The Bone Tree (49 page)

On the phone last night, Carl had offered to have his father, a local pastor, discreetly question some members of his Athens Point congregation about the Bone Tree. Since the church was 100 percent African-American, Caitlin had felt it was worth the risk to gain good information. But apparently Reverend Sims had learned little.

Jordan poked her thumb at Dontae Edwards, who was paying close attention to their conversation.

“Scoot!” Carl ordered. “And forget you ever saw this map, or you’ll be hauling ass out of town like Toby did. Only you haven’t got the money to do it.”

The boy jumped back on the motorcycle and kick-started it, but Caitlin yelled “Wait!” before he pulled on his helmet. As he watched impatiently, she took five one-hundred-dollar bills from the envelope and handed them over. A grin spread across the boy’s face. He waited a half second, then snatched the bills, stuffed them into his jacket, and tore out of the clearing with a scream of his engine.

“So what now?” Jordan asked. “We don’t have a boat.”

Carl smiled, his white teeth gleaming in his coffee-colored face. “I think I can probably do something about that.”

“Such as?”

“My man Danny McDavitt is doing a check-ride in the LCSO chopper this morning. He could pick us up and have a look for Toby’s X for you.”

Caitlin blinked in disbelief. Danny McDavitt was a retired air force pilot who flew the helicopter for the Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department. She’d met him two months ago, when the pilot had assisted Penn in fighting against the criminals operating the
Magnolia Queen
casino. McDavitt had gone far beyond the call of duty to try to locate Caitlin after she’d been kidnapped by those men. “Carl, are you serious?” she asked. “Would he help us today?”

“Sure. Just let me call him.”

“You wouldn’t have to tell Major McDavitt anything about what we’re looking for, would you? I trust him, but this is a special case of secrecy. Not even Penn knows I’m here.”

Carl nodded thoughtfully. “I can play it off like I don’t know myself.”

“Can you trust the major to keep quiet about the search? At least for a few hours?”

The deputy smiled. “Danny’s good people. You know that. He can keep a secret.”

Caitlin was sorely tempted, but the prospect of complications worried her. “But what if we
find
the Bone Tree?”

“Well . . . at that point it’s going to become a law enforcement matter one way or another, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But I’d like at least an hour there before we call anyone else in. And we’ll have to call the FBI, even if we call your sheriff as well. Would that put your job at risk?”

“That I don’t know. For now, we’ll chalk this flight up to hunting for marijuana fields. If we find that tree . . . maybe Danny and I will scoot and leave you two to report it.”

Caitlin’s pulse raced in anticipation of the hunt, but she also felt conflicted. If Tom’s life was at risk, what was the point of searching the swamp for a tree? On the other hand . . . what could she really do to help find Tom? Walt had already told her she could do nothing. While Carl spoke to Danny, Caitlin tried to call Walt back, but her phone wouldn’t work. When she checked the screen, it said
NO SERVICE
.

“Danny’s coming,” Carl said, drawing Caitlin’s attention away from her Treo.

“I can’t get a tower,” Caitlin said. “Do you have AT&T or Cellular South?”

Carl grinned and tapped the radio on his collar. “Neither. I’ve got the Lusahatcha County Sheriff’s Department radio net. I used a channel nobody monitors.”

Caitlin’s face fell.

“Sorry,” Carl said. “Reception in this swamp is practically nonexistent. You need to make a call?”

She shrugged. “I don’t feel good about taking off on this little jaunt if I can’t monitor the situation back home. Penn’s father . . .”

The deputy’s smile vanished. “I know. When we get to altitude, your phone will find a tower. Danny can make sure of it.”

Jordan walked over and took Caitlin’s hand. “It’s your call. We can keep going, or you can head back to town and I’ll go on to New Orleans.”

Caitlin looked into the cypress trees and pressed down all guilt and doubt. “Screw it,” she said. “Let’s go.”

