Bluebird, Bluebird Page 9

  “I know the sheriff out there. Parker’s a good cop.”

  “Then let me talk to him,” Darren said. “Let me do my job.” He was asking for something more than a ten-minute talk with Van Horn, and they both knew it. It was the thing that hadn’t been discussed on the phone with his wife yesterday—the fact that his conscience might not let him quit, that the badge was who he’d become, the only way he knew to navigate his life as a Texan. “It’s not just the one,” he said. “The black man. There’s another body, a girl, white and local. She washed up out of the same bayou just a few days later. Michael Wright was at the icehouse where the girl worked on the night he disappeared.”

  It was quiet on Wilson’s end of the line, and Darren knew he was taking that in—no one in law enforcement would hear those details and not know there was more to this story. Darren slid in for a home run. “And listen, if you got the Tribune already thinking there’s a black Ranger out here investigating the unexplained death of one of his own, it’ll sure as shit look bad if I up and leave now that folks’ imaginations have been stirred. Let me dig around, see what I can put together about both murders. I’ll report to you daily, I promise.”

  “Daily?” Wilson balked. “How long you planning to be out there?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “I want you out of there inside a week. You check in with me every day, Mathews. I don’t hear from you, I’m taking this whole thing up to the captain and let him deal with your ass.”

  “What about the grand jury? You hear anything?”

  Wilson sighed at what he considered Darren’s inappropriate level of interest in the Rutherford McMillan case, what he believed had gotten Darren into trouble in the first place. Never should have gone out there, son. He’d said it more than once. Unlike others, he did not believe that Darren had actually hidden evidence to protect Mack, or if he did believe it, he wasn’t saying so. Darren was William Mathews’s boy, and that was worth the benefit of the doubt every time.

  “No bill of indictment…yet,” Wilson said. “No word either way.”

  Darren felt relief and dread in equal measure. He wondered how Mack and Breanna were holding up. Even before Darren testified, Mack was already talking about selling his place, asking Darren to look after his granddaughter if he got sent away. Make sure she finishes school. The money from the house and his truck should get her through senior year, he’d said. Promise me, Darren.

  “I’ll give Sheriff Van Horn in Shelby County a call,” Wilson said. “Let him know you’re only there to help.”

  “I’ll need a copy of that autopsy.”

  “Put in a request through the sheriff,” Wilson said. “Follow protocol and keep his defenses down. Don’t go in there shaking your fist and making a lot of noise about hate crimes and the like until we know for sure what this is. I’m serious, Darren,” he said before adding, “And get that wife under control.”

  He’d have to find her first.

  The rental car was gone from the parking lot, and there was absolute silence when he knocked on the door to her room. The front-desk clerk would answer none of his questions, including the most basic one: how did Randie get the keys to the rental car from his room when the only other person with access to Darren’s room was the desk clerk herself? “I don’t get in people’s business, but if a lady says a man’s got her car keys, and she can’t leave, well, I don’t believe in standing idly by. I watch Dateline.” She’d apparently let herself in, with Randie waiting just outside the room, and had gone through Darren’s pants while he was passed out. “I want your things out of that room right now. I don’t want your kind around here,” she said, the gold cross on her neck catching the morning sun through the front window. He had a thought to flash the badge, to make a stink, but he’d just promised his boss he wouldn’t. He paid for one night, tried to cover the cost of Randie’s room, too, but the clerk wouldn’t let him.

  “Did she check out?” he asked, alarmed by the idea of her roaming the town alone.

  “Wouldn’t tell you if she did,” the woman said. “You got ten minutes.”

  Darren took a hot and fast shower to rid himself of the lingering bayou stink, then he dressed and reassembled the Colt .45, got in his truck, and went looking for her.

