Natchez Burning

  She nods once into my chest.

  Only after I draw back do I realize we’re standing outside the room where Henry was shot. Henry himself has been moved to a windowless office in the administration area and placed under FBI guard. Using mobile equipment, the staff converted the office into a makeshift hospital room.

  Two more FBI agents arrive in short order, one of them the evidence specialist who processed the bones that came out of the Jericho Hole. With silent proficiency, they begin working the scene as a Concordia Parish sheriff’s detective observes. It quickly becomes obvious that John Kaiser knows more about homicide investigations than anybody else on the scene, but he takes pains to make sure Sheriff Dennis doesn’t feel the Bureau is running roughshod over his turf.

  This détente lasts until Kaiser resumes questioning the deputy who was guarding the door to Henry’s room. The man had been instructed to keep a careful log of everyone entering or leaving, but no nurse or aide on his list has admitted to opening the window blinds—which made the head shot possible. Kaiser obviously believes the deputy was lax in his logging, and as he presses the man, Sheriff Dennis boils toward the limit of his forbearance.

  “White uniforms all start to look the same after a while, don’t they?” Kaiser asks with apparent empathy. “They become sort of an official pass in a hospital environment.”

  “Nobody went in without me logging them,” the deputy says doggedly, but I sense that he isn’t sure.

  “Could you have dozed a little bit? Even for a minute? Standing post in an empty hallway is pretty boring, I know from experience. And you had the desk.”

  The deputy’s lips lock shut in a thin white line. Then he says, “I wasn’t sleeping, damn it. I told you that.”

  “Ease up, Agent Kaiser,” Sheriff Dennis says in a tense voice. “Tommy’s had a rough night.”

  Kaiser turns to Walker and speaks with grim purpose. “A material witness in several major murder cases nearly died because somebody reached up and turned a plastic rod on a window blind. The person who opened those blinds was almost certainly working with the shooter.”

  “How do you know that?” asks the deputy, who then points at Caitlin. “She was in there for two hours.”

  Caitlin looks up in shock from beside Jordan Glass.

  The harassed deputy sticks his chin out angrily. “How do we know she didn’t just reach up and open them blinds without even thinking about it?”

  “I didn’t,” Caitlin insists.

  “Agent Kaiser,” I cut in, “didn’t you tell me you were going to make sure Henry was covered? Were there any FBI agents in the hospital?”

  Kaiser sighs with frustration. “We were shorthanded at the Jericho Hole. I thought Sheriff Dennis had two more men over here.”

  Walker’s face is turning redder by the second.

  “I’m not accusing anyone of negligence,” Kaiser goes on. “We’re here to find out what happened, not whose fault it was. But whoever opened those blinds almost certainly knows who the shooter is. It could have been a hospital employee, or it could have been a walk-in.”

  He turns back to the deputy. “Your list shows five names in the past three hours, aside from the people with us here. One nurse is positive the blinds were closed shortly before Sherry left to go home. Caitlin says she didn’t open them, nor does she remember seeing anyone open them. But she was working on her computer while Henry slept, and she dozed some herself, so we have to assume that’s when the blinds were opened. We need to bring everybody on your list back down here, so you and Caitlin can verify who you remember, and see if you recall anyone else not in that group. Okay?”

  The deputy nods sullenly.

  Kaiser waves at one of his men, who takes the log and heads down to the central area of the one-floor hospital. Sheriff Dennis whispers to his deputy, who nods and walks down the hall toward the restroom.

  Hiking up his gun belt, Walker leans close to Kaiser. “We screwed up, okay? But I went to school with Henry Sexton. I played peewee football with his little brother. And I just got off the phone with his mama, whose scream I won’t forget for the rest of my life. I appreciate your help on this case, but I’m telling you—in the nicest way possible—to ease the fuck up on my deputy. You hear?”

  “I understand, Sheriff. I’ll go as easy as I can.” Kaiser turns and focuses on Caitlin. “Tell me about the shots. How many did you hear?”

  “None. The first thing I heard was glass falling out of the window. That’s when I saw the blood. The same thing with the shots that killed Sherry. Just glass getting punched out of the window.”

