The Bone Tree Read online

I step closer to her. “Are you going to tell the cops about your recording of what Katy said?”

  “I might as well, since Brody burned both copies. They’re going to read about it in tomorrow’s paper anyway.”

  Closing my eyes, I see Caitlin’s Treo smartphone and my borrowed tape recorder being consumed by the fearsome blast of a flamethrower. “You really don’t have another copy at the newspaper?”

  Her look of desolation is my only answer.

  The fire engine has reached the head of Royal’s driveway. We only have seconds now.

  “What about Brody’s confessions?” Caitlin asks. “That he was behind Pooky Wilson’s death? That Frank and Snake Knox killed Pooky at the Bone Tree?”

  “We tell the cops all of that. Every bit of it helps justify what we did tonight.”

  Caitlin looks strangely hesitant, which I don’t understand. Even if we tell the police about those confessions, she can still publish the story before any other media outlet gets the information.

  “For God’s sake,” I say, “until tonight, no one was even sure the Bone Tree was real. And Royal admitted taking part in the gang rape of Viola Turner. We’ve got to tell them that.”

  Caitlin gives me a pointed look. “Brody also told us your father killed Viola. Do you want to tell the police that?”

  “Of course not.”

  “All right, then. That’s why I’m asking what we hold back. Is there anything else?”

  I can’t read her eyes. We’ve kept so much from each other over the past few days that it’s hard to know where our stories might diverge if compared to one another.

  “The rifles,” I say softly. “Those two rifles in the cabinet that he showed us just before you held the razor to his throat. Did you see them?”

  “Yes, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was waiting for my chance to attack him.”

  “There were identifying plaques beneath every other rifle in the gun collection. But on those two plaques there were only dates. Dates, and a small American flag emblem.”

  Caitlin shrugs. “So?”

  “The dates were November twenty-second, 1963, and April fourth, 1968.”

  She blinks in confusion for a couple of seconds, but then her eyes go wide. “No way. I mean . . . do you really—”

  “I don’t think so. But if we don’t tell Kaiser about them, whatever’s left of those guns might disappear tonight. And we’ll never know.”

  Caitlin gingerly touches the burn on her cheek. “Let’s hope Sheriff Dennis is in one of those cars, and not the goddamn state police. Not that Captain Ozan.”

  I reach out and squeeze her shoulder. “Whoever it is, act more disoriented than you are. You really are in shock, but play it up more. When they question you, try to stick to the past hour, nothing more. Act exhausted, and play up your injuries.”

  Caitlin doesn’t appear to like this plan. “I don’t want to spend the night in a damned hospital. This is the biggest story I’ve ever been involved in. I’ve got zero time to waste.”

  “I know.” Moving forward, I pull her tight against me. An hour ago I made the worst mistake of my life by begging her to suppress part of a story in order to try to bargain with a killer for my father’s life. I’ve got no right to try to control anything she does now. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you. You tried to tell me something like this would happen. My worry over Dad blinded me.”

  She shakes her head against my chest. “It wasn’t just you. Once I made that recording of Katy, Brody was going to come after us, no matter what.”

  “But he wouldn’t have known about the recording if I hadn’t told him.”

  This is debatable, but Caitlin only draws back and looks hard into my eyes. “Whatever happens now, I need to get back to the newspaper. Please do whatever you can to make that happen.”

  The fire engine screeches to a stop thirty feet from us, and uniformed men leap off and out of it. The hoses come out faster than I would have believed possible, but these guys don’t have a prayer of putting out this inferno. One fireman hurries toward the body on the ground and drops to his knees, but I call out to him that the man is dead.

  “What happened?” shouts another man from behind me. “Is there anybody still in the house?”

  When I turn, I see a fire captain wearing a black hardhat and a fireproof coat. “Three dead men. That’s all I know. Not from the fire, though. There was a gunfight.”

  His mouth drops open. “Gunfight? In Mr. Royal’s place?”

  “Brody Royal’s one of the dead.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “His son-in-law is another. The third is Henry Sexton, the reporter.”

