The Devils Punchbowl

The two goons I brought back are nowhere to be seen. Quinn reaches into his pocket and fishes out my cell phone, then takes my gun from the small of his back and passes it to me.

“Don’t do anything like this again, Your Honor. That was local boys watching you last night. Next time it’ll be my men.”

“Who was that girl back there? Miss Teen China?”

A gleam of malice lights Quinn’s dark eyes. “Maybe one day you’ll find out.”

Ignoring his implied threat, I reach for my door handle.

“Keep your cell phone switched on,” Quinn says. “I like to know where my friends are.”

With my gun hanging loose in my hand, I look off toward the river, then turn back to Quinn, my eyes stripped of all affect. “You stay away from my family.”

The Irishman’s eyes flash with challenge. “Or what?”

“This isn’t Northern Ireland. It’s Mississippi. We know how to play rough here too.”

“I'’ll remember,” Quinn says, his voice filled with good humor. “Looking forward to it.”

He turns and walks back toward the house.

I climb into the Saab, then check my cell phone. Quinn turned it off while I was inside. Switching it on, I drive toward the gatehouse. As soon as the phone locates a tower, it begins ringing, and also signaling missed calls. The LCD screen reads,

Caller: Hans Necker.

The Minnesotan is probably calling me from three thousand feet above the river, but as I glance back toward Louisiana, I see only a solitary balloon in the sky, scudding southward like a fast-moving cloud.

“Hello?”

“Penn! Hans Necker! Is your family all right?”

“Ah…yeah. I'm really sorry I had to miss the race. Everything’s fine now.”

“Good! Because we got delayed by wind. A couple of cowboys took off, but they were going the wrong way sixty seconds out. How far are you from the football field behind the prep school south of town?”

“St. Stephen’s?”

Necker speaks away from the phone, then says, “Yeah, yeah, Buck Stadium, they call it. Big hole in the ground.”

“Um…five minutes?”

“Perfect! Get down here. We’re waiting for you. But don'’t mess around. We’ll be one of the last to launch as it is.”

As I near the gatehouse, I slow the car and look back at the stucco boxes on the bluff. When the Natchez Indians looked at the dwellings of the French interlopers who’d appeared on their land in the early 1700s, they probably asked the same questions I'm asking now:

Who are these madmen and what do they want? Do they even know themselves?

The gate guard looks puzzled by my apparent reluctance to leave. I’'ve missed something here. Slowly I pan my gaze across the still-green landscape, past the alien mansion, to the rim of the bluff.

There.

In the shade of a scarlet oak, silhouetted against the blue-white sky, sits the white dog that pinned me to my front door while Sands prodded me with his knife. The animal is too far away for me to see its eyes, but he’s not looking out over the river, as I’d first thought. He’s looking at me. He seems a sculpture of alertness, his big head held high, his cropped ears erect.

As I stare, the dog raises his hindquarters until his huge body is aimed at me like a torpedo. Nearly two hundred yards separate us, but that dog could cover the distance in twenty seconds. Emboldened by the car around me, I raise my hand as though in greeting, then, irrationally, give the dog the finger. He instantly lowers his head and begins to trot toward me. After one last look, I drive through the gate.

A hundred yards down the road, a rolled newspaper lies at the foot of an asphalt driveway. I stop my car, get out, and take the rubber band off the paper. The front page carries the usual fluff about the Balloon Festival, but below the fold, I see a small story with the headline DEATH MARS POST RACE CELEBRATIONS. The byline reads

Caitlin Masters.

A quick scan of the story reveals a surprising number of facts, or perhaps not so surprising, considering the network of sources, including cops, that Caitlin developed while she lived here. But in the sixth paragraph I discover something I knew nothing about.

“Sources close to the investigation say that over a pound of crystal methamphetamine was discovered at the victim’s residence by officers sent there to inform the widow of her husband’s death. The widow had vanished, and the house was open. As of this writing, she remains missing. Anyone with knowledge of the whereabouts of Julia Stanton Jessup is urged to contact police immediately.”

Caitlin quotes the lead detective: “With this amount of drugs involved, we’re almost certainly looking at a drug murder. We need to find this woman and her child before anybody else does.”

Consumed by rage, I calmly roll the newspaper back into a tight cylinder and fit the rubber band around it. A pound of crystal meth? I searched Tim’s house myself, and I didn't find any drugs. And I beat the police there. If the two cops who drove up on me “found” the meth, either they planted it or they found drugs carefully planted by whoever tore up the house before I got there.

“Hey!” shouts a man in a bathrobe, from far up the driveway. “You work for the

Examiner

?”

“No, sorry,” I call, tossing the paper up the driveway.

“Well, who the hell are you?”

“Nobody,” I tell him, getting back into my car.

“Hey, you’re the mayor, aren'’t you?” he shouts.

“I'm supposed to be,” I mutter, leaving a foot of stinking rubber on the pavement as I fishtail onto the road.

CHAPTER

19

Two dozen balloons pass over my car in a stately if hurried procession as I drive from Sands’s house to St. Stephen’s Preparatory School, this morning’s new launch site. As I turn into the school’s driveway—painted with royal blue deer tracks the size of a brontosaur’s footprints—a huge yellow sphere rises swiftly from behind the building and sails over my head breathing fire from its gas jets.

Pulling around the elementary building, I turn onto the access road of Buck Stadium, a massive oval hole in the ground lined with modern bleachers. The stadium makes an ideal launch site, not only because it’s shielded from the wind, but also because its light poles are fed by underground electrical cables, which removes one of the primary risks for balloon flight.

More than a dozen pickup trucks are parked on the football field, but only two deflated balloons lie stretched on the grass like empty tube socks. The Athens Point sheriff’s department helicopter is parked on the fifty-yard line, its rotors slowly turning. Beyond the chopper, several crew members hold open the mouth of a partly inflated balloon while a large fan blasts cool air into it. They’ll continue until the balloon is round enough to light the burners without risk to the canopy. At the far end of the field, behind the goalposts, a single red balloon sways above the field, a half dozen people clinging

to its basket, their weight just sufficient to hold it to the earth. This is the balloon Paul Labry told me to find.

Descending the hill to the floor of the stadium, I drive along the asphalt track that surrounds the gridiron. Labry’s gold Avalon is parked behind a brightly painted trailer, but it’s the car parked next to Paul’s that brings heat to my face. Caitlin’s rented Malibu. Sure enough, I see her black hair and aquiline form silhouetted against the white T-shirt of one of the big-bellied men holding down the basket of the red balloon. She appears to be badgering Labry about something. When Paul catches sight of me, he abandons the basket and starts jogging in my direction. The balloon lifts from the earth, leaving Caitlin no choice but to take Labry’s place. Sighting me, Hans Necker yells and waves from inside the basket. I wave back, then focus on Paul.

“Christ, man, you gotta hurry,” he says. “Necker’s about to lose it.”

“What’s Caitlin doing here?”

“Asking about Tim’s death. She’s worried she got the story wrong, and she also seems to think you’re mixed up in it some way.”

Caitlin leaves the balloon and starts trotting toward us. She’s wearing dark jeans and a light sweater. I wave her off and step closer to Labry. “I need you to do me a favor, Paul.”

“What?”

“I need the names of all the partners in Golden Parachute. I checked the paperwork I have, and I don'’t have the names of the five percenters. The Golden Flower LLC guys. didn't you have copies of most everything?”

Labry looks nonplussed. “Yeah, I’'ve still got it in my garage. What’s going on? Why do you need that all of a sudden?”

Caitlin has halved the distance to us. I step to my right and shout, “Give us a minute! Please.”

She stops, but it won'’t be for long.

“Listen, Paul, if you don'’t have the names at your house, forget about it. Don’t ask anybody else for this information. Don’t try to look anything up downtown, and don'’t mention it to me on the phone. Just get the names if you have them at home and tell me the next time you see me in person. Okay?”

“Sure, sure. But what’s it for? What’s going on?”

I look hard into his eyes. “You don'’t want to know. The last person who asked that question was Tim Jessup.”

Paul’s eyes cloud with concern, then Caitlin is upon us. Thankfully, Hans Necker is screaming like a madman from the basket. Without Paul’s and Caitlin’s weight, the balloon is making three-foot leaps off the ground in the gusting wind.

“I have to go,” I tell her, walking quickly toward the basket.

“What were you and Paul talking about?”

“City business.”

“Really? It looked personal.”

“How would you know anymore?” I stop ten feet from the basket. “I need to get on board.”

“Why are you so angry?”

“Because I don'’t know what you’re doing. You show up without warning, get drunk with your boyfriend, but somehow stay up late enough to write a story slandering a dead friend of mine, just in time to screw up the image of the town’s most important festival.”

Necker does a quick burn, and the heat of the flames reaches out to us like a living thing. I move toward the balloon, but Caitlin grabs my arm and pulls me to a stop. “Wait! What exactly are you angry about? A man was killed last night, and I wrote the facts as I knew them. Are you seriously pissed because I didn't follow Natchez tradition and soft-pedal the story until after the festival?”

“I don'’t have time to discuss it.” I start forward again. “Hey, Hans, sorry I'm late.”

Caitlin obviously isn’t worried about appearances. She catches my wrist and spins me around. “Or is it the getting drunk with my boyfriend part?”

“Come on, Penn!” Necker shouts. “The wind could kick up any second.”

On any other day I would have hesitated before climbing into this basket, but today I'm grateful for an excuse to escape Caitlin’s reproving eyes.

“I never said he was my boyfriend,” she says close to my ear. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

As I turn away and climb into the basket, a strong hand grips my upper arm from behind. I turn, expecting Hans Necker’s red visage,

but instead I find the aging astronaut’s face of chopper pilot Danny McDavitt.

“Morning, Major,” I say.

As Hans Necker fires the gas burner with a roar, McDavitt leans toward me. “I hear we’ve got a mutual friend. You need something, let me know. I stuck my cell number in your back pocket.”

I nod and offer silent thanks to Daniel Kelly.

The balloon tugs at the basket like an eager horse. Caitlin has walked a few feet away, but suddenly she runs forward and leans between two men sitting on the lip of the basket. “I want to talk as soon as you get down.”

“I won'’t have time. Not today.”

“Crew!” Necker shouts. “Let go of the basket on my count. Three, two, one,

now.

”

The crew members slide off the basket almost as one, and the balloon rises like a dandelion on the wind. Thirty feet off the ground, the butterflies take flight in my stomach. My existence is now dependent on the integrity of a few dozen yards of nylon, a wicker basket, some Kevlar cables, and rope. Caitlin’s angry face dwindles rapidly. As soon as we clear the stadium bowl, higher winds catch us and hurl us westward like an invisible hand. We’re moving as fast as some cars on the road below. They’ve slowed to watch the balloon, which must from the ground look graceful in its flight. But from inside the basket, it isn’t a slow waltz of balloons and clouds; it’s like scudding before the wind in a sailboat.

My cell phone vibrates in my pocket. When I check it, I find a text message from Caitlin.

Something’s wrong. What is it? You’re not yourself.

I shove the phone back into my pocket and look westward, toward the river.

“Only about half the pilots are flying this race,” Necker says. “The winds were running eight to ten miles per hour earlier, and that scares off a lot of people. Means the winds aloft will be running pretty fast.” He grins. “As you can tell.”

I force a smile and try to look excited, but for me this flight is a necessary evil, a roller-coaster ride on behalf of the city. My strategy is the same I use with Annie in amusement parks: get aboard, tighten my sphincter for the duration, then climb out dazed and kiss the blessed earth. The flaw in that comparison is that few people die on

roller coasters, while a significant number die in ballooning accidents, often when the lighter-than-air craft strike power lines. I’'ve seen video of these slow-motion tragedies, and the memory has never left me. The canopy always floats into a high-tension wire with the inevitability of a nightmare. People on the ground become anxious, gasp in disbelief. Then comes the strike, a blue-white flash, and for a moment, nothing. Then the fuel tanks explode. The basket erupts into flame as if struck by an RPG, and the heat carries the balloon higher, making it impossible for the passengers to reach the ground alive. Some leap from the basket, others cling fiercely as the canopy collapses and the flaming contraption streaks earthward like a broken toy. When I’'ve asked about these accidents, I always get the same answer: pilot error. I'm sure that’s true in most cases, but the knowledge does nothing to ease my anxiety today.

My cell phone vibrates again. It’s another text from Caitlin.

What did I get wrong about the story? P.S. Why isn’t Annie flying with you?

Groaning aloud, I switch off the phone.

“Woman problems?” Necker asks with a wink.

“You could say that.”

He chuckles. “That was a pretty girl back at the launch site. And she was giving your friend Labry unshirted hell. I imagine she’s a lot to handle.”

I actually find myself laughing. “You’re a good judge of character, Hans.”

I shudder as the canopy makes a ripping sound, but Necker only smiles and squeezes my arm with reassurance. “That'’s normal. These things seem like they'’re coming apart in a high wind, but that’s because the rigging’s so flexible. Can you imagine what an old clipper ship must have sounded like tearing across the Atlantic?”

As we rush along above Highway 61, rising through five hundred feet, I silently repeat my day’s mantra:

Accidents are rare, accidents are rare….

