The Deadline (18 page)

Kate’s fat Lab yawned and scratched his ear with a hind paw.  He was no longer interested in the visitors.

“Did you hear the dog bark last night or early this morning?” Morgan asked.

“That overfed coyote sleeps inside with me.  He’s mostly deaf anyway.”

“Any strange cars or trucks on the road that you recall?”

“I heard nothing.”

“Do you have people who come and go?  Ranch hands?”

“I have two men, but they both live in town.  Nobody else comes out here, except the pure-gas truck and a few hunters in the fall.”

They sat down to the pheasant salad lunch, with a pitcher of sweetgrass tea, a plate of warm sourdough bread, and fresh butter.  Soon, Claire was feeling much better with food on her stomach.  She touched her husband’s hand under the table, as much a gesture of confidence as companionship.

“How many times have you gotten money like this?” Morgan asked Kate.

“Ten or eleven years in a row.  My people would say it comes from an evil spirit because it is associated with death.  I became so frightened by it, I wouldn’t even look at it or touch it.  Gabe always gave the envelopes to the Indian school to help children go to college.”

“Didn’t you come to expect it every year?” Morgan asked.  “If it were me, I’d watch all night.  Did you ever try to see who it was?”

“Sometimes Gabe would take his rifle and hide in the fields to see who came in the night, but he never saw anyone.  And I was too frightened to see, like a little girl who hides her eyes when she imagines a ghost by her bed.  The shadows know when we are watching.  They see us, but we cannot see them.”

Spirits.

Ghosts.

Shadows.

Morgan knew better.  Someone had been making very large payments to both Kate Morning and Neeley Gilmartin for the past decade.  He didn’t know why, except that it was related to the murder of Aimee Little Spotted Horse.  It might be some bleeding heart who felt sorry for both of them, or it might be the little girl’s killer.  It could be reparation or blood money.  Either way, it came from someone who still cared deeply about the murder and who had access to large amounts of money, nearly two hundred thousand dollars over the past ten years.

“Whatever happened to Charlie?” Morgan asked abruptly.

“After our daughter died, we tried to stay together, but we fell apart,” Kate said.  “In ‘Forty-nine, he went to Oklahoma to look for construction work and I came back to Crow Agency.  I was a woman on the outside, but still a little girl on the inside.  A few years later, when I became a woman on the inside, too, I met Gabe Morning and became his wife.  In time, I was happy again.”

“You’ve done well.”

“Gabe convinced me to make something of myself.  He sent me to school to become a nurse.  I worked for many years at the government hospital in town, taking care of the Indian babies.  Touching them, it filled an empty place in me.”

Kate Morning was neither a killer nor a conspirator.  His gut told him that much.

“What do you remember of the time before Aimee died?” Morgan asked her.

“That was another life.  I wouldn’t live it again, but I do not regret living it.  Charlie and me, we were foolish children who thought they were in love, but after we found out I was pregnant, the only thing we shared was being scared.  We ran away from the reservation.  We lived in a shack in the middle of nowhere, barely enough to eat, hardly any money.  But Aimee made us a family.”

“I’m sorry I have to ask this,” Morgan said, “but Charlie was in trouble once for hitting Aimee.  He even went to jail for a short time.  These things are very hard for families to deal with.  Is there any chance ...”

Kate interrupted him, shaking her head.

“I know what you are thinking, but it isn’t true.  The sheriff believed it, too, for a while.  Charlie was a good father, but when he drank, a devil took him.  He struck me, and yes, he struck her, but all the pain was inside
him
.  She was so small, so sweet.  He feared that he would separate her soul from her body.”

“How’s that?” Morgan asked.

“The Crow believe a child’s soul,
ilaáxe
, is inside the body, but it is not
bonded
to the flesh until they are grown.  You have seen children play?  When they are too rough, the soul can be separated from the body.  A Crow mother will bring her children inside, then she will again call their names in the yard, in case a soul was knocked loose.”

