Deep South (37 page)

Finally he quit fiddling and looked at Anna. "It was the pastor's truck," he said. "Could he have been there for some other reason?" Anna asked. "I've seen it there before once or twice," Barth admitted. "Those times I recognized it before turning in and just went on by. I didn't want him to know I knew."

"You think this time maybe he saw us?" Barth nodded. His luminous eyes clouded. He stared over Anna's shoulder, his eyes wide, knowing if he blinked the tears would fall and she would see them. To give him time, Anna rose, turned her back and poured herself a cup of coffee she didn't want. By the time she reclaimed Thigpen's seat, Barth was again dry-eyed, a man among men.

"You think Fullerton would kill himself because you knew he frequented a homosexual trysting place?"

"I'm a member of his flock," Barth replied simply. "Seems like overkill," Anna said and instantly regretted the literal application of the cliche. "You haven't any way of knowing what that kind of gossip would do down here. It'd be like his good work never happened. He must've figured if he just took himself out then the church he'd built would go on, not be torn apart while he was being torn apart. "You wouldn't have told anyone," Anna said. "Not only would it be generally ratty but, given your position, unethical."

"He couldn't have known that," Barth said. "And you've been feeling guilty, thinking us stumbling on the pastor in his moment of weakness drove him to suicide." Barth said nothing. He was getting that drippy, fogged look again.

"Well that's a crock," Anna said sharply. "Maybe we were the straw that broke the camel's back, but that camel must have already been carrying quite a load. If it hadn't been us day before yesterday, it would have been somebody else-something else-tomorrow. Quit worrying about it." Barth blinked. "That's it? Quit worrying about it?"

"That's it." For a moment he stared at her, then he laughed. "I thought us having a lady DR we were going to have our feelings validated, get us a more interactive management style." Glad to see he hadn't shut her words out entirely, Anna smiled.

"Group hugs tomorrow at oh-eight-hundred," she said and pushed back from Randy's desk. "Could you talk to George today? Tell him about us meeting with Lock, so he won't think we're sneaking behind his back. And see if he knows anything." Two more messages from Sheriff Davidson were waiting on the machine in her office. Anna dialed the sheriff's office, chagrined to realize her wayward thought processes had already committed the man's work number to memory. The sheriff was in and, to Anna's relief, apparently felt no awkwardness engendered by the kiss. He was warm, sounded pleased to hear from her and went straight to business as it was business hours.

Leo Fullerton's body had been recovered. Both ankles were tied together and then tethered to the VW bus transmission. Anna hadn't been the only one to wax suspicious. Fullerton had been treated as a homicide till it became clear there was no basis for it. The knot around the pastor's ankles had been a simple slip knot, one he could easily have loosed himself from, even under the water. No signs of struggle marked the body. There was no indication he'd been struck on the bead or in any other way rendered unconscious and put in the water. A quick and dirty screening had been run on a blood sample, and no obvious drugs were found.

The recovered bass boat showed scratching on the inside and left gunwale that matched what could be expected if a lone man wrestled a heavy object overboard. Fullerton's fingerprints were on the starter pull of the engine and on the rudder. Other than the normal smudging, there was nothing to indicate another person had manipulated the controls, gloved or ungloved.

Anna weighed the pros and cons of telling Paul about the Clinton pullout scenario. In the end, she told him. Unless she'd read him wrong, he would not indulge in idle gossip and it might be of some comfort to him to know the reason why this gifted and depressive man had come to believe his life was intolerable, a risk to the bridge between the races he had worked so long and hard to build.

They took a moment, the telephonic equivalent of snatching their hats off out of respect for the dead, then went on. Anna was reminded of her grandmother's telling her that if she thought she was important she should just stick her finger in a bucket of water and pull it out to see how big a hole it left. No person, no matter how important when living, left much of a hole in the great scheme of things when he died.

Brandon Deforest remained to be talked to. Again. Heather had folded.

