He slipped on his yellow rain jacket and went out. He had a lot more to think through.
But at least now he knew why her killer wanted her head.
SEVENTY-ONE
The rain kept on. It shrouded the Bird’s Nest in fog. April’s car was already there. So was Maggie’s. Ever purposeful, they were soldiering on, prepping for a new night.
The rain would keep people away. With the bank poised to seize everything he owned, he didn’t think it much mattered anymore.
He drove on, through the intersection and up the overpass. He needed to see, even in the gloom. He needed to imagine.
Turning onto Poor Farm Road, he had the thought he should stop to say some words of understanding at the spot where the bullets had been blasted into Pauly Pribilisky – bullets that had been so carefully and totally retrieved and then likely thrown into the river, for they would never be allowed to be examined. But mumbling incantations to the dead, especially in a driving rain, was an Abigail Beech kind of thing, and he wasn’t that nuts. Yet.
He continued on to the bend and followed the river. It was the cabins he needed to see – the place where Sheriff Milner had used a lie to send a squad of searchers. Milner had been the decent man in the investigation and he’d died for it, probably a suicide from guilt but perhaps a victim of murder. The difference didn’t much matter.
The cabin that had been burned, the one they’d called the Country Club, had been the last one in the row. He parked, tugged his slicker tight and walked into the rain.
The river was high, already lapping at the top of the bank. The old dam, upriver, had always prevented that, but then the Army Corps of Engineers had added a second one, south of Grand Point. Now the river threatened to overflow, in the middle, each time there was a heavy rain.
Only a few scorched cinderblocks remained to show where the cabin had been. It must have been agony to wait even a couple of weeks to torch the cabin, fearing someone would link it to Betty Jo Dean. He wondered what it was that had to be burned. Blood, he supposed, but perhaps fingernail scratchings or maybe even words she’d managed to carve into the floor or a wall when she’d been left, tied, alone. Certainly there’d been no worry about finding fluids there. DNA testing wasn’t an option back in 1982.
The Country Club. A place for bait, rods and reels, and coolers for beer. And for a camp cot, originally for naps, then for the rape of an underage girl, though surely the bastard wouldn’t have called it that. Likely, he’d called it love.
He hunched further into his yellow slicker. The rain was pounding hard as daggers now, though no matter how fierce it had come the last thirty years, the ground on which he stood could never be cleansed. Likely she’d heard the searchers combing the woods outside; likely she’d tried to scream, through the rag in her mouth, over and over for one hellish day, and then another. Likely, she’d wept at not being able to hear herself.
The edge of the water frothed at the bases of the trees. To the north and to the south there were maples and oaks, spread irregularly apart, but only Chinese elms lined the bank of the old Country Club site, tight and neat in a perfectly straight row. Chinese elms grew much faster than maples and oaks. They might have been planted to keep the soil from eroding, perhaps replacing maples and oaks that had been destroyed when the cabin burned in 1982.
But they were weak trees, those elms, and one in the center of the row was tipping toward the river. Its leaves were brown and curled, a sign of death in early July. He walked up to look closer. The ground near its base had heaved; the rush of the river was pulling away its soil.
‘Odd day to be out, Mr Mayor.’
Mac spun around. A half-inch cigar stub smoldered comically in Clamp Reems’s pipe, sending absurd little smoke signals up into the wide brim of his hat. He wore an olive drab slicker that blended into the color of the woods behind him. His hands were caked with dirt.
‘Odd day for you, too, Deputy.’ He pointed to the man’s hands. ‘Weeding?’
Clamp’s face stayed blank as he came up to within two feet. It was technique; it was intimidation.
‘I never did trust them Army Corps of Engineers,’ Reems said. ‘That new dam is holding our water too high, destroying our riverbanks.’ He’d been checking the soil around the trees.
‘Horrible about Horace Wiggins,’ Mac said. ‘Any idea who knocked him out before torching his garage?’
‘We’re investigating.’
‘Like Betty Jo Dean?’ Mac had the thought that the deputy might be carrying a gun beneath his poncho, perhaps a.38. They were alone, in the rain, in the woods, just feet from a river that could clutch at anything and carry it away.
‘I understand you’re doing your own detecting, Mr Mayor, offering up all sorts of new theories.’
‘More like throwing out the litter of old ones that never did fit.’
Clamp Reems took the pipe out of his mouth, licked his lips, and reinserted it. And smiled.
‘Like that skull,’ Mac said. ‘That doesn’t fit either.’
‘Says you.’
‘Says at least one of the other photographs Horace Wiggins took.’
It worked. Clamp Reems blinked. Not hard, not long. But the tough man blinked.
‘I surely don’t remember Horace taking more than one,’ he said. ‘And now that Horace’s garage burned, well… Don’t stay out in the rain too long, Mr Mayor.’ Reems touched the tip of his forefinger to his hat in a mockery of a salute and headed toward his own cabin, a hundred yards upriver.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Clamp Reems,’ Mac called after him. But of course, calling out from behind, there was no way of telling whether that had triggered another blink.
SEVENTY-TWO
‘Been playing in the rain?’ April asked, eying Mac’s wet clothes as he came in the kitchen door.
‘Looking at the river.’
‘Everybody’s worried how it’s rising,’ she said, no doubt deciding she didn’t want to know what he’d really been up to. ‘A man just called for you.’
‘The banker? Tell him we might not get rich tonight.’
‘No. This guy was so ancient I could barely hear him. He could have been calling from a bar. Had a bad cough.’
‘Jonah Ridl?’
‘He didn’t leave a name, only a number.’
Mac went up to the office and dialed the number. April was right; a man in a bar answered. Ridl came on two minutes later. His voice was very weak.
‘I got my car running and motored here to my favorite tap. I was nursing the first of the afternoon’s delights when I looked up. And what did I see, right next to the eight-point head mounted above the antique Schlitz sign? A video of you on the TV, holding a press conference, unleashing the dogs of hell.’
‘Now if they’ll only dig.’
‘Somebody switched the channel so I didn’t see the whole thing. That skull has given your newshounds something to chase?’
‘That, and Horace Wiggins.’
‘I missed that part. What’s your favorite crime scene photographer up to?’
‘He’s dead. I started a rumor there was a second crime scene photo. He beat it out to his garage to paw through old boxes. Someone was with him and incinerated Horace, the boxes and the garage.’
‘To get rid of old photos and negatives?’
‘And one old witness that knew too much.’ He told Ridl about the pristine bullets.
A gurgling cough seized the old reporter for a full minute, before he said, in a voice barely above a whisper, ‘Hell, man. I heard they found at least two bullets lying on the gravel, shots that went clear through Pribilski. Those alone should have been nicked up all kinds of ways.’ He stopped to suck air. ‘I remember Clamp making a big deal about recovering every one of those bullets from Pribilski and Betty Jo Dean. He said he was going to take them to the ballistics lab himself.’