  The icehouse parking lot was already half full at eight thirty in the morning, but the blue Ford was not in the parking lot, nor did he find the car down the road apiece in the lot out front of Geneva’s cafe. When he pulled in near the gas pump to turn his truck around, he saw a familiar tableau through the cafe’s front windows—Geneva behind the counter, Wendy dressed colorfully atop one of the red vinyl stools, and Huxley with his newspaper. The glint off the chrome trim on Darren’s Chevy caught Geneva’s attention. She looked up, saw Darren behind the wheel of the truck, and frowned. Darren reversed gears and started back on the highway. He’d covered what little constituted Lark’s main drag. Only place left were the back roads. As soon as he had the thought, he knew where the widow had gone. The unmarked grave of her husband.

  He turned off Highway 59 and onto FM 19, the farm-to-market road that led to the water. He came upon the Ford so fast he had to slam on his brakes to keep from hitting the hatchback’s rear end. He threw the truck into Park and hopped out, the soles of his boots still damp from last night’s slip and fall. There was no one in the driver’s seat, and he didn’t find her until he left the paved farm road on foot, walking through the same stand of trees he’d nosed through last night. By daylight, he saw clearly the line where the bank dropped steeply and the bayou water licked and softened the shoreline a few feet below. Randie was standing too close to the edge for Darren’s comfort. She had a black camera in hand, with a lens, both literal and figurative, pointed toward the water, as if the camera were the only way she could understand what she was seeing.

  Darren crunched twigs under his boot heels, making sure she would hear him coming. “You scared me,” he said, “taking off like that.”

  Randie turned to face him, red-eyed with rage. She was wearing the same ridiculous white coat, now dotted with leaves and dirt from her trek through the thicket. She was wearing the same black jeans and gray T-shirt, the same high-heeled ankle boots, which were now mud-caked and damp. “You lied to me,” she said.

  “Listen, Randie—”

  “You’re not even a cop.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I have a contact at the Tribune who said that no one from the Rangers was assigned to investigate what happened to Michael. I called the Rangers officer myself and was told that Darren Mathews is ‘currently on suspension.’”

  “Not anymore,” he said, feeling a guilty gratitude for this woman whose loss had put his life back on course. “I spoke to my lieutenant this morning, and I’m in this now. I’m investigating your husband’s death.”

  She shoved past him, walking back to her rental car, her heels sinking in the soft earth. “And what did you do to my car? The seat was wet this morning. I found a bottle on the floor, and it smells fucking terrible.” Darren reached for her hand to steady her on the uneven ground. “Get away from me,” she said.

  “He didn’t drown, Randie.”

  She stopped and turned back toward him, the distance between them less than a foot, the land studded with pinecones in the dirt. The wind around them lifted, but Randie stood perfectly still, hardened in places that were weak with hurt the night before. He guessed she needed a place for her anger to land, and he was as good a target as any. She continued on to her car as if she hadn’t heard him. He followed closely behind, wanting her to trust and believe him, to know that he was more than the man she saw before her, more than the wrinkled, stained pants and the empty pint in her car. “Michael didn’t drown.”

  “You’re saying he was killed.”

  She knew it, but saying the words aloud seemed to cut her in new places.

  Darren nodded grimly. “There was a woman, too.”

  “What are you talking about?
”

  “Another murder,” he said.

  She looked astonished but also terrified, shivering as she pulled the sides of her coat more tightly around her. The morning was still stiff and cool, the sky a slate gray, the low light making the world over in black and white.

  “She was pulled out of the bayou behind Geneva’s yesterday—”

  “Where?” she asked, confused.

  “A white girl was killed, too.” He needed to make that part clear.

  “You knew this and didn’t tell me?”

  “I had just gotten here myself, wasn’t sure what I was dealing with.”

  “Did Michael…” She lost her words for a second. “Did he know her?”

  “I don’t know,” Darren said. “But she worked at the icehouse where the sheriff said your husband was drinking on Wednesday night. I don’t know that those two things are related, but I’ve been doing this long enough to guess that the answer is yes.”

  Randie fell silent. Darren could hear the faint ripple of wind across the bayou, the kiss of tree leaves falling and skimming the surface of the water.

