Deep South (15 page)

"Follow up on the cars," Anna said. "Start with Clinton High School. It was their prom night. See if the kids need permits, anything that'll help you find the cars described and attach a kid to them. I'll give you any names I get. You can check to see if the parents have a car fitting any of your descriptions." Randy nodded, either bored or lamenting the fact that doing his work had resulted in having more work to do.

"What'd you do with your time, Barth?" Anna munched another Dorito. From the way Barth was eyeing them, she suspected Ranger Dinkin wanted some, but her need to win the guy over didn't extend that far. "Lot of what you'd expect," Dinkin said, tearing his eyes away from the chips. "The Poseys are pretty broke up. I'd got there before Mr. Posey'd told his wife.

The boy, Mike, knew-there's the two kids, or was, the girl and an older boy about nineteen, twenty. He's a piece of work."

"How so?"

"Just Is." By the firm set of Barth's mouth, he wasn't going to elaborate on that subject anytime soon.

"What else?" a r r "They weren't in a mood to talk much," Barth said casually. So casually Anna began to wonder if he was hiding the fact that he hadn't been out to the Poseys at all. She looked over at Randy to see how he was reacting. Both men were in her office, Barth in a second secretary's chair, his weight threatening to destroy its bowed spine, Randy straddling his. Randy rested his big head on hands locked across the chair's back. His mustache hid his upper lip and his eyes were half closed.

He wasn't looking at Barth and he wasn't looking at her. It was as if he watched a movie inside his own skull, and it wasn't Pollyanna.

"Randy. What are you thinking?" Anna asked abruptly.

The man's eyes refocused. "Let me go talk to them," he said. His voice was flat, the voice of a man rigidly in control of a violent emotion.

Or the voice of a sociopath.

For a moment Anna watched him, trying to figure out what was going on behind those meaty features. Several more Doritos were eaten but they didn't do anything for her mind-reading skills. "I'll go," she said finally. "It's time I met some of the locals." Anna gave the Poseys till the next morning. Two rangers, a sheriff and a dead child in one day would be enough to make anyone antisocial. A child. Anna winced involuntarily. Throughout her career she'd been told the death of a child would be harder to take than that of an adult. Till now she'd not believed it. Not a child, she told herself. A teenager. It didn't help.

As befitted the tenor of her day's activities, clouds settled low and dark, pressing into the trees, and a steady rain had been falling since before sunrise. Colors were muted, the sunshine of the Carolina Jasmine and the glow of the red buds dulled as if the rain were tinged with gray paint. Seldom, if ever, did it rain like this in the high desert. Here water streamed and pooled, the grasses by the roadside wavering like rice paddies. Wood and mud and pavement were dark with water. Anna felt damp to her core. Though it wasn't warm, she had to run the car's air conditioner to keep fog from blanking her windshield.

Following the precise and neatly written directions Barth had provided, Anna found the Posey homestead without incident. From the Trace, she could see a house with worn white siding, dwarfed by old trees. A decrepit barn, with derelict automobiles nosed up to the weathered wood like piglets to a sow, stood to one side. Trusting Barth's descriptive powers, she guessed it was the Posey place, but she had another seven miles to drive before she could get to it.

Part of the charm of the Natchez Trace-or the aggravation, depending on whether one was sightseeing or commuting-was that entrances and exits were severely limited.

A short gravel drive circled in from the surface road. A harrow rusted by the barn. A blue 1978 Chevrolet truck was parked in front of what was probably the kitchen door. Anna pulled around beside the Chevy and waited, the car idling, to let the inhabitants get used to the idea they had company. After a minute, the door opened behind the screen.

Taking that as an invitation, Anna ducked out of the Crown Vic.

The figure behind the screen didn't offer anything in the way of welcome as Anna came up a concrete walk, buckled into disparate stones, weeds pushing boldly through ever-widening cracks.

When she was seven or eight yards from the door-and as far from her car-she heard the unmistakable sound of dogs growling, low and vicious.

Watchdogs bark when an intruder arrives, a racket to alert the house.

Attack dogs don't.

