Deep South (38 page)

"Lyle and Thad returned to the graveyard without you. Heather and Danni were already separated when the boys came. Where the hell were you?

Murdering your girlfriend because she dumped you for another boy?

A black boy who's a better football player and a better lover than you could ever hope to be?"

"That fucking bitch..." He had lost it and knew he had. He pulled himself together, put his good-boy face back on.

"No, ma'am," he said. "I never hurt Danni. Maybe I got separated from Thad and Lyle for a minute or two, but that's all."

"Two against one, Brandon," Anna said. "Lyle and Thad against you. Ugly isn't it? No honor among thieves."

"It could've been longer," Brandon admitted. "But I didn't kill anybody, and no way you can prove I did." They'd gotten all they were going to get out of him on that subject for the moment. Anna switched gears.

"Your cohorts tell me you've got a picture of Heather Barnes baring her chest, that you used it to get her to lie. That's blackmail and suborning perjury. Both felonies. You're young, and you're scared. You give me that picture and the negative, and I'll see to it those charges are not brought against you."

"Shit," Brandon said and, "Yes, ma'am." Paul picked up his hat from where he'd placed it beneath his chair.

"If you remember anything else, you call me or Ranger Pigeon," he said.

"I'm free to go?" Brandon looked both surprised and relieved.

"For the moment, son," the sheriff said gently. His kindness frightened the boy more than anything either he or Anna had done to date.

Anna let Brandon get to the door, his band on the knob, the scent of freedom in his nostrils, before she stopped him. "By the way, why did you put that alligator in my carport?" Convinced Anna knew way too much about him to risk another lie-at least on a lesser crime-Deforest said:"A man called and told us where the gator was. Said if we wanted you to quit poking in our business, asking stupid questions, we could go get it. Scare you off."

"What man?"

"Some man doesn't want you around these parts. Could be anybody." Though Anna would have shot herself before she let it show, the last barb hurt.

"That alligator bit the leg off my dog," she said.

"Yes, ma'am. We were real sorry to hear about that," he said with what sounded like genuine regret in his voice. If it had been her leg that had been bitten off, she doubted Brandon Deforest would have been half as sorry.

The door closed. Slumped elbow to elbow in padded industrialstrength arm chairs, Anna and Paul said nothing. The quiet deepened until Anna could hear the faint tick of the spastic second hand on the wall clock.

Sunlight came thought the blinds of the west-facing window, painting yellow stripes across the top of Adele MacK's desk. Dust motes moved through the light in a lazy dance, then vanished the moment they were touched by the shadows. "Lord, but I hate bullying children," Paul said.

Another moment passed. The tension they'd maintained while questioning Deforest melted away like the dust in the shadow. "I don't know," Anna said thoughtfully. "I think I'm beginning to develop a taste for it." The sheriff shot her a sidelong look to see if she was joking. Anna chose not to let him know one way or another.

Ms. MacK reclaimed her office. It seemed to Anna as if they'd been camped out there several days, but just over three-quarters of an hour in real time had elapsed. They were given the small conference room, and it was made clear they were on borrowed time. Ms. MacK was tiring of having her institution of learning sullied by the less exalted realities of life. Anna didn't blame her. She'd been blessed to attend high school before police and teachers were forced to work together so closely.

Wearing skirts too short, getting pregnant and smoking dope had been the crimes that plagued Anna's alma mater. Not murder and blackmail.

Armed with information, Anna and Paul mixed bluff and bluster and were quickly finished with Thad Meyerhoff and Lyle Sanders.

From Thad they learned that events had transpired pretty much as Deforest said until the five kids left their cars and took to the graveyard. There Heather, too drunk to run, had hidden from them, probably where Anna later found her in the walled plot near the edge of the forest. Thad and Lyle had stopped to look for her.

Deforest had pursued Damn Posey out of the graveyard and into the woods, toward the Old Trace Trail that ended near the campground half a mile east.