I hope we stay low today. Last year a different pilot and I got caught in an updraft and “stuck” a mile above Louisiana. Rather than having the romantic ride most people experience, I was stranded in the clouds, with a view much like the one you get from a jetliner: geometric farms and highways, cars the size of ants. But today is different. The landmarks of the city are spread below me

with the stunning clarity of an October morning. To my right lies the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians, a carpet of green meadows and ceremonial mounds beside St. Catherine’s Creek. I scarcely have time to orient myself to the mounds before we race onward toward the river.

“Glad you made it,” Necker says, slapping me gently on the back. “We’re looking good. It’s actually lucky you were late.”

“Glad to help. It really couldn'’t be avoided.”

The CEO nods but doesn’'t question me. “They’ve shortened the race to the first target only. Nobody’s going to be able to maneuver well in this wind.”

I try to conceal my relief that this will be a short flight. Some balloon races are long and complex, like magisterial wedding processions. Others are brief and chaotic, like car chases through a mountain village, with pilots trying to divine invisible crosscurrents of wind like oracles opening themselves to revelation. Today’s event is the latter type, but there’s a certain majesty to the seemingly endless train of balloons stretching from the Louisiana Delta ahead of us back to Buck Stadium, which is now merely a fold in the green horizon. Two helicopters fly along the course like cowboys tending a wayward herd, but they have no control over their charges. The balloons go where the wind blows.

Necker has read the winds well. Where Highway 61 veers north toward Vicksburg and the Delta, we continue westward toward Louisiana. Far to my right I see the abandoned Johns Manville plant, to my left, the shuttered International Paper mill, and the scorched scar that is all that remains of the Triton Battery Company. All those plants came between 1939 and 1946, and the last shut its doors only a few months ago. So much for Natchez’s smokestack industries. But the beauty of the city remains undiminished. From this altitude it’s plain that the modern town grew over dozens of old plantations, and there’s far more forest than open ground. It makes me long for the days before the lumber industry came, when—the saying goes—a squirrel could run from Mississippi to North Carolina without once setting foot on the ground.

As downtown Natchez drifts past like a ghost from the nineteenth century, I hear bass and drums pounding from the festival field beside Rosalie. A moment later I sight the crowd swelling and mov

ing like a swarm of ants before the stage. Then we’re over the river, its broad, reddish-brown current dotted with small pleasure craft, the levee on the far side lined with the cars of people watching the balloons pass.

Far ahead, near the horizon, I can see our destination: Lake Concordia, an oxbow lake created by a bend in the river that was cut off long ago. Sometimes Annie and I go water-skiing there with friends who have boats, such as Paul Labry and his family. Thinking of Labry brings a knot of anxiety to my throat. In the rush of boarding the balloon, I asked him to get me the names of the Chinese casino partners for me. So easy to do. But have I needlessly—and selfishly—put him at risk? Probably not, if he follows my orders exactly. But will he, not really knowing what’s at stake?

Labry and I are only a year apart in age, but we went to different schools, and that can be an obstacle to close friendship in Natchez. After forced integration in 1968, the number of private schools doubled from two to four. Labry and I attended the two original ones: Immaculate Heart and St. Stephen’s. The new schools were “Christian academies” that stressed conservative ideology and athletics over academics. There wasn'’t much mixing between the four institutions, and I probably spent more time with the public school kids than with the “Christians” or the Catholics, who stuck together like an extended family. But in the eleventh grade, Paul Labry and I were sent as delegates to the American Legion Boys State in Jackson. I knew Labry only slightly when I arrived, but after spending a week with him among strangers, I knew I’d made a friend I should have gotten to know long before.

Labry went to college at Mississippi State and returned home afterward; he was already working in his father’s office-supply business while I was earning my law degree at Rice. When I returned to Natchez for good, I discovered that Labry was one of the few boys from the top quarter of his class who hadn'’t immigrated to another part of the country to earn his living. As mayor, whenever I looked at the Board of Selectmen with frustration, Labry’s constant presence and dogged, conscientious work gave me hope for change. I think he originally harbored dreams of running for mayor, but after I confided to him that I intended to run, he told me that I should go for it, and that I could count on his full support. He has been true to his

word, and I should not repay a loyal friend and family man by dragging him into the mess that has already claimed Tim Jessup’s life.

“Look at that!” cries Necker, pointing down to a vast, swampy island enclosed by an old bend in the river. “That'’s Giles Island right there. We’re setting up to win this thing, Penn, I can feel it.”

“I never had a doubt,” I tell him, which is true. Necker probably studied maps of this area nonstop during his flight back from Chicago.

As we start to cross the island, a loud crack unlike anything I’'ve yet heard snaps me to full alertness. What frightens me most is Necker. He’s gone from a relaxed posture to total rigidity in less than a second.

“What was that?” I ask.

Necker doesn’'t answer. He has leaned back to look up through the throat of the balloon, and he doesn’'t look happy.

“Was that a shot?” I ask, almost afraid to voice what my instinct tells me is true.

“Yes and no,” Necker answers, still staring up into the canopy. “Somebody just put some lead through the canopy, but that sound we heard wasn'’t the gun. It was the bullet itself.”

“Jesus.” The balloons to the west of us seem much farther away than they did ten seconds ago. “What’s the difference?”

Necker is working fast, checking the digital equipment that rests in a pouch on the inside lip of the basket. He’s as grim as a fireman about to rush into a burning building. “It takes a high-powered rifle to make the sound we just heard. That bullet was supersonic.”

My fear is scaling up into panic. I want to suppress it, but some reactions are simply beyond control. “What does that mean for us?”

“A stray shotgun pellet is one thing. But you don'’t hit a balloon this big with a high-powered rifle unless you’re aiming at it.”

Before the wind carries Necker final word away, another

crack

makes me grab the edge of the basket in terror. This time I hear the bullet rip the nylon above our heads. Necker grabs the wooden handle of a rope that stretches all the way to the top of the balloon. It’s fastened inside a carabiner, which Necker carefully opens while gripping the handle tight in his hand. He looks like a man about to pull the rip cord on a parachute.

“What are you doing?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady.

His eyes meet mine with an intensity that shakes me to the core. “We’'ve got to get down. Somebody’s trying to kill us.”

I want to help, but my mind is blank. Before I can say anything more, Necker pulls on the rope, and our balloon begins dropping like an elevator in a Tokyo office building. My stomach flies into my throat, and my feet tingle the way they do when I stand on a cliff edge.

“Will the canopy hold together?” I ask above the rush of the wind.

Necker nods with confidence. “We can take quite a few holes and maintain buoyancy. But if they hit a cable or cause a big rip, we’ll be in trouble.”

“What if they hit the fuel tanks?”

Necker gives me a grin of utter fatalism. “If they hit a tank, we’re dead.”

The sound of the wind is twofold now, the air blowing past us horizontally, and that rushing upward as we plummet toward the earth.

“Can we dump the tanks over the side?”

Necker is watching the top of the balloon through its mouth. “That would take four or five minutes in my balloon, and this isn’t my balloon. I'’ll have us on the ground in fifty seconds.”

He pulls harder on the rope, and we drop still faster. I cannot bear to look outside the basket. “What are you doing?” I ask.

“Venting hot air from the top of the balloon. It’s the only way to get down fast.”

“How fast are we going?”

“A thousand feet a minute.”

“How fast is that?”

Necker purses his lips, figuring on the fly. “A forty-yard dash straight into the ground. It probably won'’t kill you, but it’ll hurt like hell.”

Shit….

He squeezes my upper arm and winks. “We’ll be all right. I'’ll do a burn right before we hit. Try to cushion it a little.”

My heart is pounding so hard that my chest hurts. “I feel like we just jumped out of a plane!”

Necker actually laughs. “A skydiver falls ten times this fast. Just

keep scanning the ground. Watch for a muzzle flash. Somebody’s going to jail for this.”

Steeling myself, I pan my eyes over the swampy ground bounded by the snaky bend of the old river course. There’s a thousand acres of trees down there that a sniper could hide behind. There’s no way we’re going to find him without hearing his gun go off.

The ground seems to swoop up toward us with surreal speed. I'm trying to force my gaze away from it when Necker takes out his cell phone and speed-dials a number. “Major McDavitt? We’re taking ground fire…. That'’s right, rifle fire, I’d say. Could be hunters, but I don'’t think so. I'm hitting the deck right where we are, maximum safe descent.” Necker gives me a quick glance. “Maybe faster.”

A mile to the west, the Athens Point sheriff’s department chopper banks toward us and accelerates. Just as my heart lifts, another bullet punches though the canopy with the sound of a bullwhip finding flesh.

“God

damn

it!” Necker bellows, pointing toward the levee road. “I think that came from the south,” he shouts into the phone. “Skim the levee road on your way here and see if you see anything. Try to get a license plate.”

The helicopter makes no move toward the levee, but makes for us at what must be maximum speed. Major McDavitt has decided that survival means more than punishment.

Necker’s jaw is set tight, but I see a wry smile on his lips. “So that’s how it is,” he says into the phone. “Medevac time. Well, you’d better call ahead to the hospital. I'm AB positive. Penn, do you know your blood type?”

“O negative.”

Beneath us I see an orange tractor and a propane tank beside what looks like a bunkhouse. A billy goat stands munching something beside a barbed-wire fence—

“Stop looking at the ground,” Necker advises. “You’re turning green. Watch the horizon. I'’ll tell you when to brace. Fifteen seconds. If we overshoot and land in the water, stay with the basket. It’ll float. Unless you want to try to swim right to shore.”

“Shouldn’t we try for the water?”

“We might not be able to swim after impact.”

Good Lord.

The gas jet roars above our heads, heat blasts my

scalp, and the basket presses up against my feet like an express elevator slowing for the ground floor. “That old river’s full of alligators anyway!” I shout.

Necker tries to laugh, but what comes out is a strangled bark. He grabs the valve of the propane tank and shuts off the fuel line. “Five seconds! Brace! Bend your knees!”

I bend my knees and grab the upper frame of the basket, bracing against our lateral motion, which is westward toward the water. We’re moving a lot faster across the ground than I’d realized, but that may actually help us.

The impact is like falling from a galloping horse. My knees collapse and my pelvis slams the side of the basket, jolting me from ankles to crown, and then we’re sliding over the marshy ground as the wind drags us relentlessly toward the water. Necker hauls mightily on a rope, and suddenly the canopy collapses and we shudder to a stop.

The sudden silence is unnerving, but in seconds I hear the steady beating of McDavitt’s helicopter descending beside us.

Hans Necker drops to the floor of the basket like a man who died on his feet. It’s only now that I remember the gunfire that caused this crash landing.

“Are you hit?” I ask.

Necker shakes his head. “Ankle’s broken. One for sure, maybe both. Can you help me up?”

“Hell, yes. Let’s get out of this thing.”

McDavitt is already out of the chopper and running toward us. “Anybody hit?” he calls.

“No,” I shout back. “We need help though!”

When McDavitt reaches the basket, he helps me lift Necker over the side. The CEO grips the frame for a moment and smiles. “This old girl got us down alive.”

“You got us down, buddy. We need to get to St. Catherine’s Hospital, Major. Ready?”

McDavitt nods as we cradle Necker between us in a sitting position.

“Let’s do it.”

I thought the balloon was moving fast when we crossed the river, but Major McDavitt storms back toward Natchez at 120 knots, aiming

for the helipad atop St. Catherine’s Hospital. The town’s top orthopedist is waiting for Necker in the emergency room, and the Adams County sheriff’s department chopper is flying in tandem, following us in. Paul Labry is on his way to the hospital, preparing to deal with what can only be a media crisis for the Balloon Festival.

“How you doing?” I ask Necker, who’s sitting with his back to the wall of the helicopter’s cabin, his left calf propped on my knee to keep his foot elevated.

“Hurts like a son of a bitch,” he says. “But it could have been a lot worse. You did good, keeping it together. A lot of people would have panicked.”

“Oh, I panicked.”

Necker laughs, then winces. “Damn, I’d like some morphine.”

“Two minutes.”

Necker nods. “Let’s talk fast then.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don'’t believe in luck, good or bad. We weren’t the first balloon in line, or the last. But we were shot at and hit three times with a high-powered rifle. Anybody who could hit us three times could have killed us if he wanted to. All he had to do was shoot the basket. He’d have hit us or the fuel tanks, or both.”

I look back noncommittally. “So…?”

“So either we stumbled on a psycho hunter having a really bad day, or somebody was trying to send one of us a message. I don'’t have any enemies here yet, so far as I know. What about you?”

I stare back at the CEO but do not speak. Necker didn't get where he is by being dumb.

He changes tack. “A lot of people are about to ask us what happened back there. What are we going to say?”

I'm not sure what to say, to Necker or the public. I can’t quite believe that Sands or Quinn would pull a stunt like that. Especially after I reaffirmed that I intended to do what they’ve asked of me. But who else could it have been?

“Are we off-the-record?”

Necker points at a headset on the floor to indicate that Major McDavitt cannot hear us. “Unless I'm dictating a press release, I'm always off-the-record.”

I take a deep breath and look out at the spire of St. Mary’s,

growing larger in the chopper’s windshield. “I don'’t think you’re going to find out who fired those shots, Hans. But I may know already. Who ordered it, anyway.”

“I'm listening.”

“That was a message telling me to keep my nose out of something. Or my mouth shut. I'm not sure which yet. It had nothing to do with you or the race. I can’t give you details. I wish I could, but I can’t. It’s just not an option.”

