Flame

Chapter 38

No one ever knew the real source of the explosion that destroyed the Bold Entrepreneur and killed everyone on board. The news media played it as a tragedy, and the feds pressured local law into agreeing. There were glowing eulogies for some of the victims. A televangelist who’d been the recipient of SCBL donations held a series of coordinated TV prayer and memorial services throughout the South.

Carver heard months later that the city of Atlanta had named a street after Frank Wesley.

No connection was made between the boat explosion and the DEA agent who disappeared fighting the illicit drug trade in Florida. Apparently Ralph Palma wasn’t talking. Or the DEA didn’t want it made public that one of their agents had acted illegally, murderously, and without proof. Finished business, and the kind of thing the government preferred kept confidential.

Carver checked out what Jefferson had told him, and it was true. The gun recovered after the Martin Luther King assassination was never linked directly to the bullet that killed King. A smokescreen of legal technicalities and wild rumors had obscured the very suspicious facts of both the murder and the time afterward. From somewhere, James Earl Ray had received enough money to travel all over the world before running afoul of customs at Heathrow Airport in London. From somewhere.

One day, not knowing why, Carver detoured from where he’d been driving and found himself at Beach Cove Court. Drove down Little Cove Lane to Bert Renway’s mobile home. Renway, the little man who’d been made a pawn in a big game.

Everything looked the way it had when he’d first come here. He parked the Olds and limped over to the white double-wide trailer with trim the color of egg yolks. Started to knock on the aluminum door and then changed his mind. If someone did answer his knock, he wouldn’t know them. He’d have nothing to say. He wasn’t sure himself why he’d come here, except that it still bothered him, the way Bert Renway had died and why.

He backed away from mobile home, from the sun’s heat glancing off the smooth white metal. Limped across a hard, weedy stretch of ground to the Willa Hataris trailer.

He stood in the shade of the metal awning and knocked on the door. Knocked again, harder.

No one came to the door and there was no sound from inside.

Carver gave up and started toward the parked Olds.

Halfway there, he saw a thin haze of dark smoke hanging above the Renway trailer. After staring at it for a moment, he hobbled over the rough ground toward it.

He stopped and watched the man standing behind the trailer. Probably the tenant or the new owner who’d just moved in. A small, gray-haired man wearing a sleeveless undershirt and baggy brown slacks held up by suspenders. He was obviously clearing the trailer of Renway’s possessions. Using a rake handle to poke tentatively at a glowing fire inside a wire barrel.

Burning trash.

Carver limped back to his car and drove away.

He smelled the smoke for miles.