“We’ll see what we can do, Sheriff,” Harris said.
His brown skin wore a sheen of perspiration that glistened in the firelight. His blue work shirt was wet at the collar. The room was warm, Jo thought, but not that warm. The man was scared.
“Why don’t we start with a simple question,” Jo suggested. “There is no official FBI involvement in the investigations of the deaths of Elizabeth Dobson or Patricia Sutpen. So why are you here?”
Harris opened his hands as if to show the sand-colored palms concealed nothing. “I assure you, we’re here at the request of the California authorities.”
“Which authorities?” Jo asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Isn’t it true that your involvement is at the request of one authority? Your half brother, Nathan Jackson?”
“Where did you hear this?”
“Is it true?”
“I’m not prepared to answer—” Harris began to say.
“And isn’t it true that your involvement in the investigation of the murder of Marais Grand fifteen years ago was also because of your brother? Were you trying to cover up your brother’s relationship with Marais Grand, Agent Harris? To save his political career? Maybe even to help him get away with murder? And is that why you’re here now?”
She was out on a limb, and she knew it. One of the first tenets she’d ever learned in cross-examining was never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.
“These are serious accusations,” Harris cautioned.
“I don’t hear you denying them,” Schanno said.
Harris walked to the window. Against the gray outside, he looked like a shadow as he stood considering. But Jo’s attention was momentarily captured by a slice of light that appeared at the top of the stairs, as if someone down a hallway there had opened and closed a door very quickly.
“You have a reputation as a strong advocate of civil rights, Ms. O’Connor.” Harris didn’t turn, speaking instead as if Jo were beyond the glass he faced. “You’ve got an impressive history of helping the Chippewa people here.”
“They prefer to be called Anishinaabe,” she told him. “Or Ojibwe. Chippewa is a white term.”
“Whatever.” He slowly turned around. “My point is that you understand the importance of the issue of civil rights.”
“Actually, I’m having trouble understanding your point.”
“Sheriff, do you mind if Ms. O’Connor and I have a word alone?”
“I mind,” Schanno replied.
“Ms. O’Connor, I’d rather speak to you in private. It’s important. And I promise, your questions will be answered.”
Jo figured what the hell. “Wally?”
“I don’t like it.”
“Please,” Harris said. And he seemed sincere.
“You want me to leave?” Schanno asked.
“No. We’ll just step upstairs. Jerry, get the sheriff some coffee or whatever he’d like. Ms. O’Connor, if you’ll follow me.”
Harris led the way up the stairs, turned down the hallway, and knocked at the second door. Inside, someone called out evenly, “Come in.”
He was over six feet tall, the man who waited in the bedroom. Early fifties, trim and fit. He wore indigo jeans, a yellow lamb’s wool sweater, and a gold chain. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, appraising her as if he were an officer gauging a new recruit. His eyes were quick and intelligent in a face so lightly colored and softly featured that he could have passed for a beachcomber instead of an African American. Except for the gray that salted his hair, he looked no different from the first time Jo had seen him many years before in Chicago.
“Ms. O’Connor,” Nathan Jackson said, “I suspected it was only a matter of time before we met.”
Harris offered her a chair, but Jo preferred to stand.
“Then it’s true,” she said. “You were involved with Marais Grand.”
Nathan Jackson held a cigar in his left hand and gestured with it as he talked so that he seemed to write in the air with smoke. “Marais and I were lovers for a time, yes. But I certainly didn’t have anything to do with her murder. Nor would I ask my brother to compromise himself by participating in a cover-up of any kind. I’d be very interested in knowing how you came to make these accusations.”
“I had a visit this morning from Vincent Benedetti.”
Jackson froze and cast his brother a cold look. “Here? He’s here?”
“That explains a lot,” Harris said grimly.
“Explains what?” Jo asked.
“What did Benedetti say?” Harris pressed her.
Jo eyed them both. For brothers, they were not much alike. Harris was small, dark, broad in the features of his face. Jackson was tall, light as a chamois cloth, and as smooth. But then, they’d had different fathers. However, they were both the same in how they regarded her, with eagerness and concern.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Jo told them. “You tell me why you’re here, and I’ll tell you what I know.”
Harris gave his brother a quick shake of his head. But Nathan Jackson said, “I don’t think we have much choice, Booker. Ms. O’Connor, I’ll put a condition on this. What I tell you doesn’t leave this room. I’ll be perfectly candid, but I want your promise—your word—that you’ll keep this information confidential.”
“I don’t think I can agree to that.”
“The lives of people we both care about are at stake here,” Jackson said. “For you, your husband.”
“And for you?” she asked.
Jackson collected himself before he spoke, as if he’d been holding this in for a long time. “My daughter. Shiloh.”
“Your daughter?” Jo knew surprise lit her face like a flare, but the statement caught her so off guard.
The sky had darkened more. Against the bedroom windows, the drizzle began to mix with flakes of snow. Harris turned on a lamp on the stand beside the bed.
Nathan Jackson settled his cigar in an ashtray on the stand by the bed and offered Jo a photograph from his wallet. The photo was old but protected by a vinyl cover.