“You don'’t think any other pilots are in danger?”

“No. Not unless we get some nutty copycat or something.”

Necker’s appraisal of me is cold and swift. “This isn’t something personal, is it? Like diddling somebody else’s wife?”

“Hell, no. It’s criminal activity. That'’s all I can say. If you could help me, I’d tell you more, but you can’t. Not with this.”

“I know a lot of people, Penn.”

“So do I. This isn’t that kind of problem. Money and connections won'’t help. In fact, money is the problem.”

“This is why you were late this morning, isn’t it?”

I nod.

“Your family’s okay?”

“They are now. They weren’t this morning.”

Necker winces again, then nods slowly. “I see. Okay. Tell me what I can do to help you. There has to be something.”

I think for a moment. “Honestly?”

“Yessir.”

“I need this helicopter for the rest of the weekend, and I need Major McDavitt flying it. From now till Sunday night.”

Necker shifts his leg, grimaces in pain. “You’ve got it.”

“I'’ll pay for his time, of course. I—”

“It’s already paid for. What else?”

“I think that’s all you can do for now. Other than that, I’d just ask that you not let this thing affect your view of the town, if that’s possible.”

Necker smiles. “Hell, I’'ve run into strong-arm stuff in Minneapolis. You get that everywhere. I only wish you’d let me help you. I take it personally when somebody shoots at me. I’d like a few words with the son of a bitch myself.”

“If I have my way, you’ll get your chance.”

Necker glances out the window at the hospital as we descend. “I won'’t keep you, then. I'm going to be on crutches for a while anyway. Go do what you have to do. Anybody asks, I'’ll say I think that shooting was some kids that got out of hand.”

“I appreciate it, Hans.”

“Would it help you to know where those shots came from?”

“It might.”

“I'’ll get somebody to truck that balloon over here, and I'’ll have a look at it. I know our altitude when we were shot. If the shots were through and through, I can figure the angle and probably where the shooter was standing. Approximately, anyway.”

The chopper touches down on the roof like a butterfly alighting on a leaf. Necker smiles. “A lot better than our last one, eh?”

Paramedics yank open the side door and motion for me to exit the cabin. As I leave, Necker grabs my arm and says, “I'’ll tell Danny to be on call for you.”

“Thanks.”

Paul Labry is waiting for me on the helipad. I’'ve never seen him this upset before. “What the hell happened up there, Penn?”

“I told you on the phone. Somebody took a couple of shots at us. Necker had to set down hard.”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. How many people know what happened?”

“Are you kidding? With cell phones? I'’ll bet most of the pilots know by now, and the town won'’t be far behind.”

“Caitlin?”

“I don'’t know. How do you want to handle this? Some people are already saying we should cancel the rest of the flights. Today’s

and

tomorrow’s.”

“Pilots?”

“No. Couple of county supervisors.”

“I'm not surprised, but I'm not sure we should cancel. I think this was probably an isolated event. Necker agrees. The pilots are going to want input on the decision. We need to call a meeting—a closed meeting—pilots and the committee only. Let’s give them long enough to get down and packed up.” I look at my watch and give Paul a time.

He nods. “Where? The Ramada convention room?”

“That'’s fine. I need you to handle the press on this, Paul. I'’ll be at the meeting, but you’re the point man for now.”

“What? I don'’t know anything!”

“Necker can give you the details.”

Labry looks more upset than when I first got out of the chopper. “Where are you going to be?”

“You can reach me on my cell.”

Labry groans as he follows me to the hospital’s roof door.

“Go on ahead,” I tell him. “I have to make a call.”

“Don’t you need a ride back to your car?”

“My dad’s giving me a ride. He’s working downstairs. You go ahead.”

Labry starts through the door, then stops and looks back at me. “Hey, I almost forgot. I got those names you wanted.”

I pause, momentarily confused. “Names?”

“The Golden Parachute partners. That'’s where I was when you called. My garage. I didn't want to say anything on the cell, you were so cloak-and-dagger about it. I had to write the names down so I wouldn'’t forget. There are six partners sharing the five percent stake.”

“Are two of them Chinese?”

Labry nods, then produces a scrap of paper that looks like part of a grocery bag. I shove it deep in the same pocket that holds Danny McDavitt’s number. “Go on, Paul. You’re going to have a lot to deal with. Talk to Necker first.”

As Labry shakes his head and walks into the hospital, I speed-dial 1. Seamus Quinn answers the phone with a note of amusement in his voice.

“Seems like we spoke only this morning,” he says, chuckling.

“What the fuck are you trying to do?”

I shout.

“What would you be talking about?”

“You just tried to kill me!”

“How could I do that? I'm having a pint on the

Queen

as we speak.” Quinn obviously assumes I'm taping the call.

“Look, I don'’t get it. I told you, I'm going to do what you want. I'm going to find your disc. But I can’t do it if I'm dead.”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” Quinn says airily. “Unless it’s that balloon crash I just heard about.”

“What else?”

“Well, you must be exaggerating. If somebody really wanted to kill you, they’d have blown your fuel tank.”

“If you were trying to send me a message, I don'’t understand it.”

“No message. But now that I have you on the phone, I do recall someone saying you had other things to do this morning than go riding in a balloon.”

So that was the message.

Quinn continues, “I also recall telling you to leave your cell phone switched on.”

“A reporter’s been bugging me. I had to shut it off.”

“Not my problem. I like to know where my mates are, remember. Gives me a sense of security.”

I can’t even think of a response.

“Got to run now, mate. Business is picking up, now the balloons have landed. You call back soon. I like to hear good news.”

When the connection goes dead, something lets go in me, and I wobble on my feet. Delayed shock, probably. I grab the doorknob to steady myself, then back up and sit down on an air-conditioning unit. Hugging myself to stop the shakes, I wonder how I'm going to get downstairs to meet my father.

My cell phone is ringing in my pocket. I'm already wishing I hadn'’t switched it back on. This time it’s not Caitlin or Labry.

“Penn, it’s Chief Logan. I heard you had some trouble.”

“A little bit.”

“Nobody hurt too bad, I understand. Lucky break.”

“Yeah.”

“I was wondering if you could swing by headquarters for a minute.”

“What for? Is it about the shooting?”

“No. I’'ve had your girlfriend here threatening me with lawsuits till Judgment Day if I don'’t let her kid out of jail.”

“Chief, I can’t deal with Libby Jensen’s problems right now.”

Logan voice changes suddenly; all the official tone goes out of it. “We need to talk, Penn. And not on a cell phone. I'm at headquarters for another half hour. Find a way.”

I sigh in resignation. “Okay. I'm on my way.”

I'm only six feet from the roof door, but I feel it’s a mile away. The

thought of making my way to the ground floor of the hospital seems beyond me. I don'’t know if it’s sleep deprivation or the crash. I am gathering my last reserves of energy to stand when I look to my left.

Facing me like a giant blue dragonfly is the Athens Point helicopter, its rotors turning as though they could go on for eternity. Danny McDavitt sits at the controls like a waiting chauffeur, his eyes on me.

There is my ride.

CHAPTER

20

Police headquarters is on the north side of town, far from the most recent residential and commercial development, closer to the predominantly black part of town. The low-slung, one-story structure looks like a cross between a 1970s office suite and a federal prison minus the barbed wire. Wedged between a Pizza Hut and the Entergy building, it’s surrounded by car dealerships, auto parts shops, cheap motels, and a cash-for-your-car-title place. Across the street, amid this haphazard sprawl, stands Devereaux, one of the most beautiful Greek Revival mansions in the South, now dwarfed by the massive Baptist church that has become its neighbor, the only new construction on this side of town.

Inside the glass-walled entry area of the station, I announce myself to the officer behind her bulletproof glass window. After a show of finishing some paperwork, she buzzes me through the door and points to the chief’s door.

Don Logan and I have been through more than one scrape together. A year and a half ago, we were both shot at by gang members in the lobby of the city’s finest hotel. As I told Tim the night before he died, I find it almost impossible to believe that Logan could be on the pad, no matter what the temptation. On the other hand, the chief might have guilty knowledge about one or more cops under his command. Situations like that have put honorable men in

difficult positions before, so I must tread carefully with Logan, honest though he may be.

The chief is waiting behind a desk that’s the picture of order, a compulsive engineer’s desk. He wears a starched blue uniform and a silver badge, but in his wire-rimmed glasses he still looks like a high school science teacher.

“What’s going on, Don?” I ask, hoping to get past titles immediately. “You sounded pretty upset on the phone.”

“I'm not sure where to start.”

“What’s the status on Soren Jensen?” This question gives me time to read the chief’s mood. What I'm picking up is serious tension.

“Jensen’s being charged with possession with intent to distribute.”

Seeing the shock on my face, Logan hurries on, “It’s not my call, Penn. The DA’s filing those charges. Shad even came down here this morning to make sure I understood his position. I don'’t know what you did to step on his toes, but he’s out for this kid’s blood.”

“I hear you. What about the MVA?”

“The kid’s being charged with DWI as well. He was drunk on the Breathalyzer, but I think he was full of meth too. His mother told him not to take a blood test, but Shad’s going to get a court order.”

I absorb this in silence. Libby is probably close to a nervous breakdown by now.

“I know he’s basically a good kid,” Logan says. “But he hit a cop. You know he wouldn'’t have done that unless he was high.”

“Probably not. He needs help, though, not time in the pen.”

“So do all the poor black kids who come through here, and a lot of them don'’t get it. So it’s easy for Shad to throw the book at Jensen and look like he’s being impartial. But let’s move on. We’'ve got more serious problems to deal with.”

“Like?”

“Tim Jessup.”

Here we go.

“Are you treating his death as a homicide?”

Logan lifts a stainless steel pen from a holder and glances away, temporizing. “The autopsy results aren'’t back. Let’s move to some specifics before we start drawing conclusions.”

“I saw the story in this morning’s paper. Who found the dope in Jessup’s house?”

“The two patrolmen who saw you leaving there called in a K9 unit. Dog found it behind some Sheetrock in the closet. Typical hidey-hole.”

“Don, somebody tore the place apart before I got there. They would have found the drugs and taken them.”

Logan shrugs as if he can do nothing about the facts.

“How did Caitlin Masters find out about the meth so fast?”

“Come on,” he says. “You know that woman better than anybody. She’s got sources all over town, from the courthouse to Lawyers’ Row to this department.”

I concede this with a nod. “What concerns me is that to the best of my knowledge, Tim Jessup has been clean for a year.”

“There’s no way to know that.”

“Julia Stanton turned that boy around. I tend to be cynical where drugs are concerned, but I don'’t think Julia would have stayed with him if he was using again.”

Logan taps the pen on his desk, looks toward his partially open window blinds. Then he reaches into his drawer and pulls out a manila envelope. From it he takes four photographs and lays them out for me to examine. They’re printed on ink-jet photo paper, and all four show a nude or partly nude woman with a stunning body posed in various erotic positions. Unlike the teenage girl in the cell phone shots Tim showed me, this woman is in her midthirties and looks confident of her sexuality.

“What am I supposed to get from these?”

“We found these in Jessup’s house. Something tells me Julia didn't know about this either.”

I am at a loss for words.

“Nobody leaked these to Ms. Masters, by the way,” he adds.

Thank God for small favors.

“Were these stashed with the dope?”

“No.” Logan can’t suppress a small smirk. “Folded inside

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

”

“Have you ID’d the woman? She looks vaguely familiar.”

“Linda Church. Hostess at the Devil’s Punchbowl, one of the bars on the

Magnolia Queen.

Born right here in Natchez.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Who ID’d her?”

“One of the patrolmen recognized her. I did too, when I saw the

pictures. She grew up out in Morgantown, like me. She wasn'’t that far behind me in school. I'm eight years younger than you, remember, even if I'm losing my hair faster.”

I smile and nod.

“You never saw Linda on the boat?” he asks.

“I don'’t gamble.”

“Me either. But I go down there and eat with the wife sometimes. Food’s good, and not too expensive.”

“What do you know about her?”

“She stripped in Vegas. A lot of people don'’t know that. She went to a juco in Oklahoma, married a guy there. That lasted about ten years. No kids. He left her. She got short of money, started stripping in Oklahoma City, then moved on to Vegas. Not sure why she left, but she came back here and started working the boats. I do remember her from school, though. They called her Butterface.”

“Butterface?”

“You know, everything about her was hot but her face.”

I lean forward and examine the pictures more closely. Aside from her high, full breasts and tight bottom, Linda Church has large eyes and good bone structure. “She looks pretty enough in these pictures.”

“Yeah. It was acne. She had it bad in high school. She’s scarred more than these pictures show. But Linda’s like a lot of country girls, a ten-plus when you see them from behind, a five from the front.”

“So based on these pictures, you think Tim was having an affair with her.”

“Sure looks that way.”

“Jessup’s not in any of the pictures.”

“Would you be, if you were going to keep these around your house?”

“I wouldn'’t keep them around my house. And neither would Tim. Julia would castrate him if she found them.”

“No offense, but Jessup has a history of self-destructive behavior.”

“Have you questioned this woman yet?”

Logan sighs heavily. “We can’t find her.”

The moment he says this, I suspect that Linda Church may never be found alive. “Was she supposed to report for work today?”

“Not for another hour yet. We already questioned her coworkers, though. One said she’s positive Jessup and Linda were hooking up on the sly. They kept it secret because of workplace rules.”

