The Devil and the River

  And now here, of all places, was a time of horror. Gaines did not know what had been done to the girl. Most of all, he did not know why. There were no questions he could answer for Judith Denton that would assuage what she was feeling. He sat with her for more than an hour, and she eventually turned away from him, buried herself into the chair as best she could, her body tight like a knot, fists clenched and pressed against her eyes, ashamed to be unable to speak, at the same time not caring who might see her.

  Her vanished child was a child now dead. This much at least she knew. The details were yet to come, and Gaines didn’t want rumors and assumptions stepping in where facts were needed. If Judith Denton was to be told the truth of her daughter’s death, then it was only right that such a truth came from him. In such instances, the law performed a function that should not be assigned or delegated.

  “Judith,” he said, and he laid his hand on her shoulder. She neither flinched nor acknowledged his presence, and Gaines waited a few more minutes before he said her name again.

  “Judith, I have to ask something of you now.”

  Gaines could feel the cool knot of anticipation in the base of his gut. His hands were sweating, his face also, and yet he could not move to retrieve his handkerchief from the pocket of his pants.

  “Judith, you hear me?”

  A twitch of response in her shoulder. Could have been involuntary.

  “I have something I’m gonna need you to do now,” he said. “I gotta take you over to the Coroner’s Office . . .”

  Judith Denton turned slightly. For a moment, her breathing hitched and stopped.

  “You tell me what happened,” she said. Her voice cracked with emotion, but beneath it was a firmness that could not be denied. “You tell me what happened to her, Sheriff Gaines. What happened to my girl?”

  Gaines started to shake his head. “I can’t—”

  “You’re the sheriff here,” Judith interjected. “So don’t tell me can’t. You’re the sheriff, and you can do whatever the hell you like. I want to know what happened to her—”

  “We don’t know yet,” Gaines replied. “We found her down at the side of the river. She was dead. She was in the mud down there, and we had to dig her out . . .”

  “How?” she asked. “How can that be? How could this happen?”

  Gaines shook his head.

  Judith looked at him, fixed him with an unerring gaze. “How old?” she asked.

  Gaines frowned.

  “How old is she, Sheriff Gaines?”

  Gaines understood then. “I don’t know, Judith, but Bob Thurston recognized her immediately, so she can’t be much older than when she . . .”

  Judith Denton was suddenly elsewhere, as if she had summoned sufficient imagination to picture her daughter. To see someone burying her perhaps, pushing her body down into the filthy, black mud . . .

  “Sheriff—” Judith started, and then there was something else in her eyes, something that tore her up, because the expression on her face changed in a heartbeat from pain and grief to something else.

  “D-Did th-they . . . ? Did th-they . . . ,” she started, her voice catching awkwardly at the back of her throat. “Did th-they . . . ? You know wh-what I’m asking, Sheriff . . .”

  “I don’t know, Judith. I don’t know what happened, and I won’t know until the coroner does his autopsy.”

  Judith started shaking, pushed herself deeper into the chair once more, seemed to close herself off again from the rest of the world.

  Gaines tightened his grip on her shoulder. “Like I said already, Judith, I’m gonna need you to come over to the County Coroner’s Office with me. You’re gonna have to be brave, as brave as you ever could be, and you’re gonna have to take a look at Nancy and tell me that it’s her.”

  Judith’s eyes were rimmed red, her face contorted with anger. “Bob Thurston knows who she is!” she snapped. And then she moved suddenly, twisted her body, and turned to look up at Nestor, silent the entire time. “Bob Thurston says it was her! You can’t be tellin’ me that he might have made a mistake, now?” Her eyes widened, almost as if some small spark of hope had resided there all along, and he had just fanned it with his words.

  Gaines shook his head solemnly. “No, Judith. You know there isn’t going to be any mistake on this, but the law says that next of kin has to come down and identify the body. You know that, right?”

  “I know nothin’ ’cept she’s dead,” Judith said, such bitterness in her tone, and then she started crying again, this time with greater force, and her whole body was racked with spasms as she pulled herself in tight and tried to exclude Gaines.

  “Judith . . .”

  “Take Roy Nestor,” she said. “Take him with you . . . He knows her as well as anyone . . .”

  “Now, Judith, you know I can’t do that. It has to be kin. That’s the law. Has to be kin.”

  Judith’s eyes flared. There was something angry and cold in her expression. “The law?” she asked. “You’re down here telling me about the law? Where was the law when she was taken? I told them she’d been taken. I told them she would never run away, but did they listen? No, they didn’t. Tell me about the law now, Sheriff. Where was the law when my little baby was being—”

  “Judith,” he said, in his voice a tone of directness and authority. “Until the truth is discovered, there is no truth. We have no indication of what happened to her.” Gaines pictured the wide incision along the length of the girl’s body, the rough stitching that had been employed to bind it together again. He could not tell her mother of this. Not now. Not yet. “The investigation has barely begun—”

  “So what are you doing here with me? What the hell are you doing down here with me when you should be out looking for whoever did this thing?”