“It’s the only picture of Marais and me together. That was in the old days before she was famous and we both had to be so careful about everything.”
They were young and smiling. Marais Grand wore a white summer dress. Her long black hair hung over her right shoulder in a single braid. Her skin looked deeply tanned, but Jo guessed it was the evening light and Marais’s Ojibwe heritage. They stood in front of a white picket fence. Beyond that, a cypress tree partially blocked a dark blue ocean descending into night. They were holding hands.
“When was it taken?”
“The summer of 1970. I met her at a fund-raising rally for Angela Davis. We ran into each other at a lot of gatherings like that. I’d be there to speak, Marais to sing. The difference in us was that I believed in what I was saying.”
Harris made a sound like a blast of steam from a broken pipe. He didn’t bother to hide the derisive look on his face. “Cut the bullshit, Nathan. No voters here.”
Jackson went on as if he hadn’t noticed. “Marais, she’d sing anything people wanted to hear. Just so they’d listen and remember her. My God, she was good. And so beautiful. And so damn certain she was going to make it. I’m not sure I’ve ever known anybody who had a better sense of exactly what they wanted.”
“That’s when you were lovers?”
“The first time.” Jackson took the photo back. He squinted at it as if he were trying to read the faded etching on a gravestone. “We went separate ways after that. Marais got an offer in Vegas along with Willie Raye, whom she’d hooked up with professionally. I defended the Watts Eight, and that was my ticket up.” He put the photo back into his wallet.
“I didn’t see her again until the Williams Commission hearings three or four years later. She came to see me because her name was on the witness list and I was chief counsel for the commission. She was worried that if she testified it would rui
n a television deal in the works for her and Arkansas Willie. She asked me to take her name off the list.”
“And you did,” Jo said.
He nodded, with a faint smile. “The commission was bogus anyway. Congressman James Jay Williams’s version of the McCarthy hearings. Made him famous for a while. And gave me a foothold in politics. Marais and I became lovers again, briefly and very secretly. Then she told me she was pregnant. But she didn’t want anything from me. She told me she was leaving for Nashville to film her television show and that she was going to marry Arkansas Willie so the baby would have a name. She asked me if I minded. What was I going to say? To marry her was out of the question. We were going in such different directions. And to make public our liaison in that way and at that time would have ruined me. I said I didn’t mind. Didn’t mind,” he said with loathing. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He rolled the cigar between his fingers, studying the long ash, shaking his head faintly. “She was true to her word. She never asked me for anything. But she sent me pictures of little Shiloh once in a while. Here. This was the first. In over twenty years, it’s never left my person.”
He took out another photograph protected in clear vinyl. Shiloh at eighteen months in a white dress in a photographer’s studio. Jo had seen one exactly like it before in the trembling hands of Vincent Benedetti. She turned it over. The words on the back were in the same handwriting as those that had appeared on the photo in Benedetti’s possession.
Nathan—she barrels around like a fullback, knocking over everything. She has your nose and intelligence. My skin. My mother’s eyes. Marais.
“Shortly before her murder,” Jackson went on, “Marais moved to Palm Springs. She was tired of television and eager to do something different. I think she and Willie Raye were ready to call it quits. They’d played out the charade of their marriage long enough for both of them. Marais wanted to embark on a new enterprise. A recording company. She was smart. She’d investigated the angles and knew there were lots of incentives in California for minority businesses, many of them programs I’d championed. She came to see me. Told me she was prepared to do whatever was necessary to make sure she qualified. She didn’t need to do anything and she knew it. She was just testing. She brought Shiloh. It was the first time I’d ever seen my daughter, ever touched her hand. You can’t imagine what that felt like.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“It was as if from the moment Marais let me know that Shiloh was born and I couldn’t share that, I’d been living with a shattered heart. But suddenly all the pieces had been brought back together. I’d have done anything Marais asked just to be able to be with Shiloh again. Then Marais was murdered.”
“Why didn’t you come forward about your relationship to Shiloh?”
“I was afraid. It was a very confusing time.”
“And you were on a political express that might have been derailed,” Jo said.
“I know it sounds callous. I had Dwight Sloane assigned to the case. Dwight and I go way back to the old days in Watts. Practically like brothers. And I pulled a lot of strings to get Booker assigned by the Bureau. Because of Benedetti’s suspected ties to organized crime, they were willing to come in under the RICO statute. I had to know what was going on.”
“What was going on?” She looked directly at Harris.
“A lengthy, ultimately fruitless investigation,” Harris said.
“It was Benedetti,” Jackson insisted. “We just couldn’t prove it.”
“His motive?” Jo asked.
“They’d been lovers once. He wanted to start again. She told me she’d borrowed a hefty sum from him to start Ozark Records and he’d indicated he’d be willing to accept sex in lieu of interest. She wanted it strictly business. They argued—in public, in front of witnesses—the day before she was killed. Her murder was a hit, Ms. O’Connor. And it was Benedetti who arranged it. We just weren’t able to prove anything. If Benedetti’s here now, it’s to silence Shiloh, to keep whatever she remembers about that night from being told.”
Jo said, “The men who are here with you, they were all involved in the original investigation. Why are they here now?”
