replaced by a protective opacity. I hear the metallic patter of the rain beginning again.
“I know who Holly’s father is.”
She presses harder against the door, and I realize my hesitancy is only making things worse. “Drewe-”
“No,” she says, her lower lip quivering.
Even as my nerve fails I say, “Drewe, it’s me.”
Like liquid diamonds, tears fall from behind her hand into her lap. My worst fear is that she will run, simply bolt from the car and leave me stuck with a trigger-happy deputy. I spit out my excuses in a panicked flood. “I didn’t know until three months ago, Drewe. I had no idea! Erin showed up in Chicago before you and I were married, before we were engaged really, she stayed for three days, that’s all it ever was. Drewe, she never told me a thing after that and she came straight back here and married Patrick! I never knew she was pregnant and I never touched her before or since! Drewe? Drewe! Say something!”
When she takes her hand away from her eyes, a redness in the shape of butterfly wings stains her pale cheeks.
“Drewe?”
Nothing.
I start to take her outstretched hand, then realize she is reaching for her clothes bag. As her fingers grasp it, her other hand gropes backward for the door handle.
“Drewe, wait. Please… we need to talk.”
The door opens with a screech, silhouetting the back of her head against the lighted entrance. “Drewe, wait!” I plead, taking hold of the arm that holds the bag.
Lunging across the seat, I try to block the closing door, but Drewe throws her body against it with enough force to slam my arm and shoulder back into the car.
Just as I get my hand on the door handle, a decisive snick reverberates through the car. I jerk the handle hard but nothing happens.
“Ease up, ace!” Deputy Daniels says from the front seat.
“I’ve got to talk to her!” I yell, yanking the handle again and again.
“Looks like the lady don’t want to talk to you.”
I smash my fists against the wire mesh in blind rage.
“Break ’em if you want, champ,” Daniels says lazily. “I seen it lots of times.”
Outside, Drewe has paused in the rain-beaded brilliance of the floodlights. She stands like a refugee, looking back at the car with her bag in her left hand and her right raised to shield her eyes. I press my hands to the window as if to bridge the gulf between us by force of will. Her face is a ghostly decoupage of fragmented emotion: trust shattered, love blasted into confusion, unity into terrible apartness. She waits a moment longer, then backs slowly away from the car, away from me, toward the house of her parents, and of her childhood. The cruiser is moving now, backing quickly down the drive. I fight to keep her in sight. With my fingers locked in the wire screen, I watch her melt through the silver wall of rain.
CHAPTER 42
In the past twenty-six hours, revelations have detonated like artillery shells being marched across a trench position. I haven’t slept at all. When Deputy Daniels and I got back to my house last night, we found Sheriff Buckner and his demoralized posse standing around their cruisers. They’d stormed the house and found no killer. They did find a rat blown to pieces by Billy Jackson’s shotgun. Billy’s second shot had fractured an electrical conduit pipe, blowing out the lights in the tunnel. A surgeon in Jackson soon confirmed that the bullet in Billy’s thigh had probably come from his partner’s gun. The consensus was that Brahma had never been in the tunnel at all.
Buckner put me in his car and questioned me all the way to Yazoo City. After we got there he questioned me some more. In between questions he bawled me out for scrubbing the blood from my office and contaminating “his” crime scene. I was still in his office when a tugboat captain discovered the wreckage of a downed Beechcraft Baron in the Mississippi River.
The captain believed the plane had crashed in the river, sunk, skated along the bottom for a while, then ridden up his anchor cable after hanging up on it. At dawn I rode with Buckner out to the levee west of Lamont to look at the wreck. The damage was serious, but less extensive than we’d been led to believe. Buckner figured the pilot had tried an emergency landing on the spur levee near Scott and accidentally gone into the water, or else had attempted to ditch in the river.
The cockpit was empty.
We all knew the missing body meant nothing. I once saw a New York college kid leap into the Mississippi River from a paddle wheeler in New Orleans, as a prank. He thought he could easily swim the half mile to shore. He drowned screaming for help in front of three thousand people, Southerners who knew the river far too well to try to swim out to the fool who was dying to set the price of ignorance. A search began immediately, but the boy’s body was never found. It would probably be the same with Brahma, unless he happened to wash up somewhere like Vicksburg or Baton Rouge before he was shunted out into the Gulf along with the other refuse of the river.
Still, I knew something Buckner didn’t. If Brahma had told me the truth on-line, he was an accomplished swimmer. And that gave me a serious dilemma. If I told Buckner about the swimming, he would demand to know how I knew. And if I confessed that I’d been in direct contact with the killer and had kept it to myself, he would undoubtedly arrest me as an accessory to murder.
I told him nothing.
Sometime during this Kafkaesque marathon, a tow-truck driver discovered a heavy leather case containing surgical instruments wedged behind the Beechcraft’s pilot’s seat. It contained several scalpels-some of which had blood on them-a video camera, and a long “high-tech-looking” instrument that the driver didn’t recognize. From the description, I knew it could only be the neuroendoscope Miles had described the night before.
Buckner thought the abandoned instrument case bolstered the crash theory. He believed Brahma’s body and any light gear had been flushed out of the cockpit during or after the crash, leaving only the heavy case inside. When I argued that Brahma might conceivably have left the case behind to create just that impression-and then demanded round-the-clock security on Bob Anderson’s house and my own-the sheriff released me, on the understanding that I would return home and remain there, or else at the Andersons’. I didn’t say so, but I suspected it would be a long time before I’d be welcome in the Anderson house again.
The morning sun was high when I got home. The interior of the house reeked of tear gas, my office of Clorox. The deputies had torn the place to pieces during their raid and the subsequent search. Armed with my.38, I went out to the utility shed and got a stout two-by-six plank, which I sawed in half and hammered across the pantry door with the heaviest nails I could find. Satisfied that no one could enter the house by that route without my hearing them, I walked back into the office.
My answering machine showed nineteen messages. I hit the button and collapsed into my swivel chair to listen. The first nine were from TV reporters, some from Mississippi stations, others from Louisiana, even one from CNN. The tenth was from Daniel Baxter. He cussed me for about a minute, telling me he’d intended to send an FBI evidence team down to go over my house, until Sheriff Buckner informed him that I’d effectively destroyed the crime scene. I fast-forwarded through more messages from reporters, then stopped as Miles’s voice crackled from the speaker.
His message said to call him immediately at a New York number I didn’t recognize. His voice sounded strange, like a loud whisper. Too tired to rise from the chair, I rolled over to the answering machine, picked up its cordless receiver, and dialed the number. After two rings, the same whisper said:
“Yeah?”
“Miles?”
“Harper?” Still the whisper.
