Hunting Season Page 12

  When he’d cleared the doorway, Anna took possession of her chair. The back was so bent if she’d put her weight against it she would have toppled over backward. Balancing herself on the seat, she sized up Special Agent Ronnie Dent.

  He was young, early thirties at a guess, and put Anna in mind of a brick: stocky, short, red hair, red face pocked with old acne scars. Because of his face Dent came across as a much bigger man than he was. With little alteration and still maintaining its humanness, it could have been a baboon’s face, disproportionately wide and flat. Either through natural physiognomy or learned control, it was a face that gave nothing away.

  Briefly, with occasional inserts from Sheriff Jones, Anna recounted what they knew of the killing of Doyce Barnette, including the unsatisfactory interview with Herm Thorton.

  During the recital Randy returned and, finding the chairs occupied, leaned in the doorway. He filled it completely and Anna felt a twinge of claustrophobia closing her throat. Having Thigpen between herself and freedom was unsettling.

  The instant she’d finished talking, Thigpen pushed his voice if not his person into the room. “Autopsy’ll be done this afternoon or tomorrow,” he said, speaking only to Special Agent Dent. “I doubt there’ll be any surprises there. This thing’s pretty much what we were talking about earlier. As straightforward a case of sadomasochism gone wrong as I’ve seen in my thirty years working this beat.”

  Anna only just avoided rolling her eyes. Thigpen had been on the Trace for thirty years, but she was willing to bet the closest thing to a sadomasochistic homicide he’d seen was the perverse way possums insisted on committing suicide under the wheels of speeding cars.

  “Rape’s about the only sex crime we get down here,” Dent said, sounding mildly disgusted at southerners’ lack of imagination. “If you can call that a sex crime.”

  Thigpen shot Anna a look of triumph as though Dent had scored one for the home team, but Anna knew what the FBI agent meant. Rape was about violence, hate and dominance. Sex had little to do with it.

  “Any ritual trappings about the corpse or the room you found it in?” Dent divided the question between Clintus and Thigpen. Anna’d been born female, she’d grown into a small woman and, in the past ten years, had slid into middle age. If ever there was a cloak of invisibility, time and circumstances were trying to weave her one. Once she would have fought it, clamored for her share of the attention. Now she merely used it, sitting quietly, watching the interplay, hoping to learn something.

  “Like Satanism, you mean,” Thigpen said.

  “Yes.” Dent sounded hopeful.

  For a bit, Randy didn’t say anything. Anna thought he looked disappointed. He’d not seen the corpse. Everything he knew was secondhand. She waited with interest to see if he’d refer the matter to her or the sheriff. He didn’t. After a few seconds he brightened.

  “There was a religious text circled,” he offered.

  Dent wasn’t much impressed. “Just asking,” he said. “Routine. We’ve gotten a lot of press attention over the Satan cult thing but they are like ghosts. Everybody seems to believe they exist but nobody can find any real evidence that they do.”

  He pushed himself up, choosing to be the one to end the meeting. At least he spoke directly to Anna. He might prefer dealing with men, but he knew where the seat of power lay in this office. That was enough for her.

  “We’ll run your murder through the mill, see if we get any hits on the MO, see if there’s any known operators hereabouts, that sort of thing. You get any hard evidence, fingerprints, whatever, give me a call and I’ll plug them into the system for you.”

  Your murder. You get. For you. Dent was semiofficially dumping the crime back into Anna’s lap. Should something interesting turn up, the door was left open for him to snatch the case back. Anna was glad she was not an ambitious woman.

  Once Dent had taken his departure Thigpen shifted gears. The change was sudden and relatively complete as if he’d remembered that he’d turned over a new leaf. He became friendly, interested and what, to the uninitiated, could have passed for open, honest and helpful.

  Since she was in the office, had Clintus on tap and both her rangers in house, Anna decided to have an impromptu meeting to see if they’d learned anything. Barth was occupied with the vandalism of the Mt. Locust sign but Randy, during his last brief phase as a decent hardworking park ranger, had volunteered to seek out the friends and associates of Doyce Barnette. Randy spoke first. Anna let him. She didn’t want to dampen any real enthusiasm the guy might have developed for the work he was paid to do.

