Again and as usual, confidential information came up the line from one of the city’s bottom feeders. Three guys who’d always had trouble putting together the price of a draft beer of late had been seen with hands wrapped around the dewy necks of imports. One of them, the informant said, was truly spooky. Never spoke, smiled a lot, sat perfectly still. Always wore a baseball cap, Yankees one day. Dodgers the next, Orioles, Rangers. Must have one hell of a collection.
Like a lot of their breed, these guys started out doing occasional hits, then, when they got away with it repeatedly, and got used to the benefits as well, started making it a regular thing. That, along with informants, is what broke most of these cases for us. Soon these guys were surfacing every Friday night.
We knew where they were staying, in a swayback, half-abandoned apartment complex out in south Memphis, near Crump and Mississippi, kind of place where plywood’s been nailed up to make small rooms out of large and where to sit on the toilet you have to draw up your knees to fit them jigsaw like into the space between sink and door. But we still had to catch these guys with pants down. Every squad car went out with a list of mom-and-pop convenience stores in central Memphis that hadn’t been hit. We circled them like sharks.
One Friday, then another, went by without these guys showing at the crib. Hadn’t been around the bars either, our informant said when his contact tracked him down. No one had seen them. No one ever saw them again.
“Comes from inside the department,” scuttlebutt had it in locker rooms and lounges, “who else would know.”
Couple more, at least.
Someone who was offing cabdrivers. He’d hit late at night when drivers were inclined to take just about any fare they could get, he’d direct them to the city’s fringes and leave them there with their heads bashed in. The department pulled hundreds of pages of copies of log sheets and dispatcher’s records. We’d just begun heavy cruising of areas from which calls had come in the past when, abruptly, the killings stopped.
Next, a series of suspected arsons in upscale housing developments under construction. Two of those developments, then three, went up in flame. At the third, an elderly couple had moved in prematurely, before construction was completed. They went up in flame, too. Then it all stopped.
What the hell, the Captain said, sentiments echoed by many others, by the press, for instance, repetitively and at great length, is going on here?
We never really knew. But almost a year later, on an anonymous tip, in the woods just across the Mississippi line we found six shallow graves side by side, each topped by a wooden plaque into which had been burned a smiling skull and crossbones.
Chapter Seven
“Get you something? Coffee? Pie?”
“No thanks, Sheriff.”
Introducing herself, spelling the last name, Valerie Bjorn had settled in beside Don Lee.
“You new up at State?”
“Over a year now.”
“Can’t help noticing you’re out of uniform.”
“Out of-oh. I’m not a trooper, Sheriff. I’m attorney for the barracks. Commander Bailey asked if I’d mind picking up the evidence kit.”
“State’s paying top dollar for messengers these days, then.”
She smiled. “I live here, Sheriff. Well, not here exactly. Not far out of town, though.”
“The old Ames place.”
“I moved in two months ago.”
“Heard someone bought it. That house’s been empty a long time. Few rungs down from fixer-up would be my guess.”
“I’m doing most of the work myself. My grandfather was a builder, the kind that back in his day handled everything himself, plumbing, electric, carpentry. He raised me. I started crawling under houses when I was eight or nine.”
“And haven’t quit yet,” I said.
“I thought I had. But we’re so often wrong about such things, aren’t we? Not that I get much chance to crawl and so on, between my own work and what I do for the barracks. Hope you don’t mind my tracking you down, Sheriff. I saw your Jeep outside.”
“Not at all, Miss Bjorn.”
“Val. Please.”
Suddenly Thelma was at the booth saying, “Here, let me clear some room,” scooping up plates and laying them along her left arm. “Get you anything else, boys? Ma’am?” Their eyes met briefly. “Some more coffee? Just made a fresh pot.”
“Gettin’ too late for this old man,” Bates said. “Prob’ly be up through Tuesday or so, as it is.”
Don Lee and I also declined.
“I’m fine,” Val said. “But thank you.”
“We have the check?” Bates said. Thelma turned back and shook her head. He shook his.
“How long we been doing this, Thelma? Four, five years now?”
“Sonny says I don’t give you a bill. You know that.”
“And you know-”
“He’s my boss, Lonnie. I got to do what he tells me. That’s how most of us live. What, this job isn’t hard enough already?”
“Okay, okay. Anyway, your shift’s almost over now.”
“Life’s just chockful of almosts, ain’t it.”
Waiting till she was gone, Bates pulled out his wallet, extracted a twenty and a five, and tucked them under the sugar bowl. Easily twice what the bill came to.
“She’s dying to know who you are,” he told Val.
“I got that.”
“You want to come on back with me to the station, pick up that kit?”
“Would you mind if I waited and came by on my way in to work tomorrow, Sheriff? I’d dearly love to go on home now, get some rest.”
“Wouldn’t we all.” He nodded. “What time you figure to be swinging by?”
“Seven, seven-thirty?”
“Good enough. I’m not still there, Don Lee will be.”
We stood and made our way to the door.
“Goodnight, then,” Val told us outside. Her eyes met each of ours in turn. She shook hands with Bates.
“Lisa’s gonna hang me out to dry,” Don Lee said.
“Reckon she will. Not to mention having fed your dinner to the pigs.” Bates turned to me: “You’ll be needing a ride back.”
“You don’t live in town?” Val said.
I shook my head. “Cabin up by the lake.”
“Nice up there.”
“It is that.”
“Awfully late, though. He’s one of yours, Sheriff, right?”
“Well…”
“Look, the lake’s a long way. I have a spare room. Not much in there yet, an old bunk bed with a futon thrown across it, some plastic cubes, a table lamp without a table. But all that could be yours for the night.”
“A kingdom.”
We drove out of town in the opposite direction from the lake, past Pappa Totzske’s sprawling apple orchard and spread of seventy-five-foot chicken houses. The back seat of Val’s six-year-old yellow Volvo was piled with boxes, portable files, clothing, a stack of newspapers. When she hit the key, old-time music started up at full blast. Gid Tanner, maybe. She punched the reject button on the cassette player.
“Sorry, I usually have this world to myself.”
“Trying to assimilate?”
She laughed. “Hardly. I grew up with this, been listening to it, playing it, since I was ten years old.”
“Right after you began your carpentry career.”
“Exactly. Hammer, screwdriver, mandolin. Lot better with the hammer, though.”
The old Ames place was six or seven miles outside town, at the end of a dirt road so deeply pitted that it could have been passed off as a child’s projection map of the Grand Canyon. Papershell pecan trees and a huge, utterly wild and unkempt weeping willow stood by the house. Whole tribes could be living in the thing unbeknownst.
Val pulled up under one of the pecan trees and we climbed out. I had to hit the car door hard with the heel of my hand to get it open. She’d warned me it stuck some times. From the trunk she took a canvas book bag that looked to serve as a briefcase. A squirrel sat on a limb just above, fussily chattering at us.
“I’ve only got two of the rooms really habitable so far,” Val said as we entered, through the entryway into a small living room that, when the house was built, would have been used only on holidays and formal occasions. Now it sported a narrow bed, a rocking chair, a table doing triple work as desk, eating space and storage area. An antique wardrobe sat in one corner, drawers on the left in use even as the right side went on being stripped of multiple layers of varnish and paint, down to fine wood beneath. Sandpaper, a shallow dish and rags lay atop it.