Deeper Than the Grave (16 page)

Chapter Thirty-two

The dream was a mosaic of sensation untethered from any real memory. No beginning, no context, only Trey, his hands and mouth, and I knew the wild hammering of his heart for what it really was—fear—even as he buried it in the animal burn of desire. And something was pulling me away from him, and I tried to hold on, but he was smoke between my fingers, and then a sound, rhythmic and insistent…

My eyes flew open. I listened harder, heard only pre-dawn shop sounds. I fumbled for my cell phone and checked the time. Barely six a.m. Surely nobody was…

And then I heard it again, this time louder. Knock, knock, knock.

I clambered to the side of the bed and squinted out the bedroom window. There was somebody in the back lot down below, somebody standing at my door. I opened the bedside table and got my .38, thumbing open the cylinder to reveal five rounds. I snapped it shut just as I heard another series of knocks.

I frowned. No-goodniks didn't usually knock. So I put on my robe, and—with silent apologies to Trey, who had been trying to break me of bad concealed carry habits—shoved the revolver into the front pocket and went downstairs to the back door.

“Who is it?” I called.

“Miss Tai?”

I unlocked the door and cracked it an inch. “Kenny! What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“At six in the morning?”

“I've got school in an hour, and I couldn't tell you last night, not with Mr. Richard around.”

“Why?”

“Because it's about Lucius.” He stared at me with his wide eyes. “Please?”

I opened the door all the way. “Get in. And make it fast before I change my mind.”

***

He accepted a mug of coffee, taking one polite sip and then holding it between his shaking white hands.

I sat opposite him. “You weren't entirely truthful last night, were you? You
did
know Lucius pretty well. And he
was
acting suspiciously the night of the reburial.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He ducked his head. “I didn't want to say anything, but…there's something the police need to know.”

“So tell them.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“I'll get in big trouble. And then I'll lose my scholarship, and if I lose that, I can't go to college.” He looked up at me, fiercely agitated. “But I didn't do anything wrong! I didn't mean…”

He bit his lip, breathing hard. I glanced up at my deer head. The red light behind its eyes glimmered, recording every word. Trey was listening, probably with his finger poised to dial 911.

“Hang on a sec,” I said.

I turned off my cell phone and went to the deer head. I looked it right in its glassy eyes, breathed a
sotto voce
“sorry” into its mangy ear, then reached behind the left antler and switched off the audio feed. I kept the video—a small placation, so that Trey wouldn't drive his ass over and yell at me, which he would do if he suddenly couldn't see me—but I knew that if he heard something incriminating, he would be required by that merciless left brain of his to turn Kenny in. And I couldn't have that. Not until I'd heard what he had to say.

I turned back to Kenny. “I can't promise to keep the police out of this. But I can try, I can promise you that. And I'm big on keeping my promises.”

He looked at the deer head, looked at me.

“Okay,” he said.

I made him hot chocolate first. This he actually drank, the cocoa foam staining his baby mustache. He suddenly looked about eight years old.

“Do you know what the Darknet is?” he said.

“One of those role-playing games? Like Dungeons and Dragons?”

This earned me a tiny flicker of a smile. “No, ma'am. It's like the Internet, only without the safeguards. Like the frontier. And it's a dangerous place if you don't know what you're doing.”

“But you do.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He leaned forward, suddenly surer of himself. “You need connections, go-betweens to vouch for you. And if you break the rules, bad things happen.”

“Bad like what?”

“Bad like your life gets hacked. They can send Trojan horse viruses into your computer that'll fry everything on there—no more programs, no more documents, just slash-and-burn code. There's sick people on the Darknet. Kiddie porn rings, hit men. But worst of all is the RBC.”

“The RBC?”

He dropped his voice. “Russian business community. You don't mess with the RBC, not even accidentally. And they rule the Darknet, ma'am.”

“You mean the mafia?”

“Worse than the mafia. The RBC started back in the Gulag prisons, the baddest of the bad. Now they have entire IT teams working the Darknet. They had connections on the Silk Road—”

“The what?”

He made a patient face. “The drug site the FBI busted last year. It was like Amazon, only instead of books and stuff, you could buy crystal meth and crack and pot.”

I stared at him. “You've got to be kidding.”

“No, ma'am. “ He looked down at his hot cocoa. “That's where this all started. Before Silk Road went down, Lucius asked me if I could help them get on it to get some pot. I told them I could, but that I wasn't going to do it on my computer. So I went to this skate shop—”

“Grindshop. In Stone Mountain.”

“Yes, ma'am. I downloaded Tor on his computer, showed him—”

“Wait, wait, slow down. What's Tor?”

