The Bone Tree (67 page)

Kaiser had examined Thornfield’s body inch by inch, and his best guess was that a Double Eagle had strangled or suffocated Sonny with something soft—a shirt or towel—while the others gently held him down. Thornfield’s arms showed faint bruising, but he’d been far too weak to fight hard—or for long. Murder was going to be hard to prove. The grim truth was, his heart might have given out even before his oxygen.

No one could understand how the killers had gotten into Thornfield’s cell, but Kaiser was pretty sure of what had happened. In the event of a power failure, the emergency generators kicked on, which powered the electronic gate system controlled by the duty guard. But after the second bomb had taken out the generator, the cell doors would have had to be operated manually. There hadn’t been enough time for someone to crank open those doors, allow the Eagles to get to Thornfield, then close the doors again while Agent Wilson had been absent from the sheriff’s office. But Kaiser had examined the door mechanism, and there was a dual DC-controller for the unit, which meant that you could hook a car battery to it and operate the doors in an emergency. He suspected that someone with advance knowledge of the bombs and their targets had done just that. Spanky Ford had claimed this was practically impossible—and Kaiser planned to hook Ford up to a lie detector as soon as possible—but the damage was already done.

He was about to go down to the garage-level holding pen where Snake and the remaining Double Eagles had been moved when he heard boots approaching the cellblock door. A few seconds later, the broad silhouette of Walker Dennis filled the space, and then the sheriff stumped down between the cells and stopped outside Sonny’s. He didn’t even nod to Kaiser, but only stared down at the body with what looked like cold fury.

“Where the hell have you been?” Kaiser asked between gritted teeth.

“None of your goddamn business,” Dennis muttered.

Kaiser shook his head in amazement. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Sheriff. Four bombs go off at your courthouse, your department falls apart, a star witness is murdered in your jail, and you don’t show up until a half hour after the fact?”

“I don’t answer to you, Kaiser.”

“No. But that begs the question: just who
do
you answer to?”

Dennis looked up at last, his eyes burning with rage. “Fuck you.”

Kaiser fought to control his temper. When he spoke, it was in a low voice that almost any man would recognize as dangerous. “Sheriff, either you come clean and tell me everything that’s going on, or I’m going to federalize your department. In all frankness, I may have to do that regardless of your actions.”

Dennis studied Kaiser for several seconds. Then he turned and walked out of the cellblock.

CAITLIN SCRAMBLED OUT
of the pirogue with her pistol in her right hand and clambered onto the grassy earth beneath the Bone Tree. Her left hand held a cheap flashlight Harold had passed to her.

“Which way?” she asked. “Where’s the opening?”

“Go to your right. Around to the other side. And quiet down. Jesus. We ain’t the only ones out here.”

“Sorry,” she panted. Fear and excitement were making her hyperventilate.

She kept her eyes on the wet ground as she moved around the great legs of the trunk, watching for cottonmouth moccasins, which were plentiful out here. She felt like she was moving in slow motion, but she knew this was only adrenaline distorting her sense of time.

The trunk of the Bone Tree was so vast that the johnboat disappeared as she worked her way around it. Again she thought of the Tree of Life in the Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World. But this tree had been made by God, or nature. And it was no tree of life, but of death.

As she worked her way to her right, a black opening like a cave mouth showed between two of the cypress’s elephantine legs. Her breath stopped in her throat. The inverted V was more a crack than a door, but certainly wide enough for men and animals to pass through.

“Harold!” she cried, forgetting all caution. “Come around here. Hurry!”

“
Shut up!
” hissed her guide. “Them bones ain’t going nowhere, if they even in there.”

He appeared about five feet behind Caitlin, his old .22 rifle clutched in his hands.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry. This is just freaking me out. This is a major deal, Harold. You have no idea what’s going to happen behind this. Do you think it’s safe to go inside?”

“Prob’ly safer in there than out here.”

She started to venture in, but Harold held up his hand.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“I heard that motor again.”

“Shit. It’s just hunters, right?”

“You think that’s good news?”

“I don’t care anymore. Just stand guard while I check out what’s inside. Five minutes is all I need.”

Harold turned and scanned the darkness under the canopy of trees. With his dark skin and the primitive atmosphere around the Chain Tree, Caitlin couldn’t help but picture a runaway slave from 150 years ago, afraid of being lynched.

“If you want to stay five minutes,” he said, “give me your gun.”

Caitlin hugged the pistol to her belly. “My gun? Why? You’ve got a rifle.”

He snorted. “This lil’ .22 ain’t worth spit against the deer guns them hunters carry. They’ll blow a pound a meat out of me. I need some firepower.”

Caitlin thought about it. “What if there are animals inside the tree?”

Harold took the stock of his rifle and banged it against the trunk of the Bone Tree. The wood made a dull thump against the fibrous bark. He watched the black opening for several seconds, then said, “Anything but a snake would have scooted right out of there. And you wouldn’t hit a snake with that pistol anyway. You got boots on. Just give ’em a wide berth.”

