Butch Karp: Absolute Rage Part 14

"Meaning you could keep an eye on her."

"That, too," said Karp, glad once again that another person in the world shared his view of his wife. "On the other hand, I'm uncomfortable with both of us being out of town and you stuck here in charge."

"We could all come down there," said Lucy brightly.

"What about the farm?"

"Oh, we'd bring Magog. Billy can handle the place after the puppies are sold, and if not, he can hire a teenager from town."

"I don't think so. That's all we need is to have to worry about you all. Apparently it's a pretty violent part of the country."

"Violence! Heavens to Betsy! What a sharp contrast that would be to my entire childhood! Well, you've succeeded in terrifying me out of that idea."

"I was actually thinking of the boys," said Karp, a little more sharply than he had intended.

"Oh, right-sorry," she said, and actually was, because she had not thought for a second about her brothers. What had immediately occupied the center of her thoughts when her father had proposed going to West Virginia was the prospect of seeing Dan Heeney again. "Okay, if you decide to go, I can hold the fort here. Don't worry."

"Are you sure? I mean, they can get someone else."

"But you're dying to go, right?"

Karp hesitated before replying to this. "I'm not sure . . . the main thing is I'm concerned about you. You have all that scientific stuff to do up in Boston. It doesn't seem fair to tie up your summer with babysitting."

"It's starting to sound like you're using us as an excuse. You're the responsible parent and Mom is the cuckoo."

"Not really . . ."

"Really. Look, the way it sounds is that they want you and you can do it better than anyone. And it's important-getting the rats who killed them. It's just your kind of thing. As far as the Boston guys are concerned, I already blew them off. It's not like they can find another me by placing an ad in the Globe . It's a seller's market in the prodigy biz."

"You actually are irreplaceable," said Karp fervently. "And I don't just mean all the Swahili."

"And you likewise. Since you're all guilted up, this would be a good time to ask you if I can get the Toyota fixed. It would be great to have."

"Is it fixable?" asked Karp, who knew little about vehicles.

"Russell says yes, and apparently he's a car maven as well as a dog agitator, kind of a Renaissance man. I'll pay for the fixing if you'll handle all the plates and insurance c.r.a.p."

"A done deal. Are you absolutely sure . . . ?"

"Of course. Go. Don't worry about us. And keep in touch, okay?"

After hanging up, Karp sat back in his chair. He had a peculiar feeling, hauntingly familiar, but it took him some little time to identify it. The last day of school? Winning a big case? Oh, right, he thought: happiness. He kicked off and spun his chair around half a dozen times. Swiveling around to the desk again, he dialed Saul Sterner's number.

Marlene was swinging in a hammock strung in the Heeneys' backyard, using a finger against the skull of her dog to push herself in a gentle rocking motion, and at the same time scratching him in the place he liked behind his ear. The dog was happy with this arrangement; Marlene less so. She did not like being stymied. She finished her beer and tossed it in a graceful arc, which did not quite reach the lip of the rubber trash can. Dan Heeney stirred himself from the lounge chair where he was drinking, reached out an arm, and flipped the can in. It was hot under a milk-gla.s.s sky. Only vagrant zephyrs stirred the dusty leaves of the maples. She was officially thinking about their next move, but productive thoughts were slow in coming. Had this been a real case, she would have been working with a private detective, doing the investigation that the cops had fluffed, maybe establis.h.i.+ng an alibi for the defendant, maybe collecting new evidence. In this particular abortion, however, this was not going to do much good, because the cops and the criminal justice system would take anything she discovered and lose it, or phony up something that undermined it.

Stan Hawes might be interested. She didn't think he was really dirty yet, but it would take an extremely pure-minded state's attorney to actively cooperate in wrecking the biggest case he was likely to see in a decade. She needed something new and major then, the murder weapon maybe, or a signed confession from the real guys, one about as likely to turn up as the other. There was no crime-scene forensic evidence that did her any good. There were prints in the house from dozens of people, but distinguis.h.i.+ng among these, separating the killers' from those of the Heeneys' many guests, was a job beyond her resources. If she had been there from the beginning, in charge of the investigation, or even on defense from the get-go . . . no, useless thoughts: if your grandma had wheels, she'd be a garbage truck. Still, if the cops had done a half-a.s.sed job, there might be areas still worth investigating. Where, though? She rolled out of the hammock, went to the cooler, and cracked another Iron City, feeling Dan's eyes on her as she did so. He was waiting for her to pull out rabbits, but she was all out of rabbits today.