“And Charlie feared he might knock Aimee’s soul loose?”

“In the year before she went away.  He hit her so hard she was unconscious for many hours.  That night, he fell to his knees under the stars and he called her name ‘til dawn.  A few days later, the sheriff came to arrest him.”

“Did it ever happen again?” Morgan asked her.

“There was much anger in Charlie when he drank.  He never stopped drinking.”

“Did he ever stop hitting you and Aimee?”

Kate Morning shook her head.  “But he didn’t kill her.  I would have known.  A mother would know.”

Morgan felt Claire tense beside him.

“Are you certain of that?”

“We both kissed her as she slept on the morning before we left.  We were together all day up north, riding the fence.  When we returned and found her gone, he cried all night in my arms.  We cried together.”

Morgan believed her.  He didn’t know why, exactly.  Being a reporter was a vague science.  Truth was, indeed, a matter of perception.  Maybe Kate Morning was still hiding a terrible secret.  Maybe she knew far more than she was telling.  Maybe she watched Charlie do it, or maybe she did it herself.

But if Kate Morning concealed such a terrible secret, why would she risk it by coming forward now?  She could have remained silent and forever anonymous to Morgan, but she didn’t.  She was alone and lonely, crying all night by the fire, afraid of ghosts. 

“Kate, was there anyone besides Neeley Gilmartin who might have done this?  Anyone who was angry with you or Charlie, or who knew Aimee was alone?  Anybody who meant harm to your family?”

“Only him.  They say he was a gambler and a drunkard who hated Charlie, that he made terrible threats.  She was my baby, so innocent.  And he confessed that he killed her.  I believe he spoke the truth.  His death comes too late and too easy.  My heart is not heavy for him.”

She was resolute, without forgiveness.  No jury’s verdict was so lasting as a mother’s conviction.  Neeley Gilmartin never had a jury, but Kate Morning’s judgment was far more harsh.  To her, Gilmartin had only one dimension:  Evil.

“What became of Charlie after he left for Oklahoma?”

“I hear he was killed,” Kate said.  “I saw his brother in town one day and he told me that Charlie had been drunk and got hit by a train near a town called Pawhuska, and he was buried there in an Indian cemetery.  I remember that was the year Kennedy was shot, because I was very sad for both of them for a long time.  But I was happy that Charlie would see Aimee and tell her that we looked for her.  I wanted her to know, because she might have thought we did not miss her.  She might have thought we did not call for her.”

Morgan glanced at Claire.  Her eyes were filled with tears.  They all sat silently, washed by a warm breeze that blew like a memory over each of them.  They shared the loss of a child, an irrational loss none of them understood.

But time was an imperfect glass that distorted what it could not reflect.  Some memories were too dark and too deep to catch the light.  Morgan felt he was chasing old ghosts through a warped mirror.

Morgan thought about the weed-covered grave atop the lonely hill on the Sun-Seven Ranch.

“We’ve been to Aimee’s grave in the Madigans’ cemetery,” he said to Kate.  “There were flowers.  Have you been there recently?”

Kate’s hand floated momentarily above the white linen tablecloth, then caressed it delicately.

“It’s too sad for me.  Her spirit is not there anyway.  Do you visit your child’s grave?”

Beneath the table, Morgan reached for Claire’s hand.  They held tightly to each other.

“No,” Morgan said.  “He wasn’t buried.  He was cremated.”

Kate nodded knowingly, comforting them.

“Perhaps they are caring for each other,” she said.

It was late.

The afternoon sun was lowering upon the red bluffs around Kate Morning’s little valley.  It was three hours back to Winchester and Morgan was eager to get back on the road.  While Claire helped Kate clear the lunch plates from the table, Morgan asked directions to the bathroom.

As he passed down a dark hallway toward the back of the house, he saw a fading photograph of two children on the wall.  The old image had tapered to brown, blanched by sunlight that streamed through a window at the end of the hall.

