Sacrificial Ground

3

It was only an hour later when Caleb lumbered into headquarters and dropped a single slender volume on Frank’s desk. It was ice blue with gold lettering: Northfield Academy.

“Page eighty-seven,” Caleb said.

Frank opened the book and flipped through it until he reached the right page.

“Third column down, fourth one over.”

Frank’s eyes followed the line of photographs until he reached the picture of a young girl whose smile beamed back at him from an open, innocent face.

“Right pretty,” Caleb said, “before the devil took her.”

She was considerably more than pretty, and as Frank continued to gaze at the photograph, he was struck by how much death had slackened her flesh and dulled her eyes until all her former beauty had been drained away.

Caleb’s eyes held sadly to the photograph, then shifted to the one of the girl as she lay on her back in the dust. He seemed to sink into the picture, or soak it up. Then he shook his head wearily. “Dead folks always look like they been left out in the rain,” he said.

Frank glanced at the column of names which bordered the left side of the page.

“Laura Angelica Devereaux,” he said softly.

“Most folks called her Angelica,” Caleb told him.

Frank glanced up from the book. “Who says?”

“Principal over at Northfield,” Caleb said. “Fancy school. They call them headmasters over there.” He shrugged. “Guess they don’t have principals at rich-kid schools.”

“What’s his name?”

“Albert Morrison.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“Well, a few things,” Caleb said. He pulled a chair over from another desk and sat down. The early morning light that beamed in from the large windows swept over him, casting one side of his face in deep shadow. “Her parents are dead,” he added casually, “but she’s got some family. A sister, named Karen. Age approximately twenty-seven; the sister, I mean. Lives at Two-fifty-five West Paces Ferry Road.” He smiled. “Ever been out that way?”

Frank glanced down at Caleb’s large, beefy hands.

“Don’t you carry a notebook?” he asked.

Caleb shook his head, then tapped one side of it with his index finger. “Keep everything up here, Frank. Know why? ’Cause if you do, it means nobody else can get at it.” His eyes rolled up toward the ceiling. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. Two-fifty-five West Paces Ferry Road. Ever been out that way?”

“For a Sunday drive,” Frank said indifferently. He glanced back down at the photographs on his desk, and suddenly Laura Angelica Devereaux came back into his mind, walked into it like a beautiful woman into an empty room, and he saw the flash of her eyes, felt, very softly, the touch of her young breath.

“Heard anything from the lab?” Caleb asked.

“No.”

“Doing a quadrant search?”

Frank nodded. “They’re stringing the wire now.”

Caleb looked away and called to a passing patrolman. “Hey, Teddy, put a star in your crown and bring me a Coke, will you?” He turned back to Frank. “What are you planning to do about those guys that bummed you up?”

Frank continued to stare at the photograph. For an instant he thought he saw her lips curl down in a thin, frightened line, and he glanced up quickly at her dead eyes, as if he might find some image of her killer still lingering like a phantom on the tightly closed lids.

“You going to get even with them, Frank?”

“I’m just going to file a report, Caleb,” Frank told him.

Caleb laughed.

“No, I mean it,” Frank said. “I’m just going to file a report and let it go. Hell, they’re probably in Mexico by now.”

Caleb shrugged. “Could be, Frank, could be. But it’s been my experience that you make them pay real early for something like this. ‘Cause if you don’t, it just gets worse. They start off with something small like whipping the shit out of a cop; then, before long, they’re running out on their rent, or not paying the power bill.” He laughed again. “You just can’t trust people. That’s a true fact, unrecorded, Frank.” He shook his head. “If I was God, I’d keep one free hand on everybody’s balls.”

The patrolman appeared with Caleb’s drink.

“Thank you, son,” Caleb said. He took a long, slow pull on the bottle, then wiped his mouth with his fist, “I can drink whiskey like this, too.”

Frank drew his eyes from the photographs, then squinted slightly in the hard summer light. “Did Morrison say anything else?”