If Tim was having an affair with her—or if she was helping him with his plan to steal evidence—why didn't he tell me about her? As soon as I ask myself, I know the answer: Tim didn't want me to judge him for cheating on Julia, if in fact he was doing so.

“Jessup never told you about this girl?” Logan asks.

“Me? We weren’t that close, Don. Not since we were nine years old.”

“Right. But you’re positive he wasn'’t doing drugs.”

Frustrated by the need to conceal my relationship with Tim, I say, “I'm just telling you what I think.”

“Well, here’s what

I

think. To an objective investigator, it looks like an old dopehead slid back to his old ways. He was banging a waitress at work and selling meth to keep up his two women.”

“That'’s what it’s supposed to look like. Did you find any meth precursors in Jessup’s house? Any cooking equipment?”

Logan shakes his head.

“It’s bullshit, Don. Staged. Every bit of it.”

Logan leans back in his chair and cradles his hands behind his head, his eyes regarding me coolly. “Were you and Jessup working on something together?”

I thought I was ready for this kind of question, but the directness of it takes me by surprise. “I'm the mayor. He was a blackjack dealer. What could we be working on?”

Logan’s eyes remain steady. “You’re also a novelist. And a lawyer. A former prosecutor.”

“And?”

“And a couple of nights ago, one of my patrolmen saw your car out at the cemetery. After midnight. That'’s not far from where Jessup worked. And his shift ended at twelve a.m. this week.”

I shrug as casually as I can. “I was feeling down, Don. I went out to visit my wife’s grave. I do that sometimes.”

Logan looks as if he’s trying to give me the benefit of the doubt—and failing. “That'’s what my man said you said. I can respect that. But if anything else happened while you were out there, I’d sure like to know about it.”

I shake my head slowly. “Nothing. Me and the ghosts, that’s it.”

Logan watches me awhile longer, then says, “There’s a couple of other things you should know. One, Jessup’s wife is missing.”

“Meaning what? Someone filed a missing persons’ report? Or you just can’t find her?”

“We can’t find her or her son.”

I shrug again. “I don'’t know where she is, if that’s what you’re asking. Do you have Tim’s car?”

“That'’s the other thing. It’s missing too. Thing is, I’'ve got Linda Church’s cell phone records, and she received a pretty disturbing text message last night shortly before midnight.”

“What did it say?”

Logan reaches back into the manila envelope, takes out a small piece of paper, and slides it across his desk. Written on it in pencil are the letters:

Thiefwww kllmmommy. Sqrttoo.

“What do you make of this?” Logan asks.

“Tim sent this?”

“It was sent from the cell phone of a man whose phone was stolen while he was on the

Magnolia Queen

last night. I think Jessup’s been doing a lot of that lately.”

Logan’s inquisitive eyes probe mine, but I say nothing. At length he says, “In my experience, strippers have been exposed to pretty much everything. Getting mixed up in a murder for hire wouldn'’t be that big a step for some of them. An objective investigator might look at that text message and see an order to kill Jessup’s wife and child.”

I can’t believe the chief is serious. “Tim was planning to murder his wife? The woman who saved his life? That'’s ridiculous. You know it is.”

“Brother, two years ago I’d have said it was ridiculous if you told me Dr. Drew Elliot was porking a high school girl. If this job has taught me anything, it’s that you have no idea what people are capable of, not even the people you think you know best.”

“Fair enough. But I'm telling you, Julia Stanton was Tim Jessup’s salvation.”

Logan taps one of the photos on his desk, his finger coming to rest on Linda Church’s shapely derriere. “Maybe Tim thought

this

was his salvation.”

“That'’s sure what somebody wants you to think. You and everybody else in town.”

“You really believe he’s being framed? After his death? Who has a motive to frame Tim Jessup?”

“Cui bono, my friend.”

“What?”

“Who benefits?”

“From his death?”

“Yes. And from smearing what remained of his good name. It’s pretty clear that someone wants Tim’s death to look like a run-of-the-mill drug murder. Guaranteed to go in the ‘unsolved’ file.”

Logan looks uncomfortable.

“Which is exactly how Shad Johnson seemed to be reading it last night at the crime scene,” I remind him. “Before any such evidence had been discovered. By the way, when Shad was here to make sure you threw the book at Soren Jensen, did he give you any sense of urgency about solving Jessup’s murder?”

The chief can’t meet my eyes now. “Not exactly.”

“Uh-huh. I’d say the situation’s pretty self-explanatory, Don.”

Logan gets up from his desk and walks to the window, toys with the blinds. “Let me ask you a question. You know a lot about this town. You were raised here, you'’ve written about it.”

“What do you want to know?”

He turns and looks me squarely in the eyes. “Who actually runs this place?”

This is a question I’'ve asked myself since I was a boy.

“You’re the mayor. Do you run it?”

“Far from it. In fact, our kind of city government is literally defined as the ‘weak mayor’ form of government.”

Logan gives me a guarded look. “You’ve got the power to fire me.”

“I’d happily trade that for the power to fire the district attorney.”

The chief grunts as if he agrees. “My folks always told me Natchez was run by the garden clubs. Maybe that was true once, but that idea’s a laugh and a half now.”

“They never really did, Don. This town was always run by a few big men behind the scenes. Men like Leo Marston. Judges, bankers, lawyers, oilmen. But things have changed. The big money’s mostly gone or spread among the heirs. There’s not that much power here

anymore. It’s a free-for-all. White or black, everybody’s chasing whatever money they can find. We’re just like the rest of the country that way.”

Logan nods dejectedly, but something else seems to be eating at him. “I tell you, I'm starting to feel like the marshal in a company town. Mining town, lumber town, whatever.”

“Gambling town?” I suggest quietly.

A quick, worried glance. “You said that, not me. Look, gambling is gambling, and everybody knows what comes with it. But it’s legal now, and given that, I have to say the casinos have been good partners.”

“You sound like a lot of people when they talk about casinos.”

“How’s that?”

“Careful.”

“Well. It’s like being police chief in a town by an army base. If you’re not pro-army, you’re in the wrong job. The way I see it, my job is to collect evidence and make arrests. I can only go by the evidence I find.”

“Chief, your job is to uncover the truth.”

Logan looks at me with a dogged defiance in his eyes. “No, sir. That'’s a jury’s job. And a judge’s. Lawyer’s, maybe. And it don'’t make a bit of difference how much detective work I do if the DA doesn’'t want to prosecute something.”

Now I stand. “If you find solid evidence, Shad will have no choice.”

“You really believe that? You were an assistant DA yourself. You know how political that stuff gets.”

“Murder is murder, Don.”

The chief makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “Well, I'’ll sure be interested to see the results of Jessup’s autopsy.”

“When will you get those? Next week?”

“Actually, Jewel Washington put a rush on it. She’s pretty tight with the people at the crime lab in Jackson. I think the pathologist may be cutting Jessup late today.”

A fillip of excitement shoots through me. “Does Shad know that?”

Logan shakes his head. “I wouldn'’t want to be Jewel when he finds out either.”

“If he tries to retaliate against Jewel for doing her job the way it ought be done, Shad’ll find out just how much power I

have.

”

“Penn, look—”

“No, this is bullshit. You tell me one thing. If the autopsy comes in conclusively as homicide, are you going to press the investigation or not?”

Logan straightens up with impressive dignity. “If it comes back homicide, I'’ll be investigating a homicide. I'’ll do it by the book, and I won'’t miss a lick. But, brother, in the end, being chief of police is a lot like being mayor. Unless you’re backed up by the people above and below you, it’s just a nice-sounding title.”

As Logan grimaces under the burdens of his office, something disturbing strikes me. “Don, we’ve been talking quite a while, and you haven'’t asked me anything about my balloon getting shot down.”

He takes a deep breath, then answers with carefully chosen words. “First off, I can see you weren’t hurt bad. Second, it happened over Louisiana. Not my jurisdiction. Mine ends at the river.”

I sense barely contained anger behind his eyes, but he will not voice it.

“One thing has troubled me since last night,” I tell him. “You said Tim tried to call me several times before his death. I was in one of the highest parts of the city, but I never got those calls. No texts either. How could that be?”

Logan folds his arms and looks at the institutional green carpet.

“May I see Tim’s phone?”

The chief shakes his head. “I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Ask the district attorney, not me.”

“Do you

have

the phone? Is it in the evidence room?”

Logan keeps his gaze on the carpet. “You’re outside the bounds of what I can answer.”

“Jesus, man, what

can

you tell me?”

Logan chews on his bottom lip for a while. Then he glances at his door and walks to within a foot of me. “Last night, there were two localized interruptions of cellular service. In two different places, and at two different times.”

I ponder this for a minute. “Let me guess. The first was around midnight, near the cemetery.”

Logan nods almost imperceptibly.

“And the second was right around the time Tim died. When he jumped out of the SUV and was trying to get away from whoever was inside.”

“You get the prize.”

“How widespread was the interruption?”

“From the complaints, the best I can figure was about half a square mile near the cemetery. Up on the bluff it was more widespread, but it had a shorter duration. Generated a lot more complaints, though, with all the people partying up there.”

“Were all carriers interrupted, or just one?”

“All.”

“Shit. Somebody was jamming the radio spectrum.”

Logan licks his lips but says nothing.

“That'’s serious business. Have you talked to the cellular providers?”

“No way. I figured this out from the complaints of witnesses. And a couple of my black officers live out by the cemetery.”

“You know what happened. Whoever killed Tim jammed the cell signals around the cemetery while they were chasing him out there. They stopped it after they had him in the SUV, when they were torturing him. Then they started jamming the lines again when he broke loose and ran for the fence.”

Logan sniffs and looks back toward his door. “Are you prepared to tell me who ‘they’ are?”

Is he asking me this honestly?

I wonder.

Or is he testing me? And if he’s testing me, is it for himself or for Jonathan Sands?

“Do I need to tell you?”

The chief walks back behind his desk. “Six months ago I got an offer to be chief of police in a little town on the Florida coast. Ever since I saw Jessup lying in that ditch, I’'ve been wishing I hadn'’t said no.”

I walk forward and lay a hand on his shoulder. “It’s a sad day when two Mississippi boys can’t trust each other any more than this.”

“Yes, sir, it is. Things have slid a long way out of whack.”

“Maybe we need to try to do something about it.”

Logan’s eyes open a little wider. “Maybe. Let’s see what that autopsy says. You stay in touch, Penn.”

I turn to go, but the chief’s voice stops me at the door.

“How’s that little girl of yours doing?”

“She’s fine,” I reply, my eyes hard and flat. “It was good to see you, Don. Take care of yourself.”

CHAPTER

21

I'm standing before the grave of Florence Irene Ford, who died in 1871 at age ten. Because the child was afraid of storms, Irene’s mother had a glass window installed in the casket, so that during inclement weather she could descend the little stairway behind the gravestone and reassure her child. This tale always fascinated Tim Jessup, so I thought Florence’s stairway might make a good hiding place for the stolen disc. But a locked metal trapdoor protects the stairway now, the price of protecting the cemetery from vandals.

For ninety minutes I’'ve crisscrossed the cemetery in search of Jonathan Sands’s missing disc, following a map that only I could have drawn. Sketched hastily in my Moleskine notebook, it shows the locations of graves of people that Tim and I both knew. If Tim were running for his life and meant to hide evidence with the intent of retrieving it later—or in the worst case for me to retrieve it—I figured he would choose a spot I might think of on my own. A grave we both knew seemed the likeliest place. Had I chosen to include deceased people from my parents’ generation, it would have been a long list indeed, but knowing that time was short, I included only ours, with two exceptions. Still, I could easily think of nine, and they were spread throughout the vast cemetery.

There was Mallory Candler, our Miss Mississippi, who was mur

dered in New Orleans. Tim’s in-laws are also buried here: Julia’s father, a suicide at forty-nine, and her mother, dead from a stroke two years later. Two St. Stephen’s schoolmates who died in accidents also made the list: a boy shot by his brother while hunting, and a girl who broke her neck diving into a pond when she was twelve. Kate Townsend, a St. Stephen’s student who was murdered a year and a half ago, also went on my map, but I found no sign of anything hidden near her—or any other person’s—tomb.

My next step was to include the famous monuments of the cemetery, figuring that in the dark Tim might not have had time to search out the stones of the recently deceased. This trek took longer, for the older sections have no modern grid layout or uniform tombstones. Sweating from the midday heat, I crawled through a world of fantastical sculptures, mausoleums fenced with heavy wrought iron, cracked marble and masonry filled with crannies ideally suited to hide contraband. I probed like an archaeologist beside the graves of the principals in the Goat Castle murder case; of Rosalie Beekman, the only casualty of the Civil War at Natchez; of Louise the Unfortunate, an unknown woman from the North who died in a Natchez brothel; and of Bud Scott, the famed black bandleader many believe to be the father of Louis Armstrong, who spent several summers in Natchez as a boy. Yet none of these mossy monuments concealed the treasure I sought.

While concealed in the shadows between two mausoleums, I used the Blackhawk satellite phone to check on Annie and my mother. They had already reached Houston, and were nearly to the safe house that awaited them. I gave the Blackhawk dispatcher the names of the five percent investors in Golden Parachute and asked if the company could check out the two Chinese investors for me. After promising this would be done, the dispatcher informed me that Daniel Kelly could arrive in Natchez in twelve to fifteen hours, depending on certain variables. This was faster than I’d hoped, and welcome news. During bad times, Kelly makes good things happen, and when he can’t manage that, he at least deters those who would like to make things worse.

