The Devil's Punchbowl (31 page)

 

“Where?” Carl asks.

 

“The Devil’s Punchbowl.”

 

The sniper whips his head around and stares at me. “No shit?”

 

“No shit.”

 

“How do you know?” asks McDavitt.

 

“I spent the night down there once. A long time ago.”

 

“Bullshit,” says Sims.

 

“Seriously. I was seventeen. It was a Boy Scout thing. Merit Badge. Camping out overnight by yourself. Being a typical teenager, I chose the scariest place I could think of.”

 

“I never knew anybody who’s actually been down there,” Sims says. “I always heard outlaws dumped the bodies of their victims there back in the old days. Heads separated from the bodies, and all.”

 

McDavitt points at the FLIR screen. “I think somebody else heard the same stories. Got inspired, maybe.”

 

“Maybe so,” I agree, trying to let the truth of what happened last night find its way to my consciousness.

 

“What did you see down there?” Carl asks me. “Find any skeletons?”

 

“No. Wildlife, mostly. Lots of deer, foxes. I saw some black-bear tracks. I almost stepped on a six-foot rattlesnake.”

 

“How deep is it? For real?”

 

“I didn’t have any way to measure it. But it got dark down there in the afternoon. And I almost drowned that night. It started raining, and before I knew it, I was in the middle of a flash flood.”

 

McDavitt chuckles softly. “I always heard that Jean Laffite might have hid his treasure down there. You didn’t find any pieces of eight, did you?”

 

“Not for lack of trying. I took a metal detector with me. And I did find a treasure, of a kind. But not pirate gold.”

 

“What did you find?” Sims asks, his eyes bright.

 

For a few moments I resist answering. This memory I’ve always kept to myself. “A cougar. I saw a cougar down there. They’re sup
posed to be extinct in these parts, but I know what I saw. He was on a limb looking down at a game path. There were deer tracks all through there. He was waiting for supper to walk by.”

 

“What happened?”

 

“He looked at me, I looked at him, and then he was gone. Never made a sound. I didn’t sleep a wink. All night I expected him to pounce on me out of nowhere. But he never did.”

 

“He didn’t like the smell of you,” Carl says.

 

“Can’t say I blame him,” McDavitt says in a deadpan voice. “I’d have to be awful hungry to choose you over venison. But let’s not get sidetracked. Anybody watching this ship is going to see us hanging over this hole like a buzzard circling a carcass. What’s the plan?”

 

“That’s got be Tim’s car,” I aver. “The question is, did he run it down there himself, or did the bad guys dump it there?”

 

“Why would he do it himself?” Carl asks.

 

“If they were chasing him, he might do it to make them think he’d crashed and died.”

 

McDavitt nods thoughtfully. “If he did that, then the bad guys might not have searched it yet.”

 

“If they know it’s there, they’ve searched it. And they probably do know,” I say, recalling Sands’s certainty that Tim did not e-mail the stolen data to anyone. “But we can’t be sure.” I could call Seamus Quinn and save myself a lot of trouble, but if Quinn doesn’t know about the car…“I need to get down there, guys.”

 

“How you going to do that?” McDavitt asks. “My hoist won’t even get you halfway.”

 

“Same way I did when I was seventeen, I guess.”

 

“How long did that take you?”

 

“Most of a day.”

 

An intermittent beep sounds in the muffled hum of the JetRanger’s cabin.

 

“What’s that?” McDavitt scans his instrument panel. “That’s not coming from the chopper.”

 

I pull off one earpiece of my headset. “Sorry. It’s a satellite phone.” I lift the phone from the floor, click the SEND button, and put the receiver to my ear. “Hello?”

 

“Penn, it’s Dad.”

 

“What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

 

“No, but I think you ought to come by my office.”

 

“Right now?”

 

“Right now. There’s somebody here to see you.”

 

“Can you say who it is?”

 

“I’d rather not.”

 

I feel momentary panic. “Are you all right?”

 

“I’m fine, don’t worry.”

 

“Did you call from your office line?”

 

“Hell no. I borrowed Chris Shepard’s cell phone.”

 

“Okay.” Chris Shepard is one of my father’s younger partners.

 

“Just get over here now, if you can.”

