He hanged himself with a stout length of rope. His service revolver lay on the floor below his feet, polished and oiled, next to his gleaming badge and his carefully folded uniform.
Claudia and Whit stood on the slope of land leading away from Buddy Beere’s cabin, watching the work crew spear the ground with their shovels. The men dug slowly, carefully, methodically unearthing the land around Buddy’s house, looking for the mortal remains of Marcy Ballew and the women from Brownsville and Laredo. Claudia stood on crutches, her leg heavily bandaged, her hair pulled up from her eyes. Whit leaned against an old laurel oak. He held blank autopsy orders, ready to fill out in case the searchers found human remains.
Whit watched her. Her face was emotionless. ‘You sure you want to be here?’
‘It’s okay. You got to look the beast in the eye, Whit.’
‘You gonna bring David here when’s he released?’ Whit asked. David was recuperating at a Corpus Christi hospital, having suffered severe bone and nerve damage in his back and chest from the shotgun blast. He was out of immediate danger, but the road to rehabilitation looked to be long and winding.
‘If he wants to come,’ she said, not looking at him.
‘You haven’t talked about David much.’
‘David… needs me right now. Badly.’
Claudia said nothing for a long while, watching the dirt slowly pile.
A pair of FBI agents came out of the cabin, notepads open, arguing. Buddy’s belongings had been boxed and catalogued and no doubt would be sent to Quantico for the criminal psychologists to purr over. All the evidence they would need to scribe their papers on Buddy Beere, add him to the literature of the compulsive killer. Patsy Duchamp, given a meaty story, had delineated most of the facts in the paper, and Whit had read the account with a greasy kink in his stomach: Buddy was born Darren Burdell in Milwaukee, with a hophead mother who disciplined her tot with blades and lit cigarettes. Little Darren killed his mother at age thirteen when she tried to castrate him. He decapitated her an hour after her death, which gave the social workers pause. He spent time at a juvenile home and mental ward, seemed to improve, worked odd jobs. Fell out of sight and headed south, apparently killing the occasional prostitute or runaway. One pundit quoted on television opined that Buddy preferred work at nursing homes since he would get to see people expire on a fairly regular basis. This might also explain his desire to be a rural JP. Serving as coroner, inspecting dead bodies, would have been delightfully stimulating for him. Credit-card receipts showed he had visited Deshay at least twice a year – perhaps treating Corey as a trophy, an example of his cleverness, paralleling the serial-killer fixation on visiting hidden remains of victims. A check of the human resources files at Placid Harbor showed that Buddy, armed with a master password, had altered the personnel records three times to indicate he was present at the nursing home when he was not. The dates were the dates when Marcy Ballew, Angela Norris, and Laura Palinski all vanished.
Claudia watched the federal agents walking around the cabin. ‘I wonder why he didn’t bury Heather if he buried the others,’ she said in a dead voice.
Whit inched onto the thin ice. ‘You couldn’t have saved Heather, Claudia. You couldn’t know she was in mortal danger. Neither did she.’
‘I could have convinced her to stay in a safe place.’
‘Stop it,’ Whit said. ‘She was a co-conspirator in murder. No way was she going to get close to you or let you help her. You saved Velvet and David and anyone else Buddy would have killed along the line. That has to be enough.’
‘Delford could have told me.’ She suddenly shivered. ‘He could have turned himself in. He had years of outstanding service on his side. He could have cut a deal, testifying against Lucinda.’
‘You want pearls with your hair shirt, Claudia?’ Whit said. He put an arm around her, and she leaned against him, old friend to old friend.
They watched the work crew begin to dig on a fresh stretch of land, between the oaks. Fifteen minutes later the crew found bones. Claudia stayed in the shade of the trees while Whit completed the autopsy authorizations.
Four days later Whit came home to find Faith Hubble, out on bond, sitting on a deck chair by his father’s pool, waiting for him. She wore jeans, a dark blouse, a ball cap, dark glasses. The uniform of the incognito.
‘I assume I’m not in violation of some restraining order,’ she said, not lowering the glasses. ‘I’m behind on reading my mail.’
‘You’re not,’ Whit said. ‘But if my father spots you here I imagine he’ll say you’re trespassing.’
He couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses. ‘I suppose you will say you were just doing your job,’ she said. ‘Destroying my son.’
‘Me? Look in the mirror. Faith.’
He saw her hands tremble. ‘My mother always said I had dreadful taste in men. I think you and Pete proved her point.’
‘Go see your son at the jail. Faith. While you can. They don’t arrange visits between prisons.’
‘You’re a cruel bastard.’
‘I spent about five seconds feeling sorry for you,’ Whit said. ‘Lucinda dragged you into the cover-up, made you dirty your hands instead of her. But you did it, willingly, for years, Faith. If you hadn’t, Sam never would have had a reason to kill his father.’
‘You don’t know thing one about my life… what my life has been like…’
‘No, I don’t. I can’t comprehend it.’ He felt a tremor of revulsion that he’d ever touched her.
She stood. ‘We have very, very good lawyers. And I promise you, when justice is served and our names are cleared’ – a straight reading from their press statement, he thought – ‘you’re done in this town. You won’t be able to get a job scrubbing toilets.’
‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘I have a feeling you’ll have filled that position.’
Selected election results from the November 7 election: Texas Senate, District 20, (Encina County tally only): Aaron Crawford (R): 11,587 Lucinda Hubble (D)*: 939* Hubble formally withdrew from race 10/24 Justice of the Peace, Precinct One, Encina County: Buddy Beere (D)**: 12 Whitman Mosley (R): 5,347** deceased but not removed from ballot
Whit could only suppose those twelve voices of democracy did not read the newspaper or voted strict party lines, death and felonies notwithstanding. Whit watched the results with a somber Irina and Babe, gave Patsy Duchamp a neutral comment for the paper, and went to bed.
You don’t act like a judge and you end up getting elected, he thought before sleep claimed him. Politics is just strange enough for you to stay.
The Honorable Whit Mosley savored the beauty of the late January afternoon as the borrowed Don’t Ask puttered out of St Leo Bay and beyond Escudo and Margarita Islands. Before him lay the wide-open Gulf of Mexico, the sea gunmetal gray, the waves whipped by just-right wind. January had been warmer than usual, the breezes sweet, the sunlight healing. Gorgeous, the fresh air like vitamins sucked straight into his lungs.
‘You let me know if you get seasick,’ Whit called to Velvet. She sat in a chair, face tilted toward the sun. She had returned from L.A. for Sam’s trial, starting in two days, and had been quiet since Whit picked her up at the Corpus Christi airport. She had hugged him fiercely but said little, nodding when he suggested spending an evening out on the Gulf and out of the reach of the reporters.
‘Just don’t steer this leaking contraption like a drunk man.’
‘Speaking of drunk,’ Whit said, ‘where are these legendary margaritas you promised?’