AS THE LUSAHATCHA County Sheriff’s Department helicopter storms northwest through gray towers of cloud, I huddle in its belly, my back pressed against the chopper’s metal skin. From across the cabin, Carl Sims stares at me like he’s been assigned to a suicide watch. Carl cares about me, I know, and at some level he loved Caitlin, but right now he might as well be a stranger. The only thing that really joins us is that once he was paid to protect Caitlin and failed in his duty. So Carl knows that pain, at least to some extent. But in the last analysis, Caitlin’s death is a tragic but transient event for him, whereas I have suffered a physical and spiritual amputation. Caitlin is gone forever, and from bitter experience I know I will feel her loss every day (as I did that of my first wife), for at least several years. The effect on Annie I cannot even begin to contemplate; I must spare myself that pain for now.
Between my legs rests a small cardboard box containing what the duty nurse at Our Lady called Caitlin’s “personal effects.” I only glanced inside the box, half hoping for some clue to what happened to her. But all I saw was her cell phone (which Carl had instinctively saved during our attempted rescue), her engagement ring (the very modest one she’d asked for), one plain gold earring (the other had somehow been lost), a navy blue hair scrunchie, and a scarred Gerber multi-tool with clotted blood still on it. The nurse seemed torn about the multi-tool, wondering aloud whether the police might want it as evidence; but the trauma surgeon believed that Caitlin herself had bloodied the tool in a failed effort to save her life.
Again and again I hear that surgeon marveling at how Dad had contrived to drain the blood from Caitlin’s pericardium with a ballpoint pen, but even more that Caitlin had carried out the painful procedure herself. Once I left the hospital, I couldn’t shut out the image of Caitlin steeling herself against the fire of that naked blade, then cutting her own flesh in a desperate attempt to save herself. God knows she didn’t lack nerve. Caitlin once put four stitches in my lacerated foot under my father’s watchful eyes, after I’d ripped it open walking through a creek on the Natchez Trace. I did similar things as a boy, when Dad tried to instill in me a love for medicine. But despite his effort, that love never developed, and instead I followed my talents for reading people, for seeing through the fog of lies, and for persuading people of certain realities. How odd that I would ultimately turn to writing fiction: telling lies to persuade people of things that never happened. Of course, the secret that all good novelists know is that the “lies” they tell are truer than any factual history could ever be.
I wish I had a good lie now. If I did, I would tell it to myself and then, before I saw through it, call Caitlin’s father and tell it to him. Because . . . how do you tell a man that his daughter has been murdered? What do you say when he asks you whether his little girl suffered before she died? And how do you answer when he asks you what you intend to do about what happened to her? In that father’s ideal world, you would say, I promise you this, sir, the son of a bitch who killed her won’t see another sunrise.
For that is one thing about the South: it’s still a place where, if a man catches someone molesting his child and beats that man to death, he can reasonably expect a jury of his peers to conclude that the pervert fell down twenty-six times on his way to the morgue. Not guilty, Judge, and by the way could we shake the defendant’s hand? The same principle would hold true for a killer of women, at least in some circumstances.
But in reality, most times the man in my position does nothing. I saw this soul-deadening dilemma too many times as a prosecutor. The desire for revenge is primal, bred deep in our species. But the fear of losing everything is greater still. Most times, a man who contemplates revenge realizes that he must throw away not only his freedom but his family in order to get it, and in the end, he turns his anger inward. There it mixes with guilt and poisons him until, with luck, the passing years eventually dilute the toxins to a tolerable level. Sometimes, though—particularly with the parents of missing or murdered children—that dilution never happens.
Sometimes the poison kills them.
I may not turn to murder for revenge, but neither will I be one of those poisoned men. Whatever responsibility Caitlin bears for her fate, I have failed in my duty to protect her. What can I do now? Killing her killer for revenge would go against everything I’ve stood for all my life. It would go against everything my father taught me. But as this thought flashes through my brain, I realize that in the past week, my father has broken every precept he ever tried to instill in me. So why do I still jump to the false tune of his teaching?
Danny McDavitt’s voice crackles in my headset: “I just heard on the radio that somebody set that Bone Tree on fire.”
This brings me out of my fog. “Set it on fire?”
“That’s what I heard. Trying to destroy evidence, looks like.”
Snake Knox, says a voice in my head. Or Forrest . . . or that Ozan.
“Danny?” I say into my headset mike.
“What is it?” Carl asks, his lips not seeming to move beneath his helmet.
“Can you fly over Valhalla on your way back to Natchez?”
“I think the FBI’s pretty active in there right now,” McDavitt says. “And Sheriff Ellis is mad as hell at them for diverting this bird. I’d hate to have to explain what we’re doing in that airspace when we’re supposed to be delivering you elsewhere.”
I guess I expected this answer, or one like it.
“We already passed it anyway,” Danny says. “I didn’t know the tree was on fire, but the swamp to the south of Valhalla was lit up like a firebase under attack.”
“Thanks,” I mutter, visualizing Kaiser and his men standing around the burning Bone Tree like angry Crusaders around a burning altar.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, Mayor?” Danny asks.
“No. Just take me home.”
“I’ll sure do that.”
After closing my eyes for nearly a minute, I take out my BlackBerry, scroll through my contacts, and find the home number of John Masters. Somewhere in North Carolina, the self-styled southern media baron sits in blissful ignorance of his daughter’s fate. For a few more seconds, he can believe he has been blessed by providence. But after he answers my call, his life will implode as surely as mine has. Where another man might pray, I simply stare across the deck at Carl Sims and give John Masters a little more time to feel alive.