Titus led a caravan down East Wood Road for nearly ten miles. He’d finally spoken with Tom on the phone and informed him of his two-week suspension. A phone call wasn’t the ideal way to communicate that decision, but things were moving fast and the secret garden was taking precedence.
“Sure. I get it. Titus, I had to shoot him. He was coming at us. He could have drawn down on us, on you. I had to do it. You know that, right?” Tom asked. Titus could tell his h’s and t’s sounded bent. He figured Tom was three sheets to the wind.
“Get you some rest, Tom. Is there somebody you can talk to?” Titus asked.
“Can I talk to you?” Tom asked.
“Well … yeah, but later. We’re heading out to Tank Billups’s field.”
“What’s happening out there?” Tom asked.
“We’re following up on some things we found on Spearman’s phone,” Titus said.
Tom went quiet for a beat. “What kind of things was on his phone?” he slurred.
Titus ignored the question. Tom was drunk. That didn’t bode well for his ability to maintain confidentiality.
“I’ll be in touch. Drop by the office and give Trey your gun,” Titus had said before ending the call.
* * *
Titus turned off East Wood Road onto a dirt lane with a horse gate across it, mounted to two ancient four-by-four posts. Titus stopped, hopped out, and opened the gate. Tank wasn’t sure if the gate was locked when they had called and asked for permission to go onto his land. He was in his sixties and he admitted to Titus he hadn’t personally been out to the property in years.
“I can’t see so good no more. And my boy Jerry got the DMV to take my goddamn license. I know why. He wants to put me in a goddamn home. And he don’t go check on the property. He just wants to sell it. That land been in our family since my grandaddy came back from World War I. Yeah, we moved to town later, but don’t mean we need to give it up. Land is the only real thing that has value in this world,” Tank had intoned.
Is that why you charged Black people double to hunt on it? Titus thought.
“We just need permission to look around, Mr. Billups.”
“What y’all looking for out there?”
Dead kids, Titus thought. “We have reason to believe that certain parties may have left evidence of a crime out there,” Titus had said.
“What kind of crime? I think I have a right to know, if y’all be out there tearing up my property. Am I gonna be compensated for this? Y’all go out there tearing up hell while I’m stuck here at the house without someone there to look out for my interests, I think I need some assurances,” Tank had said. Titus thought Tank probably didn’t talk to a lot of people anymore. He was enjoying this negotiation, as it were. The art of the deal and all that nonsense.
Titus didn’t have time for that. “Murder, Mr. Billups. Now can we go on the property?”
That ended the negotiation abruptly.
* * *
Titus led the caravan down the lane until they came to a place where the road ended and the forest began. Behind him was not only his deputies but four pickup trucks and one emergency vehicle from the Charon Volunteer Fire Department. The pickups held two people each. The emergency vehicle held three. Each pickup had shovels and work lights in the back. The emergency vehicle had body bags.
Titus got out of his SUV. He waited as the men and women piled out of the vehicles. Once everyone was accounted for, he started to speak.
“I don’t know how many of you have hunted or run your hounds through here, but we’re heading for that willow tree. If you’ve been here before, you’ve seen it. It ain’t really got no reason to be here in that clearing. That’s what makes it stand out. I’ll give more details about the radius we’re working with when we get out to the tree.”
“You really think Jeff Spearman and Latrell killed some kids and buried them out here?” a voice said, basted in incredulity.
Not just Spearman and Latrell, Titus thought.
“You didn’t see what we saw on that phone. Let’s head out,” Titus said. He led the group down among the pines, oaks, elms, and the odd cypress. As they marched, slivers of sunlight pierced the dense forest canopy and bathed them in incandescent chains of gold.
Every now and then as they walked Titus would glance up toward the crown of one of the trees they passed. He thought trees were the closest living things to immortal on earth. How many of these arboreal giants had been saplings when the first indigenous people hunted whitetails here? When the Jamestown settlers ate their shoes as the first Virginia winter tested their resolve? How many men who looked like him were lynched from their branches in the years following the failed rebellion of Southern landowners and poor hired men? What would these eternal elementals say if you asked them about the children Jeff Spearman, Latrell Macdonald, and the Last Wolf tortured? Would they say anything at all? Or would the affairs of men be like the affairs of ants to them?
“You think too much,” his pops used to tell him when he’d ask questions like that as a kid.
“That’s his superpower, Albert,” his mother would say before kissing him on the forehead. Before her flesh started turning to bone.
They crunched over dead leaves and pine needles until they reached the clearing.
“Here,” Titus said.
The willow tree towered over them as it stood in the center of a clearing that was at least a hundred feet in circumference. Multifarious branches stretched up toward the sky from a girthy trunk. These branches winnowed down to slim, jade-colored vine-like leaves. These leaves fell toward the ground like strands of hair that were the crown of glory for some eldritch elder god. The wind moved the leaves like the god was shaking its head.
“We need to excavate this whole area. We start from the outer edge and work our way in. Warren, if you and Derry could sweep the ground with your metal detectors first, then we’ll dig some exploratory samples. If they’re out here, they didn’t bury them deep.”
“We’ll sweep it, Titus, but I gotta be honest. I can’t believe Jeff Spearman could hurt a fly,” Warren said.
“He had videos showing him and Latrell and another man hurting boys and girls. Do you want to see them?” Carla asked. Warren’s face bloomed red.
Titus went on. “If you find anything, holler and we’ll mark it. Try your best not to disturb the remains. We need to preserve as much of the evidence as we can.” He searched their faces. The yearning there was plain and desperate. They didn’t want to believe it. They wanted to pretend that Jeff Spearman was what he had presented himself to them and nothing more. We all choose to be skeptics when the truth is inconvenient.
“Let’s get to it,” Titus said.
* * *
Three hours later the sun was hanging low in the sky and the shadows that stood watch over them had grown exponentially.
Warren came up to Titus with his shovel over his shoulder. “Titus, ain’t nothing here. Whatever happened to those poor children, it didn’t end here.” His face was slick with sweat despite the cool temperature.
“Let’s move closer to the tree. Did anybody bring an ax? We need to break through those roots,” Titus said.
Wayne frowned. “Titus, I know you used to be some fancy hotshot FBI guy, but I’m telling you, we done dug twenty holes and we ain’t seen shit.”
“Men like this, like Spearman, they don’t like to let them go. We need to chop through those roots and get closer to the tree,” Titus said. He ignored Warren’s dig about his past. He was used to the people who voted for him deifying his time with the Bureau and those who didn’t vote for him dismissing it. Titus thought if they knew why he’d stepped down, the roles would be reversed. He took no solace in that knowledge.
“This is a waste of goddamn time. You do what you want with your deputies, I’m taking my people home. We’re a volunteer squad. We can’t be playing around in the woods when we need to be fresh,” Warren said.
“Give me forty-five more minutes,” Titus said. He could just say he’d deputize the members of the fire department. Take advantage of an arcane proviso in the county’s charter. He’d read the charter from beginning to end. The likelihood that Warren had also read it was probably between zero and nil. No, he didn’t feel like arguing the merits of a two-hundred-year-old codicil. If Warren wanted to leave, he could go. They would carry on, with or without him or his volunteers.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do—”
“OVER HERE!”
The words echoed through the woods, ricocheting backward and forward until they came back around like the moaning of a banshee.
“I guess I won’t need those forty-five minutes,” Titus said.
They walked over to Anita Denton, the one who’d sent up the alarm. She was holding her shovel with both hands, one near the spade, the other near the tip of the handle. She took two steps away from the fresh hole she’d been digging. Her face was ashen. A flock of crows flew overhead, raining down a chorus of caws.