Hunting Season Read online

  Having left the FedEx office—actually a counter near the pharmacy in the back of Port Gibson Drug and Sundries that provided money orders and faxes, collected gas and water bills and cashed employment checks as well as handling Federal Express packages—Anna turned her car toward Natchez. The storm that crouched over the South was being pushed out by a high-pressure zone from the Northwest. Anna could see a line of blue-black arcing across the sky in a textbook example of an approaching front. Temperatures were dropping fast. According to the weatherman on the radio it would be in the twenties by midnight with a chance of sleet or snow. Anna didn’t much like the cold but the prospect of snow was exciting. Since coming to Mississippi, she found she missed waking up in the morning and finding the world miraculously transformed into a clean and glittering place as cold and untouched as her own warped vision of heaven: a wonderful place to visit...

  The unsettled weather helped her think. Steve Stilwell linking the assault on her to the poachers, then finding a person or persons had jimmied the smashed trunk and stolen the deer meat and skull, forged the first link in the chain of evidence suggesting the two were connected. If made by the poachers, the attempt on her life by the truck shed a different light on the mad-dog pursuit of her through the woods. It suggested that Randy had been wrong; they weren’t good old boys having a little fun. They wanted her dead. Had the chase through the woods been the only incident, Anna would have thought little of it; opportunism, deadly but not sustained, an impulse to the kill requiring little in the way of planning or motive. When linked to the truck battering her car, the woodland chase lost any vestige of a one-time insanity. For two attempts to be made there had to be a motive greater than getting nailed for poaching. Putting the poachers together with the death of Doyce unloosed images she’d filed away as useless: the strange details of the autopsy report, the deer stand so beautifully swept and neatly repaired. One glaring anomaly bothered her: the place and the way the body had been “disposed” of, laid out in a public place with shameful implications underlined by the circling of a religious text pointing toward depths of depravity deeper even than those suggested by the semi-nudity.

  At the roadside parallel to the meadow where the deer stand was built, Anna pulled over. Letting the engine idle so she could continue to enjoy the heat, she took the folder with Doyce Barnette’s autopsy report from her briefcase and began rereading it.

  The connection, tenuous at best, was there. No motive could be discerned, but if Anna uncovered the “how” of the crime, the “who” and “why” should follow, particularly if more than one individual was involved. Honor among thieves was pretty much a myth.

  Anna changed shoes, trading her uniform boots for sneakers, took a length of sturdy yellow rope from the trunk and trudged the now familiar route across the meadow. Wind, growing ever colder, found the chinks in her Gore-Tex armor and poked icy fingers under her collar. Still, it was good to be out of doors and on her own. Nature could be benign, dramatic, deadly—any of a seemingly endless array of faces—but all of them were beautiful.

  Black with rain, skeletal without their summer dress of leaves, branches raked at the dark sky, beckoning the winds that drove the front. The meadow grasses, too sodden and cold to move, lay in tawny shades, the brown of oak leaves lacing the edges near the woods. The air was not yet cold enough to be odorless, and on the gusting wind, Anna smelled the life sleeping beneath the ground and a faint breath of woodsmoke from where some soul kept the home fires burning.

  The deer stand was as bleak and lifeless as the branches overhead. The new wood where the railing had been repaired was rapidly graying to match the rest. There’d been so much precipitation in the last week that for a moment Anna despaired. The minute traces she hoped to find might have been washed away.

  Though she’d visited the place recently, the stand was higher than Anna remembered, close to twenty feet from platform to ground, twenty-four from the top of the railing. The old pecan it was built against was such a grand tree it dwarfed things merely human and confused the sense of scale.

  Anna dropped the rope and the scurvy World War II knapsack she used to house her field investigation tools. From the sack she took an oversized magnifying glass worthy of Sherlock Holmes that she’d cannibalized from her Oxford English Dictionary set.