In it, the children sat on the running board of an old Ford coupe, although the car was probably brand-new at the time the photograph was taken.

The little girl had wide, familiar eyes.  She wore a fetching white dress that was too small and unlaced leather boots that were too big.  Her thick, black hair was cut like Dutch boy’s, her bangs trimmed straight across her forehead, framing her cherubic little face like a dark halo.  Her smile was shy but beguiling.

A tiny oval locket hung over the frilly collar of her dress, a well-worn piece of little-girl jewelry that looked as if it were pulled from its usual hiding place around her neck to lend an air of elegance to the photograph.  And in her small hand, she held three small, daisy-like flowers, their long stems drooping.

The tow-headed boy wore suspenders, a starched white shirt and dungarees and scuffed go-to-meeting shoes.  A mutinous cowlick defied the butchwax in his hair, and his toothy grin was guileless.

“Wasn’t she pretty?” Kate said.

She startled Morgan.  He’d been studying the photo so intently, he hadn’t seen her come up beside him in the narrow hall.

“Is this Aimee?” he asked.

“Yes.  She was eight then.  She had never made a photograph before.  She wanted to be pretty.”

“She
was
pretty.”

“She made them wait while she put on the dress.  It was the only dress she owned.  She was buried in it.”

Morgan put his finger on the little boy in the picture.

“Who’s this?”

“Her best friend, Bobby,” Kate said.  “She always said she would marry him, like all little girls dream, you know.  On this day he came to visit with his father in their big, fancy car and she ran inside to put on her dress so they could make this picture.  She was so shy.”

“May I borrow this?” Morgan asked Kate.  “I have wondered what she looked like.  I’d like to make a copy of it and send it right back.  I promise to take good care of it.”

Kate hesitated, then took the dusty frame off the wall.  She placed it in Morgan’s hands delicately, as if she were handing him the wing of a butterfly.

“It’s the only one I have of my sweet baby.  Bobby’s father gave it to me after she went away.”

“That was very kind.  I’ll take very good care of it,” he said, studying the picture in his hands even more closely.  “Did you know the boy’s family very well?”

Kate smiled, one of those smiles that made Morgan think he hadn’t heard something she said.

“Of course,” she said.  “Mr. Madigan was always very good to us.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

T
he snow was not deep,
but enough had fallen that two sets of small footprints could easily be seen in the blue moonlight.  They led deeper into the dark trees, into the deadfall.

It was bitter cold.  The runner’s labored breath was frigid and thick, and his throat burned.  Sweat trickled down his back like ice water.  The air was reluctant, almost too thin to breathe.  Frost crystals sparkled all around him, suspended like tiny stars in an airless infinity.

But he followed the footprints deeper into the trees, ghosts shrouded in hoarfrost.  Their paths were parallel, never crossing as they meandered through the dark woodland.  The air grew more shallow, until the runner’s lungs ached.

Suddenly the forest surrendered to an immense meadow, where a luminous white mansion rose from the snow.  The footprints led to it, up its wide steps and through the front door.  The runner followed, though now his legs were too heavy to run.

The door was locked.  The windows were dark and crusted with ice.  He scraped away the rime and looked inside.  Numb moonlight fell on the cold hardwood floor of an empty room.

Then he heard children’s laughter, somewhere inside the house, a different room.  He dragged his leaden legs to another window, where he scratched the ice with his bare fingers.

He heard the young voices, but all he saw were two black shapes in the center of the high-ceilinged room.  Then, he was inside, through the icy glass, standing before the two shapes, which he now recognized:  Two tiny coffins atop draped funeral biers, blue in the cold glow of the moon.

The runner lifted the heavy lid on the first coffin.  There was his son, tubes and needles still dangling from him.  But his face was sunny and supple, the way it had been before he got sick.  The runner was not frightened, for he had not seen his son in a very long time, and when the boy smiled, he knew he had never died.  It was all a mistake, the dying.