  Thigpen had been industrious. He’d compiled a list of people half a page long, single-spaced and, for a wonder, neatly typed. No addresses or phone numbers had been included and Anna had a cynical moment wondering if Thigpen had just made the whole thing up. The names of Badger Lundstrom, Martin Crowley and Herman Thorton were not listed.

  “We’ll need to divide the list up,” Randy finished. “Interview the lot of ’em. Anna, why don’t you take the first six and the sheriff and I’ll split the last.”

  Anna let the suggestion slip by. “Clintus,” she said.

  The sheriff briefly outlined their interview with Herm Thorton.

  “Talking to folks around town I didn’t hear those names,” Thigpen said when he’d finished. “If they were friends of the deceased, there’s not much there. I doubt he saw them much.”

  “According to Mr. Thorton they played poker together every Friday night and some Saturdays,” Anna said.

  Randy looked annoyed. “Yeah ... well...” Whatever he was going to say next, he apparently thought better of it. His face readjusted into the visage of the new and improved Ranger Thigpen. “Well, if you all think they are worth the time, I’d like to be in on it when you talk to them. Once they’ve been got out of the way I think we’ll need to take a good close look at these fellas.” He waggled the list he’d made as if to tempt them to do the right thing.

  The sheriff had business to take care of. Probably getting the lunch Anna had denied him earlier. It was pushing three o’clock. It was decided they’d meet back at the Port Gibson office near 5 P.M., quitting time for Badger Lundstrom. Lundstrom was a scrap metal dealer. He and his twenty-six-year-old son lived a bachelor existence on the western edge of Port Gibson.

  Randy wanted to talk about his list of names. Barth needed her to stop by his slave cemetery on the way to Natchez. A blinking light on the old phone machine that served the district office summoned Anna to the news that Chief Ranger Brown wanted to speak with her.

  Anna had been a field ranger for more than ten years. She’d been a manager for seven months. The seven months seemed the longer of the two. With mumbled excuses and vague promises, she fled the office and her erstwhile assistants. She wanted to see Paul. Just see him, talk to him, hear his voice. A touch would be nice, but she could forgo that. It had been so long since she’d truly needed a man she felt the craving in a place deeper than hunger.

  “Jesus,” she murmured as she turned on the ignition. Been so long. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since she’d said good-bye to Paul Davidson on her doorstep in Rocky Springs. The fall equinox had come and gone two months before. Theoretically, the days were getting shorter. Time is relative, Anna reminded herself. For reasons of its own, it had chosen to do its petty pace thing this day.

  For a minute she just sat. The aches and stings from her rush through the woods gathered in force and she felt old and tired and decrepit. Last night she’d been hunted. How could it be only last night? Eons seemed to have passed. Time was kaleidoscoping. Zach, the high deserts of Colorado, riding Gideon through the backcountry of Texas— these things seemed to have happened only yesterday, yet her strange adventures in Dixieland felt as if they’d taken place in another life.

  Memories of who she’d once been struck so acutely she was moved to tears and had to fight to keep from sobbing out loud. She missed her husband, her sister, the sound of dry wind in the pinon p
ines.

  “Get a grip,” she ordered herself and jammed the Crown Vic into reverse, not sure where she was going but knowing getting away from where she was was imperative.

  The piercing shriek of a siren cut through the mental storm, and Anna slammed on the brakes. In her preoccupation, she’d not looked behind her and had very nearly run into another patrol car. This was why law enforcement was trained to back into parking places, she reminded herself as she shut the ignition down.

  Sheriff Paul Davidson got out of his squad car. In the perfect gold light of afternoon his blond hair gleamed. Anna had not noticed before but now, liking the way his uniform fit him, liking the way his thighs pulled the fabric taut when he walked, she saw he’d lost weight. The divorce he was fighting for was costing him. He’d grown leaner, harder looking. It suited him and Anna wanted nothing so much as to collapse in his arms and feel the strength of him down the length of her body as once she’d craved the feel of the earth against her bones.