  Wishing she had more light to work by, she set about examining first the tree and then the bottom of an angled two-by-four attached to the pecan by tenpenny nails driven into the flesh of the living plant to support the platform. The bark and the dead wood of the two-by-four were blackened and swollen from days of rain. Either water had erased the traces she sought or they’d never been there in the first place. After fifteen minutes of hoping and straining her eyes in the strange half-light preceding the storm, she gave up and carried knapsack and rope around to the stairs at the rear of the stand.

  Deer stands, like duck blinds, icefishing huts and other structures used only a few weeks each year, received little attention in the way of upkeep and repair. The third step on the narrow stair hung by a nail. Three boards had rotted through on one side of the platform. A four-foot length of warping one-by-twelve had been thrown over them to provide a walkway. The railing on the north and backside of the stand was broken.

  Anna gave this a cursory glance. What she was interested in was the thing that didn’t fit. “What’s wrong with this picture?” she muttered to herself, remembering the puzzles she and Molly had so enjoyed in the children’s section of the Sunday paper.

  The ill-fitting piece of this rain-soaked puzzle was the new construction on the southeast corner where the deer stand was affixed to the pecan. That portion of railing had been repaired. Two-by-fours nailed in securely, those they replaced taken away. On previous visits, her orderly mind had written it off as general upkeep. She hadn’t bothered to question why this love and attention had been lavished only on one sector of the entire structure. Desperate events of the last week finally beginning to interrelate, she saw the repairs in a new and more sinister light.

  The girth of the tree was greater than two men could girdle and still touch hands. Anna’s plan to anchor one end of the yellow nylon to that particular immovable object was foiled.

  The branches overhead were too high to reach. She probably could have thrown the rope over one that looked sturdy enough to hold a person ten times her size, but she was loathe to mark anything she could not examine first.

  Accepting what was necessary, she looped the line around two of the uprights supporting the railing on the theory that should one give way the other would hold.

  The encumbrance of a gun belt did not fit into her plans, but Anna was hesitant to take it off. In times of stress, guns were terrific tranquilizers. When feeling threatened Anna’d been known to sleep with her personal weapon, an old .357 revolver, literally under her pillow. Some nights a Colt was a better soporific even than a purring cat.

  Reluctantly, she pulled the Velcro loose and laid the heavy belt on the platform near the edge. Remembering as she worked—it had been a while since she’d done any technical climbing, Mississippi was not the land of mountaineers—she wove herself an emergency harness from the line, looped the remainder around her middle and climbed gingerly over the waist-high rail.

  Twenty feet was a long way when it fell away beneath one’s feet. Consoling herself with the thought that the leaf carpet below was so waterlogged if the railing gave way she’d land with a splash rather than a thud, she leaned back. Letting the rope take her weight, she fed line out, lowering herself, one foot seeking purchase on the tangle of lumber haphazardly nailed from tree to platform, the other resting lightly on the bark of the pecan.

  Both hands occupied with belaying, she’d been forced to leave her magnifying glass on the platform with her gun.

  Nose inches from the tree, she studied each swollen scrap and shingle of bark as she descended an inch at a time. The nylon line cut into the backs of her thighs. Her feet grew cold from a lack of blood, then
numb. She was only vaguely aware of the discomfort, her whole attention absorbed in the nicks and swirls in front of her eyes.

  About halfway down she found what she was looking for, or thought she did. The scattering of tiny marks was almost obscured by the encroachment of the water. In and of themselves they’d never be used as evidence. They’d grown so faint Anna doubted it would be worth her time to try and photograph them. In another few days they would disappear completely.

  Fortunately forensic science had evolved to the point that things invisible to the naked eye could be used effectively to prove or disprove guilt.

  Belaying rope in her teeth, she fished her Swiss Army knife and a plastic Baggie from the breast pocket of her shirt.

  “You oughtn’t be out here by yourself. You might could get hurt.”

  The voice, so unexpected, coming from above startled Anna. She squawked and nearly lost her bite on the rope.