  “Judith, I’m serious now. I have a lot of work to do on this thing. This is all that’s happening for me right now, and I need to get some kind of cooperation here—”

  Judith Denton faced him, and for a second Gaines believed she might throw her arms around his shoulders. She didn’t. She raised her clenched fists and started beating on him, thumping on his arms, his shoulders, his chest. The woman was strong, but he did not restrain her. It was nothing more than utter desperation and loss releasing itself the only way it could.

  Eventually, Gaines gripped Judith’s wrists and pulled her close. She collapsed against him. He held her tight, as if to let her go was to see her vanish. He felt her tears making their way through the thin cotton of his shirt once again. He could smell the funky odor of her body, the tang of something wild and bitter in her hair, the smell of the room around them. And what he felt was hopelessness. Hopelessness and futility, because he had seen this before. He had seen it all before, and so much worse.

  The horror of the tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai. Dead children, flies nesting in open mouths and hollow eye sockets, the skin dry and papery to the touch, the stomachs bloated with putrid gas. Losing his footing one time, skidding sideways like a sand surfer, arms extended for horizontal balance, Gaines had gone down a steep incline into a trench where some teenager had fallen. The weight and velocity of his descent had been sufficient to burst the boy’s stomach.

  Another time Gaines saw a man disappear. His name was Danny Huntsecker, and he stepped on a Claymore antipersonnel mine, and he simply disappeared. He was there, and then he was gone. This experience did not result in any philosophical realization; it did not impart some fundamental truth regarding the fragility and impermanence of man. Nothing so poetic. It merely demonstrated to Gaines that if you hurled seven hundred and fifty steel ball bearings at Danny Huntsecker with enough force, you could make him completely disappear.

  He had seen worse, and he had heard of much worse.

  Gaines did not understand what had happened to Nancy Denton. There were many questions to be asked and answered. When had she last been seen? Who had seen her? Where had she been going? Where had she been coming from? When had Bob
Thurston said this had taken place? August of 1954? This was a twenty-year-old mystery, and Gaines knew how rapidly memories could fade in a year, let alone two decades. Most murders possessed rationale for no one but the murderer. Gaines knew this. He believed that the circumstances of Nancy Denton’s death would be no different. Hers had been an unnecessary death for everyone but her killer. For her killer, there had been a great deal of point. Nancy Denton may have been murdered for who she was or what she represented. And if she’d been raped, assaulted, and if the butchery that had been performed upon her bore some relation to her kidnap and murder, then there was an even darker story to be uncovered.

  And so Gaines pulled Judith Denton tight against his chest and wondered who the hell had made this world. From what he’d seen and heard, it sure didn’t seem like God.

  6

  In the presence of Judith Denton, Breed County coroner Victor Powell did not divulge the details of his initial examination of Nancy’s body to Sheriff Gaines. Rather, he took Gaines aside for a moment, told him that there were things that Gaines needed to know, that he should come back later when the mother had left.

  “What things?” Gaines asked.

  Powell shook his head, looked away for a moment, glanced at Judith, and when he turned back, the expression on his face communicated a sense of disquiet. “I’m just saying, Sheriff,” he said. “I’m just saying there’s things you need to know today, all right?”

  “All right Victor, all right,” Gaines replied. “And where’s Bob?”

  “He was called away. He’ll be back shortly.”

  Gaines returned to the bench in the corridor. Judith Denton sat wringing a sodden handkerchief.

  “I can’t do this . . . ,” she said, her voice cracking, “I can’t do this, but I gotta do this . . .”

  Gaines took her hand and helped her to her feet.

  “I really don’t think I can do this . . . Don’t make me, Sheriff. Don’t make me . . .”

  Gaines said nothing. Her put his arm around her shoulder and turned toward Powell, who stood near a door on the right.

  Powell pushed the door open and then followed them through into the morgue.

  There was always a sense of surreal disconnection that removed John Gaines from such scenes. The dead were the dead. It was so clearly evident to him that the energy, the very spirit that had animated the body in life, was something separate from the body. Especially with young children who had died unexpectedly, it seemed to be the case that something remained in the vicinity. As if life had to reconcile itself to departing.

  This was something he felt in the presence of Nancy Denton.

  Her body had been covered with a simple white sheet. Victor Powell steeled himself. He took the sheet at its uppermost edge, and drawing it down, he revealed the face of the girl to her mother. Judith Denton’s breathing stopped. Gaines waited for the hysterical rush of grief that he knew was coming, something that would pale into insignificance anything she might have expressed before . . .

  “She looks the same . . .”

  Judith Denton’s words floated into the air, and they just hung there.

  She looks the same . . .

  Now that the mud had been cleaned away, Gaines saw her with such clarity.

  She was a beautiful girl, her complexion and coloring more fall than winter, her dark hair swept back from her face, her eyes closed as if in sleep, her expression almost restful. Gaines did not understand how this could be. How could a body stay unchanged for twenty years? How was such a thing even possible? It was as if she had been locked in time while the entire world went on without her. Gaines imagined meeting someone from his own past, someone from two decades before, only to find that despite the passing of so many years, they had not changed at all. It provoked a feeling that he had never before experienced, and he did not like it.