  The fire captain shakes his head, unable to comprehend what I’m telling him. “Is that it? Nobody else?”

  “I really don’t know. There’s nobody I’d risk my men to save.”

  The fireman looks at me as if I might be out of my mind.

  “They were torturing us,” I say. “Before the fire.”

  “Torturing . . . ?” The captain looks closer at me. “Hey, I know you. You’re the mayor of Natchez. Penn Cage.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I guess so. This is Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Natchez Examiner.”

  “What the hell started the fire?”

  The answer to this question isn’t something the fire captain could accept. Let’s see . . . Brody Royal was preparing to burn off Caitlin’s arm with a flamethrower. I was chained to the wall, tearing my hands to shreds in my desperation to break free. That’s when Henry Sexton, despite his injuries, somehow struggled to his feet and shielded Caitlin with his body. Royal meant to burn him too, but like some medieval martyr, the reporter charged Royal and threw his arms around him before the old man could safely ignite the flamethrower. While the rest of us stared in horror, Henry pulled the trigger and immolated them both, creating a firestorm that no amount of water could smother—

  “Mayor?” says the fire captain, catching hold of my shoulders. “Maybe you ought to sit down, huh?”

  “A World War Two flamethrower,” I mumble. “Loaded with gasoline and tar.”

  The man shakes his head in disbelief, then motions for help and starts shouting orders.

  The sound of gunning motors makes me turn toward the driveway entrance. Three Concordia Parish Sheriff’s Department cruisers roar up behind the fire truck. Two park there, but a Chevy Tahoe pulls around the fire truck and drives up to within ten feet of me before it stops.

  “Thank God,” Caitlin says in my ear.

  Sheriff Walker Dennis gets out of his cruiser and stumps toward us. Three years shy of fifty, he carries himself like a minor-league baseball star gone to seed. He weighs 220 pounds and has forearms that would discourage anyone from betting against him in an arm-wrestling match. The way he wears his brown uniform and Stetson gives the impression that he’s been a sheriff all his adult life, but in fact he only took over the job about six weeks ago, after his predecessor was indicted on corruption charges that decimated the entire department.

  “Are you okay?” Dennis shouts, striding forward and grabbing my forearm as though to reassure himself that I’m alive.

  “Yeah, yeah. Caitlin, too.”

  The sheriff looks over at the fire. Two crews have trained hoses on the base of the flames, but most of the house is gone already.

  “Anybody in there?” Dennis asks.

  “Royal and Regan, both dead.”

  “Shit. They couldn’t get out?”

  “No.”

  The sheriff gives me an odd look. “You couldn’t get ’em out?”

  “I didn’t try, Walker. They kidnapped us from the Examiner office—or sent two guys to do it. They were torturing Caitlin for information when this guy”—I point at the dead body of Sleepy Johnston—“busted in with Henry and saved us. Royal had a flamethrower in there. It was a miracle we got out alive.”

  “Henry’s dead too,” Caitlin says.
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br />   Walker Dennis rubs his forehead like a man with an incipient migraine. This has already been one of the worst days of his life, and this event will only compound his difficulties. “I obviously should have pressed you harder about Brody Royal.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

  He takes a tin of Skoal from his breast pocket, opens it with some urgency, and jams a pinch beneath his bottom lip. “Who the fuck is that?” he asks, pointing at the dead man on the ground.

  “Sleepy Johnston. You know him better as ‘Gates Brown.’”

  The sheriff’s eyes widen. Dennis knows “Gates Brown” as the alias of a man who haunted the periphery of our investigations for the past couple of days. Walking closer to the body, he looks down at the face of a sixty-seven-year-old black man who lived in this area as a boy, then fled to Detroit for the rest of his adult life.

  “This the guy who called me about seeing Royal and Regan burning the Concordia Beacon?”

  I nod.

  “We need to get the hell out of here. The state police could show up any second, and we need to get some things straight before you talk to them.”

  I glance at Caitlin, who’s watching us closely. I nod, thinking the same thing that she and Dennis must be: Captain Alphonse Ozan.