Knowing that the missing disc is all that might bring my family safety from Sands—or give me the weapon I need to destroy him—I prepare to continue my search, but the sheer size of the task is

overwhelming. I see why Quinn was so anxious for me to take it on. It would take strangers weeks to search this graveyard.

When my cell phone rings, I half expect to hear Seamus Quinn’s voice, but the caller is Paul Labry.

“Penn, you need to get over here,” he says.

“Where? The Ramada?”

“No, we moved the pilots’ meeting to the Visitors’ Center. We needed the space. All the pilots know about the shooting, and they all want a say in what happens next.”

“Well, that’s the city’s decision. The pilots can stay or leave as they will.”

“Most of them want to hear what happened from the horse’s mouth before they decide. I really need you to get over here. The meeting is controlled chaos right now. Another fifteen minutes, and it could be a riot.”

“I'm on my way.”

The Natchez Visitor and Reception Center looks like the student union building of a junior college. Cut into a slope in the shadow of a Hampton Inn and a casino hotel, it’s almost invisible as you cross the bridge from Louisiana to Mississippi. When large events are held here, access is virtually impossible. Nearly a hundred pickups with balloon trailers have wedged themselves into the parking lot. There would be enough room were it not for the regiment of cars that have filled every remaining space in the lot and even the grassy shoulders. The license plates tell me these are local people drawn to the scene by the rumor of this morning’s shooting. Making my way up the sloping asphalt, I realize it could take me a half hour to get through the milling crowd of locals. As I near its periphery, though, Paul Labry texts me to walk around to a service door behind the center, where he will be waiting.

True to his word, Labry admits me to the building and rushes me down a bland corridor to the main meeting area, which looks like a breakout meeting room in a convention hotel. A hundred men and half as many women sit in folding chairs before a lectern on a small riser. Eddie Jarvis, one of the city selectmen, is speaking to them, and everyone seems amazingly calm. Labry is talking in my ear, but it takes me a few moments to register the import of his words.

“Hans Necker just saved our ass. He called some key pilots as soon as he got out of surgery and told them he thought the shooting was a freak accident, some kids out hunting who got out of hand. About half the pilots wanted to keep flying anyway. The weather hasn’'t been this good in years, and there’s always the prize money.”

“What’s the festival committee say?”

“What do you think? Balloons in the air means money, especially tomorrow. Sunday without balloons is always a dud, financially speaking.”

“Do I need to talk at all?”

“Just a quick word of thanks. Show them you’re all right. Reassure them.”

Many in the crowd have noticed me, and they'’re watching me now, not Eddie Jarvis. Jarvis waves me forward, and I take the lectern.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for getting here on short notice. What happened to Hans Necker and me today has rattled everyone, I'm sure. But I want you to know that I agree with Hans. I feel sure this was an isolated occurrence. I think everyone should make his or her own choice about whether to continue flying, but we intend to go on with the festival. Law enforcement will have a strong presence along the course this afternoon and tomorrow.”

“Will you be flying this afternoon?” someone calls, and there’s some muted laughter.

“I will. But I'’ll be aboard a sheriff’s department helicopter, helping to scout the course. I don'’t want to put any of you good people at risk by asking you to fly me. It could be that today’s gunman was a disgruntled constituent of mine.”

There’s more laughter this time. Balloon pilots are an intrepid bunch, but not all of them seem reassured.

“I was in the balloon behind you guys,” says a mustached man in the fourth row. “I heard the bullets flying, but no gunshot. Do the police think the shooter used a silenced rifle?”

There’s some murmuring at this.

“I was in the service,” the man explains. “That'’s what it sounded like to me.”

“The police and the sheriff’s department are looking into all the available evidence. If we learn anything that bears on the safety of

future flights, you’ll all be informed immediately. I'm going to arrange the helicopter flyovers now. Thank you again for all you'’ve done to help make the festival a success. Mr. Jarvis?”

I wave and leave the lectern, joining Labry by the door.

“That was just right,” he says. “Best you could hope for.”

“How many do you think will keep flying?”

“Half. And half is plenty. If half of them fly, and this weather holds, the festival could still break a record.”

“I need a phone, Paul. Not your cell either. A hard line.”

He gives me a strange look. “What’s with all the cloak-and-dagger this weekend?”

“Nothing. I just don'’t want anybody hearing our security arrangements.”

Labry steers me toward a door, then pushes it open and speaks to a middle-aged woman sitting at a desk inside. “Could we borrow your office, Margaret? City business.”

“Of course,” she says, picking up her purse and coming around the desk. “Glad to see you’re all right, Mr. Mayor.”

“Thank you.”

I motion for Labry to follow her out, then take Danny McDavitt’s cell number from my pocket. He answers immediately.

“Do you know who this is?” I ask.

“I do.”

“Where are you, Major?”

“Adams County Airport. Topping up the tank.”

“Can you pick me up somewhere close to town?”

“No problem. Where?”

I think quickly. “There’s a big field right in the middle of town, on the north side. It’s right behind the Children’s Home on Union Street. Not a lot of people know about it. I'’ll be waiting there. If you touch down just long enough for me to jump on, nobody watching from a distance will even know you landed.”

“Got it. I'’ll see you in fifteen minutes.”

When I leave the office, Labry is there to escort me back to my car.

“Keep your head down as we pass the crowd,” he says. “Caitlin nearly beat down the door to get access to that meeting. She’s liable to have an ACLU lawyer out there.”

We exit the building at the rear, beneath the whipping flags of England, France, Spain, the Confederacy, the United States, and of course Mississippi, which still sports the Confederate battle standard in its top left corner.

Making a wide circle around the crowd outside, we move down a row of cars toward my Saab. We’re thirty feet away when Caitlin steps from behind a balloon trailer with a cell phone held to her ear.

“Well, here you are at last,” she says. “Paul, I need a minute with the mayor.”

Labry looks at me. I sigh in exasperation, then wave him off. He moves back toward the Visitors’ Center at a vigorous march.

Caitlin pockets her cell phone and walks toward me, her green eyes intent, probing mine with the power of the quick mind behind them.

“One minute,” I tell her.

“I just heard the flights are going to continue.”

“Yes.”

“There’s no way you would have supported that unless you knew that the shooting today was directed at you alone.”

“What do you want, Caitlin?”

I try to keep the frustration out of my voice, but my resentment at her decision to leave Natchez has not left me. She looks hurt, but also resolved to press forward.

“I just saw some pictures that were found at Tim Jessup’s house. Nude pictures. Of a woman who worked on the

Magnolia Queen.

”

“Some cop is going to lose his job this week.”

“Listen to me, Penn, please. I think someone is trying to play me. I'm not even having to fight to get this stuff out of them. They’re using me to put out a story, I can feel it.”

I don'’t respond.

“Won’t you tell me what’s happening? Let me help you.”

“Don’t you mean help yourself? You’re in the hunt for another Pulitzer, aren'’t you?”

Her eyes flash. “I'm hunting for the truth. As always.”

“I can’t help you.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“What else do you have?”

She takes a deep breath, looks off toward the crowd, which is dis

persing into the cars now. “Not much. But that’s going to change. You know it will.”

Conscious of my rendezvous with McDavitt, I make a fast decision. “Caitlin, let’s pretend no time has passed since we were together. None. No hurt feelings, nothing. I'm telling you that if you pursue this thing, your life is in danger. More than when we worked the Del Payton case, even. You won'’t be helping Tim or what he was trying to do. You won'’t be serving the public interest. And you’ll be putting me and my family at risk, as well as yourself. In a few days, I may be able to tell you more, but for now, that’s it.”

She looks back in disbelief. “So, I'm just supposed to walk away?”

“Weren’t you planning to anyway? I thought you were on your way to New Orleans with your friend?”

“He’s already gone.”

“Why aren'’t you?”

She starts to answer, then bites her bottom lip and shakes her head. “I don'’t know. I really don'’t. Thanks for the minute. It was a real education.”

She turns and follows Labry’s path up toward the Visitors’ Center, her jet hair blowing in the breeze from the river.

Eight hundred feet over the Mississippi River, my stomach starts to go on me. The balloon crash was too recent; I have to belt myself tightly into the chopper just to keep my nerves together. Danny McDavitt is sitting in front of me, in the left seat of the Athens Point sheriff’s department helicopter. Folded into the right-hand seat is a tall, lean black man in his twenties named Carl Sims. Carl is the former marine sniper that Daniel Kelly told me about on the phone. He works as a deputy for the Athens Point sheriff’s department, but today, like most people who live within fifty miles of town, he was attending the Balloon Festival. His black jeans and blue hoodie contrast with McDavitt’s faded khakis and polo shirt. Though Sims and McDavitt are thirty years apart in age, they seem to know each other well. They communicate in brief phrases or dry jokes, and even their silences seem charged with exchanges of information.

Ostensibly, we’re flying the course of the afternoon balloon race,

watching the ground for signs of snipers. In fact, we’re searching for Tim Jessup’s car. When a child is kidnapped, the Investigative Support Unit of the FBI recommends getting a helicopter airborne as fast as possible, equipped with a vehicle description. Choppers are remarkably effective at locating cars on the run, and I don'’t see why they should be any less effective at locating cars that have been abandoned. If Tim’s car has purposely been hidden, of course, our search is probably pointless. But since I have access to the chopper, searching for the missing car seems a better use of my time than riding shotgun for a bunch of balloons that won'’t be fired on unless I'm flying in one of them.

Once again, because of prevailing winds, the race course crosses the river from Mississippi to Louisiana. More than half of the pilots have decided to stay for the remainder of the festival, and half of these have already crossed the river and are sailing southwest under a glorious blue sky. The remaining balloons are stretched out to our left at various altitudes, from the twin bridges back to the launch site at the Natchez Airport. The wind has settled down since this morning, and from this distance the balloons look painted on the sky.

To the west, the Adams County sheriff’s helicopter is running along the levee on Deer Park Road like a gunship preparing to lay down suppressing fire on enemy troops.

“I think they’ve got the primary mission under control,” McDavitt says over the interphone. “What say we get to work?”

“I still don'’t know exactly what we’re doing,” Carl Sims confesses, looking back from the front seat. “I'm happy to help, but a little detail would be appreciated.”

I don'’t see any reason to burden McDavitt or Sims with more knowledge than they need. “Guys, let me put this as simply as I can. Last night, a friend of mine was murdered. Who did it isn’t important at the moment. But they’ve threatened my family. Right now we’re looking for my friend’s car. It’s a blue Nissan Sentra, five or six years old. I'm not sure what it can tell me, but there might be evidence inside that could nail the people who killed him. Is that enough for you?”

“Where are we looking?” McDavitt asks.

“I think they caught him somewhere out past the city cemetery, on Cemetery Road or one of the dirt roads that turns off it.”

The major executes a pedal turn and heads toward Weymouth Hall, a mansion atop the bluff not far from Jewish Hill. As we approach the widow’s walk atop the house, he turns north and starts following Cemetery Road at about four hundred feet. The cars parked at the houses and shacks below are easily identifiable, and this gives me some hope.

“Got a license plate number?” Carl asks.

“No.”

“I can get that for you. One call to the dispatcher in Athens Point.”

“Can’t risk it. This has to be totally under the radar.”

After a brief glance at McDavitt, Carl says, “Right. Blue Nissan Sentra.”

The Athens Point helicopter is brand-new, and far more advanced than the Adams County chopper, having been purchased after the crash Hans Necker mentioned during our stop at the old Triton Battery plant. It’s a Bell JetRanger, with a lot of bells and whistles I don'’t understand, but one that I do is FLIR, or Forward Looking Infrared Radar. This formerly military surveillance system is based around a pod mounted beneath the chopper’s nose, which contains an array of sensors that detect both infrared and visible light. Its readings are processed by a computer, then displayed on a screen mounted on the instrument panel in front of Major McDavitt. Modern FLIR units are so sensitive to heat that they can “see” the transient “handprint”—actually a heatprint—of a fugitive who has momentarily touched a car as he flees from police in total blackness. In daylight, FLIR signals can be blended with the signals from visible light cameras to create a sort of God’s-eye view of the terrain below. The Athens Point unit was donated by a lumber millionaire and avid hunter who occasionally uses it to monitor the white-tailed deer population on the thousands of acres he owns.

McDavitt seems to be flying with one eye on the ground and the other on the FLIR screen. When I ask about this, he explains that he flew Pave Low helicopters in Afghanistan, one of the most advanced choppers in the world, and that he became accustomed to using instruments as his primary interface with the world. Carl Sims searches the old-fashioned way, as befits a former sniper. His forehead is pressed to the curved windshield beside him, and he takes

occasional breaks to survey the ground through the “chin bubble” below his feet.

Our main problem is not that Cemetery Road runs through a vast forest, but that this forest is laced with dozens of dirt roads, most cut long ago by loggers or oil drillers, and few are well maintained. If Tim was fleeing from pursuers in his car, he could have turned down any of these roads, hoping to find a wooded sanctuary.

“How far off the road do you want me to look?” McDavitt asks, obviously sharing my concern.