“It's an onion router. You know, multi-layered. It encrypts data by bouncing it through a random selection of arrays. All those Wikileaks guys? That's what they used. Turned the government's own weapon against it.”

He said this with a pleased smirk, and I realized there was more to this young man than nervous blushes and goody-two-shoes smarts. He was a true rebel, one of the quiet unthreatening subversives that could topple entire empires. If the Confederacy had been composed of his ilk, America would have been whistling Dixie instead of the Star-Spangled Banner.

“Okay,” I said, “so you gave him this illegal download—”

“The download's not illegal. It's a proxy server, that's all.”

“Kenny. In all manners technical, I am officially an old fogey. What's a proxy server?”

His eyes brightened. “It's how Tor maintains user anonymity. With this download, your computer can act as an intermediary for requests from other Tor users. Only nobody knows who got what, or where they got it, or which specific activities are associated with which IP addresses. But that wasn't the problem.”

“What was?”

He hesitated. I put down my coffee and scooted knee to knee with him.

“Look at me, Kenny.”

He raised his eyes. He was startlingly obedient for such a rebel, but I knew why. He respected his elders—even though I winced at the term. It was the government he didn't trust, something he'd no doubt learned at Richard's knee.

“Kenny? If you know something, something that could help figure out who killed Lucius, and you don't share that, then you can get in worse trouble than losing a scholarship. I'm talking jail trouble.”

He took a deep breath. “Lucius asked me if I knew anyone who bought relics.”

I cursed under my breath. I knew it, I'd known it all along.

“There's collectors on the Darknet,” Kenny said. “Real rich ones. Anonymous. Lucius said he'd heard about them from other reenactment units, that they bought all kinds of things, even bones. For thousands, Miss Tai. Thousands.”

I kept my voice calm. “Did you ever…”

“No, ma'am! I would never desecrate the dead that way, especially not our men in gray. Never!”

“But you think Lucius did.”

He nodded. “Mr. Richard is real clear on the rules. If we find anything on the field, we report it to him and he takes care of it. But about a month before Lucius disappeared, he asked me I knew anything about the underground relic trade.”

“Did you tell him?”

“No, ma'am. I don't mess with that. But he was asking.”

“You think that's where the Amberdecker bones went?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And you think one of these Darknet bad guys took the bones and killed Lucius instead of paying him?”

“I do now. Back then, I thought he'd just run off. And that's the other reason I'm scared to death to be talking to you. It's not that I don't trust you—Mr. Richard says I can, and so I do—but there's worse things than jail, Miss Tai, things like getting killed and stuffed in a coffin and—”

“Look at me.”

He did. He was scared and brave in equal measure, and my heart went out to him.

“I promise that I will do my best to keep you safe and sound and headed to Tech, you hear me?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

I realized I'd stopped correcting him forever ago. I was a ma'am now, a grown-up.

“Good. If things get hinky, and the cops do come knocking, you ask for Detective Dan Garrity. But you have to tell me something first—when you said you showed Lucius how to cruise the Darknet, you used the word ‘them.' Who else did you show?”

He looked nervous again. “I don't know if I should say.”

“You should. Because believe me, if any one of them decides to save their own neck by throwing you under the bus, they will do it in a heartbeat. Especially Fishbone. That dude is looking for a scapegoat, and he's probably going to need one, so out with it, Kenny.”

He looked utterly miserable, but he didn't say anything.

“Kenny? Who are you protecting?”

He raised his eyes, and they were as moony as a calf's. “Catherine Ann.”

“Who?”

“She's Mr. Richard's daughter. She's a bartender now, and they don't speak to each other anymore, not since she got in trouble with the law, which was all Lucius' fault. She met him here, at this shop, and they dated for a little while, but she broke up with him right before he disappeared. She's not like Lucius, Miss Tai. She's real sweet and nice, and I don't want to get her in any more trouble with Mr. Richard.”

I felt the connection coming together. One plus one was always two, and a rose by any other name…

“She doesn't go by Catherine anymore, does she?”

“No, ma'am. She's Cat now. And if Mr. Richard knew about her and Lucius, and about me being the one who helped him get her that pot…Lord have mercy, Miss Tai.”

I sat back in my chair. Based on what Cat had told me that night at Hog Wild, I was pretty sure Richard did know, about Lucius anyway. Trey had been right—he had been hiding something that night in the tent. Which meant that Richard was now at the top of the list of people who might have wanted to crack Lucius' skull wide open and stuff him in a coffin.

Lord have mercy indeed.