  Acutely aware of how vulnerable she’d made herself, dangling alone and unarmed on the edge of a deserted wood, her legs too numb to carry her away even if she did reach the ground, adrenaline dumped in her system. It was converted, not into energy, but into liquid fear wreaking unique havoc in her bowels and brain.

  Forcing, if not calm then at least deliberation, she tucked the knife and Baggie in her belt and took the belaying rope from between her teeth. Thus freed, she could finally look up. Two great cordovan-shod feet were planted at the edge of the platform five feet above her head. The left, she noted, was on the tail end of her gun belt.

  Her eyes traveled rapidly up the green and gray to the face hanging over the rail.

  “Hey, Barth,” she managed. “You scared the bejesus out of me. Why the hell are you creeping around like some kind of felon on little cat’s feet?” Relief had not quite come. Anna replaced it with anger.

  “I didn’t do nothing on little cat feet,” he said, mildly offended. “I came right across the meadow thinking you would hear me coming, then climbed on up the steps. You just weren’t paying attention.”

  That was true. Anna had allowed herself to get tunnel vision, hypnotized by the patterns in the bark and the sweet musty smell of success.

  Barth’s pervasive normalcy at last brought on the relief. Anger faded. Without it, Anna felt the cut of the ropes, the cold, the numbness.

  “What’re you doing hanging like that?” Barth asked. “I’ve been trying to raise you on the radio from Mt. Locust. When you didn’t answer I headed up to Port Gibson to see if you were hiding out in the office. I saw your car parked by the road.”

  “I’m...” Anna thought about what she was doing. Putting it into cohesive sentences, even in her own mind, it sounded far-fetched. “I had an idea. Needed to get some bark samples.”

  “Why didn’t you get ’em from the bottom of the tree?” Barth asked reasonably.

  “Just give me a hand, would you?” Anna grumbled.

  Barth lay down on the wet platform and reached. By stretching, Anna was able to hand him the rope she used to belay herself. “Hold it till I tell you, then feed it out slowly.”

  “No problem.”

  Anna retrieved her knife and Baggie and scraped a half a teaspoon of bark into the plastic. Probably a sample from the bottom of the tree would have been fine. Since she’d had to hang midway to look she might as well take it from the source.

  Her return to earth was ignominious. Technical climbing wasn’t like riding a bicycle; one did forget. She’d made an error in tying her harness and the ropes had tightened as she put her weight on them. Though Barth lowered her with great care, her legs were so numb they wouldn’t hold her and she ended up crumpled in wet leaves massaging her backside for several minutes before they could depart.

  During the hour or so since she’d come to the stand, the temperature had continued to drop. On the outer edges of her hearing, Anna could discern the faintest crackle as she moved: leaves, wet with the incessant drizzle, were forming thin sheets of ice.

  “You gonna keep up with the secret squirrel stuff or you gonna tell me why you were hanging there like a spider poking at that poor old tree?” Barth said as they recrossed the meadow to where their cars were parked.

  “Steve had mentioned... I got to thinking about a couple things in the autopsy report and...”

  “And what?”

  Anna wanted to tell him, as a show of good faith if nothing else, but at the moment her ideas were not fully baked and she did not like exposing them to others in their half-baked state. “I got to think it through some more,” she said.

  Barth grunted.

  “Why’d you stop by? Not just to visit, though I’m honored,” Anna changed the subject. “You were trying to reach me on the radio?”

  “I was down to Mt. Locust. Tupelo ponied my new sign down and I figured it was as good a day as any to get it up.”

  Barth sounded mature and manly, but Anna knew, where matters of the heart were concerned, few ever truly aged. Barth had come out in the teeth of an encroaching storm on what was arguably the nastiest day Anna’d seen in Mississippi to do hard manual labor—not his favorite discipline—because he just couldn’t wait. The professional equivalent of getting up at 5 A.M. Christmas morning or wearing the new dress home from the store. Anna liked him for it. Passion she found admirable, even when it was misplaced, and Barth’s wasn’t. For a moment she thought of her other field ranger, Randy Thigpen. When she’d first arrived, he and Barth had appeared thick as thieves. As Barth warmed toward her, the friendship between the two men cooled. Neither seemed to miss it. Anna suspected it had been a marriage of convenience. They weren’t so much compatible as the only game in town.