“I didn’t press him much,” Caleb said. “He was a nervous little shit. The type that likes to keep his job, you know?” He took another swig of Coke. “Anyway, I told him you’d be dropping by one day soon.” He smiled. “I’ll let you handle this one, Frank. Your record could use a good collar.”

“If l can get it.”

“Well, if he’s a drifter, forget it,” Caleb said. “But if he’s got a little house somewhere, and a car payment, a whole lot of little shitty things he’s got to keep track of …”

“Then we’ve got him,” Frank said.

“If he’s like us, only just a little different,” Caleb added, “then the hook’s already in his mouth.” He drained the last of the Coke, then set the bottle down on Frank’s desk. “It’s your case, Frank, but if you get something solid, let me know. I’ll help you work it.”

“Okay.”

“Unless you’d rather share the pie with Alvin?”

“Fuck Alvin.”

Caleb smiled. “Lord, I’d hate to be the one that does.” He grabbed the edge of Frank’s desk and hauled himself to his feet. He groaned loudly, then stood quietly for a moment, as if trying to secure his balance. “Little top-heavy,” he said, patting his stomach. Then his eyes drifted slowly over to the photograph of Angelica’s body as it lay sprawled in the lot. He shook his head despairingly. “Brotherly love,” he said. “Ever see any of that, Frank?”

Frank looked up at him. “Yes, I have.”

Caleb smiled knowingly. “Good for you. It’s only the bullshitters that say no.” He turned slowly and walked away, his great frame crashing through the shaft of light as if it were a pane of glass.

Frank looked down at the pictures once again, but only for an instant. There was nothing to see, a girl alive, a girl dead, one in color, the other in black and white. The faces hardly seemed to belong to the same person, and their bodies to the same world: one was held rigidly before the camera, the chin lifted proudly, the eyes staring straight ahead; the other was laid out in the grimy lot, the fingers, toes and arms already beginning to assume death’s grotesque contortions.

He took a pair of scissors and cut out the picture of Angelica from the Northfield yearbook. The photo lab could print thirty or forty of them for distribution, but he would keep the original, as if there were something in it which could not be duplicated, which might speak to him suddenly or rise from it like an accusing finger, pointing directly at her killer’s eyes.

Once he’d cut the picture out, he shoved it into his coat pocket, leaned back in his chair and allowed his eyes to roam the surrounding room. He’d felt alone after Caleb left, but he suddenly realized that the room was dotted with plainclothes and uniformed policemen. They milled about in the far corner, and stood idly by the water fountain. He could hear the low hum of their conversation and the clatter of their typewriters as they moved through the motions of their separate investigations. The air was thick with the heavy smell of cigars and cigarettes. There was something raw and terribly male in the atmosphere, a grim potential for sudden, annihilating violence against which the pastel, parti-colored wall seemed as hopelessly out of place as a circus tent in a slaughterhouse.

To escape, he retrieved the photograph of Angelica and laid it flat down on his desk. For a moment he concentrated on her face. She had the beauty of a young girl on the brink of womanhood, waiting for experience, perhaps hungry for it, but still in some odd, indiscernible way, innocent and unknowing. It was a quality he’d seen in girls far less well-off than Angelica must have been. He’d seen it in the faces of fifteen-year-old hustlers. It didn’t matter what they’d seen or done, or what had been done to them. The innocence remained. It was in their youth, and it stubbornly maintained itself in every young girl’s face. It was a look in their eyes, a sense of something still salvageable no matter how much it had already been ruined, abused, wasted. It stayed as long as youth remained, and left when it was gone. There were times when he’d looked up from his newspaper and caught that same look in Sarah’s eyes. He’d seen it unobserved as she’d sat, staring vacantly at the television, her legs drawn up into the big orange chair, and he thought now that the birds must have seen it too as they leaped about the limbs above her, and watched that innocence fade day by day to black.

He stood up quickly and walked out onto the street. The heat closed around him like a fist, and for a moment he wanted only to plunge through it into another, cooler world. He imagined the wide boulevard of West Paces Ferry Road to be exactly that kind of world: spacious green lawns, bright blue swimming pools that glinted in the summer sun, a place where the grit of the city fell away as surely as the heat, and there was only the deep, consoling quiet and the cool, engulfing shade.