“They know the case. They owe me favors, and I wanted this done quietly. As soon as the tabloids get hold of this information, every lunatic this side of the Atlantic will be here trying to spot Shiloh. We hoped to do it so that Benedetti wouldn’t know either. I guess we blew that.
“If Benedetti’s men are out there, your husband, the boy, the others, they’re all in danger.” He held out his hands, empty. “That’s everything. I swear. Now you.”
“I spoke with Benedetti this morning,” Jo said. “He told me a story every bit as interesting as the one you’ve just told. Only in his version, he’s Shiloh’s father and you’re the man who killed Marais Grand.”
“What?”
Jo recapped Benedetti’s version of Shiloh’s origin and Marais Grand’s demise. Nathan Jackson listened with his jaws working back and forth like a silent engine powered by rage.
“The lying bastard. His daughter?”
“His story sounds no less plausible to me than yours.”
Jackson thrust the photograph of Shiloh at her. “Just look at her. She looks like me.”
“Vincent Benedetti is convinced she looks like him. We believe what we want to believe.”
“If Benedetti’s here, Nathan, we need to talk to him,” Harris said. “Maybe we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on out there.”
“What do you mean, what’s going on out there?” Jo looked from one to the other. “Don’t you know?”
The two brothers exchanged a glance. Harris said, “There’s a problem.”
“What problem?” Jo demanded.
“I think we should go downstairs.” Harris moved toward the door. “Metcalf can explain this. And Nathan, it’s time we brought the sheriff in, don’t you think?”
Jackson’s eyes fed on the photograph of Shiloh. He looked like a man worried it would be his last meal.
Downstairs, Schanno and Metcalf were at the map. Schanno saw Nathan Jackson, but probably didn’t recognize him. He looked unhappy and he looked at Jo.
“Got a problem, Jo,” he said.
“So I understand.”
“You told him?” Harris asked Metcalf.
“The essentials,” Metcalf replied.
“Will someone please tell me?” Jo said.
Metcalf beckoned Jo to the wall map.
“The last communication we had with Dwight Sloane was yesterday. Five-oh-eight P.M. Here.” He put his finger on a lake called Embarrass. “He should have checked in four hours later. He didn’t. At first light this morning, I went out in a helicopter to their last known coordinates. They weren’t there. I circled the area, but unfortunately with this weather, I couldn’t see much.”
“So the situation is, you’ve been out of touch with them since almost the beginning,” Schanno said unhappily.
“Essentially, that’s correct,” Metcalf admitted. “Probably it’s an equipment failure. The fact that we found no trace of them at the last coordinates indicates that they’re still moving.”
“But you have no idea where,” Schanno said.
“No,” Metcalf admitted.
Schanno rubbed his jaw and slowly shook his head. “Embarrass Lake. Not good.”
“Why?” Harris asked.
“The lake’s roughly circular,” Schanno explained. “There are easily half a dozen trails that lead off from various points around the shoreline.”
Harris said, “Then we do an aerial search along each trail until we spot them.”
“In that?” Schanno indicated the weather visible through the glass doors. “You couldn’t find the Eiffel Tower in that.”
“Suggestions?” Harris continued, unfazed.
“We get the Tamarack Search and Rescue Team to put men on every trail,” Schanno said.
“How soon?” Nathan Jackson asked.
&n
bsp; Schanno looked at him and must have decided that whoever he was, he was in it as thick as the rest. “They could be on the ground at Embarrass Lake in a couple of hours. We should get them started right away. With this cloud cover, dark’ll come early. They won’t have much daylight left.”
“It’s better than sitting around waiting,” Metcalf put in.
“Have it done.” Jackson turned to Jo. “I want to talk to Benedetti.”
“I can arrange that,” she replied.
31
THE WATER LOOKED LIKE GRAY EARTH and the paddle in her hand felt like a spade. With every stroke, Shiloh saw herself digging her own grave.
The man in the stern of the canoe hadn’t spoken except to press her for directions. She’d lied to him, tried to misdirect him to buy time. “That way,” she’d pointed, leading them through a narrows between two islands. “Now that way.”
His sense of direction was flawless even though the mist and the drizzle sometimes blotted out everything except the flat water fifty yards around them. “That will take us in a circle,” he said quietly at her back. “Don’t try that again. Which way is it?”
“There,” and she’d lifted her hand grudgingly in the direction of her death.
She’d struggled with despair all her life. She knew that people envied her, looked at the trappings and thought she had it all. They were wrong. Her life was a big beautiful box with lots of ribbons and bows on the outside but completely empty within. The only love she’d ever known was from her mother and that had been wrenched from her a long time ago. Her father had given her everything she wanted except love. She’d been raised by nannies, nuns, tutors, and housekeepers. She’d never had any real friends, anyone she trusted deeply. All she’d ever had was the music.
What would be the loss? Who would even care if she never came out of the woods? She laid her paddle across the gunwales, laid her head down, and wept. The canoe didn’t slow in the least.
“You disappoint me,” he said. “We all die sometime. Wendell Two Knives understood that. He went as nobly as any man I’ve ever known. You would honor him by dying well.”