Drifting off, I felt Birdie hop onto the bed and curl behind me. The clock ticked softly. Ryan’s heart thudded with a peaceful, steady rhythm. Though perhaps not happy, I felt secure.
It was the last I’d feel safe for a long, long time.
14
I LOOKED AT THE CLOCK. FOUR TWENTY- THREE. BIRDIE WAS GONE. Ryan was snoring softly beside me.
I’d been dreaming about Tamela Banks. I lay there a minute, trying to reassemble fragmented images.
Gideon Banks. Geneva. Katy. A baby. A pit.
My dreams are usually a piece of cake. My mind takes recent events and weaves them into nocturnal mosaics. No subliminal puzzlers. No Freudian brainteasers.
So what the hell was this dream all about?
Guilt over my failure to return Geneva Banks’s call?
I’d tried.
Twice.
Guilt for not telling my daughter about Ryan?
Katy had met him when she dropped Boyd off.
Met him, yes.
Fear for Tamela? Sadness over her baby?
Then my mind was off and running.
Why was Tamela Banks’s driver’s license at a farm belonging to Sonny Pounder, a man recently busted for dealing drugs? Had Tamela gone there with Darryl Tyree? Did the cocaine belong to Tyree? To Pounder? Why had it been left in the basement?
Where was Tamela?
Where was Darryl Tyree?
A sudden terrible thought.
Could the victim in the privy be Tamela Banks? Had Darryl Tyree killed her out of fear she’d reveal what had happened to the baby? Out of anger that the child wasn’t his?
But that was impossible. The bones in the privy were devoid of flesh. Tamela’s baby was found only a week ago.
But when had the infant died?
I recapped what I knew about timing.
Tamela told her sister about the pregnancy last winter. She left her father’s home sometime around Easter. Witnesses reported she’d been living with Tyree in a South Tryon Street house for four months.
The baby could have been born in July, or even late June. When had Tamela last been seen? Could she have died several weeks ago? Could the highly organic environment in the privy have hastened decomposition?
If not Tamela, who was the privy victim? Why was he there? Who had shot him?
I thought the skull looked male, but
Where was Darryl Tyree? Could I be wrong about the skull looking Caucasian? Could we have pulled Tyree’s head and hands from the pit?
Had I really seen a reaction in Rinaldi’s eyes? Had the head and hands triggered some recollection? If so, why keep it to himself?
Slidell’s question was a good one. How had two of the privy pit hand bones ended up in a shallow grave with bears and birds?
Who had killed all of those animals?
If the privy remains were not Tamela’s, could she have suffered the same fate as that victim?
Questions looped and spun in my head.
From the privy pit farm, my mind traveled west across the county to a cornfield crash site. I pictured Harvey Pearce and his anonymous passenger, their corpses encased in crispy black shrouds.
Who was Pearce’s passenger? What was the strange lesion on his nasal bone?
Jansen found charred matter under the Cessna. Was it more cocaine, or some other illegal drug? Something else entirely?
What was the relationship of the men in the Cessna to Ricky Don Dorton? Had Pearce and his passenger stolen Dorton’s plane, or were the three part of a drug trafficking ring? The doggy door and the missing seat seemed inconsistent with a recently stolen plane.
I turned my head on the pillow.
Was I making a mistake with Ryan? Could this work? If not, could we hold on to the friendship we had? To an outsider, our constant bantering might look like hostility. That was our way. Sparring. Teasing. Jousting. But