Then the runner opened the second coffin.

A white dress, lace frills at the collar, was wrapped around a homunculus, a glowing, bleeding mass of water-logged flesh.  It squirmed on a block of ice, brown river water seeping from it and freezing in screaming tendrils.

A tiny hand rose from the gelatinous mess and reached for him.

The runner couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t run.  He turned to his son, but the coffin contained only a pile of ashes.  A deep, painful sob filled the burning void in his chest, and the last air rushed from him.

Somewhere, another child laughed.

Jefferson Morgan’s clock radio clicked, but there was no music, just empty electric air.

The sun wasn’t up.  It was four-thirty in the morning.  The FM station over in Blackwater, thirty miles away, didn’t sign on until five on Monday mornings, later if the morning dee-jay was hungover.  Of the four far-flung stations whose signals were potent enough to reach Winchester, it was the only one that played old rock, the music Morgan never really outgrew.  It was also the only one without hourly livestock reports.

Morgan silenced the radio’s breathy hum, then dressed in the dark, still haunted by his dream.  He’d lost most of the weekend visiting Kate Morning in Montana and helping Claire move junk out of the workshed where she envisioned a painting studio.  He’d intended to go to the office for a few hours late Sunday night, but fell asleep after dinner.  Too much wine.

He brushed back a strand of Claire’s blond hair and kissed her, but she didn’t wake up.  He promised himself to call her later in the morning.

He left the long-suffering Escort in the driveway and walked to
The Bullet
in the indifferent, dewy shadow of morning.  He smelled new-mown grass.  Sprinklers pulsed, dogs barked somewhere in the distance, and a lumbering Garvis Creamery truck passed him, making its milk rounds.  The driver saw him and raised two fingers from the steering wheel, more an acknowledgement than a wave.

Morgan slipped his key in the brass lock of the newspaper office door.  As he opened the door, he caught the comforting smell of ink, an odor the color of night.  He turned on the lights and started a pot of coffee before he booted up his computer.  He looked forward to two or three hours to work unmolested before the workday started.  He wanted to be at the court clerk’s office when it opened, to satisfy his curiosity about the relationship between Malachi Pierce and Simeon Fenwick.

The phone rang a few minutes after seven.

It was Jerry Overton.  The normally laconic ATF agent skipped saying hello altogether.

“The Cubs are playing at Wrigley today,” he said.  “It’s a beautiful day and I got tickets.  Field level, third base.  Pick you up at O’Hare.  We’ll grab some burgers at Murphy’s Bleachers.  Man, I can almost taste an Old Style now.  It’s all on you.  Whaddya say?”

“Yeah, sure.  I’ll just shut down the paper this week so I can watch the Cubs lose,” Morgan said.  “Actually, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea.  Who are they playing?”

Overton laughed.

“Does it matter?”

“I guess not,” Morgan said.  “But the way things are going here right now, I don’t think I could get there before October.  And what good Cub fan really expects to see baseball in Wrigley in October?”

“Good point.”

There was more to this call than baseball, Morgan knew. 

“Is that it?  Just an invitation to see the Cubbies lose?  Been there, done that.  What’s up?” he asked his old friend.

“You know I can’t confirm or deny any open investigations,” he said.

Overton’s stiff-arm reply puzzled Morgan.

“I didn’t ask ...”

The tone of Overton’s voice turned abruptly official.

“But I have a few questions about the matter you reported to me last Friday.”

“But I don’t know anything.”

“Just listen to my questions,” Overton told him.  “Sometimes you don’t know what’s important.  Just listen carefully.  It might help us help you.  Do you understand?”

Morgan didn’t.

“Whatever you say,” Morgan acquiesced.  “You’re the cop.  What do you need to know?”

Overton started his inquiry in left field.

“Do you have any information linking Malachi Pierce to the Fourth Sign?” he asked Morgan.

