The Devil's Punchbowl

  “No. I’m sure about that.”

  “Were you doing anything with the white hooker?” Kelly asks. “Sexual stuff, I mean?”

  “Naw. Told her I was too old to get it up anymore, and she was fine with that. Less work for the same money.”

  Kelly rubs his thumb and forefinger together with a sandpaper sound. “Still, if she told any of the other girls that, it might have drawn some interest. I doubt many johns pay good money without wanting something at the end of the night. At least a little strip show, if not a blow job.”

  “Maybe,” allows Walt. “But I don’t think she would have told. She wanted me to herself. Why share an easy mark?”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” I tell him. “You did what you could. Sands is a smart son of a bitch. You probably just pushed too far too fast.”

  “I am getting impatient in my old age.”

  Kelly gives Walt a “buck-up” smile. “No, you’re getting too decent for the work. If you’d screwed that first whore silly, they’d never have caught onto you.”

  Walt’s face remains wrinkled with concentration. “It was the girl. Ming, or Jiao, whatever. Sands sent her to try and read me, and she did. Just like a book. To tell you the truth, I feel a little shaky now. Kelly’s right. I came close to buying it tonight, without even knowing it.”

  Dad gets up slowly and gives his old friend a consoling pat on the shoulder. “That means your luck’s holding, Walt. That’s something to celebrate.”

  The old Ranger shakes his head, his sense of failure palpable in the room. “No. I’d say that’s about as clear a message as a man gets that it’s time to hang up his spurs.”

  “You’re not serious about driving back tonight, are you?”

  “Yep. I never want to see that hotel room again, and I couldn’t sleep now anyway. Too much to think about. And Carmelita’s been patient with me. I need to get on back to Texas.”

  Dad doesn’t waste time trying to persuade his friend to stay. He knows Walt’s mind is made up. “What can we do for you?”

  “Walk me to the door, partner. That’s it.”

  We all rise and follow him into the foyer. “A pretty poor showing for me,” Walt says, shaking hands all around. “But don’t lose heart. Kelly, you quoted that old ‘One riot, one Ranger’ saw to me on the night we first met. I’ll leave you with the real one we used to live by.”

  The foyer falls silent, and Walt Garrity speaks with quiet conviction.

  “‘No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a’comin’.’ Cap’n Bill McDonald said that. Don’t you boys forget it, either, just ’cause things look black.” The old Ranger nods once for emphasis. “I’ll catch you on the turnaround.”

  Kelly opens the door, checks the street, then leads Walt out to his Roadtrek. Dad and I follow, my hand on the pistol in my pocket. As Walt reaches his door, I hear the whine of a small engine being driven hard, then headlights flash over us. A Volkswagen runs the stop sign at Union Street, races up to where we stand, and skids to a stop.

  Kelly has his pistol out a full second before I do, the weapon light mounted beneath its barrel illuminating the face of Kim Hunter, the reporter for the Examiner. The guy holds up both hands and shouts, “Penn, it’s me! Kim!”

  “He’s okay!” I tell Kelly. “What are you doing here?”

  “Are we safe out here?”

  “Safe as anywhere.”

  “I’m getting out.” Hunter climbs out of the Volkswagen, then walks to the rear of the vehicle and pops open his trunk. “Come here.” He bends out of our sight. “Hurry.”

  Kelly lifts his gun again, but as we get to the back of the car, I’m stunned to find Caitlin staring up out of the small trunk. Her face is gaunt and her feet are a bloody mess, but her eyes are filled with tears of relief.

  “She wouldn’t let me call the police,” Hunter says. “Or take her to the hospital. I’ve been driving around the block trying to see if it was safe to stop. When I saw you come out, I decided to go for it. She’s scared to death, and she can barely walk. What the hell’s going on?”

  “We’ve got her,” I say, lifting Caitlin bodily from the trunk and holding her shivering body. “Thanks, Kim. Go home, before somebody sees you. Don’t talk about this to anybody, and don’t let anybody at the paper print one word.”

  “Okay. Are you sure she’s going to be all right?”

  “We’ve got her,” Kelly says. “We owe you, buddy.”

