The Bone Tree (6 page)

The sheriff just might be right about this. Some accused criminals live in mortal terror of incarceration—dirty cops, for example—but given the racial demographics of American prisons, I imagine former
Ku Klux Klansmen rank right up there with child molesters when it comes to those who have real reason to fear going to jail.

“All right,” I say softly. “I’m with you.”

Walker glances at me, excitement in his face. “Seriously?”

“Let’s do it.”

“What made you change your mind?”

Since Dennis is going out on a limb for my father, I feel I owe him the truth. “Battle tactics. Forrest Knox is driving the manhunt for Dad and Walt. If we hit the Knox organization as hard as we can tomorrow, and keep hitting them, Forrest will have to devote a lot of energy to defending himself. And every minute he puts into fighting you and me is one less he has to track down my father.”

“Damn straight,” Walker says. “When in doubt, run it up the middle. Don’t even give Forrest time to
think
about your daddy. I just wish we could get Agent Kaiser out of the way somehow, so he can’t interfere.”

As soon as Walker says this, a memory of Brody Royal describing the murder of Pooky Wilson at the Bone Tree comes to me. “I might just be able to do that. Though not in the next six hours.”

“Anything will help. Hey, look.” Sheriff Dennis points across the westbound lanes at the jarringly modern silhouette of the 1970s courthouse. “We made it. And no state cops in sight.”

As Walker gives me a thumbs-up, I turn in my seat to make sure Walker’s brother-in-law is still behind us, and that Caitlin is still his passenger. Thankfully, I can see both their heads silhouetted by the headlights of the vehicle behind them.

“Hey,” Walker says sharply. “Earlier today you said you wanted to ride with me on the busts. Do you still want to do that? Or should you lie low and let me take the heat?”

I don’t even have to think about this question. “I’ve got my mother and daughter well hidden. What’s the point in letting you have all the fun?”

The sheriff smacks his steering wheel and smiles. “All right, then. In six hours we hit those sons of bitches. And I’ll lay odds that in twenty-four hours we’ll have at least one Double Eagle in my jail, begging to tell us everything he knows.”

Dennis pulls around to the left side of the courthouse, the site of his motor pool.

“I’d better call Chief Logan now,” I say, the weight of dread and guilt in my voice. “He needs to know he probably lost a man tonight.”

The smile melts off Walker Dennis’s face. “You tell him we’re going to get to the bottom of that tomorrow, too. Tell Logan I promised him that.”

“I will.”

Dennis switches off the engine, then looks at me. The eyes in his fleshy face burn with fearsome conviction. “Before I’m done, Forrest Knox is gonna wish his family never set foot in my parish.”

Forrest Knox’s ancestors probably arrived here generations before Dennis’s did, but the sheriff could not care less about that. Subtlety isn’t his strong suit. Special Agent John Kaiser is like a Predator drone, circling high above Forrest Knox and the Double Eagle group with an array of precision-targeted missiles. Sheriff Dennis is more like the iron bombs that dropped from the bellies of B-17s during World War II: dumb and heavy, but deadly enough to bring down a city block. And for my new purpose, Walker Dennis is just what the doctor ordered.

CAITLIN MASTERS HAD
wasted no time after getting into the cruiser. The deaths she’d witnessed, the torture she’d endured—all that was working its way through her like slow poison, she knew, but there was no quick antidote. And if what Brody Royal had said about having a mole at her paper was true, then every passing minute might mean more deleted computer files. She prayed that if there was a mole, he had not located the digital scans of Henry Sexton’s journals. The fire wasn’t even out of sight when she said, “I need to call my editor, Deputy. May I use your cell phone?”

Deputy Grady Wells pulled a Nokia from his shirt pocket and passed it over. “Walker said you could. I just hope to hell the state police don’t find out about this.”

“Don’t worry, you’re on the side of the angels tonight.”

Wells grunted skeptically.

Her editor’s cell phone rang four times, but then he answered. “Jamie Lewis. Who’s this?”

“It’s me, Jamie.”

“Christ, I was afraid you were dead.” Lewis’s crisp northern speech sounded alien compared to the drawl of Deputy Wells.

“I almost was. And some people are sure going to wish I was.”

“One minute you were here arguing with Penn, and the next you were gone. Now the police scanner’s going nuts about an explosion on Lake Concordia.”

“I was in the damned explosion. Or next to it, anyway. Don’t say anything more, Jamie. Just listen and do what I say.”

“Go.”

“Shut down our computers, right now. The servers, everything.”

“What?”

