One phone call and ten minutes later, I bundled up the exam booklets and dashed the hundred yards to Peggy’s office, clutching the bundle against my rib cage like a football. As I crossed the goal line of her doorway, I imagined a hundred thousand people leaping to their feet and cheering wildly.
Peggy glanced briefly and balefully over the lenses of her reading glasses. “It’s about time,” she said, and turned her attention back to her computer screen. The chorus of congratulatory cheers in my head evaporated, replaced by the solo buzz of a weed trimmer outside the Anthropology Department’s grimy windows on the world.
But. But: two hours after that, the buzz of the weed trimmer gave way to the song of jet engines, spooling up to take me to Tallahassee.
Later, as the plane descended toward the pines of the Florida panhandle, I looked out the window and saw dozens of plumes of smoke. Florida was on fire.
Chapter 3
Angie St. Claire was waiting for me at the security checkpoint when I got off the plane at the Tallahassee airport—an airport that made Knoxville’s modest terminal look vast and sleek by comparison. I knew Tallahassee was smaller than Knoxville, but I’d assumed that as Florida’s capital, Tallahassee would bustle with air traffic. Apparently I’d assumed wrong.
Angie shook my hand as I emerged, squeezing so hard I nearly winced. “Wow,” she said, “when you pull a string, you don’t mess around. Who’d you call, the governor?”
“Better.” I grinned. “I’m friends with a lawyer who’s in league with the devil. Well, sort of.”
“Sort of in league with the devil? How does that work?” She started toward the terminal’s main exit.
“Actually, I meant that I’m sort of friends with him. But come to think of it, maybe he is sort of in league with the devil.” I smiled. “Seems to be a good partnership, too, judging by his millions. The guy’s name is Burt DeVriess—the police call him ‘Grease’—and he’s a slick, smart attorney. He’s flayed me alive on the witness stand a few times, but lately we’ve worked together on a couple of things.” I didn’t mention that one of the “things” was a case in which I’d been framed for a murder, and that Burt had saved my hide; that, I figured, was a story for another, distant day, perhaps—or perhaps not. “I called Grease right after I talked to you. He got in touch with a colleague in Atlanta whose law partner or wife or sister—hell, in Georgia, she could be his partner and his wife and his sister—anyhow, somebody who has connections in that neck of Georgia. So there should be a couple of pieces of paperwork waiting for us at the Cheatham County courthouse. One’s an injunction to delay your sister’s burial by twenty-four hours. The other’s a court order authorizing us to examine the body in the meantime.” The glass door slid open, and we stepped out into sunshine and steam.
As we crossed the parking lot, I caught the smell of smoke in the air. “From the plane, it looked like half your state’s burning.”
“It is.” She made a face. “Most of the panhandle is owned by timber and paper companies. They’ve got huge tracts of gangly cultivated pines—slash pines, I think—planted in rows like crops. They burn the underbrush every spring so nothing competes with the trees for water and nutrients. It’s destroying the natural ecosystem. The longleaf pine, the slow-growing native species, is headed for extinction, and so are a lot of the plants and animals that used to live in the longleaf pine forests. Don’t get me started.” She clicked her remote key, and a blue Chevy Blazer a few rows back beeped at us. I was expecting an FDLE vehicle, but judging by the QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper sticker, this was Angie’s own car. Suddenly she stopped. “Dr. Brockton, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me.”
I smiled. “You don’t have time to tell me—not till we’re in the car, anyhow. The courthouse closes in an hour, and we’re, what, fifty-nine minutes away?”
“You’ve obviously never ridden with me.”
Thirty minutes later, we crossed the state line, and ten minutes after that, the Blazer skidded to a stop in front of the Cheatham County courthouse in downtown Mocksville. The papers were waiting for us at the office of the court clerk, who handed them over to Angie only after she’d carefully examined our identification and our faces. “Shame,” the woman said, reminding me that we were in a small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business—and generally had strong opinions about it. “She was your sister, wasn’t she?” Angie nodded. “It just don’t seem right.”
Angie nodded. “Thank you,” she said, managing a small smile.