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” she said. “About the Rangers letting you investigate this?”

  “You can call if you want. Lieutenant Fred Wilson, Company A in Houston. He’s already set up a meeting between me and the sheriff.”

  Her spine stiffened at once. “I want to be there.”

  Darren started to object, but Randie held firm. “I’m going,” she said.

  Get the wife under control.

  But Darren had a different idea. Get the wife some protection. Get the wife some help. Get the wife the answer she deserves. If he were Michael Wright, Darren would have wanted someone to do the same for his wife. “I’ll drive,” he said.

  10.

  SHERIFF PARKER Van Horn had temporarily set up a satellite office right in Wally Jefferson’s living room, where Darren had been told he was expecting them. But when they rolled up to the sprawling home, Darren didn’t see a squad car in the circular driveway among the line of luxury cars parked there, which included two Lincolns, a Cadillac, and a Chrysler. The land on which Wally’s house stood stretched over many acres and was manicured on its face—with a crisp green lawn and puffs of red hydrangeas planted along the house’s facade—but was backed by raw countryside creeping up behind the property.

  Darren parked next to Wally’s truck and heard Randie beside him let out a little puff of air. Not quite a laugh, but close. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, staring at the house. Darren took a second look through his gnat-spattered windshield, craning his neck to see each red brick and white column in context. The house, he now saw, was a nearly perfect replica of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Randie opened the passenger-side door, grabbing her camera on instinct. Unfazed, Darren climbed out of the truck. He’d seen weirder on Texas roads: lighthouses in fields of corn, life-size gingerbread houses, a barn with Donald Trump’s face on it, country folks offering a show for the cars trucking down long stretches of highway, anything to break up the miles and miles of pines and cedar-choked backwoods.

  He was less interested in the house than he was in the view. From the front of Wally’s home, which was just a few yards from the fence line, he could see Geneva’s cafe, could damn near read what was on the menu through her windows. It struck him as odd that with all the land on either side of their respective properties that these two had wound up being the worst kind of neighbors, those you don’t like but have to spend every damn day looking at. Maybe that explained Wally’s efforts to buy her out, if only to improve his view. Darren wondered which had come first, Wally’s house or Geneva’s cafe.

  “You’re seeing this, right?” Randie said.

  Darren turned to see her staring at a smaller property behind the house. To the rear of Monticello was a twenty-foot-tall doghouse that was a perfect scaled-down model of the White House. A black Labrador lazed in the doorway, but when he saw Randie and the camera, he came up on all fours, growling. Darren stepped in front of her just as the dog charged. The Lab came for his leg, and Darren gave a little kick in the dirt with the toe of his boot, just to scare him. The Lab trotted back a few steps, but when he realized he hadn’t actually been hit, he came back harder. He’d just gotten hold of Darren’s right pants leg when the door to the house opened. “Butch!” Wally yelled, marching down his front steps. The dog released Darren’s pants leg and trotted amiably to his master’s side, licking at the tips of Wally’s thick fingers.

  “You’re late.”

  If Wally remembered Darren from Geneva’s yesterday, he didn’t let on, nor did he react in any visible way to the badge that was once again pinned to Darren’s chest. Wally was wearing a polo shirt tucked into his Wranglers, which were pressed to a knife-sharp crease. The skin around his neck was slack, but his color was ruddy and strong. Darren couldn’t place the man’s age—or his line of work, for that matter. There wasn’t a cow or a bale of hay anywhere on the property that he could see, no fields of wheat or cotton, not a single sign of industry. The cop in Darren noted the presence of extreme wealth absent a stitch of evidence of the hard work that made it possible.

  “I’m Darren Mathews.”

  “Oh, I know,” Wally said, taking pleasure in being two steps ahead.

  Turning to Randie, he added, “I’m sorry about your husband, ma’am. But you ought to know that no one from around here had anything to do with that.”

  “Well, that remains to be seen,” Darren said.

  Wally looked vaguely amused as he shooed Butch back to the White House, then turned and opened his front door. “Sheriff’ll be back any minute.”

