Chapter

56

I got back to the table just as the waitress was putting down two slices of peach pie and two cups of coffee. Deveraux started eating immediately. She was a whole chicken pie ahead of me, and she was still hungry. I gave her a lightly edited recap of Lowrey’s information. Everything, really, except for the words Missouri, Carlton, and Riley.

She asked, “What made you give him Audrey Shaw’s name in the first place?”

“Flip of a coin,” I said. “A fifty-fifty chance. Either Butler’s buddy screwed up her case numbers or she didn’t. I didn’t want to assume one way or the other.”

“Does this stuff help us?”

Small words, but big concepts. Help, and us. It didn’t help me. Not with Janice May Chapman, anyway. With Rosemary McClatchy and Shawna Lindsay, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Lowrey’s news cast a strange new light on them. But Lowrey’s news helped Deveraux, that was for damn sure. With Chapman, at least. It decreased the chances about a billionfold that her local population was involved with her in any way at all. Because it increased the chances about a billionfold that mine was.

I said, “It might help us. It might narrow things down a little. I mean, if a senator has a problem, which of the five or six chains of command is going to react?”

“Senate Liaison,” she said.

“That’s where I’m going. The day after tomorrow.”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t.”

“You must have.”

“It was just a random choice. I needed a reason to be there, that’s all.”

“Wait,” she said. “This makes no sense. Why would the army get involved if a senator had a problem with a girl? That’s a civilian matter. I mean, Senate Liaison doesn’t get involved every time a politician loses his car keys. There would have to be a military connection. And there’s no military connection between a civilian senator and his civilian ex-girlfriend, no matter where she lives.”

I didn’t answer.

She looked at me. “Are you saying there is a connection?”

I said, “I’m not saying anything. Literally. Watch my lips. They aren’t moving.”

“There can’t be a connection. Chapman wasn’t in the army, and there certainly aren’t any senators in the army.”

I said nothing.

“Did Chapman have a brother in the army? Is that it? A cousin? A relative of some kind? Jesus, is her father in the army? What would he be now, mid-fifties? The only reason to stay in at that age is if you’re having fun, and the only way to have fun at that age is to be a very senior officer. Is that what we’re saying here? Chapman was a general’s daughter? Or Shaw, or whatever her real name was?”

I said nothing.

She said, “Lowrey told you she got the intern job because of family connections, right? So what else can that mean? We’re talking about having an actual senator who owes you favors here. That’s a big deal. Her father must be a two-star at least.”

I said nothing.

She looked straight at me.

“I can tell what you’re thinking,” she said.

I said nothing.

“I didn’t get it right,” she said. “That’s what you’re thinking. I’m on the wrong track. Chapman had no relatives in uniform. It’s something else.”

I said nothing.

She said, “Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the senator is the one with a relative in uniform.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said. “If Janice May Chapman was a sudden short-term problem who required a sudden short-term solution, why was she killed in exactly the same way as two other unconnected women four and nine months previously?”

“Are you saying it’s a coincidence? Nothing to do with the senator connection?”

“It could be that way,” I said.

“Then why the big panic?”

“Because they’re worried about blowback. In general. They don’t want any kind of taint coming near a particular unit.”

“The one with the senator’s relative in it?”

“Let’s not go there.”

“But they weren’t worried about blowback before? Four and nine months ago?”

“They didn’t know about four and nine months ago. Why would they? But Chapman jumped out at them. She had two kinds of extra visibility. Her name was in the files, and she was white.”

“Suppose it wasn’t a coincidence?”

“Then someone was very smart,” I said. “They took care of a sudden short-term problem by copycatting an MO that had been used before in two unconnected cases. Excellent camouflage.”

“So you’re saying there could be two killers here?”

“Possible,” I said. “Maybe McClatchy and Lindsay were regular everyday homicides, and Chapman was made to look like them. By someone else.”

*   *   *

We finished our desserts and drank our cups of coffee. Deveraux told me she had work to do. I asked her if she would mind if I went to see Emmeline McClatchy one more time.

“Why?” she asked.

“Boyfriends,” I said. “Apparently both Lindsay and Chapman were stepping out with a soldier who owned a blue car. I’m wondering if McClatchy is going to make it a trifecta.”

“That’s a long walk.”

“I’ll find a shortcut,” I said. I was beginning to piece together the local geography in my head. No need to walk three sides of a square, first north to the Kelham road, then east, then south again to the McClatchy shack. I was already roughly on the same latitude. I figured I could find a way across the railroad track well short of the official crossing. A straight shot east. One side of the square.

Deveraux said, “Be gentle with her. She’s still very upset.”

“I’m sure she always will be,” I said. “I imagine these things don’t fade too fast.”

“And don’t say anything about pregnancy.”

“I won’t,” I said.

I headed south on Main Street, in the general direction of Dr. Merriam’s office, but I planned to turn east well before I got there. And I found a place to do just that within about three hundred yards. I saw the mouth of a dirt road nested in the trees. It had a rusted fire hydrant ten yards in, which meant there had to be houses somewhere farther on. I found the first one a hundred feet later. It was a tumbledown, swaybacked affair, but it had people living in it. At first I thought they were the McKinney cousins, because it was that kind of a place, and because it had a black brush-painted pick-up truck standing on a patch of dirt that might once have been a lawn. But it was a different make of truck. Different age, different size, but the same approach to maintenance. Clearly northeastern Mississippi was not fertile ground for spray-painting franchises.

I passed two more places that were similar in every way. The fourth house I came to was worse. It was abandoned. It had a mailbox entirely hidden by tall grass. Its driveway was overgrown. It had bushes and brambles up against the door and the windows. It had weeds in the gutters, and green slime on the walls, and a cracked foundation pierced by creeper tendrils thicker than my wrists. It was standing alone in a couple of acres of what once might have been meadow or pasture, but which was now nothing more than a briar patch crowded with sapling trees about six feet tall. The place must have been empty for a long time. More than months. A couple of years, maybe.

But it had fresh tire tracks across its turn-in.

Seasonal rains had washed dirt down various small slopes and left a mirror-smooth puddle of mud in the dip between the road and the driveway. Seasonal heat had baked the mud to powder, like cement straight from the bag. A four-wheeled vehicle had crossed it twice, in and out. Broad tires, with treads designed for use on regular pavement. Not new, but well inflated. The tread pattern was exactly captured. The marks were recent. Certainly put there after the last time it had rained.

I detoured a couple of steps to avoid leaving footprints next to the tire marks. I jumped over the dip and fought through a tangle of waist-high crap until I got next to the driveway. I could see where the tires had crushed the weeds. There were broken stalks. They had bled dark green juice. Some of the stronger plants had not broken. They had whipped back upright, and some of them were smeared with oil from the underside of an engine.

Whoever had rolled down the driveway had not entered the house. That was clear. None of the rampant growth around the doors or the windows had been disturbed. So I walked on, past the house, past a small tractor barn, out to the space behind. There was a belt of trees ahead of me, and another to my left, and another to my right. It was a lonely spot. Not directly overlooked, except by birds, of which there were two in the air above me. They were turkey vultures. They were floating and looping endlessly.

I moved on. There was a long-abandoned vegetable garden, ringed by a rusted rabbit fence. An archaeologist might have been able to tell what had been grown there. I couldn’t. Further on was a long high mound of something green and vigorous. An old hedge, maybe, untrimmed for a decade and run to seed. Behind it were two utilitarian structures, placed there so as not to be visible from the house, presumably. The first structure was an old wooden shed, rotting and listing and down at one corner.

The other structure was a deer trestle.