Chapter Thirty-three

I dumped a stack of Union uniforms into a crate and shoved them into the closet, almost dropping the phone in the process. “I swear, Trey, it's all I can do not to march myself back into those woods—”

“Promise me you won't do that.”

I jammed another sucker in my mouth. I'd called Richard's phone, but of course he wasn't answering. He was still in his pretend officers' tent, enforcing his “no technology” rule.

“How could he turn his own daughter out for a goofy teenage stunt like shoplifting! Or trying pot! That bass-akwards, holier-than-thou—”

“Tai.”

“I know, I know. Their story, not mine. But now that I know he's Cat's father, I'm not trusting anything he told us last night, not about Lucius, not about the reburial, nothing. You were right—he really was hiding something.”

I grabbed another armful of reenactment wear and crammed it into my last empty box. What the hell, I'd just pile the rest of it in the storage room. What the ATF didn't see…

Trey's voice remained calm. “You need to explain what Kenny said after you cut the audio.” A pause. “Why
did
you cut the audio?”

“Because it sounded like he was about to confess something, which means you'd have had to call the cops and have them arrest him. And I understand. Laws are necessary sometimes—”

“Sometimes?”

I heard the bristle in his voice. “But sometimes laws need bending. I understand that you can't, and that's okay. Civilization needs people to work the lines. But I work the edges.”

He didn't say anything at first. But I could hear him pondering.

“Did you find out anything useful?” he finally said.

I told him what Kenny had shared. He listened. I hoped he was taking notes, because once Trey got information into flowcharts or outlines, he started to see things. Patterns emerged, like a camouflaged lion stepping out of the high grass.

I grabbed a dust rag and can of furniture polish. “Kenny's got a lot riding on staying out of trouble, and he's a good kid.”

“How can you be sure?”

“A bad kid wouldn't have come to me.” I hesitated. “Why? Do you see something different? Was he lying?”

“I don't know. I can't read people over video.”

“So we don't know if he was telling the truth about any of it?”

“No, we don't.” He paused. “What are we going to do about this?”

I couldn't resist a tiny smile. “Uh oh, now you're getting curious.”

“I'm simply concerned.”

I gathered up the photographs still lying on the counter and put them back into their box. “Don't worry. I may have turned the audio off to keep Kenny out of trouble, but I kept the video on so that
I
would stay out too. I didn't think he was a stone cold killer, but it was nice to know that if he'd tried something, you were watching.”

“From forty-five minutes away.”

“Still. It was a reassuring feeling.”

I hesitated before placing my one photo of Cat back in the box. Now that I knew, I could see Richard in her features—the dark hooded eyes, the prominent cheekbones. I tamped down another surge of anger. I knew I shouldn't layer my story over this one, but I couldn't help it. I seethed with it.

“The more I figure out, the more complicated things get. Now Kenny's blaming the mafia too, just like Fishbone. As if the mob would be messing around with old bones.”

My doorbell jingled, and I turned around, almost dropping the phone. Rose Amberdecker stood in my shop. She looked out of place, like a lumberjack come to tea. Behind her I saw the outline of her truck, a four-wheel-drive pickup with mud-stained bumpers. From where I stood, I could see the gun rack and the three firearms that filled it—two slim rifles and a shotgun I recognized as the one she'd had in the woods, the twelve-gauge.

Trey saw her too. “Tai?”

“I know.”

“Promise you won't turn off the audio-video feed this time.”

“You bet I won't,” I said, keeping my eyes on Rose. “Guaranteed.”

I hung up. Trey didn't have to worry about losing contact. I wanted his eyes and ears all over Rose Amberdecker.

She was dressed as if she'd come directly from the field—blue jeans, flannel-lined work jacket, hair in the ice-gray braid down her back. She stood right in front of the dedication portrait, looking down at it, not at me.

“Can I help you?” I said.

She didn't reply, kept staring at her own image, and her daughters'. She'd donned no mourning then, and I remembered Evie's story, how Braxton Amberdecker's mother had refused to do the same. Mulish blood ran in the veins of Amberdecker women.

“I remember hearing of your uncle's passing,” she said. “I only met him once, when this picture was taken, but Richard says he was a fine man.”

“He was.” I put a lid on the box of photographs. “Still no luck finding the remains?”

She shook her head. “Evie wanted to continue, but I told her it was no use. The land claims us all eventually.”

She appraised me with pale blue eyes. I'd been worried my adventure with Chelsea would come back to bite me, and now here was Mama Bear, teeth bared.

“You sell buckshot here?” she said. “Three and three quarters, double aught?”

I tried to keep the relief from showing on my face. So this wasn't about Chelsea.