Angelica Devereaux had been born into such a place, Frank thought, as he made his way down to the garage and pulled himself in behind the wheel of his car, but she’d ended up in a different world altogether, a seedy, vacant lot on Glenwood Avenue.

As he pulled into the steady downtown traffic of Peachtree Street, Frank realized that the most logical explanation for Angelica’s journey from West Paces Ferry to Glen wood Avenue was also the most obvious: she was a rich girl who had a taste for slumming. He’d seen that before, too, an attraction for the low-rent world of seedy hotels and backstreet clubs. Something flourished in such places that lay dormant in the stately mansions of the Northside, a rough, teeming life that cocktail parties and debutante balls could not match for action and adventure. From time to time, young boys or girls would dip their toes into that seamy current, then a foot, then a leg, until they were way over their heads in the swirling peril of a life whose lethal undertows they could not possibly imagine. They washed up on strange shores, gambling dens, crack parlors, redneck bars and whorehouses. He’d seen perhaps a hundred such people in his time, girls named Porsche or Mercedes, as if for the family cars, and boys named Carlton and Royal, “hotel names,” as Caleb always called them. “Hotel face down,” he’d say, when one of them would not go home again.

He pulled out his small green notebook and flipped open the first page. He jotted down the name and address Caleb had given him: Karen Devereaux, 255 West Paces Ferry Road. Beside Laura Angelica, Karen sounded as blunt and snub-nosed as Frank’s own name, and he almost immediately imagined her as the ugly duckling with the beautiful sister, the one for whom the family had never had much hope.

He pressed down on the accelerator as the traffic cleared slightly near Buckhead. Karen Devereaux. He repeated the name but could find nothing to go with it. He knew only that whoever she was, her life was about to take a dreadful turn. She would soon be told of her younger sister’s death, then be driven back downtown to identify the body. He had seen men and women snap like small twigs at such moments. Years before, he had brought a middle-aged woman downtown. She had been small, slight, so weak that she’d appeared almost breathless at the top of the stairs. Her son had been killed by a drunken driver and his body lay in one of the refrigerated vaults the police used as makeshift morgues. She’d stared at her son’s face for a long time, utterly silent as she gazed rigidly at the half-crushed skull. Then suddenly, she’d whirled around with terrific speed and slapped Frank’s face with all her womanly might. He had actually staggered backward, the heat of her hand still on his skin, his eyes watching, startled, as she’d pressed her back against the wall, slid slowly down and crumpled to the floor.

He was still vaguely thinking of her as he arrived at the Devereaux house. The driveway was circular, and it curved gently in a wide are around a broad field of neatly pruned shrubs. A line of azaleas bordered it, their bright red flowers shining brightly.

The house looked as if it had been built with something religious in mind, and as he stepped out of the car and stared up toward its tall white columns, Frank thought of the tiny wooden church in which his father had struggled to save the souls of those tormented, guilt-ridden farmers who came to him. The Devereaux house gave off the sense of people who had already been saved from most of the ordinary trials of life. Here no one had ever worried about an early frost or too dry a summer. It rose over the surrounding green as if it held dominion over everything around it. The tall columns stretched up to a wide portico, and the white facade which rested in its shade seemed almost smug in its serenity. It looked like the kind of grand, spacious place which invading armies chose to house their commanding officers, and Frank could easily imagine the conquering Yankee generals who might once have tethered their horses to its tall pillars.

An enormous oak door opened at the second ring of the bell. Frank had expected to see a butler in a black coat, but instead he found a young woman in a paint-dappled artist’s smock and tattered blue jeans. She wore unpolished brown loafers, and her long black hair was gathered casually in the back, where it hung in a wild confusion of unruly curls.

She looked at him questioningly, as if he’d ended up at the wrong entrance.

“Yes?” she said.

“Is this the Devereaux house?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I’m looking for Karen Devereaux.”

“And you are?”