FORREST KNOX SAT ON
the elevated deck of a five-thousand-square-foot lake house overlooking Lake Concordia, a steaming cup of chicory coffee and a cordless phone on the table before him. Five miles away lay the Concordia Parish courthouse complex, which held the sheriff’s office and the jail, where Penn Cage and Sheriff Walker Dennis planned to interrogate Snake, Sonny, and four other Double Eagles. As soon as the Eagles left Valhalla this morning, Billy had gratefully abandoned his babysitting job and flown himself back to his retreat at Toledo Bend, Texas. Forrest didn’t want to take any chances on someone arresting his cousin. Only after Sheriff Walker Dennis had been removed from his position and the state police had taken over his duties would Forrest tell Billy to return to Mississippi.

Forrest had sent no attorney to the CPSO. He wanted it to look as though the former Double Eagles meant to cooperate fully, right up until the moment Sheriff Dennis was arrested by one of his own deputies. As soon as that was accomplished, Forrest would make contact with Penn Cage and find out whether or not there was a deal to be made. Now that he had the ultimate bargaining tool in his back pocket—in the form of Tom Cage—the son would have no option but to
negotiate. Whether such negotiating would result in a deal remained an open question, since Forrest’s real worry wasn’t the mayor, but Cage’s goddamned fiancée.

He owed his knowledge of Mayor Cage’s whereabouts to Sheriff Billy Byrd, who had assigned one of his deputies to follow Kirk Boisseau, the former marine who’d accompanied Penn when he confronted Brody Royal at the hospital on Wednesday night. At 6
A.M.
that deputy had followed Boisseau to a house that turned out to be owned by the parents of an old schoolmate of Cage’s. Boisseau and Cage had walked one circuit of the house, then had gone inside for five minutes, after which Boisseau returned home. A half hour later, binocular surveillance had revealed the mayor’s mother as she’d briefly parted the curtains to look outside. Thankfully, rather than storming the house in search of Tom Cage, who he believed was hiding there, Sheriff Byrd had called Forrest about his discovery. He claimed to have done this out of a sense of obligation to a fellow officer who’d had one of his men murdered in the line of duty by Dr. Cage. Nevertheless, it had taken some creative manipulation for Forrest to persuade Byrd that no immediate action should be taken against that house. Forrest, of course, knew that Tom was currently on ice at the Royal Oil field near Monterey, Louisiana. But he couldn’t tell Billy Byrd that. Instead, he’d told the hyped-up sheriff that two plainclothes police officers had checked the Abrams house with infrared technology and determined that it contained only an adult woman and a juvenile female. This, and a promise to keep Byrd updated hourly, had proved sufficient to forestall a SWAT assault.

Forrest looked down at the wrought-iron patio table, where a copy of the
Natchez Examiner
lay open. While yesterday’s sensational stories had made no mention of him, today’s main article had reported that Colonel Griffith Mackiever was under fire for child pornography allegations and quoted an unnamed “FBI source” who claimed that Mackiever’s second-in-command might be behind those charges. A side article by Caitlin Masters suggested that dirty politics lay at the root of this scandal, and Masters had taken great pains to point out the connections between Forrest and his extended family, nearly all of whom had been members of the Ku Klux Klan, and some even suspected Double Eagles. Forrest had a feeling that Masters’s FBI source was John Kaiser, the same agent who had drained the Jericho Hole. He was starting to think he’d been behind
the curve where that particular FBI agent was concerned. He needed a line into Kaiser’s plans, and he had a good idea how to get one.

As his coffee went cold, Forrest began to feel a little anxious. He’d expected the call informing him of Sheriff Dennis’s arrest by seven
A.M.
, and it was ten past now. The deputy in charge of the bust hadn’t checked in since before six. Forrest took out his cell phone and speed-dialed the moron.

“Hunt here,” said a country-ass voice.

“You know who this is?”

“Yes, sir!”

“What’s the holdup?”

“The sheriff’s still in his house, Colonel. He’s usually in his office by now, and already drunk his morning coffee. I don’t know
what
the holdup is. You want me to just knock on his door with the K-9?” Deputy Hunt asked. “I could tell him we got an anonymous tip?”

Forrest looked at his watch. “No, hell no. Maybe his wife decided to give it up this morning. Give him ten more minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are you parked? Can he see you?”

“I’m down the street in a friend’s SUV. No markings. Sheriff won’t recognize it.”