She walked across the lawn, the gra.s.s cool on the soles of her feet, the can icy when she pressed it against the back of her neck. Go back into the house, look at her notes, maybe something would pop up. She closed her eyes, her mind blank. When she opened them, she was staring at a mountain. This was not unusual, as there were mountains everywhere one stared around here. This one, she recalled, was known as Belo k.n.o.b. There was a flash of light from the mountainside and then another. She heard, above the buzzing of the insect life, the distant grind of a truck in low gear, climbing. She looked up at the mountain again. The truck had disappeared. A road on a hillside: Why was that of interest? She didn't know yet, but it was, something about the night of the crime. She wandered back to the hammock and sat on its edge.

"Dan, the night of the murders," she said tentatively, "there were people at the house-Emmett said . . . ?"

"Yeah, there was a dissident-faction meeting, maybe about twenty guys. It lasted until ten, maybe ten-thirty."

"Right, and then the killers came. But, what I'm wondering is, how did they know the house was empty except for your family?"

Dan twitched his shoulders. "I don't know. They were watching the house?"

"Uh-huh. But from where? Where was their car while they were watching? It couldn't have been in your driveway or on 119 or on that little access road. Someone would've spotted them. A bunch of dissidents, all paranoid as h.e.l.l, probably armed . . . the killers wouldn't have wanted to take that chance. Come here a minute."

They walked around the house. Marlene pointed to Belo k.n.o.b. "There's a road across that mountain."

"Uh-huh. Belo Road. It hooks up Route 10 on the east side of the k.n.o.b to 130 on the west, and it picks up a bunch of no-name dirt roads that go to where folks live up there. What about it?"

"I was just thinking that if someone parked their car on that road, they'd have a pretty good view of your yard. They could see when the last guest left. Have you got a large-scale map of the county?"

"Sure. It's on the computer."

A few minutes later, Marlene was looking over Dan's shoulder at a bird's-eye view of the house they were standing in. He punched a key twice and the view expanded to take in the south flank of Belo k.n.o.b. "We have fifty-meter resolution on this. The whole county, and we have the subsurface, too, down to three thousand meters."

"Where did you get this?" she asked. "It's fantastic."

"My mom. There's a state law that says the coal companies have to map all their abandoned shafts, mines, and impoundments and share the information with the community. The state makes them do the mapping, and they also do their own mapping and subsurface exploration, to plan where they're going to cut next. They use sonar to find what the rock's like under the mountains. My mom's little enviro group sued Majestic to release this data."

"And won?"

"Amazingly, yes. It was a federal court decision. That's how we knew that Gillis Holler was going to happen before it did." He saw her puzzlement. "A local disaster." He hit some other keys. The view on the monitor changed to what looked like a cutaway of a layer cake prepared by a drunken pastry cook.

"This is Hampden, to our east. The coal-bearing strata show up in gray, and those red lines are old shafts and adits. Where the coal strata are exposed, that's Majestic Number Two, the main surface mine in the county. They're taking the whole top off Hampden." His finger tapped the screen. "This blue blob is an impoundment, or was, Impoundment Fifty-three A. They set off a charge at Number Two and the shock waves whipped along this boundary layer, under the limestone stratum, see? And focused right here. It cracked open the rock between the bottom of the impoundment and an old shaft. Half a million cubic feet of water came out of that shaft like a steel rod and blasted half a dozen houses and trailers into toothpicks."

He told her about what had happened after that, the wildcat strike, the election. He spoke with regret mixed with cynicism, a young man's approach to corruption and horror. She'd heard some of this from Rose, but she let him talk until he was through and then steered him back to the matter at hand. The south flank of Belo appeared once again. His fingers on the mouse made the vegetation details vanish, leaving only landforms, roads, and structures.

"Can we go there?" she asked.

"Sure. You mean now?"

"I almost always do." She ran off to gather some items.

Belo Road was rutted and ran narrowly through hemlocks and laurels, two lanes of thin blacktop chopped into the mountainside. Marlene drove, flicking her gaze between the road ahead and the steep slope to her left, a wall of vegetation. Which vanished briefly and then reappeared. Marlene hit the brakes and threw the truck into reverse. There was a wide place in the road, a sandy area just big enough for one vehicle, under a big slate outcrop, dripping with seepage. She jumped out and crossed the road. Dan came up beside her.

"This has to be the place," she said. "You can see everything from here-the house, the yard. Christ, what a waste! If they'd brought a crime-scene unit up here the morning after the crime, they would've got tire tracks and footprints and G.o.d knows what else. Well, let's look around anyway."

"What are we looking for?"

"Oh, you know, the usual. A matchbook with the name of a nightclub on it. The murderer's diary . . ."

