Titus changed out of his uniform and into a pair of jeans, boots, and a sweatshirt. He went outside and let the air pinch his cheeks for a moment before he went over to the woodpile. His father had a furnace installed a few years back, but they still used the woodstove now and again. Albert liked to say the heat felt more real than what came from the furnace. A few of the floor vents didn’t seem to work correctly, either. So they kept the woodstove.
As a child Titus would sit and listen with a touch of fear when the old cast-iron cube would start to roar like a lion after his father got a good fire going. The heat that came off it was biblical. Marquis would complain that the woodstove made the house too hot. His mother would bop the back of his head playfully and tell him it was hotter than this in hell.
She used to make them laugh a lot. Before.
Titus grabbed an ax and started on the cord of wood that had been dropped off last week. Most of the wood was stove-length, but was a hair too wide. Titus grabbed one of the pieces of firewood and placed it on the tree stump he used as a block. Above him an arc of sodium light hummed like an old blues man about to start singing an old tune.
Titus raised the ax and brought it down in a vicious whistling arc. The wood split in two. Both halves hopped off the block and danced across the grass. Titus started a stack against the back of the house. He grabbed another piece and repeated the vicious ax strike. As he worked, he caught a whiff of the last blooms of the magnolia tree that dominated the backyard. He paused and looked at the tree. Even though the air was cold, they hadn’t had a true frost yet.
His mother had loved magnolia flowers. She’d enlisted his aid in making perfume out of the blooms. The scent would hang in the house for weeks. A cloying, sweet scent that was half old-women-sachet, half a sickeningly sugary odor like a rotting body right before it sprouted maggots. There were days after she’d boiled the petals in a big pot that he thought he could see the scent in the air.
Titus grabbed another piece of wood and split it in two. He bared his teeth as he brought the ax down.
He and Marquis had plucked a bouquet’s worth of magnolia flowers for his mother the day before her funeral. The petals on the flowers had turned brown and brittle overnight. Marquis had thrown his in the trash. Titus had taken his and tossed them into the grave after the service. He’d watched the dead brown petals fall over his mother’s casket like scraps of burned paper. In the years since, Titus thought there was a truth in the rapid desiccation of those beautiful white flowers that all the preaching and hollering ministers did from the pulpit couldn’t deny.
Titus grabbed another piece. When he struck it with the ax he grunted deep in his chest. It wasn’t a sob, but it was damn close.
No one had picked flowers for those children buried under the weeping willow tree. There had been no fall or spring arrangements to mark their final resting place. Only the cold embrace of the earth and the ever-tightening roots of the willow closing around their frail bodies in the dark.
Titus grabbed another piece. When he swung the ax, this time he yelled. There were no words to his exclamation, only unarticulated pain.
Titus thought when this was over, when he’d caught the bastard who kept his wolf mask on, he was going to go back out to that willow tree. He was going to take a chain saw with him. He was going to chop that motherfucker down; Tank Billups be damned.
Headlights blazed behind him, and for a moment he saw the outline of his shadow projected on the side of the house. It was a slouching giant with an ax in its bulbous hands. His father got out of the truck and pulled his coat tight.
“You all right, boy?” Albert said.
Titus placed another piece of firewood on the block and split it in two. “I’m fine.”
“You sure? Because it’s nine thirty and you’re chopping wood in the dark.”
“Got the pole light,” Titus huffed.
“Titus.”
Titus grabbed another piece of wood and split it with a sharp crack.
“Titus!” his father yelled. Titus faced him. He gripped the ax handle so hard his hands ached.
“They killed kids, Pop. Latrell, Spearman, and a third person. They tied them to a table and cut on them and … and … then they killed them and buried them under a willow on Tank Billups’s land. They killed them. Black boys and girls. Did things to them. Things I can’t even say because I don’t want you to have that shit in your head,” Titus said. He knew he was breaking his own rule about confidentiality, but he couldn’t hold this in anymore. His deputies hadn’t seen what he’d seen. They hadn’t watched those children die. That duty had been his and his alone.