“And you have backup?”

“Yes, sir. Parker and McGown. They’re out of sight, too.”

“Okay. The questioning’s going to start pretty soon over at the department, so ten minutes is the limit. If he’s not outside by then, bust him right in front of his family.”

Hunt made a noise that sounded like a gulp.

“Are you up for this job, Deputy?”

“Yes, sir. No problem.”

“All right, then. If you see anything suspicious, call me. Otherwise, follow orders. Out.”

Forrest hung up and looked out over the narrow lake. A glittering gold bass boat arrowed along the opposite shore, trailing a silver wake that rolled gently into the cypresses. He sipped his coffee, then held his hand high in greeting.

Across the lake, the fisherman waved back.

“PENN? PENN, WAKE UP.”

My mother’s face materializes above mine, only inches away. It takes a few moments for reality to assert itself, and longer for my sense of time to reengage. Then I glance at my watch, and a rush of adrenaline blasts through me.

“It’s nearly seven! Did you oversleep?” I sit up in the bed, unintentionally giving my mother an accusatory look.

“No,” she says purposefully.

Of course she didn’t. She’s fully dressed, and I can smell coffee and bacon all the way from the first-floor kitchen. Undoubtedly Annie is down there eating breakfast. “Then why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

Mom sits beside me on the bed, her brow knit with worry. “Are you sure you need to go question the Knoxes? You said there would be other law enforcement people there. The FBI even. Do they really need you?”

“Sheriff Dennis wants me there. I told you last night I needed to do this.”

“I know you did. But I have a bad feeling about it. I don’t usually pay attention to that kind of thing—women’s intuition and all that. But today is different. That Knox family is bad news. We lived fifty miles away from Ferriday and never left the farm, but our men knew about Elam Knox. They kept their daughters home when he came around with his ratty old revival tent. And the apples apparently didn’t fall far from the tree.”

While she was speaking, my mind slipped back to the hotel room with Dwight Stone and Kaiser, and their surreal narrative played behind my eyes like a black-and-white sequel to
JFK
. At this point, there’s nothing Mom could say that would stop me from keeping my appointment at the Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Office.

“Mom, I have to go. It’s that simple, and it’s my best shot at
helping Dad. Now, what do you think about sending Annie back to school?”

“It’s a terrible idea. We’re fine right here.”

“Are you sure it’s not too much? I can have patrol cars watch the school. Chief Logan will do that for me.”

Mom actually snorts at this idea. “She’s not half the trouble you were. She’s staying right here.”

“All right. But I’m going to have Kirk Boisseau come over and sit with you.”

“Kirk Boisseau? Why not one of those policemen your father treated?”

“We need a different skill set than that. Kirk was a recon marine. He can handle real trouble.”

Mom sighs as though this is unnecessary, but she doesn’t argue further.

As I power up my burn phone, a text pings through. It’s from Sheriff Dennis, and it reads:
I left a present at your house. OOOO. I dropped the keys through the mail slot. See you at seven.

“The keys?” I murmur. Then it hits me: the four
O
’s in his text are meant to be the Audi rings. “Walker found my S4!”

“What?” asks Mom, looking worried. “Who found what?”

“I think Sheriff Dennis found my car.”

“Oh. I thought that was something about your father.”

I shake my head. “Wherever Dad’s hiding, he’s doing a good job.”

Her eyes betray both anxiety and satisfaction.

“Tell Annie I’ll be down in one minute.”

Whipping the sheet off the bed, I wrap it around me and hurry into the bathroom. There’s no time for a shower. Unless Walker Dennis ran into a problem I don’t know about, sometime during the last hour he busted the senior surviving members of the Double Eagle group on meth trafficking charges. And if he did, then everybody who thought the shit hit the fan yesterday is going to have their mind blown today.

“HELICOPTER,” SAID JORDAN
Glass, cocking her ear to the wind. “Sounds like a JetRanger.”

Caitlin spun around, scanning the tops of the cypress trees. She saw nothing but looming clouds in the gray morning sky, but Carl Sims was clearly impressed by this deduction, staring at Jordan with a mixture of curiosity and admiration.