  “Hey,” she said neutrally, shoving her feelings into a box that got harder and harder to open again over the years. “What brings you out here?”

  A fleeting shadow of pain darkened his blue eyes at the curtness of her greeting. Pain of Anna’s own answered it, but she didn’t amend her words by so much as a smile. Unreasonable as it was, her sudden need for him and his inability to answer it made her angry.

  “I’ve got a couple little things, excuses mostly,” he replied in a drawl made genteel by four years at the University of Tennessee and three years in seminary in Austin, Texas. “But my main-most reason was to see you, see how you’re doing. Rumor has it, you’ve been stepping out on me.”

  For a moment Anna was aware of nothing but confusion and the perverse pleasure of having, however unwittingly, stirred this splendid man’s heart. Then she remembered. “Last night,” she said.

  “If I‘d’ve known you were going for a moonlight walk, I’d’ve hung around.” Paul was smiling his slow gentle smile but there was an edge to his words. He was angry that Anna had been in danger, that she’d been hurt, made afraid, that he wasn’t there to take care of her.

  At least that was how Anna read it, and she was made weak by the glorious sensation that somebody cared whether she lived or died.

  “If I’d known I was going to be accompanied on my evening constitutional, you would have been my first choice for an escort,” she said and gave him the smile spite had been withholding.

  “Tell me about it over a cup of coffee?”

  “I was hoping for lunch,” Anna said.

  “Your car or mine?” Paul answered but Anna had seen the ghosts of the gossips haunting him before he’d answered. He was uncomfortable being seen with her, even in uniform.

  “Coffee’d be better,” she said. “I’m short on time.”

  Paul had the grace not to look relieved.

  Barth had gone. Randy was still slothing about. He was on the phone when they walked in but hung up with a hurried “Call ya back,” when he saw them. Probably talking to his mistress of many years. Once off the phone he seemed to Anna to be all eyes and ears. Either to avoid work, annoy Anna or to make himself feel important, Randy attached himself to Sheriff Davidson. He attempted classic man chat: sports, guns, dogs, internal combustion engines. Anna fought down the irritation that came with the belief that he was doing it on purpose to exclude her from the manly world of law enforcement. A tiny voice, whispered in her ear over twenty years before by a woman who didn’t like Anna enough and liked Anna’s husband Zach too much, came back. “Trust your paranoia.”

  “How do you take your coffee?” Anna cut through, choosing to pretend she didn’t remember.

  “Black.”

  Anna poured a cup of the disreputable-looking brew for herself and Paul and led the way into her office where, for once, she was grateful there were only two chairs. Undaunted by the lack of facilities, Randy lumbered after them and took up his old place in the doorway, three hundred pounds of lard Anna’d have to blast her way through to gain the outdoors.

  The idea was beginning to appeal strongly to her when Thigpen was saved by the jarring bell of the office phone. She and Randy locked eyes as it rang a second time. On the third ring she said, “Would you get that for me, Randy? I need to have a word with Paul.”

  Reluctantly he pulled himself away only to reappear a minute later. “Tupelo,” he said. “A motorist call in. Cell phone. Needs an assist up to Rocky. Dead battery it sounds like.”

  Again the staring contest. “Guess you’ll be wanting me to take that,” Thigpen grumbled. Anna said nothing. “Don’t you be going to Lundstrom’s without me. I want to be in on that.”

  “You’ll want to wrap up the motorist assist in record time, then,” Anna said.

  Finally he had no choice but to go, and she expelled the breath she’d not known she’d been holding. “God, but I hate that man,” she muttered.

  Paul laughed. “Gee, I’d’ve never guessed. So.” He nudged her knee gently with his booted foot and at once Anna was warmed and connected. Love was most assuredly blind but its other senses were remarkably acute.

  “First, who told you about last night’s escapade?” Anna’s question wasn’t to seek out idle gossipers. The hunting stand “prank,” if one chose to call it that, was the sort that the participants would want to brag about. It had all the ingredients of a bar boast except for the sex, and she doubted the perpetrators would have any compunction about using their imaginations to add that element. Anna was hoping they would boast. Realistically it was about the only chance she had of nailing the bastards.