 

“I’m kind of in the middle of something important.”

 

There’s a brief silence. Then my father says, “Well, let’s see how important. I’ve got Jewel Washington sitting here with the results of Tim Jessup’s autopsy, which she’s under instructions not to share with anybody. Is that important enough?”

 

Shit.
“Don’t let her leave. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

 

“That’s what I figured.”

 

I hang up and look down at the forest below, then at the men in the front of the chopper. “I need to get back to my car.”

 

McDavitt nods. Carl keeps looking at me, then expels a lungful of air. “If you really think what you’re looking for could be down there, I can check it out for you.”

 

A rush of gratitude flows through me. “Are you sure? That’s a deep hole.”

 

Sims laughs. “Yeah, well. I’ve heard about that place all my life. Might as well see for myself what’s at the bottom.”

 

“What exactly is he looking for?” McDavitt asks.

 

“A DVD, probably. Any form of digital media.”

 

“Any digital media in that car has been burned to a crisp,” the pilot points out.

 

“Could have been thrown clear,” Carl says. “If it was in a bag or a case, say.”

 

“You
want
to go down there,” McDavitt says, shaking his head. “Can you tell this guy was a marine or what?”

 

“You could be right about the fire,” I concede. “But if we don’t look down there, we’ll never know for sure.”

 

Carl speaks with his face pressed to the window. “If you got in
and out when you were a Boy Scout, I can sure as hell do it. Can’t be any worse than Iraq, right?”

 

“I don’t think they have rattlesnakes or bears in Iraq.”

 

“Or cougars,” McDavitt adds with sarcasm.

 

Carl nods thoughtfully. “You got a point there. But I’ve got good boots. And if I have to shoot, I hit what I aim at.”

 

“The trick,” says McDavitt, “is seeing the threat in
time
to shoot.”

 

The sniper smiles. “I’ll keep my eyes open.”

 

“Okay,” says McDavitt. “Where’s this traveling circus headed next?”

 

“My car,” I tell him.

 

“Then mine,” Sims says. “ASAP. I don’t want to be at the bottom of that hole when night falls.”

 

McDavitt swings the chopper out over the river and roars back toward town.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
22

 

 

My father’s medical office looks like something that belongs in the Smithsonian Institution, the refuge of a doctor who loves history and the art of medicine, and who exhibits his disdain for modern gadgetry by banishing his notebook computer to the nurses’ station outside his inner sanctum. The office is almost a museum itself, housing a gargantuan collection of medical books, Civil War memoirs, English novels, ship models, antique surgical instruments, and meticulously hand-painted lead soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars, each one accurate to the last detail. Every inch of fabric and leather in the room exudes the smell of cigars, which announces to patients old and new my father’s long-held medical philosophy:
Do as I say, not as I do.

 

I find Dad sitting behind his desk, his feet resting on a stool, while Jewel Washington laughs at something he said before I entered. I could swear I see a trace of embarrassment in Jewel’s dark cheeks. It’s hard to imagine what would make a nurse who’s made it past fifty blush, but if anybody knows what that would be, it’s Tom Cage. Jewel stands to greet me, and we hug briefly.

 

“Sit by me on the couch,” she says. “I didn’t bring any paperwork, for obvious reasons. I ain’t supposed to show you the autopsy, so how about I just summarize it verbally?”

 

“Did Shad Johnson tell you not to show it to me?”

 

Jewel’s eyes glint with submerged meaning. “Let’s say the district attorney advised the county coroner that a homicide investigation is no business of the mayor’s.”

 

“Duly noted. What did the autopsy show?”

 

“Your friend was shot.”

 

A chill races along my arms. I expected anything but this. “Shot?”

 

“Pathologist in Jackson dug a .22 Magnum slug out of his heart.”

 

“Why didn’t we see the entry wound? Was it masked by one of those dog bites?”

 

“You got it. Dog mauled that boy something terrible.”

 

“Are you sure it was a dog?”

 

“I got out the textbooks and took measurements. That man was tore up by a canine—a big one—and the wounds definitely occurred prior to death.”

 

Dad shakes his head in disgust.

 

Jewel says, “You combine that with the burns, and—”

 

“Just a minute. What caused the burns?”