  Thigpen had no passion for his job, his family, his wife. He even seemed lackadaisical about his mistress, if Anna correctly read the strained calls from a woman who left neither name nor message. Randy wanted things, but he wanted without caring. His lawsuit against her and the federal government, his desire to be part of this investigation, neither because he felt passionately about an unfairness, of capturing the murderer of an apparently harmless man. With Randy motives were murky, driven more by an internal anger than a need to see the right thing done.

  Anna glanced sideways at Barth, liking him better because of the comparison. “So what did you need me for? To make sure the boards on your sign are hung straight?”

  “I’d better show you.”

  “The secret is different when it’s on the other squirrel?”

  “Something like that.”

  The short drive to Mt. Locust wasn’t enough to thaw out. By the time they reached the slave cemetery, Anna was as cold as if she’d been hanging around the old deer stand. The sky was no longer cut across by the front but dark and threatening from horizon to horizon. A freezing wind whipped what few leaves remained on the trees into frenzied flight.

  Anna dug her hands deeper into her pockets, annoyed that Mississippi’s usually mild weather had lulled her into a false sense of security. Her good leather gloves were still packed in her grandmother’s cedar chest.

  The new sign, identical to the old, was up. The names of those identified had been burned into the cypress wood: Jackson, Restin, White, Pittman.

  “Looks good,” Anna said, wondering what of import Barth had dragged her down here to see.

  “Thanks,” Barth said. “But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Come on.” He led the way into the skeletal clutches of the winter woods, talking as he went.

  “I’d finished up the sign and was packing my tools when I got to hearing this strange sound. Like muffled chopping. I got curious and poked on back through the trees.” He stopped and pointed. Anna stood beside him and dutifully looked where he indicated. “See that blue triangle thing there nailed to the tree? No, past those bushes about six feet up.”

  Anna saw it. “Those mark the Trace’s property line,” she said.

  “Right. Past here we’re on old lady Barnette’s land. That’s where the noise was coming from.” He walked on, Anna
trailing him. The storm, early darkness, bony branches raking an inhospitable sky, Anna was getting creepy fantasies of Mama Barnette, cleaver in hand, springing out from behind a tree in the style of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

  “There.” Barth stopped.

  Anna stood close to his right side, letting his considerable self block the wind. Three yards in front of them, at the base of a young pin oak, was a neatly made child-sized grave. Dirt had been mounded carefully in the tradition of older burial sites.

  “Did you ever turn up a dead or missing child?” Anna asked.

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Did you see the digger?”

  “It was Ray Barnette. I’m betting that little coffin you saw him making is at the bottom of that hole.”

  Anna wouldn’t take the bet. “Did you see him?” she repeated.

  “He was gone when I got here. But it was him. Who else could it be? The old lady’s pretty spry but I doubt she could do this kind of work. We got to get a warrant. Dig it up.”

  “On what grounds?” Anna asked, genuinely hoping he’d thought of some. “A man has a right to bury things on his own property. Could be a dead cat for all we know.”

  “It’s not a dead cat,” Barth said stubbornly.

  “We’ll talk to him,” Anna said.

  “He’ll lie.”

  Of course he’d lie unless it really was a dead cat, in which case they wouldn’t believe him and in consequence suffer the same frustration.

  “We could just dig it up, see for ourselves, and go from there,” Barth said.

  Anna was sorely tempted, she was guessing it was bones, old bones, but the thought of tainting the evidence and possibly letting a child-murderer-if indeed that’s what they had on their hands—go free because of police incompetence kept her honest.