“Our system’s been breached. Somebody’s in our intranet, wiping
out information. Brody Royal had a mole on our staff. Henry’s scanned backup files are probably gone, and God knows what else. You haven’t noticed anything weird going on?”

“I did accidentally delete a story about an hour ago.”

Caitlin’s stomach did a queasy roll. “No, you didn’t. They already stole the physical copies of Henry’s journals and backup files, right out of our fire cabinet. Have you shut down the system yet?”

“I’m trying to now. We’re going to lose unsaved stories people are working on.”

“
Pull the fucking plug, Jamie!
We’ve got to start the whole edition over anyway.”

“Okay, okay. When will you be back here?”

“I don’t know. I need to read over the hub story I wrote before this happened—I can access the copy I sent to Daddy’s other papers via e-mail. Then I’ll call you back and try to dictate a new one from here.”

“Where is here?”

“I can’t tell you that on the phone. But I’ll tell you this: I’ve never worked a story this big in my life. Brody Royal just closed about five murder cases in as many minutes. He shot a black man named Sleepy Johnston right in front of us, a witness to the Albert Norris murder in 1964. I’ve got Snake Knox for murdering Pooky Wilson and trying to skin him alive. Royal admitted raping Viola Turner, and also killing his own daughter.”

“Holy shit. I heard she died in the ICU earlier tonight.”

“That’s right. Royal knew Katy was starting to talk about his involvement in her mother’s murder, and the others, too. Either Royal or his son-in-law did that. Oh, Randall Regan’s dead as well, by the way.”

Jamie’s amazement only silenced him for a moment. “How did Royal know that his daughter had talked to you?”

Because Penn played him the recording of her voice . . .
“I don’t know,” Caitlin lied. “But he did.”

“You still have that recording, right?”

“No. Royal burned both copies, mine and Penn’s.”

“Fuck!”

“I know, I know. But Penn and I both heard him admit the murders. It’ll be okay. Tomorrow’s edition is going to be like a bomb going off, Jamie. By tomorrow at noon, every media outlet in the country is going
to be chasing this story. And the FBI is going to look like the Keystone Kops. I just have to stay clear of certain people until we get the issue done.”

“Such as?”

“The Adams County sheriff, for one. How are your dictation skills?”

“Meredith’s a lot better. I’ll get her ready.”

“No. Just you. When Penn and I were kidnapped from the back parking lot, I almost made it back inside, but one of our people locked me out. I don’t know who did that, and it could have been a woman as easily as a man. Has anybody left their post tonight?”

“Now that you mention it, Nick has been out of touch for an hour or more.”

“Nick Moore, the press operator?”

“Yeah. We figured he went out for some food, since the press obviously wouldn’t run for some hours yet.”

“Try to track him down. Anybody else?”

“I don’t think so. Everybody’s working like this is the biggest story of their lives.”

“It is. Okay, I’ll call you back in two minutes, max, and dictate the new story in case I get arrested. At the very least, I’ll be stuck in a police interrogation room for a while. For now, tomorrow’s edition is on your shoulders. You’re probably going to have to try to reconstruct almost everything that’s been written from memory.”

“We’ll do it, if we have to stay till dawn.”

“Count on that. None of us will be sleeping for a long time.”

Caitlin hung up and began punching commands into the cell phone’s tiny keypad. Only then did she realize that her hands were shaking. Normally, she was an ace with a cell phone, but not now. The trauma she’d endured in Brody Royal’s basement was part of it, of course. But the larger part, she knew, was her realization that within an hour or two, Special Agent John Kaiser would learn that Royal had not only verified the existence of the Bone Tree, but also placed the murder of Pooky Wilson there. Given the massive effort Kaiser had expended to drain the Jericho Hole in search of the bones of the Double Eagles’ civil rights victims, what resources might he marshal to locate Pooky Wilson’s remains? Two hours ago, Caitlin was certain she’d had the only real chance of finding the near-mythical race-murder site that most
authorities considered apocryphal. Now she was likely to be competing with a battalion of National Guardsmen and satellite imagery specialists. As soon as she could get to a safe phone, she would try yet again to call Toby Rambin, the Lusahatcha County poacher who had sworn to Henry Sexton that he knew the location of the Bone Tree. Calling him in the middle of the night wouldn’t be ideal, but she had no choice now.

After several curses and mistakes, she finally got into her digital mailbox and called up the file attachment she needed. Blocking out the pain of her injuries, she focused on the tiny screen, processing her own words with ruthless efficiency, deciding which elements of the existing lead story could function as a foundation for the new one she would dictate before they reached the sheriff’s department. As she stared at the glowing LCD, it finally sank in how profoundly the world had changed in the two hours since she’d written that piece. The entire story would have to be rewritten.

