The chief’s head snaps up, his eyes questioning.
“Find that car, Don.”
“We will. You just make sure I know everything I need to know.”
“I will. Can I take Mia home now? I have a feeling she’s barely keeping it together.”
Logan blows out a stream of air and looks back at the men moving through the lobby. “I guess we can take a statement from her tomorrow.”
The crunch of glass heralds the approach of someone from the tunnel. My relief at being released evaporates at the sight of Sheriff Billy Byrd. The sheriff stops before the body on the ground and leans forward to look down past his gut. Then he surveys the lobby through the shattered doors.
“Christ on a crutch,” he says in his heavy drawl. “They told me it looked like a war zone. I never thought I’d see something like this in my town.”
Chief Logan offers Byrd his hand. The sheriff takes his time about shaking it.
“Who killed this one here?” Byrd asks, gesturing at the body on the ground.
“I did,” says the chief.
“Contact wound, looks like.”
“It was a hostage situation.”
Byrd nods, then turns to me, his eyes boring into mine. “You got one, too?”
“That’s right.”
“Lucky, huh?”
“I don’t feel too lucky, Sheriff. And I’m about to go home. Do you need me for anything?”
“Got a couple questions for you.”
“I can pretty much fill you in,” Logan says, tacitly claiming the crime scene for his department.
Byrd ignores him. “It’s pretty late, Mr. Cage. What were you doing here with Mia Burke at this hour? She’s still in high school, isn’t she?”
“That’s right.”
“Does her mother know she’s here with you?”
“My mother knows I’m with Mr. Cage,” Mia says, stepping up to us.
Byrd smirks. “So what were you two doing here? Is this like Dr. Elliott and the Townsend girl?”
Hot blood rushes to my face. “You’ve got no right to say that to us.”
The sheriff snorts and looks over at his men, who are gathering to watch our exchange. “It’s my job to get to the bottom of this mess, ain’t it?”
“Actually, I believe that’s Chief Logan’s job. And since he just saved our lives while you were sleeping at home, I’m not too well disposed toward you and your bullshit just now.”
Sheriff Byrd pales. “You don’t talk to me that way, smartass.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” Chief Logan says quietly. “Why don’t we let these two be on their way and concentrate on the work at hand?”
Sheriff Byrd hikes up his trousers and leans in close to me. “This is where Avery’s staying, ain’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Is the girl helping you with the case?”
“She’s working for us, yes. As a runner, basically. A gopher.”
“Is that right, Miss Burke?”
Mia nods uncertainly.
“Are they paying you anything?”
Mia looks worriedly at me. “No. I’m doing it because I believe Dr. Elliott is innocent.”
The sheriff snickers. “You’re one of the few.”
“All right, that’s it,” I say. “You want to ask more questions, you arrest us.”
Byrd looks as though he’s considering it.
Chief Logan takes a single step, but it’s a big one. He places himself directly between me and the sheriff. “Get going, Penn,” he says. “Call me tomorrow morning.”
“Thanks again, Chief.” I take Mia by the arm and lead her toward the corridor that runs out to Main Street. Then I stop and turn back to Logan. “I don’t have a car.”
Logan motions to one of his patrolmen. “Lee will drop you off.”
“Thanks.”
A young black patrolman detaches himself from a group of cops and walks toward us. Sheriff Byrd stares at me with open fury, but I ignore him. Too much has happened tonight to give a damn about a redneck sheriff and his agenda.
“Follow me, Mr. Cage,” says the patrolman.
“Thank you.”
The ride to Mia’s house is mostly silent. The young patrolman driving us asks a couple of questions, but his only intent is to learn more about the kind of gun battle he is unlikely to see in this town again.
“How’d you get the guy on the stairs before he shot you?” he asks. “He was carrying a Glock, and there was a round in the chamber.”
“I’m not sure. I killed a man like that once before. When I lived in Houston.”
“A burglar?”
Mia is staring at me from her corner of the backseat.
