forrest smiled. “That’s it. Has it crossed back over into Louisiana?”

“Yes, sir. It crossed back in fifty-eight minutes after it left.”

“We’ve got him,” Forrest said softly.

“What was that, sir?”

“Forget everything you just told me, Sergeant. Sequester that data. We may need it, or we may need it to disappear. I want you to prepare for both eventualities. Understand?”

“Understood, sir.”

Forrest pressed
END
, then picked up his encrypted phone and called Alphonse Ozan.

“Hey, boss,” said the Redbone. “What you got?”

“I think I found Dr. Cage.”

“Where is he?”

“His lawyer owns a house in Jefferson County, Mississippi, near
Fayette. It’s way out in the woods. I think he’s there. Deploy the Black Team.”

“What’s the mission? Snatch or terminate?”

“I’ll call you back. Just get ’em in the air and headed north.”

TOM HAD SPENT MOST
of the afternoon and evening sleeping. He rested a lot better with Melba Price watching him. The knowledge that his nurse was awake and alert meant that he didn’t have to start at every unfamiliar noise, of which there were many in Quentin’s mansion. After enough sleep, a good meal of bacon, eggs, and toast, and a generous regimen of various drugs, he’d begun feeling human again. Melba had even gotten him off the couch to make several circuits of the house. Thankfully, he managed this without getting angina, and his shoulder pain had been dulled to an endurable throb.

After they settled themselves on the living room couch again, Tom had told Melba she needed to think about heading back to Natchez. She’d done more than he had any right to ask of her, and he assured her that he was feeling better. But Melba wouldn’t hear any talk of leaving. She’d abandoned him the night before, she said, and he’d nearly died because of it. Tom pointed out that she might have been killed at Drew’s lake house as easily as he when the gunmen arrived. But Melba argued that the killers never would have sneaked up on Tom while she was there to keep watch.

After a few minutes, he took a rest from trying to persuade her and clicked on his current burn phone to see whether Walt had sent him any further messages.

There were none.

Melba got up and made a trip around the darkened interior of the house, peering out of each window until her eyes adjusted and she felt confident that no one was outside. Tom appreciated her effort, but Caitlin’s earlier visit by car proved just how quickly someone could appear at one of the doors. If Knox’s people showed up to storm the place, there’d be nothing he or Melba could do to stop them.

“
Why
won’t you leave, Mel?” he asked, after she’d returned to the sofa. “At a certain point, loyalty becomes foolish. Your first loyalty has to be to yourself.”

His nurse smiled wistfully. “A minute ago,” she said, “I probably couldn’t have told you why. But when you asked me just now, I realized the answer.”

“Will you tell me?”

“Back when Roderick left me—for that
girl
—and I sunk so low that I was just a shadow of myself . . . when I was drinking so much and thinking crazy thoughts . . . Do you remember that?”

“I remember.”

“That night you came to my house to keep me from doing something stupid? And I threw myself at you?”

“Oh, Mel, no you didn’t.”

She looked up sharply. “Hush. You know I did. We never talked about it after, but I never forgot it.”

“Mel—”

“Would you let me say my piece?” She folded her hands together and stared off into space, as though looking deep into the past. “Lord, that was back when I still looked good, and you were young enough to do something about it.”

Tom’s shoulder throbbed when he laughed, but he couldn’t help himself. “Those days are long gone, I’m afraid.”

“For you and me both, baby.”

“You’ve got some good living left, Mel.”

“Just be quiet, old man. That night, when I let you know you could have whatever you wanted . . . you were nothing but a gentleman. I don’t think many men would have walked away from me in that state, to tell you the truth. But you did.”

Tom recalled the night with perfect clarity. Melba
had
been a very attractive woman then. But her most alluring quality—to him—was that she’d reminded him of Viola. When she unbuttoned her robe and walked to him, trying to kiss him, for the briefest moment he’d relived the feeling of falling into Viola’s embrace. But then he’d smelled the reek of gin, and the memory evaporated.

“That wasn’t what you needed,” he said.

“I know. But I thought it was.” Melba reached out and laid a warm hand on his arm. “I knew about Viola even then. From what the older nurses had said. I think I wanted you to love me the way you loved her.”