"A lot of broken beer bottles," said Dan, standing at the base of the slate outcrop. Marlene looked and saw the remains of at least two dozen brown beer bottles and two white-gla.s.s Jim Beam pints lying in the shallow declivity below the rock wall. Marks on the wall showed that they had been thrown against it. Marlene returned to her truck and brought out a sheaf of plastic supermarket bags. She stuck her hand in one of them and selected several of the more intact bottles.

"What're you doing that for?"

"You never can tell. These might be from our guys. In fact, unless this place is a famous parking spot, I'd say it's likely. Look, they drive up here after dark, say about nine-thirty. They have to wait an hour or so until all the cars leave and they sit around and drink and smoke. See all the b.u.t.ts?" She knelt and bagged a collection of these. "I figure three guys. One smoked Winstons, one smoked Camels, and one smoked those cheap, thin cigars. The amount of drinking's right for three guys, too. Now the cars are gone from your yard, so they're ready. Do they drive down? Where does this road go?"

"West of here it hooks into 130 west on the other side of Belo, or 11 north a little farther along. East of here was the way we just came, off 119 about a quarter mile from our drive."

"Wait a second-130? Does that go over some kind of bridge? A green bridge?"

"Yeah, it does. Over the Guyandotte. Why?"

"Because that's where Mose said he found the b.l.o.o.d.y boots. They stayed here, drove down to your place, did the murders, and what . . . ? Came back the same way, past here, and out to 130, across the bridge, where they tossed the shoes off the bridge, but not too carefully, because they landed on dry land instead of in the water."

"Yeah, that makes sense," Dan agreed, "because otherwise they would've had to go through the middle of town on 119 and someone might have seen them. There's not much traffic in McCullensburg after 1 A.M. But what does that do for us?"

Marlene was leaning against a pine and looking down the slope of the hill. A scrim of young pine and ash bordered the road, below which rolled a curiously even, glossy green carpet. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe it gives us their getaway route. On the other hand, they might not have bothered to move the car at all. They might've walked down this slope. It's not more than a couple of thousand yards and the slope isn't that steep. And that would've been better for them, a.s.suming they knew about the driveway alarm and the lights."

"Maybe, but you can't walk that slope. It's a laurel h.e.l.l."

"A what?"

"They don't have those in New York?" said Dan in mock surprise. "A laurel h.e.l.l is an extremely dense growth of mountain laurel or sometimes rhododendron, mixed with greenbrier and other creepers. Rabbits can go through it but nothing else. Sometimes they roll on for miles. This one is pretty small. I guess they could've gone around it, though, on the other side of that deadfall." He pointed to where a good-sized tulip tree had come down.

"Yeah, I guess," said Marlene, still looking downslope. "What's that?"

"What?" He came over to her and followed her pointing finger. "That white stuff? Some trash. People fling stuff into laurel all the time. We call it West Virginia recycle. It makes a perfect dump."

Marlene went to her truck and came back with a pair of binoculars. She propped her shoulder against a tree and looked through them. "It's the heel of a sneaker. It's got what looks like a dark stain on the sole. I'm going to go get it."

"Marlene, it'll take you two hours to get down there and back. You got no idea what it's like in one of those."

"Nevertheless, I have a good feeling about this." She handed him the binoculars. "Stay up here and guide me." She started down the slope and before long discovered why they called it h.e.l.l. The air was still, smelling of leaf mould, and breathtakingly hot. The laurel plants grew within inches of one another, so that each step was a contortion. Before she had gone five yards she was covered in sweat, wringing wet, stinging from dozens of scratches. Tiny flies rose from the damp earth and filled her nose and mouth and crawled into her eyes. The world contracted to the next stiff branch, the next tripping root. Several times she fell and had to stop to pick thorns out of her hands. Dimly she heard Dan's shouts, giving directions. She moved sluggishly in response. Her brain was frying. She could barely remember left from right. Time slowed and ground to a halt.

"There! You're right there!" came a shout. She stopped, wiped her eyes. Her palm, when she looked at it, showed a slurry of mud, sweat, and blood. She could barely recall what she was there for. Some punishment, perhaps. The brain wasn't working too well. The heat. What was he yelling about? There was nothing there, just green leaves and cruel branches inches from her face. She looked up. There was no sky, only more green, and something white, a flower or a fruit. She wiped her burning eyes again, blinked the sweat out of them. Not a fruit. The toe of a sneaker. She reached up and plucked it. A Nike, size eleven, well worn. On the sole, a curious design in red-black, almost calligraphic, that ran up onto the heel.

"Jesus Christ!" cried Dan as she staggered out of the laurel. He grabbed her before she fell.