“No,” I reply, watching her. “He was the brother of a white supremacist I’d sent to death row. He broke into my house to kidnap my daughter. She was an infant then, and he was actually holding her when I shot him. I was so scared to shoot, I almost let him get out of the house.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I was lucky then, too.”
“Sho’ was,” says Lee, looking at me in his rearview mirror. “Man alive.”
The squad car slows, then stops before Mia’s house, a thirty-year-old home in a middle-income subdivision off Liberty Road.
“This it?” asks Lee.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He releases the locking mechanism on the rear doors, and we get out.
“I’ll walk you up,” I tell Mia.
She nods gratefully. After thanking Lee at his window, she starts up the sidewalk.
“I’ll come by tomorrow morning,” I promise, walking beside her. “I’ll talk to Meredith and explain what happened.”
“Or try to,” Mia says, laughing nervously.
“Yeah. I think your Nancy Drew days are over.”
She makes a sound I can’t interpret. “You lost Kate’s flash drives, didn’t you?”
I nod. “And her journal.”
“I’m sorry. How badly will that hurt Drew?”
“I was never going to use the journal. But we needed those drives.”
“What about Marko’s flash drive?”
I tap my pants pocket. “I still have that. Let’s just hope it has something useful on it.”
“And that Lucien can crack it.”
“If he can’t, someone can.”
Mia unlocks her front door and steps through it. She looks into the depths of the house, then back at me. “Mom’s asleep, thank God. I hope no one hears about everything tonight and decides to wake her up.”
“I think you’ll be okay on that.”
Mia reaches out and pulls my hand until I’m standing inside with her. All I can see clearly are her wide eyes shining in the dark.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I almost died, didn’t I?”
“You could have,” I admit. “And it would have been my fault. If Chief Logan hadn’t been there—”
“Look at me, Penn.”
“I am.”
“I’ve never felt more alive than I do at this moment.”
My palms are still tingling from the aftereffects of the fight at the hotel. But there’s something else happening within me, too. “I think that’s pretty common in these kinds of situations.”
“I want to kiss you,” Mia says.
“We talked about this before.”
“I know. I know we can’t have a relationship. I even respect that. I just want this moment, okay?”
Before I can think of a response, she stands on tiptoe, takes my face in her hands, and kisses me full on the mouth. I don’t kiss her back, but neither do I pull away. The truth is, I feel exactly as she does about our brush with death—phenomenally alive to every molecule of existence. And I can’t imagine anything more alive than the swelling mouth pressing against mine. Mia’s lips part slightly, and I feel her tongue brush against my lips. For one moment, I open my mouth and taste her, and in that moment I feel a rush of overwhelming de
sire, the first few feet of a plunge into bliss that Caitlin dubbed evolutionary nirvana . Mia gives my lower lip a soft bite, then pulls away.
“There,” she says, her eyes shining. “See? No harm, no foul. Tomorrow I’ll act like it never happened. I promise.”
“Try to sleep, Mia.”
“Not a chance. But don’t worry about me. And don’t feel guilty. Promise me.”
“I’ll try.”
Her teeth flash in the darkness. Then she gently pushes me out the door.
As I walk down the sidewalk, the chatter of a police radio brings me back to the present. I’ve got a lot of work to do tonight. I might have lost Kate’s flash drives, but I still have Sonny Cross’s computer and case notes. If I’m lucky, something in them will lead me to the dark soul who has brought so much death to this town. My town.
Cyrus White.
Chapter
34
News of the shooting at the Eola Hotel sent the town into shock. Caitlin published a detailed account of the attack, based on the account I gave her after waking her from a deep sleep in my bedroom early that morning. There was no point in trying to keep it from her. Besides, I figured the more people who knew about my stolen Saab, the better the odds it would be found. Caitlin seemed particularly interested in what I’d been doing at the hotel with Mia at 2 a.m. I explained that Mia was helping Quentin and me investigate Kate Townsend’s life, and that beyond that I couldn’t say more. This didn’t satisfy Caitlin, but she was so glad to get the inside story of the attack that she let it go, at least for a while. After she exhausted my memory of the night’s events—the ones I could tell her about, anyway—I pretended to get ready for bed. Caitlin got dressed, called her editor, and drove down to the Examiner offices to begin working the story.
