The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 63

Burned houses remind me of dead bodies. There’s the same feeling of senseless waste, of life extinguished. Family homes are the worst. Stumbling over a charred doll or a half-burned photo album always brings a sharp pang of sadness, the knowledge that apart from life itself, talismans of the past are our true treasures.

Ben Li’s house is not like that. A modest wood-frame structure on Park Place, near Duncan Park, it burned nearly to the ground before the fire department arrived. According to Chief Logan, the fire chief has no doubt that it was arson. The house must have been filled with accelerants to have gone up so fast.

In the hazy blue light of dawn, smoke still rises from the charred wood beneath the brick piers that once supported the house. It’s 6:15 a.m., but the older people in the neighborhood are already up and moving, getting their papers or walking their dogs. A few have strolled up to the house to stare at the ruin, as people do. One guy even picked through the wreckage as though hunting for souvenirs, until I chased him away.

I’m here because sometime during the night, in that semicomatose state between sleep and wakefulness, the one true epiphany of this case came to me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner-probably because I was so focused on the stolen USB drive-but perhaps also because the tension generated by Caitlin’s kidnapping was blocking me. But after her return last night, some tightly wrapped coil of stress must have let go, for a chain of logical thought rose out of my subconscious as effortlessly as a string of bubbles seeking the surface of a lake.

Jonathan Sands hired Ben Li because he was a computer expert. Tim Jessup believed that Li had maintained some sort of “insurance” to protect himself from his employers, probably sensitive data. When I first heard Tim say this-in the voice memo he made before he died-I assumed that Li would have hidden whatever data he had on some remote digital server, accessible only by himself or someone with the password. I also assumed that Li’s instruction to “ask the birds” about this somehow related to such a password, and that if Ben Li kept cockatoos, maybe they could speak the required phrase or numbers. Sands and Quinn almost certainly made the same assumption. But if the birds could speak the password, they did not do so for Sands. If they had, he would not have felt the need to burn down Ben Li’s house.

More to the point, last night, during Caitlin’s periods of fitful sleep, she told me something of her captivity with Linda Church. Through the rapes and abuse Linda suffered, Quinn had kept after her about one subject: Ben Li’s birds. While torturing Li in the interrogation room in the bowels of the Magnolia Queen, Sands and Quinn had asked him about anything incriminating he might have stored off the boat. Li had still been under the influence of whatever drugs Tim had given him, and was half-delirious, but in that state he had babbled something to the effect of “The birds know! Ask the birds!”

I haven’t come to Ben Li’s house because I’ve figured out his password. I’ve come because I believe there is no password. There never was. A computer wizard like Li would know that every movement through cyberspace leaves digital footprints as surely as a man walking through snow. And Li couldn’t be sure that he was the only computer wizard working for Sands. If Ben Li wanted to keep sensitive data to protect himself from his criminal employers, he would have wanted it close to hand, where he could reassure himself it was safe any time he felt nervous, and probably to add to it as more incriminating data fell within his grasp. As a prosecutor, I saw this kind of behavior all the time. Hoarding secrets is a primal human instinct.

Jonathan Sands obviously came to the same conclusion sometime yesterday and, being unable to locate the data, decided on a scorched-earth policy. But why did he assume that Li’s insurance would be inside the house? Li might have buried it, not knowing that water finds its way into even the most tightly sealed containers left underground. I can’t even recall all the ruined caches of contraband I saw as an ADA: documents, photographs, cash, drugs, bloody clothing, body parts-literally everything imaginable.

And so…as the sun rose, I stood here in the smoking ruins, trying to open myself to inspiration. I’ve searched the yard and found no sign of recent digging, as Kelly predicted, having already done the same himself. The only trees in the backyard have high limbs, and Ben Li seems to have had no ladder.

I’m about ready to surrender and walk back to my car when a vaguely familiar man in his early fifties approaches me from the adjoining yard. He smiles as he walks toward me, holding up a hand to show he doesn’t mean to bother me.

“Mayor Cage?” he says. “Bobby DeWitt.”

I hesitate for a moment, trying to place the name, but the man does look familiar. “I played ball at the public school,” he says, “about eight years ahead of you. I saw some of your games out at St. Stephen’s. Y’all had a good team.”

Now I remember him…a tight end.

“So did you guys,” I tell him, shaking his hand firmly. “State championship, right?”

“Yeah, we won the Shrimp Bowl, but that was a long time ago.”

DeWitt looks over at the ruined house. “Terrible, ain’t it? For a while we thought it might spread to our place, but we were lucky. I wet our roof down with my pressure washer, and that saved us, I reckon.”

“That’s good. Did you know the kid who lived here at all?”