“Half a mile, I guess. Much more than that, and we won'’t be able to see anything anyway.”

“Half a mile, it is.”

The pilot begins banking from side to side, and as the chopper dips and rolls, my stomach begins to churn. Following advice I’'ve heard about seasickness, I fix my gaze on the horizon line across the river. Carl and Danny make occasional comments about the landscape below, and several times the pilot drops to treetop level to examine a car more closely. Sims even spots a Sentra, but when we descend to check it, we find that its paint is actually green.

A couple of minutes after this disappointing reconnaissance, McDavitt says, “Son of a bitch,” and brings the ship into a hover over a high bluff not far from the river. He points to the FLIR screen. “Look at that, Carl.”

“I'm seeing it.”

“What is it?” I ask, leaning forward into the cockpit.

“A car,” the pilot answers. “And it’s hot.”

On the screen I see a tiny black rectangle partially obscured by masses of gray that must represent the foliage. “How hot?”

“It was probably still on fire this morning.”

“Vehicles can burn for a long time,” Sims explains. “Upholstery and stuff. I saw it in Iraq.”

“It looks…I don'’t know, sort of far away. A lot lower than the trees.”

“It’s in a hole,” says McDavitt.

“How deep?”

“I can’t tell. I tried putting the laser on it, but there’s too much vegetation to get an accurate reading. Just guessing, I’d say three hundred feet below those treetops.”

I lean into the window and gaze out over the Mississippi River. After orienting myself to the angle of the bend, and the lake not far beyond the river, a sense of certainty much like triumph settles in me.

“I know where we are.”

“Where?” Carl asks.

“The Devil’s Punchbowl.”

The sniper whips his head around and stares at me. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“How do you know?” asks McDavitt.

“I spent the night down there once. A long time ago.”

“Bullshit,” says Sims.

“Seriously. I was seventeen. It was a Boy Scout thing. Merit Badge. Camping out overnight by yourself. Being a typical teenager, I chose the scariest place I could think of.”

“I never knew anybody who’s actually been down there,” Sims says. “I always heard outlaws dumped the bodies of their victims there back in the old days. Heads separated from the bodies, and all.”

McDavitt points at the FLIR screen. “I think somebody else heard the same stories. Got inspired, maybe.”

“Maybe so,” I agree, trying to let the truth of what happened last night find its way to my consciousness.

“What did you see down there?” Carl asks me. “Find any skeletons?”

“No. Wildlife, mostly. Lots of deer, foxes. I saw some black-bear tracks. I almost stepped on a six-foot rattlesnake.”

“How deep is it? For real?”

“I didn't have any way to measure it. But it got dark down there in the afternoon. And I almost drowned that night. It started raining, and before I knew it, I was in the middle of a flash flood.”

McDavitt chuckles softly. “I always heard that Jean Laffite might have hid his treasure down there. You didn't find any pieces of eight, did you?”

“Not for lack of trying. I took a metal detector with me. And I did find a treasure, of a kind. But not pirate gold.”

“What did you find?” Sims asks, his eyes bright.

For a few moments I resist answering. This memory I’'ve always kept to myself. “A cougar. I saw a cougar down there. They’re sup

posed to be extinct in these parts, but I know what I saw. He was on a limb looking down at a game path. There were deer tracks all through there. He was waiting for supper to walk by.”

“What happened?”

“He looked at me, I looked at him, and then he was gone. Never made a sound. I didn't sleep a wink. All night I expected him to pounce on me out of nowhere. But he never did.”

“He didn't like the smell of you,” Carl says.

“Can’t say I blame him,” McDavitt says in a deadpan voice. “I’d have to be awful hungry to choose you over venison. But let’s not get sidetracked. Anybody watching this ship is going to see us hanging over this hole like a buzzard circling a carcass. What’s the plan?”

“That'’s got be Tim’s car,” I aver. “The question is, did he run it down there himself, or did the bad guys dump it there?”

“Why would he do it himself?” Carl asks.

“If they were chasing him, he might do it to make them think he’d crashed and died.”

McDavitt nods thoughtfully. “If he did that, then the bad guys might not have searched it yet.”

“If they know it’s there, they’ve searched it. And they probably do know,” I say, recalling Sands’s certainty that Tim did not e-mail the stolen data to anyone. “But we can’t be sure.” I could call Seamus Quinn and save myself a lot of trouble, but if Quinn doesn’'t know about the car…“I need to get down there, guys.”

“How you going to do that?” McDavitt asks. “My hoist won'’t even get you halfway.”

“Same way I did when I was seventeen, I guess.”

“How long did that take you?”

“Most of a day.”

An intermittent beep sounds in the muffled hum of the JetRanger’s cabin.

“What’s that?” McDavitt scans his instrument panel. “That'’s not coming from the chopper.”

I pull off one earpiece of my headset. “Sorry. It’s a satellite phone.” I lift the phone from the floor, click the SEND button, and put the receiver to my ear. “Hello?”

“Penn, it’s Dad.”

“What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

“No, but I think you ought to come by my office.”

“Right now?”

“Right now. There’s somebody here to see you.”

“Can you say who it is?”

“I’d rather not.”

I feel momentary panic. “Are you all right?”

“I'm fine, don'’t worry.”

“Did you call from your office line?”

“Hell no. I borrowed Chris Shepard’s cell phone.”

“Okay.” Chris Shepard is one of my father’s younger partners.

“Just get over here now, if you can.”

“I'm kind of in the middle of something important.”

There’s a brief silence. Then my father says, “Well, let’s see how important. I’'ve got Jewel Washington sitting here with the results of Tim Jessup’s autopsy, which she’s under instructions not to share with anybody. Is that important enough?”

Shit.

“Don’t let her leave. I'’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“That'’s what I figured.”

I hang up and look down at the forest below, then at the men in the front of the chopper. “I need to get back to my car.”

McDavitt nods. Carl keeps looking at me, then expels a lungful of air. “If you really think what you’re looking for could be down there, I can check it out for you.”

A rush of gratitude flows through me. “Are you sure? That'’s a deep hole.”

Sims laughs. “Yeah, well. I’'ve heard about that place all my life. Might as well see for myself what’s at the bottom.”

“What exactly is he looking for?” McDavitt asks.

“A DVD, probably. Any form of digital media.”

“Any digital media in that car has been burned to a crisp,” the pilot points out.

“Could have been thrown clear,” Carl says. “If it was in a bag or a case, say.”

“You

want

to go down there,” McDavitt says, shaking his head. “Can you tell this guy was a marine or what?”

“You could be right about the fire,” I concede. “But if we don'’t look down there, we’ll never know for sure.”

Carl speaks with his face pressed to the window. “If you got in

and out when you were a Boy Scout, I can sure as hell do it. Can’t be any worse than Iraq, right?”

“I don'’t think they have rattlesnakes or bears in Iraq.”

“Or cougars,” McDavitt adds with sarcasm.

Carl nods thoughtfully. “You got a point there. But I’'ve got good boots. And if I have to shoot, I hit what I aim at.”

“The trick,” says McDavitt, “is seeing the threat in

time

to shoot.”

The sniper smiles. “I'’ll keep my eyes open.”

“Okay,” says McDavitt. “Where’s this traveling circus headed next?”

“My car,” I tell him.

“Then mine,” Sims says. “ASAP. I don'’t want to be at the bottom of that hole when night falls.”

McDavitt swings the chopper out over the river and roars back toward town.

CHAPTER

22

My father’s medical office looks like something that belongs in the Smithsonian Institution, the refuge of a doctor who loves history and the art of medicine, and who exhibits his disdain for modern gadgetry by banishing his notebook computer to the nurses’ station outside his inner sanctum. The office is almost a museum itself, housing a gargantuan collection of medical books, Civil War memoirs, English novels, ship models, antique surgical instruments, and meticulously hand-painted lead soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars, each one accurate to the last detail. Every inch of fabric and leather in the room exudes the smell of cigars, which announces to patients old and new my father’s long-held medical philosophy:

Do as I say, not as I do.

I find Dad sitting behind his desk, his feet resting on a stool, while Jewel Washington laughs at something he said before I entered. I could swear I see a trace of embarrassment in Jewel’s dark cheeks. It’s hard to imagine what would make a nurse who’s made it past fifty blush, but if anybody knows what that would be, it’s Tom Cage. Jewel stands to greet me, and we hug briefly.

“Sit by me on the couch,” she says. “I didn't bring any paperwork, for obvious reasons. I ain’t supposed to show you the autopsy, so how about I just summarize it verbally?”

“Did Shad Johnson tell you not to show it to me?”

Jewel’s eyes glint with submerged meaning. “Let’s say the district attorney advised the county coroner that a homicide investigation is no business of the mayor’s.”

“Duly noted. What did the autopsy show?”

“Your friend was shot.”

A chill races along my arms. I expected anything but this. “Shot?”

“Pathologist in Jackson dug a .22 Magnum slug out of his heart.”

“Why didn't we see the entry wound? Was it masked by one of those dog bites?”

“You got it. Dog mauled that boy something terrible.”

“Are you sure it was a dog?”

“I got out the textbooks and took measurements. That man was tore up by a canine—a big one—and the wounds definitely occurred prior to death.”

Dad shakes his head in disgust.

Jewel says, “You combine that with the burns, and—”

“Just a minute. What caused the burns?”

“Some were from an electric cigarette lighter, like in a car. Others from an actual cigarette, which gets hotter than a car lighter. A lit cigarette burns at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Draw on it, it heats up to nearly thirteen hundred degrees. That'’s a world of pain right there.”

“Sons of bitches,” Dad mutters.

“Add up those two things, you get one answer. Somebody tortured that man. Why? For kicks? For revenge? Something he knew? I'm guessing you’d know more about the motive than I would.”

“I don'’t know anything at this point, Jewel.”

She gives me a long look. “You sound more like Shad Johnson than Penn Cage.”

“Let’s get back to Shad in a minute. What else did the postmortem show?”

“They only have the initial toxicology panel back, but there were definitely drugs in the victim’s blood.”

Damn it.

“What kind of drugs?”

“Opiates, some crystal meth.”

I shake my head, unwilling to accept that Tim had gotten high before carrying out his secret mission.

“Funny thing, though,” Jewel says. “There was some bruising at

the injection site. Antecubital vein, which is unusual. Most addicts try to hide needle marks. This guy wasn'’t a habitual user, at least not that way. His veins were in decent shape, except for some old scarring between his toes and on his penis.”

“What killed him, Jewel? The fall or the bullet?”

“The fall, but only because it happened so soon after he was shot. Bullet wound would’ve killed him in a minute or two.”

“Did anybody hear shots on the bluff prior to Tim’s fall? I don'’t remember Chief Logan saying anything about that.”

“Not as far as I know.”

“And you said the wound would have killed him in a couple of minutes.”

“Yes.”

“If he’d been shot in the SUV, could he have made the run to the fence, and then run along it like he did?”

Jewel is considering this when Dad says, “It’s possible. I’'ve seen men hit several times with higher-caliber bullets continue fighting for over a minute.”

Jewel and I look at my father in silence, knowing that this kind of knowledge was not absorbed in medical school, but in Korea.

“In that situation,” Dad goes on, “being tortured, his adrenaline would have been off the charts. And he obviously summoned the strength to break away from his captors.”

“Okay, maybe that explains it. But if he was shot at the fence, then someone used a silenced weapon.”

“Like with the balloon,” Dad says. “I see.”

Jewel looks between us but says nothing. Like a lot of people in town, she has heard about the crash landing, and the rest is simple enough to piece together.

“Any other significant findings?” I ask.

Her eyes fix on me. “You could say that.”

“Well?”

“Penn Cage, I didn't carry my tired old butt out here to be doing all the givin’ without gettin’ nothing in return. You tell me what’s going on. Who killed that man like that? And why?”

I look to my father for support, but he only shrugs. “Jewel,” I say, “I want you to listen to me. Listen like I'm telling you about one of your children. You don'’t want to know any more about this case

than you already do. You could end up on the same table Tim was cut on. Tell me you understand what I'm saying. I don'’t want to add your safety to my list of worries.”

The coroner shakes her head, but I can’t tell if she’s offended or not. “What are you telling me? Stop working this death?”

“No. Just don'’t do anything out of your normal investigative routine. Follow the book, and nothing more. And by that standard, I think you’re finished.”

Now she looks offended. “If I’d followed the book, you wouldn'’t know what you know now.”

“I realize that. And I appreciate it. But the risk is mine to take, not yours.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I owe somebody.”

A small, strange smile shows on Jewel’s face. “Now you sound like your daddy. Okay, then. You’re telling me I'm at risk just by coming here, right?”

“You could be. If they'’re watching Dad. You need to come up with a plausible reason for your visit.”

“Prescription,” Dad says. “Is your mother still having problems with peripheral neuropathy?”

Jewel smiles broadly now. “Do you ever forget anything about a patient?”

“Hell, yes. More every day.”

“I don'’t believe it.”

I touch the coroner’s wrist. “You said there was something else.”

“Pathologist found something in your friend’s rectum.”

“What? Drugs?”

“No. The cap from a thumb drive.”

My heart thumps against my sternum.

“A thumb what?” Dad asks.

“A flash-memory device,” Jewel explains. “USB type. Made by Sony. It’s about two inches long and a third of an inch wide.”