As soon as she left, I brewed a pot of coffee and retrieved Sonny Cross’s private case materials from my safe. Then I scanned twelve of Sonny’s MiniDV surveillance tapes using fast forward. It was a tedious process, but by the end of it, I’d found two that showed Kate Townsend walking into and out of Cyrus White’s building at the Brightside Manor Apartments. These tapes were what Quentin had asked me to get for him, but they didn’t satisfy me. I wanted Cyrus in the flesh.
I began sifting through Sonny’s case notebooks, line by line. They contained copious notes on the drug activity at Brightside Manor—and elsewhere in Natchez—but nothing that would help me locate Cyrus, unless he’s staying at one of his known safe houses. And Chief Logan assured me that all those are being checked on a regular basis. Sonny’s notes made it plain that he got most of his information from drug users or couriers he’d busted and then forced to work for him in exchange for their continuing freedom. My problem was that Sonny only referred to these snitches by code names. The code names seemed oddly chosen until I realized that they were all characters played by John Wayne on the big screen. “Rooster.” “Chance.” “Ethan.” “Cahill.” “Big Jake.” “Chisum.” “McQ.” Almost all the information Sonny had on Cyrus White had been provided by “Ethan,” but nowhere in the notebooks could I find a key to the identity of these snitches.
Setting aside the notebooks, I began scouring the files on Sonny’s laptop computer. After nearly an hour, I hit pay dirt. An encrypted file. I couldn’t open it, but what excited me was that this file seemed to be the only encrypted one on the computer. As soon as I was sure of this, I called Lucien Morse’s cell phone. Lucien happily agreed to meet me at the Eola the next morning to hack Sonny’s file. All he required was another five hundred dollars.
Then I called Quentin at the Eola and briefed him on the battle he’d slept through last night. He told me that Doris had awakened at one point, thinking she’d heard a shot, but no sound followed, so they went back to sleep. Quentin cared little about the deaths of the Asians, but the loss of Cyrus’s threatening e-mails left him sputtering with rage. He’d enjoyed about thirty seconds of euphoria after I told him about the existence of the e-mails—then disaster. When I tried to mollify him by telling him I’d draw up a subpoena for Cyrus’s e-mail records, Quentin just laughed.
“He uses that e-mail address for dope trafficking, man. You’re never gonna find that. He’s got that shit under somebody else’s name.”
“Then we somehow have to convince Cyrus’s crew that giving us that address is for Cyrus’s own good,” I argued.
Quentin laughed harder. “They’ll never buy that. The e-mails for that account could probably put Cyrus in Parchman for five hundred years on drug charges. The chances that he’ll be convicted of Kate Townsend’s murder are practically zero. Cyrus can read the newspaper and see that for himself. Drew looks like a slam dunk right now. You leave the defense strategy to me. I’ve been here before.”
After this conversation, Quentin left the Eola to visit Drew at the county jail. I called my father and asked him to take Annie out of town for a few days. He agreed without hesitation. He and my mother plan to leave for Jackson tonight.
Those arrangements made, I drove to the Eola Hotel and found Lucien Morse waiting for me in the lobby. The St. Stephen’s sophomore was dressed to the nines, just as he was last night. Plastic sheets had been tacked up over the shattered hotel doors, and a construction crew was already working to repair the bullet damage. In the elevator, Lucien asked some morbid questions about the attack. The only answer I gave him was Sonny Cross’s notebook computer.
