A Living Grave (22 page)

“Ma'am, the fact that you did not disclose your position put our meeting on a social level. On a social level, I may choose to talk with you or not to, as I wish. Am I not correct?”

“Yes, sir. But—”

“Do you wish to officially take me in and hold me for questioning?”

“No, sir. I—”

“Am I being detained under suspicion?”

“No, sir.”

“Y'all have a very good day, Detective.” He went through the doors, removing his hat again as he did. As the door closed the glare on the glass made it seem as if he disappeared into another world, one like this one but different in ways that could only be understood by following him through.

He was smarter than his down-home accent suggested. It was probably as much a conscious affectation as the rest of him, a package wrapped up in Dollywood. Mr. Homey-as-Grits was playing a game. He wanted everyone underestimating him from the start. He could only be a lawyer.

E
ven in a sheriff's department the weekends can be quiet. Not because there is less crime, but because all the support staff are weekday employees. The building is quieter. You'd think it would be easier to work. Quiet is not always what you need, though. It reminded me of how everyone was telling me my life looked—partially occupied.

I sat at my desk and looked around the place. Half the lights were off. Gloomy and quiet was not a good combination. It had a real
Walking Dead
feel. Sheriff Benson was in his office. That was a surprise. So was the closed door.

Without exchanging words with anyone I went to my desk and did an Internet search for Leech.

Billy was right. It had taken on a life of its own. There were dozens of pages that claimed to have documented proof that Leech was wandering the Ozarks. There were others that shared stories about the creature. Some of them read as breathless secrets from young people telling the kinds of stories that were once shared only around campfires. Some, however, were first-person narratives about personal encounters. Those were the most disturbing because the line between fantasy and reality seemed to not exist for the writers. They believed—or desperately wanted you to believe—they had seen Leech. Within that group were the truly scary accounts of those that said they had worshiped, even sacrificed, to Leech.

All of the writers on those sites were young. You could tell by both the nature of the writing and the references they used to video games, music, and movies. All of their own pop culture seemed to be mixed up in a strange gumbo that blended everything until the pieces no longer had separateness. The songs they listened to, the games of high-definition murder, were all stories upon which they fed and that some seemed to actually believe. Leech was just another part of a scary world.

Closing the browser on Leech, I was left feeling a little disturbed. Imagine peeking in the neighbor's window and catching them dressed in Nazi uniforms, engaged in bondage games with little people and farm animals. The world is a much stranger place than sometimes I give it credit for.

“Howdy there, Hurricane,” the sheriff said. He was leaning up against my doorframe. I smiled to see him but it wasn't returned. He hadn't come to talk with me; rather to me.

He peppered me with questions. Why was I going into the jail to talk with Danny Barnes? Didn't I have enough sense to stay away from Danny Barnes? Will
we
need to talk about Danny Barnes again? That sort of thing. I told him that I wasn't satisfied with how that case was stacking up.

He shrugged and said, “There is rarely any satisfaction to putting a kid in jail.” Then he said I could follow up but not to engage Barnes any further.

Fair enough. I had plenty of other anvils to juggle. I did something then that I had never done before. I asked him about his wife. I'd heard someone say that she had been ill. If Billy had not gotten me to thinking about how I keep everything close, I would never have thought to ask.

“We dodged a bullet there,” he said. “The biopsy was positive, but we caught it early.”

A hot blush crept up my throat into my face. The rest of me felt cold but I started sweating. I had thought it was a gallbladder thing. At the same time I was glad I hadn't been specific in my question and ashamed of myself for not knowing.

“There'll be a lumpectomy. Coulda been a lot worse. We thought at first she was going to lose the . . .” He pointed to his own chest, just below the badge, and circled his finger around. The man that could shout profanity as well as any sailor couldn't say the word
breast
. At least not in this situation. I nodded to say I understood. He nodded back before saying, “We're grateful.”

“I understand, sir. My mother . . .”