“The Fourth Sign?  P.D. Comeaux’s freaky militia buddies?  How the hell would I know?  No, I don’t know anything about that.  Is it true?  Is he tied up with those crazies?”

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t comment on that.  I’m merely conducting an official inquiry here in response to your report of suspicious activity.  If you’d just listen to my questions, then we might be able to help.”  Overton was more emphatic.  “Do you
understand
?”

“But I didn’t really make a report ...”

“Have you seen any evidence that would make you believe that Mr. Pierce is involved in illicit gun sales and explosives manufacturing?”

“Bombs?  I told you what I know, Jerry.  Some people hear explosions out on Pierce’s land.  Maybe he’s just blowing out stumps.  I just don’t know.”

“Any recent threats against government agencies or public officials?

“He seems the type that would, but, no, I haven’t seen anything beyond the usual black-helicopter crap in his letter.  The only real threat I saw was against me.”

“Extortion by threat of violence?”

“No.”

“Harboring fugitives?”

“No.”

“Conspiracy to receive stolen military property like, say, automatic weapons, rocket launchers and explosives?”

“Jesus.  No.”

“Tax evasion by funneling income from gun sales through his church?”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that.  But, hey, how did you know about his church?  I never mentioned it.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

“That much is in the public record, Jeff.  You can look it up yourself.  But at least you’re listening.  That’s good.”

At that moment, Morgan knew.

It was no slip of the tongue and this was no interview.  Overton was telling him everything he wanted to know, the only way a straight-arrow federal agent could without dishonoring his code.

His questions were, in fact, answers.

“I understand now, Jerry.”

“Good.”

“Is there anything else you need to ask?”

“Yes.  In regard to your fears about your family’s safety, have you taken precautions?”

“Should I?”

“Generally speaking, it’s always wise to be safe, Jeff.  You’ve been around the block.  You know how it is these days.  And you know these guys.”

Morgan nervously scribbled Comeaux’s name on the back of a blank ad invoice and retraced it unconsciously until the ink had soaked through to the desk blotter beneath it.

“Is the Fourth Sign somehow involved in this?”

“Jeff, c’mon.  You know it’s against the law for us to keep files on groups.  Just individuals who are suspected or convicted of specific crimes.  Sometimes these individuals have something in common, say, like membership in the same club.  But if you asked about any one of them, I couldn’t tell you one way or the other.”

“You mean like P.D. Comeaux?”

“Yes.  That’s a good example,” Overton said.  He spoke deliberately.  “If he or other members of the Fourth Sign were involved somehow, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.  Understand?”

“Are they?”

“Like I said, Jeff, if they were, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.  I just can’t say.”

“I understand,” Morgan said.

Overton sounded a note of caution.

“You already know about the Fourth Sign from the Comeaux case and you know without me telling you that these aren’t just bad dudes.  They’re
crazy
bad dudes.  Don’t turn your back on them.”

By saying nothing, Jerry Overton revealed much. 

At the time of P.D. Comeaux’s arrest in 1993, the Fourth Sign wasn’t even a blip on the FBI’s radical-right radar screen, much less the ATF’s.  Mostly, it was just a small, secret society of angry Bible-Belt farmers on the verge of bankruptcy, seeking conspiracies that weren’t there, rationalizing their plights irrationally and peddling a poor man’s gospel.  They believed the government was engaged in a global and domestic conspiracy to create a “New World Order” that would enslave ordinary citizens by taking away their means to revolt, namely their land and their guns.  And when they searched their Bibles for answers, they came to believe even more fervently that one-world government was the last prophesied sign from God before Armageddon, the “fourth sign.”

Nobody cared.  The Christian Identity movement hadn’t yet bubbled to the surface of the national consciousness.  Its followers considered themselves soldiers in a war against the United States government, practicing an Aryan theology that saw racial minorities as sub-human “mud people,” Jews as Satan’s children and a New World Order as a precursor to tyranny.