Tom wanted to comfort her, but Melba raised her hand to keep him
silent. “I don’t think you ever loved anybody like you did Viola. And I say that with all the respect in the world for Mrs. Cage.”

Tom sagged back against the sofa pillows, his mind drifting. “There are different kinds of love. That’s one thing I’ve learned in this life. I don’t know if concepts like
more
come into it.”

“Yes, they do,” Melba said earnestly. “Sooner or later, it always comes to a choice. My Roderick made his, and I learned what a fool I was.”

“Well, I made my choice, too.”

Melba’s luminous brown eyes and peered deeply into his. “Did you?”

Tom nodded. “I did. I don’t want to say more than that.”

“All right, then.”

Tom rubbed his eyes to break the spell of remembrance. “Are you planning to spend the night here or what?”

“I think we’re both legal,” Melba said, smiling again. “And it’s not like Quentin’s short of space. Are you sleepy yet?”

“Actually, I feel pretty good. Thanks to the drugs, the sleep, and your nursing.”

“How about we watch some TV then?”

“Fine by me.”

“What you want to watch?”

“Anything but a medical show. What about you?”

“Anything but the news or reality TV. I’d love to see one of them old shows that takes my mind off things, like
The Rockford Files
.”

Tom couldn’t hide his amazement. “
The Rockford Files
? You’re a fan of that show?”

Melba tucked her chin into her chest and fanned her face with her hand. “I love me some James Garner, now. That’s one handsome white man.”

Tom laughed so hard that he thought he might have to take another Vicodin.

“Go back and watch him in
The Great Escape,
” Melba said, “when he was young and pretty. Even my mama thought so.”

“Well, let’s see what we can find.” Tom picked up the remote control and clicked on the widescreen television.

Before he could press the
GUIDE
button, a news crawl at the bottom of the screen scrolled:
Three-state manhunt continues for accused cop killers Walter Garrity and Thomas Cage, M.D. Both men are considered armed and extremely dangerous. Do not approach these fugitives or seek to apprehend
them. They may appear elderly, but are suspected of murdering an armed Louisiana state trooper. If you have any information, contact the Louisiana State Police or dial 911 Emergency. . . .
The crawl went on to announce a severe thunderstorm alert in northeast Mississippi.

“Dear Lord,” Melba said. “What you gonna do, Doc?”

Tom swallowed hard and made himself press the buttons on the remote. “Wait for Walt. That’s all I can do, at this point.”

“Do you really believe he’s still alive?”

“His message said he’s okay.”

“Are you sure that was real?”

Tom sighed and gave her a pleading look. “Please go home, Melba. You don’t have any business being here for whatever the next act is.”

“And you don’t have any business being here alone. Find us a TV show. I told you I didn’t want no reality.”

WALT GARRITY HAD NOW
lain beneath the bed for so long he was worried about getting a blood clot. At some point he was going to have to try to get out, because it didn’t look like the Valhalla lodge was going to be empty for a long time.

He was about to switch on his burn phone to test for reception again when he heard a metallic
thunk
outside, and then the big turbo sitting atop the helicopter began to spool up. With painful effort Walt dragged himself out from beneath the bed and pulled himself up to the curtained window. This time he saw the scene he’d watched earlier played in reverse. Black-clad SWAT troopers ran from the far building to the chopper’s door, their German shepherd alongside them. Every man carried at least one assault weapon.

Gut-churning fear awakened in Walt. He saw no reason for this kind of action unless someone had located Tom. Every fiber of his being told him the time had come to bolt and find someplace with cellular reception, but it would be stupid to try before the chopper left. Worse, he could see the goddamn pit bull leaping and barking at the cops as they boarded the helicopter.

Walt rubbed his forehead and cursed quietly, thinking of his wife back in Texas. If he were ten years younger, and single, he would make his break as soon as the chopper departed. He’d kill the dog if it made
a sound, and then rely on his wilderness skills to get him to his vehicle ahead of any pursuers. But there was no point kidding himself. He wasn’t that man anymore. He would have to make the best of the situation and the skills he still had.