Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

‘God preserve me from your sensitivities. If it’s more amenable to you, his actions and behavior gave me grounds for reasonable suspicion, and I decided to place him under arrest until the nature of his character could be established. Does that sound better?’

‘It sounds better. You still haven’t told me what it means.’

‘He’s been asking questions about Patricia Hartley – Kevin says he was over by her old place earlier today, trying to establish where her people might have gone – but declined to elaborate on why.’

Knight didn’t bite. He’d made clear his position on Patricia Hartley in the past, and no good could come from going over the same ground again, not with his boss in the kind of mood that had already seen him lock up one person for invoking her name.

Griffin showed him Parker’s driver’s license.

‘New York,’ said Knight. ‘Huh. You figure him for a reporter?’

‘He’s no reporter. And why would a New York reporter be interested in a dead black girl from Burdon County, Arkansas? She barely made the papers out of Little Rock.’

‘Then what is he?’

‘That remains to be seen.’

Griffin glanced back at the cells through the plexiglass screen in the door. Parker was sitting against a wall with his eyes closed. Griffin could almost sense him listening, even though there was no way their voices could have carried to him, so quietly were they speaking.

‘You’re confident that a night in the guest suite might lead to an improvement in his attitude?’ said Knight.

‘Even if it doesn’t, it’ll give us time to find out more about him.’

‘Has he asked for a lawyer?’

‘He hasn’t asked for anything at all.’ Griffin picked up his hat. ‘It’s already after ten in New York, so it’s unlikely we’ll get much joy from there until tomorrow, which gives us an excuse to let him cool his heels. You find yourself with a few free minutes, run him through the databases, but morning should suffice.’

Kel Knight wasn’t any more competent than Griffin when it came to computers, a fact he continued to do his best to conceal, even though it was common knowledge to all. Each man carefully avoided calling the other on his ignorance, and thus contributed to the smooth running of the department.

‘Morning it is, then,’ said Knight.

‘He’s not going anywhere,’ said Griffin, ‘and I’ve already put in a longer day than any sane man should.’

He left Knight and Colson to it and headed to the parking lot. Kevin Naylor was leaning against his car, smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t in uniform, so Griffin couldn’t really discipline him for it, but he’d still have preferred the boy to resist the urge. Griffin checked his watch. If he were lucky, his wife would have left his dinner in the oven. If not, she’d have fed it to the dog. Then again, if she’d made meatloaf, it was the dog that could consider itself unlucky.

Naylor watched him approach.

‘Chief.’

‘Kevin.’

He could see that Naylor was troubled, and he knew by what: the same itch that was bothering Kel Knight – and bothering Griffin, too, truth be told, although he chose to scratch it only in private.

‘You got something you want to say?’ said Griffin, in a tone that made clear his total absence of any desire to listen should this be the case.

‘No, sir.’

‘Then go home. And Kevin?’

‘Chief?’

‘Don’t smoke in the goddamned parking lot.’

Naylor put the cigarette out against the sole of his shoe, and almost flicked the butt into the night before thinking better of it. Instead, he dropped it into one of his pockets and kept his eyes fixed on the ground as Griffin got in his car. He knew what had been done to Patricia Hartley. They all did.

And still, they’d abandoned her to her fate.

They’d left her to be forgotten.

5

Kel Knight looked in on the prisoner. Parker’s eyes were now open, but otherwise he remained in the same position as before.

‘You need anything?’ said Knight.

‘Something to read, if you have it.’

‘We got the Yellow Pages.’

‘I hear it starts strong, but tails off toward the end.’

‘I’ll see what else I can find.’ Knight began to move away, then paused. ‘You know, Chief Griffin is okay.’

‘Is he?’

‘I wouldn’t have said so otherwise. You could have saved yourself a lot of trouble by answering his questions.’

Parker shifted position to lie down on his bunk.

‘This?’ He took in the cell and – by extension – the station house, Cargill, and the rest of the county, if not the world entire. ‘This isn’t trouble, and I’ll be gone by morning.’

‘You seem very sure of that.’

‘I am, because I’m not your problem.’ He turned his face to the wall. ‘Your problem is dead girls.’

Evan Griffin didn’t head straight home, despite the lure of it, but first stopped off at the Lakeside Inn. The Lakeside wasn’t actually located near the Karagol, which represented a sensible planning decision on the part of the original owners, because in summer the mosquitoes swarmed over the black water, and it exuded a stink of vegetal decay. If a person stood on the roof of the motel, it might have been possible to glimpse the lake in the distance, although only after someone had cut a swath through a plenitude of evergreens, and it wouldn’t have been worth the effort. The Lakeside was run by the Ures, Thomas and Mary, but the bank held the paper on it, and the bank, like most everything else in the area, owed its existence and continued survival to the Cade family. The Cades had been in Arkansas, and more particularly Burdon County, for a long, long time. Their history was embedded in its earth, like the roots of the oldest trees, like the Karagol itself.

Thomas Ure appeared from the office as Griffin pulled into the lot. Ure wasn’t usually on duty so late, and was dressed for an evening on the town, as long as the town wasn’t Cargill. Here, people dressed up only for baptisms, weddings, funerals, and court appearances.

‘Is there a problem, Evan?’ he asked.

‘There might be, unless you forget you saw me here.’

‘I never did have a good memory for faces,’ said Ure, ‘or names.’

‘I always liked that about you,’ said Griffin. ‘Room twenty: single or double occupancy?’

‘Just one guy.’

‘Thanks. You can go back to being forgetful now.’

He waited for Ure to return to the office before removing the motel room key from his pocket. He’d found it among the possessions of the man named Parker, although it wasn’t exactly a surprise: Cargill had just two motels, and the Lakeside was the more salubrious. The other, the Burdon Inn, was as damp and cheerless as it looked, and it was said that the bedbugs were as big as a man’s fingernail. Griffin didn’t know what they were subsisting on, because it sure as hell wasn’t guests. The Burdon Inn only stayed open to give Bill Gorce a project on which to waste his time and retirement money. When Gorce eventually died, the Burdon Inn would expire with him, or vice versa; if the Burdon Inn collapsed to the ground tomorrow, Griffin was sure that Bill Gorce would founder at precisely the same moment. But Gorce didn’t appear likely to depart this world anytime soon. He was holding on for better days, like just about everyone else in the county. They’d been holding on like that for a long while, but now they had hope.

As long as they stayed quiet and pretended that nothing bad was happening.

As long as nobody asked questions about dead girls.

A quarter of the rooms at the Lakeside were currently occupied, judging by the lights behind the windows and the vehicles in the lot. The majority of the cars and trucks bore out-of-state plates, and looked like they had heavy miles on them, except for one newer Ford Taurus sitting alone at the end of the building to the right of the office. Griffin would have made the Ford for a rental even without the company sticker in the corner of the windshield.