  “All right,” Dennis says. “Let’s get back to the department to get your statements. At least that way I’ll be on my home turf if they try to take this case away from me.”

  “What about the FBI?”

  “Agent Kaiser called me just before I got here. He’d just heard about the fire, but he didn’t seem to know it was Royal’s house yet.”

  “I’ll bet he does by now.”

  Sheriff Dennis spits on the ground and leans close to me. “We’ve got a jurisdictional clusterfuck on our hands here. And both our asses are on the line.”

  “I know.”

  “You ride with me,” he says, pulling me toward his Tahoe. “Ms. Masters can come in the car behind us.”

  “Hold on.” I yank my arm loose. “Caitlin rides with us.”

  Walker shakes his head. “Sorry. I have to separate you two. A lot of eyes will be watching this. I’ve got to follow procedure.”

  “Surely she can ride with us? You can swear we didn’t talk on the way.”

  Sensing danger, Caitlin has come up beside me and taken hold of my arm.

  “I’m sorry,” Dennis says firmly. “It’s got to be this way.”

  Before I can argue further, Walker leans in close and says, “My brother-in-law will be driving the second car. If you need to call her on the phone, you can. The stupidest thing we can do is stay here and argue. You want Ozan to arrest you two for killing one of the richest men in Louisiana? A friend of every governor for the past fifty years?”

  “I’ll be fine in the second car,” Caitlin says, nudging me toward Dennis’s truck. “Let’s not waste one more second. Just let me grab Henry’s files.”

  Walker gives her a grateful look, then signals a deputy standing by one of the cruisers behind the fire truck. The man reaches us as Caitlin trots back with her box, and Dennis introduces him as Grady Wells, his brother-in-law. I beg Wells to take care of Caitlin like he would his own flesh and blood, and he promises that he will.

  “If the state police try to pull us over,” Walker tells Wells, “ignore them. Don’t stop until we get back to base. You only take orders from me. Ignore the radio, and if they start yelling at you over their PA speaker, pay no mind. We’ll hash out the jurisdictions when we get to the station.”

  Moments later, six doors slam, and our small convoy begins racing toward Highway 84 and the Mississippi River. Turning to look back through the rear windshield, I see the pillar of fire still towering over the vast alluvial plain, announcing calamity to the world. If my mother and daughter were to look out of their third-floor window high on the Natchez bluff, they would see it in the distance. As I think of my mother, a double-edged knife of guilt and anger slips between my ribs, and I wonder whether my father is within sight of that roaring flame.

  CHAPTER 2

  TOM CAGE DROVE through the cold Louisiana night in a stolen pickup truck, his .357 Magnum pressing hard against his right thigh. An unconscious hit man lay on the seat behind him, hands bound together and lashed to a gun rack mounted at the rear of the cab. A corpse lay on the floor between them, a bullet from Tom’s .357 in his belly.

  Tom had taken a Valium and some nitroglycerine, but he was still suffering from tachycardia, and no thought he could summon seemed to calm his overburdened heart. Walt Garrity had almost certainly been killed tonight, trying to extricate Tom and himself from the trouble Tom had gotten them into, and now nearly every cop in two states was combing the highways in search of them, believing they’d murdered a Louisiana state trooper, as well as Tom’s former nurse, Viola Turner.

  Walt had shot the trooper, all right, but only to stop him from killing Tom in cold blood. Even so, the cold-eyed state policeman had put a bullet through Tom’s shoulder before he died, and while that wound had been treated some hours ago, the pain had now built to an excruciating level. Tom didn’t dare take enough narcotics to dull the agony. Fifty years of medical experience told him that the gunshot wound had pushed him into a state where he could simply collapse behind the wheel and be dead before the pickup truck came to a stop. Only two months ago he’d suffered a severe coronary and barely survived. In the past seventy-two hours, he had endured more stress than even a healthy seventy-three-year-old man could take without caving under the strain.

