Perfect killer

CHAPTER 1

Monday lay on the land as gray and stone cold as a corpse. Slate clouds, winterfrosted grass, pale headstones, sucked the color and life from the Itta Bena I had loved as a child.

Down the gently sloping field beyond the rusting iron pickets of the cemetery fence, and across the pitted, often-patched asphalt of the access road, the trunks of naked trees waded in the chill, muddy shadows of Roebuck Lake. The day promised little for the handful of mourners due to gather on this raw January morning to say good-bye to my mother.

I stood alone next to a half dozen folding chairs beside the freshly dug grave. Timeworn Astroturf carpeted the ground but did little to mask the pile of dirt next to the headstone carrying the name of Mama's second husband. She'd married him only after previously marrying and divorcing my father three times.

The morning silence gave way infrequently to the occasional car or pickup passing by on Highway 7. A wan breeze brought me faint, episodic snatches of conversation from two distant men whose yellow coveralls lent the day an Impressionistic splash of color. I watched them lean against a muddy yellow backhoe a hundred yards away, smoking one cigarette after another.

When the wind strengthened, it struck my bare forehead like an ice-cream headache and slashed through my brand-new dark wool suit bought for this occasion. The gusts snatched at me with sharp fingers, which sent my testicles climbing tight and desperate against my groin. I turned my back to the wind and shoved my hands deeper into the pants pockets and felt the icy handprints on my thighs. It reminded me of cold evenings in high school when football practice would run until it was too dark to see the ball, and we'd jam our hands right down into our jockstraps to keep our fingers limber enough to function and yell loudly for coach to put us in because no matter how dead tired you were, it was even worse to stand on the sidelines and have the wind refrigerate the sweat soaking your practice jersey.

Where the hell was everyone? I turned in a half circle, taking in the deserted little cemetery. As I did, a sudden movement caught my eye over toward the stately magnolia tree's waxy evergreen leaves. I saw nothing now, but convinced someone lurked near the magnolia, I closed my eyes and tried to recall the brief image flashing across the vague edge of my peripheral vision. Nothing.

I shook my head. Stress again, I reasoned as I opened my eyes. Regardless, I walked among the dead, heading toward the tree and thinking that even if no one was there, a little walk would get my blood moving, generate some heat.

The headstones reminded me how dead people continue to hold us long after their deaths, binding us with memories as strong as love. I studied these things in my work. I tried to tease through the fabric of neurons and skeins of synapses to determine what makes us conscious, what makes us, us. But none of my scientific conclusions mattered now, only sorrow's dark gravity holding my heart in its irresistible orbit.

I navigated among the graves of children who died too young and the rusting iron Southern Crosses of Confederate soldiers who died for no good reason. So much sorrow here, each grave its own epicenter of pain and loss, each marker a final punctuation mark for a life story increasingly forgotten as its memories faded as those who could remember dwindled.

Death hurts not only because we face the inevitability of our own demise, but also because it opens a hole in our memories and robs us of the warm breathing evidence of who we have been. The loss forces us to redefine ourselves.

When I reached the magnolia, I found an old Ford hubcap, cigarette butts, two used condoms, and enough malt liquor cans to verify this as a major after-hours entertainment spot, life continuing, surrounded by death. I walked on and quickly found myself at the southern end of the cemetery, next to the Stone family plot holding the remains of my grandparents, my uncle William, and my uncle Wester, whom I had never known because, like so many in the rural South of the 1920s, he died as an infant from some now-treatable disease. The small angel on his headstone, meant to imply his innocence and express ticket to heaven, looked vaguely sinister to me this morning.

The low, powerful growl of a truck's exhaust drew my attention to the cemetery entrance. I watched as a limousine-sized, four-door, deep metallic gray pickup truck with a matching shell over the full-size bed pulled in and parked behind my rental. Behind the wheel sat Rex, his shaved head gleaming as if he had waxed and power-buffed it. He was a young contractor who had occasionally worked at my mother's apartment complex and had taken a liking to her sweetness and anachronistic Southern charm. For the past three years, he'd looked in on her almost every day, taken special care of her, installed all the special bathroom railings and fixtures needed for a woman whose mobility had been compromised by age.

Rex and his wife, Anita, a physician at the nearby University Medical School, had taken care of Mama and always made sure "Miss Anabel" did well. He refused to take my money for any of this and yet kept me posted on Mama's needs and condition and helped me secretly funnel funds and provide some level of extra care Mama would never take directly because she was determined she would never "be a burden to my children."

Rex was a tough man of few words and an uncertain past, which may or may not have included warrants connected with murder and mayhem. By the time I met him and learned enough about his past to confuse and concern me, he had already adopted Mama.

Rex waved at me when he got out of his truck and started toward me. He stood a head shorter than me, with a physique like a muscular tank. In his pin-striped, doublebreasted suit, he looked like a dapper Mafia hit man and I wondered if he was packing.