“I do,” I said, “but I'm technically not open right now. I've got an ATF inspection coming up this afternoon, and—”

“Agent Willoughby?”

“No. Thompkins.”

“Willoughby and I shoot together sometimes. Doves. Do you hunt?”

I shook my head. I remembered my one dove hunt with my uncle—the patient dogs, the bang of the shotguns, and then afterward, the gut buckets and smell of singed feathers. It was a sport for the keen of eye, and I knew from Richard that Rose had one. But Rose and I weren't talking sport. She was feeling me out for some reason, and I was both curious and wary.

“I don't hunt, but I do carry dove shot. When I'm open. Which I'm not right now.”

She ran her finger along the counter, tapped the hardwood. Her nails were cut short, a working woman's manicure. “Is this all there is?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your shop. Is this everything?

I put down my mug. “There's a storage room, a closet or two. And the upstairs is my apartment. But yes, this is it.”

She nodded, her eyes roving every corner. She noted the piles of catalogs and identification manuals waiting to be returned to the shelves, my well-thumbed and dog-eared guides through the world of Civil War-era antiques.

“So your business is mainly relics?” she said.

“Most of my reenactment trade is in replicas. My clients do collect, though—guns, swords, buttons, even glass eyes and bone saws. They keep wish lists, so if I run across something they'd be interested in, I try to snag it for them.”

“And do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Snag things?”

She said it with a hefty dose of accusation. I kept my voice level.

“Sometimes people bring in things to sell, usually from their grandparents' barn, and if I see something a client is looking for, I purchase it for them.”

She fingered the lock on my display case, empty still, waiting for the knives and swords piled on top to be returned to it. “I get them on my land, you know. Diggers, looters. The sheriff told me I'm not allowed to shoot them.” She smiled thinly. “But he said he'd understand if I mistook one for a deer.”

I remembered her eyes behind the twelve-gauge. She regarded weapons the same way Trey did, with a utilitarian eye, like she would a wrench or a hammer. Some of my clients were gun nuts, but some were like Rose. I wasn't sure which I found more disturbing.

Her eyes hardened. “Thieves, all of them. Hordes of them, sneaking on from the park.”

“Can't you prosecute them for trespassing?”

“I'd have to catch them first, but even then, they don't go to jail. They pay the fine and come back the next morning. But the coyotes are bad along the park edge. One day those looters are gonna find more trouble than they can handle.” She ran a finger along the lines of a replica cavalry sword, shiny and new. “Your uncle ever do any digging?”

“You mean the illegal kind? Absolutely not.”

She kept her eyes on the sword. “Richard said he had a hard time after your aunt died. Lots of bills. Times like that can make a man see things differently.”

“Mrs. Amberdecker—”

“There's shops like yours all over. I see the bullets and buttons for sale, claiming to be from the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Claiming to be properly obtained.” She turned to face me. “You have any things like that here?”

I took a deep breath, held it for a count of three, then let it out. “Dexter believed in proper provenance, and I've continued that commitment.”

“Then you won't mind showing me that paperwork.”

“Actually, I would.” I moved behind the counter. “I'll be glad to answer any questions you have about my procedures here, which are Dexter's procedures, but you can't see my log book and you can't see my sales registers and you can't see my client list.”

Her fingers tightened into fists. “Cut the nonsense. Where are they?”

“Where are what?”

“My great-great-grandfather's bones.”

So that was that.

I shook my head. “I don't have them.”

“Don't lie to me, girl. I know they weren't in the coffin. The detectives told me that
person
was in there, and not a one of Evie's students has found a thing despite looking for four days. Not a one. That's because they're not to be found. Now I don't know if your uncle took them, or somebody else who worked here, but whoever has them came through this shop to sell them, so you'd best tell me, and fast. Where are those bones?”

So this wasn't about Chelsea, who'd obviously kept her mouth shut about my little visit. I took another three-count breath.

“Mrs. Amberdecker, I have an AFT audit today. The Kennesaw Revitalization Commission is threatening to pull my business license unless I buy some sidewalks. Somebody keeps tripping my security system, and even my premises liability-agent boyfriend can't fix the problem because my neighbor's a bitch
and
I have detectives breathing down my neck because I found a skull on
your
property. And you think I have time to fool with even more bones?” I snorted. “I don't even have time for this conversation.”

She fixed me with a stare as narrow and relentless as the barrel of a gun. “You're not taking me seriously. But you should. You really should.”

She slammed the door on her way out. It made a friendly little tinkle behind her.

I looked up at the deer head. “Did you get that, boyfriend? Because I think I just got threatened by a woman who drives around with three long guns mounted in the back window of her truck.”