The booze wore off a little. Sanders and Meyerhoff got scared.

Without flashlights or much in the way of cognitive thought processes, they'd tried to find Brandon and Danni. The search had quickly been abandoned, and they headed back to the car. That's when Anna bad talked with them. Neither one of them had seen or heard from Brandon till the following day. Thad had lied about remembering, because Brandon said he'd lost sight of Danni and gotten lost in the woods but thought nobody would believe him because they'd been fighting and he'd chased her.

Sanders, they got nothing from. He'd been abused and bullied by adults most of his life. Now he sat through the worst they could do locked in a private world he'd undoubtedly begun constructing the first time his dad got drunk and started beating on him.

With Thad's information, they didn't need much from Lyle Sanders and cut him loose after a quarter of an hour. "Well," Anna said apropos of nothing. "Right. Well," the sheriff replied.

For their afternoon's combined efforts, they'd learned a great deal and nothing at all. Brandon Deforest was the prime suspect with the big three: means, motive and opportunity. The means of the murder could be anything-Anna took an educated guess that it would be some item from the same trunk that harbored the sheet and rope that mocked Danielle's corpse, common things anyone could come by. Motive was the age-old, tried and true lover's triangle. But Danielle Posey had accrued a surprising number of reasons to be done to death for a girl of her tender years: the lure of forty thousand dollars in insurance money, the racist rage of her brother Mike, the insanity of her mother, the threat she could have posed to Lockley Wentworth's chances at the pros. Even, at a stretch, George Wentworth's wrath because, in endangering Lock's chances, she threatened George's dreams.

Opportunity was the factor that tightened the noose around Deforest's neck. Though it was possible, it was not probable that anyone, with the possible exception of Lock Wentworth, could have known of Danni and Heather's impromptu decision to steal a car and run with it down the Trace. "We're going to have to arrest the boy," Anna said as she turned the key of the ignition and, like a true Southerner, reached immediately for the air-conditioning vent as if some minute adjustment would speed the cooling process.

"Looks like," Paul said absently. He slouched in his seat, the natty crease on his shirtfront crumpling under the shoulder belt.

"Brandon's not going anywhere. I doubt he's a danger to himself or society. Let's hold off a bit." "Wh y?" Anna asked, curious. She didn't care one way or another. If Deforest had killed his girlfriend because his pride had been outraged, she sincerely hoped he was punished to the full extent of the law. But she was in no hurry to do it. "I don't know," Davidson said. "It just doesn't seem the time is ripe yet.

Chances are if we nail him and all we've got is circumstantial evidence, he's going to get away with it."

"Do we have enough for a search warrant? Search his car, match fibers from the sheet. Hope to get lucky and lay hands on whatever was used as a bludgeon?" Anna was afraid her ignorance was readily apparent. It wasn't that she was totally in the dark regarding probable cause and the legalities surrounding the application for a search warrant, it was just not a job that often fell into a ranger's daily tasks. In all her years with the park service, she'd only done it half a dozen times and not for many years. "We might could," the sheriff said wearily. "I'll look into it." It was in Anna's mind to ask him to dinner, but something stopped her. They rode the forty minutes to Port Gibson lost in a world of their own thoughts.

Just before the turnoff to Port Gibson, on impulse, Anna finally asked Paul to dinner. To her excitement and dismay, he accepted.

Because she'd been tormented by motives of an ulterior stamp, she was awkward in his presence even as he'd tried to ease the evening by helping with the cooking and telling self-effacing anecdotes. It worked to a certain extent, but both spent a goodly amount of time talking to Taco and Piedmont, a sure sign of conversational strain.

In an attempt to recapture the comfort she'd felt with him during his first, unannounced visit the night of Leo Fullerton's suicide, Anna drank, three, maybe four glasses of Pinot Grigio, guzzling an expensive wine in an attempt to be out of her own skin, if only briefly.

Paul bad been warm and Paul had been sweet and Paul had been funny.