"Bag it," she said, holding out the sneaker.

Back at the house, she didn't even bother removing her clothes, but stood shaking under the cold stream of the shower for ten minutes before she thought of undressing.

Forty-five minutes later she emerged in a robe, with a towel wrapped around her head, went straight to the refrigerator, got a beer, and moved to the porch, where Dan sat.

"Feeling better?"

"Much." She sat in a rocker, drank a long pull, sighed.

"You should have seen what you looked like when you came out of there. Red as a tomato and covered with dirt and blood. I thought you were going to collapse. People have, you know. Died in those things."

"I can believe it. How long was I in there?"

"A couple of hours. Campers look at a map and figure they can cut a couple of miles of trail by bushwhacking through the laurel. They don't usually try it more than once. How do you feel?"

"Like I've been whipped by chains. But we got our sneaker."

"Yeah, you did. I guess that's blood on it, huh?"

"I'd bet."

"What're we going to do with it?"

"I've been thinking about that. I think we should take it to Poole and get his advice."

"Poole? He's a drunk."

"Yes, when he's drunk. When he's not, he's a smart lawyer and he knows the situation here a lot better than I do."

Dressed in a crisp cotton s.h.i.+rtwaist and with the worst of the scratches covered up, she drove into town, which took longer than she expected because a moron in one of those pickups with huge tires dawdled in front of her and would not let her pa.s.s. Redneck fun. It took a while to track down Poole, but she eventually found him at the VFW hall. He was at a table in the back of the barroom, a high-ceilinged, dim, echoing place smelling of old beer. He was drinking bourbon with beer chasers. Being a private club, the VFW was allowed to supply him with his own bottle, whether or not he was actually a veteran of a foreign war. She sat at his table and plopped the sneaker in its plastic bag down on the table.

"I ordered the ham on rye," he said. "That's a sneaker."

She told him what she thought it was and where she had found it. "Ah, deeper and deeper, Ciampi. Why is it people never listen to good advice? What do you expect to gain from this?"

Good, she thought: he was at the expansive stage of his drunk. "The release of our client, for starters. The murderers came down from that ridge, broke in, killed the Heeneys, and walked back up to their car. One of them noticed he had blood on his shoes, so he chucked them into the laurel. I'll bet you a bottle of Jack Black that the blood on it matches up with one of the victims. That s.h.i.+t-cans the state's theory of the case."

"If Murdoch doesn't throw it out. He'll say you cooked it up. There's no custodial chain, and without one there's no probative value. If you give it to Swett, it'll just disappear."

"I wasn't thinking about Swett. What do you know about Hawes?"

"Hawes? He's new. Been in there six months. The old state's attorney was a guy named Hailey, an old drinking buddy of mine as a matter of fact. His evil ways caught up with him and he kicked off, and the governor put this kid in there. He's ambitious as Satan and he's smart enough to know he's never going to get anywhere by bucking the system."

"But is he bent? I should say, 'bent yet'?"

"I'm not sure anyone has bothered to bend him, but I'd say he's eminently bendable. The Majestic Coal Company hires a lot of lawyers, and they fund a lot of campaigns."

"Well, let's us go and find out," she said, rising and retrieving the shoe.

"Us? No, dear, this is your play. I don't want anything to do with it."

"I thought we were partners, Poole."

He threw a half shot of the bourbon down his throat and reached for the bottle. "No. You are an annoyance and I am the annoyee. That isn't partners." He carefully poured a shot. "Also, I am thinking of the original owner of that very large shoe. It looks to be a size eleven. Did you think that he might be a local resident? That he might harbor some animus against someone who was trying to pin a triple murder on him? That he might try to dissuade that person, or take some revenge? Revenge is big in Robbens County, Ciampi. It's what we have instead of youth soccer."

"Okay, suit yourself. But you better pray that Hawes isn't completely bent, because I'm going to tell him you gave me the Nike and that you know who owns it."

She had reached the door before she felt a hand on her arm. "You're not really . . . I mean, that was a bluff, right?"

"I rarely bluff, Poole." She turned to look him in the face. "You know, you're looking a little better than you did the last time I saw you. I think you're turning into a functional drunk."

"Thank you," he said as he followed her out. "I always wanted to be beaten to death while cold sober. You look like h.e.l.l, by the way. What did you do to your face?"

"I scratched it in some bushes," said Marlene, her tone short. Marlene prided herself on not depending upon her looks to get things done (a false pride necessarily, the world being what it is), but did not appreciate having any shortcoming in that department pointed out. They walked the few streets to the courthouse in chilly silence.