“Only the cap?” I ask, certain that I'm a lot closer to at least the copy of the data on the DVD Tim stole from the

Magnolia Queen.

“Not the actual device?”

“Right. Weird, huh?”

“Maybe not.”

Jewel ponders my face. “He stuck the drive up there to hide it from whoever killed him, didn't he?”

To smuggle it off the boat,

I think. “Probably.”

“This guy worked on the

Magnolia Queen,

right?”

“Jewel—”

“So was he smuggling information off the boat.”

“Please stop, right there. I'm not kidding.”

She frowns and waves me away as she might a pestering child. “I ain’t tellin’ nobody nothin’ ’bout this. I just want to know for my own self. So when I sit up at night thinking about it, like I always do, I'’ll eventually be able to get me some sleep instead of puzzling about it till the sun comes up.”

“You’re on the right track, that’s all I can tell you.”

“Okay. So the question is, who has the USB drive now?”

I nod.

“Well, your friend left work just before midnight, and he died around twelve thirty-five. So whoever tortured him didn't have him long, not even if they had him that whole time, which they probably didn't. Jessup had lots of welts and abrasions on his legs and arms, like he’d been running through the woods.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hm. So let’s say they had ten minutes to torture him in the backseat of that SUV. I doubt they had time to do a cavity search.”

“Don’t be too sure. Some professionals do that kind of thing automatically.”

Jewel’s brow furrows. “What kind of professionals? You talkin’ ’bout cops?”

“Not exactly. Military types. Ex-military. Paramilitary, maybe.”

“What exactly does

para

military mean?”

“

Sort of

military,” Dad explains. “Like

para

medic. Not quite a doctor.”

“They didn't expect Tim to get out of that vehicle,” I reason aloud. “They injected him with drugs, started torturing him, but somehow he got out while they were driving down Broadway. So unless they cavity-searched him, or he gave up the USB drive’s location right away, he got out of that vehicle with it. Who had access to the body, postmortem?”

“The cops at the scene,” Jewel says.

“You think they’d pull his pants down and cavity-search him with spectators hanging over the fence like they were?”

“They could have,” Dad says. “They could have leaned a bunch of guys over him to shield it, the way NFL teams do when they want to hide an on-field injection from the camera.”

“No. That would take too many dirty cops. Let’s assume the drive was still in situ when Jewel got the body. Who had access after that?”

Jewel’s still looking at the ceiling, nodding slowly. “It was so late that I put him in the morgue at St. Catherine’s rather than drive him to Jackson. University said they’d rush the autopsy for me, but it wouldn'’t speed it up any for me to drive him up in the middle of the night. And I’d been all day under that hot sun—”

“The morgue is locked, right?”

“Most of the time. And the drawers are locked. But it ain’t like I got the only key. They gave me my key to the drawers when I got the job. I probably should have put new locks on them, but the administrator might not appreciate that, seeing how I don'’t own the hospital. So, I guess anybody with a key to the drawers could get to the body. The local pathologist for sure. Maybe some med techs or even nurses. Hell, maintenance might have a key, for all I know.”

“We need to find out.”

Jewel snorts. “The way things are at that hospital right now, you could ask questions for a month and never find out everybody who’s got a key. That'’s like asking who’s got a key to a church or a school. And if I start asking, everybody’s gonna know it. That how you want to play this?”

“No. Forget that. But as far as you know, no cops have reported a USB drive being found?”

“Nope. They don'’t even know about the cap, or I’d have already heard a dozen jokes about somebody ‘putting a cap in his ass.’”

“I think we need to get Jewel moving,” Dad says.

“One last thing,” I say. “Shad Johnson.”

Jewel’s brown eyes filled with an emotion I can’t read. “Pardon my French, Penn, but that man’s sure got a hard-on for you. I reckon ever since you beat him out for mayor, he’s been out to get you.”

“It goes back farther than that. It was the Del Payton case.”

“Mm-hm,”

Jewel responds with a unique emphasis that I’'ve only heard from black women. “That'’s why he lost for mayor. Betrayed his own people. And we knew it. We’re finally past the time where black folks always gonna vote for you just ’cause you black.”

“Shad explicitly warned you not to share any information with me?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Did he give you a reason?”

“He said the victim was a friend of yours, and you might be involved in the case somehow. Giving you any kind of information would be improper, maybe even illegal.”

“Were those his exact words?”

“He said something about a ‘firing offense.’”

“Yet here she is,” Dad says. “Good people.”

“I do appreciate it, Jewel,” I tell her. “More than you know. But from now on, you need to lie low. There’s nothing more you can do.”

She pulls a wry face. “I ain’t so sure about that. But you won'’t hear from me unless I’'ve got something you really need.”

“How will you know that, if you don'’t know what I'm trying to do?”

“Boy, I know what you trying to do. You trying to prove your friend was a good man and nail whoever killed him. And that’s something I can get behind. Shad Johnson can kiss my big ass if he thinks he scares me. I could break that man over my knee.”

“It’s not Shad you have to worry about.”

Jewel nods slowly. “I hear you. But I know how to walk soft when I need to. Now, let me get out of here. I'm dying for a cigarette. I hate to admit it, but it’s the Lord’s truth.”

I'm rising to shake her hand when my cell phone rings.

“Go on and get that,” she says. “You gonna give me that ’scrip for my mama, Doc?”

I move into the hall. “Hello?”

“Penn, this is Julia Jessup.”

“Julia! Are you all right?”

“

No.

I just got off the phone with that girl you used to date, or live with, or whatever.”

“Who? Libby Jensen?”

“No! The one that wrote those lies in the paper this morning!”

“Caitlin Masters? Wait a minute. How did you talk to Caitlin? Did she call your cell phone? You’re not supposed to have that switched on.”

“I called

her.

I'm not going to have half this town believing Tim was dealing drugs. There wasn'’t any damn meth in our house.”

“I know that, Julia.”

Jesus.

“And I know you’re upset. We need to talk about this face-to-face.”

“What you

need

to do is call that bitch and tell her what you just told me. Tell her to write a retraction in tomorrow’s newspaper.”

“Julia, listen, please. The last thing you want right now is Caitlin Masters poking around this story. All that matters is you and your son staying safe. That'’s all Tim would want.”

I hear a child crying, then what sounds like a hand patting flesh. “You don'’t know what Tim wanted,” she says. “It doesn’'t sound like you do, anyway. He wanted to make those bastards he worked for quit whatever they'’re doing. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn'’t listen. He said you were helping him, and now he’s dead. And I don'’t see you defending him. Maybe if Caitlin Masters put all this on the front page, something would get done. I'’ll bet she’d do it too. She already asked me for an interview.”

Beads of sweat have sprung up on my face. How can a woman who just lost her husband not see that what she’s proposing could cost her and her son their lives? Just saying it on the telephone has put her at risk, and Caitlin too.

“Julia, Tim came to me for a reason. He trusted me because I’'ve dealt with this kind of thing before, and because he knew I would do the right thing. But the right thing is rarely what your emotions tell you to do when you’re upset. I know you can’t see that right now, but you have to try. Julia…? Are you still there?”

“I'm here.”

“Please forget about talking to Caitlin. Nothing good will come of that, and it could cost you everything.

Everything.

Do you understand? Julia? Do I have to spell this out for you?”

Her only reply is a strangled growl, a mixture of rage and frustration that rises to a crescendo, then abruptly ceases.

“Julia, as long as you stay where you are and keep quiet, you’ll be safe. You can call me tonight, and we’ll work out a way to see each other. All right?”

“Christ,” she says in disgust. “I'm hanging up.”

The phone goes dead.

I walk to the open door of my father’s office. Dad is bending over his desk to sign a prescription, while Jewel studies a photograph of our family when I was eleven and my sister seventeen.

“Ya’ll ever see Jenny anymore?” she asks.

“Not very often,” Dad confesses.

“She looks just like Mrs. Peggy, almost exactly.”

“I'm sorry, I’'ve got to run,” I tell them.

“Where are you going?” Dad asks.

“I have to find Caitlin. Thanks for everything, Jewel. No more warnings from me.”

The coroner smiles. “Boy, I didn't make it this far not knowing how to take care of myself. Get out of here.”

With a quick wave, I turn and run for my car.

CHAPTER

23

Tim Jessup’s father is the last man I expected to hear from today, but four blocks from Caitlin’s house, I answered my cell phone and heard the old surgeon’s voice in my ear. Jack Jessup is the opposite of my father: arrogant, greedy, brusque with patients. Golf, money, and the respect of society are his primary obsessions, at least the ones I know about. Seen through his father’s eyes, Tim must have seemed a complete failure from the time he entered high school.

Dr. Jessup gave me no specifics, but asked if I could stop by the Catholic rectory in the next half hour. I assumed that he intended to ask me to read or say something at Tim’s wake. I wanted to see Caitlin as soon as possible—she had agreed via text message to meet me at her house—but since the cathedral and rectory are only a few blocks away from our houses, I agreed to meet the surgeon.

It’s close to dark when I pull up to the imposing mass of St. Mary’s Minor Basilica, a monument to the Irish immigrants who came to Natchez in the nineteenth century. The Irish dominated the Catholic faith here, leavened by a few Italian families who escaped indentured servitude upriver in Louisiana. Of course, Natchez has black Catholics as well, and they worship at the historic Holy Family Church on St. Catherine Street, but their journey, like so many in Natchez, was a parallel one. The dual cultures, shadows of each

other, stretch out toward infinity, a single breath apart, but never quite meeting.

The rectory is a modest building, built of the same brick as the cathedral. A long, gray Mercedes is parked in front of it, and behind this an older Lincoln Continental. As I approach the door, a woman bursts through and rushes past me. She looks familiar, but all I really register is a graying bouffant and pancake makeup concealing a face twisted into a grimace of rage and anguish. She disappears into the Lincoln, then races down the street with a squeal of rubber.

What’s going on here?

I wonder.

Father Mullen is a new priest, and young. I’'ve only met him on a couple of occasions, at civic functions. A well-educated Midwesterner, he seems somewhat bemused by the Southernness of his new flock. I wonder how he sees Jack Jessup, a clotheshorse who used to charge $1,000 to remove a mole my father would have cut off for $75.

I find Dr. Jessup and Father Mullen in the priest’s office, the surgeon’s expensive chalk-stripe suit a marked contrast to Mullen’s black robe. I can tell by Jessup’s posture that he’s disturbed about something. He’s leaning over the priest’s desk like a naval officer at the rail of a ship about to go into battle.

Judiciously clearing my throat, I say, “Excuse me?”

The surgeon turns sharply, but his face softens when he recognizes me. He motions me forward, and I shake his hand.

Behind him, Father Mullen looks as though he would rather be mortifying his flesh in a monastery than dealing with Dr. Jessup in his present state. The surgeon has intimidated more formidable men than priests.

“What can I do for you, Dr. Jessup?” I ask.

The surgeon’s mouth works behind his closed lips for a few moments, as though he’s being forced to chew and swallow a day-old lemon wedge. When Dr. Jessup finally speaks, I realize his voice is choked with indignation.

“Did you see who just left?”

“She looked familiar, but she passed me so fast, I didn't recognize her.”

“Charlotte McQueen.”

I blink in surprise, but it takes less time than a blink for me to

decode the subtext of this situation. Charlotte McQueen is the mother of the boy who died when Tim ran his car off the road in college during his beer run to the county line. In fact, she’s the one who pushed the DA into making Tim do jail time. Mrs. McQueen is an influential member of the Catholic church, and I doubt she came to express her condolences.

“I see,” I temporize. “Well, how exactly can I help, Doctor?”

Dr. Jessup jerks his head toward Father Mullen. “I'’ll let

him

explain it to you.”

The priest tries a conciliatory smile as he stands and walks around his desk, taking care to make a wide arc around Dr. Jessup. I can only imagine what must have transpired before I entered the rectory. “Mr. Mayor,” he begins in a soft voice, but then he stops and looks closely at me. “Are you all right, Mr. Cage?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your eyes are very red.”

“I haven'’t gotten much sleep this weekend. Please go on.”

“I'm not sure we should even be having this conversation, but Dr. Jessup feels that your input might help shed some light on the situation.”

“What exactly is the situation?”

“Well, as you may know, Timothy Jessup was—”

“Just tell him what the woman said,” Dr. Jessup snaps. “Tell him what she wants.”

Father Mullen gives the surgeon a pained look. “Dr. Jessup, I really don'’t think you need worry about Mrs. McQueen’s request. What she asked—”

“Demanded.”

“Yes…yes, I suppose she did. Nevertheless, it’s really very rare nowadays. Only in the most extreme cases does—”

“Stop all the mushmouth! Just tell him.”

Father Mullen turns to me. “Well, as you probably know, Mrs. McQueen’s son Patrick died twenty-seven years ago on a highway near Oxford, Mississippi.”

“Yes, I know. Tim Jessup served time for manslaughter as a result. How does that bear on the present?”

“The vindictive old bitch doesn’'t want Tim to have a Church funeral,” Dr. Jessup says in a choked voice.

Blood rises into my cheeks. “Is that true?”

Father Mullen diplomatically retreats a step. “Not exactly. But in broad terms, yes. I don'’t believe Mrs. McQueen has ever gotten over the death of her son.”

“Of course not. No one does. But I fail to see how that would have any bearing on Tim’s funeral.”