  “Silencer?” Sheriff Dennis says to Kaiser.

  Kaiser nods absently. He appears to be pondering some complex question. “Shooting through glass is no simple thing. That difficulty is the only thing that saved Henry’s life. SWAT teams have a special technique for that kind of shot. They use two shooters. The first shoots out the glass, and the second takes out the target. They make the shots so fast that the target doesn’t have time to react to the first shot. Which means the primary shooter—the one making the kill shot—fires even before the hole he will fire through actually exists. To an untrained ear, it might sound like a single shot.”

  “Never heard of that,” says a deputy on the periphery of our group.

  “But unless we have a pair of police- or military-trained snipers roaming this parish,” I point out, “that’s not what happened.”

  “The glass in there looked pretty thin,” Jordan observes.

  “When was this hospital built?” asks Kaiser.

  “Nineteen sixty-one,” says the hospital administrator.

  “No polymers back then,” says Kaiser. “Thin glass to start with, and it would be brittle after all this time. If the shooter fired at a right angle to the glass, the bullet’s deflection would be minimal, even with a small caliber.”

  “How small?” asks Sheriff Dennis. “Not a .22, huh?”

  “Twenty-two Magnum.” Kaiser takes a plastic pill bottle from his pocket and holds it up. “We dug this round out of the wall a few minutes ago. This is the one that grazed Henry’s skull. The glass probably affected the rotation of the bullet just enough to save his life.”

  The FBI agent looks up the hallway. Four of the five people listed in the deputy’s log have arrived for the mini-lineup. (One male aide apparently went off-duty but is on his way back to the hospital.) Caitlin and the deputy quickly agree that these four nurses and aides did in fact enter Henry’s room. What they can’t remember is whether anyone else did.

  “Wait a second,” Caitlin says. “When Henry woke up, he told me he’d gotten a visit from somebody. I thought he was hallucinating. He said the guy thanked him for his good work, and then left.”

  “Did he mention a name?” Kaiser asks.

  “No. He said it was a black guy … about sixty years old. Henry said the man said he was ‘just one of Albert’s boys.’ That’s why I thought he was hallucinating. Oh, and he was supposedly wearing a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.”

  “Detroit Tigers?” Kaiser echoes. “Henry was talking like the guy had just been there?”

  “Yes, but he wasn’t sure. He said it might have been when Sherry stepped out for something.”

  “There was a guy like that stopped by a good while back,” offers the deputy. “When I first came on duty, before lunch.”

  “And you didn’t think he was suspicious?” Walker asks in a challenging tone.

  The deputy shrugs. “Well … he was black, you know? I figured he was a friend of Henry’s. He sure wasn’t no Double Eagle. But I got his name, boss. It oughta be there on the list.”

  Kaiser grabs the list and scans it. At first he says nothing, but then he starts shaking his head, and his mouth shows the hint of a smile.

  “What is it?” asks the sheriff.

  “Gates Brown,” says Kaiser. “Ever hear that name?”

  “Sounds familiar,” says Dennis, cutting his eyes at me. “Who is he?”

&nb
sp; Kaiser laughs outright. “Gates Brown was a pinch hitter for the Detroit Tigers in the late sixties and seventies. Batted left-handed but threw right-handed. He won a World Series with the Tigers in 1968. Batted four-fifty.”

  “How do you know all that?” asks the deputy, marveling at the FBI agent’s encyclopedic memory.

  “I had a radioman from Detroit in my platoon in Vietnam. Black kid. He never stopped talking about Gates Brown. He liked him because Brown had been discovered while playing for a reform school team.”

  “Well, what the hell does this mean?” asks Sheriff Dennis, glancing at me every few seconds.

  Kaiser looks hard at the frazzled deputy. “Did you ask to see Mr. Brown’s ID, or did you just ask him to sign the book?”

  “I looked at his driver’s license.”

  “Did the name on the license match the signature?”

  The deputy goes red again.

  “Goddamn it,” Walker curses.