Caitlin heard nothing at first. Then she caught the
whup-whup-whup
of rotor blades slicing the air. The sound grew steadily louder, and suddenly the engine was roaring and the chopper came in over the tree line, pointed straight at them.

“Is that Danny McDavitt?” she asked.

“Who else?” Carl pulled the women toward his truck as the JetRanger flared and settled into the dirt clearing in a roaring cloud of dust.

Caitlin instinctively looked at Jordan for guidance, but the photographer was already running in a crouch toward the helicopter. She obviously knew that the most comfortable place in relation to a chopper was inside the machine, not out of it.

Once Carl shut Caitlin inside and she put on the headset Danny McDavitt handed her, the noise dropped considerably. Danny was a handsome man with a craggy face, close-cropped steel-gray hair, and kind eyes that missed nothing. He was basically a more rugged version of John Kaiser. Pulling off her headset, Caitlin motioned for Jordan to do the same, then gave her a sanitized version of their pilot’s personal history, taking care to leave out a few details that had become the feast of local gossips some time ago. She described Danny as a retired air force major—and decorated veteran of Afghanistan—who’d married the widow of a local physician. Jordan looked as if she wanted to ask for more details, but Carl was signaling that they should put their headsets back on.

“I appreciate you helping us out, Major,” Caitlin said into her headset.

“All we’re doing is a routine marijuana-crop search,” Danny said with a wink in his voice. “No thanks necessary.”

“Can we set down and pick some if we find any?” Jordan asked.

Carl Sims laughed, then leaned between the seats and double-checked that both women were strapped in. Satisfied, he nodded to McDavitt, who pushed forward on the collective and lifted the bird into the air.

Long shafts of sunlight streamed down through breaks high in the clouds, but there was a gray wall to the east.

“Do you think it’s going to rain?” Caitlin asked.

“In an hour or two,” Danny said. “If you go into the swamp today, you’re going to get wet.”

Carl handed Danny the map and pointed at it, probably at the X, Caitlin figured. Danny nodded and banked to the west. Caitlin saw patches of grassy land between the cypresses below, and spooked game ran everywhere. At least thirty deer burst from cover as they roared over a dense thicket, followed by enormous black animals that looked like giant hogs.

“They hunt those damn pigs from horses at Valhalla,” said Carl. “With
spears
. Some of ’em weigh eight hundred pounds.”

Caitlin was going ask Carl about Valhalla, which she’d read about in Henry Sexton’s notebooks, but Danny said, “Carl’s just jealous. The farmers around here pay him to shoot those hogs at night with his sniper rifle, to keep them from eating their crops. Every one a hunter gets is less money in his pocket.”

“True enough,” Carl admitted.

“Hey, look!” Jordan cried, pointing down at a wide circle of water.

Caitlin saw an old man in a green johnboat staring up at them with what appeared to be shock and even fear on his face.

“What’s he doing?” Jordan asked.

Carl laughed. “That’s Mose Tyler. He’s a local fisherman. A little like your man Toby Rambin. I think we surprised Mose setting out a treble-hook trotline, which is illegal in these waters. He probably thinks we’re game and fish wardens. He doesn’t see so good anymore.”

Danny ascended a hundred feet and left the fisherman in peace.
Caitlin was about to ask Carl about Valhalla—and the Knox family—when Carl said, “I asked my daddy about that story you told me last night. About a black woman from Athens Point who got raped out in the swamp. He’d heard a little about it, but he knew another preacher who knew the details.”

“What’s this about?” Jordan asked. “You didn’t tell me this, did you?”

Caitlin shook her head.

“A brother from down here married a colored girl from Chicago back in the early sixties,” Carl said. “She was real light-skinned—so light that some folks around here thought she
was
white. Well, for a while it wasn’t nothing but dirty looks and such. But in 1963, the Klan took notice. One night they kidnapped the couple from their house. They blindfolded them and put them in boats and took them out to this cypress that the old-timers call the Bone Tree.”

Caitlin felt as though her body temperature had dropped twenty degrees. Why had Carl mentioned the Bone Tree? Was he simply passing on a shocking story that his father had learned last night, confident that McDavitt wouldn’t suspect any connection to their present search? Or had Carl already told the pilot what they were really after?