  “No, you don’t. I love that lady, man.”

  Kelly grins and pushes Hunter toward the open driver’s door. “Get going.”

  As the Volkswagen pulls away, Kelly ushers Caitlin and me back toward my porch, his back to us as he turns left and right, covering the street behind us with his pistol. As we move through the door, I see Dad wave at Walt in the driver’s seat of the Roadtrek. Then the long, silver RV rolls up the street after the Volkswagen.

  “Linda Church is dead,” Caitlin says, her bruised hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. “She hanged herself. I saw it. I mean, I found her right afterward. She was being held next to me. In a dog kennel.”

  Caitlin’s sitting on my knee at the kitchen table, her bandaged feet resting on a pillow, my arms wrapped around the blanket my father put over her shoulders.

  “How did you get away?”

  She shakes her head as if there’s too much to explain.

  “Do you know where the kennel was? We flew the river for hours looking for you.”

  “I don’t. I walked so far, and everything looked the same. They took my cell phone, and I knew I couldn’t call you even if I had it, because they might hear. I saw a few cars, but I didn’t dare risk flagging anyone down. I kept thinking about that story your father told us, about the girl who got away from the brothel. I was afraid to talk to anyone.”

  “How did you find Kim?”

  “I finally came to a building in the middle of nowhere. A farm equipment place. I broke in and used their telephone. I figured Kim was my safest bet. But I was afraid to wait there for him. I thought the police might come.”

  I lay my cheek against her back and hold her tight. “It’s going to be all right. You’re home now.”

  “You don’t have any idea where Linda’s body might be?” Kelly asks, ever practical.

  Caitlin closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I don’t the dogs—”

  “I’m going to put her in bed,” I say, seeing that she’s about to break down. “Dad, I want you to call every cop you ever treated and put a ring of steel around this house. I’ll talk to Logan in a few minutes. Kelly—”

  “I’m there, bro. Going to the mattresses. About fucking time.”

  Dad’s already picking up the phone.

  To my surprise, Caitlin allows me to carry her to the ground-floor guest room. When I pull back the covers, she raises her arms for me to remove her sweat-soaked top, then pulls her pants off and climbs under the sheet.

  “Did they hurt you?” I ask, surprised by how afraid I am to hear the answer.

  She lies on her side, staring blankly toward my hip. “Not really. But the things I saw what they did to Linda. I wish I’d let Kelly kill them. Quinn ” Caitlin lifts a shaking hand to her eyes, as though to hide them from some awful sight. “He made me watch him rape Linda, and she was sick. I don’t understand it.”

  Almost afraid to touch her, I stroke her hair gently. “Beyond a certain point, there isn’t any understanding it. Sometimes the only way to deal with people like that is on their own terms.”

  She lets her hand fall and blinks back tears, as though still wit nessing some immutable horror. “I never really understood that. I’ll never be the person I was before. I’ll never talk to another victim of a crime the same way again.”

  “Don’t think about it now. Just try to rest.”

  She closes her eyes, then opens them again.

  “What about what Kelly asked?” I say. “You don’t have any idea where Linda might be?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. Kim can probably tell you more than I can.”

  “But you’re positive she’s dead?”

  Caitlin blinks twice, then h
er chin begins to quiver, and tears stream down across her nose. “Penn I had to use her body to get away.”

  I don’t quite understand this statement, but something tells me not to ask for details.

  “To distract the dogs,” she whispers. “I don’t I don’t think there’ll be anything left to find.”

  I lay my hand on her forehead and say, “Shhh,” just the way I do with Annie.

  Caitlin wipes her nose and looks up at me, her eyes pleading for absolution. “I tried to get her to go with me. I tried so hard. But they’d broken her. You understand? She was alive, but there was nothing really left of her.”

  “I’m sorry. Whatever you did, I’m sure it was the right thing.”

  She squeezes her eyes tight, then nods once. “She couldn’t have made it. She knew that. She was so brave . I see now. She gave her life for me.”

  “I want you to stop thinking about it, if you can. You’re never going to forget what happened, but right now you need to let it go, just for a while. You’re alive, and you deserve to be. Sometimes survivors don’t get that. I’m going to go out there and make some decisions. But I want you to call me if you can’t sleep.”

