Greg Iles 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Quiet Game, Turning Angel, The Devil’s Punchbowl. Greg Iles
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of defeatism. “No offense, Agent Stone, but I think you’ve been doing too much reading and not enough soul-searching.”
To my surprise, this does not anger him. He squeezes my shoulder. “You have more illusions than you think. I wish you luck.”
“I wouldn’t need it if you’d tell me what you know.”
He shakes his head and takes a step back. “Whatever you do, you send that little girl someplace safe before you take another step. You hear?”
“That I’ll do.”
As he retreats to his porch, I buckle Annie into her safety seat and join Caitlin in the front. She looks at me with fire in her eyes.
“Did you catch what he said inside?”
“About Payton’s murder not being about civil rights?”
“No. When you asked him if he had any personal notes he kept from his superiors.”
Stone is still watching us from the porch.
“He said if he wanted to learn what he did, we should do what he did.”
She nods excitedly. “Talk to the eyewitnesses, right? That was the first thing he said. He looked at you real hard. Remember?”
“Yes. Like he was trying to communicate something non-verbally. Do you know what it was?”
She gives me an almost taunting smile. “Talk to the eyewitnesses.”
“What is it, for God’s sake?”
“Penn … he used the plural. According to all accounts, there was only one eyewitness to the Payton bombing.”
She’s right. Frank Jones, the scheduling clerk. Had Dwight Stone tried to tell me—without telling me—that there was more than one witness in the Triton parking lot on the day Del Payton died?
“I told you I was good at this,” she says, smiling with triumph. “Let’s get out of here.”
I start the Cherokee and wheel it around until we’re pointed back toward the jeep track. “What did you think of Stone?”
“I think he’s scared.”
“Me too.”
We spent the night in Gunnison. We might have rushed and made our flight, but none of us really wanted to race back to the heat of Mississippi. We took a suite at the Best Western and ate a long meal in a local steak house. Caitlin and I tried to list every possible reason Del Payton could have been murdered besides civil rights work, but Annie didn’t cooperate with this effort, which made it virtually impossible.
Back in the suite, we rented The Parent Trap on the in-house movie channel and watched it from the big bed. Annie lay between Caitlin and me, facing the TV, while we leaned back against the headboard, the pillows from both beds padding our backs. When Annie allowed it, which wasn’t often, we speculated about Stone and his cryptic statements. But watching TV with a four-year-old means watching it.
Lying in bed with Annie and Caitlin catapulted me back to a time so innocent and wonderful that I could hardly bear to think about it. Before Sarah got sick. Before the hospitals. Just us and our baby, laid up on Sunday mornings watching Barney with no fear of the future. When our biggest problem was deciding where we wanted to go for dinner.
When The Parent Trap ended, Annie said she wanted another movie. As I punched in the code for Beauty and the Beast and Caitlin called room service for ice cream, I wondered if Annie was experiencing the same memories I was, or at least the safe warm feeling she once knew with her mother and me. I thought perhaps she was, because two minutes after she finished her ice cream, she began snoring at the foot of the bed.
With this background of Disney music and snores, Caitlin asked me about Sarah. I sat silent for a while, but Caitlin didn’t apologize or ask if I was all right. When she interviewed me, I had told her this subject was off limits. But that interview seemed a long time ago. As I sat there watching Belle confront her beast, I felt Caitlin’s hand close around mine, tentative at first, then firm and warm. After a few moments I looked over at her. She gave me a smile that asked nothing, assumed nothing. A sense of pure goodness flowed from her.
Sarah would like this woman, I thought. For the first time since the previous day, the ghost of Livy Marston receded in my mind. I began to speak, and I did not stop until I had told Caitlin all of it, the pleasure and the pain, the joy and the grief, the beginning and the end. She asked to see a picture of Sarah, and I showed her the snapshot I carry in my wallet. It could have been an awkward moment, but it wasn’t. Caitlin made it natural.
After I put the picture away, I tried to be as natural as she but found it impossible. The sadness that had been accreting in my soul for the past seven months began to break loose, and I found myself doing what I never allowed myself to do in front of Annie. I remember Caitlin holding my head against her breast, speaking soft words that escape me now. I must have fallen asleep that way, for I awakened to find light streaming through the curtains and Annie lying beside me, with no idea how we got beneath the covers. Caitlin was not in the bed, but she had taken good care of us before she left it.
When we reached Natchez the next afternoon, I found a fax waiting for me on my parents’ kitchen table. It had been sent to my father’s office just before lunch. There was no originating number at the head of the page, but the fax itself was a copy of a newspaper story clipped from the Leesville Daily Leader. Leesville, Louisiana, is a community located next to Fort Polk, a huge army training base, and a hundred and fifty miles from Natchez. Above the article was a copy of the paper’s masthead, and it showed the date as May 19, 1968. Five days after Del Payton died.
The article recounted the capture of two men—a supply sergeant and a civilian—who one month previous had stolen armaments from a military arsenal at Fort Polk. While the troops were on maneuvers and the marching band was parading around the base in full dress uniforms, these two enterprising souls had filled a two-ton truck with M-16s, Claymore mines, hand grenades, and C-4 plastic explosive, then had driven off the base and sold most of the ordnance piecemeal throughout the southeast. The civilian half of this duo was named Lester Hinson. I noticed because his name had been circled, probably by whoever sent the fax.
There was also a note for me to call Althea Payton at St. Catherine’s hospital. I tried, but someone in the nursery told me she couldn’t come to the phone. I called Caitlin at the newspaper, explained the mystery fax, and gave her Lester Hinson’s name so she could begin tracing him. She asked if I thought Dwight Stone had sent the fax. My guess was Peter Lutjens, but I didn’t say his name on the telephone. I did make a mental note to call him again and make a pitch for him to take a run at Payton’s FBI file before he woke up in North Dakota. Caitlin asked if I’d gotten started doing what Stone had told me to do: talk to the eyewitnesses of the Payton bombing. She recalled from her research that Frank Jones—the “sole” witness to the bombing—worked as a salesman at the local Pontiac dealership. Jones didn’t know it yet, but he was about to take me for a test drive.
The Pontiac dealership is festooned with balloons and strips of colored foil, but the only customers are clustered around the service bay. The salesmen hover in a loose knot inside the air-conditioned showroom, watching for customers through the huge glass window like predators scanning a drought-burned plain. The sight of my father’s BMW 740i brings them all to their feet, albeit with feigned aloofness. They probably know the car on sight, but hope that old Doc Cage has temporarily taken leave of his senses and decided to buy American for once.
After parking at the end of the main display line, I make a show of looking at price stickers as I walk toward the showroom door. I search the salesmen’s faces through the glass, gambling that the oldest will be Frank Jones. It stands to reason, although in a tough economy retirees might be working jobs like this to supplement their Social Security.