I didn't finish but he knew what I meant. He simply nodded again. His eyes, though, looked at me like I was the most important person in the world for that moment. Then he was gone.

A few minutes later I saw people I didn't know passing through the brackish hall. They went straight back to the sheriff's office. After a while Billy went by with a couple of other deputies. He waved but didn't stop. They all went into the sheriff's office and closed the door behind them.

Between reevaluating my whole life and who I thought I was, I kept drilling deeper into Leech. There had been other kids who had been caught doing crimes in his name. Two in Arkansas had stolen money and tried to offer it up by stapling cash to trees in a wooded area. There were three instances of kids sacrificing animals, two cats and one dog. Comparing that kind of desperation and confusion to the turmoil in my own life began to make me feel downright small. The one thing I found in common among the kids described was abuse at home.

Wondering and thinking, there but for the grace . . . I was lost in someone else's problems for a change when I heard a knock on my door. The noise made me jump.

“Cat walk over your grave?” It was my friend and Moon's lawyer, Noble Daniels, standing at the door, asking. I must have looked confused because he clarified, “It's something my father used to say when someone was startled. It was because a cat walked over their grave. Never understood it, though. Did the cat walk over the place your grave would be or did it walk over your grave in the future and you felt it now? Strange man, my father.”

“Working on a Saturday?” I asked. “Strange kind of lawyer.”

“It was my destiny to be so. Did I ever tell you I was named after the lawyer in
True Grit
? My father again. Thought it would ensure I was a lawyer or ‘defender of truth,' as he liked to put it. Sometimes I wish I was the ‘litigator of big corporations' instead.”

“What truth are you defending around here?”

“Working some things out for your pal,” he answered. “The one who won't ever shut up.”

“What?”

“Can you waterboard someone to make them
stop
talking?”

“I guess you're talking about Moon,” I said.

“
Moon Light
, you mean,” he answered. “The man with a motormouth and the sense God gave a turnip.”

“You talk about all your clients that way?”

“Yeah, I do. I'm a criminal-defense attorney. My clients are not the Mensa crowd but this guy—” Noble let out a long breath that sounded like frustration escaping. “You were right about this one. If I wasn't there to control him, he would have sent himself up for ten years then brought the angry bikers in with him.”

“You like him, don't you?”

“His name is
Moon Light
—how can you dislike that? Besides, he grows pot to support his mother. Five years from now his crop will probably be legal and he'll be a forward-thinking entrepreneur. Anyway, the deal is good. He'll be kicked loose Monday, charged only with growing for personal use. He'll lose the operation, of course, but there'll be no jail time.”

“Deal?” I asked. Noble stood there looking at me a little too quiet and a little too long to feel comfortable. “Noble?”

“Guess they didn't tell you.”

“I guess not.”

“Moon gave up the location for the meth lab. It's on federal land. He put names to faces and even laid out a schedule. Your office is coordinating with the Forestry Service investigators and DEA. It's going to be a big deal. One of your guys has been on the place since this morning, confirming the location and logging activity.”

Ten seconds later I was at the sheriff's door. He wasn't alone. There were a couple of suits there along with two of our detectives taking up the chairs, and Billy and two other deputies were standing to the side. I realized then that Billy must have been the one surveilling the lab. That was what he had been doing before he found me this morning. And that explained why he didn't just come right out and tell me where he had been. He saw me at the same time as the sheriff. Billy was the only one in the room who looked pleased to see me.

Sheriff Benson held up his finger at me, then went on talking to the suits. Once he finished his point, he stood slowly, excused himself and then came to me out in the hall, closing the door behind him.

“Because it's not your case,” he said.

I opened my mouth to speak and he put up his finger again.

“
And
—you are not invited because you already put one of the suspects in the hospital. And.
And
—I know you want to be involved. I know it overlaps. And I know you got the initial information.
But
. This is a big deal, for the department and the county. It requires coordination with federal authorities who have asked that you not be involved.”

“What? Why?”

“They weren't real specific. It might be that you have a reputation. Do you want to ask what kind of reputation?”