“I’m not giving you my gun,” Caitlin said. “I’m sorry. I’ll hurry, I promise. Now, promise you won’t leave me.”

“You gonna pay me the extra five hundred?”

“Absolutely. I’ll pay you an extra thousand if those bones are in there. Hell, you’ll be going on talk shows for the next six months.”

This notion didn’t seem to impress her guide. He flicked his hand like she should get on with it, then turned and gazed out over the water with his rifle clenched in his hands.

Closing her left hand tight around the flashlight, Caitlin inched toward the lightless opening with the pistol held in front of her. She felt like an archaeologist carrying a flaming torch into an undiscovered tomb. The fissure in the tree was tall, and narrower than she’d first thought. A man Penn’s size would have difficulty squeezing through,
but she was thin and could pass with relative ease. Pausing on the threshold of the strange doorway, she shone the flashlight’s weak yellow beam into the darkness at the heart of the tree.

She saw bones, far more than she’d expected. Some were white as chalk, while others looked brown and coated with moss. There seemed to be no order to their arrangement. She would have to move closer to understand exactly what she was looking at.

Shining the beam just inside the crack, she saw no snakes on the dry-looking floor of the cave. She sucked in a deep, preparatory breath, then turned sideways and stepped through the fissure.

A small animal scrambled out of her path, and she jerked backward, shining the light around in a panic. A possum stared at her from ten feet across the floor, its red eyes glazed with terror. She aimed her pistol at the gray-furred animal and started to squeeze the trigger, then stopped. A gunshot might send Harold into panicked flight across the swamp. Instead, she moved several feet to the side of the fissure, crouched, picked up a long bone, and hurled it at the possum. The animal started, froze, then scuttled around the inner wall of the cave and vanished through the crack of light that led to freedom.

Caitlin heard Harold laughing softly.

Now that she was alone in the hollow heart of the cypress, a profound transformation overcame her. She sensed the great age of the tree, an ancient, hoary temple of fiber more resilient than any bone. She understood why wounded animals might seek out this silent chamber to die. It was literally a mausoleum, and it felt like one, only without the artificiality of the stone sweatboxes in human cemeteries. In one curve of the round room, it appeared that animals or humans had mounded up earth and moss against the wall.

Remembering the need for haste, she dropped to her knees, set her pistol beside her, and began to examine the bones. Caitlin knew little about anthropology, but she seemed to be looking at a mixture of deer and human bones. Then her flashlight played across the hollow eyes of a human skull lying sideways beneath a pile of arching rib bones, and her breath stopped. Five feet away, she saw another. Something coiled beside the second skull caused her to scrabble backward, then jerk up her pistol and squint into the darkness. It wasn’t a snake, she realized, but a thick rope. Picking up the flashlight again, she saw that the rope
was rotted half through. With sickening certainty she realized that someone had probably been bound with that while being tortured.

She gasped as she started breathing again. Forcing herself to relax her diaphragm, she shone the light upward to give herself a break from the horror. What she found was horror magnified, and confirmation of the story Jason Abbott had told the FBI back in 1972. Wired to rusted nails driven into the walls of the tree were enough human bones to make a skeleton. The collection had lost much of its original composition, but the bones had clearly been posed to represent an inverted crucifixion. It brought to mind the cross of St. Peter, but Caitlin knew that Elam Knox’s death was no martyrdom.

She dropped the beam and let it play over the bones on the floor again.

“I can’t leave these here,” she said softly. “God.”

Hot tears slid down her cheeks. She had come here looking to make her reputation, but she’d found something so profoundly sad that it humbled her beyond all thought for herself. As soon as she came within range of a cell tower, she would call John Kaiser. This obscene place was the business of the FBI, not a swarm of ravenous reporters craving the latest titillating story. She pocketed her flashlight and pulled out her Casio camera to start photographing the bones.

“Harold?” she called over her shoulder while shooting pictures methodically. “Could you come in here, please?”

Getting no answer, she looked back at the vertical crack of daylight behind her. “
Harold!
”

No reply.

She felt a moment of panic at the thought that he’d abandoned her, but then his dark silhouette blotted out the lower two-thirds of light shining through the crack.

“You find what you was lookin’ for?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m going to pass you a skull and a few bones. It’s terrible crime-scene procedure, but I’m worried that whoever’s in that boat might come back and get rid of the evidence before the FBI can get here. Preserving some of this is far more important than any damage we might do. Okay?”

The boy didn’t answer.

Fear struck her like an arrow as she confronted the dark and silent
silhouette in the crack.
Is that even Harold?
she thought crazily.
Of course it is. He just doesn’t want to take the bones.

But something odd about the figure’s posture stoked Caitlin’s fear into panic. Was someone standing
behind
him? Did Harold have a gun jammed in his back? Moving as naturally as she could, she dropped her camera, closed both hands around the butt of her pistol, then shifted her feet so that she was facing the crack.