Anna stopped dead in her tracks. Slowly, she turned her head to find the source of the noise. Equally slowly, she put her hand on the butt of her pistol. A dozen feet away, the distance of a single lunge, were two white shepherds, big dogs, eighty to a hundred pounds each. The rain had flattened their fur, but along the hackles it was glued into spikes.

"Call off your dogs," Anna said quietly, never taking her eves from them. The smaller of the two, but not by much, began inching toward her, stiff mincing steps. The second broke away, circling between her and the cars. "Call off your dogs or I'll kill them," she said in the same even tone.

This interview was off to a great start.

The shadow behind the screen neither moved nor spoke. Anna thumbed the snap free on the leather strap that secured her pistol in her holster.

"Bubba! Rocket! That's enough," came a sharp female voice from within the house. The hell hounds were transformed. Tails wagged.

Tongues fell out in dopey grins.

Anna was unimpressed. Without taking her eyes from the animals or her hand from her nine-millimeter, she said: "May I come in?"

"Go on! Git!" came the same voice and Anna waited to see if the command was meant for her or the dogs.

Bubba and Rocket stopped wagging and grinning and slunk off toward the barn. They'd obviously been trained the old-fashioned way, with boot and stick.

The screen opened. "C'mon in. You're getting soaked. Don't mind them dogs. We don't get all that much company." The speaker was the shadow behind the screen, visible now that she held the door open. A little woman, not as tall as Anna, maybe five-foot-two and skinny. The flat wide kind of skinny: broad pelvis spreading fleshless hips, wide rib cage with no muscles or breasts to give it depth. From head-on, she looked average; in profile, there was nothing to her. Adding to this peculiar now-you-see-it, now-you-don't physique was the ageless quality of an aging face. The blond hair was faded, not so much gray as colorless, the skin unlined but lacking the elasticity of youth. The woman could have been thirty-eight; she could have been fifty. She had a ghostlike quality of not being in real time.

Anna found it hard to believe this wraith would set the dogs on her intentionally Then again she found it hard to believe the woman would care one way or another if the beasts tore her to pieces on the front step. Either way she seemed unoffended by Anna's threat to shoot them.

That was a plus. Anna was taking what she could get this morning. "You are Mrs. Posey?"

"Mr. Posey says I am." She stood aside to let Anna into a kitchen that apparently served as dining room and entertainment center of the house.

Shelves held the usual paraphernalia of a kitchen. The floor was covered in speckled linoleum gouged by a bygone disaster of some sort. The walls had once been papered, then peeled, but no new paper had been hung. A Formica-topped table with four matching chairs of chrome and vinyl in cracked and fraying yellow took up the center of the room. The air smelled of coffee, cigarettes and an odor that took Anna back to the sixties: hair spray. Aqua Net, if she didn't miss her guess. From a rolling stand between two doors leading to the rest of the house, a television with a twenty-seven-inch screen flashed the rude colors and noise of a talk show. Beyond, it was dark, the blinds and curtains closed, making shadowed caves where too much furniture hunkered in the gloom. "Can I get you a Coke?" the woman asked.

Anna started to decline, but the suspicious look on Mrs. Posey's face changed her mind. She said yes, and it lifted. Evidently Mrs. Posey didn't trust people who wouldn't drink a Coke at nine-thirty in the morning. Anna watched as her hostess did the honors. The old refrigerator was packed with Cokes, not Wal-Mart cola but the familiar red and white cans. There must have been close to three cases, leaving little room for anything else.

A mental institution, the sheriff had said. Suddenly Anna was glad the beverage offered came in a hermetically sealed container.

Mrs. Posey set a Coke on the table for Anna and opened one for herself.

"You sit down," she ordered. Anna did as she was told.

"Is Mr. Posey home?" Anna asked, mostly to make conversation. "He's always somewhere or other. You're the lady ranger," Mrs. Posey said. "I heard about you."

"What did you hear?" Anna asked, genuinely curious.