 

“Some were from an electric cigarette lighter, like in a car. Others from an actual cigarette, which gets hotter than a car lighter. A lit cigarette burns at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Draw on it, it heats up to nearly thirteen hundred degrees. That’s a world of pain right there.”

 

“Sons of bitches,” Dad mutters.

 

“Add up those two things, you get one answer. Somebody tortured that man. Why? For kicks? For revenge? Something he knew? I’m guessing you’d know more about the motive than I would.”

 

“I don’t know anything at this point, Jewel.”

 

She gives me a long look. “You sound more like Shad Johnson than Penn Cage.”

 

“Let’s get back to Shad in a minute. What else did the postmortem show?”

 

“They only have the initial toxicology panel back, but there were definitely drugs in the victim’s blood.”

 

Damn it.
“What kind of drugs?”

 

“Opiates, some crystal meth.”

 

I shake my head, unwilling to accept that Tim had gotten high before carrying out his secret mission.

 

“Funny thing, though,” Jewel says. “There was some bruising at
the injection site. Antecubital vein, which is unusual. Most addicts try to hide needle marks. This guy wasn’t a habitual user, at least not that way. His veins were in decent shape, except for some old scarring between his toes and on his penis.”

 

“What killed him, Jewel? The fall or the bullet?”

 

“The fall, but only because it happened so soon after he was shot. Bullet wound would’ve killed him in a minute or two.”

 

“Did anybody hear shots on the bluff prior to Tim’s fall? I don’t remember Chief Logan saying anything about that.”

 

“Not as far as I know.”

 

“And you said the wound would have killed him in a couple of minutes.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“If he’d been shot in the SUV, could he have made the run to the fence, and then run along it like he did?”

 

Jewel is considering this when Dad says, “It’s possible. I’ve seen men hit several times with higher-caliber bullets continue fighting for over a minute.”

 

Jewel and I look at my father in silence, knowing that this kind of knowledge was not absorbed in medical school, but in Korea.

 

“In that situation,” Dad goes on, “being tortured, his adrenaline would have been off the charts. And he obviously summoned the strength to break away from his captors.”

 

“Okay, maybe that explains it. But if he was shot at the fence, then someone used a silenced weapon.”

 

“Like with the balloon,” Dad says. “I see.”

 

Jewel looks between us but says nothing. Like a lot of people in town, she has heard about the crash landing, and the rest is simple enough to piece together.

 

“Any other significant findings?” I ask.

 

Her eyes fix on me. “You could say that.”

 

“Well?”

 

“Penn Cage, I didn’t carry my tired old butt out here to be doing all the givin’ without gettin’ nothing in return. You tell me what’s going on. Who killed that man like that? And why?”

 

I look to my father for support, but he only shrugs. “Jewel,” I say, “I want you to listen to me. Listen like I’m telling you about one of your children. You don’t want to know any more about this case
than you already do. You could end up on the same table Tim was cut on. Tell me you understand what I’m saying. I don’t want to add your safety to my list of worries.”

 

The coroner shakes her head, but I can’t tell if she’s offended or not. “What are you telling me? Stop working this death?”

 

“No. Just don’t do anything out of your normal investigative routine. Follow the book, and nothing more. And by that standard, I think you’re finished.”

 

Now she looks offended. “If I’d followed the book, you wouldn’t know what you know now.”

 

“I realize that. And I appreciate it. But the risk is mine to take, not yours.”

 

“Why’s that?”

 

“Because I owe somebody.”

 

A small, strange smile shows on Jewel’s face. “Now you sound like your daddy. Okay, then. You’re telling me I’m at risk just by coming here, right?”

 

“You could be. If they’re watching Dad. You need to come up with a plausible reason for your visit.”

 

“Prescription,” Dad says. “Is your mother still having problems with peripheral neuropathy?”

 

Jewel smiles broadly now. “Do you ever forget anything about a patient?”

 

“Hell, yes. More every day.”

 

“I don’t believe it.”

 

I touch the coroner’s wrist. “You said there was something else.”

 

“Pathologist found something in your friend’s rectum.”

 

“What? Drugs?”

 

“No. The cap from a thumb drive.”