Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

He shrugged. “I don’t need no help to say I didn’t do it.”

“Where did you get the jewelry?”

Another shrug. “Found it.”

The interrogation had yielded precious little information after that. Fate Harkryder sat there sullen and silent, refusing all offers of food and soft drinks with a quick shake of his head, as if he were determined to say as little as possible.

At first Spencer tried asking simple questions in a firm but courteous tone. When that got nowhere, he switched to shock tactics, describing the mutilated condition of the bodies and declaring that an unrepentant killer would get no sympathy from judge or jury. “If you want to be as dead as they are, you just keep sitting here saying nothing,” he said. “You can’t talk your way out of having that jewelry in your possession.”

“Doesn’t prove nothing.”

The jury thought otherwise.

Joe LeDonne hated the telephone. Its shrill peal was mechanical nagging as far as he was concerned, and he never answered it without an inward curse at the interruption. If he had not been in law enforcement, he would not have had one in his house. It was ironic, he thought as he stared at the instrument, an electronic spider on his desk, that so much of police work required proficiency in telephoning.

He and Martha had agreed to give it one more day before they told the sheriff about the homicides. The TBI was conducting its own investigation, but Martha and Joe were going to complete all the scut work of canvasing for witnesses, so that there would be little for Spencer to do by the time he was informed of the case. Joe didn’t think there was much chance of keeping him on the mountain once he heard about the new Trail Murders, but he reasoned that the sheriff was bound to find out sooner or later, and the news had better come from them.

So far they had played it by the book, with all the thoroughness they could pack into sixteen-hour days. They had investigated the crime scene, and then gone over the site again when the TBI arrived. The next few days had been spent talking to residents in the vicinity of the site, questioning people at the local bars and cafés, and to suppliers of camping goods and army surplus equipment.

Martha had refused to believe that the two Trail Murders, separated by twenty years, were in any way connected, but she had studied the old case file anyway. Willis Blaine, the forest ranger, was dead, but she had questioned Harmon Ritter, still a fixture out at the truck stop. She had even tracked down the two firemen from Alabama, but they had not been able to tell her anything helpful. She had expected no link between the two cases, and she found none.

LeDonne focused his attention on the individuals most likely to be involved in criminal activity. First he checked the list of parolees in residence in the area, phoning the ones whose crimes had included robbery or violence and checking on their current employment status. He had not ruled out the ex-cons entirely, but he was reasonably certain that they would have to look elsewhere for the killer.

That morning he had called the park service and asked that they fax him a copy of the sign-in sheet from the date of the murders from the two shelters on the Appalachian Trail nearest the crime scene. Maybe one of the hikers saw something. Maybe one of them was the man they were looking for. He had spent several hours in the tedious process of tracking down addresses and phone numbers via the Internet and calling the hikers or, in some cases, E-mailing them. Most of those who were hiking all the way to the end of the Appalachian Trail in Maine could not be reached, but he had been able to reach a fair number of weekend campers, and park visitors who had hiked for only a few days. It was now early evening and LeDonne was still at it, reasoning that the dinner hour was the best time to catch people at home. Beside the list of names, the cup of coffee that was his dinner grew cold.

He had just got through to Jeff Garrison in Maryland. LeDonne explained who he was and what he wanted. Days of practice had honed his explanation to a concise summary in the fewest possible words. When he finished, there was a silence on the other end of the telephone.

“Sir? Are you there?”

“I’m thinking.” Late twenties, LeDonne thought, analyzing the voice. Educated. White-collar worker. Maybe a lawyer. Not rattled by the idea of talking to a law officer. He waited.

“I’m trying to sort out the different days of the trip.”

“We’re right on the North Carolina line,” LeDonne told him. “Near Erwin. Unicoi. Do you remember anybody who looked-well, out of place-on the trail?”

“Oh, right. Let me see… There was a guy with hunting dogs. I didn’t think he ought to be in a national park.”

One of the Jessups, thought LeDonne. “They do that around here sometimes,” he said aloud, making a note to find out who had been out with the dogs, and to question them also.

“Other than that, there were just the usual folks doing the trail. It’s pretty crowded this time of year, you know. Lot of old dudes-the Woodstock leftovers, you know-out communing with nature, and some really buff women doing the Xena thing. All kinds, really. And guys that were obviously locals. Rednecks.”

LeDonne resisted the urge to tell Mr. Garrison how much he disliked talking to bigots. He had to be polite to potential witnesses, and besides, the exercise would be pointless. He was sure that the smug young man would be bewildered to be accused of prejudice. Political correctness did not require tolerance or courtesy toward white Southerners.

“Oh, wait. Speaking of locals. There was one guy out there who looked pretty odd.”

“How so?”

“He looked like he ought to be going to computer class instead of out backpacking. Skinny little guy with pens in the pocket, and dress shoes. And a necktie. In the woods.”

“Did he have a backpack?”

“Yeah. I think so. A bookbag, really. Not serious camping gear.”

“How old would you say this individual was?”

“Late teens. Early twenties. Hard to say.”

“Can you give me a description of him? Height? Hair color?”

“Not really. I just looked at him and thought: Nerd, and I kept walking.”

“Nerd, huh?”

“Yeah. Oh, wait there is one other thing I remember. The guy had an earring. You know that science fiction TV show about the space station?”

“No.”

“Well, the people from this one planet always wear this odd kind of double earring. And he had one of those. So I knew he was a space cadet. I wondered what he was doing out hiking, instead of shooting down aliens in the video arcade.”

“If I find him, I’ll ask him,” said LeDonne.

Fate Harkryder was having the dream again. It was dark, and he could not see where he was, but he knew, the way one does in dreams, that he was dead. He could not remember how he came to die, or whether there was any pain involved in the leaving of his life: all he knew was that he was dead and it was very dark. He kept still for a moment, listening for his own heartbeat or the sound of his lungs drawing breath, but there was only stillness and silence. He felt the oppression of a confined space, and he knew that he was in a box deep in the ground, but he was somehow conscious. Perhaps there had been a mistake and he was not dead after all. He had heard tales of men on the gallows who were revived after being cut down from the hanging rope, and of an electrocuted prisoner needing two or three jolts of current to finally stop the heart. Ethel Rosenberg-the convicted spy in that fifties atomic-secrets case-went to the electric chair at Sing Sing. Her husband had died on the first round, but they’d had to electrocute her a second time to make her die. Maybe his execution was over and he had been rendered unconscious, but not killed. He would shout for someone to let him out, but when he tried to open his mouth, he found that it had been sewn shut, and he could not open his eyes, because they, too, were sealed with nylon thread. He tried to lift his arms to pound on the lid of the coffin, but he could make no movement with his dead arms. The screams stayed inside his mind, caught behind sewn-shut lips, echoing in the dark.