Greg Iles: Cemetery Road

I lift my hand in greeting as I approach him. Denny tosses his head in acknowledgment, then turns back to the river, his hands never leaving the drone controller. Even with his back to me, I can see his mother in his stance. Dixie Allman was athletic and attractive in high school. A C student, mostly because of laziness, she had a quick mind. Her problem was that from age ten she’d focused it solely on getting male attention. She married at eighteen—pregnant—and divorced by twenty-five. Denny’s father was her third husband, and he abandoned them when Denny was five or six. Dixie has done her best to raise the boy right, and that’s one reason I’ve encouraged him by posting his stuff on our website.

“Did they shoot at your drone?” I call to him.

“Shit, yeah! Morons.”

I force a laugh and walk up to the fence. Denny has a salty vocabulary for an eighth grader, but so did my friends and I at that age. “They probably called a backup car to hunt for you.”

“They did, but it went down to the river. I grabbed some altitude and landed behind some trees farther south. They’re trying to work their way down there now. They’ll never make it through the kudzu.”

The drone controller in his hands mates an iPad Mini to a joystick unit. Denny has strapped a sun hood onto his iPad, so I can’t see the screen with a casual glance. Looking over the fence, I see the county boat down on the river. It’s headed toward the dock now. The deputies must have finally taken their cargo on board.

“Did you get a good look at the body?” I ask.

“Not live,” Denny replies, focusing on his screen. “I had to keep my eyes on the deputies while I was shooting.”

“Can we look now?”

He shrugs. “Sure. What’s the rush?”

“Did you ever meet Dr. Ferris, out at the Indian mounds?”

“Yeah. He came to my school a couple of times. I—” Denny goes pale. “That’s him in the water? Old Dr. Buck?”

“It might be.”

“Oh, man. What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for arrowheads or something and walked too far out on a sandbar. They collapse under people sometimes.”

The boy shakes his head forcefully. “Dr. Buck wouldn’t do that. He walked rivers and creeks all the time hunting for stuff, usually after storms. He found tons of Indian swag, even mastodon bones. You should see the stuff he’s found for the museum in Jackson.”

“I have.”

“Then you know there’s no way he fell into the Mississippi. Not unless he had a heart attack or something.”

“Maybe that’s what happened,” I say, though I don’t believe it. “Or a stroke. Buck was over seventy. With some luck, we’ll find out where he went in. That might tell us what he was doing.”

I can see Denny making mental calculations. “I need to leave the DJI down there till the cops leave,” he says, “but I can access the file from here. It just eats up a lot of my monthly data allowance.”

“I’ll reimburse you.”

His face lights up. “Awesome!”

He stabs the iPad screen, waves me closer. Thanks to the sun hood, I now have a glare-free view of what Denny shot only a few minutes ago. On the screen, two deputies with no experience at hauling corpses out of water are attempting to do just that. All I can see of the dead man is one side of a gray-fleshed face and a thin arm trailing in the muddy current. Then the head lolls over on the current, and a wave of nausea rolls through me. My mouth goes dry.

It’s Buck.

I can’t see his whole head, but the far side of his skull appears to have been broken open by some sort of fracture. As I strain to see more, his head sinks back into the water. “Fast-forward,” I urge.

Denny’s already doing it. At triple speed, the deputies dart around the deck of the rescue boat like cartoon characters, occasionally leaning over the gunwale to try to yank Buck’s body free of the tree fork holding him in the water. Suddenly one looks skyward and begins waving his arms. Then he starts yelling, draws his pistol, and fires at the camera suspended beneath the drone.

“What a freakin’ idiot,” Denny mutters, as the deputy fires again.

“Does he not realize those bullets have to come down somewhere?” I ask.

“He flunked physics.”

“Don’t they teach gravity in grade school?”

After holstering his gun, the deputy stomps back to a hatch in the stern and removes what looks like a ski rope. Then he makes a loop in the rope, leans over the gunwale, and starts trying to float the lasso he made down over Buck’s body.

“No, damn it!” I bellow. “Have some goddamn respect!”

Denny snorts at this notion.

“He needs to tie the rope around his waist,” I mutter, “then get in the water himself and free the body.”

“You’re dreaming,” Denny says in the lilt of a choirboy whose voice has not yet broken. “He’s gonna lasso the body, gun the motor, and leave a rooster tail all the way back to the dock.”

“And rip Buck’s body in half in the process.”

“Was it Buck for sure?” he asks. “I couldn’t tell.”

“Yeah. It’s him.”

Denny lowers his head over the screen.

It takes some time, but the deputy eventually gets the rope around Buck, and he does in fact use the motor to tear him free of the snag’s grasp. Thankfully, the corpse appears to stay in one piece, and after the boat stops, the deputies slowly drag it up over the transom.

“Oh, man,” Denny mutters.

“What?”

“Look at his head . The side of it. It’s all messed up.”

It doesn’t take a CIA analyst to see that something caved in the left side of Buck Ferris’s skull. The vault of his cranium has a hole the size of a Sunkist orange in it. Now that he’s out of the water, his face looks oddly deflated. “I saw.”

“What did that?” Denny asks. “A baseball bat?”

“Maybe. Could have been a gunshot. Gunshot wounds don’t look like they do on TV, or even in the movies. But it might be blunt force trauma. A big rock could have done that. Maybe he took a fall before he went into the river.”

“Where?” Denny asks, incredulous. “There’s hardly any rocks around here. Even if you fell off the bluff, you wouldn’t hit one. Not igneous rocks. You’d have to hit concrete or something to do that.”

“He could have fallen onto some riprap,” I suggest, meaning the large gray rocks the Corps of Engineers carpets the riverbanks with to slow erosion.

“I guess. But those are right down by the water, not under the bluff.”

“And he would have had to fall from a height to smash his skull like that.” Despite my emotional state, I’m suddenly wondering about the legal implications of Denny’s drone excursion. “You know, you really need to turn this footage over to the sheriff.”

“It’s not footage, man. It’s a file . And it’s mine.”

“The district attorney would probably dispute that. Are you licensed to fly that drone?”

“I don’t need a license.”

“You do for commercial work. And if I put it up on our website, or pay your data bill, you’re doing this for hire.”

Denny scowls in my direction. “So don’t pay me.”

“You’re missing the point, Denny.”

“No, I’m not. I don’t like the sheriff. And the chief of police I like even less. They hassle me all the time. Until they need me, of course. That time they had a car wreck down in a gully by Highway 61, they called me to fly down in there and check to see if anybody was alive. They were glad to see me then. And at the prison riot, too. Although they stole my micro SD cards and copied them. But any other time, they’re major A-holes.”

“I heard they have their own drone now.”