When he left her -it just before seven-thirty, Paul had been believable in his excuse. Mrs. Ruby Tangeman, the old lady whom Leo Fullerton was trying to get published, had called. Her great-niece "did" for the pastor. Using the housekeeper's key, Mrs. Tangeman had visited Leo's home to discover her precious manuscript had gone missing. The good sheriff had promised to drop by to bold her hand and help her look, Paul kissed Anna on the front step. Had he not turned and walked purposefully away, she suspected she would have tumbled into bed with him, Grateful for being saved that premature act of idiocy, she promised herself-as she had done since her first cold beer after emerging from the bowels of Lecbuguilla Cave two years before-she'd quit drinking or at least cut down. Even as the words formed in her mind, she knew they'd be meaningless come five o'clock the following day-the witching hour when one longs to drop a veil over the harsh glare of the -day's events.

Customarily, Anna wasn't the least uncomfortable around men.

She worked for them, alongside them and, most recently, as their manager. She'd always gotten on well with the brawnier gender. Nor had she led the life of a monastic. Some she slept with, some she dated and some she flirted with.

The hideous self-consciousness this time around was engendered by the fact that not only did she want to run barefoot, metaphorically speaking, through the sheriff's thick blond hair, but she liked him on a deeper level. One that made her want him to like her.

Too much time around teenagers, she thought acidly. Apparently, adolescent angst was a contagious disease.

Now all she wanted was to sober up. She'd been drinking long enough that three-or was it four-glasses of wine didn't disable her. That perhaps Paul hadn't even known she was knocking the stuff back too fast comforted her somewhat.

She longed to leave the leafy, suffocating confines of Rocky, but she hadn't descended the slippery slope far enough that she'd drive drunk.

Not yet. Not unless she got a call-out. Would she have the courage to tell dispatch she'd had too much to drink and to call someone else?

Shaking the thought from her, she left the house, not even the dog for company, and began walking toward the campground just to be moving.

Daylight saving-or wasting, she could never remember the point of moving the clock an hour twice a year-was upon the South, and though the sun had set, the sky still glowed with a rich and lingering twilight. To the southwest, a storm was brewing. Deep purple clouds piled into the stratosphere, and Anna could hear distant thunder. Until it arrived, even when night fell, there would be no true darkness. A fat moon already hung above the trees.

Stealth mosquitoes, robbed of their whine, bored itchy snouts into her back and shoulders but she ignored them, too distracted to return to the house and spray herself with insect repellent.

As she reached the intersection where the spur of road to the employee housing met with the main road into the campground and picnic areas, the headlights of a northbound car strobed through the trees, giving her a momentary sense of vertigo.

The car turned into Rocky and drove slowly past the visitor center.

When its high beams raked across her, it stopped, backed up half a dozen yards and parked in one of the handful of slots in front of the unprepossessing brick structure. The door of the Chrysler Sebring opened, and a woman dressed in a suit, as if she just had come from a vestry meeting or working late at the office, stepped out.

Anna had no wish to engage with anyone, but the woman had seen her and appeared to be waiting so she walked in that direction, prepared to answer whatever visitor-in-need questions the woman had brought with her. As Anna approached, the woman came toward her, hand outstretched, big smile, like a politician canvassing for votes. "You must be the new ranger here, Anna Pigeon, isn't it?" she said, as Anna allowed her hand to be grasped and pumped. The woman's fingers were a good thirty degrees colder than the ambient air temperature. Either she had no blood in her veins or she'd been driving with the air conditioner on max. "I am," Anna admitted. The visitor was about Anna's age and attractive in an anorexic, iron-coiffed kind of way. Her voice was high and melodic, made pleasant by a genteel drawl. Ladies' Garden Club material without a doubt. "I was just coming back from Jackson and stopped in to use the facilities," she said with an easy laugh. "I don't like driving the Trace after dark. Everybody hears the stories. But the trucks on Highway have gotten so bad it's more than your life's worth to go that way."