War was a drama scripted by spite-fueled and evil children, by warped delinquents, by incarcerated madmen driven into a deep and irredeemable psychosis by the drugs and barbaric shocks of demented psychiatrists, by men with single eyes and hooks for hands and small shards of scorched glass in place of their souls.

War was a firework display for the shallow entertainment of darker gods. War cleansed men of all that was best in them. It cleansed with fire, with bullets and blades and bombs and blood. It cleansed with loss and pain, and with its own sense of unique and incommunicable disbelief engendered in all who attended the ceremony of battle. In ten thousand years, all that had changed was distance. Perhaps, eons ago, there was some small nobility in seeing the face of the man you killed, in watching the already-too-brief light extinguished, in hearing the silence as breathing halted. Now you could kill a man a mile away. Now you could release bombs through clouds and obliterate thousands.

At first you dropped the terrible fire from the sky and you believed it was purifying. In some small way, you were an emissary of right and truth and justice, perhaps of God. Later, when you saw the burned children, you understood you were simply an emissary from hell.

There were those who got their kicks herding a half-dozen sandal-footed, coolie-headed gook collaborators into a chopper and then throwing them out from a height of three hundred feet. Hands and feet, a guy at each end—Three-two-one-awaaaay—like teenagers at the poolside. The speed of their descent just kicked the air right out of them. Gaines never heard one of them scream. Not even the kids.

A man who possessed a motivation for war was a man who hated. Hatred sourced its foundations in ignorance. Yet hatred of another was also hatred of self, for beneath all things we were the same. Agreeing to go to war did not make you wrong. It was agreeing to stay that was at fault. And the ones who went back a second time, a third time, had already lost so much of themselves, they knew they could never belong elsewhere.

There were the rationales that came afterward. The alone times when men had to justify their actions, when they had to explain to themselves why they did those terrible things.

But they did them in war. In times of war. They did not do them for love, nor for money, nor for the satisfaction of some dark and horrifying compulsion.

Outside of war, you were faced—simply—with people. Gaines believed that the vast majority of what went on in people’s heads should stay in people’s heads. But people carried shadows inside them, and sometimes the shadows escaped.

The death of Nancy Denton, what had been done to her, the things that Gaines had seen—this was an act performed out of some strange and terrifying vision of hell that exceeded much of what he had experienced.

He had told Judith Denton that he would do his best to find the truth of what had happened.

It went beyond that.

Someone had murdered a girl. Someone had cut out her heart and replaced it with a snake. Someone had roughly stitched her body and buried it in mud, and there that body had remained—undisturbed—for twenty years. It had taken six men four hours to bring her back.

There were questions to be asked. Many questions.

The burden of responsibility came down upon him like a wave, like the downdraft of a Huey.

He possessed his own ghosts and specters. His own phantoms. He would carry these things forever, and they would always lie heavy upon his conscience.

He did not need any more.

8

Bob Thurston appeared at Gaines’s office a little after five. He apologized. He’d had to leave the autopsy to attend to a delivery at the hospital.

“It is beyond belief,” Gaines said.

“Beyond disbelief,” Thurston said.

“You saw the snake?”

“I did.”

“Any thoughts?”

Thurston shook his head. “What is there to think? Voodoo? I don’t know, John. There are some crazy, crazy people out there.”

Gaines was quiet for a time, and then he said, “I saw Judith. I told her. She came and identified the body. I think it might be a good idea to go see her as soon as you can.”

“I will,” Thurston replied.

“And I need this kept as quiet as possible, Bob, for obvious reasons, but I know I’m whistling through a tornado on that one.”

“Hell, then don’t say a goddamned word to your mother, John. She’ll be laying brooms across all the doorways and making us wear bundles of pig bristles …”

Gaines smiled sardonically. “You see some line of black humor in everything?”

“I have to,” Thurston replied. “Keeps me from drinking.”

“My mother will find out,” Gaines said. “She’ll find out from one of the neighbors.”

“You better tell Caroline not to say anything.”

“Caroline is a nineteen-year-old with nothing better to do than help me look after my mother. She’s gonna be the first to get into it with her. I can’t stop her finding out, Bob, and I can’t stop the things she will do or say as a result. You know that. You know her better than anyone. Regardless, you’re changing the subject … Fact is, we have a sixteen-year-old girl murdered, buried in the riverbank, her heart removed. Took six of us to dig her out.”

“So where do you even begin on something like this?”

“I have no idea, Bob, no idea at all,” Gaines replied. “My first thought is that I might be looking for a killer who is dead themselves. This is twenty years old.”

“You think some of the ones who were around at the time can help you?”

“Hell, Bob, I don’t even know that there is anyone around apart from the girl’s mother. Right now, I don’t even have a confirmed cause of death.”

“You think there’s anything in the voodoo idea? I mean, it sure as hell is the weirdest goddamned shit I ever heard of …”

“I can’t discount anything,” Gaines replied. “I know this kind of thing goes on. When we were kids, we used to go down to Marie Laveau’s tomb and steal the pound cake that people left for Saint Expedite. Anything that involves a snake is going to be taken as a sign of Li Grand Zombi—”

“But this is Mississippi, not Louisiana—”

“Head west fifteen miles, you’re in Louisiana, Bob. The influence is as strong here as anyplace between here and Baton Rouge.”

“So let’s just hope it was a regular psycho, eh?”

“Let’s just hope. Last thing I need right now is ritual sacrifices, gris-gris ceremonies, and people turning up at your office with jimson weed poisoning.”

“So I’ll go see Judith Denton. I think she needs to know she’s got friends right now. You?”

“I’m going to go check on my ma, and then I’ll be back to see Powell. I need final COD and the autopsy report.”

“Tell your ma I’ll be over tomorrow.”

“I will.”

“You know I upped her morphine yesterday.”

“I could tell,” Gaines replied.

“She’s rambling again?”

“In and out of it. You know how she is.”

Thurston walked to the door. He hesitated, turned back. “This is a horrific thing, John. What the hell are we dealing with here? A sixteen-year-old girl, a twenty-year-old murder, a snake instead of a heart, for Christ’s sake.”

“I don’t know, Bob … Don’t know that I want to know.”

“Sure you do. That’s why you’re doing this job. That’s why we all do what we do … so we can know the answers to shit like this.”

“Go,” Gaines said. “Go see Judith. I’ll speak to you later.”

After Thurston had left, Gaines—sitting alone in his office—remembered an incident.

There was a grunt, name of Charles Binney. His helmet name was Too High on account of the fact that he was six four, maybe six five. It was a bright Tuesday morning outside of Nha Trang, near the foot of the Chu Yang Sin Mountains. There was a Vietnamese girl. Her name was not Me Quick Fuck or Suck Man Root or any of the other defamatory aliases with which such girls were christened by the members of Five Company. Her name was something like Kwy Lao, though perhaps with a Q and a handful more vowels. And Too High set his mind to impressing her by climbing a neem tree. Had Too High, arriving in-country no more than three months before, survived his brief excursion into the Southeast Asian theater of war, he would have described the young girl as angelic. Too High used such words because Too High was a cultured, book-reading kind of guy. It was not his height alone that singled him out, but also his intellect and vocabulary. Too High was an anachronism, always had been, and when his draft notice had arrived, his lack of resistance to military service was questioned by his younger brother. Too High had quoted Goethe: ‘Unless one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness … Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic and power in it. Begin it now.’