While Lucien tried to break Sonny’s encryption program, I sat at the coffee table and drafted a letter for the Top of the Morning column of the Natchez Examiner, a feature that usually contains editorials on the local political scene or articles on community events. The purpose of the letter was to announce my intent to enter the special mayoral election as a candidate. I’m not sure how the community will respond to it, but I know two people who will be profoundly affected. Shad Johnson will be enraged, and Quentin Avery will be ecstatic to have Shad distracted from Drew’s upcoming trial. A third person will be more deeply affected, of course. When I deliver that letter to the Examiner offices, Caitlin will know I mean to run for mayor. What will happen after that, I don’t know. But I have more important business to take care of before delivering the letter—business that Lucien made possible twenty minutes ago.
I am holding in my hand a printout of the contents of Sonny Cross’s encrypted computer file: a key to the true identities of Sonny’s snitches. Along with their names, Sonny recorded in this file the addresses and telephone numbers of each informant, and also details of the offenses they had committed—in effect the swords that he dangled over their heads.
Trying not to hope for too much, I lift the hotel phone and dial one of the two numbers given for code name “Ethan”—a drug courier whose real name is Jaderious Huntley. “Jaderious,” I recall, was the name of the person who shot the photo of Cyrus and Kate that was stored on Kate’s flash drive. The “597” prefix tells me the number I’m calling is a Natchez cell phone. After five rings, I get the familiar automated voice-mail greeting of Cingular Wireless. I hang up without leaving a message, then try the next number beside Huntley’s name.
This one looks like a residential phone. After seven rings, a young male voice says, “Jaderious.”
“Hello, Ethan.”
Jaderious gasps, and then the phone goes dead.
I dial the number again.
No answer.
I dial again and let it ring twenty times. No answer. I hang up and dial again. I can almost see a young black man staring at his telephone in horror, wondering if he’s hallucinating. I have no doubt that the only man in the world who knew the real identity of “Ethan” was Sonny Cross. And everyone knows that Sonny is dead. On my eighth try, someone picks up the phone but says nothing.
“This is Sonny Cross,” I say in a calm voice.
The silence stretches to infinity.
“You might as well talk, Ethan. I’m not going away.”
A tense voice says, “Sonny be dead.”
“That’s right. But
I’m not.”
“Who are you?”
“A friend of Sonny’s.”
“Oh, man, don’t be telling me that. That shit be over with now.”
“It’s not over, Jaderious. But it can be. I need one thing from you. Just one thing. After that, I’ll burn your file. It’ll be like you never knew Sonny at all.”
“Don’t play that shit, man. You guys don’t never stop. You think I’m a slave or something.”
“You put yourself in this spot, Ethan. Not me.”
“Don’t say that name, man. Just tell me what you want.”
“I want to see you face-to-face.”
“No way! Shit gone crazy in the street. That task force be on everybody’s ass. Everybody’s uptight. I can’t be seen with you.”
“You don’t even know who I am.”
“I know you white, that’s enough. Just tell me what you want!”
“I need to know where Cyrus is.”
Jaderious sucks in his breath like a monk hearing the voice of Satan. “You crazy,” he hisses. “You stone crazy, man.”
“You’re going to have to talk to me, Jaderious. One way or another.”
“No, I ain’t. If you know my number, you know where I stay at. And you ain’t coming up in here, I know that. Especially right now.”
“Tell me where he is, Ethan. Nobody will ever know it was you.”
Jaderious laughs openly. “Not even if I knew, dog, which I don’t.”
“If I have to come talk to you at home, people will see.”
“You come talk to me in person, you won’t make it out of here. So it don’t matter. You bluffing anyway, dog. I gots to go. Don’t call back.”
He hangs up before I can respond.
I sit quietly on the sofa for a while. Then I call Quentin Avery’s cell phone.
“What is it?” Quentin asks in a taut voice.
“Are you still at the jail?”
“Yes. And I’m not happy.”
“I need to get into the Brightside Manor Apartments.”
“So?”
“I need to get in there safely.”
“And?”
“Shit, Quentin, don’t play stupid. Can you get me in and out?”