  She tries to smile but fails. “I will.”

  I stand slowly, shattered by the sight of this woman I know to be so strong reduced to near helplessness.

  “Will you do me one favor?” she asks softly.

  “Anything.”

  “I want Seamus Quinn dead.” Caitlin locks her fingers around my wrist and squeezes until her arm shakes. “Not just dead. I want him to suffer.”

  I nod but don’t reply.

  “Will you promise?” she asks, her eyes bright in the shadows.

  “Let’s see how you feel after some sleep. We can talk about it then.”

  Her eyes hold mine for several seconds, then she releases my wrist and turns over. “Nothing’s going to change my mind,” she says quietly.

  “I’ll see you when you wake up.”

  “Nothing.”

  CHAPTER

  63

  Burned houses remind me of dead bodies. There’s the same feeling of senseless waste, of life extinguished. Family homes are the worst. Stumbling over a charred doll or a half-burned photo album always brings a sharp pang of sadness, the knowledge that apart from life itself, talismans of the past are our true treasures.

  Ben Li’s house is not like that. A modest wood-frame structure on Park Place, near Duncan Park, it burned nearly to the ground before the fire department arrived. According to Chief Logan, the fire chief has no doubt that it was arson. The house must have been filled with accelerants to have gone up so fast.

  In the hazy blue light of dawn, smoke still rises from the charred wood beneath the brick piers that once supported the house. It’s 6:15 a.m., but the older people in the neighborhood are already up and moving, getting their papers or walking their dogs. A few have strolled up to the house to stare at the ruin, as people do. One guy even picked through the wreckage as though hunting for souvenirs, until I chased him away.

  I’m here because sometime during the night, in that semicomatose state between sleep and wakefulness, the one true epiphany of this case came to me. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner—probably because I was so focused on the stolen USB drive—but perhaps also because the tension generated by Caitlin’s kidnapping was blocking me. But after her return last night, some tightly wrapped coil of stress must have let go, for a chain of logical thought rose out of my subconscious as effortlessly as a string of bubbles seeking the surface of a lake.

  Jonathan Sands hired Ben Li because he was a computer expert. Tim Jessup believed that Li had maintained some sort of “insurance” to protect himself from his employers, probably sensitive data. When I first heard Tim say this—in the voice memo he made before he died—I assumed that Li would have hidden whatever data he had on some remote digital server, accessible only by himself or someone with the password. I also assumed that Li’s instruction to “ask the birds” about this somehow related to such a password, and that if Ben Li kept cockatoos, maybe they could speak the required phrase or numbers. Sands and Quinn almost certainly made the same assumption. But if the birds could speak the password, they did not do so for Sands. If they had, he would not have felt the need to burn down Ben Li’s house.

  More to the point, last night, during Caitlin’s periods of fitful sleep, she told me something of her captivity with Linda Church. Through the rapes and abuse Linda suffered, Quinn had kept after her about one subject: Ben Li’s birds. While torturing Li in the interrogation room in the bowels of the Magnolia Queen, Sands and Quinn had asked him about anything incriminating he might have stored off the boat. Li had still been under the influence of whatever drugs Tim had given him, and was half-delirious, but in that state he had babbled something to the effect of “The birds know! Ask the birds!”

  I haven’t come to Ben Li’s house because I’ve figured out his password. I’ve come because I believe there is no password. There never was. A computer wizard like Li would know that every movement through cyberspace leaves digital footprints as surely as a man walking through snow. And Li couldn’t be sure that he was the only computer wizard working for Sands. If Ben Li wanted to keep sensitive data to protect himself from his criminal employers, he would have wanted it close to hand, where he could reassure himself it was safe any time he felt nervous, and probably to add to it as more incriminating data fell within his grasp. As a prosecutor, I saw this kind of behavior all the time. Hoarding secrets is a primal human instinct.