“Lord, son. Are you sure?”
“It was on video, Pop.”
“Oh Lord. Those poor children. They in God’s hands now. Let him keep and sanctify their souls,” Albert said. The statement went from an exclamation to a prayer in the blink of an eye.
“God didn’t save them. He let them die screaming in the dark,” Titus said. He knew this would spark an argument but, like his knowledge of their deaths, his disdain for the appeals to a pernicious supreme being couldn’t be contained.
“Titus, you know I don’t like that kind of talk. We can’t know God’s plan but the Father is still in control,” Albert said.
Titus turned and slammed the ax into the chopping block. “I used to believe in God’s plan. I believed he would heal Mama. Even though he’d never spoken to me. He’d never answered any of my prayers, but I still believed he’d heal her. Stop her muscles from turning to bone. Touch her with his heavenly hand and take away her pain. Stop her from howling all night. But he didn’t,” Titus said. “She died at forty years old and the world just moved on. So, when you tell me it was God’s plan for them boys and girls to end up under that weeping willow tree, I have to ask myself, which one of us is the bigger fool? You for saying it or me for listening to it?”
His father took his hands out of his coat pockets. He held them out in a gesture reminiscent of supplication. He closed his eyes. Titus watched as his lips moved silently for a few moments.
“I prayed for you. Because I know you’re hurting. She was my wife. She was the best woman I’ve ever known. So I know how much you’re hurting, because I’m feeling it too. But, son, faith is never foolish,” Albert said.
“Pop,” Titus said as he brushed past his father and went into the house, “faith broke my fucking heart.”
EIGHT
Two state police investigators were waiting for Titus when he got to the sheriff’s office the next morning. Sergeant Adam Geary and Sergeant Ian Wright. They were accompanied by two state medical examiner vans with three assistant medical examiners each.
“Good morning, Sheriff Crown,” Geary said.
“Sorry we’re meeting under these circumstances,” Wright said. Titus nodded. Geary and Wright reminded him of the lead actors from Starsky & Hutch. Geary was blond and blue-eyed, while Wright had dark hair and deep brown eyes. They all shook hands as firmly as etiquette would allow.
“You secured the crime scene?” Geary asked.
“Secured, and posted a deputy there overnight,” Titus said. The condescension was implicit, but Titus ignored it. Interdepartmental jockeying was par for the course in cases like this. He’d been on the other side of the divide when he was with the Bureau. He would put up with it, to a point, if it meant he was able to take advantage of the state police’s forensic lab. He wanted to catch the Last Wolf. That was all that mattered. He didn’t care if the state boys wanted to take the credit. He wanted the Last Wolf’s head on a spike.
Metaphorically speaking.
“Well, I’m sure your team did their best,” Geary said.
Titus let that one slide too. “Let’s head out.”
* * *
Titus leaned against the hood of his SUV while the medical examiners and field techs took measurements and soil samples of the graves. He watched as they examined each yawning maw with meticulous precision.
Geary walked over to him.
“How’d you find this place?”
“Spearman had a painting of the willow tree in his belongings. Me and my father and brother used to hunt on this property. I recognized the tree.”
“Really?” Geary asked.
“Really. I killed my first buck about two hundred yards to the west. Eight-pointer,” Titus said.
“How long ago was that?” Geary asked.
“I was eleven, so twenty-five years ago.”
“When was the last time you been out here?” Geary asked. Titus faced him. Geary was interrogating him. Like he was a suspect. That was the thing about being a cop. Gradually you became suspicious of everyone. Eventually you’d cut the deck twice on your own wife.
“I stopped hunting when I was thirteen.”
“And you remember that tree? Remember where you shot a deer twenty-five years ago?” Geary asked.
“I’ve got a really good memory,” Titus said.
“Well, that’s a blessing, I guess,” Geary said with a smile.
Titus didn’t respond.
After a few moments Geary cleared his throat. “You said you found some thumb drives?”
“We have Spearman’s computer too. I’m guessing you would want to take that with you.”