A wave of exhaustion rolled over her, giving her the sense that she was being smothered. When at last she caught her breath, her stomach rolled with nausea. The only thought she could hold in her mind was of the poacher, Rambin. Only days ago, this stranger had contacted Henry Sexton with an offer to guide him to the Bone Tree for a price. But did Toby Rambin know what he claimed to know? Henry had been misled by greedy “guides” before. And since he’d been attacked the night after Rambin contacted him, he’d been unable to keep his scheduled rendezvous. In a narcotic fog in his hospital room—only minutes before a sniper fired a bullet at his head—Henry had given Caitlin the poacher’s telephone number. With a twinge of guilt she recalled altering the entry in Henry’s cell phone so that no one else would be able to find the right number if they checked his phone. As ruthless as that was, Caitlin was glad now that she’d done it. She only hoped she could reach Rambin before the poacher heard about Henry’s murder and fled the state.

Calm down,
she told herself. Caitlin closed her eyes and tried to blank her thoughts, but the image of Henry Sexton immolating himself and Brody Royal only grew more distinct in her mind’s eye.

She opened her eyes and punched the keypad of Deputy Wells’s cell phone.

“Caitlin?” Jamie said. “Is that you?”

“Have you had any word from the press operator?”

“None. Nick’s dropped off the face of the earth.”

“With a lot more money than he had last week,” she muttered.

“You really think Nick would help somebody hurt you?”

“I doubt he thought they would kill me. But . . .” Caitlin fell silent as another memory from the basement returned to her. “Jamie . . . before he died, Brody Royal was bragging about how little it had cost him to buy one of our people.”

“Okay. And?”

“I’m pretty sure he said he’d bought a journalist. A
scribbler,
he said. I remember now. So even if Nick was the one who locked me out, he might not be the only person Royal bribed. I mean, would Nick know where we were keeping Henry’s journals? Would he know how to work the computers, navigate our intranet? Would he know the user names or passwords of the reporters?”

“No. But if Nick didn’t delete the files, then it could be anybody. How the hell do we go forward from here?”

“Think hard about who you trust. With Royal dead, the mole will assume their payday is over. So from this point forward, they might just go back to doing their job.”

“I guess. It still creeps me out, though. And it pisses me off.”

A worrisome thought struck her. “There’s another possibility. When Royal mentioned the mole, he said he had taken a page out of Forrest’s book. He was talking about Forrest Knox, chief of the Criminal Investigations Bureau of the Louisiana State Police. That means Knox was also paying a reporter somewhere. Probably Baton Rouge, where he lives, I’d guess. Or maybe New Orleans. But if Forrest knows about Royal’s mole at the
Examiner,
who’s to say he can’t extend the arrangement?”

“What if Forrest Knox’s mole was at Henry Sexton’s paper?” Jamie asked. “Or at half a dozen of them? Why limit a good thing, if you’ve got the money to spend?”

“You’re right. Jeez, that would explain a lot. We’ll have to keep our plans confined to a very tight circle. Tomorrow’s stories will have to be written on two computers only, yours and mine. No sharing files, no Internet connection for them.”

“Okay.”

Caitlin looked out at the lights flashing by outside the cruiser. At
last she recognized a building. “I’m only five minutes from the sheriff’s office. I need to start dictating.”

“I’m ready.”

“Jamie, this really is the most—”

“You’re not seriously going to waste time telling me how big this is, are you?
Go.
”

She took a deep breath, then shut her eyes and began to compose her new story on the fly. “Last night, Henry Sexton of the
Concordia Beacon
laid down his life for a fellow journalist. That journalist was me . . .”

As Caitlin spoke, a soft voice at the center of her mind asked a deeply troubling question:
Could Jamie be the mole?
Almost instantly another voice answered,
No way
. She had known her editor for six years. He was a flaming liberal, a crusader for justice who hated greed and repression in all their forms. But probably more persuasive than this, Jamie—like Caitlin herself—was rich. He’d been born into a family with money, and thus had the luxury of being immune to blandishments that might tempt those less fortunate.

“Caitlin?” Jamie said. “What the hell? Are you there?”

“Yeah, can you not hear me?”

“You stopped talking thirty seconds ago.”

“I’m sorry. God, it’s been a crazy night. Where was I?”

“The last thing you said was, ‘This lone reporter, working from a tiny newspaper in the slowly dying delta of Louisiana, accomplished more than an army of FBI agents did in forty years—’ and then you trailed off.”

“Okay . . . okay. Ready?”

“Go,” Jamie said.

Banishing the mole from her mind, Caitlin picked up the story again.