"You found that girl that was killed." Mrs. Posey was looking past III Anna at the television screen where an ample redhead was screaming and throwing her shoes at a little black girl who was doing a bad job of looking fierce while two television "bouncers" held her back. "She stole the other girl's fiance," Mrs. Posey said. "He was a white boy, too.

It's him they oughta be talking about killing, messing around with a colored." Mrs. Posey seemed unaware that her pronouncement wasn't a universally accepted truth.

Anna said nothing. It wasn't her kitchen, and it wasn't what she was here for.

"I'd like to ask you some questions about your daughter, Mrs. Posey.

Would it be better if I came back another time? When your husband's home?" Anna fought to be gentle over the contrived clamor of the TV "Fred doesn't know anything about Danni," Mrs. Posey said, still absorbed in the television. "Danni tells me everything." She stopped then, took a long pull on her soda and said, still without looking at Anna: "I know that girl you found was my Danni. I know she's dead." Her face didn't change expression and her voice lost none of its flat character, but tears began to run down her face and drip off her chin.

If she was aware of them, she made no move to wipe them away. "I'm terribly sorry," Anna said. She wanted to say more but every phrase that came to mind was so pathetically inadequate she couldn't bring herself to utter it.

Mrs. Posey watched her show, and Anna cast about for a good way to escape without being devoured by Bubba and Rocket.

The show cut to a commercial, and Mrs. Posey finally looked at her guest. "I'll talk about Danni being alive if that's all you want but I won't talk about her being dead. Not now. Not ever."

"Tell me about her friends," Anna said. "Danni was the most popular girl at school. There wasn't nobody that wasn't her friend or leastways nobody who didn't want to be. But I'd tell her, Danni you pick; you don't be running with people not good as you. They'll drag you down.

Danni always listened to me. She'd bring some girl home and I'd say that girl's just fixin' to be trash and that'd be the end of it. Danni always listened to me."

"Any special friends?" Anna asked. "She had a hundred friends. Good friends." Danni might have listened to her mother, but it didn't sound as if she talked to her much. Anna sat in silence and waited while Mrs. Posey cast about for a single name and failed to find one.

"Yesterday they sent that big nigger over here to talk to me about my girl. I'm not talking to no nigger man about my Danni." Anna jerked in her chair as the words smacked into her. Barth Dinkin. This crazy rotten remnant of a woman was talking about one of her rangers. As anger flashed and she clamped her teeth against it, Anna had a sudden thought: was this why Randy had gotten so hostile? Because he knew the Poseys had treated Barth badly and he knew Barth was too ashamed to say anything?

For the first time since meeting the man, Anna felt a wave of respect for Ranger Randy Thigpen. "You can talk to me about Danni," Anna said evenly. "I'm white." Mrs. Posey was oblivious to sarcasm. "They should've sent you first and not go insulting people like that." Anna said nothing. "Danni was going to be a model. Big, like Cheryl Tiegs.

Did you know that?"

"I didn't."

"I knew It was Danni and me's secret." The talk show came back on. Anna couldn't stomach any more of Mrs. Posey's personal brand of insanity.

Largely unnoticed by the other woman, Anna thanked her for the Coke and let herself out the kitchen door.

The rain had not let up, and the overcast had not lifted, but after the Poseys' kitchen, Anna felt she stepped into glorious sunshine.

Bubba and Rocket were nowhere to be seen. It was a straight shot to her patrol car and escape. "Can I help you?" A man materialized from the gullet of the barn and was hollering at her. Two ghostly canine forms walked about in the gloom behind him. The voice was friendly enough, but Anna felt herself tensing; his voice sounded the death knell for her new-won freedom. "Are you Mr. Posey?" Rain soaked through her shirt and grew cold against her skin. Somewhere in her new closet was her Gore-Tex rain gear. Today being a car-and-kitchen kind of day, she hadn't thought she'd need it.

"I'm Fred Posey. Don't stand out there in the rain." Anna hesitated and he added: "Don't mind the dogs. These old boys wouldn't hurt a flea." Anna didn't believe him but trusted he wasn't fool enough to let them eat a federal law enforcement officer without a pretty good reason.