“Well,” Father Mullen says in the tone of a man being forced to point out the most inconvenient of truths, “according to canon law, certain persons may be prohibited from having Catholic funerals. If the person is known to be an apostate or a heretic, or is such a publicly manifest sinner that having a Church funeral would cause a scandal among the congregation, the mass may be—and occasionally is—withheld.”

Dr. Jessup is shaking his head in disgust. “I can’t believe my ears. I’'ve been coming here for thirty-seven years, and—”

“Just a moment, Dr. Jessup,” I say. “Father, are you seriously considering Mrs. McQueen’s request?”

“Well, not in the way you might think. But given the situation, I don'’t feel I can simply reject it out of hand. The problem is that the congregation has become aware that a large quantity of drugs was found in Tim’s home on the night he died.”

“The night he was

murdered,

” Dr. Jessup corrects. “Isn’t that right, Penn? Wasn’t my son murdered?”

“He was.”

Father Mullen nods awkwardly, as though this information hardly advances Tim’s cause. “It seems that some embarrassing pictures have surfaced as well—pictures of a young lady not Mr. Jessup’s wife. They were also found in his home.”

Dr. Jessup snorts. “You want to start going through the closets and computers and cell phones of everyone in this congregation and see how many pictures like that you find?”

Father Mullen blanches at the prospect. “From an ecclesiastical point of view, the issues are several, and I suspect Mrs. McQueen researched them thoroughly before she came to me. Canons 1184 and 1185, to be precise. First, Tim hadn'’t been a practicing Catholic for many years. Second, he never had his child baptized into the faith nor showed any intent to do so. Third, he’s known to have made statements to members of the congregation that he stopped believing

in God decades ago. With all respect, Dr. Jessup, Tim appears to have led a life of dissolution from the time of the drinking incident in which Patrick McQueen died up to the night of his own death, when police say he was selling drugs for a living. But most important, if Tim was indeed murdered, it’s unlikely he got a chance to repent these actions. Any or all of these issues could technically make Tim ineligible to receive the liturgy at his funeral.”

Behind all the Churchspeak, I sense a man being tested in a way he never foresaw until tonight. “What do

you

think, Father?”

“The padre thinks it’s time to punt,” Dr. Jessup says bitterly. “He wants to call the bishop.”

“Dr. Jessup,” Father Mullen says in the soothing voice he must use at hospital bedsides, “almost no one is denied a funeral, or at least a Catholic burial, nowadays. With our modern understanding of psychology, the Church frequently gives even those who take their own lives a mass and burial. I think that in this case, it’s simply a matter of showing Mrs. McQueen that I’'ve taken her request seriously by passing it on to the bishop, who I am sure will make the appropriate decision.”

“Translation,” says Dr. Jessup, “they don'’t want to upset any big contributors. Or the women who keep the Church going. I guess I didn't put enough of the Almighty Dollar in the plate over the years.”

“Doctor,” the priest says with an edge of indignation, “I don'’t think that’s fair.”

“I thought you asked me here to talk about Tim’s wake,” I say, still not quite believing the situation.

Dr. Jessup brings a quivering fist to his mouth, and I realize I'm seeing something I’'ve never witnessed before. Jack Jessup, a surgeon who, for as long as I can remember, appeared to be as stony and remote as a Victorian banker, is crying.

Father Mullen starts toward him as though to commiserate, but I warn the priest off with a glance. When a man like Jack Jessup breaks down, he’s capable of anything.

“Mr. Mayor,” Father Mullen says softly, “Dr. Jessup felt that before I called the bishop, you might be able to give me some details unknown to the public—things that might mitigate the present appearance of things.”

Despite my desire to help, I'm hesitant to reveal anything about

what Tim was doing. It’s not that I don'’t trust the priest. My fear is that Dr. Jessup, in his desire to amend people’s opinions of Tim, might reveal more than he should. In truth I never liked the surgeon, but he’s suffering terribly now, and if I can ameliorate that, I should. The risk of Tim not getting a Catholic funeral must be remote, but one never knows what bureaucrats will do to keep from offending those who subsidize their existence.

“Gentlemen,” I say reluctantly, “I want both of you to give me your word that what I'm about to say doesn’'t go beyond these four walls.”

Dr. Jessup’s eyes narrow. “I'’ll never repeat anything you say here. As God is my witness.”

Father Mullen frowns at the doctor, but it’s hard to chide a man who has just lost his son. “You have my word, of course,” says the priest.

“I want the seal of the confessional.”

Mullen looks offended. “I'm not sure what you mean by that. You’re not Catholic, are you?”

“You know exactly what I mean, Father. I'm sorry to insist, but I’'ve known priests and pastors who betrayed confidences, both in private conversation and in court.”

Father Mullen shakes his head with a weary sigh. “The seal of the confessional. What we say here goes no further.”

Dr. Jessup is watching me like the parents of defendants I prosecuted for rape or murder watched the faces of their sons’ accusers; he’s waiting for some hint that his child wasn'’t the terrible man people believe he was—some scrap of hope to cling to as time wears him down and leaves nothing but memory.

“Father Mullen,” I say softly, “I'm ashamed to admit this, but I was Tim’s childhood friend, yet for the past few years I shared the low opinion people have of him. If we’re all honest here, I think even Dr. Jessup shared that opinion.”

A strangled croak comes from my right, but I cannot bear to look.

“In the next few days, people are going to say a lot of things about Tim. The newspaper may say he was using drugs the night he died. The police or the district attorney might even say Tim was planning to commit terrible crimes. I'm telling you now that those charges will be lies.”

Dr. Jessup’s shoes creak as he steps forward and leans closer. “What do you mean? Tell us.”

I keep my eyes on those of the priest, which are blue and clear and bright with skepticism. “Tim Jessup was a hero,” I tell him quietly. “I don'’t say that lightly. Tim died trying to save innocent people from suffering, and to protect this town from evil. That may sound archaic, Father, but I’'ve dealt with evil firsthand. I know what I'm talking about. Tim suffered terrible torment before he died. The tragedy is that his death was unnecessary. Had the rest of us been doing the work we pay lip service to doing, Tim would still be with us. I know Mrs. McQueen has suffered over her son, but Tim paid for that a long time ago. What matters most is this: Even if the truth of what Tim was trying to do never comes out, every citizen of this town is in his debt. Of that you can be sure.”

Dr. Jessup clutches my upper arm like a drowning man clutches a life preserver.

Father Mullen’s eyes are wide, his mouth half open. “Well…I think I expected a plea for the sake of the man’s wife. Can you give me any details?”

“I'm afraid not. There are lives at stake.”

The surgeon’s hand is shivering on my arm. “Please, Penn. Anything.”

I shake my head. “Father, Jacqueline Kennedy once said that the Catholic Church is at its best when dealing with death. To me, this is one of those opportunities to live up to the promise of your creed. I personally don'’t know what Tim believed about God, but I do know he believed

in

God. He made religious references to me the night before he died, and I know he believed he was doing God’s work when he was killed. Now, you can call the bishop if you like. But I think it’s best if Dr. Jessup and I just leave you alone with your conscience.”

Before the priest can respond, I turn and pull the old surgeon with me to the door. Dr. Jessup is wheezing like an asthmatic, but this sound isn’t respiratory distress; it’s the throttled crying of a man who sealed himself off from emotion for most of his life and now finds himself unable to contain the hurt and stunted love within him.

“Can you get home all right?” I ask.

Dr. Jessup won'’t let me off so easy. When we reach the steps, he

seizes my arm and turns me until I'm looking into his watery gray eyes, eyes that for forty years seemed to look down from an Olympian height to the mortals who came to him to cut out their tumors and inflamed gallbladders, and that now hold only pain and pleading. How the mighty are fallen.

“Was that true? What you said about Tim? That he was trying to do something good?”

“Yes. But don'’t ask me what it was. And please don'’t tell your wife yet. I'’ll tell you the rest of it someday, Doctor. When it’s safe. But that’s the best I can do tonight.”

Dr. Jessup shakes his head slowly. “You said he—he suffered.”

I look down the street, toward the corner of Washington Street. “You’re going to see that for yourself when Tim’s body comes back from Jackson. You’re a doctor, so you’ll know what you’re looking at. I wanted you to be prepared. Don’t let your wife see him.”

“Who killed my boy?” Dr. Jessup asks in a cracked whisper. “You tell me. Tell me!”

“I can’t.”

“But you know, don'’t you?”

“No, sir. And I'm afraid the police aren'’t even calling it murder yet. Not officially. The next few days are going to be hard on you and Mrs. Jessup. I hope you can take some comfort in what I told Father Mullen. I don'’t think you’ll have any more trouble about the funeral. Mullen’s just young, and I'm sure Mrs. McQueen was pretty formidable. She feels about Patrick the way you do about Tim.”

Dr. Jessup nods. “I know that. I see it now.”

I try to turn and walk to my car, but he clings to me, his hand like a claw on my wrist. “What are

you

doing? I know you’re your father’s son. Are you trying to finish what Tim started?”

A car with blue headlights approaches on the street. After it hisses past, I say, “All I can tell you is this: If I have anything to do with it, Tim will not have died in vain. Now, I need to go.”

“One last thing,” Dr. Jessup says. “I know your father never thought much of me. All my life I chased after things that don'’t mean a damned thing. My son needed me, and all I could do was hate him for not being what I wanted. Well, this is my punishment, I guess.” Dr. Jessup’s gaze slides off my face and climbs the but

tresses and spires of the cathedral. “Your father was the best of us. Our crop, I mean.” The wet eyes come back to me. “And Tim thought the world of you. I wish you would say something at his wake, if you will. Even if you can’t say what you told us in there.”

“Of course I will.”

Just as I think I'm free, the gray eyes peer into mine with a darkness like blood behind them. “If you find out who killed my boy, Penn, you pick up the telephone. You hear me? Tell me where to find him, that’s all. I don'’t care if I spend the rest of my life behind bars and eternity in flames.”

Dr. Jessup’s clenched hand finally loosens as the force of his passion drains from him. For a moment I fear he’s going to collapse on the steps, but then he pulls his coat around him and gets himself under control. I saw this too many times when I was a prosecutor, most often in victims’ families: fathers and brothers who would readily kill to avenge those they should have loved far better when the person was alive.

“Tim will get justice. The best thing you can do for him now is take care of your grandson. Your wife and your daughter-in-law too. They need you.”

With a last grimace of confusion, he shuffles past me toward the big Mercedes by the curb. As he wrestles with his key, I trot to my car on unsteady legs, hoping that Caitlin has waited for me.

Caitlin is watching from one of her front windows as I pull up. She opens the front door with only her face showing, as though she’s just gotten out of the shower, then motions for me to come in, but I wave her out to the car. She extends a bare foot and calf, points to the foot, then disappears inside. I get out and walk halfway to her door. A moment later she comes out wearing shorts, sandals, and a white linen top, a puzzled look on her face.

“To what do I owe this honor?”

“We need to talk,” I whisper, “and it can’t be in our houses or cars. Is there a car at the newspaper office we can use?”

She’s looking at me strangely, but she answers quietly. “Yes. Are you going to drive us over there?”

When I nod, she walks back and locks her door, then comes out to my car.

Caitlin never needs to be told anything twice, unless it’s to keep her nose out of something. She doesn’'t speak as we drive across town; she’s content to study me from the passenger seat. I look toward her a few times, but it’s difficult to do that without making eye contact, and there’s too much unsaid between us to endure that for long. It’s easier to study her legs, which are long and toned and surprisingly tawny, given her pale skin. She must have spent some time in the lower latitudes recently.

“Antigua,” she says, reading my mind.

“Alone?”

“No.” After letting me suffer for a few moments, she says, “A corporate retreat.”

“I’'ve never really understood what happens at those.”

“Depends on the company. Some put you through a week of New Age sermons on the gospel of wealth. Others encourage you to kill large mammals and screw beautiful ethnic prostitutes.”

After the awful tension at the rectory, this makes me laugh. “I spent a lot of my career dealing with men who’d rather screw large mammals and kill beautiful ethnic prostitutes.”

This brings a real laugh from Caitlin. In the closed car the sound rings bright and true. “Or writing about them,” she says.

I nod but don'’t continue our old conversational rhythm, and the sparkle dies in her eyes. As I start to pull into the newspaper parking lot, she points to the side of the building, which I assume means I should park behind it. When I get to the back, I see six cars parked in a row beside a glass door.

As soon as we’re inside, she says, “Are you sure you don'’t just want to talk here?”

“Can you get us total privacy? I don'’t want everyone in the building knowing I'm here.”

“If you don'’t mind sitting on the floor of a supply room.”

“Fine. Perfect.”

A little way up the hall, she leads me into a room lined with metal shelves and boxes, then locks the door behind us. After a quick survey of the shelves, she pulls down two boxes of legal-size copy paper and makes a seat. I pull down two more, and soon we’re facing each other, separated by three feet of harshly lit space.

“You look bad,” she says bluntly. “How long has it been since you slept?”

“That doesn’'t matter right now.”

She considers this for a few seconds. “You know, you acted like a total shit to me today.”

“You asked for it. You acted like you expected me to take you into my confidence as though we’re still together. We’re not together.”

She looks away. “I just wanted you to have a civil conversation with me.”

“No. You wanted a story. The inside story. And I couldn'’t give you that. No one would have benefited from that.”

“Is that for you to decide?”

“In this case it is.”