Lock had appeared on the scene playing a part in the tragedy. Given the new information, it was time to squeeze the recalcitrant Mr. Deforest.

Needing to pretend she was in control of some small aspect of life, Anna took her car; Sheriff Davidson rode in the passenger seat.

Once again they would be pulling Brandon out of class, questioning him on school property. This time there would be two of them.

Juvenile cases were tricky, each twist and turn in the investigative process fraught with rules, written and unwritten. But Deforest had turned eighteen on January twelfth. Anna'd gotten that bit of information from his driving record. In his junior year, he'd gotten a speeding ticket, fifty-five in a forty-mile-an-hour zone on Nortliside Drive in Jackson. The moment he'd run afoul of the law, even in this mundane and fleeting fashion, his information had gone into the computers.

There was no such thing as a private citizen anymore. Anybody with a PC and a modern was welcome to drive down the information highway.

Unless an individual kept a profile so low earthworms had to bend over to see it, he was bound to show up.

The high school shimmered in the heat, looking new and awkward with its complement of saplings not yet rooted deep enough to grow tall.

Adele MacK, the vice principal, was again the person the secretary steered them to. The door to the principal's office remained firmly shut, and Anna wondered if there really was such a person or if Ms. MacK bad done away with him or her at some point and continued to efficiently run the school, the real force behind the paper tiger.

The growing heat was taking its toll on Ms. MacK's face. Her eye makeup had melted slightly when she'd been out-of-doors, then re solidified in a blurrier configuration when exposed to the air-conditioning. Other than that, she was impeccable: hair, hose, high heels in perfect order.

"Come in," she said, neither pleased nor displeased at Anna's return but clearly concerned. Anna had intended to sit quietly and let Sheriff Davidson do the talking for two reasons. One, she thought both he and VP MacK would be more comfortable with the traditional lines of male authority in place. Two, she was feeling lazy. But once they were all in Ms. MacK's office with the door closed, both the sheriff and the vice principal stared expectantly at her, and she was forced to give up yet another preconceived notion about Southerners.

Unable to think of any reason to withhold information, Anna told Ms.

MacK what they knew of Deforest. That Danni had taken his car.

That he and his cronies had pursued Heather and Danni to Rocky Springs after the prom. Keeping Lockley Wentworth out of the equation, she said that apparently there was another boy involved, that Deforest had known about him and that Deforest and his buddies, Lyle and Thad, had lied to Anna and the police about their memory of what had occurred that night.

The boys all claimed they'd been too drunk to remember, but with new information, Anna thought they might be more forthcoming. Ms. MacK asked a few questions.

Anna and Paul answered them the best they could. Deforest, MacK confirmed, was eighteen, an adult by legal standards. As was Lyle Sanders. Thad Meyerhoff was still seventeen and, as a minor, bad a right to her protection.

Meyerboff, they assured her, was not a suspect.

"But if he committed perjury-" Ms. MacK began. "It's not perjury unless you're under oath," the sheriff said and by the look of annoyance that flickered across the VP's well-manicured face, Anna guessed she knew that and was embarrassed at having forgotten momentarily. "Lying to the police then," she said.

Though law enforcement officers hated admitting it, there was no law against lying to the police. They might try and frighten Thad Meyerhoff with obstruction of justice but would be hard-pressed to make it stick.

Ms. MacK left to fetch the boys. "We weren't entirely honest," Anna said after she'd gone. "If those boys were with Brandon when he killed Danni, they are both potentially accessories to murder. The way Danni was draped and roped and carried and dragged, it looks to me like it could have been the work of more than one person." Davidson nodded. "There's no law against lying to vice principals either," he said, and Anna glimpsed a colder part of the man than she'd seen before.

By prior agreement, Anna and the sheriff kept the three boys separated, questioning them one at a time, Thad and Lyle first.