Frank took out his badge. “Frank Clemons.”

The woman nodded slowly. Her dark eyes narrowed somewhat as if she were putting it all together, the dusty, bartered car, the dusty, battered man in his rumpled brown suit, his swollen, bluish eyes, the bent and tarnished badge.

“I’m Karen Devereaux,” she said finally. “What’s wrong?”

“Would you mind if I came in?” Frank asked hesitantly.

“All right,” Karen said. She stepped back and allowed Frank to walk into the foyer. It was painted white and decked with the portraits of what he guessed to be the more distinguished figures of the Devereaux family, senators, judges, planters, members in good standing of what Caleb always called “the moonlight and magnolia crowd.”

Frank reflexively took off his hat and twirled it awkwardly in his hands.

“I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you,” he said.

She drew in a slow, calming breath. “I’ve been through this before,” she said.

“Through what?”

“Bad news,” Karen said. “My parents were killed in an air crash in Europe. I was just a young girl at the time. A man like you came to the house. He took off his hat like you did, and he kept it in his hands. He kept glancing down at it while he told us.” She lifted her face slightly, as if trying to brace herself. “What is it this time?”

“Your sister.”

“Dead,” Karen said. It was not a question. It was a statement of fact.

“Yes.”

Her reaction was a silence so absolute that it seemed to draw everything else into it. Her eyes stared placidly into Frank’s, and her lips tightened, as if in a determined effort to hold back the scream that might have broken through them.

“We found her body early this morning,” Frank said.

Karen stepped back and grasped the edge of a small table. Her eyes darted from one portrait to another, as if she were communicating this latest family tragedy to the lost, ancestral dead.

“We’re not sure what happened to her,” Frank added after a moment.

She looked at him. “Not sure?”

“No.”

“It was some sort of accident?”

He decided to go easy. “We don’t know,” Frank told her. “We just found her body early this morning.” He waited for her to speak. She didn’t. “Off Glenwood Avenue,” he added.

“I see.”

“Did you notice that she didn’t come home last night?”

“No.”

“Does she live here, Miss Devereaux?”

“Yes, she does,” Karen said. “A room upstairs.” She drew her hand from the table, and Frank could see the marks her nails had left on its polished surface.

“You’ll have to come downtown and identify the body,” he said.

“Officially, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s no doubt that it’s my sister?”

“No doubt. We have a tentative identification from the yearbook at Northfield. She did go to Northfield, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“I could take you downtown now, Miss Devereaux,” Frank said. “Or, if you’d rather wait …”

“No,” Karen said immediately, “I’d rather go now. I don’t want to wait.”

“All right.”

“Just let me change,” Karen said.

“Of course.”

“I’ll be right down.”

“There’s no rush,” Frank told her. He smiled sadly. “I’m very sorry to have to tell you all this.”

Karen turned quickly and darted up the stairs.

Alone in the foyer, Frank allowed his eyes to settle on the room. He noticed the immaculately polished table, and the large porcelain vase that rested on top of it. There was a large enameled box beside the vase, black, but with a scene of what looked like European peasants painted on it. Absently, before he could stop himself, Frank opened it. It had a dark red velvet lining, and he ran his finger over it quickly, then closed the lid. He turned his head slowly to the right, and looked at a large portrait of a tall, gray-haired man in a dark blue wing-backed chair. The man sat in a large, book-lined room, and there was a look of enormous pride in his eyes. Perhaps the pride came from his money, or his power, or even from the books which surrounded him, all the vast learning they represented. It was a hard face to read, but in that, it was simply like every other human face. They came in all sizes and configurations, and they divulged nothing. The proud gray man in the book-lined room might be anything, anything at all.

Frank drew his eyes from the portrait and down toward the oriental rug at his feet. He saw Angelica Devereaux’s pale, dangling arm as if it were lying among the swirls of red and blue, distinct, yet indistinct, part of an indecipherable intricacy. “Farther along we’ll know more about it,” he heard his father sing madly at the altar of his mind. “Farther along, we’ll understand why.”