The White Road

To Cecil’s right, as he stood at the gates, was the old paddy wagon known as Black Lucy. It had been many years since Lucy had thrown her arms open to receive a new guest but, as Cecil looked closer, he could see a shape standing against the bars at the rear of the wagon. For a moment, Cecil’s heart seemed to pause in its beats, and he leaned a hand against the gate to guard against collapse. Cecil had already suffered two minor heart attacks in the previous five years, and he did not particularly want to leave this world in the event of a third. But instead of holding his weight, the gate opened inward with a creak.

“Hey,” said Cecil. He coughed. His voice sounded like it was about to break. “Hey,” he repeated. “You okay in there?”

The figure did not move. Cecil entered the grounds of the jail and walked warily toward Black Lucy. Dawn was lighting the city, the walls glowing dimly in the first rays of the early morning sun, but the figure in the wagon was still cast in shadow.

“Hey,” said Cecil, but his voice was already fading, the single syllable transformed into a descending cadence by the realization of what he was seeing.

Atys Jones had been tied to the bars of the wagon, his arms outstretched. His body was bruised, his face bloodied and almost unrecognizable, swollen by the blows. Blood had darkened and dried upon his chest. There was also blood-too much blood to have merely soaked down-on his white shorts, the only clothing that he retained. His chin rested on his chest, his knees bent, his feet curled slightly inward. The T-bar cross was missing from around his neck.

The old jail had just added a new ghost to its legions.

20

IT WAS ADAMS who broke the news to me. His eyes were even more bloodshot than before from lack of sleep when he met me in the lobby of my hotel, and he had built up a sprinkling of gray black stubble that had already begun to itch. He scratched at it constantly as we spoke, with a noise like bacon sizzling in a pan. A smell rose from him, the smell of sweat and spilled coffee, of grass and rust and blood. There were grass stains too on his trousers and on the sides of his shoes. Around his wrists, I could see the circular marks left by the disposable gloves he had worn at the scene as they had struggled to contain the great bulk of his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got nothing good to say to you about what happened to that boy. He died hard.”

I felt Atys’s death as a weight on my chest, as if we had both fallen at the same time and his body had come to rest across my own. I had failed to protect him. We had all failed to protect him and now he had died for a crime that he had not committed.

“Do you have a time of death?” I asked him, as he drowned a piece of toast in thick butter.

“Coroner reckons he’d been dead for about two or three hours when he was found. Doesn’t look like he was killed at the jail, either. There wasn’t enough blood in the paddy wagon, and none that we’ve found so far on the walls or grounds of the jail itself, even under UV light. The beating was systematic: started at his toes and fingers, then moved on to his vital organs. They castrated him before he died, but probably not too long before. Nobody saw a thing. My guess is they picked him up before he got too far from the house, then took him somewhere quiet to work on him.”

I thought of Landron Mobley, the cruelties visited upon his body, and almost spoke, but to give Adams more than he already had would be to give him everything and I was not ready to do that. There was too much here that I did not yet understand.

“You going to talk to the Larousses?”

Adams finished off his toast. “My guess is they knew about it as soon as I did.”

“Or maybe even sooner.”

Adams waved a finger at me in warning. “That’s the kind of implication could get a man in trouble.” He gestured to a waitress for more coffee. “But, since you brought it up, why would the Larousses want Jones beaten in that way?”

I stayed silent.

“I mean,” he continued, “the nature of the injuries he received seems to indicate that the people who killed him wanted him to reveal something before he died. You think they wanted him to confess?”

I almost spit in contempt.

“Why? For the good of his soul? I don’t think so. If these people went to the trouble of killing his guardians and then hunting him down, then it doesn’t seem to me like they were in any doubt about why they were doing it.”

There was, though, the possibility that Adams was at least partly right in his suggestion that a final confession was the motive. Suppose the men who hunted him down were almost certain that he had killed Maria

That afternoon, I did some research in the Charleston Public Library. I pulled up the newspaper reports of Grady Truett’s death, but there was little more than Adele Foster had already told me. Persons unknown had entered his house, tied him to a chair, and cut his throat. No prints had been lifted, but the crime scene squad had to have found something. No crime scene is entirely clean. I was tempted to call Adams but, once again, to do so would be to risk blowing everything that I had. I also found out a little more about the plateye. According to a book called Blue Roots, the plateye was a permanent resident of the spirit world, the underworld, although it was capable of entering the mortal world to seek retribution. It also had the ability to alter its form. As Adams had said, the plateye was a changeling.

I left the library and headed onto Meeting. Tereus had still not returned to his apartment, and he now hadn’t shown up for work in two days. Nobody would tell me anything about him, and the stripper who had taken the twenty and then sold me out to Handy Andy was nowhere to be seen.

Finally, I called the public defender’s office and was told that Laird Rhine was defending a client over at the State Courthouse that afternoon. I parked at my hotel and walked down to the Four Corners, where I found Rhine in courtroom number three at the arraignment of a woman named Joha

Rhine handled himself pretty well as he asked the arraignment judge to convert her bail to OR release. He was probably in his early thirties but he put up a good argument, pointing out that Bell had never been in trouble before; that she had been forced to call the cops on a number of occasions during the dying months of her marriage following threats and actual physical assualt by her husband; that she could not meet the bail set; and that no purpose could be served by keeping her in jail and away from her infant son. He made her husband sound like a creep who was lucky to get away with a punctured lung, and the judge agreed to her release on her own recognizance. Afterward, she hugged Rhine and took her son in her arms from an older woman who stood waiting for her at the back of the court.