  Kaiser holds up his hand to calm the sheriff. “So—Henry had a visitor who used an assumed name. A man who may have worked for Albert Norris when he was a boy. We’ll have to try to find out what we can about ‘Mr. Brown.’”

  Sheriff Dennis gives me yet another sidelong glance, but I look away. As I do, I see Caitlin watching me carefully. She’s come to the same conclusion I have: “Gates Brown” must be “Huggy Bear”—the childhood friend of Pooky Wilson, who visited his mother on her deathbed. Henry’s mystery witness is still in town—or at least he was this morning.

  “Agent Kaiser?” says a new FBI agent from the edge of the group.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve been grid-searching the grounds on the highway side of the building. We just found a dead raccoon out there. Still warm.”

  “So?”

  “It was right under the victim’s window.”

  “Show me.” Kaiser slips through the knot of bodies and heads toward the exit.

  As the FBI men move away, Walker grabs my arm and leans close to my ear. “That’s got to be that same ‘Mr. Brown’ who told me he saw Brody Royal burning the Beacon, right?”

  “I imagine so.”

  “What the hell is going on, Penn?”

  “I don’t know, Walker. Let’s go see the raccoon.”

  CHAPTER 81

  HENRY SEXTON LAY half-conscious in a windowless room that only an hour ago had been an administrative office. Two doctors, four FBI agents, and a squad of nurses had hastily converted the office into a protective cocoon for the reporter-turned-assassination-target. Only one nurse had been with Henry since the ER doctor had patched the grazing wound to his skull, and at least one plainclothes FBI agent was standing guard outside his door. The nurse had been ordered not to speak to anyone about Henry’s condition, or even to confirm that he was alive.

  To Henry’s dismay, neither Sherry nor Caitlin nor Penn Cage had been in to check on him. The FBI agents he’d questioned had been brusque, but as the dazing effect of his head wound began to wear off, Henry recognized his nurse as an old grade school classmate—Irma McKay. When he told Irma he recognized her, she lingered to talk to him, and he’d taken advantage of the opportunity to ask about the shooting. Nurse McKay tried to obey her orders not to reveal Sherry’s death, but Henry quickly read the truth in her eyes. Seconds later she broke down and admitted that Sherry was dead.

  Although Henry had feared this from the start, something broke inside him when the nurse told him the truth. Not since the murder of Albert Norris had a death hit him like Sherry’s did. Her loss proved the cliché: you never knew what you had until it was gone. For years he had taken her for granted—the thousand things she did to make his life easier and, more important, the rock-solid support she’d given him when no one else gave a damn about his work. Sherry had always begged him to pursue a different type of story, but she’d finally accepted his need to see his quest through. She’d even helped him when she could. But now she had paid for his stubbornness with her life, while he had survived.

  Try as he might, Henry simply couldn’t process the shock. As he lay on his back in a drug-induced haze, a conviction grew in him that soon became an obsession. He had to get out of the hospital. Before an hour passed, his obsession had become a compulsion, irresistible and beyond all logic. The goal of his escape seemed almost secondary. As though in self-defense, his mind had focused on logistical considerations rather than philosophical ones.

  The problem was, escape seemed impossible—at least at first. He’d considered and rejected a host of wacky ideas. A diversion was a common component of prison escapes, he knew, but with the FBI on high alert, the slightest disturbance would only tighten the protective cordon around him. Floating in an opium-derived cloud, Henry’s mind began to search for a more original solution. As the medical machines clicked and beeped around him, he recalled an older boy telling his underaged self how to sneak into adult bars. You walk in like you own the damn place, man. Show no fear. No doubt whatsoever. Henry had used this tactic many times as a journalist, and often gained exclusive access to restricted areas and crime scenes.

  Might not that same tactic serve him now?

  The next time Irma McKay returned to check his vitals, Henry gave her the saddest smile he could muster.

  “How are you holding up, Henry?” she asked. “I’m so sorry about Sherry. I should never have told you. That wasn’t my place.”

  “Yes, it was. Better to hear it from an old friend than from some grouchy government agent. It’s all right, Irma. I won’t tell anybody that you told me.”

