Robert Tanenbaum - Absolute rage

"See a fella I know." That was all Karp got during the forty-minute drive. They passed the green bridge and then headed west up increasingly primitive roads. Karp tried to recall his airborne geography lesson.

"We're on Burnt Peak, yes?"

Hendricks looked at him. "You got it." He turned into an overgrown driveway.

In a clearing stood a double-wide mobile home, painted pale green. A mud-covered white Mazda pickup sat in the yard, beside a scatter of toys, an inflatable pool, some bikes, a yellow mutt dog, and a towheaded boy of about seven, wearing swim shorts.

The dog barked. Hendricks got out of the Bronco and allowed the dog to sniff at him. To the boy he said, "Your papaw in there?"

A nod.

"Well, whyn't you go on in there and tell him Wade Hendricks wants to talk to him."

The boy ran into the trailer. A few minutes later a large-gutted man in an undershirt and stained green workpants stepped barefoot out onto the mobile home's concrete apron.

Hendricks advanced and shook the man's hand. "Russell. How you keepin'?"

"Pretty fair," said the man, not smiling. His chin indicated the Bronco. "I guess you ain't visiting."

"No, I'm not. This's police business. We're looking for a woman gone missing. Her name's Marlene Ciampi. She was Mose Welch's lawyer. The one from away."

"I heard about her. She's gone missing, you say?"

"Went out last night to the green bridge and didn't come back."

"Uh-huh. Well, how about that. She's got that Dodge four-by, ain't she? Red?"

"That's right. You seen it?"

"No, I ain't. I worked the late at Majestic last night. I'm just now getting up. You're here because of her runnin' the Cade boys off."

"That's right. You heard anything about maybe they was plannin' some get-even?"

"Tell you the truth, them boys is always running their mouths. I don't pay them much mind. They was red up, though. Earl, mostly. That lady needs to watch her step, I guess. But I didn't hear of no actual what you might call a plan."

Some polite talk about people Karp didn't know followed this exchange, and then Hendricks returned to the car and they rode off.

"What was that all about?"

"Oh, Russell is a good fella to talk to if the Cades have got up to any mischief."

"He's a Cade?"

"Related to them. It's good news, though. We're probably not dealing with foul play. On the other hand, if she decided to go cruising around these hills at night… well."

"An accident?"

"Maybe. More like she got stuck. Some of those roads peter out to nothing, or they're busted up by landslides or fall-ins."

"Fall-ins?"

"Yes, sir. All these hills are riddled with mine shafts. The pit props rot out and the shafts collapse and the land kind of sags. And there are fires. We got underground fires burning for years up here. They hollow out a whole rise and then the land just collapses like a rotten pumpkin. Then you got your sloughs. A slide blocks a creek and the water pools up and makes a little swamp. You go into one of those, and you might have a worry getting out. And there's rock slides-"

A squawk from the radio interrupted this dire catalog. Hendricks picked up the mouthpiece and talked and listened to what to Karp was incomprehensible garble.

Hendricks hung up the instrument. "They spotted the truck. It was stuck in a fall-in, but there was no sign of her. Up on Belo, the north side."

Three hours later, Karp, now in sodden shirtsleeves, tieless, his city shoes covered with mud, was leaning against the side of a Bronco, drinking from a plastic water bottle, when he saw his wife, or what seemed like his wife, striding down the dirt road, trailed by her dog and a couple of uncomfortable-looking troopers. Her face was mottled red and she was covered in stinking black mud from shoe (she had but one) to crown.

She spotted him. "One laugh and you're dead," she snapped, "and you probably forgot to bring bagels."

"Then I tripped on something, " Marlene said, and took another sip of gin and tonic, "a root, or a goddamn alligator, and went headfirst into the swamp. When I got out of it, I leaned against a tree and screamed for, I don't know, three hours? Then the dog barked and I heard your guys thrashing around in the bushes. They must have heard me." Another pull on her drink. "At which point I was discovered by this major countywide search you organized, adding the last possible increment of embarrassment."

"People get lost up here all the time, Mrs. Karp," said Hendricks.

"Marlene, please. And you're Wade, right?"

"Right. Couple of times a year we got to go up some mountain and find a hunter. Sometimes it's people who lived here all their lives. They fall in holes, they get tangled in some laurel and get exhausted, heatstroke, hypothermia, depending on the season, or they get wrecked like you did. It's no big thing, really."

They were in the living room of the Heeney house, Marlene, Karp, and Hendricks. Marlene was freshly bathed, with her hair in a towel and wearing a black T-shirt with a calligraphic design on it and her only pair of clean shorts. She wanted a nap, and more than that, she wanted the previous twenty-four hours not to have happened.

Hendricks looked at his notepad and thumbed back through some pages.

"You said the boy said his name was Darryl?"

"Sounded like Darl. You think there's any chance of finding him?"

"Maybe. Lots of Darryls in these parts. This man behind the sheet-how come you asked if he was a Jonson?"

"Just a guess. The Jonsons are feuding with the Cades, right? If someone wanted to rat out the Cades for the murders, I figured it might be the other clan. Also… the way the boy talked, calling the man he in a funny way, like he was a leader or something, more than just an older relative."

Hendricks tightened his chin, causing his upper lip to protrude, and knotted his brow. Another of his portfolio of Gary Cooper grimaces, Karp thought. "Well. It might could be. It could be you talked with old Amos Jonson. That would be something."

"Why?" Karp asked. "Who is he?"

"No one's seen him for a while. He's the only survivor of the Jonsons of his generation. I guess he must be in his late sixties if it's him. He had four brothers and a sister, all dead." Hendricks looked directly at Marlene. "Killed."

"By the Cades?"

"That's what people say. Two of them were passed off as mining accidents. No one was prosecuted. The last brother, name of Jonathan, was shot by Ben Cade, right on his own front porch. His sister, Dora, said she saw the whole thing. Well, they had to bring old Ben in on that. A couple of days before the trial, someone tossed a couple of sticks of dynamite through her bedroom window. Killed her and a couple of her kids, as I recall. So they had to let him go. That was when Amos sort of disappeared. Of course, there are still lots of Jonsons around, even if they keep sort of a low profile. He could've been staying with his kin all this time."

"Can we find him?" Karp asked. "According to Marlene, he's got lots of answers. Would he testify, do you think?"

"I would doubt it," said Hendricks after a silence.

"Right," said Karp. "And I expect that this guy Floyd and the three Cades would have alibis provided by all the merry Cades and various henchmen and would not be forthcoming out of, say, remorse."

Karp received the expected laconic agreement and clapped his hands briskly. "Well! Assuming that Marlene's guy is not just some kind of grudge horseshit, we now know who done it. Not a small thing, but on the other hand, we have bubkes on anyone from a purely legal standpoint."

"Pardon, bup what?" said Hendricks.

" Bubkes," said Karp, "a term widely used in the New York bar to signify an insufficiency of probative material. The point is, an anonymous message from a probable clan enemy is almost worse than nothing at all. That leaves the possibility of forensic evidence linking one or more of these guys to the crime. We have prints at the scene. I assume these scumbags have prints on file?"