They told neither boy of Heather's revelations but questioned them closely on details: the time they'd left the prom, where they'd gone drinking and a dozen other things. From the quick pat answers, it was clear they'd spent time rehearsing. Sanders was cocky, but Meyerboff was nervous enough. Anna guessed they could crack him if they kept him away from the support of his peers and turned up the pressure.

Questioning concluded for the present, they tucked Sanders away in the absent principal's office and incarcerated Thad Meyerboff in a small conference room to steep in their lies.

At a quarter of three, Ms. MacK showed Brandon Deforest into the little office she'd relinquished for the cause. He still grinned and strutted but Anna could see the wait while his friends had been questioned had worn him down a bit. His blue-denim eyes moved from object to object on Adele MacK's desk, and when he sat, his left leg continued to bounce.

Anna leaned back and looked intentionally smug. Paul leaned forward, elbows on knees, and ran his fingers through his hair, the picture of a tired, disappointed, but determined man.

"So," he said and scrubbed his face with both hands as if to rub away the knowledge of evil. "You argued about Danni's new boyfriend, Damn stole your car. You and Thad and Lyle chased her down the Trace and cornered her at Rocky Springs. You better talk to me, boy, and tell me why I shouldn't book you for the murder of Danielle Posey.

You'll be playing football at Parchment Penitentiary for the rest of your life." Deforest stopped jiggling his leg, stunned as if Davidson had hit him with a bucket of ice water. "Those shits," he said, and the red blood of righteous anger boiled into his face. Anna and the sheriff Just watched, he with tired compassion, she with a look she hoped came across as gloating.

The boy's anger couldn't bold through the silent watching. Blood drained away as quickly as it had risen, leaving him pale and looking younger than his eighteen years. "I just wanted my car back," he said sullenly "We took Thad's car, followed Danni and Heather to Rocky. When they got out, I got in my car and drove home. I don't care what Thad and Lyle told you. That's the truth." Anna allowed herself a small audible sniff that as much as said: "Hah!" Paul merely looked terribly sad. Neither one of them said anything. The second hand on the big round wall clock behind Brandon's bead jerked its way around twice.

Silence having failed, Paul said: "Son, you're lying to me." Brandon started to protest, but the sheriff forestalled him with a raised hand.

"We've got enough to arrest you on suspicion of murder. When you go to trial and we got two witnesses saying one thing and you saying another, it'll go bad with you. You get caught in one lie, and the jury will figure you're lying every time you open your mouth. I've bad a long day, and I'm not fixin' to sit in this office and screw around with you for much longer." The second hand continued on its appointed rounds. Anna watched a kaleidoscope of emotions flicker over Deforest's face. Nothing telling, just fragments, ill-fitting and out of context. "Danni'd been going on about having this other boyfriend, and it was pissing me off.

Then she steals my car and goes off to see this guy. Me and Tbad and Lyle chased them to Rocky Springs like I said. We were just screwing with Danni, giving her some of her own back. We dogged 'em-you know, yelling and stuff-around that loop there at the campground. Then Danni tears out and we follow'em around the back way to the old church up at the graveyard." Brandon stopped. Anna guessed he was mentally editing the next chapter in his story, deciding what would be damning and what would not, what he could get away with and what was already known.

"Danni and Heather got out and ran up through the graveyard. We followed for a while. just giving them a bad time. Then we left. That's all that happened, no big deal."

"Then why did you lie to us?" Paul asked. "Because it might've looked bad. You know, with that happening to Danni and all." Anna never broke her laid-back pose of smug self-assurance. "Makes sense to me," she said reasonably. "Lying because the truth might look bad."

"That's all it was, ma'am," Deforest said earnestly.

"What I want to know is why you're lying now," Anna said.

Brandon turned up the sincerity and, wide-eyed, hurt, he said: "Lying?

How? I don't know what you mean."

"You said you chased Danni and Heather, right? The two girls were together."

"That's right."

"You and Thad and Lyle, all together all the time."

"That's right." Anna sat up straight and dropped the easy attitude.