I didn't.

“Or it might be that your friend the major got to them. One of the feds mentioned ‘past history.' ”

My finger was tracing the shape of the scar on my face as my mind was filling in blanks with hard-edged expletives. There wasn't time to curse or even snarl, otherwise the suits in the other room would have gotten a firsthand experience of my
reputation
. Before I could dig my grave any deeper, Darlene was at my side, reaching between me and the sheriff to hand him a note. Without a word she was off again.

Sheriff Benson read the short lines on the little pink memo page then looked up at me and said, “Cotton Lambert's dead. He was shot in his hospital room.”

The sheriff turned away from me to stick his head into the office and cut his meeting off. He told Billy to “Stop sucking that damn soda pop and get on the job.” Then he turned back to me and said, “Stay away from this.”

I needed to tell him that I had been there. It was important to be clear about timelines and what I had seen. But that was when the two feds came filing out of the office. They had both heard the sheriff telling me to stay away. They were smirking like they had read my name and number on the wall of a gas station bathroom.

Reach had gotten to them
.

It is amazing how small the law-enforcement community can be. You encounter the same people when jurisdictions cross and agencies overlap. Like a small town—or worse, like a small high school—it only takes a few words to mark you in certain ways. And like the big, alpha, macho men they were, the feds were more than willing to believe the worst about a woman. Especially when that worst comes packaged in sneering innuendo and delivered by another male authority figure. I was suddenly thinking of what Billy had said to me that morning:
people talk, things get around
. Yeah, I was the poster child for that.

I opened my mouth to say something. Before that I hadn't bothered to think what I would say, so no telling what would have come out if Billy had not rattled the ice in his big soda cup. The feds walked out without the benefit of the piece of my mind they needed.

Billy stopped in the hall beside me. He looked one way to see the sheriff headed for his car. He looked the other way to watch the feds going off to the visitors' lot. With the cup in his hand he gestured at the backs of the suit jackets. “You know,” he said, “some people are jerks. They don't mean to be, they just are. But they aren't enemies till you make them that way.”

“What're you trying to say, Billy?” I left the edge in my voice so he would know that friends only goes so far.

“I'm trying to say that sometimes we have power we don't even realize.”

“I want to chew nails and you're talking in riddles.”

“The power to make enemies. And not to make them.”

There is a lot to be said about having friends. Unfortunately, there is so much more to be said about being your own worst enemy that sucks the power out of so much self-understanding and New Age in-touch Zen bullshit or whatever Billy was finding in his soda.

“Don't you have to take a leak and get a refill?” I asked him. As I walked away I could feel him watching me and I wondered what he was thinking.

The real question was: What was I thinking? I wasn't. I was acting on my impulse to get the two feds out in the parking lot and—what? Nothing good. It was habit or it was a get-them-before-they-get-me instinct. Anyway I could look at it, confrontation was my first goal.

Maybe I'm learning. Maybe I'm growing. For once in my life I did the better thing and walked away. Both of the men were staring at me.

They expected me to make a scene
.

“Good luck with everything,” I said with a smile as I walked past their car. Then I waved and I smiled again as I went the long way around the building to my truck. I felt proud of myself.

* * *

A sane woman would have gone to Nelson's place and had a talk, maybe got herself proposed to again. If not that, then at least engaged in some joyous physicality. It'd been a long time since I was accused of sanity.

I went looking for Clare Bolin. I didn't find him by phone or by driving to the usual places.
His
usual places, that is. I found him at one of mine. His truck was in the lot in front of Uncle Orson's dock.

Being Saturday and a perfect day for fishing, the shop and dock slips were busy. Men were tinkering with their boats, pulling out or pulling in. Two men were cleaning their catch at the sinks mounted right on the railing. They used the hand pumps to bring lake water up and carry the scales and guts right back down with it. Unheeding of all the activity, Orson and Clare were sitting at the table eating chicken just off the grill and drinking clear whiskey from mason jars.