  Inside, the walls were washed white, and the thick carpet was the color of churned butter. Wally nodded toward what he called the davenport and told Randie and Darren to have a seat. “Laura,” he called to the back of the house. Randie lowered herself onto the sofa, upholstered in a rose-printed fabric, but Darren, by his training as a Ranger and man, remained standing. Randie’s eyes scanned the living room, taking in the brass knickknacks and porcelain figurines of angels and quarter horses, as well as the photographic portraits of Wally and a fiftysomething white woman with reddish-brown hair who favored turquoise and sweater sets. She appeared in the flesh a few seconds later, holding a squirming toddler on her hip. She looked as surprised to see Darren as he was to see a child in her arms. There wasn’t a single photo of children or grandchildren in the front parlor. She straightened her shirt where it had ridden up her torso from the weight of the baby, a towheaded little thing who’d probably barely been walking a year. “Ranger,” the woman said politely. She glanced at Randie but did not let her gaze linger, as if sudden widowhood might be contagious. She started to inch back out of the living room, but Wally stopped her. “Laura, get these good people a glass of water, a Coke or something.”

  “Can I get you something, Ranger?” Laura said. “Miss?”

  “I’m fine,” Randie said.

  Darren wished she’d put a ma’am on it or a thank you, wished she understood you’d do well down here to meet white folks with a hefty benefit of the doubt. You’d know their real colors soon enough, so it didn’t hurt to be civil up top, insurance against pissing off the ones who were on your side.

  “No, thank you, ma’am,” he said to Wally’s wife.

  As Laura left the living room, Darren heard the child’s squeals fade.

  “Yours?” he said to Wally.

  “That’s Missy’s boy, Keith Junior,” the older man said. “Laura’s watching him while Missy’s people are putting together services. Don’t know if she’ll be buried here or up to Timpson, but Keith ain’t able to handle much of nothing right now, his child least of all. He’s plumb tore up is what they’re saying.”

  “Where’s the sheriff?” Randie asked impatiently.

  Darren shot her a look before stepping in.

  To Wally, he said, “You own the icehouse up the highway?”


  “Michael was there,” Randie said, the words sounding like a question wrapped around an accusation. Darren wished she’d let him handle this.

  “Did you see anything?” he said.

  “I wasn’t at the bar on Wednesday.”

  “How’d you know it was Wednesday?”

  “Parker’s kept me apprised,” Wally said. “I’m a well-regarded man in this community, a property owner and businessman, been on this land for four generations. There’s no police force in Lark, so I like to keep an eye on things in my town, be on the lookout for outsiders and such. Parker keeps me in the know.”

  Just then Van Horn let himself through the front door, pausing long enough to wipe his boots on the mud rug just inside the threshold before he plodded across the carpet on his squat legs. “Ranger Mathews,” he said, coming toward Darren but stopping just short of shaking his hand. “I’m gon’ be clear about this from the top. I don’t want you here, and I didn’t ask for you to be here. But I’ve been backed into this thing by the wife and what all making noise about this being something more than it is—”

  “Parker,” Wally said.

  Van Horn halted his tirade long enough to see Randie on the sofa, to understand his blunder, but he ran right over it and kept talking. He was on day two of his uniform, and his pits were damp. He looked both exasperated and utterly bemused by his circumstances. “We gon’ do this real nice like. I’m gon’ be cordial and accepting of your presence in my county. But let’s be real clear: this is my deal down here. Lieutenant Wilson practically said as much. You’re here so when Chicago or New York or whoever in the hell comes crawling down to see the rednecks out of their cages, they’ll see your face and know everything is on the up-and-up in the investigation of the death in this county of an African American,” he said, stumbling over the extra syllables it took to be politically correct. “You’re just a prop down here, son, and nothing more.”

  “Well, then, this prop would like, and is entitled to, copies of all your reports pertaining to the death of Michael Wright, starting with the autopsy.”