“Ben? Naw. He kept to hisself most of the time. Hardly ever left the house. For a long time, I didn’t even know what he did for a living. Wasn’t hardly no furniture in that place. Just some glass tables with computers on ’em. A big old beanbag chair, and one of them futon things in the back. And the birdcages, of course. He had them two parrots.”

“You’d been inside the house, then?”

“Oh, yeah, I fixed a busted pipe for him one time. He was a nice kid. Real quiet. Might’ve been into drugs a little. I thought I smelled some pot a couple of times. But, hey, that’s his business. He wasn’t hurtin’ nobody.”

I look back at the pipes sticking out of the soggy ground, wondering if broken pipes could somehow be a clue to Ben Li’s hiding place.

“Did you ever hear the parrots talk?”

DeWitt laughs. “Shit, they talked all the time.”

“What did they say?”

“Lines from old movies, mostly. Humphrey Bogart-type stuff. One of ’em always said, ‘I’ll be back,’ like in The Terminator.”

“Really,” I say, trying to guess if this might have some meaning.

“Yeah,” DeWitt says in a reflective tone. “Ben was shy all right. About the only person he ever talked to was old Mrs. Bassett, who lives in that house yonder. Widow woman.”

“Which one?” I ask.

“Back behind that fence there.” DeWitt points to a weathered board fence shrouded by overhanging limbs.

“What did those two have in common, I wonder?”

DeWitt laughs. “Don’t know. I think they just got to talkin’ by the fence one day and took a shine to each other. Mrs. Bassett’s about half-blind, and she has arthritis so bad, she can’t hardly do for herself no more. I think Ben felt sorry for her. He used to go over there and help take care of her bird feeders and stuff.”

Two seconds after the word bird leaves DeWitt’s lips, my mouth goes dry. “What bird feeders? Like hummingbird feeders?”

“Well, yeah. She’s got all kinds of birdbaths and feeders and stuff over there. Ben even climbed up in that tree back there and fixed her birdhouse for her. A martin house, you know? He brought it down to his place, fixed it, hand-painted it-the whole works. Then he remounted it on the pole for her.”

I’m trying to remain calm, but even DeWitt can see my excitement. “How did he get up there? I don’t see a ladder.”

“He borrowed my extension ladder.”

“Would you mind if I borrowed it for a minute?”

“Hell, no. I’ll get it for you. You want to look at that birdhouse?” He looks puzzled, but not particularly bothered, by my request.

“I do. Can you tell me where it is?”

“It’s back there in those limbs that hang over the fence, about twenty-five feet up. In the winter you can see it plain as day, but with the leaves still on the trees, you can’t hardly find it. The pole’s set in the ground right behind the fence.

Two minutes later, I’m climbing the aluminum extension ladder that Bobby DeWitt has leaned against a high oak limb. Ten feet above me is the simple white birdhouse that you see in half the yards in Mississippi. Only this one looks as if it were hand-painted by an Asian artist. The three circular holes in the wall of the house have a tracery of exotic leaves painted around them, and several ladybugs that look almost real have been painted under the eaves of the roof.

“You okay?” DeWitt calls from below, where he’s holding the ladder steady.

“Yeah.”

Suppressing my excitement, I slip two fingers into the first hole and feel in the dark space, hoping I won’t find a brown recluse spider. There’s nothing inside but bare wood. The center hole holds a few small twigs and something that feels like crusted bird crap. But as my fingers probe the leftmost hole, my fingertips touch plastic.

Moving them back and forth, I know immediately that I’m touching a Ziploc bag. It’s taped to the inside wall of the birdhouse. Tugging gently, I remove the baggie from the hole, taking care not to let DeWitt see it. As I look down, my heart begins to race.

Inside the sandwich-size Ziploc is a stack of SD memory cards, the kind used in some digital cameras. I count five of them, and the topmost card is labeled 2G HIGH SPEED. Keeping my hand close to my body, I slide the baggie into my front pants pocket. I can barely keep my balance as I descend the ladder, and when I release the aluminum rails, my hands are shaking.

“Find anything up there?” DeWitt asks.

“No. I’m not even sure what I was looking for.”

“Huh, I wondered. You ain’t the only one’s been around here looking. Some guys searched his house a couple nights ago, before the fire. I figured they were cops, but I had a funny feeling about them.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, I was standing outside when they come out. And they looked at me like I was just dogshit. On my own property too.”

“Did they ask you any questions?”

“Hell, no. I wouldn’t of told them nothing if they had.”

Intoxicated with hope, I slap DeWitt on the back and say, “Good man, Bobby. I’ll see you around, okay?”

“Anytime. Hey, you reckon you could get something done about these potholes on our street?”

I laugh and turn my head as I’m running to my car. “Bobby, by next week, this street will be smooth as a baby’s butt!”

“I’ll believe that when I see it!”

“Count on it!”