Greg Iles - Turning Angel

”This is bullshit,“ Drew says. ”You get me out of here now. I’ll find out what this Cyrus was doing with Kate.“

”That’s not going to happen. With Shad pushing this thing, bail will be denied.“

”Where’s Cyrus now? Have the police talked to him? Have they taken a blood sample from him? That’s got to be who raped Kate at the creek.“

”Possibly,“ I concede. ”I hope it was.“

”Son of a bitch! “ Drew explodes, slapping the ledge. ”Do you realize where Brightside Manor is?“

”About forty yards from St. Catherine’s Creek.“

”Exactly! And the creek was in flood. He could have killed her there and dumped her body in the creek!“

”I thought of that last night. Only it seems unlikely that Kate’s body would wash up within a couple of hundred yards from her house.“

”Not really,“ says Drew, shaking his head. ”That’s a dogleg bend with a lot of obstacles that trap floating objects. Kate wasn’t far from a fallen tree, now that I think about it.“ His eyes bore into mine. ”You didn’t answer my question. Where’s Cyrus now?“

”Nobody knows.“

Drew stares at me like a madman. ”You’re shitting me.“

”No. And until the police find him, question him, and take blood from him, you’re going to sit right where you are now. So settle down and get ready to tough it out.“

”Tell me you’re not serious.“

”I am. And don’t even think about doing anything crazy, Drew. I know inmates escape from the outdoor area of this jail with embarrassing regularity. I also know that if you got out of here and tracked down Cyrus White before the police, he’d be dead. But that would be the worst thing you could do. We need a confession from Cyrus. Failing that, we need a DNA match to the other semen sample taken from Kate’s body.“

The coldness in Drew’s eyes could freeze desert sand. ”They can match DNA to a corpse as easily as they can to a live body.“

”Promise me you won’t try it. Or I’ll tell Chief Logan to put you in lockdown around the clock. He’ll do it if I ask him.“

Drew’s hands are shaking.

”Promise me,“ I repeat. ”Or this is the last time you’ll see me in here.“

After some time, he nods. I stand and reach for the door behind me. ”One more thing.“

He looks up with burning eyes.

”You need a real lawyer now. A top-notch criminal defense attorney, preferably black and female.“

Drew says nothing.

”That’s nonnegotiable,“ I tell him. ”Understood?“

He waves his hand in a gesture of dismissal. He could care less about lawyers at this point. His mind and will are totally focused on one thing.

Cyrus White.

I’m sitting in Chief Logan’s office when Sonny Cross calls my cell phone and delivers the next bombshell. ”Penn, do you know Jim Pinella?“

”The oil man?“

”That’s him. He’s got a son at the Catholic school. A junior. Michael. Mike, they call him.“

”I’ve met Mike,“ I reply, vaguely recalling a tall, thin boy who acted in a play at the Little Theater.

”Well, the kid was just beaten within an inch of his life.“

A surreal feeling envelops me in a bubble, blurring Chief Logan and everything else in the office. ”Who did it?“

”Some black guys. It happened outside the Brightside Manor Apartments.“

”Brightside Manor? What the hell was a white kid doing over there? Buying dope? Or was this another mystery visit like Kate Townsend’s?“

”Mike wasn’t buying dope,“ Sonny says curtly. ”Where are you now?“

”The police station.“

”I’m on Liberty Road. Can you meet me in the parking lot of First Baptist Church?“

”Does this concern Drew?“

”I’m not sure, but it damn sure concerns St. Stephen’s.“

”I’ll be there in five minutes.“

The First Baptist Church is a massive monument to the Southern Baptist sensibility. Built on forty-eight acres of pristine meadow sold by the devout owner of the antebellum mansion next door, the towering church complex manages to look both smug and sober at the same time. Today it’s quiet, but usually the grounds echo with the screams of basketball from the church’s gymnasium or the crack of softballs from the emerald diamonds in back.

I’m parked by a bronze bell in the front parking lot, waiting for Sonny Cross to arrive. Like so many parts of Natchez, the contrasts here are stark. On this side of the highway stands Devereaux, a nationally famous gem of Greek Revival architecture surrounded by oaks shrouded in Spanish moss. On the other side sit an aging Pizza Hut restaurant, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, and somewhere in the clapboard houses behind them the fossilized shell of the Armstrong Tire plant, once one of the most powerful economic engines in the city.

Sonny Cross’s Ford Explorer turns into the entrance of the church’s broad drive. As I watch him approach, I recall visiting the Coke plant as a child. Its interior was a cavernous, open space filled with rattling, clanking machinery. The most awe-inspiring contraption in the place pulled empty green bottles along a conveyor belt, jetted ten ounces of fizzing, caramel-colored elixir into each bottle, then sealed each one with a silver cap. I could have watched that machine for hours. The icy Coke I was handed as I left that building was the best-tasting drink I ever had in my life. But that place exists only in my memory now. Today that Coca-Cola building bottles nothing. It merely serves as a hub from which trucks distribute cases of aluminum cans throughout what remains of the city I remember. We don’t make anything anymore.

”Hey,“ Sonny calls from the window of his Explorer. ”I only got a couple of minutes. You hear there’s an emergency school board meeting tonight?“

The drug agent has light blue eyes, a blond mustache, and a mullet hairstyle that belongs onstage with Lynyrd Skynyrd. Cross seems to fancy himself a sort of Miami Vice cowboy, favoring snakeskin boots and turquoise jewelry.

”I heard about it,“ I confirm.

”You gonna be there?“

”Unless you tell me I shouldn’t.“

”No, you should. The deadheads who’ve been asleep at the switch all this time are finally calling me about Marko Bakic.“

”Let me guess. Bill Sims.“

”He’s one of them.“

”What does Mike Pinella getting beat up at Brightside Manor have to do with St. Stephen’s?“

”Maybe nothing,“ says Sonny, his face hardening in anger. ”Or maybe a lot. This past October, Mike started getting into pot. He’d never tried it before, but since all his friends suddenly decided weed was the thing to do, Mike went along. He got steadily deeper into it, but the deeper he got, the more unhappy he got. He’s a Catholic kid, and he had a lot of guilt. Still, he went to that X-rave two nights ago where Marko shot off all the fireworks.“

”At the lake,“ I murmur, orienting myself.

”Right. Anyway, Mike grew up downtown, on the same block with another kid you know a lot better.“

”Who’s that?“

”Chris Vogel.“

The boy who drowned in Lake St. John last night…

”When Vogel drowned, something snapped in Mike. I know this kid pretty well, okay? His younger brother is friends with my oldest son, and I worked for his dad a couple of summers out of high school. So, after Mike heard Vogel drowned, he called me up. He told me he was really upset, and he didn’t want to see anybody else get hurt. He said he knew where Chris had got the acid that killed him. He told me he was willing to testify against the guy who sold it or set him up for a bust, whichever I wanted. He just needed to get some things straight before he told me what he knew. I pressed him, but he wouldn’t budge on that. That was this morning, Penn.“ Sonny takes a deep breath. ”Now he’s lying in the ICU at the hospital. His jaw’s broken, his hands, too. He can’t tell me what he knows, and he couldn’t write it down either, as hard as he tried. I sat there watching tears roll down that boy’s face while he struggled to do it.“