history.'
'Of course.' LaHaye said pleasantly. Gabriel let the door close as she turned to the chief warrant officer behind the reception desk.
'Jenna, please make General Gabriel a copy of all my contact information for Dr Frank Harper.'
CHAPTER 33
I stood away from the crowd in the Jackson airport's baggage claim area and dialed Vince Sloane's cell number. He picked up on the fourth ring.
'Where the hell are you, Doc? All hell's breaking loose here.'
There were times when I longed for the old, anonymous pre-caller-ID days.
'Mississippi. Jackson.' I tried to shake the fatigue from my head.
'Figures.'
'What kind of hell?'
'Jeez, it's hard to know where to start.'
'How about with Chris? How is he?'
'Dead.'
All during the flight I had hoped the cop at the roadblock had been wrong.
'It's all over the media and they're connecting it to the crap with your boat.'
'Wonderful.'
'That's not all The Army spooks did a walk-through of your house and got LAPD looking for angles.'
'Angles?'
'You know how cops think. All this stuff coming down one thing after another doesn't just happen to innocent people'
Dread sifted down into my gut like lead shot.
'You're the only link they can find connecting all the dots. And you've fled the scene.'
'Fled!'
'Whoa! Whoa! It's not me saying that; it's them. Take off your victim hat and look at it from the viewpoint of a detective.'
Luggage thudded into the pickup area. I realized he was right.
'You have now become a person of interest,' Vince continued.
'A person of-'
'They're taking your place apart with tweezers. I imagine they'll have people over to UCLA pretty soon.'
'Oh, hell.' I slumped against the wall.
'I also imagine that pretty soon they'll be contacting the local cops in Mississippi about the death of your young lady's mother.'
'But that was my mother's funeral. I had no idea Vanessa was even coming.'
'I know that, and you do. But their theory is that the slug which killed Vanessa Thompson was meant for you.'
'For me? Why do they think someone wanted to kill me?'
'They don't know, but they're fabricating a theory about some sort of drug operation-you know, your boat, the attack-'
'That's insane!'
Silence hung heavy between us.
'Vince? You still there?'
'Still here.' He cleared his throat. 'If I didn't know you… really know you, I'd probably connect the dots the same way.'
'Oh, man,' I said quietly. 'I agree something's wrong and none of this is coincidence, but it's tied to this Talmadge thing.'
'I hope you can make your case… fast.'
Jasmine's bag and my duffel thudded into view. I made my way through the crowd toward them.
'Me too.'
'Keep in touch.'
'Roger that.'
Jael St. Clair pulled her rented Ford Explorer into an empty slot in the short-term parking lot at the Jackson airport terminal where she could watch traffic exiting the rentalcar lot. She swept the blond hair from her face with one hand, then stretched her arms and untangled the knots in her back that had accumulated during the flight from Los Angeles. The Citation was an okay corporate jet, she thought, but as a bedroom, it left a lot to be desired.
She reached over to the substantial saddlebag purse on the seat and, without taking her eyes off the rental lot, sorted through the bag's contents. Her fingers quickly found her cell phone, then the Heckler amp; Koch, HK4 semiautomatic pistol with the. 380 ACP barrel and seven-round magazine, the Garmin, and finally the powerful, compact Zeiss binoculars. She pulled the binoculars out, raised them to her eyes, and adjusted the focus.
Bradford Stone made his way toward a white Ford pickup truck in the rental car lot. He had used a credit card for his flight from L.A. to Jackson, his vehicle here, and his hotel in Greenwood. He might as well be wearing a strobe on his head. Stone put his bags in the jump seat of the truck and got into the driver's seat. After several moments of adjusting mirrors and seats, he drove out of the rental lot.
Stone drove past her. Jael waited for a moment, allowing a battered Chevy truck and a midsixties Toronado listing from a broken suspension to pass, then pulled into traffic behind them, heading toward I-20.
CHAPTER 34
Robert Johnson's artfully unadorned guitar notes filled the cab of my rented pickup as I raced north along Highway 49 through the kudzu-smothered hills south of Yazoo City.
The CD had been on sale cheap at the airport gift shop on my stopover. I loved the genius of Johnson's blues guitar and the transcendent depth of the lyrics. Blues masters like Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt had a way of owning my imagination. 'There's a hellhound on MY trail too,' I thought.
The hellhound had killed Vanessa and laid waste to my life in California. No name to this hound, no breed, no face, all fangs and death without form. In my mind, I walked through the pieces of the puzzle: Mama's funeral, my boat, the attack at home. I ransacked every thought, desperate for some dim, unremembered key to the deadly puzzle placing me as the only logical suspect.
Outside, the kudzu shrouded utility poles, abandoned barns and houses, and everything in between, even the tallest of trees. The trees looked like giant undead mummies trailing their scattered rags slowly over the hills.
I listened to the beginning of Robert Johnson's 'Me and the Devil Blues' and imagined evil making its way through the landscape here. Even though Johnson was a man of the Delta's flatness, his words and music spoke to more universal fears.
It had been decades since the last time I had driven this road, and back then it had been a narrow, two-lane patchwork of cracked, tar-sealed concrete with no shoulder that slashed through the kudzu jungle, abruptly ascending and dropping like a cheap roller coaster as the highway's thick expansion joints thwapped an endless iambic k-dunk, kdunk, k-dunk against the tires.
Highway 49 was four lanes now, bordered by a broad demilitarized zone cleared of the aggressive imported Asian vine that grew up to a foot per day. Kudzu had been widely planted to control soil erosion back in the 1930s and could invade a farm and occupy it in a single growing season. Poet James Dickey called it a 'green, mindless, unkillable ghost,' and there were legends of unwary farmers found strangled in their beds because they fell asleep with the windows open. I had read once kudzu was actually a useful plant-a source of Asian medicines and a