  “Triletta told me.”

  Paul named a new clerk at the Port Gibson Sheriff’s department. Anna remembered not the woman but the name. Tired of white men’s hand-me-down names, many African-Americans in Mississippi had taken to naming their children or, if their own folks were conservative, themselves, with exotic-sounding syllables that pleased the ear and annoyed the hell out of the sense of spelling.

  “The tooth,” Paul said, tapping his front teeth to jog her memory.

  “Ah.” Triletta had capped a front tooth in gold with a diamond chip inset in an etching of a star. Another culturally based fashion. “Find out who she got the story from,” Anna said.

  “Will do. Now tell me.”

  Anna related her adventuring, enjoying the growing anger that burned in his eyes and tightened the muscles of his face.

  “Randy Thigpen wasn’t exactly Johnny-on-the-spot,” he said when she’d finished.

  “At least he showed up before somebody got hurt.”

  “I’ll see what I can dig up on my end,” he promised.

  They sat without speaking for a while. Anna let herself simply enjoy the companionship, the sight of him against the green and gold and blue that leaked through her one fly-specked window.

  At length he began to fidget, the small shifts and wriggles preparatory to leaving.

  “What do you know about a Badger Lundstrom,” Anna asked. The question was legitimate—Lundstrom lived in Paul’s county—but Anna asked it to buy a few more minutes of Paul Davidson’s time, and she hated herself for the pathetic need it evinced, if to no other judge and jury but the one in her head.

  “Lundstrom.”

  “Owns a scrap metal yard,” Anna said.

  “Okay. Got him. He’s a local boy. His folks and their folks all lived right here. Big man. Heavy drinker but never been in trouble for it—no DUIs, not the sort to get into brawls or anything, least not that’s ever come to my attention. Used to be a big football star when he was in high school. To my way of thinking he never much got past that stage. Kind of a class-clown type, though he’s got to be pushing forty if he isn’t already there. Not a church-going man to my knowledge. Divorced some years, if I remember right.” He thought a bit and Anna waited to see if anything more floated up from Mississippi’s pool of communal history. In the country, where everybody knew everybody else’s business, secrets kept were necessarily
buried deep, covered in years, sometimes generations, of lies. The anonymity of the city could not be counted on to mask antisocial behaviors.

  “That’s all I got,” he said finally. He glanced at his watch.

  “It’s a help,” Anna said, then added, “I guess I’d best be getting back to work,” to make up for keeping him longer than he’d intended to stay.

  “Me, too.” He stood, took his Stetson from the counter. Reaching out, he touched her hair lightly. “Call me when things happen. Call me at home, at night, at work. Don’t shut me out. You need somebody to be there for you.”

  Anna said nothing. Not sure what she felt and afraid to trust anything to words.

  “I need to be there for somebody,” he amended.

  Anna collected herself enough to say, “I’ll call.” She doubted she would, at least not when things were new and raw. Too needy. Perhaps not for him, but for her to have to witness in herself. Maybe she sensed if she ever let herself need somebody she’d fall into a bottomless pit of it.

  Behind her the radio began babbling. Her number wasn’t mentioned and Anna ignored it. Paul drove away with a crunching of gravel and still she stood in the doorway, not mooning over her departed lover, merely bereft of the will to move, to act, to do.

  The other door being pried open galvanized her into looking alive even if she did not feel it.

  Thigpen barreled in on a waft of stale cigarette smoke.

  “That was quick,” Anna said, too distracted to keep a note of accusation from her voice.

  “I radioed Frank up at Rocky. He’s going to jump the battery. Problem solved,” Thigpen said. Frank was the maintenance man at Rocky Springs campground. Anna hadn’t known he had cables and was certain the little three-wheeled cart he drove lacked the guts to jump a car battery.

  As if he read her thoughts, Thigpen added, “He’s got the stuff in that old truck he drives.”

  Anna knew she’d probably get complaints from maintenance because one of her rangers was leveraging off his work onto their people, but there was little she could do about it at the moment.