“What’s that?” she asked.
“Hunting club fence,” Mose said.
“Is the X on the other side of that fence?”
“Best I can tell, it is.”
“Have you ever been on the other side?”
“No, ma’am. Dat private property.”
Caitlin didn’t believe him. She looked hard into the old man’s bloodshot eyes. “I don’t care if you run illegal trotlines, Mr. Tyler, or hunt game out of season. I just want to know what’s on the other side of that fence.”
Tyler’s eyes narrowed and he looked away from Caitlin.
“I didn’t mean to suggest you were doing anything wrong,” she said.
“We despise the people who put up these fences,” Jordan said. “We’d tear every one of them down if we could.”
“You can’t,” Mose said solemnly. “You tear down them fences, you’ll find yourself sunk in a hole out here. Food for the panthers.”
“There aren’t any panthers out here,” Jordan said. “Panthers are extinct in the United States.”
Mose laughed for the first time, an eerie cackle that set Caitlin’s nerves on edge.
“Will you take us to the other side of that fence?” Caitlin asked. “Please?”
“Not for no two hundred dollars, I won’t. And not today.”
“Why not?”
“Lots of reasons. But I’ll earn my money. I’ll tell you something most people don’t know. That fence ain’t on the rightful boundary.”
“What?”
Mose nodded with conviction. “Just ’cause you puts a fence in a certain place don’t make the land yours.”
“How do you know that’s not the boundary?” Jordan asked.
“ ’Cause I was here before that fence was. Lots of times, with my daddy. And that fence be in the wrong place.”
Caitlin felt a chill go through her that had nothing to do with the rain. If Mose Tyler was correct—as Danny McDavitt had suggested—then the Bone Tree might stand on federal land. And committing murder on federal land—even dumping a body on it—meant that the killers could be tried in federal court, even if they had been tried and set free decades ago in a state court. It was one of the very few ways around the double-jeopardy statute.
“Nobody checks this fence?” Jordan asked.
“Guv’mint ain’t got the men to do it,” Mose said.
Caitlin was about to ask him another question when the old trapper raised his hand. She had no trouble interpreting that gesture as a call for silence. Caitlin listened, but all she heard was the steady hissing of the rain. A slight wind was blowing, enough to have made the boat drift farther away from the fence, but she saw nothing threatening in that.
“I think it’s time we get out of here,” Mose said. He yanked on the Evinrude’s starting cord, but the motor didn’t catch.
“Wait,” Jordan said in a commanding voice.
Mose ignored her, and this time the engine caught. As he started to throttle up the motor, Jordan stood in the bow and held up her hand. The old fisherman had little choice but to kill the motor.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, anxiety in his voice.
“I smell something,” Jordan said.
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. Something dead.”
“They’s always somethin’ dead down in here. Half this swamp be dyin’ and rotting, while the other half growin’ so fast you can almost see it. You ought to come down in here at night sometime. There’s logs glowing, under the water like the bodies of dead men lookin’ up at you.”
“What I smell is human,” Jordan said without any doubt in her voice.
“How you know that?”
“I’ve been in a lot of war zones, that’s how. I know what a dead body smells like.” Jordan turned slowly in the unsteady boat, peering off into the trees as the cold rain fell upon her. “That way,” she said, pointing toward an opening in the trunks, not far from the fence.
“Oh, hell no,” Mose said.
“We’ll pay you extra,” Jordan said. “Take us down there.”
Tyler shook his head like a scared little boy.
“Five hundred more,” Caitlin said.
“How much you got?” the old man asked.
“A thousand. It’s all yours.” Keeping her envelope in her jacket, she dug out ten more bills and handed them over. “There you go. Now, take us.”
With a resentful look, Mose switched on the electric trolling motor to propel the boat in the direction Jordan was pointing.
Ten seconds later they saw buzzards circling above the cypress trees in the distance.
WHEN I LAID JIMMY Revels’s navy tattoo on the desk Kaiser had commandeered from Walker Dennis, the sight stunned him speechless. Before he could question me, I gave him an edited version of how I’d found it and where I’d spent the time since he’d kicked me out of the sheriff’s office. I told him that Forrest Knox had used a SWAT team to kidnap my father last night, and that Snake and the old Eagles had then snatched Dad from Forrest’s men, to keep as insurance in case Forrest was setting them up to be arrested this morning.
I didn’t tell Kaiser I’d seen Forrest Knox in person, nor did I tell him anything Walt Garrity had told me about his activities relating to Forrest. If Kaiser was unwilling to use planted meth to pressure the Eagles, he wasn’t going to use a planted derringer to go after Forrest. I was tempted to tell Kaiser about the video of the Katrina sniping, but since it didn’t show Forrest himself (and since Walt no longer had possession of the video) I knew Kaiser wouldn’t go for that. After a couple of Kaiser’s men photographed the tattoo, he wrapped it carefully in a dry towel, then asked them to give us some privacy.
Once they had, he said, “Why did you bring this back here, Penn?”
“Because Snake Knox is probably the only person alive who knows where my father is, and if he’s alive or not.”
“This tattoo isn’t going to make Snake talk. You saw him in there. You talked to him. He’s not going to tell us where your father is.”