“They tied the husband to the tree and started beating him with bean poles,” Carl went on. “They beat him bad, and while it was going on they started hollering things. Well, the wife finally figured out they were beating her man for marrying a white woman! She started yelling that they were making a mistake, but the Klan boys wouldn’t listen. Finally she’s trying to tear them off her husband, screaming, ‘He ain’t done nothing wrong! I’m a nigger, too! I’m a nigger, too!’”

“Jesus,” Jordan breathed. “That really happened?”

“Not five miles from where we are, if this map is right. And after they tired of beating the husband, they raped the wife. All of ’em. The husband ended up dying. And believe it or not, they dumped the woman on the road. They’d beat her too, and she had no idea where she’d been. And of course the sheriff at that time had no interest in pursuing that crime. Since it turned out that the woman was black, the law didn’t even see it as a crime. Not the unwritten law, anyway, which was the only one that mattered back then.”

Caitlin suddenly felt dislocated from her surroundings. “Does your father know where we can find this woman?”

Carl’s helmet shook back and forth. “I don’t think he’ll tell you.”

“Why not?”

“The woman’s pastor says she has no idea who attacked her, and more important, no idea where that tree was.”

“Caitlin?” Jordan asked over the headset. “Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry if I was too coarse,” Carl said. “I forgot about . . . well . . .”

Caitlin held up her hand to reassure the deputy, but she knew the gesture wouldn’t help Carl. Deputy Sims had been guarding her when she was kidnapped only months ago. And though Caitlin hadn’t been raped herself, she had been forced to listen while a woman separated from her by only a thin partition had been repeatedly violated.

Caitlin took out her Treo. It showed one bar. She’d received eight text messages since leaving Natchez, but all were from employees of the
Examiner
. None from Walt Garrity, and none from Penn, either. A wave of guilt made her face flush. Should she try to call him? If she did, what could she say? That last night she’d had the power to send Penn to his father’s side, but now it was too late and Tom might well be dead.
No . . .

Looking across the chopper’s deck, she saw Jordan studying her with deep concern. The photographer’s eyebrows went up in a silent question:
Are you okay?

Caitlin shoved the Treo back into her pocket and looked out the chopper’s window again. There was a lot more water than earth beneath them now, and McDavitt seemed to have slowed their forward speed quite a bit. After a few seconds, Caitlin realized he was following a game fence that zigzagged between the trees. Somewhere not far away, she realized, stood the tree where Jimmy Revels and numberless others had died, where a woman she did not know had watched her husband beaten to death, and where Frank Knox might have hidden the key to the assassination of a president.

The Bone Tree.

EXCHANGING THE MUSTY OLD
city sedan for my Audi S4 was like climbing into a speedboat after poling a raft for two days. As I drove west toward the Mississippi River bridge, my mind downshifted into the automatic mode I learned first as a law student and then a
prosecutor. While I don’t have a photographic memory, I do have an uncanny ability to retain blocks of text, particularly when presented in the form of cases or reports.

The assessment of the Knoxes John Kaiser e-mailed me last night is a perfect example. Because it was filled with detail that might be useful in today’s interrogations, my brain recorded it as accurately as a tape recorder, despite my fatigue. Kaiser didn’t write in the sterile, jargon-heavy prose of an FBI report, but the language of a personal journal. I suspect he developed this habit during his stint in the Investigative Support Unit, which focuses heavily on human psychology and cares little about the formality of the rules-based bureaucracy of which it’s nominally a part.

So far as I can discover, the root of the Knox pathology begins with Frank Knox’s grandfather, Nathan Bedford Forrest Knox. Nathan was an abusive sociopath who fought in the Spanish-American War. He took scalps during the fighting in Cuba and probably murdered several people in the decades afterward. Nathan had two sons: Nathan Jr. (killed at Belleau Wood in 1918) and Elam (who fathered Frank and Snake). Nathan Jr. took some German scalps before he was killed, for which he received only minor discipline.