  He remembered how he had crouched at the top of the bank, how he had looked down at her face, how the pale, white hand had appeared from the blackness, how it had taken the strength of six men to get the mud to relinquish her, the stark and terrible image of the wound that centered her fragile frame, and now silently thanking Victor Powell for not showing the wound to the girl’s mother . . .

  Judith Denton’s knees started to give way beneath her. Gaines held on to her with everything he possessed. Coroner Powell drew the sheet back over Nancy, and then he hurried around the edge of the gurney to help as the woman became nothing but deadweight in Gaines’s hands.

  Gaines felt as if he were watching the proceedings from the ceiling of the morgue. He could not hold Judith Denton anymore, and so he let her go.

  Fifteen minutes later, Gaines and Judith Denton were seated on the bench in the corridor. From the car he’d brought a small silver flask, within which he kept a shot or two of bourbon. He had her drink it, held her as best he could while she cried some more, and then told her that the full examination was incomplete, that there were things he needed to know, things that could only be determined by the coroner. Without these things, it would be nigh on impossible to learn the truth of what had happened to her.

  “The truth?” Judith asked. “The truth is that she is dead, Sheriff.” She turned and looked at him. “So let me take her. Let me take her back where she belongs and bury her proper. Let me at least do that.”

  “I can’t, Judith, and even if I could, I wouldn’t. You’re gonna have to let me do what I need to do here, and as soon as I can release her, I will.”

  “And if I refuse—” She stopped speaking and looked at him.

  For a brief second, Gaines noticed a flash of anxiety in her eyes, as if she were afraid of what he might say or do.

  “Judith,” he said calmly. “I need you to help me on this. I need you to let me keep her until our work is finished. I’ll help you make arrangements so things are done right. I’ll find some money—”

  Judith shook her head. “That is something you don’t need to do,” she said.

  Gaines knew better than to push the point. Pride would prevent Judith Denton from ever accepting a nickel from him. “This is important enough for me to insist,” he said. “I need to give the coroner the time he needs—”

  “And if I don’t, you can have me arrested?”

  “Judith, you know I would never do such a thing.”

  She closed her eyes.

  Gaines fell silent.

  The tension between them was tangible.

  “You gonna find the truth of what happened to her?” Judith asked.

  “I’m going to do my best . . . That’s all I can tell you. I’m gonna do everything within my power to find out what happened—”

  Judith was distant for a while. “Everyone loved her,” she said. “Everyone. And that night . . . the night she went missing . . .” She shook her head and looked down at the floor. “That was supposed to be a party. Just a party for no reason other than to have a party, but everyone was there. Michael was there, Maryanne, too, and the Wade boy. Michael had on his uniform, and he was so handsome . . .”

  Judith looked back at Gaines. “I let her stay out. I let her stay out all night. She was sixteen years old, and she was a good girl. I trusted her . . .”

  Gaines reached out and took her hand. He could feel the dampness of tears on her skin from where she had been clutching her handkerchief.

  “You promise me—”

  “You know I can’t promise anything, Judith. You cannot ask me to promise anything.”

  “ ’Cept that you’ll do your best?” she asked. “You can promise me that much?”

  “Yes. That much I can promise. That I’ll do my best.”

  Judith Denton rose awkwardly, as if there were little strength in her knees.

  “I’ll drive you home,” he said.

  “I’m gonna walk, if you don’t mind, Sheriff. Been inside here enough. Been inside the house, inside the car. Feel like I’ve been inside for twenty years, you know? Want some air. Want to walk out there by myself and have a little
time.”

  “I understand.”

  Judith Denton looked down at Gaines. “I’ll be expecting her home soon as you can bring her,” she said. “Home is where she belongs.”

  “You have my word, Judith,” he replied. “You have my word.”

  Gaines walked her to the door and watched her until she disappeared at the corner, and then he returned to the morgue.

  Powell was standing over the still-shrouded body of Nancy Denton, and as Gaines entered, he drew back the entire length of the sheet and exposed the naked form of the girl.

  “How can this be?” Gaines asked, still disbelieving.

  “The mud,” Powell replied. “I don’t know a great deal about it, John, ’cept that it can happen. High salt content, low oxygen, buried deep enough to stay cold. And the fact that the mud got inside her as well. I’m sure that had something to do with it. It’s something you’d have to consult a forensic archaeologist or someone about, but I’ve heard of bodies being preserved for hundreds of years, not just decades.”

  “Unbelievable,” Gaines said. “This is truly unbelievable.”

  “The fact that you found her there is the least unbelievable thing about this,” Powell said. “It gets a great deal crazier from here on. Trust me.”

  Gaines frowned.

  “She wasn’t sexually assaulted,” Powell said. “I expected to find that she had been, but she hadn’t. I think her hands and feet were tied, but I cannot be sure. There are no signs of any real physical injury at all.”

  “Cause of death?” Gaines asked.

  “Asphyxiation, as far as I can tell right now,” Powell replied. “The hyoid bone in the throat is broken, concurrent with strangulation, but I’m not done.”

  Powell indicated the eighteen-inch incision down her torso. “But this is my greatest concern . . .”

  “This is what you needed me to know?” Gaines asked, almost afraid to ask, aware that even he was close to his own level of tolerance.