At its core, the Fourth Sign was among scores of obscure and loosely organized Christian Identity bands mixing ultra-fundamentalist zealots and anti-government paranoiacs in a combustible, fuming frenzy that produced more smoke than fire.

But Comeaux was the spark that ignited a wildfire.

Before his arrest, he’d attended a few secret meetings at a small church near Dixon, Illinois, but mostly kept to the back pews.  He put his faith in violence and fear, not talk.  His heart burned with a savagery far more advanced than anyone had dreamed.

Once he was jailed, the word went out.  He became a martyr.  To the Fourth Sign’s believers, he was no serial killer, but a casualty of a government conspiracy designed to uproot true patriots.  Even if Comeaux were truly guilty, some said, he should be sainted for exterminating the vermin whores that dragged America toward Hell by its private parts.  Offshoots of the Fourth Sign sprung up all across the forgotten interior, its demented gospel spread via the Internet and rallied by the whispered name of P.D. Comeaux.

The heart of the Fourth Sign beat somewhere in the Midwest, Morgan knew from his follow-up investigation in Comeaux, but its leadership was shadowy.  It gathered money from its far-flung members through a series of drop-boxes rented by mysterious groups with names like The Millennium Institute and The Rapture Forum, most of the money going to an ever-expanding arsenal of legal and illegal weaponry.  ATF intelligence suggested the organization’s more militant factions — radicals for whom The Order and the Aryan Nations were not radical enough — financed themselves by declaring their own war on drugs, robbing and murdering dealers from Tulsa to Detroit. 

On the day of closing arguments in Comeaux’s South Dakota trial, a sophisticated pipe-bomb filled with roofing tacks, packed in a shoebox between two plastic bags of human feces, was mailed to the county prosecutor’s office.  When it exploded, it decapitated a legal secretary and badly mutilated a law-school intern, whose wounds became lethally infected by the excrement and dirty shrapnel blasted deep into him.  The day before the student died in excruciating pain, an anonymous caller with a Western accent told a sheriff’s dispatcher that the bomb had been sent by the Fourth Sign.

“And the shit inside came right out of the ass of Saint P.D. hisself.  Consider yourself baptized,” he cackled, then hung up.

Nobody was ever arrested, nor was it ever known if P.D. Comeaux had actually smuggled his own waste out of the county jail, but the Fourth Sign was quickly added to the feds’ short list of America’s most deadly domestic terror groups.

All this, Morgan already knew.  It was frightening enough.  But what he didn’t know scared him most.

“Jeff, call me if anything comes up.  You’ve got my number, here or at home,” Jerry Overton said.  His voice was gravely serious.  “I mean it.  Anything.”

“Don’t worry, I will,” Morgan said.  “And, hey, I’ll take a raincheck on that Cubs game.  I guess I owe you one for sure, huh?”

“Don’t worry about it,” his old friend said.  “Right now, you just take care of yourself and Claire.  I learned a long time ago there are two things not worth waiting for:  The Cubs getting to the World Series, and you buying a round of beers.”

Morgan laughed.

“Dare to dream, Jerry,” he said.  “The Cubs might surprise you.”

Morgan sat on a hard bench in the dark hallway outside the district court clerk’s office, leaning against the cool wall.  It soothed him after the walk to the courthouse in the hot morning air.  He heard women’s voices inside the third-floor office, the lights were on, but the frosted-glass door was still locked.

He hadn’t planned to spend much time checking on Malachi Pierce’s court records, if they existed at all.  He had a full day ahead, hoping against hope that he could finally get the paper out on time.  He had too many stories to write, and so did his reporters.  He wanted to finish four or five pages today, but that seemed increasingly unlikely without stories to fill them.  He still hadn’t decided whether to endorse candidates in the upcoming election, a task that hung like an albatross around his neck.  And he expected more fallout from the Chamber’s boycott as the week wore on.  Later today, maybe tomorrow, he’d look in on Neeley Gilmartin.