Elam Knox became a lay preacher, a sometime farmer and trapper, a wifebeater, and a child abuser. He was decorated for bravery during WWI, and his army record notes that he was a savage trench fighter. There are no records of trophy taking by Elam Knox, but he probably carried on the tradition, because the practice showed up in both his sons, and with a vengeance.

Elam’s son Frank was probably sexually abused by his father. He was beaten often and had a generally violent childhood. Frank led a life of petty crime, had constant run-ins with the police, yet he never spent more than a night in jail. There were burglaries, probable rapes, and countless assaults. Frank was ejected from several high school football games for fighting. He was about to be charged with rape when World War II came along. The local authorities were so glad to be rid of him, they let him enlist in the Marines. Not even the victim’s family complained.

Frank was sent to the Pacific along with schoolmates Glenn
Morehouse and Sonny Thornfield, and there he flowered. Frank was a born killer, and there was plenty to be done on the islands. The more brutal the soldier, the better his officers liked him, and Frank Knox had no equal. He racked up medals faster than most men did blisters on their feet. But Frank didn’t merely take human trophies—as his father and grandfather had—he started a business selling them to the Merchant Marine. He and his buddies would bleach the skulls of Japanese soldiers they’d killed and sell them to sailors for a hefty profit. They also carved trinkets out of other bones, made bracelets out of teeth, took ears, cut off foreskins, anything that would sell.

Snake Knox was eight years younger than his brother and consequently served in Korea. Part of the time he spent as a sniper, but Snake also fought hand to hand. His army record contains several notes about one-man incursions he made behind the Chinese lines. One night a foxhole buddy told Snake he was getting frostbite because his boots couldn’t keep out the cold. That night, Snake sneaked through the Chinese lines and brought back a pair of boots with the feet still in them. He said he’d left the feet in to keep the leather warm.

Given this history, it’s no surprise that when the Knoxes turned their hands to racial violence, they would use the same tactics they’d employed in Asia. The mutilation of Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis by removal of their service tattoos is a particularly egregious example, but the Knoxes employed torture against multiple victims, and even against whites who they felt had betrayed them.

Frank Knox’s second son, Forrest, became the first Knox to conceal his savage nature under a mask of refinement. But evidence of the Knox pathology abounds during Forrest’s younger years, particularly while he served as a LRRP in Vietnam. While most Lurps living behind enemy lines avoided contact and reported on enemy movements, Forrest did the opposite. If he thought the odds were remotely in his favor (which might mean two dozen VC regulars against a six-man LRRP team), he would either set up an ambush and take them out or follow the VC patrol and pick them off one by one. A few of his men complained, but any soldier who showed initiative and upped the body count was protected in Vietnam. Forrest gave MACV intel they couldn’t get any other way, and several superiors misused his unit as a hunter-killer
team (a not uncommon occurrence with LRRP units, which had a 400:1 kill ratio).

The classic Knox pathology was revealed in a killing ritual Forrest observed in combat. He carried a bag of Kennedy half-dollars in his ruck, and always left a coin in his dead enemy’s mouth. Pretty soon, the VC in his area believed some kind of ghost or demon was operating there. Command didn’t think the coins were particularly crazy. It beat cutting off ears. Of course the army brass couldn’t know that the JFK coin was the talisman of the younger Double Eagle group members back in the States. Not that they would have cared. . . .

A loud
thunk
startles me as my Audi ramps up onto the westbound bridge and the river opens a hundred feet beneath me, spreading right and left like a broad valley filled with liquid bronze. Suddenly the horizon is miles away rather than a few hundred yards, and the effect is like gulping cold water. I’m tempted to call Walker Dennis and find out whether he’s actually busted the Double Eagles for the planted methamphetamine, but I can’t take the chance. If anyone is monitoring his calls, I could find myself tied to a serious felony. With an impatient sigh, I force myself to focus on the remainder of Kaiser’s psychological assessment. I can wait five minutes to find out whether Snake Knox and Sonny Thornfield are about to be facing mandatory thirty-year sentences. If they are, I won’t need to try to take them apart by applying pressure to well-hidden emotional cracks. . . . I’ll have a legal bludgeon that would pucker the sphincter of a hardened con.