  Jonathan Sands obviously came to the same conclusion sometime yesterday and, being unable to locate the data, decided on a scorched-earth policy. But why did he assume that Li’s insurance would be inside the house? Li might have buried it, not knowing that water finds its way into even the most tightly sealed containers left underground. I can’t even recall all the ruined caches of contraband I saw as an ADA: documents, photographs, cash, drugs, bloody clothing, body parts—literally everything imaginable.

  And so as the sun rose, I stood here in the smoking ruins, trying to open myself to inspiration. I’ve searched the yard and found no sign of recent digging, as Kelly predicted, having already done the same himself. The only trees in the backyard have high limbs, and Ben Li seems to have had no ladder.

  I’m about ready to surrender and walk back to my car when a vaguely familiar man in his early fifties approaches me from the adjoining yard. He smiles as he walks toward me, holding up a hand to show he doesn’t mean to bother me.

  “Mayor Cage?” he says. “Bobby DeWitt.”

  I hesitate for a moment, trying to place the name, but the man does look familiar. “I played ball at the public school,” he says, “about eight years ahead of you. I saw some of your games out at St. Stephen’s. Y’all had a good team.”

  Now I remember him a tight end.

  “So did you guys,” I tell him, shaking his hand firmly. “State championship, right?”

  “Yeah, we won the Shrimp Bowl, but that was a long time ago.”

  DeWitt looks over at the ruined house. “Terrible, ain’t it? For a while we thought it might spread to our place, but we were lucky. I wet our roof down with my pressure washer, and that saved us, I reckon.”

  “That’s good. Did you know the kid who lived here at all?”

  “Ben? Naw. He kept to hisself most of the time. Hardly ever left the house. For a long time, I didn’t even know what he did for a living. Wasn’t hardly no furniture in that place. Just some glass tables with computers on ’em. A big old beanbag chair, and one of them futon things in the back. And the birdcages, of course. He had them two parrots.”

  “You’d been inside the house, then?”

  “Oh, yeah, I fixed a busted pipe for him one time. He was a nice kid. Real quiet. Might’ve been into drugs a little. I thought I smelled some pot a couple of times. But, hey, that’s his business. He wasn’t hurtin’ nobody.”

  I look back at the pipes sticking out of the soggy ground, wondering if broken pipes could somehow be a clue to Ben Li’s hiding place.
br />   “Did you ever hear the parrots talk?”

  DeWitt laughs. “Shit, they talked all the time.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Lines from old movies, mostly. Humphrey Bogart–type stuff. One of ’em always said, ‘I’ll be back,’ like in The Terminator.”

  “Really,” I say, trying to guess if this might have some meaning.

  “Yeah,” DeWitt says in a reflective tone. “Ben was shy all right. About the only person he ever talked to was old Mrs. Bassett, who lives in that house yonder. Widow woman.”

  “Which one?” I ask.

  “Back behind that fence there.” DeWitt points to a weathered board fence shrouded by overhanging limbs.

  “What did those two have in common, I wonder?”

  DeWitt laughs. “Don’t know. I think they just got to talkin’ by the fence one day and took a shine to each other. Mrs. Bassett’s about half-blind, and she has arthritis so bad, she can’t hardly do for herself no more. I think Ben felt sorry for her. He used to go over there and help take care of her bird feeders and stuff.”

  Two seconds after the word bird leaves DeWitt’s lips, my mouth goes dry. “What bird feeders? Like hummingbird feeders?”

  “Well, yeah. She’s got all kinds of birdbaths and feeders and stuff over there. Ben even climbed up in that tree back there and fixed her birdhouse for her. A martin house, you know? He brought it down to his place, fixed it, hand-painted it—the whole works. Then he remounted it on the pole for her.”

  I’m trying to remain calm, but even DeWitt can see my excitement. “How did he get up there? I don’t see a ladder.”

  “He borrowed my extension ladder.”

  “Would you mind if I borrowed it for a minute?”

  “Hell, no. I’ll get it for you. You want to look at that birdhouse?” He looks puzzled, but not particularly bothered, by my request.

  “I do. Can you tell me where it is?”

  “It’s back there in those limbs that hang over the fence, about twenty-five feet up. In the winter you can see it plain as day, but with the leaves still on the trees, you can’t hardly find it. The pole’s set in the ground right behind the fence.