  Tom could scarcely believe that six weeks ago life had seemed relatively quiet. Having recovered from his heart attack, he’d been looking forward to his son’s marriage, which was planned for Christmas Eve. But then Viola Turner had returned to Natchez, trailing the past like a demon in her wake. The cancer that drove Viola back home after four decades in Chicago had reduced the beautiful nurse he’d once loved to a desiccated shadow of herself; despite his nearly fifty years of medical experience, Tom had been profoundly shocked by the sight of her. The grim truth was that Viola had come home to Natchez not to retire, but to die. The first night he saw her, he’d realized he might conceivably be charged with murder in the near future. A merciful act that usually went unreported might well draw the attention of a vindictive sheriff and DA. But not even in his darkest dreams could Tom have imagined that he and Walt would be running for their lives.

  The bound man in the backseat moaned. Tom debated whether to stop the truck and sedate the would-be assassin again. The hit man’s name was Grimsby, and he was thirty years younger than Tom. If he regained full consciousness, Tom would have difficulty handling him, even with his hands and feet bound. Tom had only managed to tie the bastard by chemically incapacitating him first. Along with his now-dead partner, Grimsby had cornered Tom at the edge of a nearby lake. And though Tom had been armed, he’d resigned himself to death before the two killers ever appeared. But then—by the simple act of checking his text messages—Tom had learned that Caitlin was pregnant. That knowledge had transformed him from an old man tired of running (and killing) into a patriarch committed to seeing his fourth grandchild—and perhaps his first grandson—born. With chilling deliberation, Tom had shot one of the two arrogant hit men as they faced him, then disarmed Grimsby and forced him to carry his dead partner up to Drew Elliott’s lake house, in which Tom had been hiding.

  After retrieving his weekend bag, Tom had filled a syringe with precious insulin and jabbed Grimsby in the back as he loaded his dead partner into the truck. That put the hit man into insulin shock. While he lay sprawled across the backseat of the truck, barely breathing, Tom had bound his hands with an old ski rope he’d found in Drew’s garage, then tied his hands to the gun rack so that Grimsby couldn’t attack him if he revived during the ride. Tom hadn’t intended to kill the other man, but his options had been limited, and the pair had surely meant to execute him beside the lake—an emotionless murder for hire. If Grimsby died (or lived out his days in
a coma) as a result of the insulin overdose Tom had given him, so be it.

  Tom’s real dilemma was what to do next. If he pointed the truck toward civilization, he would come to a roadblock sooner rather than later, and there he would be shot while “resisting arrest.” To avoid this, he’d driven the truck into the low-lying backcountry between Ferriday, Rayville, and Tallulah, endless cotton fields so thinly populated that they felt deserted, but Tom knew better. He had been born in the southwestern part of Louisiana, and he’d gone to undergraduate school at NLU in Natchitoches, where he’d met his wife. But Peggy Cage, née McCrae, was from an eastern Louisiana farm only ten miles from where he was now. The nearest conglomeration of people to her father’s homestead was a tiny crossroads village called Dunston, which lay about forty miles north of Ferriday. This familiarity gave Tom the only sense of security he’d felt in a long time: Peggy had relatives in this area, and Tom had treated them and most of their neighbors for medical emergencies while visiting over the years. He knew he could rely on the loyalty of clannish country folks.

  He needed to get rid of the truck as fast as he could. Grimsby and his partner had almost certainly notified their boss that they’d cornered him at Drew’s lake house, and that meant Forrest Knox would have an APB out for their truck in no time. Tom felt confident that his wife’s brother would help him ditch the truck, but that meant putting another family at risk, and Tom had already gotten people killed by doing that.

  Peggy would tell me to do it, he thought.

  The real question was what to do if he did manage to get safely to ground somewhere. This nightmare had begun when he was charged with Viola’s murder, but the death of the state trooper had complicated matters exponentially. Jumping bail on the first charge only made him look more guilty, and further reduced his options. Walt’s plan had been to seek help from the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police (who, like Walt, was a former Texas Ranger) in getting the APB on Tom and Walt withdrawn. But something had obviously gone wrong. Tom had expected Walt back long before the two hit men found him, yet he’d heard nothing.