  “Really?” she said hopefully, making notations on his chart.

  “Not if you’ll you do me one little favor.”

  She looked up quickly, anxiety in her eyes. “I can’t get you no cigarettes, Henry.”

  He laughed at the absurdity of her misjudgment.

  “No, that’s not it. The FBI guys never brought me my cell phone. Maybe it’s evidence now or something. But I really need to talk to my mama. She’s got to be frantic by now.”

  “I don’t know, Henry. The FBI doesn’t want anybody knowing anything about your status.”

  “I know. But you know how this town is. The news is bound to be all over the place by now. Mama could hear it any minute. She might even hear I’m dead.” He shook his head, then regretted it as his skull pounded in response. “Sherry and Mama weren’t best friends or anything, but when word gets out … Lord, I hate to think what Mama might do.”

  Irma patted his upper arm. “I know, Henry. You’re right.” The nurse reached into her scrubs pocket. “If you promise not to tell, you can use my phone. Will that help?”

  “You’re a blessing, Irma.” He gratefully accepted the phone. “Um … is there any way you could give me a little privacy? I don’t want to—get emotional in front of you.”

  “Oh, Henry. We see men cry all the time in this place.”

  He closed his eyes and gently shook his head.

  “All right. I’ll go in the boss’s private bathroom while you call.”

  Henry thanked her, then waited for Irma to fulfill her promise. As soon as she pulled the bathroom door shut, he looked down at the phone and carefully dialed his mother’s number.

  CHAPTER 82

  “COON’S RIGHT THERE,” says an FBI agent, pointing to a dark hump in the grass beneath the shattered window of Henry’s hospital room.

  John Kaiser takes a small but powerful flashlight from his pocket and shines its beam on the gray animal, which appears to have been shot more than once. Then he pushes through the bushes beneath the window. I look right, then left, surprised to see how many volunteer trees and shrubs have obscured the windows that line the hospital wall.

  “Hold my light, Penn?” Kaiser says, handing me the black metal tube. “Shine it on this tree trunk.”

  I do.

  With a penknife, Kaiser digs into a small hole in the bark of a sapling by Henry’s window.

  “You got another slug in there?” asks Sheriff Dennis.
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  “Yep.” Kaiser turns and nudges me out of the bushes. When he steps into the open, his hand held in front of him, I shine the light beam into it. Lying in his palm is a small, deformed slug.

  “Twenty-two Magnum?” Sheriff Dennis asks.

  “Just like the ones inside.”

  A deputy behind me whistles. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Is that a sniper rifle?” Caitlin asks.

  Kaiser shakes his head. “It’s a varmint gun, basically. People like them because they’re not as loud as a .308, but they have more killing power than a .22 long rifle. You can kill a coyote at seventy yards with a head shot.”

  “You can also shoot coons and armadillos without waking up the neighbors,” Sheriff Dennis observes.

  Everybody falls silent. Speculation about the bullet’s caliber temporarily blinded everyone to what is right before us. We have a dead raccoon and a dead woman within a few yards of each other.

  “You see any other holes in that tree?” Sheriff Dennis asks Kaiser. “Maybe the wall?”

  I shine the light at the window, and Kaiser points to the right of it. “Looks like one embedded in the wall there.”

  “Shit,” says Dennis. “You think some kid could have been popping off rounds at that coon and accidentally shot through the window?”

  “No way in hell,” says Kaiser.

  Walker doesn’t look so sure. “Every kid in this parish owns a .22. They get BB guns for Christmas when they’re four years old. If you stand outside around here on any given night, you’re gonna hear shots. What if some kid was chasin’ that coon and run him up that tree you dug the slug out of? That’s just what a coon does. One miss would put a bullet right through Henry’s window.”

  “Why would a kid fire with a lighted window right there?” Kaiser asks. “And why multiple shots? No. You’re reaching, Sheriff.”

  “Buck fever,” says a new voice from behind us—a voice that sounds almost as amused as it does certain. “There’s prob’ly a ten-year-old kid crappin’ his pants somewhere right now, wondering if he shot a hole in somebody’s bedpan.”