But in the event both objectives were achieved in one fell swoop, because the first eastbound car I saw was a police cruiser heading home. I had my thumb out, and the guy stopped for me. He was a talker and I was a listener, and within minutes I found out that some of what Garber had told me was wrong.

Chapter

8

The cop’s name was Pellegrino, like the sparkling water, although he didn’t say that. I got the impression that people drank from the tap in that part of Mississippi. On reflection it was no surprise he stopped for me. Small-town cops are always interested in unexplained strangers heading into their territory. The easiest way to find out who they are is simply to ask, which he did, immediately. I told him my name and spent a minute on my cover story. I said I was recent ex-military, heading to Carter Crossing to look for a friend who might be living there. I said the friend had last served at Kelham and might have stuck around. Pellegrino had nothing to say in response to that. He just took his eyes off the empty road for a second and looked me up and down, calibrating, and then he nodded and faced front again. He was moderately short and very overweight, maybe French or Italian way back, with black hair buzzed short and olive skin and broken veins on both sides of his nose. He was somewhere between thirty and forty, and I guessed if he didn’t stop eating and drinking he wasn’t going to make it much beyond fifty or sixty.

I finished saying my piece and he started talking, and the first thing I found out was that he wasn’t a small-town cop. Garber had been wrong, technically. Carter Crossing had no police department. Carter Crossing was in Carter County, and Carter County had a County Sheriff’s Department, which had jurisdiction over everything inside an area close to five hundred square miles. But there wasn’t much inside those five hundred square miles except Fort Kelham and the town, which was where the Sheriff’s Department was based, which made Garber right again, in a sense. But Pellegrino was indisputably a deputy sheriff, not a police officer, and he seemed very proud of the distinction.

I asked him, “How big is your department?”

Pellegrino said, “Not very. We got the sheriff, who we call the chief, we got a sheriff’s detective, we got me and another deputy in uniform, we got a civilian on the desk, we got a woman on the phones, but the detective is out sick long term with his kidneys, so it’s just the three of us, really.”

I asked him, “How many people live in Carter County?”

“About twelve hundred,” he said. Which I thought was a lot, for three functioning cops. Apples to apples, it would be like policing New York City with a half-sized NYPD. I asked, “Does that include Fort Kelham?”

“No, they’re separate,” he said. “And they have their own cops.”

I said, “But still, you guys must be busy. I mean, twelve hundred citizens, five hundred square miles.”

“Right now we’re real busy,” he said, but he didn’t mention anything about Janice May Chapman. Instead he talked about a more recent event. Late in the evening the day before, under cover of darkness, someone had parked a car on the train track. Garber was wrong again. He had said there were two trains a day, but Pellegrino told me in reality there was only one. It rumbled through at midnight exactly, a mile-long giant hauling freight north from Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. That midnight train had smashed into the parked vehicle, wrecking it completely, hurling it way far up the line, bouncing it into the woods. The train had not stopped. As far as anyone could tell it hadn’t even slowed down. Which meant the engineer had not even noticed. He was obliged to stop if he struck something on the line. Railroad policy. Pellegrino thought it was certainly possible the guy hadn’t noticed. So did I. Thousands of tons against one, moving fast, no contest. Pellegrino seemed captivated by the senselessness of it all. He said, “I mean, who would do that? Who would park an automobile on the train track? And why?”

“Kids?” I said. “For fun?”

“Never happened before. And we’ve always had kids.”

“No one in the car?”

“No, thank God. Like I said, as far as we know it was just parked there.”

“Stolen?”

“Don’t know yet. There’s not much of it left. We think it might have been blue. It set on fire. Burned some trees with it.”

“No one called in a missing car?”

“Not yet.”

I asked, “What else are you busy with?”

And at that point Pellegrino went quiet and didn’t answer, and I wondered if I had pushed it too far. But I reviewed the back-and-forth in my head and figured it was a reasonable question. Just making conversation. A guy says he’s real busy but mentions only a wrecked car, another guy is entitled to ask for more, right? Especially while riding through the dusk in a companionable fashion.

But it turned out Pellegrino’s hesitation was based purely on courtesy and old-fashioned Southern hospitality. That was all. He said, “Well, I don’t want to give you a bad impression, seeing as you’re here for the first time. But we had a woman murdered.”

“Really?” I said.

“Two days ago,” he said.

“Murdered how?”

And it turned out that Garber’s information was inaccurate again. Janice May Chapman had not been mutilated. Her throat had been cut, that was all. And delivery of a fatal wound was not the same thing as mutilation. Not the same thing at all. Not even close.

Pellegrino said, “Ear to ear. Real deep. One big slice. Not pretty.”

I said, “You saw it, I guess.”

“Up close and personal. I could see the bones inside her neck. She was all bled out. Like a lake. It was real bad. A good looking woman, real pretty, all dressed up for a night out, neat as a pin, just lying there on her back in a pool of blood. Not right at all.”

I said nothing, out of respect for something Pellegrino’s tone seemed to demand.

He said, “She was raped, too. The doctor found that out when he got her clothes off and got her on the slab. Unless you could say she’d been into it enough at some point to throw herself down and scratch up her ass on the gravel. Which I don’t think she would be.”

“You knew her?”

“We saw her around.”

I asked, “Who did it?”

He said, “We don’t know. A guy off the base, probably. That’s what we think.”

“Why?”

“Because those are who she spent her time with.”

I asked, “If your detective is out sick, who is working the case?”

Pellegrino said, “The chief.”

“Does he have much experience with homicides?”

“She,” Pellegrino said. “The chief is a woman.”

“Really?”

“It’s an elected position. She got the votes.” There was a little resignation in his voice. The kind of tone a guy uses when his team loses a big game. It is what it is.

“Did you run for the job?” I asked.

“We all did,” he said. “Except the detective. He was already bad with his kidneys.”

I said nothing. The car rocked and swayed. Pellegrino’s tires sounded worn and soft. They set up a dull baritone roar on the blacktop. Up ahead the evening gloom had gone completely. Pellegrino’s headlights lit the way fifty yards in front. Beyond that was nothing but darkness. The road was straight, like a tunnel through the trees. The trees were twisted and opportunistic, like weeds competing for light and air and minerals, like they had seeded themselves a hundred years ago on abandoned arable land. They flashed past in the light spill, like they were frozen in motion. I saw a tin sign on the shoulder, lopsided and faded and pocked with rusty coin-sized spots where the enamel had flaked loose. It advertised a hotel called Toussaint’s. It promised the convenience of a Main Street location, and rooms of the highest quality.