You’re being paranoid
, she told herself.
Just take out your fucking light and shine it on him.

When she did, she saw Harold watching her with a strange intensity.

“What’s the matter?” she whispered, trying to look past him. But her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and the light beyond the door was blinding.

“I’m about to do you the biggest favor of your life,” Harold said.

A spit of flame erupted from the center of the silhouette, and a blazing dart punched through her chest.

Stunned, Caitlin wavered, then fell to her knees, trying to draw breath.

“Don’t fight it,” Harold said. “I don’t want to have to shoot you again.”

From pure instinct, she raised her pistol and fired five rounds at the shadow in the opening. The blasts of her pistol deafened and blinded her, but they must have driven her guide away from the tree, because a few moments later, her traumatized retinas again perceived the blue-gray light of the crack. Every instinct told her to lie down and try to catch her breath, but what remained of her reason argued that doing so would mean death.

Flattening her left hand on the cool floor, she struggled unsteadily to her feet, even as someone turned a giant screw at the center of her chest, driving it into her heart. She nearly collapsed twice, but somehow she managed to stay erect.

Her plan was to stagger through the crack with her pistol in front of her, then take the boy’s boat by force. She told her right foot to take the first step, but more primitive fibers than her cerebral cortex now had control of her brain. After two labored breaths, she backpedaled until she collided with the wall of the Bone Tree, then sat down hard.

For half a minute, she could do no more than force breath into her lungs. The stink of burnt gunpowder in the closed space sickened her. She laid the flashlight beside her. Then, shifting the pistol to her left hand, she raised her right and slipped her fingers inside her jacket.

“Oh, God,” she gurgled, feeling warm fluid soaking her top. Then she felt the small, ridged hole a couple of inches below her left nipple.
My heart is under that
, she thought.
I’m dead.

“Hey, lady,” said a soft voice. Harold’s voice. “Can you still talk?”

Caitlin squinted at the crack of light, searching for a target, but she saw nothing. She still wasn’t sure what had happened. Had Harold shot her? Or had someone standing behind him shot them both? Or had they shot her and knifed him?

“What happened?” she croaked.

“I know you’ve got more bullets. That Springfield holds ten.”

Caitlin didn’t want to believe that the boy had shot her. If he had, then she had no hope of getting out of here alive.

“What happened?” she asked. “Is somebody else out there?”

“No. And you owe me for that. Captain Ozan told me to call him when I got you out here, but I didn’t. And I ain’t gonna. I got a walkie-talkie right here, and I ain’t even turned it on. You’re a nice lady. You don’t need to go through that.”

A wracking sob burst from Caitlin’s throat. “You shot me?”

“I had to. But it’s way better than what could have happened, believe me. Pretty thing like you . . . they’d rape you for sure. All day long, front and back. Even shot like you are now. They don’t care. That Ozan, and Colonel Forrest, man . . . they’re
sick
.”

Gasping for breath, Caitlin tried to understand why a black man would be working for the likes of the Knox family.

“Look up to the left of those wired-up bones,” Harold said. “Shine my flashlight. You see what’s up there?”

Caitlin didn’t try to lift the light. But in a shaft thrown from the door, she saw a woman’s leather coat hanging on a nail, brown and tattered where the waist hem should have been.

“That ain’t what you think it is,” Harold said. “That’s a skin. That lady wasn’t much older than you, either. Mexican lady. She got in the wrong car one night. Po-lice car. Now there she is.”

Caitlin struggled to hold down the few bites of cheeseburger she’d eaten at the Crossroads Café. She thought of Terry Foreman waiting there, her bright cheerleader’s face lined with worry.

“Will you help me?” she asked, trying not to sound pathetic. “I’ll pay anything you ask. A hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred.”

“You shoulda said something sooner. It’s too late now.”

Caitlin thought of her father, sitting in his office in the glass tower high above Charlotte. “My father will pay you a million dollars if you take me to a hospital, Harold. A
million dollars
. No questions asked. I mean it. He doesn’t care about any of this crap. Not the bones . . . nothing. Only me.”

Caitlin realized she was crying.

“Shit,” Harold muttered from outside the fissure. “After what I done just now, your daddy would stake me to the ground and back his car over me.”

“He wouldn’t!”

“This ain’t what I wanted,” said the boy. “My brother’s stuck in Angola. Twenty-year sentence. Now that I done this, Colonel Forrest will get him out. Next month, when his parole hearing comes up.”

Caitlin finally understood what had happened. Harold Wallis was probably a low-level drug dealer. He’d recognized her the moment he saw her standing outside the service station with Terry, and he’d called someone in the Knox organization. Probably Captain Ozan. Ozan had made him a proposition, or given him an order, and he’d strolled into the café to make his pitch. And she’d been so gullible! She’d brushed Terry’s doubts aside like the fears of a nervous child. After all, wasn’t she on a crusade for justice? Justice for murdered black activists? Surely a young black man would be on the side of the angels.